wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin ) (05/23/85)
I've been seeing ads for posters and T-shirts bearing the slogan, "Kill 'em all; let God sort 'em out" over the past few years in places like "Soldier of Fortune" magazine, other military-related publications, etc. Ignoring whether one agrees with or is offended by the sentiment expressed, I am just trying to find out the origin of the slogan. Did it originate in VietNam, or is it older than that? (Sometimes the "'em" is spelled out as "them"; same thing...) Regards, Will Martin USENET: seismo!brl-bmd!wmartin or ARPA/MILNET: wmartin@almsa-1.ARPA
respess@ut-ngp.UUCP (John Respess) (05/31/85)
I can't find a source for the war cry "Kill 'em all - let God
sort 'em out!" in exactly that form, but I believe that what we
see on the tee-shirts of some pretty bad dudes is tracable back to
the first of the Albigensian Crusades (1209). A number of Cathars
(heretical Christian sect - believed that the world was a creation
of Satan, hence bad; that Jesus was an emanation from God but being
in the world he could not have been consubstantial with God; what-
ever else flows from these premises) were beseiged in Beziers, a
town near Carcassonne in the Languedoc district of southern France.
The Crusaders presumably knew that not everyone in the town was a
heretic, but once they breached Bezier's walls:
There followed one of the most pitiless massacres of
the Middle Ages. No one was spared, Catholics and here-
tics, men and women, clerics and children were all put
to the sword. It is not true that the leaders of the
Crusade shouted: "Kill them all; God will know his own!"
But the German monk who invented this story a few years
later accurately reported the mood of the crusading
army.
My source is The Albigensian Crusades by Joseph Strayer. Maybe a
closer fit to the quote could be found in one of Zoe Oldenbourg's
historical novels or histories of the Crusades.