Simón Bolívar – The Pull Of The Land

[The left-wing Republicans] managed to convert the catastrophe of the [French] Revolution into a stirring and soft-focused myth, largely by downplaying, editing out, or explaining away its most sanguinary ‘episodes’, like the Terror, as deviations from the noble idea, a process in which the great historians of the Republic, some of whom achieved high office, were thoroughly collusive, and which has obvious echoes of subsequent events in Russia, although there, historians tended to be shot” — Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers, p. 339 [emphasis mine].

Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, “To destroy a people, you must first destroy her roots.” This observation has multiple applications of which two are primary.

One application is to a country, such as The United States, where for more than a century now, her media and academia have utterly distorted her colonial and early Republic history. The effect of this has been to rear generations who have been taught not only to not know, let alone understand, but to actually hate their country for her racist, repressive, and utterly corrupt colonial past and founding. In effect, there was nothing good in our past and to “progress” we must “burn it down”, cast it aside, and start over. These generations not only despise their fathers, they refuse to listen to anyone with the temerity to show them, even from primary sources, that they have been taught bunk.

Another application is to apply it to a country, such as Venezuela (and much of South America) where for more than two centuries, her media and academia have utterly distorted her colonial [Spanish] history and mythologized and glorified her recent history, inaugurated by the godlike Simón Bolívar, who “liberated” her and initiated the birth of true liberty and civilization. The effect of this has been to rear generations who have been taught to not only scorn, let alone understand, but to hate their colonial past and to believe that all civilization began in the modern era. These are generations who ignore what even Bolívar admitted as he neared death, that centuries of civilization had been wiped out by his revolutions.

Both applications are nefarious and will surely precipitate utter ruin unless arrested. In the first case, they lead to a refusal to defend one’s people and home; in the second, they inspire a false valuation of one’s recent history. In both cases, they result in a headlong rush into ruinous policies and actions.

And, in both cases, an insufferable arrogance is birthed and encouraged: Job would say to them, “No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you.”

Dishonest historians and media are nothing new. Solzhenitsyn told about American correspondents who visited Moscow and reported back to America how the Russian people were filled with unspeakable joy and gratitude for Soviet Communism, this in the face of millions dying from hunger and torture in the Gulag network of concentration camps and prisons. Not to mention the dishonest and debunked “reporting” by such as Walter Duranty who lied with a straight face about the forced famines in Soviet Ukraine. He “won” the Pulitzer prize for his grim fairy tales and to this day, that honor has yet to be denounced, let alone recalled, by The New York Times.

Examples can be easily multiplied.

Jesus said, “By their fruits ye shall know them.”

We do not need the media or historians to show us the very real, life-killing, tyrannical fruits of Communism and Socialism, by whatever names they may be called in any given era. Just a few observations here and there will suffice, assuming we are willing to see and listen. For example, we now have, in the United States, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of emigres who escaped the chains and gulags of Asian and Eastern European tyrannies. Many of them have been raising their voices and sounding the alarm, most acutely over the last three years. Sure, they are dismissed, ignored, or mocked by the bien-pensants who write from their ivory towers in commerce and academia and who despise the men and women who do the work and pay the taxes and actually love their country and her history.

But we ought not dismiss them, for in warning us, they reach back to the horrible truths of their past, and point to what our future will be if we do not change course, beginning with the very real, religious Foundation of liberty.

As for the “noble idea”, their pasts and our future are not “deviations” from it, but rather are intrinsic to it.

For it is by no means a “noble idea”, but rather an ancient, demonic one, as is attested by millions of voices crying from their blood-soaked graves.

Although this study covers religion and politics from the French Revolution to the Great War, it demonstrates, once again, that there is nothing new under the sun

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) warned the west, as he observed her unwillingness to defend her heritage, her love of materialism, ease, and pleasure, and her blindness to the same systems of philosophy and government that created the Soviet Gulag Archipelago, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s Killing Fields, and more.

I had promised to write about Simón Bolívar off and on, because “it is simply impossible to consider Venezuela … without grappling with Bolívar ….”

Bolívar possessed attributes that are worthy of admiration and imitation. But we must recognize that he also encompassed much that is not so worthy. Horribly so.

One fact we must deal with is his utter, dispassionate cruelty documented in contemporary journals and letters, including some in Bolívar’s own hand.

This post addresses Bolívar’s War to the Death Decree (Decreto de Guerra a Muerte) [Decreto]. This decree and the resulting bloodbath has to be addressed by Bolívar’s many admiring biographers and Venezuelan textbooks because it is simply too well known to be ignored. As I grew up in Venezuela I accepted at face value that the Decreto was issued in reaction to a “war to the death” on the part of the Spaniards.

That explanation was easy to accept given the Lascasian view of Spain so prevalent, even to this day, in South and North America (Bolivar). In addition, the unbelievably horrible depredations of “royalist” José Tomás Bove are well documented (Bove) and certainly help explain how a furious Bolívar might react with his own sanguinary actions.

However, a cursory review of the timelines and some additional study of easily-available documents — Bove’s actions took place after the Decreto and Bove was loyal to no one but his marauding, killer hordes; so much so that the Spaniards had moved to depose him — clearly show that Bolívar could not have used Bove as justification. Indeed, Bove’s name appears nowhere in the Decreto. How could it? He was practically an unknown at the time it was promulgated.

To understand the genesis of the Decreto, one need only consider the genesis of the South American wars for independence: The French Revolution (Bastille).

The Caribbean had already seen a “War To the Death”. It took place in Haiti, a nation which today shares an island with the Dominican Republic and which has never fully recovered from its own decree.

Bolívar’s Decreto was an adoption of the Haitian revolutionary model which had declared a “war to the death” on the French. To be clear: this was a decree calling on all inhabitants to “exterminate” every single French or European man, woman, and child on the island.

Jean-Jacques Dessalines, as bloodthirsty a man as has ever lived, succeeded in ridding Haiti of the French. He and his troops entered villages, encouraging the people to go to their churches to ensure their and their children’s safety. He and his men would then proceed to bayonet, decapitate, eviscerate, and otherwise torture the French, careful to leave the women and children for last for rape and abuse. In his presence, his troops burned at least one priest alive because the cleric dared to denounce Dessalines’s actions as Satanic.

Whenever you read or hear hagiographies of Jean-Jacque Rousseau , always remember: by their fruit ye shall know them. One fruit is his namesake, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who, in 1806, was brutally murdered and dismembered.

In 1804, Dessalines proclaimed himself Jacques I, Emperor of Haiti. He died a mere two years later, but not before he received the great Venezuelan, Francisco de Miranda. In that audience, Dessalines urged Miranda to do as he had done: proclaim a war of extermination on the Spaniards and Europeans. Miranda, to his eternal credit, declined to do so.

However, less than a decade later, Bolívar did take the advice and in 1812 the Decreto was drafted although formally proclaimed in June, 1813. Nevertheless, ever the man of action, Bolívar had previously ordered his men to kill without quarter and to incarcerate those who were not in uniform. In his letter to the congress in Nueva Granada, he wrote that he had traversed lands, cities, and towns, “where all Europeans and Canarios without exception were executed.”

And how were they executed?

The gory events in Caracas and La Guaira, where his loyal commander, Juan Bautista Arismendi, murdered 886 prisoners who had languished in execrable conditions for a year, provides an answer. They were pulled out of jail and summarily shot. He then ordered between 500 and 1,000 sick and disabled from hospitals and, to save powder, had them beaten to death with clubs and boards. The coup de grâce was by means of large rocks crushing the heads of the dying. He then ordered ladies to be dressed in white and dance among the bloody bodies as they awaited the rapine of Arismendi’s men.

Bolívar wrote about this to the Congress in Nueva Granada.

In a letter written a month before his death in December, 1830, Bolívar wrote:

“1. America is ungovernable, 2. he who serves a revolution, plows the sea, 3. the only thing one can do in America is emigrate, 4. this land will fall into the hands of an unbridled multitude who will then fall under petty tyrants of all colors and races 5. from which the Europeans will not deign to rescue us. 6. If it were possible for an area of the world to return to primitive chaos, this would be America.”

Despite his care about his physical appearance, Bolívar was one of the least self-aware men in history, never acknowledging his own role in thrusting great portions of South America into chaos.

A Venezuelan historian writes:

“Bolívar’s vocation was equivocal, his character mercurial. He proclaimed liberty and imposed tyranny. He praised civility and waged terror. He exalted fraternity and encouraged fratricide. He revered Spanish-American unity, but his wars destroyed the institutions that would have preserved it … Of that grand civilization that had successfully functioned for centuries, only the memory remained in a continent of men in conflict with men in the name of ghostly principles.”

One reason it is necessary to know one’s history is because that helps to understand how one got to the present and what path to trace towards the future. Venezuelans are no different than Americans in that they too seek peace and unity — not uniformity, but unity. In the United States that unity is achievable by a return to our traditions, which are not difficult to discern. Sources such as Bradford’s Journal, the Mayflower Compact, the Christian bases of our colonial governments, Washington’s Farewell Address, and more speak to us today.

In the case of Venezuela, her traditions, although a bit more difficult to discern, can be re-discovered with the removal of several generations of accumulated underbrush, including the hagiography bathing Simón Bolívar. One can begin with Bolívar’s own lament about “centuries of civilization” having been destroyed by his wars. What was that civilization? Can its foundations be rediscovered and improved?

I think they can.

Tag: Simón Bolívar

Converting The Catastrophe Of The Revolution

War to the Death