On this date in 1839, five French-Canadian Patriotes were hanged at Montreal’s Pied-du-Courant Prison for their parts in an abortive rebellion against British authority.
This day’s hangings were the result. And while Britain would keep Canada unified, it would never seamlessly absorb her French subjects. So the men who mounted the gallows this day, and others who fought the British, are commemorated on Quebec’s National Patriotes Day, intentionally scheduled to oppose the national — and distinctly English-flavored — Victoria Day in May.
Accounts — which also recorded that one of the hanged men was able to free a hand and resist the rope with it, and to get his feet to a supporting beam from which he had to be pushed — recalled Charles Hindelang‘s final words thus:
I declare that I die with the conviction of having fulfilled my obligations with dignity. The sentence that struck me is unjust; I forgive those who bore it.
The cause for which I sacrifice myself is noble and great. I am proud of it. I don’t fear death. The blood that is spilled will be washed away with blood. Let the responsibility fall on those who deserve it.
Canadians, my final farewell is the old French cry:
On this date in 1942, with the British about to abandon Singapore to the Japanese, turncoat officer Patrick Stanley Vaughan Heenan was summarily executed at Keppel Harbour.
Heenan, who had taken a long leave in Japan in 1938-39, used a wireless set to feed intelligence aiding the Japanese army’s invasion of Southeast Asia.
Heenan was caught on December 10, but there was little werewithal to handle his case as the defenders’ situation deteriorated desperately — less for anything Heenan had on offer than for the comprehensive weakness of the British position. He never seems to have been judicially sentenced, but he was shot by a guard chosen by lot two days before Britain surrendered Singapore. Something of an outsider to begin with, Heenan had begun taunting his guards on their impending defeat.
On this date in 1963, putschists captured Iraqi Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim,* subjected to him to a snap tribunal, and had him immediately shot.
Qasim‘s five-year run as Iraq’s Prime Minister marks that country’s transition from the British-installed Hashemite monarchy to the secular dictatorship that persisted until America’s 2002 2003 invasion.
It was the heyday of postcolonialism, of the Cold War, of pan-Arab strivings — a political topography of the Middle East that seems unrecognizably different from the distance of a half-century’s evolution.
And yet … not so alien after all. For superpower intervention and oil politics were already defining and demarcating the oil-rich nation’s choices.
Qasim had come to power in a coup of his own, a recognizable exemplar of the young Turks genre: in 1958, a cadre of energetic young officers virtually without resistance disposed of the unwelcome royal family and seized the helm of the state.
Contention among interest blocs within Iraq and without during the Qasim years, leading the coup’s author to this day’s fate, is too complex** for a full examination in this space. Of greatest moment was the nationalist officer’s alliance with the robust Iraqi Communist Party against the youthful Ba’ath party, a marriage of convenience not supported by all his cohorts.
Qasim himself was not a communist, but the arrangement of players that made this partnership expedient tended to drive Iraq out of the American orbit — out, for instance, of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact — and towards that of the Soviet Union. And Qasim himself kept an open heart for Iraq’s poor, donating his salary to pensioners and, according to a friend in the officer corps,
liv[ing] very simply. Many poor people used to visit him frequently because he served the poor by sharing his salary with the needy. In return, they would come to clean and cook and serve him, although this was strictly a voluntary action on the part of the people who loved and respected him.
Qasim partly nationalized the oil industry — that job would be completed by a successor — and hosted the meetings where OPEC was born. He threatened to annex Kuwait.
Washington looked askance at these developments, and it was well before 1963 that it took steps to abort them. Early in 1959, Qasim survived a coup attempt. Later that same year, a CIA asset botched an assassination attempt.
The 22-year-old would-be assassin escaped the country and laid up in American safehouses abroad, but young Saddam Hussein would have a part to play yet in his country’s future — and he would return to play it because on this date, the Agency got its man.
An excerpt from a U.S. State Department memorandum of a meeting with oil executives the week after Qasim’s fall. From one of several archival documents collected here. (Executed Today has also mirrored the site’s cable on Qasim’s execution page 1 | page 2).
On this date in 1512, the Taino Indian cacique Hatuey was burned alive at Yara, Cuba — the prototypical martyr of heroic resistance against the centuries of colonial onslaught to come.
“You already know that it is said the Christians are coming here; and you have experience of how they have treated the lords so and so and those people of Hayti (which is Hispaniola); they come to do the same here. Do you know perhaps why they do it?” The people answered no; except that they were by nature cruel and wicked. “They do it,” said [Hatuey], “not alone for this, but because they have a God whom they greatly adore and love; and to make us adore Him they strive to subjugate us and take our lives.” He had near him a basket full of gold and jewels and he said. “Behold here is the God of the Christians …”
Hatuey had a trenchant critique. The Spanish had the guns.
Hatuey kept up a hopeless guerrilla resistance for a few months, but was captured and tied to the stake — where a famous parting dialogue took place. Once again, de las Casas:
[A] Franciscan monk, a holy man, who was there, spoke as much as he could to him, in the little time that the executioner granted them, about God and some of the teachings of our faith, of which he had never before heard; he told him that if he would believe what was told him, he would go to heaven where there was glory and eternal rest; and if not, that he would go to hell, to suffer perpetual torments and punishment. After thinking a little, Hatuey asked the monk whether the Christians went to heaven; the monk answered that those who were good went there. The prince at once said, without any more thought, that he did not wish to go there, but rather to hell so as not to be where Spaniards were, nor to see such cruel people. This is the renown and honour, that God and our faith have acquired by means of the Christians who have gone to the Indies.
Indigenous peoples have been quite useful to political elites in Latin America generally, and in the Caribbean specifically, almost since the time of the conquests by Spanish and Portuguese adventurers in the 15th and 16th centuries. But they have been most useful dead.
…
Dead, the Indian could be transformed, generalized, denatured, and repackaged for the benefit of emerging elites. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, indigenous people supplied the foundations for a trope, both literary and political, essential for the construction of cultural, ethnic, racial and political identities distinct from the traditional colonial masters of emerging Latin American states, as well as from that great power to the North.
…
Hatuey might have thought he died as one of what would be a growing number of Indian patriots resisting the aggressive and undocumented migration of European peoples into their lands. Thus the first irony. More than that, Hatuey died a martyr for a reformed Catholic Christianity by a noble death, a martyrdom really, and one which was served up by Bartolomé de las Cases as an indictment of the practices of Spanish Catholicism. Thus the second irony.
…
Hatuey has been transfigured. From a Taíno cacique from Hispaniola (Hayti) seeking to preserve the control of Indian peoples over their lands, he has become the first Cuban—foreign born, warrior, martyr, whose blood sacrifice ties him not to the Indians of Cuba but to Cuba iteself.
On this date in 1932, legendary Salvadoran revolutionary Farabundo Marti was shot after his peasant uprising against the military government was crushed.
La matanza had erupted just 10 days before against dictator Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez. The communist-led rebellion, fomented by collapsing coffee prices, enjoyed some initial success but was soon drowned in a bloodbath.
Hernandez Martinez, who had himself toppled an elected government only weeks earlier, had the defeated Marti shot after a perfunctory hearing.
Marti remains a martyr figure on El Salvador’s left, and certainly presents a favorable contrast to the half-century of military rule that followed his death. He is the namesake of the leftist Salvadoran party FMLN — the Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional — which fought a guerrilla war against the country’s U.S.-backed oligarchy in the 1980s. The FMLN is today one of El Salvador’s two major political parties.
On this date in 1606, Guy Fawkes, “the only man to ever enter parliament with honorable intentions,” was hanged, drawn and quartered in London with three conspirators for attempting to blow up the Houses of Parliament … and the government with it.
Fawkes, a soldier, was part of the Gunpowder Plot, a Catholic attempt to assassinate the new king James I when it became clear the House of Stuart would continue its Tudor predecessors’ intolerance of the Roman church.
The conspiracy was crowded, so it was something of a miracle the secret kept for over a year while the plotters filled a rented room under the House of Lords with 36 barrels of gunpowder and waited for parliament to open. The explosion would have slain not only James, but numerous officials of the government; the conspirators’ “then what?” plan seems a little vague, but with a modern recreation confirming that the gunpowder packed under Westminster was sufficient to blow the place to smithereens, it’s safe to say something dramatic would have ensued. That “something” might easily have been a savage crackdown against Catholics.
All that remains safely in the domain of the speculative — because as the date approached, one of the conspirators felt moved to warn a Catholic Lord in writing not to attend the opening.
My lord out of the love i beare to some of youere frends i have a care of youer preseruasion therefor i would advise youe as youe tender youre life to devise some excuse to shift of youre attendance at this parliament for god and man hath concurred to punishe the wickedness of this time and think not slightly of this advertisement but retire youre self into youre contri where youe may expect the event in safti for thoughe there be no appearance of any stir yet i saye they shall receive a terrible blowe this parliament and yet they shall not see who hurts them this councel is not to be condemned because it may do youe good and can do youe no harme for the dangere is passed as soon as youe have burnt the letter and i hope god will give youe the grace to maketh good use of it to whose holy protection i commend youe.
Subtle.
Fawkes was not the leader of the conspiracy, but his wartime siege experience made him an important participant in an operation similar to undermining a castle. The affair became remembered to history under his name because he was the one caught when, once the incriminating letter was turned over to the government, yeoman guards searched the cellars.
Fawkes was tortured by express permission of the king for his conspirators’ identities, but held his tongue; those conspirators, however, went ahead with the desperate uprising that was supposed to follow the explosion, and within days they had been apprehended or killed.
Four lesser conspirators were hanged, drawn and quartered on January 30; the remainder suffered that dreadful fate today. Fawkes himself, however, managed to avoid the worst of it by leaping from the scaffold when he was strung up to be half-hung — so he was dead of a broken neck when disemboweled.
The fortuitous abortion of this stupendous act of terrorism (if we can call it “terrorism”) made November 5 Guy Fawkes Night on the English calendar, still a day of fireworks and bonfires in many of the Commonwealth countries.
Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t’was his intent
To blow up King and Parli’ment.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England’s overthrow;
By God’s providence he was catch’d
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
The opening lines of this 17th century poem celebrating the king’s miraculous deliverance introduce the 2006 film V for Vendetta …
… in which Fawkes’ subversive persona is pitted against a theocratic dictatorship in the dystopian near future. It’s notable for a forthright celebration, in a mass-market film, of the liberatory power of terrorism.
Today’s well-known victim also left a less obvious but more ubiquitous cultural artifact. The practice of marking Guy Fawkes Night with effigies of the traitor — “Guys” — caused the word to enter the general lexicon as slang for a strangely-dressed man, eventually coming to mean any man (or, arguably, any person regardless of gender) at all.
Yue fought for the Song Dynasty against the neighboring Jin Dynasty. He was a disciplined commander, an honorable and well-studied man — the very Confucian ideal.
The tale about him — the reason he is so well-recalled as a model of patriotism — is that his counterattack after the Jin overran the northern half of the Song realms was so effective that it threatened to repel the invaders. On the cusp of conquering the old northern capital, Kaifeng, he was supposed to have been ordered to lift the siege and return — an order Yue obeyed for the safety of his kingdom, even though it meant fatally confiding himself to his enemy‘s power.
The story’s dramatics are to be doubted; he seems in fact to have been recalled (with other officers) after the battle and duly cashiered into a civilian post months before dying. Much of Yue Fei’s biography is recorded by undependable sources such as a fantastical biography written decades after his death, and a historical novel dating to centuries later. Even his death — whether execution or simple murder, and the means by which it was effected — is not reliably reported.
But his place in the firmament of Chinese heroes is well beyond dispute. Yue Fei was rehabilitated not long after his death, and a shrine built (still on public display to this day) with statues of his persecutors, often abused by visitors, carved kneeling in supplication.
And just as Yue Fei is a pinnacle of honor and loyalty, those who struck him down remain contemporary emblems of infamy. It is said that the Song minister Qin Hui, pressed for his reasons for ordering Yue’s execution, responded to the effect that “Though it isn’t sure whether there is something that he did to betray the dynasty, maybe there is.” As a result, the phrase maybe there is or it could be true denotes trumped-up charges in Chinese. In a more toothsome vein, the traitors who slew the general are also supposed to have given Chinese cuisine the fried-dough dish youtiao.
Update: The Yue Fei legend gets a skeptical inquiry in view of the political situation on the ground here.
(Thanks to Jeffrey Fisher [jeffreyfisher at me.com] for the guest post.)
Sebastian In Art
Martyrdom — dying for the sake of one’s religious beliefs — has been one of the defining aspects of Christian self-understanding since at least about 100 CE, when the Book of Revelation was composed. Only a few systematic persecutions of Christians can be even minimally documented, but the idea that Christians suffer and even die for their faith — at the hands of the Jewish establishment, or the Roman authorities, or, today, secular humanists — is absolutely central to Christian identity for many Christians.
One of these ancient periods of persecution for which there is some historical evidence is in the late third and early fourth centuries, around the time of the Emperor Diocletian. On this day in 287, according to tradition, Diocletian martyred Saint Sebastian, at the time an officer in the Praetorian Guard.
The story goes that Sebastian’s Christianity was unknown to the Emperor until Sebastian balked at his job of executing Christians who refused to offer a libation to the emperor (a god, according to the emperor cult of the time). Indeed, Sebastian went so far as to encourage two Christians martyrs in their faith, and to convert several others. Upon hearing of all this, Diocletian ordered Sebastian tied to a tree and shot to death with a firing squad of the ancient sort: bows and arrows.
This, then, is how Sebastian is best known and most commonly represented: as a beautiful youth tied to a tree or a pillar and pierced with arrows.
Like the martyr Saint Catherine, however, whose iconic imagery is also a form of execution* survived by the saint, Sebastian was riddled with arrows and left for dead but did not die. He was rescued by St. Irene, who nursed him back to health. He lived until he heckled the Emperor sometime later, at which point Diocletian had him beaten and, making certain he was dead, threw him into a privy.
The truth is that we know next to nothing of the historical Sebastian. The Catholic Encyclopedia has a very short article that says mainly that. But this has not diminished his importance or cultural prominence, and he has quite the account in the Golden Legend.
Sebastian walks in a solid tradition of military martyrs, including St. George and St. Martin of Tours, and is like George a patron saint of soldiers. Interestingly, while George was also martyred, George is typically represented in strength, slaying a dragon, while Sebastian is represented (again, like Catherine) at an ostensibly powerless moment that is simultaneously his nadir as a human and his pinnacle as a saint.
The image has fascinatedartists (and writers) for millennia, including most especially Renaissance Italian artists and early modern artists from all over Europe. Botticelli painted Sebastian twice, but perhaps the single most famous painting is that of Andrea Mantegna, who painted the saint three times. The fame of these paintings may be due in part to the way in which they typify the conception of the saint and his representation as a complex icon of fantastic vulnerability and strength, suffering and fortitude, and with striking homoerotic potential (perhaps having to do with the complex relationship between pain and pleasure), which is more fully realized in, for example, Botticelli’s earlier work or in Guido Reni’s painting.
More recently, St. Sebastian has a cameo in the video for REM’s “Losing My Religion,” which seems to be very much about the hazards of being young and gay in a heteronormative culture.
There is no more or less reason to think that Sebastian himself was gay than to think that he was in the Praetorian Guard, from Gallia Narbonensis, or even, really, that he was martyred. But he has been an important icon in what we might call gay culture since at least the Italian Renaissance, and it’s not clear that it matters whether he was gay any more than it matters whether or not he even existed.
* The breaking wheel, which is said to have shattered at her touch.
That Japan’s feudal stagnation would give way to the Meiji era’s centralization and modernization may well be accounted an inevitability of history. The particular form of its birth superimposed upon the epochal conflict a bitter internal division over openness to foreigners vis-a-vis the centuries-old isolation.
The Tokugawa Shogunate had been forced to accept trading pacts dictated by better-armed western nations, and the resulting cultural and economic shockwaves carried many to the camp of a long-slumbering imperial house ready to assert its authority. Power in Japan was a prize worth killing for.
Gensai did so. Physically small and even effeminate, he was justly among the most feared warriors of his day. He became an elite imperial assassin renowned for the speed of his blade; he was famous for murdering pro-western shogunate politician Sakuma Shozan in broad daylight in 1864 — only one of scores of Tokugawa retainers assassinated during the period, although the only one that can be definitively attributed to Gensai.
It was not for any of this that Gensai was put to death, for his side won the war.
But the legendary killer was really in it for the immigration policy — “Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians” — and the Meiji government sensibly dropped the second plank of that platform as soon as it was in the saddle. That volte-face didn’t push Gensai into anything so drastic as revolt, but with modern police forces elbowing aside old-school samurai and outward-facing engagement still the political order of the day, the true believer had become a liability.
The character Himura Kenshin from the Japanese manga and anime series Samurai X is loosely based on Gensai. He’s the one helpfully marked with an “X” on his cheek:
On this date in 1775, the Russian Empress Catherine the Great had Cossack rebel Yemelyan Pugachev chopped to pieces in Moscow for sustaining a major insurrection whose effects would haunt Russia for decades to come.
Catherine was slow to see the import, but this hinterlands pretender set up a state-like bureaucracy and began issuing ukases as tsar — and one can readily discern from their content why he attracted a following:
We bestow on all those who formerly were peasants and in subjugation to the landowners, along with Our monarchic and paternal compassion … tenure of the land and the forests and the hay meadows and the fisheries and the salt lakes, without purchase and without obrok, and we liberate all the aforementioned from the villainous nobles and from the bribe takers in the city–the officials who imposed taxes and other burdens on the peasants and the whole people … [T]hose who formerly were nobles living on estates are enemies to Our power and disrupters of the empire and oppressors of the peasantry, and they should be caught, executed and hanged, they should be treated just as they, who have no Christianity, dealt with you peasants.
The insurrection speedily metastasized, and by the time a force sufficient to quash it was deployed, it had stretched itself from the Urals to the Volga.
Alexander Pushkin used the story of Pugachev’s rebellion for The Captain’s Daughter (text in English | Russian), which has been adapted to film several times — most recently in 2000.
Catherine the Great, for her part, was deeply shaken by the affair, and the “enlightened despot”, while maintaining traffic with the era’s liberal intellectual ferment, decisively turned against any reform to serfdom. Catherine’s choice, reinforced by her successors, to uphold their security with nothing but repression maintained Russian serfdom until 1861 on a staggering scale — an anchor dragging down the economy just as industrializing western Europe opened a development gap whose effects persist to this day.
The 
