Benjamin Franklin, upon being asked what sort of government the delegates to the Constitutional Convetion had created.
“A tradition cannot be inherited — it has to be earned.”
Attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Societies that are growing or strengthening are characterized by populations who not only believe in such growth and strengthening, but act upon it.
And a critical component of “acting upon our tradition” is to know it. And to know it requires that we study it.
Professor Harold Berman, in his magisterial Law and Revolution, provides the following analogy:
“From the eleventh and twelfth centuries on, monophonic music, reflected chiefly in the Gregorian chant, was gradually supplanted by polyphonic styles. Two-part, three-part, and eventually four-part music developed. The contrapuntal style exemplified in the thirteenth-century motet evolved into the harmonic style of the fourteenth century ars nova, exemplified in the ballade. Eventually, counterpoint and harmony were combined. The sixteenth century witnessed the development of the great German Protestant chorales, and these, together with Italian and English madrigals and other forms, provided a basis for opera …. Eventually Renaissance music gave way to Baroque, Baroque to Classical …. etc. No good contemporary musician, regardless of how off-beat he may be, can afford not to know this story….”
Not too long ago, American citizens, and certainly lawyers, judges, and justices were required, in a similar way, to know the story of the development of our institutions and their great debt to Christianity.
For example, about a century ago, in the early 20th Century, just about everyone in the United States understood that [church] canon law constituted the first modern Western legal system. Eventually, canon law and royal law complemented each other and formed a basis for the Western legal tradition. It was understood, at least inchoately, that rejecting the religious heritage of the West has always led to tyranny.
However, today, the above is not only generally unknown but should it be even mentioned it is only to have it dismissed outright, even by clergy who delight in writing books or preaching sermons denying our Christian legacy. In so doing, we greatly err and worse: we join forces with those who would destroy our legal and social foundations.
It is no mystery that many who most despise the American heritage have an undisguised hatred for the Christian religion because that religion places man and his institutions under an eternal, Triune God and His law. And this is unacceptable.
Once we understand this philosophical enmity, much of the violence and chaos in our era becomes intelligible.
But no need to take my word for it. I’ll conclude this post by quoting the heroes of so many of today’s usual suspects.
Engels: “We … reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatever as eternal, ultimate, and forever immutable moral law ….”
Lenin: “We repudiate all morality derived from non-human and non-class concepts. We say it is a deception, a fraud in the interest of the landlords and the capitalists … We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the toilers around the proletariat … We do not believe in an eternal morality.”
Marx: “Man makes religion, religion does not make man … The abolition of religion as an illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness….
Anyone who has read the execrable Communist Manifesto will recognize the above sentiments, and more.
Such sentiments, so fashionable today, are the polar opposite of those of our colonial and early republic era; i. e., our founding era. Put another way, engaging and promoting the convictions of those who hate Christianity will accelerate the undermining of our foundations, increase the overt despising of ordered liberty, and openly promote a topsy turvy view of humanity and society, which further dismantles our bedrock.
It is a vicious cycle, a circling of the drain that can only be stopped by refusing to live by lies and insisting on speaking the truth.
(A speech delivered at the Men’s Club of the Prospect Street Congregational Church in Cambridge, Mass., June 7, 1898, less than two months after the United States’ Congress had declared war against Spain. Despite his “progressive” credentials, Professor Norton’s remarks reflect a cautionary and even conservative temperament. His speech deserves careful reading today. Thanks to the Mises Institute which reprinted the speech in 1999.)
There are moments in every man’s life, in the life of every nation, when, under the excitement of passion, the simple truths which in common times are the foundation upon which the right order and conduct of life depend are apt to be forgotten and disregarded. I shall venture tonight to recall to you some of these commonplace truths, which in these days of war need more than ever to be kept in mind.
There never was a land that better deserved the love of her people than America, for there never was a mother-country kinder to her children. She has given to them all that she could give. Her boundless resources have lain open to them, to use at their will. And the consequence has been that never in the history of man has there been so splendid a spectacle of widely diffused and steadily increasing material welfare as America has displayed during the last hundred years.
Millions upon millions of men have lived here with more comfort, with less fear, than any such numbers elsewhere in any age have lived. Countless multitudes, whose forefathers from the beginning of human life on earth have spent weary lives in unrewarded toil, in anxiety, in helplessness, in ignorance, have risen here, in the course of even a single generation, to the full and secure enjoyment of the fruits of their labor, to confident hope, to intelligent possession of their own faculties. Is not the land to be dearly loved in which this has been possible, in which this has been achieved?
But there is a deeper source of love of country than the material advantages and benefits it may afford. It is in the character of its people, in their moral life, in the type of civilization which they exhibit. The elements of human nature are indeed so fixed that favorable or unfavorable circumstances have little effect upon its essential constitution, but prosperity or the reverse brings different traits into prominence. The conditions which have prevailed in America have, if broadly considered, tended steadily and strongly to certain good results in the national character; not, indeed, to unmixed good, but to a preponderance of good.
The institutions established for self-government have been founded with intent to secure justice and independence for all. The social relations among the whole body of the people, are humane and simple. The general spirit of the people is liberal, is kindly, is considerate. The ideals for the realization of which in private and public conduct there is more or less steady and consistent effort, are as high and as worthy as any which men have pursued. Every genuine American holds to the ideal of justice for all men, of independence, including free speech and free action within the limits of law, of obedience to law, of universal education, of material well-being for all the well-behaving and industrious, of peace and good-will among men. These, however far short the nation may fall in expressing them in its actual life, are, no one will deny it, the ideals of our American democracy.
And it is because America represents these ideals that the deepest love for his country glows in the heart of the American, and inspires him with that patriotism which counts no cost, which esteems no sacrifice too great to maintain and to increase the influence of these principles which embody themselves in the fair shape of his native land, and have their expressive symbol in her flag. The spirit of his patriotism is not an intermittent impulse; it is an abiding principle; it is the strongest motive of his life; it is his religion.
And because it is so, and just in proportion to his love of the ideals for which his country stands, is his hatred of whatever is opposed to them in private conduct or public policy. Against injustice, against dishonesty, against lawlessness, against whatever may make for war instead of peace, the good citizen is always in arms.
No thoughtful American can have watched the course of affairs among us during the last thirty years without grave anxiety from the apparent decline in power to control the direction of public and private conduct, of the principles upon regard for which the permanent and progressive welfare of America depends; and especially the course of events during the last few months and the actual condition of the country today, should bring home to every man the question whether or not the nation is true to one of the chief of the ideals to which it has professed allegiance.
A generation has grown up that has known nothing of war. The blessings of peace have been poured out upon us. We have congratulated ourselves that we were free from the misery and the burdens that war and standing armies have brought upon the nations of the Old World. “Their fires” — I cite a fine phrase of Sir Philip Sidney in a letter to Queen Elizabeth — “Their fires have given us light to see our own quietness.”
And now of a sudden, without cool deliberation, without prudent preparation, the nation is hurried into war, and America, she who more than any other land was pledged to peace and good-will on earth, unsheathes her sword, compels a weak and unwilling nation to a fight, rejecting without due consideration her earnest and repeated offers to meet every legitimate demand of the United States. It is a bitter disappointment to the lover of his country; it is a turning-back from the path of civilization to that of barbarism.
“There never was a good war,” said Franklin. There have indeed been many wars in which a good man must take part, and take part with grave gladness to defend the cause of justice, to die for it if need be, a willing sacrifice, thankful to give life for what is dearer than life, and happy that even by death in war he is serving the cause of peace. But if a war be undertaken for the most righteous end, before the resources of peace have been tried and proved vain to secure it, that war has no defense; it is a national crime. And however right, however unavoidable a war may be, and those of us who are old enough to remember the war for the Union know that war may be right and unavoidable, yet, I repeat the words of Franklin, “There never was a good war.”
It is evil in itself, it is evil in its never-ending train of consequences. No man has known the nature of war better than General Sherman, and in his immortal phrase he has condensed its description — “War is hell.” “From the earliest dawnings of policy to this day,” said Edmund Burke, more than a hundred years ago, “the invention of men has been sharpening and improving the mystery of murder, from the first rude essays of clubs and stones to the present perfection of gunnery, cannoneering, bombarding, mining, and all these species of artificial, learned and refined cruelty in which we are now so expert, and which make a principal part of what politicians have taught us to believe is our principal glory.”
And it is now, at the end of this century, the century in which beyond any other in history knowledge has increased and the arts of peace have advanced, that America has been brought by politicians and writers for the press, faithless to her noble ideals, against the will of every right-minded citizen, to resort to these cruel arts, these arts of violence, these arts which rouse the passions of the beast in man, before the resources of peace had been fairly tested and proved insufficient to secure the professed ends, which, however humane and desirable, afford no sufficient justification for resorting to the dread arbitrament of arms.
There are, indeed, many among us who find justification of the present war in the plea that its motive is to give independence to the people of Cuba, long burdened by the oppressive and corrupt rule of Spain, and especially to relieve the suffering of multitudes deprived of their homes and of means of subsistence by the cruel policy of the general who exercised for a time a practical dictatorship over the island. The plea so far as it is genuine deserves the respect due to every humane sentiment. But independence secured for Cuba by forcible overthrow of the Spanish rule means either practical anarchy or the substitution of the authority of the United States for that of Spain. Either alternative might well give us pause. And as for the relief of suffering, surely it is a strange procedure to begin by inflicting worse suffering still. It is fighting the devil with his own arms. That the end justifies the means is a dangerous doctrine, and no wise man will advise doing evil for the sake of an uncertain good. But the plea that the better government of Cuba and the relief of the reconcentrados could only be secured by war is the plea either of ignorance or of hypocrisy.
But the war is declared; and on all hands we hear the cry that he is no patriot who fails to shout for it, and to urge the youth of the country to enlist, and to rejoice that they are called to the service of their native land. The sober counsels that were appropriate before the war was entered upon must give way to blind enthusiasm, and the voice of condemnation must be silenced by the thunders of the guns and the hurrahs of the crowd.
Stop! A declaration of war does not change the moral law. “The ten commandments will not budge” at a joint resolve of Congress. Was James Russell Lowell aught but a good patriot when during the Mexican war he sent the stinging shafts of his matchless satire at the heart of the monstrous iniquity, or when, years afterward, he declared, that he thought at the time and that he still thought the Mexican war was a national crime? Did John Bright ever render greater service to his country than when, during the Crimean war, he denounced the Administration which had plunged England into it, and employed his magnificent power of earnest and incisive speech in the endeavor to repress the evil spirit which it evoked in the heart of the nation?
No! the voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent, in spite of obloquy, misrepresentation, and abuse, to insist on being heard, and with sober counsel to maintain the everlasting validity of the principles of the moral law.
So confused are men by false teaching in regard to national honor and the duty of the citizen that it is easy to fall into the error of holding a declaration of war, however brought about, as a sacred decision of the national will, and to fancy that a call to arms from the Administration has the force of a call from the lips of the country, of the America to whom all her sons are ready to pay the full measure of devotion. This is indeed a natural and for many a youth not a discreditable error. But if the nominal, though authorized, representatives of the country have brought us into a war that might and should have been avoided, and which consequently is an unrighteous war, then, so long as the safety of the State is not at risk, the duty of the good citizen is plain.
He is to help to provide the Administration responsible for the conduct of the war with every means that may serve to bring it to the speediest end. He is to do this alike that the immediate evils of the war may be as brief and as few as possible, and also that its miserable train of after evils may be diminished and the vicious passions excited by it be the sooner allayed. Men, money, must be abundantly supplied. But must he himself enlist or quicken the ardent youth to enter service in such a cause? The need is not yet. The country is in no peril.
He is to help to provide the Administration responsible for the conduct of the war with every means that may serve to bring it to the speediest end. He is to do this alike that the immediate evils of the war may be as brief and as few as possible, and also that its miserable train of after evils may be diminished and the vicious passions excited by it be the sooner allayed. Men, money, must be abundantly supplied. But must he himself enlist or quicken the ardent youth to enter service in such a cause? The need is not yet. The country is in no peril.
My friends, America has been compelled against the will of all her wisest and best to enter into a path of darkness and peril. Against their will she has been forced to turn back from the way of civilization to the way of barbarism, to renounce for the time her own ideals. With grief, with anxiety must the lover of his country regard the present aspect and the future prospect of the nation’s life. With serious purpose, with utter self-devotion he should prepare himself for the untried and difficult service to which it is plain he is to be called in the quick-coming years.
Two months ago America stood at the parting of the ways. Her first step is irretrievable. It depends on the virtue, on the enlightened patriotism of her children whether her future steps shall be upward to the light or downward to the darkness.
[A week after Norton’s speech, on June 15th, the New England anti-imperialists met at Boston’s Faneuil Hall…. This meeting resulted in the formation of the Anti-Imperialist Committee of Correspondence, which bloomed into the Anti-Imperialist League that November. Norton was one of the original eighteen honorary vice presidents of the League (along with Charles Francis Adams and Grover Cleveland).]
(This was first posted on July 16, 2020. Given that Bastille Day continues to be uncritically celebrated, it is good to be reminded)
I was on an audit in Mexico City on July 14, 1989. The radio station dedicated hours to the meaning of July 14, 1789, Bastille Day, two-hundred years before. The reason I know the program was hours long is that when, close to noon, I got back in the car to drive to another location, it was still going on.
The seemingly erudite, and fawning, discussions about liberté, égalité, fraternité brought back childhood memories from my Venezuelan history classes and my utter frustration at my inability to understand just what the multiple Venezuelan 19th century wars were all about. See here.
If my teachers had told me that the phrase originally ended with three additional words: ou La Mort, it might have helped my understanding. Those last words were eventually dropped. Clever move. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” sound much friendlier than “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death.”
And death was certainly a prominent guest on July 14, 1789.
The King, who was determined to not offend the people, ordered his troops to withdraw from Paris. He was in Versailles, hosting and groveling before the National Assembly while assuring them of his absolute acquiescence to their demands. As his troops withdrew, crowds converged at the Bastille carrying countless pikes and wearing tricolor pins that appeared seemingly from nowhere. But, of course, nothing appears from nowhere.
The Bastille had a hereditary governor, the Marquis de Launay, who, a few days earlier, had been visited by a delegation of Paris who told him the cannons in the building were an insult to the people. He promptly removed them and blocked the embrasures with wood. Then, on the 14th, “the people” began firing and demanding the drawbridge be lowered.
The Marquis appears to have finally realized that his appeasement had only emboldened the mob and, believing the Terms of Surrender the mob had sworn to, he lowered the draw bridge, as the crowd had been demanding.
A few minutes later, the Marquis de Launay’s head, had been severed and was atop a pike, dripping with blood, as it bobbed in the crowd. Several soldiers who had negotiated the Terms of Surrender with the mob, had their heads severed, but not before they had been disemboweled. The entrails carried amongst the crowd did not seem to elicit any horror or reproach from the bloodthirsty rabble. On the contrary, heads, hands, torsos, genitals, and more entrails were soon seen bobbing among the multitudes.
Seven prisoners were released. Seven. Who were astounded to see the head of their former warden, known to be a hesitant, mild sort, with a placard underneath: “De Launay, Governor of the Bastille, disloyal and treacherous enemy of the people.”
The king’s reaction, to the applause of the multitudes, was to send more troops away in order to not further provoke the people. We all know how his acquiescence ended for him, for his family, and for his country. A country that has never, to this day, recovered the heights and glories of its past.
The events of the storming of the Bastille were an ominous foreshadowing of what awaited France, including the French Revolution’s progeny, culminating with the Russian Revolution of 1917, a little over a century later.
This year, on July 14 (when this is being written), I checked a different Latin American land’s radio stations and, sure enough, inevitably, a paean to Bastille Day emerged. As noted in several posts on this blog (see here and here for two examples) Venezuela’s and much of Latin America’s intellectual heritage looks more to Paris than to Madrid. It has always been so in the modern era. And that helps explain the differing trajectories taken by North and South America.
As we observe and react to the current disturbances, let us ask ourselves whether these resemble 1776 or Bastille Day. They are not the same.
And whenever you hear or read liberté, égalité, fraternité, or similar sentiments, be sure to remember to add the remaining words from the original: ou la mort.
Propaganda poster from 1793. Note that even as late as 1793 the phrase, ou la mort, was still in use.
The king of France, Louis XVI.
The French Revolution as depicted by its admirers.
A more accurate representation of the French Revolution.
Burial of victims of Russian Revolutions of 1917. Ou La Mort.
Although there are events and places we would rather forget or not think about, it is nevertheless important for us to remember them because they act as spurs to be vigilant and to seek to understand their causes if, for nothing else, to at least teach our children what are the universal fruits of atheistic systems.
So, in this blog, I have sought to bring to mind some of the fruits of the Enlightenment’s French Revolution and its monstrous, deleterious effects not only on Europe, but also on Spanish-America. I have also noted atrocities, such as those recounted in Cetin Mert and Peter Fechter, because it is necessary to put flesh and blood on the stratospheric calls for liberté, égalité, fraternité so uncritically praised by the usual suspects in politics, academia, big business, entertainment, and more.
Of course, they rarely, if ever, note the rest of the slogan: ou La Mort. Such systems, overtly designed to “remake man”, with undisguised opposition to the Creator, coupled with open denial of His prerogatives, do indeed characterize themselves with death. And lots of it.
One of the fruits of atheistic systems was what has become known as the Katyn Massacre. Katyn is the name of a forest in Poland where, in 1943, over 4,000 Polish officers’ decomposed bodies were found in a mass grave. The world later learned that 21,768 Polish officers, professors, physicians, businessmen, and other members of the middle class had been murdered on direct orders of Josef Stalin. The killings took place principally in Starobielsk, Ostashkow, Bykivnia, Katyn, and other sites east of occupied Poland.
Briefly, upon the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact (technically, the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact or the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) in August, 1939, Poland was immediately invaded by Nazi Germany from the west and by Soviet Russia from the east. The Soviets immediately arrested all class enemies, including the aforementioned 21,768.
Over 200,000 Poles were arrested, most of whom presumably died in camps throughout the Soviet Gulag.
But the 21,768 were a special case that had to be dealt with for they represented the kernel or the core of Poland’s identity as a people or nation. The Soviets cajoled and tortured them but did not succeed in breaking them into voluntarily spouting Soviet, anti-Christian propaganda.
And so they were ordered to be executed, ruthlessly. Many had their hands bound and led to mass graves, where they were shot in the back of the head or neck. Some higher ranking officers were led to a slaughterhouse where they were shot in the back of the head and their bodies dumped in large trucks to be driven to mass graves.
The shooting started in the evening and ended at dawn. The first transport was on April 4, 1940 and carried 390 men; the executioners had a hard time killing so many people in one night. The following transports were not greater than 250.
According to a few surviving witnesses, after the condemned’s personal information was checked, he was handcuffed and led to a cell insulated with a felt-lined door. The sounds of the murders were masked by the operation of loud machines throughout the night. The victim was immediately shot in the back of the head or neck.
The procedure went on every night, except for the May Day holiday. In Katyn Forest, the Poles, with their hands tied behind their backs, were led to the graves and shot.
Lest one think this barbaric behavior on the part of the Soviets was unique to war, let us hear the testimony of another survivor who was among a group placed in a carriage house acting as a holding cell:
“In one of the walls of the carriage house there was a large hole made by bullets at the level of a standing man’s head. We were told that it was there they had shot members of the local bourgeoisie in 1917; I saw a similar gunshot hole in the wall around the Starobielsk convent. Apparently nuns from the religious order had been executed there.”
The Soviet Communists, similar to their ideological brethren, the Nazis, could not tolerate an identity other than their ideology. They therefore purposed to destroy the Poles’ nationality. The Stalinist Terror of 1937-1938 saw over 85,000 Poles executed even though Poles were less than 0.4 percent of the Soviet population.
As for the Nazis, they announced the mass killings to the world in 1943. Once the Hitler-Stalin Pact crumbled with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June, 1941, the Soviets fled occupied Poland. Local citizens advised the Germans of mass graves of Polish officers in Katyn Forest. The Nazis made no attempt to verify this information. The next year, 1942, Polish forced laborers learned about the mass executions and in one of the suggested places, they discovered a corpse in Polish Army uniform. They built a birch cross and notified the German authorities. And were promptly ignored. The Nazi regime was just as atheistic as the Soviet, and just as monstrous.
Only after the German defeat in Stalingrad, did the Nazis decide to investigate. Eight graves were opened and found to vary in depth from six to 11 feet, holding 10 to 12 layers of bodies carefully arranged face down, one on top of the other. The dead had their hands secured behind their backs with white Soviet-made cord and had been shot in the back of the head. Many were found to have puncture wounds consistent with the four-sided bayonet used by the Soviet military.
“In a distressing discovery, some of the younger officers who had perhaps vocally resisted appeared to have had sawdust or rags stuffed in their mouths. Nearby, the bodies of Soviet civilians executed many years earlier were also unearthed, and it was noted that they were bound in identical fashion to the Poles.”
But the Allies, led by Great Britain’s Winston Churchill, and the United States’ Franklin D. Roosevelt, vehemently defended the Soviets who loudly protested their innocence, asserting that the massacres were committed by the Germans.
Col. John Van Vliet, an American officer on the scene as a German POW, examined the bodies and related data and when he got home in 1945 filed a report about the murders. His verdict, borne out by later findings, was that the Soviets were the guilty parties. The Van Vliet report was marked “top secret”, kept under wraps, then disappeared entirely. A House Committee chaired by Rep. Ray Madden (D-Ind.) looked into this grim affair and found that other reports reflecting badly on the Kremlin were likewise disposed of.
“In 1944, President Roosevelt assigned Army Captain George Earle, to compile information on Katyn. Earle concluded that the Soviet Union committed the massacre. Roosevelt rejected that conclusion … and ordered the Earle report suppressed. When Earle formally requested permission to publish his findings, the President gave him a written order to desist. Earle was reassigned and spent the rest of the war in American Samoa.”
As we shall see in future posts, many such reports have been made to disappear from the historical record, including transcripts of executive hearings in Congress.
But for our present purposes, a statement by Rep. John Jesinski (D-Mich.) will suffice to summarize: “… the story of what happened to thousands of Polish officers who were murdered in the Katyn Forest was completely quashed”.
Subsequent history has demonstrated that defending a lie or hiding the truth never produces good results. Quite the contrary, as we shall see in future posts.
Post-Soviet Russia finally admitted to her guilt and on April 7, 2010, Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin joined Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk at a ceremony commemorating the massacre, marking the first time that a Russian leader had taken part in such a commemoration.
The murder of 21,768 Polish officers and professionals and the subsequent cover up, not only by the Communist Soviet Union, but also by the two “leaders of the free world,” Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, is yet another fruit that impels us to study and ponder our current situation and to not live by lies, for if we do, eventually the lies will triumph over us.
So, to Americans and to Venezuelans, I say: Speak the truth. Always, speak the truth.
Katyn Forest, 1941
The Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 divided Poland between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia
Those who grew up in El Pao will remember celebrating both the Fourth and the Fifth of July, reflecting yet another similarity between the two countries. The American and Venezuelan holidays afforded an opportunity for executives to declare and affirm ongoing genuine friendship and a collaborative spirit between both peoples while we children looked forward to having our fathers home for a more extended time than usual, and also learning a bit more to understand and appreciate our liberties. I was fortunate to have had a father and mother who, as best they knew how, taught us appreciation and gratitude for America and also for Venezuela.
Venezuela history was a required subject in school. And a most frustrating one it was for me. For the life of me, I could not understand what the early 19th century fighting was about. My teachers seemed to tell stories assuming we students possessed presupposed knowledge as to why the revolutionaries rose against Madrid. But I had no such knowledge. My father had told me about the North American colonies and how they had a history of self-government and liberties and how England had begun taking those liberties away, even to the point of stationing mercenary troops in private homes where they abused and in some cases even defiled the mothers and daughters.
Furthermore, the English parliament had decreed the assignment of Church of England bishops to the colonies: a last straw. I could see why folks would resist and seek to stop that, even if it meant overthrowing the rule of the English king.
Although my mother and father taught me to respect and honor Venezuela, my teachers told no stories about Spain’s abuses against Venezuela. We heard much about concepts of liberty and fraternity and equality. However, all stratospheric disquisitions about intangible concepts did not satisfy me as to why the criollos rose against Madrid initially, let alone explain the eventual extermination of over one-third of their number. The entire country churned with violence and at the end had been practically depopulated. It was clear to me that the savagery and atrocities occurred not prior to, but during the Revolution. I do remember hearing a teacher quote the words uttered by Simón Bolivar as he approached death in the late 1820’s, “I have plowed in the sea….” And, “…those countries will infallibly fall into chaos and dictatorships….”
But why cast off Spanish rule for intangible concepts only to install tangibly cruel “chaos and dictatorships”?
To read the July 4, 1776 and the July 5, 1811 declarations of independence back to back is an instructive exercise which might help explain why.
The Venezuelan is over 800 words longer and reflects allusions to French revolutionary thinking that is absent from the American. Consistent with the American, it also alludes to the Christian religion which sounds discordant if one has a basic understanding of Rousseau and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
The Venezuelan opens by alluding to a former declaration (April 19, 1810) which was adopted as a result of Spain’s occupation by France. It goes on to complain about three centuries of suppressed rights and that recent political events in Europe had served to offer an opportunity to restore those rights. They then, following the 1776 Declaration, proceed to justify their actions.
The United States [American] declaration does not complain about 150 years of colonial rule. Rather it expresses concern that, when abuses make it necessary to dissolve long-standing political bands, that such action must be taken carefully and with strong justification. It expresses the need and the willingness to “suffer, while evils are sufferable” before abolishing government and relations to “which they are accustomed.”
I know this is simplistic, and historians will disagree, but to the layman, the 1811 comes across as willful, the 1776, as reluctant.
The longest body in each is the justification. The Venezuelan uses 1,156 words, beginning with another allusion to 300 years of Spanish rule and affirming that a people has a right to govern themselves. Then the author expresses a willingness to overlook those 300 years by “placing a veil” over them (“corriendo un velo sobre los trescientos años“) and proceeds to recent European events which had dissolved the Spanish nation. It goes at length criticizing the Spanish monarchy for its abandonment of her throne in favor of the French and how this state of affairs had left Venezuela without legal recourse (“dejándola sin el amparo y garantía de las leyes“).
It asserts, furthermore, that the vast territories of the Americas with far more population than Spain itself cannot be governed from afar, etc. Here, the author presumes to speak for all the Spanish Americas. The layman is justified in wondering if this misdirection is inserted to remove attention from special pleading in the document that does not wholly stand up.
This section is not easy to follow today without some knowledge of the events current in 1811.
This was not a unanimous declaration; three provinces did not join, presaging the terrible bloodletting which was to follow.
For its justification, the American declaration uses 824 words (332 less than the Venezuelan), to list the abuses and their attempts to humbly address these legally only to have their attempts rebuffed. They make no allusions to 150 years of oppression or of unhappiness with their colonial status. They address only relatively recent abuses, including violence against life and property, mercenaries on their way to fight against them, war waged against them, threats to their religious liberty (the Quebec allusion), and much more. These are listed almost in bullet point format, but without the bullets, and are easy to understand, even 244 years later. It reads as if the document were a declaration of the right to self defense.
This was a unanimous declaration signed by representatives of each of the thirteen colonies.
In their conclusion, the Venezuelans, yet again, allude to centuries of oppression and their natural right to govern themselves. They assert they have a right to establish a government according to the general will (“voluntad general“) of her people.
It is hard to miss the influence of French revolutionary thinking in the Venezuelan document, despite allusions to a Supreme Being (“Ser Supremo”) and to Jesus Christ (“Jesucristo”). Its reference to the “General Will” is Rousseauean and is also found in the atheistic French Declaration of the Rights of Man.
They also state they will defend their religion.
The layman can’t help but be impressed by the schizophrenic nature of this document which contained appeals to atheistic revolutionary thinking then in vogue, while recognizing that the “regular folk” were still very religious and needed to hear allusions to religious fidelity.
The American conclusion appealed to the Supreme Judge of the world and in the name and authority of the people in the colonies they declared independence.
I know that professors delight in pointing out that Thomas Jefferson was the “author” of the American declaration and that he was not a Christian, etc.
However, one does not read the Virginia Fairfax Resolves (1774), or the Virginia Declaration of Rights (May, 1776), both of whose primary author was George Mason, a Christian, nor does one read clergyman, John Wise, who in 1710 wrote, “Every man must be acknowledged equal to every man,” and “The end of all good government is to cultivate humanity and promote the happiness of all and the good of every man in all his rights, his life, liberty, estate, honor, and so forth…” and “Democracy is Christ’s government in church and state.” Jefferson drew from a rich, deep Christian well. According to President Calvin Coolidge, Jefferson himself “acknowledged that his ‘best ideas of democracy’ had been secured at church meetings.”
The American declaration was followed by seven more years of war whose official end was the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and a constitution, still in effect, whose final ratification was in 1790. The Venezuelan declaration was followed by nineteen years of wars (plural) characterized by unspeakable cruelties and tortures, including a proclamation of “war to the death” by Simón Bolivar. By their end in 1830, one third of Venezuela’s population had perished. These wars were followed by more wars and rebellions which continued to the end of the century. She’s had 27 constitutions.
In sum, the American hearkened to her Christian heritage and history; the Venezuelan, to French revolutionary atheism, most starkly demonstrated by yet another revolution, the Russian, in 1917. Both the American and the Venezuelan shed blood. But the latter, like the French, shed it more abundantly.
I love the United States of America and its history. I love her Christian heritage and her pioneers. She is a wonderfully great country with a people who will always pull at my heart. I also love Venezuela and the warmth and genuine friendship of her people. I am grateful the Good Lord has exposed me to both and shown me that, in Christ, our best days are yet ahead.
