{"id":412,"date":"2000-02-19T12:44:26","date_gmt":"2000-02-19T12:44:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.freidenker.org\/wuf\/cms\/?p=412"},"modified":"2017-10-15T11:40:34","modified_gmt":"2017-10-15T09:40:34","slug":"17-februar-2000-400-jahrestag-der-ermordung-von-giordano-bruno-auf-dem-campo-de-fiori-in-rom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.libres-penseurs.net\/en\/17-februar-2000-400-jahrestag-der-ermordung-von-giordano-bruno-auf-dem-campo-de-fiori-in-rom\/","title":{"rendered":"February 17, 2000 – 400th anniversary of the assassination of Giordano Bruno at the Campo d\u00e9 Fiori in Rome"},"content":{"rendered":"

Address of Klaus Hartmann, President of the World Union of Freethinkers,
\n19th February 2000 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Dear Friends of freethinking,
\nCitizens of Rome,<\/p>\n

I welcome you in the name of the World Union of Freethinkers to our common rally on the occasion of the 400. Anniversary of the execution of Giordano Bruno.
\nWhen the freethinkers from Italy and other countries gather on the Campo d\u00e9 Fiori in Rome, they do so in order to commemorate a very important man and in order to remind us of a monstrous crime.
\nWe commemorate Giordano Bruno and his epochal merits in philosophy and in the freedom of thinking.
\nWe remember the monstrous crime of the Vatican, which, 400 years ago, brutally murdered this man here on this square.
\nYet with this commemoration and remembrance, we direct our gaze at the same time towards the present, towards the conditions and enemies of freethinking today.
\nWith his consistent thinking of the concept of infinity, Giordano Bruno indeed achieved revolutionary progress in the development of a philosophy based on scientific knowledge.
\nThe church has assessed very correctly the danger for its dogma-building and its power.
\nBruno\u2019s work at the end the 16th century marks the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times. Giordano Bruno possessed extensive philosophical and scientific knowledge.
\nHe knew the works of Epikur, Demokrit and Aristotle, of Averroes, Avicenna and Thomas Aquinas, of Nicolaus of Cues and Erasmus of Rotterdam.
\nHe devoted himself to astronomy and physics, particularly to the works of Copernicus.
\nCopernicus had already refuted the idea of the earth as the centre of the universe, and had placed the sun there.
\nGiordano Bruno went beyond this idea by discovering the infinity of the cosmos.
\nHe defined the universe as the infinite material substance in an infinite area as unit and a continuum.
\nOn the basis of this concept of the infinity of the universe, he made the Church\u2019s idea of a heaven over the world collapse and pushed the God who reigns over us from his throne. At the same time, he ridiculed the idea of the strict divine court of justice.
\nEven more significant in a philosophical sense was the impossibility of the creation of material and it\u2019s indestructability and the idea of the unit, he had won from his concept of infinity.
\nRefusing causes outside the world, he manifested a scientific philosophy, which explains the developments from inner laws.
\nThus he became a pioneer of modern sciences and\u00a0 created the philosophical bases for materialistic and dialectical monism.
\nBruno\u2019s findings were and are indispensable and unlosable foundations for further intellectual and historical development.
\nHis thinking had influenced Spinoza, the philosophers of French and German enlightenment, Goethe and Leibnitz, and not least John Toland, for whom in the first time in history the term freethinker was used. And also the philosophies of Friedrich Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx are built on Bruno\u2019s work.
\nWith all right, Bruno acquired the reputation of a revolutionary who had changed radically and to a lasting extent philosophy as it had been then.
\nIn the 16th Century, the Catholic church did not see itself in a comfortable situation.
\nThe renaissance was fully developed; book printing ha broken the Church\u2019s monopoly over education; the development of craft and trade, the maritime shipping and the geographical discoveries demanded breaking through narrow academic horizons.
\nAfter the orthodox churches had justified their independence because of the monopoly claim of the Roman Catholic church, the Protestant and the Calvinist church split off after the Reformation. Opposition religious currents such as Waldenser and Albigenser were pursued as heretics in a bloody way.
\nThe early-civil revolution developed in peasant\u2019s-wars and rebellions.
\nAgainst the increasing questioning and endangering of it\u2019s academic, temporal and economic power, the Church created the barbaric instrument of the \u201cHoly Inquisition.\u201d
\nThroughout nearly the whole of Europe, there was a bloody prosecution of so-called heretics and witches, hundreds of thousands fell victim to this insanity.
\nGiordano Bruno also suffered this fate.
\nGod’s men ennobled him as a \u201cheretic-prince\u201d in order to put him on the same step as the devil.
\nBertrand Russel characterized the action of the Vatican against Bruno with the words: \u201cLike already often before, the servants of the existing felled a wild judgment over someone, who dared to have another opinion, because they feared a revolution\u201d.
\nBruno answered the death sentence of the inquisition court unbowed and without fear:
\n\u201cProbably you speak your judgment to me with more fear, as I receive it\u201d.
\nUp to his death, Giordano Bruno remained only committed to reason and the truth. He became a martyr of freethinking. That is why still today, all generations of freethinkers rightly see him as their pioneer and model.
\nThe brutal execution of Bruno on this sqare 400 years ago also took place in a so-called \u201choly year\u201d. In time for the beginning of the spectacle, the Vatican wanted to liquidate \u201cblot\u201d, as they regarded Bruno.
\nThe Vatican even had a new balcony built opposite the square, so that 50 cardinals could so-to-speak enjoy the bloody perverse spectacle from an honorary-platform.
\nWith the execution of Giordano Bruno and with the hundreds of thousands of murders the inquisition was responsible for, the Catholic church has justified its eternal fame: as a sinister, criminal organization.
\nWhereas one says of people that they become wiser with increasing age, the Church seems to be immune against this development.
\nWhen this monument was erected on the Campo d\u00e9 Fiori in 1889 in honour of Giordano Bruno, the Vatican ran storm against it. Pope Leo XIII., who had praised himself as a \u201creform-pope\u201d, described Bruno at that time as \u201cinsincere, a liar, vicious and intolerant \u201dand without any importance to science.
\nThis judgment falls back on the pope and hislike.
\nAnd in the year 2000? Even if one does not believe it possible \u2013 this time, too, the Vatican has tried to have the monument removed during the \u201choly year\u201d.
\nNevertheless, the Vatican is still trying very hard to make its bad reputation be forgotten, through more openness and acknowledgment of blame. Thus, for example, it has opened his archives \u2013 with one blemish, however: the documents about Giordano Bruno have disappeared!
\nEven the authority that was responsible for the death sentence against Bruno \u2013 the \u201choly inquisition\u201d \u2013 has still not been dissolved today. It was only renamed \u201cCongregation of Faith\u201d with the German cardinal Josef Ratzinger as the chief inquisitor at the top.
\nSome prominent victims have been \u201crehabilitated\u201d in the meantime by the Catholic church. Giordano Bruno cannot expect that. At the 3rd February 2000 Radio Vatican reported: \u201cin the opinion of the papal house-theologian, George Cottiers, the Renaissance intellectual Giordano Bruno, who was executed 400 years ago, will never been rehabilitated.\u201d His very divine reason, mentioned to the Catholic newspaper Avvenire: \u201cBruno\u2019s thinking has never been Catholic.\u201d
\nThat distinguishes Bruno of course from others, par example from war criminals. The pope does not have to rehabilitate them first, no, he can beatify them first. Thus Karol Woityla, in as late as 1998, beatified the notorious Croatian cardinal Stepinac, who had held his protective hand over the fascist Ustascha regime and over the many priests of his church, who personally ran the extermination camp of Jasenovac, in which hundreds of thousands Serbs, Jews, Sinti and Romanies were slaughtered up to 1944.
\nWe can see through all cosmetics that this Church today is still the same as it stays loyal to itself. Loyal to its criminal traditions and loyal to its solidarity with the mighty of this world, as a breeding ground for reaction.
\nThe scandalous beatification of Stepinac, this friend of the fascists, came at exactly the right time: as a spiritual arming for a new war against the Serbs \u2013 the third in this century.
\nAnd in the spring of 1999, the Pope indeed called upon us \u2013 in general words \u2013 to promote peace, but he did not find a single word of condemnation for NATO\u2019s war of aggression against Yugoslavia, which violated all international law.
\nWe do not see any reason to revise our judgment on the role and function of this Catholic church. But we have all reason to take into the visor all other enemies of freethinking, of the freedom and self-determination of the individual.
\nAs an example with the war returning to Europe, we have seen that: nearly all media worked as if they were one. In the disciplines of manipulation, fooling the people and brain-washing, the churches now have a mighty and effective competitor in the monopolistic mass media.
\nThere are only good and evil as in bad western-films. Even in the crusades it was not a question of power and money, but of true belief and God’s wage.
\nToday, the mighty powers no longer wage war for economic and geo-strategic interests, but for freedom and human rights. And the earth is once again a disk.
\nIt should be blended out of our consciousness that the Nato-war violated and destroyed international law; that more than 2000 civilians lost their lives; that civilian targets were systematically attacked; that nuclear ammunition and cluster-bombs were deployed and that targeted ecological warfare took place;
\nthat all of this is outlawed in international law and is paramount to absolutely clear war crimes.
\nThe powers of the \u201cnew world-order \u201dwant unlimited world domination, the control over all raw materials and natural resources. Under \u201cglobalization\u201d they want to establish a unipolar world order.
\nThe economic dictatorship is to be established with help of the World Bank, the International Monetary Funds and the World Trade Organization. In a military manner, this dictatorship is to be guaranteed with help of NATO operating world-wide. And to safeguard this, they are aiming for a global dictatorship of opinion, uniformation of thinking through the use of the media.
\nFreethinkers express their solidarity with all those, who were persecuted because of their commitment against the war; with the French general Pierre Bunel; with those, who have been taken to court in Germany because they had called on soldiers to desert; and with the Italian demonstrators against the war base in Aviano.
\nThe restoration of international law requires complete recompensation for the destruction caused by the Nato aggressors. The war-criminals who lead the Nato states have to be brought to an International Court!
\nWe demand the annulment of all sanctions and in particular the genocidal economic embargoes against Yugoslavia, Cuba and Iraq!
\nAt all times and everywhere the mighty have exploited the prevailing religious differences for their economic, strategic and military goals.
\nThis is what is happening in Northern-Ireland, in the Near East and in Tibet. On the way to creating a unipolar world order; to encircling and weakening Russia; to acquiring the oil and mineral resources at the Caspian sea, Kosovo was a stage and the next is Chechenya.
\nLike Giordano Bruno, the freethinkers today are committed to logic, truth and reason.
\nThe fight for our ideals is more current than ever. Therefore, we reject all religious or \u201chumanitarian\u201d camouflages of imperialist interests and wars.
\nTherefore, we say unconditionally and emphatically NO to fascism and war.
\nTherefore, we fight against the uniformation of thinking, the global economic dictatorship of the \u201cnew world order\u201d, we fight against the military dictatorship of NATO.
\nTherefore, we fight for a new millennium of human rights and the strict separation of church and state.
\nTherefore, we defend the dignity of walking upright and remain committed to the freedom, progress and emancipation of the mankind.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Ansprache von Klaus Hartmann, Pr\u00e4sident der Weltunion der Freidenker, 19. Februar 2000 Liebe Freundinnen und Freunde des Freien Denkens, B\u00fcrgerinnen und B\u00fcrger von Rom! Ich begr\u00fc\u00dfe Euch im Namen der Weltunion der Freidenker zu unserer gemeinsamen Kundgebung aus Anlass des 400. Jahrestages der Ermordung von Giordano Bruno.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dokumentation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.libres-penseurs.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.libres-penseurs.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.libres-penseurs.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.libres-penseurs.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.libres-penseurs.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.libres-penseurs.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":731,"href":"https:\/\/www.libres-penseurs.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412\/revisions\/731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.libres-penseurs.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.libres-penseurs.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.libres-penseurs.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}