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July 14

Richard Barnes

(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.

Katyn

Richard Barnes

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

Fourth and Fifth of July: Declarations of Independence

Richard Barnes

(First posted on July 4, 2020)

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.

Declaration of Independence – Text of the Declaration of Independence | Britannica

Text of the July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence

Acta de la Declaración de Independencia de Venezuela – Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

Towards the bottom of article linked above, the reader will find the text of the July 5, 1811 Venezuela Declaration of Independence. It is in Spanish.

Calvin Coolidge’s Speech on the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence – Wikisource, the free online library

Highly recommended to all, not just Americans

Christendom

Richard Barnes

Our last post concluded with a rhetorical question: What is that “Western tradition”?

Although that is a mouthful, so to say, we can at least acknowledge one fact which, although incontrovertible, is ridiculously controversial today: our “Western tradition” is essentially a Christian tradition. The fact that the West used to be known and called “Christendom” is not right-wing propaganda. It is fact, as any perusal of older histories and essays makes abundantly clear. In fact, as recently as the mid-20th Century, that term, although in great decline by then, was still used by luminaries such as Winston Churchill.

Most histories of the United States practically begin with the Declaration of Independence of 1776. And such histories, in great measure, interpret the Declaration in the light of modern, Enlightenment tenets, including the oft-repeated but easily refuted axiom that our Founders were a bundle of deists straining against the constraints of organized religion and superstition.

Easily available primary sources and earlier histories demonstrate that the modern standard narratives are simply not so.

Furthermore, in past generations, our histories did not begin with the Declaration of Independence; they began with our colonial era and the background to that experience, which can only be understood by knowing what impelled our Pilgrim and Puritan fathers to come to these shores. And it was not the “1619” narrative.

In other words, our histories required an understanding of Christendom, now known as Europe, and the religious traditions which produced the legal traditions which Americans eventually inherited.

These are truths which are not only neglected but loudly disparaged and shut down today. Indeed, they are denounced as insensitive, misogynist, racist, and worse. 

But they are none of those things. Rather, they are true. And a glorious truth, at that. However, the truth requires study and effort beyond what is required to read bumper stickers and memes.

The late Harvard Professor, Harold J. Berman, wrote in his magisterial Law and Revolution (1983):

“The traditional symbols of community in the West, the traditional images and metaphors, have been above all religious and legal. In the twentieth century, however, for the first time, religion has become largely a private affair …. The connection between the religious metaphor and the legal metaphor has been broken.”

Is it any wonder that bonds of race, religion, soil, family, class, neighborhood, and work community have dissolved into abstract and superficial nationalisms? “It is impossible not to sense the social disintegration, the breakdown in communities, that has taken place in Europe, North America, and other parts of Western civilization in the twentieth century,” Berman wrote in 1983.

So when our “culture” is denounced and demands are made to toss it into the trash, such as was done by Jesse Jackson and a minority of the Stanford student body (Hey Hey, ho, ho), what is actually being called for is the abolishment of our Christian heritage. A heritage whose history includes the fact that, for example, 8 of our 13 original states had state supported churches until well after the US Constitution; all state constitutions acknowledged “Almighty God” or “God” and more.

Berman goes on to state, “For many centuries, [the West] would be identified very simply as the people of Western Christendom.” 

What does that mean with regards to our history?

Chartres Cathedral, France (1194-1220; built atop the site of four cathedrals dating to AD 400)

Published in 1983

“Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!”

Richard Barnes

In 1987, about 500 students at Stanford University gathered to protest against Stanford’s Western Culture curriculum. The invited speaker was 1984 and 1988 presidential candidate, Jesse Jackson. After his speech, he joined the students as they marched to present their demands to the faculty senate and chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!”

News reports led Americans to understand that what students and men such as Jackson were demanding was simply that undergraduates be exposed to other cultures such as the Sumerian or Inca civilizations or the achievements of Japan or China or the Arabs.

However, as usual, the media’s reporting was mere obfuscation. 

Here is the chant again: “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!”

This was exactly what had already been happening in Stanford and universities across the land for decades, and would take on added fury thereafter: a bold attack against our culture. This attack was based on neo-Marxist and other radical doctrines (ironically derived from Western sources). And the attack succeeded.

(Paradoxically, the Western Culture class, similar to its predecessor Western Civilization, was the most popular of the classes in Stanford, and was attended by students of all cultural backgrounds. In effect, the protests were actually against fellow students who saw value in learning about their history.)

So, instead of teaching our inherited culture, universities engaged in counter-cultural warfare, teaching gay, feminist, Afrocentric, and myriad more subjects, all designed to demonstrate how such are oppressed and dominated by Western Culture. And now we see the same attacks waged by high school and elementary school teachers.

In other words, academics are now designed to relentlessly bombard upcoming generations with opprobrium against our heritage, our history, and our historical figures. 

This did not start in 1987. I vividly recall a conversation in 1975 wherein a professional colleague slandered George Washington, asserting as fact something he could not possibly know and for which there is not a scintilla of evidence, outside the fervid imaginations of his college’s professoriate. 

In the 1960s radicals in American colleges and universities had fully bought into the assertion that “Western Civilization” was an early 20th-century construct, taught only to justify American entry into Europe’s wars in order to defend “our civilization”. That, in fact, such teaching did not form a part of any curriculum of higher learning prior to World War I.

How intellectuals could affirm such drivel and get away with it will one day be a subject of marvel, I suppose. Akin to how their cerebral forebears fervently believed in bleeding, phrenology, and ouija boards.

A cursory review of the writings and speeches of our colonial and early republic religious and political leaders, as well as great amounts of surviving correspondence from many lesser lights of the era, clearly demonstrates their understanding of our heritage, which was first described as “Christendom” and much later as “Western Civilization”. 

Just to take one example, Jonathan Edwards, the American Puritan minister most associated with the 18th Century Great Awakening in America, preached a series of over 30 sermons on God’s providential dealings with men, which he had intended to develop into book form but died before realizing that intention. Nevertheless, the sermons were published posthumously in the 1770’s as A History of the Work of Redemption, and you can find this work in Banner of Truth and Amazon, should you be so inclined.

In this work, Edward’s integrated landmark moments in the story of Christendom, such as the conversion of Constantine, the fall of Rome, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the Guttenburg Press, the Enlightenment deism, and more, and tied these into God’s providential history of His creation. He refuted atheistic Enlightenment narratives by demonstrating God’s work through history and nations. 

Edwards is just one of a great many American founding luminaries who not only possessed a deep knowledge of our heritage and culture, but also taught it to future generations. This is the heritage our academic, communications, corporate, medical, political, and other classes have so casually cast aside.

Nevertheless, as Professor Stanley Kurtz has written, “The Western tradition is the source of our founding principles and constitutional system. That is the most important reason for civic-minded citizens to study it.”

What is that “Western tradition”?

Jesse Jackson in Stanford, 1987, seeking to keep the majority of students from learning our heritage.

Jonathan Edwards, 1703-1758