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CHRISTIAN TERROR: EVENTS THAT TESTIFY TO GOD'S DIVINE GLORY
The Archbishop of Tyre who was an eyewitness wrote: "It was impossible to look upon the vast numbers of the slain without horror; everywhere lay fragments of human bodies, and the very ground was covered with the blood of the slain. It was not alone the spectacle of headless bodies and mutilated limbs strewn in all directions that roused the horror of all that looked upon them. Still more dreadful was it to gaze upon the victors themselves, dripping with blood from head to foot. An ominous sight, which brought terror to all who met them. It is reported that within the Temple enclosure alone about ten thousand infidels perished." [TG79] Christian chronicler Eckehard of Aura noted that "… even the following summer in all of Palestine, the air was polluted by the stench of decomposition". One million victims of the first crusade alone. [WW41] Battle of Askalon, 12/08/1099: 200,000 heathens slaughtered "In the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ". [WW45] Fourth crusade: 12/04/1204 Constantinople sacked, the number of victims was in the many thousands, many of them Christian. [WW141-148] Until the fall of Akkon in 1291 there were probably 20 million victims of the crusades, in Palestine and the Moslem territories alone. [WW224] Note:
All figures according to contemporary Christian chroniclers.
Subsequent 20 years of war until nearly all Cathars, probably half the population of the Languedoc in southern France, were exterminated. [WW183] After
the war ended in 1229, the Inquisition was founded in 1232 to search and
destroy surviving or hiding heretics. Last Cathars burned at the
stake in 1324. [WW183]. One million victims estimated (Cathar heresy alone).
[WW183]
Witches From the beginnings of Christianity until 1484 probably more than several thousand murdered for witchcraft. In
the witch-hunting era (1484-1750), according to modern scholars, several
hundred thousand (80% female) burned at the stake or hanged. [WV]
Extermination of American Indians In the words of John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony: "… justifieinge the undertakeres of the intended Plantation in New England... to carry the Gospell into those parts of the world... and to raise a Bulworke against the kingdome of the Ante-Christ." (sic) [SH235] On
average, two thirds of the native population was killed by colonist-imported
smallpox before the violence began. This was a great sign of
"… the marvelous goodness and providence of God.” The Governor of
the Massachusetts Bay Colony wrote in 1634, “As for the natives, they are
near all dead of the smallpox, so as the Lord hath cleared our title to
what we possess." [SH109, 238]
Or, on another occasion: "The Spaniards cut off the arm of one, the leg or hip of another, and from some their heads at one stroke, like butchers cutting up beef and mutton for market. Six hundred, including the cacique, were thus slain like brute beasts... Vasco [de Balboa] ordered forty of them to be torn to pieces by dogs." [SH83] “The island's population of about eight million people, at the time of Columbus's arrival in 1492, already had declined by a third to a half before the year 1496 was out." Eventually, all the island's natives were exterminated, so the Spaniards were "forced" to import slaves from other Caribbean islands, who soon suffered the same fate. Thus "The Caribbean's millions of native people were thereby effectively liquidated in barely a quarter of a century". [SH72-73] "In less than the normal lifetime of a single human being, an entire culture of millions of people, thousands of years resident in their homeland, had been exterminated." [SH75] "And then the Spanish turned their attention to the mainland of Mexico and Central America. The slaughter had barely begun. The exquisite city of Tenochtitlan [Mexico City] was next." [SH75] Cortez, Pizarro, De Soto and hundreds of other Spanish conquistadors likewise sacked southern and meso-american civilisations in the name of Christ (De Soto also sacked Florida). "When the 16th century ended, some 200,000 Spaniards had moved to the Americas. By that time probably more than 60,000,000 natives were dead." [SH95] Of course the founders of North America were no different. Although none of the settlers would have survived winter without native help, they soon set out to expel and exterminate the Indians. Warfare among North American Indians was rather 'harmless', by European standards, and was meant to avenge insults rather than to conquer land. In the words of some of the Pilgrim Fathers: "Their Warres are farre less bloudy..." so that there usually was "… no great slawter of nether side". Indeed, "They might fight seven yeares and not kill seven men." What is more, the Indians usually spared women and children. [SH111] In the spring of 1612, some English colonists found life among the friendly and generous natives attractive enough to leave Jamestown, "… being idell did runne away unto the Indyans," to live among them, which probably solved a sex problem. Governor Thomas Dale had these settlers hunted down and executed: "Some he apointed to be hanged some burned some to be broken upon wheles, others to be staked and some shott to deathe." (sic) [SH105] Of course these elegant measures were restricted for fellow Englishmen: "This was the treatment for those who wished to act like Indians. For those who had no choice in the matter, because they were the native people of Virginia" methods were different: "… when an Indian was accused by an Englishman of stealing a cup and failing to return it, the English response was to attack the natives in force, burning the entire community down." [SH105] On the territory that is now Massachusetts the founding fathers of the colonies were committing genocide, in what has become known as the "Peqout War". The killers were New England Puritans, refugees from persecution in England. When however a dead colonist was found, apparently killed by Narragansett Indians, the Puritan colonists wanted revenge. Despite the Indian chief's pledge, they attacked. Somehow they seem to have lost the idea of who they were after, because when Pequot Indians, long-time foes of the Narragansetts greeted them, the troops made war on them and burned their villages. The Puritan commander-in-charge John Mason after one massacre wrote: "And indeed such a dreadful Terror did the Almighty let fall upon their Spirits, that they would fly from us and run into the very Flames, where many of them perished... God was above them, who laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to Scorn, making them as a fiery Oven... Thus did the Lord judge among the Heathen, filling the Place with dead Bodies." [SH113-114] So "the Lord was pleased to smite our Enemies in the hinder Parts, and to give us their land for an inheritance". [SH111] Because of his readers' assumed knowledge of Deuteronomy, there was no need for Mason to quote the words that immediately follow: "Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth. But thou shalt utterly destroy them..." (Deut 20) Mason's comrade Underhill recalled how "… great and doleful was the bloody sight to the view of the young soldiers." Yet he reassured his readers that "Sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents". [SH114] Other Indians were killed in successful plots of poisoning. The colonists even had dogs especially trained to kill Indians and to devour children from their mothers’ breasts, in the colonists' own words: "… Blood Hounds to draw after them, and Mastives to seaze them." This was inspired by Spanish methods of the time. In this way they continued until the extermination of the Pequots was near its completion. [SH107-119] The surviving handful of Indians "… were parceled out to live in servitude." John Endicott and his pastor wrote to the governor asking for a share of the captives, specifically "… a young woman or girle and a boy, if you thinke good." [SH115] Other tribes were to have a similar fate. Comment the Christian exterminators: "God's Will, which will at last give us cause to say: How Great is His Goodness! And How Great is his Beauty! Thus doth the Lord Jesus make them to bow before him, and to lick the Dust!" [TA] "Peace treaties were signed with every intention to violate them. When the Indians 'grow secure uppon (sic) the treatie', advised the Council of State in Virginia, 'we shall have the better Advantage both to surprise them, and cutt downe theire Corne'." [SH106] In 1624, sixty heavily armed Englishmen cut down 800 defenceless Indian men, women and children. [SH107] In
a single massacre in "King Philip's War" of 1675 and 1676 some "600 Indians
were destroyed. A delighted Cotton Mather, revered pastor of the
Second Church in Boston, later referred to the slaughter as a 'barbeque'."
[SH115]
IN SUMMARY: Before the arrival of the English, the western Abenaki people in New Hampshire and Vermont had numbered 12,000. Less than half a century later about 250 remained alive, a destruction rate of 98%. The Pocumtuck people had numbered more than 18,000, fifty years later they were down to 920, 95% destroyed. The Quiripi-Unquachog people had numbered about 30,000, fifty years later they were down to 1500, 95% destroyed. The Massachusetts people had numbered at least 44,000, fifty years later barely 6,000 were alive, 81% destroyed. [SH118] These are only a few examples of the multitude of tribes living before Christian colonists set their foot on the 'New World.' All this was before the smallpox epidemics of 1677 and 1678. All the above was only the beginning of the European colonisation, it was before the frontier age had actually begun. Smallpox and other epidemics destroyed a total of maybe more than 150 million Indians between 1500 and 1900, amounting two thirds of the population. This leaves some 50 million killed directly by violence, bad treatment and slavery. Reverend Solomon Stoddard, one of New England's 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 in Colorado 29/11/1864. Colonel John Chivington, a former Methodist minister and still an 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 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] 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
Extermination camps: Suprisingly few know that Nazi extermination camps in World War II were by no means the only ones in Europe. Between 1942-1943 in Croatia there existed numerous extermination camps, run by the Ustasha under their dictator Ante Pavelic, a devout Catholic and regular visitor to the then Pope. There were even concentration camps exclusively for children! In these camps, the most notorious being Jasenovac headed by a Franciscan priest, Orthodox-Christian Serbs and a substantial number of Jews were murdered. The Ustasha burned their victims in kilns, whilst they were still alive (the Nazis had their victims gassed first). However, most of the victims were simply stabbed or shot to death, the number of them being estimated between 300,000 and 600,000. Many of the killers were Franciscan friars. The
atrocities were appalling enough to induce even bystanders of the Nazi
"Sicherheitsdient der SS" to complain about them to Hitler, who did not
seem interested. The Pope knew about these events but did nothing
to prevent them. [MV]
Christian terror in Vietnam: With the help of Christian lobbies in Washington and Cardinal Spellman, the Vatican's spokesman in US politics, who later on would call the U.S. forces in Vietnam "Soldiers of Christ", a scheme was concocted to prevent democratic elections in Vietnam, which would have brought the communist Viet Minh to power in the South. The fanatically Christian 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 aid, which were given to Catholics for free. By 1956 Diem promulgated a presidential order, which read: "Individuals considered dangerous to the national defence 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 teachers and monks poured
gasoline over their heads and torched themselves. Meanwhile some
of the prison compounds had evolved into 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]
Rwanda Massacres: In 1994 in the small African country of Rwanda, in just a few months, several hundred thousand civilians were butchered, apparently in a conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups. Rumours circulated that Catholic clergy were actively involved in the 1994 massacres. Odd denials of involvement were printed in church journals, before anybody had openly accused them. Then on the 10/10/96, in a broadcast of S2 Aktuell, a German station not usually critical of Christianity, the following statement was made: "Anglican as well as Catholic priests and nuns are suspected of having actively participated in murders. The conduct of a certain priest has been occupying the public mind in Rwanda's 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 had been a bloody slaughter of Tutsis seeking shelter in his parish." Even years after the massacres, many Christians refuse to set foot in their churches. To them the participation of a certain sector of the clergy in the slaughter is well established. There is almost no church in Rwanda that has not seen refugees being brutally butchered facing the crucifix. According to eyewitnesses, clergymen gave away hiding Tutsis and turned them over to the machetes of Hutu militia. In connection with these events again and again two Benedictine nuns are mentioned, both of whom fled to a Belgian monastery 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 her presence, 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, witnesses report that she watched
the slaughtering of people in cold blood without showing any emotion.
She is even accused of having procured some petrol used by the killers
to set fire and burn their victims alive..." [S2]
.
[DA] K.Deschner, Abermals krahte der Hahn, Stuttgart 1962.
BOOKS N.Cohn,
Europe's Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch Hunt, Frogmore
1976, 253.
J.B.Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, Ithaca/NY 1972, 39. H.Zwetsloot, Friedrich Spee und die Hexenprozesse, Trier 1954, 56 |
