"The Huguenots and the Second Amendment."
He also missed a chance to explain to Wolf that in all likelihood, the Founders were thinking about the extermination of a European religious minority. But that minority wasn’t the Jews — it was the Huguenots. What he should have said was, “Wolf, as you should know, if the Huguenots had been armed, their chances would have been a lot better. It all started with the Catholics taking away their weapons. Every American in the eighteenth century would have known that.” And they would have. Now, historians differ about the number of dead in the French wars of religion and even its exact dates. But they now estimate that between 1562 and 1598, the war claimed between two and four million lives, and could well be described, in modern vocabulary, as a Huguenot genocide.
9 comments:
This is spot on. I am descended from the Jerome family of Huguenots. Jennie Jerome, Lady Randolph Churchill, was my GG Grandmother. My family TO THIS DAY passes down the story of our family fleeing France for the US to avoid being slaughtered.
Never Again.
I grew up in Connecticut and with God's grace I will live see the state return to its heritage that saved my family.
Resisting....Defying...Smuggling...
Well, that explains a bit of my deMEANor - I'm a quarter Huguenot, another quarter Reformed Dutch and a quarter Scots-Irish. That explains why my head is so hard, figuratively and literally.
I think the other quarter is Welsh, but who knows?
Thanks for posting this Mike, it filled in some needed data and added another nice site to my list.
Be well and know many are thinking of you and have you in their prayers.
Excellent info Mike, thanks for driving on despite your illness. The Huguenot persecution is a lesson that should be remembered. My Huguenot ancestors fled to England during the persecution, and then came to America in 1650.
good piece, and though not expressly stated, I cant help but think that the persecution of the Huguenots was but one of the reasons a separation between Church and state was established...Europe was boiling over with religious warfare and our founders wanted no part of it..
Dr.D
My Dad's oldest sister was bitten by the genealogy bug and eventually researched her way into the DAR. She traced her father's line back to a Scot who was "exported" to Georgia colony and her mother's line back to the Huguenots. In the small box of coins I inherited from my paternal grandmother is a Huguenot-Walloon Tercentenary Half Dollar minted in 1924 to commemorate the landing of the first Huguenots in what is now the State of New York in 1624. It is one of only a handful of coins in the box. Apparently that side of her heritage was important to her. I have to admit my knowledge of the Huguenots is much more limited than what I know about the Scotsmen who were indentured servants in Georgia. Definitely something to read up on.
Thanks for the reference, Dutchman6.
The (Um)repentant Linker
Freedom of information is the appropriate cure for propaganda, whether it is for or against the existing social order. It is true that certain kinds of media (notably video) contain far less information than noise by nature, and noise (even white noise, which some people imagine to be the only kind) isn't entirely harmless. But leaving that issue aside momentarily the problem with information technology is that it can be used to present uncontested viewpoints, drowning out debate. Natural dissemination of ideas through a population by oral transmission does not allow this, because each transceiver in the process leaves their own mental level impressed upon the expression of an idea. An idea (however carefully constructed at the outset) that will only appeal to the gullible is reduced to gibberish in short order.
The use of information technology to vastly expand the reach and power of bad ideas cannot be hindered by trying to prohibit transmission of bad ideas, that merely adds another mechanism for suppressing the expression of ideas which challenge otherwise indefensible arguments. It also naturally increases the widespread reliance on 'authoritative' sources, rather than critical thought about the concepts being transmitted. Even if you succeed in really putting bad ideas "beyond the pale of reasonable discussion", all this does is eliminate training in the mental tools necessary to address them when they are encountered.
The Catholic Church managed to suppress intellectual dissent on the topic of religion till it became impossible for such disputes to be resolved by an appeal to reason simply because there weren't enough people mentally trained to seriously argue their positions. Whether or not you believe that Catholic theology had parted company with reason on certain crucial points by the time of the Reformation (which is always another natural danger of suppressing dissent), it had certainly lost far too much of the ability to answer dissenting arguments.
It is certainly true that violence is facilitated by disarming the victims. But we can't forget that it is made inevitable by the abandonment of open discourse.
Did anyone mail this article to Ann Barnhardt?
Bless you Mike. Huguenot dittos from a line of former aristocrats forced to flee, eventually, to the wilds of what is now Ulster County New York. Their castle in the Jura mountains once defended France from all manner of threat. Their blood lives, by the grace of God Almighty.
Well now. I wonder what my disarmed and exterminated Irish Catholic ancestors would say about this.
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