History is creepy

History people should really stop killing Jews.
It's like every time they get wound up they just start killing Jews.
Not wound up at them, just in general.
Like they start out all 'Let's kill Muslims!' and they look around and oops no Muslims so they just kill Jews.
As lessons from history go this one is scary.

Also crusaders are really bad at geography and, like, being a decent human.
The crusader equivalent of 'are we there yet' was to realise they were somewhere foreign and start killing people a bit.
Even if they were not in fact on the same continent as there, yet.

It's gross and creepy that so many years thought of this stuff as heroic and from god.
Their actual god of love and peace and forgiveness.
God who was pretty clear on the 'thou shalt not kill' part.

Humans.
Ugh.

Also I just read about the bit of the first crusade where the church was trying to wind up knights and armies and so forth and make them go, but knights have to gather supplies and suchlike so they'll survive, whereas peasants with nothing but what they're carrying can just start out walking. So a whole bunch of peasants did that, like tens of thousands. Because god, via the church, told them to. And they basically just died. And that was how the crusades kicked off, a bunch of poor people getting killed because they didn't know what they were doing but thought god had told them to do it.

*big long pause*

I know I read a genre that is big into knights on horseback being heroic, but, actual history makes that feel proper creepy. Like, mostly, war is people dying a lot, for some kind of money reason, because their bosses were all wound up and spread it around. There is not a lot of heroic to go around there.

I like the parts with agriculture and architecture and abbeys and universities and people doing great things together. Those are much better.