Mass murder

“ The crowd rushing and eddying to and fro, the night, the yells, the pale faces, many fright [Pg 134] ened people trying in vain to extricate themselves, the attacked man, not yet freed from the jaws of death, looking like a corpse, the silent, resolute half dozen policemen, with no weapons but their little clubs, yet stern and steady through all those eddying swarms—made indeed a fitting side scene to the grand tragedy of the murder. ”

“ There are few great crimes in proportion to the population, nor do we ever hear of such atrocities as those classes of murders which so frequently blacken the page of our modern history. Homicide is more common than actual murder, and is often the result of a sudden quarrel where knives are drawn, and a fatal stab in passion constitutes the offence. ”

“ Wherever he goes, whatever he does, he will always see that word: murder—immortally inscribed upon the pediment of that vast slaughter−house—humanity. “Then why do you expect this man, in whom the scorn of human life is inculcated from infancy, and whom we consecrate to legalized slaughter—why do you expect him to recoil from murder when he finds in it interest or distraction? In the name of what law could society condemn assassins who, in reality, have only conformed to the homicidal laws which it dictates, and followed the bloody example which it sets them? ”

“ The scenes of destruction and murder which we frequently passed in the villages and on our daily march, were dreadful. Houses and furniture burnt, men and women mutilated and murdered, lying about in the most disgusting and barbarous manner, some with their throats cut, some with their eyes and ears gone, and others cut up and most dreadfully exposed; all this for revenge, because they would not, or could not, supply the French army with provisions, and in the hope that these savage proceedings would terrify others into instant compliance. ”

“ We see myriads of men banded together to practice open violation of the very [4] fundamental tenets of humanity; we see the worst passions of mankind, murder, theft, lust, arson, pillage—all the baser possibilities of human nature—coming to the surface. Outside of the natural killing of war, hundreds of men have been murdered, often with incidents of the most revolting brutality; children have been slaughtered; women have been outraged, killed and shamefully mutilated. ”

“ You know how we once treated criminals! with what scourgings and mutilations, what brandings, what tortures with fire and red-hot iron! Death was not punishment enough, it must be protracted amid the most cruel torments that quivering flesh could bear. The multitude looked on and learned a lesson of deadly wickedness. A judicial murder was a holiday! It is but little more than two hundred years since a man was put to death in the most enlightened country of Europe for eating meat on Friday; not two hundred since men and women were hanged in Massachusetts for a crime now reckoned impossible! ”

“ Why would someone whose closest personal and professional associates unhesitatingly declare him to have been incapable of any dark deed of violence commit a murder by shooting down an unsuspecting victim as if from ambush? What could conceivably account for the metamorphosis of a mild, retiring young man, happily married and fulfilled in the birth of a dearly beloved son, into an indomitably resolute killer, ready to sacrifice his own life, rich with promise, in order to take the life of another? ”

“ There is that in the tidings of a murder that thrills the human heart to its depths. When the word passes from lip to lip and from mouth to mouth that a human life has been taken by an assassin, the stoutest hearts stop beating, lips pale and cheeks blanch, strong men grow pale with the terror of the unknown and mysterious, and if that be so with what I may, perhaps, by comparison call an ordinary assassination, what were the feelings that overpowered the community when the news of this tragedy was spread by the lightning to the ends of the world? ”

“ The instructions given were as follows on behalf of the people:
“The court instructs the jury, in the language of the statute, that murder is the unlawful killing of a human being in the peace of the people, with malice aforethought, either expressed or implied. An unlawful killing may be perpetrated by poisoning, striking, starving, drowning, stabbing, shooting, or by any other of the various forms or means by which human nature may be overcome, and death thereby occasioned. ”

“ She’s not sufficiently imaginative to have planned this accumulative massacre. But as regards the others, I could picture any one of ’em as being at the bottom of this diabolical slaughter. It’s a mistaken idea, don’t y’ know, to imagine that a murderer looks like a murderer. ”

“ In vain did they shriek to the national guard for aid: the city hears the massacre without daring to give any signs of animation. The daring of the crime chilled and paralysed every citizen. The murderers preluded the death of the females by derision [Pg 325] and insults which added shame to terror, and the agonies of modesty to the pangs of murder. When there were no more to be slain they mutilated the carcases, and swept the blood into the sewer of the palace. They dragged the mutilated corpses to La Glacière, walled them up, and the vengeance of the people was stamped upon them. ”

“ But murder will out sooner or later,—'Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed.' In spite of all their infernal cunning and midnight secresy, justice has overtaken these monsters, and never again may the annals of any age or nation be stained with such revolting criminality. ”

“ I am not here speaking of the legal definition of murder, but of murder as a term of moral reprobation, in which sense it must be used by those who speak of war as 'multitudinous murder.' They cannot mean murder in the legal sense, because in that sense only 'unlawful killing,' which killing in war is not, is murder. ”

“ They educated these criminals and created for them an atmosphere of impunity and drove their bloodthirsty hounds against peaceful citizens. They mocked at human conscience and self-respect. But those who were poisoned in murder vans and gas chambers, those who were torn to shreds, those whose bodies were burned in the ovens of crematoria and whose ashes were strewn to the winds, appeal to the conscience of the world. ”

“ But if, on a sudden quarrel, parties presently fetch their weapons, and go into a field and fight, and one of them is killed, that is manslaughter, because it is presumed that their blood never cooled. Otherwise, if the parties appoint the next day to meet, or even the same day, at such an interval as that their passion may have subsided, or if{616} from circumstances in the case, it may be reasonably presumed that their judgment had controlled the first transports, if death then ensue, it is murder. ”

“ When the police is at fault, it declares that it is on the track; and the government patiently awaits the day when it comes to say, with a sneaking air, that the track is lost."
"Yes, but they have found a corpse; the general has been killed, and in all countries they call that a murder."
"A murder do you call it? why, there is nothing to prove that the general was murdered. People are found every day in the Seine, having thrown themselves in, or having been drowned from not knowing how to swim." ”

“ Wherever the rule of the German bayonet begins to hold sway, an unbearable regime of bloody terror, agonizing torture, and savage murder is introduced. The robberies committed everywhere by the German officers and men are invariably accompanied by the beating and murder of immense numbers of entirely innocent people. ”

“ When 25 Iraqi children are killed in a bombing, or Iraqi teachers are executed at their school, or hospital workers are killed caring for the wounded, this is murder, pure and simple--the total rejection of justice and honor and morality and religion. ”

“ Today the sacrifice of life incidental to quick success rarely calls for the actual spilling of blood. How decent are the pale slayings of the quack, the adulterator, and the purveyor of polluted water, compared with the red slayings of the vulgar bandit or assassin! Even if there is blood-letting, the long-range, tentacular nature of modern homicide eliminates all personal collision. What an abyss between the knife-play of brawlers and the law-defying neglect to fence dangerous machinery in a mill, or to furnish cars with safety couplers! ”

“ Any bandit, any habitual murderer would, naturally, use such language in speaking of the destruction of a human being. For the fascist executioners the murder of a soldier who had honestly fought for his country and become an invalid, the brief expression “shot on the spot” is good enough; when occupied in killing, the executioners do not even consider it necessary to find out whom they really are murdering. Thanks to this, shame and confusion cover the police. ”

“ These manifestations are met with a ruthless military or mobile police jack-boot, with arbitrary arrests and detention, torture, and many examples of what has been described by world leaders as "judicial murder." ”

“ These deeds of murder and cruelty ceased when night came on, only to be renewed the next morning, when the demons carefully sought among the dead lying about in all directions for any of the wounded yet alive, and those they found were deliberately shot. ”

“ Whenever a rebel is caught, he is immediately tried, and unless he can prove a defence, he is sentenced to be hanged at once; but the chief rebels, or ringleaders, I make first clear up a certain portion of the pool of blood, still two inches deep in the shed where the fearful murder and mutilation of women and children took place. To touch blood is most abhorrent to the high-caste natives; they think by doing so, they doom their souls to perdition. ”

“ In fact, it was reserved for this incredible monster and his associate fiends to reduce murder to a system, and to establish a regular traffic in the bodies of their victims. Ordinary homicides slay from passion or revenge; the murders they commit are the product of an ungovernable and overmastering impulse, which hurls reason from her seat, and, in the wild conflict of guilty passion, precipitates them into the commission of acts which are no sooner done than they would perhaps give the universe were they undone. ”

“ Every murder perpetrated by poison, lying in wait, or nay other kind of willful, deliberate, malicious, and premeditated killing; or committed in the perpetration of, or attempt to perpetrate, any arson, escape, murder, kidnapping, treason, espionage, sabotage, aggravated sexual abuse or sexual abuse, burglary, or robbery; or perpetrated from a premeditated design unlawfully and maliciously to effect the death of any human being other than him who is killed, is murder in the first degree. Any other murder is murder in the second degree. ”

“ In England, Germany, or France, a man knows, that if he commits a murder, every person around him will, from that instant, become his enemy, and use every means to seize him, and bring him to justice. He knows that he will be immediately carried to prison, and put to an ignominious death, amidst the execrations of his countrymen. Impressed with these sentiments, and with the natural horror for murder which such sentiments augment, the populace of those countries hardly ever have recourse to stabbing in their accidental quarrels, however they may be inflamed with anger and rage. ”

“ It is a noteworthy circumstance how this "thrill of horror" accompanied by "indignation," "detestation," "abhorrence," and the rest of the vocabulary of penny-a lining Telegraphese, symptoms invariably following the assassination of some head of a State, never show themselves on the murder of a common domestic man through the official agency of the said State. For example, the "civilised world" duly thrilled over the knife in the late M. Carnot's liver, but we failed to observe any "thrill" after the recent fiendish murder by the cavalry officer of the Italian soldier Evangelista. ”

“ But murder was not only committed in wars; men in private life killed one another; fathers and mothers were now and then so depraved as to put their own children to death; and the highest tribunals of the world executed murderers without dreaming that it was wrong, erroneously believing that to kill was the only way to prevent killing. ”

“ We have now found Davis and his agents in Canada planning and carrying out schemes for assassination or murder by wholesale, by spreading pestilence, poisoning of reservoirs, burning cities, hospitals, and boats on their way loaded with passengers, and by the use of explosives murdering women. Human life, under any imaginable conditions of existence, received no consideration at their hands if its sacrifice held out to them any prospect of advancing their cause. ”

“ The clerk read the note aloud, after the morgue had been phoned, and the body covered.
"To Paul Judson:
"This act is my punishment, for living on the earth your presence scars; a just God will punish you in another world.
"This act will bring home to your conscience your responsibility for murder:
"Murder of twenty-three miners in the mine explosion;
"Murder of John Dawson, and fifty innocent strikers, by the guns of your gunmen;
"Murder of your guards by your own acts;
"Murder of the bodies, hearts and souls of starving strikers. Murder of good in all people. Murder of justice in your courts. ”

“ The massacres went on during the whole of the second day, though towards evening the search for victims relaxed somewhat; but still many isolated acts of murder took place during the night. On the morrow, being tired of killing, the people began to destroy, and this phase lasted a long time, it being less fatiguing to throw stones about than corpses. ”