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Currency crash Eschatology Videos

Currency crash course, 2

“As I have said many times before, the economic crisis of 2008 was only a speed bump on the way to the main event. I believe that before the end of this decade there will be an economic crisis so historic that it will eclipse the crash of 29 and the subsequent great depression. I also believe it is both unavoidable and inevitable, because it is merely the free market releasing the stored up energy from decades of economic manipulation. Yes… bad things are going to happen, but it could be the best thing that ever happened to you.”

—Mike Maloney

Note: Economics is not my forte and therefore I cannot discuss the complex issues of these new series with skeptical commenters. I would recommend those who altogether reject what Maloney says to go to his own site, subscribe if necessary (it’s free), and discuss it there.

Categories
Ancient Greece Aryan beauty Eduardo Velasco Madison Grant Miscegenation Nordicism Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Johnson’s amnesty

“White Nationalists treat Mediterraneans like Republicans treat Mestizos.”

Stubbs

In “Dies Irae” I responded to Greg Johnson’s bashing of Pierce’s novels, especially The Turner Diaries, and I exposed him as the pseudo-Nietzschean that he is. (Warning: that article is very strong meat indeed, not for the faint-hearted.) Now Johnson is bashing Pierce again but this time Pierce’s last book, Who We Are. He didn’t do it in writing but in a segment of his recent audio interview of Matt Parrott. In about minute 40 of the interview Johnson started to talk about “genetic purity and white identity,” and in minute 41:30 he began his anti-Nordicist tirade speaking about what he calls “weird forms of purism”:

My attitude is that we… should just have an amnesty for all remote past miscegenation. Because the really important thing… is to preserve our race as it exists right now.”

Since Johnson has in mind the miscegenation that took place in historical Europe through the millennia, he is omitting the crucial question: are, say, brown-looking Sicilians “white”? Pay attention to his words that I italicized below:

“…save the race as it exists… rather than being caught up in the past; and caught up in weird forms of purism.

There’s a kind of fallacy in this statement. Is Johnson implying that every European individual before the mass immigration of recent decades is per definition “white”? Is he asking us not to see the phenotypic difference between, say, a modern Greek that looks like a Turk and the hyperborean nymphs that make me mad? What about the Frenchmen and Frenchwomen who have nigger blood in their veins? Let me rephrase a bit from Arthur Kemp’s March of the Titans:

mulatos-franceses

(French women with non-white blood.)

According to official French statistics, some three million of North African Arabic mixed race and African Blacks, all from the French colonies, immigrated into France itself during the period 1919 to 1927. (Take note that this happened before the Second World War and the Morgenthau Plan to exterminate the Germans.) Kemp’s point is that a significant minority miscegenated with women like those in the pic, creating the inappropriately named “Mediterranean” look associated with the French in certain areas. But apparently, Johnson is not a believer of the one-drop rule: once you are descendant from a Negro you cannot be considered properly White.

Johnson continues his anti-Nordicist speech in his interview of Parrott:

One example of weird kind of purism is in this book by William Pierce called Who We Are, which I have been briefing thru. This book basically is a warrant for genocide—if you will—a brief for genocide, of whites by whites!

Has Johnson read the mini-book about Sparta, originally written in Spanish, that I recently translated? Or Kemp’s? Or Who We Are with due attention (“…which I have been briefing thru”)? The moral of these books is that you simply cannot coexist with non-Aryans or use a class of non-Aryan servants because, in the long run, quantity overwhelms quality. The blond Spartans decayed after the Peloponnesus War precisely because they had not expelled non-Aryans from their conquered territories: a hypothetical prophylactic measure that makes white nationalists like Johnson and liberals shrug in horror!

What Pierce wanted for ancient Greece, which outside Sparta had a substantial amount of Asian and North African half-bloods, is analogous to having expelled the Amerinds to a corner of the continent as the English-derived peoples did in America. The non-Spartiate Helots could have been whiter than the Amerinds, yes: but tolerating them and even darker peoples inside their lands caused the extinction of the Aryan Greeks (see the link to Pierce’s chapter that I baptized as “White suicide in ancient Greece” at the end of this post). Johnson continues:

Pierce basically wants to do [it] by identifying himself as a Nordicist… Everything is blond hair and blue eye and his attitude about say Greeks is that the Dorians invaders should have exterminated all these darker cute white people so they didn’t mix with them. So my attitude is that there were people in the past who were Dorians or Aryans of various sorts. They do not exist any more. They are just ingredients now in what we call white people today. Anglo-Saxons don’t exist anymore. The Anglo-Saxons tribes which landed in England—they are just ingredients in the modern Englishman.

I don’t know shorthand and had difficulties with my laptop to easily rewind the interview after minute 44 but still managed to catch Johnson phrases such as: “If we are concerned with preserving Americans, English, Greeks…” and his mocking for what Pierce, Kemp and others considered “the terrible miscegenation.” Johnson also claimed that we must get “out of that mentality,” and that it is “impractical” to do an “insidious distinction among whites today” (my emphasis).

The same old fallacy again: assuming that all ancient Europeans were, per definition, “white.” In another moment of the interview Johnson says he is concerned about the miscegenation of today but not about the miscegenation of yesterday.

He is simply begging the question. The question is that precisely because in the past white peoples were utterly unconcerned about mongrelization that we have mongrels today. The question is whether or not the French descendants of, say, the women in the above pic should be considered whites or not. Pay attention how in the above quote Johnson mentions the modern “Englishman” together with the modern “Greeks” as if both could be plainly considered “whites.”

When Johnson finished his speech Parrott mentioned his distant drop of Indian blood. But that’s different. A distant drop of Amerind blood does not invalidate your whiteness as some black drops do. See for instance Andrew Hamilton’s article, “Whiteness, blurring.” I believe Hamilton is on the right track as to where drawing the line. Curiously, most commenters of that article published at Counter-Currents subscribe Johnson’s anti-Nordicist stance so common in white nationalism today.

White blurring aside, the issue of this post is people that are literally brown, like many Greeks and Sicilians or even some Southern Spaniards and Portuguese. They look brown: and by mentioning the modern Greeks in his interview together with the Englishmen Johnson seems to be using a handy doublethink to consider them white irrespective of what his very eyes are telling him.

felix_von_luschan_skin_color_chart

(Felix von Luschan’s skin color chart.)


The doublethink mentality one sees in the comments section of Counter-Currents is exactly the kind of mentality that caused the problem centuries ago. Either white skin is white; olive skin olive, and brown skin brown, and black skin black, or we have entered the world of Wonderland.

When a humble commenter like me has to remind adults all-too elemental things that any toddler can understand—like colors!—something must have gone terrible wrong within the adult mind. Anti-Nordicist nationalists cannot refute us with facts just as liberals cannot refute the hard facts of race realism advanced by the likes of Jared Taylor. Like the liberals, what nationalists do is appealing to emotional non-sequiturs as to what is “practical” from the “political viewpoint.” The paramount issue about whether it’s OK to marry and have kids with, say, a Greek that looks like a Turk is treated with the same horror of what a leftist liberal would say. The leftist would label “racist” those who abhor the idea of seeing a daughter with mulatto grandsons. Would white nationalists call “Nordicist,” a pejorative term in their mouths, someone who would abhor the idea of having a daughter with Sicilian-like grandsons? If so, what about those who the media labels as “white” in the US? Is George Zimmerman a “White Hispanic”?

“Nordicism” is the white nationalist equivalent to “racism” in the liberal mindset. It might seem incredible but the stuff written a hundred years ago by American racialists like Madison Grant was un-infected with the virus of politically correctness as white nationalism is today. See the von Luschan chart. Isn’t it a no-brainer that human “white” skin is up to, say #15? Where do non-Nordicist nationalists draw the line, in which specific number?

Even if some would grant the lighter olive skin as still Caucasian, many so-called Mediterraneans fall into the numbers twenties of the chart. Harold Covington had a hilarious point recently when he said that quite a few modern Greeks “look like Mexicans.” And I find it rather incredible that for nationalists even of the revolutionary type not even the clearly brownish colors of the chart are to be considered “brown” anymore. If theirs and Johnson’s “amnesty” is conceded to them all what is the next step? What about the so-called White Hispanics in Johnson’s own town of San Francisco? Isn’t it so obvious that the line should be drawn somewhere in the second column of the chart (together with other factors, of course, like the shape of the cranium)?

But it is useless trying to discuss the matter with Johnson because he does not answer to honest criticism. In his site he has had a history of not letting pass the comments of those who present cogent critiques to his opinions.

Johnson controversies aside, Pierce was light-years ahead from contemporary racialists. He was the true spiritual inheritor of National Socialism for the American scene. Most, though not all, white nationalists are pigmies compared to him. Who We Are was his last testament and you will probably learn more brutal truth from that book alone than pursuing the diluted racialism so fashionable today. My purpose of translating texts from the Spanish blogsite Evropa Soberana is precisely to warn English-speaking racialists about what we might call politically-correct white nationalism. It was precisely the sort of mentality that we see in this movement, if we contrast it with the purer American authors of yesterday, what led to a runaway anti-racism that is about to grant amnesty to millions of “White Hispanic” Mexicans and other non-whites in the US.

There is a strong trend of anti-Nordicism in the movement just as there’s a strong trend of anti-racism in the conservative movement. Ultimately, when compared to personalities like Grant or Pierce, white nationalists are closer to the conservatives. Here there are three must-reads that transmit the idea of why I believe that today’s anti-Nordicist movement is a dead-end:

• “White suicide in ancient Greece.” These are my excerpts from the tenth installment of Pierce’s Who We Are: A Series of Articles on the History of the White Race. It is telling that this entry has received zero comments as to date.

• “Why Rome fell.” These are my excerpts from Kemp’s appendix to his March of the Titans: The Complete History of the White Race.

• “Were the Greeks blond and blue-eyed?” Yesterday I added all of my recent entry translations on the subject to Ex libris so that this Evropa Soberana article may be read comfortably, starting with the first entry.

Artemis

Parting word to the anti-Nordicists: Compare the so-called “Mediterranean” descendants of the Frenchwomen caught in the first pic above with the original phenotype of the handsomest ancient Greeks…

Categories
Ancient Greece Eduardo Velasco Nordicism Racial studies

Were the Greeks blond and blue-eyed?

Berlin_Painter_Ganymedes_Louvre
 
This piece has been chosen for my collection The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour. It has also been merged within a single entry.

Categories
Ancient Greece Eduardo Velasco

Were the Greeks blond and blue-eyed?

– XXXIII –

P._Oxy._8
 
This piece has been chosen for my collection The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour. It has also been merged within a single entry.

Categories
Goths Islam Islamization of Europe Literature Reconquista

On Spain and literature – I

Annoyed at the infamous TV series Toledo I tried to find some consolation in the epic film El Cid, “a romanticized story of the life of the Christian Castilian knight Don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, called ‘El Cid’, who in the 11th century fought the North African Almoravides and ultimately contributed to the unification of Spain.” But even that movie released in 1961 starts with a politically-correct scene. El Cid, interpreted by Charlton Heston, spares the live of a Moorish king in the hope that the Moor will behave in the future after an anti-Christian raid (and in fact he behaves like a gentleman in the rest of the film). Then in the royal palace El Cid has a private conversation with the woman he loved, acted by Sophia Loren, and makes a speech about his pacifist intentions when he is accused of treason for having spared the life of the Muslim king.

Well, well… What about forgetting old and new movies altogether and focus instead in the Spanish literature of the Middle Ages? What will we find there? Big surprise: the historical “Cid” found some work fighting for the Muslim rulers of Taifa of Zaragoza! This happened after his falling out of favor of Alfonso VI, king of León and Castile, who in 1081 ordered Rodrigo Díaz’s exile.

But what else can the literature of the age say about the ethno-nationalist mores, values, moral grammar and zeitgeist of medieval Spain? Let’s take a look…

retrato de soledad anaya

This is a photograph of Soledad Anaya Solórzano (1895-1978), who graduated in Spanish letters at Guadalajara in Mexico. From 1920 to 1923 she served as Director of Primary and Higher Education in the Mexican government. She also taught Spanish literature, a field that she mostly loved, and was the Principal of the Secundaria Héroes de la Libertad until her death (the Middle School in Mexico City where I studied). Of course, when Miss Anaya taught me she was in her late seventies and looked a little older than in the photo, but she still was in command of her intellectual capacities. Anaya never married and was the single author of Literatura Española (1941), a textbook of more than thirty editions that we used in her classroom and I will use below and in the coming entries on the subject of Spain. I must say that in the first chapters of Anaya’s textbook, first published during the Second World War, she unabashedly uses the word “arios” (Aryan) when referring to the first conquerors of the Iberian Peninsula.

However, about the first ancient text that Anaya analyzes, the 8th century legend of King Rodrigo and the Loss of Spain (pages 28-31), the jew-wise reader is shocked to see that no accusation is made of Jews inviting any Muslim into the peninsula. The old legend tells instead that Florinda, a Visigothic maid (a purely Aryan young woman) was seduced by King Rodrigo, another Iberian white, in Rodrigo’s castle. As revenge the Count Julián, Florinda’s father, “opened Spain to Muslim expansion” Anaya wrote: an expansion that had been previously contained by the Count himself. The Moors then invaded the peninsula “and easily destroyed the Visigothic power that already was much debilitated.” Anaya adds that “it is not known what happened to King Rodrigo, who caused so much harm” and that the “historical happenings related to this legend occurred in 711 A.D.” Note that King Rodrigo, not Count Julián (or the Moors, or a purported Jew who opened the gates) is blamed. Presumably, the accent of the legend rested on the sense of honor among the Iberians of those remote times.

Later, on pages 40-47 of the textbook I used in my middle teens, Anaya mentions the case of the legend of The Seven Infants of Lara, which recounts other Iberian whites using other Moors to take revenge about other cases of Aryan offences! This very famous medieval tale has Gonzalo Gustios, the crying father of the seven decapitated white boys in Córdova, marrying Aixa, the daughter of Almanzor (Almanzor, who had imprisoned Gonzalo Gustios, was one of the most powerful characters in the Caliphate). Mudarra González, the mongrel son of the Christian Gonzalo Gustios and the Muslim Aixa, is The One destined to avenge the father. The victim of course is not Almanzor, the Moor that ordered the decapitation of the boys on behalf of the valiant knight Ruy Vásquez. The victim is Ruy Vásquez himself that the mongrel dispatches at the end of the story.

Once more, for the medieval Spaniard race did not seem to be the central issue at all: but a knightly sense of honor, especially during in-group vendettas.

In the next chapter Anaya approaches the ancient texts about El Cid. His life inspired the most important epic poem of Spanish literature: the Cantar de mio Cid. Now that I reread her book after forty years of reading it for the first time I was shocked to see Anaya’s sentence that El Cid was “the terror of Moors and Christians” (my emphasis). When I finished the chapter I was surprised to learn that El Cid’s fame was not entirely based on the feat of expelling some Moors from the peninsula, but mainly on the chivalrous character of this historical (and legendary) figure of the Reconquista.

This, and similar cases I’ll be recounting in these brief series about the classics of Spanish literature, moves me to expand the category of this blog previously known as “White suicide” as the “Aryan problem.”

Categories
Islam Islamization of Europe Mainstream media Reconquista

Empty-headed Spaniards

cabezas-huecas

Further to my post “Empty-headed Britons.” Of the television series I have been reviewing, I have found the first season of the Spanish-produced Toledo: Cruce de Destinos, premiered the last year, as the most offensive to date. It starts with a stunning scene in a Spanish garden of a wealthy family of whites in the 13th century. After some idyllic moments the family is attacked by the Moors with women, adolescents and children being assassinated in cold blood. One would expect that when the men return and see their families butchered the plot of the entire series would be revenge and expulsion of the Moors, right?

Nope! The whole series is an attempt to demonize the patriot Spaniards of such century, some of them real historical figures, that tried to expel the enemies by force. No kidding: that is exactly the ethos behind the script.

King Alfonso X of Castile is filmed as talking about “el sueño de la convivencia de las tres culturas” (“the dream of the coexistence between the three cultures”), meaning the Christian, the Muslim and the Jewish cultures as his ultimate dream for Castile. The series are perfectly Manichean: the hawks who crave for a war against the Moors and the Semites are absolutely evil; and the multicultural doves are the goods guys of the films. The first season actually ends with King Alfonso saying that his son Sancho, the hawk, is going into exile for life while the dove, his son Fernando, will inherit the crown to pursue his dream.

The whole series can be sketched thus:

• The Moors are revealed as the cruel invaders that they were in real history

• The Christian patriots who hate them are depicted as intolerant bigots throughout all episodes

• No single piece of mischief—nothing at all!—is ever committed by the Jews, who are always depicted as innocent doves

In a heated discussion in the first episode, the very one that depicts realistically the butchery of a white family, the Queen Violant of Aragon gives a speech to the main hawks of the story, the Archbishop of Toledo and the Count Miranda. The Queen says that Christians are supposed to turn the other cheek. Most surrealist of all is that the central character of these Spanish series, Rodrigo Pérez de Ayala whose eldest son and wife were among the victims of the butchery in first scene, sides the pacifist monarchs against the hawks!

Then Rodrigo returns to his home after not seeing for ten years what was left of his family. Who is the first guest to share Rodrigo’s table? Abraham Rubini, a Jew: his best friend throughout the series in fact. So much so that Rodrigo has a conversation with Abraham almost ignoring his surviving family who had been entranced to see that his father had finally came home after a decade…

Toledo serie estreno I

The hawks Sancho and the Count Miranda are depicted as almost rapists or as rationalizing or excusing the rape of an innocent commoner girl. And—typical—the casting directors chose a very stunning actress to interpret the role of a Moorish woman: the one who speaks for the Muslim side (in the pic, sat at the front center).

In another scene, Abraham (extreme left in the pic) tells Rodrigo that Rodrigo’s role in the Castilian government must be “to defend the weak” of Toledo against the hawks. And in a discussion between Abraham and the Archbishop (standing at the right with his hands together) inside the royal court, the Christian is depicted as pig-headed and the Jew as wise. The richest Muslim of Toledo is also depicted as wise and concerned about the inexcusable intolerance of the Archbishop. It’s the Archbishop the one who incited a mob of fanatic Christians to attack the candid scholars working in Toledo’s school of translators, a school headed by Abraham. Afterwards there’s a scene where the hawk Sancho cowardly tries to stab the dove Fernando in the back, also in the royal court.

It is unnecessary continuing to recount more outrageous scenes, except adding that the series also contain typical scenes of soft-porn that have become so fashionable in recent TV series.

What alarms me is that Spaniards are largely clueless about what is happening to their media. Yes: it is true that in the blogosphere some Spanish critics have pointed out that the historical King Alfonso, also called The Wise, did not participate in such alliance of civilizations between Christians, Muslims and Jews, and that the series puts Toledo as a mainly Muslim city when really at the time they were a distinct minority in the city, surpassed even by the Jewish quarter. The TV story “invents a conspiracy of radical anti-Muslim Christians against King Alfonso, when in fact there was no such company.” But what made me laugh was a comment in “La serie Toledo” stating (my translation) that “the series could have been called ‘Zapatero in the country of the Alliance of Civilizations’.”

Even these critics don’t see the obvious: that patriot Christians have been painted with black; warrior Muslims with grey, and the Jews of Toledo with white! (In contrast to these fictional white doves, those interested to learn how the Jews behaved in historical Spain are advised to read the pertinent sections on the subject in Kevin MacDonald’s Separation and Its Discontents.)

Categories
Art Civilisation (TV series) Kenneth Clark Philosophy of history

Clark’s personal view

Civilisation_cover
My commented excerpts of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation can now be read orderly, starting with chapter 1 (here). Keep in mind that when I typed those excerpts last year Civilisation was still unavailable online. Typos are my fault, not of Clark’s editors.

Categories
Ancient Greece Eduardo Velasco

Were the Greeks blond and blue-eyed?

– XXXII –

Jason and the Golden Fleece: Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodius
 
This piece has been chosen for my collection The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour. It has also been merged within a single entry.

Categories
Currency crash Videos

Currency crash course, 1

“As I have said many times before, the economic crisis of 2008 was only a speed bump on the way to the main event. I believe that before the end of this decade there will be an economic crisis so historic that it will eclipse the crash of 29 and the subsequent great depression. I also believe it is both unavoidable and inevitable, because it is merely the free market releasing the stored up energy from decades of economic manipulation. Yes… bad things are going to happen, but it could be the best thing that ever happened to you.”

—Mike Maloney

Note: Economics is not my forte and therefore I cannot discuss the complex issues of these new series with those commenters who believe that gold or silver “are no cure for it,” no cure for the Ponzi scheme that will collapse within this decade. I would recommend those critics who completely reject what Maloney says to go to his own site, subscribe if necessary (it’s free), and discuss it there.

Categories
Art Aryan beauty Beauty Child abuse Christendom Christian art Civilisation (TV series) Crusades Kenneth Clark Marriage Metaphysics of race / sex St Francis

Civilisation’s “Romance and Reality”

For an introduction to these series, see here.

Below, some indented excerpts of “Romance and Reality,” the third chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark, after which I offer my comments.

Originally I posted this entry on April 15 of the last year, but now that I posted another entry about Spain’s Teresa of Ávila I would like to see some feedback in the comments section about my thoughts on St. Francis from those interested in child abuse as a subject.

Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:

I am in the Gothic world, the world of chivalry, courtesy and romance; a world in which serious things were done with a sense of play—where even war and theology could become a sort of game; and when architecture reached a point of extravagance unequalled in history. After all the great unifying convictions of the twelfth century, High Gothic art can look fantastic and luxurious—what Marxists call conspicuous waste. And yet these centuries produced some of the greatest spirits in the human history of man, amongst them St Francis and Dante.

A couple of pages later, Clark says:

Several of the stories depicted in the [Chartres Cathedral] arches concern Old Testament heroines; and at the corner of the portico is one of the first consciously graceful women in western art. Only a very few years before, women were thought of as the squat, bad-tempered viragos that we see on the front of Winchester Cathedral: these were the women who accompanied the Norsemen to Iceland.

Now look at this embodiment of chastity, lifting her mantle, raising her hand, turning her head with a movement of self-conscious refinement that was to become mannered but here is genuinely modest. She might be Dante’s Beatrice.

There, for almost the first time in visual art, one gets a sense of human rapport between man and woman.

About the sentiment of courtly love, on the next page Clark adds that it was entirely unknown to antiquity, and that to the Romans and the Vikings it would have seemed not only absurd but unbelievable.

A ‘love match’ is almost an invention of the late eighteenth century. Medieval marriages were entirely a matter of property, and, as everybody knows, marriage without love means love without marriage.

Then I suppose one must admit that the cult of the Virgin had something to do with it. In this context it sounds rather blasphemous, but the fact remains that one often hardly knows if a medieval love lyric is addresses to the poet’s mistress or to the Virgin Mary.

For all these reasons I think it is permissible to associate the cult of ideal love with the ravishing beauty and delicacy that one finds in the madonnas of the thirteenth century. Were there ever more delicate creatures than the ladies on Gothic ivories? How gross, compared to them, are the great beauties of other woman-worshiping epochs.

When I read these pages for the first time I was surprised to discover that my tastes of women have always been, literally, medieval; especially when I studied closely the face of the woman at the right in the tapestry known as The Lady with the Unicorn, reproduced on a whole page in Clark’s book with more detail than the illustration I’ve just downloaded. I have never fancied the aggressive, Hollywood females whose images are bombarded everywhere through our degenerate media. In fact, what moves me to write are precisely David Lane’s 14 words to preserve the beauty and delicacy of the most spiritual females of the white race.

Alas, it seems that the parents did not treat their delicate daughters well enough during the Middle Ages. Clark said:

So it is all the more surprising to learn that these exquisite creatures got terribly knocked about. It must be true, because there is a manual of how to treat women—actually how to bring up daughters—by a character called the Knight of the Tower of Landry, written in 1370 and so successful that it went on being read as a sort of textbook right up to the sixteenth century—in fact and edition was published with illustrations by Dürer. In it the knight, who is known to have been an exceptionally kind man, describes how disobedient women must be beaten and starved and dragged around by the hair of the head.

And six pages later Clark speaks about the most famous Saint in the High Middle Ages, whose live I would also consider the result of parental abuse:

In the years when the portal of Chartres was being built, a rich young man named Francesco Bernadone suffered a change of heart.

One day when he had fitted himself up in his best clothes in preparation for some chivalrous campaign, he met a poor gentleman whose need seemed to be greater than his own, and gave him his cloak. That night he dreamed that he should rebuild the Celestial City. Later he gave away his possessions so liberally that his father, who was a rich businessman in the Italian town of Assisi, was moved to disown him; whereupon Francesco took off his remaining clothes and said he would possess nothing, absolutely nothing. The Bishop of Assisi hid his nakedness, and afterwards gave him a cloak; and Francesco went off the woods, singing a French song.

The next three years he spent in abject poverty, looking after lepers, who were very much in evidence in the Middle Ages, and rebuilding with his own hands (for he had taken his dream literally) abandoned churches.

He threw away his staff and his sandals and went out bare-foot onto the hills. He said that he had taken poverty for his Lady, partly because he felt that it was discourteous to be in company of anyone poorer than oneself.

From the first everyone recognised that St Francis (as we may now call him) was a religious genius—the greatest, I believe, that Europe has ever produced.

Francis died in 1226 at the age of forty-three worn out by his austerities. On his deathbed he asked forgiveness of ‘poor brother donkey, my body’ for the hardships he had made it suffer.

Those of Francis’s disciples, called Fraticelli, who clung to his doctrine of poverty were denounced as heretics and burnt at the stake. And for seven hundred years capitalism has continued to grow to its present monstrous proportions. It may seem that St Francis has had no influence at all, because even the humane reformers of the nineteenth century who sometimes invoked him did not wish to exalt or sanctify poverty but to abolish it.

St Francis is a figure of the pure Gothic time—the time of crusades and castles and of the great cathedrals. But already during the lifetime of St Francis another world was growing up, which, for better or worse, is the ancestor of our own, the world of trade and of banking, of cities full of hard-headed men whose aim in life was to grow rich without ceasing to appear respectable.

Of course, Clark could not say that Francesco’s life was a classic case of battered child. Profound studies about child abuse would only start years after the Civilisation series. Today I would say that, since Francesco never wrote a vindictive text—something unthinkable in the Middle Ages that would not appear until Kafka’s letter to his father—, he internalized the parental abuse with such violence that his asceticism took his life prematurely.

What is missing in Clark’s account is that Francesco’s father whipped him in front of all the town people after Francesco stole from his shop several rolls of cloth. After the scourging inflicted by his father, with his own hands, and public humiliation, a citizen of Assisi reminded him that the town statutes allowed the father to incarcerate the rebellious son at home. Pedro shut Francesco in a sweltering, dark warehouse where “Francesco languished without seeing the light except when his father opened the door for Pica [the mother] taking a bowl of soup and a piece of bread.” After several weeks of being locked Francesco escaped and, always fearful of his father, hid in a cave. The earliest texts add that in the cave he often wept with great fear.

Francesco then embarked on a spectacular acting out of his emotional issues with his father. He made a big scene by returning to Assisi, undressing in the town’s square in front of Bishop Guido and addressing the crowd: “Hear all ye, and understand. Until now have I called Pedro Bernadone ‘my father’. But I now give back unto him the money, over which he was vexed, and all the clothes that I have had of him, desiring to say only, ‘Our Father, which art in Heaven,’ instead of ‘My father, Pedro Bernadone.’”

To everyone’s surprise Francesco broke with his wealthy parents forever, thus renouncing any possible reconciliation. So resolute was his parental repudiation, writes a Catholic biographer, that from that day on Pedro and Pica disappear from all the biographies of their son. There is no historical evidence of reconciliation, and no information about his parents or the circumstances of their death. (The pic is taken from Zeffirelli’s adaptation of the life​ of St Francis.)

But I don’t want to diminish the figure of St Francis. Quite the contrary: in my middle teens I wanted to emulate him—and precisely as a result of the abuse inflicted by my father on me. And nowadays our world that has Mammon as its real God—trade, banking and dehumanized cities that are rapidly destroying the white race—, this will always remind me what Clark said about St Francis.

Nevertheless, despite my teenage infatuation with the saintly young man of Assisi, I doubt that poor Francesco’s defence mechanism to protect his mind against his father’s betrayal could be of any help now…