When I was a teenager, I read the bible cover-to-cover, and I found the Old Testament, it's a pretty bloody history book.
Posterity, thinned by the crime of its ancestors, shall hear of those battles.
Only from the perspective of such a utopia is it possible to use the concepts of pessimism and optimism with full justification: an optimist is someone who thinks that on planet number five the history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is one who thinks otherwise.
The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
Given the gruesome fate of the last Tsar, Nicholas II, and his family, and the fact that five of the previous 12 Romanov rulers were also murdered, it is easy to regard Russia's imperial dynasty as cursed.
Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.
I know that history is simultaneously a bloody mess and a collection of feats so inspiring and amazing they make you proud to share the same DNA structure with the rest of humanity. I know you'd better focus on the good stuff or you're screwed.
History is a blood-drenched enigma and the world an error.
