Tales of massacre were repeated from Tasmania to the American West, and in Africa from Cape to Cairo.
The Sunni Palestinians from Syria have fetched up in the hovels of Sabra and Chatila to exchange their stories of horror with the tales of massacre and savagery visited upon their Palestinian brothers and sisters of this forsaken Lebanese camp at the hands of Israel's cruel allies 31 years ago.
Tales of massacres, rape and looting have indeed been forthcoming, especially from Mazar-i-Sharif, but so far the alliance seems to have behaved with much greater restraint in the capital than it did in 1992-96, when its men last held sway in Kabul.
The histories of the Irish, the Africans, the Arabs, and the South Asians are replete with tales of massacres, imposed famine, denial of freedom, mass imprisonment and torture.
"The Tracker" confronted a tale of a massacre of aborigines by white authorities in frontier Australia; and "Rabbit Proof Fence", awarded best film, dealt with the "stolen generations" of indigenous children removed by white authorities from their families to "save" them from an inferior life.
This epic tale of the Nanjing massacre of 1937 had a budget of $100m, stars a western A-lister, and has almost half its dialogue in English.
Lou's stunning depiction of her despair at seeing no way out is part of his audacious tale of the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square and its long-term effects on survivors.
Wilhelm Grimm censored later editions to suit a family readership, deleting some stories entirely — including, thankfully, the tale of a family massacre entitled How Some Children Played At Slaughtering.
They remain the best place to start with Yiddish literature -- Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose Satan in Goray (rating: 85) is a harrowing tale of living amid massacre in Eastern Europe, or the humanist stories of Sholem Aleichem, whose Tevye the Milkman inspired the musical Fiddler on the Roof.
Meanwhile, the band journeys through rugged country in fear of being seen by Indians, and then they chance to meet one — an outlier, wandering alone, whom they capture and whom Meek, regaling them with gory tales of Indian massacres, wants to gun down.
