First, thank you for your website, it is one of the most informative WN sites that I read on a daily basis.
Second, I wanted to share this link [admin's note of 2016: link no longer working] with you concerning the recent debate about homosexual marriage.
The point that Greg Johnson misses (purposely or not) is that the homosexual / jewish activists’ stated purpose through gay marriage is to destroy marriage. Johnson is either incredibly naive or being deceptive.
Best regards,
R. Rud
(This pic of a transvestite appears in one of the “About me” pages of James O’Meara’s blogs)
Greg Johnson responds to these threads [that criticize his stance on “gay marriage”] as he’s done before, by placing James O’Meara front and center today. In your face. It says to readers and contributors at Counter-Currents, if they want me, you have to take my foul-smelling monkey, too. The second I saw the name, I clicked out of the site.
It’s because Greg is such a strong thinker and writer that he does more damage than his weird monkey whose brain is steeped in 60’s purple haze. Greg speaks and writes eloquently about White values, while at the same time he adamantly promotes a person who, in interviews and writings, pushes an agenda that is completely contrary to White values.
_________________
The blogger “MOB” wrote the above in this thread on Occidental Dissent. Just compare the transvestite with the face of Botticelli’s Venus on the sidebar’s top: my inspiration to fight for the survival of the fair race…
A snake which cannot slough its skin is
doomed to perish. So likewise, a mind
which is prevented from changing its
opinion ceases to be a mind.
Goethe’s life expanded around a fixed point, just as year by year a circle invisible to the outer world is added to the trunk of a tree. Patiently, thanks to an active though stubborn concentration of his energies, Goethe attained his maturity; he resolutely guarded his ego while defending his proper growth.
Nietzsche, the changeable, was perpetually obliged to destroy himself that he might reconstruct himself wholly.
Each of Nietzsche’s spiritual earthquakes destroyed the whole edifice of his convictions, and the philosopher was obliged to start building anew from the foundations. Nothing even grew quietly and imperceptibly and naturally with him; his inner being was never given a chance to develop and extend by a process of stealthy labor. Invariably he is struck “as if by lightning”; always his universe must be annihilated in order that the new cosmos may emerge.
“My books tell the story of the victories I have gained over myself.” They relate his manifold transformation, his spiritual pregnancies and lyings-in, his deaths and resurrections; they are tales of the merciless warfare he carried on against himself, the punishments and summary executions he inflicted upon his own being; they are the biographies of all the creatures Nietzsche impersonated during the twenty years of his mental existence.
What makes Nietzsche’s transformations so peculiar is that they seem retrogressive. If we take Goethe as the prototype of an organic nature in harmony with the forward march of the universe, we perceive that this development is symbolical of the various ages of life. In youth he was fiery and enthusiastic; as a man in his prime he was actively reflective; age brought him the utmost lucidity of mind. His mental rhythm corresponded in every point with the temperature of his blood. As with most young men, he began in chaos and ended his career in orderly fashion, as is seemly with the old. After going through a revolutionary period he turned conservative, after a phase of lyricism he became a man of science, after being prodigal of himself he learned how to be reserved.
Nietzsche took the opposite course. Instead of aspiring to an even more complete integration of his ego, he desired complete disintegration. As he advanced in years he became increasingly impatient, vehement, revolutionary, and chaotic. His outward aspect was in strident opposition to the customary evolution of a man.
While his university companions were still delighting in the usual horseplay of undergraduates, Nietzsche, though but twenty-four years old, was already a professor, aspirant to the chair of philology at Basel, that famous seat of learning. At twenty-four, Nietzsche’s intimates were men of fifty and sixty years of age, sages such as Jakob Burckhardt and Ritschl, while his closest friend was the most celebrated artist of the day—Richard Wagner. He deliberately put the brake upon his poetical aspirations and upon his love of music. Like any other pedant, he sat over his Greek texts, revising pandects, and compiling erudite indexes. From the outset, Nietzsche’s eyes were turned towards the dead past. Old before his time, a confirmed bachelor, he had no true joy in life. Professorial dignity swamped his cheerfulness, dimming what should have been his natural exuberance. He was wholly immersed in printed texts and in dryasdust problems.
His first book, The Birth of Tragedy, was completed when he was twenty-seven. Herein he breached into the present, though his face was still wearing the mask of a philologist.
At the age of thirty, when most men are starting life, when Goethe became a minister of the State, and when Kant and Schiller were full-fledged professors, Nietzsche had kicked over the traces of his official duties and, with a sigh of relief, had quitted the chair of philology at Basel University. Now at last he came to grips with himself, seeking to penetrate into his personal universe, undergoing an initial transformation, rupturing old ties, and making his début as an artist. This initial step into the realm of the present was the moment when the real Nietzsche was born.
By the time he had reached his thirty-six year, Nietzsche had become an outlaw, an amoralist, a sceptic, a poet, a musician. He had regained “a better youth.” Such a course of rejuvenation is almost unprecedented. Having reached his fourth decade, Nietzsche’s language and his thoughts, his whole being, indeed, possess a freshness, a colour, a fearlessness, a passion, and a music he had never known as a lad of seventeen. The recluse of Sils-Maria had a lighter touch, his words soared on freer opinions, his feet danced more joyously through his works than had those of the prematurely old professor of twenty-four summers.
He could find no halting-place for his restless mind. Hardly had he settled down somewhere when he felt his “skin chapped and rent.” He himself felt as if he were confronting a ghost when someone referred to “Professor Friedrich Nietzsche of Basel”; it was hard enough even to remember that he had been such a person twenty years before. Has any human being, before him, made so trenchant a cleavage between past and present? Does not this severance account for the terrible solitude of his latter days? He had broken all the links which attached him to the past, and the furious rhythm of his life and of his ultimate transformations was too ardent for him to create new ties.
His ruthless amputation of the Wagner complex proved to be an extremely perilous surgical intervention, one that was almost fatal, because it came so very close to the heart. For, precisely at the moment when the form of his being was stretched to the utmost, his mental tensions culminated in disruption. The primitive and daimonic power exploded, annihilating the superb series of incorporations which he had created form his own blood and out of his own life while storming the hidden battlements of the infinite.
This pic of a transsexual appears in one of the “About me” pages of James O’Meara’s blogs. Just compare this grotesque fellow with the nymph at the sidebar with the background of blue sky and sea: my absolute inspiration to fight for the survival of the fair race…
In this thread on Occidental Dissent the blogger “MOB” wrote:
Greg Johnson responds to these [“homophobic”] threads, as he’s done before, by placing James O’Meara front and center today. In your face. It says to readers and contributors at Counter-Currents, if they want me, you have to take my foul-smelling monkey, too. The second I saw the name, I clicked out of the site.
It’s because Greg is such a strong thinker and writer that he does more damage than his weird monkey whose brain is steeped in 60’s purple haze. Greg speaks and writes eloquently about White values, while at the same time he adamantly promotes a person who, in interviews and writings, pushes an agenda that is completely contrary to White values.
Good White nationalists who want to be able to believe in Greg massage their instinctive resistance until they can do that.
On another racialist site, Majority Rights, Captainchaos said:
According to Greg Johnson racial preservation is “decadent”. Johnson favors expanding the franchise of Whiteness to include Turks so presumably he does not oppose the mixing of Turks with Northern Europeans. This is nothing short of a recipe for racial nihilism. Now, as far as I am concerned, that is infinitely better grounds for condemning Johnson’s work as essentially frivolous, if not maliciously misleading rather than his alleged enrichment by Jews that can only be “proven” to exist in the imagination of Johnson’s accuser [paranoid monocausalist J. Richards].
On the same thread another commenter added:
So nobody else finds it strange that Greg Johnson trashes Christianity on the web, but gives sermons about Jesus in real life? Is he lying to the Christians he preaches to, or to us? And doesn’t it say something about him either way?
I find it quite revealing that the Counter-Currents’ readership is sending money to Johnson instead of sending it to other racialists that potentially could have webzines as stunning as Johnson’s—without degeneracy, lunacies or dishonesties involved.
“Why were you so ungrateful to our gods
as to desert them for the Jews?”
—Julian, addressing the Christians
The Memoir of Julian Augustus
I arrived at Piraeus, the port of Athens, shortly after sunrise 5 August 355. I remember every one of the forty-seven days I spent in Athens. They were the happiest days of my life, so far.
I engaged a cart and driver after considerable haggling (I was able to bring the driver’s cost down to half what he asked: good but not marvelous). Then I climbed into the little cart. Half standing, half sitting on the cart rail, I was borne over the rutted road to Athens.
The sun rose in a cloudless sky. Attic clarity is not just a metaphor; it is a fact. The sky’s blue was painful.
My first reaction was delight at anonymity. No one stared at me. No one knew who I was. I looked a typical student with my beard and plain cloak. There were dozens like me. Some were in carts, most were on foot; all of them moving toward the same goal: Athens and the knowledge of the true.
On every side of me carts rattled and creaked, their drivers cursing and their contents, human or animal, complaining. The Athenian Greek is a lively fellow, though one looks in vain from face to face for a glimpse of Pericles or Alcibiades. As a race, they are much changed. They are no longer noble. They have been too often enslaved, and their blood mixed with that of barbarians.
[Chechar’s note: See Pierce’s take on this subject]
The Dipylon Gate was as busy in the early morning as any other great city’s gate might have been at noon. It is a double gate, as its name indicates, with two tall towers on the outside. Guards lolled in front, paying no attention to the carts and pedestrians who came and went. As we passed through the outer gate, our cart was suddenly surrounded by whores. Twenty or thirty women and girls of all ages rushed out of the shadows of the wall. They fought with one another to get close to the cart. They tugged at my cloak. They called me “Billy Goat,” “Pan,” “Satyr,” and other less endearing terms.
With the skill of an acrobat one pretty child of fourteen vaulted the railing of my cart and firmly grasped my beard in her fist. The soldiers laughed at my discomfort. With some effort I pried my beard from her fingers, but not before her other hand had reached between my legs, to the delight of those watching. But the driver was expert at handling these girls. With a delicate flick of his whip, he snapped at the hand. It was withdrawn with a cry. She leapt to the ground. The other women jeered us. Their curses were splendid, Homeric!
I arranged my tunic. The sharp tug of the girl’s hand had had its effect upon me, and against my will I thought of lovemaking and wondered where the best girls in Athens might be found. I was not then, as I am now, celibate. Yet even in those days I believed that it was virtuous to mortify the flesh, for it is a fact that conscience increases intellectual clarity. But I was also twenty-three years old and the flesh made demands on me in a way that the mind could not control.
Youth is the body’s time. Not a day passed in those days that I did not experience lust. Not a week passed that I did not assuage that lust. But I do not agree with those Dionysians who maintain that the sexual act draws men closer to the One God. If anything, it takes a man away from God, for in the act he is blind and thoughtless, no more than an animal engaged in the ceremony of creation. Yet to each stage of one’s life certain things are suitable and for a few weeks, eight years ago, I was young, and knew many girls. Even now in this hot Asiatic night, I recall with unease that brilliant time, and think of lovemaking. I notice that my secretary is blushing. Yet he is Greek!
♣
The driver indicated a large ruin to the right. “Hadrian,” he said. “Hadrian Augustus.” Like all travelers, I am used to hearing guides refer to my famous predecessor. Even after two centuries he is the only emperor every man has heard of—because of his constant traveling, his continuous building and, sad to say, his ridiculous passion for the boy Antinoüs. I suppose that it is natural enough to like boys but it is not natural or seemly to love anyone with the excessive and undignified passion that Hadrian showed for Antinoüs. Fortunately, the boy was murdered before Hadrian could make him his heir. But in his grief Hadrian made himself and the Genius of Rome look absurd. He set up thousands of statues and dedicated innumerable temples to the dead boy.
He even declared the pretty catamite a god! It was a shocking display and permanently shadows Hadrian’s fame. For the first time in history, a Roman emperor was mocked and thought ridiculous. Yet except for this one lapse, I find Hadrian a sympathetic figure.
Excerpted from VNN Forum. Alex Linder is responding to Greg Johnson’s “The gay marriage controversy.” Indented paragraphs come from Johnson’s June 28, 2013 essay:
Both the promoters and opponents of homosexual marriage share a common false premise: that the legalization of homosexual marriage overthrows “heteronormativity,” i.e., the idea that heterosexuality is normal and other forms of sexuality are not. But the idea that changing marriage laws can change heteronormativity is simply false.
Actually, no one says that. Leftists see queer marriage as one important campaign in a giant ongoing war.
What do I mean when I say that homosexual behavior is abnormal? I don’t mean that it is unnatural, since its exists in nature. It is even found in many species besides man.
Most of the so-called examples of homosexual behavior disappear on closer examination.
I don’t mean that it is a sin, i.e., something that displeases God. The idea of sin pretty much paralyzes the ability to think rationally about morals.
For me, the issue of abnormality all boils down to homosexuality being a non-reproductive, recreational form of sex. And if everyone had non-reproductive, recreational sex all the time, the human race would perish. Heterosexual behavior is normal, because only heterosexual sex can perpetuate our species, provided conception is not blocked by birth control.
So the real issue is not even homosexual versus heterosexual, but reproductive versus non-reproductive sex. That’s all there is to it.
Um, no. Homosexual behavior is inherently morbid, heterosexual behavior is not. Queer behavior is on a par along with drug / alcohol abuse and other anti-social behavior. Whether a taste is inborn or developed, it’s socially destructive and should be looked down on, and certainly never given any kind of legal status. What Johnson doesn’t observe that’s most significant today is that (1) homos today, unlike in all prior history, can find one other easily; (2) queers have a global support network thanks to political backing and media / communications technology.
This results in queers being able to form what the left calls communities—basically, pockets of morbidity. In these death cultures new and quite dangerous diseases are created and existing diseases are exacerbated. Thanks to jewish political clout, these diseases are untied, in the public mind, from the homosexual behavior that spawned and spread them, and actually, such chutzpah!, blamed on the surrounding squares. It’s not Gaetan Dugas, an extremely promiscuous queer, who’s responsible for spreading Queer-Related Immune Deficiency (Q-RID), it’s Ronald Reagan, the ninety-year-old president, who’s responsible for spreading AIDS (“Acquired” [LOL] Immune Deficiency Syndrome). How was it acquired? Well, doc, I sucked 500 dicks in 400 days.
Heterosexuals engaged in normal activity don’t know whether their sex will result in offspring, so the division between productive and non-reproductive sex is not so simply made. We do know that every act of anal sex between homosexuals is inherently morbid—diseased. Big, big difference.
Homosexual behaviors and tastes are older than the human race, but the idea of homosexuality as an identity is a rather recent phenomenon. People with exclusively homosexual tastes are a tiny minority in any society, no matter how permissive and decadent. Thus it stands to reason that no society has ever ceased to exist because the tiny homosexual minority doesn’t reproduce. Societies decline demographically when the heterosexual majority doesn’t reproduce, primarily due to birth control.
Birth control is not the reason societies decline. Birth control is merely something people use to avoid pregnancy, not the cause of the desire to avoid pregnancy.
Thus if non-reproductive sex is a problem because it does not perpetuate the human race, the bulk of the blame falls on selfish, hedonistic straight people.
I mean, this is like arguing with a fundamentalist instead of a human because it’s easier. That’s one step above a strawman, I suppose, but there’s little else to commend it. Yes. You’re correct. The human race never is, has been, or will be in danger of dying off because of fag activity. No serious man ever so contended. 1% of the population can’t have that effect—unless it be through spreading lethal disease, which is not entirely out of the question, considering Q-RID and the various drug-resistant strains homo behavior has created or exacerbated.
The basic problem with Johnson’s article is there’s no acknowledgement of the Frankfurt School. We know that jews aim to destroy the white race. We know that their top experts see the best way to do this is by using the official vectors (government, schools, media) to promote a General Loosening. The creation and the glorification of the homosexual identity are part of this. But only a part. Deviant sex, drug use, self-worship (self-esteem)—whatever it is, the jewish goal is to get the goy focused with himself, his stupid, worthless feelings and opinions, thereby taking his eyes off the world and its unbending factual reality.
If you do what the jews advise, soon enough you will have so many personal problems you’re unfit to participate in politics. Which is the intent. The promotion of homosexuality is simply part of this. In Aryan society, queer behavior is the proclivity of a tiny, weird minority. A minority that is generally laughed about privately but left alone. Even those engaged in it hide the fact, since it never occurs to them, any more than to the normals, that their tastes are healthy or deserving of some kind of public acknowledgement, let alone respect or legal stature.
In a jew-controlled society, the queers are encouraged to think of their deviance as healthy, normal and natural. Even more than that—as a positive good. Something to take pride in. Something to celebrate. Something to hold parades for. A term is coined to disparage anyone who shakes his head at the world turned upside down. He’s now a “homophobe.” If he dares laugh or make objection to the new scheme of things, he finds himself publicly ridiculed, without a job, and very likely cut off from his scared friends and family.
The political use of homosexual behavior is what matters. Queer marriage is simply another milestone in the promotion and normalization of deviance in order to facilitate destruction. By itself it doesn’t mean all that much, except that a few more resources are shifted away from normal people to diseased / deranged people. But from the resource-shifting point of view, queer “marriage” is trivial, given our open borders and anti-white tax and welfare policies. The main thing is that the concept of marriage and family are further degraded, since the law is on the side of the degradation. This produces confusion in people, as is the intent. Confusion leads people to make bad choices.
Proponents of marriage for homosexuals think that heteronormativity is simply a social construct, a convention that can be changed through legislation, education, and relentless media brainwashing. But heteronormativity is based in nature, not in convention. Sexual reproduction has existed before human beings formed languages and conventions. Indeed, sexual reproduction existed before mankind evolved. The birds and the bees do it too. So heteronormativity is not a social construct and cannot be changed by society. It can only be covered up, lied about, and ignored—at society’s peril.
The queers believe, some of them honestly, that they have changed the public’s mind. They believe they have, through their gritty marches and public activism since Stonewall, converted people to thinking their side is morally right. Just as the negroes did. The truth is that, just as with the so-called civil rights movement, the public was simply browbeaten by a hateful media into accepting a new order accomplished anti-democratically by judicial edict. People’s minds haven’t been changed. They’ve just seen a thousand times there’s a price to be paid for speaking up. Disagree with The Cult on race, you’re aracist. Disagree with The Cult on sexual behavior, you’re a homophobe.
Both these, and other, labels can get you sued, fired, ostracized—even murdered. Who wants that? So the people keep their heads down, and content themselves with expressing any doubt in private, or not at all. Meanwhile, the 1% minority, along with the 2% minority that owns the mass media, preens and chortles over its great victory. The community, they say, supports “gay” rights. The community has changed its mind. It had a moral awakening. It decided to get on the right side of history. But homosexual behavior will never be anything but ludicrous and disgusting to the majority of the population. The public has been successfully intimidated out of expressing open criticism of deviant sexual behavior, but its basic views have not changed.
It is easy to understand why homosexual marriage proponents believe they are overturning heteronormativity. It is harder to understand why the opponents of homosexual marriage make the same claims, since presumably they think that heteronormativity is based on nature or divine will, neither of which can be altered by man, even by the US Supreme Court. Yet the opponents of heterosexual marriage claim that legally defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman is the key to preserving the institutions of marriage and family life.
The point isn’t what they can build, it’s what they can destroy. And we have the who and the why. They say it themselves. Yet you refuse to acknowledge this. Your essay could have been written by James A. Dobson (Focus on the Family) or any other conservative fundraising hack.
This makes no sense for two reasons.
First, if heteronormativity is based in nature or divine commandment, not in law, then it cannot be changed by changing laws. (Human laws can, of course, strengthen natural laws by adding additional punishments and incentives to follow nature.)
Leftists are cultists. They are not interested in reality, since reality shows them to be liars and weirdoes. Their solution to nature disagreeing with them is speech codes and laws. This won’t change anything fundamental, but it will keep the air- and mind-waves free of anything that would make them cry. And that is good enough. See Paula Deen.
Second, the institutions of marriage and family life have been pretty much destroyed already. But during the whole period that marriage and family life have been decaying, homosexuals have not been allowed to marry, and marriage has been defined as a union of a man and a woman. In other words, marriage and family life have declined with their heteronormativity entirely intact. Therefore, heterosexuals bear the primary blame for the decline of marriage and the family.
No, heterosexuals have nothing to do with it. The elite setting the agenda bear all the responsibility. They have passed the easy divorce laws. They copied the Soviet family laws in their guidelines for settling child disputes. The agenda is anti-white. Deliberately so. This is not a matter of debate. You can’t have stable families in a nation with a gigantic government touching every area of life and extracting huge taxes to pay for it all. No one has any time or energy left to fuck, let alone fuck productively. Throw in a popular culture that is nothing but 24/7 streaming garbage about hotness, masturbation, homosexuality, getting drunk / wasted / high and mass sports—nothing’s left. You’re either working, sleeping, or thinking about fucking. Well, the legal / media communist jews know exactly what they are doing. Destroying families. Destroying men.
Destroying the very ideas of manliness, womanliness, or families. The very use of family without an article is subversive, and deliberately so, even though many who use it that way—i.e., “the importance of family”—don’t grasp the fact. Barbara Bush, for example, or I could cite other conservatives, do this. A family is anything, who are we to say? It’s certainly not a man, his wife, and his children. They’re all independent agents, who might temporarily combine, if it suits their interests. Well, that’s true for the Strong Women and children. Not for the men. They’re only a group if they’re queers. As family men, they have no rights. They have duties only. To pay their deadbeat dad bills when the court orders. To worship the chictator. And humbly to admit how goofy, doofy and clumsy they are. Just watch any sitcom or commercial if you need an example.
Since homosexuals are a tiny minority, and only a tiny minority of that minority wish to marry in any case, I think that homosexual marriage opponents owe us an explanation as to how, exactly, such a small group of people could mess up marriage any more than straight people already have.
Johnson doesn’t grasp what’s going on. The point of the queer marriage drive is to destroy the family. Destroy enough families, you’ve destroyed society; not to give queers the right to marriage. Something most queers don’t want, since anonymous, promiscuous sex is the heart of their culture, if you want to call it that.
The point is to disempower any legal or social structure that defends anything “patriarchal,” as the feminists and jews call it. These are people at war, or pretending to be at war (jews), with the biological nature of men and women. They denounce the observation that men and women do differ sexually and biologically as “essentialism,” and it is one of their high crimes. Funnily enough, they’re all about this essentialism when it comes to queers. It’s not homosexual behavior, not a choice, it’s an identity. It’s who they are. They are essentialists when it comes to queers, but not when it comes to men and women, or races.
If one really wanted to defend marriage and strengthen the family, one should do the following.
1. End no-fault divorce
2. Criminalize adultery
3. Criminalize alienation of affections
4. End child support for unwed mothers
5. Establish a legal presumption that unwed mothers are unfit mothers, so that giving up illegitimate children for adoption is the norm
6. End adoption by unmarried individuals
7. Institute positive incentives for high-quality individuals to marry and have families
8. Institute tax incentives for people to marry/disincentives to stay single
These policies would significantly strengthen the bonds of marriage and family life. And the burdens and benefits of these measures would fall on the heterosexual population, where they belong.
Mostly good things, but the point is to find out who is behind the pushing of homosexuality and why, and to what end. Homosexuals did not persuade the majority they were right. The people running the media did that. And it wasn’t persuasion of anything beyond “you’d better shut up or we’ll mock and ridicule you and get you fired.”
But none of our pro-family politicians and moral crusaders shows any interest in such measures. And that, to me, is the sign that the whole anti-homosexual marriage campaign is just another phony Right-wing con job: (1) scapegoating homosexuals for the mess that heterosexuals have made of marriage and the family, (2) and channeling the discontent, energy, idealism, and money of a certain segment of the Right (albeit a pretty hopeless segment, from my point of view) into just another dead end, a battle that, even if it were won, would do nothing to halt the demographic decline of our race.
Much like the Jared Taylor he verbally fellates, Johnson’s main concern here is to see that homosexuals aren’t blamed. I repeat—that is main concern. You can figure out why.
With Taylor, of course, it’s jews. As the public face of a White NAACP, funded and directed by jews, Taylor’s job—above all else—is to see that the awakening / burgeoning white identity movement does not blame the jews who put us in the position we’re now in. Instead, we must ever and always blame our own grandparents! You know how they directed the nation’s politics in between slaughtering hogs and growing muskmelons.
Johnson’s engaged in “blame whitey” by another means, which is particularly ironic in light of his “right-wing con job.” The Mormon church in Utah was behind most of the California campaign, as the left gleefully and hatefully exposed, and there is no reason to think they were kidding. Hell, their side won. How often do right-wing con jobs actually win? It was the left-wing court that reversed the popular vote. Which is par for the course. Exactly what we see on race. And illegal aliens. See California’s, again, Prop. 187. It’s a tiny elite setting the agenda. Let’s not blame generic heterosexuals for the imposition of a tiny-elite agenda. It isn’t far. It isn’t accurate.
I used to think that these mainstream Right-wingers were merely stupid and / or deluded. A lot of the rank and file are. But they are generally far better than their leadership. The ones on top are so consistently wrong-headed and ineffectual that it is hard to resist the conclusion that they are agents of the enemy, working to misdirect and dissipate Right-wing dissent lest it give rise to a genuine populism that would threaten the hegemony of our ruling coalition of Jews and raceless, rootless plutocrats. I think that the purpose of their campaigns may be to run out the clock until whites are a minority and there is no hope of change within the present system.
Who is he kidding? Everyone has known this for 100 years. I’ve quoted Joe Sobran a thousand times, and Greg Johnson has read it. “It was all a game; a way of making a living”—Joe Sobran on professional conservatism. They’re raising money from the rural hinds and bourgeois Fox watchers. The real agenda is set by jews. The superficial stuff, there’s a degree of freedom. The serious stuff, the racial stuff—the conservatives are exactly the same as the liberals. Racism is evil, squawk. Racism is the worst thing in the world. Hitler is the worst man ever. The Nazis were the ultimate bad guys. Churchill is the best. man. ever.
The only political issue that matters is whether the white race will continue to exist on this planet in 200 years. White Americans are increasingly aware of, and alarmed by, our demographic decline. But frank appeals to white racial interests are still taboo on the American Right. Instead, the mainstream Right at best offers us race-neutral proxies for racial interests (opposition to “illegal” immigration, libertarian individualism, etc.) and at worst promotes distractions (opposing gay marriage and flag burning, or promoting school prayer) or outright demographic suicide (opposing abortion). Thus I think that White Nationalism will never move forward until the mainstream Right is thoroughly defeated and discredited. I just hope that, by that time, it is not too late to save our race.
Good to see Greggy has finally come around to my position. Before, and remember he was bragging about defeating me in argument over this point, he was all about influencing existing elites. Now he’s all Linder-squawking “we must defeat the conservatives and Republicans.” Maybe he offered Pat Buchanan a blowjob and was rebuffed in a way he felt unmannerly. It’s really hard to say. Although it’s easy—and fun!—to speculate.
Like I said, and you can read it in Strategy forum, attack the conservatives. Quit appeasing them. Quit pretending they’re on our side. Our side is basically everyone who’s not a feminist, sex deviant, non-white—anyone who is normal. Any normal white man or woman.
That is who White nationalism represents, potentially. We fight for white normals with the other groups—the jew-left, and the jew-right. The jew-left relies on its sheer power, rather than its persuasive ability. Its ideas are, after all, directly opposed to the ideas and interests of the average white man. But it can use public schools and mass media and political authority to mislead him as to this fact. The right is more attractive to this average man because its ideas are either right or less obviously wrong. What’s not obvious is what you have to listen to me to learn, or take decades discovering—even where the professional right is right it doesn’t mean it. It won’t fight over anything essential. Starting with race. And pretty much ending there too. Because if you don’t believe that racial difference exist and matter then you’re too dumb to figure in politics beyond serving as someone’s fodder. And if you are smart enough to see that they do, yet you still won’t lead or fight, you’re likewise irrelevant.
So the right has written itself out of the equation, from the Realpolitik perspective. But it still exists as powerful media and political machine. It’s just that its agenda is not what it seems. Rather than protecting and advancing certain principles, even if imperfectly, it has instead changed into a simple money-making scheme. What’s advanced and defended are individual careers, not peoples (races) or positions. Republicans and conservatives are mouthers. They don’t mean. White nationalism is the only school that can mean it. But most people aren’t even aware that it exists. Except in Greece!
Glad to see you joining the fight, Greggy. The next step in your intellectual maturation is to quit pretending the “alternative” or “radical traditionalist” or non-respectable conservatives are any different from the regular ones. I’ll check back in 2018.
I have argued that homosexual marriage is an unimportant issue from the point of view of white demographics. The most important thing to do to increase white fertility and improve white parenting is to strengthen marriage and decrease non-reproductive sex among heterosexuals. I have also argued that the gay marriage issue is being promoted by the phony Right as a distraction from far more important issues. But I am not going to deal with the merits of demerits of homosexual marriage as a policy, because I need to devote more reading and thought to the matter. I do, however, want to end this piece by at least raising the possibility of a society that combines “heteronormativity” with tolerance.
The right didn’t pick that fight, the left did. The professional right accurately saw it as a way to raise money. It’s the leftist media setting the agenda, after all. I love how you continue to think you can just pick and choose your fights rather than fighting on all fronts at all times. And if you disagree, remember it’s your ilk who doesn’t want to force the enemy into a head and call that head jews. Which, after all, fits. Is accurate. There is no term, certainly, more accurate than jews, and only Englishmen who will be thrown in prison if they say otherwise say otherwise.
The only real way to maintain high standards is to recognize that people will fall short of them in some ways. That means a certain amount of latitude and tolerance. A society that cannot tolerate deviation from its norms will inevitably lower its standards to make it easier for more people to comply. And the end of that process is complete nihilism, for if integrity to one’s values is the highest value, in the end, it will be one’s only value. For the easiest way to insure perfect integrity and to make hypocrisy impossible is to value nothing but being oneself at the present moment, i.e., to collapse any difference between the real and the ideal, to affirm that whatever happens to be real at any given moment is the ideal. In short, the only way to always practice what one preaches is to preach nothing but one practices. And that boils down to doing whatever one feels like from moment to moment, a kind of groundless self-affirmation which is pretty much the moral and cultural dead end toward which liberalism is leading.
This wouldn’t be a problem in a society without a gigantic government involved in every detail of personal life. Who do you think is promoting queerness? Government and media. It’s not coming from the grassroots. It’s a top-down phenomenon. People support homosexuality and talk like it’s a good thing out of conformity or fear. Not because they actually like and support.
Most of them honestly don’t even know what faggotry truly is, since, after all, they aren’t fags. Where are they going to learn the truth about faggotry? From sex education? From fag depictions on prime-time tv? From the newspapers? From politicians? The whole thing is a giant charade, proof only of the power of the tiny minority setting the national agenda. Put the nation on a stable racial basis, reduce the role of central government to collective racial defense, watch the homosexual issue (issue is jewspeak for problem) disappear.
Why can’t we have a society in which parents of homosexual children say, “We’re sorry that you are not going to give us grandchildren. It is a misfortune. But we still love you as our flesh and blood, and we know you will still be a good son to us, a good brother to your siblings, and a good uncle to your nieces and nephews”? Why can’t we have a society in which homosexuals accept that they fall short of the norm, rather than tearing down norms merely to feel good about themselves? Why can’t we have a society in which homosexuals are grateful to the heterosexuals who gave them life and glad that others are carrying on their families and their race as a whole? I believe that there are already quite a few people who think this way. But their voices are not being heard.
It’s more subtle than that: whatever good homosexuals can do, and there is much, can be done best if they are objects of average-man hatred and ridicule. Homosexuals flourish, in their various talents, when their actors are locked in the closet. Keep it on the down low, as the niggers say. That’s how you do it. Have your bars. Have your places. But not publicly acknowledged. Accept some cop busts. Accept executions where you show any interest in those under eighteen. If you want to go public, then you ought to be charged for the diseases you create and spread with your behavior. And once those are acknowledged, it’s a very tiny step to the case that anyone with these proclivities is so dangerous that he ought simply to be executed as a botch that potentially threatens public health.
In his most recent article, “Mens arya in corpore arya” Manu Rodríguez writes (my translation):
We should consider Aryan blog contents as sacred spaces; as places for consensus and not for dissent. Let’s say you come here for addition and multiplication, not to subtract and divide. The comments to the posts must be constructive or positive; they should increase, supplement, enrich the text or proposal.
But in the next paragraph he adds:
There should therefore be excluded all comments not specifically Aryan: be them pro-Jewish, pro-Christian, pro-Muslim, pro-Hindu or pro-Buddhist (or any other religious tradition or non-Aryan culture), and also the destructive or demoralizing critiques. They only foster division and sterile discussions in our ranks, and are the joy of the enemy.
There’s the rub. The second paragraph contradicts the first one, because in the American scene most white nationalists are also Christians. In such blogsites it is simply impossible to “exclude all Christian comments” and at the same time demand that “comments must be constructive.”
I am not quoting Manu to criticize him. Rather, I would like to say that nowadays it is impossible to pursue comradeship when the factions do not agree, and won’t agree, on pivotal subjects. For example:
• These days Greg Johnson has been entertaining his readers with homo apologetics, and apparently his blog does not let pass serious criticism on the subject. Since I consider the promotion of homosexualism as both culturally and racially destructive, does it mean that I must shut my mouth up?
• These days some well-known voices in the white movement have been labeling as “crank” the peak oil studies that, in my opinion, will represent the most important data later in the century—insofar as the death of billions in the Third World due to energy devolution will open a big window of opportunity for white racialists. Does it mean that when I listen the word “crank” to refer to serious scientific studies I must shut my mouth up?
Those are just a couple of subjects of what I have been discussing in the last week. But I could fill a page with other subjects that awake similar emotions among white nationalists, like the extent to which Jews are responsible for our darkest hour; whether or not Christianity is involved in the etiology of that hour; whether Hitler should be a figure of admiration or vituperation; whether or not 9/11 was orchestrated by Mossad; whether popular music, TV sports or Hollywood are toxic, etc.
Recently in one of those Aryan blogs, to use Manu’s term, a commenter stated that in other times I would have been burned at the stake for blasphemer (even though I did not blaspheme against Christianity in that blog), and another nationalist assented cheerfully.
Trolls… And I am afraid that we will have to wait until the balloon goes up to see under which banner survivors will start to organize.
Meanwhile the “white nationalist” scene will continue to be a trolling arena beyond belief, and we can do nothing about it except continue to write down the reasons for our differences.
The History of the Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire
Chapter XXIII: Reign of Julian
Part I
The religion of Julian. Universal toleration. He attempts to restore and reform the pagan worship. To rebuild the temple of Jerusalem. His artful persecution of the Christians. Mutual zeal and injustice.
The character of Apostate has injured the reputation of Julian; and the enthusiasm which clouded his virtues has exaggerated the real and apparent magnitude of his faults. Our partial ignorance may represent him as a philosophic monarch, who studied to protect, with an equal hand, the religious factions of the empire; and to allay the theological fever which had inflamed the minds of the people, from the edicts of Diocletian to the exile of Athanasius.
A more accurate view of the character and conduct of Julian will remove this favorable prepossession for a prince who did not escape the general contagion of the times. We enjoy the singular advantage of comparing the pictures which have been delineated by his fondest admirers and his implacable enemies. The actions of Julian are faithfully related by a judicious and candid historian, the impartial spectator of his life and death. The unanimous evidence of his contemporaries is confirmed by the public and private declarations of the emperor himself; and his various writings express the uniform tenor of his religious sentiments, which policy would have prompted him to dissemble rather than to affect.
A devout and sincere attachment for the gods of Athens and Rome constituted the ruling passion of Julian; the powers of an enlightened understanding were betrayed and corrupted by the influence of superstitious prejudice; and the phantoms which existed only in the mind of the emperor had a real and pernicious effect on the government of the empire. The vehement zeal of the Christians, who despised the worship, and overturned the altars of those fabulous deities, engaged their votary in a state of irreconcilable hostility with a very numerous party of his subjects; and he was sometimes tempted by the desire of victory, or the shame of a repulse, to violate the laws of prudence, and even of justice. The triumph of the party, which he deserted and opposed, has fixed a stain of infamy on the name of Julian; and the unsuccessful apostate has been overwhelmed with a torrent of pious invectives, of which the signal was given by the sonorous trumpet of Gregory Nazianzen.
The interesting nature of the events which were crowded into the short reign of this active emperor, deserve a just and circumstantial narrative. His motives, his counsels, and his actions, as far as they are connected with the history of religion, will be the subject of the present chapter. The cause of his strange and fatal apostasy may be derived from the early period of his life, when he was left an orphan in the hands of the murderers of his family. The names of Christ and of Constantius, the ideas of slavery and of religion, were soon associated in a youthful imagination, which was susceptible of the most lively impressions.
The care of his infancy was intrusted to Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia, who was related to him on the side of his mother; and till Julian reached the twentieth year of his age, he received from his Christian preceptors the education, not of a hero, but of a saint. The emperor, less jealous of a heavenly than of an earthly crown, contented himself with the imperfect character of a catechumen, while he bestowed the advantages of baptism on the nephews of Constantine. They were even admitted to the inferior offices of the ecclesiastical order; and Julian publicly read the Holy Scriptures in the church of Nicomedia. The study of religion, which they assiduously cultivated, appeared to produce the fairest fruits of faith and devotion.
They prayed, they fasted, they distributed alms to the poor, gifts to the clergy, and oblations to the tombs of the martyrs; and the splendid monument of St. Mamas, at Cæsarea, was erected, or at least was undertaken, by the joint labor of Gallus and Julian. They respectfully conversed with the bishops, who were eminent for superior sanctity, and solicited the benediction of the monks and hermits, who had introduced into Cappadocia the voluntary hardships of the ascetic life. As the two princes advanced towards the years of manhood, they discovered, in their religious sentiments, the difference of their characters.
The dull and obstinate understanding of Gallus embraced, with implicit zeal, the doctrines of Christianity; which never influenced his conduct, or moderated his passions. The mild disposition of the younger brother was less repugnant to the precepts of the gospel; and his active curiosity might have been gratified by a theological system, which explains the mysterious essence of the Deity, and opens the boundless prospect of invisible and future worlds. But the independent spirit of Julian refused to yield the passive and unresisting obedience which was required, in the name of religion, by the haughty ministers of the church.
Their speculative opinions were imposed as positive laws, and guarded by the terrors of eternal punishments; but while they prescribed the rigid formulary of the thoughts, the words, and the actions of the young prince; whilst they silenced his objections, and severely checked the freedom of his inquiries, they secretly provoked his impatient genius to disclaim the authority of his ecclesiastical guides.
He was educated in the Lesser Asia, amidst the scandals of the Arian controversy. The fierce contests of the Eastern bishops, the incessant alterations of their creeds, and the profane motives which appeared to actuate their conduct, insensibly strengthened the prejudice of Julian, that they neither understood nor believed the religion for which they so fiercely contended. Instead of listening to the proofs of Christianity with that favorable attention which adds weight to the most respectable evidence, he heard with suspicion, and disputed with obstinacy and acuteness, the doctrines for which he already entertained an invincible aversion.
Whenever the young princes were directed to compose declamations on the subject of the prevailing controversies, Julian always declared himself the advocate of Paganism; under the specious excuse that, in the defence of the weaker cause, his learning and ingenuity might be more advantageously exercised and displayed. As soon as Gallus was invested with the honors of the purple, Julian was permitted to breathe the air of freedom, of literature, and of Paganism. The crowd of sophists, who were attracted by the taste and liberality of their royal pupil, had formed a strict alliance between the learning and the religion of Greece; and the poems of Homer, instead of being admired as the original productions of human genius, were seriously ascribed to the heavenly inspiration of Apollo and the muses.
The deities of Olympus, as they are painted by the immortal bard, imprint themselves on the minds which are the least addicted to superstitious credulity. Our familiar knowledge of their names and characters, their forms and attributes, seems to bestow on those airy beings a real and substantial existence; and the pleasing enchantment produces an imperfect and momentary assent of the imagination to those fables, which are the most repugnant to our reason and experience.
In the age of Julian, every circumstance contributed to prolong and fortify the illusion; the magnificent temples of Greece and Asia; the works of those artists who had expressed, in painting or in sculpture, the divine conceptions of the poet; the pomp of festivals and sacrifices; the successful arts of divination; the popular traditions of oracles and prodigies; and the ancient practice of two thousand years.
The weakness of polytheism was, in some measure, excused by the moderation of its claims; and the devotion of the Pagans was not incompatible with the most licentious scepticism. Instead of an indivisible and regular system, which occupies the whole extent of the believing mind, the mythology of the Greeks was composed of a thousand loose and flexible parts, and the servant of the gods was at liberty to define the degree and measure of his religious faith.
The creed which Julian adopted for his own use was of the largest dimensions; and, by strange contradiction, he disdained the salutary yoke of the gospel, whilst he made a voluntary offering of his reason on the altars of Jupiter and Apollo. One of the orations of Julian is consecrated to the honor of Cybele, the mother of the gods, who required from her effeminate priests the bloody sacrifice, so rashly performed by the madness of the Phrygian boy.
The pious emperor condescends tolerate, without a blush, and without a smile, the voyage of the goddess from the shores of Pergamus to the mouth of the Tyber, and the stupendous miracle, which convinced the senate and people of Rome that the lump of clay, which their ambassadors had transported over the seas, was endowed with life, and sentiment, and divine power. For the truth of this prodigy he appeals to the public monuments of the city; and censures, with some acrimony, the sickly and affected taste of those men, who impertinently derided the sacred traditions of their ancestors.
But the devout philosopher, who sincerely embraced, and warmly encouraged, the superstition of the people, reserved for himself the privilege of a liberal interpretation; and silently withdrew from the foot of the altars into the sanctuary of the temple. The extravagance of the Grecian mythology proclaimed, with a clear and audible voice, that the pious inquirer, instead of being scandalized or satisfied with the literal sense, should diligently explore the occult wisdom, which had been disguised, by the prudence of antiquity, under the mask of folly and of fable. The philosophers of the Platonic school, Plotinus, Porphyry, and the divine Iamblichus, were admired as the most skilful masters of this allegorical science, which labored to soften and harmonize the deformed features of Paganism.
Julian himself, who was directed in the mysterious pursuit by Ædesius, the venerable successor of Iamblichus, aspired to the possession of a treasure, which he esteemed, if we may credit his solemn asseverations, far above the empire of the world. It was indeed a treasure, which derived its value only from opinion; and every artist who flattered himself that he had extracted the precious ore from the surrounding dross, claimed an equal right of stamping the name and figure the most agreeable to his peculiar fancy.
The fable of Antsy and Cybele had been already explained by Porphyry; but his labors served only to animate the pious industry of Julian, who invented and published his own allegory of that ancient and mystic tale. This freedom of interpretation, which might gratify the pride of the Platonists, exposed the vanity of their art. Without a tedious detail, the modern reader could not form a just idea of the strange allusions, the forced etymologies, the solemn trifling, and the impenetrable obscurity of these sages, who professed to reveal the system of the universe.
As the traditions of Pagan mythology were variously related, the sacred interpreters were at liberty to select the most convenient circumstances; and as they translated an arbitrary cipher, they could extract from any fable any sense which was adapted to their favorite system of religion and philosophy. The lascivious form of a naked Venus was tortured into the discovery of some moral precept, or some physical truth; and the castration of Atys explained the revolution of the sun between the tropics, or the separation of the human soul from vice and error.
The theological system of Julian appears to have contained the sublime and important principles of natural religion. But as the faith, which is not founded on revelation, must remain destitute of any firm assurance, the disciple of Plato imprudently relapsed into the habits of vulgar superstition; and the popular and philosophic notion of the Deity seems to have been confounded in the practice, the writings, and even in the mind of Julian. The pious emperor acknowledged and adored the Eternal Cause of the universe, to whom he ascribed all the perfections of an infinite nature, invisible to the eyes and inaccessible to the understanding, of feeble mortals.
The Supreme God had created, or rather, in the Platonic language, had generated, the gradual succession of dependent spirits, of gods, of dæmons, of heroes, and of men; and every being which derived its existence immediately from the First Cause, received the inherent gift of immortality. That so precious an advantage might be lavished upon unworthy objects, the Creator had intrusted to the skill and power of the inferior gods the office of forming the human body, and of arranging the beautiful harmony of the animal, the vegetable, and the mineral kingdoms. To the conduct of these divine ministers he delegated the temporal government of this lower world; but their imperfect administration is not exempt from discord or error.
The earth and its inhabitants are divided among them, and the characters of Mars or Minerva, of Mercury or Venus, may be distinctly traced in the laws and manners of their peculiar votaries. As long as our immortal souls are confined in a mortal prison, it is our interest, as well as our duty, to solicit the favor, and to deprecate the wrath, of the powers of heaven; whose pride is gratified by the devotion of mankind; and whose grosser parts may be supposed to derive some nourishment from the fumes of sacrifice. The inferior gods might sometimes condescend to animate the statues, and to inhabit the temples, which were dedicated to their honor.
They might occasionally visit the earth, but the heavens were the proper throne and symbol of their glory. The invariable order of the sun, moon, and stars, was hastily admitted by Julian, as a proof of their eternal duration; and their eternity was a sufficient evidence that they were the workmanship, not of an inferior deity, but of the Omnipotent King. In the system of Platonists, the visible was a type of the invisible world. The celestial bodies, as they were informed by a divine spirit, might be considered as the objects the most worthy of religious worship.
The Sun, whose genial influence pervades and sustains the universe, justly claimed the adoration of mankind, as the bright representative of the Logos, the lively, the rational, and the beneficent image of the intellectual Father. In every age, the absence of genuine inspiration is supplied by the strong illusions of enthusiasm, and the mimic arts of imposture. If, in the time of Julian, these arts had been practised only by the pagan priests, for the support of an expiring cause, some indulgence might perhaps be allowed to the interest and habits of the sacerdotal character.
But it may appear a subject of surprise and scandal, that the philosophers themselves should have contributed to abuse the superstitious credulity of mankind, and that the Grecian mysteries should have been supported by the magic or theurgy of the modern Platonists. They arrogantly pretended to control the order of nature, to explore the secrets of futurity, to command the service of the inferior dæmons, to enjoy the view and conversation of the superior gods, and by disengaging the soul from her material bands, to reunite that immortal particle with the Infinite and Divine Spirit.
The devout and fearless curiosity of Julian tempted the philosophers with the hopes of an easy conquest; which, from the situation of their young proselyte, might be productive of the most important consequences. Julian imbibed the first rudiments of the Platonic doctrines from the mouth of Ædesius, who had fixed at Pergamus his wandering and persecuted school. But as the declining strength of that venerable sage was unequal to the ardor, the diligence, the rapid conception of his pupil, two of his most learned disciples, Chrysanthes and Eusebius, supplied, at his own desire, the place of their aged master.
These philosophers seem to have prepared and distributed their respective parts; and they artfully contrived, by dark hints and affected disputes, to excite the impatient hopes of the aspirant, till they delivered him into the hands of their associate, Maximus, the boldest and most skilful master of the Theurgic science.
By his hands, Julian was secretly initiated at Ephesus, in the twentieth year of his age. His residence at Athens confirmed this unnatural alliance of philosophy and superstition. He obtained the privilege of a solemn initiation into the mysteries of Eleusis, which, amidst the general decay of the Grecian worship, still retained some vestiges of their primæval sanctity; and such was the zeal of Julian, that he afterwards invited the Eleusinian pontiff to the court of Gaul, for the sole purpose of consummating, by mystic rites and sacrifices, the great work of his sanctification.
As these ceremonies were performed in the depth of caverns, and in the silence of the night, and as the inviolable secret of the mysteries was preserved by the discretion of the initiated, I shall not presume to describe the horrid sounds, and fiery apparitions, which were presented to the senses, or the imagination, of the credulous aspirant, till the visions of comfort and knowledge broke upon him in a blaze of celestial light. In the caverns of Ephesus and Eleusis, the mind of Julian was penetrated with sincere, deep, and unalterable enthusiasm; though he might sometimes exhibit the vicissitudes of pious fraud and hypocrisy, which may be observed, or at least suspected, in the characters of the most conscientious fanatics.
From that moment he consecrated his life to the service of the gods; and while the occupations of war, of government, and of study, seemed to claim the whole measure of his time, a stated portion of the hours of the night was invariably reserved for the exercise of private devotion. The temperance which adorned the severe manners of the soldier and the philosopher was connected with some strict and frivolous rules of religious abstinence; and it was in honor of Pan or Mercury, of Hecate or Isis, that Julian, on particular days, denied himself the use of some particular food, which might have been offensive to his tutelary deities.
By these voluntary fasts, he prepared his senses and his understanding for the frequent and familiar visits with which he was honored by the celestial powers. Notwithstanding the modest silence of Julian himself, we may learn from his faithful friend, the orator Libanius, that he lived in a perpetual intercourse with the gods and goddesses; that they descended upon earth to enjoy the conversation of their favorite hero; that they gently interrupted his slumbers by touching his hand or his hair; that they warned him of every impending danger, and conducted him, by their infallible wisdom, in every action of his life; and that he had acquired such an intimate knowledge of his heavenly guests, as readily to distinguish the voice of Jupiter from that of Minerva, and the form of Apollo from the figure of Hercules.
These sleeping or waking visions, the ordinary effects of abstinence and fanaticism, would almost degrade the emperor to the level of an Egyptian monk. But the useless lives of Antony or Pachomius were consumed in these vain occupations. Julian could break from the dream of superstition to arm himself for battle; and after vanquishing in the field the enemies of Rome, he calmly retired into his tent, to dictate the wise and salutary laws of an empire, or to indulge his genius in the elegant pursuits of literature and philosophy.
The important secret of the apostasy of Julian was intrusted to the fidelity of the initiated, with whom he was united by the sacred ties of friendship and religion. The pleasing rumor was cautiously circulated among the adherents of the ancient worship; and his future greatness became the object of the hopes, the prayers, and the predictions of the Pagans, in every province of the empire. From the zeal and virtues of their royal proselyte, they fondly expected the cure of every evil, and the restoration of every blessing; and instead of disapproving of the ardor of their pious wishes, Julian ingenuously confessed, that he was ambitious to attain a situation in which he might be useful to his country and to his religion.
But this religion was viewed with a hostile eye by the successor of Constantine, whose capricious passions alternately saved and threatened the life of Julian. The arts of magic and divination were strictly prohibited under a despotic government, which condescended to fear them; and if the Pagans were reluctantly indulged in the exercise of their superstition, the rank of Julian would have excepted him from the general toleration. The apostate soon became the presumptive heir of the monarchy, and his death could alone have appeased the just apprehensions of the Christians.
But the young prince, who aspired to the glory of a hero rather than of a martyr, consulted his safety by dissembling his religion; and the easy temper of polytheism permitted him to join in the public worship of a sect which he inwardly despised. Libanius has considered the hypocrisy of his friend as a subject, not of censure, but of praise. “As the statues of the gods,” says that orator, “which have been defiled with filth, are again placed in a magnificent temple, so the beauty of truth was seated in the mind of Julian, after it had been purified from the errors and follies of his education.
His sentiments were changed; but as it would have been dangerous to have avowed his sentiments, his conduct still continued the same. Very different from the ass in Æsop, who disguised himself with a lion’s hide, our lion was obliged to conceal himself under the skin of an ass; and, while he embraced the dictates of reason, to obey the laws of prudence and necessity.” The dissimulation of Julian lasted about ten years, from his secret initiation at Ephesus to the beginning of the civil war; when he declared himself at once the implacable enemy of Christ and of Constantius.
This state of constraint might contribute to strengthen his devotion; and as soon as he had satisfied the obligation of assisting, on solemn festivals, at the assemblies of the Christians, Julian returned, with the impatience of a lover, to burn his free and voluntary incense on the domestic chapels of Jupiter and Mercury. But as every act of dissimulation must be painful to an ingenuous spirit, the profession of Christianity increased the aversion of Julian for a religion which oppressed the freedom of his mind, and compelled him to hold a conduct repugnant to the noblest attributes of human nature, sincerity and courage.
