We are the heirs of marauders, pirates, conquerors, colonizers, colonialists, and imperialists...

Today we say that the beheadings and crucifixions of ISIS remove them from the company of civilized men. They should be annihilated to the last man, we hear on cable TV. 

But the Romans beheaded St. Paul and crucified Christ. Queen Elizabeth beheaded her cousin Queen Mary, even as her mother Anne Boleyn had been beheaded by her father Henry VIII, who also decapitated Sir Thomas More.

The French Revolution Jefferson loved used at its instrument of justice the guillotine, to which Louis XVI and his queen Marie Antoinette were sent. Those heroes of the Revolution, Danton and Robespierre, were guillotined, as was Charlotte Corday, four days after she stabbed to death in a bathtub a third great man of the revolution, Marat.

 

Great men are rarely good men, and every great empire is guilty of great crimes. But the empires men still study and admire are those that created, built and advanced civilization, that brought mankind to a higher plateau, that left behind magnificent legacies.

I have no conflicted conscience regarding whence I came or where Men must soon go.

I have no problem with the Hard Things.

Here's the entire PJB piece.  I commend it to you. 

Kerodin
III