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Breivik’s closing statement

Today I read a wonderful article by Andrew Hamilton at Counter-Currents about Norwegian revolutionary nationalist Anders Behring Breivik, 33. Hamilton let us know that among Norwegians the date July 22 is like September 11 in the US, that “literally everyone knows what it means.”

Recording and broadcasting of both, opening and closing statements by Breivik (April 16, 2012 & June 22, 2012) in Oslo District Court in Norway was prohibited. Reporters had to take manual notes.

It seems that Breivik’s courtroom statements have not been published by any major media outlet in any European language outside Norway. I would recommend future revolutionaries to study closely both statements and think seriously of what a trouble trio can do once it hits the fan.



Breivik’s statement

Thank you.

I think we can all agree that on July 22 a barbaric action occurred. What happened on July 22 in the government quarter and on Utøya were barbaric acts.

And I remember that on July 21 I thought after several years of planning, “Tomorrow morning I will die” [Breivik took a deep breath and leaned forward before continuing].

I came to within 200 meters of the government quarter. Then I remember I thought, “In two minutes I will die.”

And what am I going to die for? That’s what I’m going to talk about now.

I’m not going to deliver a speech. I gave my explanation on April 17th, and it contains many of my arguments. That statement explains the most. [See Breivik’s opening statement on Day 2 of the trial.]

There are still some things I did not say enough about, and that’s what I’ll take up now.

The Sanity Issue

I will start with the assessment of my sanity. As a starting point, every person under the law is presumed sane.

And of those who have evaluated me, a total of 37 highly qualified individuals, out of 37 people, 35 have not found any symptoms at all. And of the 37, two have found a multitude of symptoms.

So it’s pretty obvious what one should emphasize. The 35 people or the two people. It’s clear the prosecutors do not want to repeat here in court what I said in the interrogations. I will not go into that now.

The prosecutor said I wanted to claim mental incapacity in the beginning. That is not true.

In December or late November, when the firsaA [psychiatric] report came [concluding that Breivik was a paranoid schizophrenic], everyone was shocked

I was thinking: What to do next? I thought I would wait for the debate to die down. And I thought hard about strategy before demanding two new experts.

Also, gradually I thought: Now that I have been betrayed by two psychiatrists who do not have access to the conversations, how will I ever trust a psychiatrist again? That’s why I was considering not allowing myself to be examined again. If I get two reports against me, it’s over.

Democracy No Longer Functioning

As I’ve explained, especially on April 17 [the opening statement], the European democratic political model is not working. The arguments I presented emphasize the need for a fundamental change of leadership in Norway and Europe.

This began with World War II. In the 1960s the Labor Party decided that a large group of Pakistanis who had been refused entry into Finland, and who came to Norway on a tourist visa, should be granted residence.

And that was how the multicultural experiment in Norway began. The Labor Party decided that Norway should follow Great Britain’s example, with Asian and African mass immigration.

I have already talked a lot about the ridicule of cultural conservatives. So I will not talk much about it, except to address some high points.

The main characteristic has been political discrimination. Cultural conservative NGOs [non-governmental organizations] and youth organizations receive no funding. They are opposed. Perhaps the only cultural conservative newspaper we had in Norway, Norway Today, lost press subsidies just a few years ago.

After July 22 subsidies to HRS [Human Rights Service], a cultural conservative organization, were halved. That’s an organization that has nothing to do with me. During the past 20 or 30 years there has been public funding of extreme left organizations in Norway such as Blitz [an “antifa” communist, anarchist, and socialist youth movement permitted by the state to employ violence against the Progress Party, the Fatherland Party, the Democrats in Norway, and others] Serve the People [Serve the People—Communist League; Tjen Folket – Kommunistisk Forbund, a Maoist group] and the Norwegian Center Against Racism [Antirasistisk Senter, an anti-white NGO].

Ethnic Deconstruction

Perhaps some will remember the leader of Future In Our Hands [Fremtiden i våre hender], Steinar Lem [a Norwegian environmentalist], who died of cancer a few years ago. One of the last things he said was something that had burned within him, but he had not dared to articulate before he knew he was going to die.

It was that we fought for Tibetan rights and the Tibetan indigenous people, but in Norway it is not permitted to say that Norwegians have as much right to a homeland as the Tibetans, and that our rights are in fact equally important.

He did not dare to speak the truth before he was told by his doctor that he was going to die. Only then did he dare to say what he thought.

In part of the compendium, I’ve written a lot about [ethnic] deconstruction and the absence of morality in Norway since 1968. They are huge problems. In Norway today, ideals are upheld that are extremely harmful and will be detrimental to our future.

When it comes to sexually transmitted diseases and the sexual revolution, it’s actually something that is underreported, and has created major problems in Europe. The ideal being upheld is to have sex with as many strangers as possible. Instead of focusing on the nuclear family, the focus is on dissolving it, and all the problems which that entails.

For example, the Sex and the City ideal, where Samantha and Carrie through 100–200 episodes of the series have sex with hundreds of men. These are the ideals that are upheld today. This is a disease. It’s like sugar to the audience. These sick ideals should be censored and shielded from our community.

So people neglect their duty to family and nation. They get education, travel, and are 35 before they start having children. Women should begin having children in their 20s. Our birth rate is below replacement level.

No Free Speech

One of the most influential people in Norway, Arne Strand [a print and broadcast journalist and former member of Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland’s cabinet] in Dagsavisen [the daily newspaper Strand edits, until 1999 the official organ of the Labor Party, now independent] has issued many statements about press subsidies.

He proposes that everyone on the right, to the right of Carl I. Hagen [former Vice President of the Storting (Norwegian Parliament) and ex-chairman of the Progress Party], should be censored, and excluded from the democratic process. He says straight out that government press subsidies [to the Left, denied to the right] are necessary to preserve the current political hegemony.

We must protect hegemony, we must not allow people the right to express themselves. The system of press subsidies ensures that Norway will never be a democracy, because those on the far right are excluded.

I will mention some important political actions by the Labor Party, those in power in Norway, that legitimize and may trigger violent counter-reactions.

Psychiatry and the Legacy of World War II

Svein Holden [one of Breivik’s prosecutors] said that after WW II not many people in Norway were sent to psychiatric wards. He meant that only novelist Knut Hamsun and Justice Minister Sverre Riisnæs were sent to mental hospitals.

[Sverre Riisnæs served in Vidkun Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling (NS, National Unity) government during the German occupation; after the war he was imprisoned in a Norwegian psychiatric hospital from 1948–1960.]

But there were several. [“Breivik sits leaning forward in his chair as he speaks. Defense attorneys Geir Lippestad and Vibeke Hein Bæra lean back and look down at the table.]

It’s no secret that after the war many cultural conservatives and nationalists were neutralized with the help of psychiatry. Many members of the Nasjonal Samling were sent to the madhouse by Labor.

Halldis Neegaard Østbye, Quisling’s secretary and NS-ideologue, among other things wrote the book Jews’ War in 1943. She eventually died at Dikemark madhouse. Her and her husband’s ski factory was taken from them by the Labor Party at war’s end.

[Halldis Neegaard Østbye, active NS leader and prolific writer. In 1938 she wrote The Jewish Problem and Its Solution under the pseudonym “Irene Sword.” It was reissued in 1942 and 1943.]

And Knut Hamsun we know about.

These unconstitutional, unjust, illegal sentences should be abolished, and compensation provided to the relatives.

Non-NS’ers who were opposed to the Labor Party were also tried and declared mad.

An example is editor Toralv Fanebust [a harsh critic of Norway’s post-WW II trials and persecutions]. When the attempt [to declare him insane] failed, he was given a lengthy prison sentence for having written about important Labor Party members’ actions before and after the war.

His grandson has recently released the book Krigshistorien: oppgjør med mytene [War History: Reckoning With the Myths].

Violence Against the Right

What else has the political power instigated and applauded that is likely to precipitate violent resistance?

The Fatherland Party [FLP, Fedrelandspartiet, a nationalist party in Norway between 1990 and 2008] received about 0.5 percent of the vote in 1993, the first time they ran in Parliamentary elections.

[FLP leader] Bjarne Dahl in 1993 tried to legitimize political opposition to immigration. At a market square meeting in Oslo, he had his face smashed with an iron pipe, his jaw broken, and his teeth knocked out in attacks by some Blitz members [antifas belonging to the state-funded group mentioned previously].

Party leader and professor Harald Trefall [1925–2008, experimental physicist, anti-immigration activist, and Fatherland Party founder] was also hit in the face by something that was thrown. The party chairman was bleeding from a wound in the face.

Also, others were beaten and kicked.

When a horrified spectator tipped off Dagbladet [one of the country’s largest newspapers] about these violent attacks, he received the following response from Dagbladet: “Isn’t that good, then?”

This was their attitude. The same attitude shared by most of the press. The mass media made no mention of the violent and dangerous attacks against the Fatherland Party.

No Freedom of Association

On June 28, 2002, the parliamentary parties committed democratic suicide. They passed a new law saying that all parties that hadn’t received at least 5,000 votes in the last election were stricken [from the ballot].

They must collect 5,000 signatures under stringent restrictions. This means that there are very few small parties. It is almost impossible to start a new party in Norway today. In Sweden, the requirement is 1,500 signatures.

Vigrid logo

The PST [Police Security Service, Politiets sikkerhetstjeneste, internal secret police] boasts unrestrainedly about how they crushed Vigrid [link to its website]. The police called on all the young people in the organization and their parents. PST destroyed the organization through harassment of its young members.

[One day in 2004, agents from all 26 field offices paid personal visits to each of Vigrid’s members, many of whom were teenagers living with their parents. The investigators continued this tactic for several months, until about 60% of Vigrid quit the group. –Trans.]

What they have done is systematically harass political activists.

In addition, PST ran a comprehensive harassment campaign against the leader of Vigrid, Tore Tvedt. Among other things, extensive surveillance, house raids, arrests, and making sure he was repeatedly thrown out of rented houses.

At a school debate on August 28 in connection with the parliamentary elections of 2009, the party leader [Øyvind Heian] of the Norwegian Patriots [NP, NorgesPatriotene, a defunct anti-immigration party] received cuts in his forehead causing severe bleeding [during an attack by a far left anti-white mob including SOS Racism], forcing him to leave the meeting. The meeting continued as if nothing had happened. Neither the school administration nor the police did anything at all about the attack on the party leader.

Before local government elections last year the Christian Unity Party [KSP, Kristent Samlingsparti] was attacked by a person belonging to SOS Racism; they are communists.

Such things of course anger everyone with nationalist attitudes in this country.

That a counter-reaction has not occurred before July 22 amazes everyone who follows national trends. The anti-democratic forces that govern our country are obviously expecting something. This can be seen from the adoption of new surveillance measures. They have been doing exercises on scenarios like what happened [on July 22].

Yet those who govern the country say they have done nothing that could give rise to such a reaction. It is quite possible that many people connected with the power structure actually believe this.

Which means dark prospects for our country.

Communism and the Ruling Class

It is well known and documented that the Labor Party before World War II received funding from the Soviet Union. However, it is wrong to say that Labor is a full-fledged communist party. They do not support a planned economy. Hence the expressions “cultural Marxists” or “semi-communists.”

It is known that many Labor Party leaders had close relations to the Soviet Union right up to 1993. The Prime Minister’s father, [former Norwegian Foreign Minister] Thorvald Stoltenberg, had, for example, a code name in the KGB. Even Jens Stoltenberg [leader of the Labor Party and current Prime Minister of Norway] had a code name, “Steklov,” in the KGB archives.

[According to Wikipedia, until 1990 now-Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg “had regular contacts with a Soviet diplomat who later was revealed to be a KGB agent. According to Stoltenberg he immediately broke off this relationship when he came to the knowledge that his contact was a KGB agent. Several sources have confirmed that Stoltenberg’s code name within the KGB was “Steklov,” a name Jens Stoltenberg used as his online alias when playing computer games such as Age of Empires.]

Of two books about this, one, The Eagle Has Landed [Ørnen har landet, 2003] by Reiulf Steen I do not think has been suppressed, but I believe there’s a new book by Christopher Andrew that has been halted.

The problem with Labor is not their communist past, but that they refuse to acknowledge it.

Deconstructing the Nordic Race and European Culture

Labor Party Secretary Raymond Johansen claims they are required by international agreements to admit immigrants—instead of confessing that they want to transform Norway ethnically and culturally.

Raymond Johansen is intelligent enough to know that Japan and South Korea have experienced the same pressure from the UN to accept immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Japan and South Korea have learned to say no. They do not want the nation to be used as a dumping ground for the birth rate of the Second or Third World.

The political model in Japan and South Korea proves that countries that say no to mass immigration in the long run will be stronger than those open to mass immigration.

We will experience huge ethnic, cultural and religious conflicts. It is such conflicts that led to July 22.

This the Labor Party and Raymond Johansen know. If they had any integrity they would admit why they want mass immigration. In other words, they have exactly the same agenda as the social democrats in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Great Britain.

Labor wants to deconstruct Norwegian culture. They want to deconstruct the Nordic race and Norwegian and European culture.

Individuals who have manifested support for cultural conservative organizations have been systematically ridiculed, harassed and persecuted in Norway and Western Europe since World War II.

In Norway, several hundred people over the last ten years have lost their jobs and been branded as racists because they opposed immigration.

An example is Remi Huseby [the young spokesman for the Norwegian Defence League, a group affiliated with the English Defence League], who lost his job after being labeled an intolerant and vicious right-wing extremist on the ground that he was opposed to the Norwegian state ideology, multiculturalism.

As a result, his employer felt pressured to fire him. This is only one case that documents journalists and editors ridiculing and persecuting cultural conservatives from WW II to the present.

The worst thing is that this demonization is better than being ignored. Being ignored is the worst of all.

In hundreds of cases in Europe and Norway cultural conservatives, anticommunists, and nationalists have been driven to suicide by public labeling and demonization. It is the same as in the Soviet Union.

So, another point I thought of omitting: cultural self-loathing. Norwegian society is suffering from a cultural psychological disorder that manifests itself through self-contempt for Norwegian ideals. This collective cultural psychosis is caused by decades of cultural Marxism.

A good example is Norway’s contributions to the Eurovision Song Contest over the past four years.

We let a White Russian asylum seeker, probably with a Tartar background. It is indeed good that we very occasionally allow an asylum seeker to represent us. But what is going on?

A few years later we let Stella Mwangi [a black, Nairobi-born “Norwegian-Kenyan” singer] win with a bongo song. What is Norway doing, sending an asylum seeker as ambassador? Is it lack of Norwegians in Norway, or are they suffering from self-hatred?

Then we let an asylum seeker from Iran win. This is an insult to all Norwegians. The answer is simple. A great many Norwegians suffer from cultural delusions and have urgent need for “medication,” with immediate implementation of cultural protectionism and the Nordic ideal.

Regarding the definition of the term “indigenous people,” this means original or old residents. It does not mean ethnic Norwegians are not indigenous.

We know of course that the United Nations does not recognize ethnic Europeans as indigenous people. But we must observe the UN’s agenda, its creation when the Axis powers were defeated in WW II.

The UN supports the deconstruction of European states. So does the European Union [EU]. The UN does not support the idigenous European population because the UN is controlled by cultural Marxists—the same as the EU.

José Manuel Durão Barroso, who has been the EU’s supreme leader for many years, was a longtime member of the Portuguese Communist Party. This shows the kind of people that hold power in the EU and the UN.

So, to come back to the definition of the word “indigenous.” There is no definition of “indigenous peoples” that nationalists and cultural Marxists can agree upon. Europe’s nationalists and cultural conservatives use a different definition than does the EU or the UN. The correct definition is “old or original people.”

Why should one support the struggle for indigenous people in Tibet, Bolivia, and other places but not in Europe? Why do indigenous activists in other parts of the world receive support and praise, while indigenous activists in Europe are branded as racists?

The battle is identical for all indigenous activists, namely, to fight against the ethnic and cultural extinction of their people from immigration. The fact that activists elsewhere are supported while we are combated as if we were a disease is an intolerable injustice.

When it comes to ongoing ethnic deconstruction I would recommend that everyone read the essay [he mentions its title, but the reporter omits it] by David Coppell and Johan__.

Muslim Demographics

Regarding Mullah Krekar [a Kurdish Islamic refugee in Norway], the reason I wanted to call him as a witness was to shed light on orthodox Islam’s view of Europe. He calls himself a Kurdish religious leader. He is one of the few Muslim leaders who are honest about Islam’s takeover of Europe.

Krekar said:

“In Denmark they printed drawings, but the result was that support of Islam increased. I, and all Muslims, are evidence. You have not managed to change us. It is we who are changing you. Look at the changes in the population of Europe, where Muslims reproduce like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in Europe has 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries gives birth to 3.5 children.”

All the sources are in the compendium [Breivik says, looking at the judges].

I also remind you that Muammar Gadaffi, who was recently killed by NATO, said in March 2007:

“There are signs that Allah will grant us victory in Europe without use of the sword. We need no terrorists, we need no suicide bombers. The millions of Muslims in Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.”

I will mention a few points about demographics. Demographic examples documenting how Islamic demographic warfare works in practice.

Kosovo is a very good example that I have not talked about. In 1900 Kosovo was 60% Christian, 40% Muslim. In 1913 the figure was 50% [Muslim], 1948 72%; in 1971 it was 79 percent Muslim. In 2008, after NATO had bombed our Serbian, Christian brothers, Kosovo was 93% Muslim. In just 100 years Kosovo has gone from being a Christian country to being a Muslim country.

Lebanon is an occupied state. In 1911 it was 21 percent Muslim. Today there are more—approximately 80 percent. This is demographic warfare. Warfare that is waged against Europe and against Norway at this moment.

And not only against against Christians, but against Hindus as well. Pakistan [carved out of India as a Moslem state in 1947] was 25 percent Hindu in 1941; in 1948, 17 percent. Today, it is less than 1 percent. This is Pakistani “tolerance” for people who think differently. Bangladesh [which declared independence from Pakistan in 1971] in 1941 was 30 per cent Hindu; today it is less than 8 percent.

Then one can look at the exploding populations in Muslim countries.

In 1951 there were 33 million people in Pakistan. Today they are nearly 200 million. From 33 million to nearly 200 million in 60 years. Officially, they report a birth rate of 3.58, but it is of course a lie.

The media like to convey the idea that most Muslims support democracy, but it is not true. A survey conducted by the University of Maryland, in which 4,000 Muslims were queried, shows that 65 percent want to unite all Muslim countries into a caliphate, and 65 percent wish to implement strict interpretation of Sharia law.

“Child Killer”

One last point. Lawyers previously called me a child murderer. But we know that the average age on the island was over 18.

Many armies in the world have 18-year-old soldiers. Many of our own soldiers in Afghanistan are 18. Does this mean that we send children to war?

The Labor Party and the AUF [Labor’s youth auxiliary] are themselves guilty of mass murder of children in hospitals across the country. Thousands of children are killed every year by abortion. Muslims do not practice abortion because Sharia does not permit it. Labor is thus a culprit in mass murder, and then uses the low birth rate as an excuse for mass immigration.

Resistance Increasing

If you choose to recognize my claim of necessity, you will effectively send shock waves through all the illegitimate regimes in Europe.

The court should remember that the biased judges who worked for Hitler’s Germany were condemned by history after the war. Likewise, history will judge the judges in this case. [When Breivik said this, district court judges Wenche Elizabeth Arntzen and Arne Lyng looked directly at him.] History will tell whether they convicted a man who tried to stop the evils of our time. History shows that sometimes one must implement a barbarity to stop an even greater barbarism.

My brothers in the Norwegian and European resistance movements are sitting out there watching this case as they plan new attacks. They might be responsible for as many as 40,000 deaths. Yesterday, explosives were found at a Swedish nuclear plant, suggesting that my brothers in the Swedish resistance had something to do with it.

In the compendium I describe how to attack Swedish, German (…) [ellipses indicate missing material from the original transcript] nuclear power plants. It is intended to break the back of (…) PST knows that militant nationalists have access to weapons that can cause (…) It is my duty to warn about this because it can be prevented if the will is there.

Create an Ethnostate

In the compendium I described a solution that can prevent all future conflicts with ultra-nationalists.

The smartest thing that could be done is to give us autonomy, autonomy within a specific area of Norway for people who oppose mass immigration and multiculturalism. We are interested in having our own state within the state, reserved for the indigenous Norwegian people. In other words, national conservatives, orthodox Christians, and National Socialists.

Such a solution would be good for both parties. Marxists and liberals would not have to experience our anger and complaining about the current state. And we would not have to live in a multi-ethnic hell. I have written about this political model and will convey the proposal later.

A solution like this can be used in all European countries, and can thus prevent further escalation of the conflict between cultural conservatives and multiculturalists.

The starting point might be that they get control over an area equivalent to about 1–2 percent of the country, and the area increases proportionally with growth. If we do not succeed and flourish, the autonomous state will not be developed. This political model is similar to political solutions relating to indigenous peoples in other parts of the world. Many ultra-nationalists and others would feel positive about developing such a solution.

Fair Warning

The alternative is that we focus on the takeover of the entire country of Norway—something Marxists and liberals would be mightily displeased with.

But the current regime is not interested in dialogue with us, so we have nothing to lose and the conflict will escalate over the next few years. It might not be tactful to say this in that the prosecutor is “gunning” on with “mental incapacity,” but I must convey my peace proposal, which could save many lives in the future [Breivik raises his voice when he talks about what will happen in the future].

This trial should be about finding the truth. The documentation of my claims—are they true? If they are true, how can what I did be illegal?

Norwegian academics and journalists work together and make use of (…) methods to deconstruct Norwegian identity, Christianity, and the Norwegian nation. How can it be illegal to engage in armed resistance against this?

The prosecution wondered who gave me a mandate to do what I did. Was it the KT [Knights Templar] network? I have answered this before, but will do so again. Universal human rights, international law, and the right to self-defense provided the mandate to carry out this self-defense.

Everything has been triggered by the actions of those who consciously and unconsciously are destroying our country. Responsible Norwegians and Europeans who feel even a trace of moral obligation are not going to sit by and watch as we are made into minorities in our own lands. We are going to fight.

The attacks on July 22 were preventive attacks in defense of my ethnic group, the Norwegian indigenous people. I therefore cannot acknowledge guilt. I acted from necessity (nødrett) on behalf of my people, my religion and my country.

I therefore demand that I be acquitted.

See endnotes at Counter-Currents

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Free speech / association Videos

Orwellian Canada


Ezra Levant on Section 13 (part 1)

Ezra Levant on Section 13 (part 2)

Ezra Levant and guest on Big Sister

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Free speech / association Wikipedia

Metapedia

Note of 2016 – I’ve now removed the whole content of this post: see first comment below.

Categories
Free speech / association Madison Grant Nordicism Racial studies

Preface



Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, published in 1916, is a classic in race studies.

It is hard to imagine that when my grandmas were little girls, The Passing became immensely popular both in the United States and in Europe. Henry Fairfield Osborn wrote in the Preface:

In the chapters relating to the racial history of Europe we enter a new and fascinating field of study, which I trust the author himself may some day expand into a longer story.

I was fascinated by Osborn’s Preface and can only ask, after a century since the book was written, where are the historians who ought to have followed Grant’s steps? By now heavy treatises, such as Gibbon’s multivolume study on the fall of Rome, but this time taking race as the basis to understand European history should have been written. But we only have Grant’s preliminary study for a racial understanding of history. Why are people of European origin sleeping so deeply?

In “Europe in Dormition” Dominique Venner wrote, “The state of ‘dormition’ is the consequence of the catastrophic excesses of the murderous, fratricidal frenzy perpetrated between 1914 and 1945. It was also the gift of the US and USSR, the two hegemonic powers resulting from the Second World War.” I would have said “between 1914 to 1947” since the Americans and the Bolsheviks perpetrated an Holocaust targeting the German people that nobody wants to discuss in the mainstream media.

While Grant was a Nordicist I believe that studying this classic may help Caucasians of both Nordish of Mediterranean ancestry to wake up. Below, a few excerpts from Osborn’s Preface (no ellipsis added):




The Passing of the Great Race, in its original form, was designed by the author to rouse his fellow Americans to the overwhelming importance of race and to the folly of the “Melting Pot” theory, even at the expense of bitter controversy. This purpose has been accomplished thoroughly, and one of the most far-reaching effects of the doctrines enunciated in this volume and in the discussions that followed its publication was the decision of the Congress of the United States to adopt discriminatory and restrictive measures against the immigration of undesirable races and peoples.

The best example of complete elimination of a dominant class is in Santo Domingo. The horrors of the black revolt were followed by the slow death of the culture of the white man. This history should be studied carefully because it gives in prophetic form the sequence of events that we may expect to find in Mexico and in parts of South America where the replacement of the higher type by the resurgent native is taking place. In the countries inhabited by a population more or less racially uniform the phenomenon of the multiplication of the inferior classes fostered and aided by the noble but fatuous philanthropy of the well-to-do everywhere appears. Nature’s laws when unchecked maintain a relatively fixed ratio between the classes, which is greatly impaired in modern society by humanitarian and charitable activities.

The late Peloponnesian War in the world at large, like the Civil War in America, has shattered the prestige of the white race and it will take several generations and perhaps wars to recover its former control, if it ever does regain it. [This preface was written in 1916] The danger is from within and not from without. Neither the black, nor the brown, nor the yellow, nor the red will conquer the white in battle. But if the valuable elements in the Nordic race mix with inferior strains or die out through race suicide, then the citadel of civilization will fall for mere lack of defenders.

One of the curious effects of democracy is the unquestionable fact that there is less freedom of the press than under autocratic forms of government. It is well-nigh impossible to publish in the American newspapers any reflection upon certain religions or races which are hysterically sensitive even when mentioned by name. The underlying idea seems to be that if publication can be suppressed the facts themselves will ultimately disappear. Abroad, conditions are fully as bad, and we have the authority of one of the most eminent anthropologists in France that the collection of anthropological measurements and data among French recruits at the outbreak of the Great War was prevented by Jewish influence, which aimed to suppress any suggestion of racial differentiation in France. In the United States also, during the war, we were unable to obtain complete measurements and data, in spite of the self-devotion of certain scientists. This failure was due to lack of time and equipment and not to racial influences, but in the near future we may confidently expect in this country strenuous opposition to any public discussion of race as such.

The days of the Civil War and the provincial sentimentalism which governed or misgoverned our public opinion are past, and this generation must completely repudiate the proud boast of our fathers that they acknowledged no distinction in “race, creed, or color,” or else the native American must turn the page of history and write:

FINIS AMERICA

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Ancient Greece Arcadia Architecture Art Arthur C. Clarke Beauty Child abuse Christendom Civilisation (TV series) Counter-Reformation Demography Free speech / association Friedrich Nietzsche Homosexuality Industrial Revolution Islamization of Europe Kali Yuga Kenneth Clark Mainstream media Martin Luther Michelangelo Montaigne New York Philosophy Philosophy of history Protestantism Real men Reformation Rembrandt St Francis William Shakespeare

On Kenneth Clark’s “Civilisation”

Kenneth Clark may have been clueless about the fact that race matters. Yet, that our rot goes much deeper than what white nationalists realize is all too obvious once we leave, for a while, the ghetto of nationalism and take a look at the classics, just as Clark showed us through his 1969 TV series Civilisation.

Compared to the other famous series, Clark’s was unsurpassed in the sense that, as I have implied elsewhere, only genuine art—not science—has a chance to fulfill David Lane’s fourteen words.

By “art” I mean an evolved sense of beauty which is almost completely absent in today’s nationalists. Most of them are quite a product of Jewish modernity whether with their music, lifestyles or Hollywood tastes, to a much greater degree than what they think. For nationalism to succeed an evolved sense of female beauty has to be the starting point to see the divine nature of the white race. In Clark’s own words, “For all these reasons I think it is permissible to associate the cult of ideal love with the ravishing beauty and delicacy that one finds in the madonnas of the thirteenth century. Were there ever more delicate creatures than the ladies on Gothic ivories? How gross, compared to them, are the great beauties of other woman-worshiping epochs.”

Below, links to excerpts of most of the chapters of the 1969 series, where Clark followed the ups and downs of our civilisation historically:

“The Skin of our Teeth”

“The Great Thaw”

“Romance and Reality”

“Man—the Measure of all Things”

“The Hero as Artist”

“Protest and Communication”

“Grandeur and Obedience”

“The Light of Experience”

“Heroic Materialism”

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Art Civilisation (TV series) Free speech / association Kenneth Clark Martin Luther Montaigne Painting Protestantism Reformation William Shakespeare

Civilisation’s “Protest and Communication”

For an introduction to these series, see here.

Below, some indented excerpts of “Protest and Communication,” the sixth chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark, after which I offer my comments.

Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:

The dazzling summit of human achievement represented by Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci lasted for less than twenty years. It was followed (except in Venice) by a time of uneasiness often ending in disaster. For the first time since the great thaw civilised values were questioned and defied, and for some years it looked as if the footholds won by the Renaissance—the discovery of the individual, the belief in human genius, the sense of harmony between man and his surroundings—had been lost. Yet this was an inevitable process, and out of the confusion and brutality of sixteenth-century Europe, man emerged with new faculties and expanded powers of thought and expression.

In this room in the castle of Würzburg are the carvings of Tilman Riemenschneider, one—perhaps the best—of many German carvers in the late Gothic style. The Church was rich in fifteenth-century Germany, and the landowners were rich, and the merchants of the Hanseatic League were rich; and so, from Bergen right down to Bavaria, sculptors were kept busy doing huge, elaborate shrines and altars and monuments like the famous group of St George in the old church at Stockholm: a supreme example of late Gothic craftsman deploying his fancy and his almost irritating skill of hand.

The Riemenschneider figures show very clearly the character of the northern man at the end of the fifteenth century.

First of all, a serious personal piety—a quality quite different from the bland conventional piety that one finds, say, in a Perugino. And then a serious approach to life itself. These men (although of course they were unswerving Catholics) were not to be fobbed off by forms and ceremonies. They believed that there was such a thing as truth, and they wanted to get at it. What they heard from Papal legates, who did a lot of travelling in Germany at this time, did not convince them that there was the same desire for truth in Rome, and they had a rough, raw-boned peasant tenacity of purpose. Many of these earnest men would have heard about the numerous councils that had tried throughout the fifteenth century to reform the organisation of the Church. These grave northern men wanted something more substantial.

So far so good. But these faces reveal a more dangerous characteristic, a vein of hysteria. The fifteenth century had been the century of revivalism—religious movements on the fringe of the Catholic Church. They had, in fact, begun in the late fourteenth century, when the followers of John Huss almost succeeded in wiping out the courtly civilisation of Bohemia. Even in Italy Savonarola had persuaded his hearers to make a bonfire of their so-called vanities, including pictures by Botticelli: a heavy price to pay for religious conviction.

The Germans were much more easily excited. Comparisons are sometimes an over-simplification; but I think it is fair to compare one of the most famous portraits, Dürer’s Oswald Krell, with Raphael’s portrait of a cardinal in the Prado [above]. The cardinal is not only a man of the highest culture but balanced and self-contained. Oswald Krell is on the verge of hysteria.

Those staring eyes, that look of self-conscious introspection, that uneasiness, marvellously conveyed by Dürer through the uneasiness of the planes in the modelling—how German it is.

Four pages later Clark devotes several pages to Erasmus of Rotterdam, whom Bronowski praised even more in The Ascent of Man. I have quoted Clark at length on the German character because I believe that Nietzsche was spot on in blaming Luther and Protestant hysteria for the restoration of Christianity when Christendom was falling apart in the times of the Renaissance popes. But in the next entry I will try to convey some of my antichristian thinking by taking the Catholic Erasmus to task. Meanwhile let’s continue with Clark’s views:

In 1506 Erasmus went to Italy. He was in Bologna at the exact time of Julius II’s famous quarrel with Michelangelo; he was in Rome when Raphael began work on the Papal apartments. But none of this seems to have made any impression on him. His chief interest was in the publication of his works by the famous Venetian printer and pioneer of finely printed popular editions, Aldus Manutius. Whereas in the last chapter I was concerned with the enlargement of man’s spirit through the visual image, in this one I am chiefly concerned with the extension of his mind through the word. And this was made possible by the invention of printing.

Printing, of course, had been invented long before the time of Erasmus. Gutenberg’s Bible was printed in 1455. But the first printed books were large, sumptuous and expensive. It took preachers and persuaders almost thirty years to recognise what a formidable new instrument had come into their hands, just as it took politicians twenty years to recognise the value of television. The first man to take advantage of the printing press was Erasmus. He poured out pamphlets and anthologies and introductions; and so in a few years did everyone who had views on anything.

This should remind us of our own age! Take heed of the elucidating excerpts from a 2009 interview of James Bowery by Jim Giles.

Bowery said: “We are essentially living under a theocracy. I call it Holocaustianity but other people call it political correctness. It’s essentially a canon of morals that have taken over Christianity, and the primary sins of this religion involve ‘racism’ which is an undefined word, and anti-Semitism (sexism is certainly down their list; it is like a venial sin, not a mortal sin). So people have been indoctrinated in this by the media and the academia. The government has passed legislation about these morals to make them violation of law. So people [in the 21st century] are essentially in a medieval mindset, living in a theocracy. It’s just that it is not operating under that name… Right now people are essentially in a State where there cannot be a Protestant Reformation. You can’t have other religions than this State religion of political correctness” (39:40).

And later during the interview Bowery added: “Let me go back to my point about the theocracy, and the dissolution of the theocracy in Europe. The Gutenberg press created a situation in which the monopoly of the Church on the written word was broken. A large portion of what the Church was about was media control. So through the media control they could indoctrinate the populations and maintain, you know, a revenue stream. The Gutenberg press broke that. Now all of a sudden you get lots of other voices. As I said, I have been working in this Internet stuff since the early days” (1:29:42).

And that is altogether crucial for our cause. Bowery concludes: “I knew this time was coming. The Internet is the new Gutenberg press. And the theocracy is being taken apart because its control of the media is being taken apart. And we are getting a new Protestant Reformation and following on the heels of that, people are going to say: ‘Look: We have our own beliefs… This is the way things should be.’ Even the Jesuits just couldn’t stand up to that. I don’t think the Jews can’t either.” (1:31:35).

That’s exactly why Erasmus was so notable, as the nationalist Internet bloggers will be equally notable from the standpoint of a latter-day Clark in the coming ethno-state, once the current theocracy falls apart.

Both Erasmus and Luther were involved in important translations of the Bible that shaked the medieval worldview. Although in the next episode Clark spoke highly about Counterreformation art, after the last indented quotation he said: “Whatever else he may have been, Luther was a hero; and after all the doubts and hesitations of the humanists, and the hovering flight of Erasmus, it is with a real sense of emotional relief that we hear Luther say: ‘Here I stand.’” However, at the same time Clark was also dismayed that the Protestants smashed the colored glasses of beautiful Catholic churches, and that artistic images of the Virgin were decapitated.

But it had to happen if civilisation was not to wither, or petrify. And ultimately a new civilisation was created—but it was a civilisation not of the image, but of the word.

But even the Protestant reaction had to be triumphed over, this time by secularism.

It is refreshing to see, in the closing remarks of the episode, Clark praising Montaigne as “completely sceptical about the Christian religion” and of Shakespeare as “the first great poet without a religious belief.”

Categories
Child abuse Conspiracy theories Free speech / association Hojas Susurrantes (book) Lloyd deMause

Satanic Ritual Abuse

I don’t get Greg Johnson. Yesterday I tried to post the following comment in the most recent piece published at Counter-Currents (CC). The subject? Jewish ritual murders of cute, gentile kids!

I’ve not read much about blood libel, speciously called here “Jewish ritual murders,” but I was pretty involved in editing Wikipedia’s Satanic Ritual Abuse which I studied thoroughly some years ago: a clear case of moral panic where many innocent American adults were indicted in the 1980s as in the Salem trials.

The “About” page in my blog has me as a researcher and debunker of the famous “wall face,” paranormal appearances in a house in Spain. One thing is clear to me now that I’m starting to see that many white nationalists religiously believe in retarded theories that blame the Jews for everything (e.g., 9/11). Unlike me they have not subscribed the Skeptical Inquirer, attended the conferences of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), or read their Prometheus Books that debunk not only paranormal claims but blood libels as well.

And no: the CSI founders—I’ve met Paul Kurtz twice in the conferences and corresponded to Martin Gardner before he died—are not Jews.

Johnson deleted my comment. Why? Is he mad with me for my criticizing those homosexuals that post featured articles at his webzine (see my recent entries here and here)? But in my above comment I was not criticizing these guys. Nor was it another criticism of Johnson’s musical and movie tastes, about which I posted here quite a few entries by the end of the year.

I wrote the above comment because, due to my experience with CSI, on these subjects—claims such as the ritual murder of children and adults—I am far more knowledgeable than the common nationalist. And extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Just to give you a bit of the flavor of the mendacity of these claims, this is what I wrote in my book Hojas Susurrantes, which precisely deals with child abuse, the subject I’ve researched most in my life:

Satanic Ritual Abuse

The confusion of my feelings about [Lloyd] deMause—lucubration such as [the above] are psychobabble but deMause’s authentic discoveries are the great lighthouse for the humanities—moved me to annotate each cognitive error I encountered in his legacy.

In 1994 deMause devoted more than a whole issue of his journal to one of the scandals originated in his country that destroyed the reputation of many innocent adults: claims of multiple victims, multiple perpetrators during occult rites in daycare centers for children, known as “Satanic Ritual Abuse” or SRA. I was so intrigued by the subject that, when I read deMause’s article “Why Cults Terrorize and Kill Children” I devoted a few months of my life to research the subject by reading, printing and discussing in the internet: material that would fill up the thickest ring-binder that I possess. I also purchased a copy of a book on SRA published by Princeton University. My objective was to ascertain whether the man whom I had been taking as a sort of mentor had gone astray. My suspicions turned to be justified, and even worse: by inviting the foremost believers of SRA to publish in his journal, deMause directly contributed to the creation of an urban myth.

The collective hysteria known as SRA originated with the publication of a 1980 sensationalist book, Michelle Remembers. Michelle claimed that Satan himself appeared to her and wounded her body, but that an archangel healed it. In the mentioned article deMause wrote credulous passages about other fantastic claims by Michelle, and added that the people who ran certain daycare centers in the 1980s put the children in boxes and cages “as symbolic wombs.” DeMause then speculated that “they hang them upside down, the position of fetuses” and that “they drink victim’s blood as fetuses ‘drink’ placental blood,” in addition to force children to “drink urine” and “eat feces as some do during birth.” DeMause also referred to secret tunnels that, he wrote, existed beneath the daycare centers: “They often hold their rituals in actual tunnels.” In fact, those tunnels never existed. In Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Ritual Abuse in History, published in 2006, professor David Frankfurter wrote about deMause’s article: “In this way a contemporary writer can assemble a theory of ritual power to explain rituals that have no forensic evidence.”

This is the sort of thing that, in Wikipedia’s talk page about psychohistory, culminates with rants like the one that I rescued before another editor deleted it: “Don’t ever listen to this lunatic!” (deMause). It is true that Colin Ross is another gullible believer of SRA, as seen in a book in whose afterword Elizabeth Loftus disagrees with him. But since the mid-1990s the phenomenon was discredited to such degree that sociologists, criminologists and police officials recognized what it was: a witch-hunt that led to prison and ruined the lives of many adults. The movie Indictment: The McMartin Trial, sponsored by Oliver Stone and based on the most notorious of these hunts, sums up what I mean. Using invasive techniques for adults in the interrogation of little kids, therapists of the McMartin case and other kindergartens obtained confessions full of fantasies: that the children had been abducted and taken through a network of tunnels to a hidden cave under the school; that they flew in the air and saw giraffes, lions and the killing of a rabbit to be returned to their unsuspecting parents in the daycare center. Kyle Zirpolo was one of the McMartin children. A twenty-nine in 2005, several years after the trial, Zirpolo confessed to reporters that as a child he had been pressured to lie:

Anytime I would give them an answer that they didn’t like, they would ask again and encourage me to give them the answer they were looking for. It was really obvious what they wanted… I felt uncomfortable and a little ashamed that I was being dishonest. But at the same time, being the type of person I was, whatever my parents wanted me to do, I would do.

In its heyday in the 1980s and early 90s, and in some ways similar to the Salem witch trials of 1692, SRA allegations reached grotesque levels. Proponents argued that an intergenerational group of families raised and kidnapped babies and children in an international conspiracy that had infiltrated the police and the professions of lawyers and doctors. Conspiracy theorists claimed that the FBI and the CIA were involved to discredit the veracity of the phenomenon. The allegations ranged from brainwashing and necrophilia, kidnapping, sexual abuse and child pornography, to black masses and ritual killings of animals and thousands of people every year. In the McMartin case they talked about children washed away when the perpetrator pulled the toilet chain taking them to hidden rooms where they would be molested; orgies in carwash business, and even flying witches. Needless to say, no forensic evidence was found to support such claims.

After the legal catastrophe that McMartin and several other cases represented, small children have not been questioned with the aggressive techniques that led them to fantasize so wildly. Nowadays there is no witch-hunting going on in the U.S., UK or Australia caused by coercive techniques of fanatics that induce either false memories or outright lies (like Zirpolo’s) to please therapist and parent. However, despite the consensus in 21st century’s sociology and criminology—that SRA was a case of moral panic about which there is no forensic evidence—, deMause did not change his view. The work that describes his thinking more broadly, The Emotional Life of Nations published in 2002 and recently translated into German, contains a brief passage where he still regards SRA as something real.

Is my criticism of homosexuals who, in my humble opinion, ought not be featured at CC enough reason to suppress legit commentariat on unrelated subjects, such as SRA or the so-called “blood libel”?

Suppose that a causal visitor hits CC today and, erroneously, gets the impression that all white nationalists believe in these literally medieval rumors about the Jews. Wouldn’t this automatically disqualify CC to the eyes of our skeptical visitor? Wouldn’t this turn out into a psychological stumbling block for our visitor to become familiar with the more sober, legitimate criticism of the Jews, such as the work of Kevin MacDonald?

With my single comment I tried to balance a bit the gullibility of the editor, author and commenters. No kidding: I was trying to do some good public relations for CC after reading that ill-researched piece.

And this is what I got.

Categories
Ancient Rome Art Christendom Civilisation (TV series) Constantine Destruction of Greco-Roman world Free speech / association Kenneth Clark Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Zeus

The fall of Rome

“But the advances made by Jewish theology were more dangerous than the disorder of the streets and the robber.”

—Theodor Mommsen, in Provinces of the
Roman Empire, from Caesar to Diocletian


1.

Constantine the Great, also Saint Constantine (Emperor from 306 to 337 C.E.) has been described as a monster even for the standards of the ancient world. Catholic historian Paul Johnson wrote about him: “Constantine had no respect for human life, and as emperor he executed his eldest son, his own second wife, his favorite sister’s husband.”

The Roman Emperor inaugurated the Christianization of public life. He sanctioned with death penalty, instead of the traditional exile, those who published anonymous libels. His dispositions for death penalty were extremely severe, and I would like to know if it is true what I have read in a book: that under Constantine tortures such as pouring molten lead into the mouths of some women who had violated certain laws accompanied death penalty.

In 330 Constantine condemned the Neoplatonic School. Sopater of Apamea, a distinguished Neoplatonist philosopher was one of many who were put to death by Constantine.

Under Constantine’s reign pagans were referred to as “foolish,” “people without morals,” and their religion “a hotbed of discord,” “a fatal error,” “empire of darkness,” and “madness that has ruined whole nations.” However, while Julian said that Constantine was a “destroyer of ancient and venerable constitutions,” throughout the centuries Constantine has been much praised by Christian apologists.

Constantine was the first Roman Emperor who ordered the destruction of the intellectual work of Porphyry, the best mind of his age, whose work I briefly discussed in a recent entry. During his campaign of looting of the sculptures and shrines, Constantine did not even respect the famous tripods for the pythia of the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi. The historian Kornemann notes that this was “a larceny of works of art never seen in Greece before.”

After Constantine’s death, his sons Constans and Constantius shared the empire of their father for some time, and only aggravated the all-out, state-sponsored assault on the Hellenic culture.

Under Constans the first destructions, not only loots, of the temples themselves were perpetrated, albeit sporadically. Under Constantius, who appears well described in Gore Vidal’s novel, the most fanatic Christians attacked the altars and temples. The deacon Cyril of Heliopolis, for example, became famous with his actions. The Arethusa in Syria, the priest Marco demolished an ancient shrine. At Caesarea in Cappadocia, the Christian community razed a temple of Zeus, the patron of the city, and another of Apollo.

Under the reigns of both Constantius and Constans, Firmicus Maternus preached the looting: “Out of all pagan temples ornaments! The mint and the crucible with the metal of the idolatrous statues, melt them in the heat of the flames!” In one of his pamphlets Firmicus incited extermination of the pagan cults, including those of Dionysus-Bacchus and Aphrodite.

But most of the temples of the classical world were still upright. The Christian agitator declaimed: “Take away without fear the ornaments of the temples! Melt the figures of gods and coin your money! The Lord has called to the task of annihilate all temples!” Always invoking the god of the Jews, this Sicilian lawyer from upper nobility claimed being an heir of biblical hecatombs as no Christian had done before.

In a subsequent post we shall see what happened to our civilization after this war of cultural extermination inspired by the cult that repudiated the Greco-Roman Gods, and adored instead the zealous, “no other gods before me” god of the Jews.

(Source: Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, Vol. I, 1986, by Karlheinz Deschner)

2.

“In discussing Barbarism and Christianity I have actually been discussing the Fall of Rome.”

—Edward Gibbon

All Roman emperors after Julian would be Christians. Theodosius “the Great” and the subsequent emperors only completed the destruction of the Greco-Roman spirit that had started with Constantine and his sons. Not only the magnificent temples of worship of antiquity were destroyed almost everywhere, irreplaceable buildings of artistic value that transmitted like nothing else the soul of Hellenic culture, but even until the tenth century the fanatical worshipers of the god of the Jews continued smashing the statues that depicted the divinity of Man like no other art before.

But the most tremendous destruction occurred in the field of education. From the time of St. Paul at Ephesus, church censorship was devoted to the burning of books. After Julian the flourishing book trade disappeared in antiquity, whilst the activity of the monasteries was purely receptive. In the universities the hypertrophy of Aristotelianism aborted any possibility of independent research. In the Middle Ages what I call “real history” was completely unknown, and the sciences were drowned.

With this knowledge I venture to answer a question that has perplexed historians since the Enlightenment: What caused the fall of Rome?

German professor Alexander Demandt published a collection of two hundred theories on why Rome fell. Everything has been postulated—from lead poisoning and environmental degradation to Toynbee and many others’ diverse economic explanations—except the most obvious explanation. The simple truth is that the spirit of an alien, Semitic god undermined the soul of Classical Antiquity. After all, Gibbon himself assigned a major portion of the responsibility for the loss of civic virtue in Rome, and the ensuing decay of the Roman Empire, to the influence of Christianity. I would go further and claim that those unfamiliar with this work, which remains a literary landmark, lack the framework to understand why the Jew-god worshipers and their secular offspring are responsible for the ongoing Fall of the West. (Yes: I am blaming the Christians and the secular Christians who tolerate the Jews far more than I blame the Jews themselves.)

It is true that Rome’s eastern half survived almost a thousand years, until the Muslim conquests. But it was already a thoroughly petrogenic culture under the Medusan spell of Christian dogma. In fact, with its mongrelized citizens the population looked very different from the Latin Rome of the Republic.

3.

“The Skin of our Teeth” was the very first chapter of Kenneth Clark’s 1969 Civilisation. About the loss of historical consciousness, in the first chapter of Civilisation, Clark said:

Civilized man, or so it seems to me, must feel that he belongs somewhere in space and time; that he consciously looks forward and looks back. And for this purpose it is a great convenience to be able to read and write.

For over five hundred years this achievement was rare in Western Europe. It is a shock to realise that during all this time practically no lay person, from kings and emperors downwards, could read or write.

St. Gregory, who looks so intensely devoted to scholarship on a tenth century ivory, is credited with having destroyed many volumes of classical literature, even whole libraries, lest they seduced men’s minds away from the study of holy writ. And in this he was certainly not alone. What with prejudice and destruction, it’s surprising that the literature of pre-Christian antiquity was preserved at all. And in fact it only just squeaked through. In so far as we are the heirs of Greece and Rome, we got through by the skin of our teeth.

(Page 17 of the printed, Harper & Row book.)

Categories
Ancient Rome Christendom Emperor Julian Free speech / association Homer Jesus Judaism Libanius Moses (fictional Hebrew lawgiver) New Testament Old Testament St Paul

Julian on Christianity

“Why were you so ungrateful to our gods as to desert them for the Jews?”

—Julian (addressing the Christians)



Below, excerpts from the remains of the book by Julian the Apostate (Roman Emperor from 361 to 363 C.E.), Against the Galileans. Remains I say, because the totalitarian Church did not even respect the writings of one of their emperors if the emperor himself dared to criticize Christianity!

About the literary remains of Against the Galileans, Hitler said: “The book that contains the reflections of the Emperor Julian should be circulated in millions. What wonderful intelligence, what discernment, all the wisdom of antiquity! It’s extraordinary.”

Julian only reigned twenty months. In 364, his friend Libanius stated that Julian had been assassinated by a Christian. The Roman Emperor had written (ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages):




Now I will only point out that Moses himself and the prophets who came after him and Jesus the Nazarene, yes and Paul also, who surpassed all the magicians and charlatans of every place and every time, assert that [Yahweh] is the god of Israel alone and of Judaea, and that the Jews are his chosen people.

Though in Paul’s case this is strange. For according to circumstances he keeps changing his views about god, as the polypus changes its colours to match the rocks, and now he insists that the Jews alone are god’s portion, and then again, when he is trying to persuade the Hellenes to take sides with him, he says: “Do not think that he is the god of Jews only, but also of Gentiles: yea of Gentiles also.”

Now of the dissimilarity of language Moses has given a wholly fabulous explanation. For he said that the sons of men came together intending to build a city, and a great tower therein, but that god said that he must go down and confound their languages.

And then you demand that we should believe this account, while you yourselves disbelieve Homer’s narrative of the Aloadae, namely that they planned to set three mountains one on another, “that so the heavens might be scaled.” For my part I say that this tale is almost as fabulous as the other. But if you accept the former, why in the name of the Gods do you discredit Homer’s fable?

For I suppose that to men so ignorant as you I must say nothing about the fact that, even if all men throughout the inhabited world ever employ one speech and one language, they will not be able to build a tower that will reach to the heavens, even though they should turn the whole earth into bricks. For such a tower will need countless bricks each one as large as the whole earth, if they are to succeed in reaching to the orbit of the moon.

Why do we vainly trouble ourselves about and worship one [the god of the Jews] who takes no thought for us? For is it fitting that he who cared nothing for our lives, our characters, our manners, our good government, our political constitution, should still claim to receive honour at our hands?

Certainly not. You see to what an absurdity your doctrine comes. For of all the blessings that we behold in the life of man, those that relate to the soul come first, and those that relate to the body are secondary. If, therefore, he paid no heed to our spiritual blessings, neither took thought for our physical conditions, and moreover, did not send to us teachers or lawgivers as he did for the Hebrews, such as Moses and the prophets who followed him, for what shall we properly feel gratitude to him?

For you would be worshipping one god instead of many, not a man, or rather many wretched men [the Hebrew people in the Bible]. And though you would be following a law that is harsh and stern and contains much that is savage and barbarous, instead of our mild and humane laws, and would in other respects be inferior to us, yet you would be more holy and purer than now in your forms of worship.

But now it has come to pass that like leeches you have sucked the worst blood from that [Jewish] source and left the purer. Yet Jesus, who won over the least worthy of you, has been known by name for but little more than three hundred years: and during his lifetime he accomplished nothing worth hearing of, unless anyone thinks that to heal crooked and blind men and to exorcise those who were possessed by evil demons in the villages of Bethsaida and Bethany can be classed as a mighty achievement.

As for purity of life you do not know whether he so much as mentioned it; but you emulate the rages and the bitterness of the Jews, overturning temples and altars, and you slaughtered not only those of us who remained true to the teachings of their fathers, but also men who were as much astray as yourselves, “heretics,” because they did not wail over the corpse [the dead Jesus] in the same fashion as yourselves.

But these are rather your own doings; for nowhere did either Jesus or Paul hand down to you such commands. The reason for this is that they never even hoped that you would one day attain to such power as you have.

Why were you so ungrateful to our Gods as to desert them for the Jews?

But if this that I assert is the truth, point out to me among the Hebrews a single general like Alexander or Caesar! You have no such man. Further, as regards the constitution of the state and the fashion of the law-courts, the administration of cities and the excellence of the laws, progress in learning and the cultivation of the liberal arts, were not all these things in a miserable and barbarous state among the Hebrews? What kind of healing art has ever appeared among the Hebrews, like that of Hippocrates among the Hellenes, and of certain other schools that came after him?

Consider therefore whether we are not superior to you in every single one of these things, I mean in the arts and in wisdom and intelligence; and this is true, whether you consider the useful arts or the imitative arts whose end is beauty, such as the statuary’s art, painting, or household management, and the art of healing derived from Asclepius.

For if any man should wish to examine into the truth concerning you, he will find that your impiety is compounded of the rashness of the Jews and the indifference and vulgarity of the Gentiles. Nay, it is from the new-fangled teaching of the Hebrews that you have seized upon this blasphemy of the Gods who are honoured among us; but the reverence for every higher nature, characteristic of our religious worship, combined with the love of the traditions of our forefathers, you have cast off.

And let us begin with the teaching of Moses, who himself also, as they claim, foretold the birth of Jesus that was to be. For the words “A prophet shall the lord your god raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me; to him shall ye hearken,” were certainly not said of the son of Mary. And the words The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a leader from his loins,” were most certainly not said of the son of Mary, but of the royal house of David, which, you observe, came to an end with King Zedekiah. And certainly the Scripture can be interpreted in two ways when it says “until there comes what is reserved for him,” but you have wrongly interpreted it “until he comes for whom it is reserved.”

It is very clear that not one of these sayings relates to Jesus; for he is not even from Judah. How could he be when according to you he was not born of Joseph but of the holy spirit? For though in your genealogies you trace Joseph back to Judah, you could not invent even this plausibly. For Matthew and Luke are refuted by the fact that they disagree concerning his genealogy.

You are so misguided that you have not even remained faithful to the teachings that were handed down to you by the apostles. And these also have been altered, so as to be worse and more impious, by those who came after. At any rate neither Paul nor Matthew nor Luke nor Mark ventured to call Jesus god. But the worthy John, since he perceived that a great number of people in many of the towns of Greece and Italy had already been infected by this disease, John, I say, was the first to venture to call Jesus god.

However this evil doctrine did originate with John; but who could detest as they deserve all those doctrines that you have invented as a sequel, while you keep adding many corpses newly dead [the martyrs] to the corpse of long ago?

Categories
Adversus Christianos (book) Ancient Rome Celsus Christendom Final solution Free speech / association Porphyry of Tyre

Porphyry

The following excerpts are taken from the introduction and epilogue of Joseph Hoffman’s book, Porphyry’s Against the Christians. Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:


wanderer
Persecution is a slippery term in the annals of the early church. An older generation of church historians, using the martyrologies and writings of the church fathers as their sources, believed that the era from Nero to Constantine was one of almost unremitting slaughter of professing Christians. Their opinion was enfeebled somewhat by the certainty that the Romans could have tried a “final solution” to the Christian problem much earlier, if they had wanted, and the fact that along with boasting of their many martyrs, church writers like Origen also bragged that rich folk, high officials, elegant ladies, and illuminati were entering the church in great numbers. The pagan writers tried to counter this trend in their insistence that Christianity was really a religion for the lazy, the ignorant and superstitious, and the lowborn—“women, yokels and children,” Celsus had sneered. But the ploy was ineffective. Diocletian’s persecutions revealed that Christianity had crept into the emperor’s bedroom: his wife, his daughter, their servants, the treasury official Audactus, the eunuch Dorotheus, even the director of the purple dye factory in Tyre, were Christians or Christian sympathizers. Insulting the new converts did not stop the process of conversion. The political solution of the third century, therefore, was an attempt to scare people off—to make being a Christian an expensive proposition. Persecution was the strong-arm alternative to failed polemical tactics by the likes of Celsus, Porphyry and Hierocles.

In 250 Decius decreed simply that Christians would be required to sacrifice to the gods of Rome by offering wine and eating sacrificial meat. Those who refused would be sentenced to death. To avoid this punishment, well-to-do Christians seem to have given up this new religion in substantial numbers, becoming in the eyes of the faithful “apostates,” a new designation derived from the Greek word revolt. The apostates also numbered many bishops, including the bishop of the important region of Smyrna, as well as Jewish Christians who rejoined the synagogue, as Judaism was not encompassed in the Decian order.

In the reign of Valerian (253-260) the focus shifted from the practice of the Christian faith to the church’s ownership of property. In August 257, Valerian targeted the wealth of the clergy and in 258 the riches of prominent Christian lay persons. The tactic was obviously intended to make upper-crust Romans think twice before throwing their wealth in the direction of the “beggar priests” as Porphyry called them.

On 31 March 297, under the emperor Diocletian, the Manichean religion was outlawed. Like Christianity it was an “import” of dubious vintage. More particularly, it was Persian, and Rome was at war with Persia. Holy books and priests were seized and burned without much ado. Professing members of the cult were put to death without trial. The most prominent Roman Manicheans (the so-called honestiores) were spared, but their property was confiscated and they were sent to work in the mines. The process against the Manicheans boded worse things to come for the Christians.

Diocletian published his first decree against the Christians in February 303. The edict to stamp out (“terminate”) the Christian religion was issued. Diocletian had hoped to cripple the movement. Termination would have meant extermination. But the survival tactics of the movement made police work difficult. Christians had become sly. The enthusiasm of martyrdom was now paralleled by accomplished doubletalk.

Executions increased, especially after rumors reached Galerius that plots against the throne were being fomented in Christian circles. New edicts were issued with regularity, each a little more severe than the one before. The fourth edict (304) required that all the people of a city must sacrifice and offer libations to the gods “as a body,” Christians included. Diocletian abdicated, in declining health. Galerius issued an edict of toleration.

Maximinus Daia, who had an active retaining program in place, designed to reeducate lapsed Christians in their pagan heritage. But the life was going out of the movement to repress Christianity. The pagan critics had not succeeded in stemming the popularity of the movement, and the “persecuting” emperors (except perhaps Diocletian himself) had miscalculated both the numbers and the determination of the faithful. The movement was Rome’s Vietnam, a slow war of attrition which had been fought to stop a multiform enemy. Even at their worst under Diocletian, the persecutions had been selective and, in their intense form, short-lived. And (as has been known since the seventeenth century) the number of martyrs was not great.

The goal of the fourth edict against the Christians in 304, in fact, had been to compel loyalty to unpopular rulers, and in 308 the greatly detested Maximinus tried the same tactic, “to offer sacrifices and wine-offerings.” The tactic was ineffectual, Eusebius says, because even the enforcers had lost their heart to impose the penalties and to support the machinery required for the “sacrifice factories” Maximinus tried to set up.

Unhappy with this failure, he sponsored a literary attack, circulating forged gospels and memoirs containing the stock slanders against Jesus. These were posted in public gathering-places and schoolteachers were required to assign portions of them to children as lessons. To substantiate charges against the moral habits of the Christians, Maximinus then hired agents (duces) to round up prostitutes from the marketplace in Damascus. Tortured until they confessed to being Christians, they then signed statements to the effect that the churches routinely practiced ritual prostitution and required members to participate in sexually depraved acts. These statements were also distributed to the towns and cities for public display.

Desperate times, desperate men, desperate measures.

By the time Galerius issued his edict of toleration in favor of the Christians on 30 April 311 three waves of attack had failed: the erratic policies of emperors Nero and Marcus Aurelius; the literary and philosophical attacks, carried on in collusion with imperial sponsors; and the more sustained persecutions of the third century, ending in 311. Paganism was dying. Maximinus’ plan for “reeducating” Christians in the religion of their ancestors had failed.

After Constantine’s conversion—whatever it may have been—only Julian (332-363), his nephew, remained to pick up the baton for the pagan cause. Julian did his best to reestablish the old order. He reorganized the shrines and temples; outlawed the teachings of Christian doctrine in the schools, retracted the legal and financial privileges which the Christians had been accumulating since the early fourth century; wrote polemical treaties against the Christians himself, and—in a clever political maneuver—permitted exiled bishops to return to their sees to encourage power-struggles and dissention within the church. Naturally, the Christians despised him. The distinguished theologian Gregory of Nazianzus had been Julian’s schoolmate in Athens, where both learned a love for the classical writers (but where Julian had been converted to Greek humanism). Cyril of Alexandria wrote a long refutation of Julian’s Adversus Christianos (Against the Christians), parts of which hark back to Porphyry and Hierocles. All in all, this pagan interlude—never really a renaissance—lasted only three years, until Julian’s death in June 363.

In the middle of this period we have just described stands Porphyry of Tyre. Born in 232, Porphyry was eighteen when the persecution broke out under emperor Decius. Twelve years later, his dislike for Christianity was firmly established. Porphyry had heard Origen preach, studied the Hebrew scripture, especially the prophets, and the Christian gospels, and found them lacking in literary quality and philosophical sophistication. He had joined a “school” in Rome (ca. 262) run by the famous neoplatonic teacher, Plotinus, where he remained until about 270. In Sicily, following Plotinus’ death, and back again to Rome, Porphyry developed an intense dislike of popular religion—or superstition, as the Roman intellectuals of his circle preferred to call it, regarding Christianity as the most pernicious form of a disease infecting the empire. In a work titled Pros Anebo he pointed out the defects in the cults. Then he tackled Christian teaching in a work. Popular under the rescript of Galerius in 311, the work was targeted for destruction by the imperial church, which in 448 condemned all existing copies to be burned.

The first thing to say about Porphyry’s fifteen books against the Christians is that they are lost. The exact title is not known, and its popular title, Kata Christianon, can be dated securely only from the Middle Ages. Opinions radically differ over the question whether the books can be substantially restored. A few facts can be stated succinctly, however. First, the church was unusually successful in its efforts to eradicate all traces of Kata Christianon from at least 448. Not only were Porphyry’s books destroyed, but many of the works of Christian writers incorporating sections of Porphyry’s polemic were burned in order to eliminate what one critic, the bishop Apollinarius, called “poison of his thought.”

Second, the ninety-seven fragments gathered by Harnack, half of which were taken from the fourth-century writer Macarius Magnes, are enough—if barely enough—to give us shape of Porphyry’s critique. That Macarius does not name his opponent and sometimes seems to characterize rather than quote his opinions could easily be explained as a strategic decision by a Christian teacher who wished his defense to survive. Naming his adversary—or quoting him too precisely—would have almost certainly guaranteed the burning of Macarius’ defense. Put appositely, anyone wishing to write a defense of the faith in the fourth or fifth century would have been foolhardy to identify the enemy as Porphyry.

[Third], I think we owe it to Porphyry and his “interpreters” to permit them speak to us directly. Having been buried—more or less successfully—since 448, the words should be permitted to breathe their own air.