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Category: Cicero

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Cicero Judea v. Rome Literature

Krauze and the JQ

Last Friday I added a short piece on Spinoza in Mexico Park: a book by the Mexican-Jewish Enrique Krauze that I had just bought. Now that I’ve been reading it, I couldn’t resist the urge to write a critical review of it for The Occidental Observer (TOO). My book review has just been published in that webzine for JQ connoisseurs—click: here!

The following is a passage (my translation) of Spinoza in Mexico Park that I could have quoted in my TOO article:

José María Lassalle: In our last conversation we had covered a decade in your intellectual life: that of your integration into Mexican culture as a historian and as editorial secretary of the magazine Vuelta… The one you described in the first conversation with great detail and love: your culture of origin, Jewish culture. I was very surprised by everything you said. I didn’t know that this root was so deep. It almost covered everything… I understand that you wanted to belong to Mexico and to the Hispanic world, and all your life you have worked to achieve it. But secretly you were driven by that initial impulse, by that root. That root is Judaism: the tree grew in Mexico, in Mexican soil, and bore Mexican fruit, but the root and the trunk were Jewish.

Enrique Krauze: What I did was to build that Jewish compound in Amsterdam [obliquely, Krauze is referring to Spinoza, who was born in Amsterdam]… And I began to build a library of Jewish subjects from all eras. A library, above all, of characters and ideas. [pages 419-420]

Latin Americans idolise their intellectuals and writers, so there are a couple of things I’d like to add to what I wrote in the TOO review.

Besides having enormous fame in the Spanish-speaking world, Krauze is one of those serene-speaking ethnic Jews with subtle but toxic messages for the white world. For example, he hasn’t only translated Susan Sontag for the cultural magazines in Spanish he has edited (I have read Krauze since 1990). In Spinoza in Mexico Park, where he talks a lot about WW2, the historian Krauze doesn’t mention David Irving once. Moreover, Krauze writes ‘Holocaust’ in a capital letter and ‘gulag’ in a lowercase in spite of the fact that far more Gentiles died in the Gulag than Jews in the so-called holocaust!

In the TOO piece I only mentioned a few names of the Jewish authors that influenced Krauze, but Spinoza in Mexico Park is replete with other names of historical Jews, from cover to cover. (There is no notable writer in the Spanish-speaking world to point these things out. That’s why I have been calling Latin America the ‘blue pill’ subcontinent.)

On the dilemma that plagues every Westerner—Athens or Jerusalem?—Krauze wrote the following (my translation) about the Greco-Roman world, in the context of Jewish writers of antiquity, such as Josephus and Philo:

[Jewish historian Arnaldo] Momigliano argues that Jerusalem resisted Athens because of the radical religious obstinacy of the people. The Jewish people remained faithful to the priests, the guardians of orthodoxy. For them, Greek culture was synonymous with idolatry, vain pleasures, frivolous comedies, and pagan myths… The Alexandrian Jews tried to persuade the Greek world of the goodness of their faith… One text points to the excesses of a certain Flaccus, the Roman governor in Egypt, who unleashed a veritable pogrom in that city. Even then, this persecution took on the dramatic forms and dimensions that were to be seen many centuries later in the Middle Ages. The profile he [the Jew Momigliano] draws of the delirious Caligula is a jewel worthy of Suetonius [Spinoza in Mexico Park, pages 430-431].

Regular visitors to The West’s Darkest Hour know that this site has a masthead, a guide that allows us to navigate the seas of history. Compare Krauze’s Jewish POV quoted above with the Aryan POV of our ‘masthead’ (pages 33-123 of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour, linked in our featured post):

In 62-61 b.c.e., the proconsul Lucius Valerius Flaccus (son of the consul of the same name and brother of the consul Gaius Valerius Flaccus) confiscated the tribute of ‘sacred money’ that the Jews sent to the Temple of Jerusalem. The Jews of Rome raised the populace against Flaccus. The well-known Roman patriot Cicero defended Flaccus against the accuser Laelius (a tribune of the plebs who would later support Pompey against Julius Caesar) and referred to the Jews of Rome in a few sentences of 59 b.c.e., which were reflected in his In Defence of Flaccus, XVIII:

‘The next thing is that charge about the Jewish gold… I will speak in a low voice, just so as to let the judges hear me. For men are not wanting who would be glad to excite those people against me and against every eminent man, and I will not assist them and enable them to do so more easily. As gold, under the pretence of being given to the Jews, was accustomed every year to be exported out of Italy and all the provinces to Jerusalem, Flaccus issued an edict establishing a law that…’

From these phrases, we can deduce that already in the 1st century b.c.e., the Jews had great political power in Rome itself and that they had an important capacity for social mobilization against their political opponents, who lowered their voices out of fear: the pressure of the lobbies.

Thus spake Cicero (brown letters) before the senate. The story of the Flaccus family doesn’t end there. In the masthead we then see what happened to another Flaccus[1] in the section about Caligula: another historical figure maligned by Jews and Christians, including the historian Krauze.

Incidentally, I’m in the final proofreading of the November 2022 edition of On Exterminationism, so I won’t be adding more entries here while I work on it. But I’ll answer any questions I am asked about Krauze, whom I met personally—even shook hands with him in 1993!—when he and Octavio Paz published a book by Cuban dissident Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

________

[1] Aulus Avilius Flaccus was appointed praefectus of Roman Egypt from 33 to 38 c.e.

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Cicero Quotable quotes

Cicero quote

Omnium rerum principia parva sunt.

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Axiology Cicero Deranged altruism Eschatology Friedrich Nietzsche Hegel Philosophy

The Story of Philosophy, 2

On the uses of philosophy

There is a pleasure in philosophy, and a lure even in the mirages of metaphysics, which every student feels until the coarse necessities of physical existence drag him from the heights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain.
Some ungentle reader will check us here by informing us that philosophy is as useless as chess, as obscure as ignorance, and as stagnant as content. “There is nothing so absurd,” said Cicero, “but that it may be found in the books of the philosophers.” Doubtless some philosophers have had all sorts of wisdom except common sense; and many a philosophic flight has been due to the elevating power of thin air. Let us resolve, on this voyage of ours, to put in only at the ports of light, to keep out of the muddy streams of metaphysics and the “many-sounding seas” of theological dispute.
But is philosophy stagnant? Science seems always to advance, while philosophy seems always to lose ground. Yet this is only because philosophy accepts the hard and hazardous task of dealing with problems not yet open to the methods of science—problems like good and evil, beauty and ugliness, order and freedom, life and death; so soon as a field of inquiry yields knowledge susceptible of exact formulation it is called science. Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.
Philosophy is a hypothetical interpretation of the unknown (as in metaphysics), or of the inexactly known (as in ethics or political philosophy); it is the front trench in the siege of truth. Science is the captured territory; and behind it are those secure regions in which knowledge and art build our imperfect and marvelous world. Philosophy seems to stand still, perplexed; but only because she leaves the fruits of victory to her daughters the sciences, and herself passes on, divinely discontent, to the uncertain and unexplored.
So let us listen to these men, ready to forgive them their passing errors, and eager to learn the lessons which they are so eager to teach, “Do you then be reasonable,” said old Socrates to Crito, “and do not mind whether the teachers of philosophy are good or bad, but think only of Philosophy herself. Try to examine her well and truly; and if she be evil, seek to turn away all men from her; but if she be what I believe she is, then follow her and serve her, and be of good cheer.”
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s comment:
All this sounds very nice. I will never have a command of the English language as Durant had it. But I had to celebrate more than fifty springs to begin to understand things I did not see when, as a teenager, I wanted to pursue a philosophy course. Now I see things that not only an adolescent is incapable of seeing on his own, but that even when doing a philosophy career the ‘mature’ academic usually doesn’t see.
With elementary knowledge of the central tragedy of the West—the takeover by the Judeo-Christians that destroyed the classical world—, Durant’s exposition seems ignorant. Although he does not devote whole chapters to the scholasticism that he so despises, he does not seem to notice, as Ferdinand Bardamu realised in an entry reproduced this month, that the ‘secular’ liberals, socialists and utopians were influenced by the Christian ethic in an extraordinary way.
But long before I read Bardamu I was extremely irritated by the philosophy of the back doors of Kant and Descartes (and I don’t forget the chapter on ‘The New Understanding of God’ in Does God Exist? by Hans Küng and in his erudite study on Hegel). Descartes alleged that he began his philosophical system in tabula rasa but, as soon as he reached the conclusions he wanted, he immediately went to the church to thank Providence. The self-deception not only of Kant and Descartes but of other modern philosophers is truly overwhelming: everything opposite to the ‘Know Thyself’ that was recorded in the Oracle of Delphi before the damned Christians destroyed it.
Now I see from another point of view what in the academy is called philosophy. The transition from Christianity to an authentic secularism is so traumatic that the so-called modern philosophers were stuck in a sort of chess for the sophisticate: epistemologies and metaphysics, instead of using their minds to culminate the apostatising process from Christianity.
Only Nietzsche started to succeed from the viewpoint of this new understanding of philosophy. Keep in mind that not even the vast majority of secular white nationalists have apostatised altogether, as seen in the fact that they continue to preach love for the Jews, whom they want to deport to Israel. Compare such love with the hatred the Jews feel for the Aryans—no ethnic state for them until they become extinct—and we will see how ‘Neo-Christians’ are still those atheists among contemporary racists. The love that these ‘racists’ feel for the Jews and other races is something that the Greeks and Romans of the ancient world would not have understood. Comparing it to chess again, those who have the white pieces but hold Semitic malware in their minds and ‘love their enemies’, the coloured pieces, are doomed to lose the battle.
In the previous entry about Durant’s book I said that philosophy did not exist. I exaggerated and would like to correct myself. We can rescue the term philosophy as long as we apply it to the thinkers of the Greco-Roman world. There has not been, nor will there be again, philosophy in the West until the day when all the churches that have installed Semitic malware on the Aryan psyche have been brought down by a triumphant Fourth Reich.
As I said a couple of days ago, the message on this site is the very opposite of what Andrew Fraser recently wrote in The Occidental Observer.

Categories
Ancient Rome Cicero Eduardo Velasco Judea v. Rome

Apocalypse for whites • IX

by Evropa Soberana

 
Cicero and the Jewish lobby
In 62-61 BCE, the proconsul Lucius Valerius Flaccus (son of the consul of the same name and brother of the consul Gaius Valerius Flaccus) confiscated the tribute of ‘sacred money’ that the Jews sent to the Temple of Jerusalem.
When this happened, the Jews of Rome raised the populace against Flaccus. The well-known Roman patriot Cicero defended Flaccus against the accuser Laelius (a tribune of the plebs who would later support Pompey against Julius Caesar) and referred to the Jews of Rome in a few sentences of 59 BCE, which were reflected in his In Defence of Flaccus, XVIII:

The next thing is that charge about the Jewish gold. And this, forsooth, is the reason why this cause is pleaded near the steps of Aurelius. It is on account of this charge, O Laelius, that this place and that mob has been selected by you. You know how numerous that crowd is, how great is its unanimity, and of what weight it is in the popular assemblies. I will speak in a low voice, just so as to let the judges hear me. For men are not wanting who would be glad to excite that people against me and against every eminent man; and I will not assist them and enable them to do so more easily. As gold, under pretence of being given to the Jews, was accustomed every year to be exported out of Italy and all the provinces to Jerusalem, Flaccus issued an edict establishing a law that…

From these phrases we can deduce that already in the 1st century BCE, the Jews had great political power in Rome itself, and that they had an important capacity for social mobilization against their political opponents, who lowered their voices out of fear: the pressure of the lobbies.

Categories
Ancient Rome Cicero Eduardo Velasco Horace Judaism Judea v. Rome Tacitus

Apocalypse for whites • V

by Evropa Soberana

 
Roman anti-Semitism: a spiritual conflict
What happened after the arrival of Roman troops in Judea was a spiritual confrontation unprecedented in the history of mankind. Four million Jews were now going to share borders with the other 65 million subjects of the Roman Empire.
It is impossible to write an article on this subject without mentioning the profoundly anti-Jewish quotes written by great Roman authors of the time. In them a true conflict is perceived between two systems of values exactly opposite each other. The clash between Roman rigidity and the dogmatism of the desert caused in Rome a genuine movement of rejection of Judaism. Although anti-Semitism goes back to the very origins of Jewry, the Romans, heirs of the Greeks and of a superior military discipline, were undoubtedly, until then, the ones who showed the greatest hostility towards the Jews.
Cicero (106-43 BCE), as we shall see later, condemns hostile Jewry considering that their mentality of skulduggery and cowardice is incompatible with the altruistic mentality of the best in Rome.

Horace (65-8 BCE), in Book I of his Satires mocks the Sabbath or Sabbatic rest, while Petronius (dies in 66 CE) in his Satyricon ridicules the circumcision.
Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) in his Natural History speaks about ‘Jewish impiety’, and refers to ‘the Jews, well known for their contempt for the gods’.
Seneca (4-65 CE) called Jewry ‘the most evil nation, whose waste of a seventh of life [he refers to Shabbat] goes against the utility of it… These most perverse people have come to extend their customs into the whole world; the defeated have given laws to the victors’.
Quintilian (30-100 CE) says in his Institutio Oratoria that the Jews are a derision for the rest of men, and that their religion is the embodiment of superstition.
Martial (40-105), in his Epigrams, sees the Jews as followers of a cult whose true nature is secret to hide it from the rest of the world, and he attacks circumcision, the Shabbat (or Saturday: that is, doing nothing on the seventh day of the week, which gave them lazy press), and their abstinence from pork.
Tacitus (56-120), the famous historian who praised the Germans, also spoke about the Jews but in very different terms. He says that they descend from lepers expelled from Egypt, and that under the Assyrians, the Medes and Persians, they were the most despised and humiliated people. Among the terms with which Tacitus qualifies Jewry we have ‘perverse, abominable, cruel, superstitious, alien to any law of religion, evil and filthy’ among many others:

The Jewish customs are sad, dirty, vile and abominable, and if they have survived it is thanks to their perversity. Of all enslaved peoples, Jews are the most despicable and disgusting.
For the Jews, everything that is sacred to us is despicable, and what is repugnant to us is lawful.
The Jews reveal a stubborn bond with one another, which contrasts with their hatred for the rest of humanity… Among them, nothing is lawful. Those who embrace their religion practice the same thing, and the first thing they are taught is to despise the gods [History, chapters 4 and 5].

Juvenal (55-130), in his Satires, criticizes the Jews for the Sabbath, for not worshiping images, for circumcising themselves, for not eating pork, for being scrupulous with their laws while despising those of Rome, and that they only reveal the ‘initiates’ the true nature of Judaism. In addition, he blames Orientals in general and Jewry in particular for the degeneration of the environment in Rome itself.
Marcus Aurelius (121-180) passed through Judea on his trip to Egypt, being surprised by the ways of the local Jewish population. He will say, ‘I find this people worse than the Marcomanni, the Quadics and the Sarmatians (Rerum Gestarum Libri by Ammianus Marcellinus).
These quotes summarise how the Romans, an Indo-European martial, virile and disciplined people, saw the Jewish quarter. It can be said that, until the triumph of the Romans, no people had been so aware of the challenge posed by Judaism.
All these quotes point to a stubborn ideological as well as military confrontation, in which both Rome and Judea were going to think a lot for a final solution: a conflict that would influence History in a huge way and, therefore, cannot be ignored under any pretext. This article tries to give an idea of what the old clash of the East against the West meant.

Categories
Ancient Rome Cicero Eduardo Velasco Judea v. Rome

Apocalypse for whites • II

by Evropa Soberana

 
Chapter 1
Geopolitical, anthropological and ethnic context
The Near East or the Levant—what today are Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Egypt—has been a very important geostrategic zone of confrontations between the Europe of the forests, the snows, the rivers and the mists, and the deep East of the dry, jealous, sterile and inhospitable spirit of the desert. In this area there have been, from time immemorial, ebbs and flows from both Europe and Asia and Africa, and crystallized in the appearance of the Neolithic and the first civilizations of the world.
Paraphrasing Nietzsche, we would say, ‘if you stare at the desert for a long time, the desert will also stare at you’. If there is a natural selection environment radically different from that of the glaciations, it is undoubtedly the desert: monotonous and infinite environment like the laments of the songs now preached from the minarets of the mosques. Immersed in this type of landscape for a long time, it is easy for a man to have visions and see illusions and distorted reflections; to listen voices that, according to oriental folklore, come from evil spirits and, finally, to lose one’s way and sink into despair and madness, and let your mind take a journey into darkness, from which it will never return.

The deserts are the places where the total absence of the fecundating power of heaven—represented by rain and lightning, and by typically European gods such as Zeus or Jupiter—has propitiated the triumph of the Earth, and therefore the death of Nature and the levelling, the devastation, the equalization of the horizons and the lack of permanence of the same floor that is stepped on. It is totally imprudent to think that all these elements do not leave a deep mark on the idiosyncrasy and collective imagination of a people.
The subject that we treat is revealed as a confrontation that, in last instance, is reduced to an evolutionary insurrection of the East not to disappear in an unequal competition with the European human varieties. In 56 BCE, in a speech entitled De Provinciis Consularibus given in the Senate of Rome, Cicero himself describes the Jews, along with the Syrians as a ‘race born to be a slave’.
Syrians and Jews were ethnic communities in which the Armenid race was strongly represented, and which are encompassed as Semitic cultures. The Semitic waves constituted, for millennia, a source of pain, malaise, violence and tragedy for Europe, from the Carthaginians to the Ottomans. The present book will deal particularly with the Jews, without forgetting other groups that, like the Arabs, Persians and Syrians, made common cause with them on many occasions, including during the rise of Christianity.
Although today they try to unload Europe with an unreal multiculturalism, the daily and historical reality is that the coexistence between different races has only two results: third-worldization and/or balkanization: ethnic conflicts and territorial ruptures. What we are going to see in this book, of course, has nothing of multi-cult and nothing of ‘peaceful coexistence’, since for centuries and centuries the coexistence between Greeks and Jews was marked by great waves of bloody violence. It did not work.
Far, therefore, from the politically correct fantasy of the ‘coexistence of cultures’, we will investigate the beginning of a series of ethnic cleansings throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, which would culminate in the low Roman Empire with eradication, in North Africa and in the Near East, of the Greek and Roman communities and of most of the classical legacy at the hands of the East.

Categories
Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Cicero Eduardo Velasco Indo-European heritage Israel / Palestine Judea v. Rome

Apocalypse for whites • I

by Evropa Soberana

 
Below, abridged translation from the first chapter of Roma contra Judea, Judea contra Roma, authored by the Spanish blogger Evropa Soberana:
 

______ 卐 ______

 
‘The Jews have long been in rebellion not only against Rome, but against all humanity’.

—Euphrates the Stoic

‘The Jews belong to a dark and repulsive force. I know how numerous this clique is, how they remain united and what power they exert through their unions. They are a nation of liars and deceivers’.

— Cicero

I

Foreword
The purpose of this book is to give an idea of what happened to the Ancient World, of how Europe fell into the Middle Ages and, especially, to what extent what happened in Rome 1,600 years ago is exactly what is happening in our days throughout the West, but magnified a thousand times by globalization, technology and, above all, the deputation of psycho-sociological and propagandistic knowledge by the System.
What is dealt with in this book is the story of a tragedy, of an apocalypse. It is the end not only of the Roman Empire and all its achievements, but also of the survival of the Egyptian, Persian and Greek teachings in Europe in a bloodthirsty process: premonition of the future destruction of Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic heritages, always accompanied by their respective genocides.
This process had a markedly ethnic character: it was the rebellion of Christianized slaves (from Asia Minor and North Africa) against Indo-European paganism, which represented the ancestral customs and traditions of the Roman and Hellenic aristocracies—decadent, minoritarian and softened in comparison with an overwhelmingly numerous, brutalized people who cordially detested the distant pride of their lords.
In the third chapter, ‘Christianity and the fall of the Roman Empire’, we will see processes that marked the first development of Christianity: that strange synthesis between Jewish and Greco-decadent mentality that, from the East, devoured the classical world to the bone, undermining Roman institutions and the Roman mentality to the point of propitiating its total collapse.
However, we will begin by focusing on the Eastern Roman provinces, especially Judea, which was snatched by Rome to the heirs of Alexander the Great. How were the relations between Greeks and Jews? What role did the Romans play in Asia Minor and in the management of the Jewish problem? What are the true roots of Israel and the current instability in the Near East?
It will be worthwhile to expand on the subject to familiarise oneself with the foundations of what is today the greatest geopolitical conflict on the planet: the State of Israel. We will also see the impossibility, in the long term, of the coexistence between two radically different cultures—in this case, the Greco-Roman and the Jewish.
For now, the Romans will meet a people who take the tradition with the same seriousness as them, but replacing that Olympic, artistic, athletic and aristocratic touch with a spark of fanaticism and dogmatism, and changing the Roman patriotism for a kind of pact sealed behind the backs of the rest of humanity. A people, above all, with a fiercely rooted sense of identity—in fact, much more than any other people—and who also considered themselves to be no less than the ‘chosen people’…
 

Index

First part
Geopolitical, anthropological and ethnic context
Rome
Judea
Roman anti-Semitism: a spiritual conflict
The Hellenistic legacy
Greek anti-Semitism
The conquest of Pompey
Herod the Great
About Jesus Christ and the birth of Christianity
Caligula
Claudius and Nero
Second part
First Jewish-Roman War: the Great Jewish Revolt of 66-73 CE
Ethnic disturbances in Egypt
Siege and fall of Jerusalem: the destruction of the Second Temple
Fall of Masada
Consequences of the Great Jewish Revolt
Second Jewish-Roman War: the revolt of Kitos of 115-117 CE
Third Jewish-Roman War: the revolt of Bar Kokhba of 132-135 CE
Consequences of the Palestine revolt
Some conclusions
Nietzsche on the conflict Rome vs. Judea
Third part
Let’s have a look at the situation
‘The Jewish sect’ appears
The Nero case as an example of historical distortion
Destruction of Jerusalem: Christianity takes hold outside Judea
Christians stops being persecuted
At the top of the pyramid there are only slaves: Anti-pagan genocide
The Emperor Julian as the last Roman breath
The Anti-pagan genocide continues with more virulence
The martyrdom of Hypatia as an example of Christian terrorism
In conclusion
Nietzsche on Christianity
Nietzschean version of the Sermon on the Mount

Categories
Adversus Christianos (book) Ancient Rome Cicero Emigration / immigration Porphyry of Tyre Tacitus

The Roman legacy

by Manu Rodríguez (translated from Spanish)



Rome not only opened Europe’s doors to our Greek brothers, but also to the Syrians, and the Phoenicians, and Jews, and the Persians, and to the Egyptians…

It was a flood, a deluge of Eastern cults. Finally, nothing could be saved because we were not anchored onto anything solid. Uprooted, we went astray after a process of self-destruction that had even corroded our very roots, our very fundamentals (courtesy of our Cynic and Skeptic philosophers and Stoics). We navigated adrift, without a North; a wind without North. We laid at the mercy of anyone, of any clever devil. And that’s what happened to us: a clever devil caught us, and we were held captive in his cave for more than a thousand and five hundred years.

In no way did we need any morality or Eastern cult. The European natives (indigenae, born of the interior) had their own gods (indigetes, divinities of the interior), i.e., their own laws, norms, morals. We were doing well: they were the treasures of the families, the ancestral legacy. While these values were maintained nothing bad could happen to us.

It was the contempt for such symbolic significances what marked the beginning of our decline and ruin: the neglect of our being. We should have been stronger. Instead, notice our superficiality in detaching ourselves from the highest value; our folly, our decline, our stupidity, our decadence, our weakness. We disappointed our parents who are in heaven. We were perfidious, unfaithful, disloyal, infidels; unfair.

Anyone who abandons his people, his mother country, is an outcast, a bastard. Those who abandon their Fathers and their legacy, these are the true stateless. They have no country, no parents; they’re only infidels. But that was precisely our behavior. That’s what they did, by force or degree, all of our ancestors: the Romans, Greeks, Germans, Celts, Slavs… All of them disowned the Fathers during the fateful Christianization of Europe. I speak for our ancestors. Upon us falls such guilt, such error, such treachery.

We, the present generations of Europeans, have to repair such perfidy, such disloyalty. We must reclaim the thread with our ancestors, the legacy; give it life again.

♣

Here’s what we missed, what we throw overboard, what was lost of our sight. I speak of the genius of Rome, from her being and her becoming, of a living branch of the Indo-European tree that has not perished. Of her success and failure we must all learn. They succeeded in both keeping their identity, which made them strong, and their ethical significances, moral and civic, so familiar.

The symbolic significances I mention below are taken from the Atlas of World History by Hermann Kinder and Werner Hilgemann, page 88. They are slogans that provide strength and firmness, and moral courage. They were the weapons that we could have used then, and failed to do; but we can use them now. There is still time. It is time to recover what makes us strong and asserts us. Let’s see if those significances remain valid. The following is a summary.

The preservation ( disciplina potestas) of the domestic or household order is made by the father (both parents we would say today without objection), by the authority (sapientia), the maturity of judgment (consilium) and integrity (probitas). The circumspection (diligentia), the rigor (severitas), and self-control (continentia, and temperantia) define the solemn character (gravitas) of their actions, acquired by the industriousness (industria) and tenacity (constantia). The offspring are educated in adult models (mos maiorum). Humility (modestia) and worship (reverentia) are the virtues that should govern the relationship of the younger generation with the older. Young people are also demanded obedience (obsequium), respect (verecundia) and purity (pudicitia, integritas morum).

As for the training of citizens this is what it says: Valor (virtus), independence of judgment and action (libertas), glory, devotion (pietas), fidelity or reliability (fides) and propriety in public life (dignitas) constitute the ideal virtues of a Roman citizen; something that he must put in the service of the community (res publica) in order to contribute to a greater power and greatness of his people (maiestas populi romani). The common good is the highest law (salus populi suprema lex).


I also recommend the reading of the treatise De officiis (On Duties) of Cicero.

Each of these Latin terms has a wider semantic field that expresses the translation (that I copied from the original). The auctoritas had a sense of moral standing, as when we say “so and so is an authority in a particular science or branch of knowledge.” The sapientia is both the wisdom, knowledge as intelligence, sanity. Pietas is the devotion we owe to the manes or Parents, the elder (mos maiorum) and to the res publica, the mother country. Sacrae patria deserere and deserere patriam were Roman expressions that designated desertion of the Fathers and the adoption of a foreign religion. Gloria is precisely fame, good reputation, be renown; reaching general and public honors after a cursus honorum full of merit, in the service of my people, for the greater glory of my people.

These values can be reclaimed today with dignity and without any demerit.

I remind my fellow citizens this past story because presently Europe (and the Magna Europe) runs a similar risk to that loss in the ancient world. This time it will be much worse because it is foreign people and foreign to our being what will dominate us. That was a purely ideological domination; this will also be a demographic domination. We will be clearly disadvantaged on earth and in heaven.

♣

The decline was soon shown in Greece (since the Alexandrian period) and Rome (since the Carthaginian wars): corruption, despotism, injustice, immorality, treachery—in all areas of life. Polybius and Cicero warned in Rome, and Columella and Sallust, Tacitus, Persius and Juvenal. Everyone noticed it and pleaded: “Go back to the sources, Roman: return to the Fathers, purify and recover the aura, the prestige (auctoritas), the majesty.” All in vain. The echo of that failure still resonates today.

No, it was not the alien cults, nor the Jews or the Christians… It was us, our indifference and our nihilism, the cause of our destruction. There laid our weakness. We were not up to par. We failed to respond adequately to the Christian apologists, for example. There was no Demosthenes, no Cicero in the first Christian centuries. We watched them destroy our foundations. The philosophical schools provided arguments to the Christian propagandists (criticism of our gods, traditions and customs, our values). We weakened the security and confidence in ourselves, in our science, knowledge and powers. The future lords of Europe had little to add.

Doesn’t this story sound familiar to you, European? Behold our times. Haven’t we for more than two centuries been destroying ourselves? Which result we get from our current nihilism, our skepticism, our relativism, our political, moral and cultural indifference; our profound boredom? We repeat that history. We make the same mistakes. Again, we will be defeated.

Categories
Alexandria Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Celts Cicero Franks Friedrich Nietzsche Goths Individualism Indo-European heritage Islam Plato Universalism

The Aryan problem

Dear César:

Not all Spaniards think like that. The causes of our decline in the past after the Christianization, and in the present, are due to ourselves. I refer to excerpts published in one of my posts last year:

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periander_vat2Already in pre-Socratic times we can see this disregard for a fundamental part of our culture: in the whimsical and superfluous theogonies and cosmogonies of Epicharmus and Pherecydes, which rivaled the traditions collected and transmitted by Homer and Hesiod and confused the people through pseudo-Orphic and Pythagorean preaching about individual souls and religious proposals of “personal” salvation: individualists and universalists. They divided the people and ended up influencing Plato and some philosophers (Xenophanes). Finally, in post-Socratic times, coinciding with the Alexandrian period—culturally chaotic, cosmopolitan—, philosophical ethics circulated from Cynics, Stoics and Epicureans, already fully individualistic and universalist (transnational, stateless doctrines for “all men”) and consistent with the cultural decay of the time. I think that this was a big mistake; this contempt by the Hellenic “intelligentsia” as Nietzsche said. The Greek people lost their right to their autochthonous gods. This “intelligentsia” should have taken care of the native and ancestral legacy.

This attitude just ended up weakening the strength and security that the people had in their own cultural traditions. These traditions, these “worlds” were part of the ancestral collective memory of our people that was devastated, made it like a desert, annihilated by our own philosophers and thinkers. They were in some way responsible for this great loss, for that debacle, for that alienation which resulted in the loss of our cultures when Christianization took over. They neglected their duty, not only the education of the people, but the care and defense of our traditions (our worlds) before the Other. Our people lost their cultural property, or watched it sullied, undervalued, or ridiculed by their own kind.

The thing did not improve in Roman times when the schools of Stoics and Epicureans dominated everywhere in the Empire, and the words of Cato or Cicero could not avoid the dissolution, this disintegration of the cultural symbolic (colectivas) of Greeks and Romans.

The entry of Jewish, Chaldean, Egyptian and Persian sects found a disoriented people; neglected, abandoned, without guidance and their traditions scorned by the “enlightened” classes. They preyed upon the preachers of these sects. It was not only Plato or Christianity. Centuries of neglect and scorn put our people in the hands of these preachers of foreign divinities.

We can do the same reasoning with the traditions of Germans, Celts, Slavs and others. They seemed to be infected by the general attitude that Greeks and Romans had regarding their own cultures, not valued at all. The values, it seems, were elsewhere: in the economic and the military power, or in religions of “personal” salvation coming from the outside, which denoted disintegration and a previous decomposition of these peoples.

Nothing forced the Goths, Lombards, Burgundians and Franks to be Christianized but their greed for power and willingness to take over the remains of the Empire without reflection or discussion of its “ideological” bases, fully Christianized by the 5th century (the century of the Germanic expansions). This was not the case of forced Christianization, centuries later, of the Saxons and Frisians (by Charlemagne), or the politics from the top (the monarchs) as done by the Norwegians (Olaf “The Holy”) and the Slavs (Vladimir, also “The Holy”). The Germans could have been the liberators of Europe, but they put their arms in the service of a foreign faith and an ecclesia (priestly community). This attitude says very clearly how they were indifferent to their own traditions.

It was a betrayal. Our history would have been different if they had remained faithful to the cultural legacy of their ancestors.

Breaking the sacred bonds wrought what it wrought. And from the ominous Christianization of our people we have been suffering this cultural and spiritual alienation that affects us so much; this drift, this going astray, this wandering…

The post-mortem world of the Indo-European cultures has to do with the collective memory of the people. It is a “space” that houses the gods, but also the Fathers, all the ancestors without distinction. This can be seen in the Hittite or Aryan-Vedic world (with Yama, Manu’s brother, and the first mortal); in the Celtic world (remember the original Halloween), or in the Roman world (the Manes). Keeping memory and even worship of the absent, the departed, was part of the education and morals of our ancestors, and was a sign of distinction and nobility against other peoples. The Patricians were those who had Fathers, who kept memory of the Fathers, in the sense already said. Let’s say that this memory was part of the “being” for our Indo-European ancestors.

Forgetfulness or loss of these “spaces” had (and has) bad consequences. Precisely the Christian or Muslim preachers noticed such loss or damaged being; this symbolic amputation among the peoples, and therefore preached (and still preach) their values. The loss or decline or forgetting of these spaces leaves people orphaned and incomplete. This was the picture that the Christian apostles (Jews) found in the area of the Roman Empire: stranded peoples abandoned to their lot; incomplete, empty. They found the right spot to spread their worlds. They found people without “being,” without memory, without identity and already acculturated—by their own kind. Christian acculturation, or later Muslim acculturation, allowed these people to complete their symbolic being—at least spuriously in the outside.

What I’m writing down has a counterpart, a repetition in our contemporary European and Western world. Both are similar circumstances that repeat the cultural deterioration and we see a return to the same religious-cultural “offers”—the everlasting impostors, the usurpers. Not only Christians and the “people of god” (the Hebrew god) lacking a homeland (but with Israel as sacred land), but the “umma”, the stateless Muslim “nation” (though based in Mecca). And also the politicians and the intellectuals: from democratic universalism to proletarian internationalism (Marx’s “workers or proletarians have no fatherland”) to sociologists such as the cosmopolitan Adorno or Marcuse, or Derrida who preaches the philosophy of the philosopher as cosmopolitan and stateless.

It’s the same song again, the same charm, the same lure, the same trap.

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You can find similar reasoning in my blogging of the last year (there are 68 pages) and the posts published this year. I would like you to read, at least, those entries.

The subject requires a great deal of debating with the participation of all Aryan nations: a process of self-gnosis that revisits at least our last two millennia, although in my opinion we should start with the cultural deterioration that has its beginning in the pre-Socratic times and reached its climax in imperial Rome (from Caesar on).

Well, César, I don’t take more of your time.

Regards,

Manu