Nine million, n-i-n-e million. Ah, the world got what it deserved. The lessons had been written on the board in big letters thousands of years ago and repeated several times every century since.
Question: How many men can I kill if I dig out the Suez Canal?
Question: How many men can I kill if I build myself a Great Pyramid?
Question: How many men, women and children can we kill if we retake the Holy Land from the heathens? (We’ll call it a Crusade.)
Question: How many men, women and children can we kill if we establish a slave trade between Africa and the New World?
Question: How many men can we kill to make the world safe for democracy?
Question: How many men can we kill to make the world safe for communism?
Answer: Hundreds, thousands, millions, billions.
And then, we’ll start all over again.
From John A. Williams’ 1967 novel The Man Who Cried I Am.