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Author: C .T.

Categories
Christendom Hojas Susurrantes (book) Kenneth Clark Matthias Grünewald Theology

On Erasmus

When I was a boy I heard of Erasmus and imagined that his famous book was about something like praising so-called “mad” people in a world gone mad. Later, still before reading him, I imagined Erasmus was a great humanist who saw the madness of the religious wars of his time.

I was not prepared in the slightest to find out that Erasmus himself was pretty much part of civilizational madness. When in 1996 I hit Kenneth Clark’s page 146 of his illustrated book Civilisation I was moved to purchase the excellent 1993 Penguin edition of Praise of Folly totally unsuspecting of what the contents really were. A few days after I wrote on the book’s inside cover that Erasmus disappointed me; that, contrary to what I had expected, he did not see the folly of his age but was a fool himself.

A.H.T. Levi’s Penguin introduction to Praise of Folly is worth reading, and precisely on page xlii of the long introduction I was shocked to learn that no one in the whole Middle Ages had questioned Christian “truths.” Instead of challenging the accepted wisdom, I found in the introduction to Erasmus’ other works scholastic discussions about whether or not the ancient Greeks and Romans would be saved—from eternal damnation!

Erasmus is truly an alien for the people of our time. The problems he struggled with in his soul—he never considered his Praise of Folly his most important book—are infinitely distant from the problems that overwhelm us today. His worldview is dead except for those who, like me, were tormented by our parents with doctrines of eternal punishment.

Erasmus was the most famous humanist of the so-called “Northern Renaissance,” a man in touch with all leading princes and scholars of the time. Many consider him the central figure of the intellectual world of what, to my mind, was a pseudo-Renaissance (the real intellectual Renaissance would only begin with Montaigne). How could the “Northern Renaissance” be compared to the Italian Renaissance when its most emblematic intellectual, like Thomas à Kempis, was an Augustinian canon that took Pauline folly as a panegyric to Christian piety? Erasmus, who was deeply shocked before the pagan atmosphere of Julius II’s Rome, probably decided to publish Praise of Folly precisely to support the growing opposition to Julius in France. When the art of Michelangelo and Raphael were conquering the soul of Rome, Erasmus went as far as recommending a return to scripture and the so-called “Fathers”: Origen, Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine, and Erasmus’ Greek New Testament was in fact more feared by the Church than his Praise of Folly.

Now that I am talking of Clark’s Civilisation, let us remember the image that Clark chose to depict St Francis: Jacquemart de Hesdin’s The Fool. In Erasmus’ most famous book, women, “admittedly stupid and foolish creatures,” are Folly’s pride. Erasmus takes a surprisingly modern, “liberal” position about the role of women in society. Since Folly praises ignorance and lunacy, Erasmus reasons, women must be instrumental for the Christian cause. In his book Folly is only interested in following the example of Jesus, the exemplar of charitable simplicity against the budding intellectualism of the sixteenth century. The fact that Erasmus took St Paul’s “praise of folly” against the best minds St Paul encountered in Athens speaks for itself and needs no further comment.

It doesn’t take a great intellectual effort to recognize that the so-called Northern Renaissance was set against the real Renaissance of Italy, which had fallen in love with our genuine, Greco-Roman roots. Erasmus et al’s “optimist” discussions around the subject of the predestination of both the elect and the damned represent the medieval mind. How could Erasmus’ work that discusses whether or not a personal God “predestined” some of us to an eternity of torture be called “Renaissance” by any stretch of imagination? It is true that, in Erasmus’ century, the current theology was Pelagian rather than Augustinian, in the sense that we were supposed to be allowed to earn salvation by our own efforts. But this is altogether medieval, not modern, thinking.

To understand Erasmus one must remember the bestsellers of his time. The Pseudo- Gregorian Dialogues, composed in 680 C.E. and translated to all known vernaculars, reinforced in the faithful what priests used to call “a salutary fear of hell.” The book clearly implied that hell was eternal and that the soul, though spiritual, suffered physically from burning. Dante himself drew heavily from the Dialogues “and its influence on popular piety was greater that that of any other single work of piety in the history of western Christendom.”

(Detail of a Grüenwald painting. Grüenwald’s Isenheim Altarpiece painting in the times when Erasmus published his book depicts the spirit of those still dark ages far better than any scholastic treatise.)

Visualize yourself one moment living under the sky of Erasmus’ age. Visualize yourself trapped in the Church dogma and struggling with the terrible discussion about whether the ancient Greeks could possibly be “justified”—a nasty Lutheran word inspired in Augustine—and thus saved from the eternal flames.

For the so-called humanists of Erasmus’ time this dilemma was all too serious theological business, and they rationalized their wishes to save the “pagans” after the recent discoveries of Indian “souls” in America, who had no opportunity to receive the gospel through no fault of their own. That such doctrines represented a slight advance from Augustine’s “pessimism” (cf. Erasmus’ treatise against Luther, On Free Will and Luther’s reply, On Unfree Will) will never refute the fact that Erasmus and his ilk were chained in the trappings of medieval thought.

I was moved to write this article because all westerners, including white nationalists, have forgotten what living under Christendom was like. With the exception of the final section of my Hojas Susurrantes, no contemporary writer that I know—no one—has said something real about the horrors of the infinitely evil doctrine of eternal damnation, and how that fear was so central in Christendom. On the contrary, modern westerners seem to retroproject their own healthy psychoclass and never wonder about the subjective horrors that millions upon millions of whites endured during the Dark Ages as a result of such doctrine.

Categories
William Pierce

Two essays on Hitler

Shelter in Fournes ca. 1915 by Hitler


Listen here three pieces about Hitler from Counter-Currents Radio. Or if you prefer to skip the music breaks, see below the written version of a couple of them:

William Pierce’s “The Measure of Greatness”

Irmin Vinson’s “Some Thoughts on Hitler”

Categories
Art Civilisation (TV series) Free speech / association Kenneth Clark Martin Luther Montaigne Painting Protestantism Reformation William Shakespeare

Civilisation’s “Protest and Communication”

For an introduction to these series, see here.

Below, some indented excerpts of “Protest and Communication,” the sixth chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark, after which I offer my comments.

Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:

The dazzling summit of human achievement represented by Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci lasted for less than twenty years. It was followed (except in Venice) by a time of uneasiness often ending in disaster. For the first time since the great thaw civilised values were questioned and defied, and for some years it looked as if the footholds won by the Renaissance—the discovery of the individual, the belief in human genius, the sense of harmony between man and his surroundings—had been lost. Yet this was an inevitable process, and out of the confusion and brutality of sixteenth-century Europe, man emerged with new faculties and expanded powers of thought and expression.

In this room in the castle of Würzburg are the carvings of Tilman Riemenschneider, one—perhaps the best—of many German carvers in the late Gothic style. The Church was rich in fifteenth-century Germany, and the landowners were rich, and the merchants of the Hanseatic League were rich; and so, from Bergen right down to Bavaria, sculptors were kept busy doing huge, elaborate shrines and altars and monuments like the famous group of St George in the old church at Stockholm: a supreme example of late Gothic craftsman deploying his fancy and his almost irritating skill of hand.

The Riemenschneider figures show very clearly the character of the northern man at the end of the fifteenth century.

First of all, a serious personal piety—a quality quite different from the bland conventional piety that one finds, say, in a Perugino. And then a serious approach to life itself. These men (although of course they were unswerving Catholics) were not to be fobbed off by forms and ceremonies. They believed that there was such a thing as truth, and they wanted to get at it. What they heard from Papal legates, who did a lot of travelling in Germany at this time, did not convince them that there was the same desire for truth in Rome, and they had a rough, raw-boned peasant tenacity of purpose. Many of these earnest men would have heard about the numerous councils that had tried throughout the fifteenth century to reform the organisation of the Church. These grave northern men wanted something more substantial.

So far so good. But these faces reveal a more dangerous characteristic, a vein of hysteria. The fifteenth century had been the century of revivalism—religious movements on the fringe of the Catholic Church. They had, in fact, begun in the late fourteenth century, when the followers of John Huss almost succeeded in wiping out the courtly civilisation of Bohemia. Even in Italy Savonarola had persuaded his hearers to make a bonfire of their so-called vanities, including pictures by Botticelli: a heavy price to pay for religious conviction.

The Germans were much more easily excited. Comparisons are sometimes an over-simplification; but I think it is fair to compare one of the most famous portraits, Dürer’s Oswald Krell, with Raphael’s portrait of a cardinal in the Prado [above]. The cardinal is not only a man of the highest culture but balanced and self-contained. Oswald Krell is on the verge of hysteria.

Those staring eyes, that look of self-conscious introspection, that uneasiness, marvellously conveyed by Dürer through the uneasiness of the planes in the modelling—how German it is.

Four pages later Clark devotes several pages to Erasmus of Rotterdam, whom Bronowski praised even more in The Ascent of Man. I have quoted Clark at length on the German character because I believe that Nietzsche was spot on in blaming Luther and Protestant hysteria for the restoration of Christianity when Christendom was falling apart in the times of the Renaissance popes. But in the next entry I will try to convey some of my antichristian thinking by taking the Catholic Erasmus to task. Meanwhile let’s continue with Clark’s views:

In 1506 Erasmus went to Italy. He was in Bologna at the exact time of Julius II’s famous quarrel with Michelangelo; he was in Rome when Raphael began work on the Papal apartments. But none of this seems to have made any impression on him. His chief interest was in the publication of his works by the famous Venetian printer and pioneer of finely printed popular editions, Aldus Manutius. Whereas in the last chapter I was concerned with the enlargement of man’s spirit through the visual image, in this one I am chiefly concerned with the extension of his mind through the word. And this was made possible by the invention of printing.

Printing, of course, had been invented long before the time of Erasmus. Gutenberg’s Bible was printed in 1455. But the first printed books were large, sumptuous and expensive. It took preachers and persuaders almost thirty years to recognise what a formidable new instrument had come into their hands, just as it took politicians twenty years to recognise the value of television. The first man to take advantage of the printing press was Erasmus. He poured out pamphlets and anthologies and introductions; and so in a few years did everyone who had views on anything.

This should remind us of our own age! Take heed of the elucidating excerpts from a 2009 interview of James Bowery by Jim Giles.

Bowery said: “We are essentially living under a theocracy. I call it Holocaustianity but other people call it political correctness. It’s essentially a canon of morals that have taken over Christianity, and the primary sins of this religion involve ‘racism’ which is an undefined word, and anti-Semitism (sexism is certainly down their list; it is like a venial sin, not a mortal sin). So people have been indoctrinated in this by the media and the academia. The government has passed legislation about these morals to make them violation of law. So people [in the 21st century] are essentially in a medieval mindset, living in a theocracy. It’s just that it is not operating under that name… Right now people are essentially in a State where there cannot be a Protestant Reformation. You can’t have other religions than this State religion of political correctness” (39:40).

And later during the interview Bowery added: “Let me go back to my point about the theocracy, and the dissolution of the theocracy in Europe. The Gutenberg press created a situation in which the monopoly of the Church on the written word was broken. A large portion of what the Church was about was media control. So through the media control they could indoctrinate the populations and maintain, you know, a revenue stream. The Gutenberg press broke that. Now all of a sudden you get lots of other voices. As I said, I have been working in this Internet stuff since the early days” (1:29:42).

And that is altogether crucial for our cause. Bowery concludes: “I knew this time was coming. The Internet is the new Gutenberg press. And the theocracy is being taken apart because its control of the media is being taken apart. And we are getting a new Protestant Reformation and following on the heels of that, people are going to say: ‘Look: We have our own beliefs… This is the way things should be.’ Even the Jesuits just couldn’t stand up to that. I don’t think the Jews can’t either.” (1:31:35).

That’s exactly why Erasmus was so notable, as the nationalist Internet bloggers will be equally notable from the standpoint of a latter-day Clark in the coming ethno-state, once the current theocracy falls apart.

Both Erasmus and Luther were involved in important translations of the Bible that shaked the medieval worldview. Although in the next episode Clark spoke highly about Counterreformation art, after the last indented quotation he said: “Whatever else he may have been, Luther was a hero; and after all the doubts and hesitations of the humanists, and the hovering flight of Erasmus, it is with a real sense of emotional relief that we hear Luther say: ‘Here I stand.’” However, at the same time Clark was also dismayed that the Protestants smashed the colored glasses of beautiful Catholic churches, and that artistic images of the Virgin were decapitated.

But it had to happen if civilisation was not to wither, or petrify. And ultimately a new civilisation was created—but it was a civilisation not of the image, but of the word.

But even the Protestant reaction had to be triumphed over, this time by secularism.

It is refreshing to see, in the closing remarks of the episode, Clark praising Montaigne as “completely sceptical about the Christian religion” and of Shakespeare as “the first great poet without a religious belief.”

Categories
Charlemagne

Hitler

The greatest man yet to be born of the modern age has been slandered and vilified to the point where he has become the very symbol of evil. It fills me with despair when I reflect on the fact that the Anglo element of the Germanic population was tricked into sacrificing close to a million of its best young men to destroy the movement which had the potential to bring about our salvation.

—Hyperborean



Today is the Führer’s birthday. He was the most outstanding defender of the West since the times of Charlemagne. But the unimaginably malignant treason of our times has raised a smoke screen so dense around his figure that nobody, except a few blog commenters perhaps, like Ciaran at The Occidental Observer, are starting to see through it:

He was a visionary, and a statesman—but no general. Jewish power is based on the slander, and inversion of real history about the events of the Twentieth Century. Hitler and the Nazis are the Trojan Horse, used to colonize the very minds of Western Whites.

Hitler and the Nazis were not evil. You are blaming the victims. How dare you? They made a lot of mistakes—but Hitler was the last White Man that tried to defend his own people.

Every single time any one of you allows a lie to stand—you collude with our murderers. You may want to get rid of Hitler et al—but to allow the slander to stand is simply nothing more than laziness, and cowardice. How dare you?

Telling the truth about the real events of the Twentieth Century does not “keep White Nationalism in a ghetto”—it’s the laziness and timidity and cowardice that does that.

The Worst Generation fought against people who had done them no harm, actively participated in the Civil Rights dismantling of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and did nothing to resist the 1965 Immigration Act, “Women’s Lib”, and the absolute degradation of the culture. The Worst Generation went along with everything, while they wallowed in what’s turning out to be rather short-term affluence.

The worst Generation did immense, civilization-wrecking harm. They set the stage for our genocide. They did wrong—for a host of reasons. And one wrong enabled another.

I’d like to ignore Hitler—but I’m not allowed to. The Jewish Media parades his demonized corpse around 24/7. I challenge any of you to turn on a radio, a TV set, open a magazine, or website, and not have poor old Adolf thrown right in your face. His name is invoked in the weirdest, and most unrelated situations. We will never be free of Hitler until we stop caving to the monstrous and fallacious demonization of Hitler.

This generation should be called out for what they’ve done. They should be ashamed of themselves. The ones that are around can still vote. Their shame should be held up as an example to future generations. The Founding Generation will feel repulsion of the deeds of the Worst Generation.

Adolf Hitler and the soldiers of the Reich did not bring death and destruction. Talmudic Jewry, and their vile Shabbos Goy sell-out whores, did that.

Refusing to accept this alienating, and self-obliterating lie is what sets us free.

Flattering the soldiers of World War II as “The Greatest Generation,” is one of Satan’s most beloved and successful tricks—cosseting human vanity. If that generation, and the succeeding generations, get hung up on that meme, that fraud, that con job, then it becomes more and more difficult to assess, with each passing day, the true, real-world legacy of that generation. Why do any of us want to lock ourselves into a mythos, created by our enemies, that leads directly to our dispossession and genocide, simply to flatter old men?

When I challenge these oldsters—and every last one of them is a Christian—I tell them, “I know it’s terrible to have to accept the fact that the ‘biggest’ event of your life was a terrible, horrible mistake. But you are going to have to deal with this when you face God—so get used to the idea now. Think about how you will account for this…”

Categories
Architecture Catholic religious orders Napoleon

Léon Degrelle’s “The Enigma of Hitler”

Léon Degrelle was a Belgian Rexist leader, SS officer, decorated combatant on the Eastern Front. Of the first eight hundred Walloon volunteers who left for the Axis campaign against the Soviet Union and Stalinist Marxism, only three survived the war—one of them Degrelle. He died in 1994, while still in exile in Spain.


“Hitler—you knew him—what was he like?” I have been asked that question a thousand times since 1945, and nothing is more difficult to answer.

Approximately two hundred thousand books have dealt with the Second World War and with its central figure, Adolf Hitler. But has the real Hitler been discovered by any of them? “The enigma of Hitler is beyond all human comprehension,” the left-wing German weekly Die Zeit once put it.

Salvador Dalí, art’s unique genius, sought to penetrate the mystery in one of his most intensely dramatic paintings. Towering mountain landscapes all but fill the canvas, leaving only a few luminous meters of seashore dotted with delicately miniaturized human figures: the last witness to a dying peace. A huge telephone receiver dripping tears of blood hangs from the branch of a dead tree; and here and there hang umbrellas and bats whose portent is visibly the same. As Dalí tells it, “Chamberlain’s umbrella appeared in this painting in a sinister light, made evident by the bat, and it struck me when I painted it as a thing of enormous anguish.”

He then confided: “I felt this painting to be deeply prophetic. But I confess that I haven’t yet figured out the Hitler enigma either. He attracted me only as an object of my mad imaginings and because I saw him as a man uniquely capable of turning things completely upside down.”

What a lesson in humility for the braying critics who have rushed into print since 1945 with their thousands of “definitive” books, most of them scornful, about this man who so troubled the introspective Dalí that forty years later he still felt anguished and uncertain in the presence of his own hallucinatory painting. Apart from Dalí, who else has ever tried to present an objective portrayal of this extraordinary man whom Dalí labeled the most explosive figure in human history? (Dalí was ejected from the Surrealist Movement in 1934 because of his fascination with Hitler and his fascist sympathies.)


Like Pavlov’s Bell

The mountains of Hitler books based on blind hatred and ignorance do little to describe or explain the most powerful man the world has ever seen. How, I ponder, do these thousands of disparate portraits of Hitler in any way resemble the man I knew? The Hitler seated beside me, standing up, talking, listening. It has become impossible to explain to people fed fantastic tales for decades that what they have read or heard on television just does not correspond to the truth.

People have come to accept fiction, repeated a thousand times over, as reality. Yet they have never seen Hitler, never spoken to him, never heard a word from his mouth. The very name of Hitler immediately conjures up a grimacing devil, the fount of all of one’s negative emotions. Like Pavlov’s bell, the mention of Hitler is meant to dispense with substance and reality. In time, however, history will demand more than these summary judgements.


Strangely Attractive

Hitler is always present before my eyes: as a man of peace in 1936, as a man of war in 1944. It is not possible to have been a personal witness to the life of such an extraordinary man without being marked by it forever. Not a day goes by but Hitler rises again in my memory, not as a man long dead, but as a real being who paces his office floor, seats himself in his chair, pokes the burning logs in the fireplace.

The first thing anyone noticed when he came into view was his small mustache. Countless times he had been advised to shave it off, but he always refused: people were used to him the way he was.

He was not tall—no more than was Napoleon or Alexander the Great.

Hitler had deep blue eyes that many found bewitching, although I did not find them so. Nor did I detect the electric current his hands were said to give off. I gripped them quite a few times and was never struck by his lightning.

His face showed emotion or indifference according to the passion or apathy of the moment. At times he was as though benumbed, saying not a word, while his jaws moved in the meanwhile as if they were grinding an obstacle to smithereens in the void. Then he would come suddenly alive and launch into a speech directed at you alone, as though he were addressing a crowd of hundreds of thousands at Berlin’s Tempelhof airfield. Then he became as if transfigured. Even his complexion, otherwise dull, lit up as he spoke. And at such times, to be sure, Hitler was strangely attractive and as if possessed of magic powers.


Exceptional Vigor

Anything that might have seemed too solemn in his remarks, he quickly tempered with a touch of humor. The picturesque word, the biting phrase were at his command. In a flash he would paint a word-picture that brought a smile, or come up with an unexpected and disarming comparison. He could be harsh and even implacable in his judgments and yet almost at the same time be surprisingly conciliatory, sensitive and warm.

After 1945 Hitler was accused of every cruelty, but it was not in his nature to be cruel. He loved children. It was an entirely natural thing for him to stop his car and share his food with young cyclists along the road. Once he gave his raincoat to a derelict plodding in the rain. At midnight he would interrupt his work and prepare the food for his dog Blondi.

He could not bear to eat meat, because it meant the death of a living creature. He refused to have so much as a rabbit or a trout sacrificed to provide his food. He would allow only eggs on his table, because egg-laying meant that the hen had been spared rather than killed.

Hitler’s eating habits were a constant source of amazement to me. How could someone on such a rigorous schedule, who had taken part in tens of thousands of exhausting mass meetings from which he emerged bathed with sweat, often losing two to four pounds in the process; who slept only three to four hours a night; and who, from 1940 to 1945, carried the whole world on his shoulders while ruling over 380 million Europeans: how, I wondered, could he physically survive on just a boiled egg, a few tomatoes, two or three pancakes, and a plate of noodles? But he actually gained weight!

He drank only water. He did not smoke and would not tolerate smoking in his presence. At one or two o’clock in the morning he would still be talking, untroubled, close to his fireplace, lively, often amusing. He never showed any sign of weariness. Dead tired his audience might be, but not Hitler.

He was depicted as a tired old man. Nothing was further from the truth. In September 1944, when he was reported to be fairly doddering, I spent a week with him. His mental and physical vigor were still exceptional. The attempt made on his life on July 20th had, if anything, recharged him. He took tea in his quarters as tranquilly as if we had been in his small private apartment at the chancellery before the war, or enjoying the view of snow and bright blue sky through his great bay window at Berchtesgaden.


Iron Self-Control

At the very end of his life, to be sure, his back had become bent, but his mind remained as clear as a flash of lightening. The testament he dictated with extraordinary composure on the eve of his death, at three in the morning of April 29, 1945, provides us a lasting testimony. Napoleon at Fontainebleau was not without his moments of panic before his abdication. Hitler simply shook hands with his associates in silence, breakfasted as on any other day, then went to his death as if he were going on a stroll. When has history ever witnessed so enormous a tragedy brought to its end with such iron self-control?

Hitler’s most notable characteristic was ever his simplicity. The most complex of problems resolved itself in his mind into a few basic principles. His actions were geared to ideas and decisions that could be understood by anyone. The laborer from Essen, the isolated farmer, the Ruhr industrialist, and the university professor could all easily follow his line of thought. The very clarity of his reasoning made everything obvious.

His behavior and his lifestyle never changed even when he became the ruler of Germany. He dressed and lived frugally. During his early days in Munich, he spent no more than a mark per day for food. At no stage in his life did he spend anything on himself. Throughout his thirteen years in the chancellery he never carried a wallet or ever had money of his own.


Intellectual Curiosity

Hitler was self-taught and made not attempt to hide the fact. The smug conceit of intellectuals, their shiny ideas packaged like so many flashlight batteries, irritated him at times. His own knowledge he had acquired through selective and unremitting study, and he knew far more than thousands of diploma-decorated academics.

I don’t think anyone ever read as much as he did. He normally read one book every day, always first reading the conclusion and the index in order to gauge the work’s interest for him. He had the power to extract the essence of each book and then store it in his computer-like mind. I have heard him talk about complicated scientific books with faultless precision, even at the height of the war.

His intellectual curiosity was limitless. He was readily familiar with the writings of the most diverse authors, and nothing was too complex for his comprehension. He had a deep knowledge and understanding of Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus Christ, as well as Luther, Calvin, and Savonarola; of literary giants such as Dante, Schiller, Shakespeare, and Goethe; and of analytical writers such as Renan and Gobineau, Chamberlain and Sorel.

He had trained himself in philosophy by studying Aristotle and Plato. He could quote entire paragraphs of Schopenhauer from memory, and for a long time carried a pocked edition of Schopenhauer with him. Nietzsche taught him much about the willpower.

His thirst for knowledge was unquenchable. He spent hundreds of hours studying the works of Tacitus and Mommsen, military strategists such as Clausewitz, and empire builders such as Bismarck. Nothing escaped him: world history or the history of civilizations, the study of the Bible and the Talmud, Thomistic philosophy and all the master- pieces of Homer, Sophocles, Horace, Ovid, Titus Livius and Cicero. He knew Julian the Apostate as if he had been his contemporary.

His knowledge also extended to mechanics. He knew how engines worked; he understood the ballistics of various weapons; and he astonished the best medical scientists with his knowledge of medicine and biology.

The universality of Hitler’s knowledge may surprise or displease those unaware of it, but it is nonetheless a historical fact: Hitler was one of the most cultivated men of this century. Many times more so than Churchill, an intellectual mediocrity; or than Pierre Laval, with his mere cursory knowledge of history; or than Roosevelt; or Eisenhower, who never got beyond detective novels.


Artist and Architect

Even during his earliest years, Hitler was different than other children. He had an inner strength and was guided by his spirit and his instincts.

He could draw skillfully when he was only eleven years old. His sketches made at that age show a remarkable firmness and liveliness.

His first paintings and watercolors, created at age 15, are full of poetry and sensitivity. One of his most striking early works, “Fortress Utopia,” also shows him to have been an artist of rare imagination. His artistic orientation took many forms. He wrote poetry from the time he was a lad. He dictated a complete play to his sister Paula who was amazed at his presumption. At the age of 16, in Vienna, he launched into the creation of an opera. He even designed the stage settings, as well as all the costumes; and, of course, the characters were Wagnerian heroes.

More than just an artist, Hitler was above all an architect. Hundreds of his works were notable as much for the architecture as for the painting. From memory alone he could reproduce in every detail the onion dome of a church or the intricate curves of wrought iron. Indeed, it was to fulfill his dream of becoming an architect that Hitler went to Vienna at the beginning of the century.

When one sees the hundreds of paintings, sketches and drawings he created at the time, which reveal his mastery of three dimensional figures, it is astounding that his examiners at the Fine Arts Academy failed him in two successive examinations. German historian Werner Maser, no friend of Hitler, castigated these examiners: “All of his works revealed extraordinary architectural gifts and knowledge. The builder of the Third Reich gives the former Fine Arts Academy of Vienna cause for shame.”


Humble Origins

Impressed by the beauty of the church in a Benedictine monastery where he was part of the choir and served as an altar boy, Hitler dreamt fleetingly of becoming a Benedictine monk. And it was at that time, too, interestingly enough, that whenever he attended mass, he always had to pass beneath the first swastika he had ever seen: it was graven in the stone escutcheon of the abbey portal.

Hitler’s father, a customs officer, hoped the boy would follow in his footsteps and become a civil servant. His tutor encouraged him to become a monk. Instead the young Hitler went, or rather he fled, to Vienna. And there, thwarted in his artistic aspirations by the bureaucratic mediocraties of academia, he turned to isolation and meditation. Lost in the great capital of Austria-Hungary, he searched for his destiny.

During the first thirty years of Hitler’s life, the date April 20, 1889, meant nothing to anyone. He was born on that day in Branau, a small town in the Inn valley. During his exile in Vienna, he often thought of his modest home, and particularly of his mother. When she fell ill, he returned home from Vienna to look after her. For weeks he nursed her, did all the household chores, and supported her as the most loving of sons. When she finally died, on Christmas eve, his pain was immense. Wracked with grief, he buried his mother in the little country cemetery: “I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief,” said his mother’s doctor, who happened to be Jewish.

In his room, Hitler always displayed an old photograph of his mother. The memory of the mother he loved was with him until the day he died. Before leaving this earth, on April 30, 1945, he placed his mother’s photograph in front of him. She had blue eyes like his and a similar face. Her maternal intuition told her that her son was different from other children. She acted almost as if she knew her son’s destiny. When she died, she felt anguished by the immense mystery surrounding her son.

Throughout the years of his youth, Hitler lived the life of a virtual recluse. He greatest wish was to withdraw from the world. At heart a loner, he wandered about, ate meager meals, but devoured the books of three public libraries. He abstained from conversations and had few friends.

It is almost impossible to imagine another such destiny where a man started with so little and reached such heights. Alexander the Great was the son of a king. Napoleon, from a well-to-do family, was a general at twenty-four. Fifteen years after Vienna, Hitler would still be an unknown corporal. Thousands of others had a thousand times more opportunity to leave their mark on the world.

Hitler was not much concerned with his private life. In Vienna he had lived in shabby, cramped lodgings. But for all that he rented a piano that took up half his room, and concentrated on composing his opera. He lived on bread, milk, and vegetable soup. His poverty was real. He did not even own an over-coat. He shoveled streets on snowy days. He carried luggage at the railway station. He spent many weeks in shelters for the homeless. But he never stopped painting or reading.

Despite his dire poverty, Hitler somehow managed to maintain a clean appearance. Landlords and landladies in Vienna and Munich all remembered him for his civility and pleasant disposition. His behavior was impeccable. His room was always spotless, his meager belongings meticulously arranged, and his clothes neatly hung or folded. He washed and ironed his own clothes, something which in those days few men did. He needed almost nothing to survive, and money from the sale of a few paintings was sufficient to provide for all his needs.


Summing Things Up

Hitler had not yet focused on politics, but without his rightly knowing, that was the career to which he was most strongly called. Politics would ultimately blend with his passion for art. People, the masses, would be the clay the sculptor shapes into an immortal form. The human clay would become for him a beautiful work of art like one of Myron’s marble sculptures, a Hans Makart painting, or Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

His love of music, art, and architecture had not removed him from the political life and social concerns of Vienna. In order to survive, he worked as a common laborer side by side with other workers. He was a silent spectator, but nothing escaped him: not the vanity and egoism of the bourgeoisie, not the moral and material misery of the people, nor yet the hundreds of thousands of workers who surged down the wide avenues of Vienna with anger in their hearts.

He had also been taken aback by the growing presence in Vienna of bearded Jews wearing caftans, a sight unknown in Linz. “How can they be Germans?” he asked himself. He read the statistics: in 1860 there were sixty-nine Jewish families in Vienna; forty years later there were two hundred thousand. They were everywhere. He observed their invasion of the universities and the legal and medical professions, and their takeover of the newspapers.

Hitler was exposed to the passionate reactions of the workers to this influx, but the workers were not alone in their unhappiness. There were many prominent persons in Austria and Hungary who did not hide their resentment at what they believed was an alien invasion of their country. The mayor of Vienna, a Christian-Democrat and a powerful orator, was eagerly listened to by Hitler.

Hitler was also concerned with the fate of the eight million Austrian Germans kept apart from Germany, and thus deprived of their rightful German nationhood. He saw Emperor Franz Josef as a bitter and petty old man unable to cope with the problems of the day and the aspirations of the future.

Quietly, the young Hitler was summing things up in his mind.

First: Austrians were part of Germany, the common fatherland.

Second: The Jews were aliens within the German community.

Third: Patriotism was only valid if it was shared by all classes. The common people with whom Hitler had shared grief and humiliation were just as much a part of the fatherland as the millionaires of high society.

Fourth: Class war would sooner or later condemn both workers and bosses to ruin in any country. No country could survive class war; only cooperation between workers and bosses can benefit the country. Workers must be respected and live with decency and honor. Creativity must never be stifled.

When Hitler later said that he had formed his social and political doctrine in Vienna, he told the truth. Ten years later his observations made in Vienna would become the order of the day.

Thus Hitler was to live for several years in the crowded city of Vienna as a virtual outcast, yet quietly observing everything around him. His strength came from within. He did not rely on anyone to do his thinking for him. Exceptional human beings always feel lonely amid the vast human throng. Hitler saw his solitude as a wonderful opportunity to meditate and not to be submerged in a mindless sea. In order not to be lost in the wastes of a sterile desert, a strong soul seeks refuge within himself. Hitler was such a soul.


Lightning and the Word

The lightning in Hitler’s life would come from the Word.

All his artistic talent would be channeled into his mastery of communication and eloquence. Hitler would never conceive of popular conquests without the power of the Word. He would enchant and be enchanted by it. He would find total fulfillment when the magic of his words inspired the hearts and minds of the masses with whom he communed. He would feel reborn each time he conveyed with mystical beauty the knowledge he had acquired in his lifetime.

Hitler’s incantory eloquence will remain, for a very long time, a vast field of study for the psychoanalyst. The power of Hitler’s word is the key. Without it, there would never have been a Hitler era.


Transcendent Faith

Did Hitler believe in God? He believed deeply in God. He called God the Almighty, master of all that is known and unknown.

Propagandists portrayed Hitler as an atheist. He was not. He had contempt for hypocritical and materialistic clerics, but he was not alone in that. He believed in the necessity of standards and theological dogmas, without which, he repeatedly said, the great institution of the Christian church would collapse. These dogmas clashed with his intelligence, but he also recognized that it was hard for the human mind to encompass all the problems of creation, its limitless scope and breathtaking beauty. He acknowledged that every human being has spiritual needs.

The song of the nightingale, the pattern and color of a flower, continually brought him back to the great problems of creation. No one in the world has spoken to me so eloquently about the existence of God. He held this view not because he was brought up as a Christian, but because his analytical mind bound him to the concept of God. Hitler’s faith transcended formulas and contingencies. God was for him the basis of everything, the ordainer of all things, of his destiny and that of all others.

Note

Excerpted from volume two of Degrelle’s uncompleted multi-volume series on the life and legacy of Adolf Hitler, Hitler: Born at Versailles (Costa Mesa, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1987). The examples of Hitler’s art have been scanned from Adolf Hitler: The Unknown Artist (Houston: Billy F. Price, 1984).

Source: Irmin Vinson’s site.

Categories
Art Civilisation (TV series) Friedrich Nietzsche Kenneth Clark Michelangelo Painting Philosophy Real men

Civilisation’s “The Hero as Artist”

For an introduction to these series, see here.

Below, some indented excerpts of “The Hero as Artist,” the fifth chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark, after which I offer my comments.

Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:

In the Middle Ages men had been crushed by this [ancient Roman] gigantic scale. They said that these buildings must be the work of demons, or at best they treated them simply as natural phenomena—like mountains—and built their huts in them.

But by 1500 the Romans had begun to realise that they had been built by men. The lively and intelligent individuals who created the Renaissance, bursting with vitality and confidence, were not in a mood to be crushed by antiquity. They meant to absorb it, to equal it, to master it. They were going to produce their own race of giants and heroes.

In what is commonly described as the decadence of the papacy, the Popes were men of unusual ability who used their international contacts, their great civil service and their increasing wealth in the interests of civilisation. Nicholas V, the friend of Alberti and the humanists, was the first man who saw that papal Rome could revive the grandeurs of pagan Rome.

Pius II, a poet, a lover of nature and of beauty in all its forms, yet gave up his life in an attempt to save Christendom from the Turks. Even Sixtus IV, who was as brutal and cunning as he looks in the wall-painting by Melozzo da Forlo, founded the Vatican library and made the great humanist, Platina, its first prefect. Pope Julius II was able by magnanimity and strength of will to inspire and bully three men of genius—Bramante, Michelangelo and Raphael. Without him Michelangelo would not have painted the Sistine Ceiling, nor Raphael decorated the papal apartments, and so we should have been without two of the greatest visible expressions of spiritual power and humanist philosophy.

The above paragraphs remind me what Nietzsche said almost at the end of his Antichrist: that without the Reformation and Counter-Reformation these rather pagan popes would have brought Christianity down. Clark continues:

The old St Peter’s was one of the largest and most ancient churches in the western world, and certainly the most venerable. Julius decided to pull it down and put something far more splendid in its place. The first step in this visible alliance between Christianity and antiquity was taken when Julius decided to pull down the old basilica.

The men of fifteenth-century Florence had looked back eagerly to the civilisation of Greece and Rome. They sought for ancient authors and read them with passion, and wrote to each other in Latin. Their greatest source of pride was to write prose like Cicero. But the man who really assimilated antique art and recreated it, with all its expressive power made more vital and more intense, was Michelangelo.

Seen by itself the David’s body might be some unusually taut and vivid work of antiquity; it is only when we come to the head that we are aware of a spiritual force that the ancient world never knew. I suppose that this quality, which I may call heroic, is not part of most people’s idea of civilisation. It involves a contempt for convenience and a sacrifice of all those pleasures that contribute to what we call civilised life. It is the enemy of happiness.

And this of course can only remind me of Harold Covington’s extreme contempt for those so-called “nationalists” who watch TV while eating so tasty Nachos that only grow their bellies; always reluctant to come home and fight for the creation of a new nation. Clark continues:

And yet we recognise that to despise material obstacles, and even to defy the blind forces of fate, is man’s supreme achievement; and since, in the end, civilisation depends of man extending his powers of mind and spirit to the utmost, we must reckon the emergence of Michelangelo as one of the great events in the history of western man.

[His drawing of Battle of Cascina] was the first authoritative statement that the human body—that body which, in Gothic times, had been the subject of shame and concealment, that body which Alberti has praised so extravagantly—could be made the means of expressing noble sentiments, life-giving energy and God-like perfection. It was an idea that was to have an incalculable influence on the human mind for four hundred years.

And this brings us back to Rome, and to the terrible Pope. Julius II was not only ambitious for the Catholic Church: he was ambitious for Julius II, and in his new temple he planned to erect the greatest tomb of any ruler since the time of Hadrian. It was a staggering example of superbia; and Michelangelo at that time was not without the same characteristic. I need not go into the question of why the tomb was never built. There was a quarrel—heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes. Nor does it matter to us what the tomb was going to look like. All that matters is that some of the figures made for it survive, and they add something new to the European spirit—something that neither antiquity nor the great civilisations of India and China had ever dreamed of. As a matter of fact the two most finished of them were derived from antiques, but Michelangelo has turned them from athletes to captives, one of them struggling to be free—freedom from mortality?—and the other sensuously resigned.

People sometimes wonder why the Renaissance Italians, with their intelligent curiosity, didn’t make more of a contribution to the history of thought. The reason is that the most profound thought of the time was not expressed in words, but in visual imagery.

For centuries writers on Michelangelo have criticised Julius for taking him off the tomb, on which he had set his heart, and putting him to work on the painting of the Sistine Ceiling, although he always said he hated the act of painting.

Michelangelo’s power of prophetic insight gives one the feeling that he belongs to every epoch, and most of all, perhaps, to the epoch of the great Romantics, of which we are still the most bankrupt heirs. It is the attribute that distinguishes him most sharply from his brilliant rival, Raphael. Michelangelo took no interest in the opposite sex; Leonardo thought of women solely as reproductive mechanisms. But Raphael loved girls as much as any Venetian.

The convention by which great events in biblical or secular history could be enacted only by magnificent physical specimens, handsome and well-groomed, went on for a long time—till the middle of the nineteenth century. Only a very few artists—perhaps only Rembrandt and Caravaggio in the first rank—were independent enough to stand against it. And I think that this convention, which was an element in the so-called grand manner, became a deadening influence on the European mind. It deadened our sense of truth, even our sense of moral responsibility; and led, as we now see, to a hideous reaction.

Categories
Arcadia Architecture Art Arthur C. Clarke Beauty Civilisation (TV series) Kenneth Clark Painting

Civilisation’s “Man—the Measure of all Things”

For an introduction to these series, see here.

Below, some indented excerpts of “Man—the Measure of all Things,” the fourth chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark, after which I offer my comments.

Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:

The Pazzi Chapel, built by the great Florentine Brunellesco in about 1430, is in a style that has been called the architecture of humanism. His friend and fellow-architect, Leon Battista Alberti, addressed man in these words: ‘To you is given a body more graceful than other animals.’

There is no better instance of how a burst of civilisation depends on confidence than the Florentine state of mind in the early fifteenth century. For fifty years the fortunes of the republic, which in a material sense had declined, were directed by a group of the most intelligent individuals who have ever been elected to power by a democratic government. From Salutati onwards the Florentine chancellors were scholars, believers in the studia humanitatis, in which learning could be used to achieve a happy life.

In Florence the first thirty years of the fifteenth century were the heroic age of scholarship when new texts were discovered and old texts edited. It was to house these precious texts, any one of which might contain some new revelation that might alter the course of human thought, that Cosimo de Medici built the library of San Marco. It looks to us peaceful and remote—but the first studies that took place there were not remote from life at all. It was the humanist equivalent of the Cavendish Laboratory. The manuscripts unpacked and studied under these harmonious vaults could alter the course of history with an explosion, not of matter, but of mind.

The discipline of trade and banking, in its most austere form, was beginning to be relaxed, and life—a full use of the human faculties—became more important than making money.

The dignity of man. Today these words die on our lips. But in the fifteenth century Florence their meaning was still a fresh and invigorating belief. Gianozzo Manetti, a humanist man of affection, who had seen the seamy side of politics, nevertheless wrote a book entitled On the Dignity and Excellence of Man. And this is the concept that Brunellesco’s friends were making visible.

Gravitas, the heavy tread of moral earnestness, becomes a bore if it is not accompanied by the light step of intelligence. Next to the Pazzi Chapel are the cloisters of Santa Croce, also built by Brunellesco. I said that the Gothic cathedrals were hymns to the divine light. These cloisters happily celebrate the light of human intelligence, and sitting in them I find it quite easy to believe in man. They have the qualities that give distinction to a mathematical theorem: clarity, economy, elegance.

Alberti, in his great book on building, describes the necessity of a public square ‘where young men may be diverted from the mischievousness and folly natural to their age.’ The early Florentine Renaissance was an urban culture, bourgeois properly so-called. Men spent their time in the streets and squares, and in the shops.

Elsewhere I’ve talked about how the modern world of money is inimical to racial interests. As to date, no white nationalist that I know has criticized the barbarous architecture, symptomatic in the worshiping of the new god of capitalism, so well epitomized in both London and New York: the subject of the last episode of Civilisation.

Together with the degenerate music, TV and Hollywood tastes and sexual lifestyles of some nationalists, architecture is another facet where the uncorrupted individual can read the signs of a decadent society; and why he cannot blame non-gentiles for all our problems when even the nationalists themselves are part of this problem.

Remember Clark’s words in the first episode? “If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a Minister of Housing or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the buildings.” One only has to contrast the completely soulless edifices we see everyday going to work with Raphael’s town square and see how extremely degraded, Mammonesque in fact our large cities have become.

In the popular imagination, the extreme examples of this degeneracy are the Foundation novels of Asimov and the latest Star Wars films, where a whole planet has become metropolis: the exact opposite of the most humane sci-fi novels by Arthur C. Clarke where, like the Florentines, the white people lived in small Elysian towns. Architecture today is so degenerate that even Roger Scruton in Why Beauty Matters—a 2009 BBC documentary that, unlike Clark’s Civilisation, is marred by the constant presence of non-whites—pays special attention to the sterile architectural forms of today’s world.

I wish young nationalists became believers in the studia humanitatis and familiarise themselves with those intellectuals in the movement that (like Clark) have a much broader sense of European culture than the common white nationalist blogger. I refer to people like Tom Sunic in Europe and Michael O’Meara in America. Both could help us to leave behind the provincial scene so common in the nationalist sphere as well as the simplistic single-cause hypothesis.

It is true that, unlike the Athenians, fifteenth century Florentines were chiefly interested, like contemporary western man, in making money. But like the Athenians the Florentines… loved beauty. Of the landscapes whose beauty mostly caught my attention during a trip through Europe by train, I still remember the Italian, about which Clark said:

Looking at the Tuscan landscape with its terraces of vines and olives and the dark vertical accents of the cypresses, one has the impression of timeless order. There must have been a time when it was all forest and swamp—shapeless, formless; and to bring order out of chaos is a process of civilisation.

Then, in the first years of the sixteenth century, the Venetian painter Giorgione transformed this happy contact with nature into something openly sensual. The ladies who, in the Gothic gardens, had been protected by voluminous draperies, are now naked; and, as a result, his Fête Champêtre opens a new chapter in European art. Giorgione was, indeed, one of the inspired, unpredictable innovators who disturb the course of history; and in this picture he has illustrated one of the comforting illusions of civilised man, the myth of Arcadia, which had been popularised some twenty years earlier by the poet Sannazaro. Of course, it is only a myth. Country life isn’t at all like this, and even on a picnic ants attack the sandwiches and wasps buzz round the wine glasses. But the pastoral fallacy had inspired Theocritus and Virgil, and had not been unknown in the Middle Ages. Giorgione has seen how fundamentally pagan it is.

True, but I don’t believe that the pastoral fallacy is childish. Pace Arthur Clarke, achieving Arcadia is an essentially psychogenic endeavour rather than a technological one. And I sincerely believe that utopia is feasible: only human primitivism, and especially the “monsters from the Id” currently affecting the white peoples, prevent it.

It has long seemed to me wise thinking about an ideal to direct our efforts toward it. It doesn’t matter if the ideal encounters numerous pitfalls: our will should incessantly be directional toward the worlds of the Florentine Fête. If the will of a sufficiently massive amount of white people is noble, the outside world can and will only represent the nobility of that will. Clark said:

With Giorgione’s picnic the balance and enjoyment of our human faculties seems to achieve perfection. But in history all points of supposed perfection have a hint of menace; and Giorgione himself discovers it in that mysterious picture known as the Tempesta.

What on earth is going on? What is the meaning of this half-naked woman suckling a baby, this flash of lightening, this broken column? Nobody knows; nobody has ever known.

To me the meaning is obvious. Even since the Renaissance artists started to see that the cities, more inclined to Mammon than to Raphael’s square, were places of tribulation in contrast to the madonna and her child with the man standing in contrapposto. Broken pillars often symbolize death (that bucolic world was about to die), and the painting’s storm in the background could be interpreted to symbolize urban turmoil.

Categories
Beauty Crusades

Civilisation’s “The Great Thaw”

For an introduction to these series, see here.

Below, some indented excerpts of “The Great Thaw,” the second chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark, after which I offer my comments.

Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:

There have been times in the history of man when the earth seems suddenly to have grown warmer or more radio-active… I don’t put that forward as a scientific proposition, but the fact remains that three or four times in history man has made a leap forward that would have been unthinkable under ordinary evolutionary conditions. One such time was about the year 3000 BC, when quite suddenly civilisation appeared, not only in Egypt and Mesopotamia but in the Indus valley; another was in the late sixth century BC, when there was not only the miracle of Ionia and Greece—philosophy, science, art, poetry, all reaching a point that wasn’t reached again for 2000 years, but also in India a spiritual enlightenment that has perhaps never been equalled.

But what people don’t always realise is that it all happened quite suddenly—in a single lifetime.

In the brainwashed United Kingdom of the late 1960’s it would not have occurred Clark that another great awakening had occurred in Germany during his lifespan, just thirty years before; and that it was crushed by the forces of evil led by the government of his country. Speaking about Christendom at the beginning of the second millennium of the Common Era, on the next page Clark continues:

How had all this suddenly appeared in Western Europe? Of course there are many answers, but one is overwhelmingly more important than the others: the triumph of the Church.

And here Clark omitted to mention what he implied in the previous chapter: that in the first millennium the role of the Church was destructive, as surmised in his paragraph about St. Gregory who destroyed entire libraries of classical knowledge (search for “St. Gregory” here). After starting to describe the medieval period that our silly high schools completely ignore, six pages later Clark mentioned the most emblematic feature of the age:

On the physical side this took the form of pilgrimages and crusades. I think they are among the features of the Middle Ages which it is hardest for us to understand. Pilgrimages were undertaken in hope of heavenly rewards. How can one hope to share this belief which played so great a part in medieval civilisation?

Later in the series I loved to see Clark saying that he never bothered to understand economics, because this is one of the things that contemporary historians, so alienated by Marxism will never understand.

In my childhood I received a medieval education from my father. When during my adolescence he started to abuse me, the doctrine of eternal damnation that he had inculcated me since childhood metamorphosed into an internal persecutor. It didn’t matter that I managed to escape my parents’ home and moved to San Rafael in the US: the internal persecutors accompanied me throughout my twenties.

When I asked for help to the organization known as Fundamentalists Anonymous by regular mail I received a dumb reply that greatly offended me, as I recount in my last book of Hojas Susurrantes. Although technically I had already abandoned the faith I then asked for help, always through regular mail, to John J. Heaney who taught theology at Fordham University. It was the Christian Heaney, not the silly rationalists of Fundamentalists Anonymous, who immediately understood what my inner agonies really meant and tried to help, at least in the modest form of an epistle. (These were times before the electronic mail became fashionable.)

Modern rationalists who find pilgrimages hard to understand lack elemental empathy toward the Other. Even Clark, when he talks of pilgrimages undertaken “in hope of heavenly rewards,” understates what a brutally-honest historian would have said instead: undertaken in hope of saving one’s soul from the eternal fire.

I mention this personal vignette because, despite claims to the contrary, history will never be understood “objectively.” We need the subjective experiences of the survivors of a given culture, even if such experiences were written by latter-day Christians and apostates: a sphere of knowledge altogether alien for the naïve historian who’s afraid to enter the tragic, subjective universes.

But Clark was infinitely superior to the Mr. Spock historian who currently controls the universities. On the next page he states:

Of course the most important place of pilgrimage was Jerusalem. After the tenth century, when a strong Byzantine empire made the journey practicable, pilgrims used to go in parties of 7,000 at a time. This is the background of that extraordinary episode in history, the First Crusade.

The crusades aside, several pages later Clark speaks of the author of The Heavenly Hierarchies:

He argued that we could only come to understand absolute beauty, which is God, through the effect of precious and beautiful things on our senses. He said: ‘The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material.’ This was really a revolutionary concept in the Middle Ages. It was the intellectual background of all sublime works of art in the next century and in fact has remained the basis of our belief in the value of art until today.

“Today” still meant 1969, when Clark’s body language and voice were recorded by the BBC. Not anymore. Presently many whites seem to loathe traditional works of art not only by labelling them “kitch” but by praising instead degenerate forms of cultural expression. That this happens even among white nationalists, the watchdogs of the West, should be enough to convince the honest reader that something really odd is gong on in the white psyche, and that we hardly can blame the Jews for all our problems.

Following next Clark takes us to that place where the dull mind, even the atheist’s mind, rises indeed through the matter, Chartres Cathedral:

Chartres was the centre of a school of philosophy devoted to Plato, and in particular to his mysterious book called the Timaeus, from which it was thought that the whole universe could be interpreted as a form of measurable harmony.

Figures had been made into columns since the Cnidian treasury at Delphi, but never so narrowly compressed and elongated as they are here. I fancy that the faces which look at us from the past are the surest indication we have of the meaning of an epoch.

Once more the chronicles describe how people came from all over France to join the work, how whole villages moved in order to help provide for the workmen; and of course there must have been many more of them this time, because the buildings was bigger and more elaborate, and required hundreds of masons, not to mention a small army of glass-makers.

Chartres is the epitome of the first great awakening in European civilisation.

Absolute beauty, the God of the post-Christian, not evil music or Hollywood treason has a chance to bring into being another great awakening…

Categories
Christendom Judeo-reductionism Kali Yuga

Fascinating Guessedworker / Linder exchange

In 2009 the British Guessedworker interviewed the American Alex Linder. The full interview (here) is 1:17 hrs. I boiled it down to the bare essentials: only 15 minutes.

It touches the subjects discussed in the previous entries: the single-cause hypothesis—i.e., Jews as the basic etiology of Western malaise—versus the more complex models that would involve depth psychology of the white people.

My edited clip also includes other topics discussed here recently, such as Christianity and Anti-christianity, the toxic role played by Hollywood and more:

Categories
Egalitarianism Judeo-reductionism Kevin MacDonald

Blaming the shark

sparing the Megalodon

For a pic of the Megalodon size compared
to a modern day great white shark, see: here.

 

(I have edited this article in September of 2017.)

I find it hilarious that Greg Johnson now believes in what my good friend Tanstaafl calls “the suicide meme” because it was Johnson himself who showed us how Christianity has also been a contributing factor in our racial eclipse.

In his latest article Johnson wrote, “The claim that white dispossession is entirely our fault is absurd… But it is more than absurd. It is repugnant.” And after a few statements he added, “Thus America is not committing suicide.”

But Johnson failed to mention who in the white nationalist movement is blaming whites a hundred percent for our predicament. On the other hand, there are some nationalists who blame the Jews a hundred percent and are unwilling to conceive that there’s something wrong going on in the white psyche.

Johnson is not among them. In his above-linked article, “Our fault?” he concedes:

But most powerless whites still share the universalistic, altruistic, anti-ethnocentric values of the whites who are actively selling us out. Many others share the cynical, selfish, individualistic, devil-take-the-hindmost values…

And he adds:

White traitors would be far fewer if their actions were viewed as evil by the majority of the white community. Thus all whites who share the values that promote white genocide also share a small [my emphasis] degree of complicity.

A small degree? I thought whites shared the largest share in Western suicide!—an ongoing suicide since the times of how they performed upon themselves a cultural self-lobotomy when a Galilean-inspired cult took over the Roman Empire, to the French Revolution that emancipated the Jews and the American Civil War that was fought on the Negro’s behalf. Johnson wrote:

Our goal as White Nationalists should be to bear no further culpability for our ongoing genocide. And the way to do that is: (1) to understand the problem to its roots, (2) to reject all the causes of our predicament, and (3) to actively work for our race’s salvation. Until you do that, you remain part of the problem.

(1) I believe that no one fully understands the problem at its roots. It is just too complex. And it looks like there are hidden monsters from the Id that have not been considered by anyone.

(2) If I am right in my claim that there are hidden psychological factors unrecognized by the larger community, it is not possible at present to consciously “reject all the causes of our predicament.”

(3) Johnson, and many white nationalists, remain part of the problem. If Johnson et al were fully aware of all the factors they would strenuously reject both degenerate music and Hollywood as part of the cultural toxicity that is killing us.

Nonetheless, unlike the monocausalists who only blame the Jews for everything, Johnson also wrote:

The liberal, democratic, capitalist system alone is conducive to white genocide, even without Jewish involvement…

The white universalism, egalitarianism, and racial altruism that sustain the system are entirely alien to Judaism. Their roots lie in Greek natural law philosophy, Christianity, and Enlightenment liberalism. These values led Americans to fight a bloody and devastating Civil War largely over black slavery long before the rise of Jewish hegemony.

As Patrick Buchanan points out in Suicide of a Superpower, the materialistic values of liberal democracy have led to declining fertility in every first world country, including Israel and Asian countries, which lack hostile Jewish elites. If you combine this system with the racial egalitarianism and altruism and non-white immigration that existed in America before Jewish hegemony, one arrives at pretty much the same system that it killing us today. In other words, the present American system could conceivably have developed along essentially the same lines, even if Jews had never set foot on our shores.

This means that if the Jews suddenly departed tomorrow, but the capitalist system and universalist, egalitarian values remained in place, our race would still be on the path to extinction. Thus we need to do more than merely separate ourselves from other races. We also need to get to the deepest roots of the problem: the moral, political, and economic weaknesses that Jews are exploiting so effectively.

So far so good. But then Johnson added that “the organized Jewish community is now committing genocide against our race” failing to mention that the organized Christian community has been even more involved in our demise, as I tried to show in my list of antichristian articles, “The Christian problem encompasses the Jewish problem,” that a blogger known as Freedom Cobra summarized in a nutshell:

Here’s a simple flow-chart. Years of research and it boils down thusly:

Christianity is founded.

—> Christianity helps to destroy Rome

—> Christianity made somewhat decent by White efforts

—> White people thrive due to their nature

—> White people take Christianity to its logical, ethnocidal conclusion

—> White Civilization Waxes

—> We perish…

Johnson’s piece blamed the shark and essentially spared the Megalodon.

After Johnson deleted my comment in a recent, gullible piece that swallows the medieval claims about blood libel (evil Jews ritually sacrificing our little kids!), I don’t want to risk another censorship in subjects that I know better than him. But I can quote a dissident voice of his most recent article:

Deinking said…

When 2% of a population controls 98% with impunity, it’s empirical proof that that the 98% is inferior. If they weren’t inferior, things would be the opposite. Blaming Jews would be understandable if they were 20-30% of our population, but when they’re just a tiny fraction and still rule over us, we have no one to blame but ourselves. If we were just one-tenth as motivated, organized, and pitiless as they are, there would be no possible way for them to dominate us. They would hardly matter at all.

We Whites have always been too naive, too gullible, too kind, and idealistic. That’s our problem. If we were hardened realists then we would have destroyed Judaism and Jewish identity thousands of years ago, when the Romans had total control over Judea. But even the Romans were too softhearted and continually let the Jews have their own society even after they viciously slaughtered Roman citizens in their various rebellions… and this was before Christian morality warped our minds. There’s something seriously wrong with us.

Greg Johnson said…

Are humans inferior to scorpions and spiders because we are vulnerable to their stings? The term “inferior” is misplaced here. We are vulnerable to Jews, just as we are vulnerable to bullets. When a man has been shot, you don’t blame him for not being bullet proof. You blame him, though, if he handed his gun over to a criminal.

Denikin said…

A human getting accidentally stung by a scorpion is one thing. But when millions of humans have been repeatedly stung by scorpions for 2,000 years and have not yet learned to stay away from them, it means there’s something wrong with the humans, not the scorpions.

Perfect logic.