3641 lines
192 KiB
D
3641 lines
192 KiB
D
56 page printout
|
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Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.
|
||
|
||
This disk, its printout, or copies of either
|
||
are to be copied and given away, but NOT sold.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
**** ****
|
||
|
||
THE COLUMBIA ENCYCLOPEDIA'S
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
HOW A POPULAR REFERENCE WORK IS BEING USED AS A
|
||
WEAPON AGAINST FREE CULTURE AND TWISTED TO
|
||
FIT THE PURPOSES OF LYING OBSCURANTISTS
|
||
|
||
BY JOSEPH McCABE
|
||
|
||
HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS
|
||
|
||
GIRARD, KANSAS
|
||
|
||
**** ****
|
||
|
||
FOREWORD
|
||
|
||
A few months ago I published a work, "History's Greatest
|
||
Liars," in which I examined a dozen manuals of world or European
|
||
history which have issued from the American press in the last
|
||
quarter of a century. Their main purpose seems to have been to tell
|
||
Europe how to understand itself; to dispel the mist of superstition
|
||
and prejudice with which its own earlier historians, from Gibbon
|
||
and Mommsen to the great Cambridge History, have obscured its fine
|
||
medieval record, and to select the vital elements out of the vast
|
||
jumble of uncouth names, bewildering dates, and insignificant
|
||
events which used to pass as history. But having to dip
|
||
occasionally into these ponderous tomes in composing my earlier
|
||
historical works, I have been repeatedly startled to find that what
|
||
was -- now -- in the new history was not true and what was true was
|
||
not new. I therefore made a systematic examination of the works.
|
||
Within the prescribed limits of my book I could not pursue the
|
||
enquiry beyond the Reformation, and in the present volume I extend
|
||
it as far as the Second World War.
|
||
|
||
We realists will agree with Leonard Woolf when he says:
|
||
|
||
"The sordid and savage, story of history has been written
|
||
by man's irrationality, and the thin precarious crust of
|
||
civilization which has from time to time been built over the
|
||
bloody mess has always been built on reason."
|
||
|
||
If the worst fears of many sagacious observers of our time are
|
||
realized, same angel in the upper counting-house will in a few
|
||
years write off the story of man, impatiently, as "From Armageddon
|
||
to the Third World War." And when I discovered that the new history
|
||
was written under the influence and in favor of one of the worst
|
||
agencies that have hindered progress for the last 15 or 16
|
||
centuries, the Church of Rome, I feared that it must have had some
|
||
share in causing the present mental aberration of the race.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
1
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
But how shall a man judge between the statement and the
|
||
counter-statement? Most of my readers know that I have given the
|
||
full evidence for our version of European history in scores of
|
||
works. Other readers, it seemed, might turn to a very learned-
|
||
looking new encyclopedia which assures them that in the compilation
|
||
of it "enormous and painstaking effort was expended to make it the
|
||
most complete and up-to-date of its kind." For the second edition
|
||
of this Columbia Encyclopedia, which was published in 1950, we are
|
||
told that "every article was again most carefully scrutinized and,
|
||
where necessary, pruned and revised." I have checked it throughout
|
||
on the points on which, as I have shown, the American public is
|
||
duped by the new history and the latest edition of the Encyclopedia
|
||
Britannica, and here is the result.
|
||
|
||
**** ****
|
||
|
||
1. THE COLUMBIA ENCYCLOPEDIA
|
||
|
||
This work takes its title from the fact that it was, it says,
|
||
"compiled and edited at Columbia University." it must be the
|
||
weightiest volume that the American press ever produced. The new
|
||
edition of it, which appeared last year, seems to weigh about 20
|
||
pounds. What the advantage of compressing 6,000,000 words -- the
|
||
equivalent of 60 novels of the average length -- in one volume may
|
||
be I cannot imagine. It has the disadvantage that, while 30 folk
|
||
simultaneously could consult separate volumes, of an ordinary
|
||
encyclopedia, one must imagine a queue of readers impatiently
|
||
waiting their turn in the National Library to consult this oracle.
|
||
|
||
The editors may plead that they had to find room for 70,000
|
||
entries. I venture to suggest that the number could have been
|
||
reduced to about 20,000 if they had omitted one to three line
|
||
notices of obscure villages abroad and obscure men, from the days
|
||
of the pyramids to our own time, which no one will ever read; or,
|
||
at the most, some learned professor, who has other and more
|
||
reliable works of reference might possibly find an interest in one
|
||
of these once in 10 years. Many further thousands of entries, short
|
||
biographical notices of mythical saints, obscure popes, kings and
|
||
queens who merely lived, loved and died, soldiers of no
|
||
distinction, bishops, humdrum professors and authors, etc., might
|
||
Safely have been omitted, and less space given to royal persons
|
||
might have spared space for kings who really helped the world along
|
||
or queens who sinned more picturesquely. The English Charles I and
|
||
Charles II, for instance, have a full enormous page to themselves,
|
||
while monarchs who are worth remembering get about a tenth of a
|
||
page each,
|
||
|
||
But let me say at once that this encyclopedia has certainly
|
||
one distinction, though it does not boast of it. It has more ladies
|
||
than men on the list of its editorial and writing staff, 31 females
|
||
and 28 males. We, of course, applaud their bold vindication of the
|
||
new equality of the sexes; or we would applaud if we could take it
|
||
as proof that the majority of experts on the many subjects
|
||
discussed are now feminine. Unfortunately, we cannot infer that if
|
||
we know the technique of creating an encyclopedia. A number of real
|
||
experts are paid handsomely to write and sign lengthy articles on
|
||
subjects of which they are masters, and the bulk of the work is
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
2
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
copied from earlier encyclopedias by a large number of "Penny-a-
|
||
liners." None of the articles in the Columbia are signed. You might
|
||
infer from this that all articles are written by experts, but we
|
||
shall have reason, presently, to doubt this.
|
||
|
||
There are, on the other hand, peculiarities of this
|
||
encyclopedia that one is tempted to ascribe to the preponderantly
|
||
feminine character of the staff. Sex questions, for instance, which
|
||
deeply interest large numbers of readers in America, are treated
|
||
with an inconvenient delicacy or ignored altogether. The article
|
||
"Sex" might be read in a Sunday-School, and it is perhaps
|
||
creditable to the editors that they seem never to have heard, since
|
||
they have not a line about them, of such things as sexology,
|
||
adultery, aphrodisiacs, paederasty, sodomy, lesbianism, girdles of
|
||
chastity, perversion, Ivan Bloch, Professor Kinsey, or any of the
|
||
technicalities of modern sexology.
|
||
|
||
Doubtless it would be a mistake to affect to sex the same
|
||
influence in the very different treatment of religion, which is
|
||
boundlessly hospitable. Most of the articles of this nature seem to
|
||
have been written by Fundamentalists or Catholics. On the cover the
|
||
work boasts that it has at least a few words on every proper name
|
||
in the Bible, and you know what that means for the Old Testament.
|
||
From Adam and Eve to Peter they are treated with respect, and the
|
||
writers who do not treat them with this respect are apt to be
|
||
ignored. There is a paragraph about a Professor Haldeman who, it
|
||
appears, was a school-master about the middle of the last century,
|
||
but Mr. Haldeman-Julius is not mentioned. I should have thought
|
||
that hundreds of thousands of Americans were more interested in my
|
||
distinguished friend than in Abiaraph, Abitub, or Arboga. Last year
|
||
the editors of the new International 'Who's Who' did me the honor
|
||
of putting me among the 40,000 most distinguished citizens of the
|
||
earth, but, alas, I am shut out of this Columbia Valhalla. Atheism
|
||
(which is wrongly defined) gets the same number of lines as
|
||
Athangild. It has now as many supporters as the pope, but the
|
||
encyclopedia assures us readers that it has now "few active
|
||
advocates except the orthodox Marxian Communists;" who, by the way,
|
||
have been for many years very chary of advocating it.
|
||
|
||
In contrast, Romanism is treated with a generosity that must
|
||
have touched the hearts, if not the pockets, of its supporters.
|
||
Just once or twice a bit of the truth slipped through while the
|
||
censor slumbered. For instance, in the article "Eunuchs" it is
|
||
admitted that men castrated for the purpose sang the soprano parts
|
||
in the papal choir at Rome until the latter part of the 19th
|
||
century. Catholics got this cut out of the last edition of the
|
||
encyclopedia Britannica and vigorously denied it when I stated it.
|
||
|
||
But such lapses are rare in the Columbia. Usually in any
|
||
article relating to the church there is so much suppression or
|
||
smothering of harsh facts, so much truly Catholic sentiment, that
|
||
one feels that the pope must have given, or sold cheaply, some of
|
||
his Iron Crosses to members of the staff. In the chief articles
|
||
(Mass, Eucharist, Confession, the soul, relics, lives of the popes,
|
||
etc.) one seems to smell the fragrant breath of a Child of Mary.
|
||
Saints and martyrs whom even the Jesuit experts have shown to be
|
||
myths are here enshrined with all the old respect, while medieval
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
3
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
mystics like St. Anselm get as much space as the Emperor Hadrian or
|
||
Frederick II. Individual notices of scores of popes to whom not
|
||
even a Catholic ever refers swell the volume of the work, and their
|
||
virtues and high qualities -- just two out of the scores of sinners
|
||
are admitted to have been "immoral" -- astonish us. Where it is
|
||
advisable, from the Catholic angle, to be silent, the encyclopedia,
|
||
is silent. It has no articles on toleration, persecution, the
|
||
death-sentence for heresy, mental reservation, apostates, Catholic
|
||
nullification of marriages, torture, Feasts of Fools, the Syllabus,
|
||
etc., and other bits of false statement reconcile the reader to the
|
||
peculiar position of the Church. For instance, in the article on
|
||
marriage we read that "in all human groups, simple or advanced,
|
||
anthropologists find monogamy to be the dominant form of marriage."
|
||
In so far as this covers the Catholic doctrine of the
|
||
indissolubility of marriage it is the exact reverse of the truth.
|
||
|
||
In view of all this we know what to expect in the field of
|
||
history, which today is more dreaded by the Church than science
|
||
because in its own version of European history it rivals Baron
|
||
Munchausen. Articles of an historical nature show generally --
|
||
where the Catholic Encyclopedia has not had to be consulted, as in
|
||
lives of saints, martyrs and popes -- the guidance of the new
|
||
history. In my criticism of this I complained in the first place of
|
||
the way in which it slighted the most notable advances, from the
|
||
modern angle, in the Greek-Roman civilization -- the Ionic-
|
||
Epicurean line of thought and its fine results in the science of
|
||
Alexandria and the social-welfare schemes of the Roman Empire --
|
||
and later attempts, foiled by the popes in the Dark Age, to bring
|
||
the race back to this line. The objection applies in full force to
|
||
the new encyclopedia. The growth of a sound conception of the
|
||
universe and life in the ancient world is ignored, and the work of
|
||
the Ostrogoths, the Lombards, and particularly the Arabs is
|
||
miserably undervalued.
|
||
|
||
On the other hand the Catholic myth that their Church, instead
|
||
of bringing darkness upon civilization, brought light into a dark
|
||
world and made heroic efforts to preserve it after the collapse of
|
||
the Roman Empire is sustained in hundreds of articles. In the list
|
||
of the popes, which is obviously borrowed from the Catholic
|
||
Encyclopedia, 40 out of the first 50 are described as saints. The
|
||
halo decorates even Victor I (friend of the most brazen concubine
|
||
in the harem of the debauched Emperor Commorlus), Collistus (ex-
|
||
slave and, imprisoned for theft, and a corrupter of the church),
|
||
Damasus (who got elected by his followers murdering 150 of those of
|
||
his rivals, an acknowledged forger of lies and myths, and the only
|
||
pope who was indicted by the civil authorities for adultery),
|
||
Boniface I (who, fought his way to the throne), Zosimus I (whom
|
||
some historians think as bad as Damasus,) Symmachus (repeatedly
|
||
accused of adultery), and Hormisdas (whose son, "St." Silvarius,
|
||
succeeded to the papacy). The Church, moreover, gives the first 30
|
||
popes their halo on the ground that most of them earned the crown
|
||
of martyrdom, whereas, even the Catholic experts on the martyrs
|
||
like Duchesne, Delehaye, Ehrhard, etc., admit that only one Pope
|
||
ever died for his faith. Even the ancient legend of the seven
|
||
persecutions of the early church finds place in this up-to-date
|
||
encyclopedia. History has recognized for the last hundred years
|
||
that there were only two.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
4
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
The Dark Age, it seems, has been so completely abolished by
|
||
the new historians that it has not here been considered worthy of
|
||
a special entry. It is explained in the article on the Middle Ages
|
||
that at one time the phrase Dark Age was applied to the whole of
|
||
the Middle Ages. No historian ever did this, so the encyclopedia's
|
||
little joke -- that we now see that the darkness was not so much in
|
||
the period as in the mind of those who considered it -- falls flat.
|
||
Nor is the encyclopedia more impressive when, following the new
|
||
historians, it gives the Carolingian Renaissance as one of the
|
||
great discoveries that make the Dark Age light. Our encyclopedia
|
||
even says that "the preservation of classical literature was due
|
||
almost entirely to his initiative" -- which is more daring, even
|
||
than the myth that "the monks preserved the classics" -- but it
|
||
admits that he is "scarcely to be considered educated by later
|
||
standards." In point of fact his secretary tells us that though he
|
||
tried hard, he never learned to write. However, the encyclopedia
|
||
tells us that he was a man of such "simple manners" and led such a
|
||
"frugal existence" that the Church declared him "Blessed" (or a
|
||
semi-saint). I should not have thought that any cultivated person
|
||
was unaware that he was a savage in war (the Saxon war), and that
|
||
he and his daughters and court had a notorious contempt for the
|
||
Church's supreme virtue, chastity.
|
||
|
||
As I showed in the earlier volume, it is now generally agreed
|
||
in history that the work of Charlemagne has bean greatly
|
||
exaggerated and that it was in any case wiped out in the next
|
||
generation. I admit that the Columbia could quote in its support
|
||
practically the whole of the historians, but listen to this. In its
|
||
article on Pope Nicholas I, who became Pope 54 years after the
|
||
death of Charlemagne, the Catholic Encyclopedia says about the time
|
||
of his accession:
|
||
|
||
"Christianity in western Europe was then in a melancholy
|
||
condition. The Empire of Charlemagne has fallen to pieces. ...
|
||
Christendom seemed on the brink of anarchy.... There was
|
||
danger of a universal decline of the higher civilization."
|
||
|
||
Contemporary with Charlemagne was the Lombard civilization in
|
||
Italy which did make a permanent impression. Our encyclopedia
|
||
barely mentions it. The pope and Charlemagne (who got most of his
|
||
teachers from it) did their best to destroy it.
|
||
|
||
The article on "Education" (which is shorter than the
|
||
following article on King Edward I) has not a single word about the
|
||
system of universal free schooling for the sons of the workers in
|
||
the Roman empire which had no equal in history until the French
|
||
Revolution. Thus the reader who has been inoculated with the
|
||
monstrous lie that "the church first gave the world schools" is
|
||
encouraged to persevere in it. Much the same is the impression
|
||
given by the article "Libraries." There is a reference to the
|
||
"great public libraries of the Roman Empire," of which it is
|
||
lightly said that as they were "filled with pagan learning" they
|
||
were destroyed or burned. We are told also that the Arabs
|
||
"collected and preserved many libraries." Not a word is said about
|
||
the burning of the Alexandrian Library and others by the monks and
|
||
Christian mobs long
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
5
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
before the Middle Ages began, and, as no figures are given, the
|
||
reader gets a totally false, perspective. He might be less disposed
|
||
to surrender the phrase Dark Age if he were told that the
|
||
Alexandrian Library had about 500,000 books, and the Arab royal
|
||
library at Cordova (in the 10th century) had the same number, but
|
||
no monastic library in the whole of Europe had as many as 2,000
|
||
books (99 percent religious), and very few had 500. throughout the
|
||
Middle Ages. Yet this is what the chief of the new historians,
|
||
Professor Thompson, has established in his defense of medieval
|
||
culture.
|
||
|
||
The article on Roger Bacon says of his 30-year confinement in
|
||
monasteries of his order, which is fully substantiated in the most
|
||
reliable biography of him, in the Dictionary of National Biography:
|
||
|
||
"Bacon would seem to be involved in some obscure trouble
|
||
with the authorities of the Church, but there is no evidence
|
||
that his difficulties were caused by his interest in science,
|
||
and it would seem more likely that they were due to his
|
||
notoriously pugnacious disposition."
|
||
|
||
Instead of explaining that, as is now well known, his
|
||
remarkable scientific learning was derived entirely from the
|
||
Spanish Arabs through a school of their science at Oxford, it is
|
||
scurvily granted only that he was "acquainted with Arab
|
||
Aristotellanism." Aristotle's share in his science was like a
|
||
single pebble in a truck-load of ballast.
|
||
|
||
The article on the Arabs is just as inadequate, and in the
|
||
article on Sylvestus II (Gerbert) not a single word is said about
|
||
the Arab character of his learning and his studies in Cordova.
|
||
Under the title Canossa we get the discredited myth that the
|
||
Emperor Henry stood or knelt three days barefoot in the snow
|
||
begging absolution of the pope; a legend that Professor Thompson
|
||
himself refutes. Under "Chivalry" we get the full flavor of the
|
||
Catholic myth of the Age of Chivalry.
|
||
|
||
My readers will have noticed that in the field of historical
|
||
lies this is my pet aversion, for this purely mythical moral
|
||
splendor during three centuries is still generally believed outside
|
||
serious history (and by most of the new historians) and regarded as
|
||
one of the best redeeming features of the Middle Ages, while every
|
||
historical expert on any country in Europe during the period (1100-
|
||
1400) shows that it is the exact opposite of the truth. Yet here in
|
||
the Columbia you get the myth in all it's virginal freshness. There
|
||
is not even a hint that it was ever disputed. The "ethical code" of
|
||
the knights, who were almost entirely on the moral level of
|
||
Hitler's worst troops, is said to be "Still the basis of the ethic
|
||
of gentlemanly conduct." We get unctuous passages like this:
|
||
|
||
"The cult of the Virgin, with which chivalrous love is
|
||
intimately connected, was the supreme expression of the
|
||
glorification of womanhood."
|
||
|
||
That is as flagrant a defiance of the facts as the saying of a
|
||
Jesuit writer that the Inquisition was a model court for the
|
||
administration of justice. For the overwhelmingly greater part of
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
6
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
the women of the Age of Chivalry were "viragoes," as Professor
|
||
Luchaire calls them, who despised tenderness and chastity. It is
|
||
only when the Inquisition got busy that we find a few pious
|
||
sonnets; and Bayard, who is here given as a type of chivalry, does
|
||
not belong to the age of chivalry at all. The standard work of Leon
|
||
Gautier is given as the chief authority, yet he says, often in
|
||
violent language, just the opposite of what the dreamy writer of
|
||
the article says. I notice that peculiarity in several places.
|
||
|
||
The Donation of Constantine, the blatant forgery by which the
|
||
popes claimed that the Emperor Constantine had bequeathed nearly
|
||
the whole of Italy to the papacy, may seem an awkward document to
|
||
mention when the Catholic Encyclopedia acknowledges that it was a
|
||
forgery. But Our encyclopedia glides gracefully -- much more easily
|
||
than its Catholic colleague -- over the thin ice. It seems that it
|
||
was "never of great practical value." In point of fact, as I
|
||
pointed out 30 years ago, Pope Hadrian, in whose court it was
|
||
forged, expressly reminds Charlemagne (Ep. LX) that it was the
|
||
bases of the swollen territorial claims of the papacy, and this
|
||
makes it clear that the forged document was shown to the Frank
|
||
monarch when he was taken, melodramatically, to the "tomb of St.
|
||
Peter," to sign the document which, by the way, mysteriously
|
||
disappeared) in which he awarded nearly the whole of Italy to the
|
||
pope. The Columbia adds that "it was not, as is sometimes asserted,
|
||
universally accepted in the Middle Ages." The undisputed fact is
|
||
that from the date of Charlemagne's award (774) to within a few
|
||
years of the end of the Middle Ages (as fixed by this encyclopedia)
|
||
it was universally accepted. To the great anger of the papacy,
|
||
which severely punished him, Lorenzo Valla then exposed the
|
||
forgery, but the Church insisted that it was genuine and up-held it
|
||
until the 19th century. Equally false is the statement that the
|
||
pope's temporal power did not rest on the Donation of Charlemagne
|
||
but on that of his father, Pepin. That monarch awarded the pope
|
||
only the territory he had conquered in Italy, which was far
|
||
smaller; and Pepin, an entirely ignorant and boorish soldier, was
|
||
duped by a forged "letter from St. Peter in heaven," which we still
|
||
have, just as Charlemagne was duped by the forged Donation of
|
||
Constantine.
|
||
|
||
For the errors and misleading statements in the devout article
|
||
on the Crusades I should require an essay and must refer my readers
|
||
to my discussion of these piratical expeditions in my earlier
|
||
volume. Our encyclopedia regards them as an outcome of "the highest
|
||
point which religious devotion had reached in Western Europe,"
|
||
though it does admit an infiltration of less august motives. The
|
||
description of the knights of Europe at the beginning of the 12th
|
||
century as very devout is humorous. They were then in the most
|
||
brutal and licentious stage of the so-called Age of Chivalry. In
|
||
calling for the first crusade the pope, whose sermon we, still
|
||
have, held out to the knights the prospect of rich loot, and all
|
||
experts on the crusades acknowledge that, except in a few cases,
|
||
the motives were greed, love of fighting, and liberation from the
|
||
heavy feudal burdens at home. Historians admit also that the Turks
|
||
did not hinder pilgrimages as the Columbia, says, and a crusade was
|
||
unnecessary. The pope chiefly aimed at bringing the Greek Church
|
||
under Rome. Naturally the perfidy and horrors of the Fourth
|
||
Crusade, which I described in the earlier volume, do not appear in
|
||
this article.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
7
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
Just before the Fourth Crusade the Knights whet their
|
||
appetites for loot in the massacre of the Albigensians, and this
|
||
foulest episode of the 13th century is gravely misrepresented. The
|
||
reader has not the least idea of its magnitude. It was not the
|
||
people of Albi (one city) but a population of hundreds of thousands
|
||
all over Southeastern France that defied the church: not because
|
||
they all embraced what is called the Albigensian creed, which few
|
||
strictly adopted, but because of the corruption of the church. The
|
||
article does not tell that it took 300,000 soldiers several years
|
||
to reduce the region, so numerous were the rebels. The article says
|
||
that the action of Pope Innocent III in sending a body of preachers
|
||
to them was decisive -- they notoriously accomplished nothing and
|
||
that is why the Pope turned to violence but their efforts were
|
||
hampered by "the war which soon broke Out." and this war was
|
||
"overshadowed by political interests from the first." This is a
|
||
miserable sophistication of the whole ghastly story in order to
|
||
conceal the guilt of the pope. Not a word is said about the
|
||
duplicity with which he engineered the "war," and the reader has no
|
||
suspicion of the mighty volume during three or four years of rape,
|
||
loot, and murder, as described, by contemporary Catholic writers.
|
||
|
||
Out of it all, as the encyclopedia rightly says, emerged the
|
||
Inquisition; for even after the appalling carnage and the ravishing
|
||
of the most civilized part of Christendom large numbers continued
|
||
to reject the faith. So this grim institution was, says the
|
||
encyclopedia, just "an emergency measure" -- it lasted in Catholic
|
||
countries until the 19th century -- and in the usual fashion of
|
||
Catholic propagandists it tells the reader that the worst evils
|
||
were due to the civil authorities and the people, who, in their
|
||
horror of heresy, compelled the gentle papal authorities to act.
|
||
"Burning of heretics was not common in the Middle Ages" the writer
|
||
says. The editors have overlooked the fact that in the article on
|
||
Witchcraft we read, "Burning, as for heresy, was common." He omits
|
||
also to remind the reader that until the 11th century the
|
||
population was too ignorant, the clergy generally too illiterate,
|
||
and sensual, and the middle class too scanty for heresy to spread,
|
||
and that burning began as soon as heresy began. But the chief fault
|
||
of the article is to exonerate the clergy at the expense of the
|
||
laity. The inquisitors, it says, were always anxious to avoid the
|
||
extreme penalty but the civil rulers were sterner. All the greed
|
||
and sacrifice of the innocent was, the writer says, because the
|
||
confiscated property of the heretic went to them. It did not. It
|
||
was divided between the informers, the Inquisitors, and the civic
|
||
power. The writer does not perceive how much he (or she) gives away
|
||
in saying that the civic authorities got the loot. It was just
|
||
because civic rulers were so reluctant to persecute that the papacy
|
||
tempted them with this loot, besides threatening them with
|
||
excommunication. The writer also says that torture was used against
|
||
"a long-standing papal condemnation of torture (e.g. by Nicholas
|
||
I)." When a writer says "e.g." he means that he is quoting one out
|
||
of many others he could quote. He not only could not quote any
|
||
others but Nicholas I himself never issued a general condemnation
|
||
of torture. Neither that fanatical historian of the early medieval
|
||
popes, Father Mann, nor the Catholic encyclopedia credits him with
|
||
this. And at the close of this remarkable article the writer warns
|
||
the reader against Lea's scholarly work on the Inquisition as out-
|
||
dated and inaccurate, and recommends instead a zealous French
|
||
Catholic and two other works that I cannot trace.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
8
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
The Society of Jesus is another of those subjects as to which
|
||
much mendacious Jesuit literature is in circulation, and a neutral
|
||
encyclopedia ought to give a correct statement of facts only. Here
|
||
again I must refer to my earlier volume. It is enough that here all
|
||
the charges brought against the Jesuits, as much by Catholics as by
|
||
non-Catholics, until modern times are lumped together, solid or
|
||
exaggerated, and handily declared ridiculous. The reader must just
|
||
take the word of the anonymous writer. There is then a summary of
|
||
their glorious record -- the zeal for purity particularly tickles
|
||
me as they were notoriously the confessors of most of the loose
|
||
princes and nobles of Catholic Europe -- and their distinction in
|
||
science and learning. It is, of course, not stated that when Pope
|
||
Clement XIV suppressed the society in 1773 he emphatically endorsed
|
||
the charges brought against it by the Catholic monarchs. And the
|
||
authorities given for these entirely Catholic contentions are, of
|
||
course, a bunch of Catholic writers.
|
||
|
||
Speaking of Jesuit writers reminds me that one of the more
|
||
learned of them in the last generation, the French Jesuit Delehaye,
|
||
was a leading expert on martyrs. The martyr-literature of the
|
||
Church is so packed with forgeries that Delehaye and other clerical
|
||
experts could not even pretend to apply modern historical methods
|
||
to it and not acknowledge that it is for the overwhelmingly greater
|
||
part a mass of forgery, yet in popular Catholic literature and the
|
||
ritual of the Church all this Catholic scholarship is completely
|
||
ignored. Out of this dilemma the Columbia easily escapes. It has no
|
||
article on "Martyrs." But it has a short article on the Colosseum,
|
||
the ancient Roman Amphitheaters, which closes with the words,
|
||
"According to tradition persecuted Christians were thrown here to
|
||
beasts." Now this is the subject of a special work by Father
|
||
Delehaye, who shows that there is not a particle of evidence that
|
||
any Christian was ever "exposed to lions" in the Amphitheater.
|
||
Similarly, it has long been known, and acknowledged by Catholic
|
||
scholars like Delehaye and Duchesne that the "martyrs of the
|
||
Catacombs" are mostly bogus, but the long article on the Catacombs
|
||
in the Columbia does not give a hint of this.
|
||
|
||
An amazing contrast in historical values is seen in the twin
|
||
articles "Reformation" and "Catholic Reform." Whether it occurred
|
||
by accident in the allocation of themes or from a politic fear that
|
||
American Protestants would not tolerate the familiar juggling with
|
||
facts in the cage of the Reformation I do not know, but while the
|
||
article on the Reformation is very fair and based upon Protestant
|
||
authorities, the article on the Catholic Reform is on the worst
|
||
lines of the new history. We are told that "it is pejoratively" --
|
||
get out your best dictionary -- "called the Counter-Reformation";
|
||
as, in fact, the best Catholic historian of the last 50 years. Dr.
|
||
L. Pastor (whose work is not mentioned), calls it. To call it that,
|
||
we read, is to suggest that it was only a response to the
|
||
Protestant Reformation; when practically all European non-Catholic
|
||
historians assert and no one who knows the facts can avoid saying.
|
||
Except that we get a frank reference to the corruption of the
|
||
bishops and the immoral Renaissance papal court, the article is the
|
||
same tissue of lies and sophistry as that which I examined in the
|
||
previous volume.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
9
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
"The central feature of the Catholic reform was the Council of
|
||
Trent" we read, and the popes of the Council were Paul III (who
|
||
resisted the Emperor's demand for a council -- he was too busy
|
||
enriching his four children), Julius II (one of the most repulsive
|
||
popes of that gay century) and Pius IV (after whose election, says
|
||
Pastor, "the evil elements at once awakened once more"). As a
|
||
matter of historical fact, the Council did not begin its debates
|
||
until 1562, when the Reformation had swept over half of Europe;
|
||
but, of course, it is "pejorative" to say that the reformation
|
||
provoked it. The reign of Paul IV (died 1559) was, the writer says,
|
||
"devoted to the purge of the papal court," and from Paul's time
|
||
dated the "quasi-monastic air that has ever since characterized the
|
||
Vatican." Phew! In the earlier volume I quoted a Cardinal's
|
||
description of the papal court in 1670, a century later, as grossly
|
||
corrupt. The "quasi-monastic" makes me laugh when I remember how,
|
||
in 1904. I stood on the summit of the Capitol in Rome with an
|
||
American official who knew it well. He pointed out the house of the
|
||
mistress and children of Cardinal Vanrutelli, who had got several
|
||
votes for the papacy in the 1903 election. As, I showed, only three
|
||
popes, who ruled collectively for only 15 years, brought about a
|
||
limited reform of Rome (chiefly in regard to sex); and the
|
||
statement that there was Catholic Reform in England, France, and
|
||
Spain is ridiculous.
|
||
|
||
Among the many pages on saints my eye is caught by "St.
|
||
Bartholomew's Day, Massacre of," and I turn eagerly to the account
|
||
of this foulest outrage of the 16th century (which is supposed to
|
||
have followed the Catholic Reform). Only 20 lines are devoted to it
|
||
(much less than to the St. Bernard Dog), and nothing is said about
|
||
the appalling extent and brutality of the massacre. The article on
|
||
the Thirty Years' War is worse. In the vein of the new history it
|
||
is represented as predominantly a political struggle. "It was," we
|
||
read, "a general European war" and "it is recognized today that the
|
||
accent placed by 19th-century historians on the religious aspects
|
||
is misleading." This is recognized by nobody except Catholic and
|
||
the American new historians, and it is worse than misleading that
|
||
an encyclopedia that presents itself to the public as neutral
|
||
should say otherwise. In fact, the writer then goes on to describe
|
||
it as an almost purely political struggle; a conflict of petty
|
||
German princes and foreign powers -- France, Sweden, Denmark,
|
||
England -- against the Holy Roman Empire. France notoriously
|
||
refused to take part in it, to the great anger of Rome, and one
|
||
does not need to know much to realize that if you strike it out of
|
||
this list you have simply a conflict of Protestant and Catholic
|
||
forces. As I told in the earlier volume, the papacy had collected
|
||
funds for years for a war for the extinction of Protestantism. It
|
||
was instigated by the Jesuits through their royal and military
|
||
pupils, and they moved freely in the imperialist camps; and the
|
||
papacy subsidized it until, near the end, Pope Urban VIII allowed
|
||
his greedy relatives to appropriate the whole of the war-fund. That
|
||
political antagonism entered the quarrel no one ever disputed, but
|
||
it was overwhelmingly a religious war, and a war of the most
|
||
barbarous description.
|
||
|
||
The article on Galileo and other articles will be considered
|
||
presently, when we examine the new historians on these points. But
|
||
it must be understood that there are very many other articles
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
10
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
besides those I have noticed, or will notice that are very far from
|
||
being neutral and balanced statements of the facts. In the few
|
||
lines on Satanism we have a purely Catholic perversion of the
|
||
facts. Apart from witchcraft, which was a formal religion or cult
|
||
of Satan, the Black Mass was either a hypocritical exploitation of
|
||
the rich by priests, as it was in the time of Louis XIV, or, as
|
||
regards recent times, a fiction of novelists. The long article on
|
||
Scholasticism is obviously Catholic and gives no hint of the
|
||
ordinary philosophic estimate of that weird collection of
|
||
disputations about fixed dogmas. It amuses me when it says that the
|
||
University of Louvain, under Cardinal (then Professor) Mercier, was
|
||
a busy center of the new zeal for Thomism. I was Mercier's favorite
|
||
pupil there, and he let me know how far his creed was from that of
|
||
Thomas Aquinas.
|
||
|
||
The article on slavery is a masterpiece of misrepresentation.
|
||
Slavery in the Roman Empire is most unjustly described, and it is
|
||
said that the introduction of Christianity "mitigated" their
|
||
condition. It was, in fact, relieved by the Stoic-Epicurean lawyers
|
||
and, especially, the great Epicurean Emperor Hadrian. But not a
|
||
word is said about the many pagan condemnations of slavery -- we
|
||
still have fine speeches against it by the friend of the Emperor
|
||
Dio Chrysostom -- and, on the other hand, the defense of it by the
|
||
two leading Catholic moralists, Augustine and Aquinas. The reader
|
||
does not get the faintest idea, how the lot of the urban slave in
|
||
Rome was transformed before 150 A.D., or how vilely the serfs of
|
||
Europe (real slaves and the bulk of the population) were treated
|
||
for seven centuries, and in many countries longer. He does not
|
||
realize, though a little reflection would tell him, that it must be
|
||
so, since the whole of those wonderful moralists, the Scholastics,
|
||
who are now proposed to us as moral guides, failed to condemn
|
||
slavery or serfdom, and that no pope condemned them until the
|
||
French philosophers of the 18th century taught them justice. The
|
||
introduction of slavery into America -- it had never been fully
|
||
abolished in Europe -- is misrepresented in the interest of the
|
||
Church. The large use of slave-eunuchs by the Moslem is heavily
|
||
censured, but it is not mentioned that the Spanish Arabs were
|
||
furnished with castrated slave-boys -- apparently castrated by the
|
||
monks -- by Catholic France. Wilberforce is said to owe his zeal
|
||
for abolition to his Christian piety, whereas his very orthodox
|
||
sons admit in their biography of him that he learned it from
|
||
skeptical writers and was himself a skeptic for 10 years
|
||
afterwards.
|
||
|
||
It will be understood that for my present purpose I have not
|
||
made a systematic examination of this 6,000,000 word encyclopedia.
|
||
I have just selected a few articles in which I was likely to find
|
||
the kind of prejudice and untruth which I suspected after my
|
||
analysis of the new history. Any reader who is familiar with my
|
||
writings on the popes for instance, will be amused to read the
|
||
article on the papacy and the scores of notices of individual
|
||
popes. It is amazing how many virtues of them (generally vouched
|
||
for by their epitaphs) I overlooked and how many vices of theirs
|
||
the writers of the encyclopedia overlooked. I have, moreover,
|
||
confined myself to historical articles, and in fact to such as
|
||
relate to Catholic history and therefore properly confirm my
|
||
suspicion that the Catholic Church in America, with its masses of
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
11
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
ill-instructed voters and readers, has such influence on the
|
||
circulation of books and periodicals through its hold on
|
||
bookstores, libraries and reviewers. that it is directly and
|
||
indirectly poisoning the sources of public instruction. But I am
|
||
little more than half-way through my task and must return to the
|
||
analysis of important points in the new history, now coupling with
|
||
it a glance on each point at the Columbia Encyclopedia.
|
||
|
||
2. DEATH FOR HERESY CONTINUES
|
||
|
||
When we cross the chronological line of the year 1600, which
|
||
we did at the close of the first part of this work, an important
|
||
point to consider is whether the foul practice of imposing
|
||
penalties, especially the death-penalty, for criticizing the
|
||
traditional creed continued in what the historians called Modern
|
||
Times. Some of our historians blunt the edge of the indignation of
|
||
their readers at the horrors of the Inquisition -- if they have
|
||
been conscientious enough to tell these -- by reminding them that
|
||
the Protestants as well as the Catholics now punished or executed
|
||
men for heresy. Some go so far as to insist that Catholics, having
|
||
so exalted an opinion of their creed, were logical and consistent
|
||
in doing so, while the Protestants, being free to read both sides
|
||
and less peremptory, had no right to inflict such penalties. To all
|
||
such Sophistry in the mouths of laymen we moderns reply that the
|
||
papacy and the hierarchy were mainly defending their own privileges
|
||
by such outrages on the most precious of all freedoms, the right to
|
||
form and assert one's own convictions. And it is, in any case, most
|
||
unjust to Protestants to suggest that as long as they had the power
|
||
to do so they were equally guilty with the Catholics of torturing
|
||
and murdering men who differed from them.
|
||
|
||
One has a right to expect historians who claim that they apply
|
||
psychology to the record of the past to remind their readers of the
|
||
momentum of tradition, as few of them do. As this horrible practice
|
||
had been forced upon the civic authorities of every country long
|
||
before the, Reformation and men had been taught to regard it as a
|
||
vital part of religious duty, no impartial person would expect the
|
||
Protestant powers at once to reject it, especially in the time of
|
||
religious wars and Jesuit plots and revolts. Yet it died out in
|
||
Protestant countries when this turbulent period was over, though
|
||
the state was still all-powerful and the nation in each was still
|
||
virtually united in its faith. In England, which had never admitted
|
||
the Inquisition but had a national law, the statute De haeretico
|
||
Comburendo, condemnings, heretics to be burned, this was abolished
|
||
as early as 1678. In France, torture or execution for heresy
|
||
continued until the days of Voltaire; in Italy, Spain, Portugal,
|
||
and Latin America until the 19th century. Hardly one of our
|
||
historians notices this socially significant fact. Not one notices
|
||
the still more important fact that the Church of Rome still
|
||
officially claims in its Canon Law, reaffirmed in this century. not
|
||
only that it has the right but the duty to put heretics (by which
|
||
it means all who were once baptized in it, even as infants, and
|
||
have quit it) to death, and therefore to inflict on them any
|
||
punishment short of death. No Protestant church has held that for
|
||
more than 200 years. But the Catholic Church is bound to revert to
|
||
the practice if ever a Catholic government feels itself strong
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
12
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
enough to permit it. Take no notice of American Catholic writers
|
||
who say otherwise. Let them quote a papal declaration that the law
|
||
is, not in abeyance, but is officially disowned and abolished.
|
||
|
||
The last historical phase of this infamous practice on a large
|
||
scale gives us a splendid opportunity of testing the reliability of
|
||
the new history. In the 16th and 17th centuries the sacred fury
|
||
expended itself mostly upon witches and I do not know a single one
|
||
of our historians who has a correct idea of its nature. The
|
||
majority of them do not mention it. Professor Langer refers only to
|
||
witchcraft in America. The few who do refer to "the abominable
|
||
superstition," as Professor Lucas calls it, have the old
|
||
discredited idea that the witches were men and women who
|
||
individually "sold their souls to the devil," or aged and neurotic
|
||
dames who were suspected by the people of having done this. "It was
|
||
still generally thought," says Professor Lucas, "that the evil
|
||
spirits and the. devil operated in the witches." It is true that
|
||
this was a common opinion, but the mass of definite evidence that
|
||
has been collected in recent years, particularly from the records
|
||
of trials of witches, shows that witchcraft was an organized
|
||
religion, spread from end to end of Europe, with at least hundreds
|
||
of thousands of adherents at any time in the 16th and 17th
|
||
centuries, having a large body of officials who were the equivalent
|
||
of priests and a ceremony of initiation for which the women
|
||
presented even their babies in arms, and with apparently as many
|
||
men as women members.
|
||
|
||
It was a definite cult of the devil (called the Spirit) and on
|
||
intelligible grounds. If, on the lines of the ancient Persian
|
||
religion, which was its chief root, God created Spirit only and the
|
||
devil created matter (including the body) -- if God put a harsh
|
||
prohibition on sex and the devil must encourage what he had created
|
||
-- man's supreme, friend was the devil and not the Christian God.
|
||
The sexual hypocrisy of nearly the whole of Christendom century
|
||
after century encouraged the creed. It was not a revival of the
|
||
Albigensian creed, for the real Albigensians frowned upon sex as
|
||
the work of the devil and honored Christ as a "pure spirit." The
|
||
witches respected Christ as the apostle of austerity and worshipped
|
||
the devil. They did not, as in the popular conception, sell their
|
||
souls to the devil in order to get preternatural powers, knowing
|
||
that after death they must join the devil in hell. They made no
|
||
claim to unusual powers, and they rejected the repulsive Christian
|
||
idea of the devil and hell.
|
||
|
||
The evidence for this view of witchcraft has been collected by
|
||
H.C. Lea in his posthumous "Materials Toward a History of
|
||
Witchcraft" (3 vols. 1939), the German expert Dr. W.G. Soldan, and
|
||
especially Dr. Margaret Murray, of London University, ("Witchcraft
|
||
in Western Europe," 1921). It is so generally accepted in Europe,
|
||
that it is recognized in the latest editions of both our leading
|
||
encyclopedias, the Britannica and the Americana. I am not for a
|
||
moment suggesting here that our now historians are claiming to have
|
||
corrected the "Old" history. The endorsement by the whole of them
|
||
of the theory that has been current in European history for
|
||
centuries and their complete exclusion of the new view just
|
||
confirms what I have said: the writer of a universal history must
|
||
on most points take his views from others, and the new historians
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
13
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
have unfortunately taken theirs largely from Catholic writers. The
|
||
Columbia Encyclopedia amusingly illustrates this. The writer of the
|
||
article on Witchcraft gives the old idea in all its ripeness, never
|
||
even mentioning that it has been challenged, and then he blandly
|
||
gives as his chief authority Dr. Margaret Murray (whose book he or
|
||
she has never even glanced at), the ablest and most convincing
|
||
champion of the new view.
|
||
|
||
The fault of the new historians here is the more remarkable
|
||
because the old idea of the witch is not only ridiculous in itself
|
||
but was completely refuted by authentic evidence given in so
|
||
important an American publication, with a special chapter on the
|
||
subject, as Prof. A.D. White's "History of the Warfare of Science
|
||
with Theology" (3 vols. 1876). The old idea, so incongruous in the
|
||
"new" history, was that these witches were wrinkled old dames who
|
||
lived in isolation, generally on the fringe of a village or the
|
||
forest, yet used once a month to repair (flying through the air on
|
||
a broomstick) to some glade in the forest where they held an orgy
|
||
(apparently with a company of devils) with all the sexual vitality
|
||
of goats.
|
||
|
||
Apart from this inherent absurdity, the evidence given by Dr.
|
||
White, later multiplied enormously by Lea and Dr. Murray, ought to
|
||
have blown the old myth sky-high. It is a letter written in 1629 to
|
||
a friend by the Chancellor of the Bishop of Wartzburg about things
|
||
that are happening under his own eyes at that time. He says that
|
||
400 men in his city have been, or are to be, arrested on the charge
|
||
of witchcraft, and they include a dean (who has been tortured),
|
||
several priests, 14 seminary students, the notary of the Church
|
||
Consistory (a very learned man), and several lawyers and city
|
||
officials. Several beautiful and virtuous teen-age girls and
|
||
hundreds of children of both sexes from the age of three to five
|
||
have been or are to be executed. This was the situation in a large
|
||
number of German cities, to the panic of the clergy. In three
|
||
months 900 were burned in the bishopric of Barberg and 600 in
|
||
another bishopric. The one historian who has attempted to compute
|
||
the number of witches burned says -- doubtless with a large
|
||
exaggeration -- that it is 9,000,000. Another historian says that
|
||
300,000 were burned in England, where, Miss Murray shows, the cult
|
||
was similarly organized and so firmly held that women willingly
|
||
died for it. It was the same in France. An entire region in the
|
||
South of France is described by the distinguished judge who was
|
||
sent to clear it up as wholly given up, including the priests, to
|
||
witchcraft and sexual orgies every month. Yet in this vast spread
|
||
of a rival religion to Christianity on the threshold of modern
|
||
times our new historians, who give one-tenth the space to it that
|
||
they give to many an insignificant monarch or saint, are so little
|
||
interested that they just repeat about it an old legend that breaks
|
||
up from its inherent absurdity the moment you reflect upon it.
|
||
|
||
|
||
3. GALILEO AND THE ADVANCE OF SCIENCE
|
||
|
||
As we approach Modern Times our historians see that the
|
||
science which is slowly developing into one of the most beneficent
|
||
of human agencies must receive more attention, I assume that most
|
||
readers will agree with me that it is mainly in virtue of our
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
14
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
science and our social idealism that oar age has risen -- or had
|
||
until the present demoralization began a few years ago -- so high
|
||
above all earlier ages. A modern history ought, therefore, to make
|
||
a special point of tracing the broken course of these two factors
|
||
through the past 2,500 years, and in this our historians almost
|
||
completely fail. Instead of doing justice to the Ionic-Epicurean-
|
||
Alexandrian development of science they enlarge upon Aristotle --
|
||
is it because Catholics are now calling their philosophy the
|
||
Aristotelic-Thomist philosophy? -- and they do little justice to
|
||
the great revival and further development in the Arab-Persian
|
||
world. Instead of frankly describing the fine social schemes
|
||
inspired by the Epicureans in the Roman Empire, they, or most of
|
||
them, ascribe the improvement to the new religion which, when the
|
||
Empire perished, let the whole of its social welfare work perish.
|
||
Scarcely one of them fully acknowledges that the revival of
|
||
civilization in Europe was initially due to the influence of the
|
||
brilliant civilization -- brilliant in science and social welfare
|
||
as well as art and wealth -- of Arab Spain. They echo the absurd
|
||
Catholic pretensions about "the science of the school-men." They
|
||
suppress all the evidence of the church's hostility to science and
|
||
all reference to the imprisonment of Roger Bacon and the tragic
|
||
fate of Cecco d'Ascoli and Vesalius; and they do not tell how
|
||
Copernicus, who got his central idea from the revived Greek
|
||
literature, was so persecuted that he dare publish it only as an
|
||
hypothesis, and only when the door of escape to heaven was opening
|
||
before his eyes.
|
||
|
||
We now come to the famous case of Galileo. Most of our
|
||
historians (Langer, Sheppard and Godfrey, Geise, Sellery and Krey)
|
||
seem to have decided that this little matter of the persecution of
|
||
Galileo was not worth mentioning. Others (Boak, Slosson, and
|
||
Anderson) refer to the first trial, which was comparatively
|
||
harmless, and not to the scandalous second trial, condemnation, and
|
||
grave persecution of the aged scientist. Professors Wallbank and
|
||
Taylor (II. 40) on the other hand say that "in the last trial
|
||
torture was applied to the old scientist, now 70"; of which there
|
||
is no evidence, and it seems unlikely. Professor Perkins says
|
||
(351):
|
||
|
||
"These revolutionary teachings (that the sun is
|
||
stationary and the earth moves) were regarded by many as
|
||
wicked contradictions of the teaching of the Bible. The clergy
|
||
feared that they would turn men away from religion. Here,
|
||
Galileo was imprisoned and forced to swear that his teachings
|
||
were false."
|
||
|
||
This sophistication of the facts is hardly better than
|
||
suppression. Some of these historians who set out to help us really
|
||
to understand the mind of the Middle Ages have strange ideas of the
|
||
conditions. The common people about whom -- according to them --
|
||
the papacy was so concerned, not only know nothing whatever about
|
||
the new idea of a central sun, but very few of them had ever heard
|
||
that Joshua had once commanded the sun to stand still. Not more
|
||
than 10 percent of the Italian people could read and not 1 percent
|
||
ever read the Bible; and the idea that the Old Testament was read
|
||
to them in church is absurd.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
15
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
Professor Lucas may have been conscious of this when he says
|
||
that Galileo annoyed the philosophers. who followed Aristotle, and
|
||
these approached the theologians, who as a rule were friendly
|
||
towards the theories of Copernicus. In point of fact it was the
|
||
Polish clergy, not the Italian professors of philosophy, who
|
||
intimidated Copernicus. "However," says Professor Lucas, "Galileo
|
||
harshly ventured into biblical scholarship" -- to the profound
|
||
extent of pointing out that Joshua (or the writer) evidently
|
||
believed that the sun traveled round the earth -- and so drew upon
|
||
himself an inevitable condemnation. This, however, was "not an
|
||
official pronouncement of the Church because the pope did not sign
|
||
it." He seemed to think that the Sacred Congregation was not an
|
||
official body.
|
||
|
||
The wickedness of Galileo, he says, forced the Church from
|
||
both its earlier and its later liberal attitude towards science. To
|
||
justify the latter part of this strange proposition he asks us to
|
||
observe that from this date onward we find eminent men of science
|
||
equally distributed among Catholics and Protestants. The partisan
|
||
is apt to form his own opinion as to who is or is not eminent in
|
||
Science, but fortunately Professor Lucas has several admirable
|
||
chapters on science and names about 70 of its more distinguished
|
||
representative in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Omitting
|
||
those whose opinions about religion are obscure. this is what we
|
||
find:
|
||
|
||
17th Century -- 4 Catholics and 12 Protestants.
|
||
|
||
18th Century -- 3 Catholics, 6 Protestants and 9 Rationalists.
|
||
|
||
19th Century -- 4 Catholics, 8 Protestants and 22
|
||
Rationalists.
|
||
|
||
A complete list of the more eminent names of the last hundred
|
||
years, when distinguished men of science have been so numerous
|
||
would betray that not half a dozen out of hundreds were Catholics.
|
||
I have shown repeatedly that such men is Pasteur and Claude Bernard
|
||
are falsely described as such.
|
||
|
||
Professor Barnes, who rightly treats European history since
|
||
1600 in large developments (political, economic, etc.) rather than
|
||
detail, avoids the persecution of Galileo, but I feel that in his
|
||
fine work he has suffered some influence of the new history in his
|
||
treatment of science. He is severe on earlier historians of science
|
||
who followed, he says, "the once popular doctrine that medical
|
||
superstition was suddenly superseded in the late 15th and 16th
|
||
centuries by the rapid and unparalleled discovery of scientific
|
||
truth" (II. 143). They thought, he continues, that the flight of
|
||
the Creek scholars to Italy when the Turks captured Constantinople
|
||
in 1450 (which he counts the end Of the Middle Ages) brought about
|
||
the Renaissance, and this led to the Reformation and the Age of
|
||
Enlightenment. Now he says, we realize that the roots of the
|
||
scientific development that appears in the case of Copernicus and
|
||
Galileo go far beck into the Middle Ages. We perceive, in fact,
|
||
that the Crusades were "the most potent influence in introducing
|
||
Muslim and Hellenistic science into Europe." Greek science -- there
|
||
was none in the medieval Greek empire -- or that of the Alexandrian
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
16
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
Greeks was incorporated in Arab culture long before the 12th
|
||
century, and this in turn was penetrating into Europe (see Gerbert,
|
||
for instance) long before the first crusade; apart from the fact
|
||
that whatever love of luxury the few brutal chiefs of the Crusades
|
||
who returned to Europe brought with them, they were certainly not
|
||
of a character to introduce science. That science was brought into
|
||
Europe from Arab-Spain and Sicily in the 10th and 11th centuries I
|
||
have myself always contended and do not know any serious older
|
||
authorities who differ.
|
||
|
||
Professor Barnes is here misled by the work of Professor
|
||
Thorndike, "The History of Magic and Experimental Science" (2 vols.
|
||
1923), which, he imagines, traces a good deal of the mastery of
|
||
science by Christian Scholars before the year 1300. But all
|
||
Professor Thorndike's heroes were known cultivators of Arab
|
||
science. They are men who either went to study in the Arab colleges
|
||
(Gerbert, Abelard, William of Auvergne) or men (Grosseteste, Bacon,
|
||
etc.) whom these taught. Such details as he adds do not alter our
|
||
general estimate. The point that is really open for fresh research
|
||
by an unprejudiced investigator is why, if Christian scholars were
|
||
welcomed to Arab colleges as early as the 10th century, even the
|
||
science of astronomy -- in which the Arabs had made great progress,
|
||
made so little, if any, advance in Christendom until the end of the
|
||
15th century. The science of chemistry, we admit, was much
|
||
cultivated, because princes and prelates were eager everywhere for
|
||
the chemist or alchemist to find the elixir of life (to keep them
|
||
out of heaven as long as possible) and the philosopher's stone (for
|
||
turnings. base metals into gold).
|
||
|
||
The experience of Copernicus and Galileo on the threshold of
|
||
the scientific age, and smothered with Catholic sophistry and
|
||
mendacity ever since, ought to be presented with scrupulous
|
||
accuracy to the modern reader. If I do this, briefly on the facts
|
||
as they are determined by the leading experts -- Prowe for
|
||
Copernicus and Favaro for Galileo -- the reader will see how
|
||
unsatisfactory the new historians are at this point. Niklas
|
||
Coppernigh (in Latin Copernicus) was not "a devout Polish priest,"
|
||
but a loose-living Prussian medical man whose bishop-uncle made him
|
||
titular canon (though never priest) to give him an income. He spent
|
||
some years in the universities of North Italy, but did not lecture
|
||
there or in Rome. In North Italy he picked up the old Greek idea
|
||
that the earth circles round the sun, and after his return to
|
||
Poland verified it with instruments of Arab origin; but the scheme
|
||
of the solar system which he worked out was totally wrong. The
|
||
hostility of the clergy forced him to put off the writing and
|
||
publication of his famous book until the end of his life, and even
|
||
then he had to represent it only as an hypothesis. When Galileo,
|
||
now armed with a telescope, proved that it was a fact and was so
|
||
indiscreet as to mention Joshua he was, in 1615 summoned by the
|
||
inquisition, headed by Cardinal Bellarmine, and his theory of the
|
||
central position of the sun was condemned as "formally (explicitly)
|
||
heretical." Whether he solemnly promised never again to teach it is
|
||
disputed. The highest authority, Favaro, denies this. Copernicus'
|
||
book was put in the index, and the teaching of his system was
|
||
forbidden in all Catholic colleges until the 19th century.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
17
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
Eighteen years later, there was a second and far more serious
|
||
trial of Galileo, and the account given by A. Favaro, the chief
|
||
Italian expert (not translated, I believe), is based upon documents
|
||
in the possession of the Vatican which were taken by the French but
|
||
were not made public until late in the last century. These and
|
||
Favaro's work are not taken into account by the new historians and
|
||
are not mentioned in the bibliography of our "up-to-date" Columbia
|
||
Encyclopedia; and Fahie's book, which it recommends, is too early
|
||
to take account of them.
|
||
|
||
Here I need say only that the documents show that Pope Urban
|
||
VIII, who is generally represented as benevolent to science and
|
||
most considerate to Galileo, pressed the trial with great
|
||
harshness, even cruelty in view of the age and illness of the
|
||
scientist, because Galileo had, in his recent book, made him
|
||
ridiculous in the eyes of Rome: that the statement, that the earth
|
||
revolves round the sun was again declared formally heretical; and
|
||
that, while the actual use of torture is improbable, there is a
|
||
significant blank in the records from June 21 to 24, and Favaro
|
||
thinks that this means that Galileo was in the dungeon of the
|
||
Inquisition. He was exiled from his beloved city, Florence, for the
|
||
rest of his life. And the Catholic Professor Walsh says in his
|
||
"Popes and Science" that Galileo's life was "one of the most serene
|
||
and enviable in the whole of science."
|
||
|
||
4. THE JESUITS AND DEMOCRACY
|
||
|
||
So generously has the new history broadened the opportunities
|
||
of the lying propagandist that he now occasionally advances claims
|
||
for the church which arc positively indecent in their audacity.
|
||
Last year the Supreme Council of the Knights of Columbus (who still
|
||
believe that the medieval knights were chivalrous) issued, and
|
||
supplied free to the American public in hundreds of thousands of
|
||
copies, a pamphlet with the title "Is the Catholic Church a Menace
|
||
to Democracy?" On the contrary, it assures the defenseless public,
|
||
it is just from the Jesuit theologians of the church that the
|
||
Fathers of the Revolution got the idea of democracy. On page 17 it
|
||
has a short article "Did, Bellarmine whisper to Jefferson?" To
|
||
support this weird idea of the ghost of Cardinal Bellarmine, head
|
||
of the Inquisition and the man who condemned Galileo, inspiring
|
||
Thomas Jefferson, the most dogmatic materialist in American
|
||
literature, the article gives a number of quotations from the works
|
||
of Bellarmine -- in the usual Catholic way, no reference is given
|
||
so nobody can check them -- and a number of sentences from the
|
||
Declaration of Independence (which many attribute to Thomas Paine)
|
||
and asks us to Admire the identity of sentiment and even of
|
||
language. Other Catholic writers couple the Jesuit Suarez, also of
|
||
the 17th century, with Bellarmine as co-discoverer of the Sublime
|
||
principle of democracy.
|
||
|
||
Now if this sort of thing were worth serious examination we
|
||
should ask a few questions about it. Isn't it much more likely that
|
||
Jefferson, who is not known to have wasted much of his time on
|
||
medieval theologians, got his democracy from English writers of the
|
||
time of the Civil War (Lilburn, etc.), or French skeptical writers
|
||
of the 18th century whom he read; assiduously? Did he rely need to
|
||
borrow the idea from anybody, seeing that it had occurred to lesser
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
18
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
men over and over again in the course of history from the Greeks
|
||
onwards? How was it that the Papacy tolerated this teaching in the
|
||
works of two important Jesuit's while it insisted on the divine
|
||
right of all Catholic kings? How is it that that stupendous
|
||
monument of American Catholic scholarship, the Catholic
|
||
Encyclopedia, which in its long articles on the two Jesuits does
|
||
not say a word about this wonderful anticipation of modern ideas,
|
||
missed such a golden opportunity? How is it that in the great fight
|
||
for modern democracy (1760-1860) the papacy was the most determined
|
||
supporter of the murderous anti-democrats? and so on.
|
||
|
||
We will not pretend to be surprised that our own historians
|
||
entirely ignore this discovery of the American Jesuits, though
|
||
since it has been forced upon the public by Catholic propagandists
|
||
for the last 30 years we might hope to find some notice of it. It
|
||
is true that on earlier pages we have found them violently, even
|
||
heatedly, lashing out at unnamed writers (mostly Catholic fiction)
|
||
who are supposed to have said that Europe was entirely boorish, and
|
||
gross during the Dark Age; that this Dark Age lasted until the 15th
|
||
century, that the 13th century was still a gross age: that it was
|
||
the church that began the burning of heretics and the Reformation
|
||
was mainly caused by the corruption of Rome and so on. But, of
|
||
course, in these cases it is anti-Catholic writers whom they
|
||
rebuke. However, while we should not dream of expecting them to
|
||
refute the statements of Catholic historian, we could justly demand
|
||
that on all issues of vital social importance they ought to provide
|
||
an adequate and correct statement of the facts.
|
||
|
||
Now on this question of the evolution of the democratic idea,
|
||
which to us moderns is as vital as the evolution of science, our
|
||
historians, while devoting much space to political evolution, no
|
||
more give an adequate account than they do in the case of early
|
||
science. in fact, our Columbia Encyclopedia has a good word to say
|
||
for the Jesuit theory. In its article on the Jesuit Suarez, which
|
||
occupies just as much space as the article on Charles Darwin, it
|
||
says:
|
||
|
||
"His teaching on the Divine right of kings, that earthly
|
||
power is properly held by the body of men and that kingly
|
||
power is derived from them ...
|
||
|
||
The democratic idea had, of course, occurred to men (in Greece)
|
||
2,000 years before the time of Suarez. It was one of the most
|
||
valuable elements brought back to the race by the revival of
|
||
classical literature, which our historians generally disparage.
|
||
Early in the 12th century one of the pupils of Abelard, the noble-
|
||
minded monk Arnold of Brescia (whom the popes judicially murdered)
|
||
preached the idea with great success in the cities of North Italy.
|
||
Our historians never explain why these cities were more enlightened
|
||
than Rome until recent times, and they misrepresent the democratic
|
||
movement in them and at Rome and do not give the reader the least
|
||
idea that in Rome democrats fought the pope for two centuries and
|
||
were as savagely treated by the popes as by the foulest monarchs.
|
||
We shall find them just as careful to suppress the facts for the
|
||
19th century, when a full knowledge of the fierce and bloody
|
||
hostility of the popes to the democrats would enable the reader to
|
||
distinguish soundly between reactionary and constructive agencies,
|
||
which Catholics do not want him to do.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
19
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
We shall see that presently. Meantime, it would puzzle any
|
||
reader who knew both the ancient and the modern history of
|
||
democracy to understand how it can ever be claimed that just when
|
||
royal absolutism, according to all historian became worse than ever
|
||
(in the latter part of the 16th century) two Jesuit theologians who
|
||
were in all other matters as narrow-minded as Thomas Aquinas,
|
||
insisted that a nation had the right to self-government and could
|
||
depose a misbehaving king. Our historians might at least have
|
||
reminded their reader's of one change that would at once give them
|
||
an idea of the value of the Jesuit argument. Half the monarchs of
|
||
Europe were now Protestants, and the Jesuits were plotting
|
||
everywhere to undermine their authority. The Jesuits had entered
|
||
upon the cloak-and-dagger phase of their history. When, in 1589,
|
||
the French king, Henry III, was murdered by a monk for his anti-
|
||
papal policy, the leading Jesuits of Paris publicly applauded the
|
||
murder. One published a book which defended regicide, and a pupil
|
||
of the Jesuits attempted to murder Henry IV. If this was their
|
||
attitude in a country which was mainly Catholic, what would they be
|
||
likely to say about Protestant monarchs like Queen Elizabeth?
|
||
|
||
Bellarmine and Surez were especially concerned about James I,
|
||
who was trying to discover traitors by imposing an oath of
|
||
allegiance on the Catholics who Survived in England. So they made
|
||
the timely discovery that God conferred upon the people the right
|
||
to govern themselves and the people could delegate this authority
|
||
to a king. Naturally, if he misbehaved they could take back their
|
||
power or depose him; provided they had "the sanction of the
|
||
Church," as the article on Bellarmine in the Encyclopedia of Social
|
||
Science says. The whole theory was a trick to get individual
|
||
Catholics to murder, of the people to rise against Protestant
|
||
rulers, and it was quietly dropped when the iron curtain was
|
||
established between Protestant and Catholic Europe, especially when
|
||
the Catholic kings forced the pope to suppress the Jesuits. The
|
||
Papacy which had in the 12th century condemned the English Barons
|
||
for demanding what is now respectfully called the first instalment
|
||
of democracy, Magna Carta was still in the 19th century the
|
||
strongest support of the vile monarchs of Naples, Spain and
|
||
Portugal in their wholesale massacres of democrats. But you won't
|
||
read that in the new history.
|
||
|
||
5. LOUIS XIV AND THE EDICT OF NANTES
|
||
|
||
In the 17th century Italy and Spain sank rapidly into the
|
||
ignoble somnolence in which they would remain as long as they were
|
||
Catholic. Germany was paralyzed by the Thirty Years' War, and
|
||
England was checked in its progress by the Civil War. France, which
|
||
had ignored the pope's order to enter the religious war, grasped
|
||
its opportunity and became the most brilliant and most prosperous
|
||
power in Europe; and its splendor culminated in the reign of Louis
|
||
XIV. There is here an admirable opportunity to test the value of
|
||
any modern history, and it is easy to do so by seeing whether the
|
||
history accepts or rejects the gross compliments that Catholic
|
||
literature pays to Louis XIV and his work. He has come down to us
|
||
as "The Great Monarch," "The King Sun"; not only the most
|
||
magnificent king in Europe, but the man who raised France to the
|
||
peak of its prosperity and splendor.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
20
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
In modern critical history the gorgeous robes and impressive
|
||
physical appearance of Louis XIV barely cover an ignoble
|
||
personality; a man of gross appetites in food and sex, a man so
|
||
weak in self-control that, in defiance of his church, he never made
|
||
the least effort to keep within the bounds of decency in these
|
||
respects. He had a mediocre intelligence and a monstrous vanity,
|
||
and whatever great work is assigned to him was performed by his two
|
||
chief ministers, Colbert and Louvols. The gorgeous palaces
|
||
(Versailles, etc.) which seem today to the tourist to confirm the
|
||
legend of his greatness really bear witness to the callousness of
|
||
his egoism, for the funds were wrung cruelly from a vilely-treated
|
||
and sometimes starving people. For their capital city, Paris. he
|
||
hid a contempt, and he very rarely ventured into it because it was
|
||
squalid and resentful. The one important act of his reign for which
|
||
he was personally responsible was the revocation of the Edicts of
|
||
Nantes; that is to say, the annulment of the charter of toleration
|
||
of Protestants, an act which inflicted appalling suffering on the
|
||
best part of the nation and began the ruin of his country. From the
|
||
social and moral point of view his age was not glorious but fully
|
||
equal in viciousness to the "glorious" 13th century.
|
||
|
||
In face of all this the duty of a modern historian is clear,
|
||
and our new historians fail in it. They cannot, of course, repeat
|
||
the Catholic legend of Louis XIV in its full flavor, but they
|
||
suppress the unflattering truth and so confirm the legend in the
|
||
minds of readers. Oar Columbia Encyclopedia gives him three times
|
||
as much space as it gives to the Emperor Hadrian, and, beyond
|
||
casually mentioning his mistresses, conveys the impression that he
|
||
really was a great monarch and had "an infinite capacity for work."
|
||
Professors Boak, Slosson, and Anderson allot him a "glorious reign"
|
||
with a few shades. Wallbank and Taylor find him a man of "more than
|
||
average intelligence." But I do not here so much complain of what
|
||
they say as deplore the lack of frankness which leaves the Catholic
|
||
legend intact. In no chapter have we found them describing the
|
||
social and moral grossness of the general population, lay and
|
||
clerical, and I submit that that is because they would have to tell
|
||
truths that would be quite inconsistent with their continual praise
|
||
of the Church as a moral agency. Moreover, in the 16th century they
|
||
all claim a great reform of the Church, and the reign of Louis XIV
|
||
affords a unique opportunity to judge what the reform was worth,
|
||
for we have a better knowledge of its character than of that of any
|
||
previous century.
|
||
|
||
For the writing of one of my books I read a large volume of
|
||
the official police records for the time of Louis (the Archives of
|
||
the Bastille). Stenography was now in use, and these long verbatim
|
||
records of trials, helped out by the horrible tortures in the
|
||
jails, afford an almost unique picture of the criminality of the
|
||
greatest city in Europe. Poisoning with arsenic was terribly rife,
|
||
especially in the middle class and a dozen priests in the actual
|
||
service of the church duped and exploited the wealthy middle class
|
||
and the nobles by performing "black masses," by means of which they
|
||
professed to put folk in contact with the devil. It is a Catholic
|
||
lie that this was done only by a few ex-priests. There was not one
|
||
ex-priest among them, and some were fashionable preachers in Paris.
|
||
Babies were sacrificed to the devil, and some of the highest ladies
|
||
in the land lay nude at the altar while the priest said his parody
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
21
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
of the mass on their bellies. The vilest scum of Paris hung round
|
||
the palaces, even the royal palace, and pandered to the
|
||
unrestrained passions of the nobles. The Cardinal Arch bishop
|
||
flaunted his mistresses as openly as the king, and the people sang
|
||
ribald songs about him in the streets. On account of Louis XIV,
|
||
says the Duc de Saint Simon, one of the chief French writers of the
|
||
age, "Paris became the main sewer of the lusts of Europe." Gambling
|
||
was more sordid than in any other age, and in some ways the
|
||
glittering nobles were filthy. There is an unforgettable scene in
|
||
a letter of one of the literary ladies. There had been a Quarrel
|
||
between the King and his chief mistress. He complained that she
|
||
stank because she never took a bath, and she retorted that the
|
||
smell came from his chronically foul breath. In another letter we
|
||
find one of the greater nobles receiving convoys as he sits on his
|
||
pot in his bedroom in the morning. The streets of Paris still had
|
||
no pavements and no sewers. Filth was thrown from the bedroom
|
||
windows in the narrow streets, down the middle of which an open
|
||
sewer trickled, and the stench was notorious throughout Europe.
|
||
|
||
This was Paris in the glorious reign. But our historians do
|
||
not think it of interest to describe these things, or to tell how
|
||
the streets of Cordova had been paved and sewered seven centuries
|
||
earlier and the streets of Rome a thousand years before; and I
|
||
have admired a good sewage system in a Cretan Royal Palace that
|
||
was nearly 4,000 years old. Our tourists find confirmation of the
|
||
legend of the Golden Age of Louis XIV when they visit his superb
|
||
palaces. No one tells them how the money to build them was
|
||
squeezed out of the veins and pores of the people. A large part
|
||
of the country was at one time so distressed that folk fled to
|
||
the woods from the tax-gatherer, tried to live on grass, bit into
|
||
their own limbs, or ate bodies of some of the nude children who
|
||
wandered in troops over the country.
|
||
|
||
As to the moral value of the church, the life of Louis
|
||
itself is eloquent. From the age of 16 to 45 he had a succession
|
||
of mistresses who were as well known as Mrs. Truman is in America
|
||
today. Did the Jesuits denounce him one of the monarchs whom the
|
||
people ought, on their "democratic" theory, to depose? On the
|
||
contrary, during all this time he had successive Jesuit
|
||
confessors and none of them demanded the dismissal of his
|
||
mistresses as their own theology required them to do. Nearly all
|
||
the nobles and ladies and mistresses had Jesuit confessors. It
|
||
was their golden age. At the age of 45 Louis fell under the
|
||
influence of a lady (herself a convert from loose ways) of strict
|
||
virtue and piety. In view of his age, poor health, and the pace
|
||
of his life it seems probable enough that Louis had lost his
|
||
vigor. However that may be, Mme. de Maintenon and the Jesuits
|
||
closed round him, foully persecuted the Huguenots, and in the end
|
||
persuaded him to do penance for his sins by revoking their
|
||
charter of freedom, the Edict of Nantes. it was, apart from the
|
||
vast amount of suffering, a deadly blow to his country from which
|
||
France never recovered. It is estimated that 300,000 families of
|
||
the most sober and industrious type fled, and England, in which
|
||
most of them settled, rose to the level from which France fell.
|
||
As Professor Barnes says, "the Protestants had been butchered in
|
||
droves."
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
22
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
|
||
Some may claim that, however much France sank in prosperity
|
||
it must have been morally improved. It was not. Although the king
|
||
dropped his mistresses (and took to pious savagery instead), the
|
||
nobles, as the Cambridge Modern History shows, were as flagrant
|
||
as ever after Louis' conversion. And it was far worse after his
|
||
death. It is undisputed that in the higher clerical and
|
||
aristocratic circles the standard of conduct fell lower than
|
||
ever. With all his industry in love-making Louis had left no son,
|
||
an the Duke of Orleans became Regent. He, his licentious (and
|
||
probably incestuous) daughter, and his debauched favorite,
|
||
Cardinal Dubois, presided over orgies in the court that had been
|
||
unknown under Louis. The Cambridge History says (VI. 332):
|
||
|
||
"The open vices of Orleans and his daughter doubtless
|
||
contributed to the lawlessness of society, but in the
|
||
reliable memoirs (Saint Simon, etc.) the vilest stories
|
||
relate not to Orleans but to others, and the example of the
|
||
prince was followed by the dukes and by such of the nobility
|
||
as came into contact with society and by lawyers and
|
||
financiers."
|
||
|
||
But what was the reformed papacy doing? It had made a cardinal of
|
||
one of the vilest of the courtiers, Dubois, and the distinguished
|
||
jurist President de Brosses tells us in his 'Familiar Letters'
|
||
that on his visits to Rome he found Pope Benedict XIV (counted by
|
||
Catholics the greatest pope in two centuries) eager for the
|
||
latest smutty stories about the court and "full of good stories
|
||
about girls" himself.
|
||
|
||
You cannot fully understand the French Revolution if your
|
||
historian refuses to say a word about all this, yet there, is not
|
||
a word about it in most of the new histories.
|
||
|
||
6. PARALYSIS OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD
|
||
|
||
By the second half of the 17th century the struggle of
|
||
Catholic and Protestant, which had cost millions of lives in a
|
||
century, was over. Europe was now divided into two halves by the
|
||
real Iron Curtain of religious hatred. At this point a historian
|
||
who is faithful to his primary social duty, which is to enable
|
||
his readers to recognize which agencies in the human tragi-comedy
|
||
have been progressive and which reactionary, would pause to
|
||
contrast the fortunes during the next two centuries of,
|
||
respectively, the countries which still followed the guidance of
|
||
the pope and those that did not. It would doubtless be considered
|
||
a sectarian act if he did this too pointedly, but at least he
|
||
ought to provide his reader with the facts. In this again the new
|
||
historian completely fails. The story of each country in modern
|
||
times is told at some length, but in the case of Catholic
|
||
countries we have just the conventional account of kings,
|
||
battles, and similar matters without any indication of the causes
|
||
of their decay. The historian is careful not to draw attention to
|
||
the fact that the more solidly Catholic a country was the deeper
|
||
it sank, while the Protestant countries rose as rapidly as the
|
||
Catholic countries declined. That is the broad and significant
|
||
fact of European life from about 1650 to the French Revolution
|
||
or, with that interruption, to 1850.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
23
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
On the extreme wings of the European world, untainted by
|
||
heresy, were Catholic Poland and Ireland. Poland showed the last
|
||
flicker of its earlier greatness under Sobieski in the 17th
|
||
century and then became the drab, illiterate, anarchic, and
|
||
miserably poor land that its neighbors would cynically divide
|
||
between them in the 18th century. After that it falls out of the
|
||
news until 1918.
|
||
|
||
Ireland had long before dropped out of European
|
||
consideration, and it remained ignorant, violent, fanatical, and
|
||
impotent. It is sometimes said that we must make allowances for
|
||
its poverty in natural resources, but that did not matter much
|
||
until the Industrial Revolution began; and the historian smiles
|
||
at the complaint that all its misfortunes were due to English
|
||
misrule, which was certainly grievous. It and Poland were, until
|
||
the second half of the last century, On a level with the strictly
|
||
Catholic countries: Italy, Spain, Portugal, and South America.
|
||
And not simply socially and economically, but in regard to what
|
||
the Church calls virtue.
|
||
|
||
Spain and Portugal were the most conspicuous examples of
|
||
Catholic paralysis, for they had under the Arabs far surpassed
|
||
every other country in Europe in size and population, prosperity
|
||
in every class, enlightenment, and general character. This
|
||
prosperity had been lowered by the real Moors, who were Moslem
|
||
fanatics from Morocco and were far inferior to the Arabs, before
|
||
the Spanish Catholics, with the help of a vast army of French and
|
||
English knights, had fallen upon it, but until the 15th century
|
||
the Catholic kings were as a rule sufficiently independent of the
|
||
Church to take over the culture and the services of the Arabs,
|
||
Moors and Jews. But when the final step, the conquest of Granada,
|
||
was taken, the priests had only a fanatical queen and the crafty
|
||
and unscrupulous Ferdinand to deal with, and they were permitted
|
||
to set up the harshest intolerance and the most truculent branch
|
||
of the Inquisition. The popes, our historians generally point
|
||
out, did not control the Spanish Inquisition. No, they wanted to,
|
||
but Ferdinand and his clergy coveted the rich spoils (from
|
||
confiscation) for themselves, and warned Rome to keep out. The,
|
||
ruin which this brought upon Spain was checked for a time by the
|
||
gold of America -- they had learned navigation from the Arabs --
|
||
then a palsy crept over the short-lived brilliance of Catholic
|
||
Spain. Before the year 1,000 the Peninsula, or the lower half of
|
||
it, had supported 30,000,000 of the happiest, most prosperous,
|
||
and most enlightened people in Europe. Before the end of the 17th
|
||
century, Spain -- the whole of Spain had only 6,500,000 people,
|
||
and they were among the poorest and most ignorant in Europe; and
|
||
certainly not more virtuous than any other. Spain and Portugal
|
||
fell under the same disdain as Poland and Ireland in the eyes of
|
||
Europe.
|
||
|
||
Italy, as statesmen would say at a later date, had become,
|
||
thanks largely to the ambition of the papacy, "merely a
|
||
geographical expression." The northern one-third of it was under
|
||
Austria, as the heir of the Holy Roman Empire: the central one-
|
||
third was the kingdom of the pope; the south was the kingdom of
|
||
Naples. Except for one or two small Balkan countries which were
|
||
ruled by the degenerate Sultan of Turkey the papal kingdom and
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
24
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
that of Naples were the poorest in wealth, culture, and character
|
||
in the whole of Europe. I return to them, especially the papal
|
||
states, in later sections. The north was in far better condition
|
||
than these, and the apologist at once points out Austria, which
|
||
ruled it, was a Catholic country. You will look in vain in the
|
||
new history for the explanation; which is that while it did
|
||
remain Catholic after the Thirty Years' War, its most famous
|
||
monarch in the 17th century, Joseph II, the man who did most to
|
||
raise the level of its civilization, was a pupil of Voltaire and,
|
||
in express defiance of the pope, ruled it on the principles of
|
||
the French deists and atheists. The Columbia Encyclopedia, while
|
||
giving a list of his great reforms and even some of his anti-
|
||
clerical measures, goes out of its way to deny the influence of
|
||
the French Freethinkers, against all authority. Joseph was a
|
||
contemporary of Frederick the Great and drew his inspiration from
|
||
the same source. Prof. Harry Elmer Barnes's edition of Ploetz's
|
||
"Epitome of History" (1935), which is necessarily very brief in
|
||
it's notices, is moved to lengthy admiration of the reign of
|
||
Joseph II -- he regenerated the Austrian monarchy, lending it
|
||
nobility and vitality -- and it alone frankly tells how he defied
|
||
Rome and disbanded 30,000 monks. But Dr. Barnes is, as I said,
|
||
not properly counted among the new historians.
|
||
|
||
And this concealment of the truth about the lack of social
|
||
inspiration in the Catholic faith which, in view of its
|
||
pretensions in our time, is very important, is further helped by
|
||
the way the development of French civilization is treated. The
|
||
general corruption of which I gave some idea in the last section
|
||
plainly shows, since the church professes to be particularly
|
||
concerned about sex-morals, that it had no social influence and
|
||
therefore nothing to do with the rise of the nation, but by
|
||
suppressing these facts the reader is left to entertain the claim
|
||
of the Catholic apologist. Naturally any thoughtful man will
|
||
reflect that if the church had no influence on sexual conduct and
|
||
general viciousness it certainly had none on the increase of
|
||
wealth, the progress of art, and military victories. The truth,
|
||
of which the reader gets no idea, is that France was not at all a
|
||
Catholic country in the same sense as Italy, Spain and Portugal.
|
||
The best elements in the Church itself defied the papacy and
|
||
declared the independence of the Gallican Church. There were more
|
||
than a million Protestants in the land, and the licentiousness of
|
||
the higher clergy encouraged. the skepticism that had been
|
||
growing for a century. A number of the greatest French writers
|
||
from the 16th century onward -- Montaigne, Cyrano de Bergerac,
|
||
Moliere, Boileau, Bayle -- were Freethinkers and had extensive
|
||
support in the middle class. France was only in a formal sense a
|
||
Catholic country,
|
||
|
||
On the other hand the Protestant countries advanced rapidly
|
||
once the religious wars were over and the devastated areas
|
||
restored. England, in suite of the reaction of the Civil War and
|
||
the Puritan period, became superior to any in art, science,
|
||
literature, trade, and prosperity. Holland acquired a trade,
|
||
prosperity, and social position which most folk have now
|
||
forgotten. Prussia, under the Skeptical Frederick, became the
|
||
most enlightened and one of the mast advancing countries in
|
||
Europe. Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden won an
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
25
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
importance they had never had before. There is no need for
|
||
learned research in making up the account. Every historian knows,
|
||
though few will say, that the Catholic world sank lower and
|
||
lower, and in proportion to its Catholicism. The new history
|
||
offers no explanation of this interesting phenomenon.
|
||
|
||
7. VOLTAIRE AND THE PHILOSOPHERS
|
||
|
||
The chief defect of the writing of both science and history
|
||
is that a vast amount of unnecessary detail is included. This
|
||
tires and repels a reader and he is less able to appreciate the
|
||
(educationally) more important general truths. The new history
|
||
not only has this general defect, but it fails repeatedly even to
|
||
mention the general truths, especially when these would be
|
||
resented by the Catholic authorities. Every other development --
|
||
artistic, literary, political, economic, etc. -- receives full
|
||
and impartial treatment, but situations and events which the
|
||
Catholic apologist wants suppressed are either omitted or
|
||
scantily noticed or misrepresented. I have here nothing to say
|
||
about the historian's excuse that he would be trespassing on the
|
||
domain of theology (as he quite often does when it gives no
|
||
offense) if he stated these, or that in writing for the public he
|
||
has no right to affront one-fifth (as Catholics count) of the
|
||
American nation. I am content to state the facts.
|
||
|
||
When we come, as we now do, to the 17th century, we find
|
||
another of these lamentable omissions. There is no good ground
|
||
for saying, as most of our historians do, that the Middle Ages
|
||
ended in 1450 or even 1550, but they might plausibly argue that
|
||
Modern Times began about 1750. A new conception of life, a new
|
||
spirit, won its way into the mind of the middle class, which
|
||
then, at least, might justly be called the backbone of a nation,
|
||
and long before the end of the century it was recognizable as the
|
||
modern conception which, after overcoming the devils or dragons
|
||
of the first half of the 19th century, established itself and has
|
||
transformed the world. None of our historians make this quite
|
||
clear. The new conception is associated especially with the work
|
||
of a number of French writers who have, not very aptly, come to
|
||
be known as "the Philosophers"; unless the word be used in its
|
||
original sense, "seekers after wisdom." But they sought wisdom,
|
||
not in the cloud-land of metaphysics, but in regard to the nature
|
||
of the universe and of man and his practical problems. In the
|
||
last century they were apt to be superficially dismissed as a
|
||
bunch of Atheists or near-Atheists who, by disturbing the
|
||
religions serenity of the French mind, "unleashed the passions of
|
||
the mob" and caused all the bloodshed of the Revolution.
|
||
|
||
This miserable caricature of a great and pregnant
|
||
development was so thoroughly discredited by the modern French
|
||
historians (and the writers of the Cambridge Modern History) long
|
||
before the new history was born that it is not included with
|
||
other Catholic myths in the works I am examining. Even the
|
||
Columbia Encyclopedia has a long and generally admirable article
|
||
on Voltaire; though it is sublime in its simplicity when it says
|
||
that, "his chief flaw is his prejudice against religion."
|
||
Professor Langer, it is true, virtually ignores the whole
|
||
movement and thus leaves the stirring 18th century unexplained in
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
26
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
some of its most important aspects. All the others are
|
||
complimentary even to "Voltaire the Scoffer" and to the romantic
|
||
revolutionary Rousseau.
|
||
|
||
But they completely fail to impress the reader with the
|
||
historical importance of the school as a whole. Professor Geise
|
||
goes out of his way to criticize "the Age of Reason" at great
|
||
length and in effect suggests that the Romantic School which
|
||
arose in reaction to it was more important, which, we shall see,
|
||
is absurd. Professor Lucas observes (693) that Voltaire's age did
|
||
not understand the profound importance of medieval culture in the
|
||
history of civilization; which reminds us only of the inflated
|
||
language which the new history uses about the beautiful 13th
|
||
century and the Middle ages generally. He does, however, later
|
||
say, if too inadequately, that humanitarianism was "a marked
|
||
feature of the Age of Reason." Professor Barnes rather Surprises
|
||
us by criticizing Voltaire's lack of taste, which suggests that
|
||
he is unaware of the grossness of morals and manners during the
|
||
reign of Louis XIV and the Regency (in which Voltaire was
|
||
educated); and he fails to appreciate Voltaire's splendid and
|
||
self-sacrificing work for political freedom, toleration, and
|
||
other social ideals. As to taste, Voltaire was an aristocrat of
|
||
exquisite taste though apt to use the freedom of speech of the
|
||
time in his jibes at the hypocritical church. He was as fond as
|
||
any other rich man of the pleasures and luxuries of Paris, yet
|
||
rather than stifle his indignation at untruth and injustice he
|
||
spent nearly the whole of his adult life in exile from it.
|
||
Compare the futility and self-indulgence of the arch bishops and
|
||
conservative nobles of France.
|
||
|
||
But what one chiefly deplores here is that the whole of our
|
||
historians and the Columbia Encyclopedia fail or decline to
|
||
inform their readers of the Profound social importance of the
|
||
work of the philosophers and the high distinction of most members
|
||
of the group. In earlier sections we have found them complaining
|
||
that when a brilliant period like the Renaissance opened the
|
||
"old" historians did not recognize its roots in earlier
|
||
centuries. Now they fail lamentably to show how the great
|
||
developments of the 19th century were deeply rooted in the French
|
||
school of the 18th century; and one cannot hesitate to connect
|
||
this defect with the fact that the religious authorities bitterly
|
||
resent any candid treatment of the fact that European progress
|
||
was so slow under the Church but, in its social aspects and in
|
||
regard to science, entered upon a stage of rapid advance when the
|
||
clerical lead was replaced by that of a brilliant group of
|
||
Freethinkers. These men thought primarily of inducing the world
|
||
to look to science rather than to theology or philosophy, but
|
||
they meant science in its broadest range; social, political, and
|
||
economic reform as well as astronomy, physics, biology, and
|
||
anthropology.
|
||
|
||
Their chief instrument of education was the famous
|
||
encyclopedia in 53 volumes which they published, in difficult
|
||
circumstances and under heavy persecution, from 1751 to 1772.
|
||
There are few modern reforms of which you will not find the germ
|
||
in it, while the criticism of religion in it is not obtruded. It
|
||
had for the time an enormous circulation in France and abroad,
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
27
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
for some of the ablest scholars and writers in Europe contributed
|
||
to it. Professors Sheppard and Godfrey make the curious
|
||
reflection (II, 148) on it:
|
||
|
||
"It lacks the scholarship such a compendium of the arts
|
||
and sciences merited."
|
||
|
||
The list of its chief contributors includes the famous Baron de
|
||
Montesquieu (the real pioneer of modern democracy, whose great
|
||
work "The Spirit of the Laws" makes Bellarmine and Suarez look
|
||
like thimbleriggers), the still more famous Count Buffon (the
|
||
greatest scientist of his age), Voltaire (certainly the most
|
||
brilliant writer and historian of his age), Rousseau, Turgot (the
|
||
founder of economic science and one of the ablest ministers of
|
||
state), Laland (one of the finest astronomers and mathematicians
|
||
of the time), Euler ("probably the most talented mathematician
|
||
that ever lived" says Dr. Barnes), D'Alembert (who was hardly
|
||
second to him), Diderot (one of the most learned men in France),
|
||
Bernouilli (famous Italian scientist), Marmontel (one of the most
|
||
brilliant French writers of the time), Baron D'Holbach,
|
||
Helvetius, and others of the most cultivated writers in Paris. It
|
||
is strange to find Dr. Barnes, who has only a few lines on the
|
||
work -- he calls it "a monumental survey of knowledge" -- saying
|
||
that these writers "shared with Aquinas and Duns Scotus many of
|
||
the problems they discussed" (II. 185).
|
||
|
||
In spite of the high position of the chief writers they had
|
||
to produce their work in the teeth of fierce hostility. As volume
|
||
after volume was more or lese secretly printed and published they
|
||
were repeatedly condemned and the authors threatened. When the
|
||
work was near completion the clergy bribed the printers to
|
||
mutilate the finest articles after Diderot had passed the proof.
|
||
But the leading Minister, the Due de Choiseul, a secret skeptic,
|
||
and -- it is amusing to learn -- the king's chief mistress Mme.
|
||
de Pompadour protected the rebels, and the great work circulated
|
||
freely when its arch-critics the Jesuits, were suppressed by the
|
||
pope as grave offenders.
|
||
|
||
The immense influence of the book rebukes our historians for
|
||
taking so little notice of it. Such was its circulation that the
|
||
printers made a profit of $5,000,000: an immense sum to make out
|
||
of a literary and scientific work at a time when little more than
|
||
10 percent of the community could read. It electrified the French
|
||
middle class and put into their minds the germs of all the
|
||
reforms which they put forward in the Revolution before the pious
|
||
Robespierre ruined it with his Supreme Being and Terror. Germany,
|
||
where Frederick II (more French than German in culture) warmly
|
||
welcomed the chief writers, now ceased to be a medieval power and
|
||
entered the modern world, the world of Goethe, Catherine the
|
||
Great welcomed them to Russia, where it seemed for a time as if
|
||
the modern ideas were dissolving the medieval feudalism. Joseph
|
||
II of Austria eagerly accepted the ideas of the Encyclopedia, as
|
||
I said in the last section, and in the 10 years of his reign made
|
||
immense progress in the reform of his country. In north Italy its
|
||
plea for reform of prisons and the penal code inspired. the
|
||
Marquis de Beccaria to write the first great work on that line.
|
||
Its gospel penetrated even the sordid kingdom of Naples, and an
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
28
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
enlightened Voltairean minister" Tannucci, bravely attempted to
|
||
cleanse the Augaean stables; The greatest pope of the century,
|
||
Benedict XIV, corresponded amicably with Voltaire, but here the
|
||
medieval thickets were too dense and profitable for the reform
|
||
idea to make progress.
|
||
|
||
Europe was "filled with it and shaken by it" says an
|
||
authority in which we should hardly expect such language, the
|
||
Encyclopedia Americana. The most eminent minister that Portugal
|
||
had in that century, the Marquis de Pombal, a Voltairean, began
|
||
with great success to save the country from the squalor into
|
||
which it had drifted, but the clergy checked and then ruined his
|
||
work. The equally distinguished first minister of spain, the
|
||
Count d'Aranda, a friend as well as a Pupil of Voltaire,
|
||
initiated a series of notable reforms in Spain, but again the
|
||
church destroyed his work, Even in England the French
|
||
Encyclopedia had a host of readers, and the reform ideas which
|
||
spread in England before the French Revolution came mainly from
|
||
it. and from writers inspired by it. One reads still how the
|
||
abolitionist William Wilberforce was inspired by his deep
|
||
Christian faith to take up the cause of the abortion of Slavery,
|
||
but I do not know any historian or writer on the subject who
|
||
quotes from the official biography of Wilberforce, by his
|
||
orthodox sons, that he was a skeptic until near the age of 30,
|
||
and he learned his zeal for abolition from French skeptical
|
||
writers whom he read in his teens. From England and France the
|
||
ideas of the French Encyclopedia, perhaps copies of it, crossed
|
||
the Atlantic -- Jefferson, at least, was a goad French scholar
|
||
and prized the friendship of some of the French skeptics -- and
|
||
inspired men like Franklin and Jefferson with their social
|
||
idealism. The reform which the work advocated -- it was in the
|
||
encyclopedia that Jean-Jacques first expounded his dream of
|
||
equality -- was later thundered over the world by the French
|
||
Revolution. The royalists and clerics flattered themselves that
|
||
they had buried them forever after the fall of Napoleon, but it
|
||
is the realization of these ideas that makes our world superior
|
||
to any age that has gone before. No other single work has had so
|
||
beneficent and massive a part in making the new world. But the
|
||
new history dismisses it in a short and tame paragraph.
|
||
|
||
8. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
|
||
|
||
Professor Barnes introduces his treatment of this most
|
||
towering event of the 18th century, this first fine fruit of the
|
||
French Encyclopedia, with this admirable passage (II. 107):
|
||
|
||
"The French Revolution was long portrayed as an epic of
|
||
blood and glory. The Reign of Terror loomed up as the great
|
||
event of the Revolution. ... A subsequent generation of
|
||
historians have tended to minimize the element of gore and
|
||
confusion. They have made it clear that the French
|
||
Revolution represents a very considerable collection of
|
||
permanent achievements in the creation of modern society."
|
||
|
||
We may wish that he had made it plainer that in this case he does
|
||
not mean that it is the new American historians who have
|
||
corrected the older libels of the Revolution. For more than half
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
29
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
a century Paris University has had a special chair of the history
|
||
of the Revolution, and the old libels were completely refuted
|
||
before the end of the 19th century. In fact, even older and more
|
||
conservative French historians like Thiers, Taine, and Sorel had
|
||
refuted most of the lies that had got into English literature,
|
||
and from it to American, from emigrant nobles and priests -- even
|
||
Carlyle, exposed many of them in 1836 -- and they were finally
|
||
dismissed from serious history in Professor Lavisse's "History of
|
||
the Revolution" and the works of Professor Aulard.
|
||
|
||
Yet, these lies are still much alive in literature. Not many
|
||
years ago a novelist who is well above the average in culture
|
||
spoke casually and irrelevantly about "the prostitute who sang
|
||
ribald songs from the High Altar of Notre Dame": a gross
|
||
misrepresentation of a solemn and artistic pageant that was
|
||
performed in the cathedral when it was used no longer for
|
||
Catholic services. Quite recently, that distinguished British
|
||
scholar and humanist, Dr. Gilbert Murray, has repeated some of
|
||
the worst of the old legends in a published lecture. Thus a much
|
||
larger literature than that of the Catholic propagandist still
|
||
spreads its lies While, especially since it has became the
|
||
fashion to couple the French and the Russian Revolutions.
|
||
Catholic radio and Catholic influence, in the press have given a
|
||
new vitality to the old lies. In these circumstances, while We do
|
||
not expect the new historian to quote and condemn these Catholic
|
||
lies, he may surely be expected to give an adequate account of
|
||
the facts which are so grossly falsified.
|
||
|
||
In this they again fail us, though most of them give a
|
||
generally fair account of the course of events. The broad truth
|
||
about the Revolution which not only as a matter of historical
|
||
truth, but for purposes of social controversy today, ought to be
|
||
impressed upon the reader is that the actual revolt in 1789 was
|
||
accompanied by little bloodshed even on the part of the ignorant
|
||
masses. It was a fine middle-class overthrow of a galling
|
||
tyranny, which at first demanded even less than the Fathers of
|
||
the American Revolution demanded and then proceeded during two or
|
||
three years to reform the country and draft a constitution that
|
||
was more admirable than any other in Europe and included more
|
||
social advances even than the American.
|
||
|
||
There were no official reprisals, as there would be when the
|
||
clerical-royalists recovered power, and the burning of the
|
||
Bastille and attack on the Tuileries cannot be considered popular
|
||
outrages, especially as the king drew his armies round Paris.
|
||
There were a few individual mob-outrages in Paris, but the chief
|
||
acts of violence were the burning of chateaux and murder of small
|
||
nobles and their families in the provinces. There is solid
|
||
contemporary evidence, not noticed by any of the new historians,
|
||
that it was agents of the Duke of Orleans, who coveted the
|
||
throne, who went out from Paris and inflamed the densely-ignorant
|
||
peasants by spreading rumors that the king and the nobles were
|
||
plotting against them. The guillotine was not even invented until
|
||
three years later, and the execution of the king and queen, still
|
||
later, was voted by the Assembly because they attempted to fly to
|
||
join the bitter enemies of the republic abroad.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
30
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
It is mentioned by few of our historians that the Revolution
|
||
was voluntarily accepted by the king, the nobles, and the hearts
|
||
of the clergy on August 4, 1789, and that the nobles and higher
|
||
clergy then almost immediately began to fly to England and
|
||
Austria, and inflame those countries with gross exaggerations of
|
||
events. It is not made clear that the middle-class men, led by a
|
||
few nobles, who had carried the revolution continued all through
|
||
1790 and 1791 in a city that was in the circumstances remarkably
|
||
free from disorder, to work out a constitution and plans for
|
||
social amelioration (including abolition of slavery, general
|
||
education, and other measures which were yet unknown even in
|
||
America). Near the end of 1791 the new constitution was finished
|
||
and hardly any of our historians tells this: the politicians, by
|
||
an act of virtue that has hardly a parallel in the history of
|
||
politics, bound themselves to take no office under it, to avoid
|
||
even the suspicion of graft and so handed power to a new,
|
||
inferior, and inexperienced body of men. This was shortly
|
||
followed by a fierce civil war, excited by the clergy, in
|
||
Britanny and a plan of the monarchs of England, Austria and
|
||
Prussia, egged on by the fugitive nobles and priests, to send
|
||
large armies of the finest soldiers of the time and destroy the
|
||
republic. It was in these circumstances, which are rarely clearly
|
||
stated, that, four years after the actual revolution, there
|
||
occurred those horrible massacres which are by a deliberate
|
||
confusion, represented as characteristic of the French
|
||
Revolution.
|
||
|
||
The first was what is called the September Massacre. Even so
|
||
liberal and learned a historian as Professor Barnes says of it
|
||
(11. 113):
|
||
|
||
"The mob got out of hand and between September 2nd and
|
||
7th. 1792, it is estimated that 2,000 to 20,000 Royalists
|
||
were slain."
|
||
|
||
Before the end of the, last century the French historians had
|
||
carefully sifted all contemporary evidence, and it is summed up
|
||
in Professor Lavisse's authoritative "History of the Revolution"
|
||
(10 vols. 1901). The "mob' of Paris was not only not concerned in
|
||
the massacre, but resented it. One small section of the Paris
|
||
Commune, about 500 citizens, organized and carried out the
|
||
massacre with the respectable design (they said) of purifying
|
||
Paris in view of the grave danger of the nation. They seem to
|
||
have been mostly middle-class men. The number of victims was
|
||
about 1,100, and more than one-half of these were criminals or
|
||
prostitutes from the jails; less than half the inmates of the
|
||
jails at that time, as the official documents show. "The people
|
||
of Paris," says Lavisse, "had taken no part in these outrages and
|
||
warmly condemned such scoundrels." Danton and the government
|
||
leaders took strict precautions to prevent further massacres; and
|
||
the people in the provinces were "generally horrified." So much
|
||
for the first "unleashing of the passions of the mob."
|
||
|
||
The reactionaries always connect this supposed bloody
|
||
hysteria of the mob with the loss of religion; in fact, in fact,
|
||
they say that Danton and Robespierre first deprived them of the
|
||
restraints of the Catholic faith and the horrors followed. The
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
31
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
truth, which Professor Aulard has shown in a small specialist
|
||
work ("Christianity and the French Revolution." 1927) is that the
|
||
mass of the People voluntarily quit the Church, and Danton and
|
||
Robespierre resisted all their demands that it should be
|
||
disestablished until the summer of 1793. I do not find that any
|
||
of our new historians endorse the Catholic legend that the people
|
||
of Paris then set up a cult of Reason and had a Prostitute
|
||
masquerading as the Goddess of Reason in the cathedral. That myth
|
||
is too ragged to appear in any but a Catholic Publication. The
|
||
ceremony in honor of Liberty and Reason that was held in Notre
|
||
Dame, which had been handed over by the clergy to the
|
||
municipality, was a dignified pageant in which a lady (not a
|
||
prostitute and not using the altar) Personified Liberty and
|
||
recited a fine ode composed by the leading poet of the day.
|
||
|
||
But an important point in this connection, which none of our
|
||
historians mentions, is that before the Terror of 1793-4, the
|
||
really horrible page of French history (four years after the
|
||
Revolution), the Catholic religion and Atheism (which was
|
||
Publicly burned in effigy before all Paris) were replaced as the
|
||
official religion by the Cult of the Supreme Being, and it was
|
||
this high priest of this cult, Robespierre, who, hated Atheism
|
||
more deeply than he hated Romanism, who was responsible for the
|
||
cold savagery of the Terror. Exact research has brought down the
|
||
number of victims to about 20,000 -- less than half the number of
|
||
victims of the St. Bartholomew Massacre -- and of these only 6
|
||
percent were aristocrats and 8 percent priests and nuns. It was a
|
||
political massacre of Robespierre's opponents, and as they were
|
||
followers of the Atheist Danton, we may almost say that it was
|
||
largely a massacre of Atheists by theists.
|
||
|
||
There are other aspects of the Revolution which, for actual
|
||
sociological reasons, our historians ought to impress upon the
|
||
modern reader, and they do not. Professor Barnes and Professor
|
||
Geise, alone point out that, in spite of the long period of
|
||
reaction that followed the fall of Napoleon the Revolution
|
||
contributed to European civilization certain elements that it had
|
||
lacked for 12 or 13 centuries. It put an end to feudal tyranny,
|
||
for, except in Russia, kings, nobles and priests, in spite of
|
||
their recovery of power, rarely used it so ruthlessly as they had
|
||
done, and only for a few decades. The new historians are too apt
|
||
to say that feudalism had died in the 15th or 16th century, but
|
||
in its most odious form it lasted in France, where there were
|
||
still immense numbers of actual serfs, until the Revolution. It
|
||
took up the demand for the abolition of slavery and ended the
|
||
shameful ownership of a high proportion of the soil of France by
|
||
the clergy. The workers, urban and rural, were, taught to look
|
||
forward to a time when the scandalous inequality in the
|
||
distribution of wealth would be rectified and the black contrast
|
||
between the life of the privileged one-tenth and the foul
|
||
existence of the nine-tenths would be gradually relieved. As
|
||
Professor Barnes says (II. 190):
|
||
|
||
"It is a significant fact that more than 99 percent of
|
||
the period of man's existence on this planet was passed
|
||
through without any consciousness of actual progress in
|
||
hundreds of years."
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
32
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
It was Turgot and the encyclopedists who first started the
|
||
idea of an indefinite possible progress in the improvement of
|
||
life. It was one of the noblest citizens of the Revolution, the
|
||
Marquis de Condorcet, who first developed it in a book that
|
||
spread widely; and it was his noble wife who pleaded for the
|
||
emancipation of woman from 13 centuries of injustice. The scheme
|
||
of general education for both sexes that Tallyrand worked out for
|
||
the revolutionary government had no equal until late in the 19th
|
||
century. The use of torture was abolished, the law reformed,
|
||
democracy established.
|
||
|
||
And just as the encyclopedists had planted the idea of these
|
||
reforms in other countries, so the Revolution taught the people
|
||
to demand them and how to get them. The revolutionary armies that
|
||
in time poured south as far as Naples and over Spain and Portugal
|
||
emptied the foul dungeons of state and church (the Inquisition).
|
||
broke their instruments of torture everywhere, and set up
|
||
humanitarian republics. Even in England, in spite of the fierce
|
||
hatred of the Revolution that was fed by the lies of political
|
||
fugitives, as such folk libel Russia or Czechoslovakia today,
|
||
Jacobin Clubs appeared in the cities, and when the period of
|
||
suppression and reaction ended, the rebels emerged from the
|
||
vaults and began a score of reform-movements (political,
|
||
industrial, educational, pacifist, feminist, etc.). "The world"
|
||
said even the conservative historian Freeman "was never the same
|
||
again after the French Revolution." But the new history knows
|
||
nothing of this, and it is not the aspect of the Revolution that
|
||
interests the Columbia Encyclopedia.
|
||
|
||
I find it still worse that our historians completely ignore
|
||
another point which has definite lessons for us today, and again
|
||
they are lessons which the Catholic authorities do not wish us to
|
||
draw. In modern French history and the Cambridge History there
|
||
are two Terrors, the Red and the White. Even our Columbia
|
||
Encyclopedia mentions -- it just gives it half a line -- that
|
||
there, was a White Terror, not even explaining what the phrase
|
||
means. But you will not find even the phrase in the index of any
|
||
of these histories, and the facts which it indicates are entirely
|
||
suppressed.
|
||
|
||
It means the Royalist-Catholic Massacre of the Reds. At the
|
||
death of Robespierre the secretly organized Catholics took
|
||
advantage of the political confusion and believed that they were
|
||
about to recover power. Though still a minority they fell with
|
||
fury upon the republicans. At Lyons, for instance. 20,000
|
||
Catholics seized and held the city for a time and barbarically
|
||
murdered a large number of active republicans. The same occurred
|
||
in 62 departments (county divisions;) of the country, and
|
||
thousands were slain in a few months. No records were kept so it
|
||
is not possible to say whether there were as many victims as in
|
||
the Red Terror, but the Paris Government, as soon as order was
|
||
established, sent men to collect information, and it is the
|
||
opinion of the French historians, that there were not less, and
|
||
that its savagery was worse, though all this was directed by
|
||
educated Catholics. They, says Professor Martin, "showed a
|
||
mixture of cold cruelty and depravity which was more hideous than
|
||
the brutal ferocity of the Jacobin Terrorists." He reproduces the
|
||
official reports.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
33
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
This savagery was renewed after the defeat of Napoleon, and
|
||
we can only imagine how far it would have gone if Wellington and
|
||
the other allied leaders in Paris had not compelled the king to
|
||
check it, although it was now organized by the aristocracy and
|
||
the priests. How many Americans ever heard of the White Terror?
|
||
Most of them have read or seen pictures of the densely-ignorant
|
||
slum women of Paris knitting at the foot of the guillotine. Does
|
||
one in 100,000 of them know that we have, not a rumor or fiction,
|
||
but definite evidence that Catholic "ladies" embroidered their
|
||
silks while, they sat, in chairs specially provided for them by
|
||
the civic officials, to watch the less merciful dispatch of
|
||
revolutionaries? In the five years of the Revolution less than
|
||
four thousand aristocrats, priests and nuns were murdered or
|
||
executed. Far more rebels against the monarchy and the church
|
||
were murdered in a few months in the White Terror. The new
|
||
history has not a word to say about this.
|
||
|
||
|
||
9. THE FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY
|
||
|
||
Still worse is the complete suppression of the bloody
|
||
chronicle of the murder and torture during the next 40 years of
|
||
men whose only demand was for constitutional monarchy and the
|
||
abolition of the Inquisition. The history of Europe from about
|
||
1750 onward is more important and richer in lessons for us today
|
||
than any other period of history. French writers began, we saw,
|
||
to draft the plan of a higher civilization from 1750 to 1780. In
|
||
the Revolution the foundations were laid, and then, after the
|
||
compromise of the reign of Napoleon, the restored monarchs and
|
||
the Church tore up the foundation stones and forced the race back
|
||
under a regime of absolute monarchy, the Inquisition, the
|
||
subjection of women, industrial semi-slavery, dense ignorance,
|
||
and sordid criminal law and practice.
|
||
|
||
The monarchs met at Vienna and formed a Holy Alliance,
|
||
blessed by the Church, to (they said) stamp out the last spark of
|
||
the revolutionary fire. From 1820 to 1860 (and in some places
|
||
later) the peoples of Europe fought magnificently for the
|
||
restoration of those Rights of Man (now everywhere recognized)
|
||
,which the Revolution had formulated and the pope had derided. In
|
||
England, Germany and Protestant countries they were won early,
|
||
and with little bloodshed. In France, Italy, Spain. and Portugal,
|
||
the lands which were saved from the taint of Protestantism, about
|
||
400,000 unarmed men and women, even children, fell in the great
|
||
battle, and more than a million rotted in medieval jails or penal
|
||
colonies or were driven into exile. If yon care to add the men
|
||
who died in arms, facings, seasoned troops for the same cause in
|
||
Poland. France, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Latin
|
||
America, the number rises to millions. And it is hardly too much
|
||
to say that all this is suppressed in the new history and the
|
||
Columbia Encyclopedia. It is very fully and indignantly described
|
||
in the Cambridge Modern History.
|
||
|
||
The large Catholic literature that pretends to prove that
|
||
the Church is not, and never was, hostile to democracy would look
|
||
very tawdry if these facts were put before the public in their
|
||
full brutality; and many other writers who are eloquent about the
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
34
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
bloodiness of popular revolutions and the passions of the mob
|
||
would be exposed as blind leaders of the blind if these facts
|
||
were told in the general public's manuals of the history of
|
||
Europe or the history-classes in school and college. The
|
||
journalistic and literary practice of applying this supposed law
|
||
-- the bloody chaos of revolution and the Justice and restraint
|
||
of the counter-revolution -- to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917
|
||
and deducing that it must have been accompanied by a good deal of
|
||
bloodshed, would be recognized as political propaganda. For this
|
||
savagery of revolution and serenity of counter-revolution is the
|
||
exact opposite of a law of history or a lesson of the history of
|
||
Europe since 1789. Since that year there have been four
|
||
revolutions and three counter-revolutions in France, eight
|
||
revolutions and six counter-revolutions in the three divisions of
|
||
Italy; six revolutions and six counter-revolutions in Spain, and
|
||
a further number in Portugal, Germany, Austria, and Hungary.
|
||
There have been about 40 revolutions and counter-revolutions in
|
||
all, and there was little bloodshed during or after the people's
|
||
seizure of power, but there were terrible reprisals after each
|
||
recovery of power by the gentle and gentlemanly clerical-
|
||
royalist's.
|
||
|
||
Is not this as well worth telling and describing at adequate
|
||
length as the development of science, the improvement of
|
||
machinery, the evolution of capitalism, the extension of the
|
||
colonial system, or the, history of literature in the 19th
|
||
century? Isn't it important at least to sum up all these
|
||
revolutions and counter-revolutions and point out how they
|
||
represent one of the mightiest efforts of the race to throw off
|
||
the burden of old errors and injustices and lift life to a higher
|
||
level? The new historian and the encyclopedia entirely fail or
|
||
refuse to do this. They refuse to make even summary statements of
|
||
the ugly facts, as these are told in the Cambridge Modern
|
||
History; and it would be ridiculous to ignore the fact that to
|
||
make these statements. even briefly (but truthfully), would
|
||
mortally offend the Catholic authorities and the modern
|
||
representatives of kings and princes, so there is no hint of
|
||
them. Most of our manuals, after a short and generally, as far as
|
||
it goes, fair account of the French Revolution, completely ignore
|
||
subsequent revolutions, or just notice that there were isolated
|
||
disturbances here and there in the course of the next half-
|
||
century. Only Professor Barnes whose work is generally loyal to
|
||
his claim in his introduction that the supreme aim of history is
|
||
to help the living to cast off what remains of the burden of the
|
||
past and rise to a higher level, notices the chief revolutionist
|
||
and connects them with the great French Revolution. But he omits
|
||
the evidence that shows the guilt of the church, the inhumanity
|
||
of the clerical-royalist's revolutions, and the general freedom
|
||
from bloodshed of the popular revolutions.
|
||
|
||
I have not space here to devote more than a few lines to
|
||
each of the 40 revolutions, but it is necessary to give the
|
||
reader some idea of the horrors through which European
|
||
progressives passed. Italy was, as I said, divided into three
|
||
political spheres. The northern part, under Austria, suffered
|
||
less, and I will not linger over it. The central part was the
|
||
kingdom of the pope, and I will deal with this in the next
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
35
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
section, as it is important to understand its condition. The
|
||
southern part and Sicily were the kingdom of Naples, and the man
|
||
who speaks slightly of it today as the classic land of dolce far
|
||
niente -- "it is grand to have nothing to do" -- would learn with
|
||
surprise that it had a high civilization under the Greeks 23
|
||
centuries ago, and still higher under the Arabs 900 years ago,
|
||
and one of the most progressive regimes in Europe under the
|
||
Voltairean minister Tannucci in the 18th century; and that under
|
||
the French revolutionary troops in 1792 it set up a very
|
||
promising republic which the restored Catholic monarchy and
|
||
church savagely suppressed, yet its people for the next 60 years
|
||
made an heroic fight for justice. Under Ferdinand I, who got back
|
||
his throne by a solemn oath at the Altar to respect the
|
||
constitution, 100,000 men, women and children were done to death,
|
||
and the king, at whose perjury the bishops smiled, was one of the
|
||
vilest monarchs in Europe. There were orgies of savagery. One
|
||
royalist leader drank his wine from the skull of a liberal, and
|
||
once a group of Catholic beggars roasted and ate the bodies of
|
||
liberals under the palace windows. It is a royalist Catholic
|
||
general, Colletta, who tells us these things, and Professor Croce
|
||
answers for the conscientiousness of his work. It was continued
|
||
after the death of the king by an anonymous writer, and this
|
||
historian claims that there were 150,000 further victims under
|
||
Francis II. The best stocks of the middle class (and some of the
|
||
nobles) were exterminated.
|
||
|
||
In the case of Spain, where the king was of the same gross
|
||
type as Ferdinand of Naples and perjured himself in the same way
|
||
to recover his throne, we have a full account of the horrors in
|
||
the Cambridge Modern History (Vol. 5). Here the clergy and the
|
||
Jesuits cooperated even more actively with the Royalists, and the
|
||
savagery lasted, roundly, from 1814 to 1860, with the
|
||
interruption of several bloodless revolutions, to be revived
|
||
under the late Alfonso XIII and again under the present dictator
|
||
Franco. Even the queens of Spain in this period were despicable
|
||
types of women, yet the pope gave that highest reward of feminine
|
||
purity, the Golden Rose, to the loosest of them all, Queen
|
||
Isabella. I estimate from the figures given in contemporary
|
||
writers that Spain in less than 50 years gave at least 150,000
|
||
martyrs to the cause of democracy, and the sufferings of hundreds
|
||
of thousands of others were severe. We must remember that in
|
||
those days and in the hot summers of south Europe the jails were
|
||
as vile and deadly as the Black Hole of Calcutta. in Portugal
|
||
King Manuel, a man of even more sordid type and a perjurer like
|
||
his royal cousin of Madrid and Naples, let loose an even worse
|
||
savagery; for it was these Catholic monarchs and their bishops
|
||
who "unleashed the passions of the mob." We have contemporary
|
||
assurance that of a total population of about 2,000,000 no less
|
||
than 17,000 were executed, 17,000 were sent to a living death in
|
||
the penal colonies, and 30,000 were packed into the fetid jails
|
||
in the space of five years; and the Church cooperated as
|
||
cordially as in Spain.
|
||
|
||
Of all these savage reprisals after clerical-royalist
|
||
recoveries of power, to which must be added the ferocious
|
||
executions in Hungary in 1849 and the horrors in the papal states
|
||
to which I will return, not a word is said in the new history --
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
36
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
Such is the effect that in 1948 the press generally overlooked
|
||
the fact that this was the centenary of Six great democratic
|
||
revolutions (followed by no reprisals) in Europe, which shook as
|
||
many kings from their thrones, and that 1949 was the centenary of
|
||
six counter revolutions which put the kings and the pope back on
|
||
their thrones and were followed by such reprisals as I have
|
||
described. What school or college in America now hears of these
|
||
things? What book will you find in circulation that tells them?
|
||
And the professors who set out to tell European professors the
|
||
truth about the history of Europe are silent.
|
||
|
||
Only in the case of France do they, or most of them, tell
|
||
that there were revolutions in 1830 and 1848, but they do not
|
||
make it clear that this meant a repeated emergence of the
|
||
revolutionaries or democrats who had been crushed into the earth
|
||
by the White Terror after the death of Napoleon. Even in a small
|
||
and neutral manual designed for British schools (J.G. Aldham's
|
||
"Students notes of European History," 1927, u. 40) we find the
|
||
situation thus briefly described:
|
||
|
||
"An amnesty refused: and 38 of the most prominent men
|
||
in France banished and Nay executed. The White Terror in the
|
||
South of France rivalled the Red Terror of the Revolution.
|
||
Wholesale pillage and murder, and hundreds of executions."
|
||
|
||
The distinguished French historian. Professor Martin (Vol. IV,
|
||
Ch. IV) has a long and detailed account of this stage of the
|
||
White Terror. He says that the reaction comprised every variety
|
||
of infamy -- obscenity, rapacity, ferocity -- it surpassed the
|
||
ignominy of the Thermidarcan reaction of the year III (the Red
|
||
Terror). And when the government was at last forced by the Allies
|
||
to cheek "the, wild Catholic disorder," it proceeded itself
|
||
against Napoleonists and Protestants "with implacable vengeance."
|
||
|
||
The hatred of rival politicians, the pathetic fury of
|
||
illiterate crowds, avenging 15 centuries of oppression, are
|
||
thought worthy of description, but this organized massacre,
|
||
directed by educated folk living in luxury, is not to be
|
||
considered of any social significance. The systematic persecution
|
||
of democracy and of freethinkers and Protestants continued until
|
||
1830. The revolt now took the form of pitched battles in the
|
||
street of Paris against the trained royalist-clerical regiments.
|
||
With barricades and primitive muskets (seized from the museums
|
||
and sometimes loaded with old-fashioned printers' type) the
|
||
rebels conquered the king's troops, losing 5,300 killed and
|
||
wounded in the fight.
|
||
|
||
But the prince they raised to the throne to replace the
|
||
tyrant had duped them, like Ferdinand of Naples, Ferdinand of
|
||
Spain, and Miguel of Portugal, and in a few years the struggle
|
||
was revived. More than 10,000 were sent to the vile jails and the
|
||
deadly penal colonies and thousands were shot when the workers,
|
||
who were not taking the place of the students and middle-class
|
||
men, numbers of these now joining the Royalists, led by strange
|
||
new leaders called Socialists, again raised the barricades and
|
||
gave Europe the signal for revolt as far as Rome, Even in London
|
||
the government marshalled 500,000 police and troops to meet an
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
37
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
expected march of the Chartists, England made its peace with the
|
||
workers, but in Catholic countries there was the familiar triumph
|
||
of "law and order" -- with the aid of a vast army of Russian
|
||
serfs -- and the familiar bloody revenge. In Paris at least
|
||
10,000 workers were shot in the streets, besides the thousands
|
||
whose bodies were just flung into the Seine like dead dogs. You
|
||
may have wondered sometimes why European Socialists still chant
|
||
"Our flag is red with martyrs' blood," and rave at the
|
||
Bourgeoisie. It began in the terrible events of 1848 and 1849,
|
||
when the middle-class generally supported the reactionaries. But
|
||
the sleek and treacherous descendent of Napoleon (Napoleon II)
|
||
whom they had chosen to be their savior from the threat to their
|
||
bank accounts turned against them and allied himself with the
|
||
clericalist and aristocracy, and by 1852 we find the liberals
|
||
complaining that 100,000 of their best men are in jail, penal
|
||
colonies, or exile. Would one of our new historians tell us why
|
||
whole chapters may be spared for the learning of medieval monks
|
||
and the struggles of rival kings and dynasties, yet all these
|
||
things, which still live in our problems today, must be
|
||
completely suppressed?
|
||
|
||
10. THE PAPAL STATES
|
||
|
||
The plea might be made both for the clerical-royalists who
|
||
perpetrated these horrors and the historians who suppressed them
|
||
that they regarded these revolutions as blind and dangerous
|
||
revolts of the passions of the mob -- as if the rulers of the
|
||
people, secular and spiritual, were not responsible for the
|
||
unhappy condition of most of them -- against the restraints of
|
||
Religion, Law and Order, Democracy, and divinely-appointed
|
||
Monarchs. When we find a Humanists, scholar like Dr. Gilbert
|
||
Murray saying that "all revolutions are full of horror and
|
||
inhumanities" and that Europe "recoiled in horror" from the
|
||
atrocities of the French Revolution as it row recoils from the
|
||
legendary atrocities of the Bolshevik Revolution, we realize how
|
||
widely this grossly false conception of modern history is still
|
||
entertained, and we resent more deeply than ever the suppression
|
||
of the facts in the new history. It encourages a mischievous
|
||
misconception of the world-struggle in which we are still engaged
|
||
and permits unscrupulous papers to dupe their readers with the
|
||
idea that Stalin and his colleagues are driven by the same
|
||
criminal ambition as Hitler and Mussolini were.
|
||
|
||
The proper concern of an historian is not with the revenge
|
||
that a crowd here and there may take on their exploiters in the
|
||
sudden dawn of a new liberty; just as in the Spanish Revolution
|
||
in 1932 a few folk in widely-separated localities burned churches
|
||
or killed a few priests or monks. Every historian knows that the
|
||
radical reason why the world entered at such a late date in
|
||
history upon the path to real civilization was the development of
|
||
an extensive middle-class, a body of men more independent,
|
||
intelligent, and better educated than the princes or priests.
|
||
Until in the second half of the last century the workers in turn
|
||
were educated, these middle-class men had to organize and lead
|
||
every revolution, however much they had to rely on the vigor of
|
||
the workers to carry it through. These men knew well that for
|
||
more than 1,000 years the mass of the people had been kept in
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
38
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
ignorance and treated with gross injustice, yet in no revolution
|
||
which they carried did they inflict reprisals on the exploiting
|
||
class. On the other hand the fully-educated monarchs, nobles, and
|
||
priests who controlled the counter-revolution, the men who were
|
||
the champions of law, order and decency, always perpetrated the
|
||
most cruel reprisals. This coupling of revolutions with the
|
||
Passions of the mob is a gross historical lie.
|
||
|
||
A second contrast is that from 1789 onward the leaders of
|
||
the revolutions were usually men of character whose aim was to
|
||
get justice for the people. The monarchs against whom they
|
||
rebelled were in large part repulsive in their conduct, and the
|
||
nobles, ministers, and higher clergy were as a rule selfish,
|
||
frivolous and (from the church angle) immoral. But a third and
|
||
much more important contrast is that these kingdoms which were
|
||
defended against revolutionaries with the greatest cruelty and
|
||
bloodshed were, apart from the small Balkan states which were
|
||
still under the Turks, the foulest in Europe in respect of law,
|
||
order, decency and justice, and that the revolution at once
|
||
initiated a series of what everybody now regards as reforms.
|
||
|
||
I will illustrate this by a short description of the papal
|
||
States as described by contemporary liberal Catholic and Italian
|
||
writers and all recent non-Catholic historians (and some
|
||
Catholic). I have often quoted the opinion of the chief Catholic
|
||
historian of recent times, Lord Acton that the Popes of the first
|
||
half of the 19th century were "worse than the Old Man of the
|
||
Mountains" (the arch-murderer of history), and the verdict of the
|
||
famous French priest, Lantennais, approvingly quoted by the
|
||
Catholic Lady Blennerhassett in the Cambridge Modern History (X.
|
||
164, that Rome in 1832 was "the foulest sewer ever opened to the
|
||
eye of man." Professors Boak, Slosson, and Anderson quote
|
||
Gladstone's indignant remark that the kingdom of Naples, the
|
||
next-door neighbor and docile subject of the papacy was "the
|
||
negation of God erected into a system of government"; meaning the
|
||
negation of all moral principle, for the government was very
|
||
pious. But neither they nor any other recent American historians
|
||
even glance at the condition of the Papal States. In fact you
|
||
would be inclined to gather from the new history that the papacy
|
||
ceased to exist after the death of Napoleon, came to life again
|
||
in the person of Leo XIII (whom they are able to describe
|
||
(inaccurately) as a progressive and constructive force, then
|
||
almost completely disappeared from the scene while the present
|
||
century was wrestling with it's gigantic problems. What, the
|
||
papacy was really doing in this time I will tell later.
|
||
|
||
Under the Republic and Napoleon the French had token over
|
||
Italy and introduced good government and many reforms. When the
|
||
Vienna Council restored the papal kingdom -- the, pope, like the
|
||
kings of Naples, Spain, and Portugal, solemnly promising to
|
||
respect the reforms -- all the French improvements were destroyed
|
||
or abandoned. Even new roads and sewers were neglected, the lamps
|
||
in the streets of Rome unlit and neglected. The administration
|
||
was entirely put into the hands of clerics, and by these, as the
|
||
Catholic Lady Blennerhassett says dishonesty was "developed into
|
||
a system." The Secretary of state, Cardinal Antonelli, son of one
|
||
of the poorest peasants, lived opulently and loosely, yet left
|
||
$20,000,000 at his death. The peasants, who made a few cents a
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
39
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
day with great difficulty, took to banditry on such a scale that
|
||
9,000 Soldiers had at times to protect a train bringing a Royal
|
||
visitor to Rome. All schools were closed. The Inquisition and the
|
||
Jesuits were restored, and thousands of progressives soon crammed
|
||
the jails; and there, were no fouler jails in Europe, Orsini
|
||
tells us that when he was sent from Rome to the villa in which
|
||
Alexalider VI had once enjoyed his orgies -- his obscene frescoes
|
||
still adorned the walls in 1850 -- he found that men with a life-
|
||
sentence were chained to the wall and never released even for
|
||
sanitary purposes. The higher clergy were as openly loose as in
|
||
the 16th century, and the standard was very low among all the
|
||
clergy and the monks and nuns. The courts and Vatican offices
|
||
were sodden with corruption; the people were illiterate to the
|
||
extent of 95 percent: crimes of violence were appalling, and the
|
||
men who dared to demand reform died by the thousand on the
|
||
scaffold or in the horrible jails.
|
||
|
||
At Rome 40,000 (including 10,000 priests) out of a total
|
||
population of 170,000 lived on the corrupt system, and the city
|
||
was, as I quoted a distinguished French priest saying, "the
|
||
foulest sewer that was ever opened up to the eyes of man." the
|
||
British Ambassador, Lord Clarendon, pronounced it "the shame of
|
||
Europe." In 1831, in fact, the kings of Prussia, Austria, France,
|
||
and Britain gravely censured the pope in an open letter and
|
||
demanded that he should reform his dominion. And only half a
|
||
century later Pope Leo XIII was posing as the moral ruler of the
|
||
race and telling the nations how they needed the guidance of the
|
||
papacy; as Pious XII is telling them today. But don't look to our
|
||
historians or our grand new encyclopedia for a word of all this,
|
||
though it is all vouched for by the Catholic Italian historians
|
||
of the time -- the Marquis d'Azeglio and his brother, the
|
||
statesman Farini, etc. -- and endorsed in all non-Catholic
|
||
histories (Cambridge History, Professor Orsi, Bishop Nielsen, R.
|
||
Thayer. Bolton King, etc.).
|
||
|
||
The papacy had from the start benignly blessed this fetid
|
||
system. Indeed, while almost the last thing our historians say
|
||
about the papal court is that it thoroughly purified itself in
|
||
the 16th century, there is no evidence that it ever was reformed
|
||
(except for a few years in the 16th century) and plenty of
|
||
evidence that it was not. The aged, incompetent Pope whom
|
||
Napoleon had treated like a lackey died in 1823, and the corrupt
|
||
Secretary of State engineered the election of a 70-year-old
|
||
converted rake (father of several bastards in the good old
|
||
style), whose chief ambition was to shoot as many birds as he
|
||
could in the Vatican garden, He dribbled in his invalid chair for
|
||
a few years, and the corrupt cardinals then elected a gluttonous
|
||
and lazy monk of questionable morals, a man who ate candy and
|
||
read the saucy novels of Paul de Kock while Cardinal Albarii (the
|
||
bare-footed peasant boy who died worth $20,000,000) ruled his
|
||
kingdom. "Horror and dread darkened the whole of Rome," says
|
||
Veri, while a countess amused Europe by claiming in the courts
|
||
that she was a bastard and heiress of Cardinal Albani.
|
||
|
||
But the revolutionary forces were shaking the soil of Europe
|
||
before he died (1846), and the cardinals allowed one of their
|
||
number who professed liberalism to become Pope Pius IX (of
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
40
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
disputed memory in history, a quarter-saint in the Church). He
|
||
did in 1848 sanction reform in Rome, then, in the disguise of a
|
||
footman, fled from the palace to the still utterly demoralized
|
||
kingdom of Naples and summoned Louis Napoleon from France to
|
||
destroy the Roman republic for him. It is enough to say that the
|
||
Papal States sank back into the stinking mud, and soon the
|
||
horrible jails were packed again with political prisoners. The
|
||
face of one of them, Orsini, frowns at me from the wall of my
|
||
study as I write, and his description of them is among my books.
|
||
It was in such a world that Pius IX penned that tawdry defiance
|
||
of the modern world, the Syllabus.
|
||
|
||
But modern Italy was gathering strength in the north, and in
|
||
1870 the national armies entered Rome and made an end of the
|
||
ignoble kingdom of the pope and its bloody history. Our
|
||
historians tell this and they explain that when in 1929 the pope
|
||
accepted a bribe of $95,000,000 from Mussolini to bless his
|
||
corrupt regime, it was not a bribe but a long-delayed
|
||
compensation, with compound interest, for the seizure of the
|
||
Papal States in 1865-70. They omit to tell one important point
|
||
about that seizure. A plebiscite was taken in every province of
|
||
the papal kingdom and, by an overwhelming majority the
|
||
inhabitants voted that they wanted an end of papal rule. But,
|
||
says, the Catholic, the pope had warned his people not to take
|
||
any part in this sacrilegious plebiscite. Listen. The city of
|
||
Rome had a population of 180,000 of whom 30,000 or 40,000 lived
|
||
on the miserable papal system, yet 40,831, which must mean about
|
||
the whole of the remaining adult male voters, cast their votes
|
||
for Victor Emmanuel and 46 for the pope! In the city and its
|
||
province taken together 133,681 voted for Victor Emmanuel and
|
||
only 1,501 for the pope. In the first province in which the
|
||
plebiscite was taken 132,853 voted for Victor Emmanuel and 1,590
|
||
for the pope Surely these facts are not only of interest but of
|
||
importance. But would the pope like them published?
|
||
|
||
THE REVOLT AGAINST REASON
|
||
|
||
I am here ignoring the admirable, sometimes valuable,
|
||
accounts of many typical modern developments that we find in
|
||
these manuals of European world history: scientific, industrial,
|
||
literary, artistic, and so on. I am not looking for inaccuracies,
|
||
which an expert on these developments might or might not find in
|
||
our new manuals of history. My purpose is much more serious. I am
|
||
showing that from Greek-Roman days onward the new history, by
|
||
suppressing large masses of relevant, and undisputed facts,
|
||
borrowing false statements from Catholic or idly conventional
|
||
writers, and distorting the balance of importance of historical
|
||
documents, gives a false view of the evolution of real
|
||
civilization and the relative value of the factors or agencies
|
||
which have contributed or hindered that evolution. Most of those
|
||
factors are still active in "the loom of time," and the most
|
||
serious function of history today is to throw the very
|
||
considerable light that it can upon their usefulness or their
|
||
harmfulness.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
41
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
Two further points demand our attention before we come to
|
||
the history of our own time. The first is that most of our
|
||
historians describe -- some insist at considerable length -- a
|
||
Revolt against Reason following upon the Age of reason (or Age of
|
||
Enlightenment) of the middle of the 18th century. Professors
|
||
Sheopard and Godfrey say (II. 184):
|
||
|
||
"In the revival of the religious spirit of the time,
|
||
and it was widespread, the Church of Rome began to regain
|
||
some of its lost influence while the Protestant churches,
|
||
especially in England and America, went through a baptism of
|
||
evangelical cleansing."
|
||
|
||
Professor Barnes, who keeps a sense of proportion in his scanty
|
||
treatment of the religious development, nevertheless speaks of "a
|
||
marked growth of religious feeling and pietism," as a reaction
|
||
against Voltairianism, in the first half of the 19th century.
|
||
Professor Lucas deals at some length with the supposed revolt,
|
||
but he is misleading in paying so much attention to the
|
||
philosophy of Kant. Not only had this no connection with the
|
||
revolt against reason or the Revival of religion which the others
|
||
describe -- Kant's freethinking contemporary Goethe had
|
||
immeasurably more influence on the general reading public than he
|
||
-- but Kant himself was an arch-apostle of reason and as such was
|
||
dreaded by theologians. Even when in his later year's he decided
|
||
to say a good word for God and the Soul (and this was never
|
||
widely accepted even in philosophical quarters) he still said
|
||
that he was appealing to reason (Practical as distinct from Pure
|
||
Reason).
|
||
|
||
Others quote the Romantic Movement which began in Germany
|
||
toward the end of the 18th century and spread to France and
|
||
England. This is represented as a return to medieval thought over
|
||
the ruins of Voltairianism, but nearly every great name given in
|
||
connection with it is that of an artist or a literary man. A
|
||
renewed appreciation of Gothic architecture spread -- even as far
|
||
as America -- but there was no new appreciation of medieval
|
||
theology. It was mainly a trend in art and literature. especially
|
||
fiction, and the characteristics of it had been as conspicuous in
|
||
Rousseau as they were in Goethe's early romantic stories or the
|
||
later novels and poems of Victor Hugo.
|
||
|
||
The chief fact which one recognizes in all this exaggerated
|
||
talk about a Revolt against Reason was the spread of religious
|
||
revivals started by John Wesley in England and James McGready in
|
||
America. Our Columbia Encyclopedia has, strangely, no article on
|
||
Reason: though one would think that the changed attitude to it in
|
||
modern psychology and the renewed talk in our time about a Revolt
|
||
from Reason makes this very desirable. But in the article
|
||
"Revivals" a good deal is said about McGready's activity at the
|
||
end of the 18th century. I need not discuss how far the
|
||
psychology of the times encouraged revivalism because this was in
|
||
no sense a Revolt against Reason. The folk who joined the
|
||
movement had not been conspicuous as followers of reason. And
|
||
this applies also to the Wesleyan or Methodist movement in
|
||
England. We do not read of any of the, British followers of
|
||
Voltaire breaking with him to join Wesley. Whatever number of the
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
42
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
British workers who had been indifferent about religion and gross
|
||
in behavior were won to the Methodist body, it was mainly
|
||
recruited from the Church of England. It was a revolt against the
|
||
formalism and ritual of the church, the stress on correctness of
|
||
dogma and indifference to morals, and a return to the Bible. In
|
||
Protestant countries, where only higher-educated men of the
|
||
middle class had read Voltaire or the encyclopedia, no historian
|
||
has yet contended that the evangelical churches had lost much
|
||
ground, and it is, therefore, curious to speak now of a great
|
||
revival. That the Roman Church recovered power is a platitude,
|
||
and that with the recovery of power it was able to compel large
|
||
numbers at least to profess to believe in it follows from the
|
||
facts I gave in the preceding section. The new position of the
|
||
papacy after 1816 counted in two ways; it could drastically
|
||
suppress criticism of religion, leaving the field free to the
|
||
100,000 priests of France, Italy, Spain and Portugal and it
|
||
could, except in France, use the grim power of the Inquisition to
|
||
bring men into subjection. It would be surprising if the Vatican
|
||
could not count for more adherents in 1826 than it did in 1816.
|
||
Napoleon had already paved the way for it in reestablishing the
|
||
Church and favoring it in every possible way. Although he was
|
||
himself unquestionably a skeptic, he felt and said that the power
|
||
of the clergy was an important part of the basis of his imperial
|
||
authority. So in the first half of the century the Catholic one-
|
||
third of Europe returned, except for the short spell after a
|
||
popular revolution, to the Middle Ages. It is ingenious of our
|
||
historians to refuse to tell HOW the Church of Rome recovered
|
||
power (by political alliance with despotic monarchs) and what use
|
||
it made of the power, and then ask us to admire the growth of
|
||
religion.
|
||
|
||
Even in England there was very serious coercion. Attendance
|
||
at church on Sundays was a legal obligation, and writers of the
|
||
19th century describe the paid beadles or bailiffs collecting the
|
||
miserable men who were sleeping off the Saturday night's drink
|
||
and herding them to a church. There was also little freedom for
|
||
Freethinkers to disturb the beliefs of churchgoers. My old friend
|
||
George Jacob Holyoake, who lived in those days, was sent to jail
|
||
for six months for making a mild joke or "blasphemy" at the
|
||
expense of his Christian hearers. In short, the half-century from
|
||
1815 to 1865 was one of profound reaction throughout Europe. If I
|
||
were a Christian writer I should be more disposed to conceal the
|
||
fact that it witnessed a new spread of religion.
|
||
|
||
If the idea of stressing this apparent recovery of religion
|
||
is to connect this with the various reforms or humanitarian
|
||
movements which began to be active in the second part of the
|
||
century it is even more misleading. We saw that in the Age of
|
||
Reason in the 18th century the germs of these reforms, most of
|
||
which had been dormant since Roman days, found a congenial soil
|
||
in the mind of Europe, and in the revolutionary years they began
|
||
to be embodied either in legislation or in propagandist bodies.
|
||
It is generally true to say that they were mostly blighted in the
|
||
wintry decades of the reaction after Waterloo. The one exception
|
||
was the growth of the Abolitionist Movement. A sincere and
|
||
distinguished writer of the Church of England, Canon Streeter,
|
||
one of the leading British apologists, says (The Spirit, p. 358):
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
43
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
"The greatest blot on the history of the Church in
|
||
modern times is the fact that, with the glaring exception of
|
||
the campaign to abolish slavery, the leaders in the social,
|
||
political, and humanitarian reforms of the last century and
|
||
a half in Europe have rarely been professing Christians,
|
||
while the authorized representatives of organized
|
||
Christianity have as often as not been on the wrong side."
|
||
|
||
It illustrates the weakness of this sort of clerical apologetic
|
||
that on the American side we have the Rev. Loring Brace (Gesta
|
||
Christi, p. 265) saying:
|
||
|
||
"The guilt of this great crime (black slavery) rests
|
||
upon the Christian Church as an organized body."
|
||
|
||
And he considers that in America the worst sin of the Churches is
|
||
in not helping abolition. The churchless cynic might reflect
|
||
that, apparently, in England, where there were (apart from its
|
||
remote colonies) no slaves, the churches were valiant against
|
||
slavery, and in America, where there were vast bodies of slaves
|
||
the churches owned great numbers of them -- the Methodists and
|
||
Baptists who had passed through the reforming flames of the great
|
||
revival owned 450,000 of them -- and violently opposed the
|
||
abolitionists. Streeter would retort that the greatest name in
|
||
the whole Abolitionist movement is that of William Wilberforce a
|
||
strict member of the Church of England. It never seems to occur
|
||
to the historians who make Wilberforce stand for the Church of
|
||
England in this humanitarian reform that, while they can (or
|
||
could if they knew much about the matter) name half a dozen
|
||
clergymen (out of thousands and no bishop) who supported the
|
||
Abolition Movement in England, the only effective champion they
|
||
can quote is a layman. What is worse -- and I believe that I am
|
||
the only writer who has pointed this out -- Wilberforce was a
|
||
skeptic when he first learned to attack slavery, and he learned
|
||
it from skeptical literature. I have said this on an earlier
|
||
page, but I am so solitary in this discovery that I will here
|
||
quote his own words. In his diary, which is included in the
|
||
biography of him by his sons, he speaks of "the dreadful effects
|
||
of the efforts afterwards used, but too successfully, to wean him
|
||
from all religion." He makes it clear that by "afterwards" he
|
||
means after the age of 12 and it was at the age of 14 that he
|
||
first wrote against slavery (1773). Ten years later he tells a
|
||
friend in a letter (p. 32):
|
||
|
||
"My moral and religious principles are such as in those
|
||
days are not very generally prevalent.."
|
||
|
||
His sons explain that he was nearly 30 when he was converted to
|
||
Christianity. He carried over his zeal for abolition from his
|
||
dark past, and from that date he never adopted any other
|
||
humanitarian reform.
|
||
|
||
It is the same with all other reforms which one or other of
|
||
our historians ascribe to the influence of religion. I have
|
||
summarized the real history of all of them in my book "How
|
||
Freethinkers Made Notable Contributions to Civilization"
|
||
(Haldeman-Julius, 1938). In this I trace the early stages of all
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
44
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
the great social reforms, as I have done in the case of slavery,
|
||
feminism, education, philanthropy, legal reform, etc. That pious
|
||
half-century, (1800-1850). which our historians describe as one
|
||
of a great religions revival, was the time when modern social
|
||
reforms struggled up out of a wintry soil. The men and women who
|
||
fostered their growth were in a very large majority outside the
|
||
churches, and churchmen were in a large majority opposed to them.
|
||
But our new historians disdain to notice the literature in which
|
||
the truth about these matters is patiently and scientifically
|
||
traced. It encroaches upon the field of religious controversy,
|
||
they say. They prefer to follow on such matters the conventional
|
||
and theological literature with all its ancient and superficial
|
||
untruths. This is, presumably, not encroaching upon theology.
|
||
|
||
12. THE THIRD REVOLUTION
|
||
|
||
The historian of the future will probably regard the period
|
||
1500 to 2000 as by far the most important in the history of the
|
||
race. The human record from what is called the dawn of
|
||
civilization to about the year 1500 will be to him a moving-
|
||
picture of the mass of the race toiling blindly while they mostly
|
||
bear the burden of a privileged one-tenth who live on their
|
||
labors and use them up in wars. In a few ages what is called a
|
||
middle class, men whose work required that the bandages be
|
||
stripped from their eyes yet they are not counted as of the
|
||
sacred, privileged castes, multiplies, and we get ideas of
|
||
freedom and reform. This occurred at the end of the Dark Age,
|
||
during which privilege had been unchallenged by the blind mass of
|
||
serfs, and a few like Arnold of Brescia began to preach a social
|
||
gospel. The most obvious caste to attack, both on account of its
|
||
hypocrisy and the feebleness of its claims, was the clergy, and,
|
||
we saw, revolt against the church at once began. But the church
|
||
was able to retaliate with fire and sword until, in the 16th
|
||
century, the political situation and the cynical moral condition
|
||
of the papacy and the church facilitated a combined action of
|
||
princes, nobles, middle-class, and people, and half of Europe
|
||
rejected the right to dominate and exploit of the most powerful
|
||
body of priests the world had ever known.
|
||
|
||
The echo of the great shock rumbled over Europe until the
|
||
middle of the 17th century, and then the middle class, with its
|
||
leisure to think and its self-consciousness, began to consider
|
||
the next privileged class, royalty and nobility. England made the
|
||
first dent in the monarchical structure by cutting off the head
|
||
of a king, but in its new prosperity the English middle class
|
||
settled down again to an idle acquiescence, and it was the
|
||
French, who bore, the more galling tyranny, who took up the
|
||
crusade. Few nobles, who clung to the monarchs in self
|
||
preservation, could join the middle class, but the workers were
|
||
rapidly developing self-consciousness, and stimulated by the news
|
||
of a revolt and the setting up of a republic in America, they
|
||
began to move. Through 70 years of revolution, counter
|
||
revolution, and bloody reaction, the workers and middle class
|
||
fought together while the second privileged class, the monarchs
|
||
and nobles of the feudal type, was destroyed or tamed.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
45
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
Meantime, the workers concentrating in cities to meet the
|
||
needs of the Industrial Revolution, stung by the rapid increase
|
||
of wealth of the middle class while their own condition remained
|
||
semi-servile granted education at last by the benevolent
|
||
bourgeois, slowly prepared for the Third, the Economic
|
||
Revolution. Even this was long led by the middle class men:
|
||
Socialists of the type of Robert Owen, Marxian, Socialists.
|
||
Communists, Anarchists, Christian Socialists, etc. But in the
|
||
later part of the 19th century universal free education in most
|
||
countries created a new proletariat, and it began to regard the
|
||
middle class capitalists as its natural enemy. The middle class
|
||
had, with its wealth, taken the place of the old feudal nobility
|
||
and generally thought that the millennium had been reached by the
|
||
First (Religious) and second (Political) Revolutions. Taking
|
||
advantage of the miserable inadequacy of the system of schooling
|
||
it created a vast system of daily and Sunday papers which should
|
||
take over the work of education from the age of 16 or so; just
|
||
when the thinking portion of the cortex is beginning to be
|
||
educable. Where circumstances compelled this -- where it was
|
||
necessary to concede a yard in order to save a mile -- it
|
||
cordially admitted that social improvement was possible. But,
|
||
Evolution not Revolution. Rome was not built in a day. Private
|
||
enterprise is more vital to the interests of the race, more
|
||
sacred, than even altars and thrones.
|
||
|
||
That is the most important feature of the history of the
|
||
19th century. What then happened we will consider in the next
|
||
section, but a few words must be said here. The prospect of a
|
||
Third Revolution led to a sort of Counter-Revolution against the
|
||
earlier two, the Religious and the Political. The middle class,
|
||
the Humanists of the 16th century, the Liberals of the 19th, who
|
||
led the religious and political attacks on privilege, now joined
|
||
amicably with the conservatives (the modern representatives of
|
||
the Royalists) and the clericalist against the common enemy.
|
||
Ignoring, or in our ill-informed age not knowing, the fact that
|
||
the "martyr's blood" in which the symbolic red flag of the
|
||
Socialists had been dipped was in the main Liberal blood, they
|
||
jeeringly called the men who now marched under it the Reds, and
|
||
in the press and on the platform they vaguely conjured up visions
|
||
of them wading to power through lakes of blood. They generally
|
||
add "as in the French Revolution"; which, in fact, had been led
|
||
by what we should call the middle-class Liberals. And while it
|
||
was the middle class that had ruined the churches in the 19th
|
||
century, so now, to please their new clerical allies, agreed that
|
||
these Reds would destroy civilization by a violent suppression of
|
||
religion. Such is the historical basis of what men call their
|
||
convictions today.
|
||
|
||
I do not belong, and have never belonged, to any political
|
||
organization. Dogmas do not agree with my mental digestion. I
|
||
write all this simply as a historian, an observer and chronicler
|
||
of facts. It seems to me that this historical development, which
|
||
has created a situation that causes many sound-minded folk to
|
||
mutter to themselves the old Latin slogan "Those whom the Gods
|
||
wish to destroy they first make mad," calls much more seriously
|
||
than how many books there were in medieval libraries for a
|
||
thorough and impartial enquiry. This is, therefore. almost the
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
46
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
last point on which we may test the new history, both in regard
|
||
to what it says and what it does not say but, in view of the
|
||
abounding lies, ought to say. We shall find in most cases that
|
||
just as up to the 17th century it significantly harmonizes with
|
||
the Catholic version of events, so for recent decades it tells
|
||
the human story much in the accents of the new Triple Alliance of
|
||
the Church, State and Money.
|
||
|
||
13. THE EMERGENCE OF COMMUNISM
|
||
|
||
If we reflect that those forces in the Triple Alliance that
|
||
are particularly concerned about money -- that is to say, about
|
||
the right of the individual to make an indefinite amount of
|
||
wealth (bankers, enterprisers, etc.) -- must, like the clergy,
|
||
act through politicians, we understand the union of such
|
||
incongruous elements in a hatred of the Communist Party. It, they
|
||
say, wages a war to the death against their ideals; Religion
|
||
Private Enterprise, and Democracy. The party has, of course,
|
||
modified its formulae in the course of the struggle. Officially,
|
||
it now declares itself not concerned about religion, though all
|
||
its leaders are Atheist and there cannot be much doubt what the
|
||
future of religion would be if they prevailed in the great
|
||
conflict. They claim also that they advocate democracy; in fact,
|
||
a purer democracy than that of the self-styled Democratic powers.
|
||
And, at present, at least, they have not the least idea of
|
||
forcing economic equality. Nevertheless, it remains true that
|
||
they would ultimately destroy the Holy Trinity of the new Holy
|
||
Alliance: Religion, Private Enterprise, Democracy.
|
||
|
||
It is, therefore, at first sight, surprising that in the
|
||
works of our historians we find little to resent when they
|
||
describe the rise and aims of the Communist Party and the
|
||
attainment of power in Russia. The reader will not forget that
|
||
all the works which I set out to examine were written before 1946
|
||
when the journalist's Hymn of Praise of Soviet Russia began to
|
||
lower its note and became a Hymn of Hate. Mast of the works were
|
||
written in the 30's, when not much notice was taken of the lies
|
||
of the Catholic Press and the pope's strident call for "the
|
||
extinction of Bolshevism." In the article in the latest edition
|
||
of the Encyclopedia Britannica Farbmann writes (in 1933):
|
||
|
||
"Until quite recent times legend had taken complete
|
||
control of the Russian Revolution, and it is only lately
|
||
that critical control has begun to substitute for it a solid
|
||
basis of historical fact."
|
||
|
||
We could not expect our historians to anticipate that the
|
||
poisonous legends of 1917 to 1927 would not only be restored but
|
||
amplified after Russia's magnificent Performance in the war. Yet
|
||
the present morbid hysteria could have been checked to some
|
||
extent if the public could refer to historical works in which the
|
||
earlier libels were refuted by a full statement of facts.
|
||
|
||
The Columbia Encyclopedia has three generally correct and
|
||
informing articles (Bolshevism, Communism, and Russian
|
||
Revolution), but they fail to tell facts of crucial importance
|
||
and at times they encourage the libel by careless casual
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
47
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
observations. They refer to "the bloodshed that had accompanied
|
||
the Russian Revolution." The reader gets the idea, that this
|
||
confirms the legend of "the passions of the mob" in rape and
|
||
murder, whereas in both the revolutions of 1917 there were few
|
||
outrages apart from the inevitable fighting in the streets, and
|
||
of these few there were more at the first (Liberal-Socialist)
|
||
than the second (Bolshevik) revolution. It was later, in the
|
||
White War (in which Americans, British, Czechs, French and
|
||
Japanese invaders outnumbered the White Russians), that something
|
||
like savagery occurred, and it is unjust to say, as the
|
||
Encyclopedia does, that "atrocities were committed on both sides
|
||
throughout the Civil War." It was more an invasion than a Civil
|
||
War." and we have impartial testimony that the Bolshevik soldiers
|
||
were the least to blame.
|
||
|
||
But the chief fault here is a lack of balance in such facts
|
||
as are given, and it is the same in the new history. Professors
|
||
Wallbank and Taylor entirely mislead when they Say (ii. 348):
|
||
|
||
"During the course of the second revolution in Petrograd
|
||
disorder and massacre were prevalent throughout Russia."
|
||
|
||
There was hardly any bloodshed in Petrograd and no massacres (but
|
||
a few days fighting against armed police) in Moscow; and peasant
|
||
disorders were promptly checked by the Bolshevists. If we
|
||
understand the Tsarist horrors of preceding years (to 1912), the
|
||
intense strain, distress and confusion of the year 1917, we
|
||
almost agree with Mrs. Litvinor and her history of the revolution
|
||
that it was "one of the most bloodless on record." Outrages
|
||
amounting to savagery began several months after the revolution,
|
||
these were committed not by the mob in the cities, but by the
|
||
armies, especially the anti-Bolshevik Russian troops in the
|
||
field. Professor Geise seems to be confused about this when he
|
||
says that after the revolution the Bolsheviks only kept power by
|
||
the unmitigated use of rigid discipline and terrorism, and he
|
||
apparently entertains some of the most mendacious legends when he
|
||
speaks of the extreme anti-intellectual and anti-family attitude
|
||
of the revolutionary period. The second point is absurd. What the
|
||
Bolsheviks did was to institute civil marriage, make divorce
|
||
easy. and declare children born out of wedlock legitimate. The
|
||
one or two small local Soviets who wanted a common right to women
|
||
were freaks and were at once condemned by Moscow.
|
||
|
||
But in order to show how badly historians (except Professor
|
||
Barnes) fail to provide the reader with an account of the
|
||
revolution which would enable him to judge the wild stories that
|
||
are current today I must give a very short sketch of the Progress
|
||
of events. In this, I follow one of the best and most detailed
|
||
histories of it -- apart from partisan versions on both sides --
|
||
the British W.H. Chamberlain's work "The Russian Revolution" (2
|
||
vols. 1935).
|
||
|
||
No historian has a lenient word for the Tsarist regime. The
|
||
government and church stank. They had oppressed the people
|
||
murderously for 1,000 years. And if some describe the abortive
|
||
revolution of 1905, they still give no idea of the horrors that
|
||
preceded it and the savage oppression that continued until 1910
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
48
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
or later. The defeat of Russia, by Japan had led to a shocking
|
||
disclosure of the corruption of the official and noble class and
|
||
a widespread revolt, and the reprisals were appalling and lasted
|
||
several years. The jails had normal accommodation for 107,000
|
||
prisoners, but by 1910 they had 180,00 mostly political
|
||
prisoners. Boys and girls who attended a radical lecture or read
|
||
an underground journal were arrested. Youths and girls over 15
|
||
were shot on the street or stripped and flogged (with the brutal
|
||
knout) in the jails, and the young women (largely university
|
||
students) were raped by the gross jailers. Suicides in jails rose
|
||
to 160 in one month, and typhus was terribly rife. It is material
|
||
to remember that even the young radicals of 1917 had Passed
|
||
through this diabolical ordeal a few years earlier; and it is not
|
||
immaterial to add that the British and American press and the
|
||
churches had almost entirely ignored the savagery that went on
|
||
for years. Papers that were in 1913 to pour out volcanic rhetoric
|
||
over enormously exaggerated stories of Bolshevik outrages had
|
||
been silent about the monstrous and real outrages perpetrated at
|
||
the order of educated and religious men from 1904 to 1912. Every
|
||
Russian knew these things. Hardly any American did; and the
|
||
volumes of European history that now appeared gave him no help.
|
||
|
||
To the heavy distress into which this struggle had driven
|
||
the country was now added the strain of the First World War, the
|
||
sacrifice of millions of peasants. the acute scarcity of food. In
|
||
February 1917 the strain snapped, and the combined Constitutional
|
||
Democrats (Cadets, led by university professors and other middle
|
||
class men and a few liberal nobles) and the Socialists seized
|
||
power. Some call it the March Revolution, because it was in the
|
||
next month that they compelled the Tsar to abdicate. No historian
|
||
rate, was the real Russian Revolution, as all historians relate.
|
||
It was "in the main good-natured," says Chamberlain, but there
|
||
was naturally a fight with Tsarist troops and police, and in the
|
||
provinces the peasants here and there burned mansions and
|
||
murdered nobles. There was actually more bloodshed at this first
|
||
revolution than at the Bolshevik Revolution in November. Yet such
|
||
is the debauchery of the human mind in our time that the
|
||
overwhelming majority do not know even that there were two
|
||
revolutions, and they just heap together all the bogus stories
|
||
and atrocities in a confused idea of "the Bolshevik Revolution of
|
||
1917." I doubt if one American in a million knows that it was the
|
||
Liberals who forced the Tsar to abdicate. No historian points out
|
||
that there were no official reprisals at either revolution,
|
||
though, as I have told, every royalist-clerical counter-
|
||
revolution during 130 years had been followed by fiendish
|
||
reprisals. There were murders, but no massacres; and the man who
|
||
shudders at these outbreaks among the peasants ought to read of
|
||
the thousand years of brutal treatment of them and how church and
|
||
state had left them, right up to the revolution in a sodden
|
||
state, morally and intellectually. But don't look for any of this
|
||
in the new history or the new encyclopedia.
|
||
|
||
No one questions that the new regime was feeble and
|
||
incompetent and the country drifted toward a new crisis. Price
|
||
Lvov, a literary noble -- he translated my "Church and the
|
||
People" into Russian -- was the first leader but was soon
|
||
compelled to withdraw. Professor Milyukov, leader of the Cadets
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
49
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
(Liberals), was next. I knew him well in later years. He was a
|
||
fine man but not strong, and was hampered by his Liberal distrust
|
||
of the people. There was no place for a "benevolent bourgeois" in
|
||
that boiling world. Kerensky, Right-wing Socialist, remained for
|
||
some months but was quite incompetent for the job. He allowed the
|
||
Bolshevik leaders to return -- I met Trotsky in New York the day
|
||
before he set out, and I didn't like him at all -- but scattered
|
||
them again for a premature revolt in the summer, though he had to
|
||
recall them to help him when the Tsarist General Kornilov marched
|
||
on Petrograd. But the Bolshevik leaders alone knew precisely what
|
||
they wanted, and they had been toughened by long exile. The
|
||
soldiers were tired of war; the whole country was tired. They
|
||
worked on that line. Just as in the 16th century the religious
|
||
revolt succeeded, while earlier revolts had failed, largely
|
||
because the Emperor was a foreigner to the Germans, so the
|
||
Bolsheviks succeeded because there was a war on and they
|
||
supported the resentment of it by the army and people.
|
||
|
||
I am concerned here only that our historians tell the story
|
||
in such a way that writers, editors, and politicians cannot so
|
||
easily press upon the public their unjust and inflammatory
|
||
version of the revolution. There was little more bloodshed at the
|
||
Second Revolution than at the first, and the idea of the Liberals
|
||
politely taking over the portfolios and deposing the Tsar in
|
||
February and the Bolsheviks wading through a stream of blood to
|
||
power in November is monstrously wrong.
|
||
|
||
At Petrograd, which was still the seat of government, the
|
||
proceedings were, says Chamberlin, "relatively bloodless." There
|
||
were three days of desultory fighting, the Tsarist police firing
|
||
from windows and more resistance in the south. Deaths in such
|
||
fights are not outrages. The Reds themselves lost about 500 men.
|
||
In places soldiers and sailors sometimes killed their former
|
||
officers, while in many places the peasants burned mansions and
|
||
killed landowners and nobles. Their backs still smarted from the
|
||
knout. There were no reprisals, as there had always been when, to
|
||
parody the familiar phrase, "the passions of the nobles and the
|
||
priests were unleashed." In fact, one of the first acts of the
|
||
Bolshevik leaders was to abolish the death sentence. Chamberlain
|
||
says (I. 242):
|
||
|
||
"Moscow was the sole place in Central and Northern
|
||
Russia in which the Bolshevik regime and power encountered
|
||
serious, substantial, and sanguinary resistance."
|
||
|
||
The Bolshevik revolution was over and it had so far carried out
|
||
the wishes of the army and the nation that it was, as revolutions
|
||
go, accomplished with little violence.
|
||
|
||
The violence began in what all our historians call The civil
|
||
War, though hardly one of them tells the reader that in the
|
||
armies which fought Bolshevism during, the next two years only
|
||
about one-tenth of the soldiers were Russians. It was an invasion
|
||
war, waged by about 200,000 Japs, Czechs, French, British, and
|
||
Americans against a beggarly and starving people. Elections for a
|
||
Constituent Assembly (Congress) were held in November, and the
|
||
qualifications had been so determined by Kerensky that 62 percent
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
50
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
voted against the Bolsheviks. Lenin, nevertheless announced that
|
||
the Assembly would meet in January, but feeling rose to white
|
||
heat. The Bolsheviks were pledged to withdraw from the European
|
||
war, and the agents of the Allies lent all the aid and
|
||
encouragement they could to the Cadets, Social Revolutionaries,
|
||
and Tsarists. Large provinces broke away and declared themselves
|
||
Independent, and such was the scarcity of food in the cities and
|
||
confusion in the provinces that nerves were strained everywhere.
|
||
Our historians admit that the country was terribly dilapidated
|
||
and suffering, but unless readers get some concrete details they
|
||
still picture Russia to themselves as not very different from
|
||
Britain and France during the war.
|
||
|
||
When the Assembly met there was at once a clash of Menshevik
|
||
(and allies) and Bolshevik, and the soldiers and sailors who
|
||
attended in great numbers drowned the orators. An attempt had
|
||
previously been made to murder Lenin, and there was a known plot
|
||
to kidnap him. He dissolved the Assembly and inaugurated, on the
|
||
familiar lines of the Marxian philosophy, the Dictatorship of the
|
||
Proletariat (of the Community Party). The nation at large, says
|
||
Chamberlain, was completely indifferent to this, but the Cadets
|
||
and Social Revolutionaries were, naturally, infuriated and began
|
||
to organize and to form underground movements. The negotiations
|
||
with the Germans for a sperate peace, which was conducted in
|
||
March, were pushed on and the Allies intrigued with the
|
||
Mensheviks and in the provinces; and this anger was increased by
|
||
the action of the Bolsheviks in repudiating all the international
|
||
loans that the Tsarest government had contracted. Before the Fall
|
||
of 1918 Petrograd, half starved itself, looking out upon a vast
|
||
country that was in ruins and inconceivably demoralized, saw
|
||
armies of well-fed and perfectly-equipped troops -- the world in
|
||
arms -- advancing from east, north and south to destroy it
|
||
utterly. There were 70,000 Japs (who felt that this was a grand
|
||
opportunity to annex their first large slice of Asia), 35,000
|
||
Checks, about 40,000 White Russians and volunteers, 35,000 French
|
||
and other West Europeans, 13,000 British and Americans, and at
|
||
least 50,000 Poles.
|
||
|
||
The Columbia Encyclopedia ("Russian Revolution") describes
|
||
at some length the fighting that followed as a Civil War between
|
||
the Reds and the Whites. It does not tell that the Whites were
|
||
entirely equipped by the Japanese, Americans, French and British,
|
||
and were only a tenth of the whole. It says, rather ridiculously,
|
||
that "few of the Whites were Tsarists." it does not mention that
|
||
the immense armies of 150,000 Japs, White Russians, etc., from
|
||
the east advanced ruthlessly over more than 4,000 miles of
|
||
Russia. corrupting all who were corruptible and torturing or
|
||
'killing those who were not, living on the food of the starving
|
||
country. It just says briefly at the end of its account of the
|
||
war that it was "complicated by Allied intervention," whereas,
|
||
clearly, the regular troops of the Allies must have done by fir
|
||
the most fighting. It says that the British and Americans
|
||
"occupied" Murmansk and Archangel, and only, to prevent stores
|
||
from falling into the hands of the Reds, but "American forces did
|
||
not participate in the fighting between the Allies and
|
||
Bolsheviks."
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
51
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
The latter is a wanton fiction for American consumption. In
|
||
August 1918 two American regiments landed in Siberia to help the
|
||
British to protect the rear of the Czechs and Japanese. On August
|
||
1st a British fleet reached Archangel with 6.000 British and
|
||
Canadian troops. 5,000 Americans, and 2,000 Italians and Serbs.
|
||
The American government said that these were all the troops that
|
||
were available at the time. Chamberlin described in detail how
|
||
these troops were intended to fight their way across a thousand
|
||
miles of Russia and join the Japs when they reached the Volga.
|
||
That was a dream, but the Americans fought their way 200 miles
|
||
south of Archangel, took Shenkursh, and held it until the Reds
|
||
drove them back. The British and Americans got no help, he says,
|
||
from the people they had set out to deliver and were obliged to
|
||
quit Archangel before the winter. And the first authority
|
||
recommended by the Encyclopedia is Chamberlin's book!
|
||
|
||
The encyclopedia is, as I said, almost equally misleading
|
||
when it says that "atrocities were committed throughout the civil
|
||
war by both sides." Professor Langer is equally misleading when
|
||
he says (1036.),
|
||
|
||
"These executions and persecutions made a miserable
|
||
impression throughout the world and did much to discredit
|
||
Russia."
|
||
|
||
As regards the soldiers, we have impartial testimony that the
|
||
Reds were the least guilty of all. When, in February, 1918 the
|
||
Bolsheviks had recaptured Kiev and some of them had retaliated on
|
||
the Ukrainians, the Soviet issued an instruction, which is given
|
||
by Chamberlin, that "any who disgrace themselves by the murder of
|
||
unarmed people must be expelled from the Soviet army and handed
|
||
over to a revolutionary court" (I. 376). As all admit that the
|
||
White Russians -- whose leaders were aristocrats with long
|
||
tradition of brutality to the peasants -- and the Poles committed
|
||
atrocities, it would be foolish to suggest that Soviet
|
||
resolutions prevented retaliation. But the French scientist, Dr.
|
||
G. Montandon, who was head of the International Red Cross and
|
||
with the armies in the east, says in his books, "Two Years with
|
||
Kolchak (the Whites) and with the Bolsheviks" (1927, but not
|
||
translated, of course), that the Whites kept 250,000 prisoners in
|
||
camps of the later Nazi type and treated them with terrific
|
||
brutality. The Poles and Czechs also were brutal, he says, but
|
||
"the good and mystic Russians (Reds) were more humane." He sums
|
||
up, on the strength of "what we have seen with our own eyes and
|
||
heard with our ears," that "the Reds are less sanguinary than the
|
||
White Russians and their supporters" (p. 38). The French General
|
||
Rouquerol ("The Adventure of Admiral Koleliak," 1929. also not
|
||
translated) agrees about the Whites. Even the young aristocratic
|
||
officers were "cutthroats" a German General assured him.
|
||
|
||
This distinguished French General, by the way, defends the
|
||
Reds against another libel. On an earlier page I quoted Professor
|
||
Geise attributing the general hatred of the Bolsheviks in part to
|
||
their supposed attempt to destroy marriage. General Rcuquerol
|
||
says (p. 246):
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
52
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
"This alleged nationalization of women in Russia is one
|
||
of the most pyramidal inventions that was ever constructed
|
||
in the brains of its cronies. The truth is very different.
|
||
It is that never in the history of prostitution was this
|
||
more nearly abolished than in the first period of the
|
||
Bolshevik regime."
|
||
|
||
It was much the same in regard to religion. Professor Langer says
|
||
(p. 993) that "the Bolshevik campaign against religion appalled
|
||
all Christendom." It is enough to recall that on April 23, 1930
|
||
the British Secretary for Foreign Affairs, a Conspicuously
|
||
religious man, read out in the House of Commons this official
|
||
assurance from the British Ambassador at Moscow:
|
||
|
||
"There is no religious persecution in Russia in the
|
||
strict sense of the word Persecution, and no case has been
|
||
discovered of a priest or anyone else being punished for
|
||
practicing religion."
|
||
|
||
Our Professors seem to take as authoritative such works as
|
||
Lancelot Lawton's history of the Russian Revolution. They have
|
||
this excuse that the author was the representative in Moscow at
|
||
the time of the Chief British Liberal daily. But so peculiar is
|
||
the ethic of journalism in regard to Russia that this writer
|
||
makes the Bolsheviks kill 1,275 archbishops and bishops when
|
||
there were -- see the Catholic Encyclopedia -- only 169
|
||
archbishops and bishops in Russia; and even on the just charge of
|
||
treason very few of these were shot.
|
||
|
||
There was, however, a Red Terror, from the fall of 1918 to
|
||
the summer of 1920, when the Allies and Whites were driven out.
|
||
The death penalty was reintroduced for traitors and the terrible
|
||
Cheka set up. Chamberlin estimates that it condemned and executed
|
||
about 50,000. Some British and American papers said 1,700,000;
|
||
the Bolsheviks said about 20,000. Take your choice. There had
|
||
been treason everywhere. But the condition of the country after
|
||
four years' war, two revolutions, and a savage civil war was
|
||
inconceivable. The nation had not had enough food for three years
|
||
and was drifting into the great famine of 1921-2. More than a
|
||
quarter of a million international forces were in Russia, and the
|
||
largest army got to within 300 miles of Moscow. A girl of the
|
||
Social Revolutionary Party shot Lenin and maimed him for life.
|
||
The press of the world was gloating over the impending victory
|
||
over the improvised and ill-equipped Red Army. In November, 1918,
|
||
the British Financial News said:
|
||
|
||
In the city (London) events are shaping once more
|
||
toward international suzerainty over Russia, modelled on the
|
||
British plan over Egypt. Such an event would transform
|
||
Russian bonds into the cream of the international market."
|
||
|
||
Even when the other Allies were driven out by the poorly-equipped
|
||
Reds -- and no historian gives them credit for this or suggests
|
||
that it shows the general feeling of the people -- the Poles, who
|
||
thought they could now seize the rich and vast province of
|
||
Ukraine from the afflicted Russians, spurred by the Catholic
|
||
Church and subsidized by the French, pressed on. And since
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
53
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
outside the chief cities the Bolsheviks were in the minority,
|
||
there were millions of traitors and the whole of the clergy
|
||
helped the enemy. We can admit, without using violent language,
|
||
that 50,000 of them were shot.
|
||
|
||
Just one word more. When Professor Langer says that "the
|
||
terrible number of executions discredited Russia" it is possible
|
||
that he refers also, if not chiefly, to the purges, trials and
|
||
execrations of later years. These certainly were, together with
|
||
the, lie about religion, the chief material used by the press of
|
||
the world before the war to poison all nations against the
|
||
Communists and support the pope's cry for the extinction of
|
||
Bolshevism. Stalin, it was said, was murderously getting rid of
|
||
rivals. When most of their leaders confessed their guilt, foreign
|
||
journalists nauseously speculated as to what hideous means had
|
||
been used to extort the confessions.
|
||
|
||
Now the most famous of these trials was in 1938, and the
|
||
vilest language was used about it in America. Well, in December,
|
||
1937, and January. 1938 an American engineer, neither Socialist
|
||
nor Communist, John D. Littlepage, wrote a series of articles in
|
||
the Saturday Evening Post. He had just returned from special work
|
||
in the Russian mines. To his article on January 1st be gave the
|
||
title "Red Wreckers in Russia." He wrote that he had known many
|
||
of the Bolshevik leaders who were executed or imprisoned in 1936
|
||
and 1937. and he said:
|
||
|
||
"I am convinced, from my experience, that these
|
||
Communists made genuine confessions.
|
||
|
||
He said that there was an extraordinary amount of treachery and
|
||
sabotage, some political (Trotskyist), and some for foreign gold,
|
||
and he named several leaders (who were arrested months later) as
|
||
being to his knowledge, bribed' by the Germans or Japanese. The
|
||
U.S. Ambassador Davis was present at the big 1938 trial, and he
|
||
tells that of 21 accused at least 19 were clearly guilty, yet
|
||
abuse was heaped upon Stalin (sadism, bloody Jealousy, etc.) for
|
||
these trials all over the world.
|
||
|
||
14. PAPAL POLICY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
|
||
|
||
Most of the works I have examined were published before the
|
||
beginning of the Second World War, so I have no occasion here to
|
||
discuss any events since that time. There is, however, one more
|
||
outstanding theme of our own time on which I must say a few
|
||
words, especially as it is, mainly by suppressing facts, totally
|
||
misrepresented in the new history and the Columbia, yet the truth
|
||
about it is of vital social importance today; and it is
|
||
misrepresented obviously because of Catholic pressure. In an
|
||
earlier section we ended with the spectacle of Pius IX returning
|
||
to the brutal feudal policy of his predecessors when reaction
|
||
seemed to have recovered full power in Europe and defying all
|
||
liberal and progressive thought with the stage thunder of his
|
||
syllabus. He lived to see Italy sweep away the temporal power and
|
||
make considerable progress in revolt against the Vatican: and to
|
||
see France sweep away his friend Napoleon III and set up a
|
||
republic.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
54
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
Leo XIII inherited this (from the Church angle) dangerous
|
||
situation. Our historians and our encyclopedia pay him the
|
||
familiar gorgeous compliments, but in fact his pontifical career
|
||
was a series of blunders. By his obstinacy for some years in
|
||
maintaining his predecessor's attitude he drove the French
|
||
Republic into the arms of "the Jews and Freemasons" (so he said),
|
||
saw all its institutions secularized and the Catholic population
|
||
sink rapidly from more than 20,000,000 to less than 10,000,000.
|
||
He repelled all advances of the Italian Government and saw
|
||
skepticism capture the middle class and spread extensively among
|
||
the people. In these and other countries (Spain Portugal, Latin
|
||
America, Belgium, the United States, etc.), his church lost at
|
||
least 50,000,000 members during his pontificate. He was harsh and
|
||
offensive in his dealings with the American hierarchy, and, while
|
||
he won some ridiculous prestige in the world-press for saying in
|
||
an encyclical that the workers had a right to a living wage -- a
|
||
singular discovery for these inspired moralists after 1,500 years
|
||
of power -- he retracted even this in his last years and died in
|
||
despair, while the anti-papal statesmen died serenely in the dawn
|
||
of a new world.
|
||
|
||
His successors in the first three decades of the present
|
||
century had not his ability, and they blundered along while the
|
||
Church continued to decay. One would think that our historians
|
||
were unaware that the birth-rate of Catholics, who are forbidden
|
||
under pain of hell to practice birth control, is double that of
|
||
the rest of a civilized community, and that Catholics in
|
||
publishing their statistics count the millions of seceders from
|
||
their body as actual members of it. But their reports to Rome are
|
||
required to be truthful, and the popes saw the shrinkage of the
|
||
church continue. They saw vast numbers fall away in Spain, which
|
||
moved on toward its Socialist and Liberal Revolution of 1932.
|
||
Literacy and skepticism spread equally in Latin America, and
|
||
Socialism made rapid strides in Italy and South America. The
|
||
future of the Church in the democracies was clouded and, in
|
||
further disproof of its fabled intelligence-system and sagacity,
|
||
the Vatican embarked upon what is known as the Eastern Policy,
|
||
looking for compensation in the mere docile regions of the
|
||
decaying. Orthodox Church and Asia for the immense losses in
|
||
Europe and the United States. I remember that I was in Athens
|
||
when the Turks under Kemal swept the Greek army out of Asia
|
||
Minor. The secretary of the British Legation told me that the
|
||
Greek Foreign Minister assured the Legation that this defeat,
|
||
which came like a clap of thunder, was due to the fact that the
|
||
Turks got French guns, tanks and officers. The Vatican felt that
|
||
the Turks were the coming power in the East and their skeptical
|
||
rulers might, in their disdain of Islam, be induced to favor the
|
||
pope's ambition in the East. In view of the general
|
||
representation of our historians that the papacy is, and always
|
||
was, the greatest moral power in the world, it is singular that
|
||
Professor Langer is the only one of them who devotes a page to
|
||
papal policy and work in the fateful first quarter of the present
|
||
century -- and Professor Langer just pays the conventional
|
||
compliments to the popes.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
55
|
||
|
||
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
|
||
|
||
One of the more important inaccuracies on this page (933) of
|
||
Professor Langer's book is when he says of Pope Pius XI: "From
|
||
the outset he took a strong stand against Communism." He was. as
|
||
a matter of fact, elected pope in February 1922, and in April and
|
||
May his representative, the Archbishop of Genoa, conspicuously
|
||
courted the Red envoy Chicherin at the Genoa Conference, and,
|
||
though the Catholic priests had been expelled from Russia for
|
||
treachery in the Civil War, got permission for the Jesuit mission
|
||
to be re-admitted; and it remained there, apparently on the best
|
||
of terms with the Communists, until 1924, when the priests were
|
||
again expelled for treachery.
|
||
|
||
The point is important because 1924 was the real date of the
|
||
beginning of the new papal policy: back to the West, to cooperate
|
||
with the leaders of the democracies and dictators against
|
||
Communism and Socialism. It was in 1924 that the Jesuit Father
|
||
Walsh, one of those expelled from Russia, started the vitriolic
|
||
and mendacious campaign against Communism in America. By then new
|
||
and fiercely anti-social forces had appeared in Europe, and,
|
||
while Nazism was still uncertain of its future, Mussolini became
|
||
a power. A new force appeared also in Rome after the blundering
|
||
mediocrities who had occupied the chair since the death of Leo
|
||
XIII. Cardinal Pacelli became Secretary of State to the senile
|
||
Pius XI in 1929 and the full papal policy was soon clear;
|
||
alliance with any and every power -- democrats or Fascists,
|
||
Christian or Japanese -- that promised to work for the extinction
|
||
of Communism. But how Pius XII cooperated with the Japs from
|
||
their invasion of Manchuria onward, consecrated Fascism in Italy,
|
||
Nazism in Germany, and Phalangism in Spain, inspired the sordid
|
||
dictatorships in South America, was intimately associated with
|
||
the Germans, Italians and Japanese in setting the world aflame in
|
||
the Second World War, and, when they lost their ghastly gamble,
|
||
found that his "international moral power" was still
|
||
indispensable to the Capitalists, Politicians, and Militarists
|
||
who made the destruction of Communism the ground for a third war
|
||
is another story, now involved in the manuals I have examined,
|
||
that I discuss in other works.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
56
|
||
|