Adolph Hitler – The Pull Of The Land

Katyn

July 11, 2023July 12, 2023 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

El Pao As Microcosm of American Culture

January 12, 2023January 12, 2023 Richard Barnes

That title promises more than I can deliver in a short post; however, I hope to at least be able to address what my memory retains regarding the evolving culture of my childhood years in a jungle mining camp and how it very much reflected the general culture in the United States. The purpose is not to reminisce but to seek to identify our root cultural problem and how to address it.

With regards to “class struggle” so prominent in modern society, please see my post, Class Struggle, as I will not be repeating those comments here, although for a better overall understanding, that post should be considered in tandem with this one.

Cornelius Van Til’s aphorism is true, in my opinion: “Culture is religion externalized.” So, for example, historically, the culture of Europe is drastically different, even contradictory, to that of pre-William Carey India or pre-WWII Japan. The difference relates or related directly to the vastly different dominant religions of each: Christianity versus Hinduism or Buddhism or Shintoism. Even cultures which arose under a predominantly Protestant Christianity differ markedly from those arising under a predominantly Roman Catholic Christianity. Witness northern versus southern Europe, or North versus South America.

Nevertheless, every major Christian confession, regardless of denomination, makes claims to objective truth; such is not the case with other major religions such as Hinduism or Buddhism, other than categorical statements affirming, at best, dubious claims, such as “all religions are the same”. They most certainly are not, as even my Hindu friends will admit upon reflection.

El Pao’s culture in the 1950s was undeniably Christian, although its population was marked by Roman Catholics, Protestants, non or infrequent church-goers. We also had one or two atheists. Outside of El Pao, I remember genuinely friendly relations with Jewish people in Caracas. Our general Christianity did not generate Anti-Semitism, but rather a tolerance increasingly rare today.

All, even those who denied Christianity, lived according to Christian societal norms.

If I were offered Hobson’s Choice of either living in Mexico City today or living there before Cortes’ arrival in 1519, I would not hesitate to choose to live there today, since I do not particularly care for Aztec human sacrifice, whether my own or anyone else’s. I believe the reader would also choose likewise. We do incline towards self-preservation, after all.

And what makes the difference between Mexico today and Mexico before Cortes? In a word: Christianity.

Unlike the era of the Great Reformation in the 16th and 17th centuries, the crisis in religion today is not denominational or doctrinal (although I do not minimize such serious matters).

The crisis in religion today, as Harold O. J. Brown put it, is in the “radical sensate approach to truth”. That crisis goes well beyond the walls of any church or denomination and into all of society, culture, and civilization.

In El Pao, although we had our doctrinal differences which were cause of strong, even bitter, disagreements, we all generally agreed that we were to live according to the Ten Commandments; that there was such a thing as objective truth; that we were created by the Triune God to Whom we were accountable; that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh; that Christmas celebrated the Incarnation; that the world was never the same thereafter; that society would not survive a denial of these eternal verities….

We recognized our fallen nature, which would be evidenced in sin and unfaithfulness. But overall we sought adherence, however imperfectly, to God’s Law, although sometimes with grumbling.

This began to change openly (at least to my friends and me) in the late 50s and early to mid 60s. I remember in 1966 an American teacher who received his monthly issue of Playboy magazine; I also recall a friend who showed me where his father hid his own monthly issues.

The aforementioned teacher was also very insistent in cramming Darwin’s evolutionary theories down our throats.

The relationship between the playboy outlook, with its myriad and increasingly degenerate manifestations, and Darwinism is not coincidental: the latter prepares the soil which enables the former to flourish. Of course, pornographic literature preceded Playboy by centuries; however, there is a major difference between the culture in England and the English colonies in 1750 and that of England and the United States in the latter 20th Century: in broad strokes, the former still believed in objective truth and understood that such literature was offensive to God and destructive to society; the latter does not believe in objective truth nor God nor the necessity of morality to the proper functioning of society.

For instance, in the 18th and even 19th centuries, folks had to exert themselves — sometimes traveling across state or even national boundaries — to get hold of bawdy material. By the latter 20th, such material was not only readily available, it was thrust into children’s faces at the grocery checkout, because the conviction that unfettered depictions of such degenerate behavior was contrary to the moral law of God had largely disappeared.

It was no coincidence that, preceding or concurrent with such changing norms, we also witnessed an increasing intolerance of the Christian religion. That is not accidental. The writings of Marx and Engels and Nietzsche, the godfathers of Communism, Nazism, and Fascism — all anti-Christian to the core — are frightening in their depictions glorifying man without God. To wit:

“The New Testament is the gospel of a wholly ignoble species of man … These little herd-animal virtues do not by any means lead to ‘eternal life'” — Nietzshe

“We … reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatever as eternal, ultimate, and forever immutable moral law …” — Engels

“We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society … which is creating a new communist society … We do not believe in an eternal morality.” — Lenin

“The proletariat can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages …” — Marx

“The state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” — Marx

“A revolution is the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon another … [and] must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries.” — Engels

Why are we surprised at Stalin’s gulags, Pol Pot’s killing fields, Mao’s forced famines against tens of millions, Castro’s murders, and Hitler’s gas chambers? They were merely faithful followers of their founding, anti-Biblical prophets and literature. They did not “pervert” Communism or Fascism or Nazism or Nihilism: they successfully imposed such on millions. And their descendants, mostly in western corporate and university boards and faculties, are busy imposing the same.

How can they succeed?

By the foolish submission of millions to a “radical sensate approach to truth”.

What does this mean in practice?

Brown and Sorokin are helpful here. They trace three phases in culture: the Ideational, the Idealistic, and the Sensate. The first sees spiritual truth and values as virtually the only truth, with God and the Scriptures “as the highest and truest realities”. The second is a compromise between the ideational and sensate, but inclines more to the ideational in that it places a higher value on eternal verities while not ignoring physical realities. The third is interested only in the material things and is accompanied by a rapid degeneration in culture “not only in the technical sense that they no longer form part of a well-functioning integrated whole, but also in the sense that they are morally blameworthy and merit condemnation.”

History has no record of a system of liberty, tolerance, and harmony having been created from a sensate approach to truth. Conversely, the historical record is littered with the remnants of peoples and institutions who perished because of their founding upon or descent into such an approach to truth.

As a first or second grader in El Pao, I vividly recall my teacher talking about her belief that there are levels or grades in hell. She said that Hitler would certainly receive greater punishment than a common thief who did not repent. Such musing by a teacher today is inconceivable.

As a seventh grader in El Pao, my “Playboy-reading” teacher barely hid his unbelief, but nevertheless respected the Christian norms of the culture in which he thrived. For example, in a discussion about the Beatles, he said something along these lines, “I won’t deny that many of my colleagues play Beatles music in parties. But is such music as long lasting as, say Bach or Beethoven? We can have fun, but we need to be careful to continually learn that which is permanent.”

In his sensate approach to truth, he still retained the old “ideational” or “idealistic” bearings which built the civilization which produced him. However, he failed to see that a society will eventually choose one above the other. And our culture has chosen the sensate.

And now, if we care about our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, we must face the need to return to the Truth. Most of us would readily condemn a Stalin or Hitler; however, have we paused to consider how their approach to truth has become the prevalent approach in our own corporate, educational, cultural, and even religious institutions? Do we really believe that our own homes are immune to such?

How do we push back? By unflinchingly proclaiming the truth — objective, truth — whenever we are given an opportunity to do so. We must not retreat from affirming that some things are good and others are evil and that such is defined by God, not man. And we must recognize that there is nothing new under the sun. After all, it was in the Garden of Eden when man first attempted to define the truth without God: “Ye shall be as gods, knowing [defining] good and evil”.

Teach your children to not mock their grandparents and great-grandparents’ simple faith. The generations whose faith was implicit and simple have done far more to preserve and expand our liberties and peace than generations of multi-degreed faculties and administrations in all Ivy League colleges.

For those who wish to read and understand these themes at a deeper level, I recommend The Sensate Culture, by Harold O. J. Brown, and also The Crisis of Our Age, by Pitirim A. Sorokin.

Harold O. J. Brown (1933 – 2007)

Pitirim Sorokin (1889 – 1968)

Christmas 2019 — A Look at the Christmas Truce of 1914

December 26, 2019December 26, 2019 Richard Barnes

Although it had long faded from public memory, this century has brought renewed awareness of the “Christmas Truce” of 1914. About ten years ago our family enjoyed the deeply moving, 2005 production of Joyeux Noel. We knew a little about the truce, but hardly enough. We later learned that there were truces in all fronts of that war.

To better understand this event requires an appreciation of the religious awareness of men and women at the turn of the twentieth century. Although the nihilism of Nietzsche, combined with the deleterious effects of the German, and, later, English “lower criticism”, had begun their march across elite academia and her handmaidens, their effect had not yet dribbled down to Everyman. Yet it was Everyman who would be sent out to march to his death in the name of the cynicism making its inroads into western civilization.

Most men and women of the West considered themselves Christian and cherished their traditions, with Christmas occupying a special place in their hearts. So when, a few days before Christmas, 1914, in defiance of national leaders, a “Christmas Truce” was observed across all fronts of the war, the politicians and military brass (along with certain civilian sectors ) were outraged. In other words, those not actually in the arena, in the war’s front; those not bleeding and dying, were angry. Adolph Hitler was not in the trenches at the time, but he is known to have been bitterly opposed to the truce. Charles De Gaulle called it “lamentable.”

In one section, the Truce began with Germans singing Silent Night, in their language. The British across no man’s land were surprised, but also began to sing the same Christmas carol in English. Eventually, a German soldier came out of his trench and erected a Christmas tree in no man’s land. British guns were aimed on him, but no one fired. That action spurred more spontaneous reactions, and, eventually, British and German soldiers were meeting in no man’s land, shaking hands, laughing, singing, exchanging cigarettes, food, and other small gifts — even soccer matches were held — in the spirit of Christmas.

Many letters are extant which tell, sometimes in moving prose, the details of the truce as it unfolded and ended in the letter-writers’ sections. Especially touching are the narrations about how the respite also allowed each opposing side to bury their dead.

In some sections, this truce extended through the first of January.

The brass descended with guns blazing. In one incident, an irate British officer, beside himself, took a rifle and, not to put too fine a point on it, murdered an unarmed German soldier standing in no man’s land.

The war resumed and carried on through three more Christmastimes and almost a fourth, were it not for the armistice of November 11, 1918. The high commands ensured there would be no more Christmas truces by, among other measures, issuing orders the following December warning against any “fraternizing” with the enemy. Anyone participating in any Christmas truce would be charged with “rendering aid and comfort to the enemy.”

By the end of the war, over twenty million people had died in the conflict, ten million of which were soldiers such as as those who had participated in the Christmas truce of 1914.

The 20th (twentieth) century should be known as the atheistic century, as it was characterized by regimes that boasted their denials of God. Gil Elliott in his 1972 work, The Book of the Dead tells us that the twentieth century, the century which represents the great triumph of humanism, gave us wars, revolutions, and concentration and re-education camps that killed between 89 and 159 million men, women, and children. Twenty-eight years later, seven French scholars wrote the magisterial, The Black Book of Communism which in over 900 chillingly documented pages, using formerly unavailable source documents, demonstrates that over 100 million fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, boys, girls, and babies died under the hand of atheistic communism, in addition to the dead from the wars of that century.

“From whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members (James 4:1)?” The great fighter pilot and writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whose existentialist tendencies I reject, but whose insights of man-in-action I respect, expressed it pithily: “For in the end, man always gravitates in the direction commanded by the lodestone within him.”

The Biblical, Augustinian concept of Just War needs to be dusted off and examined once again. There is evil in the world and Just Wars may be necessary; however, many wars certainly are not just.

On that first Christmas Day over two-thousand years ago was born the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6). God commands all, including governors and princes and judges to honor Him. In history, many have done just that. And many have disdained to do so, especially in the 20th century. Peace and life tend to characterize the former; wars and death, the latter.

On this Christmas season of 2019, may we renew our love for God and may that renewal bring us to love our neighbor, and to be at peace with one another even as those soldiers of opposing armies were at peace, albeit for a short time, on the Christmas Truce of 1914.

Our family wishes you and yours a Very Merry Christmas season.