Yesterday I got the book whose review I reproduced last Sunday: Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland (pictured left). I read the preface and a few pages Holland wrote about how Hitler and Himmler had broken with Christian ethics. I found what I read fascinating, and I would like to start reviewing Dominion in many entries under a new series that could be titled ‘How the Woke Monster Originated’. Although the author is a normie, Dominion demonstrates the main thesis of The West’s Darkest Hour: Christian ethics governs today’s secular, atheistic West (a moral compass that, I would add, directs us to ethnic suicide).
I have done this with another normie writer: Richard Weikart’s book on Hitler’s pantheistic religion, not to mention another normie, the late Karlheinz Deschner’s criminal history of Christianity. Alex Linder does something similar: he reads entire books on tape recordings which he then uploads onto the internet, commenting here and there on a few illustrative passages. The difference is that Linder does in audio what I do in text.
The dust cover of Holland’s book contains these words:
Today, the West is utterly saturated by Christian assumptions… Christianity is the principal reason why, today, we assume every human life to be of equal value.
Bingo! And this cannot but remind me of what, alluding to Nietzsche’s loneliness, I said the day before yesterday about my solitude—insofar as reversing Christian ethics in our moral compass results in social ostracism, even from those who argue in racialist forums.
I said that Holland is a normie. When I just started to leaf through his book yesterday, I detected a terrible flaw. In the last two chapters, he cherry-picked historical cultural milestones (which I label ‘neochristian’) from 1916 to 1967—skipping how WW2 was a vicious conflict perpetrated by Anglo-Americans who abhorred a pagan resurgence in Europe (Tom Sunic talks about this in Homo Americanus).
Another thing that irritates me greatly about Holland is that living in London, where there are still English roses, he doesn’t denounce in the least how the English Establishment is exterminating them by promoting intermarriage. It’s obvious that, despite his lucidity in Dominion, Holland suffers from a huge blind spot at the centre of his vision.
But that’s natural: the book of a true dissident—like Sunic’s Homo Americanus—wasn’t elegantly published by a prestigious publisher (as Dominion was), nor would it have reached me as quickly and efficiently via Amazon Books. And though I’ve only just started reading it, there are several things to keep in mind before the first instalment of this new series.
First, Holland, who had a Christian upbringing and then became a secular freethinker, hasn’t read Richard Carrier. As a scholar, he has no excuse since Carrier’s magnum opus was published five years before Dominion. Like many agnostics today, Holland believes that Jesus existed, though he hastens to add that the only thing that can be known about him is that he was crucified by the Romans (before Dominion, Holland wrote a book about the last days of the Roman Republic that became a bestseller).
While Holland hasn’t read Deschner’s ten volumes, there is no excuse for him not to mention the very readable book by his fellow countrywoman, Catherine Nixey, on how Christians murdered the classical world (as a conventional scholar, Holland confines himself to Gibbon’s nineteenth-century treatise).
Needless to say, in the Index at the end of Dominion, which is replete with scholarly bibliographical references, the names of David Skrbina and Tom Goodrich are missing (as I said above, WW2 should be a perfect paradigm for Dominion’s central thesis) as is missing Kevin MacDonald (Holland has written on several occasions about anti-Semitism). Has Holland even read Hitler’s after-dinner talks?
However, the last chapter of Dominion is entitled ‘Woke’, and Holland claims that this ethos is by no means a new phenomenon but, by doing a deep psychic archaeology of the West from the ancient world, it is the same mental virus albeit mutated.
If all goes well, on Monday I will start my comments on this very erudite 612-page book.
5 replies on “Dominion”
I’ve already written about how the Woke Monster is inspired by Xtian ethics. Cf. ‘On empowering carcass-eating birds’ in Daybreak, pages 132-135 (see featured post).
> “Another thing that irritates me greatly about Holland is that living in London, where there are still English roses, he doesn’t denounce in the least how the English Establishment is exterminating them by promoting intermarriage.”
Because he’s an enemy of the fair race, duh. “Normie” is a code word for “Christian”, and “neo-Christian” is a code word for LGBT (what a tasty portmanteau). Although it does sound weird to call Deschner a normie considering he fought for Hitler.
After he hung up his uniform, he was very critical of the Nazis.
Holland condemned Jeremy Corbyn for “anti semitism” because Corbyn was tangentially involved in some political action that included a Palestinian activist who accused the Jews of Blood Libel.
The first couple of chapters of Dominion is wonderful. It discusses the origin of Christian doctrines in religions such as Zoroastrianism and Babylonianism.
I hope the new book gives you an abundance of new material for the site. I am always a little suspicious of supposed learned men who still claim “jesus” existed when no historical of any kind reveals he did. I had a neighbor, an instructer of physics at the local university who was a big Christian. He knew Oppenheimer, Stephen Hawking, Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman, Hugh Everett, and Murry Gell-Mann. It had never occurred to him to investigate the claimed origins of “jesus”. We had the discussion of “jesus” only once and he contended that the idea of “jesus” was more important than proving he ever lived. What a pompous ass. This is him.