Christianity’s Criminal History, 168

Frankish expansion from 481 to 814

 
Last uprisings, war of annihilation and ‘the serene height of the staff’

The war of the Saxons, which lasted for more than ten years, didn’t, however, affect the foreign sovereignty of the Franks, or even Christianity as such. Rather, it was directed primarily against their representatives and institutions, against the Church, their rigorous attacks on private property, and their brutal collection of tithes, of which Alcuin, Charles’ Anglo-Saxon adviser, had already complained, seeing predators (praedones) in the missionaries rather than preachers (praedicatores). ‘That tithes had destroyed loyalty and faith’ seems to have been a proverbial saying among the Franks. The northern Albigensians then fought the Church with the same harshness that the latter had shown. Everywhere the new temples were destroyed, the ecclesiastics were expelled, and not infrequently the Christian Saxons were murdered and their possessions plundered. In short, the entire ecclesiastical organisation north of the Elbe was completely eradicated.

The uprising grew into a war of annihilation lasting more than ten years, with extreme cruelty on both sides. The counter-offensive, which was only resumed in the autumn of 794 and in which Charles took several relics with him, consisted of simple raids of destruction. Several times he even used pagan Slavs, such as the Wilzos and the Obrodites, whose King Witzin was attacked and killed by the Saxons at the Elbe crossing. Charles plundered, destroyed and ravaged everything he could find, mainly with the use of firebrands, and killed thousands of people. After a victory at Kiel, it seems that 4,000 Saxon corpses littered the battlefield. And year after year he made large numbers of hostages, taking every third males—‘as many as he wanted’ the chronicler says—most of whom he ‘regularly killed’ (Bullough). Until 799 the ‘apostle of the Saxons’, ‘he who preached the gospel with a bronze tongue’ (Bertram), marched annually against them. In 802 he sent out another army, while he spent the whole summer in the Ardennes indulging in the pleasures of hunting. In 804 he returned in person to the battlefield, where the Saxons finally succumbed to his power.

To make any uprising impossible, he ended up ordering mass deportations with frightful large-scale population transplants, such as the Byzantine Christians had already practised. ‘He took out such several hostages as had never been seen in his day, nor the days of his father, nor in the days of the Frankish kings’, says one chronicler. The man who, as early as 794 at the synod of Frankfurt, openly presented himself as ‘head of the Western Church’, had his army settle thousands of Saxons with their wives and children in the years 795-799 and 804, totalling 160,000. Even today, the event is still remembered by some place names on Frankish soil, such as Sachsenfahrt and Sachsenmühie.

Many of the deportees, however, were placed in closely guarded camps and had to spend the rest of their lives there. One source even speaks of ‘total extermination’. And not a few Saxons, who had certainly not yet been cleansed of all pagan filth by the sacred bath of baptism, were sent in the course of the war to Verdun, the great slave emporium.

Thus, in the North, the relations of ownership and possession were completely changed. For even the territory stolen from the Elbe was again divided among bishops, priests and his lay vassals. And in the 9th century, numerous monasteries were founded in Saxony at the expense of private nobles.

Thus, using a thirty-three-year war, Charles had convinced ‘the most heathen’ of the idea ‘that there is still something superior to fighting and victory, superior to death on the battlefield’, as Cardinal Bertram, the encourager of two world wars and Hitler’s assistant, assures us. Charles had ‘planted the victorious and beneficent cross in the virgin soil of the Saxon country’. And, finally, most importantly, ‘the serene height of the staff acted beneficently and alongside the power of the royal sceptre and sword’.
 

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Editor’s immodest note: It is right here that you may notice not only the gulf between us and the white nationalists but even with the Nazis.

Hitler allowed, it seems to me amid the world war, a homage to be paid to Charlemagne because he had Germanic blood (as we shall see when I review one of the chapters of Tom Holland’s Dominion).

While Hitler and those closest to him were already aware of the Christian problem, they, like today’s anti-Christian racialists, didn’t realise that it was far more serious than the Jewish problem.

As we review Holland’s book you will see what I mean. For the moment I can only repeat my metaphor. The active substance that has been killing the white man since Constantine is Christian ethics (cf. the process of miscegenation in the Byzantine Empire and the Americas under Iberian rule). Jewry is only a catalyst that accelerates an ethnocidal process that already existed, albeit slower, in Christendom.

Even Hitler didn’t know that the main enemy was Christianity rather than Judaism: the modern catalyst of Christian ethics. Can you begin to glimpse why the message of The West’s Darkest Hour is the most important of all?