Karl Marx – The Pull Of The Land

The Guide

November 1, 2023November 1, 2023 Richard Barnes

In the prior post I quoted Philip Jaffe, one of many American operatives, agents, or otherwise “true believers” who, although they did incalculable harm to the United States and her allies, that harm was nothing compared to the tens of millions who were tortured, starved, and murdered plus the hundreds of millions who were enslaved under the Communist utopias they helped usher in and maintain in power.

Let us read again part of what Jaffe wrote:

“It was through Chi Chao-ting, a cousin of mine by marriage, that I accepted the Communist version of Marxism as a guide to the contemporary world … For a period of more than fifteen years, Chi Chao-ting and I were intimate personal friends and close personal associates…. (emphasis mine)”

Like Jaffe, many 20th Century Americans and Europeans had lost the “Guide” that previous generations had taken for granted: Christianity.

For example, a Wall Street Journal survey, published in March, of this year found that “America Pulls Back From Values That Once Defined It: Patriotism, religion, and hard work hold less importance”.

“Since 1998”, it found drastic declines in importance of patriotism (70% to 38%), religion (62% to 39%), childbearing (59% to 30%), and more. What is truly alarming is that these categories had already suffered steep downturns throughout the 20th Century, especially from the late 1950s onward. To experience such additional declines “since 1998” is indicative of a country that has been transformed more deeply than most of us care to acknowledge.

I believe that all men are religious; we are religious because we are made in the image of God. Even atheists such as Jaffe concede the religious need for a “guide” through which to see the world. Of course, he would have denied that need to have been “religious”, but it most certainly is. His bible was Communism and he acted upon it. His gods were Marx and Engels and Chi Chao-ting, his cousin by marriage.

In the 1990s during business trips to Belgium, Switzerland, France, and Italy, I would seek opportunities to talk about American history with professionals in financial and general management executive positions of power and influence. They all had higher education and above average intelligence. Without exception, not one of them mentioned Christianity or religion when I’d ask them what they knew or had learned about the history of the United States. Instead, their confident, matter-of-fact replies would go into great depth on issues such as autonomy, material wealth, distrust of monarchy, hatred of taxation, with the Boston Tea Party thrown in for good measure.

They were genuinely surprised when I would steer the discussion to historical facts such as the Mayflower Compact; the great Puritan migration; the “Presbyterian rebellion”; the Great Awakening; the influence of Puritan, John Winthrop in the colonial era, which was the foundation of the constitutional republic, founded over a century later; the pervasive role of Calvinist Presbyterian, John Witherspoon, in the founding of the republic and his influence on our Founders; and much more.

The distressing thing about the ignorance about the true causes of liberty and our love thereof was that much of their learning had come from American sources taught in their European schools. It is a false teaching, which has had profound, baleful effects on Europe to this day.

So now, in both Europe and the United States, individual rights and personal autonomy are glorified and idolatrously exalted. All forms of collective identity — family, church, community, “mom and pop” commercial or agrarian entrepreneurship — are mocked, downplayed, and, where possible, destroyed. Did you notice that during the recent years of “crisis”, the “Big Boys” — Walmart, Sam’s, Costco, etc. — were deemed “essential” but small businesses, homes, farms, and church were not?

By seeking to supposedly unshackle ourselves from any religious guidance, we end up pursuing freedom from even biological certainties — men and women denying their physical realities and actually harming their bodies in doing so; mothers doing the same to their own children(!). We now hear about “transhumanism” where some seek to take us beyond the reality of being human.

In my boyhood, I had the privilege of being in the presence of general managers and even high executives of Bethlehem Steel. They saw themselves as “belonging” to their country; as leading a company that was “an American company”. They were not perfect, but at least they had an identity you could sink your teeth into. Movies such as 1954’s Executive Suite with William Holden merely reflected the reality on the street in that era.

But now, we hear of CEO’s and President’s who consider themselves to be “citizens of the world”. They pay more attention to Xi Jinping than to Middle America.

Their pragmatic, cold, decisions tell us they are uncaring because they are unmoored.

It is refreshing to read about Poland and Hungary who, seeing the devastation such rootless atheism has wreaked on their countries, have openly questioned the wisdom of modern liberal democracy, so called, and have called instead for a return to the old paths. In 2012, Hungary passed the Fundamental Law, a way of law based on Christianity. The liberal Guardian, practically beside itself, promptly went on the attack, mocking Hungary’s appeal to “values such as family, nation, fidelity, faith, love, and labor,” and its recognition of marriage and childbearing as foundational to society, and Christianity as inseparable from nationhood.

Hungary simply announced that a Christian democratic model entails the separation of church and state but not that of church and society. She rejects the compulsory atheism now prevalent in America and Europe. And for that she has been attacked to this very day. I wish them the very best and hope we take a page from her gutsy valor. Because it is a page from our own founding.

We all need a Guide. We all need a framework, or spectacles through which we see and measure our lives and the world we inhabit and in which we act. Jaffe was honest in admitting this and his guide led him to embrace the antithesis of the principles which formed our founding and our liberty and in so doing, it led him to a very real, palpable, costly, and bloody betrayal of those principles and of the very real people who believed in those principles. People not only in America, but in Europe, Africa, and Asia.

What is most distressing is that Jaffe’s guide is what has been being inculcated in America’s universities and in her elementary and high schools since the early and the mid 20th Century, respectively.

It is an Erastian indoctrination, one that insists on giving the state (government) all power and authority, even above the church. That is not our heritage. Our founding, which includes the century and a half colonial era, presupposed a Triune God under Whom all else lives and has its being. The state is merely one sphere of several, which include the family and the church. But all are under God, our Guide.

Any sphere which rejects this ends up usurping what belong to God alone. And the results are not pretty.

“Between 1629 and 1640, no fewer than twenty thousand Puritans fled from England to America. This was an astonishing number, considering the distances and the hazards of the journey (M. Stanton Evans).”

Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) and Karl Marx (1818-1883). Engels was a wealthy industrialist who pretended to tell the rest of us what was good for us; Marx was a truly despicable, hateful character (see Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals) whose personality is rampant in all Communist regimes. Their apologists have a very tough row to hoe: they must overturn the words of Jesus: “By their fruits ye shall know them.”

Mayflower Compact (1620) — America’s history, including the constitutions of the 13 colonies, the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and the constitutions of the states simply cannot be understood if we ignore the covenantal nature of our founding.

John Winthrop (1588-1649), first governor of Massachussets, whose sermon, known as “The City Upon A Hill” resonates even today.

John Witherspoon (1723-1794) was a very influential Founding Father of the United States. He was a minister of the Gospel and the president of Presbyterian College of New Jersey, now Princeton.

Viktor Orbán (born 1963), Prime Minister of Hungary. Having lived under Soviet Communism, he now refuses to live under EU totalitarianism.

Iconic view of the “stacks” in Bethlehem, PA. Bethlehem Steel Company no longer exists (1857-2003)

The cast of 1954’s classic movie, Executive Suite

It Has To Be Earned

July 24, 2023July 24, 2023 Richard Barnes

“A republic, if you can keep it.”
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.

With God’s help we can do so.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

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)

Seeds Planted

December 10, 2022December 10, 2022 Richard Barnes

(Note: This post largely extracts a letter I wrote 22 years ago, which is even more relevant today)

We’ve heard it said that seeds planted in a given century come to fruition in the next. If so, it may be helpful to look at 19th century seeds which gave the 20th and the 21st (so far) centuries a harvest of depravity unknown to the first 1,800 years of the Christian calendar.

We begin (without seeking to offend our neo-Darwinian friends) with Darwin’s (1809-1882) On the Origin of Species, which purported to explain why some “races” are superior to others (this purpose, actually in its original subtitle, is rarely mentioned today, and new editions omit it. The full title is: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle For Life).

The book was published in 1859; its first 1,250 copies sold out overnight. It was not the common folks, but rather the intellectual elite, which bought it out and began to apply it, for it gave a patina of scientific support (emphasis on patina) to the ancient desire to divorce oneself from the claims of a Creator. Claims seen in political documents until then, such as the Declaration of Independence, which presupposed that we are created men and women with God-given (inalienable) rights. (The authors of the declaration knew pagan history; they knew the pagan idea of the eternity of matter and ascending circles of existence. This preceded Darwin by millennia. Yet, though knowing this, the Founding Fathers rejected it. They knew that inalienable rights could not be grounded on a la-la theory.)

Another 19th century seed, Karl Marx (1818-1883), first dedicated Das Kapital to Charles Darwin, who, in a rare fit of prudence, declined the honor. Darwin could never fully shake off his Christian heritage. His doubts pursued him to the grave. That was not the case with Marx. For more on this monster, known for “howling gigantic curses”, we would recommend Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals. For our purposes, suffice it to say that this seed reaped a more overt harvest than Darwin and Nietzsche (see below). Darwin and Nietzsche’s harvests are obvious to anyone who pauses but a moment. But to see Marx’s harvest doesn’t require a pause; it merely requires that one be sentient. His assertion that man is a mere economic animal fits nicely, as intended, with Darwin’s theory. In both, man is declared to be an animal.

The third seed, Frederick Nietzsche (1844-1900), whose most famous work was Thus Spake Zarathustra, was grossly antichristian. His most salient ideas were a despising of the weak, the mediocre, and the altruistic. He exalted war and chaos as a stimulus for energy and the triumphant life. He was hostile to Christian morality. To him, each individual — not a transcendent Creator — defines his or her identity, not to mention morality. But he did preach a morality of the lords and a morality of the slaves. The former, a superior morality, is characterized by power and dominion; the latter, a weak morality, is characterized by compassion, humility, and patience. He died a madman.

We hardly need to comment on the 20th century harvest from these seeds. The thoughtful reader will recognize how the above philosophies prevail in today’s political and corporate life. As illustration, we will simply summarize that harvest in terms of a basic rule: the good tends to life; the evil tends to death. Clearly the harvest of the 20th century has tended to death. And the progress so far of the 21st has not abated that tendency much.

The following statistics are conservative estimates. More data continues to become available which reflects numbers far higher than these (for example, The Black Book of Communism, Mao: The Unknown Story, Hungry Ghosts, etc.). Nonetheless, the data below will suffice for our purposes. It declares the 20th century tale of deaths caused by deliberate state policy:

95.2 million deaths; 477 per 10,000 population — Communist states (international socialism)

20.3 million deaths; 495 per 10,000 population — Fascist states (national socialism)

3.1 million deaths; 48 per 10,000 population — Partially free

8 million deaths; 22 per 10,000 population — Free

The above figures exclude the 60 million estimated deaths caused by abortions since 1973 in the United States and their territories; the 35.7 million estimated deaths caused by 20th century wars; and the 15 million deaths caused by the state-sponsored Ukraine famine of the early 1930s. Be reminded: the first two state systems in the list above are/were atheistic, antichristian systems, whose first order of business was to suppress the Bible and the Christians. This is well documented and overt, but hardly ever stated in polite company. If the Spanish Inquisition of a few centuries back deserves censure, then surely the regimes alluded to above deserve opprobrium. But the public elite has never been known for consistency … or honesty.

The biggest characters (using that term deliberately) associated with the statistics above, were ALL disciples of the ideas of Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche.

Is there cause for optimism in the 21st century? Well, if evil seeds can be expected to germinate in subsequent centuries, then surely good seeds will do the same. On that basis, we can be cautiously optimistic, although the harvest may be more fully enjoyed by our children and grandchildren. We’ll mention only one such seed, but a most critical one: the great shift in education from a state sponsored function back to a father and mother duty.

This tectonic redirection was clearly seen in the latter part of the 20th century but was accelerated after the draconian measures imposed by most — though thankfully not all — “First World” governments since early 2020. These mandates — very few were formally passed into law by legitimate legislatures — ironically exposed the philosophies pushed by state education systems to horrified parents who promptly removed their children from government schools and either began to educate them at home or, at great financial sacrifice, in private religious schools.

This is a consequential shift back to first principles. We are already seeing some impact in that major universities are actively seeking home-educated children or at least those whose education has been closely overseen by their parents. In sharp contrast to the Zeitgeist since the mid-19th century, the late 20th and early 21st centuries mindset of many is that the child is on loan to the father and mother by God. And it is the family’s duty, not the state’s, to educate him or her. We are convinced this shift tends to life and, therefore, will result in a more compassionate and a more life-supporting and life-affirming 21st and 22nd centuries. May our children and grandchildren see that day!

Declaration of Independence, original (“engrossed copy”) on display in the National Archives

Charles Darwin, 1809-1882

Karl Marx, 1818-1883

Frederick Nietzsche, 1844-1900

July 14, 1789: Further Comments

July 29, 2022July 29, 2022 Richard Barnes

The fall of the Bastille and its attendant, macabre events (see here) were a sinister foreshadowing of what was to come to Paris and to all of France, not to mention much of the world in the ensuing centuries, including the bloodletting in Spanish America.

The King, Louis XVI, had been awakened long before dawn in Versailles to receive the news of the Bastille. The Assembly had been meeting in Versailles. In the morning, as the deputies listened to themselves give speeches, the King was announced, entered, and spoke, “You have been afraid, well it is I who have confidence … in you.”

He then announced further that the troops would be removed not only from Paris, but from Versailles as well. As if to say, “You see? No need to fear me at all.” The announcement was greeted with thunderous applause and cheers.

Two days later, the king journeyed to Paris to further demonstrate his goodwill. But Maximilian Robespierre, one of history’s most blood-soaked names, in a surviving letter to a friend, wrote, “The present Revolution has produced in a few days greater events than the whole previous history of mankind…”

“A patriotic army of 300,000 men, composed of every class of citizen, accompanied by Gardes Françaises, Suisses, and other soldiers, has captured the Bastille and punished its Governor and the Prévost des Marchands for their treachery. The fear that this army might march to Versailles has decided the Revolution.”

That’s how the more astute revolutionaries saw, interpreted, and described the king’s supine actions.

The crowds had been admonished, upon pain of death, to not dare shout out, “Vive le Roi“. Unsurprisingly, they humbly obeyed.

After touring the city, surrounded by deputies and armed crowds, he returned to Paris.

The following is from Otto Scott’s Robespierre. I quote it as a microcosm of what was to follow throughout the country and, through the next two centuries, many corners of the entire globe, but especially Eurasia and China:

“Five days later … on July 22, 1789, ex-Minister Foullon [whom the newspapers had accused of saying the ‘people could eat hay’; this was never proved or sourced] was … surrounded … a bundle of straw [tied] to his back and … a necklace of nettles and thistles around his head. He was dragged to City Hall….”

“The new Mayor Bailly orated about the law. Lafayette, summoned to the scene, argued that if Foullon was taken in safety to prison instead of being summarily lynched, he could be brought to disclose his ‘confederates’. After several hours of this the fiery crowd seemed placated. But when the old man — he was seventy-four — and his guard emerged from City Hall, a man suddenly jumped forward, caught Foullon by the neck, and three him into the crowd. A cluster closed around [him] immediately. Beating him energetically … [dragged him] across the Place de Greve to the lamp iron at the corner of the rue de la Vannerie. A noose was thrown over him; one man hoisted him up while others pulled on the lower end of the rope. After he was strangled to death his cadaver was lowered, his head cut off and stuck onto a pitchfork. The rest of the body was stripped, mutilated, and carved into pieces. A horrid parade through the streets started.”

A side note, Alexander Hamilton had expressed concerns about the nature of the French Revolution to his friend Lafayette, who paid no heed as he hastened back to France. Hamilton’s warning likely rang in his ears a few short years later, when he escaped just ahead of the mob.

Many men and women, including the king and queen, were executed after days, months, and years of imprecations and insults hurled at them, culminating with the same accusations painted on placards and posters as people trudged behind them, shortly before their lynchings.

Words are powerful. And effective. All revolutionaries understand that.

Clarence B. Carson wrote, “What particularly intrigued revolutionary socialists, Karl Marx among them, about the French Revolution was the drastic changes it made in the lives and ways of a people. It demonstrated, at least for them, in embryo form, the potentialities for changing man and men in society by revolution. The relentless thrust to equality especially caught the attention of socialists….

“In sum, society would be completely reconstructed.”

The French Revolution expressed those ideas loudly and made attempts at such. It moved to change the calendar with Year 1 being the first year after the Convention of 1792. But the most virulent attacks were on the church and its priests, nuns, adherents, and property. In Nantes the guillotine could not kill priests quickly enough so the representative-on-mission there, Jean-Baptiste Carrier, conjured up an even more effective way to rid the revolution of clergy, and entire families of men, women, and, children too. “Wolflings grow to be wolves,” he explained.

Boatloads of people were towed to the middle of the Loire and scuttled. Other boatloads were merely emptied into the river and, should any unfortunate attempt to grasp the side of the boat, his or her fingers or hands were slashed or cut off, ensuring drowning. Reports survive of many cases where Carrier ordered men and women stripped, tied together, and thrown into the river. “Republican Marriages” he called them. Modern historians tend to discount this, although they cannot deny the fact of thousands of cruel, inhumane deaths.

Carrier later became yet another fulfillment of Jacques Danton’s exclamation at his execution, “The Revolution, like Saturn, devours her own children!”

But the main objective must be kept in sight at all times: the de-Christianization of France. In this hatred of Christianity, revolutionaries have been consistent throughout the centuries. And this hatred is very knowledgeable, it not only attacks the church and churches, it attacks the home. One of the first acts of Revolutionary France was to make it much easier to dissolve the marriage bonds. It also decriminalized abortion. This was re-criminalized in 1810 with the Napoleonic Code.

As noted before, all this was studied with great interest by Karl Marx. As for Vladimir Lenin, an absolutely pitiless man, he said that he had learned much from the French Revolution, but that the revolutionaries had made one major mistake which he would not make: they had ended the Terror. This he was determined to not do.

The king and the queen were executed by guillotine. Their young son, born in 1785, died in prison ten years later, in 1795, days before physicians were called to perform an autopsy which revealed countless scars reflecting indescribable torture. The people whom the king loved and trusted had repaid him with their own currency.

It pains me to say, yet again, that Venezuela, the land of my birth, had its own birthing pangs in the philosophies and anti-clerical fervors of the French Revolution, however much lip service her revolutionaries paid to the American Declaration of Independence.

Simón Bolivar said, “We need equality to recast, so to speak, into a single whole, the classes of men, political opinions, and public custom,” thereby neatly encapsulating The One while ignoring The Many. His executions of defenseless prisoners of war, his pitiless emptying of Caracas, and his Declaration of War to the Death follow logically from such sentiments.

May Venezuela see better days soon. Meanwhile, may those of us in the USA, learn to push back and not acquiesce so easily as did Louis XVI.

Whenever you hear lofty sounding words and ideals, be sure to check the fruit. That’s always a dead giveaway.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité, sounds marvelous. But the fruit is seen in the original’s last three words: ou la mort.