Category: Christendom

and the survival of the West, 3

by Revilo Oliver (1973)

Chapter Three: CHRISTIANITY TODAY
 

If you desire to preserve our country and our civilization, you must face two fundamental facts.

The first of these is that 90% of all the active support of pro-American efforts has come from Christians.

Of that, there can be no doubt. Almost without exception, all of the thousands of “conservative” and “anti-Communist” organizations that have come and gone during the past fifty years have been specifically Christian, proposing to defend Christianity and the Constitution simultaneously. Many of the most active organizations today are evangelical and try to revive Christian faith by holding meetings in which the Gospel and patriotism are inseparably blended. Some organizations specifically established to resist or promote certain legislation do not explicitly raise religious issues, but they take Christianity for granted. The only patriotic organizations that are explicitly non-Christian are a small periodical, The Truth Seeker, which, having spoken disrespectfully of Jews, is now being forced to the wall, and one small “activist” group in California.

It is true that a very successful promotion was founded by a master-salesman who began by admitting, with a show of candor, that he rejected belief in a personal god as childish and preferred a vague pantheism that recognized an “upward reach” in “all mankind” that was similar to the upward reach of growing plants. But after testing the market, he began to claim that he was purveying a doctrine that was a kind of pep pill good for all religions and guaranteed to make the purchaser a better Christian, better Pharisee, or better Moslem, as the case might be. (There are no Buddhists, Parsees, Yezidis, Jains, Saivites, or Tantrists with large bank rolls in the United States at the present time, nor are they represented by oil-rich governments abroad.) The only point that need concern us now is that the promoter accurately gauged his market. Of all the members who passed through his organization in its heyday, at least 80% were Christians—probably 90% of those who really worked and gave money to the limit of their resources.

You have only to attend any “anti-Communist” meeting, including both the most sincere efforts and the most fraudulent promotions, and talk to the persons who attend and contribute to convince yourself that almost all of them are Christians, and by that I mean persons who really believe in Christ, as distinct, of course, from the many persons who attend Sunday-morning clubs because they think it good for business, politically expedient, or socially amusing. Whether you like it or not, you must accept the fact that 90% of the active support for patriotic and pseudo-patriotic efforts comes from men and women who have a sincere faith in Christ.

During more than two decades, the active Defense of the West has rested almost entirely on the shoulders of Christians in all Occidental nations. And that has been true on all levels. I know that comparisons are invidious, but to make my point I will say that if I had to pick one periodical on our side as having the highest literary finish and intellectual content, I should have to name Découvertes, the monthly publication of a highly cultivated group of staunchly Christian Frenchmen now in Lisbon.

That is not astonishing. For almost fifteen centuries Occidental civilization was Christendom, and, as is shown by the data that we have always examined, Christianity as we know it is, and always has been, an Indo-European religion, incomprehensible to the rudimentary minds of the primitive races and unacceptable to the subtle minds of the Orientals who have civilizations of their own. If that seems to you negative proof, consider the conversion of the Norse peoples during the early Middle Ages. They were not subject to a Christian government that could coerce them and they needed no Christian support against anyone; the Christians whom they plundered on occasion were certainly not militarily superior, nor were the institutions and culture of the Dark Ages anything that Vikings and Varangians might have envied and wished to imitate. Their only reason for abandoning the bleakly pessimistic religion of Thor and Odin must have been that Christianity was more congenial to their minds.[1] Such spontaneous conversions are rare phenomena in the history of the world’s religions; the closest parallel is the adoption of decadent Buddhism by the Chinese who found it congenial to their mentality.[2]

There is a second fact that you must also face. The Western world is no longer Christendom. The religion that once united us has become the faith of a minority.

That is obvious from what is happening here and in every country of Europe except Spain and Portugal. The real question is how small a minority are Christians in the United States.

In 1942, after a very careful study of the situation in England, Professor A. N. Whitehead concluded that “in the whole country far less than one-fifth of the population are in any sense Christians today.” There is very little difference in this respect between England and the United States. And today?

Let us transcend all the doctrinal differences, important as they are, that divide the Christian churches. The absolute minimum requirement of a Christian is faith that Christ was literally the Son of God. Of course, persons who do not have that faith may have the impudence to call themselves Christians, just as they may call themselves elves, Martians, or pterodactyls, but if they do, they are obviously intending some hoax or fraud.

How many adult Americans today really believe that Christ was God Incarnate? I have consulted discerning Christians of indubitable piety and zeal who have had exceptional opportunities to observe in all parts of the country. The lowest estimate was 9%. The figure that was best supported was approximately 12%.

Of the 12% of adult Americans who truly believe in Christ, not all, by any means, are active in efforts to defend our nation and civilization. Of true believers, some also believe that the End of the World is at hand; others believe that the destruction of the Western world has been ordained as condign punishment for its sins, and that it would be impious to resist the manifest Will of God; and others quite logically regard the events of the brief life on earth as merely preparation for the salvation of their souls. I should be astonished if more than half of the remaining Christians are actively committed to the preservation of our country. And yet this 6% has provided almost all of the support for anti-Communist causes. That is something to think about.

We must specifically notice that the minority that still believes that Christ was really the Son of God does not include the majority of the persons who now talk from the pulpits of Sunday-morning clubs, including the propaganda-chain operated by the National Council of Churches. The majority of professional clergymen were trained in theological seminaries in which they were taught that the Christian Bible is an agglomeration of forgeries perpetrated by persons too ignorant to write coherently and patched together by persons too stupid to make a consistent story out of it. They were further taught that Christ, if he existed and was not merely a myth created by awkward revision of the Essene story about the Teacher Yeshu, was a crack-pot agitator to whom were attributed, long after his death, some nice remarks about ethics and “social justice.” [3]

Believing this but lacking the courage to seek honest employment, the poor wretches are ordained and find themselves in a business in which their income depends on their ability to keep congregrations awake or, at least, in a donating mood each Sunday, while they must curry the favor of both their atheistic superiors and of the Lords of the Press and Radio. It is no wonder that they preach the “social gospel.” Some of them, no doubt, really believe it, for it is a fact that the loss of religious faith merely leaves many minds morbidly susceptible to the contagion of the most grotesque superstitions. Some see no reason why they shouldn’t peddle the brand of buncombe that pays the best. Some doubtless thirst for revolution and chaos to avenge themselves on the society that makes them exert themselves in pulpits, and, like the Vicar in Daphne du Maurier’s memorable novel, Jamaica Inn, picture themselves as clever wolves preaching to congregations of uncomprehending mutton-heads. That is the real explanation of what has happened to most of our churches, and there is no need to imagine some fantastically large and cunning conspiracy of Illuminati or other Supermen to account for the behavior of clergymen who do not believe in Christianity.

The catastrophic decline of Christian faith is the most important, the crucial event of our recent history. Even the dullest members of Sunday-morning clubs know that it has happened, but they will try to deny it by informing you that the Seventh Baptopistical Church has just moved to a wonderful new edifice that cost half a million dollars and is architecturally indistinguishable from a night club, and that St. Olaf’s Presbyterian Church has just added a hundred-thousand-dollar gymnasium to its sacred facilities. Believing Christians, on the other hand, know what has happened and deplore it. When they try to account for the catastrophe, however, they, if they recognize a natural cause at all, most commonly blame the Jews. That, I think, is unfair and, what is much worse, incorrect and therefore dangerous.

The most comprehensive and scholarly survey of Jewish pressures on, and infiltration of, Christianity from the earliest times is the work of one of the most learned ecclesiastical historians of our day and is now available in a passable English translation: The Plot Against the Church by Maurice Pinay. The virtual capture of the Catholic Church in recent years, which has been celebrated in articles in Look and other periodicals, is ably described by Vicomte Leon de Poncins in his Judaism and the Vatican. No Protestant scholar, so far as I know, has made a comparable study of Protestant denominations. It would be difficult to take exception to the reporting of historical facts in the two books that I have cited, and let us not question the authors’ conclusions. Do they adequately explain the decline of Christianity?

I have no wish to defend the Jews, and I shall not ask whether it is entirely reasonable to blame them for forwarding their own interests by their own methods wherever they have planted colonies among populations whom they regard as inferior, much as our ancestors regarded the aborigines of North America. Let the Jews be as wicked and diabolical as you wish, but let us consider the religious question objectively, lest error delude us with fallacious hopes. [emphasis added by Ed.]

If we, from our vantage point in the present, look back over the history of our religion dispassionately, we can discern, at a distance of a thousand years and more, the origins of our plight today. I do not refer to sectarianism and heresies: they are simply normal in all evangelical religions. In Islam, for example, the multiplicity of sects is proverbial, and by the time that Buddhism became a religion in the second century B.C., there were already eighteen major sects, each claiming, of course, to be the sole repository of the true doctrine. Christianity is exceptional only for its relative stability. Over a period of twelve centuries, from 325 A.D., when its doctrine had taken form in all essentials, to the Protestant Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, the religion of the West was an effective unity, not seriously disturbed by such sporadic heresies as the Albigensians, and Waldenses, the Patarini, and the Hussites.[4]

Christianity is, as we have said, an Indo-European religion and it was therefore accepted and understood in terms of the mentality and thought-processes peculiar to our race. Our minds, unlike those of other races, demand that all the elements of a doctrine be logically consistent with one another and in conformity with observed reality. The intellectual efforts of the early Fathers of the Church, who labored to establish texts and resolve contradictions, have some analogies in other religions, but the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages is unique. This great philosophical effort to understand the world about us has nothing to do with heresies or even skepticism; it was, as one of the Scholastics defined it, fides quaerens intellectum; it was carried on by churchmen, and, as we too often forget, accompanied by mathematical investigations and empirical observation of nature. There are many histories of Scholasticism, and a good outline may be found in the second volume of Ueberweg’s standard History of Philosophy. There are some very stimulating observations on late Scholasticism in the first volume of Egon Friedell’s Cultural History of the Modern Age. The histories of science by Sarton and by Thorndike cover the Mediaeval period fairly well. The reader, however, will find the essentials most clearly presented in the brilliant work of Lawrence R. Brown, The Might of the West, which not only brings together facts that are artificially separated in other works, but identifies in its Mediaeval origins the great tension of modern thought. Christianity brought with it from Asia Minor alien elements that were generally ignored but remained latent in its sacred books and dogmas, incompatible at the limit with Western man’s innate need to know and master the physical world, and further complicated by historical accidents. That is what gave us, as Mr. Brown observes, “a society whose inward convictions have been at hopeless variance with the outward professions that the events of history have forced it to make.” We need only add that the conflict became even more acute with the Renaissance and became one of the hidden causes of the Reformation and Europe’s first Civil War.

From the Renaissance to the present, we of the West have had to observe an ever increasing discrepancy between the tenets of our religion and the observed phenomena of the world in which we live, and during the past century the discrepancies became catastrophic.

One can enumerate sixteen intellectual factors that have contributed to the decline of Christianity, but the four most important, all of which took effect during the past hundred years, are:

(1) The recovery by archaeological excavation of much of the history of the Near East.

(2) Perception of the great physiological and anatomical similarity of human beings to extinct sub-human species and to existing anthropoids, the whole forming a neat evolutionary sequence.

(3) Determinations that the earth is at least a billion years older than the Creation posited by Christian doctrine.

(4) Most important of all, perhaps, perception of the size of the universe. It is one thing to call it infinite; it is another to know that there are galaxies so remote that light from them, travelling at more than eleven million miles a minute, has taken eight billion years to reach us.

Christian theologians, to be sure, have offered innumerable explanations of these discrepancies. Some are forthright efforts to meet the issues squarely, of which the best that I have seen is The Genesis Flood, by Professor John C. Whitcomb, Jr., of Grace Theological Seminary, and Professor Henry M. Morris, of the Virginia Polytechnical Institute. Some are bizarre efforts to conjure a god from the Planck constant or squeeze him out of the (hypothetical) Lorentz contractions. And some reach the level of the books that Teilhard de Chardin must have written with tongue in cheek. But we are not here concerned with the validity of any of these Christian explanations. The important fact is that they convince no one except Christians. Perhaps they should, but they do not.

That is the principal cause of the recession of Christian faith, and you cannot blame the Jews for it. It is most unlikely that the Jews planted every inscribed tablet found by excavators in Asia Minor, and it is quite certain that they did not create quasars or even the great galaxy in Virgo. The blame, if any, must fall entirely on our race—on the philosophical mentality and Faustian will that distinguish us from all other races and that alone made possible the abstruse and complex determinations of fact that undermined our faith. The four intellectual factors that I listed above and eleven of the twelve that I did not have space to enumerate all depend on data that no other race had either the capacity or the wish to ascertain—data, furthermore, that all other races either cannot comprehend or regard as insignificant and irrelevant to their racial mentality.

To repudiate the science of the West is simply to blow out our brains figuratively, as our fetish-men, witch-doctors, and other “Liberal intellectuals” would have us do. And if we of the West do it figuratively, we may as well all do it literally, too, and so escape the ultimate misery and degradation in store for us.

I began this cursory discussion by saying that it did not matter whether we were Christians or atheists so long as we faced facts and reasoned objectively about them. As rational men, all that we can do is measure the consequences of the disastrous decline of faith—for it is a disaster even greater than most Christians suppose—and ascertain by what means (if any) we can hope to survive it.
 

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[1] One factor often overlooked was Christianity’s appeal to the historical sense of our race. Norse theology was a collection of inconsistent tales, admittedly mythical since the skalds could revise or elaborate them at will, about the adventures of various gods in Niflheim, Jotunheim, Asgard and other realms outside the known world and inaccessible to men, at dates no more specific than “once upon a time.” Christianity offered a circumstantial and realistic narrative of events that had taken place in remote but specific and well-known towns and geographical areas at precisely stated times during the reigns of known Roman Emperors; the historicity of the narrative was further guaranteed by the generally consistent and apparently independent statements of four eyewitnesses, whose veracity was further guaranteed by the official reports of Roman governors who had themselves participated in the climactic scene (i.e., the Acta Pilati, Epistula Lentuli, and other forgeries that were accepted as genuine during the Dark Ages). It may be relevant that the Epistula Lentuli certifies Christ as unmistakably Nordic: tall, fair-skinned, with blonde hair and blue eyes.

[2] Note, however, the very important difference that although the Chinese adaptation of the Buddhist religion eventually made a large number of converts, it never supplanted Taoism and other native cults, to say nothing of the widely-held doctrine of Confucius (which virtually ignores the supernatural) and the more restricted philosophy of the Fa Chia (which regards all religions as myths useful for governmental purposes). It would never have been proper to speak of China as a Buddhist country.

[3] Christians who have the courage to contemplate the present status and the now inevitable future of all the large organized denominations must read a recent book by a highly reputed “Biblical scholar” whose works have been long been respected as authoritative in ecclesiastical seminaries: Dr. Hugh J. Schonfield’s The Passover Plot (1965). Although his reconstruction of the way in which a crack-brained Jewish agitator named Jesus tried to stage a fake miracle is admittedly conjectural, his interpretation of the character and motives of that man (assuming that he ever existed) is now accepted in all of its essentials by virtually all educated clergymen, although, understandably, they may prefer to envelop it in clouds of misty verbiage when they harangue the persons who fill the collection-plates each Sunday. That Jesus, although an ignorant blunderer, is thought admirable because he was an early Bolshevik who tried to incite a revolution to destroy our race’s Classical civilization and realize the old Jewish dream of One World ruled, of course, by God’s Own People.

[4] We are not here concerned with the theological convulsions of the Byzantine (“Orthodox”) Church, which, as we observed earlier, was a radically different kind of religion, imbued with Levantine elements rejected by the West, and thereby appealing to a racially different people. A discussion of the origin, incidence, and relative importance of Jewish and other Levantine elements in the early Christian doctrines, the progressive supersession of such elements in the West, and their recrudescence in some heresies would necessarily be long, involved, and somewhat abstruse. We cannot touch upon that topic here, where our concern is with Christianity as it was generally understood and accepted by our race. Debates about whether our distant ancestors understood it correctly or should have accepted what they did would be, for our present purposes, irrelevant and otiose.

and the survival of the West, 2

by Revilo Oliver (1973)

Chapter Two: THE ORIENT
 

We Indo-Europeans have been Christian for about half of our recorded history, and our whole culture was so intimately connected with our religion that we called our world Christendom. Today, however, our religion and hence our understanding of ourselves and the world about us have been drastically affected by three distinct developments that have no necessary relation to one another and that we should be careful not to confuse, viz.:

(1) The catastrophic decline of religious faith and belief among our own people during the past century and a half or two centuries. That is a phenomenon which, although perhaps slightly accelerated by alien influences, arose within our culture and was simply a revival of the tendency of our Western philosophy before the appearance of Christianity. It is therefore a separate topic that we must postpone for later consideration.

(2) The now obvious failure of our efforts to communicate Christianity to the primitive races, which we discussed briefly in our opening chapter.

(3) The futility of all our efforts to export our Occidental religion to the old and civilized nations of the Orient. This is really the most striking phenomenon of all.

Among the biologically and mentally primitive Congoids, Capoids, and Australoids, Christian missionaries attained for a while some specious semblance of success. One can only marvel, however, at the illusions that Christendom obstinately entertained, century after century, despite its constant and virtually total failure to win converts among the highly intelligent and subtle Orientals, both white and yellow, who had elaborate cultures of their own.

Since we are, on the whole, a rational race, there was some basis for those illusions. The sacred books of Christianity did not originate in the West. The Old Testament deals almost entirely with the activities of Israelites and Jews. The events of the New Testament, to be sure, took place in a Roman province in Asia Minor, and largely in Galilee, a small territory inhabited by a conglomerate population that the Jews despised as inferiors, but the first apostles, whatever their race, were certainly not Europeans, and Paul was admittedly a Jew. It was known, furthermore, that in the early centuries there had been some small Judaeo-Christian sects,[1] and that it was not until later that the new religion attracted votaries that could be identified as authentically Greek, Roman, and Celtic. Although Europeans knew the Christian scriptures only in Greek and Latin, and during the Middle Ages only in Latin, the Asiatic origins created a supposition that Christianity, the religion of Europe, was not European, even when everyone knew that it had no adherents outside Europe except in the territories of the Byzantine Empire, and that Byzantine Christianity was so adulterated with Levantine elements that it was unacceptable to the West.

The differences between Western and Oriental Christianity were so profound and fundamental that repeated attempts made before 1453 to effect a union of the two churches were utter failures despite the Byzantines’ desperate need for military aid from the West, despite the West’s idealistic notion that its religion was “universal,” and despite a generous amount of hypocrisy on both sides. After the capture of Constantinople by Mohammed II, most of the surviving Byzantines devoutly thanked their god that they had fallen under the rule of Moslems (with whom they had much in common) instead of European Christians, who would have tried to impose on them an alien religion. It is significant that the abyss between the two religions that called themselves Christian was too wide to be bridged, even though the conglomerate and partly Levantine population of the Byzantine Empire had inherited the culture and learning of the ancient (and extinct) Greeks.[2]

Ever since it was founded, the Christian Church has labored incessantly to convert Jews, using every method from flattering exhortations and cash rewards to legislative pressure and armed coercion, and it has failed utterly. That failure, furthermore, was conspicuous in every city and almost every town of Christendom, year after year and century after century. It was known even to the most ignorant and isolated peasant.

In Christendom, as elsewhere, the international race planted its colonies wherever there was money to be got from the natives, and it always followed the standard procedure that it used, for example, in Alexandria in the fourth century B.C. The colonists filtered in in small groups until their numbers were sufficient to take over a part of the city for themselves to establish their own ghettos, from which the natives of the country were informally, but effectively, excluded. But the main body of colonists, ostentatiously exclusive, was usually or always accompanied by a number, smaller or greater as the occasion demanded, of Marranos, i.e., Jews who feigned conversion to the religion and culture of the nation in which they had come to reside. As they had professed Greek philosophy in Alexandria, so in Mediaeval Europe they professed Christianity. They, so to speak, covered the flanks of their less versatile congeners.

Here and there in Europe, Christians sometimes tried to dislodge and expel the Jewish colonies, but they never succeeded. By violence or threats of violence some cities and territories were able to drive Jews from their ghettos for a few years, but invariably, except in Spain and Portugal, the ostentatiously alien Jews returned sooner or later and industriously restored their ghettos. The Marranos, sheltered by their professed “conversion,” eluded all efforts to control them, and in Spain and Portugal, at least, they not only entered the highest offices of the state but, despite the frantic efforts of the Inquisition, they filled even the Church with nuns, priests, bishops, and archbishops who solemnly celebrated in public the rites of a religion they despised and, when they met in their secret conclaves, laughed at the stupidity of the gullible goyim.

The amazing versatility of subtlety of the Marranos, especially in “most Christian” Spain and Portugal, has been described by many distinguished Jewish scholars. A History of the Marranos, by Professor Cecil Roth of Oxford, is a concise survey; the recent work by Haim Beinart, Anusim be-Din ha-Inqwizisiah (Tel Aviv, 1965), unfortunately not available in English, is a highly detailed study of a single community at one point in its history.

Was a Jew ever converted to Christianity? The learned and candid Rabbi Solomon Schindler,[3] addressing a Christian audience in Boston, was certain that no Jew could “submit conscientiously” to so inferior a creed. “There never was a Jew,” he said, “converted to Christianity who conscientiously believed in the doctrines of his adopted religion. They were all hypocrites, who changed their creed for earthly considerations merely.” And the acute, sagacious, and earnest Maurice Samuel,[4] after diligent and conscientious study, concluded that “Obviously you do not make a gentile of a Jew by baptizing him any more than you would make an Aryan of a negro by painting him with ocher.” Such sweeping generalizations may be too absolute, and there seem to be some certain instances of Jews who sincerely defected to Christianity, but they are few. On the whole, the failure of Christians to allure or compel Jews has been total and spectacular.

Christians often explain that failure by attributing to the Jews some peculiar perversity or malevolence, the result of either a divine curse or of conscious collaboration with Satan. But in the interests of both fairness and objectivity, we should consider respectfully and dispassionately the testimony of the erudite and discerning Jews who have earnestly studied and pondered the many and profound differences between their people and ours, and who assure us, as courteously as they can, that to their minds our religion and most of the standards of our culture appear ludicrous or repulsive and sometimes utterly incomprehensible. How can we expect or require a man to believe what is to his mind mere nonsense? Would not that be as absurd as to expect the Jews who reside in our country to consult our interests rather than their own?

So long as Christendom knew only the Jewish colonies in its territory and the Semitic and Hamitic Moslems on its southern borders, some theory of an obduracy or perversity peculiar to Jews and Moslems could perhaps be maintained, but surely Christians should have perceived, as their geographical horizons expanded, that their religion has no appeal for any Oriental people.

The name of Christ, to be sure, is used by certain Monophysite cults in the Near East and Malabar and by other sects in Egypt and Abyssinia, of which vague rumors reached Mediaeval Europe and inspired the romantic legends of Prester John. But actual contact with those sects in the Sixteenth Century brought disillusion; the reading of their sacred books in Syriac, Coptic, and Geez showed how vastly those conceptions of religion differed from the European; and missionaries were dispatched to convert those “Christians” to Western Christianity—efforts that always ended in failure and sometimes in bloody failure.

With the exceptions of such isolated and minor cults as the Mandeans and the Yezidis, the Semitic peoples of Asia have found their aspirations and their religiosity fully satisfied by Islam, and all the exhortations of our missionaries for a millennium induced only a handful of Moslems to profess Christianity. In India, where the blood of the Aryan conquerors was blotted up long ago, a few outcasts and famished drudges became “rice Christians,” and some educated babus said they were converts so long as “conversion” seemed likely to expedite their advancement in the bureaucracy of British India; and the Hindus sent us in return hundreds of sloe-eyed swamis to convert us and care for our souls—especially the souls of wealthy dowagers. In China and Japan the seeds of the Gospel, though sown over and over again by generations of earnest and often martyred missionaries, produced no better harvest.

In sum, experience has shown us that the Jews, though unique as an international race, do not differ from other Orientals in their resistance to the “glad tidings” (euangelium) of Christianity. In Asia, as in Africa, though for far different reasons, Christianity is evaporating as rapidly as dew in the morning sun, and there is every reason to believe that, with a few possible exceptions, the remaining Asiatic “Christians,” including native clergymen and bishops, are simply Arab, Hindu, Chinese, or Japanese Marranos and profess a Western religion for business or diplomatic reasons.

We have an unbroken record of failure in all our efforts to export Christianity to other peoples. That failure has nothing to do with the decline of faith among our own people in very recent times as a result of a skepticism based on our science and technology. Uniformly since the foundation of the Western Church, Christianity failed to attract and convince other races, and in the great Age of Faith in Europe that failure was as complete as it is today. Christendom should have understood the reasons for that inevitable failure long ago.

For centuries our clergymen had the strange custom of looking through all the other religions and cults of the whole world to find superficial similarities that they would then adduce as somehow corroborating our religion. They clutched eagerly at every ghost story in the world and used it to “prove” that a belief in immortality was “universal.” What all the other doctrines and myths really proved was that our belief in immortality was something peculiar to ourselves and probably incomprehensible to other races.

We Aryans have a deep and innate longing to endure forever. But the immortality of which the atheist despairs and for which the Christian hopes is a personal immortality—the survival of the individual consciousness complete with all its memories of life on earth. For each of us, immortality is the prolongation of his consciousness after the death of his body. Although we, if not spiritually sick, desire the survival of our race and culture, that is not what we mean by immortality; even if we felt assured that our people would eventually own the whole earth and all the other peoples in it, that would seem to us to have nothing to do with the question whether or not you and I as individuals will live after death. Again, we can believe that at death a man will be either annihilated or become a single disembodied consciousness: we cannot believe that he will become five or six different and widely scattered pieces of a ghost. Again, if some psychic spark of ourselves should survive death but be unconscious, having no knowledge or memory of what we were in life, to us that fate would be annihilation, not immortality. Again, if I am to live after death, so must my wife: no number of houris could reconcile me to a Paradise attained by many millions of men but only four women and one dog. Furthermore, we can imagine reincarnation, but only reincarnation as ourselves. If my wife has been Napoleon and Richard the Lion-Hearted, she is nothing that I have ever known or loved. And if I was ever Aspasia and Nell Gwyn, then I do not exist even now: I am just an illusion.

The kinds of “immortality” posited by the other major religions are inacceptable to us: meaningless, absurd, or repulsive to our racial instincts. But obviously such notions of a future life are not only satisfactory to other peoples but represent what they instinctively desire. To the great majority of the world’s inhabitants our conception of immortality is meaningless, absurd, or repulsive. That is simply a fact that we cannot change.

Christianity embodied all the moral instincts of our race, such as our concepts of personal honor, of personal self-respect and integrity, of fair play, of pity for the unfortunate, of loyalty—all of which seem preposterous to other races, at least in the form and application that we give to them. They simply lack our instincts. We think that it makes a great difference whether we kill a man in a fair fight or by treacherously stabbing him in the back or by putting poison in the cup that he accepts from our friendly hand; to at least one other race, we are simply childish and irrational: if you are to kill a man, kill him in the safest and most convenient way. Again, we, whether Christians or atheists, have an instinct for truth, so that if we lie, we have physical reactions that can be detected by a sphygmomanometer (often called a polygraph or “lie detector”). When officers of American military intelligence tried to use that device in the interrogation of prisoners during the Korean War, they discovered that Koreans and Chinese have no reaction that the instrument can detect, no matter how outrageous the lies they tell. We and they are differently constituted.

We can no longer be so obtuse as to ignore the vast differences in mentality and instinct that separate us from all other races—not merely from savages, but from highly civilized races. The differences are innate, and to attempt to change their way of thinking with argument, generosity, or holy water is as absurd as attempting to change the color of their skins. That is a fact that we must accept. However one may relate that fact to Christian doctrine, if we, a small minority among the teeming and terribly fecund populations of the globe, call all other peoples perverse or wicked, we merely confuse ourselves. If we are to think objectively and rationally, we must do so in the terms used by Maurice Samuel, who, after his discerning and admirably candid study of the “unbridgeable gulf that separates Indo-Europeans from Jews, had to conclude that “This difference in behavior and reaction springs from something more earnest and significant than a difference of beliefs: it springs from a difference in our biologic equipment.”

We cannot reasonably expect beings differently constituted to have our instincts or to believe as we do, any more than we can expect dogs to climb trees or cats to bark at intruders. And let us beware of the word “superiority.” If it means that we are superior in terms of our own values, it is mere tautology; if it has an objective and practical meaning, it poses a question that can only be answered only when the future has proved which peoples will survive and which will go under in the proximate struggle for possession of an overcrowded globe.

This is not a matter of doctrine or wishes, and it does not depend on our faith or lack of faith. Whatever may be the meaning of certain passages in the Old Testament, the earth is not flat. Whatever may be the meaning of certain passages in the New Testament, Christianity was not for “all the world.” The earth is spherical. Christianity is an Indo-European religion.
 
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[1] The Ebionites and the Cerinthians were the most important of these sects, but there were others, most of which are catalogued in the seven-volume edition of Adolf von Harnuck’s History of Dogma. I need scarcely add that the term “Judaeo-Christian” is correctly used only with reference to these sects and their antecedents.

[2] We cannot here analyze the effects of that supposition on Mediaeval Christendom. A concise and incisive treatment of that subject may be found in Lawrence R. Brown’s brilliant work, The Might of the West (New York, 1963). It will here suffice to note that even during the high-tide of Christian faith marked by the Crusades, that supposition prevented our ancestors from drawing the correct deductions from their manifest and perpetual failure to extend Western Christianity beyond the borders of the West.

[3] Solomon Schindler, Messianic Expectations and Modern Judaism, with an introduction by [the Reverend] Minot J. Savage. Boston, Cassino, 1886.

[4] Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles. New York, Harcourt-Brace, 1924.

and the survival of the West, 1

by Revilo Oliver (1973)

Contents

The Religion of the West
The Orient
Christianity Today
The Predictable Future
The Consequences
Succedaneous Religion
Postscript

The mission of this generation is the most difficult that has ever faced a Western generation. It must break the terror by which it is held in silence, it must look ahead, it must believe when there is apparently no hope, it must obey even if it means death, it must fight to the end rather than submit… The men of this generation must fight for the continued existence of the West.

—Francis Parker Yockey (1948)

 

Chapter One: THE RELIGION OF THE WEST

YOU, WHO ARE NOW reading these lines, and I are strangers. I have no means of knowing whether you are a Christian or an atheist. That, however, will not matter, so long as we talk about facts and not wishes.

The observed and verifiable facts of the world about us are not affected by religious faith or the lack of faith. Christians and atheists must find themselves in perfect agreement when they affirm that lead is more malleable than steel, that the earth is an oblate spheroid rotating on its axis, that whales are mammals, that Germany was defeated and devastated by the many nations allied against her in 1945, and that the Chinese are Mongolians. About such matters there can be no dispute among Western men, who instinctively accept the reality of the world about us and cannot believe, as do many Orientals, that it is merely an illusion in the mind of a dreamer.

If we would salvage and restore our civilization—the Occidental culture that is peculiarly our own and that now seems to be disintegrating and rotting before our very eyes—we must do so as Western men, by observing reality objectively and by reasoning from it dispassionately. And when we try to compute what resources remain to us, we need first of all to determine the actual strength of the Christian tradition at the present time.

It is a fact, which Christians will regard with satisfaction and some atheists may deplore, that Western civilization, for about half of its recorded history, has been a Christian civilization in the sense that the great majority of the people belonging to it (though never, at any time, all of them) believed implicitly in the truth of the Christian revelation. That religious unanimity was for a long time so nearly complete that, after the fall of the Roman Empire and the evanescence of hopes for its restoration, we of the West regarded our religion as the bond that united us and distinguished us from the rest of the human species. During the Middle Ages, our ancestors occupied the greater part of Europe, and, until they discovered the American continents, they lived only in Europe, but despite that geographical unity, they did not generally refer to themselves as the Europeans. For all practical purposes, furthermore, our ancestors belonged to the same division of the white race: they, like the true Greeks and the true Romans before them, were all members of the great race that we now call Indo-European or Aryan, but they had in their languages no word to designate their blood relationship and biological unity. Thus, when they referred to the unity of which they were always conscious as something transcending the constantly shifting territorial and political divisions of Europe, they called themselves Christendom. And for many centuries that word was adequate and misled no one.

For many centuries the West was Christendom and its civilization was indubitably Christian: that, whether you like it or not, is an historical fact. There is a complementary historical fact that was less obvious at the time and that even thoughtful men overlooked or tried to ignore until the events of the past two decades made it indubitable: Christianity is a religion of the West, and, for all practical purposes, only of the West. It is not, as its polemical adversaries so often charge, a Semitic cult, for it has never commanded the adhesion of any considerable number of Semites, and it is not, as Christians once generally believed, a universal religion, for experience has proved that it cannot be successfully exported to populations that are not Indo-European.

Experience has also proved that it does not do the slightest good to deny ascertained facts. The men of Classical antiquity knew, of course, that the earth is spherical, and Eratosthenes in the third century B.C. calculated its circumference as 24,663 miles. But the early Fathers of the Church, living in the age of growing ignorance that shrouded the last century of the Roman Empire, decided, on the basis of some statements in the Old Testament, that the earth ought to be flat or, at least, no more curved than a shield. Lactantius was the most eloquent and probably, therefore, the most influential of the many who assiduously demanded that the earth be flat and so imposed on their contemporaries the conviction that it was. In the Middle Ages, to be sure, there were some learned men, such as Buridan, who knew that the globe is a globe, but they, like learned men today, who all know very well that talk about the equality of races is utter nonsense, usually refrained from publicly denouncing fashionable delusions. It was not until the Fifteenth Century that the truth became again inescapable, but when it did, the Christians, being men of the West, who do not deny the lessons of experience, surrendered the comfortable error in which they had once generally believed; and since that time, no rational Christian has doubted that the earth is spherical.

Today, as in the Fifteenth Century, Western men have had to discard a congenial assumption to bring their conception of the world into conformity with observed reality. So long as we of the West held unquestioned dominion over the whole earth, we permitted ourselves to assume that our civilization in general, and our religion in particular, could be exported and made universal. We did not sufficiently observed that talent for mimicry is common to all human beings and indeed to all anthropoids; that all human beings stand in awe of those who have power over them; and that a genius for dissimulation and hypocrisy is hereditary in the most intelligent Orientals. Even with these oversights, the evidence against our assumption was fairly clear, but in the pride of our power we felt that we could indulge an assumption that was so congenial to the romantic generosity that is a peculiarity of our race. But the events of half a century, and especially of the last two decades, have shown us, beyond peradventure of doubt, the shape of the world in which we live. We now know what our prolonged missionary effort, cultural as well as religious, accomplished—and how its visible effects were produced.

When Cortés and his small but valiant band of iron men conquered the teeming empire of the Aztecs, he was immediately followed by a train of earnest missionaries, chiefly Franciscans, who began to preach the Gospel to the natives and soon sent home, with naive enthusiasm, glowing accounts of the conversions they had effected. Their pious sincerity and innocent joy still lives in the pages of Father Sahagun, Father Torquemada, and many others. For their sake I am glad that the poor Franciscans never suspected how small a part they played in the religious conversions that gave them such happiness. Far, far more persuasive than their sermons and their book had been the Spanish cannon that breached and shattered the Aztec defenses, and the ruthless Spanish soldiers who slew the Aztec priests at their own altars and toppled the Aztec idols from the sacrificial pyramids. The Aztecs, Tepanecs, and other natives accepted Christianity, not because their hearts were touched by alien and incomprehensible doctrines of love and mercy, but because it was the religion of the white men whose bronze cannon and mail-clad warriors were invincible.

That was early in the Sixteenth Century and even then there were not wanting indications that should have given pause to a critical mind, but we of the West went on repeating that fond mistake for four centuries, as the missionaries whom we sent to all parts of the world wrote home glowing reports of the number of “hearts” they had “won for Christ.” It was only after our enemies’ campaign of “anti-colonialism” really got under way that most of us realized that what had won all those hearts was primarily the discipline of British regiments and the manifest power of the white man.

We now know what happened. On many a shore of Africa, for example, missionaries eager to “win souls for Christ” ventured to land alone, and the aborigines, after mutilating and torturing them for a good communal laugh, ate them, cooked or raw according to the custom of the local cuisine. Usually, a few weeks or a few months later, a British cruiser hove to off shore and lobbed half a dozen 4.5 shells into the native village, and, if not pressed for time, landed half a company of marines to beat the bushes and drag out a dozen or so savages to hang on convenient trees. Consequently the tribe, if not very obtuse, took the hint and respected the next bevy of missionaries as somehow representing the god of thunder and lightning. And if the men of God distributed enough free rice and medical care with their sermons, they were able to make “converts,” as the natives learned to utter the words that Christians like to hear.

That is, in essence, the whole history of “winning souls” among the savages. There were, of course, many local variations. If the first missionaries were preceded by troops or white settlers, the blacks had already been convinced of the virtues of Christian rifles and had learned that white men should not be regarded as esculent comestibles. It often happened, however, that the natives, even after many years of preaching and conversion, rejected the white man’s odd rites very emphatically, and a fresh supply of missionaries was needed. In 1905, for example, the Maji-Maji conspiracy in Tanganyika murdered all the missionaries and almost all the white men and women in the entire territory, and it required a German regiment and several companies of marines to restore the teachings of the Gospel. That was done by giving some forty or fifty thousand demonstrations that a Mauser bullet could penetrate even a black hide that had been most carefully anointed with the grease of a boiled baby.

The Christian missionaries did teach a ritual and often inculcated a superstition that had some superficial resemblance to their religion, but as for teaching the spiritual substance of Christianity, they might as well have followed the example of St. Francis and preached sermons to the birds. That is why the many, many thousands of devoted Christians who expended their whole lives to “save souls” built only an edifice of cardboard and tinsel that is now gone in the wind.

What the vanishing of that flimsy facade has made obvious was predictable from the first. The religion of the West has never been comprehensible to the rudimentary minds of Congoids, Capoids, and Australoids, races so primitive that they were congenitally incapable of inventing a wheel and even of using one without supervision—races that could not develop for themselves even the first and simplest preliminaries of a civilization. When the missionaries invented systems of writing the crude languages of the primitives, they had also to invent words to express such concepts as “God,” “soul,” “justice,” “morality,” and “religion”—invent them by either creating new words or by perverting to such meanings sounds that in the native jargons conveyed impressions that were faintly and remotely analogous. That fact alone should have made us think. It was clear, furthermore, that the “converts,” even those who had been most thoroughly imbued with an awe of the god of repeating rifles and locomotives, would conform to the white man’s morality only under coercion, and that whenever they escaped from the white man’s supervision they spontaneously reverted not only to their own mores but also to whatever form of voodoo they had practiced before. Even if earlier experience had not been conclusive, what happened in Haiti at the very beginning of the Nineteenth Century should have removed the last lingering doubt. But the missionaries did not learn, and the “Ladies’ Missionary Society” went on contributing their mites, plying their needles, and glowing with tender emotion for the sweet little savages depicted by their romantic imaginations.

Although it is true that in some places in the former colonial possessions missionaries are still tolerated, if they are obsequious to the natives and pay very well, we have at last learned that the Gospel follows the British regiments in the white man’s ignominious and insane retreat from the world that was his.