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Evil George Orwell Newspeak Psychiatry

From the Great Confinement of Louis XIV of France to a Chemical Gulag (part 2)

At the end of the 18th century, there was no psychiatry as a medical specialty. The word ‘psychiatry’ was coined by Johann Reil in 1808. The new profession took for granted a postulate that had roots in the medicine of ancient Greece. A postulate is a proposition that is admitted without proof. The postulated platform of the new profession assumed the organic origin of psychic disturbances. This postulate elevated to an axiom, and even to dogma, prevented the introduction of subjectivity in the study of mental disturbances.
As we saw with John Modrow [explained in a previous chapter of the online book], the reality is the diametrically opposite. Only by introducing the subjectivity of a soul in pain, and by rejecting the organic hypothesis, is it possible to understand what the hell is going on in the innermost chambers of those who suffer from mental distress and disorders. Objectivity in matters of the internal world of a subject is as impossible as the opposite case: approaching the empirical world in the manner of philosophers like Plato, who, from his idealist Olympus, despised the practical study of nature.
This colossal error cost the Greek culture its moving upward, just as the antipodal error of reducing the humanities to science is misleading our civilisation. It is a categorical mistake trying to understand psychological trauma through neuroscience, as it is a categorical mistake trying to understand the empirical world, say astronomy, through social discourse. Postmodernist philosophers and psychiatrists represent two symmetrical, albeit diametrically opposed, attempts at extreme ideologies. The former want to reduce science to the humanities; the latter, the humanities to science: and none respects the other as a separate and intrinsically legitimate field. In another place I will delve into these two antithetical errors.
The birth of modern psychiatry occurs when the outcast leaves the jurisdiction of the houses of confinement in France and the rest of Europe and is left in charge of the medical institution. In the profession of the 21st century, armed with a battery of genetics, neurology and nosological taxonomy, it is impossible to see what psychiatry is at its root. But in the book by Johann Christian Heinroth, Lehrbuch der Störungen des Seelenlebens (Textbook on the Disturbances of Mental Life), published in 1818, we see the fundamentals of psychiatry without the pseudoscientific smokescreen so common in our days.
Following the tradition of the 17th and 18th centuries, Heinroth used the expression ‘mental illness’ and defined it as ‘selfishness’ or ‘sin’: terms he used interchangeably. Heinroth not only equated the Christian concept of sin with that of mental illness. Although he considered mental illness an ethical defect, Heinroth’s great innovation consists that he treated it with medical procedures.
How did Heinroth take this conceptual leap? Or we may ask, why should MDs reroute the flock of the straying sheep? This turn was not contemplated in the blueprints of the architects of the Great Confinement of the 17th century. Once the Inquisition was officially abolished, Heinroth himself wonders who would be the new social controller: ‘would this be the task of a doctor?, or perhaps of a cleric?, or of a philosopher?, or an educator?’ [7]
The task fell, finally, on the physician. Presumably this was because, as the doctor deals directly with the physicality of human beings, it was easier to cover physical violence in the medical profession than in the other professions. At a time when the ideals of the French Revolution were still in the air, civil society would have suspected a cleric or a philosopher with jurisdiction over other people’s bodies, but not a doctor.
In order for people to accept the new inquisitor, they also had to literalise the central metaphor of the profession. Originally ‘mental illness’ was understood as a mere metaphor of what in previous centuries had been called ‘men of unreason’, which put together the dissidents with the disturbed. When the doctor assumed the responsibility of occupying the role that used to be occupied by the officials of the houses of confinement, Heinroth assumed that the selfishness and sin that he treated were medical entities: something like saying that the ‘viruses’ that infect our hard drives are not metaphor of subversive programs, but microorganisms.
The literalisation of the metaphor ‘mental illness’ into an authentic illness would not have been possible if Heinroth and many other professionals of mental health had not counted with societal approval. The 19th century was the most bourgeois of recent centuries, and the social forces that drove the wealthy to lock up the undesirables were still expanding, even more than in the times when Heinroth himself was born.
The only way to understand Heinroth and his philosophy of the hammer is to let him speak. I have borrowed the following paragraphs from a study of Thomas Szasz. The first quoted sentence is taken from Medicina Psychica Politica (Psycho-Political Medicine): a title that perfectly illustrates how, in its origins, the psychiatrists did not speak in Newspeak but in Oldspeak. Heinroth wrote: ‘It is the duty of the State to care for mentally disturbed persons whenever they are a burden to the community or present a public danger; and the accommodation, cure, and care of such individuals is the duty of the police’. But who are ‘mentally disturbed’? He answers: ‘It is those least deserving of freedom, namely the maniaci [maniacs], who love freedom best; and as long as they are left to themselves and to their perverted activity, even if only in an Autenreith chamber, no recovery is thinkable’.[8] The Autenreith chamber and the mask of the same name were torture apparatuses on which he explains his modus operandi:

Experience has shown that the patient in the sack is in danger of asphyxiation and of falling victim of convulsions… [In the confinement chair] the patient can remain bound in the chair for weeks on end without incurring the slightest bodily harm. [The pear is a] piece of hard wood, with the shape and dimensions of a medium-sized pear, has a cross-bar with straps which can be tied at the back of the neck of the patient. Since the oral cavity of the patient is more or less filled by the instrument, the patient can obviously utter no articulate sounds, but he can still utter stifled screams.[9]

Heinroth articulated some guidelines for the psychiatrist: ‘First, be master of the situation; second, be master of the patient’.[10] Szasz comments that in these phrases psychiatry appears naked as to what it was and continues to be today: subjugation, enslavement and control of one human being by another. He also comments that contemporary psychiatrists, although they do similar things, do not speak frankly as they used to speak in Heinroth’s time.
However, Heinroth understood from the beginning that in his profession he had to disguise the torture chambers for social control as a hospital activity, for which he recommended: ‘all impression of a prison must be avoided’, a situation that persists today. In Spain, for example, contemporary psychiatrists have changed the bars of the windows by external blinds, some cosmetic though rigid metal sheets that serve as prison bars. The façade of psychiatric gardens of our century follows 19th-century regulations. About what happens behind the façade, according to Heinroth:

The edifice should have a special bathing section, with all kinds of baths, showers, douches, and immersion vessels. It must also have a special correction and punishment room with all the necessary equipment, including a Cox swing (or, better, rotating machine), a Reils’s fly-wheel, pulleys, punishment chair, Langermann’s cell, etc. [11]

Here are other words of this doctor who lived a century before Orwell wrote 1984. According to Heinroth, the psychiatrist

appears to the patient as helper and saviour, as a father and benefactor, as a sympathetic friend, as a friendly teacher, but also as a judge who weighs the evidence, passes judgement, and executes the sentence; at the same time seems to be the visible God to the patient… [12]

Heinroth seems a hybrid between the Orwellian O’Brien and a contemporary man of his times: Sade. The fact that some psychiatrists see in Heinroth one of the founders of modern psychiatry and the precursor of Eugen Bleuler, speaks for itself and does not need further comment.
Thanks to Heinroth and other apologists of medical violence, in the mid-19th century the metaphor ‘mental illness’ was recognised as an authentic disease. In England, the parliament granted the medical fraternity the exclusive right to treat the newly discovered disease. The first specialised journals in psychiatry appeared. The American Journal of Psychiatry, which was originally called the American Journal of Insanity and whose first issue appeared in 1844, published data, since its inception, that now are known to be fraudulent.[13] Throughout the 19th century countless of ‘imprudent’ women like Hersilie Rouy and Julie La Roche [cases mentioned at the beginning of the online book] were imprisoned by their parents and husbands; and the psychiatrists resisted attempts to inspect their ‘asylums’, as they were then called, because it interfered with medical autonomy. Many doctors tried to obtain important positions in the asylums.
The psychiatric profession, in its modern version, was born.
In the 20th century, the psychiatric profession consolidated its power and prestige in society. A smoke-screen terminology was developed and, for the man of the street, it became impossible to see psychiatry in its naked simplicity. Some sadists like Heinroth became ‘psychiatrists’, their tortures ‘treatments’, the social outcasts ‘patients’, the asylums ‘hospitals’ and dementia praecox ‘schizophrenia’.
Before the creation of the Newspeak the asylums were properly called Poorhouses. Before drugs were designed to induce tortuous states for the mind, Emil Kraepelin and Bleuler used other methods of subjugation. In 1911 the latter experimented with a particularly disgusting medication that caused bleeding vomit, but at least Bleuler confessed with a frankness something no longer seen in today’s psychiatry: ‘His behaviour improves. From the ethical point of view, I cannot recommend this method’.[14] Similarly, in 1913 Kraepelin used to inject sodium nucleate to cause fever in his patients, who ‘become more docile and obey the doctors’ orders’.[15]
____________
[7] Johann Christian Heinroth, quoted in Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Psychotherapy (NY: Syracuse University Press Edition, 1988), p. 73.
[8] Ibid., pp. 74-75.
[9] Ibid., pp. 76-77.
[10] Ibid., p. 77.
[11] Ibid., p. 79.
[12] Ibid., p. 78.
[13] See, for example, Robert Whitaker: Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus, 2001), pp. 75ff.
[14] Bleuler, quoted in John Read, Loren Mosher & Richard Bentall: Modelos de Locura (Herder, 2006), p. 39
[15] Kraepelin, quoted in ibid.

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Art Aryan beauty Athens Christendom Constantine Constantinople Darkening Age (book) Destruction of Greco-Roman world Evil Old Testament

Darkening Age, 10

In chapter seven of The Darkening Age: The Christian
Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey wrote:

Constantine… demanded that the statues be taken from the temples. Christian officials, so it was said, travelled the empire, ordering the priests of the old religion to bring their statues out of the temples. From the 330s onwards some of the most sacred objects in the empire started to be removed. It is hard, today, to understand the enormity of Constantine’s order. If Michelangelo’s Pietà were taken from the Vatican and sold, it would be considered a terrible act of cultural vandalism—but it wouldn’t be sacrilege as the statue is not in itself sacred. Statues in Roman temples were. To remove them was a gross violation, and Constantine knew it…
The possibility that Jesus would triumph over all other gods would, at the time, have seemed almost preposterous. Constantine was faced with an intransigent population who insisted on worshipping idols at the expense of the risen Lord. He realized that conversion would be more ‘easily accomplished if he could get them to despise their temples and the images contained therein’. And what better way to teach wayward pagans the vanity of their gods than by cracking open their statues and showing that they were, quite literally, empty? Moreover, a religious system in which sacrifice was central would struggle to survive if there was nothing to sacrifice to. There was good biblical precedent for his actions. In Deuteronomy, God had commanded that His chosen people should overthrow altars, burn sacred groves and hew down the graven images of the gods. If Constantine attacked the temples then he was not being a vandal. He was doing God’s good work.
And so it began. The great Roman and Greek temples were— or so Eusebius said—broken open and their statues brought out, then mutilated…
Not all the temple statues were melted down. The ‘tyrant’ Constantine also had an eye for art and many objects were shipped back as prize baubles for the emperor’s new city, Constantinople (Constantine, like Alexander the Great, was not one for self-effacement). The Pythian Apollo was put up as ‘a contemptible spectacle’ in one square; the sacred tripods of Delphi turned up in Constantinople’s hippodrome, while the Muses of Helicon found themselves relocated to Constantine’s palace. The capital looked wonderful. The temples looked—were—desecrated. As his biographer wrote with satisfaction, Constantine ‘confuted the superstitious error of the heathen in all sorts of ways’.
And yet despite the horror of what Constantine was asking his subjects to do there was little resistance…
Christianity could have been tolerant: it was not pre­ordained that it would take this path. There were Christians who voiced hopes for tolerance, even ecumenicalism. But those hopes were dashed. For those who wish to be intolerant, monotheism provides very powerful weapons. There was ample biblical justification for the persecution of non-believers.
The Bible, as a generation of Christian authors declared, is very clear on the matter of idolatry. As the Christian author Firmicus Maternus reminded his rulers—perfectly correctly—there lay upon emperors an ‘imperative necessity to castigate and punish this evil’. Their ‘severity should be visited in every way on the crime’. And what precisely did God advise as a punishment for idolatry? Deuteronomy was clear: a person indulging in this should be stoned to death. And if an entire city fell into such sin? Again, the answer was clear: ‘destruction is decreed’.
The desecration continued for centuries. In the fifth century AD, the colossal statue of Athena, the sacred centrepiece of the Acropolis in Athens, and one of the most famous works of art in the empire, was torn down from where she had stood guard for almost a thousand years, and shipped off to Constantinople—a great coup for the Christian city and a great insult to the ‘pagans’…
Note of the Ed.: After the centuries, Europeans even forgot how the Greco-Roman sculptures that were destroyed looked like. My guess is that Constantine’s bishops were not Aryans. Destroying a representation of the beauty of the Aryan physique was part of the Semitic takeover of white society: Let’s destroy your self-image as a means to undermine your self-esteem. Something similar is happening today with the religion of Holocaustianity: Let’s undermine your self-image from a decent person to historic grievances so that you may accept masses of non-white immigrants.
History is written by the winners and the Christian victory was absolute. The Church dominated European thought for more than a millennium. Until 1871 the University of Oxford required that all students were members of the Church of England, while in most cases to be given a fellowship in an Oxford college one had to be ordained. Cambridge was a little freer—but not much.
This was not an atmosphere conducive to criticism of Christianity and indeed, in English histories, there was little. For centuries, the vast majority of historians unquestioningly took up the Christian cause and routinely and derogatorily referred to non-Christians as ‘pagans’, ‘heathens ‘ and ‘idolaters’. The practices and sufferings of these ‘pagans’ were routinely belittled, trivialized or—more often—entirely ignored. As one modern scholar has observed: ‘The story of early Christian history has been told almost wholly on the basis of Christian sources.’

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¿Me Ayudarás? (book) 2001: A Space Odyssey (movie) Against the Fall of Night (novel) Arthur C. Clarke Arthur Schopenhauer Autobiography Child abuse Day of Wrath (book) Evil Hate Hermann Göring Infanticide Neanderthalism Vegetarianism Welfare of animals

Day of Wrath, 21

Four years ago I had posted this chapter here but now, that I’ve used engines to check the grammar, I realised the old text was plagued with syntactic inaccuracies. Although I feel it is greatly improved (see below) I can never be sure as English is not my native language. Now that the revision is almost compete, as soon as I order a proof copy, and get it from Amazon Books, the softcover will be available again for the general public.
 

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(Abridged Spanish-English translation
from the introduction to ¿Me Ayudarás?)

 

Men are the devils of the earth, and
animals are their tormented souls.

—Schopenhauer

 
At fifty-three, I received a surprise in what in Hojas Susurrantes I call the cursed house. Someone had left a box on the shelf outside the bathroom for visitors. When I opened it I saw something that amazed me. A divine little animal! He looked like a very young bunny but it was so beautiful and graceful that it could not be a rabbit, I told myself. It took me a long time to recognize that he was really a white bunny, but so otherworldly it seemed to me that I had difficulty in reconciling my two hemispheres: one telling me that it could only be a divine creature, and another telling me that it was a little rabbit that had come into the world not long ago.
Almost abandoned in a non-custodial box, it had been one among many gift bunnies to the kids at a birthday party that one of my irresponsible siblings had bought, the father of the celebrated child. Elsewhere I might tell how I came to interact with the creature, whom I would rescue from an uncertain destiny due to the pettiness of my family and the Mexicans in general. I had never interacted in such way with an animal before. In fact, I had never wanted to have a pet even though I did not get married and have no offspring. But seeing a being so helpless and at the mercy of the modified apes in my family moved me to adapt it. Elsewhere I may tell anecdotes, but the only thing I can add now is that, over time, the white rabbit would help me in my way out from the inverted world of Alice.
A little less than two and a half years later I would receive a great shock. The Mirror reported that four teenagers from Seaham in Durham, England, tortured and murdered Percy: a bunny who, in the picture that can be seen online with the naked young people, seems identical to my pet; now, an adult rabbit. They tried to shave and rape Percy; set her on fire, tried to drown her and then threw her dying but still alive from the window. The human monsters, all white, even recorded on their cell phone what they did: a video that the owner of the bunny could not see when the police arrested the perpetrators; only a frozen image to identify it. The punishment for these criminals was negligible in today’s Britain. I would have tortured them—exactly what they did to the rabbit—and then cast them out the window to let them die in agony lying on the ground (eye for an eye). In fact, if by a miracle of fate an extraterrestrial force had empowered me on my latest visit to the United Kingdom, I would have done it.
We must bear in mind that if the Anglo-Saxon demons had allowed Germany an empire from the Atlantic to the Urals, in the areas under the Nazi flag the torment of the animals would have been greatly reduced. Personally, I regard Hermann Göring one of my patron saints: and he should also be for those who long for a world free of this type of abuse. Let us not forget the 1933 caricature in which the freed animals—“No more vivisection! No more experimentation with animals!”—salute their savior Hermann.
Unlike my beloved Nazis, in one of my blogs I spoke of what non-Nazis are capable of doing with defenseless animals. I mentioned fur coats factories in China where some mammals are skinned alive; farms in Mexico where they hang rabbits from their ears until they die, which has also happened in some Australian farms. That and what they did to Percy pierced my soul. Her photograph in The Mirror shows her in a posture of serene confidence before the humans who would torture her: identical image to the postures of my own little bunny who, accustomed as Percy was to her benign owner, relaxes placidly in human presence. The betrayal of the universe that Percy had to experience before the change from her angelic owner to human devils must have been such that I caressed the idea of dedicating this volume to her memory.
Although what those damned humans did in Durham was condemned by other Englishmen, so-called normal people are not left behind. Humans whom I consider exterminable are able to pour concentrated solutions into laboratory rabbits, and to prevent them from closing their eyes, hold their eyelids with tongs. How many women ignore that their cosmetic products have been tested in this way… This happens today with the approval of society precisely because the Second World War was won by the wicked. Few know that from 1944 to 1947 the Soviets and the Americans, including Jews on both sides, practiced a real holocaust of Germans, the “Hellstorm,” preventing among other things that the benign policies of Hermann, who had saved our mammals cousins in the very brief historical window that represented the Third Reich, were implemented in the West after the war.
Science philosopher Thomas Kuhn used the optical illusion of the duck-rabbit to show how a paradigm shift causes one to see the same information in a completely different way. If Westerners had not been brainwashed, instead of seeing a duck (the Nazis were bad) they would see a rabbit (actually they were the good guys). I noticed this psychological phenomenon in 1992 when I studied the so-called Faces of Bélmez in a small town in Andalusia.
(The author at thirty-three in Spain’s “House of the Faces”.) Originally I believed that the faces of Mrs. María Gómez Cámara’s kitchen were a paranormal phenomenon until, once, seeing the face called “La Pelona” (part of the concrete block with this image is behind my back in the photo above), I made a change in my inner subjectivity. I experienced the sensation that the crude strokes of the face were the work of a human hand, debunking the parapsychological investigation in which I had placed my hopes. Perhaps in the future I will have a life to write the details of that adventure in Spain. Suffice it to say that the paradigm shift comes from the internal will. Following Kuhn’s example, the volitional faculty of my mind stopped seeing a bird and discovered another small animal.
The same can happen in our inner eye as we transcend Christian and neo-Christian values to their National Socialist antithesis. Many white nationalists, mostly Christian theists and Neochristian atheists, are frightened by The Turner Diaries. Unlike William Pierce, with their stupid love for the modified apes they condemn other animals to a torture of millennia—as potentially the Aryans, who are extinguishing themselves, are capable of becoming Görings. For a truly integrated individual it is obvious that moral is putting a screeching stop to the sadism towards our cousins, and the only way to do this is to get rid of the human devils. A change from love to hatred towards sinful humanity—great hatred I mean: a hatred à la Yahweh in the mouth of Jeremiah—represents a paradigm shift.
Do you remember the quote from Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End that I included in the fifth and final book of Hojas Susurrantes? In this novel human beings are metamorphosed into a higher entity. I will quote one of those passages again. In the novel “Karellen” was the leader of the extraterrestrial visitors, physically indistinguishable from the iconography of the devils:

“If you want a single proof of the essential—how shall I put it—benevolence of the Overlords, think of that cruelty-to-animals order which they made within a month of their arrival. If I had had any doubts about Karellen before, that banished them—even though that order has caused me more trouble than anything else he’s ever done!
That was scarcely an exaggeration, Stormgren thought. The whole incident had been an extraordinary one, the first revelation of the Overlords’ hatred of cruelty. That, and their passion for justice and order, seemed to be the dominant emotions in their lives—as far as one could judge them by their actions.
And it was the only time Karellen had shown anger, or at least the appearance of anger. “You may kill one another if you wish,” the message had gone, “and that is a matter between you and your own laws. But if you slay, except for food or in self-defense, the beasts that share your world with you—then you may be answerable to me.”
No one knew how comprehensive this ban was supposed to be, or what Karellen would do to enforce it. They had not long to wait.
The Plaza de Toros was full when the matadors and their attendants began their processional entry. Everything seemed normal; the brilliant sunlight blazed harshly on the traditional costumes, the great crowd greeted its favorites as it had a hundred times before. Yet here and there faces were turned anxiously towards the sky, to the aloof silver shape fifty kilometers above Madrid.
Then the picadors had taken up their places and the bull had come snorting out into the arena. The skinny horses, nostrils wide with terror, had wheeled in the sunlight and their riders forced them to meet their enemy. The first lance flashed—made contact—and at that moment came a sound that had never been heard on earth before.
It was the sound of ten thousand people screaming with the pain of the same wound—ten thousand people who, when they had recovered from the shock, found themselves completely unharmed. But that was the end of that bullfight, and indeed of all bullfighting, for the news spread rapidly.

Before I woke up to the real world and stopped diabolizing Hitler, Childhood’s End had been my favorite book. Now I see that the devil Karellen, as Clarke painted him, was too magnanimous with humans. The mere fact that there are seedy slaughterhouses should move us to take more drastic measures than those of that character.
In Mexico the calves are enclosed in compartments so narrow that they cannot even turn inside the cage. As adults, farmers cut horns, castrate and mark with iron without anesthesia. In trucks on the way to the slaughterhouses, the animals sometimes spend more than a day without food or drink, arriving thirsty and dizzy to the Inferno. The first thing the poor animal sees in the slaughterhouse is a Dantesque spectacle: puddles of blood and corpses skinned or torn from other cows; severed heads on the ground… She enters the first circles of hell in a state of panic. At the seventh circle the blow that the slaughterer gives the cow’s head does not always kill her. Sometimes this noble animal is only wounded, in a state of shock and with the deepest pain, wondering without language why the demons of Hell do what they do to her. Humans are so exterminable that they throw live pigs into a pond of boiling water so that the pain of the Gehenna fire causes the animal to release its hairs. (In Mexico people are fond of eating pork rind—a delicacy for my father by the way—and they dislike seeing hairs on it.) The Spaniards do not stay too far behind. They prepare the bull in a bullfight to make it less dangerous: they cut off the tips of the horns, they put vaseline on his eyes to cloud his vision and an irritating solution on his legs so that the bull is always moving in the ring. (Long before they would have stuck a needle in his genitals to atrophy its growth.) They put tow in the nose to make it hard for him to breathe, they give him strong laxatives before the bullfight, and hit his loins and kidneys with sacks before he faces the bullfighter. And let’s not talk about what can be seen on television at both sides of the Atlantic once the bull goes out to the arena.
Only until now can the strength of my unconscious be glimpsed during my dream in Madrid [recounted also in the introduction to ¿Me Ayudarás?]. If we pass the dream from the unconscious not only to consciousness but to super-consciousness, it means that most human beings should not exist. It is not enough that, according to the polls, most Spaniards of today do not care about bullfighting. The mere fact that they and other peoples are involved in the chain of cruelty to animals—whether using a feminine vanity product that was experimented in the eyes of a bunny or gobbling fried skin from a pig that had been submerged alive in boiling water—should be enough to arouse the exterminationist hatred of the savior devil. Consider for example this passage from a comment by one J. Marone, who in 2005 reviewed for Amazon Books Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhuman Treatment Inside the US Meat Industry:

Cows, pigs and chickens are taken through the slaughter house alive. Cows are often alive all the way through the line, this includes while they are getting their legs chopped off with cutters—imagine that… They do not stop the line for these inconveniences. The workers shove electric prods in their rectums and eyes—deep into the sockets occasionally pulling out the eye to get them moving to the slaughter line.
After reading this I will never eat another piece of meat again. It is not my decision to make any other living thing suffer. But I find it amazing that when you go to share this book, people don’t want to know. They would rather stay ignorant and that in itself has shocked me tremendously.

The italics in the last paragraph are mine and express why it is not enough for humans to claim ignorance, as almost every adult has heard what happens in the slaughterhouses.
When in my preparations to write this chapter I began to read what was happening in those places, I promised myself, like Marone, not to put again pieces of mammalian or bird carcasses into my mouth. I do not believe in the postmortem survival of the soul. However, until one has stopped eating meat (or derivatives from tormented animals), a part of our soul remains unawakened. This goes back to what was stated in the previous pages, which expose the psychogenic evolution of man. If in childrearing the Spaniards represented a psychogenic quantum leap compared to the Amerindians who still ate the flesh of their children, a new leap means to develop, in our times, empathy towards our cousins of the animal kingdom. Unlike Hitler and the vegetarians at the top of the Nazi party most Aryans have not gone through that leap, not even neo-Nazis. It is enough to see the photographs of mammals in laboratory experiments that are carried out throughout North America and Europe to perceive that the human being is truly a wicked species. I will not incur the rudeness of adding those photographs in this text: a task I leave to my readers.
My exterminating fantasies would not seem unhealthy if we do another thought experiment. In Dies Irae I quoted a non-fiction book by Arthur Clarke where he talked about the “judgment from the Stars” that earthlings could experience. If we imagine that in real life someone similar to a Karellen visited our planet, what is the first thing he would see from his distant silver ships, far above the human tingling? Urban spots. Industries that destroy the environment and, bringing his cameras closer, abject human misery and inconceivable suffering of the other species that share the planet with us. If, as in Clarke’s novel, the visitor also possessed machines to open a visual window to the past to study the species, he would perceive that, besides the hell that the naked apes subject their cousins, through history and prehistory they had behaved in an absolutely horrendous way with their own children. It does not hurt to summarize the revelations of the previous pages.
With his machines to literally see the human past this hypothetical extraterrestrial would be taken aghast by the magnitude of infanticide: nine percent of all human births. He would see thousands of young children slaughtered ritually, offered to the goddess of Babylon. He would see the infant sacrifices of the Pelasgians, the Syrians, the sacrifices in Gezer and in Egypt of the centuries that the earthlings call 10th to 8th before Christ. And let’s not talk about what the visitor would see with his machines when focusing on the ancient Semites of Carthage, where the burning of living children ordered by their own parents reached levels that surpassed the exclamation of Sahagún. Something similar could be seen by our visitor about other Phoenicians, Canaanites, Moabites, Sepharvaim, and ancient Hebrews: who in their origins offered their firstborn as a sacrifice to their gods. With his magic to see our past, the alien visitor would learn that both the exposure and the abandonment of infants continued in Europe until a council took action against the custom of leaving the children to die in the open.
With technology based on unimaginable principles the visitor would also see much worse behavior in the lands of colored people: thousands of babies, mostly women, abandoned in the streets of ancient China, and how those babies that were not abandoned were put in cold water until they died. He would see how in feudal Japan the baby was suffocated with wet paper covering her nose and mouth; how infanticide was systematic in the feudal Rajputs in India, sometimes throwing the living children to the crocodiles; and how in pre-Islamic Arabia they buried alive not a few newborns. The visitor would also see that the sub-Saharan inhabitants of Africa killed their children much more frequently than other races did. He would even see that the sacrifice of children in Zimbabwe was practiced as recently as the beginning of the century that the earthlings call the 20th century. The window to the past would also make visible the incredibly massive slaughter of infants among the natives of the countless islands of Oceania, New Guinea and even more so among the extremely primitive aborigines of Australia, Tasmania and Polynesia. He would realize that in the American tribes, including the redskins, infanticide continued at a time when the practice had been abandoned in Europe. The same happened not only in Central American and South American tribes, but also in the civilizations prior to the Spanish conquest: where the ritual sacrifice of women and children suggests that they did it out of pure sadism. Finally, the visitor would see how, after the Conquest, the sacrificial institution of the Mesoamerican and Inca Indians was forbidden only to be transferred to the animals in the so-called santería in times when our visitor no longer has to use his devices to open the Complete Book of History and Prehistory of the species he studies.
It’s clear where I want to go… If it is legitimate for this hypothetical extraterrestrial to remove from the face of the Earth a newly-arrived species whose haughtiness blinds them from seeing their evil ways, how can it be pathological for an earthling to arrive at identical conclusions? Just because, unlike the visitor, he lacks technological power? The sad truth is that the infanticidal passion and cruelty of primitive humans have not been atoned, only transferred to our cousins.
In Dies Irae I talked about the Star-Child. An eschatology from above would be a son of man who returned on the clouds with great power and glory to judge humanity, or, in the new version of the myth, a David Bowman in a sphere of light approaching Earth. But I, who am skeptical of both personal deities and intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way, could conceive, rather than an eschatology “from above”, an eschatology “from below.” I am referring to the intrapsychic evolution of a human being by developing an infinitely more intense empathy than that developed by the bulk of the modified apes (whom I call Neanderthals).
In other words, the rhetoric currently used by child and animal protectors in the West is just a first babbling of what we have in mind. Unlike the hypothetical Star-Child, the most fanatical animal protectors I have met do not even dare to see that, in addition to humans, there are other species that must be removed from the earth and its oceans. A Star-Child with mile-high empathy and powers would not tolerate, for example, the torture of hours that a pack of killer whales inflict on a whale calf by killing her to tear out her tongue. And the images of hyenas eating a small elephant alive—there are video recordings of how a member of the pack rips off the trunk from the small elephant—speak for themselves and we do not need to think much about how we would proceed.
Regardless of the cruelty of animals with animals, the hatred that the metamorphosed human also feels towards the modified apes that surround him can be glimpsed in the following anecdote. Before visiting England with plans to emigrate I left my pet in the cursed house that, as we saw in the fifth book of Hojas Susurrantes, is virtually on a freeway that goes out to the Cuernavaca highway where trucks and cars are constantly passing, even in the wee hours of the morning. Seeing my bunny in a cultivated garden that is paradise for him, but wrapped in such noise, especially at night, I imagined, with powers à la Bowman, eliminating each and every one of the Mexicans who drive through that stretch of the road in order to avoid the background roar for the little animal. Such a fantasy would not seem far-fetched if, in the new tablets of the law, we value the naked apes negatively; and noble species of animals, like some lagomorph mammals, positively regardless of the relative size of their brains or sophistication of their culture. It does not matter that to cleanse the freeway from humans it is necessary to eliminate millions of Mexicans, since literally millions are taking that road. The interests of a single bunny trump the interests of millions of humans, insofar as the modified apes are valued on the negative side of our scale.
Except for a few nymphs as beautiful as Catalina residing here (see the cover of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour) no one else from the inhabitants of this city is worthy. Of Creole men, for example, I know exactly no one with honor or true nobility of the soul. In an article that the author himself requested to be removed from The Occidental Observer, Farnham O’Reilly stated that Mexico City needs to be razed and transformed into a memorial atonement park dedicated to Nature. I would add that the sum of millions of modified apes in this city does not give a positive just because they are millions. It gives a great negative. In contrast, a single modified dinosaur (contemporary bird) or a lagomorph, however modest and discreet his life, is a small positive. The arithmetic with which the Star-Child judges the species of the Earth, including the primates, has little to do with the standards about the positive or the negative in the eyes of the latter. A world of cultivated forests turned into an Arcadia, and Percys that will never be molested again by monsters, is what the Earth shall inherit. It cannot be more significant that my most important works to date, Hojas Susurrantes and this one that I begin to write, are dedicated to nonhumans: a tree and a bunny.
In the final chapter of Childhood’s End the metamorphosed children eliminated all forms of animal and plant life except theirs. I do not think it is necessary to go that far. In the laws of the universe there is an Aristotelian golden mean between the apocalyptic children of the end and the law of the jungle that the naked apes currently impose. The mean lies in populating the planet with an archipelago of Elysian islands. Twenty-nine-year-old Clarke beautifully described this place with his prose: the city of Lys in his first novella, Against the Fall of Night, where, in addition to the forests and some animals, an evolved form of human being is allowed—a human in which empathy prevails and the original sin is a thing of the past. But let’s get down from the heights of Clarkean science-fiction and get back to the real world.
The monastic orders brought by the Spanish crown alongside the soldiery, including some mendicant orders that protected the natives, did not represent genuine empathy. The 16th century Spain was Don Quixote, and these orders represented a counterproductive version of empathy or compassion for those who suffer. What the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Augustinians, and eventually the Jesuits did in the Americas was quixotic folly: to conceive the naturals as souls to be saved. In the islands of the Caribbean and Tasmania the Europeans would exterminate the natives but not having exterminated them in the American continent meant that, throughout the Colonial period, the natives displaced their sadism with their children (as we have seen) towards the animals. If, instead of catechizing them, they had been cornered, as the Americans did on this part of the continent, the New Spaniard psychoclass of the Americas would have reflected the Iberian psychoclass without the tinges of Mesoamerican sadism. The social engineering of the Counter-Reformation was the great culprit that a mestizo cruelty between Spanish bullfighting and the Amerindian sacrificial passion was born in this enormous part of the continent.
In this book [¿Me Ayudarás?] we will analyze the stubborn infatuation of my father for a Dominican who protected the Amerindians and who, with his jeremiads, originated the Black Legend against Spain. At the moment suffice it to say that the bases of my feelings towards humanity are already in these pages. Hojas Susurrantes was like the tunnel in which Dave suddenly found himself: a vortex of colored lights where, terrified, he traveled at great speed across vast distances of space, seeing bizarre cosmological phenomena and strange landscapes of unusual colors. But Hojas ends before the final metamorphosis: before the new Odysseus discovered himself as middle-aged in a bedroom designed in the style of Louis XVI; progressively seeing later versions of himself and, finally, a very old man lying in a bed.
My complete autobiography will explain how, due to the evil in my family and society, without extraterrestrial agency in the form of a black monolith at the foot of the bed of an agonizing centenary, I underwent an inner metamorphosis and now I return to hate humanity as much as the Star-Child.

Categories
Ancient Rome Destruction of Greco-Roman world Evil Julius Caesar Libanius William Pierce

A response to Spahn Ranch

The following is not a formal post but rather a comment that I chose to put here rather than on this thread, where it belongs.

______ 卐 ______

 
Obviously, we see the world in a very different way.
The mere fact that Rome changed from Republic to Empire was a voluntary surrender to evil, as Brutus and his followers saw it. Julius Caesar should be one of the most reviled figures in Western history.
Believing the Jews was explicable among the envious non-whites around Rome. But for a white Roman to believe them, and allowing being baptized, was a sin as Julian the Apostate saw it.
Following Constantine and the next Christian emperors was voluntary surrender to evil, as philosophers like Libanius saw it.
Once Christianity was established, having burned the libraries of classical knowledge was voluntary surrender to evil. To have broken the statues that represented the divine beauty of the Aryan race was voluntary surrender to evil (for a list of these atrocities see: here).
To have destroyed the temples, including the most beautiful building of Alexandria and another one, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World leaving only these ruins in the respective two cases, was voluntary surrender to evil.
The fact that whites repudiated the healthy religion of the Hellenes and accepted the idea of eternal torture by fire, even for unbaptized infants, was such a massive and astronomical voluntary surrender to evil, that it is most likely that their little race will perish due to such a sin.
That the so-called secularized whites of today are incapable of healing psychically, and continue to believe the lies of the Jews and Christian ethics, is voluntary surrender to evil.
As Axe of Perun says, with the historical and exegetical tools at our disposal today there is no excuse. Nationalists could repudiate the perfidy of their own parents—their religion—; the ethics that accompany it, as well as its secular offshoot from the late 18th century. Not doing so is voluntary surrender to evil. And there are hundreds of white nationalists who think they’re good but deep down they’re bad. (That’s why the first pages of my Day of Wrath start with the example of Greggy’s ethics.)
If there is something that emerges from my Hojas Susurrantes and ¿Me Ayudarás? it’s to frame the discourse in ethical terms—if we are to save the West from the extermination in progress. But that can only be done with the complete collapse of the USA and through the acute suffering that, for decades, white sinners shall suffer: a dark night for the soul, a window of opportunity to amend one’s own ways.
As Pierce said about the common American, so surrendered to evil, ‘The only way to persuade the population of this country that they need to change their ways is to give them a good, hard boot in the ass—about 600 times. They need to be reprogrammed, and that takes order and discipline, not books or leaflets…’

Categories
Alexandria Architecture Darkening Age (book) Destruction of Greco-Roman world Evil Library of Alexandria

Darkening Age, 9


Saint Apollonia destroys a Greco-Roman sculpture, Giovanni d’Alemagna, c. 1442-1445.
The saint calmly ascends to the ‘idol’, hammer in hand. Hagiographies frequently praised the flair with which saints smashed ancient temples and centuries-old statues.
In ‘The Most Magnificent Building in the World’, chapter six of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey wrote:
 
At the end of the first century of Christian rule, the Colosseum still dominated Rome and the Parthenon towered above Athens. Yet when writers of this period discuss architecture, these aren’t the buildings that impress them. Instead, their admiration is drawn by another structure in Egypt. This building was so fabulous that writers in the ancient world struggled to find ways to convey its beauty. ‘Its splendour is such that mere words can only do it an injustice,’ wrote the historian Ammianus Marcellinus. It was, another writer thought, ‘one of the most unique and uncommon sights in the world. For nowhere else on earth can one find such a building.’ Its great halls, its columns, its astonishing statues and its art all made it, outside Rome, ‘the most magnificent building in the whole world’. Everyone had heard of it.
No one has heard of it now. While tourists still toil up to the Parthenon, or look in awe at the Colosseum, outside academia few people know of the temple of Serapis. That is because in AD 392 a bishop, supported by a band of fanatical Christians, reduced it to rubble.
It is easy to see why this temple would have attracted the Christians’ attention. Standing at the top of a hundred or more marble steps, it had once towered over the startling white marble streets below, an object to incite not only wonder but envy. While Christians of the time crammed into insufficient numbers of small, cramped churches, this was a vast—and vastly superior—monument to the old gods. It was one of the first buildings you noticed as you sailed towards Alexandria, its roof looming above the others, and one that you were unlikely to forget.
Walk on and, just behind the porticoes of the inner court, you would have found yourself in a vast library—the remnants of the Great Library of Alexandria itself. The library’s collection was now stored here, within the temple precinct, for safekeeping. This had been the world’s first public library; and its holdings had, at its height, been staggering, running into hundreds of thousands of volumes. Like the city itself, the collection had taken several knocks over the years, but extensive collections remained.
Like all statues of this size, Serapis was made of a wooden structure overlaid with precious materials: the god’s profile was made of glowing white ivory; his enormous limbs were draped in robes of metal—very probably gold. The statue was so huge that his great hands almost touched either side of the room…
To the new generation of Christian clerics, however, Serapis was not a wonder of art; or a much-loved local god. Serapis was a demon… Fierce words—but Christians had been fulminating in this way for decades and polytheists had been able to ignore them. But the world was changing. It was now eighty years since a Christian had first sat on the throne of Rome and in the intervening decades the religion of the Lamb had taken an increasingly bullish attitude to all those who refused it…
One day, early in AD 392, a large crowd of Christians started to mass outside the temple, with Theophilus at its head. And then, to the distress of watching Alexandrians, this crowd had surged up the steps, into the sacred precinct and burst into the most beautiful building in the world.
And then they began to destroy it.
Theophilus’s righteous followers began to tear at those famous artworks, the lifelike statues and the gold-plated walls. There was a moment’s hesitation when they came to the massive statue of the god: rumour had it that if Serapis was harmed then the sky would fall in. Theophilus ordered a soldier to take his axe and hit it. The soldier struck Serapis’s face with a double-headed axe. The god’s great ivory profile, blackened by centuries of smoke, shattered.
The watching Christians roared with delight and then, emboldened, surged round to complete the job. Serapis’s head was wrenched from its neck; the feet and hands were chopped off with axes, dragged apart with ropes, then, for good measure, burned.
As one delighted Christian chronicler put it, the ‘decrepit, dotard’ Serapis ‘was burned to ashes before the eyes of the Alexandria which had worshipped him’. The giant torso of the god was saved for a more public humiliation: it was taken into the amphitheatre and burned in front of a great crowd. ‘And that,’ as our chronicler notes with satisfaction, ‘was the end of the vain superstition and ancient error of Serapis.’
A little later, a church housing the relics of St John the Baptist was built on the temple’s ruins, a final insult to the god—and to architecture. It was, naturally, an inferior structure. According to later Christian chronicles, this was a victory. According to a non-Christian account, it was a tragedy…
Nothing was left. Christians took apart the temple’s very stones, toppling the immense marble columns, causing the walls themselves to collapse. The entire sanctuary was demolished with astonishing rapidity; the greatest building in the world was ‘scattered to the winds’. [1]
The tens of thousands of books, the remnants of the greatest library in the world, were all lost, never to reappear…
Far more than a temple had gone. As the news of the destruction spread across the empire, something of the spirit of the old culture died too. As one Greek professor wrote in despair: ‘The dead used to leave the city alive behind them, but we living now carry the city to her grave.’
_________
[1] Note of the Ed.: See the remains today of the Serapeum of Alexandria: here.

Categories
Christendom Darkening Age (book) Evil

Darkening Age, 8


These are the last words of chapter five of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World:
A little over a century later, AD 423, the Christian government announced that any pagans who still survived were to be suppressed. Though, it added confidently—and ominously: ‘We now believe that there are none’.

Categories
Autobiography Christendom Evil Matthias Grünewald Racial right

Christianity is pure evil

– and white nationalists are evil too –

I had changed the status to ‘private’ of the Friday post for fear that my relatives who see my Facebook page would find out what I wrote about the family tragedy (after a Mass, yesterday was the burial of my cousin in a cemetery). But today something happened that I cannot ignore.
Murder and suicide in the family have devastated many. I even had to come for a few days to the house of my octogenarian mother, who still lives. This day my brother talked on the phone with her and I did something I never do: listen to a conversation from the other speaker.
In another recent post I said that, for the medieval mind, demons were a very living and very real psychological reality. I also said that, nowadays, demonological paranoia can only be observed in the most traditional Christian families.
Well: in the conversation I just heard my mother said regarding the acts of my cousin (my translation from Spanish into English): ‘There the Evil One intervened’. My brother replied: ‘Sure!’
But the worst was not that.
Then the subject of the salvation of the soul of my late cousin came up. My mother burst into anguished tears because she fears that he will go to eternal fire. My very Catholic brother, who goes to Mass every day, consoled her with reasons within Catholic theology: saying that if at the last minute my cousin would have thought this or that thing, he could be saved.
Yesterday my mother expressed with me the same fear for the soul of my cousin: her very dear first nephew. But when I heard about her fears I got angry and with a quick ‘It does not exist!’ referring to hell I turned around, away from her.
It is not clear what will happen to my mother or the surviving siblings of my cousin. Here I only came to say that an ideology of Semitic origin that has deceived the white man for millennia, with its doctrine of eternal torture, is infinitely perverse. And this includes white nationalists who, like schizophrenic imbeciles, cling to their Jewish drug.
It is not possible to save the white race by surrendering your will to evil. It is not possible to save the white race by swallowing the infinite lies of the Jews and the Judaised gentiles who invented Christianity; the torture by eternal fire being the most conspicuous doctrine of all. When the Aryan race finishes extinguishing, I hope that this bottle thrown into the sea—this humble blog that very few read—serves so that the coloured may explain the inexplicable: that not even in the darkest hour for the fair race did whites give up their Semitic drug.
This month I have gone so far as to quote an ethnic enemy in the previous entries, Heisman, to see if that would provoke more visitors to debate the central claim of this site, that indiscriminate love is killing the West: the new subtitle of The West’s Darkest Hour. But very few read this site to the extent of using, or merely linking, these arguments publicly in the Christian and neo-Christian forums of white nationalism.
My cousin was very emotionally attached to my mother. Today I heard her howling in pain, in the homely chapel that keeps the image of the Virgin of Lourdes; praying to her god, and with enormous anguish asking for answers to explain what happened. The fear of the eternal torment for his soul that she now suffers is an agony caused solely and exclusively by the wickedness of whites’ having accepted a worldview of clearly Jewish origin. Although the Jew Heisman was our ideological enemy, and I am glad he committed suicide eight years ago, his book shows that the current liberalism that inverted Roman values clearly was nourished by the very fertile soil that Christian ethics provided.
When will white nationalists give up their evil ways? When will they stop having Jews as saints or overmen (Jesus, Paul, etc.)? When will they stop taking seriously Church Fathers who were not even white (Ambrose, Augustine)? When will they face the history we have been collecting recently about the destruction of the classical (white) world by Christians (mostly non-whites)? Can’t they even face what a woman (!) says in a book published this year in the United States?
Keep committing suicide, white nationalists. I only hope that the coloured historian of the future, the one who writes the epitaph of your race, one day finds the texts of this blog-bottle thrown into the sea…

Categories
Athens Autobiography Catholic Church Christendom Darkening Age (book) Destruction of Greco-Roman world Evil Free speech / association Library of Alexandria

Darkening Age, 2


 
INTRODUCTION
Athens, AD 532

‘That all superstition of pagans and heathens should be annihilated is what God wants, God commands, God proclaims.’

— St Augustine

This was no time for a philosopher to be philosophical. ‘The tyrant’, as the philosophers put it, was in charge and had many alarming habits. In Damascius’s own time, houses were entered and searched for books and objects deemed unacceptable. If any were found they would be removed and burned in triumphant bonfires in town squares. Discussion of religious matters in public had been branded a ‘damnable audacity’ and forbidden by law. Anyone who made sacrifices to the old gods could, the law said, be executed. Across the empire, ancient and beautiful temples had been attacked, their roofs stripped, their treasures melted down, their statues smashed. To ensure that their rules were kept, the government started to employ spies, officials and informers to report back on what went on in the streets and marketplaces of cities and behind closed doors in private homes. As one influential Christian speaker put it, his congregation should hunt down sinners and drive them into the way of salvation as relentlessly as a hunter pursues his prey into nets.
The consequences of deviation from the rules could be severe and philosophy had become a dangerous pursuit. Damascius’s own brother had been arrested and tortured to make him reveal the names of other philosophers, but had, as Damascius recorded with pride, ‘received in silence and with fortitude the many blows of the rod that landed on his back’. Others in Damascius’ s circle of philosophers had been tortured; hung up by the wrists until they gave away the names of their fellow scholars. A fellow philosopher had, some years before, been flayed alive. Another had been beaten before a judge until the blood flowed down his back.
The savage ‘tyrant’ was Christianity. From almost the very first years that a Christian emperor had ruled in Rome in AD 312, liberties had begun to be eroded. And then, in AD 529, a final blow had fallen. It was decreed that all those who laboured ‘under the insanity of paganism’—in other words Damascius and his fellow philosophers—would be no longer allowed to teach. There was worse. It was also announced that anyone who had not yet been baptized was to come forward and make themselves known at the ‘holy churches’ immediately, or face exile. And if anyone allowed themselves to be baptized, then slipped back into their old pagan ways, they would be executed.
For Damascius and his fellow philosophers, this was the end. They could not worship their old gods. They could not earn any money. Above all, they could not now teach philosophy. The Academy, the greatest and most famous school in the ancient world—perhaps ever—a school that could trace its history back almost a millennium, closed.
It is impossible to imagine how painful the journey through Athens would have been. As they went, they would have walked through the same streets and squares where their heroes—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle—had once walked and worked and argued. They would have seen in them a thousand reminders that those celebrated times were gone. The temples of Athens were closed and crumbling and many of the brilliant statues that had once stood in them had been defaced or removed. Even the Acropolis had not escaped: its great statue of Athena had been torn down.
Little of what is covered by this book is well-known outside academic circles. Certainly it was not well-known by me when I grew up in Wales, the daughter of a former nun and a former monk. My childhood was, as you might expect, a fairly religious one. We went to church every Sunday; said grace before meals, and I said my prayers (or at any rate the list of requests which I considered to be the same thing) every night. When Catholic relatives arrived we play-acted not films but First Holy Communion and, at times, even actual communion…
As children, both had been taught by monks and nuns; and as a monk and a nun they had both taught. They believed as an article of faith that the Church that had enlightened their minds was what had enlightened, in distant history, the whole of Europe. It was the Church, they told me, that had kept alive the Latin and Greek of the classical world in the benighted Middle Ages, until it could be picked up again by the wider world in the Renaissance. And, in a way, my parents were right to believe this, for it is true. Monasteries did preserve a lot of classical knowledge.
But it is far from the whole truth. In fact, this appealing narrative has almost entirely obscured an earlier, less glorious story. For before it preserved, the Church destroyed.
In a spasm of destruction never seen before—and one that appalled many non-Christians watching it—during the fourth and fifth centuries, the Christian Church demolished, vandalized and melted down a simply staggering quantity of art. Classical statues were knocked from their plinths, defaced, defiled and torn limb from limb. Temples were razed to their foundations and burned to the ground. A temple widely considered to be the most magnificent in the entire empire was levelled.
Many of the Parthenon sculptures were attacked, faces were mutilated, hands and limbs were hacked off and gods were decapitated. Some of the finest statues on the whole building were almost certainly smashed off then ground into rubble that was then used to build churches.
Books—which were often stored in temples—suffered terribly. The remains of the greatest library in the ancient world, a library that had once held perhaps 700,000 volumes, were destroyed in this way by Christians. It was over a millennium before any other library would even come close to its holdings. Works by censured philosophers were forbidden and bonfires blazed across the empire as outlawed books went up in flames.

Fragment of a 5th-century scroll
showing the destruction of the Serapeum
by Pope Theophilus of Alexandria

The work of Democritus, one of the greatest Greek philosophers and the father of atomic theory, was entirely lost. Only one per cent of Latin literature survived the centuries. Ninety-nine per cent was lost.
The violent assaults of this period were not the preserve of cranks and eccentrics. Attacks against the monuments of the ‘mad’, ‘damnable’ and ‘insane’ pagans were encouraged and led by men at the very heart of the Catholic Church. The great St Augustine himself declared to a congregation in Carthage that ‘that all superstition of pagans and heathens should be annihilated is what God wants, God commands, God proclaims!’ St Martin, still one of the most popular French saints, rampaged across the Gaulish countryside levelling temples and dismaying locals as he went. In Egypt, St Theophilus razed one of the most beautiful buildings in the ancient world. In Italy, St Benedict overturned a shrine to Apollo. In Syria, ruthless bands of monks terrorized the countryside, smashing down statues and tearing the roofs from temples.
St John Chrysostom encouraged his congregations to spy on each other. Fervent Christians went into people’s houses and searched for books, statues and paintings that were considered demonic. This kind of obsessive attention was not cruelty. On the contrary: to restrain, to attack, to compel, even to beat a sinner was— if you turned them back to the path of righteousness—to save them. As Augustine, the master of the pious paradox put it: ‘Oh, merciful savagery.’
The results of all of this were shocking and, to non-Christians, terrifying. Townspeople rushed to watch as internationally famous temples were destroyed. Intellectuals looked on in despair as volumes of supposedly unchristian books—often in reality texts on the liberal arts—went up in flames. Art lovers watched in horror as some of the greatest sculptures in the ancient world were smashed by people too stupid to appreciate them—and certainly too stupid to recreate them.
Since then, and as I write, the Syrian civil war has left parts of Syria under the control of a new Islamic caliphate. In 2014, within certain areas of Syria, music was banned and books were burned. The British Foreign Office advised against all travel to the north of the Sinai Peninsula. In 2015, Islamic State militants started bulldozing the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, just south of Mosul in Iraq because it was ‘idolatrous’. Images went around the world showing Islamic militants toppling statues around three millennia old from their plinths, then taking hammers to them. ‘False idols’ must be destroyed. In Palmyra, the remnants of the great statue of Athena that had been carefully repaired by archaeologists, was attacked yet again. Once again, Athena was beheaded; once again, her arm was sheared off.
I have chosen Palmyra as a beginning, as it was in the east of the empire, in the mid-380s, that sporadic violence against the old gods and their temples escalated into something far more serious. But equally I could have chosen an attack on an earlier temple, or a later one. That is why it is a beginning, not the beginning. I have chosen Athens in the years around AD 529 as an ending—but again, I could equally have chosen a city further east whose inhabitants, when they failed to convert to Christianity, were massacred and their arms and legs cut off and strung up in the streets as a warning to others.

Categories
Darkening Age (book) Destruction of Greco-Roman world Evil

Darkening Age, 1


PROLOGUE
Palmyra, c. AD 385

‘There is no crime for those who have Christ.’

—St. Shenoute

The destroyers came from out of the desert. Palmyra must have been expecting them: for years, marauding bands of bearded, black-robed zealots, armed with little more than stones, iron bars and an iron sense of righteousness had been terrorizing the east of the Roman Empire.
Their attacks were primitive, thuggish, and very effective. These men moved in packs— later in swarms of as many as five hundred—and when they descended utter destruction followed. Their targets were the temples and the attacks could be astonishingly swift. Great stone columns that had stood for centuries collapsed in an afternoon; statues that had stood for half a millennium had their faces mutilated in a moment; temples that had seen the rise of the Roman Empire fell in a single day.
This was violent work, but it was by no means solemn. The zealots roared with laughter as they smashed the ‘evil’, ‘idolatrous’ statues; the faithful jeered as they tore down temples, stripped roofs and defaced tombs. Chants appeared, immortalizing these glorious moments. ‘Those shameful things,’ sang pilgrims, proudly; the ‘demons and idols… our good Saviour trampled down all together.’ Zealotry rarely makes for good poetry.
In this atmosphere, Palmyra’s temple of Athena was an obvious target. The handsome building was an unapologetic celebration of all the believers loathed: a monumental rebuke to monotheism. Go through its great doors and it would have taken your eyes a moment, after the brightness of a Syrian sun, to adjust to the cool gloom within. As they did, you might have noticed that the air was heavy with the smoky tang of incense, or perhaps that what little light there was came from a scatter of lamps left by the faithful. Look up and, in their flickering glow, you would have seen the great figure of Athena herself.
The handsome, haughty profile of this statue might be far from Athena’s native Athens, but it was instantly recognizable, with its straight Grecian nose, its translucent marble skin and the plump, slightly sulky mouth. The statue’s size—it was far taller than any man—might also have impressed. Though perhaps even more admirable than the physical scale was the scale of the imperial infrastructure and ambition that had brought this object here. The statue echoed others that stood on the Athenian Acropolis, well over a thousand miles away; this particular version had been made in a workshop hundreds of miles from Palmyra, then transported here at considerable difficulty and expense to create a little island of Greco-Roman culture by the sands of the Syrian desert.
Did they notice this, the destroyers, as they entered? Were they, even fleetingly, impressed by the sophistication of an empire that could quarry, sculpt then transport marble over such vast distances? Did they, even for a moment, admire the skill that could make a kissably soft-looking mouth out of hard marble? Did they, even for a second, wonder at its beauty?
It seems not. Because when the men entered the temple they took a weapon and smashed the back of Athena’s head with a single blow so hard that it decapitated the goddess. The head fell to the floor, slicing off that nose, crushing the once­ smooth cheeks. Athena’s eyes, untouched, looked out over a now-disfigured face.
Mere decapitation wasn’t enough. More blows fell, scalping Athena, striking the helmet from the goddess’s head, smashing it into pieces. Further blows followed. The statue fell from its pedestal, then the arms and shoulders were chopped off. The body was left on its front in the dirt; the nearby altar was sliced off just above its base.
Only then does it seem that these men—these Christians—felt satisfied that their work was done. They-melted out once again into the desert. Behind them the temple fell silent. The votive lamps, no longer tended, went out. On the floor, the head of Athena slowly started to be covered by the sands of the Syrian desert.
The ‘triumph’ of Christianity had begun.

Categories
Catholic Church Christendom Evil Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Theology

Kriminalgeschichte, 68

A 17th-century Calvinist print depicting Pelagius

The caption says:

Accurst Pelagius, with what false pretence
Durst thou excuse Man’s foul Concupiscence,
Or cry down Sin Originall, or that
The Love of GOD did Man predestinate.

 
The overthrow of Pelagius
Rather than the struggle against the Donatists, Augustine was internally motivated by the prolonged quarrel with Pelagius, who convincingly refuted his bleak complex of original sin, along with the mania of predestination and grace; the Council of Orange of the year 529 dogmatized it (partly literally) and the Council of Trent renewed it.
According to most sources, Pelagius was a Christian layman of British origin. From approximately the year 384, or sometime later, he imparted his teachings in Rome, enjoying great respect.
Interestingly, when he disembarked at Hippo in 410, Pelagius was in the retinue of Melania the Younger, her husband Valerius Pinianus and her mother Albina—that is, ‘perhaps the richest family in the Roman Empire’ (Wermelinger). The father of the Church, Augustine, had also intensified his contacts with this family for a short time. Indeed, he and other African bishops, Aurelius and Alypius, had convinced the billionaires not to squander their wealth with the poor, but to hand them over to the Catholic Church! The Church became heir to this gigantic wealth. Melania was even elevated to sanctity (her holiday: December 31). ‘How many inheritances the monks stole!’, writes Helvetius, ‘but they stole them for the Church, and the Church made saints of them’.
From Pelagius, a man of great talent, we have received numerous short treatises, whose authenticity is subject to controversy. However, there are at least three that seem authentic. The most important of his works, De natura, we know by the refutation of Augustine, De natura et gratia. Also the main theological work of Pelagius, De libero arbitrio has been transmitted to us, in several fragments, by his opponent, although his theory is often distorted in the course of the controversy.
Pelagius, impressive as a personality, was a convinced Christian; he wanted to stay within the Church and what he least wanted was a public dispute. He had many bishops on his side. He did not reject prayers or deny the help of grace, but rather defended the need for good works, as well as the need for free will, the liberum arbitrium. But for him there was no original sin: the fall of Adam was his own; not hereditary.
It was precisely his experience with the moral laziness of the Christians that had determined the position that Pelagius adopted, in which he also often included an intense social criticism tainted with religiosity, appealing to Christians to ‘feel the pains of others as if they were their own, and shed tears for the affliction of other human beings’.
But this was not, of course, a subject for the irritable Augustine; he, who did not see the human being, like Pelagius, as an isolated individual but devoured by a monstrous hereditary debt, the ‘original sin’, and considered humanity a massa peccati, fallen because of the snake, ‘an elusive animal, skilled on the sinuous roads’, fallen because of Eve, ‘the smaller part of the human couple’ because, like the other fathers of the Church, he despised the woman.
In strict justice, all mankind would be destined for hell. However, by a great mercy there would be at least a minority chosen for salvation, but the mass would be rejected ‘with all reason’.

There is God full of glory in the legitimacy of his revenge.

According to the doctor ecclesiae we are corrupted from Adam, since the original sin is transmitted through the reproductive process; in fact, the practice of the baptism of children to forgive sins already presupposes those in the infant. On the other hand, the salvation of humanity depends on the grace of God, the will has no ethical significance.
But in this way the human being becomes a puppet that is stirred in the threads of the Supreme: a machine with a soul that God guides as he wants and where he wants, to paradise or to eternal perdition. Why?

Why? Because he wanted. But why did he want it? ‘Man, who are you who want to talk to God?’

Augustine warned against Pelagius and launched, increasingly busier in the causa gratiae, his theory of predestination which Jesus does not announce and which he himself did not defend in his early days, for more than a decade and a half, until the year 427, when he published a dozen controversial writings against Pelagius.
St. Jerome, at odds with the Bishop of Jerusalem, then wrote a very wide-ranging polemic, the Dialogi contra Pelagianos, in which he defamed his adversary by calling him a habitual sinner, arrogant Pharisee, ‘greasy dog’, etc.: dialogues that Augustine extolled as a work of wonderful beauty and worthy of faith. In 416 the Pelagians set fire to the monasteries of Jerome, and his life was in grave danger.
Pope Zosimus was left out of play in a clever stratagem of Emperor Honorius, and in a letter addressed on April 30, 418 to Palladius, prefect praetorian of Italy, he ordered the expulsion of Pelagius and Caelestius from Rome—the harshest decree by the end of the Roman Empire. He also censured his ‘heresy’ as a public crime and sacrilege, with a special emphasis on the expulsion from Rome, where there were riots and violent disputes among the clergy. All the Pelagians were persecuted, their property was confiscated and they were exiled.
In the final phase of the conflict the young bishop Julian of Eclanum (in Benevento) became the great adversary of Augustine, who by age could have been a son: the authentic spokesman of the opposition, who often cornered the bellicose African through a frontal attack.
Julian was probably born in Apulia, at the bishop’s headquarters of his father Memor, who was a friend of Augustine. As a priest he married the daughter of a bishop, and Pope Innocent appointed him in 416 as bishop of Eclanum. Unlike most prelates, he had an excellent education, was very independent as a thinker and very sharp as a polemicist. He wrote for a ‘highly intellectual’ audience, while Augustine, who found it difficult to refute the ‘young man’, did so for the average clergy, who always constitute a majority.
Although he theologically subscribes the theory of grace, he does not see it as a counterpart of nature, which would also be a valuable gift of the Creator. He highlighted free will, attacked the Augustinian doctrine of original sin as Manichaean, fought the idea of inherited guilt, of a God who becomes a persecutor of newborns, who throws into eternal fire little children—the God of a crime ‘that can scarcely be imagined among the barbarians’ (Julian).
Along with the eighteen bishops who gathered around him, Julian was excommunicated in 418 by Zosimus and, like most of them, expelled from his position, he found refuge in the East. Augustine became more and more severe in his assertions about predestination, the division of humanity between the elect and the condemned. Already on his deathbed, he attacked Julian in an unfinished work.

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