In 52 B.C. on July 8th, before it was called "July" after Julius Caesar, July conquered a fishing village called Lutetia Parisiorum. Under Roman rule this city became quite popular and was eventually renamed "Paris." As such, July 7th is still credited as the founding day of Paris. To the victor goes the spoils.
Speaking of the Spoils of War, on this day in 1853 Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, representing the U.S. government, sails into Tokyo Bay, Japan, with a squadron of four vessels. Under threat of attack, the Japanese accepted letters from President Millard Fillmore, making the United States the first Western nation to establish relations with Japan since the slaughter of the Christian Missionaries known worldwide as the Martyrdom of Nagasaki, when Japan turned the Missionaries away and avoided losing their beautiful culture which is still with us today (maybe that's why the U.S. dropped the unnecessary nuclear bomb on Nagasaki to end a war they had already won?).
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| The Christian martyrs of Nagasaki. 16th/17th-century Japanese painting. |
"So what is so esoteric about July 8,"you ask? July 8th, 2022, is the date that Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister of Japan was shot over his beliefs in the Unification Church from South Korea. The Unification Church was founded on the standard Christian beliefs left in Korea by the Missionaries that Japan had turned away. The young man, Tetsuya Yamagami, was pissed at the church he once belonged to because his mom gave away most of her earnings to the church, and in the mind of Yamagami, had little to show for it. Yes, the circle was unbroken.
All not bad on July 8th, on this day in 1918, Ernest Hemingway was shot in the ass driving an ambulance for the America Red Cross. In the hospital he did like most wounded soldiers at war do: he fell in love with his nurse, and subsequently, used this experience in his great novel, A Farewell to Arms. A novel I actually counted the word "hand" written over a hundred times. Needless to say my professor wasn't impressed with my work and so gave me an "E" on the paper for "Excellent." That's when I decided I would rather blog, that write. It is a far, far, better thing I do now.... or as Hemingway opened his novel with:
"In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in the village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves."
Is it any wonder July 8th just happens to be the day that Percy Bysshe Shelley died in 1822. I'm not sure how many "hands" Percy used in his works, but he did have an interesting take on the Christian missionary saviors of yesterday:
"Christianity indeed has equaled Judaism in the atrocities, and exceeded it in the extent of its desolation. Eleven millions of men, women, and children have been killed in battle, butchered in their sleep, burned to death at public festivals of sacrifice, poisoned, tortured, assassinated, and pillaged in the spirit of the Religion of Peace, and for the glory of the most merciful God."
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| "I'm not 'Peter the Hermit,' but I am in the Public Domain. So, yes, I am the Hermit Man of which you speak." |
And finally, on July 8, 1115, that great guy Peter the Hermit dies. Peter the Hermit is fondly remembered in the Christian history books for killing Jews. Yes, the Nazis Patron Saint.
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| No, no! Not the Peter the Hermit story again! |
You can't make this shit up.
~~ Eso Terry
