Tag: Liberté

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

July 14, 1789

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.

July 14, 1789

Richard Barnes

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 utter 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.