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Degenerate art

Back to the Future

For years now I have been telling family members, on the rare occasions when I talk to them, that all films of the last decades have bad messages.

My late sister asked me some years ago, smiling triumphantly as if challenging me, what a bad message Back to the Future could have. I did not answer because I’d have had to speak in a big way on issues that she would not accept. But I do now, even though my sister can no longer read my answer.

The film begins with an experiment that Marty McFly (Michael Fox) makes with a huge speaker and his electric guitar. Well: the invention of the electric guitar alone was a blunder for Western culture. See, for example, this comment by the British Roger that we reproduced on this site six years ago.

So badly does Back to the Future initiate that the audience doesn’t disapprove of that experiment in which Marty harms his hearing with such decibels—something that, in the real world, many teenagers do with rock music.

Another bad message in the film occurs in the first scene inside the cafeteria of Hill Valley town, when Marty tells the humble black waiter that, in the future, he will be mayor of the town. The film implies that those changes from 1955 to 1985 would be seen as natural, that the inversion of values is perfectly okay.

I do not need to say more to show that even the funniest movie—Ronald Reagan himself loved Back to the Future when he saw it in the White House in 1985—may harbour a toxic message for the 14 words. But I could finish this brief review by pointing out that the film culminates with Marty playing the degenerate music of the future in the school dance of 1955: a time when the music for dancing was not so degenerating.

Categories
Der Antichrist (book) Friedrich Nietzsche

The Antichrist § 15

In Christianity, morality and religion are both completely out of touch with reality. Completely imaginary causes (‘God’, ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, ‘free will’ – or even an ‘unfree’ one); completely imaginary effects (‘sin’, ‘redemption’, ‘grace’, ‘punishment’, ‘forgiveness of sins’). Contact between imaginary entities (‘God’, ‘spirits’, ‘souls’); an imaginary natural science (anthropocentric; total absence of any concept of natural cause); an imaginary psychology (complete failure to understand oneself, interpretations of pleasant or unpleasant general sensations – for instance, the states of nervus sympathicus – using the sign language of religious-moral idiosyncrasy, – ‘repentance’, ‘the pangs of conscience’, ‘temptation by the devil’, ‘the presence of God’); an imaginary teleology (‘the kingdom of God’, ‘the Last Judgment’, ‘eternal life’). – This entirely fictitious world can be distinguished from the world of dreams (to the detriment of the former) in that dreams reflect reality while Christianity falsifies, devalues, and negates reality. Once the concept of ‘nature’ had been invented as a counter to the idea of ‘God’, ‘natural’ had to mean ‘reprehensible’ – that whole fictitious world is rooted in a hatred of the natural (of reality!), it is the expression of a profound sense of unease concerning reality… But this explains everything. Who are the only people motivated to lie their way out of reality? People who suffer from it. But to suffer from reality means that you are a piece of reality that has gone wrong… The preponderance of feelings of displeasure over feelings of pleasure is the cause of that fictitious morality and religion: but a preponderance like this provides the formula for decadence…

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Joseph Goebbels

The world’s enemy

by Joseph Goebbels

‘Three hundred men, each of whom knows the others, direct the economic fate of the continent. They find their successors from within their ranks’.

That is what one of these three hundred, who surely should know, wrote on 25 December 1909 in Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse: the leading capitalist, minister of the Republic, friend of the Bolshevists, and International Jew Walter Rathenau. When he died, hundreds of thousands of the Marxist proletariat demonstrated against capitalism and Reaction, for socialism and for Rathenau.

International high finance has taken command of the sovereign rights of the German people and is now making itself at home in our former realms of power. True to the ancient law of the Jewish race, ‘You shall devour all the peoples’, they began with us by shattering our people’s strength to resist through war and revolution, then bit by bit by taking over the most important structures of the state body.

They now own our currency and control by far the greatest part of German production, our transportation system, and as a result of their military and diplomatic capacities, Germany’s borders. The press is almost entirely in their hands; they thus control public opinion and determine the parliament and government. With the help of German politicians they put an overseer in place, the secret Kaiser Parker Gilbert. He controls the colonial budget and influences income and expenditures; the parliament and government are entirely in his hands, and the conditions of slavery that have prevailed in Germany since 9 November 1918 guarantee the continuation of this miserable state.

The Marxist parties are willing tools in the hands of these exploiters of money. With their help, world stock exchanges were able to rob the German people of its possessions. During the world-shattering military struggle they took two million of Germany’s best sons; from their blood Wall Street coined the gold bars that today obligate us to pay tribute. They used the so-called inflation to rob us of what we owned, and in place gave us a new currency, one that no longer belongs to us, but rather to our oppressors. The world enemy has the vital organs of our national body in its hands.

On the asphalt streets of modern big cities, the World Jew builds an imperialistic dictatorship of Red Gold; its pillars are the press, the workers’ movement, parliament, and the cowardice of the bourgeois parties. Each wretched day that passes is another step in the march of gold against blood. Things are moving relentlessly, and one can already determine with mathematical certainty when the last element of Germandom disappear from politics, the economy, and culture, and we will be at the end.

That is the situation! While we break our heads and chase after phantoms, money is preparing for its last destructive blow against German labour, and today there can be no doubt that, given the continuing weaken of the German will to resist, this catastrophe is closer than we all want to believe.

The great national and international parties have long since capitulated shamefully to the lust for power of the world enemy, whether openly or not. They either work for collapse or else advance it consciously or unconsciously through cowardice and the lack of a will to resist. While parliament gives speeches and holds debates, no one knowing anything, the forces of money march directly and clearly forward in a campaign of conquest against German labour. One day we will again be unprepared to face the facts that confronted us in 1914 and 1918, which will then be even more terrible and unavoidable as those that prevailed when this world-historical battle first began.

Are we, then, wrong in calling for resistance? Have we Germans deserved to have our chains of slavery made from gold made from the sweat and blood of our brothers?

The lords of money are preparing their final blow. They have robbed our people of faith and will, they have shamed and dishonoured us, and now want to grab us around our neck. No speeches, no begging, can stop that—only resistance, battle, attack! God will not help us. We must help ourselves.

Our life is in danger. The German people is in a constant state of emergency. Any means is appropriate to stop the enemy.

We are ready to use everything we have. If we free Germany from the insanity of gold, it will be the greatest achievement in world history! Blood against gold! Labour against money! Fists against legal paragraphs! Life against dead phrases!

That is what we march for!

19 March 1928.

Doves

https://youtu.be/4S5DpT1pSw0

It is interesting that, after the 20th minute of this Q & A session in Stockholm a year ago, Greg Johnson answered a question about the repatriation of non-whites in a diametrically opposite sense to The Turner Diaries, and that in the final minute of the video Jared Taylor said he’s located at the ultra-left in racialist circles regarding hatred: a feeling he disapproves.

Interestingly, it was this same Taylor, who says he doesn’t even hate the invaders from the south of the Rio Grande, whom the European Union banned a few days ago from entering the same conference in Stockholm that was held this year…

What kind of man has the best chance of regaining their lands: hawks like Pierce and Linder or doves like Johnson and Taylor?

Categories
Racial right

New subtitle

Alex Linder is not a National Socialist. However, his comments today about one of the foremost white nationalists inspired me to change the subtitle of this site from ‘The JQ [Jewish Question] and Christianity are one and the same’ to ‘WN [white nationalism] is a fraud; NS [National Socialism] is the real thing’.

In line with this decision tomorrow I’ll start posting old NS texts on a daily basis.

Categories
Civil war

Linder responds to Johnson

Greg Johnson has seriously criticised Brenton Tarrant in a recent conference at Sweden. He seems to be saying that we can save the white race through peaceful means alone:

https://youtu.be/KggpebZ5qHU

Alex Linder has just responded (I will be updating my quotes of what he’s saying this day):
 

______ 卐 ______

 
What Prof Poofter doesn’t understand is that no one joins a cause that only suffers blows and never delivers them. No essay ever has or will deliver the heartfelt joy of seeing for once, a white man slaughter the enemy.

[Tarrant] wrote a manifesto too. Unlike yours [Johnson’s manifesto], it’s been read by millions. It explains clearly and plausibly why he acted. Even on your own terms he beat you…

May thousands of Breiviks and Tarrants bloom.

Update of 7:45 am

It’s fine to write, but why denounce those who act?

The funny thing is, too, that guys like Johnson are always saying let everyone do what he feels comfortable with. Then when someone does his own thing, they complain. They’re hypocrites.

It’s child’s play to outargue the left. The left isn’t interested in ideas but in power. At some point there has to be fight back and obviously more people are concluding that time is now.

What needs to be done is organize people into an overt public force. But short of that, individual acts are fine too, and should never be disparaged.

You can disagree with someone’s actions and explain why, but to call Breivik or Bowers or Tarrant “nihilists” is simply to smear in the manner of the left.

Update of 8:47 am

He’s also a hypocrite when it comes to banning speech. I tried to post comments on his site [Counter-Currents], he censored them. This was years ago. He wanted to come here [VNN Forum] and post, but he wouldn’t tolerate responses on his site. So fuck him. On his own terms he’s inconsistent.

Update of 9:50 am. Linder also said:

If what Tarrant did hurt white people, they wouldn’t have immediately censored his video and criminalized distribution of his manifesto. “Nihilism” is a jew-tier smear. What we need now is a White Liberation Army; the age of essays has passed, it is Time to Kill.

Update of 10:50 am. Editor’s note: I for one recommend the perfectly legal tactic of saving precious metals preparing for the coming crash of the dollar. Only after that, the freedom fighters will find a collapsed society where a revolution is comparatively easier. Linder added:

Maybe you explain in your manifesto how you do it legally and peacefully given demographic change and shrinking base for promoting your message. The future is our views banned as hate. Everybody knows that. It’s already the reality in the world outside the US. There’s nothing left but violence.

We’ve been watching this for 20+ years; it has only gone one direction and until there is physical destruction of the agents of white genocide—the jews and their tool-races and whiteskin lackeys—nothing will change except things will get worse.

The problem here is you refuse to accept yourself for what you are—here I’m talking in the non-sexual sense. You’re a publisher who fantasizes himself as revolutionary. We had great essays, even almost as good as yours, 100 years ago. We won the “battle of ideas” (what a fruity concept) that long ago. But it turns out it’s not a war of ideas, it’s just a war.

We need to fight back. Would be better if it were organized, but if we can’t do things that way, or that way yet, then fight back as lone heroes.

The irony that those pushing your approach don’t realize is that all the softer democratic-political stuff would eventually flow from the harder stuff, but you wrongly thing it precedes it. It took Hitler just a few years to go national and huge and then win. This stuff is not long buildup, it’s incendiary.

But address this: how are you going to build a counterculture when it’s illegal? You have no answer to this because there is no answer to this.

It’s time to fight. You can self-characterize your arguments as sober strategy but they’re self-serving mush in reality. Write your essays. Who cares? I’ll give you 20% better than Tarrant—but he acted, and so he’s the one who creates persuasion and belief and gains followers. That’s where we are now. You’re trying to gain at the table what “we” haven’t won on the battlefield. The enemy will be reasonable when it’s on the verge of being wiped out; until it will continue to laugh at your “moral and intellectual” strengthiness and beat our race into the ground.

The way forward is violence. Tut all you like, but Breivik, Roof, Bowers and now Tarrant show us the way.

Update of 11: 12 am.

Yes, we are against right-wing terrorism, because the enemy who is literally exterminating our people from Earth through genocide is going to be defeated with movie/tv reviews, intelligent essays about Heidegger and memes!

My review of a Batman movie [Johnson writes movie reviews of the Batman films] is more powerful than all the political power they have in USA and EU! My porcelain gun [Johnson’s words some years ago] is more powerful than their M4 and their F16!

What a bunch of pussies you are, all of you. No wonder why the enemy is going to win.

Regarding what the commenters are saying about Johnson’s speech in other forums, Linder said:

Sometimes you gotta be a dick. These people make me puke.

Categories
Eduardo Velasco

On the One Ring (1 of 2)

by Evropa Soberana

It is not gold all that shines.

The ‘indefinite progress’ is an idea of illuminist origin, which was born in the Near East with the same civilisation and theoretical-rational legitimacy as it was sought during the French enlightenment of the 18th century. It is based on the notion that human beings come from a sick, dirty, ignorant and primitive past, and that little by little they move towards a healthy, clean, cultured and ‘advanced’ future. Archaeology suggests rather the opposite, namely: that civilisation has caused the fall of the human being from the state of grace, making him sick. The idea of religious traditions was similar: there was an Edenic ‘golden age’ (Satya or Kritta Yuga for the Hindus) in which the human being was more perfect, and after which a trauma caused human degeneration and the appearance of misery and disease, culminating in the Iron Age (Kali Yuga for Hindus). Despite this, the industrial spiral in which we are immersed continues to propagate that infinite economic growth is viable, that the Tower of Babel can rise indefinitely, that things are going better and, in short, that the human being ‘has improved’.

Throughout its evolutionary history, man ascended the food pyramid from the archaic frugivorous apes, becoming an increasingly effective predator and crowning the peak when, after the carnivorous revolution, he ceased to be the victim of other predators. However, with the end of the ice age and the advent of the Neolithic Revolution, man and the planet fell under a new form of predation: technology and parasitism of the Earth—two new factors that violated a hitherto harmonious holistic equation, and that forever upset the ecological balance of the planet and the biodiversity and genetic quality of the species.

The human being, or rather, a type of uprooted human, alienated, mixed and confused, believed that the reason for his discomfort and his fear was that the natural order was poorly designed. The glacial cold penetrates to the marrow, oppresses the heart, demoralises the timorous and does not allow thinking about anything else. The elements and vegetation whip and scratch the skin. The ground abuses the feet. The daily sustenance is only gained with atrocious sacrifice and bloodshed. Women, monopolised by the best hunters and warriors, are hard to come by. Every minute of life is a minute torn from death by struggling against the environment and against oneself. And to top it off, in every corner lurk the jaws of a predator or the sharp flint tips of an enemy tribe that has no qualms about cheerfully devouring whatever miserable falls into their hands. As for the tribe itself, it is a forceful, ruthless, cold and severe organism. It is not a mother in whose tender lap we cry for consolation and charity, but a strict father who imposes obedience, who rejoices with sacrifice and who does not forgive error. As military commanders, the wise elders marginalise the weak of the reproductive life, reward only good hunters and fighters, demand absolute loyalty and devotion and do not hesitate to let the less valuable elements of the community die for the good of the clan. Like it or not, these are the factors that made us rise above the ape-man and who wrote our genome as a novel with letters of ice, stone, blood, semen, flesh and sweat.

‘Evolve or die’, said the world at that time. But that law can be very hard for the victims of the voracious evolutionary machinery: to live like cannon fodder of natural selection is not life. Therefore, it is necessary to question this horrible state of affairs, redesign everything from scratch, reorganise the work of the gods—since they have not been able to organise it to the taste of man—flee from suffering and erect a messianic ‘new order’. The moral of the slave is born. A system (civilisation) must be built within the System (Nature), in which the daily sustenance does not involve so much effort and in which the search for pleasure and comfort prevails over the alchemical virtues of asceticism, sacrifice and willpower. The competitiveness must be attenuated and the ferocity of the predator must be softened to make it fit into the new pseudo-matriarchal social mould. To achieve such a goal, people of diverse backgrounds must be recruited, willing to work for a new common good—by persuasion or by force—and abolish their baggage of ancestral traditions and identity. Where previously there were only the professions of mother, hunter, warrior, fisherman, harvester and shaman, now there will be completely new occupations (potter, farmer, shepherd, merchant, prostitute, priest, miner, servant, slave) that will hierarchise society based to criteria that have nothing to do with the quality of genes. A weak and cowardly man can now be valuable if he is dedicated to moving objects along commercial routes. A promiscuous woman, once cursed by the tribe, can now sell her body. The nascent society must be a mass entity in which the strong pull the car, towing the weak with the sweat of his forehead. The brave ones die in the war while the cowards multiply in the rear. They do not need to hunt anymore; bread replaces meat and wine the blood. There is only one universal god: that of civilisation. All other gods are abominations. Those who belong to this kind of sect are the chosen ones. Those who do not belong to it are the pagans, the barbarians, the profane, the violent: the blind, savage and impure human mass that lives in darkness and that must be enslaved and integrated into the system so that the elect can live without working. This linear, rational and logical thought must grow monstrous until annulling the symbolic and instinctive thought. Civilisation will eventually dominate Nature, deciphering all its secrets, dissecting it and finally subduing it, phagocytizing and domesticating it completely, so that nothing escapes human control and for the system to be predictable, mechanical and mathematical.

This philosophy had to take root very early in the Near East and affected many peoples, among them the Jew—who is currently the human group that has lived the longest under civilised conditions. The Old Testament is dotted with testimonies about the dawn of civilisation, collected throughout the Fertile Crescent, from the Sumerian city of Ur to the Egyptian of Memphis.

It is much studied by eugenics that civilised social environments that preserve the lives of weak and stupid will be unable to perpetuate their ancestry. By throwing the strong and intelligent into fratricidal struggles or aberrant occupations that undermine their fertility rate, this irreparably causes the degradation of the genetic code of the human being. Nature has very twisted ways of taking revenge on those who turn their backs on it or pretend to dominate it. The fossil record shows that once man stopped hunting and embraced agriculture, he paid for it with a tremendous decline in his health and biological quality, as we saw in the article on the Neolithic Revolution.

Currently, the increasing proliferation of degenerative diseases, allergies and mental disorders (‘The investigation of diseases has advanced so much that it is increasingly difficult to find someone who is completely healthy’, said Huxley) is a clear signal that we have not been dominating Nature, but it continues to dominate us as always, only this time it attacks us, because we are not obeying it. Disease and degeneration are Nature’s ways of protesting and making us see that we are not exercising our human functions, that we ignore reproductive wisdom and that we are breathing, drinking and eating things we should not. If civilisation is like a snake that bites its tail, it is because it is the result of genetic quality and depends on it, but like a curse, it turns against the same substance that feeds it, closing the circle of its own perdition. This biological boomerang effect is the true reason why all civilisations collapse sooner or later, and raises a logical and disturbing question: if the next human civilisation will be global, what will come next?

Civilised man has not experienced the hardness of the real world in his flesh nor has he ever adapted to Nature. On the contrary: his actions are aimed at adapting Nature to him, even if by hammering. Therefore, he tends to have a big ego and a small spirit, and considers that he is the peak of evolution. This new artificial creature, this new domestic animal that is the modern human, for its isolation in the bubble of ‘well-being’, ignores the humility before the Creation, and is therefore the only way of life on the planet capable of deviating from natural laws, reverse the correct order and incur in the sin of rising against the work of the gods. To this sacrilegious and self-destructive pride, the Greeks called hubris or hybris. [1] It is the reason why, despite the fact that civilisation has been totally, absolutely and indisputably catastrophic from a strictly evolutionary, biological, spiritual and environmental point of view, man has become a ‘satisfied gentleman’ of his work.

Is civilisation a war to the death against biology and, therefore, a revolt against life, by the sickly, malignant and antithetical forces of the world, those who are resentful of suffering? Is man running the risk of becoming a slave to his own creation, in a simple productive factor, a number, a statistic? Have we created a system with a life of its own that has subordinated our good to yours? Is technology dehumanising and mechanising the species, exterminating its biodiversity, causing its involution and taking its domestication to chilling levels? Is modern society an immense concentration camp, a mass zoo in whose cages languish, domesticated and castrated, the degenerate mutant descendants of the free man and hunter? What kind of natural selection are we promoting? What human type is most favoured by ‘progress’? What will man become the day he has definitively lost his adaptation to Nature and instead is fully adapted to the industrial, commercial and technological world? Has the human species arrived at senility? Do we suffer from Alzheimer’s? Is the modern world in general and Western Civilisation in particular self-destructing? Is civilisation still that jealous Eastern sect that demands the submission of life and that to achieve that, like every sect, it removes the individual from its ancestral framework, annihilating its identity and dynamiting the loyalties it may have outside the sect (nation, people, race, class, sex, family, religion, guild, etc.)? This is the kind of questions that could be asked by the authors that we shall see in this article.

Civilisation has meant the overwhelming advance of inert matter (technology, commerce, consumerism, comfort), and the absolute regression of living matter (health, body, genetic code, mind, sacrifice), not to mention the fall of spirituality. Until the human power systems do not adopt a biocentric perspective in general and anthropocentric in particular, and while the top of the pyramid of world power remains occupied by the international financial elite (the shepherds who are domesticating us, castrating and poisoning us), the species will continue to degenerate itself, and the planet as well. Cutting down entire forests to print millions of copies of the magazine Telva make people sick so that they have to buy medicines from the pharmaceutical industry, charging maternity and births so that women work in order to earn money to buy completely useless things, or pulling millions of people from the Third World to feed the machinery of multinationals, are things that only in a wrong economic and rotten system could be beneficial—for a few, and only in the short term. As long as the states do not rebel against the free market economy and the stateless international trade, and as long as they do not resolutely and decisively intervene in human reproduction to stop the involution of the species and improve its genetic code, the human being is on the way to becoming an increasingly ridiculous being, uprooted in his lifestyle. The modern world desperately needs a series of popular revolts that overthrow the financial, global and consumer economy, and establish a multipolar, austere and simple economy based on self-sufficiency, the autarchy of each State, local goods that are strictly necessary and in which the State, identified with the working people, controls the merchants, the parasites and the usurious lenders.

The current lifestyle has nothing to do with the needs of the species, but with the demands of an economic system, which is in total contradiction with human nature, its innate instincts and the real role of the free man in the concert of life and the world.

The collection of quotations of the next post should not be understood as an argument against civilisation or against technology, but against a misunderstood civilisation, against misused technology, against the usurious, free-market, parasitic, consumerist and indefinitely growing economy, and in favour of a radically different kind of civilisation, as for example Sparta was in its day: a State, perhaps the only one in history, that with an unprecedented clairvoyance, realised that gold corrupts and that the Civilisation is a distinctly dangerous product that you have to approach with the whip in your hand. For centuries, Sparta was able to keep the nature and tradition of its citizens alive, but it was also able to defend the most vulnerable geopolitical environment in Europe against enemies infinitely more advanced, economically and materially.

Note:

[1] From hubris comes the Latin hybrida, from which comes the word ‘hybridize’, that is, the crossing of two varieties.

Unz commenter, 10

‘Jews only get away with what whites raised in their masochistic Christian culture let them get away with; they only have as much power as whites give them’.

Categories
Evil Summer, 1945 (book) Thomas Goodrich

1945 (VIII)

by Tom Goodrich

Chapter 1:
The hour zero

The long gray column stretched east for mile upon muddy mile. Like a wounded animal searching for a quiet place to die, the line moved slowly, painfully, yet steadily. Limping and dragging, staggering and stumbling, the once-mighty German Wehrmacht was now bound for slavery and death. In a stand-up club and claw fight to the finish, a contest between Adolf Hitler and European nationalism versus Josef Stalin and International Communism, the latter, with the power and weight of the United States and the British Empire behind him, had come off victorious. Now, just as the ragged, starving old men and boys in gray were marching east to oblivion, much of the Europe they were leaving was also passing into its own oblivion; for years to come the once bright and beautiful continent would know little else than darkness, degradation, death, and despair.

Above, black as a funeral, the brooding clouds of dejection and defeat. Below, littering the muddy road to Siberia, tattered bits of burnt clothing, broken strips of boot leather, dirty brown bandages, and puddles of blood, fresh, wet and dark. Ahead, years of back-breaking, mind-killing work in mines, bogs and forests and for almost all, the end—a frozen, unmarked grave. Behind, thousands of dead comrades, thousands of dead friends, thousands of dead family members—men, women, children, pets—buried beneath the rubble of a place that no longer resembled anything of this world. Behind, Berlin, the last battle of the war.

“The capital of the Third Reich is a heap of gaunt, burned-out, flame-seared buildings,” reported one of the first Allied correspondents to reach Berlin. “It is a desert of a hundred thousand dunes made up of brick and powdered masonry… It is impossible to exaggerate in describing the destruction… Downtown Berlin looks like nothing man could have contrived… I did not see a single building where you could have set up a business of even selling apples.”

Others who reached Berlin when the bombs stopped falling were likewise stunned by the almost total destruction. Block after block, mile after mile, as far as eyes could see and as far as legs could walk. There was no end to the ruins, ruins that once were one of the most gorgeous and glittering capitals on earth. But even more staggering to those who first viewed Berlin after the war was the total disbelief that anything calling itself “human” could still exist amid such utter ruin.

“Seeing them you almost hope that they are not human,” admitted a visitor.

But, and almost miraculously, there were humans yet living in Berlin. When the guns finally fell silent on May 8, 1945, these tattered and starved survivors crept from their cracks and caves, trying to flee: a nightmare, they knew not where.

“We clamber over bomb craters,” describes one woman trying to escape. “We squeeze through tangled barbed wire and hastily constructed barricades of furniture. It was with sofas that our army tried to block the Russian advance!… One could laugh if it didn’t rather make one feel like crying.”

Tanks riddled with holes block the way. A pitiful sight, pointing their muzzles toward the sky… Burned-out buildings left and right… Behind a projection in a wall sits an old man. A pipe in his right hand, a lighter in his left . He is sitting in the sun, completely motionless. Why is he sitting so still? Why doesn’t he move at all? A fly is crawling across his face. Green, fat, shiny. Now it crawls into his eyes. The eyes… Oh God have mercy! Something slimy is dripping onto his cheeks…

At last the water tower looms up in the distance. We are at the cemetery. The gate to the mortuary is wide open… Bodies, nothing but bodies. Laid out on the floor. Row after row, body after body. Children are among them, adults and some very old people. Brought here from who knows where. That draws the final line under five years of war. Children filling mortuaries and old men decomposing behind walls.

What had taken the German race over two millennia to build, had taken its enemy a mere handful of years to destroy. When the fighting, finally ended, the Great German Reich, which had been one of the most modern industrial giants in the world, lay totally, thoroughly and almost hopelessly, demolished. Germany, mused an American newsman drifting through the rubble, resembled nothing so much as it resembled “the face of the moon.”

At Germany’s second largest city, Hamburg, what Philip Dark found likewise staggered the senses. It was, thought the soldier, “a city devastated beyond all comprehension. It was more than appalling. As far as the eye could see, square mile after square mile of empty shells of buildings with twisted girders scarecrowed in the air…”

And what Leonard Mosley saw when he reached Hanover epitomized the condition of all German cities at war’s end. Hanover, typed the British reporter, “looked like a wound in the earth rather than a city. As we came nearer, I looked for the familiar signs that I used too know, but… I could not recognize [them] anywhere… The city was a gigantic open sore.”

Just as in Berlin, to the shock and surprise of not only Dark and Mosley, but to the survivors as well, life actually existed among and under the seemingly sterile rock piles. Like cave-dwellers from the beginning of time, men, women and children slept, whispered, suffered, starved, cried, and died below the tons of jagged concrete, broken pipes and twisted metal.

Other than being utterly destroyed, another feature shared by Hanover, Hamburg, Berlin, and every other German city was the nauseating stench that hung over them like a pall. “[E]verywhere,” remembered a witness, “came the putrid smell of decaying flesh to remind the living that thousands of bodies still remained beneath the funeral pyres of rubble.”

“I’d often seen it described as ‘a sweetish smell’—but I find the word ‘sweetish’ imprecise and inadequate,” one survivor scribbled in her diary. “It strikes me not so much a smell as something solid, tangible, something too thick to be inhaled. It takes one’s breath away and repels, thrusts one back, as though with fists.”

By their own tally of firebombing casualties, the British estimated that they had killed upwards of half a million German civilians. That some sources from the Dresden raid alone set the toll there at 300,000—400,000 dead would suggest that the British figures were absurdly­ and perhaps deliberately—low. Whatever the accurate figure, the facts are that few German families survived the war intact. Those who did not lose a father, a brother, a sister, a mother—or all the above—were by far the exception to the rule. In many towns and villages the dead quite literally outnumbered the living. For some, the hours and days following the final collapse was simply too much. Unwilling to live any longer in a world of death, misery and alien chaos, countless numbers took the ultimate step.

“Thousands of bodies are hanging in the trees in the woods around Berlin and nobody bothers to cut them down,” a German pastor remarked. “Thousands of corpses are carried into the sea by the Oder and Elbe Rivers—one doesn’t notice it any longer.”

Nor did one notice any longer the thousands of black and bloating bodies laying in the German countryside, on farms, in pastures, along fields, by roads, in ditches, the bodies of gray old men and fresh-faced boys of the Volkssturm, or militia, the pathetic last line of defense; disarmed, beaten, then murdered in cold blood by the same American army that murdered the boys at Dachau, murdered as they desperately tried to surrender, to somehow survive a war that was already over.

For Germany, May 8, 1945 became known as “The Hour Zero”—the end of a nightmare and the beginning of a dark, uncertain future. Most assumed, no doubt, that awful though the coming weeks and months would be, the worst was nevertheless behind them. It seemed to these dazed and damaged people that nothing the future had to offer could match what they had suffered through in the past.

But these people were wrong. The worst yet lay ahead. Though most of the shooting and bombing had indeed stopped, the war against Germany would continue unabated, forever if necessary, until the last German was dead. World War II was by far history’s most terrifying war, but what still lay ahead would prove, as Time magazine later phrased it, “History’s most terrifying peace.”

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Goths Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 116

The non-white Honorius: one of the children-emperors.

Editors’ note: To contextualise this translation of a 5-page section, ‘Honorius, Stilicho, Alaric and the first incursions of Germanic Christians’ taken from Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, read the abridged translation of Volume I.
 

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At first, in the name of the western emperor Honorius (395-423), crowned when his father Theodosius was already on his deathbed, and who was only eleven years old when he died, the half-vandal and general of the imperial army (magister militum), Flavius Stilicho, ruled.

Son of a Vandal officer, who led a cavalry regiment with Valens, Stilicho was Catholic. He ordered that the golden ornaments to be removed from the doors of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. He also ordered the burning of the very ancient Sibylline books, and prosecuted the ‘heretics’, especially the Donatists, thanks to the intervention of Augustine, and restored the privileges of the Church. […]

In Stilicho’s time the irruption in Italy of the Visigoths occurred, a Germanic tribe that had embraced Christianity prematurely. The Goths became the main missionaries among the Germanic peoples. Soon most of the ‘barbarians’ that had settled since the middle of the 4th century in the Danubian provinces, especially in Pannonia and Messia (where in other times there were already ‘bishoprics’), were no longer ‘pagans’ but Arians. According to the historian of the Church Socrates, impressed by their defeat before Constantine, that is, forced by the sword, the Goths ‘believed in the religion of Christianity’.

These despots eager of power constantly fought against the Romans—in 315, 323, 328—who defeated them, with an especially serious defeat in 332, in which their dead, which apparently included women and children, were estimated at one hundred thousand. The most recent investigations also admit that Constantine’s warlike successes and the political relationship of the Goths with the Roman Empire gave ‘impulse’ to the Christianisation of the latter. Already bishop Theodoret, the father of the Church, said that such policy proved its effectiveness in a curious saying: ‘The historical facts show that war gives us greater benefits than peace.’ […]

According to Eunapius of Sardis (around 345-420), a fervent enemy of the Christians, the betrayal of the monks also allowed the attack of Alaric in the Thermopylae. Be that as it may, Greece had never been so devastated before: Macedonia, Thessaly, Boeotia, Attica. The Thebans were saved by their thick walls. Athens (which was protected by Athena and Achilles, a tendentious pre-Christian tale) was terribly plundered. The rest of the country, its villages, temples and works of art, suffered harsh punishments; Corinth was set on fire, and Boeotia was desolate for decades. […]

Honorius, mounted on the victory cart and with Stilicho at his side, hurried to Rome, for the Milvian Bridge, with the glorious spoils of victory in the escort of Christ, as Prudentius sings.