Crusade

against the Cross, 19

Yesterday I said a few harsh words about the founding cucks in the neighbouring country to the north, but here things were even worse: Hernán Cortés himself married an Indian woman and had a mestizo child with her! At least the northern Protestants would take a little longer to repudiate their anti-miscegenation laws but Catholic Cortés did it from the start!

On the other side of the Atlantic, things were never much better, as the Europeans had already betrayed themselves with Christianity for many centuries. In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche told some home truths to his compatriots. In §4 of ‘The Improvers of Mankind’ Nietzsche wrote:

These regulations [the Laws of Manu] are instructive enough: we encounter Aryan humanity at its purest and most primordial; we learn that the concept of ‘pure blood’ is very far from being a harmless concept. On the other hand, it becomes obvious in which people the chandala hatred against this Aryan ‘humaneness’ has has become a religion, eternalized itself, and become genius — primarily in the Gospels, even more so in the Book of Enoch.

Christianity, sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a growth on this soil, represents the counter-movement to any morality of breeding, of race, privilege: it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence. Christianity — the revaluation of all Aryan values, the victory of chandala values, the gospel preached to the poor and base, the general revolt of all the downtrodden, the wretched, the failures, the less favored, against ‘race’: the undying chandala hatred is disguised as a religion of love.

In §5 he adds a sentence: ‘all the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral’.

Nietzsche starts the next chapter, ‘What the Germans lack’ with these words: ‘Perhaps I know the Germans, perhaps I may even tell them some truths’. They have ‘more virile virtues than any other country in Europe can show, much cheerfulness and self-respect…’

But this people has deliberately made itself stupid, for nearly a millennium: nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been abused more dissolutely…

How much disgruntled heaviness, lameness, dampness, dressing gown — how much beer there is in the German intelligence! How is it at all possible that young men who dedicate their lives to the most spiritual goals do not feel the first instinct of spirituality, the spirit’s instinct of self-preservation — and drink beer?… the gentle degeneration which beer produces in the spirit!

And in §5 of that chapter Nietzsche adds: ‘In present-day Germany no one is any longer free to give his children a noble education: our “higher schools” are all set up for the most ambiguous mediocrity, with their teachers, curricula, and teaching aims’. In §7 he adds: ‘Learning to think: in our schools one no longer has any idea of this… That the Germans have been able to stand their philosophers at all, especially that most deformed concept-cripple of all time, the great Kant, provides not a bad notion of German grace’.

Countless times I have cited my favourite Nietzsche quote, which I put as an epigraph in the seminal text of this site, ‘The Red Giant’ (German translation here) which we published in 2009 on Blogspot, even before the incarnation of The West’ Darkest Hour on WordPress (I was deplatformed from both!).

Now I will put that quote in context, by citing the preceding pages of ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’ of Twilight of the Idols. It is here that can be seen that it’s very difficult to follow Nietzsche without considerable European culture, which is why I read Andrés Sánchez Pascual’s heavily annotated German-Spanish translation of Twilight of the Idols. Without Sánchez Pascual’s explanatory endnotes I couldn’t have followed the philosopher in his finesses.[1]

The German-English translation by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale of Twilight of the Idols can be read here, but the translators removed a good amount of italics from the original German (italics that I add back below). Reddish colour added on my favourite Nietzsche quote:

§ 1 My impossible ones. — Seneca: or the toreador of virtue. Rousseau: or the return to nature in impuris naturalibus [in natural filth]. Schiller: or the Moral-Trumpeter of Säckingen. Dante: or the hyena who writes poetry in tombs. Kant: or cant as an intelligible character. Victor Hugo: or the pharos at the sea of nonsense. Liszt: or the school of smoothness — with women. George Sand: or lactea ubertas — in translation, the milk cow with ‘a beautiful style.’ Michelet: or the enthusiasm which takes off its coat. Carlyle: or pessimism as a poorly digested dinner. John Stuart Mill: or insulting clarity. Les frères de Goncourt: or the two Ajaxes in battle with Homer — music by Offenbach. Zola: or ‘the delight in stinking.’

§ 2 Renan. — Theology: or the corruption of reason by ‘original sin’ (Christianity). Witness Renan who, whenever he risks a Yes or No of a more general nature scores a miss with painful regularity. He wants for example, to weld together la science and la noblesse: but la science belongs with democracy; what could be plainer? With no little ambition, he wishes to represent an aristocracy of the spirit: yet at the same time he is on his knees before its very counter-doctrine, the evangile des humbles — and not only on his knees. To what avail is all free-spiritedness, modernity, mockery, and wry-neck suppleness, if in one’s guts one is still a Christian, a Catholic — in fact, a priest! Renan is most inventive, just like a Jesuit and father confessor, when it comes to seduction; his spirituality does not even lack the broad fat popish smile — like all priests, he becomes dangerous only when he loves. Nobody can equal him when it comes to adoring in a manner endangering life itself. This spirit of Renan’s, a spirit which is enervated, is one more calamity for poor, sick, will-sick France.

§ 3 Sainte Beuve. — Nothing of virility, full of petty wrath against all virile spirits. Wanders around, cowardly, curious, bored, eavesdropping — a female at bottom, with a female’s lust for revenge and a female’s sensuality. As a psychologist, a genius of médisance [slander], inexhaustibly rich in means to that end; no one knows better how to mix praise with poison. Plebeian in the lowest instincts and related to the ressentiment of Rousseau: consequently, a romantic — for underneath all romantisme lie the grunting and greed of Rousseau’s instinct for revenge. A revolutionary, but still pretty well harnessed by fear. Without freedom when confronted with anything strong (public opinion, the Academy, the court, even Port Royal). Embittered against everything great in men and things, against whatever believes in itself. Poet and half-female enough to sense the great as a power; always writhing like the famous worm because he always feels stepped upon. As a critic, without any standard, steadiness, and backbone, with the cosmopolitan libertine’s tongue for a medley of things, but without the courage even to confess his libertinage. As a historian, without philosophy, without the power of the philosophical eye — hence declining the task of judging in all significant matters, hiding behind the mask of ‘objectivity.’ It is different with his attitude to all things in which a fine, well-worn taste is the highest tribunal: there he really has the courage to stand by himself and delight in himself — there he is a master. In some respects, a preliminary version of Baudelaire.

§ 4 De imitatione Christi is one of those books which I cannot hold in my hand without a physiological reaction: it exudes a perfume of the Eternal-Feminine which is strictly for Frenchmen — or Wagnerians. This saint has a way of talking about love which arouses even Parisian women to curiosity. I am told that that cleverest of Jesuits, Auguste Comte, who wanted to lead his Frenchmen to Rome via the detour of science, found his inspiration in this book. I believe it: ‘the religion of the heart.’

§ 5 G. Eliot. — They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic females à la Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there. — We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands.

If there is something I really love about Nietzsche it is that, once you realise that Christianity and its bastard son neochristianity are the cause of all Western evil, everyone in today’s West seems incredibly idiotic to you: something similar to the child with zero superego—the vindication of the Id!—who sees the king naked.

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[1] Friedrich Nietzsche: Crepúsculo de los ídolos. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, fourteenth edition: 1996 (I originally read the 1973 or 1976 edition, a copy now lost).