I wrote about how history is created based on how leaders slaughter people in the name of a society's sacred ideals. We know this was true for 20th century leaders. The Generals of the First World War, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the Emperor of Japan (to name just a few) caused the deaths if large numbers of human beings, and therefore are "written up in the history of books."

The number of people a leader kills is to political history what the number of home-runs is to baseball history. The historical record honors those who produce the greatest numbers.

Terrorist leaders also aspire to kill human beings in the name of affirming their societies' sacred ideals. Bin Laden's mentor and guru, Abdullah Azzam, stated that history grows out of the "blood of the martyrs" and the "ink of the scholars." 

The job of journalists and historians is to document mass-murder. The historical narrative valorizes leaders based on the number of people they have killed. Mass-murders are the "stars" of history.

Napoleon was one of these mass-murderers who became a star.

David Starr Jordan discusses a painting from the time of Napoleon called “A Scene in Hell” (Une Scene dans l’Enfer) depicting the great marshal with “arms and face unmoved.” The picture is filled with the faces of soldiers—men “sent to death before their time by Napoleon’s unbridled ambition”—expressing “every form of reproach.”

Four millions there were, Jordan says, more than half of them French, youth without blemish, made “flesh for the cannon.” Over Napoleon’s career, campaign followed campaign—against enemies, against neutrals, against friends. Conscription followed victory, conscription followed defeat, again conscription and conscription.

“Let them die with arms in their hands,” Napoleon said. “Their death is glorious. You can always fill the places with soldiers. A great soldier like me doesn’t care a tinker’s damn for the lives of a million men.”

Napoleon—like Azzam’s terrorists—created history building on an edifice of blood and skulls--upon a foundation of cripples and corpses. Napoleon dreamt of greatness for himself and France. He was one of those rare founders of nations who became an architect of glory—creating history by generating a sea of blood.