‘The Wolf and the Lion’ is the fifth episode of the first season of the HBO medieval fantasy television series Game of Thrones, first aired on May 15, 2011.
The episode opens with beautiful shots of King’s Landing and a manly conversation between Ned Stark and a prominent member of the royal guard. Inside the castle, Ned’s studio, the studio of the Hand of the King, is so beautiful and Aryan that just for those shots the series is worth watching.
But the scene I want to focus on takes place on another side of the castle, in the room of the Small Council: a body that advises the King of the Seven Kingdoms and institutes politics under his command. It is the internal council, therefore, ‘small’, of the King that forms his cabinet. The members are appointed by him. Specifically, the scene I am referring to is a heated discussion about Dany (Daenerys Targaryen) between King Robert and Ned Stark, of which the following words stand out:
King Robert: ‘The whore is pregnant!’
Ned Stark: ‘You are speaking of murdering a child…’
King Robert: ‘I want’em dead, mother and child both! And the fool Viserys as well. Is that plain enough for you? I want them dead!’
Ned Stark: ‘You will dishonour yourself forever for this’.
King Robert: ‘Honour? I’ve got seven kingdoms to rule! One king, seven kingdoms. Do you think honour keeps them in line? Do you think it’s honour that’s keeping the peace? It’s fear—fear and blood’.
Ned Stark: ‘Then we’re no better than the Mad King’.
King Robert: ‘Careful Ned. Careful now’.
Ned Stark: ‘You want to assassinate a girl [Dany] because the spider [Lord Varys’ nickname] heard a rumour?’
Spider Varys serves as the ‘Master of Whispers’, a sort of a medieval intelligence department in service of the king. The eunuch Varys is famous for possessing what he calls ‘Little Birds’: informants from all corners of the Seven Kingdoms and even beyond the Narrow Sea. His spy Jorah Mormont found out that Dany was pregnant.
King Robert: ‘A Targaryen at the head of a Dothraki army. What then…?’
Ned Stark: ‘The Narrow Sea still lies between us. I’ll fear the Dothraki the day they teach their horses to run on water’.
King Robert: ‘Do nothing? That’s your advice? Do nothing till our enemies are on our shores? You’re my council. Counsel! Speak sense to this honourable fool’.
The Small Council—Robert’s brother Renly, Lord Varys, Littlefinger, and Grand Maester Pycelle—try to reason with Ned. Everyone agrees that the last of the Targaryens should be killed, especially the one who carries in her womb the child of non-white warlord Drogo.
King Robert: ‘She dies!’
Ned Stark: ‘I will have no part in it’.
Ned’s blunder in his heated argument with the king was even more colossal than the one his wife committed in the previous episode: so great in fact that here the series already makes me angry.
If there is something that attracts the fandom toward Game of Thrones it’s that it portrays a medieval universe without Christianity, something similar to what would have happened in Europe if Christianity hadn’t conquered Rome. But Ned’s attitude is evangelical, and it even makes me want to suspend watching the episode.
His quixotic standards of morality can only lead to the catastrophe of House Stark, which is exactly what happened in subsequent episodes. If George R.R. Martin had been consistent in devising a medieval universe without a single character whose behaviour mimics Christian ethics, he wouldn’t have written such a scene. It reminds me of an old discussion between Brad Griffin and Alex Linder on Radio Free Mississippi, where Griffin tried to corner Linder by asking him what Linder would do if he was left alone with a seven-year-old Jewish girl in a room. For the Lutheran Griffin any exterminationist ideation had to be admonished, as Ned did with Robert in the above quote regarding wiping out the Targaryen House for good.
King Aerys II Targaryen, commonly called ‘the Mad King’, had been a member of House Targaryen in ruling from the Iron Throne. Although his rule began benevolently, he succumbed to the insanity caused by his incestuous lineage and was ultimately deposed by Lord Robert Baratheon in a civil war. The Mad King was the father of both Viserys Targaryen and Daenerys Targaryen, whom I introduced from the first instalment of this series.
Years before what we see in the fifth episode, the Mad King had Ned Stark’s father burned alive! This had happened not far from where Ned’s heated argument with King Robert takes place. Despite their hyper-Nordish beauty the Targaryens had a reputation for being prone to psychotic outbursts. In the real world, as I have already said on this site, I don’t believe that white people are prone to psychosis due to genetic factors. It’s not the hardware but software issues what are driving them mad (Christian and neochristian programming).
The discussion between Ned and Robert makes me say that there should be no Christians in the Small Council of the new government once the racists take power. There should be no one like a Brad Griffin or a Matt Parrott who, in a sensitive moment, behave like Ned. What we must do is the complete opposite of what Harold Covington wrote in his novels about the formation of a White Republic in the US: that eventually the ‘pagans’ (Covington’s term) and Christians would compromise.
Why such an uncompromising attitude?
Game of Thrones consists of 73 episodes. As we will see in the penultimate episode, #72, Dany, the Targaryen girl that Ned felt so sorry for, would finally arrive at King’s Landing with her non-white Dothraki army and burn the capital of the seven kingdoms (think of what happened in Dresden).
King Robert was right!
This also reminds me of what the neo-Christian Greg Johnson wrote about The Turner Diaries: that Pierce’s novel disgusted him. The ‘secular’ Johnson, who gave homilies in his church of San Francisco has been, axiologically, identical to Brad Griffin and Ned Stark. So let’s iterate it again: No Christian or pseudo-apostate of Christianity shall be in our Small Council.
Ned removes his badge of office of Hand of the King at Robert’s table. Later he was about to lose his life not because of the king’s rage: but because of an attack by Jaime Lannister’s guard after Jaime learnt about what Ned’s stupid wife did with Tyrion Lannister on the other side of the kingdom. But what I want to get to is that white nationalists, children of Christian parents after all, are like Don Quixote Ned. They imagine it’s possible to reclaim their countries without violating Jesus’ commandments, even the so-called secular nationalists.
Stop reading their web pages! The question that the new visitor to those sites should ask himself is: Has the admin of this site abandoned the ethical code that the Jew who wrote the Gospel left us?
But what I loved about the episode was the tone in which King Robert spoke: just the outrageous tone in which I speak in my mother tongue.