PART FOUR. Murders carried out by the Christian Church over the centuries.More Glorious events in US history • Reverend Solomon Stoddard, one of New Englands most esteemed religious leaders, in 1703 formally proposed to the Massachusetts Governor that the colonists be given the financial wherewithal to purchase and train large packs of dogs to hunt Indians as they do bears. [SH241] • Massacre of Sand Creek, Colorado 11/29/1864. Colonel John Chivington, a former Methodist minister and still elder in the church (I long to be wading in gore) had a Cheyenne village of about 600, mostly women and children, gunned down despite the chiefs waving with a white flag: 400-500 killed. From an eye-witness account: There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for protection; they sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick; she had not proceeded but a few steps when she was shot and killed. All the squaws in that hole were afterwards killed ... [SH131] More gory details. • By the 1860s, in Hawaii the Reverend Rufus Anderson surveyed the carnage that by then had reduced those islands native population by 90 percent or more, and he declined to see it as tragedy; the expected total die-off of the Hawaiian population was only natural, this missionary said, somewhat equivalent to the amputation of diseased members of the body. [SH244] 20th Century Church Atrocities • Catholic extermination camps Surpisingly few know that Nazi extermination camps in World War II were by no means the only ones in Europe at the time. In the years 1942-1943 also in Croatia existed numerous extermination camps, run by Catholic Ustasha under their dictator Ante Paveli, a practising Catholic and regular visitor to the then pope. There were even concentration camps exclusively for children! In these camps - the most notorious was Jasenovac, headed by a Franciscan friar - orthodox-Christian serbians (and a substantial number of Jews) were murdered. Like the Nazis the Catholic Ustasha burned their victims in kilns, alive (the Nazis were decent enough to have their victims gassed first). But most of the victims were simply stabbed, slain or shot to death, the number of them being estimated between 300,000 and 600,000, in a rather tiny country. Many of the killers were Franciscan friars. The atrocities were appalling enough to induce bystanders of the Nazi Sicherheitsdient der SS, watching, to complain about them to Hitler (who did not listen). The pope knew about these events and did nothing to prevent them. [MV] • Catholic terror in Vietnam In 1954 Vietnamese freedom fighters - the Viet Minh - had finally defeated the French colonial government in North Vietnam, which by then had been supported by U.S. funds amounting to more than $2 billion. Although the victorious assured religious freedom to all (most non-buddhist Vietnamese were Catholics), due to huge anticommunist propaganda campaigns many Catholics fled to the South. With the help of Catholic lobbies in Washington and Cardinal Spellman, the Vaticans spokesman in U.S. politics, who later on would call the U.S. forces in Vietnam Soldiers of Christ, a scheme was concocted to prevent democratic elections which could have brought the communist Viet Minh to power in the South as well, and the fanatic Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem was made president of South Vietnam. [MW16ff] Diem saw to it that U.S. aid, food, technical and general assistance was given to Catholics alone, Buddhist individuals and villages were ignored or had to pay for the food aids which were given to Catholics for free. The only religious denomination to be supported was Roman Catholicism. The Vietnamese McCarthyism turned even more vicious than its American counterpart. By 1956 Diem promulgated a presidential order which read: ◦ Individuals considered dangerous to the national defense and common security may be confined by executive order, to a concentration camp. Supposedly to fight communism, thousands of buddhist protesters and monks were imprisoned in detention camps. Out of protest dozens of buddhist teachers - male and female - and monks poured gasoline over themselves and burned themselves. (Note that Buddhists burned themselves: in comparison Christians tend to burn others). Meanwhile some of the prison camps, which in the meantime were filled with Protestant and even Catholic protesters as well, had turned into no-nonsense death camps. It is estimated that during this period of terror (1955-1960) at least 24,000 were wounded - mostly in street riots - 80,000 people were executed, 275,000 had been detained or tortured, and about 500,000 were sent to concentration or detention camps. [MW76-89]. To support this kind of government in the next decade thousands of American GIs lost their life.... • Rwanda Massacres In 1994 in the small african country of Rwanda in just a few months several hundred thousand civilians were butchered, apparently a conflict of the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups. For quite some time I heard only rumours about Catholic clergy actively involved in the 1994 Rwanda massacres. Odd denials of involvement were printed in Catholic church journals, before even anybody had openly accused members of the church. Then, 10/10/96, in the newscast of S2 Aktuell, Germany - a station not at all critical to Christianity - the following was stated: Anglican as well as Catholic priests and nuns are suspect of having actively participated in murders. Especially the conduct of a certain Catholic priest has been occupying the public mind in Rwandas capital Kigali for months. He was minister of the church of the Holy Family and allegedly murdered Tutsis in the most brutal manner. He is reported to have accompanied marauding Hutu militia with a gun in his cowl. In fact there has been a bloody slaughter of Tutsis seeking shelter in his parish. Even two years after the massacres many Catholics refuse to set foot on the threshold of their church, because to them the participation of a certain part of the clergy in the slaughter is well established. There is almost no church in Rwanda that has not seen refugees - women, children, old - being brutally butchered facing the crucifix. According to eyewitnesses clergymen gave away hiding Tutsis and turned them over to the machetes of the Hutu militia. In connection with these events again and again two Benedictine nuns are mentioned, both of whom have fled into a Belgian monastery in the meantime to avoid prosecution. According to survivors one of them called the Hutu killers and led them to several thousand people who had sought shelter in her monastery. By force the doomed were driven out of the churchyard and were murdered in the presence of the nun right in front of the gate. The other one is also reported to have directly cooperated with the murderers of the Hutu militia. In her case again witnesses report that she watched the slaughtering of people in cold blood and without showing response. She is even accused of having procured some petrol used by the killers to set on fire and burn their victims alive... [S2] As can be seen from these events, to Christianity the Dark Ages never come to an end.... References: [DA] K.Deschner, Abermals krhte der Hahn, Stuttgart 1962. [DO] K.Deschner, Opus Diaboli, Reinbek 1987. [EC] P.W.Edbury, Crusade and Settlement, Cardiff Univ. Press 1985. [EJ] S.Eidelberg, The Jews and the Crusaders, Madison 1977. [LI] H.C.Lea, The Inquisition of the Middle Ages, New York 1961. [MM] M.Margolis, A.Marx, A History of the Jewish People. [MV] A.Manhattan, The Vatican’s Holocaust, Springfield 1986. See also V.Dedijer, The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican, Buffalo NY, 1992. [NC] J.T.Noonan, Contraception: A History of its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists, Cambridge/Mass., 1992. [S2] Newscast of S2 Aktuell, Germany, 10/10/96, 12:00. [SH] D.Stannard, American Holocaust, Oxford University Press 1992. [SP] German news magazine Der Spiegel, no.49, 12/2/1996. [TA] A True Account of the Most Considerable Occurrences that have Hapned in the Warre Between the English and the Indians in New England, London 1676. [TG] F.Turner, Beyond Geography, New York 1980. [WW] H.Wollschlger: Die bewaffneten Wallfahrten gen Jerusalem, Zrich 1973. (This is in german and what is worse, it is out of print. But it is the best I ever read about crusades and includes a full list of original medieval Christian chroniclers writings). [WV] Estimates on the number of executed witches: • N.Cohn, Europes Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch Hunt, Frogmore 1976, 253. • R.H.Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, New York 1959, 180. • J.B.Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, Ithaca/NY 1972, 39. • H.Zwetsloot, Friedrich Spee und die Hexenprozesse, Trier 1954, 56. This page 1996 by kelsos. So there. (Reprinted with permission from author.)
Posted on: Mon, 23 Jun 2014 10:04:08 +0000
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