Tag / history

by omniagallia

Reflections from London: Pathos and Progress

Today, November 2, was the birthday of my late mother, so I dedicate this post to her memory. Also to honor and advocate for the power of kindness and wise compassion, such as she often showed. That is relevant to my overall topic here, about our potential to advance beyond archaic lower impulses.

November 2 is also ‘All Souls Day’ in the Catholic tradition, when we may reflect on all those – not just our loved ones or co-religionists – who have gone before us in the great, turbulent narrative of Mankind.

Both those references, to advancement and reflection, apply to this post, which comes from my recent October, ’24, visit to Europe (London, Paris, Bordeaux). It deals specifically with a dark chapter of that narrative, one that our civilization has largely left behind, and with the hopeful implications of our having done so.

The word ‘Tyburn’ still resonates among many historically aware people. It is the name of a site originally beyond the western fringe of London (which has now grown up around it) where, for more than 500 years, men and women (and sometimes, children) convicted of capital crimes in the city were executed.

It lingers in the cultural semi-consciousness as a place of injustice, cruelty, indifference (as well as deep grief and sorrow) and other base attributes supposedly indelibly in Human Nature. Yet Tyburn may also now be considered a point from which ‘Human Nature’ has arguably taken a substantial step forward.

Perhaps the most somber incident during my 2016 visit to Europe was in Amsterdam, when I stood outside Anne Frank’s House, where she and her Jewish family hid from the occupying Nazis, only to be betrayed, resulting in most of them dying in the Death Camps. I had gone there immediately after viewing works by Rembrandt in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, a short distance away.

In my eventual online post about that episode, I referred to the end points of my walk to the House – starting at a venue of breathtaking creativity, but ending at one of abominable cruelty – as ‘A summit and an abyss of human endeavor, separated by a brief walk, yet from different worlds.’

Tyburn is no direct analogue to the Anne Frank House. If anything, its eventual fate reflects the sort of peaceful evolution which the Nazis, rabid advocates of the law of the Jungle, disdained and tried to thwart. But like the Frank House, it too, is only a short stroll from a locality of preoccupied vitality.

London’s largest retail district, Oxford Street, bustles immediately east of Tyburn, oblivious in its materialist spirit to the nearby place of morbid memory. Oxford’s commerce is hardly as exalted as the artistry on display in that Amsterdam museum, but like it, is an acute contrast to the mournful spot that Tyburn was for many generations.

The accompanying photo shows the extremely modest memorial – possibly thus due to shame by British society today at what was done here – to ‘Tyburn Tree.’ That was a gibbet which stood here from 1571 till the mid-Eighteenth Century, consisting of three vertical poles with horizontal beams between them, upon which multiple condemned persons could be hanged simultaneously. Before and after the ‘Tree,’ Tyburn was used to publicly carry out executions, till those were moved to Newgate Gaol (Jail) in the 1780s.

I had explicitly planned to go see this plaque when in London. An ancient city, it has many fascinating attractions, but I wanted to seek parts of its story beyond ‘attractions.’ Tyburn is one such, which should be remembered and pondered, as it so long epitomized how fearsome and punitive our world once was. So I arranged for my sister (who accompanied me in London and Paris) to browse an Oxford Street store nearby, while I made my semi-pilgrimage to this focus of melancholy.

If one feels any need to reflect on dark, sad aspects of history, Tyburn is certainly a ‘focus’ to do so. Over the centuries of its use as a place of judicial killing, masses of ordinary folk were put to death here at the behest of a callous, hierarchical society, making it one of the grimmest places in the world before mechanized killing. (The Tower of London, more famous as a place of executions, was used to do away with the high-born who had offended the Crown. Commoners were consigned to the disgrace of Tyburn, with its jeering spectators and general chaos)

One of the most shocking things about Tyburn to 21st Century sensibilities is how many people were hanged there for petty larceny, a relatively trivial offense no right-minded person today would dream warranted dying for.

Statistics of how many executions there were, how many were hangings, how many of each sort of crime, etc. may be available in scholarly sources, but I did not seek those out for this post. For context however, it is believed that, during its 500 years as the main site where the law put Londoners to death, several thousand were slain here.

My interest is more in what such a phenomenon can tell us about who we were, and by implication, who we have become, and still are becoming. Bluntly, Tyburn was a place where English society proved that it valued property more than life; or at least the lives of the ‘lower orders.’ My unverified impression is that most of the people dispatched here were hanged for often paltry crimes such as the theft of the equivalent of 3 days’ wages. Again, these were offenses for which no modern person should ever accept that capital punishment was appropriate.

Thus, however many ‘souls’ were hanged here for such deeds, it was too many.

Those found guilty of more serious crimes, like murder and treason were also disposed of here, but again, class status played a crucial role – especially in cases of rebellion/treason. Noble folk found guilty of such were usually beheaded in, or near, the Tower, while commoners endured the gruesome ignominy of Tyburn.

Far worse, traitors from of a lower social ‘station’ were ineligible for the relatively merciful death of beheading, reserved to those ‘gently born.’ Lower status men were subjected to the full, horrific, meant-to-terrify traitor’s death, including being torn apart (quartered) by horses, along with other torments.

Thus, what happened at this site for so long should offend us today from various perspectives: First, it reflected a generally savage environment. Also, no doubt, many of the condemned were innocent of the crimes with which they were charged, but got swept up by a court system whose real concern was the protection of the elite’s privilege, property and prestige, more than individual guilt or innocence.

Worse, many, if not most of the victims did things that absolutely wouldn’t rate a death sentence today (even if such still existed). Capital punishment was applied to such a broad range of crimes that it was seemingly the preferred response to almost any sort of getting out of line against the social order, or even against mere convention.

Especially such as hanging for theft, when the guilty party may have acted out of desperation, starving in a culture whose priority was not the general welfare, but ferociously upholding a self-serving Status Quo. Like gibbeting a man for stealing a week’s bread to feed his hungry family when he could find no honest means of doing so. He got snared in a web in which his ‘betters’ got, and kept, the best of everything.

Worst of all in my view, even those who committed deeds we still abhor, like murder and rape, were often made to suffer in ways so perversely cruel that arguably they negated any moral high ground of the authority that would impose them. They were naked, cathartic revenge and intimidation, masquerading as justice.

How can any law that mandates human beings be disemboweled (part of the martial penalty for treason) consider itself to be defending civilization, rather than legitimizing barbarism? Any society that imposes such atrocities is acting out of organic self-interest, arguably little, if at all, better than those upon whom it inflicts them.

All of us today can, and should, be relieved that we are now living in a world where such things cannot, or should not, happen to us (or to anyone else). Slipshod convictions are far rarer, and ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ is expressly prohibited. Even non-lethal penalties during this timeframe were often ghastly, including whipping, branding and pillories.

Returning to the photo, this plaque is not at all prominent, set in a traffic island (ironically, triangular like the setup of the ‘Tree’ itself). Most of the drivers passing it probably don’t even know it is there, or don’t register that it marks a miasma of injustice (‘legality’ notwithstanding), the scene of uncounted deaths over centuries of enforcement of societal norms set by those who benefited most from them. To say nothing of the ongoing bestialization of a citizenry already roughened by the struggles of daily life.

As cars roared around me, I said a prayer for all the Souls whose mortal lives were ended there: Those wrongly accused, those guilty of crimes we would now consider misdemeanors, and those made to suffer in ways we couldn’t even find people today willing to inflict, regardless of the offense. Even for the genuinely guilty, and truly evil ones, of whom there must have been many, themselves often victims of squalid realities.

The former site of Tyburn is now mostly overlooked, but I had felt some compulsion to visit it. I cannot believe that most of those ‘souls’ deserved what was done to them here; not in severity, and possibly, not at all. I mused – hoped? – that my lamentations might at least partly offset the sheer dreadfulness this place both witnessed and reflected, and might minutely help compensate for the inequity of their wrongful sufferings and death being forgotten. Or just ignored.

As the Colosseum, where bloodshed was staged as entertainment, is now a ruin, so Tyburn – where a public reduced to semi-savagery by the brutishness of their grinding existences came to enjoy watching brother beings perish – is now long gone. An abandoned, shameful echo of life as pitiless conflict, and a mass failure of empathy for ‘brother beings.’

There are likely still some people today, in 2024, who might regard the agony of others as a diversion, as the mob often did at Tyburn. But such persons are now repugnant outliers; our culture has, as a whole, grown beyond such bloodlust. Most people today (I fervently want to assume) would be aghast at the idea of public hangings, or worse, as amusement.

All of which may explain why this site is now so modestly marked. Some acknowledgment of the enormity it represents may have seemed needed for propriety – but not to be proudly emphasized. Like a gross transgression committed in one’s raw immaturity of which one grows to be remorseful, ashamed, and even penitent. (As far as I know, British law today does not allow Capital punishment for anything, even Regicide; killing the King.)

I choose to interpret the transition of English culture beyond the need for a place like Tyburn and the values it was used to oppressively sustain, as mirroring the gradual improvement of our species. As proof that our ability to reason may manifest as an inclination to empathize. And as demonstrating that any assertion that Human Nature is immutably corrupt and selfish is not indisputably true.

Those who believe that facts, such as evidence of recurrent human baseness, must be accepted at face value, are free to do so. Those like me, who have faith that events may have subtler implications beyond their face value alone, are equally free (and in my opinion equally justified) to follow that path instead.

Such a hope also is a tribute to my mother; indeed, to most mothers. Perhaps the kindness, sympathy and tolerance that their role in bearing, protecting, and nurturing vulnerable life requires of them will, slowly but inexorably, continue to shape our world more than primitive impulses we should strive to subdue in order to deserve, and to attain, our fullest humanity.

Impulses like valuing our property (and our prosperity) more than others’ lives. That we should leave more and more ‘Tyburns’ behind, and recall them with only shame and a shudder, as we come to regard each other less mainly as competitors for survival. Such is an outmoded habit, an artifact starkly unsuitable for our brighter Age.

Just as the Tyburn Tree would be.

by omniagallia

Another Side of D-Day: ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’

A late Uncle of mine had been an officer serving in Britain in the U.S. Navy at the time of D-Day (code name, Operation Overlord). Though I don’t believe he was involved in the first wave of the invasion on June 6, 1944, he was there a few days later, in some support role. I never learned what he saw and experienced then, because he didn’t want to talk about it. Even the immediate aftermath of the initial landings was ghastly, and not something he cared to re-live.

The World War II Western Allies, the British, Canadians and Americans, are still rightly proud and grateful for what our countrymen began 80 years ago today. First of all, the awesome personal courage and sacrifice; most of the American troops who landed on the French beaches that day had never been in actual combat before, so their very first experience of it was being hurled against Hitler’s fearsome ‘Atlantic Wall,’ the grim fortifications built in Nazi held lands from Norway to the Pyrenees. They were faced with ‘the deep end of the pool’ – when that pool was a lake of fire.

Yet those American kids leaped into that lake, toward a storm of steel from German machine guns and artillery, because they believed they were fighting to help restore freedom to Humanity. As indeed they were, and for which France is still thankful.

And beyond that heroism, there was the epic planning for the invasion, thousands of logistical details from supplies procurement, to planning to transport troops in an orderly sequence, to ingenious deception to make the Nazis believe the invasion would come at the Pas de Calais, far from Normandy, to keep them diverting their strength there while the Allies solidified their toe-hold on the Norman beaches.

The place and timing of the landings of course, had been among the deepest secrets of the War, so the public had no idea it was coming. Thus on that day, President Franklin Roosevelt addressed America (including the anxious families of soldiers) by radio, extolling the valor and enterprise of the undertaking by America’s young men – ‘the pride of our nation’ – while asking for prayers for their deliverance and ultimate victory.

Only after acknowledging all of these facts does it seem appropriate to point out the following:

D-Day was an epic undertaking, unquestionably essential to the eventual destruction of Hitler and the Nazis. But – please forgive me, I do not use this term lightly – it was really something of a side-show to the main event. A very big and important ‘side-show,’ but still a lot smaller than the monstrous, and truly savage, War on the Eastern Front – Germany against the USSR – where Hitler, as a result of his unprovoked invasion, faced off with Stalinism; two forces of equally primitive ferocity. The statistical truth is that four out of five – Four out of Five – casualties the Nazis suffered in the course of the whole war were inflicted on the Eastern, Russian front.

So it isn’t strictly accurate to think of D-Day as the ‘turning of the tide’ against Nazi Germany’s wars of aggression, as the invasion is often now characterized from the American perspective. In hindsight, it is clear that the ‘turning’ was at Stalingrad, the titanic and hideous battle that lasted from Autumn of 1942 to well into 1943, between the German and Soviet armies. It was the first time Hitler’s Wehrmacht had been not just stopped, but definitively, undeniably thrashed. And it was stupendous.

Stalin, adamant to relieve the German pressure on his country, had been demanding a second front against Hitler in the west since 1942, and (suspicious bastard that he was), found it hard to accept the Anglo-Americans’ explanation for delaying invading western Europe until they were thoroughly prepared to do so successfully. He felt the Allies were stalling just so the Russians would sustain more losses, so as to weaken his Communist regime. And in view of how much Churchill, Britain’s Prime Minister was known to loathe Communism, such suspicions were not wildly implausible.

Operation Overlord was of course, an essential nail in Hitler’s coffin; but it was far from the first, or most pivotal one. It was, arguably the beginning of the end, the point at which it became certain Germany would eventually be overwhelmed. But the agonizing reversal of her military juggernaut was at Stalingrad, where the tide that turned was on the Volga River there, crimson with Russian blood. Awful as Anglo-Canadian-American losses on D-Day were, the deaths on both sides at Stalingrad were spectacularly greater, in the hundreds of thousands.

And Hitler’s need to deploy the bulk and best of his forces in the East – those stationed in France were not just far fewer in number, but were of lesser quality – made the Overlord landings far less bloody than they might have been.

So we Americans, in particular, ought to recognize how misinterpreting the scope of our role in crushing Nazism has – justifiably, in my view – rankled Russian sensibilities for decades. And that resentment is still playing out today, in 2024, manifest in Vladimir Putin’s festering outrage at perceived Western ingratitude – and worse, ignorance – for what his own country paid to destroy Hitler.

Thus, I have put an image here of men at arms around water. It may call to mind the American assault of Omaha Beach – ‘Bloody Omaha’ – but is actually from eight months earlier, the Battle of the Dnieper, in Eastern Europe. The Dnieper is a vast river, and the Soviet Red Army was determined to cross it, to pursue the Nazis, whom they had been steadily driving out of conquered Soviet territory. This battle – though little-known or remarked in the West – was so huge and horrendous that the Dnieper at some points turned red with the blood of Russian soldiers, killed by the Nazis as they tried to cross it. Just as the Volga had been stained, at Stalingrad.

We may rightly pause to lament their fate; certainly, their own ruler Stalin, cared very little about individual Russian lives. (Sound familiar?)

Here is more about why I feel it is vital to point all this out:

No one is wrong all the time. Although Hitler’s response to Germany’s defeat in World War I was in every sense criminal, even he had a point, that the treaty of Versailles, dictated by the winners, had been unfair to his country. Especially in that it explicitly obliged her to accept the entire guilt for having started the war, which simply was not true, and much of the European public knew it. Prussian militarism had certainly been a crucial factor in starting ‘The Great War’ of 1914 – 1918, but was by no means the only one. Hitler’s reaction to the staggering blows of defeat followed by defamation was maniacal and monstrous, but the source of that resentment – unlike most of his others – was not entirely delusional.

And in the interest of accuracy, fairness and of redressing dangerous and harmful misunderstanding – much as I hate to admit it, as I utterly detest him – the same is true of Vladimir Putin, current faux Czar and heartless, spendthrift waster of the lives of ordinary Russians (and Ukrainians).

Putin has many false, delusional, cruel beliefs, but as noted above, he does have at least one legitimate grievance. He, and a great many Russians of his generation, feel that their erstwhile Western Allies have never fully grasped nor appreciated the unspeakable magnitude of their country’s suffering – set upon by the Nazis in a war of annihilation against the sub-human Slavs, and their noxious regime of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ (a Nazi definition) – in what the Russians refer to as ‘The Great Patriotic War,’ instead of World War II.

Also, about 2 weeks after the D-Day landings, the Soviet Red Army began ‘Operation Bagration,’ a colossal counterblow at the Germans, mostly in what is now Byelorussia. This obliged Hitler, still thrashing in Normandy, to confront an even more crucial threat in the East, which was, of course, just what was intended: to force the Nazis to fight on two fronts, in the East and West (at this time, they were also still fighting in Italy; ironically, the Americans had entered Rome on June 4, two days before D-Day).

So by all means, let us remember, honor – and learn from – the valor and sacrifice of D-Day. But Americans especially, who suffered no combat on our territory, as European Russia was barbarically ravaged, should never forget that for all we paid in money and material (much of it provided to the USSR, and critical to its war effort), the Russians paid on a Biblical scale in blood and lives.

Their losses are beyond reckoning – almost beyond imagining – but aside from the gargantuan, spiteful physical damage the Germans committed, the Russians are generally held to have had approximately 20 million dead – maybe more – military and civilians (in the occupied USSR the Nazis often killed civilians, Jewish and Gentile Russians, like rodents; Jews were explicitly targeted, but non-Jews were still subhuman Slavs, killed for the most minor infractions or even simply to reduce local food consumption).

The Soviet mortality of 1941-45 was so stupendous that it altered the demographics of the nation to this day. In the absence of millions of young men killed in the fighting, the birthrate of the USSR – and of today’s Russia – never fully recovered.

American deaths in the war were approximately 420,000. A terrible toll – one of whom was my own mother’s fiancé before she met my father, and I don’t think she ever fully got over her grief. But for context, one cemetery for the mass graves dug outside Leningrad for the dead of its horrifying siege by the Nazis holds just under 500,000 victims. There are more Russian war dead – most of them civilian residents of Leningrad – in that one cemetery than all the American losses, globally, in the entire conflict.

The Soviet Union sustained deaths (a great proportion of them non-combatants) in a ratio of more than 40 to 1, as opposed to those of the U.S. If one reflects on that, the seething anger of Putin and many of his countrymen – when they hear D-Day called the ‘turning of the tide’ for Nazism – gets easier to understand. And to acknowledge as proper.

So as you honor D-Day, please also register, and honor, the epic, heroic, and far more tragic sacrifices made then by our Russian Allies – ruled by Stalin, indifferent to spending the lives of his own citizens like pocket change, to grind Hitler’s war machine to a halt, and begin to reverse it.

Victory was paid for with a nightmarish trauma for the Russian people from which they will probably never recover, persisting in their folk memory after the last eye-witnesses are gone. They are right to expect that we, in the West, step outside our own historical reference ‘bubble’ and at the very least be aware of what they went through. And to appreciate it.

(Russians are not the only ones who notice, and abhor, the apparent American tendency to assume that anything in which we were not directly involved, cannot be very important. Our nearest neighbors, the Mexicans and Canadians, would almost certainly agree, even though their grievances are not as bitter as having a national calamity of apocalyptic proportions overlooked or disregarded. As many Russians feel we have done to them. But we are all citizens of the same world.)

Their suffering was incomparably worse than America’s, or even Britain, which endured the Blitz, but didn’t have millions of German troops rampaging on its soil, all indoctrinated to believe that the residents were essentially two-legged vermin, and acting accordingly, as they did with the Russians – Slavic and Jewish. No one in the West – not even the conquered French – had to endure anything like that at Hitler’s hands.

So today’s Russians have a right to our gratitude, and respect, for the unimaginably greater sorrows they endured and overcame.

The Nazis capitulated at Stalingrad on February 2, 1943; perhaps we should remember that date – with awestruck salutes for the resolute courage of those triumphant Russians, struggling in the jaws of Hell on Earth, as that battle surely was – just as we recall June 6, 1944. To do so might even help to calm the frenzy of East-West recriminations that still linger.