Претражи Живе Речи Утехе

by Roberto de Mattei On Thursday 9 June 2022, at the Brompton Oratory in London, Prof de Mattei presented the following talk for the launch of Calx Mariae Publishing, at which his book The Church in the tempests: the first millennium of the history of the Church was among those presented, notably along with The Christian sense of history by Dom Prosper Guéranger. Picking up in the same century where he left off in his book, Prof de Mattei highlighted Dom Guéranger’s principles for Christian historians and continued to apply them to the phenomenon of Eastern Christianity in the second millennium — unravelling a history which is of greater importance than ever as we enter the third. Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, One of the volumes published by Calx Mariae is my book The Church in the Tempests: The First Millennium of the History of the Church. In these pages I try to offer a summary of Church history, from its origins to the First Crusade, taking my inspiration from the teaching of Dom Prosper Guéranger, who — in his book, The Christian Sense of History — writes that the Catholic historian is someone who “judges facts, men, and institutions from the point of view of the Church; he is not free to judge otherwise, and that is his strength”. I am glad that Calx Mariae has also translated and published the important essay by Dom Guéranger, which confirms for us the importance of history in the battle of ideas. Today, we are witnessing an attempt to erase historical memory, an attempt to rewrite history in an anti-Catholic and anti-Western sense. And the history of the Church helps us to fight these errors. I will give just one example. Leo XIII, in the encyclical, Quarto Abeunte Saeculo, issued 130 years ago on 16 July 1892 for the fourth centenary of the discovery of America, extolled the enterprise of Christopher Columbus, calling it “in itself the highest and grandest which any age has ever seen accomplished by man”. But in America, Columbus Day, on 12 October, which celebrates the Italian navigator’s arrival in the Americas, is being equated with the celebration of a genocide. In recent years, many American states have chosen to turn Columbus Day into Indigenous Peoples’ Day. The message is unmistakable: the supreme evil is the West, its culture, its Christian tradition. While the West is denying itself, its roots, its tradition, Putin’s Russia is proclaiming an identity opposed to that of the West, it too erasing and rewriting its own history. I am not going to speak on the merits of the war underway, but I take Vladimir Putin’s vision of history very seriously and would like to draw your attention to an important speech that the president of the Russian Federation gave on 12 July 2021 at the Valdai Club, the best known Russian think tank.1 In this speech, entitled On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians, Putin sets out to rewrite the history of Russia over the past thousand years, in order to justify the invasion of Ukraine. The basic thesis of the president of the Russian Federation is this: Ukraine has no right to exist, because it is a piece of Russia, part of the Russian state for more than a thousand years. Russians and Ukrainians are one people, bound together by one language, one culture and one faith, that of the Orthodox Church, said to date back to the baptism of Prince Vladimir in the year 988. Putin continues his historical analysis by stating that, after the devastating Mongol invasion of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, two Russias were formed: Lithuanian Rus’, which absorbed Poland, and the principality of Moscow, which became the Tsarist Empire. The Grand Dukes of Lithuania converted to the Catholic faith, while the princes of Moscow kept the Orthodox faith. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, through Catholicism and Latinisation, allegedly tried to break Russian linguistic and religious unity. This unity was restored thanks to the tsarist conquests and subsequent Soviet domination. According to Putin, after the fall of the Soviet regime, the Ukrainian state rebelled against Russia, asserting its independence and opening up to the West. In order to stop this process, which threatens Russia’s territorial, linguistic and religious integrity, Ukraine must be Russified. For Putin, the work of Russification is not only political and territorial; it is linguistic and cultural, because it affirms the primacy of Russian language and culture over other national languages and cultures; and above all, it is religious, because it consists in the imposition of Orthodoxy as the only religion of the state. This ideological project is in reality based on a profound falsification of Russian history. The first historical falsehood of Putin’s reconstruction lies in attributing a Slavic origin to the kingdom of Kiev, while it was instead the creation of an elite group of Scandinavian warriors, the Normans or Vikings, whom the Byzantines called Varangians. They were the same Normans who, at the dawn of the Middle Ages, conquered the British Isles and Sicily, and reached Greenland and the coasts of America. The city of Kiev, on the right bank of the Dnieper River, was conquered in the ninth century by the Norman Rurikid dynasty, which takes its name from its founding father, Rurik. The term “Rus’” itself does not belong to the Slavic language, but comes from Balto-Finnic.2 The second historical falsehood is that of disregarding the fact that the State of Kiev, which between the tenth and twelfth centuries extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea, up to the Carpathians, remained part of Western Christian civilisation until the Mongol invasion. Kiev experienced the apogee of its splendour during the first half of the eleventh century, under the reign of Prince Yaroslav “the Wise” (978–1054), who was the monarch most interrelated by marriage to the ruling families in Europe.3 Yaroslav’s sister, Maria, was married to King Casimir of Poland; while, among his daughters, Elisiv was married to King Harald III of Norway, Anastasia to King Andrew I of Hungary, and Anne to King Henry I of France, with whom she had four children, the eldest of whom was France’s king Philip I — a Greek name which thus came into use by the French royal family. The historian, Christian Raffensperger, has written a book on genealogy and dynastic marriage in Kievan Rus’, which shows how extensive the interweaving of kinship between East and West was, within a selfsame Christendom.4 Yaroslav’s last son, Vsevolod I, who reigned from 1073 to 1093, spoke five languages and married a Greek princess. His daughter, Adelaide (1067–1109), was empress of the Holy Roman Empire, because in 1089, in Cologne, she married Henry IV (1050–1106), who later became emperor and the great enemy of St Gregory VII, by whom he was humiliated in Canossa. Adelaide accused her husband of abuse and took refuge with Matilda, Grand Countess of Canossa. Then, in 1095, with uncommon courage, she publicly accused the emperor before Urban II at the Council of Piacenza, where the pope announced the First Crusade. Adelaide at last returned to Kiev, where she died in a convent. The third historical falsehood is that of attributing to the State of Kiev, or of Rus’, a religious determination deemed Orthodox, meaning by this term the Greek-schismatic religion that was defined in 1054, after the schism with the Church of Rome. Prince Vladimir received Catholic baptism in 988. The baptism took place in Kherson and was followed soon after by his marriage to Princess Anna, sister of Emperor Basil II. Towards the end of May 989, Vladimir and Anna left Kherson accompanied by many bishops and priests and went to Kiev, where the collective baptism of the people took place in the waters of the Dnieper. This baptism is considered to be the historical origin of Russia. Kievan Rus’ was born Catholic, because the schism in 1054 that brought about the religious fracture between East and West came more than half a century after Vladimir’s baptism. But even after the schism, Kiev struck its own balance between Constantinople and Rome. What in fact happened after the act of rupture of Constantinople patriarch Cerularius? As the historian Bernard Leib observes, one must distinguish between the metropolitans and the faithful of Kiev. The metropolitans remained tied to Constantinople in administrative terms, but the princes and the population never showed any sentiment of hostility towards Rome.5 In Kievan Rus’, two rites coexisted peacefully, the Eastern rite and the Latin rite. Please note: two rites, not two churches. Kievan Rus’ had understood that its mission was to act as a bridge between East and West, to continue to maintain, in addition to the rites, the unity of the universal Church.6 The princes of Kiev recognised the Roman Pontiff as the supreme spiritual authority of the Respublica Christiana, into which they were fully integrated. Thus, in 1075 Prince Iziaslav I (1024–1078), whose Christian name was Demetrius, sent his son Yaropolk to pay homage to St Gregory VII, and the pope responded by sending “most benevolent wishes of every heavenly blessing” to “Demetrius, king of the Russians, and to his consort the queen”.7 The annus horribilis of the Rus’ was 1236, when the Mongol cavalry crossed the Caucasus, led by Batu, a grandson of Genghis Khan. All the Russian principalities were conquered. Kiev was stormed and razed to the ground in 1240.8 The Mongol domination lasted for over 250 years, until the beginning of the sixteenth century. It is to the time of the Mongol domination that the tradition of servility and moral corruption which would characterise Russian history dates back. Alexander Nevsky (1221–1263), the Russian national hero, progenitor of the Muscovy princes, agreed to be a vassal of the Mongols in order to keep the throne, and his grandson Ivan I (1288–1340) became the tax collector of the Great Khan. They belonged to the Rurikid dynasty, but politically were the descendants not of the princes of Kiev but of the Tartar Khans, from whom they learned how to govern the new state: the Grand Duchy of Moscow which was born in opposition to that of Kiev. After the liberation from the Mongols, Catholics and schismatic Orthodox competed for religious primacy in Kiev. In 1439, the seventeenth ecumenical council of the Church was convened by Pope Eugene IV in Florence. Isidore (1385–1463), metropolitan of Kiev and all Rus’, signed with his own name the decree by which the Greek Church was solemnly reunited with the Latin Church, recognising the Roman primacy, after the schism of 1054.9 The union with the Greeks was not destined to last long. The Byzantine bishops who returned to Constantinople were challenged and reconsidered the agreement and, in 1453, the Turks conquered the capital of the Eastern Empire. On 18 December 1439, Eugene IV rewarded the work of Archbishop Isidore with the purple and sent him as his legate to Russia to implement the union. Isidore met with no difficulty in Kiev and its nine bishoprics, but in Moscow, where he arrived on 19 March 1441, his mission failed. In fact, Isidore delivered a letter from Eugene IV to the prince of Moscow, Basil (Vasily) II (1415–1462), in which the pope urged him to support the spread of Catholicism in Russian lands. Basil categorically refused and had Isidore arrested, but he managed to escape and make his way Rome, where he died on 27 April 1463. He is now at rest in the Vatican basilica. Moscow, which at the time of the birth of the State of Kiev was just a small Finnish village, had received Christianity from Ukraine, and its church reported to the metropolitan see of Kiev. But when, in 1453, Constantinople fell under the dominion of the Turks, Moscow proclaimed itself heir to Constantinople’s political and religious role, developing a visceral theological and political hatred against Rome and Latinity. The sixteenth century was that of the first great Revolution: the Protestant Revolution that followed the era of humanism and the Renaissance. But during the same years in which Luther turned his back on Rome, a second great apostasy took place: that of Muscovite Russia. It was in the years of Martin Luther’s revolt, between 1520 and 1530, that expression was given to the concept of Moscow as the “Third Rome”. The letter of the monk Philotheus of the Pskov monastery (c. 1520) addressed to the Grand Duke of Muscovy, Basil III (Vasily III Ivanovich) is considered as a manifesto of this ideology. According to Philotheus, the true faith that for centuries was held by Constantinople did not collapse along with the fall of the city. “Holy Byzantium did not vanish but was transferred to Moscow” as to “the third Rome, and there will be no fourth”. The historian Felix Koneczny (1862–1949) states that Philotheus finally defined “the basic canon of Moscow culture: the conviction about their own superiority over the rest of the world, founded on a state religion and temporal despotism, controlling the Orthodox Church”.10 Orthodox Christianity, with Ivan IV — “Ivan the Terrible” — (1530–1584), became a sort of national religion. Ivan IV reunified the Russian lands under Moscow and was the first to take the title of Tsar of all Rus’, which in 1561, was approved by decree of the patriarch of Constantinople. Russia presented itself as the sanctuary of the true faith, and the Kremlin was the fortress that contained the foundational myth of the Third Rome. The legacy of Genghis Khan merged with that of the Byzantine Empire. The Moscow Patriarchate was created in 1589. Six years later came the response from Rome and Kiev. On 23 December 1595, in the Hall of Constantine in the Apostolic Palace, Archbishop Michael Rohoza (1540–1599), Metropolitan of Kiev, Galychyna and all Ruthenia, after having presented to the Supreme Pontiff the declaration of all the bishops, made in their name and in his own name a solemn profession of the Catholic faith. The union was solemnly proclaimed in Brest on the Bug River on 16 October 1596. Pope Clement VIII, with the apostolic constitution Magnus Dominus et laudabilis nimis,11 announced this to the whole Church, and with the apostolic letter Benedictus sit Pater, addressed the bishops of the Metropolia, communicating to them that the union had taken place.12 Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ukraine lost its territorial and state identity and was repeatedly taken apart and put back together between Russia, Austria and Poland, but it did not entirely lose the Catholic identity that it had recovered in the Union of Brest. Brest is the answer to the Third Rome of Muscovy, and it is once again a historical falsehood on Putin’s part to link this religious event to the Latinisation process promoted by Austria and Poland because, in the Union of Brest, the Eastern rites were maintained, and not the Latin ones of the Church called Ruthenian. The popes of the twentieth century always confirmed that the ancient Greek rites can be preserved, as had already been permitted by the Council of Florence and the apostolic letter Benedictus sit Pater of 1596.13 When John Paul II spoke of a Europe that could breathe with two lungs, that of the West and that of the East, he was not referring to the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, but to the method of evangelisation of Saints Cyril and Methodius, who, worked according to the ideal of uniting the new believers in Christ; adapting the liturgical texts to the Slavic language and the Greco-Roman law to the customs of the new peoples.14 The Eastern rites should not be confused with the Orthodox religion, falsifying history. Above all, there is a line, not of continuity but of discontinuity, between the state of Kiev in the year 1000 and the principality of Moscow in the sixteenth century. Unlike the state of Kiev, which was integrated into Western Christian civilisation, Muscovite Russia began its existence as an extra-European state, meaning that it was outside the domain of the “Christian Republic”.15 The Moscow Patriarchate, subordinate to the state, was always characterised by a radical theological hatred of the Rome of Peter. Equally visceral was the Kremlin’s hatred of the Lithuanian-Polish state, which after 1569, became the largest and most powerful country in eastern Europe, within which were found a good nine contemporary nations: Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Russia and Transnistria. This was also the vision of Peter the Great (1672–1725), who moved the capital from Moscow to St Petersburg (1703), strengthened the centralised and autocratic state and created the Holy Synod, the supreme ecclesiastical council placed at the head of the Russian church and controlled by imperial authority. In the title of “Autocrat of all Rus’” that he adopted in 1721, there was the convergence of Mongolian absolutism, Byzantine Caesaropapism and the Muscovite ideology of the Third Rome. The autocratic character of the Russian state, its Asiatic connotation and its isolation from Europe has never wavered during the entire period from Peter the Great to the Bolshevik Revolution, or up to our own day. The destruction of historical memory represented a constitutive element of the totalitarianism of the twentieth century and is a characteristic of the new totalitarianism of the twenty-first century. Although totalitarianism can erase and manipulate memory, it must nonetheless resort to it if it wants to survive. Stalin, to consolidate his regime, invoked the memory of Alexander Nevsky, the victor over the Teutonic knights in the thirteenth century, and not that of Marx; he invoked the memory of Ivan the Terrible, the destroyer of the Tartars in the sixteenth century, and not that of Engels. To justify the invasion of Ukraine, Putin invokes the founder of Kievan Rus’, St Vladimir, seeking to combine his memory with that of Stalin, the patriot who, in the Second World War, restored the territorial unity and moral greatness of Russia. At the conclusion of these considerations of mine, some may object that I have given a negative image of Putin’s historical reconstruction and question whether a positive value be ascribed to the West, which today sets itself against Russia? Are Putin’s patriotic and religious values not better than those of the depraved West in which we live? My answer is this: in all my books, my articles, my talks, I have always denounced the cultural and moral degradation of the West, which, for centuries, has been going through a historical process of self-dissolution. I define this historical process as Revolution, with a capital letter, following the analysis that Professor Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira made in his work Revolution and Counter-Revolution. But Joseph de Maistre had already said that the Revolution must not be resisted with a Revolution in the opposite direction, but with the opposite of Revolution; or if one prefers, an error has to be counteracted with the truth and not with an error in the opposite direction. So if it is true that Putin’s Russia cannot be counteracted with Biden’s West, the contrary is equally true, namely that the ideology of Soros and Bill Gates cannot be counteracted with that of Aleksander Dugin and Russkiy Mir. This is precisely the temptation I am trying to combat within the Catholic and conservative world. I am not afraid of Moscow’s tanks and missiles, but of the ideology that lies behind them. For me, more dangerous than Russia’s political and military expansion is the Kremlin’s ideological propaganda, which consists of presenting the religious and patriotic values of Russia as better than those of the corrupt West and even those of the Catholic Church, which remains its true enemy. An error is not fought with another error, but with the truth, full and intact. This truth is, for me, the way of thinking and living transmitted by the Catholic Church over the centuries. This is why, in my book, The Church in the Tempests, I sought to follow Dom Guéranger’s teaching, to which I wanted to bear witness in today’s brief contribution as well: “the Catholic historian is someone who judges facts, men, and institutions from the point of view of the Church; he is not free to judge otherwise, and that is his strength.” Roberto de Mattei Presentation of The Church in the tempests: the first millennium of the history of the Church - Voice of the Family VOICEOFTHEFAMILY.COM by Roberto de Mattei On Thursday 9 June 2022, at the Brompton Oratory in London, Prof de Mattei presented the following talk for the launch of Calx Mariae

In an episode of “The Archpastor” TV program (Yekaterinburg), Bishop Irinej of Bačka (Serbian Orthodox Church) spoke about various topics. Here is what he had to say on the Ukrainian issue: “We deeply regret that the Ecumenical Patriarch in his personal capacity, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate as a whole, have (in my opinion and in the opinion of the majority of our theologians and hierarchs), made the greatest mistake in the whole history of the Ecumenical Throne of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. I say it here for the first time, I have never said this before to the media: Ten years ago, maybe more, I told the ecumenical patriarch privately that I urged him not to interfere in the Ukrainian issue, because that would provoke an immense tragedy, not only there, but in the whole Orthodox world. I am not a prophet, but I knew enough about the situation and history, that it was easily predictable. Unfortunately, he did it. It is difficult to say for what reasons. Some consider it could be because of some grievance, a bitter feeling against the Patriarch of Moscow and against the Russian Church, due to their absence at the Council of Crete, but many also think it is the result of the pressure from the West, especially from the Americans, and that it is only a part in the general course of Western policy regarding Ukraine, and an attempt to further deepen the gap, to break apart the Russian world, and to ensure that Ukraine and Russia are not only separate, but enemy states. I fear that this may be true, at least partly. It is interesting that this opinion is shared also by some of my Greek friends, who have no reason to be at the service of the Church of Moscow. The Ecumenical Patriarchate thus made an absolutely uncanonical decision – or at least a decision that is not based on canons: to enter the territory of an already existing Church, the Ukrainian autonomous Orthodox Church, through negotiations with Ukrainian political power. As you know, Ukrainian political leaders are not very Orthodox: there are Orthodox in the parliament, but also Uniates and schismatics. The course of action is quite strange: the Ecumenical Patriarchate delegation does not discuss with the legitimate local Church, which is the majority in Ukraine. For the legitimate Church, the nationality of their members (whether Ukrainian, Russian, etc.), is not important. There is no national or political connection, but only the feeling of the ecclesial people that they are one church, as it has been along centuries. They do not prevent anyone from being Ukrainian or whatever – it is difficult to say how many nations are present in the Russian Church, one hundred, one hundred and fifty. [The Constantinople delegates] have not even visited Metropolitan Onufriy once. All their discussions took place with politicians and schismatics. And we are not talking here of occasional schismatics, but about people like Filaret Denisenko, who was once a candidate to become the new patriarch of Moscow. But he did not become a patriarch, for known reasons – his personal and moral life, and other factors. At first, he was opposed to Ukrainian separatism (at the level of the Church and other levels), far more than many in Ukraine. But then, when he was not elected patriarch, he remembered he was Ukrainian. And of course, his broke his oath to the patriarch not to create a schism, and he did create one anyway. He was then reduced to the lay state, excommunicated and anathematized. And now, the people of the Phanar come and say this is rubbish: “We acknowledged it [the Moscow decision], but we no longer do.” I read a letter from the Ecumenical Patriarch in which he writes to the Patriarch of Moscow that he recognizes and supports his decision, and that it cannot be otherwise. And now he says now that his own act is invalid. It is impossible in our Church. This is why our Church has made the decision of supporting the Russian Orthodox Church, especially in regard to the Ukrainian issue. Unfortunately, in Constantinople and in some circles, they think it’s odd. They say that the Serbs who had always been devoted to them and had fraternal relationships with them have now betrayed them and gone with the Russians. This reflects a very unhealthy feeling of ecclesial life. The Church is one, it is the divine and human body of Christ, it is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and the house of the heavenly Father. It is not an ideological, political, or social organization. Autocephaly is not an ontological, but administrative concept. It is a mode of organization for the Churches in the world. Autocephalous Churches are not separate Churches: it is a mode of organization for the one and unique Church. In this sense, we cannot accept this approach, in which we see ourselves as Greek Orthodox, Phanariots, and that over there, there are Muscovites, Slavs, etc. No: the Church is one. There are no Hellenes, no Greeks, no Russians, no Serbs, we are all one, if we are Orthodox. If we do not understand this, we are not Orthodox enough. When we are accused of having become Russians, or servants of the Russians, I consider this is not healthy, this is not ecclesial. We are not against one another, nor for one another. We take into consideration the canonical order. A healthy ecclesial life, that’s what we are interested in. If what Constantinople is doing now had been done by Moscow or Kyiv, we would also react against them. We cannot be against other for selfish reasons or goals. Things can happen, to us or to other Churches, that exists. But here, we consider that Constantinople acted in an unfair and, unfortunately, irresponsible way. They hurt not only the Russian or the Ukrainian Church, but also themselves and the whole Orthodoxy. And we are getting humiliated and ridiculed, by Roman Catholics and followers of other religions, and even by people without any religion. Unfortunately, this has been caused by Constantinople unilateral actions. https://orthodoxie.com/en/the-patriarch-of-constantinople-has-made-the-greatest-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-ecumenical-throne/?fbclid=IwAR19WFsa1I9CjC2AtFTlbStAMiHb_E01fJ-2TKvvqO7SPrMoKOF5RSg5e2s

Islamic India – The biggest holocaust in World History The genocide suffered by the Hindus of India at the hands of Arab, Turkish, Mughal and Afghan occupying forces for a period of 800 years is as yet formally unrecognised by the World. With the invasion of India by Mahmud Ghazni about 1000 A.D., began the Muslim invasions into the Indian subcontinent and they lasted for several centuries. Nadir Shah made a mountain of the skulls of the Hindus he killed in Delhi alone. Babur raised towers of Hindu skulls at Khanua when he defeated Rana Sanga in 1527 and later he repeated the same horrors after capturing the fort of Chanderi. Akbar ordered a general massacre of 30,000 Rajputs after he captured Chithorgarh in 1568. The Bahamani Sultans had an annual agenda of killing a minimum of 100,000 Hindus every year. The history of medieval India is full of such instances. The holocaust of the Hindus in India continued for 800 years, till the brutal regimes were effectively overpowered in a life and death struggle by the Sikhs in the Panjab and the Hindu Maratha armies in other parts of India in the late 1700’s. We have elaborate literary evidence of the World’s biggest holocaust from existing historical contemporary eyewitness accounts. The historians and biographers of the invading armies and subsequent rulers of India have left quite detailed records of the atrocities they committed in their day-to-day encounters with India’s Hindus. These contemporary records boasted about and glorified the crimes that were committed – and the genocide of tens of millions of Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhist and Jainist, mass rapes of women and the destruction of thousands of ancient Hindu / Buddhist temples and libraries have been well documented and provide solid proof of the World’s biggest holocaust. Quotes from modern historians Dr. Koenraad Elst in his article “Was There an Islamic Genocide of Hindus?” states: “There is no official estimate of the total death toll of Hindus at the hands of Islam. A first glance at important testimonies by Muslim chroniclers suggests that, over 13 centuries and a territory as vast as the Subcontinent, Muslim Holy Warriors easily killed more Hindus than the 6 million of the Holocaust. Ferishtha lists several occasions when the Bahmani sultans in central India (1347-1528) killed a hundred thousand Hindus, which they set as a minimum goal whenever they felt like punishing the Hindus; and they were only a third-rank provincial dynasty. The biggest slaughters took place during the raids of Mahmud Ghaznavi (ca. 1000 CE); during the actual conquest of North India by Mohammed Ghori and his lieutenants (1192 ff.); and under the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526).“ He also writes in his book “Negation in India”: “The Muslim conquests, down to the 16th century, were for the Hindus a pure struggle of life and death. Entire cities were burnt down and the populations massacred, with hundreds of thousands killed in every campaign, and similar numbers deported as slaves. Every new invader made (often literally) his hills of Hindus skulls. Thus, the conquest of Afghanistan in the year 1000 was followed by the annihilation of the Hindu population; the region is still called the Hindu Kush, i.e. Hindu slaughter.” Will Durant argued in his 1935 book “The Story of Civilisation: Our Oriental Heritage” (page 459): “The Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. The Islamic historians and scholars have recorded with great glee and pride the slaughters of Hindus, forced conversions, abduction of Hindu women and children to slave markets and the destruction of temples carried out by the warriors of Islam during 800 AD to 1700 AD. Millions of Hindus were converted to Islam by sword during this period.” Francois Gautier in his book ‘Rewriting Indian History’ (1996) wrote: “The massacres perpetuated by Muslims in India are unparalleled in history, bigger than the Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis; or the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks; more extensive even than the slaughter of the South American native populations by the invading Spanish and Portuguese.” Alain Danielou in his book, Histoire de l’ Inde writes: “From the time Muslims started arriving, around 632 AD, the history of India becomes a long, monotonous series of murders, massacres, spoliations, and destructions. It is, as usual, in the name of ‘a holy war’ of their faith, of their sole God, that the barbarians have destroyed civilizations, wiped out entire races.” Irfan Husain in his article “Demons from the Past” observes: “While historical events should be judged in the context of their times, it cannot be denied that even in that bloody period of history, no mercy was shown to the Hindus unfortunate enough to be in the path of either the Arab conquerors of Sindh and south Punjab, or the Central Asians who swept in from Afghanistan…The Muslim heroes who figure larger than life in our history books committed some dreadful crimes. Mahmud of Ghazni, Qutb-ud-Din Aibak, Balban, Mohammed bin Qasim, and Sultan Mohammad Tughlak, all have blood-stained hands that the passage of years has not cleansed..Seen through Hindu eyes, the Muslim invasion of their homeland was an unmitigated disaster. “Their temples were razed, their idols smashed, their women raped, their men killed or taken slaves. When Mahmud of Ghazni entered Somnath on one of his annual raids, he slaughtered all 50,000 inhabitants. Aibak killed and enslaved hundreds of thousands. The list of horrors is long and painful. These conquerors justified their deeds by claiming it was their religious duty to smite non-believers. Cloaking themselves in the banner of Islam, they claimed they were fighting for their faith when, in reality, they were indulging in straightforward slaughter and pillage…” A sample of contemporary eyewitness accounts of the invaders and rulers, during the Indian conquests The Afghan ruler Mahmud al-Ghazni invaded India no less than seventeen times between 1001 – 1026 AD. The book ‘Tarikh-i-Yamini’ – written by his secretary documents several episodes of his bloody military campaigns : “The blood of the infidels flowed so copiously [at the Indian city of Thanesar] that the stream was discoloured, notwithstanding its purity, and people were unable to drink it…the infidels deserted the fort and tried to cross the foaming river…but many of them were slain, taken or drowned… Nearly fifty thousand men were killed.” In the contemporary record – ‘ Taj-ul-Ma’asir’ by Hassn Nizam-i-Naishapuri, it is stated that when Qutb-ul- Din Aibak (of Turko – Afghan origin and the First Sultan of Delhi 1194-1210 AD) conquered Meerat, he demolished all the Hindu temples of the city and erected mosques on their sites. In the city of Aligarh, he converted Hindu inhabitants to Islam by the sword and beheaded all those who adhered to their own religion. The Persian historian Wassaf writes in his book ‘Tazjiyat-ul-Amsar wa Tajriyat ul Asar’ that when the Alaul-Din Khilji (An Afghan of Turkish origin and second ruler of the Khilji Dynasty in India 1295-1316 AD) captured the city of Kambayat at the head of the gulf of Cambay, he killed the adult male Hindu inhabitants for the glory of Islam, set flowing rivers of blood, sent the women of the country with all their gold, silver, and jewels, to his own home, and made about twentv thousand Hindu maidens his private slaves. This ruler once asked his spiritual advisor (or ‘Qazi’) as to what was the Islamic law prescribed for the Hindus. The Qazi replied: “Hindus are like the mud; if silver is demanded from them, they must with the greatest humility offer gold. If a Mohammadan desires to spit into a Hindu’s mouth, the Hindu should open it wide for the purpose. God created the Hindus to be slaves of the Mohammadans. The Prophet hath ordained that, if the Hindus do not accept Islam, they should be imprisoned, tortured, finally put to death, and their property confiscated.” Timur was a Turkic conqueror and founder of the Timurid Dynasty. Timur’s Indian campaign (1398 – 1399 AD) was recorded in his memoirs, collectively known as ‘Tuzk-i-Timuri.’ In them, he vividly described probably the greatest gruesome act in the entire history of the world – where 100,000 Hindu prisoners of war in his camp were executed in a very short space of time. Timur after taking advice from his entourage says in his memoirs : “they said that on the great day of battle these 100,000 prisoners could not be left with the baggage, and that it would be entirely opposed to the rules of war to set these idolaters and foes of Islam at liberty. “In fact, no other course remained but that of making them all food for the sword’ Timur thereupon resolved to put them to death. He proclaimed : “throughout the camp that every man who has infidel prisoners was to put them to death, and whoever neglected to do so should himself be executed and his property given to the informer. When this order became known to the ghazis of Islam, they drew their swords and put their prisoners to death. 100,000 infidels, impious idolaters, were on that day slain. Maulana Nasir-ud-din Umar, a counselor and a man of learning, who, in all his life had never killed a sparrow, now, in execution of my order, slew with his sword fifteen idolatrous Hindus, who were his captives“. During his campaign in India – Timur describes the scene when his army conquered the Indian city of Delhi : “In a short space of time all the people in the [Delhi] fort were put to the sword, and in the course of one hour the heads of 10,000 infidels were cut off. The sword of Islam was washed in the blood of the infidels, and all the goods and effects, the treasure and the grain which for many a long year had been stored in the fort became the spoil of my soldiers. “They set fire to the houses and reduced them to ashes, and they razed the buildings and the fort to the ground….All these infidel Hindus were slain, their women and children, and their property and goods became the spoil of the victors. I proclaimed throughout the camp that every man who had infidel prisoners should put them to death, and whoever neglected to do so should himself be executed and his property given to the informer. When this order became known to the ghazis of Islam, they drew their swords and put their prisoners to death.” The Mughal emperor Babur (who ruled India from 1526 -1530 AD) writing in his memoirs called the ‘Baburnama’ – wrote : ” In AH 934 (2538 C.E.) I attacked Chanderi and by the grace of Allah captured it in a few hours. We got the infidels slaughtered and the place which had been Daru’l-Harb (nation of non-muslims) for years was made into a Daru’l-Islam (a muslim nation).” In Babur’s own words in a poem about killing Hindus (From the ‘Baburnama’ ) he wrote : “For the sake of Islam I became a wanderer, I battled infidels and Hindus, I determined to become a martyr Thank God I became a Killer of Non-Muslims!” The atrocities of the Mughal ruler Shah Jahan (who ruled India between 1628 – 1658 AD) are mentioned in the contemporary record called : ‘Badshah Nama, Qazinivi & Badshah Nama , Lahori’ and goes on to state : “When Shuja was appointed as governor of Kabul he carried on a ruthless war in the Hindu territory beyond Indus…The sword of Islam yielded a rich crop of converts….Most of the women (to save their honour) burnt themselves to death. Those captured were distributed among Muslim Mansabdars (Noblemen)” The Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Abdali attacked India in 1757 AD and made his way to the holy Hindu city of Mathura, the Bethlehem of the Hindus and birthplace of Krishna. The atrocities that followed are recorded in the contemporary chronicle called : ‘Tarikh-I-Alamgiri’ : “Abdali’s soldiers would be paid 5 Rupees (a sizeable amount at the time) for every enemy head brought in. Every horseman had loaded up all his horses with the plundered property, and atop of it rode the girl-captives and the slaves. The severed heads were tied up in rugs like bundles of grain and placed on the heads of the captives…Then the heads were stuck upon lances and taken to the gate of the chief minister for payment. “It was an extraordinary display! Daily did this manner of slaughter and plundering proceed. And at night the shrieks of the women captives who were being raped, deafened the ears of the people…All those heads that had been cut off were built into pillars, and the captive men upon whose heads those bloody bundles had been brought in, were made to grind corn, and then their heads too were cut off. These things went on all the way to the city of Agra, nor was any part of the country spared.” Banda Singh Bahadur was tortured to death after being imprisoned for 3 months. The heart of Banda Singh’s son was put in his mouth in an attempt to humiliate him Why we should remember The biggest holocaust in World History has been whitewashed from history. When we hear the word HOLOCAUST most of us think immediately of the Jewish holocaust. Today, with increased awareness and countless cinema films and television documentaries – many of us are also aware of the Holocaust of the Native American peoples, the genocide of the Armenian peoples in the Ottoman Empire, and the millions of African lives lost during the Atlantic slave trade. Europe and America produced at least a few thousand films highlighting the human misery caused by Hitler and his army. The films expose the horrors of Nazi regime and reinforce the beliefs and attitude of the present day generation towards the evils of the Nazi dictatorship. In contrast look at India. There is hardly any awareness among the Indians of today of what happened to their ancestors in the past, because a great majority of historians are reluctant to touch this sensitive subject. The World seems to either ignore or just does not seem to care about the many millions of lives lost during the 800 – year long holocaust of Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhist in India. The Indian historian Professor K.S. Lal estimates that the Hindu population in India decreased by 80 million between 1000 AD and 1525 AD, an extermination unparalleled in World history. This slaughter of millions of people occurred over regular periods during many centuries of Arab, Afghan, Turkish and Mughal rule in India. Many Indian heroes emerged during these dark times – including the 10th Sikh Guru – Guru Gobind Singh and also the Hindu Maratha king – Shivaji Maratha – who led the resistance against this tyranny and eventually led to its defeat by the late 1700s – after centuries of death and destruction. The modern World today is facing a global threat from organizations and groups of terrorists such as the ISIS, Taliban and Al-Qaeeda – whose ideology is chillingly similar to that of the perpetrators of the World’s biggest holocaust in India. Let us hope that the bloody lessons of the past are learnt so that history does not even have the remotest chance of repeating itself. (https://www.sikhnet.com/news/islamic-india-biggest-holocaust-world-history)