SEEDS OF RESENTMENT

The history of relationships between nations, which ought to be peppered with examples of great statesmanship and rhetoric of world leaders, is in fact peppered with the deep seated resentments of ambitious individuals who carry their acrimony and malice into the very heart of their negotiations. This indignation and umbrage has had the unfortunate effect of causing countless misery and death for millions of ordinary citizens.

The most galling example of this I brought to mind by an event which occurred on the 15^th September 1873, following on from the end of the Franco-Prussian war, when the last occupying German troops left France upon completion to the payment of indemnity.

Areas of France occupied until the war reparations were paid.

With the defeat of Napoleon III, the Second Empire was at an end and the French established a Government of National Defence, which subsequently established the Third Republic; however, the final concluding armistice between Germany (Bismarck) and France (Favre) at Versailles (January/February 1871). The final agreement became the Treaty of Frankfurt, signed 10th May 1871. The surrender terms were pretty severe including loss of certain territories and large payment of indemnity.

Favre

Bismarck

The reaction to the agreement and the new French Government led many to join the Paris Commune, which lasted from March 1871 to May 1871 and was savagely put down by the French Versailles Government with the death of some 20 to 30,000 French citizens - a butchery watched by the German Troops stationed outside the city.

Paris Commune

In any event, the seeds of dissatisfaction planted in French moral depression of 1871, led to a vindictive French policy and the winter of their discontent made glorious summer by the Treaty of Versailles on June 1919, after the slaughter of millions in the First World War. The seeds of further German dissatisfaction as a result of this treaty led to the rise of National Socialism in the form of the Nazi Party.

Prior to that event, 62 years to the day after German forces pulled out of France in 1873, on the 15^th September 1935, Nazi Germany enacted the Nuremberg Laws depriving German Jews of their citizenship and on the same day adopted their new national flag with the swastika. This was merely a prelude of what was to come - the Second World War; which led to the Second French/German Armistice signed at Compiègne on the 22^nd June 1940 in the same famed railway carriage used in 1919.

French General Huntziger signs armistice

The Group

Can one trace the seeds of holocaust to that 15^th September 1873 or does it go back to the 15^th September 1812, the day on which the French Army under Napoleon reached the Kremlin in Moscow? We all know what that unfortunate movement led to.

The evolution of evil is a difficult theory to express. Oddly enough 100 years to the day before the enactment of racist legislation in Germany of 1935, on the 15^th September 1835, HMS Beagle, with Charles Darwin aboard, reached the Galapagos Islands.

One should not be too depressed by the 15^th September. Just have a look at an advert shown today for Australia’s R/U OK day, in support of assistance to potential suicides.