The following is my abridgement of chapter 12 of William Pierce’s history of the white race, Who We Are:
Macedonian and Roman Empires Were Built by Nordics
Latin Founders of Rome Came from Central Europe
The last five installments in this series have dealt with the migrations of Nordic, Indo-European-speaking tribes from their homeland in southern Russia, beginning more than 6,000 years ago and continuing into early historic times. In installment 11 we traced the fate of those Nordics who invaded Asia, conquering races which differed substantially from them and eventually being absorbed by those races, despite strong measures for self-preservation.
Only those Nordics who migrated westward, into Europe rather than into Asia, have left a significant genetic heritage. And only those who went northwestward predominated genetically in the long run. Along the shores of the Mediterranean the population density of non-Nordic natives was too high, and racial mixing eventually overwhelmed the invaders. We have already seen what happened to the Greeks.
Balkan Nordics. To the north and northeast of Greece, from the head of the Aegean Sea to the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea, other Nordic peoples from beyond the Black Sea settled. Among these peoples were the Illyrians, the Dacians, the Thracians, and the Macedonians. Very roughly, the Illyrians occupied the territory comprising much of present-day Yugoslavia and Albania; the Dacians occupied the loop of the lower Danube, in what is now Romania; the Thracians occupied Bulgaria and European Turkey; and the Macedonians occupied the territory between Albania and Bulgaria, comprising the Macedonian provinces of Yugoslavia and Greece. This was a greatly varied territory, and consequently the Nordic inhabitants, though closely related in blood and culture, experienced varied fates.
As we noted in earlier installments, this territory was the site of the Mediterranean Neolithic culture known as Old Europe, which arose about 8,000 years ago and lasted until the first Nordic invasions, which came during the late fifth and early fourth millennia B.C. The early invasions were numerically thin, however, and resulted, in many parts of this Balkan area, in a situation with which we are already familiar: a Nordic warrior elite ruling masses of indigenous Mediterranean farmers and craftsmen.
Blending, Disunity. This situation led to a great deal of racial and cultural blending. The languages of the Nordics prevailed everywhere, but their blood and their religion became mixed with those of the Mediterraneans. For example, even as late as historic times, when further invasions had greatly reinforced the Nordic racial element in the area, the Thracian religion remained a strongly interwoven blend of Mediterranean Earth Mother elements and Nordic Sky Father elements. In the case of the Greeks the Nordic elements had prevailed, but in the case of the Thracians the Mediterranean elements, with their serpent-phallic symbolism and orgiastic rites, played a much larger role.
Both geography and the inhomogeneous racial pattern of the area worked against political unity, and the Balkan region, in ancient times just as in recent times, remained balkanized. Only in Macedonia did a strong enough central authority arise and maintain itself long enough to have a major impact on the world beyond this corner of Europe.
Rise of Macedonia. Ancient Macedonia consisted principally of an inland, mountain-and-plateau region (Upper Macedonia); and a grassy plain at the head of the Thermaic Gulf (Gulf of Salonika), spanning the valleys of the lower Haliacmon (Vistritsa) and Axius (Vardar) Rivers. The Macedonian plain provided ideal conditions for the Nordic horsemen from the steppe of southern Russia.
In the middle of the 12th century B.C. the Dorian invasion swept through Macedonia on its southward course, and a large contingent of Dorians remained in the Macedonian plain, pushing much of the earlier population of Greeks, Thracians, and Illyrians into Upper Macedonia.
After a half-millennium of consolidation, the Macedonian kingdom was born. The first Macedonian king, Perdiccas I, unified the Dorians and the other tribes of the plain and brought them under his control around 640 B.C. Three centuries later King Philip II brought Upper Macedonia into the kingdom as well.
The Macedonians in the fourth century B.C. still had the vigor which decadence had drained from the Greeks of the south, and Philip was able to establish Macedonian hegemony over the greater portion of the Balkan peninsula. In 338 B.C., in the battle of Chaeronea, he crushed the Greek armies, and Macedonia became a world power.
Alexander the Great. But it was Philip’s son. Alexander, who used this power base to launch a new and vastly greater wave of Nordic conquest. In 336, at the age of 20, he succeeded his father as king of Macedonia. Within a decade he had conquered most of the ancient world.
Alexander’s principal conquests lay in the Middle East, however, in the area treated in the previous installment: Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Iran, Afghanistan, and the Aryan realm of northwest India. The greater portion of this territory had already been conquered by the Persians, under Cyrus the Great, two centuries earlier. By bringing it under common rule with Greece and Macedonia, Alexander created the greatest empire the world had yet seen.
Unfortunately, despite his military and organizational genius, Alexander did not understand the racial basis of civilization. He dreamed of a unified world-empire, with all its diverse races expressing a single culture and ordered by a single rule. At a great feast of reconciliation between Greeks and Persians at Opis, on the Tigris River some 40 miles above Baghdad, in 324, when his conquests were complete, he stated his dream explicitly.
Forced Racemixing. And throughout his brief but uniquely dynamic career of empire-building, Alexander acted consistently with this dream. He adopted Asiatic customs and dress, blending them with the Macedonian lifestyle and requiring many of his officers to do the same. He left in power many of the native satraps of the conquered regions, after receiving their oaths of loyalty. And it was not Macedonian Pella, but Semitic Babylon which he chose as the capital of his empire.
Alexander preached racemixing, and he practiced it. During the conquest of Sogdiana (comprising the modern Uzbek and Tadzhik Republics of the U.S.S.R.) he took to wife the daughter, Roxane, of a local baron. Four years later, at Susa, in 324, he also married the daughter of the defeated Persian king, Darius II. On that occasion he bade his officers and men to imitate him; nearly a hundred of the former and 10,000 of the latter took native brides in a mass marriage.
Alexander’s brides, and presumably those of his officers as well, were of noble Persian blood, which, even as late as the fourth century B.C., meant most of them were White—Nordic, in fact. But certainly most of the 10,000 brides of his soldiers were not; they were Asiatics: Semites and the bastard offspring of Semites and Aryans and a dozen other races.
Short-lived Empire. On June 13, 323 B.C., at Babylon, Alexander, not yet 33 years ears old, died of a fever—and with him died the unnatural dream of a mixed-race universal empire. Most of his Macedonian troops at once repudiated their Asiatic wives. His satraps began revolting. The various plans he had set in motion for homogenizing the culture and government of his vast realm became sidetracked.
Elements of Alexander’s empire survived long after his death. In Egypt, for example, the Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty lasted three centuries; Queen Cleopatra was not an Egyptian by blood, but a Macedonian. And in the east, after the breakup of the empire, local rulers claimed descent from Alexander, even as late as modern times.
But the far-flung empire itself had no natural unity, no unity of blood or spirit; and even if Alexander had lived long enough to impose an artificial unity of coinage and dress and language and custom, it would still have required the strength of his unique personality to hold it together. And it is well that the empire died with him; otherwise it might have sucked the best blood out of Europe for centuries, in a vain effort to maintain it.
Lost Opportunity. The attractions of the vast and rich Orient for one Nordic conqueror after another are obvious. What is unfortunate is that none made racial considerations the basis of his program of conquest—and it could have been done.
Alexander, for example, could have laid the foundations for a Nordic empire which could have stood against the rest of the world—including Rome—forever. The Macedonians and the Greeks shared common blood and had similar languages (ancient Macedonian was an altogether different language from modern Macedonian, which has its roots in the sixth century A.D. conquest of Macedonia by Slavic tribes). If, before invading Asia and defeating the Asian armies, Alexander had devoted his energies to forging just these two peoples into a unified population base, casting out all the alien elements which had accumulated in Greece by the latter part of the fourth century B.C.; and if, while conquering Asia, he had carried out a policy of total extermination—then he could have colonized Asia with Nordic settlements from the Indus to the Nile, and they could have multiplied freely and expanded into the empty lands without danger of racial mixing.
But Alexander did not cleanse Greece of its Semitic merchants and moneylenders and its accumulated rabble of half-breeds, and he chose to base his Asiatic empire on the indigenous populations instead of on colonists. And so the Greco-Macedonian world, despite its uninterrupted prosperity and its maintenance of the appearance of might after Alexander’s death, continued its imperceptible downward slide toward oblivion.
The focus of history shifted to the west, to the Italian peninsula.