July 14: How appropriate
that on this historic day when the French Revolution began that Obama signs a
deal with Iran!
Solzhenitsyn
Mourned Bastille Day. So Should All Christians.
The French Revolution invented radical nationalism and
socialism, and launched the first modern genocide, aimed at Christians
Tuesday, July
14 probably passes without much fanfare in your home, but the date, Bastille
Day, marks the beginning of the greatest organized persecution of Christians
since the Emperor Diocletian.
This day, the beginning of the French Revolution, also planted the
seeds for the murderous ideologies of socialism and nationalism that would
poison the next two centuries, murdering millions of believers and other
innocent civilians. Between them, those two political movements racked up quite
a body count: In Death By
Government, scholar R.J. Rummel pointed
out that
during the first 88 years
of this century, almost 170,000,000 men, women and children have been shot,
beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death;
or buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad
ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens or
foreigners.
But the first
such modern genocide in the West took place in France, beginning in 1793. It
was undertaken by modern, progressive apostles of Enlightenment and aimed at
pious peasants in the Vendée region of France. By its end up to 300,000
civilians had been killed by the armies of the Republic.
This story is
little discussed in France. Indeed, a devout historian who teaches at a French
university once told me, "We are not to mention the Vendée. Anyone who
brings up what was done there has no prospect of an academic career. So we keep
silent."
It is mostly
in the Vendée itself that memories linger, which may explain why that part of
France to this day remains more religious and more conservative than any other
region. The local government opened a museum marking these atrocities on their
200th anniversary in 1993 — with a visit by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who noted
during his eloquent address that the mass murders of Christians
in Russia were directly inspired by those in the Vendée. The Bolsheviks, he
said, modeled themselves on the French revolutionaries, and Lenin himself
pointed to the Vendée massacres as the right way to deal with Christian
resistance.
The
ideologues of the Revolution had already
- Executed the king and queen, and left their young son
to die of disease in prison.
- Seized the Cathedral of Notre Dame, stripped it of
Christian symbols, and enshrined a prostitute as the "Goddess of
Reason" on the altar;
- Declared a revolutionary "war of liberation" against
most of the other countries in Europe;
- Suspended all Protestant services, in deference to the
state’s cult of Reason;
- Seized all church property from Catholics, expelling
thousands of monks, priests and nuns to fend for themselves, then sold the
property to their cronies to raise money for their wars;
- Ordered all clergy to swear allegiance to the
government instead of the Church; and
- Launched the first universal conscription in history,
drafting ordinary people — most of them devout peasants bewildered by the
slogans that held sway in Paris — to fight for the Revolution.
Read
the rest at The Stream.
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