Brüder – überm Sternenzelt
 muß ein lieber Vater wohnen.


It was Beethoven's birthday this past Monday. I am so pleased I was introduced to Beethoven at a very early age. Very insightful listening to some of his lesser known works.

Michael De Sapio is a h0Ɩ0h0αx peddler: https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2017/11/catholic-girl-wartime-holland-michael-de-sapio.html

The Jєω test rarely fails.

As for Beethoven, I don't have an opinion.

Beethoven was a Catholic—seldom in his adulthood a devout or a consistently practicing Catholic, certainly not a sinless one, but a Catholic nonetheless. He died fully reconciled to the Faith.

It has been duly certified by those near to him in his last days (i.e., March 1827) that he was quite conscious and welcoming to the priest who administered the Last Rites on the morning of March 24. Among those present on that morning was Anton Schindler, Beethoven's first biographer and his friend of thirty years. Schindler records that Beethoven thanked the priest and added, "You have brought me comfort."

Later that day, before he lapsed into fitful unconsciousness, he spoke—with reference to a gift from his longtime publisher, Schott, of a few precious bottles of old Rhine wine—these words, reportedly with a smile: "A pity, a pity—too late!" Schindler and others at his bedside attest that these were the composer's last recorded words.

Beethoven died in the late afternoon of March 26 during what has been uniformly described as a very frightening thunderstorm. According to Anselm Hüttenbrenner, one of only two people who were at Beethoven's bedside when he died, after one especially loud thunderclap, Beethoven stirred, opened his eyes, and briefly raised his right arm. He then fell back dead.

Beethoven's funeral took place on the morning of Thursday, March 29, in Vienna, at the Church of the Holy Trinity (in German, Dreifaltigkeitskirche). He was buried in the local cemetery, in the locality of Vienna called Währing. (His coffin was exhumed and moved to a place of honor in Vienna's Central Cemetery in 1872.) In solemn recognition of the composer's passing, all of the city's schools and many of its businesses closed for the day. The church was jammed with mourners, as were the roads from the church to the cemetery. As the police were called out to maintain order, there is an official record of the number of mourners: in excess of twenty thousand, a figure that amounts to more than 10 percent of the city's population at that time.

Michael De Sapio is a h0Ɩ0h0αx peddler: https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2017/11/catholic-girl-wartime-holland-michael-de-sapio.html.

Thank you for this link to an interesting article. As for De Sapio, I would characterize him as not so much a h0Ɩ0h0αx peddler as simply one who shares the h0Ɩ0h0αx delusion that hundreds of millions of others have been brainwashed into accepting as historical fact. Whichever characterization is more accurate, I quite agree that truth is done a grave disservice.

One thing I particularly noted in the article is that the description of the horrible Dutch famine of the 1944/45 winter (it lasted about four months, not the two years the article offhandedly implies) is distinguished by the curious absence of any quoted remarks from Mrs. van Egmond. That fact alone ought to put a casual reader on the alert. As it happens, I had a very dear friend, a gentleman I shall call Frits, who also lived through that famine. Frits, who was born in October 1927* and was thus nine months older than Mrs. van Egmond, lived with his family in The Hague. He thus lived through the entirety of the German occupation and knew the truth about the cause of the famine—as Mrs. van Egmond probably does, too.

The most relevant aspect of that truth is that the famine was knowingly caused by the sainted Allies, not by the evil German occupiers.** Because of both the incessant and criminally immoral Allied bombing of civilian targets throughout Germany and occupied Europe and the success of the D-day invasion on a great many fronts, the Dutch harvest of autumn 1944 had largely been destroyed, and the supply routes connecting the Netherlands to Germany were in a state of ruin, what with most of the bridges across the Rhine and many other rivers having been destroyed either from the air or by Allied saboteurs. The general in charge of the Germans' Dutch occupation administration, entirely on his own initiative, approached the International Red Cross officials in autumn 1944 and warned them that a devastating famine would soon strike Holland because of the Allied offensive. He proposed an arrangement whereby neutral and even Allied planes and surface vessels would bring food and clothing to the Dutch people and would be unmolested by the German troops and air defense installations. He further proposed to place the entire program under Red Cross supervision to guarantee its integrity and the absence of deceit and to ensure that no more than an agreed-upon small percentage of the foodstuffs would be diverted to the German soldiers.***

Despite the fact that the IRC gave its enthusiastic support to the plan, Eisenhower and the rest of the Allied command rejected it contemptuously. They didn't care in the least how many civilians died so long as their plan for the utter destruction of Germany continued unabated.

Frits told me that although everyone in the Netherlands with even the slightest connection to news from underground sources knew who had caused the famine and how it could have been averted, Allied propaganda brazenly attributed the famine to nαzι cruelty—and continues to do so.
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*He died in February 2008. May God rest his soul.
**Facetiousness alert!
***The German occupying forces did not starve as the Dutch civilians did, but they did have to endure very strict rationing.