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<conspiracyFile>26 page printout
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Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.
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This file, its printout, or copies of either
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are to be copied and given away, but NOT sold.
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Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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<div> <div>
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Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius
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The Black International No. 1
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THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
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HOW THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL JOINED THE
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WORLD-PLOT AGAINST FREEDOM,
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LIBERALISM, AND DEMOCRACY
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by Joseph McCabe
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HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS
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GIRARD -- : -- KANSAS
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<div> <div>
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Chapter I
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THE FOULEST WAR IN HISTORY
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This war is one of the most deliberately aggressive, one of
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the most bloody and costly, and the most revolting war in history.
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It is not the work, of an Attila or a Genghis Khan, a man from the
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wilds of Asia whose barbaric dreams of conquest had never been
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checked by the ideals of modern civilization. It is the foul work
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of men who know how the race has fought during a century and a
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half, ever since the American and the French Revolutions, to rid
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its life of the last taint of barbarism and had reached at least a
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fair prospect of a final victory over violence and injustice: the
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work of loathsome hypocrites, who masked with a pretense of
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creating a higher social order the most monstrous greed, the most
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abhorrent callousness, that ever debased the human mind.
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Historians have disputed how the guilt of the war of 1914-1918
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must be distributed amongst the combatants. No historian will ever
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hesitate in assigning the guilt for this war. it brands for all
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time a relatively small number of men in Germany, Italy, and Japan.
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It puts upon them this infamy, that from a barbaric lust of power
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and "glory," which ought now to be confined to the idle dreams of
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young schoolboys, and from an almost insane greed of wealth for
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themselves and their supporters they set out to drench the planet
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and in blood and bring incalculable misery upon hundreds of
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millions of innocent men, women and children.
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These men, the Hitler's and Goering's and Goebbels of Germany
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-- "the vilest triumvirate that has appeared in history, said the
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late Ambassador Dodd, who knew them and knew history -- the
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Mussolinis and Cianos of Italy, the Hirohitos and Matsuokas of
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Japan saw with wide-open eyes the tragic close of the last war.
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They knew that nearly 9000000 men in the prime of life had been
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slaughtered in altars that were less merciful than those of the
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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1
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THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
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Aztecs; yet they were prepared to sacrifice even more on the sordid
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altars of their hellish ambitions. They had seen desolation from
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Calais to Poland: and they proposed to spread a worse desolation
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over the greater part of the earth. They had learned how in the
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last war at least $100000000000 of the wealth that men
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laboriously create and meagerly share -- not to count the waste of
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man-power and the paralysis of trade -- had been thrown into a
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morass; yet knowing the advance of science and expecting a larger
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theater of war they would squander more than that sum in the
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pursuit of their greed.
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The historian of the future who will coldly write these lines
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will add a fourth count to the charge. During the twenty years
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between the two great wars we had caught a vision of a new and
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better world. That light of science which, as it slowly dawns,
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enriches the imagination of man with plans that are more hopeful
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and more confident than those offered us by any utopian, had grown
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brighter. You remember how ten years ago America rang with
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discussion of the promises of the Technocrats. Professors said that
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we could, if we were wise, "smother every family in America with
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commodities," Engineers became visionaries and made blueprints of
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a world in which poverty would be unknown and no man would feel
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that gnawing anxiety about holding the job which a dozen jobless
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hungrily envied. No more of this niggardly counting of dimes when
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the children want to go to the pictures, of dollars for the winter
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boots and clothe's . . . An exaggeration, if you like, but every
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man knows that there is a great and solid scientific truth behind
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it all. And now, instead of seeing our wealth grow and brighten a
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million drab homes, we must pour down the military drain a sum with
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which we could have transformed the face of the earth, and we must
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see our industrial productiveness pass from prostitution to
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weariness.
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That was only half the promise of science. Those knowing folk
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who read so little and talk so much asked, when you spoke about
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this promise of the future: Can you change human nature? You can
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build a house for a pig but it remains a pig. And while folk were
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glibly repeating this old saw science was quietly proving that it
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is just one more popular fallacy like the luck of a rabbit's foot
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or the ill-luck of number thirteen, the virtue of priests or the
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wisdom of Popes. By 1930 the science of psychology had conducted
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the "soul" or "mind" to its frontiers, thanking it for its
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provisional services -- if any. What was left to study was human
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behavior, and as we examined this in a scientific light we saw
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that, instead of it being unalterable or requiring a prodigious
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time to change, it is one of the most modifiable things under the
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sun. Precisely because it is human. Man's behavior differs from the
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rigid automatic behavior of the pig just in that fact that it is
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not rigid and automatic. It depends upon ideas and stimulations
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from without which can be changed; as Russia changed them for its
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people, with stupendous results, in less than a generation.
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It is one of the tragic ironies of our time that, apart from
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Russia, it was only the criminal Dictators who acted upon this rich
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principle of science. As late as the end of 1929 Hitler had not yet
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poisoned the minds -- the mechanism of behavior -- of one in 350 of
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the German people. He had 180000 followers in a population of
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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2
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THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
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60000000. Han's wanted a quiet life, his big pipe and mug of beer
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and friendly neighbors, just as we do. He would have shuddered if
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someone had foretold that in ten years he would, because he
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accepted the lead of a criminal lunatic and a bunch of greedy
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adventurers, see his wife and little Gretchen just splashes of
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churned flesh and blood under the ruins of the home he had built
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for them. But Goebbels changed his "human nature" in six years.
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Mussolini, or Gayda, did the same, with the help of the priests of
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Italy. The Japs did the same with their fishers and farmers and
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textile workers, seizing and prostituting all the magnificent means
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of instruction that science has provided -- the school and college,
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the radio and the cinema, the printing press and the library --
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||
these poisoners of the human race had the majority of folk in three
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nations soon howling like wolves at the scent of blood. Had it not
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been for this we were within measurable distance of a genuine era
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of peace, comfort, and brotherhood.
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This, you may say, certainly looks like what happened, but
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it's impossible. How could a gang, smaller than that which looted
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New York in 1860 or St. Louis in 1890, take over a whole country,
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make a corrupt fortune that beggars Tammany, and have a very fair
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chance of becoming super-emperors?
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Think again; and start with the fact that a small minority of
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men in three countries, men of the vilest character and of colossal
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greed, did secure control of those countries and organize them for
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war. No one disputes that. And if you have had this success
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explained to you on the line that Italy and Germany had, through
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the conduct of Some melodramatic villains called Reds or
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Bolsheviks, fallen into an anarchy that ruined their economies, and
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||
that Mussolini and Hitler came along with "ideologies" which
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promised deliverance from this anarchy, put the theory in the
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trash-basket with the stories of Washington's cherry tree and
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William Tell's apple. It's worse. It is, as we shall see later, a
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||
lie. For years Mussolini and Hitler were just small-scale gangsters
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directing mobs of hoodlums with bottles of castor-oil, loaded
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whips, and automatics. They ranked in the European press, when it
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||
thought fit to notice them, as part of the scum that had boiled to
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||
the surface in a time of trouble.
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||
It was just because they had no appeal to thinking men,
|
||
because they had relied upon disorder and brutality instead of
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||
order and discipline to attain such position as they had, that
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certain larger and more respectable forces -- wealth, privilege,
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and religion -- took them up and gave them that control of the
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spring's of opinion and behavior which has enabled them to make a
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lie look like a grand truth, a gangster's plan seem a schedule of
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national salvation. Thyssen wandering about Europe telling
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||
everybody how the Nazis took his millions and double-crossed him is
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||
one of the thousands who thought they could hire the gunman as the
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White Knights of Privilege and then dismiss them with a suitable
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reward. The heads of the German Church are only less outspoken
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because they are still within reach of the Nazi lash. The King of
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Italy fumes in his Quirinal just as the Pope does in his Vatican.
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||
It is -- to borrow a Phrase from French history -- the Day of
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Dupes.
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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3
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THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
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Until we understand this the blight which has cursed our life
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and the Vatican's share in causing it will remain painful and
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disquieting mysteries. Advertisement is a mild variety of hypnotism
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weakened by the fact that the advertiser has limited resources, and
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a hundred rivals. Smith's soup is the finest in the world until you
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see Jones's poster on the next hoarding. Now the Fascist system was
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so successful in corrupting nations, once its highly respectable
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patrons had given it wealth and power, because it uses the
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hypnotism of the advertiser in its ideal form: no rivalry, no
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discordant note, unlimited resources, the employment of every
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device from the pulpit, to the professor's chair or the urchin with
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||
his bit of chalk. You may object that at all events there must be
|
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something sensible, convincing, attractive in the message that is
|
||
brayed and blazed everywhere. Is it always necessary? If you assail
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ear and eye at every moment of the day for years with "Heil Hitler"
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||
or "Mussolini Solo" millions will begin to see genius in a
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neuropathic or a brutal adventurer who ought to be selling beef and
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mutton. however, there was a message, and it was very convincing.
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Take the case of Germany. On April 3, 1938 the leading German
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scientific weekly, Die Umschau, contained an article, not too
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||
prominently displayed, on the future of Germany in Europe. It was
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||
the program of the New Order, yet as far as I can ascertain, not a
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||
single paper in Britain or America noticed it. It described a
|
||
system of ship-canals and canalization of lakes, already more than
|
||
half constructed in 1938, which would connect every industrial town
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||
in Germany along the Danube and even across France and Belgium,
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||
with nearly every country and port in Europe. The scientific
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||
writer, who ended with a "Heil Hitler," coldly explained how all
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||
Europe would then supply food and raw materials to Germany and
|
||
receive payment in manufactured goods. This, in a respectable
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||
scientific periodical, was the raw program of the future
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||
enslavement of Europe, the paralysis of industry in every country,
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||
and the colossal enrichment of the German manufacturer and worker.
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||
That was the bait. Neither, Thyssen nor Hans cared the toss of a
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||
coin about theories of Nordic blood or Nazi ideology. it was a
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stupendous greed that was dangled before the eyes of Germany; and
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the poor fish in Italy, who believes that he would share the loot,
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||
used the bait to attract his own industrialists and workers. Japan
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notoriously has nothing but the same shameless greed behind its
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bland talk of New Order and Asia for the Asiatic.
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Few took any notice when, in 1938, I drew attention to this
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and similar articles in the responsible German press. At the time
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there was still a world-chorus of praise for the "order and
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efficiency" of the Nazi system, and it would not do to admit a
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jarring note. Folk were told that, while there was no need of
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||
Fascism in the United States and Great Britain, these other -- or
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inferior -- countries were "without form and void" and "darkness
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||
was upon the face of the deep," and it was fine that the spirit of
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||
Fascism "moved upon the face of the waters" creating a new world.
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This Fascism, it was said, menaced only disorderly folk, sadists,
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atheists, corruptors of women and children -- the Reds, in short.
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What a tissue of lies it has all turned out to be! Roosevelt was
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deluded as effectively as Chamberlain or Reynaud; Cardinal
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Dougherty as effectively as the Pope. The historian of the future
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will not ask how a few gunmen nearly became the emperors of half
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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4
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||
THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
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the world. That is already clear. He will ask why the world looked
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on supinely, even applauding, while these men built a force. of so
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formidable a character that they almost compassed their sordid aim.
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There can be only one answer. The statesmen, industrialists,
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||
bankers, and bishops of America are as able and well-informed as
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those of Germany and Japan and far superior to those of Italy. They
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were deluded about the Fascist program because one clause of it so
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far coincided with their own interests that they were not disposed
|
||
to pay close attention to the other clauses. The great thing was
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that they promised to cheek the rapid world-growth of Socialism.
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But the other clauses of the program were plain enough from the
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start. The only change in the scheme of the gunmen in recent years
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is that it has been expanded until it aims at conquering and
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exploiting more than half the earth; and this is not so near to
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lunacy as some would have us believe, It was due to a cold
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||
calculation of the possibilities in view of the supineness or
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||
complacency of the democratic governments and their press and the
|
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support of the Black International.
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Japan, Germany, and Italy have made no secret of their
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aggressive imperialistic schemes during the last ten years. I
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described them in full in 1937 in three booklets of "The A B C
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||
Library of Living Knowledge," taking the facts from semi-official
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and other reliable publications. There was no secrecy about these
|
||
publications. It was a necessary part of Mussolini's appeal to the
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mob from the first that, once the politicians were cleared away, he
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would make a greater Italy by annexing Malta, Corsica, Savoy, and
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Dalmatia. Little girls read that in their balilia catechisms and
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||
even little girls knew that this meant war on England, France, and
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Yugo-Slavia. It was equally necessary for Hitler to promise that he
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would restore the greatness of Germany by bringing in all German-
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speaking lands (Austria, Alsace, and part of Switzerland, Czecho-
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||
Slovakia and Denmark); and to these he added as early as 1924, in
|
||
Mein Kampf, the annexation of the Ukraine and the annihilation of
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France. That meant a European War. Japan has for the last ten years
|
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organized great patriotic societies, With millions of members,
|
||
demanding the annexation of the eastern half of Asia and all
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islands of the Pacific. These three programs were the protocol of
|
||
a world war; the war by which we now suffer. In my three booklets
|
||
I showed that there was not the least uncertainty about that. It is
|
||
just another fairy-tale for adults that the Axis has sprung a
|
||
surprise upon an innocent world.
|
||
The vital question which we have to ask is why America, Great
|
||
Britain, and France permitted, without arming themselves, the three
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||
robber nations to create so gigantic a military force that they had
|
||
a real hope of attaining their object and dividing the earth into
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three Fascist spheres: into two, rather, because Germany and Japan
|
||
never regarded Mussolini as more than a catspaw. In a general way
|
||
you know the answer to this question. The Fascists were going to
|
||
destroy the Reds and that was so monumental a service to the
|
||
democracies, or to their ruling class and their Churches, that even
|
||
diplomats and statesmen and prelates took the word of the arch-
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liars that they would cultivate peace when they had crushed the
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Reds. They were not ignorant but they were guilty of a gross amount
|
||
of wishful thinking. Even when Mussolini publicly and brazenly said
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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5
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||
THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
|
||
that he offered the world "peace resting on eight million bayonets"
|
||
they put it down as a harmless overflow of a strong man's strength.
|
||
When, in 1934, he made the most deliberate and official statement
|
||
of the nature of Fascism (in the article "Fascismo" in his new
|
||
Encyclopedia Italians), saying that Fascism regarded war as the
|
||
noblest work of the race and peace as a degrading ideal, statesmen
|
||
and journalists pretended that they had never read it. So through
|
||
five shameful years the world that was threatened with an appalling
|
||
disaster smiled and praised the "efficiency" of the butchers who
|
||
were sharpening their knives; because the world is now ruled by its
|
||
press, and of the papers on which men relied the world over nine
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||
copies out of ten came from the editorial offices and printing
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shops of rich men who wanted the Reds suppressed at any price.
|
||
But where, you ask, does the Black International enter this
|
||
conspiracy, as it really was? We are going to see immediately that
|
||
of all the privileged minorities which dreaded the Reds and were
|
||
therefore far too easily duped by the promises of the Anti-Reds the
|
||
Church of Rome had the most urgent need of relief. The cry will be
|
||
raised, of course, that I now accuse the Papacy of causing the war.
|
||
That sort of rubbish is a necessary part of the Catholic
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||
propagandist system. What I do say is that the Papacy allied itself
|
||
with Italy, as everybody knows, with Japan, as everybody ought to
|
||
know -- it is only a year since the Vatican coined a gold medal for
|
||
the virtuous Matsuoka -- and, as far as it was allowed to do so,
|
||
with Germany, and that it used its international organization to
|
||
create that fierce and confused hatred of Communism on which the
|
||
Axis would rely when the crisis of the war was reached. Of that
|
||
international plotting in every country these ten booklets will
|
||
provide decisive evidence. It is shame enough that a Church which
|
||
makes such arrogant claims of moral superiority, a Church which
|
||
professes to have the finest international intelligence-service and
|
||
to be inflexible in the condemnation of crime, should be silent, as
|
||
it was silent, during ten years of monstrous outrages -- Manchukuo,
|
||
Austria, Abyssinia, etc. -- but the Pope has a deeper shame. He
|
||
played an active part over and over again on the side of the devil.
|
||
Because the Church of Rome was not merely threatened, like all
|
||
wealth and privilege, by the growth of Socialism -- it was in fact
|
||
breaking up under the impact, and only the violent suppression of
|
||
the Socialists, if necessary by war, could arrest this
|
||
disintegration.
|
||
Chapter II
|
||
JUST WHAT THE PAPACY NEEDED
|
||
There are various ways of divining into sections the broad
|
||
stream of events which we call human history. One might divide it
|
||
from a sociological viewpoint into two parts: the rise and the fall
|
||
of privilege. During the first 3000 years of history we find an
|
||
ever-widening gap between a privileged minority and the working
|
||
majority. Once upon a time men had chosen able and strong men to
|
||
"rule" them, and these had chosen "companion's" (Counts) and
|
||
"leaders" (Dukes) of the troops who shared their privileges. In
|
||
those days it was considered just as important to ward off evil
|
||
spirits and flatter good spirits, and cunning men who could
|
||
persuade their fellows that they were particularly skilful at this
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
6
|
||
THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
|
||
sort of work founded another privileged caste. With the growth of
|
||
wealth, when men began to live in cities, the glamour of the sacred
|
||
castes -- kings, nobles, and priests -- increased, The Kings were
|
||
Sons of God, and the priests were his very special friends. Palaces
|
||
and temples, the mansions of the rich, the nobles, and the chief
|
||
priests, rose high above the clutter of mean homes.
|
||
That is another story, but it is necessary to outline it
|
||
because the world-torture which we endure in this generation is a
|
||
vital stage in the second half of history; the era of the undoing
|
||
of privilege. The "profound" folk -- usually literary men whose
|
||
knowledge of any branch of positive learning would hardly fill a
|
||
five-cent note-book -- who now enlighten us about our problems by
|
||
essays, feature-articles, and sermons have made some remarkable
|
||
discoveries about our age. It is sick; it is degenerate; it is
|
||
World-weary; it has the insolence of youth; it relies too much on
|
||
old men; it misses the firm guidance of religion; it talks too much
|
||
about rights and too little about duties, and so on.
|
||
It is all bunk. For instance, one of the most persistent
|
||
charges is that, being irreligious, our younger men have lost the
|
||
Spirit of sacrifice, whereas in Europe and China at least
|
||
15000000 bravely confront the horrible dangers of a modern war,
|
||
and certainly four-fifths of them (Germans, Russians, British and
|
||
Chinese) have no religion. The truth is that our generation, our
|
||
degenerate, frivolous, selfish generation, has taken up, and more
|
||
vigorously than ever, a task which the race has approached whenever
|
||
and wherever it was free during the last 2500 years; to reduce the
|
||
harsh contrasts of privilege and service, idleness and work, wealth
|
||
and poverty. Our age does not mind paying a good price for high
|
||
service, but it doubts if the services of priests and kings are
|
||
worth billions of dollars to a nation, and the conviction spreads
|
||
that the entire system of privilege is the chief obstacle to the
|
||
scientific organization and betterment of life. The world of
|
||
privilege is, as it has always done, reacting bloodily to the
|
||
revolt.
|
||
The work of undoing privilege began 2500 years ago in the
|
||
cities of Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor, where Greeks mingled
|
||
with men of many races on free soil. There were no kings or nobles,
|
||
the priest's had little power, and the rich -- moderately rich --
|
||
men served as merchants and in their leisure did some very useful
|
||
thinking for the race. Privilege -- the Kings of Persia --
|
||
scattered them, and Greece took up the task. It got rid of its
|
||
kings and listened to philosophers rather than priests; and if the
|
||
Romans to whom the torch was next passed, apostatized to the extent
|
||
of restoring monarchy and allowing some to become very rich --
|
||
though not nearly so rich as our multi-millionaires -- they at
|
||
least exacted a princely price in superb free services to the
|
||
workers. Then the night of the Dark Age fell upon Europe.
|
||
Now that Professors as well as politicians have a great
|
||
respect for "the venerable Church of Rome" and its "august head" we
|
||
must, it appears, not talk about a Dark Age. Please yourself. The
|
||
facts are that whereas in the later days of the Roman Empire three
|
||
workers out of four had been free men, nine out of ten of them were
|
||
during the Dark Age (500-1100) serfs, which is the polite French
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
7
|
||
THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
|
||
way of saying slaves; whereas the Roman workers had all free
|
||
education (and free bread, free games, free medical service, etc.),
|
||
nine out of ten in the new Europe were totally illiterate and of an
|
||
incredible ignorance; and that whereas the Roman and Greeks of the
|
||
fourth century had had the protection of a fine code of law and in
|
||
general character were as good as we are, law was almost as extinct
|
||
as art in the new Europe, and the grossness of manners and morals
|
||
was indescribable. But please yourself, I am merely, in all
|
||
clarity, explaining why the work of human redemption was dropped
|
||
for five or six centuries.
|
||
What it is important to know if we want to understand our own
|
||
age is that from the time when Europe mentally awoke, in the
|
||
eleventh century, to our days this attempt to put the world right
|
||
has inspired three great revolutions, and what we witness today is
|
||
the most logical and the broadest of the three. After five
|
||
centuries of revolts -- the Popes had to fight a republican
|
||
movement in their own city for two centuries -- and bloody
|
||
reprisals Europe saw that the Roman Church was the arch-enemy and
|
||
its power must be broken. Hence the Reformation. On the last
|
||
ghastly fields of the Thirty Years' War, the War of Catholicism and
|
||
Protestantism, which was one of the most savage and squalid in
|
||
history, the race won its first great victory over privilege; and
|
||
it is pleasant as well as informing to recall that this first
|
||
instalment of freedom was won in large part through the criminal
|
||
misbehavior of the Popes themselves. They had stored away in Rome
|
||
a treasure of at least a quarter of a billion dollars to help the
|
||
Catholics when the war came, and when it reached its crisis Pope
|
||
Urban VIII gave the whole vast sum to his greedy and vicious
|
||
relatives. You can read that in the latest Catholic History of the
|
||
Popes (Hayward's, 1931).
|
||
Some of our advanced writers smile at the Reformation, but in
|
||
point of fact it released forces which brought about a rapid
|
||
progress in wealth and science and inspired the deeper revolt; the
|
||
revolt which flared up in the American and the French Revolutions
|
||
and then for a hundred years sustained a struggle against reaction
|
||
and privilege which was as heroic as any in history. The fight was
|
||
now against Church and feudalism as against priests and kings (and
|
||
their politicians) in alliance. America, having abolished
|
||
feudalism, had no share in it except to welcome refugees, and so
|
||
there is some excuse for the very shabby treatment of it in
|
||
American schools, colleges, and history books. But the chief reason
|
||
for the suppression of it is Catholic influence because it knocks
|
||
into a cocked hat everything that the apologists say about the
|
||
Church. I gave a fairly full account of it in various volumes of
|
||
the Appeal to Reason Library and must here confine myself to what
|
||
is vitally required in order to understand the Black International
|
||
and the lies of its apologists.
|
||
Five year's ago, when we began to try to help Spain and I
|
||
recalled Spain's magnificent record in the nineteenth-century
|
||
struggle, a Communist leader, a friend of mine, disdainfully swept
|
||
that struggle aside as "merely a political revolution" and -- this
|
||
was the main point -- thought it wrong to antagonize Catholics by
|
||
talking about it. I doubt if the economic revolt would have been
|
||
possible if the political-religious revolutions had not been
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
8
|
||
THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
|
||
carried first. In any case, a few years later Communism was extinct
|
||
in most of Europe and South America, and the Church of Rome was
|
||
shrieking for the blood of "Bolsheviks" from one side of the planet
|
||
to the other. In fact, Catholic writers are now saying everywhere
|
||
that this Liberalism of the last century is the real root of all
|
||
our modern disorder, and the official attitude of the Church is to
|
||
claim a full restoration of the royalist-clerical regime for which
|
||
it had fought in the last century. Would-be kings, semi-consecrated
|
||
loafers, wait with its blessing, on the frontiers of France, Spain,
|
||
Portugal, Austria and Hungary; and of course poor Leopold of
|
||
Belgium, whom the Church has white-washed, is going to be put back
|
||
on his golden throne.
|
||
Whatever satisfaction anyone finds in dismissing the
|
||
revolution of the last century, the fight to hold the gains of the
|
||
French Revolution, as "a mere political struggle" or a "bourgeois
|
||
revolution," the story of it is vitally relevant to our tragedy
|
||
today, and it is just on that account that it is suppressed or
|
||
toned down in our educational and historical literature. For it
|
||
shows, even as you find it told in the most important European
|
||
manuals, that it is the black priests and their white allies who
|
||
were guilty of just such murderous excesses and vindictive
|
||
massacres as they now mendaciously attribute to the Reds.
|
||
In the course of the Nineteenth Century nearly half a million
|
||
unnamed men, women, and children were done to death, on scaffolds
|
||
and in massacres and deadly jail's, for claiming less -- they were
|
||
as a rule not republicans -- than the rights granted in the
|
||
American Constitution of 1787. If we care to add the men who, from
|
||
Poland to Peru, died on the battlefield for the sacred cause the
|
||
number rises to more than a million, but let us keep to the unarmed
|
||
victims and their very moderate demands. These men and women, and
|
||
often children, were crushed with a savagery that surpasses even
|
||
the worst features of the untruthful stories about the Reds in
|
||
Spain and Russia; and the murderers and torturers were in nearly
|
||
every case directed by priests and bishops who cooperated with
|
||
monarchs (of Naples, Spain, and Portugal) of the vilest type of
|
||
character. The outrages were so revolting and the complicity of the
|
||
Church so clear, that the Catholic historian, Lord Acton, the one
|
||
outstanding historian the Church can claim in modern times, wrote
|
||
to the Catholic historian Lady Blennerhassett:
|
||
The accomplices of the Old Man of the Mountains (the
|
||
classic assassins of history) picked off individual victims,
|
||
but the Papacy contrived murder and massacre on the largest
|
||
and also on the most cruel and inhuman scale. They were not
|
||
only wholesale assassins, but they also made the principle of
|
||
assassination a law of the Christian Church and a condition of
|
||
salvation. (Selections from the Correspondence of the First
|
||
Lord Acton, 1917, Vol. I, p. 55.)
|
||
You may read the horrible details in the Cambridge Modern
|
||
History (Vol X) the greatest historical work in the English
|
||
language, or in any standard history of modern Spain, Portugal
|
||
Italy, and Austria.
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
9
|
||
THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
|
||
These are the undisputed historical facts and the recognized
|
||
authorities upon which I base the statement which I have put in
|
||
italic's and in bold face words. And on the same solid ground I now
|
||
make another statement in bold face words, because these are the
|
||
essential points to remember: The people recovered power from the
|
||
clerical-royalists repeatedly but they never indulged in reprisals,
|
||
much less savagery, as the Black-and-Whites always did. There were,
|
||
naturally, local outbursts against the defeated tyrants, a few
|
||
churches were burned and priests killed, but the authorities always
|
||
checked these spurts of violence. Who, then, are the real Reds?
|
||
What about the famous French Revolution, you may ask? You will
|
||
find it strange, if you reflect, that when Catholic (and some other
|
||
writers) want to show you how the "mob" is prone to commit
|
||
outrages, especially if it is deprived of "the restraints of
|
||
religion", they skip from the French Revolution of 1789 to the
|
||
Russian Revolution of 1917. They refuse to glance at the dozen
|
||
important revolutions which lie between because these were always
|
||
followed by clerical-royalist, savagery when the Whites recovered
|
||
power; a savagery which led Lord Acton, in his day one of the
|
||
leading historians in England, to denounce his own Popes and the
|
||
worst assassins in history. But they also tell long discredited
|
||
lies about the French and the Russian Revolutions.
|
||
Historians are now agreed within narrow limits about the
|
||
September Massacre and the Terror which are the chief charges
|
||
against the French Revolution, as you will find in Lavisse's
|
||
standard history of France, the equivalent of the Cambridge
|
||
History, and more recent French works. In the September Massacre
|
||
there were only about 1100 victims, and most of these were
|
||
criminals and prostitutes from the jails. It is agreed that only
|
||
about 500 men were involved in the butchery, and the hundreds of
|
||
thousands of citizens of Paris were horrified. In the Terror
|
||
(1793-4) there were about 18000 victims -- there had been at least
|
||
30000 in a few days in the horrible Catholic St. Bartholomew
|
||
Massacre -- and only one-fifth of these were nobles, priests, and
|
||
nuns, while <data type="percent" unit="%">67%</data> were atheistic working men. It was a fight
|
||
of rival political parties, and the leader of the winning party,
|
||
the director of the carnage, Robespierre was a fanatically
|
||
religious man who hated Atheism. What is worse, Catholic writers
|
||
never mention, and very few other writer's ever mention, that there
|
||
was a White Terror in 1794 and after the fall of Napoleon which
|
||
was, more brutal, than the Terror of 1793. You probably never heard
|
||
of it. That is how the education of democracies is conducted today;
|
||
to the great satisfaction of the Church and the reactionaries.
|
||
The long and bloody fight which, as I said, dragged on through
|
||
the nineteenth century and was maintained in Russia and Spain until
|
||
our own time was part of this second European Revolution. By 1920
|
||
it seemed to have triumphed everywhere, but the third revolution
|
||
had already begun. We may call this the Economic Revolution but it
|
||
was much broader. Socialism -- not the Anglo-American anaemic type
|
||
but as the world knew it -- threatened a comprehensive war on
|
||
privilege; on rank, wealth, priestly immunities, political
|
||
corruption, and all sorts of "rulers." And just because it was so
|
||
all-embracing, every variety of privilege that it threatened took
|
||
alarm, and they formed a grand coalition. The Unholy Alliance of
|
||
1814 was alive again.
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
10
|
||
THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
|
||
To enlist in its support the more simple-minded folk and the
|
||
masses who had no wealth or privileges to fight for the cry of
|
||
Communism, Bolshevism, or the Reds was raised. The enemy is, of
|
||
course, Socialism, because it aims to create a new social order in
|
||
which there shall be no great private wealth, no chance to make a
|
||
million, no rich landowners, no hereditary rank or office, no
|
||
parasitism, no privileges of priests. The present Pope may be as
|
||
ignorant as you like to think him outside of his theology and
|
||
Church Law but he did know, when he told his Catholics that
|
||
"Communism is the greatest evil in the world" and called for a
|
||
crusade against it that outside Russia Communism never had a
|
||
prospect of attaining power and in Russia -- the Union of Socialist
|
||
Soviet Republics, remember -- it is an ideal of the future.
|
||
Mussolini, we shall see, confesses that he laughed in his sleeve
|
||
when he raised the boogie of Communism in Italy, and in Spain the
|
||
Communists were the smallest, if not the most respectable, of the
|
||
popular parties. But it would not do to talk of extinguishing
|
||
Socialism when the Labor Party in England occasionally calls itself
|
||
Socialist, so they set up the scarecrow of Communism or Bolshevism
|
||
and clothed it in ragged stories of rape and murder.
|
||
In view of it's history the Papacy would inevitably join its
|
||
natural allies -- wealth, power, and privilege -- but in the
|
||
present state of the world it had a special and very pressing
|
||
reason. During the fifteen years -- say from 1919 or 1920 -- after
|
||
Socialism began to spread from Russia over the world the Vatican
|
||
lost, mainly through its influence, more than four times as many
|
||
followers as it had lost at the Reformation.
|
||
The Press is now so much controlled in the Catholic interest
|
||
that this will seem to many a startling statement. It is, in fact,
|
||
well within the range of demonstrable facts. If you reflect that,
|
||
as you will find, the population of Great Britain, the largest
|
||
seceding country, in the days of Henry VIII was only about
|
||
4000000, you easily see that the total loss to the Vatican at the
|
||
Reformation could hardly be more than 12000000. But beyond
|
||
question it lost, mainly to Socialism and Communism, at least
|
||
50000000 between 1919 and the beginning of the Fascist reaction.
|
||
The largest items in this total will be vindicated as we proceed
|
||
but a few words of explanation will reconcile the reluctant reader
|
||
to it.
|
||
In countries where there was a clear-cut issue of Church and
|
||
anti-Church at the polls -- Spain, the South American Republics,
|
||
Italy, Mexico, Germany, and Austria -- the election figures give a
|
||
very safe indication, and they show that in each of these cases
|
||
(except Mexico and Austria) the Church had lost, and the Socialists
|
||
had gained, at least 10000000. Add Russia (where Catholicism was
|
||
nearly extinguished), Mexico, Czecho-Slovakia (where, we shall see,
|
||
the Catholic clergy admit a loss of about 2000000), Holland, and
|
||
Austria (where the Socialists held Vienna until they were
|
||
treacherously disarmed for Hitler by gallant little Dollfuss), and
|
||
further losses in France, Belgium . . . Need I say more? The loss
|
||
was probably nearer 70000000 than 50000000. After the anti-
|
||
clerical revolution in Spain in 1932 the only countries in the
|
||
world that remained officially loyal to the Vatican were Poland and
|
||
Hungary. We will not count Mussolini's Italy.
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
11
|
||
THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
|
||
The Roman Church knows from seven centuries of experience,
|
||
ever since the Albigensian Massacre, that it never recovers ground
|
||
by an intellectual appeal, by honest propaganda. How was it to
|
||
check this new and appalling leakage? Only, as in all ages, by an
|
||
alliance with forces which could and would trample on the ideals of
|
||
peace and freedom. Fascism was just what it needed.
|
||
Chapter III
|
||
IS THE CHURCH OF ROME FASCIST?
|
||
America has been so drenched in recent years with Catholic
|
||
claims that the Church is ideally democratic and that the Pope is
|
||
-- or has been since democracy seemed to have won its battle
|
||
against feudalism -- the inflexible champion of political justice
|
||
and freedom that some may imagine that an alliance with Fascism is
|
||
unthinkable. We shall see largely on the testimony of Catholics, in
|
||
the following booklets that this alliance is an elementary fact of
|
||
the present situation, but it is easy to show at once that this
|
||
Catholic description of the Church's attitude which is broadcast in
|
||
the United states -- and now in the United States only -- is a
|
||
mockery.
|
||
The British Catholic writer, W. Teeling (The Pope in Politics,
|
||
1937), who has quite a reputation for boldness, almost heresy, is,
|
||
his own sect, says that there are 350000000 Catholics in the
|
||
world. How Teeling came to be described as bold and critical I do
|
||
not know. He criticizes the Church only in the matter of Abyssinia
|
||
and only the most expert clerical -- shall we say manipulators of
|
||
truth? try to defend it on that point. With his 350000000
|
||
Catholics he goes 20000000 better than the sufficiently audacious
|
||
official claim, and, recalling how Macaulay gave the total as
|
||
150000000 a century ago, he ask us to admire the miracle of its
|
||
growth. But when you reflect on the high Catholic birth rate -- you
|
||
go to hell, the priest tells Catholic parents, if you cheat the
|
||
Church of possible subscribers by using contraceptives -- and when
|
||
you learn, as you easily can, that according to the experts, the
|
||
population of a modern State would, without birth control, double
|
||
every third of a century, the miracle looks rather tawdry. The
|
||
Catholic total now obviously ought to be 600000000. It is in
|
||
point of fact less than 200000000.
|
||
You smile at the figure of 330000000 when, if you take the
|
||
trouble to look up Catholic statistics, you find that it includes
|
||
30000000 in France, where optimistic Catholic writers do not
|
||
claim 10000000; 30000000 in Germany, where Hitler plays
|
||
skittle's with the Church; 40000000 in Italy, where as long ago
|
||
as 1919 the banned Socialists polled 1840593 votes (more than
|
||
half of the literate adult males) out of 3500000; 24000000 in
|
||
Spain, where it took the armies of three nations two years to put
|
||
the clerical Humpty Dumpty back on the wall; 60000000 in South
|
||
America, where the Blacks keep power only by the use of violence,
|
||
torture, and the zeal of masses of illiterate Indians. And so on.
|
||
These are the little pleasantries of Catholic arithmetic.
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
12
|
||
THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
|
||
Let us say 200000000. Where are they? Now, no sophistry can
|
||
obscure the lesson of the answer to that; and it is the same
|
||
whether you prefer to speak of 150000000 or 350000000
|
||
Catholics. Apart from the "converts" on foreign missions, who might
|
||
be classed as consumers goods, nine-tenths of the Pope's subjects
|
||
live under a Fascist flag. That fact is so uncomfortable that even
|
||
the most ingenious American apologist prefers to say nothing about
|
||
it. They live under the regimes of Vichy France, Franco Spain,
|
||
Salazar Portugal, Mussolini Italy, Horthy Hungary, and in the
|
||
Republics of South and Central America, nearly all of which are
|
||
Fascist, Poland was Fascist before it became compulsorily Nazi. And
|
||
not the boldest apologist can say, even to his own flock, that this
|
||
fact gives pain to the democratic Pope. Everybody knows that he
|
||
warmly blesses the Fascist regime under which they live and urges
|
||
it as the model for all Catholic countries. He has to. In an
|
||
atmosphere of freedom his Church always crumbles.
|
||
Who are the enemies of Fascism? Russia, where the Church has
|
||
virtually perished because of its political intrigues, is the most
|
||
effective and most thorough going enemy, Great Britain, where
|
||
Catholics are less than one-twentieth of the population, is next.
|
||
I do not say the British Empire because the Catholic half of Canada
|
||
is Fascist, and the Catholics of Australia are, under the lead of
|
||
anti-British Archbishop Mannix, by no means united for the struggle
|
||
against Fascism. Third is the United States, where genuine
|
||
Catholics are less than one-tenth of the population but very much
|
||
more than one-tenth of the Isolationists. In sum, there are in
|
||
Europe and America 350000000 non-Catholic thorough opponents of
|
||
Fascism to about 20000000 Catholic more-or-less opponent's. Add
|
||
Asia, and you have 1000000000 non-Catholic opponents, fighting
|
||
or ready to fight against Fascism, and less than 30000000
|
||
Catholics.
|
||
Who were the chief traitors to the cause of democratic
|
||
civilization? Catholic France -- that is to say, the Catholic and
|
||
Pope-directed part of France, Belgium (or its Fascists, royalists,
|
||
and priests), and the Catholic Croats of Yugo-Slavia.
|
||
Who made the best fight against the invading Huns? Norway,
|
||
which has only 2000 Catholics to nearly 3000000 Protestants; the
|
||
Serbs, who are bitterly anti-Papal and were let down by the
|
||
Catholic provinces of their country; Greece, where the Pope has no
|
||
influence; and Russia, where, if you will forgive in Irishism, he
|
||
has still less. Not for a moment do I belittle the fine resistance
|
||
of Poland, but it was not fighting Fascism as such. It was already
|
||
Fascist and had for twenty years persecuted religious minorities.
|
||
It fought for its national independence and to prevent the
|
||
extension to Poland of the anti-clerical elements of Nazism.
|
||
What is the Constitution of the Catholic Church? It is the
|
||
newest approach on earth to that of Nazi Germany. The Church is a
|
||
despotic monarchy. The Pope may not only disregard the collective
|
||
opinion of his cardinals (his cabinet) but he is not bound to
|
||
submit to the decisions of a general council of all the bishops,
|
||
arch-bishops and abbots of the Catholic world. He is the Fuhrer,
|
||
with the additional prerogative of infallibility.
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
13
|
||
THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
|
||
What is the law of the Catholic Church? The most tyrannical
|
||
code of law in the world. The Church has two sets of laws: a code
|
||
of Public Law, which in plain English means Private Law because it
|
||
is kept in a dead language and taught to very few priests and no
|
||
laymen, and Private Law, which you may prefer to call Public Law
|
||
because it alone is translated into modern languages and accessible
|
||
to the general public. You may read this in an American
|
||
translation, if you are able to disentangle the text from the
|
||
artful commentaries of the translator's. It is Fascist enough, if
|
||
Fascism means tyranny. It treats the Catholic laity like sheep.
|
||
They must not read a criticism of the Church and its untruthful
|
||
literature without the permission of a priest who will insist on
|
||
"replying" to it. Penalty -- hell. They must not discuss such
|
||
matters with a critical non-Catholic friend or hear a lecture that
|
||
may be critical. They must urge non-Catholics to read both sides
|
||
but never do it themselves. They must not marry except on lines
|
||
prescribed by the Church whether these accord with civil law or
|
||
not. Penalty -- hell. They must never get a divorce. Penalty --
|
||
hell. But if they are rich the Church will find, even if they have
|
||
been married twenty years and have ten children, that they never
|
||
were married at all.
|
||
The Public Law of the Church is the most arrogant and most
|
||
truculent code in the history of jurisprudence, It is supposed to
|
||
define the relations of the Church to other corporations (states,
|
||
etc.) but if the Church has a bit of legislation which might look
|
||
rather naked and immodest in English, it keeps this also under the
|
||
veil of the dead language of the Public Law. For instance, it is
|
||
one of the most emphatic principles of this Public Law (which is
|
||
never made public) that you cannot leave the Church and so escape
|
||
its jurisdiction, and that if you say that you no longer believe in
|
||
it and have quitted it the Church has "the right and the duty." to
|
||
put you to death. I pass sleepless nights under the shadow of this
|
||
awful sentence which has been hanging over me for 45 years. The
|
||
fundamental principle of the law is that the Church, being the only
|
||
institution on earth that has been established by God, is the only
|
||
"perfect society," and therefore it has the right to overrule and
|
||
dictate to merely secular and human states on any point which it
|
||
chooses to regard as affecting religion or morals; and believe me,
|
||
the clerical genius could prove in five minutes that the color of
|
||
your wall-paper or the number of your blankets is a question of
|
||
morals. It follows at once that the Church will, where it has the
|
||
power, not tolerate the practice or propaganda of any other
|
||
religion, much less irreligion, or any criticism of itself or its
|
||
priests; that no priest must be tried in a civil court; that all
|
||
schools must be subject to clerical authority, and so on.
|
||
Well, you may say, a dead language means a dead letter. Pardon
|
||
me. Latin may be a dead language to you but it is the living
|
||
language of the Church. This ultra-medieval law is not dead letter
|
||
but is taught today in the international Papal (or Gregorian)
|
||
University at Rome, to which selected American priests are sent,
|
||
just as a few are sent from all countries, and Latin is their
|
||
Esperanto. It is, in fact, mainly to give them a thorough knowledge
|
||
of this secret law that they are sent to Rome, for it is not taught
|
||
in the education of ordinary priests, and not one in 100000 of the
|
||
zealous laymen (Knights of Columbus, etc.) who help the priests
|
||
knows anything about it.
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
14
|
||
THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
|
||
But you may be sure that the priestly writers, who tell
|
||
America about the beautiful harmony of Church Law and American Law
|
||
know all about it. The chief manual of it, Father Marianus de
|
||
Luca's Institutiones Juris Ecclesiastici Publici is in every
|
||
seminary. It is not one of those Yellow and dusty tomes that are
|
||
considered too valuable to open every day but a modern book,
|
||
published by the Vatican in the present century. It has a
|
||
particularly warm letter of authorization from Leo XIII, the great
|
||
"democratic Pope," though about ten pages of it are devoted to
|
||
chastising priests who say that the Church his abandoned its "right
|
||
of the sword" or any other medieval claims. I have quoted
|
||
extensively from it elsewhere (Appeal to Reason Library, No.1), and
|
||
you can spend a pleasant hour comparing the nice sentiments which
|
||
Catholics quote for you from Pope Leo's inspiring Encyclicals with
|
||
the sentiments he endorses in Marianus de Lucas book.
|
||
In fact, it comes a little closer to Americans. A more recent
|
||
but equally truculent manual of this Public Church Law is Cardinal
|
||
Lepicier's De Stabilitate et Progressu Dogmatis, Lapicier is a
|
||
Canadian, the oracle of the Canadian Catholics. So white priests in
|
||
Detroit were getting round Henry Ford and the American public with
|
||
stories of how Thomas Aquinas and the Jesuit Suarez laid down our
|
||
most modern principles of political morality centuries ago, and how
|
||
the Pope is the incorruptible protector of democracy, justice, and
|
||
freedom of conscience, other priests just across the river, were
|
||
chuckling over Lepicier. Perhaps they were also in Detroit.
|
||
From the ease with which the American public were duped in
|
||
this matter one would imagine that Quebec is an obscure place round
|
||
Hudson's Bay or in Greenland. Quebec is, under Church law, a
|
||
Fascist state. It is the only free country -- if you can call it
|
||
free -- in the world where Petain's miserable senile corruption of
|
||
our civilization is hailed with joy and admiration instead of
|
||
curses and derision.
|
||
A few years ago a Canadian Journalist, Grant Dexter, had an
|
||
article in the London press (News-Chronicle, August 18, 1938) with
|
||
the title "There is Fascism under the British Flag," and it opened
|
||
with the words: "The facts about Quebec are not in dispute; Church
|
||
and State are combining in an effort to suppress freedom and to
|
||
create a Fascist State on the Italian model." Dexter might have
|
||
said that there has always been Fascism in French Canada. When the
|
||
British took it over from the French the clergy made with them one
|
||
of the usual selfish deals; they would stamp out revolt in the
|
||
people if the British would give them tyrannical rights and powers
|
||
over the people. I found the place a paradise of sleek priests,
|
||
monks and nuns in 1925, but it has become much worse just when the
|
||
British Empire was getting up its courage to "rid the world of
|
||
Fascism." Under the new "Padlock Law" (1937) against Communism,
|
||
which means anything the priests don't like and was directly
|
||
inspired by the present Pope, the police became gestapo. They can
|
||
invade and close premises and arrest men without appeal to the
|
||
Courts. The censorship is tyrannical, and Protestants and Jews who
|
||
have nothing to do with Communism are persecuted. In 1940 a
|
||
respectable girl of sixteen was sentenced to jail (or a heavy
|
||
payment) for distributing tracts of the International Bible
|
||
Students' Association.
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
15
|
||
THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
|
||
To these French Canadians -- and they are four out of the 12000000
|
||
people of Canada -- Franco Spain is an idyllic land, and
|
||
Vichy France is making a noble effort to reach its level. Salazar
|
||
in Portugal and Horthy in Hungary are ideal rulers, and Mussolini's
|
||
sale to the Pope of the liberties which the Italian people had won
|
||
with their blood was a grand victory over the materialism of the
|
||
age. That this encouraged Hitler and his gang, led directly to the
|
||
rape of Ayssinia, and had a considerable influence on the Vatican's
|
||
alliance with Japan is -- well, it is just one of those things.
|
||
How American priests and their writers and politicians were,
|
||
while these sentiments were rampant in canada, assuring the
|
||
American public that the Church stood inflexibly for democracy and
|
||
freedom we shall consider presently, but we must notice here one
|
||
very ironic occurrence. In 1929 the papers announced with great joy
|
||
that Mussolini and the Pope had entered into a Holy Alliance. They
|
||
did not recall that Mussolini had recently said, or roared out on
|
||
a public platform, that he had "marched to victory over the rotting
|
||
corpse of liberty." They did not mention that he had 10000
|
||
political prisoners in jail, many under torture. They said nothing
|
||
to disturb the soothing assurances of Catholic writers, even of Al
|
||
Smith during his presidential campaign, that it was only when the
|
||
founders of our liberties "wedded themselves to ancient Catholic
|
||
political principles that they were able to give birth to modern
|
||
democracy as we know it." Shades of Franklin and Jefferson!
|
||
However, just when Catholic mendacity of this sort was given place
|
||
of honor in the American press the Pope himself was angrily tearing
|
||
it to tatters in Italy.
|
||
Mussolini had bluntly declared in the Italian Camera
|
||
(Congress) that he had made no concession to medievalism, and the
|
||
Pope retorted at once, in an open letter to his Cardinal Secretary
|
||
of State which was published in the Vatican organ, the Osservatore
|
||
Romano (May 30, 1929), that in accepting the Canon Law (Public
|
||
Church Law) for Italy the Duce had conceded everything. The Pope,
|
||
exactly on the lines which I have described above said that
|
||
Mussolini had admitted the thesis that the Church is a "perfect
|
||
society" and he must accept "the logical and juridical consequences
|
||
of such a situation according to constitutive [Church] law."
|
||
We saw what these consequences are. Naturally the Pope did not
|
||
dare assert his "right of the sword" or his duty to put apostates
|
||
to death. It would have meant a claim for the execution of about
|
||
20000000 Italians; and, in spite of the Catholic censorship,
|
||
those blamed Americans might have heard of it. He could not demand
|
||
the suppression of every other religion, because the Americans and
|
||
British had chapels and missions in Italy, but he insisted on
|
||
severe restrictions, complained bitterly that it was only the
|
||
pressure of circumstances that forced him to make any concession,
|
||
and secured at least that the civil law would deal with any free or
|
||
critical discussion of religion. He did point out that one
|
||
consequence of recognizing that the Church is a perfect society is
|
||
that it is "absolutely superior to the State": another is that "in
|
||
matters of conscience the Church and the Church alone has competent
|
||
authority;" another that this particularly applies to "the matter
|
||
of propaganda" and criticism of the Church: another that "the full
|
||
and perfect right to educate does not belong to the State but the
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
16
|
||
THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
|
||
Church": another that "in a Catholic State liberty of conscience
|
||
and of discussion must be understood and carried out in accordance
|
||
with Catholic teaching and law"; another, referring to the Catholic
|
||
scheme of controlling marriage, that the Church "can and must
|
||
enforce it."
|
||
From the viewpoint of the man who wants to know the truth
|
||
about the relation of Catholic law to civil law, who wants to
|
||
examine whether the Church is really democratic or Fascist, this is
|
||
the most important and most explicit document that has emanated
|
||
from the Vatican for fifty years. But no American or British paper
|
||
reproduced it; and even the Catholic who wants to read his own
|
||
Pope's words on the subject will find that he would have to read
|
||
them in my books or one of Marshall's -- which he is forbidden
|
||
under pain of hell to open! Remember what Heywood Broun, a
|
||
journalist of knowledge and character, said about the Catholic
|
||
censors of the Press: "There is not a single New York editor who
|
||
does not live in terror of this group,"
|
||
One of the aims of this general intimidation of editors or of
|
||
newspaper owners by threats to withdraw Catholic advertisers or
|
||
readers is to protect the Catholic-American fiction that the Church
|
||
never interferes in polities. The Vatican, we are told, cooperates
|
||
at one time with a democratic state and at another with a Fascist
|
||
state because it leaves to the people the choice of its political
|
||
form. It must cooperate with the established state in protecting
|
||
the interests of religion. Did not the great Pope Leo XIII
|
||
formulate that principle in golden words which have been reproduced
|
||
so many hundreds of times that there is no excuse for any writer
|
||
who does not know it?
|
||
We smile. Until 1939 the assurances of Hitler and Mussolini
|
||
that they ardently desired peace in Europe were reproduced just as
|
||
many hundreds of times. And the Catholic writer who quotes the
|
||
Encyclical (Immortale Dei) of Leo XIII as a sublime utterance on
|
||
"The Constitution of Christian States" and the freedom of people to
|
||
shape their own constitutions is no more honest than Hitler or
|
||
Mussolini. The very title given to it in the English translation is
|
||
a trick. The Pope's title is "On the Constitution of Catholic
|
||
States." A few other neat little changes conceal the fact that the
|
||
aim of it was almost the exact opposite of what Catholic writers in
|
||
America pretend. It was addressed to France, and its chief object
|
||
was to chastise the French for daring to choose a constitution
|
||
which put all religions on the same level by excluding the Catholic
|
||
Church from polities, the lawcourt, and the school: which is just
|
||
what the American Constitution does. The Encyclical was written in
|
||
1885, and the French people had then lived under a Republic for
|
||
fourteen years. The Papacy had during all that time refused to
|
||
recognize the political form which they had chosen in a free
|
||
Congress and with the full support of the country. Leo XIII, who
|
||
never interfered in politics, had stubbornly insisted that they
|
||
must take back either the royal or the imperial family.
|
||
The whole Catholic propaganda on this point is nauseating in
|
||
its dishonesty. The world does not need a Pope to tell it that a
|
||
nation can choose its own political form, and the Pope forgot this
|
||
Catholic principle when the Spaniards set up a Republic in 1932. It
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
17
|
||
THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
|
||
is not the business of a moralist, however richly oiled he may be,
|
||
to dictate on such matters as choosing between a royalist and
|
||
republican form. But if there is any such thing as political
|
||
morality or principle in public affairs, the Fascist form of a
|
||
state, being imposed upon a people by force, does concern it. And
|
||
when those who have imposed it are corrupt adventurers like Hitler,
|
||
Mussolini and Franco, or senile splutterers like Petain, when they
|
||
lie and cheat like medieval Popes and princes, when they debauch
|
||
their people with sentiments of banditry and commit outrages on a
|
||
vast scale, it is time for the Pope, to speak out. Yet, while
|
||
statesmen all over the world who do not claim to be "holy men"
|
||
loathe and execrate them, the Pope enters into alliance with them.
|
||
He has a concordat with every Fascist ruler in Europe and South
|
||
America, but he goes far beyond that.
|
||
Does the Catholic apologist mean that men in power, no matter
|
||
how criminal they may be, must be taken into alliance if they
|
||
promise to protect and promote "the interests of religion"? What
|
||
interest of religion, in the best sense, can such men promote? And
|
||
what are their promises worth? A man's principles are suspect if he
|
||
deals with them, but his intelligence is worse than suspect.
|
||
Religion in such a case obviously means the power and wealth of the
|
||
Papacy and the Catholic hierarchy, And it will be shown
|
||
overwhelmingly in this series of booklets that for the last ten
|
||
years or more the Black International has intrigued with the powers
|
||
of darkness in its own interest and condoned every outrage and
|
||
deception that prepared the way for this ghastly crime against
|
||
humanity.
|
||
Chapter IV
|
||
HOW THE CRIME WAS ORGANIZED
|
||
Aggressive war was always barbaric. Priests reserve the
|
||
richest section of their vocabulary of vituperation (loathsome,
|
||
swinish, filthy, obscene, bestial, etc.) for the man who loves a
|
||
woman without their blessing, but they have always contrived to
|
||
keep their dignity when they condemn aggressive war. They know that
|
||
whenever their own nation enters upon one they will support it. Yet
|
||
it is a crime on so vast a scale that no individual crime can for
|
||
a moment be compared with it.
|
||
It was always a relic of barbarism. Today it stinks. There
|
||
used to be, and still in defensive war are features -- a superb
|
||
courage, a heroism, a self-sacrifice for others, a splendid
|
||
challenge to our common cowardice -- that have moved quite
|
||
respectable writers to praise it. Sir Arthur Keith, one of the most
|
||
kindly And most humane of men, said some years ago that war is
|
||
necessary. He could not say that today. Modern aggressive war,
|
||
Fascist war, the war launched by the men who mouth about their
|
||
invincible legions, their indomitable courage, their noble blood,
|
||
is an incarnation of cowardice. What is called the Age of Chivalry
|
||
in European history is a Catholic lie. Historical experts -- not
|
||
writers of manuals of general European history for American
|
||
colleges -- consider the period (1100-1400) one of the most brutal,
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
18
|
||
THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
|
||
dishonest, treacherous, and aggressively sexual in the chronicle of
|
||
civilization. What we see today is not a decay of chivalry but
|
||
precisely a return to the so-called Age of Chivalry, with certain
|
||
diabolical improvements (from the bandit's angle).
|
||
You prepare the way for your war by years of lying, cheating,
|
||
corrupting, prostituting your women, seducing soldiers and
|
||
statesmen, and buying traitors and Fifth Columnists. Meantime you
|
||
forge your weapons in underground arsenals. When you are ready, you
|
||
look round the map for the weakest victim, and you bear down upon
|
||
him with a force four or five times as great as his. You shelter
|
||
your men behind an advancing war of steel. You drive hundreds of
|
||
thousands of frantic women and children and old men along the roads
|
||
before them, knowing that your enemy is less inhuman than you and
|
||
it will paralyze his defense. You pour hell upon the towns where
|
||
the women and children and old men live so as -- this is laid down
|
||
in German and Japanese military manuals -- to take the heart out of
|
||
their husbands or sons in the field, and you then announce that you
|
||
have bombed their "military installations." You flood them with
|
||
poison gas -- unless you learn that they have enough to retaliate
|
||
A your cities . . . In a word, it stinks. And the Black
|
||
Internationals, the Pope and his cardinals, archbishops, bishops,
|
||
priests, monks, nuns, and paid journalists and organizers, have for
|
||
ten years or more cooperated with the arch-criminals who have
|
||
brought this blight upon civilization. They have done more. They
|
||
have summoned the bandits to the foul work and called it a Crusade.
|
||
Now that, you say, is really too strong. But is any man really
|
||
ignorant that the present Pope raised the cry, years before the war
|
||
started, before we heard those first shots in Spain which were the
|
||
curtain-raiser of the great tragedy, that the powers must unite to
|
||
"extinguish Bolshevism in Spain, Mexico, and Russia," and that the
|
||
cry was taken up by the whole Catholic world? How did Catholic's
|
||
think that Bolshevism was going to be extinguished? With rose-
|
||
water? Seldes is very frank in his work The Vatican about the way
|
||
in which the Knights of Columbus joined the Wall Street Choral
|
||
Society in demanding war upon Mexico, that is to say, of course,
|
||
upon its Bolshevism, though it hasn't got any. Is a war less
|
||
criminal when the defender is incomparably weaker than the
|
||
aggressor? Profane moralists think otherwise. Has any man now any
|
||
serious doubt that the Pope encouraged Franco to rebel and the
|
||
Italians and Germans to assist him? As to Russia, Pacelli, who is
|
||
now Pope Pius XII, has howled for the extinction of its Bolshevism,
|
||
and in particular has appealed to Germany to allow him to cooperate
|
||
in this, in explicit terms since 1936 and implicitly long before
|
||
that. Crushing Bolshevism in Russia meant, as we now see and as any
|
||
properly informed man could have foreseen, the bloodiest war in
|
||
history.
|
||
If, as one can hardly suppose, a man has any doubt about this
|
||
charge against the Black International, he will get ample
|
||
information in the following books. We shall, in fact, see all
|
||
about Pacelli Pius in the next book. But proofs meet the eye every
|
||
day. Why do you suppose that the head of the Roman Church in
|
||
Britain, Cardinal Hinsley, has warned Catholics to be prepared for
|
||
terrible propaganda against the Church when the war is over? Why is
|
||
Archbishop Mannix, the head of the Church in Australia, permitted
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
19
|
||
THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
|
||
to make such attacks on the British effort to extinguish Nazism,
|
||
that on the latest count, only <data type="percent" unit="%">16%</data> of the Australian
|
||
volunteers are Catholics and <data type="percent" unit="%">65%</data> Protestants? Why do
|
||
international radio experts complain in England (News-Chronicle,
|
||
August 21, 1941) that Italian broadcasters address English
|
||
Catholics "as if they were a ready-made Fifth Column"? Why does the
|
||
Vatican radio find it necessary repeatedly to meet the charge that
|
||
the Pope is pro-Axis? Why does it denounce as traitors to the
|
||
Church Polish and other officials who adhere to the Anglo-Russian
|
||
alliance? Why do those servile followers of the Vatican, Franco and
|
||
DeValera, help Germany? What about the Pope's latest pet scheme, a
|
||
Catholic bloc to be formed with the help of Germany?
|
||
But this booklet must be a preliminary general survey. The
|
||
plot will be shown and proved in detail in the following booklets,
|
||
and on the most positive evidence. It is sometimes difficult, even
|
||
impossible, to prove the Vatican's share in international intrigues
|
||
and crimes. Catholicism is not the same thing in America as in
|
||
Italy. It is a minority Catholicism and most behave very prudently.
|
||
Sometimes American Catholics tell you, when you point out the
|
||
irrepressible absurdities and eccentricities of their Church, that
|
||
you "ought to see it in a Catholic country." You may be sure these
|
||
men have never seen it themselves in Eire, Spain, Italy, and
|
||
Poland. In these countries Catholics can from long familiarity see
|
||
and hear without raising an eyebrow things that would make an
|
||
American Catholic pale. Very often, in fact, they are kept in
|
||
complete ignorance of what the Vatican is doing in their own
|
||
country with its underground diplomacy and secret agreements, and
|
||
the apologist flatly denies these things -- until they come to
|
||
light years later.
|
||
What do you think of this choice specimen? In the years when
|
||
Britain obstinately refused Home Rule to Ireland there was very
|
||
serious trouble, and it was often said, and angrily denied, that
|
||
the Vatican secretly negotiated with the British Government to use
|
||
the influence of the priests to cheek the people in return for
|
||
concessions in England. The Irish leaders knew that it was true. I
|
||
have myself heard John Dillon in the last century exclaim: "I take
|
||
my religion from Rome but not my polities." It all came out in the
|
||
official biography of Leo XIII by Msgr. T'Serelaes, but it had an
|
||
ironic sequel which American papers have probably not noticed. The
|
||
British statesmen and the Catholic lords never thought that in the
|
||
end the Vatican would double-cross them, but it did. The Irish
|
||
Press, a staunch Valerist paper, said in an editorial in its issue
|
||
of May 26, 1933:
|
||
Today Ireland learns for the first time one of the most
|
||
moving and glorious stories in connection with the Easter Week
|
||
Rising [1916]. Before it took place Pope Benedict XIV received
|
||
a mission from the Irish Volunteer Executive in the person of
|
||
George Noble, Count Plunkett. The Count had a private audience
|
||
of two hours with His Holiness and disclosed to him the
|
||
decision to rise and the date of the insurrection and received
|
||
from him his Apostolic Benediction on the men who were facing
|
||
death for Ireland's liberty.
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
20
|
||
THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
|
||
You may admire the pathetic rebellion or you may think it
|
||
foolish in its plain futility. You may acknowledge the right of
|
||
rebellion yet feel that these secretly organized revolts, when a
|
||
country is engaged in a terrible war, are not pleasant to
|
||
contemplate. But the only point of interest here is that if we had
|
||
suggested at the time that the Papacy was in any way involved in
|
||
the movement we would have raised a storm of indignation. Yet it
|
||
was not simply involved. The Pope outwardly friendly with the
|
||
British, gave his most solemn encouragement to the enterprise by
|
||
giving it his Apostolic Benediction. Now that De Valera has got all
|
||
that he expects to get out of England he reveals the truth.
|
||
Should we be unduly suspicious we suggested that the Vatican,
|
||
through the Catholic hierarchy, encouraged De Valera to refuse the
|
||
use of ports to Britain and so prolonged the carnage of seamen and
|
||
the brutality of the Nazi regime? Especially when we have the heads
|
||
of the hierarchy in Australia publicly threatening what the Church
|
||
will do if Britain forces a temporary occupation; especially when
|
||
De Valera, Franco, Salazar, and Weygand (who would grant the
|
||
Germans the use of ports tomorrow if they were more confident of
|
||
its final victors) are abjectly amenable to Papal direction. We
|
||
remember how Leo XIII's clerical biographer boasts of the
|
||
cleverness of his hero in making deals with Prussia at the expense
|
||
of the Poles, which was denied at the time, just as he boasts of
|
||
his diplomatic intrigues in London at the expense of the Irish. We
|
||
remember how American Catholics raged when Pegler in one of his
|
||
syndicated articles accused the Vatican of supporting Japan. Now
|
||
the Pope receives Matsuoka in great honor at the Vatican and gives
|
||
that arch-hypocrite a gold medal.
|
||
But do not get a false impression. This exposure of the plots
|
||
of the Black International will not at any point rely on
|
||
suspicions. It is based on such positive evidence is I have just
|
||
given of the Irish plot. The only suggestion or suspicion I
|
||
introduce is that the plot most probably goes far beyond what we
|
||
can at present prove. That is a plain inference from the historic
|
||
way in which Vatican intrigues are angrily denied at the time and
|
||
later revealed or -- as is the case with the Japanese alliance --
|
||
indignantly denied by American priests and at the same time claimed
|
||
by French and Italian priests as proof of the Pope's cleverness.
|
||
The known facts, the Pope's published words and actions, are,
|
||
however, grave enough and, in view of the criminality of the Axis
|
||
plot against the world, the infamy of the way in which it was
|
||
organized, the bestiality with which it has so far been carried
|
||
out, they make a mockery of what Catholic apologists have said in
|
||
America for half a century.
|
||
Let us first be quite clear on this organization of the plot;
|
||
and this I particularly recommend to men and women of fine
|
||
sensitivity who are tempted to say that the whole world has somehow
|
||
apostatized from its ideals. Three nations only want aggressive
|
||
war: three nations out of fifty, or one-tenth only of the race.
|
||
Another tenth (backward people) know nothing about it, but eight-
|
||
tenths loath aggressiveness and the brutality it causes. Don't
|
||
blame the world.
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
21
|
||
THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
|
||
Even in the case of Germany, Italy, and Japan, the nation is
|
||
not so much corrupt as corrupted by a minority; and this corruption
|
||
was accomplished in ten years and can, by a reversal of the
|
||
educational machinery, be redeemed in less than ten years. Nations
|
||
like France and Spain may seem under Vatican influence to have
|
||
adhered to the corrupt gangs, but we know that the majority are
|
||
sound and when the time comes for the final and drastic,
|
||
destruction of this clerical influence they will rise to greater
|
||
heights than ever.
|
||
The second point to hold clearly in mind is that it is a
|
||
military-economic plot. It appeared first in Japan, where a score
|
||
of very wealthy families wanted more wealth and hundreds of others
|
||
wanted to reach the same position. Fortunately for them Japanese
|
||
naval and military commanders are still at the medieval or Samurai
|
||
level of mentality. They want to win "glory" by conquering half of
|
||
Asia. The miserable politicians and the heads of the Shinto and
|
||
Buddhist religions were bought -- literally -- to support the plot,
|
||
and the Vatican promised that if it were given a monopoly of the
|
||
Christian missions it would see that the Gospel was accommodated to
|
||
this noble design of exploiting the slave labor and vast resources
|
||
of China, indo-China, Thailand, etc!. In Germany the economic
|
||
element precedes the military, as it had to create the army afresh,
|
||
and in the case of Italy we will not venture to speak of military
|
||
"glory." In sum, the world is darkened by a plot of two nations to
|
||
create a vast wealth by exploiting all the other nations. Italy was
|
||
never seriously meant to share it. Mussolini ought to have paid
|
||
more heed to Hitler's emphatic statement in Mein Kampf twenty years
|
||
ago that there is no room in Europe for two great powers.
|
||
The third point to keep clear is that Mussolini and Hitler had
|
||
not at first any idea of the ultimate plot. Mussolini, a brutal,
|
||
scatter-brained adventurer, was too busy breaking the heads of
|
||
Socialists with whom he had quarrelled, to write programs, and
|
||
Hitler just put together a few Christian Socialist ideas
|
||
(especially anti-Semitism) and the already familiar demand that all
|
||
sections of the German-speaking race must unite. Add the spice of
|
||
denouncing Versailles, though it had treated Italy far too
|
||
generously. How these mob leaders and saloon-bar politicians came
|
||
to have definite and rapidly expanding programs is a long story
|
||
that will, as far as, is necessary, be told in later booklets. In
|
||
a word, it was due to the adoption of the parties by the
|
||
capitalists, who in time saw an opportunity of acquiring amazing
|
||
wealth by enslaving Europe, Asia, and Africa; the majority of the
|
||
workers, who were diverted from dreams of dispossessing their own
|
||
wealthy to a dream of taking England's lucrative place as "the
|
||
world's shopkeeper"; the army, which is always ready to "conquer"
|
||
when you give it the tools; the Churches in each country and the
|
||
Vatican for the whole world.
|
||
The question that will interest the future historian is, as I
|
||
said, not how the plot grew, which it is very easy to trace, but
|
||
how the rest of the world was so duped that it made no defensive
|
||
preparations, except the futile Maginot Line in France. Again there
|
||
can be only one answer. The world was duped by its statesmen and
|
||
its rich newspaper-owner who refused to see anything except that
|
||
privilege would be saved by the extinction of Bolshevism in Italy,
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
22
|
||
THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
|
||
Spain, Germany, China and Russia. These are large questions to
|
||
which a full answer will be Provided in the later booklets, but
|
||
most people will remember how the press of America and Britain (and
|
||
France) was filled for years with (1) lying stories of the
|
||
confusion and inefficiency into which Socialism had led Italy,
|
||
Germany, Spain, and Russia; (2) lying, stories of the efficiency of
|
||
the Nazi and Fascist regimes; (3) sympathy with the pressure of
|
||
population in Italy and Germany, though everybody knew that
|
||
Mussolini and Hitler were forcing the birth rate, and every expert
|
||
knew that there was far less pressure than in England or Belgium.
|
||
To what extent statesmen and editors and heads of Churches
|
||
really fooled themselves into thinking that the vast armaments
|
||
which Hitler and Mussolini were creating would be allowed to rust
|
||
when they had crushed Bolshevism in Spain and Russia as well as
|
||
their own countries is not my concern. Perhaps you remember how a
|
||
few years ago an French journalist in an interview (arranged for
|
||
the purpose,) asked Hitler about his emphatic statement in Mein
|
||
Kampf that France would be ground to powder, when he airily brushed
|
||
it aside as an ebullition of younger days -- it was still printed
|
||
in every edition on a score of pages. -- the press everywhere gave
|
||
prominence to his assurance; and the same press everywhere, with a
|
||
few honorable exception's, repeated every lie and libel about
|
||
Soviet Russia that anybody cared to send in.
|
||
Chapter V
|
||
HOW UNCLE SAM WAS DUPED
|
||
The verdict of this generation of young folk, when they grow
|
||
up, will be that the "Guilty Men" -- journalists use that language
|
||
at last, forgetting that editors were as guilty as statesmen -- who
|
||
let the monstrous evil attain such proportions are only a little
|
||
less guilty than the bandits. In this respect I approach death with
|
||
clean hands. In my Haldeman-Julius publications for the last six
|
||
years, especially the Appeal to Reason Library, and the ABC
|
||
Library, and The History of the World Since 1918, I have thoroughly
|
||
exposed the current untruths, described the growth of the plot, and
|
||
made clear the true attitude of the Roman Church. This attitude and
|
||
the work of American Catholic apologists in falsely representing it
|
||
are the last point to be noticed in this introductory booklet.
|
||
The New York Times of May 12, 1940, contained a very special
|
||
apology for the Vatican by Dr. Ryan, Catholic bishop of Omaha. That
|
||
paper has, as many quotations in these booklets will show, given us
|
||
a fair news-service both from the Vatican and Russia, and it was
|
||
right to publish the Catholic case. Ryan, formerly head of the
|
||
Catholic University, is the fifteen-inch gun, the 50-ton tank, of
|
||
American Catholic apologetic on these matters. His strength is,
|
||
besides his Catholic learning, that he is so solemn that he always
|
||
gives you the impression that he believes what he says. Even when
|
||
in the course of this article he says that today "the place of
|
||
Papacy in world affairs seems to stand out in bolder relief than at
|
||
almost any other epoch of its long existence," he is quite serious,
|
||
though he cannot possibly refer to the Vatican's share in the
|
||
world-plot.
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
23
|
||
THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
|
||
Dr. Ryan's complete vindication of the wisdom and the
|
||
integrity of the Papacy is this. In the last century it fought
|
||
"political liberalism." This is now dead and "on its ruins there
|
||
have risen such extremes as communism and fascism" which "meet on
|
||
the common ground of state totalitarianism." Against these new
|
||
dragons the Papacy steps out again in shining armor, and they "have
|
||
thrown down the gauntlet to Catholicism," which cannot possibly
|
||
"capitulate to the new theories," Thus "the democratic regimes"
|
||
have no stouter champion than the Pope, and all Americans must
|
||
rally to him.
|
||
Two months later, when the pious and purblind Petain trampled
|
||
on the last remnants of democracy in France, the Papal newspaper,
|
||
the Osservatore Romano (July 8), hailed his restoration of "the
|
||
principle of authority" with enthusiasm and Said that in this
|
||
respect "the aims of the dictatorships coincided with those of the
|
||
Church." What the leading Catholic apologist felt when the same New
|
||
York Times (July 19) gave the gist of this Papal article one
|
||
wonders. The Osservatore quoted its pet dictator Salazar saying:
|
||
"The authoritarian regimes have the purpose of creating a civic
|
||
conscience as a way to create a moral conscience", and in the name
|
||
of the Pope added: "Such are also the desire, the aspiration, and
|
||
the program of the Church." And the Times Rome correspondent, went
|
||
on to say that the Germans rejoiced at this "complete about-face by
|
||
the Vatican in its position toward totalitarian states!" You see,
|
||
the terrible case with which Germany crushed Holland, Belgium, and
|
||
France had convinced the Pope that it was going to win the war; and
|
||
from that time onward the Vatican's one great idea was to set up a
|
||
bloc of totalitarian Catholic States in cooperation with Hitler.
|
||
Pity the poor American apologist in these days. But Ryan's
|
||
plea was gross even at the time. In the last century, he begins,
|
||
the Church fought political liberalism. Yes, at a cost of half a
|
||
million lives of Liberals and with such documents as its moth-eaten
|
||
Syllabus. Political liberalism means simply democracy, sol the
|
||
Church fought democracy, which Ryan has always denied. Other
|
||
apologists prefer to say "economic liberalism" but they obviously
|
||
do not know what they are talking about because the Church joined
|
||
with economic liberalism in a violent attack upon its opposite,
|
||
Socialism. This political liberalism is now "defunct," Ryan says.
|
||
Yes -- in all Catholic countries. As we saw, nine-tenths of the
|
||
Pope's subjects live under a Fascist flag, and the Pope presses
|
||
upon them as the political ideal the totalitarian regime of Italy
|
||
and Portugal. It is upon Protestant lands that the Crusade for
|
||
democracy and against Fascism vitally depends. And Ryan's final
|
||
point that the principles of the Catholic Church compel it to fight
|
||
for democracy and freedom is even worse. If it were true, the
|
||
Vatican is guilty of a monstrous moral apostasy. But it is the
|
||
reverse of the truth. We have seen that the Church of Rome is
|
||
Fascist in its Constitution, its law, its principles, and
|
||
everything about it. It coquetted -- cocotted might be better --
|
||
with democracy as long as it paid.
|
||
The recent history of Vatican policy -- it has no "principles"
|
||
in the ordinary sense -- is not obscure. It was fiercely anti-
|
||
democratic, until the last quarter of the last century. It still
|
||
remained anti-democratic, expressing this plainly in its relations
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
24
|
||
THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
|
||
with France, until near the end of the century. It insulted and
|
||
humiliated the heads of the Catholic Church in America by
|
||
addressing to them an Open Letter, published all over the world,
|
||
condemning what is called Americanism. What it condemned was
|
||
precisely what Ryan and other apologists teach: that there is no
|
||
lack of harmony in any respect between the spirit and law of the
|
||
Church and the American spirit and law But the "century ended with,
|
||
apparently, the triumph of political liberalism all over the world,
|
||
and the Vatican ceased its mumbling. On political matters it became
|
||
ideally neutral; and the Church in America began to store up
|
||
billions of dalliers while the Church in France and Italy shrank,
|
||
so much that its contributions to the treasury were meager. One
|
||
must keep an eye on these Americans.
|
||
Then began the golden age of Catholic propaganda in America.
|
||
The Church, they said, was essentially democratic; always had been
|
||
in fact. The apologists grew bolder and bolder. Not only is the
|
||
eternal political truth in the Encyclicals (slightly retouched) of
|
||
Leo XIII (who hated democracy) but it was now discovered in the
|
||
writings of the Jesuit Suarez (who would have had a man burned at
|
||
the stake for professing it) and even in the works of Thomas
|
||
Aquinas (who had picked a few ancient Greek ideas out of the works
|
||
of Aristotle but otherwise defended the most merciless principles
|
||
of medieval clerical tyranny). The flag of freedom had been first
|
||
set up in Catholic Maryland; which, Bancroft had clearly shown,
|
||
never had more than a Catholic minority, and these had passed the
|
||
policy of toleration in their own defense.
|
||
Year after year American Catholic writers and journals
|
||
broadcast this monumental untruth, but the Vatican itself was
|
||
meantime watching for the first opportunity to get rid of its
|
||
misalliance with the vulgar drab Democracy and recover its
|
||
association with its elegant Aristocracy. Ryan says: "Political
|
||
liberalism and not the Papacy was almost completely destroyed in
|
||
the cataclysm of the World War." He ventures to say that in one of
|
||
the best-informed countries in the world! Just think for yourself,
|
||
for no reading is necessary in order to test this.
|
||
Democracy was not destroyed in Russia, for it had never had
|
||
democracy. It was not destroyed but for the first time set up in a
|
||
pure form, by getting rid of Kaiserism and the Junkers, in Germany.
|
||
It was not in the least weakened, but invigorated by the collective
|
||
war-effort in America, the British Empire, France, Italy -- in
|
||
fact, all over the world except in Japan. Oh, Ryan will say, I take
|
||
a long view; I see Communism already growing. We will not press his
|
||
language -- that democracy was destroyed in the World War -- but we
|
||
reply that he is using one of the flimsiest tricks of propaganda.
|
||
Outside Russia, where the conditions were unique, Communism, which
|
||
must be taken in this connection to mean the dictatorship of the
|
||
proletariat, never had a chance of attaining power. Bela Kun was an
|
||
episode. What did show a prospect of gaining the world was
|
||
Socialism, and it is the only pure form of democracy. But the
|
||
Catholic apologist, like his colleagues as fellow-crusaders in Wall
|
||
Street, finds it more useful to say Communism. They could never
|
||
have made America quite so red-hot about Socialism.
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
25
|
||
THE VATICAN'S LAST CRIME
|
||
What are the facts? Dictatorship began first after the war in
|
||
Poland; and no government in the world was more subservient to the
|
||
Vatican than the Polish, no other nation so solidly Catholic. The
|
||
democracy began next in Spain where in 1923, the King and Church
|
||
had, to prevent an inquiry into their corruption, set up a
|
||
dictator. He had the blessing and cordial cooperation of the Pope.
|
||
Mussolini had marched on Rome in the previous year, but his
|
||
dictatorship was very imperfect -- as late as 1925 more than
|
||
2500000 or half the country voted against him -- until he came to
|
||
terms with and bought the support of the Vatican. This was in 1929.
|
||
During ten years after the war the only blows at democracy, which,
|
||
instead of being "defunct," as Ryan says, was as vigorous as ever,
|
||
had been dealt in Catholic countries with the warm support of the
|
||
hierarchy, and the Pope.
|
||
In 1929 Pacelli-Pius became Secretary of State at the Vatican,
|
||
and democracy began to bleed. Japan started on China, (1931) and
|
||
the only power in the world to enter into close association with it
|
||
was the Vatican City. Germany still rejected Nazism, but in 1932
|
||
the Pope made an underhand deal with Hitler, and this was one of
|
||
the chief reasons why he won and destroyed democracy. In 1934
|
||
democracy was destroyed in Vienna, after Dollfuss had had an
|
||
interview with the Pope and with the zealous cooperation of the
|
||
Austrian hierarchy; and Mussolini, loudly cheered by the whole
|
||
Italian Church, entered Abyssinia. Next year (1935) Pacelli visited
|
||
South America, and the statesmen and generals who fawned upon him
|
||
made a bloody end of democracy. In 1936 Franco, with the Pope's
|
||
blessing, began his vile work in Spain, and the way was prepared
|
||
for the world-assault on democracy. It survives, fighting for its
|
||
life, in non-Catholic countries.
|
||
That is the story we shall tell in detail, but that this is
|
||
the true outline of it everybody knows. The Church of Rome is
|
||
vitally implicated in the most criminal and most gigantic
|
||
conspiracy in history. It blesses or courts men to whom lying is a
|
||
pastime and wholesale murder and brutality are necessities which
|
||
they defend with amazing callousness. Perhaps it is the Vatican's
|
||
last crime, for when this war is over a grim reckoning will be
|
||
required of the Pope. He clings to his infamous association while
|
||
every sane and free part of the world covers it with obloquy.
|
||
<div> <div>
|
||
Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.
|
||
The Bank of Wisdom is always looking for more of these old,
|
||
hidden, suppressed and forgotten books that contain needed facts
|
||
and information for today. If you have such books please contact
|
||
us, we need to give them back to America.
|
||
<div> <div>
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
26
|
||
</conspiracyFile> |