Famous Political/Religious Bloodbaths!

http://www.ronaldbrucemeyer.com/rants/0824almanac.htm

Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre (1572)

It was on this date, August 24, 1572, that the bloodiest massacre of Christians by Christians began in France — the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. The Reformation of the corrupt practices of the Roman Catholic Church, which had begun in Germany, had spread to France and gained many followers, including the heir to the French throne, his brother and sons, and some of the highest French nobles. The French Protestants were called Huguenots and there was considerable tension between the cohabiting Christian sects.

Catherine de' Medici, a relative of Pope Clement VII, married the duke of Orléans at age 14; he would become King Henry II of France. But Henry died after about six years of rule, and his successor, Francis II, died the year after that, leaving Catherine as regent for the 10-year-old Charles IX. Catherine let the Jesuits back into France and, seeing the alarming probability that the Reformation might gain a toehold in France, the Jesuits began circulating provocative rumors (1567) of a Huguenot plot to sack and burn Paris.

The Huguenot leader, Admiral Coligny, began to exercise more influence over Charles in matters of state than Catherine, so she used the occasion of a political marriage designed to make peace between Protestants and Catholics — the marriage of Henry of Navarre to Marguerite de Valois — to have Coligny assassinated. The plot failed and Coligny was only wounded, but the Huguenot leaders, assembled in Paris in great numbers for the wedding, were infuriated.

Charles vowed punishments for the plotters, but with all the important heretics in one place, Catherine saw her final solution to the Huguenot problem: She browbeat the young King into approving a massacre — for reasons of national security. On Sunday, 24 August 1572, at daybreak, French Catholic troops and Catholic citizens drew blood. An eyewitness described the scene:

The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre
— a contemporary painting

...the streets and ways did resound with the noise of those that flocked to the slaughter and plunder, and the complaints and doleful out-cries of dying men, and those that were nigh to danger were every where heard. The carkasses of the slain were thrown down from the windows, the Courts & chambers of houses were full of dead men, their dead bodies rolled in dirt were dragged through the streets, bloud did flow in such abundance through the chanels of the streets, that full streams of bloud did run down into the River: the number of the slain men, women, even those that were great with child, and children also, was innumerable.*

The slaughter in Paris lasted until 17 September, but spread to the provinces, where it continued until 3 October. Admiral Coligny was among the dead. In all of France about 50,000 were slain — more than twice as many people killed over religion in 40 days, as French revolutionaries killed over politics in three years!

When news of this holocaust of French Protestants reached the world, Catherine de' Medici received the congratulations of all the Catholic powers, and Pope Gregory XIII ordered bonfires lighted and the singing of the Te Deum. Indeed, the Pope's joy was so great that he commanded a gold medal to be minted, with the inscription, "Slaughter [strages] of the Huguenots." He then had Giorgio Vasari paint pictures in the Vatican of "the glorious triumph over a perfidious race."

An ecclesiastical annalist named Strype suggested that the comet of 1572 was a token of Divine wrath provoked by the massacre. But if God was watching, he made no move to turn the events begun on St. Bartholomew's Day, 1572. They remain one of the most infamous episodes in the bloody history of religion.

* Jacques-Auguste de Thou's History of the Bloody Massacres of the Protestants in France in the year of our Lord, 1572 (London, 1674). The writer was a young man at the time of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, parts of which he witnessed. De Thou helped to draft the Edict of Nantes, which (briefly) granted toleration to the Huguenots in France. He goes on,

"At the same time, but with greater slaughter, were things carried at Rouen, where Tanaquilius Venato Garrugius, the Governor of the chief Nobility of Provence, a man of a merciful disposition, did what he could to hinder it. But at last, not being able any longer to withstand the violence of the seditious, (and especially of those who, the year before, were, by the decree of the Judges, delegated from Paris, proscribed, who hoped that, by this course, they should both revenge the injury offered them, and also obliterate the memory of the Decree), many were thrown into prison, and afterwards 15 Kal. of VIIIbr [September 17]. being called out one by one by the voice of the Cryer, were cruelly slain by those Emissaries, Maronimus a most wicked wretch leading them on. Upon this they set upon private houses, and that day and the day following they fell upon men & women, without distinction, and 500 of both sexes and all ages were slain, and their bodies being stripped, were cast into the ditches at Portam Caletenfem, and their garments all bloudy as they were, were distributed among the poor, they seeking even by these murders to ingratiate themselves with the people. This the Senate was in shew offended at, and began to proceed against the Authors of this fact: but through connivance it came to nothing, the murderers and cut-throats for a time slipping out of the City."

and, yes, he merits a plug for voice-over work!
http://www.ronaldbrucemeyer.com/voicedemo/demochar.mp3
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http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004-2_archives/000512.html

November 05, 2004

Wars of Religion

PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column: I eventually finished the piece and decided to go see the war since I had been in Beirut and Angola, but had never seen trench warfare, which is what I was told they had going in Iran. So I took a taxi to the front, introduced myself to the local commander, who had gone, as I recall, to Iowa State, and spent a couple days waiting for the impending human wave attack. That attack was to be conducted primarily with 11-and 12-year-old boys as troops, nearly all of them unarmed. There were several thousand kids and their job was to rise out of the trench, praising Allah, run across No Man's Land, be killed by the Iraqi machine gunners, then go directly to Paradise, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 dinars. And that's exactly what happened in a battle lasting less than 10 minutes. None of the kids fired a shot or made it all the way to the other side. And when I asked the purpose of this exercise, I was told it was to demoralize the cowardly Iraqi soldiers.

It was the most horrific event I have ever seen, and I once covered a cholera epidemic in Bangladesh that killed 40,000 people.

Waiting those two nights for the attack was surreal. Some kids acted as though nothing was wrong while others cried and puked. But when the time came to praise Allah and enter Paradise, not a single boy tried to stay behind.

Now put this in a current context. What effective limit is there to the number of Islamic kids willing to blow themselves to bits? There is no limit, which means that a Bush Doctrine can't really stand in that part of the world. But of course President Bush, who may think he pulled the switch on a couple hundred Death Row inmates in Texas, has probably never seen a combat death. He doesn't get it and he'll proudly NEVER get it.

Welcome to the New Morality.

But while we're at it, let's also quote from historian-eyewitness Jacques-Auguste de Thou's account of the September 1572 St. Bartholomew's Day massacre:

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http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004-2_archives/000512.html
Posted by: Bruce Moomaw at November 6, 2004 05:04 AM

The children were not fighting. They knew they were not going to fight. They did not care about their own lives enough to refuse. Does anyone think you could get any crowd of 12 year old American kids to do this? That is Cringely's point.

Let's remember the reason we did not go to Baghdad in the first Gulf War. The Iraqis were fleeing down a highway in their own country. We flew missions over the highway, killing them like those children were killed. We did not have the stomach to shoot fleeing men in the back.

Now we would?

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http://www.privacy.li/ WHAT HAPPENS IN LICHTENSTEIN -- STAYS IN LICHTENSTEIN

http://nonesoblind.org/ "Americans" are alarmed about the moral condition of their society today. Many in the liberal half of America worry that the political right has been taken over by amoral forces that pretend to be righteous while indulging a lust for power and wealth. Many conservative Americans fear that America's moral integrity is being eroded by an "anything goes" culture that's fostered by contemporary liberalism. Both these worries are well-founded. Each side of America's political and cultural divide is challenged to overcome its moral blindspot. Read more: short version/long version

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004-2_archives/000512.html
Posted by: Davis X. Machina at November 5, 2004 09:05 PM

The army general on Lehrer's Newshour tonight was on about teaching them the meaning of American "resolve." Accept our vision of your future or die! That will have to do, instead of morality. For where do our Religious Values Voters stand? Let's see, they all acquiesced as Bush traduced his opponent's courage and wisdom, so bringing upon them a dishonor that will not be cleaned, but spreads like infection to other parts of their ministry, and opens another vast estrangement from their own God.

Anyway why shouldn't all peoples be compelled to decide upon their leaders by the same horseshit? At least it's not violent! Or wait a minute

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