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Free speech / association Jesus Martin Luther New Testament Old Testament Porphyry of Tyre Theology

Hermann Samuel Reimarus

The following is excerpted from a classic in New Testament studies, Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus, published in 1906: a scholarly yet readable introduction to the field of NT studies from a modern viewpoint. Schweitzer’s second chapter is titled “Hermann Samuel Reimarus”:

Hermann_Samuel_Reimarus

“Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Junger.” Noch ein Fragment des Wolfenbuttelschen Ungenannten. Herausgegeben von Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Braun- schweig, 1778, 276 pp. (The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples: A further Instalment of the anonymous Woltenbiittel Fragments. Published by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Brunswick, 1778.)


Before Reimarus, no one had attempted to form a historical conception of the life of Jesus. Luther had not so much as felt that he cared to gain a clear idea of the order of the recorded events. Speaking of the chronology of the cleansing of the Temple, which in John falls at the beginning, in the Synoptists near the close, of Jesus’ public life, he remarks: “The Gospels follow no order in recording the acts and miracles of Jesus, and the matter is not, after all, of much importance. If a difficulty arises in regard to the Holy Scripture and we cannot solve it, we must just let it alone.”

When the Lutheran theologians began to consider the question of harmonising the events, things were still worse. Osiander (1498-1552), in his “Harmony of the Gospels,” maintained the principle that if an event is recorded more than once in the Gospels, in different connexions, it happened more than once and in different connexions. The daughter of Jairus was therefore raised from the dead several times; on one occasion Jesus allowed the devils whom He cast out of a single demoniac to enter into a herd of swine, on another occasion, those whom He cast out of two demoniacs; there were two cleansings of the Temple, and so forth. The correct view of the Synoptic Gospels as being interdependent was first formulated by Griesbach.

Thus there had been nothing to prepare the world for a work of such power as that of Reimarus. It is true, there had appeared earlier, in 1768, a Life of Jesus by Johann Jakob Hess (1741-1828), written from the standpoint of the older rationalism, but it retains so much supernaturalism and follows so much the lines of a paraphrase of the Gospels, that there was nothing to indicate to the world what a master-stroke the spirit of the time was preparing.

Not much is known about Reimarus. For his contemporaries he had no existence, and it was [David Friedrich] Strauss who first made his name known in literature. He was born in Hamburg on the 22nd of December, 1694, and spent his life there as a professor of Oriental Languages. He died in 1768. Several of his writings appeared during his lifetime, all of them asserting the claims of rational religion as against the faith of the Church; one of them, for example, being an essay on “The Leading Truths of Natural Religion.” His magnum opus, however, which laid the historic basis of his attacks, was only circulated, during his lifetime, among his acquaintances, as an anonymous manuscript.

In 1774 Lessing began to publish the most important portions of it, and up to 1778 had published seven fragments, thereby involving himself in a quarrel with Goetze, the Chief Pastor of Hamburg. The manuscript of the whole, which runs to 4000 pages, is preserved in the Hamburg municipal library.

The following are the titles of Fragments which he published:

• The Passing of the Israelites through the Red Sea
• Showing that the books of the Old Testament were
not written to reveal a Religion
• Concerning the story of the Resurrection
• The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples

The monograph on the passing of the Israelites through the Red Sea is one of the ablest, wittiest, and most acute which has ever been written. It exposes all the impossibilities of the narrative in the Priestly Codex.

To say that the fragment on “The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples” is a magnificent piece of work is barely to do it justice. This essay is not only one of the greatest events in the history of criticism, it is also a masterpiece of general literature. The language is as a rule crisp and terse, pointed and epigrammatic—the language of a man who is not “engaged in literary composition” but is wholly concerned with the facts. At times, however, it rises to heights of passionate feeling, and then it is as though the fires of a volcano were painting lurid pictures upon dark clouds. Seldom has there been a hate so eloquent, so lofty a scorn; but then it is seldom that a work has been written in the just consciousness of so absolute a superiority to contemporary opinion. And withal, there is dignity and serious purpose; Reimarus’ work is no pamphlet. This was the first time that a really historical mind, thoroughly conversant with the sources, had undertaken the criticism of the tradition.

[Editor’s note: Because the Christians destroyed all copies of Porphyry’s book, we don’t really know if Porphyry’s anti-Christian polemic was also “thoroughly conversant with the New Testament sources.” From a few fragments discovered by the end of the 20th century I believe it was. One could barely imagine the revolution in thought that could have occurred since the later phases of the Roman Empire and the Early Middle Ages had Porphyry’s biblical criticism been allowed to survive 1,300 years before Reimarus…]

It was Lessing’s greatness that he grasped the significance of this criticism, and felt that it must lead either to the destruction or to the recasting of the idea of revelation. He recognised that the introduction of the historical element would transform and deepen rationalism. Convinced that the fateful moment had arrived, he disregarded the scruples of Reimarus’ family and the objections of Nicolai and Mendelssohn, and, though inwardly trembling for that which he himself held sacred, he flung the torch with his own hand.

Reimarus takes as his starting-point the question regarding the content of the preaching of Jesus. “We are justified,” he says, “in drawing an absolute distinction between the teaching of the Apostles in their writings and what Jesus Himself in His own lifetime proclaimed and taught.” What belongs to the preaching of Jesus is clearly to be recognised. It is contained in two phrases of identical meaning, “Repent, and believe the Gospel,” or, as it is put elsewhere, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”

Jesus shared the Jewish racial exclusiveness wholly and unreservedly. According to Matt. x. 5 He forbade His disciples to declare to the Gentiles the coming of the Kingdom of God. Evidently, therefore, His purpose did not embrace them. Had it been otherwise, the hesitation of Peter in Acts x. and xi., and the necessity of justifying the conversion of Cornelius, would be incomprehensible.

Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are no evidence that Jesus intended to found a new religion. In the first place the genuineness of the command to baptize in Matt. xxviii. 19 is questionable, not only as a saying ascribed to the risen Jesus, but also because it is universalistic in outlook, and because it implies the doctrine of the Trinity.

The “Lord’s Supper,” again, was no new institution, but merely an episode at the last Paschal Meal of the Kingdom which was passing away, and was intended “as an anticipatory celebration of the Passover of the New Kingdom.” A Lord’s Supper in our sense, “cut loose from the Passover,” would have been inconceivable to Jesus, and not less so to His disciples. Miracles have no basis in fact, but owe their place in the narrative to the feeling that the miracle-stories of the Old Testament must be repeated in the case of Jesus, but on a grander scale. It is useless to appeal to the miracles, any more than to the “Sacraments,” as evidence for the founding of a new religion…

For popular uprising, however, He waited in vain. Twice He believed that it was near at hand. The first time was when He was sending out the disciples and said to them: “Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel before the Son of Man comes” (Matt. x. 23). He thought that, at the preaching of the disciples, the people would flock to Him from every quarter and immediately proclaim Him Messiah; but His expectation was disappointed. The people in Jerusalem refused to rise, as the Galilaeans had refused at the time when the disciples were sent out to rouse them.

All this implies that the time of the fulfilment of these hopes was not thought of by Jesus and His disciples as at all remote. In Matt. xvi. 28, for example, He says: “Truly I say unto you there are some standing here who shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.” There is no justification for twisting this about or explaining it away. It simply means that Jesus promises the fulfilment of all Messianic hopes before the end of the existing generation.

Thus the disciples were prepared for anything rather than that which actually happened. Jesus had never said a word to them about His dying and rising again, otherwise they would not have so played the coward at His death, nor have been so astonished at His “resurrection.” The three or four sayings referring to these events must therefore have been put into His mouth later, in order to make it appear that He had foreseen these events in His original plan.

Inasmuch as the non-fulfilment of its eschatology is not admitted, our Christianity rests upon a fraud.

Such is Reimarus’ reconstruction of the history. We can well understand that his work must have given offence when it appeared, for it is a polemic, not an objective historical study. But we have no right simply to dismiss it in a word, as a Deistic production, as Otto Schmiedel, for example, does; it is time that Reimarus came to his own, and that we should recognise a historical performance of no mean order in this piece of Deistic polemics. His work is perhaps the most splendid achievement in the whole course of the historical investigation of the life of Jesus, for he was the first to grasp the fact that the world of thought in which Jesus moved was essentially eschatological.

In the light of the clear perception of the elements of the problem which Reimarus had attained, the whole movement of theology, down to Johannes Weiss, appears retrograde. In all its work the thesis is ignored or obscured that Jesus, as a historical personality, is to be regarded, not as the founder of a new religion, but as the final product of the eschatological and apocalyptic thought of Late Judaism. Every sentence of Johannes Weiss’s Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes (1892) is a vindication, a rehabilitation, of Reimarus as a historical thinker.

Even so the traveller on the plain sees from afar the distant range of mountains. Then he loses sight of them again. His way winds slowly upwards through the valleys, drawing ever nearer to the peaks, until at last, at a turn of the path, they stand before him, not in the shapes which they had seemed to take from the distant plain, but in their actual forms. Reimarus was the first, after eighteen centuries of misconception, to have an inkling of what eschatology really was.

The sole mistake of Reimarus—the assumption that the eschatology was earthly and political in character. Thus theology shared at least the error of the man whom it knew only as a Deist, not as an historian, and whose true greatness was not recognised even by Strauss, though he raised a literary monument to him.

The solution offered by Reimarus may be wrong; the data of observation from which he starts out are, beyond question, right, because the primary datum of all is genuinely historical. He recognised that two systems of Messianic expectation were present side by side in Late Judaism. But what matters the mistake in comparison with the fact that the problem was really grasped?

The attitude of Jesus towards the law, and the process by which the disciples came to take up a freer attitude, was grasped and explained by him so accurately that modern historical science does not need to add a word, but would be well pleased if at least half the theologians of the present day had got as far.

Further, he recognised that primitive Christianity was not something which grew, so to speak, out of the teaching of Jesus, but that it came into being as a new creation, in consequence of events and circumstances which added something to that preaching which it did not previously contain; and that Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, in the historical sense of these terms, were not instituted by Jesus, but created by the early Church on the basis of certain historical assumptions.

Still more remarkable is his eye for exegetical detail. He has an unfailing instinct for pregnant passages like Matt. x. 23, xvi. 28, which are crucial for the interpretation of large masses of the history. The fact is there are some who are historians by the grace of God, who from their mother’s womb have an instinctive feeling for the real. They follow through all the intricacy and confusion of reported fact the pathway of reality, like a stream which, despite the rocks that encumber its course and the windings of its valley, finds its way inevitably to the sea. No erudition can supply the place of this historical instinct, but erudition sometimes serves a useful purpose, inasmuch as it produces in its possessors the pleasing belief that they are historians, and thus secures their services for the cause of history.

In truth they are at best merely doing the preliminary spade-work of history, collecting for a future historian the dry bones of fact, from which, with the aid of his natural gift, he can recall the past to life. More often, however, the way in which erudition seeks to serve history is by suppressing historical discoveries as long as possible, and leading out into the field to oppose the one true view an army of possibilities. By arraying these in support of one another it finally imagines that it has created out of possibilities a living reality. This obstructive erudition is the special prerogative of theology, in which, even at the present day, a truly marvellous scholarship often serves only to blind the eyes to elementary truths.

Reimarus’ work was neglected, and the stimulus which it was capable of imparting failed to take effect. He had no predecessors; neither had he any disciples. His work is one of those supremely great works which pass and leave no trace, because they are before their time; to which later generations pay a just tribute of admiration, but owe no gratitude.

Thus the magnificent overture in which are announced all the motifs of the future historical treatment of the life of Jesus breaks off with a sudden discord, remains isolated and incomplete, and leads to nothing further.

Categories
Alice Miller Autobiography Child abuse Hojas Susurrantes (book) Pedagogy

Pinocchio, 2

Why I am starting this new series is explained: here.

pinocchiohanged


Mankind sees things in photographic negative about childrearing: it’s all backwards, and only those who have deeply assimilated Alice Miller’s legacy have noticed it. Perhaps the most splendid paradigm, in stories, of what Miller called poisonous pedagogy or adult-child projection is precisely the original story by Carlo Collodi.

Pinocchio is nothing more than the transformation of the pure feelings of a child into adult madness; for example, by going to schools where children’s souls are murdered and the child is socialized so that he finally sacrifices his sanity in search for the affection of parental figures, symbolized by the carpenter and the Blue Fairy.

Let’s see. The heading of Chapter IV states: “The story of Pinocchio and the Talking Cricket, in which one sees that bad children do not like to be corrected by those who know more than they do.”

Head over heels—everything in photographic negative! How I wish that my Whispering Leaves were sold out so that I could, by now, be writing the book I had dreamt since the beginning: pure narrative without using hundreds of pages to introduce the reader to the legacy of Miller, deMause and the critics of psychiatry.

Here is a passage of the Collodi tale, poisonous pedagogy in its purest form:

“Woe to boys who refuse to obey their parents and run away from home!” [Chapter IV]

The passage obviously presupposes that the parents (who beat their children or torment them emotionally and ocassionally even rape them) are always right and benign with their children: the opposite of what we saw in the previous entry showing the dark side of Geppetto, a side only noticed by the neighbors who knew him in the story. And what is worse, the domestic abuse is often supported by the abuse at school, so Pinocchio says to the cricket:

“If I stay here the same thing will happen to me which happens to all other boys and girls. They are sent to school, and whether they want to or not, they must study…” [Ibid]

To which the voice of the system, symbolized by the cricket who wants to instill a consciousness of black pedagogy into the child, responds:

“If you do not like going to school, why don’t you at least learn a trade…?” [Ibid]

That is a great insult; not bona fide council as adults often utter these sort of words not out of genuine empathy for the kids.

When I was a child I wanted to be a filmmaker. Kubrick, who dropped out from school, was my idol. Alas, in my late teens my parents put me in a medieval school system and I could not become either (1) a filmmaker or (2) get what they wanted: a college degree either. The mandatory school system was the barrier that destroyed my professional life. Unlike Kubrick, no “Uncle Jacob” appeared in my life to sponsor my filming career since Christian families don’t help their relatives as much as kike families do (cf. MacDonald’s first book of his trilogy).

More recently, this year in fact, I heard my brother angrily telling his child that if my nephew did not want to study at a conventional school, he should seek a trade, and mentioned a supermarket boy (something similar to what the Cricket proposed). My brother’s advice was not directed in an empathic way: it was an obvious act of psychological aggression as no one in his right mind wants to be an errand kid that only earns a few cents.

Going back to my life, if my parents had any empathy with the potential filmmaker I was as a kid, they would have supported my immigration to the US, and instead of spending money at a Mexican school, send me those scarce funds to complete my expenses near Hollywood. But no: the unconscious desire of my mother was to destroy the individualistic mind of her firstborn, as I recount in my Leaves.

Disney’s film is nonsense intended to beautify the crudeness of the Italian text. In Collodi’s original story the cricket’s advice was so insulting that Pinocchio grabbed a hammer of Geppetto’s workshop and threw it toward the damned bug, who “stayed stiff and flat against the wall”: precisely what I did as an adolescent.

Categories
Autobiography Axiology Final solution Heinrich Himmler Helmut Stellrecht Hermann Göring Neanderthalism William Pierce

Follow my yellow brick road

Today is my birthday so I will indulge myself a little in my typical ethnocidal fantasies.

Recently I watched the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz after decades of not seeing it (as a small child), based on the 1900 novel by L. Frank Baum, and the thought occurred to me that each day I realize more that I have little to do with “white nationalism.” I am closer to the historical Himmler; not the fictional Himmler in the effeminate WN literature in denial that he did dispatch millions of der Juden (while the Enemy was committing a Holocaust of Germans).

In my previous entry of today I quote from Faith and Action (1938) by Helmut Stellrecht for the Hitler Youth, and a single line caught my attention very strongly: “He loves the animals that are tortured and tormented in other countries.”

A caricature from Kladderadatsch of September 1933 depicted lab animals, including white rabbits, giving the Nazi salute to Hermann Göring for his order to ban vivisection. My hero Göring prohibited vivisection and said that those who “still think they can continue to treat animals as inanimate property” will be sent to concentration camps.

But the West ganged upon poor Germany right after The Wizard of Oz was premiered and, as Stellrecht implied, in other countries the torture continued.

As you know, I live in Mexico. Every time I learn about how these slightly mesticized Amerinds literally torture the cows in the butchering houses, and continue to perform vivisections on my beloved bunnies and other animals, I cannot but remember Frank Baum’s words. His solution is the only way to put a final, screeching halt to the torture of the animals I love:

With his fall [Sitting Bull] the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished… The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? We cannot honestly regret their extermination…

Yes: these are the wise thoughts of the famous author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; words that appeared in Saturday Pioneer, December 20, 1890. Just compare Baum’s words with the effeminate, politically-correct pronunciations of the “White” and “Southern” nationalists of today, ready to use Judaic epithets like “sociopaths” and “psychopaths” for any white who dares to think like old Uncle Frank.

Neochristian white nationalism must die. The spirit of William Pierce must live instead. This is why I am posting, and will continue to post in WDH, entries about Nietzsche (let’s transvaluate Christian axiology) and the New Testament as well. As long as, contrary to uncles Frank and Bill, the current generation of “Nationalists” sticks to the old axiology, white Americans will continue to travel on the (red) road to extinction.

follow yellow road

My birthday advice: Start following my yellow brick road if you don’t want to see the U.S. completely turned into the African-American interpretation of The Wizard of Oz.

Categories
Helmut Stellrecht Hitler Youth

“Nature”

From Faith and Action (1938) by Helmut Stellrecht for the Hitler Youth:


The divine is powerful in its creatures. It dwells not in walls that people build. They may be witnesses of its will, but god is in the living.

§ Our ancestors went into the forests to find or to honor god. They greeted his light rising in the morning. That was more to them than a lamp in a man’s hand. They stood on mountain tops because his greatest work, the starry sky, was nearest there, not covered by a roof of stone. The great spring flowing from the mountain was more genuine and nearer to god than anything that could flow from a bottle held by a human hand.

§ Who dares to say that they were not close to the living god?

§ Other peoples may seek refuge in the stone walls of their cities or seek their god in caves. The true German senses god with holy fear in the life of creation. He prays to god by honoring his great works.

§ Who dares to say that God is nearer to us in that which human beings have built?

§ The faith of our fathers remains strong in us. Still today the German wanders through his countryside and is moved by the beauty of the land god has given him. The summits of his mountains give freedom. He feels eternity amidst the sea. Flowing water is to him the image of eternal change.

§ He protects the forest and the tree and the bush as if they were his comrades. He loves the animals that are tortured and tormented in other countries. What to him is part of his household is elsewhere only a possession.

§ He sees and honors in everything god’s creation, in the holy earth, in the wandering wind, in the flickering flames, in which there is always change. Ever again we stand on the summits of the peaks and wave the torch and feel the magnificent and the ineffable.

§ Who dares chide us because our eyes are open?

Categories
Ancient Rome Emperor Julian Libanius

Gibbon on Julian – 16

Edward-Gibbon

The History of the Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire

Chapter XXIV
The retreat and death of Julian
Part I


The philosophical fable which Julian composed under the name of the Cæsars, is one of the most agreeable and instructive productions of ancient wit. During the freedom and equality of the days of the Saturnalia, Romulus prepared a feast for the deities of Olympus, who had adopted him as a worthy associate, and for the Roman princes, who had reigned over his martial people, and the vanquished nations of the earth.

The immortals were placed in just order on their thrones of state, and the table of the Cæsars was spread below the Moon in the upper region of the air. The tyrants, who would have disgraced the society of gods and men, were thrown headlong, by the inexorable Nemesis, into the Tartarean abyss. The rest of the Cæsars successively advanced to their seats; and as they passed, the vices, the defects, the blemishes of their respective characters, were maliciously noticed by old Silenus, a laughing moralist, who disguised the wisdom of a philosopher under the mask of a Bacchanal.

As soon as the feast was ended, the voice of Mercury proclaimed the will of Jupiter, that a celestial crown should be the reward of superior merit. Julius Cæsar, Augustus, Trajan, and Marcus Antoninus, were selected as the most illustrious candidates; the effeminate Constantine was not excluded from this honorable competition, and the great Alexander was invited to dispute the prize of glory with the Roman heroes. Each of the candidates was allowed to display the merit of his own exploits; but, in the judgment of the gods, the modest silence of Marcus pleaded more powerfully than the elaborate orations of his haughty rivals.

When the judges of this awful contest proceeded to examine the heart, and to scrutinize the springs of action, the superiority of the Imperial Stoic appeared still more decisive and conspicuous. Alexander and Cæsar, Augustus, Trajan, and Constantine, acknowledged, with a blush, that fame, or power, or pleasure had been the important object of their labors: but the gods themselves beheld, with reverence and love, a virtuous mortal, who had practised on the throne the lessons of philosophy; and who, in a state of human imperfection, had aspired to imitate the moral attributes of the Deity.

The value of this agreeable composition (the Cæsars of Julian) is enhanced by the rank of the author. A prince, who delineates, with freedom, the vices and virtues of his predecessors, subscribes, in every line, the censure or approbation of his own conduct. In the cool moments of reflection, Julian preferred the useful and benevolent virtues of Antoninus; but his ambitious spirit was inflamed by the glory of Alexander; and he solicited, with equal ardor, the esteem of the wise, and the applause of the multitude. In the season of life when the powers of the mind and body enjoy the most active vigor, the emperor who was instructed by the experience, and animated by the success, of the German war, resolved to signalize his reign by some more splendid and memorable achievement.

The ambassadors of the East, from the continent of India, and the Isle of Ceylon, had respectfully saluted the Roman purple. The nations of the West esteemed and dreaded the personal virtues of Julian, both in peace and war. He despised the trophies of a Gothic victory, and was satisfied that the rapacious Barbarians of the Danube would be restrained from any future violation of the faith of treaties by the terror of his name, and the additional fortifications with which he strengthened the Thracian and Illyrian frontiers. The successor of Cyrus and Artaxerxes was the only rival whom he deemed worthy of his arms; and he resolved, by the final conquest of Persia, to chastise the naughty nation which had so long resisted and insulted the majesty of Rome.

As soon as the Persian monarch was informed that the throne of Constantius was filed by a prince of a very different character, he condescended to make some artful, or perhaps sincere, overtures towards a negotiation of peace. But the pride of Sapor was astonished by the firmness of Julian; who sternly declared, that he would never consent to hold a peaceful conference among the flames and ruins of the cities of Mesopotamia; and who added, with a smile of contempt, that it was needless to treat by ambassadors, a she himself had determined to visit speedily the court of Persia. The impatience of the emperor urged the diligence of the military preparations.

The generals were named; and Julian, marching from Constantinople through the provinces of Asia Minor, arrived at Antioch about eight months after the death of his predecessor. His ardent desire to march into the heart of Persia, was checked by the indispensable duty of regulating the state of the empire; by his zeal to revive the worship of the gods; and by the advice of his wisest friends; who represented the necessity of allowing the salutary interval of winter quarters, to restore the exhausted strength of the legions of Gaul, and the discipline and spirit of the Eastern troops.

Julian was persuaded to fix, till the ensuing spring, his residence at Antioch, among a people maliciously disposed to deride the haste, and to censure the delays, of their sovereign. If Julian had flattered himself, that his personal connection with the capital of the East would be productive of mutual satisfaction to the prince and people, he made a very false estimate of his own character, and of the manners of Antioch.

The warmth of the climate disposed the natives to the most intemperate enjoyment of tranquillity and opulence; and the lively licentiousness of the Greeks was blended with the hereditary softness of the Syrians. Fashion was the only law, pleasure the only pursuit, and the splendor of dress and furniture was the only distinction of the citizens of Antioch. The arts of luxury were honored; the serious and manly virtues were the subject of ridicule; and the contempt for female modesty and reverent age announced the universal corruption of the capital of the East.

The love of spectacles was the taste, or rather passion, of the Syrians; the most skilful artists were procured from the adjacent cities; a considerable share of the revenue was devoted to the public amusements; and the magnificence of the games of the theatre and circus was considered as the happiness and as the glory of Antioch. The rustic manners of a prince who disdained such glory, and was insensible of such happiness, soon disgusted the delicacy of his subjects; and the effeminate Orientals could neither imitate, nor admire, the severe simplicity which Julian always maintained, and sometimes affected.

The days of festivity, consecrated, by ancient custom, to the honor of the gods, were the only occasions in which Julian relaxed his philosophic severity; and those festivals were the only days in which the Syrians of Antioch could reject the allurements of pleasure. The majority of the people supported the glory of the Christian name, which had been first invented by their ancestors: they contended themselves with disobeying the moral precepts, but they were scrupulously attached to the speculative doctrines of their religion. The church of Antioch was distracted by heresy and schism; but the Arians and the Athanasians, the followers of Meletius and those of Paulinus, were actuated by the same pious hatred of their common adversary.

The strongest prejudice was entertained against the character of an apostate, the enemy and successor of a prince who had engaged the affections of a very numerous sect; and the removal of St. Babylas excited an implacable opposition to the person of Julian. His subjects complained, with superstitious indignation, that famine had pursued the emperor’s steps from Constantinople to Antioch; and the discontent of a hungry people was exasperated by the injudicious attempt to relieve their distress. The inclemency of the season had affected the harvests of Syria; and the price of bread, in the markets of Antioch, had naturally risen in proportion to the scarcity of corn.

But the fair and reasonable proportion was soon violated by the rapacious arts of monopoly. In this unequal contest, in which the produce of the land is claimed by one party as his exclusive property, is used by another as a lucrative object of trade, and is required by a third for the daily and necessary support of life, all the profits of the intermediate agents are accumulated on the head of the defenceless customers. The hardships of their situation were exaggerated and increased by their own impatience and anxiety; and the apprehension of a scarcity gradually produced the appearances of a famine. When the luxurious citizens of Antioch complained of the high price of poultry and fish, Julian publicly declared, that a frugal city ought to be satisfied with a regular supply of wine, oil, and bread; but he acknowledged, that it was the duty of a sovereign to provide for the subsistence of his people.

With this salutary view, the emperor ventured on a very dangerous and doubtful step, of fixing, by legal authority, the value of corn. He enacted, that, in a time of scarcity, it should be sold at a price which had seldom been known in the most plentiful years; and that his own example might strengthen his laws, he sent into the market four hundred and twenty-two thousand modii, or measures, which were drawn by his order from the granaries of Hierapolis, of Chalcis, and even of Egypt.

The consequences might have been foreseen, and were soon felt. The Imperial wheat was purchased by the rich merchants; the proprietors of land, or of corn, withheld from the city the accustomed supply; and the small quantities that appeared in the market were secretly sold at an advanced and illegal price. Julian still continued to applaud his own policy, treated the complaints of the people as a vain and ungrateful murmur, and convinced Antioch that he had inherited the obstinacy, though not the cruelty, of his brother Gallus.

The remonstrances of the municipal senate served only to exasperate his inflexible mind. He was persuaded, perhaps with truth, that the senators of Antioch who possessed lands, or were concerned in trade, had themselves contributed to the calamities of their country; and he imputed the disrespectful boldness which they assumed, to the sense, not of public duty, but of private interest.

The whole body, consisting of two hundred of the most noble and wealthy citizens, were sent, under a guard, from the palace to the prison; and though they were permitted, before the close of evening, to return to their respective houses, the emperor himself could not obtain the forgiveness which he had so easily granted. The same grievances were still the subject of the same complaints, which were industriously circulated by the wit and levity of the Syrian Greeks.

During the licentious days of the Saturnalia, the streets of the city resounded with insolent songs, which derided the laws, the religion, the personal conduct, and even the beard, of the emperor; the spirit of Antioch was manifested by the connivance of the magistrates, and the applause of the multitude. The disciple of Socrates was too deeply affected by these popular insults; but the monarch, endowed with a quick sensibility, and possessed of absolute power, refused his passions the gratification of revenge.

A tyrant might have proscribed, without distinction, the lives and fortunes of the citizens of Antioch; and the unwarlike Syrians must have patiently submitted to the lust, the rapaciousness and the cruelty, of the faithful legions of Gaul. A milder sentence might have deprived the capital of the East of its honors and privileges; and the courtiers, perhaps the subjects, of Julian, would have applauded an act of justice, which asserted the dignity of the supreme magistrate of the republic.

But instead of abusing, or exerting, the authority of the state, to revenge his personal injuries, Julian contented himself with an inoffensive mode of retaliation, which it would be in the power of few princes to employ. He had been insulted by satires and libels; in his turn, he composed, under the title of the Enemy of the Beard, an ironical confession of his own faults, and a severe satire on the licentious and effeminate manners of Antioch.

This Imperial reply was publicly exposed before the gates of the palace; and the Misopogon still remains a singular monument of the resentment, the wit, the humanity, and the indiscretion of Julian. Though he affected to laugh, he could not forgive. His contempt was expressed, and his revenge might be gratified, by the nomination of a governor worthy only of such subjects; and the emperor, forever renouncing the ungrateful city, proclaimed his resolution to pass the ensuing winter at Tarsus in Cilicia. Yet Antioch possessed one citizen, whose genius and virtues might atone, in the opinion of Julian, for the vice and folly of his country.

The sophist Libanius was born in the capital of the East; he publicly professed the arts of rhetoric and declamation at Nice, Nicomedia, Constantinople, Athens, and, during the remainder of his life, at Antioch. His school was assiduously frequented by the Grecian youth; his disciples, who sometimes exceeded the number of eighty, celebrated their incomparable master; and the jealousy of his rivals, who persecuted him from one city to another, confirmed the favorable opinion which Libanius ostentatiously displayed of his superior merit.

The preceptors of Julian had extorted a rash but solemn assurance, that he would never attend the lectures of their adversary: the curiosity of the royal youth was checked and inflamed: he secretly procured the writings of this dangerous sophist, and gradually surpassed, in the perfect imitation of his style, the most laborious of his domestic pupils. When Julian ascended the throne, he declared his impatience to embrace and reward the Syrian sophist, who had preserved, in a degenerate age, the Grecian purity of taste, of manners, and of religion.

The emperor’s prepossession was increased and justified by the discreet pride of his favorite. Instead of pressing, with the foremost of the crowd, into the palace of Constantinople, Libanius calmly expected his arrival at Antioch; withdrew from court on the first symptoms of coldness and indifference; required a formal invitation for each visit; and taught his sovereign an important lesson, that he might command the obedience of a subject, but that he must deserve the attachment of a friend.

The sophists of every age, despising, or affecting to despise, the accidental distinctions of birth and fortune, reserve their esteem for the superior qualities of the mind, with which they themselves are so plentifully endowed. Julian might disdain the acclamations of a venal court, who adored the Imperial purple; but he was deeply flattered by the praise, the admonition, the freedom, and the envy of an independent philosopher, who refused his favors, loved his person, celebrated his fame, and protected his memory.

The voluminous writings of Libanius still exist; for the most part, they are the vain and idle compositions of an orator, who cultivated the science of words; the productions of a recluse student, whose mind, regardless of his contemporaries, was incessantly fixed on the Trojan war and the Athenian commonwealth.

Yet the sophist of Antioch sometimes descended from this imaginary elevation; he entertained a various and elaborate correspondence; he praised the virtues of his own times; he boldly arraigned the abuse of public and private life; and he eloquently pleaded the cause of Antioch against the just resentment of Julian and Theodosius. It is the common calamity of old age, to lose whatever might have rendered it desirable; but Libanius experienced the peculiar misfortune of surviving the religion and the sciences, to which he had consecrated his genius.

The friend of Julian was an indignant spectator of the triumph of Christianity; and his bigotry, which darkened the prospect of the visible world, did not inspire Libanius with any lively hopes of celestial glory and happiness.

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche

Curt Paul Janz on Nietzsche, 2

nietzsche_after_catastropheExcerpted from Curt Paul Janz’s last volume of his biography, Friedrich Nietzsche. Biographie. Band 3: Die Jahre des Siechtums, Chapter “The Catastrophe”:


On Sunday January 6, 1889 Jacob Burckhardt received a long letter from Nietzsche. While it is true that, from the Genealogy [On the Genealogy of Morals] at least Burckhardt had not followed Nietzsche’s philosophical way, he did continue to be humanely united to his former colleague. For long Burckhardt had watched with concern his state and inquired about it, but this turn towards mental disturbance surprised and deeply affected him.

Burckhardt did immediately what was in his hand: he went immediately with the letter to see Franz Overbeck, whose close contact with Nietzsche he knew. Although their houses were not far apart—from the suburb of St. Alban to the Sevogelstrasse there are only a few hundred meters—, Burckhardt had never felt moved to walk that way. But now, the terrible impression he received prompted him to overcome that barrier. Also for Overbeck it was an alarming surprise to see Jacob Burckhardt into his home.

Following a review of the two letters to Burckhardt and Overbeck, Wille [Prof. Dr. Ludwig Wille, a psychiatrist] had no doubt about how he had to try the case and what they had to do. He urged Overbeck that, without loss of time, to bring the friend from Turin to Basel, before he disappeared in any one of the dubious Italian centers.

Overbeck immediately followed the advice, which seemed more like an order. By doing so he had to weight two considerations: firstly the question of costs. Neither he nor Nietzsche were doing well economically. Professorial fees were then rather scarce. And besides, surely it was not easy to a conscientious teacher to leave without official dispensation for a few days.

In spite of everything, in the night of January 7 he parted to Turin, where he arrived the next day around 2 pm. Given his perennially poor health, the feat demanded a great effort from Overbeck, especially in the middle of winter. 18 hours in those times when trains, insufficiently heated or not heated at all during the night (no sleeper), meant a real sacrifice. But the worst still awaited him.

By his own efforts Overbeck found Nietzsche’s housing in a city unknown to him. The landlord, Fino, was absent. Nietzsche, with his behavior, had finally put Fino in a state of despair, and he was now seeking help from the German consulate and police. The whole family was scattered so that it took some time for Overbeck to find the wife. Only then he approached his friend. In his letter of January 15 to Köselitz he narrates the encounter:

It happened in the last time when it was still possible to get him without official impediments, except his own state. I pass over the moving circumstances in which I found Nietzsche as a pupil of his landlords; which seem to be also characteristic of Italy in general. With the terrible moment as I saw Nietzsche I come again to the principal issue: a terrible moment like no other, and totally different from everything that happened afterwards.

I see Nietzsche in a corner of the armchair, curled up and reading—as it was apparent later, the latest proofs of Nietzsche contra Wagner—, tremendously deteriorated in external appearance. He sees me and rushes towards me, recognizing me he hugs me tightly, and becomes a sea of tears. He goes back then, in convulsions, to sink himself into the armchair. Neither do I find strength, because of the shock, to pull myself on my legs. Did it open at that moment the abyss in which he finds himself, or better, into which he has fallen? In any case, no such thing has been repeated. All of the Fino family was present.

Just as Nietzsche returned to rest there, moaning and with convulsive contractions, the watered bromide that was on the table was given to him. Instantly he relaxed, and, laughing, began to talk about the great reception that was prepared for him at night. Thus Nietzsche moved in a circle of delusions from which he never came out after I lost sight of him; being always clear of mind about me in general and other people, but caught in a full night about him. It happened that, exalting himself without measure, and with strong songs and frenzies on piano, shreds of the ideas were recovered from the world in which he had lived lately.

Then, in short sentences, uttered in a tone indescribably flat, he had us hearing sublime, wonderfully visionary things and unspeakably terrible about himself as the successor of the dead God, tapping all, so to speak, at the piano. Afterwards the convulsions and fits of indescribable suffering returned. But, as said, this only happened in rare and fleeting moments. While I was present, generally the profession statements that he awarded himself dominated: to be the jester of the new eternities, and he, the incomparable master of expression, was unable to represent the enthusiasm even from his joy otherwise than through the most trivial expressions or by a ridiculous dancing and jumping.

Overbeck’s report in his memoirs and letters to Köselitz is very summary. Carl Albrecht Bernoulli was able to complete it:

He then wrote to Peter Gast [Heinrich Köselitz] everything that happened in Turin during the terrible encounter; his hand refused to transcribe to paper the latest and most sordid details. Although occasionally he alluded to this in the most intimate circles, and to me personally he completed by word the description.

Overbeck was also more forthcoming with Möbius, who visited him on April 10, 1902. Möbius informs us:

In Turin he met a Jewish man who volunteered as a caregiver of the crazy (but he was not) and that with the help of his intervention they carried out the risky venture. Nietzsche was in bed and refused to get up. The Jew told him that they were prepared for large receptions and festivities, and Nietzsche got up, dressed and went to the station with them.

There he wanted to embrace all people, but the companion explained him how it was not appropriate for such an important man: and Nietzsche calmed down. Using large quantities of sleeping pills the patient remained quiet during the trip, and thus came the three happily to Basel.

Another visitor to Overbeck, the writer Eduard Platzhoff-Lejeune, based on an earlier conversation with Overbeck, presented the episode thus:

The Turin police was already aware, and only a true kidnapping could prevent a forced entry into a center of that place.

Then, miraculously, a stranger, a German Jew, apparently offered himself [for a fee] to transport the sick. Overbeck agreed and did not repent of his acceptance. With surprising touch the stranger immediately got influence on the wayward sick, something that the friend was not able to.

Nietzsche obeyed as a child, left the bed and dressed. A new outburst became a torture for Overbeck on the way to the station. Shouting and chasing them, Nietzsche was addressing the curious crowd, at the point of nearly thwarting the traveling. The train left while Nietzsche sang a fishermen’s Neapolitan song [?]. That deeply touched the excited friend. The caregiver tried a suggestion: “You’re a prince. In Basel station a festive crowd is expecting you. Come in before it without greeting to the car that is waiting to you!”

The trick worked better than expected. The morning of January 10, 1889, around 8, Nietzsche and his caretakers arrived to Basel. A ready-cab took them to “Friedmatt” where the patient could be entrusted to the care of specialists.

With that Nietzsche stopped being a person acting autonomously.

Categories
Bible Christendom Hojas Susurrantes (book) Infanticide Jesus New Testament Old Testament

Matthew Kersten’s hilarious review

Of the Holy Bible

1-First-Edition-King-James-Bible-1611

Poor editing, logical fallacies, one-dimensional characters, and narrative inconsistencies ruin an otherwise imaginative dystopian fantasy novel in which a vengeful deity enslaves humanity into worshipping him. The King James Bible has an extremely intriguing premise, but the execution of that premise is poor and doesn’t do it justice at all. Regardless, the King James Bible is one of the world’s bestselling books of all time and has garnered a massive cult following, and understandably so, as it comes with a provocative promise of eternal life after death for anyone who believes it to be true. After reading it for myself, I find belief in this book’s alleged validity to be impossible.

It is worth noting that the King James Bible is not simply one book but an anthology of books (which are categorized under two iterations labeled as the Old and New Testaments) spanning many generations, all written by different authors at different points in time. And it shows. Oftentimes books in this collection offer redundant information and, at other times, contradictory information. In fact, the very first two chapters of the first book, titled Genesis, which lays out the origins of the book’s fictional universe, heavily contradict each other, and it all goes downhill from that point on. The editing in this book is absolutely atrocious.

The story starts off simple enough. There’s an omniscient, omnipotent, immortal celestial entity that has existed before the universe even began. This being, known as God, is bored and lonely and decides to create the universe to amuse himself. He creates light, which he calls day, followed by darkness, which he calls night, before he creates the sun. He then creates a flat earth of water, followed by dry land, grass and plant life, two great lights (one to rule the day and one to rule the night, even though the latter of which—the moon—isn’t actually a light and the former of which—the sun—would have been vital to the survival of the previously created plant life); firmament through which precipitation may occasionally be allowed to pass, creatures, and man. There’s also a tree with fruit that gives knowledge to whoever eats it and a sneaky, malicious talking snake, so if you’re into fantasy novels, the creation story at the beginning of Genesis should hold your interest.

It doesn’t take long before things go awry. The talking snake convinces the first woman, Eve, to eat fruit from the knowledge tree. Eve then convinces Adam, the first man, to do the same. God, despite supposedly being omniscient, is shocked to learn that they have done this and starts laying down the law on them, saying that men will be forced to work all the days of their life and women will be subservient to men. (To add insult to injury, childbirth will also be painful.) He punishes all of humanity for the disobedience of the first humans.

It seems puzzling that an omniscient God couldn’t devise a better creation plan. Even more puzzling is that the humans who disobeyed him were punished, along with all future members of humanity, for what they did despite not having any knowledge of what the consequences would be beforehand. Besides, if a creation is bad, does the blame rest upon the creation or the creator? Still more puzzling is that God doesn’t bother to attempt to refine his human design but sticks with the original failed one.

Things get all screwed up and a few chapters later. God, despite being omniscient, comes to a realization that his creation plan was a massive failure and that most of humanity is a lost cause and decides to destroy the world in a giant flood. That’s right; the world is destroyed at the very beginning of the book, and only a select few of each species are allowed to survive, somehow all crammed into an ark made from gopher wood. (How the plant life survives is not explained, nor is it explained how aquatic life survives salt water and fresh water mixing together, nor is it explained where the excess water ends up after the flood is over.) Why this omnipotent God couldn’t just stop the hearts of all humans who displeased him is quite beyond me. This flood plan is remarkably inefficient and serves as filler material, as the surviving human family needs to engage in incest to repopulate the world just like the first humans needed to engage in incest to originally populate the world. It’s just the same scenario rehashed. I can’t help but feel as though the contrived flood account was interpolated into the beginning of Genesis to dress it up and make it appear more impressive. It might help hook some readers early on, but I found it to be unnecessary.

Through various semi-comical, semi-irritating mishaps involving a giant tower, a child sacrifice practical joke, and a sold birthright, a tribe known as Israel arises. Israel is the tribe that God favors over all others, though it doesn’t take long for the Israelites to become enslaved in Egypt despite possessing the guidance of this omniscient God.

The second installment in the anthology, Exodus, deals with their emancipation from Egypt. God decides to give this guy named Moses some cheat codes for the universe, so that he’ll be able to use them in an attempt to intimidate the Pharaoh into allowing the Israelites to go free. Whether or not this plan would have actually worked is anyone’s guess, as God decides to violate the Pharaoh’s free will to allow the Israelites to leave (Exodus 4:21, 7:3, 7:13, 7:22, 8:19, 9:7, 9:35, 10:1, 10:20, 10:27, 11:10, 14:4, and 14:8), giving himself an incredibly flimsy excuse to send ten plagues on all of the Egyptians, punishing them for the Pharaoh’s compulsory obstinacy, just to show off. After this fiasco, the Pharaoh is finally allowed to let the Israelites go. Very shortly thereafter, the Pharaoh changes his mind about letting them go and chases them with his army. He almost catches them, but Moses uses his magical powers that God gave him to divide the waters of the Red Sea so that the Israelites can walk through them. There’s also a pillar of fire separating the Egyptians from the Israelites. If you enjoy fantasy epics, Exodus should be right up your alley.

Once the Israelites are through, the fire pillar dissipates and the Egyptians very stupidly charge into the path between the parted waters. The waters collapse onto the Egyptians, drowning them, and the Israelites celebrate the grisly deaths of their enemies before setting up camp in the desert.

This is where the real fun begins. From the remainder of Exodus and all throughout Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the vindictive, tyrannical God establishes a delightfully sinister theocracy under which basic happiness is impossible. He endorses slavery (Exodus 21:2-27, Leviticus 25:44-46, and Deuteronomy 20:10-14), public execution by stoning for failure to worship him on the Sabbath (Numbers 15:32-36), stoning of unruly children (Deuteronomy 21:18-21), and death as punishment for nearly every crime, usually by stoning. (Stoning seems to be his preferred method of execution.)

He also demands that virgin women who are raped marry their rapists (Deuteronomy 22:28-29), calls for genocide (Exodus 23:23-27, Leviticus 26:7-8, and Deuteronomy 7:1-5 and 12:2-3), and condones all sorts of other atrocities. The Israelites, who witnessed his power during the plagues and parting of the waters, have no choice but to submit to this new horrific celestial totalitarian regime.

After the death of Moses, Joshua takes over as leader of the Israelites. In Joshua, the sixth installment, the Israelites fulfill God’s call for genocide by fighting battles with other tribes all throughout the desert, winning them simply because God rigs them in their favor. After some initial victories, the Israelites forget about God’s power and start worshipping other gods.

In the next book, Judges, God, who freely admits to being jealous (according to Exodus 34:14, his very name is Jealous), punishes them for doing so and delivers them into bondage. When they repent, a “judge” is sent to free them. This happens multiple times throughout Judges, making for repetitive reading. (God also allows a man named Jephthah to sacrifice his daughter to him in exchange for a battle victory in Judges 11:30-40; a testament to how much he loves human death.)

After this nonsense goes on for awhile, delaying exposition, the Philistines arrive on the scene and pose a major threat to the Israelites. A guy named David scares them away by killing a Philistine giant by firing a rock at his head with a slingshot. He then becomes Israel’s king. (There’s also a disgusting yet somewhat amusing anecdote in which David slays two hundred Philistines, cuts off their foreskins, and gives them to Saul as a dowry for his daughter, Michal, in 1 Samuel 18:25-27. This seems like a very poor deal to me. I’ll bet that Saul later had buyer’s remorse.)

Some less important, not particularly memorable (save for God’s killing of King David’s illegitimate seven-day-old son in 2 Samuel 12:15-18, a census mishap in 2 Samuel 24:1-15, and an incident involving two she bears in 2 Kings 2:23-24) events take place throughout the next nine books before the reader is forced to trudge through 150 chapters of dull, repetitive, excessively slavish poetry written to God by one of his more abject followers in Psalms.

The author of that book has the audacity to claim that both God and his statutes are perfect (Psalms 119:142, 119:151, 119:160, and 119:172), even though this would mean that God would need to follow his own rules, which he doesn’t. It is also claimed in Psalms that happiness can be derived from bashing children’s heads against rocks (Psalms 137:9), which is a proclamation that thoroughly baffles me. I’m not sure what the author was going for here. Perhaps this verse is supposed to be some sort of black comedy joke intended to express the impaired judgment of those living under the theocratic dystopia depicted in this collection of books, or it might have been included to emphasize the ghastly nature of the aforementioned theocratic dystopia, or it might just be there for shock value.


[Chechar’s interpolated note: I think I have psychoanalyzed well those barbaric Semites in a passage of my book Hojas Susurrantes. Just click on this link and then scroll almost to the bottom of that entry until you hit the subtitle “The historical Israel”.]


Whatever the case may be, it’s far too mean-spirited. The author of Psalms also frequently and redundantly berates anyone who is not a member of the tribe(s) that God favors, making for tiresome and irritating reading.

The next three books provide even more dull reading material. After slogging through these books, the reader arrives at the writings of the Old Testament prophets.

Throughout Isaiah and Jeremiah, God ruthlessly annihilates entire nations that fail to submit to his terrorist demands. Isaiah also mentions unicorns (Isaiah 34:7), dragons (Isaiah 34:13), and satyrs (Isaiah 34:14) and identifies them as legitimate safety hazards, so if you enjoy fantasy novels, you should enjoy chapter 34 of Isaiah.

Furthermore, Jeremiah 10:1-5 forbids cutting trees out of the forest, adorning them with decorations, and displaying them as a holiday custom. A substantial portion of the cult followers who claim to live by this book’s teachings fail to uphold this passage, which is puzzling. (In fact, there are many passages that they fail to uphold.) It’s almost as if they don’t even realize that decorated trees are explicitly forbidden by their highly revered literary work, but that would mean that they haven’t actually read the entire book for themselves and are blindly accepting the subjective interpretations of others, which would be just plain absurd. Right?

The next book in the series is Lamentations, which is just as pathetic as it sounds. (The entire Old Testament is excellently summarized in one sentence by Lamentations 2:21.)

The celestial terrorism continues throughout Ezekiel, in which God sinks to a new low by demanding that Ezekiel eat cakes containing human excrement (Ezekiel 4:12). (The entire Old Testament is excellently summarized in one sentence in Ezekiel 25:17.) Ezekiel also sees creatures that each has four faces, four wings, and straight feet with calf’s soles in Ezekiel 1:5-28, so if you enjoy fantasy novels, you should enjoy that passage.

Some more less important events happen throughout the next ten books, which consist mainly of more divine terrorism and ultimatums. Jonah, in which a man survives being swallowed by a giant fish and is vomited up three days later, is amusing.


The second (much shorter) iteration of the King James Bible, the New Testament, starts off with this guy named Jesus, who is supposed to be God in human form, gathering followers on Earth and spreading his word to them.

Given how much of a tyrannical, ethnic-cleansing maniac God was in the Old Testament, one would most likely expect Jesus to be a Terminator-style infiltrator who goes on killing sprees, but instead he’s a hippie. This almost complete character reversal makes the main protagonist (I use that word loosely) seem even more contrived and unbelievable.

Granted though, traces of God’s evil do remain within Jesus, as he brings his followers the most horrendous news of all; that anyone who fails to accept him as his or her totalitarian slave master will be tortured for all eternity after death! It is the epitome of horror, revamping God’s vindictive, petty, unforgiving nature that was established in the Old Testament.

The inherent problem with the premise of the Jesus story is that a man who is an omniscient deity incarnate would have extremely advanced knowledge; knowledge far beyond that of the humans who wrote this collection of books, called gospels. However, the gospel authors were able to work around it in an extremely clever way. The four authors telling the story of Jesus and his time on Earth all pieced together a generalized account of his life from minor, disjointed details and the four resulting accounts all heavily contradict each other. Brilliant!

Some fans of this book claim that Jesus abolishes the atrocious laws established in the Old Testament, making up for them. This, however, is not the case, as Jesus himself states in Matthew 5:17-18 and Luke 16:17 that he came not to “destroy the law” but to fulfill it and that not “one tittle” of the law would fail until “heaven and earth pass.” Once again it seems as though those who claim to admire and adhere to this book don’t actually know it very well. Go figure.

Two of the gospel authors claim that Jesus was born to a virgin, which is rather far-fetched, but then again, it is a fantasy novel. Jesus also claims that anyone who has faith in him will be able to magically transfer mountains and trees into the sea (Matthew 17:20 and 21:21, Mark 11:23, and Luke 17:6), further emphasizing the alternate, fictional universe (where sorcery is possible) in which this story is set.

Also, in this universe, all ailments are caused by demons, which Jesus is able to cast out of the ill and physically deformed.

The end of the story of Jesus and his time on Earth, however, ruins the whole thing, as it is completely nonsensical. Jesus (also God) is there to die for the imperfect nature of all humans (in which God created them) as a blood sacrifice to God (also himself) simply so that he can ask God (also himself) to forgive all humans for involuntarily existing in an imperfect nature in which they were created by God. It is supposed to be a noble sacrifice, but it instead comes across as utterly absurd and obscene.

It isn’t even a sacrifice, because Jesus magically comes back to life three days later, which he knew ahead of time would happen. Besides, given the other resurrections throughout this anthology of books (1 Kings 17:21-22, Ezekiel 37:9-10, Matthew 27:51-53, Mark 5:41-42, Luke 8:54-55, and John 11:41-44), the Jesus resurrection doesn’t seem all that significant. It would have had greater effect if those other completely random resurrections had been omitted. As I’ve already stated, this book would have benefited tremendously from better editing.

The next 22 books describe the actions and teaching of the followers of Jesus. The writings of his followers contradict each other numerous times regarding what is required to attain salvation. (Is it faith or works or both?)

Most of these books are written by some guy named Paul and are comprised of rambling about how faith is the only way to attain salvation (even though Paul apparently was made witness to the spirit of Jesus in Acts 9:3-6, making faith for him impossible, making him a hypocrite) and how sex is evil and women are inferior and must be submissive to men and all kinds of other crap that Jesus doesn’t say in any of the gospels. The writings of Paul are irritating and dull. (Although 1 Corinthians 1:18-29 is good for a laugh.)

After these writings, the final book, Revelation, describes the end of the world when Jesus comes back to kill all nonbelievers. Revelation is replete with cartoonish imagery and prophecies more vague than an astrology horoscope. It feels to me as though it was tacked on as an afterthought so that the book could have a climactic ending, no matter how contrived. What exactly was the point of adding all of this extra material to the end of the book if the savior of humanity was already dead and resurrected?

As far as dystopian novels go, I prefer George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four by a long shot. That book isn’t self-contradictory, poorly written, fallacious, or outright absurd and it doesn’t insult the reader’s intelligence by claiming that Big Brother is good.

Categories
Axiology Miscegenation William Pierce Women

Hunter – 2

dr_pierce

This entry has been moved: here.

Categories
Americanism Civil war Conservatism Egalitarianism Emigration / immigration Enlightenment Individualism Liberalism Thomas Hobbes

An overly traveled road to extinction

by Hajo Liaucius



Klan-sheet-music

As a distant observer of the American White Nationalist scene, I am struck by its utter irrelevancy in public discourse outside of being a fund-raising tool for anti-Occidental activists[1] and as a subject of lurid speculation. In part, this distressing situation is a product of the typical pathologies and corruption endemic to counter-culture groups but I am not inclined to cover the endless scandals that have in large part defined the White Nationalist scene during the last fifty years or so. While the character issue and other matters should be approached, the issue of what exactly American Occidental advocacy presently entails in terms of an ideological foundation is of paramount importance.

Currently paleoconservatism dominates what little racialist discourse occurs in the States. Given that the mainstream of racialist thought in the states since the reconstruction era has been remarkably consistent, it matters little if one refers to it as Americanism, racial populism or racial paleoconservatism in terms addressing its ideological validity. Before considering the present-day applicability of the paleocon doctrine I think a consideration of the golden era of modern American racialism is worthwhile simply because it provides an excellent case study of the consequences of the character issue alluded to earlier as well as the utility of a racially based paleoconservatism as a governing ideology.

The golden age of American racialism coincided with the birth of what is commonly referred to as the Second Klan Era, which was founded by the publisher of The Jeffersonian newspaper and U.S. senator Thomas Watson in 1915. Watson built the Klan into a nationwide organization with more than four million members (about 15 percent of the white male Protestant population of the country at the time) that was particularly powerful in the Midwest and Southern states. The influence attained by the Second Klan Era far exceeded the accomplishments of American racialism at any time since as they managed to gain control of state legislatures in Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon as well as electing a governor in Indiana and several Congressmen and Senators. Most impressive of all, they managed to heavily influence the Democratic Convention of 1924 and helped get a Klansman on the Supreme Court.

The combination of segregation, constitutionalism, opposition to Southern/Eastern European immigration, Protestant fundamentalism, isolationism and economic populism were all popular causes fully within the mainstream of public social and political thought at the time. Simply put, the Second Klan Era enjoyed a nearly ideal historical context in which to transform America into a society far more reflective of Occidental values. Yet they achieved little in terms of societal reform and lapsed into obscurity very quickly. The reason for this failure was largely a result of the limitations of the paleoconservative ideology they promoted, as will be shown.

The Second Klan Era was largely, with the notable exception of The Black Legion, committed to working within the confines of electoral politics for the purpose of advancing its public policy agenda. That agenda consisted of the preservation of the constitutional order of the day, maintaining the predominance of Europeans of Nordic, Western and Celtic origins in cultural and political terms; restoring Protestant fundamentalism to a place of preeminence, the maintenance of American neutrality, advancing prohibition and advancing the economic populist agenda of the time.

Needless to say, the reelection of Wilson in 1916 resulted in America’s subsequent entry into the First World War (as well as numerous imperialistic adventures in Central and South America during the 1920s), and the entry into the League of Nations ended American neutrality and weakened its sovereignty. On the domestic front Klan influence failed to slow the flood of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, the suffragette movement’s triumph, the decadence of the 1920s or the rise of the anti-Occidental mass media during the 1930s. In short, they failed to preserve the societal order that defined America at the turn of the century or protect the ethnic and religious interests they held dear despite being given an ideal opportunity to do so.

While the Klan was heavily involved in promoting prohibition and progressive economic policies popular during the first two decades of the 20th century, the passage of such measures happened because they were promoted by popular sentiment across major portions of the political spectrum (including Negroes, organized labor, fundamentalist Protestants and women) as well as the efforts of significant portions of the political establishment that were entirely unsympathetic to the Klan. As a result, it is very unrealistic to view the Second Klan Era as anything more than one of several significant factions promoting progressive reforms and prohibition.

The collapse of the Second Klan Era began in large measure as a result of Stephenson scandal of 1925. Under Stephenson’s guidance, Klan membership swelled to 300,000 in the State of Indiana and, in the 1924 elections, Klan-backed candidates won all but one of Indiana’s U.S Congressional seats as well as the Governor, Lieutenant Governor and the Secretary of State. Stephenson was the most charismatic leader the Klan ever had as he was a gifted orator and a popular leader throughout much of the country as well as the Grand Dragon of Indiana which was a major Klan stronghold at the time. Yet all he is remembered for now is the extremely brutal kidnapping, rape and subsequent suicide of Madge Oberholtzer. The resultant media coverage devastated the Klan and turned formerly cordial elite opinion against the organization resulting in a dramatic and rapid decline of its influence and popularity.

In 1936 the kidnapping and murder of Charles Poole and the subsequent crackdown on the Black Legion (a paramilitary offshoot of the Klan active in Illinois, Michigan and Ohio) sped the disintegration of what remained of the Klan forcing its sale in 1939 and it subsequently bankrupted because of tax avoidance in 1944, thereby ending the Second Klan Era and hastening the decline of racially-based paleoconservatism. The lesson provided by the Black Legion is that poorly planned, sporadic political violence can’t threaten state power but it does motivate repression and the political marginalization of would-be revolutionaries.

Any post-mortem analysis of the Second Klan Era naturally raises the matter of what would have happened had the rape and subsequent death of Oberholtzer been concealed, or conjecture about how history might have been different had Stephenson been able to control his depraved instincts. Such conjecture doesn’t seem fruitful given that sexual psychopaths tend to behave in ways that are incompatible with the rational life of self-sacrifice needed of anyone that aspires to revolutionary political leadership. In light of the savagery directed against Oberholtzer it appears obvious that his bestial nature couldn’t be controlled nor concealed indefinitely. His arrest for sexual assault in 1961 after spending decades in prison seems to confirm his unsuitability for life among Occidental people although other aspects of his conduct during the 1920s paint a very troubling portrait of the man as well as the organization that he led.

On a more fundamental level, the problem of the Second Klan Era was metapolitical in nature, which is to say that they ceded the parameters of discourse which predetermined the sorts of policies and tactics they adopted. Accepting the paleoconservative notion of Americans meant that the Second Klan Era accepted contemporary egalitarian notions about democracy while promoting a narrow form of racialism. Practically what this meant was that they hoped to restrict enfranchisement to the old Nordic/Western/Celtic racial base with no meaningful thought given as to how pragmatically exclude the already substantial Southern and Eastern European populations within the confines of universal suffrage, nor how the established party system could be dissuaded from catering to emerging demographics. Long-term Negro demographic trends in the South and Midwest made the Klan’s strategy of regional race-based enfranchisement unviable in the long term, which wasn’t surprising given the overwhelming financial, institutional and cultural strength of the establishment that dominated the rest of America.

Although an aristocratic remnant survived in the South as late as the 1930s, an adherence to democratic dogma and the economic/social populism of the period meant that the acceptance of the foundations of capitalism negated any consideration of natural hierarchies as a basis for establishing both rights and responsibilities, as well as a means of providing for greater social cohesion. The old Southern aristocracy provided a bulwark against Eastern financial interests in the antebellum and reconstruction eras, making such a choice tactically questionable and ideologically puzzling for an allegedly conservative movement based in the South. However, since no thought at all was given to syndicalism, guildism or corporatism, the Klan was left with populist prescriptions for state-based restraints upon the influence of capital which had proven to be a dead-end by the beginning of the 1930s.

While the Second Klan Era paid homage to the Confederacy, any serious discussion about secession simply didn’t exist within its circles at the time. Instead, lots of effort was spent praising constitutionalism resulting in the Klan seeing itself as the standard bearer of a contemporary Americanism rather than as a revolutionary secessionist movement. Unaddressed was the matter of how the constitution failed to stop the transformation of the country into a society dominated by North Eastern plutocrats or how a regional movement like the Klan could formulate a long term defensive strategy against a national leadership animated by a deep malevolence to all that the Klan stood for.

When one considers the obvious unsuitability of its foundations and practical experiences that should have been gleaned from what was then recent history, it is reasonable to presume that the Second Klan Era was content with being a regional force with no long-term strategy for remaining relevant. It appears instead that they hoped that somehow state-level autonomy could be maintained with current societal trends.

A consideration of contemporary written material clearly indicates that the Second Klan Era lacked any metapolitical foundation or coherent ideology but instead was a manifestation of incoherent but well-intended sentiments opposed to Occidental dispossession in the American South and Midwest. In a practical sense, the Second Klan Era was purely defensive and reactive and destined to fail even if Stephenson’s sexual psychopathy would have been concealed or repressed.

The ideology promoted by the Klan and like-minded groups since the Reconstruction Era is extremely similar to the ideology promoted by the mainstream of American racialist groups such as Stormfront, American Renaissance, Liberty Lobby, VDARE, the Council of Conservative Citizens, various Klan factions, the American Nationalist Union, the recently disbanded National Vanguard [2] and several other organizations as well.


American paleoconservatism

Given the failure of paleoconservatism to preserve Occidental interests in America within the nearly ideal historical context that presented itself in the Second Klan Era, honest men should question the suitability of the ideology within the current era even if most in the White Nationalist community refuse to do so, as has been the case for nearly ninety years.

obsolete constitution

As an adherent of the Revisionist Integralism/Organicism school, my critique of paleoconservatism is metapolitical in nature rather than drawn from a historicist perspective or bound by a narrowly conceived ideological preference.[3] As such, I would maintain that a foundational consideration of the paleoconservative disposition is needed.

Fundamentally, paleoconservatism should be about the preservation of that which makes a people or a nation-state unique. Yet within the American context that uniqueness has unfortunately come to mean classical liberalism, capitalism, constitutionalism and a less permissive form of Christianity.

The single greatest flaw with such an ideology is that the things it wishes to preserve are already dead. The constitutional republic of the founders so revered by the paleocons is like any other legal doctrine: it can’t help but die along with the societal conditions that gave rise to it.

It died when the states ceased to be sovereign entities able to withdraw from the union. The ordinal constructs that succeeded it are as alien to the vision of the 18th century liberals that created the constitution as the founders compared to the typical Obama voter or Howard Stern fan. When American paleocons speak of an American Order they incorrectly presume that a consistent legal and governing doctrine upon which public life is ordered has suffered degradations over time while still being salvageable and relevant by means that have never been meaningfully articulated. Such a view ignores the legal doctrines of the Confederated Republic era or simply presumes it to be a consistent, logical precursor to a perfected legal doctrine that began in 1789 and degraded to a major extent sometime after 1861 yet still represents an ideal that can be restored via the subverted institutions that have perverted America beyond recognition if some unspecified populist course of action is taken by a population wholly removed from the societal framework that gave birth to it.

In philosophical terms a major challenge to the notion of ordinal continuity so beloved of American paleocons and the angst about the decline of the republic is the reality that history has thus far given birth to six distinct American ordinal eras. With the exception of the First Federal Republic, the fundamental reordering of American life has involved a commixture of constitutional amendments and the practical nullification of constitutional rule via legislation, executive orders and the natural Dissipative effects inherent in liberalism.[4]

The paleoconservative notion of the American Order is premised upon an institutional and civic societal construct that hasn’t existed for several generations. Instead, it is more accurate to see American history defined by ordinal epochs characterized in terms of the degree to which Occidental folkways and mores within society had been dominating, are in decline, or nonexistent. Within the American context Permanence had always been undermined by the Degenerative aspects inherent in classical Liberalism. When Dissipationist forces became ascendant to such an extent that the order of the area became fundamentally changed, a new, more degenerate order with a new set of systemic contradictions comes into being giving birth to a new ordinal era.[5]

In the briefest of all possible terms these ordinal eras are:

1.- The Confederated Republic (1781-1788). This period was characterized by an extremely decentralized and weak confederation of effectively sovereign agrarian states whose cooperative association formed a republic defined by the radical liberalism of the late 18th century and an expansionist, racial supremacy led by Occidentals. This order was Generative in nature.

2.- The First Federalist Republic (1789-1861). This period was characterized by strong sub-national governments that voluntarily became part of a federated national state defined by a less radical form of liberalism and an expansionist racial supremacy led by Occidentals. Although agrarian economic interests dominated a large portion of the country, industrial elites had obtained substantial financial and political power during this era. This order was Generative in nature.

3.- The Second Federalist Republic (1861-1912). This period was characterized by sub-national governments with high degrees of autonomy involuntarily forced to remain part of a federated national state with significant centralization of power, typical of 19th century liberalism. For most of this period America was still defined in terms of an expansionist racial supremacy led by Occidentals although an ascendant Jewish minority held major influence in media, finance and government. This period was also characterized by experiments with imperialism and a decline of agrarian societies and a typically liberal consolidation of wealth. This order was characterized by a tension between Regenerative and Dissipationist forces with dominion of the former, but in decline.

4.- The Third Federalist Republic (1913-1954). This period was characterized by sub-national governments with significant but declining autonomy consistent with the progression of 20th century liberalism. America was for most of this ordinal era defined in terms of a preservationist racialism that had fully abandoned the Celtic/Nordic/Western core identity in favor of a pan-European ideal held together by propositional nationalism. Although still nominally led by Occidentals, an ascendant Jewish minority held a major (or arguably a dominant) position in media, finance and government. This period was also characterized by experiments with imperialism, the establishment of Chesterton’s Servile State, and the ascendancy of globalism. This order was characterized by a tension between Regenerative and Dissipationist forces with the latter ascendant.

5.- The First Post-Federal Republic (1954-2001). This period was characterized by sub-national governments with moderate and declining autonomy and centralization of power consistent with typical late 20th century liberalism. America was for most of this period defined in Cultural Bolshevik terms of racial nihilism, globalism and Chesterton’s Servile State. America’s ruling elite by this time was characterized by a mixture of racialist Asian, Mestizo and Negro factions as well as deracinated Occidentals subservient to Jewish power. This order principally represented Transience with Regenerative forces in steep decline.

6.- The Second Post-Federal Republic (2001 to the present). This period is characterized by sub-national governments without any meaningful degree of autonomy forced to remain part of a federated national state with a far greater centralization of power consistent with typical 21st century liberalism. The current American order is defined as an increasingly militant expression of Cultural Bolshevism which is manifested in terms of racial nihilism, familial collapse, globalism and an increasingly common form of authoritarianism created by the merger of finance and statist authority. America’s current ruling elites differ from that of the previous order in terms of the militancy used in the service of the destruction of America’s Occidental remnant and its growing insolvency. This order represents the triumph of Transience with Regenerative forces playing a negligible societal role.

The essence of the paleocon perspective on the constitution is that it can somehow resurrect a classically inspired form of liberalism while ignoring the reality that the foundational elements of Liberalism are naturally Dissipative. Instead of representing a force of Continuance the constitution has been reinterpreted and restructured to serve successive orders whose values are fully divorced from those created by those that founded their nation state.[6]

One endlessly hears commentary about the sacred glory of the constitution and debate among paleocons over its relevance in various contemporary controversies. Constitutionalists at best ignore and often celebrate that the constitution failed to protect Occidental children from literally being militarily forced to attend publicly funded indoctrination centers extolling the virtues of miscegenation while being physically abused by racial aliens.

In fact the constitution made of such travesties a celebrated basis of decades of legal doctrine. Although the constitution failed to prevent Occidentals in America from being dispossessed by an endless tidal wave of flotsam from the third world, it has granted the invaders legal equality with those that created a nation state. The constitution failed to prevent America from becoming a client-state of Israel just as it failed to prevent the rise of Bush’s Orwellian surveillance state.

The constitution has been powerless to stop the ascension of a multi-billion dollar industry based upon sexual debasement and an economic order in which tens of millions of Americans live the lives of serfs for global enterprises which buy legislators, presidents and judges. Although Constitutionalism has done absolutely nothing to prevent cultural Bolshevism dominating American life, it has given legal license to every manner of social malignancy one can imagine. And yet for more than one hundred and fifty years American paleocons cling to the fantasy that the very same legal/governmental doctrine that gutted the republic they love will somehow restore it back to the halcyon days of the 1950s, the early 1900s, the antebellum South, 1789 or whatever nostalgic fantasy they aspire to.

The reason that such a tragedy has come to pass is because such an outcome is a consequence of the individualistic nature of liberalism without which cultural Bolshevism simply would not have been possible.

What little remains of the paleocon movement is committed to racial egalitarianism and the notion that Occidental civilization can be perpetuated by races other than the one that created it. Mainstream paleocons believe that racial aliens can be assimilated to accept and even advance Occidental culture ignoring the realities of racial psychometrical differences and evolutionary psychology, and historical evidence to the contrary. In short, they embrace a major cause of Occidental decline (multi-racialism) and even uphold it as an example of enlightened Western values while bemoaning the societal disintegration it engenders.

Although racially conscious paleocons have been relegated to the margins of political and cultural discourse for several decades, they have continued to embrace classical liberalism because they fail to understand that the liberalism of the 18th century has cultural Bolshevism as its logical consequence.[7]

In part this stems from the egalitarianism and individualism expressed in the American constitution. America as a nation state can’t be understood to be an organic national entity in any meaningful sense of the term since it was not the product of the confluence of blood and soil and the folkways produced from such a dynamic. Rather, the old republics came about as an expression of the liberal idealism of the late 18th century and as such they exemplified a rejection of Occidental traditionalism with its emphasis upon communal responsibilities, privileges and hierarchy which are the foundational elements of Occidental social existence. The afore-mentioned confluence animates a society by defining its strengths and contradictions as well as determining what attempts are made to resolve said conflicts from the standpoint of furthering national uniqueness and survivability.

Liberalism is expressed economically as capitalism and socially as atomistic individualism.

Restorative forces are incompatible with capitalism because social interactions are determined largely by financial prowess and conformity to fleeting consumerist fads. Within such an environment, communing with ancestors and descendants becomes impossible when individuals can at best think in terms of family welfare and the occasional act of charity while typically they become defined by crass materialism or merely serfs living at the edge of subsistence.

The_worship_of_Mammon

The Worship of Mammon by Evelyn De Morgan (1909)

A notion often promoted in mainstream paleocon and White Nationalist circles is that modern day capitalism (often termed super-capitalism) is somehow substantially different than capitalism of whatever era they romanticize. Such a notion is absurd because it fails to recognize the antisocial nature inherent in capitalism.

Such destructiveness is demonstrated by the accumulation of financial power via usury which results in an extreme consolidation of wealth distorting so-called market forces, allowing oligopolies and/or monopolies to control markets and limit competition. In so doing they further consolidate their economic power by creating an economy in which purchasing decisions, competition and chances for individual enrichment suffer. Oligopolies and/or monopolies also subvert supposedly free markets and democratic institutions when they inevitably discover that legislation, and political parties and public office holders can be purchased as easily as any other commodity.
In effect, highly concentrated capital is able to nullify popular will via well-funded lobbying campaigns, dramatically manipulative electoral campaigns and molding public opinion to suit plutocratic interests. In practical terms the so-called private sector can be just as an effective oppressor as an omnipotent state although some would argue that the engineering of consent via a highly concentrated, corporate media creates a propasphere[8] that is far more capable of controlling dissent than any state could.

Paleocon economic thought is like mainstream libertarianism in that they both prefer to believe the flagrant lie that capital is not inevitably concentrated and/or that such concentration does not distort the market nor cause, social havoc.

Surveying the formally Occidental portions of the world makes it apparent that the political power of concentrated finance often cannot be overcome by regulatory regimes or tax policies consistent with the current liberal gestalt because the means by which such policies are crafted are owned by the very interests they seek to regulate. To the extent that various Western states have implemented social-democratic inspired controls over capital, the same dynamics of alienation remain in part because excessive statist regulation and taxes have simply shifted the power of capital to the state rather than to society at large. Statist regulation of capital is ineffective as transnational finance has far more power culturally and politically than any nation state can possibly muster within its own boarders. This unfortunate reality has been the case from the earliest days of the East India Trading company and remains so today.

Racially aware paleocons are cognizant of the reality that culture is a biologically based construct and that demographics determine the destiny of nations. Unfortunately they fail to realize that capitalism shapes demographics to suit the interests of those able to control capital.

When racial paleocons look upon the Antebellum South under the soft, uncritical glow of an unfocused nostalgic yearning for that which never was, they choose to ignore the enslavement of Europeans and the misery that was inflicted upon free White men forced to compete with slave labor. In the case of Rhodesian and South African segregation and the concentration of political power in White hands did not translate into economic security for working-class Occidentals who were forced to compete with far more abundant Negroid labor while paying higher taxes to support parallel social services for two separate races. Elsewhere in the Western World slave labor came to be supplanted by an endless supply of low-cost alien labor when it became technologically and politically possible to do so during the second half of the 20th century.

If by some miracle the racial paleocons of the likes of American Renaissance take power tomorrow, bringing back segregation and ending the influx of alien peoples, the twin forces of third world fertility and capitalism’s need for ever cheaper labor will do away with whatever demographic gains the racial paleocons may achieve in short order. Because a nation’s demographics determine its destiny, any such a White Nationalist democracy will be faced with disenfranchised alien masses that will have common cause with the plutocrats whose economic logic demands a system highly similar to what the formerly Occidental world has now.

While mainstream and racial paleocons alike pay homage to Burke’s famous call for self-determination from Madras to Manchester, they ignore that the traditionalism of both will perish when left to so-called market forces. Since capitalism views individuals as any other commodity, why should one expect tradition to be anything more than a marketing tool, discarded when something else can be sold with a greater return on investment? The same market forces which imported slaves nearly two centuries ago for higher profits while taking bread from the mouths of White laborers exports Occidental jobs for higher profits today.

With rare exceptions, rebellion within the context of a consumerist society has nothing to do with upholding traditionalistic values. Instead, uniqueness is based upon purchasing items which convey a pseudo-rebellion likely to win approval from one’s peers or reaffirm the carnality and nihilism sanctioned by the media.

Occidentals must confront the discomforting reality that we are faced with a relentless marginalization and a looming extinction for the benefit of an elite that hold us in contempt, rather than as individual members of a transcendent order in which commonality of purpose extends beyond material advancement and fashionableness. When a societal consensus is based upon ever fluxuating fads and the need to produce wealth for others with ever greater efficiency. Promiscuity, homosexualism, substance abuse, familial disintegration and delinquency will follow.[9]

Capitalism, and the individualism which gave birth to the classical liberalism of yore, and the liberty so cherished by those that claim to be conservatives, have seen the legal doctrines and institutions they cherish transformed into mere tools for competing interest groups and ascendant racial entities seeking to impose themselves over groups of individuals lacking any sense of common identity and purpose. Such an outcome is to be expected as Occidental peoples have had any sense of organically derived sense of purpose torn from them by design. Occidentals of all nations have no sense of an inherent uniqueness and value extending across countless generations of the past and those yet to be born, and are doomed to extinction as long as such a mindset persists. Occidentals merely produce greater profits for a global plutocracy which uses those returns to fund our displacement with no thought of communal purpose beyond our grandchildren (if that).

Surveying the decaying remnants of the Occidental world after more than two centuries of Liberalism in action has, without exception, meant cultural devolution, the rise of the anti-culture and our demographic decline culminating in the apocalypse slowly unfolding upon us. Segregationist efforts and slavery have uniformly failed to preserve a liberalism meant to serve Occidental humanity because of the inerrant contradictions within liberalism necessitate either continued Devolution or Restorative revolution. Realizing the uniformity of the Dissipative effects of liberalism upon Occidental societies, the only sensible conclusion one can reach is that liberalism cannot be fine-tuned or reformed into a Restorative force. We will not vote our way out of Annihilation and our tormentors won’t simply collapse, allowing a return to some halcyon era that never was. A viable attempt at a Restorative revolution has never been based upon liberalism because liberalism as an ideal intrinsically serves Transience.

Given that mainstream as well as racial paleocons lack the fortitude to realize the corrosive effects of capitalism and atomistic individualism upon what remains of the liberal democratic order, they cannot help but bemoan the demise of our traditions—while hoping that institutions controlled by racial aliens and deracinated Occidentals will once again serve the vision of the liberals of the late 18th century. A return to the liberalism of ages past presumes an electoral awakening of masses of lemmings motivated by gut and groin. Since history and current experience proves otherwise the continued paleocon adherence to such a fantasy demonstrates a Fourierian contempt for reality every bit as unreal as skull shapes being explained by Boasian anthropology.

A legal code is nothing more than a mechanism for articulating and balancing competing interests for the greater good of a society, as reflected within the confines of texts recognized as reflecting some transcendent truth. For a collection of texts to have such authority depends upon a nation being defined in terms of a people with a sense of common purpose, history and destiny. To pretend that such an authority can be instilled in a fractious collection of rival cultures bound by force and avarice (as is the case in the post-Occidental West) simply cannot hold up to even a mildly honest bout of cognizance.

The vast material disparities and attendant political/societal dispossession we suffer should be seen as an inevitable consequence of capital becoming ever more focused resulting in the amplification of the social and economic Hobbesian struggle of all against all. Given that paleocons have chosen to accept the foundational elements that have gutted our civilization and will continue to do so, it is sensible to conclude that constitutionalism has no chance of reviving Burke’s proud submission to the responsibilities of class and providence revealed in custom. Instead, recent generations have inherited the negation of those things, resulting in the end of common identity and purpose which has been replaced by the current anti-culture abhorred by all who reject the modern crapulence of liberalism.

What now is termed paleoconservatism is simply a sentimental attachment to the vestigial institutions of a largely mythical and deceased liberalism. Paleoconservatism is in practice nothing more than the collective delusion of viewing an apparition as a viable basis for restoring society to an idealized past.

Raspail is right when he sees us as Hermit Crabs inhabiting the bounty of an ancestry we neither build upon, preserve, appreciate nor recognize. Instead they identify with a romanticized concept of institutions and doctrines that once gave prosperity within a highly unique historical and demographic context which they refuse to understand. That such a context also conflated license for freedom making our current decrepitude inevitable is also ignored. Paleocons of all sorts as well as libertarians have done so partly out of ignorance and nostalgia, but also out of cowardice. The cowardice I speak of is that what they imagine to be prudence is nothing more than a hope—in opposition to reason that submission will ingratiate them to those that loath them and control the institutions that destroyed the ideals held dear so as to be co-opted by their tormentors. In the end all the paleocons of any description can hope for is the demented fantasy that, contrary to evidence and reason, revolutionary change can be avoided by merely fine tuning the legal code; withering the state, praying more fervently, or that assimilation will magically transform aliens into Occidentals as we fade as an anthropological curiosity.

Such a perspective is a biological and ideological distraction the Occidental world hasn’t been able to afford for several generations. A genuine conservatism, given the current demographic and institutional context, must be revolutionary in its rejection of the foundational assumptions of liberalism. Paleoconservativism and libertarianism never have and will never rescue a decadent, deracinated people from oblivion, nor even have made a credible attempt at doing so.

By contrast National Revolutionary doctrine has done so several times during the last century. Occidental man requires a revolutionary traditionalism totally divorced from liberalism. Anything else is merely an overly traveled road to the extinction of Occidental humanity.


__________________

Endnotes:

[1] The services provided by white nationalist groups in the U.S. seem to be to generate scary stories published by the ADL/OPP/SPLC etc., which get old Jewish ladies and paranoid urban hipsters to give money to those groups.

[2] National Vanguard was founded by William Pierce but it degenerated after read Pierce’s death. (Note of the Ed.)

[3] Like its Iberian/French/Italian predecessors, the Revisionist Integralism/Organicism school is principally concerned with the goal of societal unity as a means for the preservation and expansion of the nation which is understood as a product of the confluence between a homogenous folk and the land it inhabits. History is principally the record of how the national organism comes to define itself it in experiential terms and produce a communal entity reflective of providential will.

Both schools see the innate value of the individual realized within the context of a communion with ancestors, decedents and the living in which transcendent responsibilities to the values of Permanence shape collective and individual identity.

Like its predecessors, the school maintains that economic, political and spiritual matters can’t be seen as distinct from each other as the coherent expression of a nation is a prerequisite for survival in an anarchic world of rival nations and forces antithetical to all nations. Both perceive folkways as an expression of what is termed the associative/formative drive or verbunden Bildungstrieb of a nation and that state legitimacy is a product of how well it reflects and maintains a communion of ancestors, the living and descendants of a folk.

The Revisionist Integralism/Organicism differs from its predecessors in that it perceives human social existence primarily in terms of folk-specific conflicts between foundational elements that animate a society and how attempts to resolve such conflicts further national uniqueness and survivability. While historically Integralism often wasn’t explicitly concerned with the biologic foundation of national organicism, Revisionist Integralism/Organicism attributes the associative formative drive of a folk as well as the culture produced by it as unintelligible outside of a racial context.

Likewise, cultural and biologic decline is seen as inseparable tendencies although the mechanism that initiates the decline is seen as resulting from an interaction between the inherent contradictions with the application of folk’s verbunden Bildungstrieb and Mosca and Pareto’s understanding of elite degeneration. The practical resolution of the contradictions mentioned above usually involves blended elements of corporative, syndicalist, guildist and distributivist prescriptions within an explicit biologic and revolutionary conservative context broadly compatible with the formulations of the original Integralist movements.

[4] The concept of Dissipationism is an aspect of a broader metapolitical weltanschauung known as Integralism or Organicism and its successor movement, Revisionist Integralism/Organicism. Dissipationism is a force that is manifested as a range of social movements animated by a utilitarian reason that serves the ascendance of the Transience ideal. In practical terms Dissipationism is appositional to Burkian notions of prejudice, prudence and civilization as a consequence of biologic uniqueness formed by the confluence of genetics and geography which has historical progression and culture as it’s byproduct.

Examples of expressions of Dissipationism include feminism, globalism, egalitarianism, anti-racism, organized expressions of libertine lifestyles, liberalism and trans-humanism. Transience as an ideal is effected when social relations have wholly, or nearly so, dispensed with any sense of communion between the descendants and ancestors of the living in favor of social propositions that are not resultant from anything uniquely attributable to a genetically distinct folk.

[5] The concept of systemic contradictions within the Revisionist Integralist/Organic school posits that all political doctrines and the societal constructs that create them have inherent contradictions that are an expression of the folkish character that produced them. These contradictions consequently give rise to alienation within individuals, a class or society at large which lessens societal cohesion giving rise to Dissipative forces.

[6] The diametrical ideal to Transience is Permanence which when effected entails the ordering of social relations resulting from the confluence of genetics and geography which define history so as to provide a continuity of uniqueness and purpose to a genetically distinct folk expressed in terms of an organic state and society. Forces that are Generative are in effect when the ideal of Permanence is in ascendance or dominates social discourse. When the Transience ideal is in ascendance or dominates social discourse the oppositional forces are said to be Regenerative.

[7] Within the context of Revisionist Integralist/Organicist thought America’s radical liberalism of the Confederated and the First Republican orders owe their regenerative qualities only partly to the biologic qualities of the colonizers and the positive aspects of liberalism specific to a given era and place. The vitalism of the fist two republican eras is owed in equal measure to a combination of the Paleolithic condition of the American aboriginal folk dispossessed by Occidental colonizers, the geographic isolation and natural resources of the New World and the limited technological options then available to capital acting upon its naturally Dissipative tendencies.

[8] Propasphere: A sphere of propaganda. (Note of the Ed.)

[9] Alienation within the Revisionist Integralist/Organicist context refers not to the Marxist use of the term but rather to a process by which individuals, social groups or entire societies become disassociated from the values of Permanence.

Alienation is a product of the anti-culture in which societies and the constituents that comprise them cease to maintain a communion with the land and as an integral component of current, past and coming generations with a common purpose and identity. The forming of identity on the basis of shared banalities in the form of propasphere generated sports or media consumption present the most obvious and ubiquitous manifestations of alienation although in some instances thematic strains within such unwholesome diversions can be harnessed into efforts that have some utility to the Restorative cause.

Categories
Axiology Deranged altruism Liberalism

Christianity’s secular offshoot


Alex Kurtagic said…

The so-called “universal declaration of human rights” is a Western concept, developed by Westerners, and only genuinely believed in by Westerners—so what makes them human and universal?


Commenter responded

I have been struck by the extent to which this UN Declaration mimics the tenets of the Sermon on the Mount.