In my previous posts I said that I have been counter-signalling white nationalists because they maintain Judeo-Christian tails, and at the same time I have been citing Richard Carrier’s work on the nonexistence of Jesus. But Carrier is a typical liberal, as can be seen from the debate I heard yesterday between him and Richard Weikart on YouTube:
Hitler is often claimed to have been an atheist or a Christian by believers and skeptics eager to put the dictator in the other’s camp. Christian historian Richard Weikart argues he was neither in his new book Hitler’s Religion: The twisted beliefs that drove the Third Reich. Richard Carrier is an atheist historian who has researched Hitler’s purported anti-Christian statements often quoted by apologists in his book Hitler, Homer, Bible, Christ. He says that Hitler was anti-Catholic but thought of himself as a “positivist” Christian. In contrast Weikart argues Hitler was a pantheist who personally despised Christianity and only used it in public to aid his rise to power.
Everything sharp and forceful that Carrier had in debating (and refuting) the historicists of Jesus collapses when he speaks of Hitler. He is suddenly transmuted into a completely dishonest fellow. In that 2017 debate, you can tell that Carrier overstates his case when he wants to force his view that a Christianity similar to Christian Identity (‘Positive Xtianity’) was always behind Hitler. What would Carolyn Yeager say about such claim?
Weikart repeatedly replied that Hitler used the word ‘Christianity’ in his criticisms, that Hitler was not only referring to Catholicism or the Church. But Carrier, with that alchemy that he refutes in the fundamentalists, transmutes everything that Hitler said about Christianity as if he supposedly referred only to Catholicism. A case of self-delusion, and big time!
The nadir of the debate occurred in the final segment, where Carrier became as dense as those NPCs that Black Pigeon Speaks was making fun of a month ago. I mean: Carrier criticised Trump claiming that what Trump was doing was ‘demonizing Muslims and Hispanics’. Really? Why did Carrier see nothing about Muslim terrorism, and that Trump only wanted to restrict the migration of the seven countries that produce the most terrorists?
This demonstrates once again that intelligence can be accompanied by very serious character flaws that remind me of my favourite Hamlet quote (cited below). Intelligence is of no use if people voluntarily surrender themselves to self-deception. And Carrier does it. For example, in his discussion with Weikart he sugars the pill about Charles Darwin, claiming that his Darwinism was human and sensitive to other races! Does Carrier ignore that according to Darwin niggers were to be exterminated?
Both Carrier and Weikart regurgitate the widespread myth that Hitler wanted to exterminate the Jews ‘because they were an inferior race’. At this point, Weikart surprises me more than Carrier, as the latter is not a Hitler scholar, only a Jesus scholar. Is it possible that none have read Esau’s Tears, a 1997 book with an academic imprimatur and good reviews among normies, authored by a Jew who showed the depredations of the Jewish quarter in the 19th century (which caused the German reaction in the 20th century)?
White nationalism has a point. What could we possibly do with these two Richards, a typical Christian and a typical liberal, without the incredibly detailed analysis of the JQ in WN?
You must understand the POV of this site: if I criticise white nationalists, it is because they maintain a tail of Judaism in the sense of Judeo-Christian axiology, so toxic to the Aryan cause. But I don’t criticise white nationalism for its general vision of the JQ. And if there is something in which the two Richards are absolute ignorant it is the JQ. I wonder if any of them know the work of Kevin MacDonald, if they have even looked at The Occidental Observer?
The debate linked above only corroborates something that my female friend told me: that men—including myself—tend to worship the intellect at the expense of character, in the sense that there may be very intelligent people whose moral flaws eclipse their virtues, the Hamlet quote:
So oft it chances in particular men
That for some vicious mole of nature in them,
By the o’ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit grown too much; that these men–
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Their virtues else — be they as pure as grace,
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault.
3 replies on “The two Richards”
I honestly couldn’t have put it any better myself. RC sacrifices all credibility when he tries to represent Hitler as a different kind of Christian.
RC had some merit in pointing out how RW had overlooked Hitler’s statements on the hereafter (about being in the company of enlightened thinkers, in the Table Talk and his Political Testament) in his book, but once again, he irrationally frames this as a Christian take on the afterlife when it’s really a Valhalla-like conception.
Hitler’s valet Heinz Linge mentions AH declaring in jest that at the Obersalzberg, he felt like he was standing on an environment comparable to Olympus, but also compares him with Antaios. Incidentally, Hermann Giesler (Hitler’s other architect, after Troost and Speer) mentions that Hitler identified with the mythical figure Antaios.
RW has merit in relying on primary/secondary sources and documents in circulation in the Third Reich epoch, as well as putting considerable distance between Hitler and Christianity, occultism, and paganism, but falls short in his conclusion that Hitler was a pantheist, which he bases chiefly on Christian testimony (“the RCC said he was pantheist, so he must have been so.” The rest, AH’s appeals to nature, are merely supplementary proofs).
By using the misleading word pantheist, RW has merely discovered a way to get around the controversial stigma of atheism. Even Schopenhauer remarked that pantheism was just a polite atheism, devoid of ethics, and castigated the term for being a self-destroying conception.
Also, RW is completely mistaken in pinning Hitler’s ideology with the vague and misleading word “social Darwinism”. I don’t want to clog up too much space this time around, but I would refer people to the study/article “Was Hitler a Darwinian?” by Robert J. Richards.
Oddly enough, RW once hit upon the remarkable similarities between AH’s statements and Ernst Haeckel (also in his book Hitler’s Ethic), calling upon AH’s contemporary Eric Voegelin and mainstream historian Alan Bullock as witnesses, but he promptly returns back to his pantheist narrative.
Haeckel had argued that Goethe had been heathen, a renegade non-Christian. It’s worth noting that Hermann Rauschning’s anti-Christian Hitler wanted to reclaim Haeckel and Goethe from the Christians, which matches Otto Wagener’s representation of a Hitler who wanted to reclaim Goethe from “cosmopolitans”, as well as Hitler’s defense of Goethe in Mein Kampf.
> What would Carolyn Yeager say about such claim?
Her view on Hitler’s attitude towards Christianity was that “Hitler identified as a Christian in his youth and early adulthood. and he never spoke against it to the German people or did anything to restrict the churches.”
I countered by pointing out that AH had admitted he had seen through Christianity already in his youth and had wished to intervene in the church’s fraudulent activities with dynamite. Even Kubizek said he owed nothing to the church.
Her view on Christianity:
Whereas I turned to Christianity in a moment of great weakness/inner turmoil and even had Zionism foisted on me (by my own father, my own flesh and blood) at a time when I was feeling like a child again, finding solace for 15 years in absurd promises and assurances about the great reformation I would carry out on the behalf of Christianity.
Nowadays, I like to view myself as it’s supreme destroyer. It’s demise lies in Hitler’s statement that there was no difference between the immaterial and the material, which matches what he said in his September 6, 1938 speech (check the German version). And he declared that this scientific discovery would deliver the final death-blow to Christianity, once the knowledge of the world became more prevalent (at that time, people didn’t even know there was more than one sun in the universe).
> Intelligence is of no use if people voluntarily surrender themselves to self-deception.
List of people who fall under this category: Protagoras, Parmenides, Socrates, Kant, Hegel, Marx. They overestimate their qualifications. They typically enter into politics or end up in mental institutions.
Nietzsche was an exceptional case. He started off with Hellenic ideals, but went off-the-rails in his later inquiries.
I had forgotten Carolyn’s stance on Xtianity. I thought that after reading Hitler’s table talks she would change her mind but, apparently, she has an idée fixé about the religion of her childhood.
Carolyn apart, Carrier’s painting Hitler as a sort of CI buff is ridiculous.
I will have to check out the book Esaus Tears!