Category: Friedrich Nietzsche

Hitler made us holy again

Address given at the 2016
JdF 127 Hitler Festival
in Detroit, Michigan
by NEW ORDER Chief of Staff
Martin Kerr

In the Table Talk, Adolf Hitler accepts as a matter of course that the figure commonly known as Jesus Christ was an actual historical person. He describes him as the leader of a popular revolt against the Jews of his time. Savitiri Devi, one of the best known and most eloquent of Hitler’s post-war disciples, felt otherwise. In her essay, Saul of Tarsus, she writes that based on her own extensive research, she believed that Jesus (whose name would have been Yeshua bin-Yusef al-Nazarini or something similar in his native Semitic tongue of Aramaic) was merely a fictional character from Christian mythology; that is, he was not an historical person.

It matters little to us today whether or not Yeshua was real, or whether he was as imaginary as Bilbo Baggins and Huckleberry Finn. But, of course, it does matter to the Christians, who have built up an elaborate if perverse theology based on his putative teachings. In fact, so important has he been to the Christian world that all historical dates are routinely calculated from the year that he was supposed to have been born. That practice started around the year 525 by a Christian monk named Dionysis Exiguus. Years after his birth were counted forwards and those before his birth were counted backwards. Traditionally, these designations have been known as AD for Anno Domini (or “Year of our Lord”) and BC or “Before Christ.” For reasons of Political Correctness, these old terms have now been replaced by CE (for “Common Era”) and BCE (“Before Common Era”).

But regardless of what initials are used, the basic method of calculating and enumerating the years of the calendar has remained unchanged, because Jesus—real or not—is held to be someone who “broke history in half.” In the Christian conception of things, there is an absolute rift between what came before him and what came after. In the conventional wisdom, Jesus changed everything.

______ 卐 ______

In the 1880s, a towering intellectual figure arose in Germany to challenge the accepted dispensation: the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In his autobiography, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche suggested that it was he, Nietzsche, who was the one who would break history in half. Through a process which he called the “transvaluation of all values,” Nietzsche sought not just to supersede Christianity, but to reverse it. Thereby he would lay the foundations for a new European super-civilization. I imagine that in Nietzsche’s scheme of things, future historians would date all history from his, Nietzsche’s coming, and not from the advent of the one whom our Norse ancestors called the “Pale Christ.”

Nietzsche, we note, was completely ignored during his lifetime, except for some cursory interest that he aroused in philosophical circles, which had a negative, dismissive view of his work. That he grandiosely described himself as the man who would break history in half is widely viewed either as sarcasm on Nietzsche’s part, or else as a psychological defensive mechanism to protect his ego from the rejection he suffered from his colleagues.

Perhaps there is a modicum of truth to both of these explanations, but I feel at the heart of things, Nietzsche was being fiercely serious. He recognized the full import and significance of his teachings, even if his contemporaries did not. Today, we National Socialists recognize him as one of the earliest “fragments of the future,” someone who was not the “last of yesterday,” but rather was one of the “first of tomorrow.”

______ 卐 ______

As it turned out, neither the Christian savior nor Nietzsche was the one who broke history in half. The theology espoused by Jesus was merely a reshuffling of the older Semitic worldview, a prime feature of which was the belief that there is a dichotomy between spirit and matter. Spirit is pure and good, it tells us, while the flesh is impure and corrupt. Nietzsche, for all his genius, was unable to articulate a realistic, systematic alternative to the Christian worldview.

No, it remained to Adolf Hitler to be the man to shatter the dispensation that had held Aryan man in thrall for 2,000 years or more.

I do not know when the realization first entered the Führer’s mind that there is no division between soul and matter, but rather that our flesh is infused with and animated by our spirit, while spirit is given form by our bodies. It must have been at a very young age. Probably, it did not dawn on him all at once, but instead only emerged gradually as he matured intellectually. In any event, by the time that he sat down to write Mein Kampf, his basic worldview was already well-formed and complete.

Adolf Hitler believed that the universe was governed by natural laws, and that for man to be happy and successful, he must first acknowledge that these laws exist; secondly, he must discover what they are; and thirdly, he must live in accordance with them.

This is another way of saying that the universe runs according to the principles of Causality—that is, of cause-and-effect relationships—and that it does not operate on the basis of supernatural forces, or on the mental constructions and wishful thinking of intellectuals and ideologues, or on the religious fantasies of theologians.

But at the same time, he knew that the human soul or spirit was a reality. His consistent use of religious language and imagery, plus specific comments recorded in Table Talk, reveal the Führer to be a deeply religious man, even if his spiritual outlook was diametrically opposed to that of Christianity.

Rather than believing that Man is born as a sinful being who can only be rescued from eternal hellfire and damnation by accepting the good lord Jesus as his personal savior, Adolf Hitler believed that Man was born into a state of grace with the Natural Order. In the Hitlerian worldview, we are all holy beings at birth. It is through being raised with false beliefs, and thrown into a society out of synch with the Natural Order, that we lose our state of natural grace and holiness.

Matt Koehl once discussed the Christian conception of original sin with me, contrasting it to the Hitlerian outlook. “If you look at a newborn baby in its cradle, what do you see?” he asked. “The Christians see an evil being born in sin, and doomed to Hell and torment without the intervention of their savior. But as a National Socialist, I see an innocent and holy being, born into a state of harmony and grace with the Natural world.”

This is the Führer’s great gift to Aryan man—and, indeed, to the whole world: he has restored us to a state of grace with the Natural Order. Hitler made us holy again, and only the Gods have the power to sanctify.

______ 卐 ______

As Aryans, we may be endlessly, sincerely, and profoundly thankful on a personal level for such insights. But unlike the Christians, as National Socialists, we are committed not just to our own personal salvation, but to the salvation and resurrection of our Race.

How do we incorporate our fundamentally religious perception of National Socialism into the practical work of building Adolf Hitler’s earthly movement? We struggle with these issues today—but we are not the first to have raised such questions.

Our great forbearer, George Lincoln Rockwell, wrestled with this question as well. During the final year of his life he prepared to transform his tiny, noisy band of political dissidents into a mighty mass movement. In a passage from his book, White Power, he gives us his thoughts on the future religious or spiritual orientation of the movement:

National Socialism, as a PHILOSOPHY, embodies the eternal urge found in all living things—indeed in all creation—toward a higher level of existence—toward perfection—toward God.

This “aristocratic” idea of National Socialism—the idea of a constant striving in all Nature toward a higher and higher, more and more complex, and more and more perfect existence—is the metaphysical, supernatural aspect of our ideal.

In other words, concepts of social justice and natural order are the organs and nerves of National Socialism, but its PERSONALITY, its “religious” aspect—the thing that lifts it above any strictly political philosophy—is its worshipful attitude toward Nature and a religious love of the Great gifs of an Unknown Creator.

Christianity, for instance, is a far higher thing than its rituals, the words of its prayers, or any of its creeds. It is a SPIRITUAL STRIVING toward the believer’s ideals of spiritual perfection.

National Socialism is the same sort of striving toward even higher and higher levels here on this earth, while Christianity is striving toward a future and later life not of this earth.
For the ordinary “soldier” in our “army”, building and fighting for Natural Order—National Socialism—it is sufficient that they respect and obey the laws and doctrines established by the lofty ideals of our philosophy with merely an instinctive love of those ideals, perhaps not with the complete understanding of the highest forms of our philosophy.

But just as the greatest Christian leaders have been those not preoccupied with details and rules but rather those who were “God intoxicated” with the highest ideals of the religion, the leaders among our National Socialist elite must share this fundamentally religious approach. For them the true meaning of our racial doctrine must be part of their idealistic “striving toward God.” [1]

Through total identification of ourselves with our great race, we partake of its past and future glories. When we contribute in any way, especially by self-sacrifice, toward helping our race along the path toward higher existence, we reach toward God—the Creator of the Master Race.

In short, while the mechanics and rules of National Socialism, as codified and set forth here, are sufficient for most of us, for the few idealists ready and willing to sacrifice their very lives in the cause of their people, National Socialism must be a very real religious ideal—a striving toward God.

We should all keep Commander Rockwell’s words in mind as we go forth into the world in the coming Jahre des Führers 127. We should endeavor to bring every single racially conscious White person into our Movement. But at the same time, we must maintain the ideological purity of our Cause by seeing to it that only those with a clear understanding of the spiritual, religious character of our worldview become Movement officers. And this is especially true with members of the senior leadership corps.

In this way, we will guarantee that we, too, are “breaking history in half,” in keeping with the Führer’s mission.

HEIL HITLER!

_____________

[1] From White Power, chapter XV, pp. 455-457.

Tags Christian question (CQ), Genuine spirituality, National Socialism, Nature

Dominion (book) Friedrich Nietzsche Tom Holland

Dominion, 32

Post author By C .T.
Post date May 3, 2023
1 Comment on Dominion, 32

It was not the front, but the journey to the front that was the worst. ‘There was some shit in people’s pants, I tell you.’ Two years into the war, Otto Dix had seen it all. In 1914, he had unhesitatingly signed up to the field artillery. Back then, people had assumed that victory would be swift in coming. Germany was the greatest military power in Europe. [page 459]

In the next pages Tom Holland describes the horrors Dix witnessed in the First World War. He then adds:

It was not the Bible that had brought Dix to this conviction. In his determination to spurn the mindset of a slave, to revel in all the qualities that made for a master, there was a conscious repudiation of Christian morality, with its concern for the weak, and the poor, and the oppressed. A trench in the midst of the most terrible battlescape in history seemed to Dix a fitting vantage point from which to observe what was, so he had come to believe, the collapse of a 1900-year-old order. Alongside his Bible, he had a second book. So stirred was he by its philosophy that in 1912, while still an art student in Dresden, he had made a life-size plaster bust of its author. Not just his first sculpture, it had also been his first work to be bought by a gallery. Discerning critics, inspecting the bust’s drooping moustache, its thrusting neck, its stare shadowed by bristling eyebrows, had proclaimed it the very image of Friedrich Nietzsche.

‘After a terrible earthquake, a tremendous reflection,
with new questions.’ Otto Dix’s life-size bust of Nietzsche.
[Tom Holland himself took this photo—Ed.]

‘Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction?—for even gods putrefy! God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’ To read these words beside the Somme, amid a landscape turned to mud and ash, and littered with the mangled bodies of men, was to shiver before the possibility that there might not be, after all, any redemption in sacrifice. Nietzsche had written them back in 1882: the parable of a madman who one bright morning lit a lantern and ran to the marketplace, where no one among his listeners would believe his news that God had bled to death beneath their knives.

Little in Nietzsche’s upbringing seemed to have prefigured such blasphemy. The son of a Lutheran pastor, and named after Friedrich Wilhelm IV, his background had been one of pious provincialism. Precocious and brilliant, he had obtained a professorship when he was only twenty-four; but then, only a decade later, had resigned it to become a shabbily genteel bum. Finally, seeming to confirm the sense of a squandered career, he had suffered a terrible mental breakdown. For the last eleven years of his life, he had been confined to a succession of clinics.

True, he was briefly institutionalised, but for most of the years following the psychotic crisis of January 1889, Nietzsche spent most of his time at home with his mother, and later with his sister.

Few, when he finally died in 1900, had read the books that, in an escalating frenzy of production, he had written before his collapse into madness. Posthumously, though, his fame had grown with startling rapidity. By 1914, when Dix marched to war with his writings in his knapsack, Nietzsche’s name had emerged to become one of the most controversial in Europe. Condemned by many as the most dangerous thinker who had ever lived, others hailed him as a prophet. There were many who considered him both.

Nietzsche was not the first to have become a byword for atheism, of course. No one, though—not Spinoza, not Darwin, not Marx—had ever before dared to gaze quite so unblinkingly at what the murder of its god might mean for a civilisation. ‘When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.’

Nietzsche’s loathing for those who imagined otherwise was intense. Philosophers he scorned as secret priests. Socialists, communists, democrats: all were equally deluded. ‘Naiveté: as if morality could survive when the God who sanctions it is missing!’ Enthusiasts for the Enlightenment, self-proclaimed rationalists who imagined that men and women possessed inherent rights, Nietzsche regarded with contempt. It was not from reason that their doctrine of human dignity derived, but rather from the very faith that they believed themselves—in their conceit—to have banished. Proclamations of rights were nothing but flotsam and jetsam left behind by the retreating tide of Christianity: bleached and stranded relics. God was dead—but in the great cave that once had been Christendom his shadow still fell, an immense and frightful shadow.

The title of this chapter is precisely ‘Shadow’.

For centuries, perhaps, it would linger. Christianity had reigned for two millennia. It could not easily be banished. Its myths would long endure. They were certainly no less mythical for casting themselves as secular. ‘Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour’: these were Christian through and through.

Nietzsche did not mean this as a compliment. It was not just as frauds that he despised those who clung to Christian morality, even as their knives were dripping with the blood of God; he loathed them as well for believing in it. Concern for the lowly and the suffering, far from serving the cause of justice, was a form of poison. Nietzsche, more radically than many a theologian, had penetrated to the heart of everything that was most shocking about the Christian faith. ‘To devise something which could even approach the seductive, intoxicating, anaesthetising, and corrupting power of that symbol of the “holy cross”, that horrific paradox of the “crucified God”, that mystery of an inconceivably ultimate, most extreme cruelty and self-crucifixion undertaken for the salvation of mankind?’

Like Paul, Nietzsche knew it to be a scandal. Unlike Paul, he found it repellent. The spectacle of Christ being tortured to death had been bait for the powerful. It had persuaded them—the strong and the healthy, the beautiful and the brave, the powerful and the self-assured—that it was their natural inferiors, the hungry and the humble, who deserved to inherit the earth. ‘Helping and caring for others, being of use to others, constantly excites a sense of power.’ Charity, in Christendom, had become a means to dominate. Yet Christianity, by taking the side of everything ill-constituted, and weak, and feeble, had made all of humanity sick. Its ideals of compassion and equality before God were bred not of love, but of hatred: a hatred of the deepest and most sublime order, one that had transformed the very character of morality, a hatred the like of which had never before been seen on earth. This was the revolution that Paul—‘that hate-obsessed false-coiner’—had set in motion. The weak had conquered the strong; the slaves had vanquished their masters.

‘Ruined by cunning, secret, invisible, anaemic vampires! Not conquered —only sucked dry! Covert revengefulness, petty envy become master!’ Nietzsche, when he mourned antiquity’s beasts of prey, did so with the passion of a scholar who had devoted his life to the study of their civilisation…

That Nietzsche himself was a short-sighted invalid prone to violent migraines had done nothing to inhibit his admiration for the aristocracies of antiquity, and their heedlessness towards the sick and the weak. A society focused on the feeble was a society enfeebled itself. This it was that had rendered Christians such malevolent blood-suckers. If it was the taming of the Romans that Nietzsche chiefly rued, then he regretted as well how they had battened onto other nations.

Nietzsche himself, whose contempt for the Germans was exceeded only by his disdain for the English, had so little time for nationalism that he had renounced his Prussian citizenship when he was only twenty-four, and died stateless; and yet, for all that, he had always lamented the fate of his forebears. Once, before the coming of Boniface, the forests had sheltered Saxons who, in their ferocity and their hunger for everything that was richest and most intense in life, had been predators no less glorious than lions: ‘blond beasts’. But then the missionaries had arrived. The blond beast had been tempted into a monastery. ‘There he now lay, sick, wretched, malevolent toward himself; filled with hatred of the vital drives, filled with suspicion towards all that was still strong and happy. In short, a “Christian”.’ Dix, enduring the extremes of the Western Front, did not have to be a worshipper of Woden to feel that he was free at last.

‘Even war,’ he recorded in his notebook, ‘must be regarded as a natural occurrence.’ That it was an abyss, across which, like a rope, a man might be suspended, fastened between beast and Übermensch: here was a philosophy that Dix felt no cause to abandon at the Somme…

The unprecedented scale of the violence that had bled Europe white did not shock most of its peoples into atheism. On the contrary: it served to confirm them in their faith. How otherwise to make sense of all the horror? As so often before, when Christians had found themselves enmired in misery and slaughter, the veil that lay between earth and heaven could appear to many hauntingly thin. As the war ground on, and 1916 turned to 1917, so the end times seemed to be drawing near. In Portugal, in the village of Fatima, the Virgin made repeated appearances, until at last, before huge crowds, the sun danced, as though in fulfilment of the prophecy recorded in Revelation that a great and wondrous sign would appear in heaven: ‘a woman clothed with the sun’. In Palestine, the British won a crushing victory at Armageddon and took Jerusalem from the Turks. In London, the Foreign Secretary issued a declaration supporting the establishment in the Holy Land of a Jewish homeland—a development that many Christians believed was bound to herald the return of Christ…

Meanwhile, in basements stale with beer and sweat, men with strident voices were talking about Jews. [pages 462-467]

Tags Christian question (CQ)

Friedrich Nietzsche

Postscript

Post author By C .T.
Post date March 24, 2023
2 Comments on Postscript

I would like to add to what I said yesterday.

While it is true that suppressing the errors of both Wagner’s and Nietzsche’s worldviews, while assimilating their insights, produces a Hitlerian synthesis (by which I mean the critical view of Judeo-Christianity that the Führer confessed to his closest friends), the Wagner/Nietzsche thesis-antithesis was, and remains, extremely asymmetrical.

In my post yesterday I mentioned two German biographers of Nietzsche. I was referring to Curt Paul Janz and Werner Ross, whose voluminous treatises on the German philosopher’s life I own and are boring as hell, unless the reader has a passionate interest in Nietzsche’s tragic life (as I have). So, for those new to the subject, I recommend the more lyrical prose of an Austrian biographer of Nietzsche I have already linked to several times on this site. The Spanish translation of Werner Ross’ book, by the way, I read it all in 1995:

If there is one thing that emerges from all these biographies that I have read and conscientiously weighed up, it is the revelation that Christianity condemned Nietzsche, to use the poet-philosopher’s words, to a seventh solitude: absolute solitude that over the years annihilated him psychologically. That’s the tremendous asymmetry I was talking about, compared to the much famed and incredibly beloved Wagner by Europeans in general and Germans in particular. See for example this video about the famed composer:

One German gets all the glory and the other is condemned to the extent that nobody wants to listen to him, to the point of losing his mind. And it all has to do, of course, with the fact that the Aryans were Christians in the 19th century. And even in the 21st century the racial right loves those who echo Wagner’s anti-Semitism, but those who also blame Christianity are ignored.

As only a Hitlerian synthesis between Wagner and Nietzsche would save the white race, the Aryan man, still clinging to Christian ethics, is lost. He is like Siegfried whose potion made him lose his ancestral memory to the extent of betraying Brunhild, as we will see in my post tomorrow.

The dialectical synthesis I was talking about yesterday could only be realised if a substantial percentage of JQ-conscious Aryans were also conscious of the Christian Question. But there aren’t, and on the racial right I see no willingness whatsoever to put the religion of our parents in the dock.

Tags Christian question (CQ)

Friedrich Nietzsche Richard Wagner

Dialectic synthesis

On the eleventh of this month, I said that what moved me to present the story of Richard Wagner’s tetralogy was to try to elucidate a little more of Savitri Devi’s point of view, insofar as I consider her book, together with my footnotes, to be a kind of manifesto of The West’s Darkest Hour.

I’m still four entries short of completing the tetralogy’s story (the penultimate, which deals with Siegfried’s death, will be the longest in the series) according to the Argentine publisher who summarised the story when I was a child. I’ve already taken several images from those illustrated booklets, as can be seen here, here, here and here. But I would like, at once, to put down in writing some of my conclusions even before I finish translating the series.

I have just reviewed my thick biographical volumes on Friedrich Nietzsche, written by two German scholars. Nietzsche apparently lost his sanity on the last day of 1888. It is fascinating to note that his last essay before losing his mind was ‘Nietzsche contra Wagner’. Recall that, years before, Wagner and Nietzsche had been great friends. These are my conclusions:

Wagner was absolutely right to consider Jewry a parasite; and the later Nietzsche, i.e. the Nietzsche of the last months of 1888, was absolutely wrong to hate anti-Semites. But Wagner was completely wrong in believing that it was enough to baptise the Jews to make them good. For example, when for his last opera, Parsifal, he was assigned a Jewish conductor, Wagner rebelled and said that he would only accept him if he was first baptised. Such a stance reminds me of the American E. Michael Jones, although Jones is a Catholic and Wagner was a Protestant.

On the other hand, Nietzsche was right to condemn Judeo-Christianity as the key factor in the decline of Aryan culture, as we can see in this quote written before his upheaval. Precisely because of this, Nietzsche began to distance himself from Wagner when he began to see that the composer was making concessions to Christian morality.

The dialectic synthesis, so to speak, between the grave rights and grave wrongs of both Wagner and Nietzsche, provides a picture in which the contradictions of both are resolved. Resolving the contradictions of both positions is what I attempt on this site: unlike the latter Nietzsche we must be aware of the JQ, but, also, unlike Wagner we must be aware of the CQ.

All this has to do with Savitri’s book because, if our understanding of the cause of the dark hour isn’t perfect (Savitri wasn’t as anti-Christian as Nietzsche), we won’t be able to save the Aryan man. We will end up deceived by unscrupulous rascals like those who deceived Siegfried and eventually killed him. There is more I would like to say about the Wagnerian tetralogy but for tonight the above is enough.

(Incidentally, this image also appears in one of the booklets I used to leaf through as a child, which I still have in my library after so many decades of leafing through them for the first time.)

Tags Christian question (CQ)

Evropa Soberana (webzine) Friedrich Nietzsche

Evropa Soberana, backup 6

Post author By C .T.
Post date January 13, 2023

Click here

English translation of Soberana’s last quote (from The Greek State by Friedrich Nietzsche, preface to an unwritten book, 1871):

He who contemplates war and its uniformed possibility, the soldiers profession, with respect to the hitherto described nature of the State, must arrive at the conviction, that through war and in the profession of arms is placed before our eyes an image, or even perhaps the prototype of the State. Here we see as the most general effect of the war-tendency, an immediate decomposition and division of the chaotic mass into military castes, out of which rises, pyramid shaped, on an exceedingly broad base of slaves, the edifice of the “martial society.” The unconscious purpose of the whole movement constrains every individual under its yoke, and produces also in heterogeneous natures as it were a chemical transformation of their qualities until they are brought into affinity with that purpose. In the highest castes one perceives already a little more of what in this internal process is involved at the bottom, namely the creation of the military genius […] I should like to think the warlike man to be a means of the military genius and his labor again only a tool in the hands of that same genius; and not to him, as absolute man and non-genius, but to him as a means of the genius—whose pleasure also can be to choose his tool’s destruction as a mere pawn sacrificed on the strategist’s chessboard—is due a degree of dignity, of that dignity namely, to have been deemed worthy of being a means of the genius.

Exterminationism Friedrich Nietzsche

The daimon within us…

This lone walker from 1870 on a track leading up a mountain in the Trossachs reminds me of Nietzsche’s loneliness.

Tomorrow I will probably continue with the Charlemagne theme of Karlheinz Deschner’s series, but first I would like to recapitulate a few things.

Crossing the psychological Rubicon has its problems, especially since almost nobody is on the other side of the river.

A few days ago for example a Canadian contacted me by email and didn’t understand why I reject white nationalism, even though I don’t know any nationalist who has as his absolute religion what I call ‘the extermination of the Neanderthals’. Even the latest commenter who has commented on this site doesn’t seem to have a clue about our position on the so-called holocaust.

Virtually all racialists today are stuck at levels 1-5 on the Mauritius scale. There is a real psychological gulf between us and them. The distance is unbridgeable. It is a fact that the people who write articles, and comment in the comments section of the main racialist forums, haven’t made the step to level 6 (let alone level 10!) and won’t make it, unless World War III breaks out and the US becomes a sort of lunar desert.

Since I live in Mexico, it makes me angry that normies like the Argentinian Agustín Laje and the Chilean Gonzalo Lira have thousands and thousands of fans and that those of us on the other side of the river are so lonely. But that’s the price to be paid by those who dare to cross the Rubicon, as we see in the prose of an Austrian biographer:

The tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s life was that it happened to be a one-man show, a monodrama wherein no other actor entered upon the stage: not a soul is at his side to succour him; no woman is there to soften by her ever-present sympathy the stresses of the atmosphere. Every action takes its birth in him, and its repercussions are felt by him alone. Not one person ventures to enter wholeheartedly into the innermost sanctum of Nietzsche’s destiny; the poet-philosopher is doomed to speak, to struggle, to suffer alone. He converses with no one, and no one has anything to say to him. What is even more terrible is that none hearken to his voice.

In this unique tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche had neither fellow-actors nor audience, neither stage nor scenery nor costume; the drama ran its course in a spaceless realm of thought. Basel, Naumburg, Nice, Sorrento, Sils-Maria, Genoa, and so forth are so many names serving as milestones on his life’s road; they were never abiding-places, never a home. The scene having once been set, it remained the same till the curtain was rung down; it was composed of isolation, of solitude, of that agonizing loneliness which Nietzsche’s own thoughts gathered around him and with which he was entrapped as by an impenetrable bell-glass, a solitude wherein there were no flowers or colours or music or beasts or men, a solitude whence even God was excluded, the dead and petrified solitude of some primeval world which existed long ago or may come into being æons hence.

At first, while he was professor of Basel University and could speak his mind from the professorial chair, and while Wagner’s friendship thrust him into the limelight, Nietzsche’s words drew attentive listeners; but the more he delved into his own mind, the more he plunged into the depths of time, the less did he find responsive echoes. One by one his friends, and even strangers, rose to their feet and withdrew affrighted at the sound of his monologue, which became wilder and more ecstatic as the philosopher warmed to his task. Thus was he left terribly alone, upon the stage of his fate. Gradually the solitary actor grew disquieted by the fact that he was talking into the void; he raised his voice, shouted, gesticulated, hoping to find a response even if it were no better than a contradiction.

Thus the drama was played to a finish before empty seats, and no one guessed that the mightiest tragedy of the nineteenth century was unrolling itself before men’s eyes. Such was Friedrich Nietzsche’s tragedy, and it had its roots in his utter loneliness. Unexampled was the way in which an inordinate wealth of thought and feeling confronted a world monstrously void and impenetrably silent. The daimon within him hounded him out of his world and his day, chasing him to the uttermost marge of his own being.

My excerpts from The Struggle with the Daimon can be read here.

Adolf Hitler Arthur Schopenhauer Friedrich Nietzsche Immanuel Kant Joseph Goebbels Judaism Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site) Martin Luther New Testament St Paul The Jesus Hoax (book) Voltaire

The Jesus Hoax, 5

Post author By C .T.
Post date October 7, 2022

CHAPTER 5: RECONSTRUCTING THE TRUTH

To recap, I am reconstructing the likely sequence of events, based on a total picture and complete analysis of the situation.

Just as Paul’s life was ending, war broke out and the great Temple was destroyed. We can only imagine the distress and outrage of the Jewish community. Their hatred of Rome must have reached atmospheric heights. If the Jews had any illusions about peaceful coexistence, those were crushed. Military responses were no longer an option. Perhaps Paul’s ‘psychological’ ploy, the Jesus hoax, would work after all. But it would have to be taken to the next level.

(Note of the Ed.: Left, representation of Mark the Evangelist.) Thus it was that Paul’s surviving followers—perhaps Mark, Luke, Peter, John, and Matthew—decided to pick up the game. This band of “little ultra-Jews”[1] needed a more detailed story of Jesus’ life; Paul’s vague allusions to a real man would no longer suffice. Someone—“Mark”—thus decided to quote Jesus extensively and directly. Unlike Paul’s letters, this “gospel” (Paul’s word) would be intended for mass consumption. It had to be impressive—lots of miracles from their miracle-man. It would end up with 19 Jesus miracles wedged into the smallest of the four Gospels. And there were several other firsts. Here we read, for the first time ever, about the 12 apostles, Jesus as a carpenter, and the concept of hell. Here too Jesus makes a clever “prophecy” that the Jewish temple would be ruined (13:1-2)—an easy call to make, given that the temple was just actually destroyed!

It seems that Mark’s anger against his fellow Jews, however, got the better of him; for centuries afterward, Christians would blame the Jews for killing Christ, not realizing that the whole tale was a Jewish construction in the first place. Perhaps there’s a kind of justice in that irony after all.

The Gospel of Mark evidently sufficed for some 15 years. It must have been effective at drawing in Gentiles and building a functioning church. But then perhaps things stalled a bit. Maybe the little Jewish band got impatient. Maybe they splintered over tactical issues. Whatever the reason, some time around the year 85, two of the group—“Luke” and “Matthew”—decided that they needed to write an even more detailed account of Jesus’ life. But evidently the two couldn’t agree on a single plan, so they worked apart, drawing from Mark’s story while weaving in other new ideas they had jointly invented. Each man went off on his own, drafting his own new gospel.

The new documents had much more detail than Mark; in fact, both were nearly twice as long as their predecessor. They had to keep the same basic story line, of course, but each man added his own embellishments. What was new? The virgin birth in Bethlehem, for one, and the whole manger scene. These now appeared, for the first time ever, some 85 years after the alleged event. We scarcely need to ask how much truth is in them. (I note as an aside that Matthew included the bit about the star, whereas that was apparently an unimportant detail to Luke, since he omitted it completely.) Luke included a vignette about Jesus as a 12-year-old (2:41-51), something utterly lacking in the other three Gospels. The Sermon on the Mount appears for the first time, though Matthew has a much longer version than Luke. In the sermon we find a number of famous sayings, all of which were never seen before: “the meek shall inherit the earth” (Mt 5:5), “you are the light of the world” (Mt 5:14), turn the other cheek (Mt 5:39; Lk 6:29), love thy enemies (Mt 5:44; Lk 6:27), “cannot serve God and mammon” (Mt 6:24), “judge not” (Mt 7:1; Lk 6:37)—all now recorded, for the first time, some 50 years after they supposedly occurred.

Followers must now virtually abandon their families for the cause. “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:26). These are remarkably cult-like dictates, but perhaps appropriate for the Jewish-led Christian movement.

Then we have passages of outright militancy. In Matthew, Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (10:34)—how very un-Christ-like! Luke has Jesus say, “I came to cast fire upon the earth… Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division” (12:49-51). Every man must do his part: “let him who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one” (Lk 22:36). Jesus becomes downright ruthless: “as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slay them before me” (Lk 19:27). All this is necessary because “the devil” rules all the kingdoms of the world (Lk 4:5-6). But not to worry; if we all stick to the plan, and “this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world,” then “the end will come” (Mt 24:14). And so, sometime around the year 85, two new Gospels were released into the world.

Once again, these apparently sufficed for a good decade or so. But then one more member of the cabal, “John,” breaks rank and moves in yet a different direction. He feels the need for an intellectual and esoteric Jesus story, and so constructs a gospel using abstract, almost philosophical terms and concepts. It ends up as mid-length essay, between the short Mark and the longer Matt/Luke. Miracles are still there, but they are now down-played— just eight appear. We can imagine that John understood that his new, more intellectual audience would likely not be taken in by such nonsense…

“Saint” Paul and his Jewish cabal turn out to be blatant liars. In fact, the epic liars of all recorded history.

Recall my explanation above, regarding how Paul and the Gospel writers had two sets of enemies: the Romans and their fellow elite Jews. In fact, they had a third enemy: the truth. Paul and crew knew they were lying to the masses, but they didn’t care. The Gentiles were always treated by the Jews with contempt, as I showed in chapter four. They could be manipulated, harassed, assaulted, beaten, even killed, if it served Jewish ends. This was not a problem for them…

In the early 1500s Martin Luther—founder of the Lutheran church—wrote a rather infamous book titled On the Jews and their Lies. There he declared that “they have not acquired a perfect mastery of the art of lying; they lie so clumsily and ineptly that anyone who is just a little observant can easily detect it”—a statement that could well be a motto for the present work. I also note the striking irony of a man like Luther who was so opposed to Jewish lies, even as he himself fell for the greatest Jewish lie of all.

In 1798, the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant called the Jews “a nation of deceivers,” and in a later lecture he added that “the Jews…are permitted by the Talmud to practice deceit”. In his final book, Arthur Schopenhauer made some extended observations on Judeo-Christianity. He wrote, “We see from [Tacitus and Justinus] how much the Jews were at all times and by all nations loathed and despised.” This was due in large part, he says, to the fact that the Jewish people were considered grosse Meister im Lügen—“great master of lies”. Employing his usual blunt but elegant terminology, Nietzsche saw it in this way:

In Christianity all of Judaism, a several-century-old Jewish preparatory training and technique of the most serious kind, attains its ultimate mastery as the art of lying in a holy manner. The Christian, this ultima ratio of the lie, is the Jew once more—even three times a Jew.

Similar comments came from express anti-Semites. Hitler called the Jews “artful liars” and a “race of dialectical liars,” adding that “existence compels the Jew to lie, and to lie systematically”. And Joseph Goebbels, in his personal diary, wrote: “The Jew was also the first to introduce the lie into politics as a weapon… He can therefore be regarded not only as the carrier but even the inventor of the lie among human beings”.

Finally, a remark by Voltaire seems relevant here. The Jews, he said, “are, all of them, born with a raging fanaticism in their hearts… I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not someday become deadly to the human race”. If a Jewish lie were to spread throughout the Earth, eventually drawing in more than 2 billion people, becoming the enemy of truth and reason, and causing the deaths of millions of human beings via inquisitions, witch burnings, crusades, and other religious atrocities—well, that could be considered a mortal threat, I think.

This, then, is my “Antagonism thesis”: Paul and his cabal [2] deliberately lied to the masses, with no concern for their true well-being, simply to undermine Roman rule. This little group tempted innocent people with a promise of heaven, and frightened them with the threat of hell. This psychological ploy was part of a long-term plan to weaken and, in a sense, morally corrupt the masses by drawing them away from the potent and successful Greco-Roman worldview and more toward an oriental, Judaic view.

As we know, it took some time but the new Christian religion did spread, eventually permeating the Roman world. In the year 315, the emperor himself, Constantine, converted to Christianity. In 380, Emperor Theodosius declared it the official state religion.

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[1] Nietzsche, The Antichrist (sec 44). In German kleine Superlativ Juden.

[2] I’ve been using cabal throughout the present text. It is, I think, precisely the right word. A cabal is “a small number of persons secretly united to bring about an overturn or usurpation, especially in public affairs.” That’s a perfect description of Paul and his band.

Tags Christian question (CQ), Jewish question (JQ)

Bible Friedrich Nietzsche Jesus Judaism New Testament The Jesus Hoax (book)

The Jesus Hoax, 1

Post author By C .T.
Post date October 3, 2022

Editor’s note: This Monday I begin quoting excerpts from The Jesus Hoax by American professor David Skrbina. As his book is six chapters long, unless something unforeseen comes up I will finish quoting these excerpts from his book on Saturday.

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CHAPTER 1: SETTING THE STAGE

There are about 2.1 billion Christians on Earth today, roughly 1/3 of the planet, making Christianity the #1 religion globally. The United States is strongly Christian; about 77% of Americans call themselves Christians.

But some historians and researchers have made a startling claim: that Jesus, the Son of God, never existed. They say that Jesus Christ was a pure myth. Is that even possible? Surely not, we reply. This most-influential founder of the most-influential religion of Christianity surely had to exist. And he surely had to be the miracle-working Son of God that is proclaimed in the Bible. How could it be otherwise? we ask. How could a venerable, two thousand-year-old religion, with billions of followers throughout history, be based on someone who never existed? Impossible! Or so we say.

If that were the case, if Jesus never existed, imagine the consequences: an entire religion, and the active beliefs of billions of people, all in vain. All of Christianity based on a myth, a fable, even—as I will argue—a lie. Why, that would be catastrophic…

Note that it’s very important to distinguish between the two conceptions of ‘Jesus.’ If someone asks, “Did Jesus exist?” we need to know if they mean (a) the divine, miracle-working, resurrected Son of God (sometimes called the biblical Jesus), or (b) the ordinary man and Jewish preacher who died a mortal death (sometimes called the historical Jesus). Christianity requires a biblical Jesus, but the skeptics argue either for simply an historical Jesus—which would mean the end of Christianity—or worse, no Jesus at all.

I will, however, accept the historical Jesus…

Another Jesus Skeptic?

So, why this book? Why do we need yet another Jesus skeptic?

To answer this question, let me give a brief overview of some of the prominent skeptics and their views. I will argue that their ideas, though on the right track, are woefully short of the truth. They lack the courage or the will to look hard at the evidence, and to envision a more likely conclusion: that Jesus was a deliberately constructed myth, by a specific group of people, with a specific end in mind. None of the Christ mythicists or atheist writers have, to my knowledge, articulated the view that I defend here.

But first a quick recap of the background and context for the idea of a mythological Jesus. The earliest modern critic was German scholar Hermann Reimarus, who published a multi-part work, Fragments, in the late 1770s. Strikingly, his view is one of the closest to my own thesis of any skeptic. For Reimarus, Jesus was the militant leader of a group of Jewish rebels who were fighting against oppressive Roman rule. Eventually he got himself crucified. His followers then constructed a miraculous religion-story around Jesus, in order to carry on his cause. They lied about his miracles, and they stole his body from the grave so that they could claim a bodily resurrection. This is quite close to what I will call the ‘Antagonism thesis’—that a group of Jews constructed a false Jesus story, based on a real man, in order to undermine Roman rule. But there is much more to the story, far beyond that which Reimarus himself was able to articulate.

In the 1820s and 30s, Ferdinand Baur published a number of works that emphasized the conflict between the early Jewish-Christians—significantly, all the early Christians were Jews—and the somewhat later Gentile-Christians. This again is a key part of the story, but we need to know the details; we need to know why the conflict arose, and what were its ends.

In 1835, David Strauss published the two-volume work Das Leben Jesu—“The Life of Jesus.” He was the first to argue, correctly, that none of the gospel writers knew Jesus personally. He disavowed all claims of miracles, and argued that the Gospel of John was, in essence, an outright lie with no basis in reality.

German philosopher Bruno Bauer wrote a number of important books, including Criticism of the Gospel History (1841), The Jewish Question (1843), Criticism of the Gospels (1851), Criticism of the Pauline Epistles (1852), and Christ and the Caesars (1877). Bauer held that there was no historical Jesus and that the entire New Testament was a literary construction, utterly devoid of historical content. Shortly thereafter, James Frazer published The Golden Bough (1890), arguing for a connection between all religion—Christianity included—and ancient mythological concepts.

It was about at this time that another famous Christian skeptic emerged: Friedrich Nietzsche. In his books Daybreak (1881), On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), and Antichrist (1888) he provides a potent critique of Christianity and Christian morality. Nietzsche always accepted the historical Jesus, and even had good things to say about him.

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Editor’s note: I think I am a better scholar of Nietzsche than Skrbina. In one of his excellent translations of Nietzsche’s books, the Spaniard Andrés Sánchez Pascual quoted a passage in which Nietzsche said that Jesus was an idiot. Seven years ago I quoted Nietzsche’s posthumous fragment here.

I first read that fragment from the isolated manuscripts left by Nietzsche in one of the books published in Spain by Alianza Editorial, but I haven’t heard of English speakers quoting it. I refer to page 132 of El Anticristo, which I read in 1976, where Sánchez Pascual speaks of Nietzsche’s criticism of Renan regarding Jesus’ alleged ‘genius’ and ‘heroism’. Skrbina continues:

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But he was devastating in his attack on Paul and the later writers of the New Testament. He viewed Christian morality as a lowly, life-denying form of slave morality, attributed not to Jesus but to the actions of Paul and the other Jewish followers. Along with Reimarus, Nietzsche provides the most inspiration for my own analysis.

Into the 20th century, we find such books as The Christ Myth (1909) and The Denial of the Historicity of Jesus (1926), both by Arthur Drews, and The Enigma of Jesus (1923) by Paul-Louis Chouchoud. All these continued to attack the literal truth claimed of the Bible.

More recently, we have critics such as the historian George Wells and his book Did Jesus Exist? (1975). Here he assembles an impressive amount of evidence against an historical Jesus. Bart Ehrman has called Wells “the best-known mythicist of modern times,” though in later years Wells softened his stance somewhat; he accepted that there may have been an historical Jesus, although we know almost nothing about him. Wells died in 2017 at the age of 90.

Similar arguments were offered by philosopher Michael Martin in his 1991 book, The Case against Christianity. Though a wide-ranging critique, he dedicated one chapter to the idea that Jesus never existed. Martin died in 2015.

Among living critics, we have such men as Thomas Thompson, who wrote The Messiah Myth (2005); he is agnostic about an historical Jesus, but argues against historical truth in the Bible. By contrast, Earl Doherty (The Jesus Puzzle, 1999), Tom Harpur (The Pagan Christ, 2004), and Thomas Brodie (Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus, 2012) all deny that any such Jesus of Nazareth ever existed. Richard Carrier, in his book On the Historicity of Jesus (2014), finds it highly unlikely that any historical Jesus lived.

Perhaps the most vociferous and prolific Jesus skeptic today is Robert Price, a man with two doctorates in theology and a deep knowledge of the Bible. Price’s central points can be summarized as follows:

1) The miracle stories have no independent verification from unbiased contemporaries.

2) The characteristics of Jesus are all drawn from much older mythologies and other pagan sources.

3) The earliest documents, the letters of Paul, point to an esoteric, abstract, ethereal Jesus—a “mythic hero archetype”—not an actual man who died on a cross.

4) The later documents, the Gospels, turned the Jesus-concept into an actual man, a literal Son of God, who died and was risen…

With the exception of Nietzsche, all of the above individuals exhibit a glaring weakness: they are loathe to criticize anyone. No one comes in for condemnation, no one is guilty, no one is to blame for anything. For the earliest writers, I think this is due primarily to an insecurity about their ideas and a general lack of clarity about what likely occurred. For the more recent individuals, it’s probably attributable to an in-bred political correctness, to a weakness of moral backbone, or to sheer self-interest. In recent years, academics in particular are highly reticent to affix blame on individuals, even those long-dead. This is somehow seen as a violation of academic neutrality or professional integrity. But when the facts line up against someone or some group, then we must be honest with ourselves. There are truly guilty parties all throughout history, and when we come upon them, they must be called out…

For now I simply note that none of our brave critics, our Jesus mythicists, seem willing to pinpoint anyone: not Paul, not his Jewish colleagues, not the early Christian fathers —no one. A colossal story has been laid out about the Son of God come to Earth, performing miracles, and being risen from the dead, and yet—no one lied? Really? Can we believe that? Was it all just a big misunderstanding? Honest errors? No thinking person could accept this. Someone, somewhere in the past, constructed a gigantic lie and then passed it around the ancient world as a cosmic truth. The guilty parties need to be exposed. Only then can we truly understand this ancient religion, and begin to move forward.