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Dominion (book) Vladimir Lenin

Dominion, 31

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Axiology Charles Darwin Dominion (book)

Dominion, 30

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Dominion (book) Tom Holland Who We Are (book)

Complementing WWA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Dominion (book) Slavery

Dominion, 29

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________

Editor’s Note:

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

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

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

Categories
Dominion (book)

Dominion, 28

by Tom Holland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Dominion (book) Napoleon Slavery

Dominion, 27

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My bold type.

Categories
American Revolutionary War Axiology Dominion (book) French Revolution

Dominion, 26

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

So far, I have only quoted a few paragraphs from the chapters of Tom Holland’s book. But the ‘Woe to You Who Are Rich’ section of the ‘Enlightenment’ chapter is so important that I will quote it in full.

That section shows no more and no less how Christianity metamorphosed into neochristianity: the mental virus that has been infecting the white man since the American Revolution and the French Revolution: two sides of the same coin, as we shall see in this post.

Although the boldface is mine, the colour image of the Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du citoyen de 1789 appears in Holland’s book, as does the footnote to that image. The words that I put in bold and in red reflect this entry in a nutshell:

It took effort to strip bare a basilica as vast as the one that housed Saint Martin. For a millennium and more after the great victory won by Charles Martel over the Saracens, it had continued to thrive as a centre of pilgrimage. A succession of disasters—attacks by Vikings, fires—had repeatedly seen it rebuilt. So sprawling had the complex of buildings around the basilica grown that it had come to be known as Martinopolis. But revolutionaries, by their nature, relished a challenge. In the autumn of 1793, when bands of them armed with sledgehammers and pickaxes occupied the basilica, they set to work with gusto. There were statues of saints to topple, vestments to burn, tombs to smash. Lead had to be stripped from the roof, and bells removed from towers. ‘A sanctuary can do without a grille, but the defence of the Fatherland cannot do without pikes.’ So efficiently was Martinopolis stripped of its treasures that within only a few weeks it was bare. Even so—the state of crisis being what it was—the gaunt shell of the basilica could not be permitted to go to waste. West of Tours, in the Vendée, the Revolution was in peril. Bands of traitors, massed behind images of the Virgin, had risen in revolt. Patriots recruited to the cavalry, when they arrived in Tours, needed somewhere to keep their horses. The solution was obvious. The basilica of Saint Martin was converted into a stable.

Horse shit steaming in what had once been one of the holiest shrines in Christendom gave to Voltaire’s contempt for l’infâme a far more pungent expression than anything that might have been read in a salon. The ambition of France’s new rulers was to mould an entire ‘people of philosophes’. The old order had been weighed and found wanting. The monarchy itself had been abolished. The erstwhile king of France—who at his coronation had been anointed with oil brought from heaven for the baptism of Clovis, and girded with the sword of Charlemagne—had been executed as a common criminal. His decapitation, staged before a cheering crowd, had come courtesy of the guillotine, a machine of death specifically designed by its inventor to be as enlightened as it was egalitarian. Just as the king’s corpse, buried in a rough wooden coffin, had then been covered in quicklime, so had every division of rank in the country, every marker of aristocracy, been dissolved into a common citizenship. It was not enough, though, merely to set society on new foundations. The shadow of superstition reached everywhere. Time itself had to be recalibrated. That October, a new calendar was introduced. Sundays were swept away. So too was the practice of dating years from the incarnation of Christ. Henceforward, in France, it was the proclamation of the Republic that would serve to divide the sweep of time.

Even with this innovation in place, there still remained much to be done. For fifteen centuries, priests had been leaving their grubby fingerprints on the way that the past was comprehended. All that time, they had been carrying ‘pride and barbarism in their feudal souls’. And before that? A grim warning of what might happen should the Revolution fail was to be found in the history of Greece and Rome. The radiance that lately had begun to dawn over Europe was not the continent’s first experience of enlightenment. The battle between reason and unreason, between civilisation and barbarism, between philosophy and religion, was one that had been fought in ancient times as well. ‘In the pagan world, a spirit of toleration and gentleness had ruled.’ It was this that the sinister triumph of Christianity had blotted out. Fanaticism had prevailed. Now, though, all the dreams of the philosophes were coming true. L’infâme was being crushed. For the first time since the age of Constantine, Christianity was being targeted by a government for eradication. Its baleful reign, banished on the blaze of revolution, stood revealed as a nightmare that for too long had been permitted to separate twin ages of progress: a middle age.

This was an understanding of the past that, precisely because so flattering to sensibilities across Europe, was destined to prove infinitely more enduring than the makeshift calendar of the Revolution. Nevertheless, just like many other hallmarks of the Enlightenment, it did not derive from the philosophes. The understanding of Europe’s history as a succession of three distinct ages had originally been popularised by the Reformation. To Protestants, it was Luther who had banished shadow from the world, and the early centuries of the Church, prior to its corruption by popery, that had constituted the primal age of light. By 1753, when the term ‘Middle Ages’ first appeared in English, Protestants had come to take for granted the existence of a distinct period of history: one that ran from the dying years of the Roman Empire to the Reformation. The revolutionaries, when they tore down the monastic buildings of Saint-Denis, when they expelled the monks from Cluny and left its buildings to collapse, when they reconsecrated Notre Dame as a ‘Temple of Reason’ and installed beneath its vaulting a singer dressed as Liberty, were paying unwitting tribute to an earlier period of upheaval. In Tours as well, the desecration visited on the basilica was not the first such vandalism that it had suffered. Back in 1562, when armed conflict between Catholics and Protestants had erupted across France, a band of Huguenots had torched the shrine of Saint Martin and tossed the relics of the saint onto the fire. Only a single bone and a fragment of his skull had survived. It was hardly unsurprising, then, in the first throes of the Revolution, that many Catholics, in their bewilderment and disorientation, should initially have suspected that it was all a Protestant plot.

In truth, though, the origins of the great earthquake that had seen the heir of Clovis consigned to a pauper’s grave extended much further back than the Reformation. ‘Woe to you who are rich.’ Christ’s words might almost have been the manifesto of those who could afford only ragged trousers, and so were categorised as men ‘without knee-breeches’: sans-culottes. They were certainly not the first to call for the poor to inherit the earth. So too had the radicals among the Pelagians, who had dreamed of a world in which every man and woman would be equal; so too had the Taborites, who had built a town on communist principles, and mockingly crowned the corpse of a king with straw; so too had the Diggers, who had denounced property as an offence against God. Nor, in the ancient city of Tours, were the sans-culottes who ransacked the city’s basilica the first to be outraged by the wealth of the Church, and by the palaces of its bishops. In Marmoutier, where Alcuin had once promoted scripture as the inheritance of all the Christian people, a monk in the twelfth century had drawn up a lineage for Martin that cast him as the heir of kings and emperors—and yet Martin had been no aristocrat. The silken landowners of Gaul, offended by the roughness of his manners and his dress, had detested him much as their heirs detested the militants of revolutionary France. Like the radicals who had stripped bare his shrine, Martin had been a destroyer of idols, a scorner of privilege, a scourge of the mighty. Even amid all the splendours of Martinopolis, the most common depiction of the saint had shown him sharing his cloak with a beggar. Martin had been a sans-culotte.

There were many Catholics, in the first flush of the Revolution, who had recognised this. Just as English radicals, in the wake of Charles I’s defeat, had hailed Christ as the first Leveller, so were there enthusiasts for the Revolution who saluted him as ‘the first sans-culotte’. Was not the liberty proclaimed by the Revolution the same as that proclaimed by Paul? ‘You, my brothers, were called to be free.’ This, in August 1789, had been the text at the funeral service for the men who, a month earlier, had perished while storming the Bastille, the great fortress in Paris that had provided the French monarchy with its most intimidating prison. Even the Jacobins, the Revolution’s dominant and most radical faction, had initially been welcoming to the clergy. For a while, indeed, priests were more disproportionately represented in their ranks than any other profession. As late as November 1791, the president elected by the Paris Jacobins had been a bishop. It seemed fitting, then, that their name should have derived from the Dominicans, whose former headquarters they had made their base. Certainly, to begin with, there had been little evidence to suggest that a revolution might precipitate an assault on religion.

And much from across the Atlantic to suggest the opposite. There, thirteen years before the storming of the Bastille, Britain’s colonies in North America had declared their independence. A British attempt to crush the revolution had failed. In France—where the monarchy’s financial backing of the rebels had ultimately contributed to its own collapse—the debt of the American revolution to the ideals of the philosophes appeared clear. There were many in the upper echelons of the infant republic who agreed. In 1783, six years before becoming their first president, the general who had led the colonists to independence hailed the United States of America as a monument to enlightenment. ‘The foundation of our Empire,’ George Washington had declared, ‘was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined than at any former period.’ This vaunt, however, had implied no contempt for Christianity. Quite the opposite. Far more than anything written by Spinoza or Voltaire, it was New England that had provided the American republic with its model of democracy, and Pennsylvania with its model of toleration. That all men had been created equal, and endowed with an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, were not remotely self-evident truths. That most Americans believed they were owed less to philosophy than to the Bible: to the assurance given equally to Christians and Jews, to Protestants and Catholics, to Calvinists and Quakers, that every human being was created in God’s image. The truest and ultimate seedbed of the American republic—no matter what some of those who had composed its founding documents might have cared to think—was the book of Genesis.

The genius of the authors of the United States constitution was to garb in the robes of the Enlightenment the radical Protestantism that was the prime religious inheritance of their fledgling nation. When, in 1791, an amendment was adopted which forbade the government from preferring one Church over another, this was no more a repudiation of Christianity than Cromwell’s enthusiasm for religious liberty had been. Hostility to imposing tests on Americans as a means of measuring their orthodoxy owed far more to the meeting houses of Philadelphia than to the salons of Paris. ‘If Christian Preachers had continued to teach as Christ & his Apostles did, without Salaries, and as the Quakers now do, I imagine Tests would never have existed.’ So wrote the polymath who, as renowned for his invention of the lightning rod as he was for his tireless role in the campaign for his country’s independence, had come to be hailed as the ‘first American’. Benjamin Franklin served as a living harmonisation of New England and Pennsylvania. Born in Boston, he had run away as a young man to Philadelphia; a lifelong admirer of Puritan egalitarianism, he had published Benjamin Lay; a strong believer in divine providence, he had been shamed by the example of the Quakers into freeing his slaves. If, like the philosophes who much admired him as an embodiment of rugged colonial virtue, he dismissed as idle dogma anything that smacked of superstition, and doubted the divinity of Christ, then he was no less the heir of his country’s Protestant traditions for that. Voltaire, meeting him in Paris, and asked to bless his grandson, had pronounced in English what he declared to be the only appropriate benediction: ‘God and liberty.’ Franklin, like the revolution for which he was such an effective spokesman, illustrated a truth pregnant with implications for the future: that the surest way to promote Christian teachings as universal was to portray them as deriving from anything other than Christianity.

In France, this was a lesson with many students. There, too, they spoke of rights. The founding document of the country’s revolution, the sonorously titled ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’, had been issued barely a month after the fall of the Bastille. Part-written as it was by the American ambassador to France, it drew heavily on the example of the United States. The histories of the two countries, though, were very different. France was not a Protestant nation. There existed in the country a rival claimant to the language of human rights. These, so it was claimed by revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic, existed naturally within the fabric of things, and had always done so, transcending time and space. Yet this, of course, was quite as fantastical a belief as anything to be found in the Bible. The evolution of the concept of human rights, mediated as it had been since the Reformation by Protestant jurists and philosophes, had come to obscure its original authors. It derived, not from ancient Greece or Rome, but from the period of history condemned by all right-thinking revolutionaries as a lost millennium, in which any hint of enlightenment had at once been snuffed out by monkish, book-burning fanatics. It was an inheritance from the canon lawyers of the Middle Ages.

Nor had the Catholic Church—much diminished though it might be from its heyday—abandoned its claim to a universal sovereignty. This, to revolutionaries who insisted that ‘the principle of any sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation’, could hardly help but render it a roadblock. No source of legitimacy could possibly be permitted that distracted from that of the state. Accordingly, in 1791—even as legislators in the United States were agreeing that there should be ‘no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’—the Church in France had been nationalised. The legacy of Gregory VII appeared decisively revoked. Only the obduracy of Catholics who refused to pledge their loyalty to the new order had necessitated the escalation of measures against Christianity itself. Even those among the revolutionary leadership who questioned the wisdom of attempting to eradicate religion from France never doubted that the pretensions of the Catholic Church were insupportable. By 1793, priests were no longer welcome in the Jacobins. That anything of value might have sprung from the mulch of medieval superstition was a possibility too grotesque even to contemplate. Human rights owed nothing to the flux of Christian history. They were eternal and universal—and the Revolution was their guardian. ‘The Declaration of Rights is the Constitution of all peoples, all other laws being variable by nature, and subordinated to this one.’

The Declaration of the Rights of Man
portrayed as though delivered on
tablets of stone from Mount Sinai.

So declared Maximilien Robespierre, most formidable and implacable of the Jacobin leaders. Few men were more icily contemptuous of the claims on the future of the past. Long an opponent of the death penalty, he had worked fervently for the execution of the king; shocked by the vandalising of churches, he believed that virtue without terror was impotent. There could be no mercy shown the enemies of the Revolution. They bore the taint of leprosy. Only once they had been amputated, and their evil excised from the state, would the triumph of the people be assured. Only then would France be fully born again. Yet there hung over this a familiar irony. The ambition of eliminating hereditary crimes and absurdities, of purifying humanity, of bringing them from vice to virtue, was redolent not just of Luther, but of Gregory VII. The vision of a universal sovereignty, one founded amid the humbling of kings and the marshalling of lawyers, stood recognisably in a line of descent from that of Europe’s primal revolutionaries. So too their efforts to patrol dissidence. Voltaire, in his attempt to win a pardon for Calas, had compared the legal system in Toulouse to the crusade against the Albigensians. Three decades on, the mandate given to troops marching on the Vendée, issued by self-professed admirers of Voltaire, echoed the crusaders with a far more brutal precision. ‘Kill them all. God knows his own.’ Such was the order that the papal legate was reputed to have given before the walls of Béziers. ‘Spear with your bayonets all the inhabitants you encounter along the way. I know there may be a few patriots in this region—it matters not, we must sacrifice all.’ So the general sent to pacify the Vendée in early 1794 instructed his troops. One-third of the population would end up dead: as many as a quarter of a million civilians. [see, e.g., this Wikipedia article—Ed.]

Meanwhile, back in the capital, the execution of those condemned as enemies of the people was painted by enthusiasts for revolutionary terror in recognisably scriptural colours. Good and evil locked in a climactic battle, the entire world at stake; the damned compelled to drink the wine of wrath; a new age replacing the old: here were the familiar contours of apocalypse. When, demonstrating that its justice might reach even into the grave, the revolutionary government ordered the exhumation of the royal necropolis at Saint-Denis, the dumping of royal corpses into lime pits was dubbed by those who had commissioned it the Last Judgement.

The Jacobins, though, were not Dominicans. It was precisely the Christian conviction that ultimate judgement was the prerogative of God, and that life for every sinner was a journey towards either heaven or hell, that was the object of their enlightened scorn. Even Robespierre, who believed in the eternity of the soul, did not on that count imagine that justice should be left to the chill and distant deity that he termed the Supreme Being. It was the responsibility of all who cherished virtue to work for its triumph in the here and now. The Republic had to be made pure. To imagine that a deity might ever perform this duty was the rankest superstition. In the Gospels, it was foretold that those who had oppressed the poor would only receive their due at the end of days, when Christ would return in glory, and separate ‘the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats’. But this would never happen. A people of philosophes could recognise it to be a fairy tale. So it was that the charge of sorting the goats from the sheep, and of delivering them to punishment, had been shouldered—selflessly, grimly, implacably—by the Jacobins.

This was why, in the Vendée, there was no attempt to do as the friars had done in the wake of the Albigensian crusade and apply to a diseased region a scalpel rather than a sword. It was why as well, in Paris, the guillotine seemed never to take a break from its work. As the spring of 1794 turned to summer, so its blade came to hiss ever more relentlessly, and the puddles of blood to spill ever more widely across the cobblestones. It was not individuals who stood condemned, but entire classes. Aristocrats, moderates, counter-revolutionaries of every stripe: all were enemies of the people.

Holland fails to mention something vital: the revolutionaries took it upon themselves to guillotine blond Frenchmen in particular. See the chapters on the French Revolution in the histories of the white race from the pens of William Pierce and Arthur Kemp.

To show them mercy was a crime. Indulgence was an atrocity; clemency parricide. Even when Robespierre, succumbing to the same kind of factional battle in which he had so often triumphed, was himself sent to the guillotine, his conviction that ‘the French Revolution is the first that will have been founded on the rights of humanity’ did not fade. There needed no celestial court, no deity sat on his throne, to deliver justice. ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’ So Christ, at the day of judgement, was destined to tell those who had failed to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to visit the sick in prison. There was no requirement, in an age of enlightenment, to take such nonsense seriously. The only heaven was the heaven fashioned by revolutionaries on earth. Human rights needed no God to define them. Virtue was its own reward. [pages 395-405]

Categories
Dominion (book) Enlightenment Voltaire

Dominion, 25

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

One might ask: Why doesn’t this site pay homage to Voltaire or the French philosophers, so anti-Christian they were?

The answer is devastatingly simple.

They were all secular Christians, what we have been calling neochristians (read Ferdinand Bardamu’s essay in The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour). They all broke with church dogma, true: but not with the ethical code that underlies Christianity.

For the fourteen words, a secular ‘Christianity’ like that of the French Enlightenment is even more dangerous than traditional Christianity, since the atheist, the agnostic or the deist of other times believes he has emancipated himself when in reality he is as much an axiological slave to the religion of our ancestors as the most fundamentalist or bigoted Calvinist.

After a few pages in which Tom Holland told us of the horrible torture and death inflicted on an innocent Frenchman for religious reasons, and how Voltaire reacted with pamphlets to this outrage perpetrated by Catholics, he quoted the most famous French philosopher:

‘He has his brethren from Beijing to Cayenne, and he reckons all the wise his brothers.’

Yet this, of course, was merely to proclaim another sect—and, what was more, one with some very familiar pretensions. The dream of a universal religion was nothing if not catholic. Ever since the time of Luther, attempts by Christians to repair the torn fabric of Christendom had served only to shred it further. The charges that Voltaire levelled against Christianity—that it was bigoted, that it was superstitious, that its scriptures were rife with contradictions—were none of them original to him. All had been honed, over the course of two centuries and more, by pious Christians. Voltaire’s God, like the Quakers’, like the Collegiants’, like Spinoza’s, was a deity whose contempt for sectarian wrangling owed everything to sectarian wrangling. ‘Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy, that is the very foolish daughter of a wise and intelligent mother.’ Voltaire’s dream of a brotherhood of man, even as it cast Christianity as something fractious, parochial, murderous, could not help but betray its Christian roots. Just as Paul had proclaimed that there was neither Jew nor Greek in Christ Jesus, so—in a future blessed with full enlightenment—was there destined to be neither Jew nor Christian nor Muslim. Their every difference would be dissolved. Humanity would be as one.

‘You are all sons of God.’ Paul’s epochal conviction that the world stood on the brink of a new dispensation, that the knowledge of it would be written on people’s hearts, that old identities and divisions would melt and vanish away, had not released its hold on the philosophes. Even those who pushed their quest for ‘the light of reason’ to overtly blasphemous extremes could not help but remain its heirs.

In 1719—three years before the young Voltaire’s arrival in the Dutch Republic, on his ever first trip abroad—a book had been printed there so monstrous that its ‘mere title evoked fear’. The Treatise of the Three Imposters, although darkly rumoured to have had a clandestine existence since the age of Conrad of Marburg, had in reality been compiled by a coterie of Huguenots in The Hague. As indicated by its alternative title—The Spirit of Spinoza—it was a book very much of its time. Nevertheless, its solution to the rival understandings of religion that had led to the Huguenots’ exile from France was one to put even the Theological- Political Treatise in the shade. Christ, far from being ‘the voice of God’, as Spinoza had argued, had been a charlatan: a sly seller of false dreams. His disciples had been imbeciles, his miracles trickery. There was no need for Christians to argue over scripture. The Bible was nothing but a spider’s web of lies. Yet the authors of the Treatise, although they certainly aspired to heal the divisions between Protestants and Catholics by demonstrating that Christianity itself was nothing but a fraud, did not rest content with that ambition. They remained sufficiently Christian that they wished to bring light to the entire world. Jews and Muslims too were dupes. Jesus ranked alongside Moses and Muhammad as one of three imposters. All religion was a hoax. Even Voltaire was shocked. No less committed than any priest to the truth of his own understanding of God, he viewed the blasphemies of the Treatise as blatant atheism, and quite as pernicious as superstition. Briefly taking a break from mocking Christians for their sectarian rivalries, he wrote a poem warning his readers not to trust the model of enlightenment being peddled by underground radicals. The Treatise itself was an imposture. Some sense of the divine was needed, or else society would fall apart. ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him’…

The standards by which he judged Christianity, and condemned it for its faults, were not universal. They were not shared by philosophers across the world. They were not common from Beijing to Cayenne. They were distinctively, peculiarly Christian… Atheist though he was, Diderot was too honest not to acknowledge the likeliest answer. ‘If there were a Christ, I assure you that Voltaire would be saved.’

The roots of Christianity stretched too deep, too thick, coiled too implacably around the foundations of everything that constituted the fabric of France, gripped too tightly its venerable and massive stonework, to be pulled up with any ease. In a realm long hailed as the eldest daughter of the Church, the ambition of setting the world on a new order, of purging it of superstition, of redeeming it from tyranny, could hardly help but be shot through with Christian assumptions. The dreams of the philosophes were both novel and not novel in the slightest. [pages 392-395]

For new visitors to this site, when I mentioned The Fair Race I was referring to a book whose PDF is available with some of our other recommended books.

Categories
Dominion (book)

Dominion, 24

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

To be a Christian was to be a pilgrim. This conviction, widely shared by Protestants, did not imply any nostalgia for the dark days of popery, when monks had gulled the faithful into trekking vast distances to bow and scrape before bogus relics. Rather, it meant to journey through life in the hope that at its end the pilgrim would be met by shining angels, and dressed in raiment that shone like gold, and led into heaven, a city on a hill…

New World, though, was not New England. South of Boston and Plymouth, there was no lack of places where dissenters might settle without fear of harassment. The most visionary of all was a colony named Philadelphia: ‘Brotherly Love’. William Penn, its founder, was a man of paradox. The son of one of Cromwell’s admirals, he was simultaneously a dandy with close links to the royal court, and a Quaker who had repeatedly suffered imprisonment for his beliefs. Philadelphia, the capital of a huge tranche of territory granted Penn by royal charter, was designed to serve as ‘a holy experiment’: a city without stockades, at peace with the local Indians, in which all ‘such as profess faith in Jesus Christ’ might be permitted to hold office. Just as the godly colonies of New England had been founded to serve the whole world as models, so too was Philadelphia—but as a haven of tolerance. By the early eighteenth century, its streets were filled with Anabaptists as well as Quakers, and with Germans as well as English. There were Jews…

In the autumn of 1718, when a Quaker named Benjamin Lay sailed for the Caribbean with his wife, Sarah, he could do so confident that they would literally be among Friends… One day, visiting a Quaker who lived some miles outside Bridgetown, Sarah Lay was shocked to find a naked African suspended outside his house. The man had just been savagely whipped. Blood, dripping from his twitching body, had formed a puddle in the dust. Flies were swarming over his wounds. Like the more than seventy thousand other Africans on Barbados, the man was a slave. The Quaker, explaining to Sarah that he was a runaway, felt no need to apologise. As in the time of Gregory of Nyssa, so in the time of the Lays: slavery was regarded by the overwhelming majority of Christians as being—much like poverty, or war, or sickness—a brutal fact of life. That there was no slave nor free in Christ Jesus did not mean that the distinction itself was abolished. Europeans, who lived on a continent where the institution had largely vanished, rarely thought for that reason to condemn it out of hand. Even Bartolomé de las Casas, whose campaign to redeem the Indians from slavery had become the focus of his entire life, never doubted that servitude might be merited as punishment for certain crimes. In the Caribbean as in Spanish America, the need for workers who could be relied upon to toil in hot and sticky climates without dying of the tropical diseases to which European labourers were prone made the purchase of Africans seem an obvious recourse. No Christian should feel guilt. Abraham had owned slaves. Laws in the Pentateuch regulated their treatment. A letter written by Paul’s followers, but attributed to Paul himself, urged them to obey their owners. ‘Do it, not only when their eye is on you and to win their favour, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord.’ The punishment of a runaway, then, might well be viewed as God’s work. Even Lay, despite not owning slaves himself, had been known to reach for a whip when other people’s slaves stole from him. ‘Sometimes I could catch them, and then I would give them Stripes.’

Lay, when he remembered bringing down the lash on a starving slave’s back, did not reach for scriptural justifications. On the contrary, he felt only a crushing sense of self-abhorrence. His guilt was that of a man who had suddenly discovered himself to be in the city of Destruction. ‘Oh my Heart has been pained within me many times, to see and hear; and now, now, now, it is so.’ Las Casas, brought to a similar consciousness of his sin, had turned for guidance to the great inheritance of Catholic scholarship: to Cajetan, and Aquinas, and the compilers of canon law. Lay turned for guidance to the Spirit. When he and his wife, fearlessly confronting the slave-owners of Barbados, beseeched them to ‘examine your own Hearts’, it was with an inner certitude as to the ultimate meaning of Scripture. The God that Lay could feel as enlightenment had bought his Chosen People out of slavery in Egypt; his son had washed feet, and suffered a death of humiliating agony, and redeemed all of humanity from servitude. To trade in slaves, to separate them from their children, to whip and rack and roast them, to starve them, to work them to death, to care nothing for the mixing into raw sugar of their ‘Limbs, Bowels and Excrements’, was not to be a Christian, but to be worse than the Devil himself. The more that the Lays, opening their home and their table to starving slaves, learned about slavery, the more furiously they denounced it—and the more unpopular they became. Forced to beat a retreat from Barbados in 1720, they were never to escape the shadow of its horrors. For the rest of their lives, their campaign to abolish slavery—quixotic though it seemed—was to be their pilgrims’ progress.

Benjamin Lay, the four-foot hunchback who devoted his
life to an ultimately successful campaign to persuade his
fellow Quakers to condemn the slave trade.

The image and the text at the bottom of the image appear in Tom Holland’s book.

They were not the first abolitionists in the New World. Back in the 1670s, an Irish Quaker named William Edmundson had toured both Barbados and New England, campaigning to have Christianity taught to African slaves. Then, on 19 September 1676, writing to his fellow Friends in the Rhode Island settlement of Newport, he had been struck by a sudden thought. ‘And many of you count it unlawful to make slaves of the Indians, and if so, then why the Negroes?’ This again was to echo las Casas. The great Spanish campaigner for human rights, in his anxiety to spare Indians enslavement, had for many decades backed the importation of Africans to do forced labour. This he had done under the impression that they were convicts, sold as punishment for their crimes. Then, late in life, he had discovered the terrible truth: that the Africans were unjustly enslaved, and no less the victims of Christian oppression than the Indians. The guilt felt by las Casas, the revulsion and dread of damnation, had been sharpened by the sustenance that he knew he had provided to the argument of Aristotle: that certain races were suited to be slaves. ‘God has made of one blood all nations.’ When William Penn, writing in prison, cited this line of scripture, he had been making precisely the same case as las Casas: that all of humanity had been created equally in God’s image; that to argue for a hierarchy of races was an offence against the very fundamentals of Christ’s teaching; [bold by Ed.] that no peoples were fitted by the colour of their skins to serve as either masters or slaves. Naturally—since this was an argument that so selfevidently went with the grain of Christian tradition—it was capable of provoking some anxiety among the owners of African slaves. Just as opponents of the Dominican had cited Aristotle, so opponents of Quaker abolitionists might grope after obscure verses in the Old Testament.

Yet Lay’s campaign, for all that it drew on the example of the prophets, and for all that his admonitions against slavery were garlanded with biblical references, did indeed constitute something different. To target it for abolition was to endow society itself with the character of a pilgrim, bound upon a continuous journey, away from sinfulness towards the light… It was founded upon the conviction that had for centuries, in the lands of the Christian West, served as the great incubator of revolution: that society might be born again. ‘Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.’

Never once did Lay despair of these words of Jesus. Twenty years after he had gatecrashed the annual assembly of Philadelphia Friends, as he lay mortally sick in bed, he was brought news that a new assembly had voted to discipline any Quaker who traded in slaves. ‘I can now die in peace,’ he sighed in relief… Benjamin Lay had succeeded, by the time of his death in 1759, in making the community in which he had lived just that little bit more like him—in making it just that little bit more progressive. [pages 379-386]

Categories
Dominion (book) Oliver Cromwell

 Dominion, 23

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

So far I have collected some passages from the ‘Antiquity’ and ‘Christendom’ sections of Tom Holland’s book. The last section is entitled ‘Modernitas’ and begins with a chapter on Reformed England.

Oliver Cromwell c. 1655 by Samuel Cooper.

In England, where the self-identification of Puritans as the new Israel had fostered a boom in the study of Hebrew, this might on occasion shade almost into admiration. Even before Menasseh’s arrival in London…

The rabbi Menasseh ben Israel travelled from Amsterdam to London to beg that Jews be granted a legal right of residency in England.

…there were sectarians who claimed it a sin ‘that the Jews were not allowed the open profession and exercise of their religion amongst us’. Some warned that God’s anger was bound to fall on England unless repentance was shown for their expulsion. Others demanded their readmission so that they might the more easily be won for Christ, and thereby expedite the end of days. Cromwell, who convened an entire conference in Whitehall to debate Menasseh’s request, was sympathetic to this perspective. Nevertheless, he failed to win formal backing for it. Accordingly—in typical fashion—he opted for compromise. Written permission for the Jews to settle in England was denied; but Cromwell did give Menasseh the private nod, and a pension of a hundred pounds…

The refusal of Cromwell to grant them a formal right of admission prompted missionaries to head for Amsterdam. The early signs were not promising. The Jews there seemed resolutely uninterested in the Quakers’ message; the authorities were hostile; only one of the missionaries spoke Dutch. Nevertheless, it was not the Quaker way to despair. There was, so one of the missionaries reported, ‘a spark in many of the Jews’ bosoms, which in process of time may kindle to a burning flame’…

A second pamphlet, A Loving Salutation to the Seed of Abraham Among the Jews, quickly followed. Anxious to get both tracts into Hebrew, the Quaker missionaries in Amsterdam were delighted to report back to Fell that they had successfully procured the services of a translator. This translator was not only a skilled linguist; he had also been a pupil of none other than Menasseh himself. [pages 372-374]

This Jew was none other than Baruch Spinoza. Protestant Christians were instrumental in reversing the ban on Jews. Soon after, they returned to England.