April 10: A Voice for the Voiceless, A Revolutionary Silenced, A Nation Born in Darkness

The stories that April 10 carries are bound together by a single, uncomfortable question: who has the power to protect, and who is left exposed when that power is absent or corrupted? A New York reformer who decided that animals had a claim on human conscience helped build a movement that would save millions of lives. A Mexican revolutionary who spent his life fighting for the landless poor was killed the moment he became inconvenient to those in power. And in occupied Europe, a regime that called itself a nation announced its existence by targeting those it had already decided did not deserve to live. Each story is, in its way, about the stakes of advocacy — and the terrible cost of its absence.

The Man Who Heard the Animals

On April 10, 1866, Henry Bergh — a wealthy New York diplomat and philanthropist who had been disturbed by the casual cruelty he witnessed on the streets of cities across the United States and Europe — formally incorporated the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the first organization of its kind in the Western Hemisphere. The ASPCA was not born from sentiment alone but from legal strategy: Bergh had already secured from the New York state legislature a charter granting the ASPCA the authority to investigate complaints of animal cruelty and make arrests. He took the mandate seriously and personally, patrolling New York City himself and intervening — often in the face of ridicule and hostility — in cases of overworked cart horses, dog-fighting rings, and the appalling conditions in which livestock were transported. His contemporaries frequently mocked him. He persisted anyway.

The organization Bergh built became a template that spread rapidly across the country and eventually the world. By 1907, there were more than two hundred humane societies operating in the United States, most of them modeled on the ASPCA's structure of education, advocacy, and legal enforcement. The ASPCA also played an unexpected role in the protection of human beings: in 1874, Bergh's organization assisted in the landmark case of Mary Ellen Wilson, a nine-year-old girl who had been severely abused by her guardians and for whom no child protection laws yet existed. The case directly inspired the founding of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children the following year — the first child protection organization in the world. A man who set out to protect horses had, in the process, helped lay the groundwork for the protection of children. The circle of moral concern, once expanded, does not easily contract.

¡Zapata Vive!

On April 10, 1919, Emiliano Zapata rode into the hacienda of Chinameca in the state of Morelos, Mexico, responding to what he believed was a genuine offer of negotiation from a colonel named Jesús Guajardo, who claimed to be willing to defect to the revolutionary cause with his men and weapons. It was a trap. As Zapata and his escort entered the courtyard, a bugle sounded and soldiers opened fire. He was thirty-nine years old. Zapata had been the defining figure of the agrarian wing of the Mexican Revolution — a man from the village of Anenecuilco who had watched his community's communal lands stripped away by sugar plantation owners and who had organized resistance in Morelos with a ferocity and moral clarity that made him the most beloved and feared of all the revolutionary leaders. His Plan de Ayala, issued in 1911, demanded the return of stolen land to the peasants who had worked it for generations and remains one of the foundational documents of Mexican agrarian politics.

President Venustiano Carranza, who ordered the assassination, understood that Zapata alive was ungovernable — a living rebuke to a revolutionary government that had co-opted the language of land reform without delivering its substance. Dead, Carranza hoped, Zapata would be easier to manage. He was wrong. The killing instantly transformed Zapata from a regional guerrilla leader into a national and eventually international symbol of resistance to dispossession and the betrayal of the poor by political power. In many Morelos villages, people refused for years to believe he was dead, insisting that the body shown to the press was not his. His image — the broad sombrero, the thick mustache, the crossed bandoliers — became one of the most reproduced icons of the twentieth century. In 1994, the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas took his name. More than a century after Chinameca, the cry that erupted when his death became known — ¡Zapata vive, la lucha sigue!, Zapata lives, the struggle continues — has not gone silent.

A State Built on Terror

On April 10, 1941, four days after Nazi Germany and its Axis partners invaded and dismembered the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Ustaše movement proclaimed the Independent State of Croatia — known by its Croatian acronym, the NDH. The announcement was not a declaration of liberation but of occupation under a different flag. The Ustaše were a Croatian fascist organization that had operated in exile under Italian and German patronage for years, and their new state was a satellite of the Axis powers in every meaningful sense, dependent on German and Italian military presence for its survival from the first day. Within weeks of its founding, the NDH had enacted racial laws modeled on the Nuremberg statutes, targeting the country's substantial Serbian, Jewish, and Roma populations for persecution, expulsion, and extermination.

The atrocities committed by the Ustaše regime over the next four years were among the most savage carried out by any Axis collaborator government. The concentration camp complex at Jasenovac, operated entirely by the NDH without direct German involvement, became one of the largest killing sites in occupied Europe; estimates of the number murdered there range from 77,000 to more than 100,000, the majority Serbs, with significant numbers of Jews and Roma. The scale and cruelty of the killing shocked even some German SS officials. The NDH collapsed with the Axis defeat in May 1945, and Yugoslavia was reconstituted under Tito's communist government. The history of the NDH remained a suppressed and contested subject for decades under Yugoslav rule, resurfacing painfully during the conflicts of the 1990s. April 10, 1941, is not commemorated in Croatia today as a day of national pride — it stands instead as a date that demands honest reckoning with what can happen when nationalist ideology is stripped of all moral restraint.