Veritas odium parit, 2

In the royal chapel of the cathedral of Granada this painting representing the Mass of St. Gregorio is preserved. Jesus shows the wound on his side and the attributes of his passion appear around him. It is a work of a 15th-century painter known as ‘Master of the Legend of St. Lucía’.

Apparently, the images of Christian art that I have been choosing as introductions to different posts have nothing to do with the content of the articles. For example, apparently this painting, in which the most famous Jew in history shows the wound on his side, inflicted by evil Romans, has nothing to do with the phobia that many white nationalists feel toward Nordicism (a Nordicism that, in times of the golden age of the American eugenicists and the Third Reich, was taken for granted).

But art is the Royal Road to understand the Zeitgeist of a stage of Western culture. In his 1969 series, Civilisation, Kenneth Clark showed the Greek head of Apollo as an example of the highest white culture. He then said that, with the arrival of Christianity, the human body virtually disappeared and the only thing that remained were degenerate homunculi in Irish pictorial art, especially as illustrated books.

A lot of white nationalists are still Christians who don’t want to hurt the feelings of the homunculi. If the beauty of the ancient Aryan man had not been demonised throughout Christendom, there would be no anti-Nordicists in the alt-right today. In other words, anti-Nordicism is the tail of the Era in which the Semite convinced the Aryan that His beauty was sinful. This is the last part of the tail of ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond or free, male or female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus’.

The superiority of National Socialism over the American movement today consists in that, like the Renaissance Italians, the Germans transvalued the Christian disvalue of a wounded Jew to the ancient value of Aryan beauty. That was very remarkable in the art, pamphlets and outdoor sports of the Third Reich. Replacing the Jew that shows us his wounds to make us feel guilty (the ancient version of the Holocaust), with the sculpture of a perfect Aryan, is part of the healing process to save the fair race.

The author of Counter-Currents insulted by anti-Nordicists (surely muds with an inferiority complex) wrote:

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Northern Europe vs. the Mediterranean

The oft-quoted statement of Aristotle, “Man is a political animal,” is actually a mistranslation. A truer rendering of his words would be, “Man is the kind of animal who lives in a polis.” That Greek word encompasses more than “city-state,” its usual translation. First of all, the English term “city-state” makes the city the dominant element and the surrounding countryside an afterthought, whereas in ancient Greece, most people lived in villages and farming communities. Even in the polis of Attica, which had the bustling city of Athens, the citizens it sent to fight at the Battle of Marathon were mostly farmers.

Such a community, moreover, must be relatively small. Athens was the exception: most Greek poleis had a total population of fewer than 50,000, with perhaps 5-10,000 citizens. In the Laws, Plato sets the ideal, with characteristic precision, at 5,040 citizens. Aristotle did not have Plato’s affinity for applying mathematical exactness to human affairs, but he did believe that a man should know his fellow citizens, if not personally then at least by reputation – else how could he properly judge if a man is fit to govern? He also thought it important that the citizens should be able to assemble in one place. Still, the polis must not be so small that it cannot meet its economic needs and defend itself properly.

Most important of all, by polis Greeks understood a whole nexus of ideas centered around a self-governing community that is bound not just by laws but by traditions and a common religion, language, and history. Absent these elements, the polis ceases to be. If the community is ruled not by itself but from a distant capital, or if it is a vast metropolis comprising a kaleidoscopic range of ethnicities, it is no longer a community in the true sense. What is more, its inhabitants cannot reach their moral, spiritual, or intellectual potential, because their nature has been cramped. Thus, life in the kind of community Aristotle describes is intimately bound up with Western man’s nature; without it, he becomes less human.

Using Aristotle’s criteria, we can see that medieval Iceland, for example, meets the definition of a polis. Overwhelmingly rural, it possessed no metropolis drawing off all financial and intellectual capital from the countryside. While spread over a large territory, the citizens of the Icelandic polis managed to assemble once a year at the Althing. That they knew of each other by reputation, or through a sort of medieval Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, is evident from the impressive corpus of their sagas. In these, newcomers in the narrative always identify their kinship and lineage to an impressive degree, often crossing over between sagas, giving others the proper context in which to place them. The Icelanders governed themselves and were as fiercely independent as the Greeks who faced the Persian invasion. Above all, they were bound by a common history, language, and religion—this latter unity being such an important point that the official conversion to Christianity was decided at the Althing.

It does not take much imagination to see that the polis can also be a tribe: that is, kinship proves more important than geographic location. Aristotle was adamant, in fact, that whatever we call a collection of people who happen to live in the same place and interact merely for the purpose of making money off each other, we cannot call it a polis. Upon closer inspection, then, any of the Germanic tribes described by Tacitus meet Aristotle’s definition of a polis, and this would apply even later, during the period of the great Völkerwanderung that hastened Rome’s demise. But the polis had long since died out in Aristotle’s homeland, which had much to do with his most famous pupil.