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Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 117

Editor’s note: Still more retrocognitive visions from the cave of the three-eyed raven that white nationalists, so addicted to their Semitic cult, simply don’t want to see:
 

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At the end of 405 a new group of Germans broke out, more violent, formed mostly by ‘pagan’ Ostrogoths, led by King Radagaisus, from Pannonia, and in early 406 invaded Italy: some two hundred thousand people according to Orosius and even four hundred thousand in opinion of Zosimus, which is nonsense. Be that as it may, panic spread throughout Italy. The Goths besieged Florence, but in the presence of Flavius Stilicho they had to retire to the mountains (Fiesole). There Stilicho surrounded them with a routine strategy, ‘thanks to Divine Providence’ (Orosius), and he rendered them out of hunger; according to Augustine, who attributes it to ‘the mercy of God’, ‘over a hundred thousand men died, without killing a single Roman or even injuring anyone!’

On August 23, 406, when trying to cross the Roman lines, Radagaisus was taken prisoner and shortly after beheaded. His troops capitulated. The number of prisoners turned into slaves was so great that it affected market prices. One by one they were sold for a few gold coins. God has helped, Augustine celebrates, ‘wonderful and merciful’.

Meanwhile, a few years ahead of the events, Alaric threatened a new invasion of Italy. Stilicho was in difficulties. He advised to give in, but the Catholics were opposed. They hated the descendant of a vandal; they hated a man who in spite of all his struggles against the ‘heretics’ had suspended the destruction of the temples, and who had even restored the statue of Victory to the place it occupied in the Senate session room, although not as a cult image but as an ornament. In short, the anti-Germanism of the East was penetrating more and more into the West.

On the occasion of the incursion of the ‘barbarians’ into Italy, the father Church of the Jerome attacked the policy of Stilicho. He saw in the Germans the foreshadowing of the Antichrist, and even considered the Antichrist personified in them.

According to Jerome, the culprit was not the pious Catholic ruler, but Stilicho, to whom the inscription of his statue in the Roman forum immortalized as a participant in all the wars and victories of the emperor (the name Stilicho was now stripped from it). A semi-barbarous traitor had brought the Romans against the Empire with Roman money. In any case, the Roman ‘pagans’, all the anti-Germanic opponents of Stilicho, ‘of the administration and of the Catholic Church’ (Elbern) believed the same thing.

But it was the Catholic Olympius, the leader of the enemy faction of Stilicho in Italy, who most incited the emperor against him. And when, on August 13, 408, Honorius presided over a military parade in Ticinum (Pavia), Olympius, a fervent Catholic ‘of the strictest observance’ (Clauss) who owed much to Stilicho, had Stilicho’s friends’ throat cut off in the imperial entourage.

After having eliminated his supporters and having attacked and killed while sleeping his personal guard, formed by faithful Huns, Stilicho was dismissed. On the morning of August 22, 408, the soldiers removed Stilicho from the church by deception. They swore and solemnly affirmed in the presence of the bishop that the emperor—Stilicho’s son-in-law—had not charged them to go kill him, but to escort him. A letter from his Catholic Majesty gave him more security. However, he had barely left the church, when he was read a second imperial letter, which communicated his death sentence for high treason; the next day his head fell.

Olympius became the strongman. He tortured Stilicho’s friends to death and confiscated all the property of his companions. The anti-Germanic party achieved supremacy with Olympius. Throughout the Western Empire the followers of Stilicho and all the Germans were persecuted. Likewise, by order of the Senate, the widow of Stilicho, Serena, niece of Emperor Theodosius, was killed in Rome. They also killed the husband of Stilicho’s sister, the comes africae Batanarius, and his position was taken over by Heraclianus, who was later killed. At the same time, in all the cities of the country, Italian troops murdered numerous women and children of German mercenaries.

With the fall of Stilicho, not only his son and his brother-in-law were executed, but also his wife… As Augustine writes, the promotion has taken place ‘for his services’. He immediately urged Olympius to make the enforcement of anti-‘pagan’ laws a reality. It was time to show the enemies of the Church what the laws mean! On the side of the Catholics it was believed that a victory over the ‘barbarians’ required as a precondition the annihilation of paganism.


To contextualise the above excerpts of a 6-page section of Vol. II, ‘Radagaisus, Stilicho’s death and new massacres of Goths’ in Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, read the abridged translation of Volume I.