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Category: Antiochus IV Epiphanes

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Ancient Rome Antiochus IV Epiphanes Final solution Hadrian Horace Jerusalem Judaism Old Testament

The Jesus Hoax, 4

 
CHAPTER 4: ONE AGAINST ALL

If the Jews are chosen by God, then everyone else is, of necessity, not chosen. If Jews are first class humans in the eyes of God, everyone else is second-class at best. And indeed, Jews do view themselves as distinct, special, and superior to others. As Exodus states, “We are distinct from all other people that are upon the face of the earth” (33:16). Similarly, the Hebrew tribe is “a people dwelling alone, and not reckoning itself among the nations” (Numbers 23:9).

Moses adds that “you shall rule over many nations” (15:6)… you shall eat the wealth of the nations” (61:5-6).

Clearly, when other people began to encounter these ideas and the attitudes that derived from them, one would expect a backlash. And there was. Hence we find a consistent thread of opinions from non-Jewish observers, for centuries, who are repelled by such arrogance…

The earliest direct references come from Aristotle’s star pupil Theophrastus. He had a concern about one of their customs: “the Syrians, of whom the Jews (Ioudaioi) constitute a part, also now sacrifice live victims… They were the first to institute sacrifices both of other living beings and of themselves”. The Greeks, he added, would have “recoiled from the entire business.” The victims—animal and human —were not eaten, but burnt as “whole offerings” to their God, and were “quickly destroyed.” The philosopher was clearly repelled by this Jewish tradition.

Egyptian high priest Manetho (ca. 250 BC) tells of a group of “lepers and other polluted persons,” 80,000 in number, who were exiled from Egypt and found residence in Judea… When in power they treated the natives “impiously and savagely,” “setting towns and villages on fire, pillaging the temples and mutilating images of the gods without restraint,” and roasting the animals held sacred by the locals. This is a very different version than we read in the Jewish Bible…

The decline of the Seleucids coincided with Roman ascent. Rome was still technically a republic in the second century BC, but its power and influence were rapidly growing. Jews were attracted to the seat of power, and travelled to Rome in significant numbers. As before, they grew to be hated. By 139 BC, the Roman praetor Hispalus found it necessary to expel them from the city: “The same Hispalus banished the Jews from Rome, who were attempting to hand over their own rites to the Romans, and he cast down their private alters from public places”. In even this short passage, one senses a Roman Jewry who were disproportionately prominent, obtrusive, even ‘pushy.’

Perhaps in part because of this incident, and in light of the Maccabean revolt some 30 years earlier, the Seleucid king Antiochus VII Sidetes was advised in 134 BC to exterminate the Jews… Apollonius Molon wrote the first book to explicitly confront the Hebrew tribe, Against the Jews.

The rhetoric is clearly heating up. In 63 BC, as we know, Roman general Pompey took Palestine. In the year 59 BC Cicero gave a speech, now titled Pro Flacco. The Jewish religion is “at variance with the glory of our empire, the dignity of our name, the customs of our ancestors.” That the gods stand opposed to this tribe “is shown by the fact that it has been conquered, let out for taxes, made a slave.”

Ten years later Diodorus Siculus wrote his Historical Library. Among other things, it again recounts the Exodus: “The refugees had occupied the territory round about Jerusalem, and having organized the nation of Jews had made their hatred of mankind into a tradition” (34, 1).

Here, though, it is Antiochus Epiphanes, not his successor Sidetes, that was urged “to wipe out completely the race of Jews, since they alone of all nations avoided dealings with any other people and looked upon all men as their enemies”.

The great lyric poet Horace wrote his Satires in 35 BC, exploring Epicurean philosophy and the meaning of happiness. At one point, though, he makes a passing comment on the apparently notorious proselytizing ability of the Roman Jews—in particular their tenaciousness in winning over others. Horace is in the midst of attempting to persuade the reader of his point of view: “and if you do not wish to yield, then a great band of poets will come to my aid, and, just like the Jews, we will compel you to concede to our crowd” (I.4.143). Their power must have been legendary, or he would not have made such an allusion.

The last commentator of the pre-Christian era was Lysimachus. Writing circa 20 BC, he offers another variation on the Exodus story. The exiled ones, led by Moses, were instructed to “show goodwill to no man,” to offer “the worst advice” to others, and to overthrow any temples or sanctuaries they might come upon. Arriving in Judea, “they maltreated the population, and plundered and set fire to the local temples.” They then built a town called Hierosolyma (Jerusalem), and referred to themselves as Hierosolymites.

The charge of misanthropy, or hatred of mankind, is significant and merits further discussion, especially in light of the Christian story.

 

Romans of the Christian Era

Emperor Tiberius expelled them in the year 19 AD. The expulsion did not succeed. Eleven years later, as we recall from chapter two, Sejanus found reason to oppose them again.

Anti-Jewish actions continued. In 49, Claudius once again had to expel them. In a fascinating line from Suetonius circa the year 120, we find mention of one ‘Chrestus’ (Latin: Chresto) as the leader of the rabble; this would be perhaps the fourth non-Jewish references to Jesus. “Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, [Claudius] expelled them from Rome”. This is an important observation that, even at that late date, the Romans still identified Christianity with the Jews.

Despite all this, the beleaguered tribe still earned no sympathy. The great philosopher Seneca commented on them in his work On Superstition, circa 60. He was appalled not only by their ‘superstitious’ religious beliefs, but more pragmatically with their astonishing influence in Rome and around the known world, despite repeated pogroms and banishments. Seneca adds: “The customs of this accursed race (sceleratissima gens) have gained such influence that they are now received throughout all the world. The vanquished have given laws to their victors.”

Seneca is clearly indignant at their reach. Then came the historic Jewish revolt in Judea, during the years 66 to 70. The Romans were surely gratified; to their mind, the Jews received their just deserts.

In besieging Jerusalem, and consequently the mighty Jewish temple, Titus had the Jews trapped. There was thought of sparing the temple, but Titus opposed this option. For him, “the destruction of this temple was a prime necessity in order to wipe out more completely the religion of the Jews and the Christians.” These two religions, “although hostile to each other, nevertheless sprang from the same sources; the Christians had grown out of the Jews: if the root were destroyed, the stock would easily perish”. The passage closes by noting that 600,000 Jews were killed in the war.

The third and final Jewish uprising occurred just a few years later, in 132. The reasons for this were many, but two stand out: the construction of a Roman city on the ruins of Jerusalem, and Emperor Hadrian’s banning of circumcision: “At this time the Jews began war, because they were forbidden to practice genital mutilation (mutilare genitalia)”. Dio describes the conflict in detail. “Jews everywhere were showing signs of hostility to the Romans, partly by secret and partly overt acts”. They were able to bribe others to join in the uprising: “many outside nations, too, were joining them through eagerness for gain, and the whole earth, one might almost say, was being stirred up over the matter.” For those today who argue that Jews were perennially the cause of wars, this would provide some early evidence. Hadrian sent one of his best generals, Severus, to put down the insurgency. Through a slow war of attrition, “he was able to crush, exhaust, and exterminate them. Very few of them in fact survived.”

Finally we have Celsus, a Greek philosopher who composed a text, The True Word, sometime around 178. The piece is striking as an extended and scathing critique of the increasingly prominent Christian sect.

 

Conclusions

So what can we conclude from this brief overview of some 600 years of the ancient world? To say that the Jews were disliked is an understatement. The critiques come from all around the Mediterranean region, and from a wide variety of cultural perspectives. And they are uniformly negative. I note here that it’s not a case of ‘cherry-picking’ the worst comments and ignoring the good ones. The remarks are all negative; there simply are no positive opinions on the Jews or early Christians. A reasonable conclusion is that there is something about the Jewish culture that inspires disgust and hatred.

In any case, it’s clear that the Jews had few if any friends in the ancient world. Their religion instructed them to despise others (Gentiles), and others in turn despised them. But the originating source was the Jews themselves: their religion, their worldview, their values. They were willing to use and exploit non-Jews for their own ends. They were willing to kill, and to die.

This situation feeds directly into the circumstances of the Roman occupation and Paul’s reaction. The preceding analysis suggests that Paul was interested in nothing other than saving ‘Israel,’ the Jewish people. We have seen a few textual clues indicating that he was willing even to commit murder in order to further his ends. Surely he hated the Romans with a vengeance, and yet he also could see the futility of confronting them directly.

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Alexander the Great Antiochus IV Epiphanes Evropa Soberana (webzine) Judaism Judea v. Rome Tacitus

Apocalypse for whites • VI

by Evropa Soberana

‘When the Macedonians seized power [in Judea], King Antiochus sought to extirpate their superstitions and introduce Greek habits to transform that inferior race’.

—Tacitus, History

 
The Hellenistic legacy
To understand the virulent ethnic conflicts that occurred during the Roman domination, it is necessary to go back a few years and place ourselves in the era of the Macedonian domination, since the Greek social strata bequeathed from the conquest of Alexander the Great had a lot to do with the uprisings of Jewry and the long history of hatred, tensions, reprisals and counter-reprisals that followed one another thereafter.
When Alexander the Great was on his way to conquer Egypt he passed through Judea, and the Jewish community, fearful that they would destroy Jerusalem, did with the Macedonians what they used to do whenever there was a new triumphant invader: betray their former lords and welcome the invader with open arms. Thus, just as they had betrayed the Babylonians with the Persians, they betrayed the Persians with the Macedonians. Grateful, Alexander granted them extensive privileges; for example, in Alexandria they were legally equated with the Greek population.
This point is important, because the legal status of the Alexandrian Jews—who would constitute almost half of the city’s population—later led to bitter misgivings on the part of the Greek community, leading to riots, which we will see later.
When Alexander the Great died in the year 323 BCE, he left a vast legacy. The whole area he had dominated, from Egypt to Afghanistan, received a strong Hellenisation which produced the period called Hellenistic, to differentiate it from the classical Hellenic. The Macedonian generals, the so-called Diadochi, foolishly fought among themselves to establish their own empires, and in this case we will be interested in the empire of the Ptolemies (centered in Egypt) and that of the Seleucids (centered in Syria) because Israel, between both, would become part of the first and finally, in 198 BCE, annexed by the Seleucids.
Under the umbrella of Alexandrian protection, the Jews were spread not only in Palestine and the Near East, but throughout Rome, Greece and North Africa. In these areas already existed well-organized, rich and powerful Jewish Qahals, all of them connected to Judea, the nucleus of Judaism. In Jewish society, some social sectors would absorb the Hellenisation which, with the fermentation of the centuries, produced a cosmopolitan breeding ground that would lead to the birth of Christianity. Other Jewish sectors, the most multitudinous, clung to their traditional xenophobia and began to react against those who, in the lead of Alexander the Great, had received them as saviours.
Although the Near East was a hotbed of Egyptians, Syrians (also called Chaldeans or Arameans, whose language was lingua franca in the area, being spoken regularly by the Jews), Arabs and others, the traditionalist Jews saw with great displeasure that Asia Minor and Alexandria were filling up with Greeks who, naturally, were pagans and, therefore, in Jewish thought, infidels: ungodly and idolatrous, as had been the hated Egyptians, Babylonians and Persians before them.
With time, to the discomfort of these sectors of the Jewish quarter adverse to assimilate into the Greek culture, a series of measures decreed by Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Seleucid king, were added. In December of the year 168 BCE, Antiochus literally forbade Judaism, attempting to extirpate the cult of Yahweh, suppressing any Jewish religious manifestation, placing circumcision outside the law and even forcing Jews to eat foods considered religiously ‘unclean’.
The Greeks imposed an edict by which an altar to the Greek gods should be built in every city in the area, and Macedonian officials would be distributed to ensure that in every Jewish family the Greek gods were worshiped. Here, the Macedonians demonstrated elemental clumsiness as they did not know the Jewish people. According to the Old Testament (2 Maccabees and 4 Maccabees), those who remained faithful to the Mosaic Law, Antiochus had them burned alive and the Orthodox Jews who escaped to the desert were persecuted and massacred. These statements should be taken with caution, but what is clear is that there was anti-Jewish repression in general.
What were these measures? We must bear in mind that the pagan world was a world of religious tolerance, in which religions were not persecuted just like that. However, in Judaism, the Greek sovereigns saw a political doctrine that potentially could turn the subversive Jews against the pagan states that dominated them. They were hostile towards the other peoples of the planet, and therefore, a threat. In this context, it is possible that the first manifestations of religious intransigence came from the Jewish side among other things because, as I said, the ancient pagan Greeks were never religiously intransigent or intolerant. Such intransigence was not funny for the Macedonians, who considered their gods symbols of their own people.
The fact is that in that year, 168 BCE, Antiochus sacrificed nothing more and nothing less than a pig on the altar of the temple of Jerusalem, in homage to Zeus. This act was considered a double desecration: On the one hand because it was a pig (a profane animal of Semitic creeds like Judaism and Islam), and on the other because that was the first step of consecrating the entire temple to the Olympian Zeus and to convert Jerusalem into a Greek city.

Antiochus IV Epiphanes, Seleucid king and descendant of Seleucus I Nicator, perhaps the most brilliant of the generals of Alexander the Great. According to Jewish tradition, this Macedonian king, by desecrating the altar of the temple in Jerusalem and sprinkling it with pig’s blood, was possessed by a demon: the same who will possess the anti-Messiah or the ‘coming prince’ spoken of in the Old Testament (Daniel, 9:26).

This sacrilegious act brought a strong reaction from the fundamentalist sectors of the Jewish quarter. The most zealous rabbis began to preach a kind of holy war against the Greek occupation, urging the Jews to rebel, and when the first Jew timidly decided to make an offering to the Greek Zeus, a rabbi, Mattathias Maccabeus, murdered him.
The ethnic turmoil that followed led to the period known as the Maccabean wars (years 167-141 BCE), of which there is much talk in the Old Testament (Maccabees). Carrying out, with the Hassidim (the ‘pious Jews’, also called Chassidim or Chassidic) a guerrilla war against the Macedonian troops surrounded on all sides, the ‘Maccabees’ were finally spared from being overwhelmed when an anti-Greek rebellion broke out in Antioch, and crushed the influence of the Hellenizing Jews.
Judas Maccabeus, who succeeded Mattathias renewing the cycle of treason, would even negotiate with the Romans to secure their support. In fact, the Roman Senate would formally recognize the Hasmonean dynasty in 139 BCE, without suspecting the headaches that this remote land would give them in the near future.
During this time, in addition to the Hellenised Jews, two other important Jewish factions would be formed, also in bitter dispute: on the one hand, the Pharisees, a fundamentalist sector that had the support of the multitudes; and on the other, the Sadducees, a group of priests more ‘progressive’, more ‘bourgeois’, in better dealings with the Greeks and who in the future would be victims of the ‘cultural revolution’ that the Pharisees carried out after the fall of Jewry in the hands of Rome.
Their writings would be destroyed by the Romans, so the vision we have today of the panorama is the point of view of the Pharisees, from whom would come the lineages of orthodox rabbis who would complete the Talmud. The Hasmonean dynasty, in spite of numerous swings and changes, would be essentially pro-Sadduceean.

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Antiochus IV Epiphanes Tom Sunic

On Judaised Americans

My last posts on the Greco-Roman wars against the Jews (here and here) made me wonder… Just compare how pre-Christian Europeans handled the Jewish problem with how, in modern America, the red carpet was rolled out for the Jews since the 19th century in line with the dominant Judeo-Christian, liberal ideology.

As Tom Sunic explained in the very first chapter of Homo Americanus, in the US not a single politician will ever admit that America is a theocratic system with a peculiar political theology. Think of how Donald Trump recently became the first sitting American president to visit Jerusalem’s Western Wall!

If Aryans ever wish to re-establish their own racial sovereignty, they must identify their foe: Judeo-Christian ethics, which pervades even the white nationalist movement. One example will suffice. Greg Johnson has been working on a White Nationalist Manifesto for some time. When he finally publishes and advertises it through the forums, will it contain his “Old Right” bashing favouring an effete Neo-Christian “New Right”?

Whatever the impact of the forthcoming White Nationalist Manifesto among American racists, many of whom are Christians, the US owes its very existence to the Jews. The 17th century reverence for the Old Testament by those naïve, starry-eyed colonisers who imagined a “City on the Hill” comes to mind. “Very early on America’s founding fathers, pioneers, and politicians identified themselves as Jews who had come to the new American Canaan from the pestilence of Europe,” writes Sunic.

After another post on the Jewish-Roman wars, the following Saturdays I’ll be adding passages from Deschner’s Criminal History of Christianity describing how the Early Church dealt with the Jews. Despite their rabid anti-Semitism, early theologians did not push for those pagan attempts to solve the Jewish problem once and for all.

Certainly, unlike the US, in anti-Semitic Christendom the Jews were not revered, but they were tolerated. Those early theologians that I’ll be quoting on Saturdays are similar to the white nationalists of today: much barking but no bites. This is why, unlike National Socialism, white nationalism won’t ever work. Whites must transvalue “New Right” values back to “Old Right” values!

Antiochus’ war (167-164 BCE)

“He ordered his soldiers to cut down without mercy those whom they met and to slay those who took refuge in their houses. There was a massacre of young and old, a killing of women and children, a slaughter of virgins and infants. In the space of three days, eighty thousand were lost, forty thousand meeting a violent death, and the same number being sold into slavery.” —2 Maccabees, 5:11–14.

The siege of Jerusalem (63 BCE)

Jews were massacred by invading Romans. The event marked the end of Jewish independence.

The Samaritan Revolt (36 CE)

The Samaritans rebelled against the Romans. The rebels were ruthlessly massacred by order of the Roman Procurator.

The First Jewish-Roman War (66-73 CE)

Jews were massacred by Romans throughout the war; 97,000 enslaved. It was the first of three major Jewish revolts against the Romans. It resulted in the destruction of the Holy Temple and a devastating depopulation of the Jewish population as the massacre wiped out a large percentage of their population. (Again, compare Titus’ deeds with what Donald Trump did a couple of months ago in what remains of that temple.)

Bar Kokhba revolt (132-136 CE)

Decisive Roman victory. The Romans enslaved many Jews of Judaea, massacred many Jews, suppressed Jewish religious and political authority, banned Jews from Jerusalem, and renamed and merged Judaea into the Syrian Palestine province. The war meant another devastating depopulation of the Jewish population.

If white nationalists, so overwhelmed by Judeo-Christian ethics, are not committing ethnic suicide how do you explain that they are not celebrating such victories?

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Antiochus IV Epiphanes Axiology Civil war Jerusalem Old Testament

Antiochus

Greek effigy coin of
Antiochus IV Epiphanes

A couple of days ago I resuscitated the idea of adding here further excerpts from the monumental Criminal History of Christianity. Four years ago I purposely left those excerpts with a short entry because Deschner’s last sentence provided much food for thought: “If the stringent measures against the Jews by Antiochus IV had taken effect, it would not only have meant the end of Judaism, but also ‘would have prevented the rise of Christianity and Islam.’ Our imagination almost fails to conceive a world so different…”

It is a pity that the sources for understanding the revolt of the Maccabees are the Old Testament and Josephus: both Jewish sources. Even so, what happened 2183 years ago can be deduced from those texts.

Early in 167 BC, the Greek Hellenistic king Antiochus sent an army to Jerusalem. He did it on Saturday so the Jews could not carry weapons. Thus, the Hellenistic forces entered the Jewish city without finding opposition. The soldiers of Apollonius, the general of Antiochus, destroyed much of Jerusalem and set up camp on a hill from which the Temple was dominated. That hill would turn into a citadel: the stronghold of the white man in Jerusalem in the next quarter-century.

Antiochus then proceeded to act directly against the Jews. He ordered them to accept the Greek customs; to desecrate the Sabbath and the feasts, to build altars for the white man’s gods, and to immolate therein animals which the Jews considered impure. The decree of Antiochus ended with these words: “Whoever does not obey the orders of the king shall be put to death.”

The very Jewish law became the target of the decrees of Antiochus. “You could not observe the Sabbath, keep the country feasts, or even declare yourself a Jew.” The possession of the Scriptures was a capital offense, and members of a congregation who were caught secretly celebrating the Sabbath were burned alive. “Two women were denounced for having circumcised their children. They tied the children to their breasts, so they walked about the city and threw them down the wall. ”

On the occasion of the festival of Dionysius, orthodox Jews were forced to parade in the procession. In the middle of the drums and voices in honour of the Greek god of wine, they marched with wreaths of ivy, symbol of the foreign god. Later, the whole procession, under pain of death, was exhorted to eat pork.

The way the Jews first reacted was by writing the Book of Daniel. The authors deceived the Jerusalemites into believing it to be a remote text they had just unearthed. As literary criticism has revealed the Book of Daniel was a trick: a vaticinium ex eventu or foretelling after the event written during the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes. It is from that book that the phrase of the abomination of desolation, desolating sacrilege, became famous.

Just compare how pre-Christian Aryans dealt with Jerusalem’s Jews with the standing ovations for Prime Minister Netanyahu in the American Congress last year! It is a pity that memes like “white sharia” are becoming popular among some white nationalists while the purely Aryan meme that should become popular is Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values” (see for example my post on Sweden I published today).

If nationalists transvalued Judaic values back to Aryan values, a new constellation of saints of the Ancient World would emerge. Not only the Judeo-Christian names would become gradually repudiated in the generations to come, they would even name their sons after Antiochus, Vercingetorix and Hermann.

Back in 2012 I asked in this blog, Why do we not celebrate the victory of Antiochus IV over the Jews, or Titus’ conquest of Jerusalem? The transvalued individual might well start calling the Hellenistic king as St Antiochus.

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Antiochus IV Epiphanes Catholic Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Kriminalgeschichte, 5

Below, translated excerpts from the first volume of Karlheinz
Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums
(“Criminal History of Christianity”)

 
The Church and the Maccabees
 
Mattathias, the first rebellious leader of the Maccabees, was a priest and assassin whose name means “gift of Yahweh”, of the family of Asmon. Possessed by the “religious zeal” in the traditional biblical way, he killed an Israelite who by order of the royal commissioner intended to celebrate a sacrifice to idols.

Judas Maccabeus generalized the guerrilla struggle and purified the Temple, where he had found “the abomination of desolation” (Daniel 12, 11) imposed by Antiochus Epiphanes; he also nailed the head of the enemy general Nicanor on the gate of the citadel: an event that is still being celebrated today [by Jews] by means of a fixed holiday of the calendar.

Yohanan Hyrcanus (reigned 135-103) undertook great military campaigns, as they had not been known since the time of Solomon. Thus he Judaized by the force of arms the provinces of Idumaea and Galilee. But we should not believe that these were vulgar campaigns of expansion or ambition for power; they were “particularly religious wars called holy wars” (R. Meyer).

Hyrcanus also ravaged Samaria, a region that disappears completely from political history in the Christian era. Samaria, which had been the capital of the kingdom of Israel, enlarged with great splendour by King Amri, always rivalled Jerusalem. The Samaritans, a hybrid people in the middle of Palestine between Jew and idolater, were hated by the Jews more than any other.

Few of the Maccabees died of natural death: Judas Maccabeus, in the field; his brother Jonathan, killed; Simon, murdered; Hyrcanus II, grandson of John Hyrcanus I, executed by Herod, the ally of the Romans; Aristobulus II, poisoned; his son, executed, as well as his brother and the last Asmonean prince. Also the daughter of Alexander, Mariamne, married in the year 37 with Herod, died victim of palatial intrigues, like the mother, Alexandra and their children. “The reign of Herod was, to a great extent, a time of peace for Palestine” (Grundmann).

At the head of these conflicts, imperialist wars, civil wars and various atrocities shines the star, historical or not, of the seven “Maccabean brothers,” seven heroes of the “holy war.” It is thus that these Maccabees deserve not only to be “revered by all,” according to Gregory of Nazianzus, a doctor of the Church, but: “Those who praise them, and those who hear their praise, should better imitate their virtues and, spurred by this example, rise to the same feats. ”

It is a typical opinion. The most famous doctors of the Church rival among each other in praise of the (supposed) proto-martyrs of the insurrection, those “Maccabean brothers” who, according to St. Augustine, “before the Incarnation of Christ already fought for the Law of God to the point of giving their own lives,” or who “erected the magnificent banner of victory,” according to John Chrysostom.

They became symbols of the ecclesia militans and remembered in the three oldest martyrology lists. Once converted the synagogue of Antioch that housed the supposed sepulchres in a Christian church; once transferred their precious “relics” to Constantinople, then to the Roman church of San Pietro in Vincola and to the church of Maccabees in Cologne and celebrated in Germany and France, they are venerated: especially in the Rhine and Rhone valleys. (Below, what are believed to be the Maccabees’ relics.)

The existence of Christian saints before Jesus Christ can only seem absurd to anyone who does not know the Catholic mentality, the sceptical in earnest who insists on taking logic as the sole foundation of any reasoning.

Pagan saints… and holy wars. In the two great insurrections of the first and second centuries, the practice of “holy war” returned with all its savagery and cruelty, with its apocalyptic follies. The “battle of the last days” against the idolatrous Rome searched for, no less, “the Messianic Kingdom of God.”

Categories
Antiochus IV Epiphanes Judaism Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Kriminalgeschichte, 4

Below, translated excerpts from the first chapter of Karlheinz
Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums
(“Criminal History of Christianity”):

 
The sacred warmongering of the Maccabees

Once obtained the high priesthood, Jason established in Jerusalem a gymnasium or ephebeión, and raised the possibility of bringing the political and religious situation in the capital with the numerous Hellenistic cities of the country, turning Jerusalem into a Greek polis.

This provoked a reaction from the traditionalists, who saw a menace for the old Jewish laws and beliefs. Unrest, riots and street altercations grew, all of which triggered strong repressive measures by the energetic Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV, who was trying to consolidate his shaky kingdom by introducing a syncretic religion that unified the peoples.

He also desecrated the Temple in Jerusalem (in 168 he reformed the great altar of burnt offering and laid right there an altar to Olympian Zeus); banned the Jewish religion and burned the city, but not before looting the treasury of the Temple and taking 1,800 talents from it. (Centuries later, the painter Raphael was commissioned by Pope Leo X to solemnize such a significant episode in one of the walls of the Vatican.)

According to Elias Bickermann, if the stringent measures against the Jews by Antiochus IV had taken effect, it would not only have meant the end of Judaism, but also “would have prevented the rise of Christianity and Islam.”

Our imagination almost fails to conceive a world so different…

Categories
Antiochus IV Epiphanes Catholic Church Christendom Individualism Indo-European heritage Inquisition Jerusalem Kevin MacDonald Philosophy of history Racial studies Universalism

Kevin MacDonald’s trilogy

The second book of Kevin MacDonald’s study on Jewry, Separation and its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (1994/2002), the first of his trilogy to be translated to German, is my favorite of MacDonald’s three academic works that I read in more than two years. Professor MacDonald is the foremost scholar on the Jewish question. In Separation and its Discontents (hereafter SAID) he wrote:

Western societies, unlike prototypical Jewish cultures, do not have a primitive concern with racial purity. Rather, concern about racial purity emerges only in the late stages of Jewish-gentile group conflict…

Despite a great deal of commonality among Western anti-Semitic movements, there was a great difference between the universalistic, assimilatory tendencies of traditional Western Christianity and the exclusivistic, racialist program of National Socialism. Indeed, we have seen that beginning in the 19th century an important aspect of German anti-Semitic ideology was a criticism of Western universalism and the development of peculiarly German conceptions of Christianity. A critical component of official National Socialist ideology, as represented in the thought of Alfred Rosenberg, was the idea that “the twin forces of disintegration, namely universalism and individualism, act in perpetual conflict with the Germanic concept of race.” In this regard, National Socialism was indeed profoundly anti-Western. In rejecting both universalism and individualism, National Socialism resembled, much more closely than did medieval Western collectivist Christianity, its mirror image rival, Judaism. [page 196]

In a previous chapter MacDonald had written:

We shall see that with the rise of the National Socialist movement in Germany, the universalist themes of Western Christianity were completely overthrown in favor of a full-blown racialist ideology of the ingroup. In Chapter Five I will argue that National Socialism is a true mirror-image of Judaism. Not surprisingly, it was also the most dangerous enemy that Judaism has confronted in its entire existence. [page 133]

One of the hypothesis advanced in SAID provides food for thought. MacDonald wrote, “I propose that the Christian church in late antiquity was in its very essence the embodiment of a powerful anti-Semitic movement…” (page 112). This is something I had never heard of, and reminds me my first readings of psychohistory and Lloyd deMause’s insights on why the Christ archetype galvanized the population of the ancient world, although MacDonald’s hypothesis is totally distinct and is presented from an altogether distant point of view. But after digesting what both deMause and MacDonald say, for the first time I feel I am starting to comprehend facets of Christianity that would have never occurred to me from a conventional reading to history. If MacDonald is right, the Roman Catholic Church was the earliest attempt toward a type of society that we may call collectivism for European-derived peoples.

Although Christianity always held universalist ideals at its core, it nonetheless fulfilled its role of impeding, as did the Muslim nations, that Judaism became a destructive force for the indigenous culture of the Late Roman Empire and the Early Middle Ages. One of the facts that I learnt in SAID is that most restrictions enacted against Jewry, initiated in the period from Eusebius to Justinian, were still active throughout Christendom until the French Revolution hit the continent with its egalitarian fury. It was precisely the so-called Enlightenment (that presently some Western dissidents are starting to call “the Dark Enlightenment”) what inspired the founding fathers of the United States of America. And contrary to those white nationalists who still insult the memory of Adolf Hitler and the movement he created, I would claim that the mortal sin of the French Revolution, the emancipation of Jewry, was not properly atoned in Europe until the arrival of a specifically racial ideology: National Socialism.

But not only Nazi Germany has been demonized in the public mind. The Inquisition is widely regarded as a black page in the history of the Church even by the most Catholic individuals that I know. In contrast to such view MacDonald presents us with a radical reevaluation of what was precisely the role of the Inquisition. On page 147 he states: “I here develop the view that the Spanish Inquisition was fundamentally an authoritarian, collectivist, and exclusionary movement that resulted from resource and reproductive competition with Jews, and particularly crypto-Jews posing as Christians.” One could even argue that, thanks to the Inquisition, for three-hundred years before the movement of independence that gave birth to Mexico, New Spain (1521-1821) was Judenfrei.

While reading SAID I could not escape the thought that whites are un-insightful because, unlike the Jews and with the exception of William Pierce and Arthur Kemp (see the long chapters in this book quoting them), very few have knowledge of the history of their race. If we take into account that, in one of their holydays, New York Hassidic Jews celebrate their victory over the ancient Greeks who tried to assimilate them millennia ago, a basic question comes to mind: Why don’t we celebrate the victory of Antiochus IV over the Jews, or Titus’ conquest of Jerusalem?

Bust of Antiochus IV

We do not celebrate these victories precisely for the reason that both Kemp and Pierce explain so well: neither the Greeks nor the Romans exist today. What we call contemporary Greeks or Romans are the product of centuries of blood mixing that devalued not only the genotype of the original Indo-European population, but their extended phenotype as well: the Greco-Roman hard ethos and their galvanizing mythos mostly reflected in the Homeric tales. The Greeks and Romans who embraced Christianity were a totally different breed of the pure Aryans of Sparta or the austere Latins of the Roman Republic (see e.g., the essays that I translated from Evropa Soberana in later chapters of this book).

MacDonald himself acknowledges on page 190 that “the Jews have continued as a creative race into the present, while the Greeks gradually merged with the barbarians and lost their distinctiveness—a point remarkably similar to Chamberlain’s ‘chaos of peoples’ in which the decline of the ancient world is attributed to loss of racial purity.” Conversely, I would say that since the Jews have conserved their genotype almost intact throughout the millennia they are able to celebrate their Maccabean revolt as if it was yesterday. In other words, had whites preserved their genes intact, some of us might still be celebrating Antiochus’ victories over the subversive tribe; or, if we knew our history with the same passion that Jews know theirs, we might still be celebrating the fall of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD, or the more recent expulsion of the tribe from the Iberian peninsula.

What conventional historians ignore is that, once the Church lost its power to sell a worldview after the late 18th and early 19th centuries, our genetic individualism placed us at the mercy of a collectivist tribe.

Fortunately, the ethno-traitorous West has committed financial blunders in the 20th and 21st centuries. The dollar and all fiat currencies of the West will crash probably in this decade (I am reviewing this essay in 2014), which means that there is hope that some of us will start to understand the Jewish problem in a post-crashed world. On page 10 of SAID MacDonald says that “in congruence with the results of social identity research, anti-Semitism is expected to be most prominent among those most in competition with the Jews and during times of economic crisis.”

Although most readers of MacDonald treasure The Culture of Critique, the third and last of his trilogy on Jewry as their favorite book of this collection, I believe that MacDonald’s work should be read from the beginning. A People that Shall Dwell Alone, Separation and its Discontents and The Culture of Critique can help us, using William Pierce’s metaphor, to “see the forest” with crystal-clear vision.

Remember Pierce’s words? If we don’t try to understand the Jews we can never really understand what is happening to our race and our civilization. Professor MacDonald’s voluminous texts have done the hard work for us—both the trilogy and his webzine The Occidental Observer—in a scholarly and yet entertaining way.