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Author: C .T.

Categories
Vladimir Lenin

Dominion, 31

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

[Andrew] Carnegie, then, proudly surveying his Diplodocus, could feel that its bones had been provided with a fitting reliquary. He was not, though, the only foreign visitor to London that May who believed that a proper understanding of science would enable humanity to attain world peace.

One day before the unveiling of the Diplodocus, a Russian named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov—Lenin, as he called himself—had also visited the city’s museum of natural history. No less than Carnegie, he was a proponent of putting the lessons taught by evolution to practical effect. Unlike Carnegie, however, he did not believe that human happiness was best served by giving free rein to capital. Capitalism, in Lenin’s opinion, was doomed to collapse. The workers of the world—the ‘proletariat’—were destined to inherit the earth. The abyss that yawned between ‘the handful of arrogant millionaires who wallow in filth and luxury, and the millions of working people who constantly live on the verge of pauperism’ made the triumph of communism certain.

For two weeks, Lenin and thirty-seven others had been in London to debate how this coming revolution in the affairs of the world might best be expedited—but that the laws of evolution made it inevitable none of them doubted. This was why, as though to a shrine, Lenin had led his fellow delegates to the museum. It was only a single stop, however. London had a second, an even holier shrine. The surest guide to the functioning of human society, and to the parabola of its future, had been provided not by Darwin, but by a second bearded thinker who, Job-like, had suffered from bereavement and boils.

Every time Lenin came to London he would visit the great man’s grave; 1905 was no exception. The moment the congress was over, Lenin had taken the delegates up to the cemetery in the north of the city where, twenty-two years earlier, their teacher, the man who —more than any other—had inspired them to attempt the transformation of the world, lay buried. Standing before the grave, the thirty-eight disciples paid their respects to Karl Marx. There had been only a dozen people at his funeral in 1883.

That is: the year following the deaths of Darwin and Gobineau, who, had it not been for the fact that Christian ethics still reigned in the minds of agnostic scientists, their influence would have begun to lay the foundations for the revaluation of values.

None, though, had ever had any doubts as to his epochal significance. One of the mourners, speaking over the open grave, had made sure to spell it out. ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution as it applies to organic matter, so Marx discovered the law of evolution as it applies to human history’…

Marx, the grandson of a rabbi and the son of a Lutheran convert, dismissed both Judaism and Christianity as ‘stages in the development of the human mind—different snake skins cast off by history, and man as the snake who cast them off’. An exile from the Rhineland, expelled from a succession of European capitals for mocking the religiosity of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, he had arrived in London with personal experience of the uses to which religion might be put by autocrats. Far from amplifying the voices of the suffering, it was a tool of oppression, employed to stifle and muzzle protest…

‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’ Here was a slogan with the clarity of a scientific formula.

Except, of course, that it was no such thing. Its line of descent was evident to anyone familiar with the Acts of the Apostles. ‘Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to everyone as he had need.’ Repeatedly throughout Christian history, the communism practised by the earliest Church had served radicals as their inspiration. Marx, when he dismissed questions of morality and justice as epiphenomena, was concealing the true germ of his revolt against capitalism behind jargon. A beard, he had once joked, was something ‘without which no prophet can succeed’…

Marx’s interpretation of the world appeared fuelled by certainties that had no obvious source in his model of economics. They rose instead from profounder depths. Again and again, the magma flow of his indignation would force itself through the crust of his scientific-sounding prose. For a self-professed materialist, he was oddly prone to seeing the world as the Church Fathers had once done: as a battleground between cosmic forces of good and evil… The very words used by Marx to construct his model of class struggle—‘exploitation’, ‘enslavement’, ‘avarice’—owed less to the chill formulations of economists than to something far older: the claims to divine inspiration of the biblical prophets. If, as he insisted, he offered his followers a liberation from Christianity, then it was one that seemed eerily like a recalibration of it.

Lenin and his fellow delegates, meeting in London that spring of 1905, would have been contemptuous of any such notion, of course. Religion— opium of the people that it was—would need, if the victory of the proletariat were properly to be secured, to be eradicated utterly. Oppression in all its forms had to be eliminated. The ends justified the means. Lenin’s commitment to this principle was absolute. Already, the single-mindedness with which he insisted on it had precipitated schism in the ranks of Marx’s followers. The congress held in London had been exclusively for those of them who defined themselves as Bolsheviks: the ‘Majority’.

Communists who insisted, in opposition to Lenin, on working alongside liberals, on confessing qualms about violence, on worrying that Lenin’s ambitions for a tightly organised, strictly disciplined party threatened dictatorship, were not truly communists at all—just a sect. Sternly, like the Donatists, the Bolsheviks dismissed any suggestion of compromising with the world as it was. Eagerly, like the Taborites, they yearned to see the apocalypse arrive, to see paradise established on earth. Fiercely, like the Diggers, they dreamed of an order in which land once held by aristocrats and kings would become the property of the people, a common treasury. Lenin, who was reported to admire both the Anabaptists of Münster and Oliver Cromwell, was not entirely contemptuous of the past. Proofs of what was to come were plentiful there. History, like an arrow, was proceeding on its implacable course. Capitalism was destined to collapse, and the paradise lost by humanity at the beginning of time to be restored. Those who doubted it had only to read the teachings and prophecies of their great teacher to be reassured.

The hour of salvation lay at hand. [pages 454-458]

What infected the world after the misnamed Age of Enlightenment was not the raciology of Darwin and Gobineau. Rather, millions of whites took as their new Messiah a bearded German-Jewish man whose father had been a Lutheran.

Furthermore, Darwin expected blacks to become extinct as white peoples took over their territories. It never occurred to him that Christian ethics would metastasise to such delusional levels that, in our century, it is whites who may become extinct.

CQ v. JQ

The reason this site is hardly visited by white nationalists is simple: it represents a paradigm shift in terms of the primary cause of Aryan decline. They believe it is the Jews and I believe it is Christian ethics (which comprises the scale of values of the secular world in the West, as we are seeing with the Dominion series).

That doesn’t mean I’m not aware of the JQ. The only feature article I have published in The Occidental Observer (TOO) can be seen in this PDF which includes the comments. (TOO has been known to remove the comments after a few months of the essay being published, so it doesn’t hurt to upload a PDF.)

Categories
Axiology Charles Darwin

Dominion, 30

For centuries, in the Christian world, it had been the great project of natural philosophy to identify the laws that animated God’s creation, and thereby to arrive at a closer understanding of God himself. Now, with The Origin of Species, a law had been formulated that—even as it unified the realm of life with that of time—seemed to have no need of God at all. Not merely a theory, it was itself a startling display of evolution.

But was it right? By 1876, the most impressive evidence for Darwin’s theory had been uncovered in what was fast proving to be the world’s premier site for fossil beds: the American West. Cope was not the only palaeontologist to have made spectacular discoveries there…

Nervousness at the idea that humanity might have evolved from another species was not bred merely of a snobbery towards monkeys. Something much more was at stake. To believe that God had become man and suffered the death of a slave was to believe that there might be strength in weakness, and victory in defeat. Darwin’s theory, more radically than anything that previously had emerged from Christian civilisation, challenged that assumption. Weakness was nothing to be valued. Jesus, by commending the meek and the poor over those better suited to the great struggle for survival that was existence, had set Homo sapiens upon the downward path towards degeneration.

For eighteen long centuries, the Christian conviction that all human life was sacred had been underpinned by one doctrine more than any other: that man and woman were created in God’s image. The divine was to be found as much in the pauper, the convict or the prostitute as it was in the gentleman with his private income and book-lined study.

Nowadays, the spiritual heirs of the Christians, which I call neochristians, find the divine in the most grotesque mental illnesses: like those men who believe they are women, or vice versa.

Darwin’s house, despite its gardens, private wood and greenhouse filled with orchids, stood on the margins of an unprecedented agglomeration of brick and smoke. Beyond the fields where he would lovingly inspect the workings of worms there stretched what Rome had been in Augustus’ day: the capital of the largest empire in the world. Just as Rome had once done, London sheltered disorienting extremes of privilege and squalor. The Britain of Darwin’s day, though, could boast what no one in Augustus’ Rome had ever thought to sponsor: campaigns to redeem the poor, the exploited, the diseased.

Darwin himself, the grandson of two prominent abolitionists, knew full well the impulse from which these sprang. The great cause of social reform was Christian through and through. ‘We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment.’ And yet the verdict delivered by Darwin on these displays of philanthropy was a fretful one. Much as the Spartans had done, when they flung sickly babies down a ravine, he dreaded the consequences for the strong of permitting the weak to propagate themselves. ‘No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.’

Here, for any Quaker, was a peculiarly distressing assertion. Cope knew the traditions to which he was heir. It was Quakers who had first lit the fire which, in the recent civil war, had come to consume the institution of American slavery; it was Quakers who, in America as in Britain, had taken the lead in campaigning for prison reform. Whatever they did for the least of their Saviour’s brothers and sisters, they did for Christ himself. How, then, could this conviction possibly be squared with what Cope, in mingled scorn and dread, termed ‘the Darwinian law of the “survival of the fittest”’?

The question was one that had perturbed Darwin himself. He remained sufficiently a Christian to define any proposal to abandon the weak and the poor to their fate as ‘evil’. The instincts that had fostered a concern for the disadvantaged must themselves, he noted, have been the product of natural selection. Presumably, then, they had to be reckoned to serve some evolutionary purpose. Yet Darwin havered. In private conversations he would confess that, because ‘in our modern civilisation natural selection had no play’, he feared for the future. Christian notions of charity—however much he might empathise with them personally—were misplaced. Only continue to give them free rein, and the peoples who clung to them were bound to degenerate.

And this, were it to happen, would be to the detriment of the entire human race. Here, at any rate, Cope was in perfect accord with Darwin. He had taken the railroad across the vast expanses of the Great Plains, and he had sent telegrams from forts planted in the lands of the Sioux, and he had seen their hunting grounds littered for miles around with the bleached bones of bison, felled by the very latest in repeating rifles.

He knew that Custer’s defeat had been only a temporary aberration. The native tribes of America were doomed. The advance of the white race was inexorable. It was their manifest destiny. This was evident around the world. In Africa, where a variety of European powers were scheming to carve up the continent; in Australia, and New Zealand, and Hawaii, where there was no resisting the influx of white colonists; in Tasmania, where an entire native people had already been driven to extinction. ‘The grade of their civilisation,’ as Darwin put it, ‘seems to be a most important element in the success of competing nations.’

How were these differences, between a white and a native American, between a European and a Tasmanian, most plausibly to be explained? The traditional response of a Christian would have been to assert that between two human beings of separate races there was no fundamental difference: both had equally been created in the image of God. To Darwin, however, his theory of natural selection suggested a rather different answer. As a young man, he had sailed the seas of the world, and he had noted how, ‘wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal’. His feelings of compassion for native peoples, and his matching distaste for white settlers, had not prevented him from arriving at a stark conclusion: that there had come to exist over the course of human existence a natural hierarchy of races.

What Darwin said between the lines, Gobineau, who died the same year Darwin died, set out in a whole book.

Joseph Arthur, Count de Gobineau (1816-1882) was the one who elaborated the theory of Aryan racial superiority in Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. He is considered the father of racial demography. Count Gobineau’s works were seminal to demonstrate that the race factor is central to the understanding of human history.

The progress of Europeans had enabled them, generation by generation, to outstrip ‘the intellectual and social faculties’ of more savage peoples. Cope—despite his refusal to accept Darwin’s explanation for how and why this might have happened—conceded that he had a point. Clearly, in humanity as in any other species, the operations of evolution were perpetually at work. ‘We all admit the existence of higher and lower races,’ Cope acknowledged, ‘the latter being those which we now find to present greater or less approximation to the apes.’

So it was that an attempt by a devout Quaker to reconcile the workings of God with those of nature brought him to an understanding of humanity that would have appalled Benjamin Lay. Cope’s conviction that a species could will itself towards perfection enabled him to believe as well that different forms of the same species could co-exist. Whites, he argued, had elevated themselves to a new degree of consciousness. Other races had not. In 1877, a year after he had lain amid the fossil beds of Montana, oppressed by terrible dreams, Edward Drinker Cope formally resigned from the Society of Friends. [pages 439-444]

Categories
Tom Holland Who We Are (book)

Complementing WWA

That a Chinese is now the world chess champion (see my Wednesday post) is symptomatic of our times.

Among the racialist sites, The West’s Darkest Hour is the only one that has, over the years, done an ad campaign for William Pierce’s Who We Are (WWA). Before I go on to continue to quote Tom Holland’s Dominion, I must say that in WWA, the history he wrote about the white race, Pierce focused on prehistory, the Middle East, Greece and Rome, the Jewish problem, the Middle Ages and made a quantum leap to the greatest catastrophe of all time: the Second World War.

I ignore the reasons why Pierce skipped modernity, the period when the virus of Christian ethics mutated into secular liberalism: a crucial stage for understanding the egalitarian, individualistic and universalist infection of values that whites suffer from today. In the comments section on my Dominion quote yesterday, I was telling Adunai that a famous quote from Nietzsche, which Holland himself quotes in his book, explains the psychosis of modern Englishmen.

Today in the early hours of the morning, after a few years, I re-watched the first episode of the first season of Downton Abbey. This 2010-2015 series, which begins when the Titanic sank, attracted a lot of attention to the native English. But now I saw things I missed the first time I watched it.

For example, already from that episode the law that used to prevent women from inheriting large estates starts to be discussed (at the end of the series and subsequent 2019 film Mary would inherit the estate when, in the 1920s, the zeitgeist changed in England). I have already written about Downton Abbey on this site, but in the early hours of the morning a scene that I had already forgotten caught my attention: a homosexual liaison between a duke and a would-be butler.

All that, women who would be empowered in the decades following the sinking of the Titanic, and later even the gradual tolerance of homosexuality on the island, has to be understood in the light that Holland showed us in our last post about the fanatical crusade of the 19th-century English to liberate blacks, even in the Muslim world! The exploration of that stage that Pierce skipped in WWA, very odd considering his country is involved to the core in such rampant liberalism, is vital; and I think Holland’s book is doing a superb job of explaining it.

Dominion, which I have yet to post a dozen more posts until we reach the final metastasis of Christian ethics, can be read as an excellent complement to WWA to understand the history of the mental virus that is killing whites.

Categories
Slavery

Dominion, 29

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

The duty of a Christian nation, so Rawlinson’s colleague had advised him, was to work for the regeneration of less fortunate lands: to play a ‘noble part’. This, of course, was to cast his own country as the very model of civilisation, the standard by which all others might be judged: a conceit that came so naturally to imperial peoples that the Persians too, back in the time of Darius, had revelled in it. Yet the British, despite the certitude felt by many of them that their empire was a blessing bestowed on the world by heaven, could not entirely share in the swagger of the Great King. Pride in their dominion over palm and pine was accompanied by a certain nervousness. The sacrifice demanded by their God was a humble and a contrite heart. To rule foreign peoples—let alone to plunder them of their wealth, or to settle their lands, or to hook their cities on opium—was also, for a Christian people, never quite to forget that their Saviour had lived as the slave, not the master, of a mighty empire. It was an official of that empire who had sentenced him to death; it was soldiers of that empire who had nailed him to a cross. Rome’s dominion had long since passed away. The reign of Christ had not…

In 1833, when the ban on the slave trade had been followed by the emancipation of slaves throughout the British Empire, abolitionists had greeted their hour of victory in rapturously biblical terms. It was the rainbow seen by Noah over the floodwaters; it was the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea; it was the breaking of the Risen Christ from his tomb. Britain, a country that for so long had been lost in the valley of the shadow of death, had emerged at last into light. Now, in atonement for her guilt, it was her responsibility to help all the world be born again.

Nonetheless, British abolitionists knew better than to trumpet their sense of Protestant mission too loudly. Slavery was widespread, after all, and one that had made many in Portugal, Spain and France exceedingly rich. A campaign against the practice could never hope to be truly international without the backing of Catholic powers. No matter that it was Britain’s naval muscle that enabled slave-ships to be searched and their crews to be put on trial, the legal frameworks that licensed these procedures had to appear resolutely neutral. British jurists, conquering the deep suspicion of anything Spanish that was an inheritance from the age of Elizabeth I, brought themselves to praise the ‘courage and noble principle’ of Bartolomé las Casas. The result was an entire apparatus of law—complete with treaties and international courts—that made a virtue out of merging both Protestant and Catholic traditions. In 1842, when an American diplomat defined the slave trade as a ‘crime against humanity’, the term was one calculated to be acceptable to lawyers of all Christian denominations—and none. Slavery, which only decades previously had been taken almost universally for granted, was now redefined as evidence of savagery and backwardness. To oppose it was to side with progress. To support it was to stand condemned before the bar, not just of Christianity, but of every religion…

The owning of slaves was licensed by the Qur’an, by the example of Muhammad himself, and by the Sunna, that great corpus of Islamic traditions and practices. Who, then, were Christians to demand its abolition?

But the British, to the growing bafflement of Muslim rulers, refused to leave the question alone. Back in 1840, pressure on the Ottomans to eradicate the slave trade had been greeted in Constantinople, as the British ambassador in the city put it, ‘with extreme astonishment and a smile at the proposition of destroying an institution closely interwoven with the frame of society’. A decade later, when the sultan found himself confronted by a devastating combination of military and financial crises, British support came at a predictable price. In 1854, the Ottoman government was obliged to issue a decree prohibiting the slave trade across the Black Sea; three years later the African slave trade was banned. Also abolished was the jizya, the tax on Jews and Christians that reached back to the very beginnings of Islam, and was directly mandated by the Qur’an. Such measures, of course, risked considerable embarrassment to the sultan. Their effect was, after all, to reform the Sunna according to the standards of the thoroughly infidel British. To acknowledge that anything contrary to Islamic tradition had been forced on a Muslim ruler by Christians was clearly unthinkable; and so Ottoman reformers instead made sure to claim a sanction of their own. Circumstances, they argued, had changed since the time of the Prophet. Insidiously, among elite circles in the Islamic world, a novel understanding of legal proprieties was coming to be fostered: an understanding that derived ultimately not from Muhammad, nor from any Muslim jurist, but from Saint Paul…

In the United States, escalating tensions over the rights and wrongs of the institution had helped to precipitate, in 1861, the secession of a confederacy of southern states, and a terrible war with what remained of the Union. Naturally, for as long as Americans continued to slaughter one another in battle, there could be no definitive resolution of the issue. Nevertheless, at the beginning of 1863, the United States president, Abraham Lincoln, had issued a proclamation, declaring all slaves on Confederate territory to be free.

Clearly, should the Unionists only emerge victorious from the civil war, then slavery was liable to be abolished across the country. It was in support of this eventuality that the mayor of Tunis sought to offer his encouragement. Aware that the Americans were unlikely to be swayed by citations from Islamic scripture, he concluded his letter by urging them to act instead out of ‘human mercy and compassion’. Here, perhaps, lay the ultimate demonstration of just how effective the attempt by Protestant abolitionists to render their campaign universal had become. A cause that, only a century earlier, had been the preserve of a few crankish Quakers had come to spread far and wide like the rushing wildfire of the Spirit. It did not need missionaries to promote evangelical doctrines around the world. Lawyers and ambassadors might achieve it even more effectively: for they did it, in the main, by stealth. A crime against humanity was bound to have far more resonance beyond the limits of the Christian world than a crime against Christ. A crusade, it turned out, might be more effective for keeping the cross well out of sight…

The more the tide of global opinion turned against slavery, so the more the prestige of the nation that had first recanted it was inevitably burnished. ‘England,’ exclaimed a Persian prince in 1862, ‘assumes to be the determined enemy of the slave trade, and has gone to an enormous expense to liberate the African races, to whom she is no way bound save by the tie of a common humanity.’ Yet already, even as he was expressing his wonderment at such selflessness, the British were busy capitalising on the prestige it had won them. In 1857, a treaty that committed the shah to suppressing the slave trade in the Persian Gulf had also served to consolidate Britain’s influence over his country. Meanwhile, in the heart of Africa, missionaries were starting to venture where Europeans had never before thought to go. Reports they brought back, of the continuing depredations of Arab slavers, confirmed the view of many in Britain that slavery would never be wholly banished until the entire continent had been won for civilisation. That this equated to their own rule was, of course, taken for granted. ‘I will search for the lost and bring back the strays.’ So God had declared in the Bible. ‘I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak, but the sleek and the strong I will destroy.’ [pages 429-434]

_____________

Editor’s Note:

What struck me about these pages of Holland’s book is that it places more emphasis on the axiological ‘going astray’ of the British Empire than on the American Civil War (I omitted to quote several pages). Living so close to the US, and with so many films about that war, gives the impression that the Americans caused the rampant liberalism, but in fact, the disease started in Europe.

This website looks like those movies where the heroes try to find out where the virus that caused a fatal pandemic originally came from. The only difference with the real world is that our obligation, as priests of the sacred words, is to find out where and how exactly the mental virus that has now infected all white people started.

I think the POV of The West’s Darkest Hour does a much better job of explaining the causes of white decline than, say, The Occidental Observer.

Categories
Painting

Marion Collier

Oil on canvas (1882-1883)
by John Collier

Dominion, 28

by Tom Holland

Friedrich Wilhelm had first travelled there in 1814. The highlight of the young crown prince’s journey had been a visit to Cologne. The city—unlike Berlin, an upstart capital far removed from the traditional heartlands of Christendom—was an ancient one. Its foundations reached back to the time of Augustus. Its archbishop had been one of the seven electors. Its cathedral, begun in 1248 and abandoned in 1473, had for centuries been left with a crane on the massive stump of its southern tower. Friedrich Wilhelm, visiting the half-completed building, had been enraptured. He had pledged himself there and then to finishing it. Now, two years after his accession to the Prussian throne, he was ready to fulfil his vow. That summer, he ordered builders back to work. On 4 September he dedicated a new cornerstone. Then, in a spontaneous and heartfelt address to the people of Cologne, he saluted their city. The cathedral, he declared, would rise as a monument to ‘the spirit of German unity’.

Startling evidence of this was to be found on the executive committee set up to supervise the project. Simon Oppenheim, a banker awarded a lifelong honorary membership of the board, was fabulously wealthy, highly cultured—and a Jew. Even within living memory his presence in Cologne would have been illegal. For almost four hundred years, Jews had been banned from the devoutly Catholic city. Only in 1798, following its occupation by the French, and the abolition of its ancient privileges, had they been allowed to settle there again. Oppenheim’s father had moved to Cologne in 1799, two years before its official absorption into the French Republic.

Satiric print about the emancipation
of the Jews of Westphalia—Ed.

Since France’s revolutionary government, faithful to the Declaration of Rights, had granted full citizenship to its Jews, the Oppenheims had been able to enjoy a civic equality with their Catholic neighbours. Not even a revision of this by Napoleon, who in 1808 had brought in a law expressly designed to discriminate against Jewish business interests, had dampened their sense of identification with Cologne—nor their ability to run a highly successful bank from the city. It helped as well that Prussia, by the time it came to annex the Rhineland, had already decreed that its Jewish subjects should rank as both ‘natives’ and ‘citizens’. That Napoleon’s discriminatory legislation remained on the statute book, and that the Prussian decree had continued to ban Jews from entering state employment, did nothing to diminish Oppenheim’s hopes for further progress. The cathedral was for him as a symbol not of the Christian past, but of a future in which Jews might be full and equal citizens of Germany. That was why he agreed to help fund it. Friedrich Wilhelm, rewarding him with a house call, certainly had no hesitation in saluting him as a patriot. A Jew, it seemed, might indeed be a German.

Except that the king, by visiting Oppenheim, was making a rather different point. To Friedrich Wilhelm, the status of Cologne Cathedral as an icon of the venerable Christian past was not some incidental detail, but utterly fundamental to his passion for seeing it finished. Half-convinced that the French Revolution had been a harbinger of the Apocalypse, he dreamed of restoring to monarchy the sacral quality that it had enjoyed back in the heyday of the Holy Roman Empire. That he himself was fat, balding and short-sighted in the extreme did nothing to diminish his enthusiasm for posing as a latter-day Charlemagne. ‘Fatty Flounder’, as he was nicknamed, had even renovated a ruined medieval castle, and inaugurated it with a torchlit procession in fancy dress.

Unsurprisingly, then, confronted by the challenge of integrating Jews into his plans for a shimmeringly Christian Prussia, he had groped after a solution that might as well have been conjured up from the Middle Ages. Only Christians, Friedrich Wilhelm argued, could be classed as Prussian. Jews should be organised into corporations. They would thereby be able to maintain their distinctive identity in an otherwise Christian realm. This was not at all what Oppenheim wished to hear. Shortly before the king’s arrival in Cologne, he had gone so far as to write an open protest. Others in the city rallied to the cause.

The regional government pushed for full emancipation. ‘The strained relationship between Christians and Jews,’ thundered Cologne’s leading newspaper, ‘can be resolved only through unconditional equalisation of status.’ The result was deadlock. Friedrich Wilhelm—channelling the spirit of a mail-clad medieval emperor—refused to back down. Prussia, he insisted, was Christian through and through. Its monarchy, its laws, its values—all derived from Christianity. That being so, there could be no place for Jews in its administration. If they wished to become properly Prussian, then they had a simple recourse: conversion. All a Jew had to do to be considered for public office was to make ‘confession of Christianity in public acts’. This was why Friedrich Wilhelm had been willing to pay a social call on Oppenheim. What was a Jew prepared to fund a cathedral, after all, if not one close to finding Christ?

But the king had been deluding himself. Oppenheim had no intention of finding Christ. Instead, he and his family continued with their campaign. It was not long before Cologne, previously renowned as a bastion of chauvinism, was serving as a trailblazer for Jewish emancipation. In 1845, Napoleon’s discriminatory legislation was definitively abolished. Time would see a sumptuous domed synagogue, designed by the architect responsible for the cathedral, and funded—inevitably—by the Oppenheims, rise up as one of the great landmarks of the city. Well before its construction, though, it was evident that Friedrich Wilhelm’s dreams of resurrecting a medieval model of Christianity were doomed. In 1847, one particularly waspish theologian portrayed the king as a modern-day Julian the Apostate, chasing after a world forever gone. Then, as though to set the seal on this portrait, revolution returned to Europe. History seemed to be repeating itself.

In February 1848, a French king was deposed. By March, protests and uprisings were flaring across Germany. Slogans familiar from the time of Robespierre could be heard on the streets of Berlin. The Prussian queen briefly dreaded that only the guillotine was lacking. Although, in the event, the insurrectionary mood was pacified, and the tottering Prussian monarchy stabilised, concessions offered by Friedrich Wilhelm would prove enduring. His kingdom emerged from the great crisis of 1848 as—for the first time—a state with a written constitution. The vast majority of its male inhabitants were now entitled to vote for a parliament. Among them, enrolled at last as equal citizens, were Prussia’s Jews. Friedrich Wilhelm, appalled by the threat to the divine order that he had always pledged himself to upheld, declared himself sick to the stomach. ‘If I were not a Christian I would take my own life.’

Nevertheless, as the king might justifiably have pointed out, it was not Judaism that had been emancipated, but only those who practised it. Supporters of the Declaration of Rights had always been explicit on that score. The shackles of superstition were forged in synagogues no less than in churches. ‘We must grant everything to Jews as individuals, but refuse to them everything as a nation!’ This was the slogan with which, late in 1789, proponents of Jewish emancipation in France had sought to reassure their fellow revolutionaries. ‘They must form neither a political body nor an order in the state, they must be citizens individually.’ And so it had come to pass. When the French Republic granted citizenship to Jews, it had done so on the understanding that they abandon any sense of themselves as a people set apart. No recognition or protection had been offered to the Mosaic law. The identity of Jews as a distinct community was tolerated only to the degree that it did not interfere with ‘the common good’.

Here—garlanded with the high-flown rhetoric of the Enlightenment though it might be—was a programme for civic self-improvement that aimed at transforming the very essence of Judaism. Heraclius, a millennium and more previously, had attempted something very similar. The dream that Jewish distinctiveness might be subsumed into an identity that the whole world could share—one in which the laws given by God to mark the Jews out from other peoples would cease to matter—reached all the way back to Paul. Artists in the early years of the French Revolution, commissioned to depict the Declaration of Rights, had not hesitated to represent it as a new covenant, chiselled onto stone tablets and delivered from a blaze of light. Jews could either sign up to this radiant vision, or else be banished into storm-swept darkness. If this seemed to some Jews a very familiar kind of ultimatum, then that was because it was. That the Declaration of Rights claimed an authority for itself more universal than that of Christianity only emphasised the degree to which, in the scale of its ambitions and the scope of its pretensions, it was profoundly Christian. [pages 421-425, bold added by Ed.]

Categories
Chess

Idiot chess players


2023 Postscript

When I wrote the above book I was asleep in the womb of the System as far as the most elementary historical and socio-political realities were concerned. It was only in 2021 that I modified my old text by inserting, here and there, some disconcerting phrases on Jewish and racial issues. While these additions do some violence to the original text, in this postscript I will be unashamed to spit out the naked truth.

Perhaps in 2004, when I circulated the rough draft of the above-linked book among friends, I was the first to recount the chess player’s agonies in confessing what we feel in tournaments. But now some fans of the game, like Stjepan Tomic who blogs on his site Hanging Pawns and other YouTubers, have begun to talk about their agonies. I welcome this small breakthrough in chess psychology, but it is only a baby step. In the other areas mentioned I still see wasted talent, or idiot chess players in the etymological sense of the word.

Idiot is a word derived from ἰδιώτης, idiōtēs from ἴδιος, idios (private, self). It began to be used in ancient Greece when there was direct democracy (not the so-called representative democracy of our days: deception of the people by those in power). But even in such healthy times as ancient Greece one or the other citizen was too private or selfish: he didn’t care about public affairs. He was an ‘idiot’. Now, people, in general, persist in their bourgeois and private attitude without, let’s say, inquiring into the real causes of mental disorders [there’s a chapter on disorders among chess players in the above-liked book]. And chess continues to be a refuge for idiots or apathetic people who are not interested in the real world but in intellectual autism.

Worse, when some renowned chess players deign to engage in political activism, their pronouncements are beyond idiotic: they are toxic. The most popular pair of world champions of our time, the ethnic Jew Kasparov (1985-2000 champion) and the Gentile Carlsen (2013 champion to date) exemplify this. However, in this postscript [to the above-linked book—note of 2023] I shall call Kasparov by his real Jewish surname: Weinstein, even if it is worse what gentile traitors like Carlsen do because the traitor is worse than the subversive Jew.

In a recent interview, Weinstein said: ‘Tucker Carlson has become a mouthpiece of Russian propaganda. That’s the gift from heaven for Putin’s propaganda machine’. The Baku-raised Jew, who emigrated to New York, thus repeats the lies of the US television networks at the hands of his fellow Jews. I confess that on the days I wrote this paragraph I was reading the chapter on Korchnoi in translation of the fifth volume of Weinstein’s My Great Predecessors (I own the whole collection). I am impressed that he who wrote such didactic treatises on chess is the same person from whom we could quote veritable nonsense, but I will confine myself to a couple of absurdities. Weinstein tweeted: ‘Le Pen is a weapon, part of Putin’s larger war, a second front in attacking Europe and democracy. I am often critical of Macron’s dealings with Russia, but he is an essential bulwark in France today’. And Weinstein endorsed in a news broadcast what, for us, is the paranoia of CNN and other TV channels: ‘I think Russia is behind…’ Trump’s 2016 election victory.

Weinstein’s pronouncements are infinitely worse than Fischer’s paranoia [recounted in the above-linked book], who saw his abusive mother’s Jewish cronies everywhere.

I won’t go into detail about the war in Ukraine. Anyone interested can read my posts on Russia on this site. Suffice it to say that Russia has become a healthy barrier to the sexual degeneracy of the West and, thanks to the newly formed bloc with China, there is finally an alternative power to stand up to the LGBT flag of crazy Uncle Sam: one provides the economic muscle and the other the nuclear umbrella. The typical subversive Jew, like Weinstein doesn’t like it when someone stands up to degeneracy even though, thanks to his mother Russia, he became world champion. But the attitude of an idiot like Magnus Carlsen, as I said, is even worse as he comes from a Scandinavian country where the majority are pure Nordic. Shortly after Putin’s invasion, Carlsen organised an online tournament supposedly to help Ukrainian children. Once again, this is worse than being a mere idiot as the current world champion, who has accepted invitations to George Soros’ mansion, is thus supporting the propaganda of the Establishment.

Carlsen has lunch and plays chess
with Soros at his summer home.

The cretinism of the apolitical chess player is also evident in all other chess players. No master or GM, as far as I know, complained about Sergey Kariakin’s punishment for political incorrectness regarding the invasion of Ukraine. Unlike his Russian compatriot Yan Nepomniashchi (‘Nepo’)—a bien-pensant player—Kariakin spoke out in favour of Putin’s special operation. Although with enormous efforts Kariakin had earned the right to participate in the most important tournament of all—the Candidates Tournament for the world crown—in 2022, for that political pronouncement he was disqualified by FIDE, which put a Chinese player in his place.

I finish writing this postscript when the Chinese, Ding Liren, and the Russian Nepo, have just two games left to define who will be the next world champion (the Norwegian Carlsen refused to defend his crown). If the Chinese wins, it will be the first time in history that an East Asian has won the chess laurel.

Back to the subject. Given the current war against the white man, we must see white-skinned people in love with Caissa [the goddess of chess] as idiots. If nature made us intelligent, burying talents like that is a crime deserving of the lord’s wrath. That said, chess need not be inherently alienating. I am reminded of a film in which a 19th-century Russian in traditional dress played with wooden—not plastic—pieces with one of his compatriots in the open air. So, taken lightly and without the agony of tournaments, the game could become a healthy recreation as long as we only spend a little time on it.

But what is real chess [the new title of the above-linked book, once I add this postscript]?

Chess of ideas involves more than a fierce critique of the egalitarian dogma of our age; more than a complete and utter refutation of that worldview to replace it with another. This is what I am engaged in in The West’s Darkest Hour. The new white religion of alleged race equality, what Newspeakers call ‘gender’ equality and sexual identity, must be destroyed.

In this little book, I would just like to confess that this last year I have suffered from a moral hangover for having used my talents to buy a score of books on chess openings. I read and studied them because I was planning to play a couple of more tournaments. Finally, I decided not to do so for reasons confessed in my intimate chess diaries. Let me just say here that the only thing that matters is real chess: to checkmate the Christian ethics that white atheists currently suffer.

Only in this way, by playing real chess and abandoning the other chess for good, would I cease to be an apprentice of the sacred words and become a true priest of those words. And only by reading my books would the reader know what I meant in this last paragraph.

Categories
Napoleon Slavery

Dominion, 27

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

‘The darkness of the middle ages exhibits some scenes not unworthy of our notice.’ Condescension of this order, an amused acknowledgement that even amid the murk of the medieval past the odd flickering of light might on occasion be observed, was not unknown among the philosophes. To committed revolutionaries, however, compromise with barbarism was out of the question. The Middle Ages had been a breeding ground of superstition, and that was that. Unsurprisingly, then, there was much enthusiasm among Jacobins for the customs and manners that had existed prior to the triumph of Christianity. The role played by the early Church in the imaginings of the Reformation was played in the imaginings of the French Revolution by classical Greece and Rome. Festivals designed to celebrate the dawning of the new age drew their inspiration from antique temples and statuary; the names of saints vanished from streets in Paris, to be replaced by those of Athenian philosophers; revolutionary leaders modelled themselves obsessively on Cicero. Even when the French Republic, mimicking the sombre course of Roman history, succumbed to military dictatorship, the new regime continued to plunder the dressing-up box of classical antiquity. Its armies followed eagles to victories across Europe. Its victories were commemorated in Paris on a colossal triumphal arch. Its leader, a general of luminescent genius named Napoleon, affected the laurel wreath of a Caesar. The Church meanwhile—grudgingly tolerated by an emperor who had invited the pope to his coronation, but then refused to be crowned by him—functioned effectively as a department of state. Salt was rubbed into the wound when a saint named Napoleon was manufactured in honour of the emperor, and given his own public fête. Augustus would no doubt have approved.

Nevertheless, the notion that antiquity offered the present nothing save for models of virtue, nothing save for exemplars appropriate to an enlightened and progressive age, had limitations. In 1797, a book was published in Paris that provided a very different perspective. Emphasis on the ‘toleration and gentleness’ of the ancients there was not. The Persians, ‘the world’s most ingenious race for the invention of tortures’, had devised the scaphe. The Greeks, when they captured a city, had licensed rape as a reward for valour. The Romans had stocked their households with young boys and girls, and used them as they pleased. Everyone in antiquity had taken for granted that infanticide was perfectly legitimate; that to turn the other cheek was folly; that ‘Nature has given the weak to be slaves’. Over many hundreds of pages, the claim that empires in the remote past had regarded as perfectly legitimate customs that under the influence of Christianity had come to be regarded as crimes was rehearsed in painstaking detail. Provocatively, it was even suggested that a relish for displays of suffering—such as in ancient Rome had been staged as public entertainments in the very heart of the city—had been a civic good. ‘Rome was mistress of the world all the while she had these cruel spectacles; she sank into decline and from there into slavery as soon as Christian morals managed to persuade her that there was more wrong in watching men slaughtered than beasts.’ [pages 405-406]

Here we see an error of omission ubiquitous in virtually all normie historians. Tom Holland refers to Imperial Rome while omitting that Republican Rome, when the patricians had not polluted their blood, wasn’t degenerate (cf. William Pierce’s history book). Holland then devotes a couple of pages to Marquez de Sade, whom he quotes:

‘The doctrine of loving one’s neighbour is a fantasy that we owe to Christianity and not to Nature.’ Yet even once Sade, set free by the Revolution, had found himself living under ‘the reign of philosophy’, in a republic committed to casting off the clammy hold of superstition, he had found that the pusillanimous doctrines of Jesus retained their grip. Specious talk of brotherhood was as common in revolutionary committee rooms as it had been in churches. In 1793—following his improbable election as president of a local committee in Paris—Sade had issued instructions to his fellow citizens that they should all paint slogans on their houses: ‘Unity, Indivisibility of the Republic, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. Sade himself, though, was no more a Jacobin than he was a priest. The true division in society lay not between friends and enemies of the people, but between those who were naturally masters and those who were naturally slaves. Only when this was appreciated and acted upon would the taint of Christianity finally be eradicated, and humanity live as Nature prescribed. The inferior class of man, so a philosophe in The New Justine coolly observed, ‘is simply the species that stands next above the chimpanzee on the ladder; and the distance separating them is, if anything, less than that between him and the individual belonging to the superior caste.’

Yet if this was the kind of talk that would see Sade spend his final years consigned to a lunatic asylum, the icy pitilessness of his gaze was not insanity. More clearly than many enthusiasts for enlightenment cared to recognise, he could see that the existence of human rights was no more provable than the existence of God. In 1794, prompted by rebellion in Saint-Domingue, a French-ruled island in the West Indies, and by the necessary logic of the Declaration of Rights, the revolutionary government had proclaimed slavery abolished throughout France’s colonies; eight years later, in a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to prevent the blacks of Saint-Domingue from establishing their own republic, Napoleon reinstated it…

Yet even amid the concert of the great powers there was evidence that it lived on as an ideal. That June, on his return from preparatory negotiations in Paris, the British Foreign Secretary had been greeted by his fellow parliamentarians with a standing ovation. Among the terms of the treaty agreed by Lord Castlereagh had been one particularly startling stipulation: that Britain and France would join in a campaign to abolish the slave trade. This, to Benjamin Lay, would have been fantastical, an impossible dream…

Both in the United States and in Britain, dread that slavery ranked as a monstrous sin, for which not just individuals but entire nations were certain to be chastised by God, had come to grip vast swathes of the population. ‘Can it be expected that He will suffer this great iniquity to go unpunished?’ Such a question would, of course, have bewildered earlier generations of Christians. The passages in the Bible that appeared to sanction slavery remained. Plantation owners—both in the West Indies and in the southern United States—did not hesitate to quote them. But this had failed to stem the rising swell of protest. Indeed, it had left slave owners open to a new and discomfiting charge: that they were the enemies of progress. Already, by the time of the American Revolution, to be a Quaker was to be an abolitionist. The gifts of the Spirit, though, were not confined to Friends. They had come to be liberally dispensed wherever English-speaking Protestants were gathered. Large numbers of them, ranging from Baptists to Anglicans, had been graced with good news: euangelion. To be an Evangelical was to understand that the law of God was the law not only of justice, but of love. No one who had felt the chains of sin fall away could possibly doubt ‘that slavery was ever detestable in the sight of God’. There was no time to lose. And so it was, in 1807, in the midst of a deadly struggle for survival against Napoleon, that the British parliament had passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade; and so it was, in 1814, that Lord Castlereagh, faced across the negotiating table by uncomprehending foreign princes, had found himself obliged to negotiate for the eradication of a business that other nations still took for granted. Amazing Grace indeed.

To Sade, of course, it all had been folly. There was no brotherhood of man; there was no duty owed the weak by the strong. Evangelicals, like Jacobins, were the dupes of their shared inheritance: their belief in progress; their conviction in the potential of reform; their faith that humanity might be brought to light….

On 8 February 1815, eight powers in Europe signed up to a momentous declaration. Slavery, it stated, was ‘repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality’. The language of evangelical Protestantism was fused with that of the French Revolution. Napoleon, slipping his place of exile three weeks after the declaration had been signed, and looking to rally international support for his return, had no hesitation in proclaiming his support for the declaration. That June, in the great battle outside Brussels that terminally ended his ambitions, both sides were agreed that slavery, as an institution, was an abomination. The twin traditions of Britain and France, of Benjamin Lay and Voltaire, of enthusiasts for the Spirit and enthusiasts for reason, had joined in amity even before the first cannon was fired at Waterloo. The irony was one that neither Protestants nor atheists cared to dwell upon: that an age of enlightenment and revolution had served to establish as international law a principle that derived from the depths of the Catholic past. Increasingly, it was in the language of human rights that Europe would proclaim its values to the world. [pages 407-412]

My bold type.

Categories
Free speech / association

Tucker

Gonzalo Lira’s take on Tucker Carlson yesterday and today.

A commenter said earlier this month: ‘Tucker needs to stay on the air, waking up White minds. Criticizing the ADL is as extreme as he can get on the Jewish issue. And he was very brave to do that!’

But now he’s gone…