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Category: Immanuel Kant

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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

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.

Categories
2nd World War Holocaust Immanuel Kant Plato Theology

Peterson’s tears

This was recorded on Uncle Adolf’s birthday last month, I’ve just watched Peter Robinson’s interview with Jordan Peterson.

Robinson is alarmed by the rise of the Woke Monster. But unlike me, who already sees the mental virus of this monster in the tiny mustard seed of the gospel (which has now grown into a huge tree where birds nest), Peterson said that cognitively we needed ‘Judeo-Christian ethic’, his words.

Robinson quoted Chesterton: ‘The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man’. I couldn’t have put it better myself! American democracy is the creature of Judeo-Christian ethic, but in the sense that democracy is the most aberrant system the Westerner has ever devised, something that Plato saw (it is the priest of the sacred words who must reign, someone analogous to Plato’s philosopher-king).

Speaking of kids who are lobotomised in universities, Robinson says that they believe all the propaganda of the elites: ‘If you don’t have some notion of the transcendent, if you don’t have some notion of the divine, you believe any damn thing’. Peterson Christianised that statement by alluding to Dostoyevsky: ‘If there is no God everything is permitted’ and a couple of minutes later added that he acted as if God existed, without answering whether he believed in the existence of God. This reminded me of the way Kant ended his second Critique, but the serious thing is that neither Kant nor Peterson realise that they are creatures of daddy’s introjects; that our view of ‘God’ has been contaminated by the Christianity of our parents: Kant’s extremely puritanical parents, Peterson’s, Robinson’s and my own parents (see the third volume of my autobiographical trilogy, which is now once again available in the language in which I wrote it).

At the end of minute fifty-three, Peterson said he wanted to understand the psychological motivation for why atrocities are committed, and gave the example of wanting to understand the mind of the Auschwitz guard. Peterson wasn’t honest in his analysis. He had the privilege of writing a foreword to the 50th anniversary of The Gulag Archipelago, but in another of his lectures he didn’t dare to answer a question from the audience about the same Russian author’s other non-fiction book, 200 Years Together.

If Peterson were honest, in 200 Years Together he would have begun to glimpse the answer to what he calls the ‘atrocity’ of Auschwitz. The next step would have been to read the Jewish Lindemann’s chapter on this subject in Esau’s Tears, a book published by a respected university, where he gives context as to why the German state took such prophylactic measures (an incredible thing to come from the pen of a Jew). And if Peterson had wanted to graduate on the subject of Auschwitz, then he would have read what Savitri Devi said in the book we recently translated into English for this site (a book I would love to have in my Daybreak Press so that it could be sold in print form to visitors to this site).

Savitri died forty years ago. If Peterson were honest, he would ask those who advance the POV of exterminationist anti-Semitism why they believe that; say, by interviewing Alex Linder. But one who couldn’t bring himself to answer in public a simple question about a study of Jewry in Russia—Solzhenitsyn’s second and last non-fiction book—will be much more incapable of pondering the mind of the Other honestly. And even if Linder’s arguments seemed limited to this hypothetical Peterson who would dare to interview him, a more substantive response would be Savitri’s book. (But fully digesting Savitri is something that even the so-called neo-Nazis fail to do, since more than Nazis they are American white nationalists using NS paraphernalia.)

Surprisingly, Peterson ends his speech by invoking the fear of hell: one of the central themes in some chapters of my trilogy. And it is precisely because of this that I feel infinitely more mature than Peterson in terms of knowing oneself. On another note, in the final minute Peterson used a swear word in criticising one of his academic colleagues, who had said, ‘We have to demoralise the youth to become ethical’. When he said that Peterson cried…

It’s worth watching the interview to get to that final minute. The sad thing is that Peterson fails to realise that the Woke Monster is due precisely to that campaign of demoralisation waged since 1945.

As long as Peterson hasn’t yet set foot in the waters of the psychological Rubicon, to use my metaphor, he is still firmly in Normieland. That Peterson can dedicate the foreword to the recent edition of The Gulag Archipelago but is unable to comment about the Russian author’s other non-fiction book speaks more eloquently than anything I could say in a single post.

Categories
Immanuel Kant Jean-Jacques Rousseau Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 16

But Kant—so independent and so strong in the field of criticism of knowledge—had a moral teacher, apart from the Christian teaching of his family: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose influence was still being felt throughout Europe at that time.

I can hardly imagine two men more different from each other than Rousseau, the perpetual wanderer, whose life was somewhat disordered, to say the least, and the meticulous Herr Professor Immanuel Kant, whose days and years were all alike, passing according to a rigorous schedule where there was not the slightest room for the unexpected or the whimsical.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau never misses an opportunity in his works to exalt ‘reason’ as well as ‘virtue’. But he seems to have had no rules of conduct other than his fantasy, or his impulses, with the result that the story of his life gives an impression of inconsistency, not to say imbalance. A poet rather than a thinker, he dreamed his existence; he did not live it—and especially not according to fixed principles.

The love he professed, whenever he could—on paper—for children, didn’t prevent him from putting his five children, one after the other, in the Assistance Publique on the pretext that the woman who had given them to him, Thérèse Levasseur, would have been incapable of bringing them up in the spirit he would have liked. And this abandonment, repeated five times, didn’t prevent him from writing a book about the education of children, and—what is worse—didn’t prevent the public from taking him seriously! He was taken seriously because, while believing himself to be highly original, he reflected the trends of his time, above all the revolt of the individual against Tradition in the name of ‘reason’.

It is not surprising that the enemy spirits of the visible traditional authorities, that is to say of kings and the clergy, should have chosen him enthusiastically as their guide, and placed the French Revolution, which they were organising, under his sign. It seems, at first sight, less natural that Kant should have been so strongly influenced by him.

But Kant was a man of his time, a time when Rousseau had seduced the European intelligentsia, partly by his poetic prose and paradoxes, partly by certain clichés, which come up everywhere in his work: the words ‘reason’, ‘conscience’ and ‘virtue’. It was these clichés that gave Kant’s limited imagination the opportunity for all the flight of which he was capable, and that gave the German philosopher the form of his morality.

The content of this morality—as indeed that of Rousseau himself and all the ‘philosophers’ of the 18th century and, before them, that of Descartes, the true spiritual father of the French Revolution—is drawn from the old foundation of Christian ethics, centred on the dogma of the ‘dignity’ of man, the only being created ‘in the image of God’, out of respect for this privileged being [red by Editor].

In other words, with meticulous honesty and quite Prussian application and perseverance, Kant tried to establish as a system the common humanitarian morality in Europe, because of Christian morality, which Rousseau had glorified in sentimental effusions: that morality which Nietzsche was one day to have the honour of demolishing with his pen, and which we were later destined to negate, by action.

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Editor’s note: By ‘later’ she probably meant during the Third Reich. Unlike the Nazis, American white nationalists continue to subscribe to Christian ethics, including atheists. Incidentally, why ‘Rousseau’s babble was utter nonsense’, as Revilo Oliver wrote, can be seen: here.

Does my audience begin to tell the difference between a common white nationalist and a priestess (or priest) of the 14 words?

Categories
Immanuel Kant Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Universalism

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 15

Kant and friends on table

Is there such a thing as objectivity in the field of values? [Editor’s note: formally known as ‘axiology’]. To this question I answer yes. There is something independent of the ‘taste’ of each art critic, which makes a masterpiece of painting, sculpture or poetry a masterpiece for all time. Behind every perfect creation—and not only in the field of art proper—there are secret correspondences, a whole network of ‘proportions’ which themselves ‘recall’ unknown but prescient cosmic equivalences. It is these elements that link the work to the eternal—in other words, that give it its objective value.

On the other hand, there is no universal scale of preferences. Even if one could penetrate the mystery of the structure of eternal creations, which are human only in name because the author has effaced himself before the Force (the ancients would have said: ‘the God’), who for a moment possessed him, and acted through it and by it—if one could, say, explain in clear sentences like those of mathematicians, why such creations are eternal, one could never force everyone to prefer the eternal to the temporary; to find a work which reflects something of the harmony of the cosmos, more pleasant, more satisfying than another, which reflects anything.

There is good and bad taste. And there are moral consciences that are more or less similar to those of a man with an objective scale of values. But there is no more universal consciousness than there is universal taste. There is no such thing, and there can be no such thing, for the simple reason that the aspirations of men are different, once they have passed the level of the most elementary needs. (And even these needs are more or less pressing, depending on the individual. Some people find life bearable, even beautiful, without comforts, pleasures or affections, the lack of which would make other people frankly unhappy.)

Different aspirations mean different preferences. Different preferences mean different reactions to the same events, different decisions in the face of the same dilemmas, and therefore different ways of organising lives that might otherwise have been similar. Never forget the diversity of human beings, even within the same race, let alone from one race to another. How can people who are so different from each other have ‘the same rights and the same duties’?

There is no more universal duty than there is universal consciousness. Or, if we absolutely want to find a formula that is true for all, we must say that the duty of every man—indeed, of every living being—is to be to the end, in his visible or secret manifestations, what he is in his deepest nature; to never betray himself.

But deep natures differ. Hence, despite everything, the diversity of duties, as well as of rights, and the inevitable conflict, on the level of facts, between those who have opposite duties. The Bhagawad-Gîta says: ‘Focus on fulfilling your duty (svadharma). The duty of another involves (for you) many dangers’.

And what, in practice, will decide the outcome of the conflict between people with opposing duties? Force. I can only think of it. If I don’t have it, I have to put up with the presence in the world of institutions that I consider criminal, given my own scale of values. I can hate them. I cannot remove them with the stroke of a pen, as I would if I had the power. And even those who have power can not—insofar as they need the collaboration of some men, if not of a majority, precisely to maintain the position they have conquered. But I shall speak to you later about force, the condition of any visible and sudden change, that is to say of any victorious revolution, on the material plane.

I will first tell you a few words about the fathers of ‘universal consciousness’ and the idea that derives from it: the idea of a ‘duty’ that would be the same for all. I will recall the names of only a few of them who, in fields other than morality, are distinguished by some preeminence: by the firmness of their thought or the beauty of their prose.

First, there is Immanuel Kant, to whom we must be infinitely grateful for having drawn the line between scientific knowledge and metaphysical speculation; between what we know, or what we can know, and what we can only speak about arbitrarily, knowing nothing about it, or not at all, the direct vision we have of it is incommunicable. The whole part of Kant’s work that deals with the subordination of thought to the categories of space and time, and with the impossibility of going beyond the sphere of ‘phenomena’ with our conceptual intelligence, is of exemplary solidity.

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Editor’s Note: Infinitely grateful? Exemplary solidity? Lol! As we saw in my previous post, ‘On Shelob’s lair’, on this issue Savitri errs. But she continues:

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The recipes given by the thinker to help every man discover ‘the duty’, which he believes to be the same for all, are less worthy of credence, precisely because they do not fall within the scope of what, according to Kant’s deductions, makes up the essence of the scientific mind.

We are here in the realm of values—not of ‘facts’, not of ‘phenomena’. The only ‘fact’ that could be noted in this connection is the diversity of value scales. And Kant takes no account of this. He believes he bases his notion of ‘duty’ on that of ‘reason’. And since reason is ‘universal’, the laws of discursive thought being so—two and two make four for the last of the Negroes, as well as for one of us—it seems that duty must be too.

Kant does not realise, as his values seem indisputable to him, that it is not ‘reason’ at all, but his austere Christian upbringing—pietistic, to be more precise—which dictated them to him; that he owes them, not to his ability to draw conclusions from given premises—an ability which he shares with all sane men, and perhaps with the higher animals—but to his spontaneous submission to the influence of the moral environment in which he was brought up. He forgets—and how many have forgotten before and after him, and still do!—that reason is powerless to set ends; to establish orders of preference; that, in the domain of values, its role is limited to highlighting the logical—or practical—link between a given end and the means that lead to its realisation.

Reason can tell an individual what his ‘duty’ will be in a specific circumstance if, for example, he loves all men, or better still, all living beings. Reason cannot force him to love them, if he doesn’t feel attracted to them. It can suggest to him what to do, or not do, if he wants to contribute to ‘world peace’. It cannot force him to want peace. And if he does not want it, if he finds it demoralising or simply boring, it will suggest to him, with equal logic, an entirely different course of action—just as it will direct the intelligent misanthrope to an entirely different course of action from that which it would command the philanthropist. It will always command each of those who think, the action that corresponds to the promotion of what he really loves, and deeply wants. How could it inspire duties, identical in content, to individuals who love different, even incompatible ideals, and who each want the revolution that their ideal implies? Or to individuals who love only people, and to others who love only ideas?

‘Always act’, says Kant, ‘as if the principle of your action could be set up as a universal law’.

How can this ‘rule’ be applied both to the conduct of one who, loving only his family and friends, far from sacrificing them to any idea whatsoever, will feel that it is ‘his duty’ to protect them at all costs, and that of the militant who, loving only a cause which goes beyond him, considers that it would be ‘his duty’, if necessary, to sacrifice him and his recent collaborators (as soon as he feels them weakening in terms of orthodoxy and becoming dangerous), and a fortiori his family, alien to the holy ideology, as soon as he sees one of its members, whoever he may be, making a pact with the hostile forces?

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Editor’s note: Remember Savitri’s words in my Friday’s post: ‘During the war, my mother—although 75 years old in 1940, 80 in 1945—joined the resistance movement in France. I did not know it naturally. There was no communication between Calcutta and Europe. She told me in 1946, when I visited her, and said also that if I had been present in France in 1944 and had actively worked against the resistance (as I then surely would have), she would have handed me over to the resistance’.
 

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And what about the rule: ‘Always act in such a way that you take the human person as an end, never as a means’? In other words: ‘Never use a man’. And why not?—especially if, by using him, I am working in the interest of a Cause that is much greater than him, for example, the cause of Life, or the human elite (the elite of every living species) or simply that of a particular people, if this one has a more than human historical mission?

Man unscrupulously exploits the animal and the tree in favour of what he believes to be his own interest. And Kant apparently finds no fault with this. Why should we not exploit man—the ‘human person’ whose so-called ‘value’ we have been hearing about more than ever for the past quarter-century—in the interest of Life itself? What prevents us from doing so, if we do not have—like Immanuel Kant and so many others; like most people born and raised in a Christian (or Islamic, or Jewish, or simply ‘secular’) civilisation—a scale of values centred around the sacrosanct two-legged mammal?

Of myself, if I love ‘all men’, I won’t use any of them; I won’t take any of them ‘as a means’, for an end which is not him. You don’t exploit what you really love. This is a psychological law.

But no ‘reason’ can force me to ‘love all men’—any more than it can force most men to love all animals. Kant’s ‘reason’ ordered him not to exploit any human being, not because this is a universal commandment, but because he loved all men, like the good Christian he was. I, who do not love them all, do not feel that this ‘duty’ concerns me. It is not my duty. I refuse to submit to it. And if a man who finds the exploitation of animals and trees—and what exploitation!—quite natural, dares to come and preach me about ‘respect for the human person’, I would brutally send him to mind his own business.

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Editor’s Note: This is more than fundamental. If there is something that my work From Jesus to Hitler teaches, it is that we must stop loving the vast majority of humans to save the nymphs of the sidebar and the animals under the human yoke.

Categories
David Irving Friedrich Nietzsche Immanuel Kant Newspeak Protestantism Theology

On Shelob’s lair

Or: Kant’s trap

In the modern world, Immanuel Kant has been the poet’s greatest enemy, the enemy of clear, concise and transparent prose (my style).

Kant initiated the dark movement of classical German idealism, from which perhaps only the German nationalist pronouncements of Fichte are salvageable. While German music and literature were luminous (think of Beethoven and Goethe), German philosophy was tremendously obscurantist: and a thin tail of that cobweb even reached its way about how Mein Kampf was elaborated.

David Irving is correct that he never read Mein Kampf because, as an exact historian of the Third Reich, he didn’t want a text dipped into feather pens other than Hitler’s to contaminate his true biography (which is why Irving recommends reading daily each of the after-dinner talks of Uncle Adolf: these are uncontaminated). Mein Kamp is a PR book written for a people who, influenced by their philosophers’ style, had already betrayed the lyrical way of writing. For the same reason I don’t recommend The Gulag Archipelago, but the excellent abbreviation made by an Englishman, with the permission of the Russian author, that reads like an entertaining novel. I sincerely believe that an abridged edition of Mein Kampf should be tried, trying to keep only the passages that Hitler dictated.

But even in Hitler’s Table Talk I see a couple of disagreements with our Führer. One of them was a short sentence in which he expressed himself about the genius of Kant. As John Martínez said more than eight years ago on this site:

In another post you mentioned the fact that not a single one of the supposedly greatest philosophers ever said something about the importance of race to the establishment of a great civilisation like ours. That is to say, these guys have devoted millions of man-hours [Shelob’s trap] to discussing every single subject under the sun—except for what is perhaps the most important of them all from the point of view of our civilisation: the fact that it is a White civilisation and that these discussions are not taking place in Africa, Asia or what have you.

As Nietzsche scoffed at using an English word, Kant is ‘Cant’: his prose was empty and insincere, and he shouldn’t have hypnotised the Germans. The only proponent of the German Enlightenment worth rescuing was Hermann Samuel Reimarus, who initiated the discipline of analysing the New Testament that recently culminated in Richard Carrier’s book. The rest was hot air.

 
Matthew Stewart

In my home library I have many books from the publisher Prometheus Books, which taught me to distrust the pseudosciences of the paranormal and even early Christianity (for example, the book that collects the surviving fragments of the 4th-century book that the philosopher Porphyry wrote against Christians, was published by Prometheus). Stewart’s first book was also published by Prometheus, The Truth About Everything. He believes that we have lost sight of what philosophy was in its original conception, and wrote that iconoclastic pamphlet to poke fun at academic philosophy.

In the chapter on Kant, Stewart asserts that this German philosopher was no Copernicus. On the contrary: his ‘metaphysics’ is one of the possible manifestations of a philosophical trend. Regardless of Kant’s influence, because of the apotheosis that was applied to him after his death, his name, says Stewart, is only a point of convergence of a plethora of beliefs based on the mistakes of Descartes.

Since, like Descartes, in those times the aim of the philosophers whose parents were Christians had been the reconciliation between science and religion, Kant divided the world into two absolutely disconnected worlds. Using my language, the celebrated philosopher of the kingdom of Prussia was just another guy who didn’t know how to shake off his parental introjects. The Kantian dream of ‘perpetual peace’ reminds me of the pictures of the lion laying with the lamb of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who ring the doorbell of my house.

It said that Prometheus Books warned me against pseudosciences. In one of the Martin Gardner books that I own, this hilarious writer informs us that crank scientists love to develop new vocabularies and mystifying language (imagine the hundreds of neologisms that L. Ron Hubbard created for Scientology).

A feature of Kant’s work is its vast technical vocabulary and abominable prose. Stewart tells us that if one translates Kant’s newspeak into oldspeak (the same is possible with Hubbard’s neologisms) it is possible to begin to see behind the smokescreen and mirrors of the three Kantian ‘critiques’.

For example, a priori / a posteriori are Latin words that simply mean ‘before’ and ‘after’ in a logical rather than temporal sense. But those who are not alert to the crank sciences will believe that there is something very profound when Kant speaks to us, say, about the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’, or of the ‘transcendental ego’ (the latter reminds me of Hubbard’s ‘operative thetan’!). Even with the word ‘pure’ in his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant means ‘uncontaminated by experience’.

According to Stewart, this repertoire of concepts seems to be sophistry and illusion, adding that Kant succumbs to the medieval error of turning a tedious logic into a radical ontological falsehood (How many angels can fit on the head of a pin?). Stewart also claims that Kant confines the science of the world to projections and shadows, mere appearances, and all this to save religion. The Categorical Imperative is the Kantian machine for the Moral Law (read: the education that little Immanuel received as a child in a religiously abusive home) based on ‘reason’ (and, to boot, we must take into account the cryptic definition of ‘reason’ by Kant).

Beyond the very dense Kantian jargon, this guy surreptitiously inserts the substance into the bosom of an otherwise purely formal theory. That’s why, Stewart affirms, the Critique of Practical Reason is a betrayal, and that this is the key we need to decipher Kantian ethics: the result of the standards that Kant received as a child in the bosom of a pietistic Christian family. (Pietistic Lutheranism is a movement within Lutheranism that combines its emphasis on biblical doctrine with an emphasis on individual piety and living a vigorous Christian life.)

Stewart’s criticism is not original. Almost all of his arguments were defended in writing by living characters as a result of the publication of the first Kantian critique. The problem is that modern ‘philosophers’ share the apotheosis of Kant, and generally believe in the professional respectability of that crank thinker. The Eastern gurus (think of the Zen monks) hypnotise the faithful by saying things that are extremely unpleasant for commonsensical ears, but presented as profound metaphysical truths. Kant’s promise that he was able to reverse the basis of all knowledge, from ‘object’ to ‘subject’, is just this kind of psyop to dupe the unwary.

In sum, Stewart tells us, Kant’s obscurity is the critical factor in allaying the concerns of those who have brought Kant to the universities. His obtuse distinctions exude an air of professionalism and his twisted arguments give the impression of depth. The resulting inconsistencies supply grain for the controversial windmills of academic philosophy.

All that Stewart says invalidates not only bestsellers on philosophy like the bestselling story that Will Durant wrote, but what they want to teach us in the academy under the pretentious name of ‘philosophy’, supposedly love of wisdom. Stewart concludes by telling us that both the rationalists and the empiricists of the 17th century tried to take philosophy out of the monasteries, turning it into the fiefdom of the amateurs. Kant collected his ideas at the service of a return to the monastic age. After him, philosophy was to be safe from rebellious amateurs and returned to its peaceful seminaries and universities. Of course, the new theologians were no longer debating the sex of angels. They are masturbating themselves, intellectually, with ‘the facts of conscience’. Aristotle ceased to be the object of scholastic comments to be relieved by Kant.

Nietzsche wrote: ‘Kant’s success is just a theologian success: Kant, like Luther, like Leibniz, was one more drag on an already precarious German sense of integrity… Kant became an idiot. — And such a man was the contemporary of Goethe! This disaster of a spider (*) passed for the German philosopher!’

___________

(*) For Francis Bacon (1561-1626) the metaphysicians were like spiders that constructed their webs with a substance segregated from their insides, resulting in that their conclusions kept little if any connection to empirical reality. Kant has been the biggest spider of all, Tolkien’s Shelob! The number of philosopher’s apprentices who have fallen into his cobwebs trying to decipher them, in a vain search for wisdom, is legion.

Categories
Alfred Rosenberg Catholic Church Immanuel Kant Martin Luther Nicolaus Copernicus Protestantism Swastika

Rosenberg on Christian subversion of NS

Translated from the original
Foreword of Blut und Ehre:

Born on January 12, 1893 in Reval, Alfred Rosenberg experienced as Baltic-German all the severe suffering of ethnic Germans and the Russian Revolution. To enlighten Germany about this and to help protect her against communism, at the end of 1918 Rosenberg went to Germany, was introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart and joined him in 1919.

In 1921 he took over the Völkischer Beobachter [Folkish Observer]. Rosenberg marched with the Führer in Coburg in 1922 and the Feldherrnhalle in 1923. After November 9, 1923 he tried to hold together the movement’s remnants. When the Führer returned from Landsbergand he took over management of the Völkischer Beobachter and expanded it more and more in the following period until, after the victory, it became Germany’s largest newspaper.

When in 1930 the wish for an official NSDAP magazine became even stronger, Rosenberg created the Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte [The National Socialist Monthly]. In 1929 he founded the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur [Fighting Federation for German Culture]. In 1930 Rosenberg became a member of the Reichstag and a representative of his faction for foreign affairs. Through trips and work, he became more and more immersed in questions of foreign affairs and presented the new foundations in this area. He was appointed in April 1933 chief of the Foreign Affairs Office of the NSDAP by Adolf Hitler and shortly thereafter Reichsleiter.

Alfred Rosenberg, in a certain sense, is the father of National Socialist literature. Already in 1919/20 he had published several writings about Bolshevism, Freemasonry and the Jewish Question and made the fight against international powers one of his main tasks. We find him as a domestic fighter in his little-noted book Thirty November Heads, which appeared in 1927. His 1930 fighting work The Swamp, one of the most valuable documents against the cultural decline of the post-war years, was on a similar level. Already in 1922 Rosenberg had published Nature: Principles and Goals of the NSDAP, the movement’s first publication! Later, he gave the movement two of its most basic writings: Future Path of German Foreign Policy and The Structure of National Socialism.

His main work, however, is The Myth of the Twentieth Century, which in 1923 experienced huge press popularity. Hanns Johst wrote: ‘I am often asked about the principles of National Socialism. Here is the work in which the manifestation of these principles is achieved…’ [Pages 7-8. The following is taken from pages 36-43 of the English translation.]

 

The ‘Centre’ and ‘Christian Folk Service’ parties

Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte [The National Socialist Monthly], April 1931:

The relationship between National Socialism and religion has been an issue since the appearance of the NSDAP. Adolf Hitler took the standpoint of a statesman from the beginning. He views the existence of various religious denominations as given and wants to keep the political movement out of the religious fighting. One should think that it would be agreeable to every Christian denomination to see the emergence of a worker movement that energetically combats soul-killing, atheistic Marxism and takes up an idealistic idea against our time’s rule by Mammon and, like Jesus, swings the whip against the money-changers and traders.

But the opposite has happened. Precisely the party that has claimed to practice Christian politics picked up a fight against National Socialism and put itself on the side of a Social Democracy hostile to any religion. That party formed coalitions with the purpose to annihilate the German workers’ movement and supported those powers that, for years, have financed the leave-the-church movement. After such a coalition this propaganda has not ceased.

Something was just as hated by Marxism as by the Centre: the conscious folk-feeling and the call to a Germanic morality-feeling, as can be read in our party program, paragraph 24. At Catholic Days, which represent Centre meetings (Contance 1923), German nationalism was presented as ‘the greatest heresy’ and bishop Mainz and cardinal Faulhaber competed in the condemnation of this ‘new heathenism’. As church princes, they banned membership in the NSDAP; yes, sometimes even excluded Catholic National Socialists from the sacraments.

In the process they referred to the Catholic doctrine. What is bizarre is that, in strictly Catholic Italy, the most extreme nationalism has become a state government and the Pope, who for decades has refused any reconciliation with liberalism, is now in peace with the leader of this growing nationalism. The Pope even called Mussolini a ‘man of Providence’ after the signing of the Lateran Pact. From Italy’s church organs we can now hear, even more frequently, the king’s hymn. And of the cardinals of Italian descent it is said that, under the purple, they wear the black-shirt of fascism.

The German folk now claims nothing more than it should be granted the same right to national pride; the right to erect a real national state based on its character. If, in face of the no longer contested Italian facts, this is contested based on the ‘Catholic doctrine’ by church princes there are two possibilities: either there are two Catholic doctrines, or the faith of the Catholic masses is being intentionally misled for the achievement of political goals.

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Editor’s Note: Since this article of The National Socialist Monthly was addressed to the Christian masses, Rosenberg fails to say the obvious. Remember Hitler’s words in Mein Kampf:

We have to distinguish between the state as a vessel and the race as the content. This vessel only makes sense if it is able to preserve and protect its contents; otherwise it is worthless.

This week, commenting on the above quotable quote, Krist Krusher said: ‘This is why all self-proclaimed National Socialists should never think of Hitlerism as being nothing more than “German Fascism”. As Fascism is built entirely from the State, it always thought of race as secondary. It is about as removed from us as Marxism in this regard’.

______ 卐 ______

Since we can dismiss the first possibility (the Roman church has only one leader), only the second remains. The Centre accepts Zionists and chairmen of Jewish cultural communities as Reichstag candidates. It even allows Protestants as members without influence, but is nonetheless a strictly Catholic denomination party. Just as Marxism wants to eternalise the nation’s split through the doctrine of social class struggle, has the Centre declared against the German nation the denominational class struggle and has carried the spiritual, religious struggle into the sphere of power politics. And just as the Social Democrat only has an eye on his class, so does the Centre leader only has his denomination’s interests.

This party lives from conflict. Hence the NSDAP was hated most deeply from the first day because religious tolerance inside the party was practically carried out in an exemplary manner. Religious differences of opinion and philosophical competitions had to be carried out outside the party organisation. As soon as it assembled, as soon as the SA put on its brown-shirt, they were no longer any Catholics and Protestants but Germans fighting for the existence and honour of their folk. No co-worker of the NSDAP is asked whether he belongs to the Deutsch Kirche [German Church] or if he is Reformierter [a member of the Evangelical Reformed Church in Germany]. Only the achievement in the service of German freedom is pivotal. The deep wounds of the Thirty Years War were finally healed in the National Socialist movement, just like the wounds of the Marxist and bourgeois class conflict began to scar. Then there arose the concentrated struggle of all those political upstarts who want to suck the blood for their parasitic existence from the wounds of their folk. The Marxists screamed ‘capitalist lackeys’; the bourgeois leaders lamented ‘National-Bolsheviks’, and the Centre cried ‘enemies of any religion’.

Never have religious feelings been treated so unscrupulously by the Centre and the political prelates directing it, and it was one issue at which the zealous dialecticians aimed. As stated above, it is claimed that National Socialism is not a common political party, rather a worldview (emphasis by Editor. Remember Savitri Devi’s words: ‘it is the enemies of Hitlerism, and in particular the Jews, and intelligent Christians, who have understood this best). To solidify the struggle against German nationalism, the Centre points to our worldview and declares it a ‘heathen, anti-Catholic race idolization’. We can reply that race science determined the diverseness and diverse value of the races, similar to how one makes discoveries in the field of chemistry. Such a discovery cannot be combated by any kinds of dogmas and excommunications, and many times the church has had to bow to the facts.

When Copernicus presented the heliocentric doctrine, when the flat Earth with heaven above and hell below suddenly became a sphere hovering in space, the whole world of dogma rebelled against this new doctrine. Until 1827 (!) all works that taught this solar system stood in the Index. Copernicus’ worldview also produced a different worldview than the biblical one, a different look at the world, but this discovery in no way damaged genuine religion, which stems from man’s soul. The Roman and Protestant churches (Martin Luther called Copernicus a swindler and deceiver) needed three hundred years to adapt to the new world image, and they had to bow before it despite everything.

Another example is provided by the treatment of our mother tongue. Someone demanded exclusive use of the heathen Latin (here the expression is appropriate). Meister Eckart encountered much hostility when he preferred the German language, but the whole German folk owe to the ‘heretic’ Luther the High German language uniting the nation. But it stood in the statutes of the Jesuit Order that use of the mother tongue in all matters relating to school would be never allowed. In 1830 the order saw itself compelled to at least allow the mother tongue for poetry, when Goethe stood at the end of his life’s work! And the very well known Jesuit Father Duhr affirmed: ‘This remains a principle: the practice of the mother tongue is recommendable, but it should not be turned into its school subject’. The persecution of the dearest thing that a folk calls its own has been overcome; today the Catholic Church often stands up for the mother tongue in upholding the interests of its faithful.

It is now quite similar to race science regarding religion. The verdict of a bishop or cardinal or even the Pope on race is, in this case, a completely private opinion about the biological problem or the political problem based on it, which stands outside purely religious authority that the devote Catholic grants him. A dogmatic excommunication can no longer nullify a natural scientific discovery.

In the Middles Ages, researchers were burned as sorcerers. Today, the Vatican builds a radio station that Torquemada would have certainly cursed as devil’s work. Thus the struggle against race science is not religious, rather a struggle of the politically interested that previously gathered their followers around themselves on a different basis. An anathema against blood consciousness will be overcome for the same reason that one had to acknowledge Copernicus, and it represents a historical irony that one of the finest researchers of the laws of genetics was the Catholic Father Gregor Mendel.

We can conclude that worldview and religion are not the same. A worldview can exist outside religion (atomic world explanation, naturalist monism), but it can also include religion. The National Socialist movement is a folk movement about a new and yet ancient, firmly founded worldview of the value of blood. It wants to protect healthy, good blood. Regardless of whether one wants to call this God’s creation or Nature’s iron rule, in both cases National Socialism serves a constructive principle under a fundamental religious disposition. The political battle movement leaves the most thorny questions about God and immortality, fate and mercy to the individual personality for decision. They may seek their comforters and spiritual counsellors, whom they require for the development of their inner life. (Editor’s Note: On this point the Christians, not Rosenberg, were right. NS is, in fact, the new paradigm that comes to replace the old one. This is why American white nationalists, more Christian than Nazis, don’t honour the memory of the Führer every April 20th.)

The opponents of the German essence in Bavaria, Silesia and the Rhine lower themselves in their hatred when criticising paragraph 24 of the National Socialist program by claiming that no special ‘Germanic moral feeling’ exists that could be viewed as the measure of action. This means a quite intentional denial of German cultural awareness and a terrible disregard of the value of our ancestors. For without the characteristic prerequisites of the Germanic man for the creation of state and society, Germany as a life form would not have emerged at all. Without her energy and her will the soil itself would not have been conquered, upon which today live those who have been the beneficiaries of this colonising but are inwardly alienated from the founders of their prosperity, and the freedom of the state structure.

And if the state-building character has already been a part of Germanic morality, that has so mightily revealed itself in life and the art, a brazenness without equal would be necessary to equate the Hottentot or Jew with Germanic essence. When, for example, the Vandal Stilicho became Rome’s regent, one of his first acts consisted of banning the gladiator fighting: that most terrible symbol of a decadent, animalised world, which had adopted those horrible games from the Middle Eastern Etruscans. Later, the Eastern Goth Theodorich did the same, replacing the gladiator massacre with knight tournaments. And without falling into a one-sided deification of Germanic man one may probably say that the Gudrunlied, the high song of a proud woman, corresponds to the most beautiful emotional yearning, as well as Siegfried’s generous figure. Even in Hagen it sparkles reconciliation from the depth of something unconditional, the loyalty to the king.

Germanic morality that was true to itself wanted to account for nature and the cosmos. From this yearning were born the mystics and the great researchers of nature down to Immanuel Kant’s noble doctrine of duty. (Editor’s Note: This is another mistake common among German nationalists. Kant’s influence—sneaking in the house the Jewish god through the back door after the French Enlightenment expelled it from the front door—was terrible for the German Enlightenment.) And in German music the same world-overcoming life developed, so that the denial of this Germanic-German [germanisch-deutsche] value means an attack to annihilate the world-shaping German soul. That such a denial could be openly expressed shows the deep decline that Germany as folk has suffered. It also shows the necessity of a general folk resistance, without difference of religious denomination, against a dynamics at whose end stands race chaos: psychological decline and then political decline of the German nation.

If it is now brazenly declared by the Centre that National Socialism is preparing a new ‘cultural struggle’, a government persecution of the Catholic church, that is an agitation lie of the worst sort. Whatever a National Socialist may think about this or that religious dogma, it has always rejected any political intercession against a denomination and will hold to that in the future. And it has proven that policy through the deed. The Centre has done the opposite. It has given lip-service support to Catholic dogmas but through its alliances with the Marxists it accepts the possibility of uninhibited atheist propaganda and thereby assistance to overall Bolshevization. The prerequisite for a religious renewal is hence the annihilation of Marxism and the beating down of the Centre as long as in practice it broadly nurtures Marxism.

On the Protestant side, similarly oriented political opportunities have watched the anti-Marxist movement grow. The Protestants have now founded a denominational party similar to the Centre: the Christian Folk Service. National Socialism takes the same position toward this ‘evangelical’ foundation as to the ‘Catholic’ Centre. The success of the Folk Service will degrade the Germans’ struggle for liberation to a denominational quarrel, and force the struggle to a level that must stand outside the great political battle of all. The first thing, by the way, that the Reichstag delegates of these ‘evangelicals’ did, was to vote against the candidate of the Nationalist opposition for the post of Reichstag President. They preferred, together with the Centre, to give their vote to the champion of conscientious objectors, the leftist Social Democrat Paul Loebe. Here, once more, we see a downright betrayal to both the Nationalist and the Christian idea.

Given this treasonous bearing, influenced by Marxist thought and political representatives of both denominations, it is no wonder, if the movement that leaves the church grows, that the sects of Adventists, First Bible Researchers, and the Communist International of the godless prepares the organised destruction of all religious values. The NSDAP has acted against these folk-destructive forces as well (in Munich rallies of the ‘Bible Researchers’ were only banned after clear words on our side by the government of the Bavarian Folk Party). But the the spread of all these currents shows the weakness of the inner persuasiveness of both the Catholic as well as the Protestant church.

To evaluate the deeper worldview causes that may exist here lies outside the NSDAP’s area of competency. Some believe it is imperative duty to push the clerics into the political party fight. Already Bismarck scolded Stoecker that he, as an active preacher, wanted to be a political leader based on the instinct that invariably a national policy would become subjected to denominational considerations, especially since the psyche of the spiritual counsellor and the political leader cannot be organically united. Today in Germany we stand anew before the fact that a party, the whole Centre, stands under purely clerical leadership. The party chairman of the Centre and its Foreign Affairs Politician (with the Prelate Ulitzka) is the Papal House Prelate Dr Kaas. The actual chief of the Bavarian Folk Party is the leader of the Landtag faction in the Bavarian Cathedral, the Provost Wohlmuth: leader of the Reichstag faction of this party and also its foreign affairs spokesman, Prelate Leicht. Thus, Catholic priests work in the foremost battle-line for the Centre (they simply forbid patriotic clerics such as Abbott Schachleitner, Doctor of Theology, from speaking). And if, in opposition to the folk-destructive Centre policy, one also fights in the form of rejection of the leaders, they call it insulting priests.

The folk see this everywhere and here lies a reason why antireligious criticism falls on fertile soil. The task of the gentlemen of the Centre clerics does not lie in giving Catholic lip service in folk assemblies to share the political spoils with atheist Marxist partners; rather, to leave the political arena and become again spiritual counsellors. Today the nation needs comforters of the human soul more than ever, but it must be noted that the hate-filled Centre spirit has penetrated even those circles that do not stand out politically. For example, a Bavarian pastor from the pulpit openly defamed Adolf Hitler saying he had spat out a consecrated wafer. Indicted and convicted of defamation, the pastor was nonetheless acquitted. In the confessional, children are forbidden under threat of harsh punishments and the torments of hell to visit National Socialist meetings or reading the Völkischer Beobachter. Women are told they must deny their husbands marital rights in the event they do not vote for the Centre, etcetera. All that—in connection with terrible harassment against clerics who do not agitate for the Centre—outrages the healthy folk, which increasingly slips away from the spiritual counsellor.

A recovery in religious life will not come until the priest reflects on his actual office and obeys the decree of his chief leader, and the same is true about the evangelicals. The most beautiful cultural blossoming of Protestantism was doubtlessly the evangelical pastor’s house in small towns and villages. But here, too, the metropolis intervened, agitating nerves, and awakened wishes which would have otherwise turned the energies away from the direction of a purely spiritual counsellor. Here, too, the cleric, as long as he works as such, should disappear from the parliament tribunes and the political folk assembly.

We wish hereby to restrict neither the Evangelical nor the Catholic cleric in his life energy. But he should treat the common national culture from the pulpit and in a form such as his office is intended. Here lie the great possibilities for effectiveness; here alone lies the lever to deepen and renew religious life. It is as unnatural if the cleric becomes parliamentarian as if a statesman wanted to set himself on the confessional seat. In the organically based separation of these social spheres lies the prerequisite of a new, spiritually healthy construction of Germany.

______ 卐 ______

Editor’s Note: But the Christians triumphed after the war. The first time in my life I visited Germany, in 1982, I was truly shocked to see handsome Aryans bending the knee before the Jewish god in a big church.

I never saw a swastika.

White nationalists still ignore that the JQ and the CQ are the same.

Categories
Antichrist (book) Friedrich Nietzsche Immanuel Kant Lord of the Rings

The Antichrist § 11

One more word against Kant as a moralist. ‘Virtue’, ‘duty’, ‘goodness in itself’, goodness that has been stamped with the character of the impersonal and the universally valid—these are all chimeras, and expression of decay, of the final exhaustion of life, of the Königsberg Chineseanity.

A people is destroyed when it confuses its own duty with the concept of duty in general…

Kant became an idiot. — And such a man was the contemporary of Goethe! This disaster of a spider passed for the German philosopher — and still does!

Categories
Antichrist (book) Friedrich Nietzsche Immanuel Kant Philosophy

The Antichrist § 10

Germans understand me immediately when I say that philosophy has been corrupted by theologian blood…

What German philosophy really is—an underhanded theology…

Why were Germans so convinced that Kant marked a change for the better? The theologian instinct of the German scholar had guessed just what was possible again: a hidden path to the old ideal lay open…

Kant’s success is just a theologian success: Kant, like Luther, like Leibniz, was one more drag on an already precarious German sense of integrity —

Categories
Cicero Deranged altruism Destruction of Greco-Roman world Eschatology Friedrich Nietzsche Hegel Immanuel Kant Philosophy René Descartes Story of Philosophy (book) Will Durant

The Story of Philosophy, 2

On the uses of philosophy

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

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

Categories
Arthur Schopenhauer Enlightenment Immanuel Kant Racial studies Voltaire

Raciology, 1

The Wikipedia article on “scientific racism” has the input of Jews and white liberals, but substantially edited it contains relevant info:
 

Classical thinkers

Benjamin Isaac, in The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (2006), reports that scientific racism is rooted in Greco-Roman antiquity. A prime example is the 5th century BC treatise Airs, Waters, Places by Hippocrates, about which the Pseudo-Aristotle notes: “The idea that dark people are cowards, and light people courageous fighters, is found already in Airs, Waters, Places.”

A further example is the Roman writer, architect, and engineer Vitruvius (70-25 BC), who, relying upon the racial theories of the Greek Stoic polymath Posidonius (c. 135-51 BC), said:

…those races nearest to the southern half of the axis are of lower stature, with swarthy complexions, curly hair, black eyes, and little blood, on account of the sun. This poverty of blood makes them over-timid to stand up against the sword… On the other hand, men born in cold countries are, indeed, ready to meet the shock of arms with great courage and without timidity.

 
Enlightenment thinkers

Historian Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658-1722) divided the French as two races: the aristocratic “French race” descended from the invader Germanic Franks, and the indigenous Gallo-Roman race (the political Third Estate populace). The Frankish aristocracy dominated the Gauls by innate right of conquest, the contrary of modern nationalism. Despite supporting hagiographies and epic poetry, such as La Chanson de Roland, c. 12th century, he sought scientific legitimating by basing his racialist distinction on the historical existence of genetically and linguistically distinguished Germanic and Latin-speaking peoples in France.

Voltaire found biblical monogenism laughable, as he expressed:

It is a serious question among them whether the Africans are descended from monkeys or whether the monkeys come from them. Our wise men have said that man was created in the image of God. Now here is a lovely image of the Divine Maker: a flat and black nose with little or hardly any intelligence.

The Scottish lawyer Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782) was a polygenist: he believed God had created different races on Earth in separate regions. In his 1734 book Sketches on the History of Man, Home claimed that the environment, climate, or state of society could not account for racial differences, so the races must have come from distinct, separate stocks.

Meanwhile, Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), the Swedish physician, botanist, and zoologist, modified the established taxonomic bases of binomial nomenclature for fauna and flora, and was a pioneer researcher in biologically defining human race. In Systema Naturae (1767), he labeled several varieties of human species: the red Americanus, the Europeanus, the Asiaticus, the Africanus.

In 1775, Immanuel Kant published Über die verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen, which proposed natural or purposive causes of variation, as opposed to mechanical law or a product of chance. He distinguished four fundamental races: whites, blacks, Kalmuck, and Hindustanic, and attributed the variation to differences in environment and climate, such as the air and sun, but clarified by saying that the variation served a purpose and was not purely superficial. Kant argued that “the yellow Indians have a meager talent. The Negroes are far below them, and at the lowest point are a part of the American people.”

Charles White (1728-1813), an English physician and surgeon, tried to scientifically prove that human races have distinct origins from each other. He believed that whites and blacks were two different species. White was a believer in polygeny, the idea that different races had been created separately. His Account of the Regular Gradation in Man (1799) provided an empirical basis for this idea. White defended the theory of polygeny by refuting French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon’s interfertility argument, which said that only the same species can interbreed. White pointed to species hybrids such as foxes, wolves, and jackals, which were separate groups that were still able to interbreed.

Christoph Meiners (1747-1810) was a German polygenist and believed that each race had a separate origin. Meiners studied the physical, mental and moral characteristics of each race, and built a race hierarchy based on his findings. Meiners split mankind into two divisions, which he labelled the “beautiful white race” and the “ugly black race.” In Meiners’ book The Outline of History of Mankind, he said that a main characteristic of race is either beauty or ugliness. Meiners also claimed the “Americans” were an inferior stock of people and wrote that the noblest race was the Celts. They were able to conquer various parts of the world, they were more sensitive to heat and cold, and their delicacy is shown by the way they are selective about what they eat.

 
Post-Enlightenment thinkers

Racial studies by Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), the French naturalist and zoologist, influenced scientific polygenism and scientific racism. Cuvier believed there were three distinct races: the Caucasian (white), Mongolian (yellow) and the Ethiopian (black). He rated each for the beauty or ugliness of the skull and quality of their civilizations. Cuvier wrote about Caucasians: “The white race, with oval face, straight hair and nose, to which the civilized people of Europe belong and which appear to us the most beautiful of all, is also superior to others by its genius, courage and activity.” Regarding blacks Cuvier wrote:

The Negro race… is marked by black complexion, crisped or woolly hair, compressed cranium and a flat nose. The projection of the lower parts of the face, and the thick lips, evidently approximate it to the monkey tribe: the hordes of which it consists have always remained in the most complete state of barbarism.

One of Cuvier’s pupils, Friedrich Tiedemann, was one of the first to make a scientific contestation of racism. He argued based on craniometric and brain measurements taken by him from Europeans and black people from different parts of the world that blacks have smaller brains, and are thus intellectually inferior.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) attributed civilizational primacy to the white races, who gained sensitivity and intelligence via the refinement caused by living in the rigorous Northern climate:

The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, are found exclusively among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste, or race, is fairer in color than the rest, and has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, the Brahmins, the Inca, and the rulers of the South Sea Islands. All this is due to the fact that necessity is the mother of invention, because those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers, and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want, and misery, which, in their many forms, were brought about by the climate. This they had to do in order to make up for the parsimony of nature, and out of it all came their high civilization.

Franz Ignaz Pruner (1808-1882) was a medical doctor who studied the racial structure of blacks in Egypt. In a book which he wrote in 1846 he claimed that Negro blood had a negative influence on the Egyptian moral character. He published a monograph on blacks in 1861, where he said that the main feature of the Negro’s skeleton is prognathism, which he claimed was the Negro’s relation to the ape.