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Bible David Skrbina Friedrich Nietzsche Jesus Jewish question (JQ) Judaism New Testament The Jesus Hoax (book)

The Jesus Hoax, 1

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.

Categories
Daybreak (book) Jesus Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site) New Testament Romulus Transvaluation of all values

The most recommended article on ‘Daybreak’

This Monday I am still in the process of correcting the syntax of Daybreak, a task I will finish this week.

Just as the previous collection of essays, The Fair Race, has a ‘masthead’—the struggle between Judea and Rome that a Spaniard wrote and we translated for this site—so Daybreak has its central essay.

I refer to ‘Romulus & Jesus’. Anyone who has assimilated the essay by the Spaniard will understand the implications of this article, which I reproduce below after having used DeepL Translator to modify its syntax. The difference is that the Spaniard’s essay is very long and the following one very short, but they are complementary.
 

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Romulus & Jesus
[pages 141-143 of Daybreak]

In The Fair Race I mentioned the work of Richard Carrier. ‘All the evidence we have’, Carrier said in a public debate with an American Christian, ‘strongly supports the conclusion that there were actually literal rabbis that originated the sect’ (Christianity). They simply used the story of the Hero-God founder of the Romans: Romulus. The idea of those who wrote the New Testament was simply to use the mythological biography of the white God to convince the Romans to worship, instead, the god of the Jews. The parallels between the old Romulus and the new Jesus invented by the rabbis are so obvious that it is worth mentioning some of them.

Both are sons of God; their deaths are accompanied by wonders and the earth is covered with darkness; both corpses disappear; both receive a new immortal body superior to the one they had; their resurrected bodies were sometimes luminous and shining in appearance; after their resurrection they meet a follower on a city road; a speech is given from a high place before the ‘translation to heaven’; there is a ‘great commission’ or instruction to future followers; they physically ascend to heaven and, finally, are taken up into a cloud.

Everyone in the West has heard the story that the New Testament authors invented about Jesus. But who knows the original legend, that of the white Hero-God Romulus? It really seems that the Gospel writers plagiarised the founding myth of Rome to sell us another founding myth. But the new Christian myth did more than just substitute the Aryan Romulus for the Jewish Jesus, something infinitely more subversive as we shall see.

In the draft of ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ I had said that all whites are heading for Jerusalem, a metaphor to be understood in the context of my essay ‘Ethnosuicidal Nationalists’ (also in this book). How did Christianity manage to reverse the moral compass of the Aryans from pointing to Rome to pointing to Jerusalem? Remember: according to Richard Carrier in his magnum opus On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, there is no historical Jesus, but rather authors of the Gospels. Also, keep in mind what we have been saying on this website about the inversion of values that occurred in the West when whites, including atheists, took the axiological message of the Gospels very seriously. Building on this and the crucial part of Evropa Soberana’s essay on Judea vs. Rome in The Fair Race, let us look at what Carrier says at the beginning of chapter 4 of On the Historicity of Jesus.

Romulus appears to Proculus Julius.

In Plutarch’s book on Romulus, the founder of Rome, we are told that Romulus was the son of God, born of a Virgin, and that there were attempts to kill him as a baby. As an adult, the elites finally killed him and the sun went dark, but Romulus’ body disappeared. Then he rises from the dead. Some doubted and, along the way, Romulus appears to a friend to pass on the Good News to his people (see image above). It is revealed that, despite his human appearance, Romulus had always been a God and had become incarnate to establish a great kingdom on earth (note these italicised words in the context of the indented quote on the next page). Romulus then ascends to heaven to reign from there. Before Christianity, the Romans celebrated the day Romulus ascended to heaven. Plutarch recounts that at the annual Ascension ceremony the names of those who were afraid because they had witnessed the feat were recited, something that reminds me of the true ending of Mark’s Gospel (Mk 16:8) before Christians added more verses. Carrier comments that it seems as if Mark is adding a Semitic spin to the original story of Romulus: an Aryan story that seems to be the skeleton on which the evangelist would add the Semitic flesh of his literary fiction. Carrier’s sentence in bold has convinced me that his treatise On the Historicity of Jesus deserves our attention.

There are many differences in the two stories, surely. But the similarities are too numerous to be a coincidence—and the differences are likely deliberate. For instance, Romulus’ material kingdom favoring the mighty is transformed into a spiritual one favoring the humble. It certainly looks like the Christian passion narrative is an intentional transvaluation of the Roman Empire’s ceremony of their own founding savior’s incarnation, death and resurrection. [page 58]

The implications are enormous. It does seem that the Gospel writers, presumably Jews, thoroughly plagiarised the founding myth of Rome to sell us another myth. This new myth not only involved the substitution of an Aryan hero (Romulus) for a Jewish hero (Jesus). It did something infinitely more subversive, what Nietzsche called the transvaluation of values.

It is becoming increasingly clear: Not only Jesus of Nazareth didn’t exist. The evangelist Mark stole the myth of the Aryan God Romulus for incredibly subversive purposes (see my boldface above). That is why they tried to erase any trace of the Romulus festivals when they destroyed almost all the Latin books, from the 4th to the 6th century. It cannot be a coincidence that Mark wrote his gospel in 70 c.e.—chronologically, the first gospel of the New Testament ever written—right after the Romans destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem!

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Posted in two entries (‘The resurrected Jew’ and ‘Unhistorical Jesus’) on September and October 2019. In addition to Carrier’s scholarly volume, see Catherine Nixey: The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World.

Categories
Arthur de Gobineau Bible Deranged altruism Eugenics Heinrich Himmler Hitler's Religion (book) Jesus Mein Kampf (book) Miscegenation Racial studies Richard Weikart

Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 7

Editor’s note: Here are some excerpts from the seventh chapter of Richard Weikart’s book.
 

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Under the leadership of Madame Blavatsky, theosophy had tried to blend a mystical racism with a scientific view of an evolutionary hierarchy of races. Despite professing the brotherhood of all humanity, theosophy taught racial inequality, and Blavatsky even endorsed the extermination of inferior races. Lanz also drew inspiration from non-mystical, non-occult sources, such as the physician and racial theorist Ludwig Woltmann. Before founding his own journal, Lanz wrote an extended review of Woltmann’s book, Die politische Anthropologie, for a freethinking journal and waxed enthusiastic about Woltmann’s racist doctrine of Nordic superiority. Woltmann’s book had been written for a prize competition for the best work on the political and social implications of Darwinian theory. He synthesized Darwin’s theory of natural selection with Arthur Gobineau’s theory of the racial superiority of the Nordic race.

[Left, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882), a French aristocrat.] Woltmann was a biological and racial determinist, believing that not only physical characteristics, but also mental and moral traits, are hereditary. Thus, one’s destiny is predetermined in one’s biological makeup. Race, according to Woltmann, is the key to historical development, because some races—the fair-skinned Nordic one especially—were superior. The Nordic race, he stated, is “the highest product of organic evolution,” and they were the founders of civilization. Further, he believed that races arose through an ongoing racial struggle for existence, and, like Gobineau, he thought that racial mixing was deleterious, leading to racial decline.

Though Lanz used the term Aryan rather than Nordic, many of his ideas about race were similar to those of Woltmann and other Nordic racists. Lanz believed that “race is the driving force behind all deeds,” determining the destiny of all peoples, or Völker. Racial wisdom was thus the paramount value, motivating him to establish a religion of race. Lanz warned that the Aryan race was threatened with decline, and his religion aimed at rescuing and preserving this endangered, but valuable, race. The key peril confronting Aryans was racial mixture. One of the more bizarre claims that Lanz made—based on his mystical interpretation of the Bible—was that the Fall happened when Eve copulated with an animal, producing progeny who were half-ape and half-human. These “ape-people” that Eve bore were the ancestors of the inferior races around the globe, such as black Africans, and their animal blood tainted all inferior races. This Fall involved racial mixture with a vengeance, and it dehumanized all non-Aryans, who supposedly had admixtures of animal blood coursing through their veins.

Unlike Hitler, who despised the Hebrew Bible as the effluvium of the Jewish mind, Lanz claimed that Moses was a Darwinist who—if interpreted in the proper mystical sense—taught Aryans how to triumph in the racial struggle through conscious racial selection. Lanz maintained that the Jews had succeeded historically despite their inferiority because they had appropriated the biblical wisdom that was really intended for Aryans. Aryans should embrace the Bible, including the Old Testament, “as the hard, racially proud and racially conscious book, which proclaims death and extermination to the inferior and world domination to the superior (Hochwertigen).” Unfortunately, Lanz continued, a false kind of love had been incorporated into the Bible by some misguided souls.

Elsewhere, Lanz elaborated that the kind of neighborly love and compassion that most people equated with Christianity, and which appeared in the Bible, was based on a misinterpretation hypocritically taught by the inferior races, the so-called “ape-people.” The word “neighbor” in the Old Testament really meant, he assured his fellow Aryan racists, one’s racial comrade. Thus the command to love our neighbor really “means that we only have to love our racial comrades, thus those who stand closest to our kind and our race.” In a 1907 issue of Ostara, he warned his fellow Aryans that they were committing race suicide by extending generosity to those of inferior races. Rather, they should always discriminate racially in their charitable giving. (Apparently, Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan meant nothing to Lanz—or to Hitler.) Ominously, Lanz compared racially inferior people to weeds needing to be pulled. A major theme in this pamphlet and many others was the need to introduce eugenics measures to improve the race.

Many of Lanz’s doctrines became core tenets of Hitler’s worldview: the primacy of race in determining historical developments, Aryan superiority (with the Aryans being the sole creators of culture), the Darwinian racial struggle, the need for eugenics policies, and the evils of racial mixing. Hitler also shared Lanz’s view that Aryans had developed an ancient civilization in the mythical Atlantis. In a passage of Mein Kampf that decries racial mixing in a manner reminiscent of Lanz’s writings, Hitler admonished the state to elevate the status of marriage, which under the present system was supposedly contributing to biological decline. By hindering the marriages of those he dubbed inferior, he hoped marriages could “produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.” By claiming that racial mixture could result in human-ape hybrids, Hitler was pulling a page out of Lanz’s repertoire. No wonder [Wilfried] Daim was struck by the similarities between Lanz and Hitler and supposed that Hitler’s ideology hailed largely from Lanz’s writings. Given all these parallels, most historians acknowledge the likelihood that Lanz’s Ariosophy influenced Hitler’s ideology, either directly or indirectly.

But another like-minded Ariosophist in Vienna, Guido von List, was probably even more influential among early twentieth-century Pan-German nationalists than his colleague Lanz. He introduced the swastika symbol into Aryan racist circles before Lanz, and his ideas were widely discussed in the Pan-German press in Vienna. List and Lanz propagated similar occult racial ideologies, and they belonged to each other’s organizations. Before becoming entranced with occult thinking, List wrote for Pan-German publications. He carried this intense nationalist and racist heritage with him into his occult Aryan religion.

Like Lanz, he claimed he was recovering ancient Germanic wisdom that had been lost, and he wanted to replace Catholicism with his mystical faith. He preached Aryan supremacy, the need to engage in the struggle for existence against other races, and eugenics measures to improve the vitality of the Aryan race. In 1908, he explained the core of his message: “The high meaning of this custom [of ancient Aryans] lay in the intention of a planned, widespread breeding of a noble race, which through strict sexual laws would also remain racially pure.” List wanted to reconstitute an ancient Germanic priesthood with esoteric knowledge that could elevate the racially purified and ennobled Aryans to dominate the globe.

We do not know if Hitler had any direct contact with List or the List Society when he lived in Vienna. Brigitte Hamann, however, believes that Hitler’s racial ideology had more in common with List than with Lanz. List, for example, taught that the Aryans evolved into a superior race during the Ice Age. They were steeled in body and mind by the harsh conditions, and they had to wage a bitter battle against the elements. Natural selection eliminated the weak, sickly, and less cooperative, leaving the robust, healthy, and more moral members to propagate their superior biological traits. Hitler narrated a similar tale of Aryan origins in his 1920 speech, “Why Are We Anti-Semites?” List also viewed nature as the source of divine power, and according to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, he reduced all morality to just one ethical precept: “Live in accordance with Nature.” Hitler’s ethical views also stressed conformity to nature and its laws…

In August 1918, shortly before the end of the war, he [Rudolf von Sebottendorff] founded the Thule Society in Munich as an organization to foster German nationalism and Aryan racism. The Thule Society adopted the swastika as its symbol and “Heil” as its greeting, thus contributing to later Nazi practices.

In June 1918, Sebottendorff acquired the Münchner Beobachter as the mouthpiece for the Thule Society. In order to attract young Germans to his movement, he featured sports articles in this newspaper. However, its real purpose was to advance his racist and ultranationalist views, so he also published articles on these themes. One early article he wrote was “Keep Your Blood Pure,” which sounds remarkably similar to Hitler’s racial philosophy in Mein Kampf. In this essay, Sebottendorff asserted that race is the key to understanding history. He was incensed that Christianity had led some Germans to embrace racial equality. He wrote,

Encouraged by Christianity they propagated the doctrine of the equality of humans. Gypsies, Hottentots, Brazilian natives, and Germans are supposedly completely equal in value. Too bad the great teacher, nature, teaches otherwise. It teaches: This equality is nonsense. It is the greatest lie that humanity has ever been talked into. To the destruction of us Germans. There are higher and lower races! If one values the racial mish-mash, the “Tschandalen” [this was Lanz’s term for inferior human races that had resulted from a human-ape hybrid] the same as the Aryans—the noble humans—then one commits a crime against humanity… Wherever one looks in the past, the bearers of Germanic blood have always been the bearers and creators of culture.

The affinities with Hitler’s worldview are obvious: racial inequality, the role of nature in confirming racial inequality, and the Aryans as the sole creators of culture. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Sebottendorff boasted that he had laid the intellectual foundation for Nazism.

Sebottendorff’s view of Christianity was similar to Hitler’s, too. He criticized many of its features, especially its tendency to promote human equality. While appreciating Luther’s anti-Semitism, he noted that it was nonetheless deficient, because it was based on religious, not racial, considerations. He also dismissed the notion that people should turn the other cheek. Rather, he proclaimed, they should strike back until their opponent remained on the ground. Strangely, Sebottendorff thought Jesus approved of this pugnacity, for he continued, “That was also the opinion of our Savior: He came to bring the sword”…

A different movement, neo-paganism, also held sway over some leading Nazis, especially Himmler and Rosenberg. Neo-paganism, the attempt to resurrect the old Germanic gods and goddesses, sometimes overlapped with occultism, though some neo-paganists were staunch opponents of it. Both schools of thought were anti-Christian in their orientation. The occultist Sebottendorff, for example, tried to resurrect the worship of Wotan and other ancient Germanic gods. Himmler and Rosenberg saw neo-paganism as a way to bring Germans back to their original pre-Christian religion. Neo-paganism countered the universalizing tendencies of Christianity and emphasized the distinctiveness of the Aryan race, even in their religion.

Despite all these historical connections between Hitler and occultists, the popular idea that Hitler was an occultist—or at least powerfully influenced by occultism—faces serious objections…

Categories
Adolf Hitler Jesus Richard Carrier

‘You’re almost there!’

As the fourth chapter of Richard Weikart’s book made clear, Hitler was aware of the theme that Nietzsche (before Hitler) and Evropa Soberana (after Hitler) called Rome against Judea; Judea against Rome: a subject so important that we have called the masthead of this site.

Hitler had all the right instincts to understand the subject. Nevertheless, his view of Jesus, as it appears in that Weikart chapter, evokes Christian Identity: people incapable of breaking away altogether from the old paradigm, to the extent of producing naïve pseudo-history (or naïve pseudo-biography, in the case of Jesus).

Hitler’s apostasy from Christianity was almost absolute, in that not only the dogmatic part of Christianity was rejected, but the axiological part as well. He was almost there. But his apostasy wasn’t absolute. As Savitri said, it is necessary for the Avenger to come, who, I would add, will no longer harbour in his mind residues of Judeo-Christian introjects, but will see things even more clearly thanks to the heart tree that allows him to see the past, to the extent of realising that Jesus never existed.

If we compare all the quotes about Jesus from Hitler’s mouth that we read in Weikart’s book, we will see that Hitler’s imaginary Jesus was, from the point of view of Aryan interests, inferior to the Jesus of Evropa Soberana: who depicts Jesus simply as a zealot executed by the Romans. (Interestingly, that Jesus resembles the Jesus of the first modern exegete, Reimarus, whom we have discussed on this site.)

But we can use Carrier’s non-existent Jesus as a final step in our crossing of the psychological Rubicon. As I said to a disciple of that author, Carrier is not a full apostate in that axiologically he is still Christian (love thy neighbour even if he is black, Jewish or Chinese, etc.). Only by intellectually assimilating Carrier’s legacy of the non-historical Jesus, but unlike him transvaluing Christian ethics, will we have reached dry land, the other side of the river.

Categories
Albert Speer Alfred Rosenberg Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Catholic Church Constantine Destruction of Greco-Roman world Emperor Julian Heinrich Himmler Hitler's Religion (book) Jesus Joseph Goebbels Michelangelo Old Testament Protestantism Richard Weikart Schutzstaffel (SS) St Paul

Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 4

(excerpts)

by Richard Weikart

Many Christian leaders in the 1930s and 1940s, both within and outside Germany, recognized Hitler was no friend to their religion. In 1936, Karl Spiecker, a German Catholic living in exile in France, detailed the Nazi fight against Christianity in his book Hitler gegen Christus (Hitler against Christ). The Swedish Lutheran bishop Nathan Soderblom, a leading figure in the early twentieth-century ecumenical movement, was not so ecumenical that he included Hitler in the ranks of Christianity. After meeting with Hitler sometime in the mid-1930s, he stated, “As far as Christianity is concerned, this man is chemically pure from it.”

Many Germans, however, had quite a different image of their Führer. Aside from those who saw him as a Messiah worthy of veneration and maybe even worship, many regarded him as a faithful Christian. Rumors circulated widely in Nazi Germany that Hitler carried a New Testament in his vest pocket, or that he read daily a Protestant devotional booklet. Though these rumors were false, at the time many Germans believed them…

Most historians today agree that Hitler was not a Christian in any meaningful sense. Neil Gregor, for instance, warns that Hitler’s “superficial deployment of elements of Christian discourse” should not mislead people to think that Hitler shared the views of “established religion.” Michael Burleigh argues that Nazism was anticlerical and despised Christianity. He recognizes that Hitler was not an atheist, but “Hitler’s God was not the Christian God, as conventionally understood.” In his withering but sober analysis of the complicity of the Christian churches in Nazi Germany, Robert Ericksen depicts Hitler as duplicitous when he presented himself publicly as a Christian…

However, when we turn to Hitler’s view of Jesus, we find a remarkable consistency from his earliest speeches to his latest Table Talks. He expressed admiration for Jesus publicly and privately, without once directly criticizing Him. But his vision of Jesus was radically different from the teachings of the Catholic Church he grew up in. For him, Jesus was not a Jew, but a fellow Aryan. He only rarely stated this explicitly, though he frequently implied it by portraying Jesus as an anti-Semite. However, in April 1921, he told a crowd in Rosenheim that he could not imagine Christ as anything other than blond-haired and blue-eyed, making clear that he considered Jesus an Aryan. In an interview with a journalist in November 1922, he actually claimed Jesus was Germanic…

While Hitler appreciated Jesus because he considered him a valiant anti-materialistic anti-Semite, I have never found any evidence that Hitler believed in the deity of Jesus. Richard Steigmann-Gall bases his mistaken claim that Hitler believed in Jesus as God on a mistranslation of Hitler’s April 22, 1922 speech (some of which we discussed earlier in this chapter). According to the Norman Baynes’ edition of The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, during that speech Hitler stated about Jesus, “It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to the fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as sufferer but as fighter.” The term that is translated “God’s truth!” is wahrhaftiger Gott, a common German interjection that is rendered in some German-English dictionaries as “good God!” or “good heavens!” In the original German edition, wahrhaftiger Gott is set off in commas, indicating that it is indeed an interjection… Steigmann-Gall uses this mistranslation to argue that Hitler believed in the deity of Jesus. Apparently, he did not understand the colloquial expression used…

While Hitler’s positive attitude toward Jesus—at least the Jesus of his imagination—did not seem to change over his career, his position vis-a-vis Christianity is much more complex. Many scholars doubt that as an adult he was ever personally committed to any form of Christianity. They interpret his pro-Christian utterances as nothing more than the cynical ploy of a crafty politician. Almost all historians, including Steigmann-Gall, admit that Hitler was anti-Christian in the last several years of his life…

Even when he publicly announced his Christian faith in 1922 or at other times, Hitler never professed commitment to Catholicism. Further, despite his public stance upholding Christianity before 1924, he provided a clue in one of his earliest speeches that he was already antagonistic toward Christianity. In August 1920, Hitler viciously attacked the Jews in his speech, “Why Are We Anti-Semites?” One accusation he leveled was that the Jews had used Christianity to destroy the Roman Empire. He then claimed Christianity was spread primarily by Jews. Since Hitler was a radical anti-Semite, his characterization of Christianity as a Jewish plot was about as harsh an indictment as he could bring against Christianity. Hitler was also a great admirer of the ancient Greeks and Romans, whom he considered fellow Aryans. Blaming Christianity for ruining the Roman Empire thus expressed considerable anti-Christian animus. Hitler often discussed both themes—Christianity as Jewish, and Christianity as the cause of Rome’s downfall—later in life.

Hitler’s anti-Christian outlook remained largely submerged before 1924, because—as Hitler himself explained in Mein Kampf—he did not want to offend possible supporters…

But by the time Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in 1924-25, he was walking a tightrope. His political ally, General Ludendorff, was increasingly hostile to the Catholic Church, as were many on the radical Right in Weimar Germany. Hitler did not want to follow them into political oblivion—and indeed Ludendorff did end up politically isolated, perhaps in part because of his antireligious crusade. But Hitler was also sensitive to the anticlerical thrust within and outside his party. Thus, after warning his followers in the first volume of Mein Kampf against offending people’s religious tastes, he threw caution to the wind in the second volume by sharply criticizing Christianity. In one passage, he complained that both Christian churches in Germany were contributing to the decline of the German people, because they supported a system that allowed those with hereditary diseases to procreate. The problem, he thought, was that the churches focused on the spirit and neglected the physical basis of a healthy life. Hitler immediately followed up this critique by blasting the churches for carrying out mission work among black Africans, who are “healthy, though primitive and inferior, human beings,” whom the missionaries turn into “a rotten brood of bastards.” In this passage, Hitler harshly castigated Christianity for not supporting his eugenics and racial ideology.

Worse yet, he actually threatened to obliterate Christianity later in the second volume. After calling Christianity fanatically intolerant for destroying other religions, Hitler explained that Nazism would have to be just as intolerant to supplant Christianity:

A philosophy filled with infernal intolerance will only be broken by a new idea, driven forward by the same spirit, championed by the same mighty will, and at the same time pure and absolutely genuine in itself. The individual may establish with pain today that with the appearance of Christianity the first spiritual terror entered in to the far freer ancient world, but he will not be able to contest the fact that since then the world has been afflicted and dominated by this coercion, and that coercion is broken only by coercion, and terror only by terror. Only then can a new state of affairs be constructively created.

Hitler’s anti-Christian sentiment shines through clearly here, as he called Christianity a “spiritual terror” that has “afflicted” the world. Earlier in the passage, he also argued Christian intolerance was a manifestation of a Jewish mentality, once again connecting Christianity with the people he most hated. Even more ominously, he called his fellow Nazis to embrace an intolerant worldview so they could throw off the shackles of Christianity. He literally promised to visit terror on Christianity. Even though several times later in life, especially before 1934, Hitler would try to portray himself as a pious Christian, he had already blown his cover.

Hitler’s tirade against Christianity in Mein Kampf, including the threat to demolish it, diverged remarkably from his normal public persona… In January 1937, Goebbels was with Hitler during an internecine debate on religion and reported, “The Führer thinks Christianity is ripe for destruction. That may still take a long time, but it is coming.”

In reading through Goebbels’ Diaries, Hitler’s monologues, and Rosenberg’s Diaries, it is rather amazing how often Hitler discussed religion with his entourage, especially during World War II. He was clearly obsessed with the topic. On December 13, 1941, for example, just two days after declaring war on the United States, he told his Gauleiter (district leaders) that he was going to annihilate the Jews, but he was postponing his campaign against the church until after the war, when he would deal with them. According to Rosenberg, both on that day and the following, Hitler’s monologues were primarily about the “problem of Christianity.” In a letter to a friend in July 1941, Hitler’s secretary Christa Schroeder claimed that in Hitler’s evening discussions at the headquarters, “the church plays a large role.” She added that she found Hitler’s religious comments very illuminating, as he exposed the deception and hypocrisy of Christianity. Hitler’s own monologues confirm Schroeder’s impression…

When Hitler told his Gauleiter in December 1941 that the regime would wait until after the war to solve the church problem, he was probably trying to restrain some of the hotheads in his party. But he also promised the day of reckoning would eventually come. He told them, “There is an insoluble contradiction between the Christian and a Germanic-heroic worldview. However, this contradiction cannot be resolved during the war, but after the war we must step up to solve this contradiction. I see a possible solution only in the further consolidation of the National Socialist worldview”…

At a cabinet meeting in 1937, Hitler commented, “I know that my un-Christian Germanic SS units with their general non-denominational belief in God can grasp their duty for their people (Volk) more clearly than those other soldiers who have been made stupid through the catechism.” Hitler’s contempt for Christianity could hardly have been more palpable.

Hitler’s press chief, Otto Dietrich, confirmed Frank’s impression. In private, according to Dietrich, Hitler was uniformly antagonistic to Christianity. Dietrich wrote in his memoirs:

…Primitive Christianity, he declared, was the “first Jewish-Communistic cell”…

Dietrich stated, “Hitler was convinced that Christianity was outmoded and dying. He thought he could speed its death by systematic education of German youth. Christianity would be replaced, he thought, by a new heroic, racial ideal of God.” This confirms the point Goebbels made in his diary—that Hitler hoped ultimately to replace Christianity with a Germanic worldview through indoctrination of children…

[Albert] Speer recalled a conversation in which Hitler was told that if Muslims had won the Battle of Tours, Germans would be Muslim. Hitler responded by lamenting Germany’s fate to have become Christian: “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?” As this conversation reveals, Hitler saw religion not as an expression of truth, but rather as a means or tool to achieve other ends—namely, the preservation and advancement of the German people or Nordic race. In April 1942, Hitler again compared Christianity unfavorably with Islam and Japanese religion. In the case of Japan, their religion had protected them from the “poison of Christianity,” he opined…

In fact, Hitler contemptuously called Christianity a poison and a bacillus and openly mocked its teachings… After scoffing at doctrines such as the Fall, the Virgin Birth, and redemption through the death of Jesus, Hitler stated, “Christianity is the most insane thing that a human brain in its delusion has ever brought forth, a mockery of everything divine.” He followed this up with a hard right jab to any believing Catholic, claiming that a “Negro with his fetish” is far superior to someone who believes in transubstantiation. Hitler… believed black Africans were subhumans intellectually closer to apes than to Europeans, so to him, this was a spectacular insult to Catholics… Then, according to Hitler, when others did not accept these strange teachings, the church tortured them into submission…

Another theme that surfaced frequently in Hitler’s monologues of 1941-42 was that the sneaky first-century rabbi Paul was responsible for repackaging the Jewish worldview in the guise of Christianity, thereby causing the downfall of the Roman Empire. In December 1941, Hitler stated that although Christ was an Aryan, “Paul used his teachings to mobilize the underworld and organize a proto-Bolshevism. With its emergence the beautiful clarity of the ancient world was lost.” In fact, since Christianity was tainted from the very start, Hitler sometimes referred to it as “Jew-Christianity”… He denigrated the “Jew-Christians” of the fourth century for destroying Roman temples and even called the destruction of the Alexandrian library a “Jewish-Christian deed.” Hitler thus construed the contest between Christianity and the ancient pagan world as part of the racial struggle between Jews and Aryans.

In November 1944, Hitler described in greater detail how Paul had corrupted the teachings of Jesus…

Hitler’s preference for the allegedly Aryan Greco-Roman world over the Christian epoch shines through clearly in Goebbels’s diary entry for April 8, 1941… “The Führer is a person entirely oriented toward antiquity. He hates Christianity, because it has deformed all noble humanity.” Goebbels even noted that Hitler preferred the “wise smiling Zeus to a pain-contorted crucified Christ,” and believed “the ancient people’s view of God is more noble and humane than the Christian view.” Rosenberg recorded the same conversation, adding that Hitler considered classical antiquity more free and cheerful than Christianity with its Inquisition and burning of witches and heretics. He loved the monumental architecture of the Romans, but hated Gothic architecture. The Age of Augustus was, for Hitler, “the highpoint of history.”

From Hitler’s perspective, Christianity had ruined a good thing. In July 1941 he stated, “The greatest blow to strike humanity is Christianity,” which is “a monstrosity of the Jews. Through Christianity the conscious lie has come into the world in questions of religion.” Six months later, he blamed Christianity for bringing about the collapse of Rome. He then contrasted two fourth-century Roman emperors: Constantine, also known as Constantine the Great, and Julian, nicknamed Julian the Apostate by subsequent Christian writers because he fought against Christianity and tried to return Rome to its pre-Christian pagan worship. Hitler thought the monikers should be reversed, since in his view Constantine was a traitor and Julian’s writings were “pure wisdom.” Hitler also expressed his appreciation for Julian the Apostate in October 1941 after reading Der Scheiterhaufen: Worte grosser Ketzer (Burned at the Stake: Words of Great Heretics) by SS officer Kurt Egger. This book contained anti-Christian sayings by prominent anticlerical writers, including Julian, Frederick the Great, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Lagarde, and others. It was a shame, Hitler said, that after so many clear-sighted “heretics,” Germany was not further along in its religious development… A few days later, Hitler recommended that Eggers’s book should be distributed to millions because it showed the good judgment that the ancient world (meaning Julian) and the eighteenth century (i.e., Enlightenment thinkers) had about the church.

This notion that Christianity was a Jewish plot to destroy the Roman world was a theme Hitler touched on throughout his career, from his 1920 speech “Why Are We Anti-Semites?” to the end of his life. It made a brief appearance in his major speech to the Nuremberg Party Rally in 1929, and reappeared in a February 1933 speech to military leaders. In a small private meeting with his highest military leaders and his Foreign Minister in November 1937, Hitler told them that Rome fell because of “the disintegrating effect of Christianity.” From the way that Hitler bashed a generic “Christianity” as a Jewish-Bolshevik scheme, it seems clear that he was targeting all existing forms of Christianity…

During a monologue on December 14, 1941, Hitler divulged a decisive distaste for Protestantism. That day, Hitler learned Hanns Kerrl, a Protestant who was his minister for church affairs, had passed away. Hitler remarked, “With the best intentions Minister Kerrl wanted to produce a synthesis of National Socialism and Christianity. I do not believe that is possible.” Hitler explained that the form of Christianity with which he most sympathized was that which prevailed during the times of papal decay. Regardless of whether the pope was a criminal, if he produced beauty, he is “more sympathetic to me than a Protestant pastor, who returns to the primitive condition of Christianity,” Hitler declared. “Pure Christianity, the so-called primitive Christianity… leads to the destruction of humanity; it is unadulterated Bolshevism in a metaphysical framework.” In other words, Hitler preferred Leo X, the great Renaissance patron of the arts who excommunicated Luther, to the Wittenberg monk who called the church back to primitive, Pauline Christianity. According to Rosenberg’s account of this same conversation, Hitler specifically mentioned the corrupt Renaissance Pope Julius II, Leo X’s predecessor, as being “less dangerous than primitive Christianity”…


(Note of the Editor: Left, The monument of Julius II, with Michelangelo’s statues of Moses, with Rachel and Leah). Many anti-Semites in early twentieth-century Germany despised the Old Testament as the product of the Jewish spirit, and Hitler was no exception. He saw the Old Testament as the antithesis of everything he stood for. In his view, it taught materialism, greed, and deception. Further, it promoted racial purity for the Jews, since it taught them to avoid mingling with other races…

Moreover, Hitler lamented that the Bible had been translated into German, because this made Jewish doctrines readily available to the German people. It would have been better, he stated, if the Bible had remained only in Latin, rather than causing mental disorders and delusions…

Many SS members followed Himmler’s example and encouragement to withdraw from the churches, and Hitler lauded them for their anti-church attitude. Hitler once advised Mussolini to try to wean the Italian people away from the Catholic Church, lest he encounter problems in the future. When Mussolini asked how to do this, Hitler turned to his military adjutant and asked him how many men in Hitler’s entourage attended church. The adjutant replied, “None”…

In the end… he [Hitler] had utter contempt for the Jesus who told His followers to love their enemies and turn the other cheek. He also did not believe that Jesus’s death had any significance other than showing the perfidy of the Jews, nor did he believe in Jesus’s resurrection.

Categories
Adolf Hitler Extermination of the Neanderthals Jesus New Testament On the Historicity of Jesus (book) Richard Carrier

Jesus – triple homonym

The impossibility of speaking with normies about Hitler lies in the fact that the word ‘Hitler’ is, in reality, a double homonym. When we use it we refer to the ‘historical Hitler’ (cf. David Irving’s books). The normie, on the other hand, believes in the ‘Hitler of dogma’: a propaganda figure created by Anglo-Americans and Jews after World War II to demoralise the Aryan. One need only glance at the book I quoted in my previous post to realise that the Hitler of dogma never existed.

This is best illustrated by the figure through whom our civilisation betrayed itself: Jesus of Nazareth. But here we encounter not a double but a triple homonym!

For the ordinary Christian, Jesus rose from the dead. To the ordinary secular man, Jesus was a mortal whose ethical system, despite the mythical miracles attributed to him, remains exemplary. But to the priest of sacred words Jesus not only didn’t exist. The ethical system sold to us by the imaginative writer who created this fictional character, the evangelist Mark, was the apple of discord whose ingestion brought about the downfall not only of the Roman Empire, but of the white race. (Remember that, according to Jung, an archetype can literally take possession of human souls. If I could relaunch Daybreak Press, I would publish another book collecting several entries on the Christian question.)

If the word ‘Hitler’ is a double homonym, from this angle the word ‘Jesus’ is a triple homonym in the sense that the word ‘bank’ is also a triple homonym: it can mean (1) a financial institution, (2) land at river’s edge, or (3) a panel in the sense, for example, that ‘the bank of switches for controlling the lighting is over there’.

Let’s now imagine a room with three men: a traditional Christian, a secular humanist and a priest of the sacred words. Common sense might lead us to believe that both the atheist and I could team up against the Christian. But this is not so. The Christian and the atheist will team up against me as soon as they learn that, in my scale of values, exterminationism à la Turner Diaries are the new tablets of law. And it is exactly at this point that we see that the expression ‘secular Christian’ or ‘neochristian’ is most apt to refer to today’s ‘atheists’.

Pre-Christian Aryans would have gladly used technological weapons of mass destruction to exterminate their enemies. It was Christian ethics that inculcated the notion of the sanctity of human life. An example from the country where I live will exemplify this.

In the summer of 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and a few months before the dissolution of the USSR, an extraordinary event took place in Mexico City: intellectuals from all over the world gathered to talk about it. I was following them closely, although at the time I was a normie of the secular humanist type. A few years ago, in the comments section of The Occidental Observer, I put the list of the participants in the various panel discussions at that event, which lasted a couple of weeks, but there is no need to put it here. Suffice it to say that, at the panel discussion ‘Nationalist and religious tensions’, the Mexican Octavio Paz—a secular humanist who would go on to win that year’s Nobel Prize for literature—concluded the discussion with these words (my translation):

We owe religions the inquisitors, we owe them many wars, we owe them many crimes, crusades, human sacrifices. But we also owe them essential things that we cannot renounce: for example Christ, for example Buddha. Thank you. [see YouTube clip: here]

Octavio Paz (1914-1998), who had repudiated his mother’s Catholicism at an early age, was in fact a typical neochristian. If it were possible to locate the three men of our example geographically, the Christian and the atheist would be almost side by side. The real eccentric would be the priest of the sacred words, who would be far removed from the Christian and the atheist insofar as the scale of values is concerned. (I am more like the Romans who left no stone unturned of the Semitic civilisation of Carthage than like the secular whites who are still under the spell of the Jesus archetype.)

There is indeed a gulf not only in believing that Jesus didn’t exist, but—contra Paz & secular company—in openly proclaiming that the message of this mythical ‘Christ’ is pure poison for the fourteen words: a psyop by Mark and his Semitic followers Matthew, Luke and eventually John, to brainwash the white man.

Although Richard Carrier is, like Octavio Paz, a typical neochristian, to racially conscious conservatives who still cling to the religion of their parents I suggest that they, at least, read the Amazon Books starred reviews of On the Historicity of Jesus.

Categories
Jesus Liberalism

Spengler was right

On Monday I quoted Oswald Spengler: ‘Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism’, words that I have seen quoted in various forums. Racialist Christians reject that quote. But these days I have been thinking about a series of magazines that my father had bound. In times when Francisco Franco still lived in Spain, the series of magazines Jesucristo (Jesus Christ) was published in Madrid.

In one of the 1974 Jesucristo magazines, in the image on the back cover (left) we see a non-Aryan but a Semitic Jesus, and inside we can read a brief interview with Alfonso Paso, a Spanish playwright. In this magazine for Spanish-speaking Catholics from Franco’s time, the interview is titled ‘He [Jesus] preached a proletarian revolution in the world’.

As we have already observed on this site, Jesus did not exist. What did exist was a literary fiction author, the evangelist Mark, who stole passages from the history of the Roman God, Romulus, to sell us to the god of the Jews.

Here’s the interview that reminded me of Oswald Spengler:

What has been the contribution of Jesus to the history of humanity?

Alfonso Paso: As a historical figure, it should be noted that Jesus Christ preached a proletarian revolution amid a world ruled by violence and, using a word that shouldn’t make us blush, by capitalism. The great success of Jesus Christ the man is to have linked the great dissatisfied and deficient mass to a congruent metaphysics. Convinced of the unhappiness of others, Jesus Christ warns them that there is another world, another dimension in which goodness has its prize. The metaphysics of Jesus Christ is not original, it is steeped in orientalism. What is original is his social revolution.
 
What future do you foresee for faith in Jesus Christ?

Alfonso Paso: From the point of view of historical evolution, and thinking, like Toynbee, that politics is a form of ‘religion’, many things can happen. Today faith in Jesus Christ has grown to the point that many young people have made Him a kind of Che Guevara or Lenin, without knowing exactly what they were doing. It seems to them, simply, that Jesus Christ brings the message of the protest, and it is evident that in something these young people are not wrong.

We have been holding onto faith in Jesus Christ for two thousand years. If human evolution confirms the prognoses that we professionals in History are studying, it is very true that the number of believers in Him will decrease. Personally I am sorry, but the message of the Aquarian Age is, finally, a coherent message in which a lot of things are going to become clear. It happens, however, that the keys to the thought of Jesus Christ will always be current, in the same way that the keys to the thought of Confucius or Buddha are current today. After the first streak of Marxist enthusiasm, I foresee a plummet of atheistic materialism. That, so far, seems pretty clear to me.[1]

Alfonso Paso would die four years after the interview, in 1978. Indeed, in the following decade the New Age would reject atheistic materialism. And already in our century the revolutionary message of the fictional character that Marcos created culminated in the secularist Woke age, that Paso called the Aquarian Age (‘Personally I am sorry, but the message of the Aquarian Age is, finally, a coherent message in which a lot of things are going to become clear…’).
 
_________
 
[1] Original interview in Spanish:

¿Cuál ha sido la aportación de Jesús a la historia de la humanidad?

Alfonso Paso: Como figura histórica hay que destacar que Jesucristo predicó una revolución proletaria en medio de un mundo gobernado por la violencia y, sin que nos sonroje la palabra, por el capitalismo. El gran acierto de Jesucristo hombre es haber vinculado a la gran masa disconforme y deficitaria a una metafísica congruente. Convencido de la infelicidad de los demás, Jesucristo les advierte que hay otro mundo, otra dimensión en la que la bondad tiene su premio. La metafísica de Jesucristo no es original, está impregnada de orientalismo. Lo que es original es su revolución social.

¿Qué futuro prevé usted para la fe en Jesucristo?

Alfonso Paso: Desde el punto de vista de la evolución histórica, y pensando, como Toynbee, que la política es una forma de “religión”, pueden ocurrir muchas cosas. Ha crecido en la actualidad la fe en Jesucristo hasta el punto de que muchos jóvenes han hecho de Él una especie de Che Guevara o de Lenin, sin saber a punto fijo lo que estaban haciendo. Les parece, simplemente, que Jesucristo trae el mensaje de la protesta, y es evidente que en algo no se equivocan estos jóvenes.

Llevamos dos mil años aferrados a la fe en Jesucristo. Si la evolución humana confirma los pronósticos que estamos estudiando los profesionales de al Historia, es muy cierto que disminuirá el número de creyentes en Él. Personalmente lo siento, pero el mensaje de la Era Acuariana es, por fin, un mensaje coherente en el que se van a poner en claro muchísimas cosas. Sucede, sin embargo, que las claves del pensamiento en Jesucristo tendrán siempre actualidad, del mismo modo que tienen actualidad hoy días las claves del pensamiento de Confucio o de Buda. Pasada la primera racha de entusiasmo marxista, preveo una caída en picado del materialismo ateo. Eso, hasta ahora, me parece bien claro.

Jesucristo, publicación semanal (published by Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos & Editorial Miñon), BS 4, #7, page 30.

Categories
Jesus

The Big Jew

‘Happy Easter! He is risen indeed!’—you can read in the last article published by Occidental Dissent (snapshot: here), one of the places where I discovered white nationalism more than ten years ago. I wonder how many among those nationalists have read Carrier’s book or at least listened to his lectures on YouTube?

Categories
Jesus Kevin MacDonald Monocausalism

Morgan’s comments on Unz Review

Christianity has always been anti-racist. How could it be otherwise? It’s built upon the idea of whites worshiping a Jew; i.e., someone of another race. Jesus encouraged the apostles to make converts of all races. More, from the earliest times the church has allowed and even encouraged interracial marriage.

The white Christian cult of the victim began with Jesus, and continued through the various martyrs celebrated by the Catholic Church. Before the Christian takeover of white civilization, there was no cult of the victim. White people didn’t see any virtue in being a victim at all.

MacDonald thinks Christianity is generally positive for whites, and because of that, his way of explaining the fanatical anti-racist and pro-immigration stance of all mainstream Christian churches is to say that they have been infiltrated and subverted by Jews. Poor white people! Not even safe from Jewish attack within the confines of their own churches! No, it definitely could not be the case that two thousand years of Jesus’ message to love everyone, regardless of race, has had a weakening effect on their racial solidarity. Perish the thought! MacDonald approves of Christianity even though it came from Jews and even though it perfectly fits his own paradigm of a Jewish movement. In his view, whites were completely helpless to prevent the takeover of their churches by the devious, treacherous, scheming Jews.

His approach to issues such as feminism, corporate power, civil rights, the mass media and so on follows this same pattern. To MacDonald the vast majority of whites are mere clay, existing only to be molded by Jewish power.

Assuming he was an actual person and not just a mythic figure, and his Biblical portrayal is accurate, it would be fair to describe Jesus as the original social justice worker. He’s the prototype, and all the rest, with their foot washing and boot kissing, their uplifting of the poor, the persecuted, and the meek (like Jesus!), and condemnation of the rich, the proud, and the strong (like Satan!), are but imitators of Christ. As for racial in-group constraints, the whole point of Christianity seems to be to eliminate them, and while one can dispute all day whether that’s a proper interpretation of various Bible verses or not, it’s inarguable that that has been the effect Christianity has produced. The Christian mainstream is ostentatiously “color blind” and places no value at all on race.

This view also presents a problem for Sunic’s friend MacDonald, since if the egalitarian impulse is indeed “primordial”, and present in everyone as a matter of “instinct”, why would Jews be needed to bring it out? As an alternative explanation, could it not be that, instead of being “brainwashed”, subverted, and culturally undermined by Jews, whites are merely following their own egalitarian impulses? Hard to see why not. It doesn’t require much persuasion to persuade someone to do something they want to do anyway.

Of course, portrayal of oneself or one’s in-group as a victim is a handy way to avoid self-examination and self-blame. A man who enters on a self-destructive course of action will often blame someone other than himself. But everyone knows, or should, that that’s just an excuse.

Categories
Adolf Hitler Alfred Rosenberg Genuine spirituality Heinrich Himmler Jesus Joseph Goebbels Mein Kampf (book) Nature Reinhard Heydrich Rudolf Hess Schutzstaffel (SS) Swastika

Religious aspects of National Socialism

In the previous post today, I quoted a commenter who explained why the bulk of white nationalists in America don’t admire Hitler. His comment resulted in a sort of eureka moment for me as to solving another mystery: why these nationalists don’t have ‘pagan’ William Pierce’s Who We Are as their leading bestseller.

The sad answer is that these nationalists sold their souls to the devil: Judeo-Christianity, even those secular nationalists who refuse to place their parents’ religion on the bench of the accused.

It’s worth rephrasing what the Wikipedia article, ‘Religious aspects of Nazism’, says, purging from it of all anti-white crap that that damned online encyclopaedia promulgates, and adding some observations of my own:

Historians, political scientists and philosophers have studied National Socialism with a specific focus on its religious aspects.

Among the writers who alluded before 1980 to the religious aspects of National Socialism are Albert Camus, Romano Guardini, Denis de Rougemont, Eric Voegelin, Klaus Vondung and Friedrich Heer. Voegelin’s work on political religion was first published in German in 1938. The French author and philosopher Albert Camus made some remarks about National Socialism as a religion and about Adolf Hitler in particular in L’Homme révolté.

Outside a purely academic discourse, public interest mainly concerns the relationship between National Socialism and Occultism, and between National Socialism and Christianity. The persistent idea that the National Socialists were directed by occult agencies has been dismissed by historians as modern cryptohistory. The interest in the second relationship is obvious from the debate about Adolf Hitler’s religious views—specifically, whether he was a Christian or not.
 

National Socialism and occultism

There are many works that speculate about National Socialism and occultism, the most prominent being The Morning of the Magicians (1960) and The Spear of Destiny (1972). From the perspective of academic history, however, most of these works are ‘cryptohistory’. Academic historians did not consider the question until the 1980s. Due to the popular literature on the topic, National Socialist black magic was regarded as a topic for authors in pursuit of strong sales. In the 1980s, however, two Ph.D. theses were written about the topic. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke published The Occult Roots of National Socialism (1985) based on his thesis, and the German librarian and historian Ulrich Hunger’s thesis on rune-lore in National Socialist Germany (Die Runenkunde im Dritten Reich) was published in the series Europäische Hochschulschriften.

Goodrick-Clarke’s book is not only considered without exception to be the pioneering work on Ariosophy, but also the definitive book on the topic. The term ‘Ariosophy’ refers to an esoteric movement in Germany and Austria of the 1900s to 1930s. It clearly falls under Goodrick-Clarke’s definition of occultism, as it obviously drew on the western esoteric tradition. Ideologically, it was remarkably similar to National Socialism. According to Goodrick-Clarke, the Ariosophists wove occult ideas into the völkisch ideology that existed in Germany and Austria at the time. Ariosophy shared the racial awareness of völkisch ideology, but also drew upon a notion of root races, postulating locations such as Atlantis, Thule and Hyperborea as the original homeland of the Aryan race (and its purest branch, the Teutons or Germanic peoples).

The Ariosophic writings described a glorious ancient Germanic past, in which an elitist priesthood ‘expounded occult-racist doctrines and ruled over a superior and racially pure society’. The downfall of this hypothesised golden age was explained as the result of the interbreeding between the master race and the untermenschen (lesser races). With the exception of Karl Maria Wiligut, Goodrick-Clarke has not found evidence that prominent Ariosophists directly influenced National Socialism.

But Goodrick-Clarke considers the National Socialist crusade as ‘essentially religious’. His follow-up book Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric National Socialism and the Politics of Identity examined ‘ariosophic’ ideas after 1945 and ‘neo-völkisch movements’.

 
National Socialism and Christianity

After National Socialist Germany had surrendered in World War II, the US Office of Strategic Services published a report on the National Socialist Master Plan of the Persecution of the Christian Churches. Historians and theologians generally agree about the National Socialist policy towards religion, that the objective was to remove explicitly Jewish content from the Bible (i.e., the Old Testament, the Gospel of Matthew, and the Pauline Epistles), transforming the Christian faith into a new religion, completely cleansed from any Jewish element and conciliate it with National Socialism, Völkisch ideology and Führerprinzip: a religion called ‘Positive Christianity’.

This, of course, was tried before, back in… 144 C.E.! Marcionism depicted the God of the Old Testament as a tyrant or demiurge. Marcion’s canon, the first Christian canon ever compiled, consisted of eleven books: a gospel, which was a form of the Gospel of Luke; and ten Pauline epistles. Marcion’s canon rejected the entire Old Testament, along with all other epistles and gospels. In my opinion, NS Positive Christians failed in this. It was a good try but ultimately it is impossible to combine water with oil. It is a very explainable mistake in the recent nation that had just awakened to the most elemental racialism.

Alfred Rosenberg was influential in the development of Positive Christianity. In The Myth of the Twentieth Century he wrote that:

  • Saint Paul was responsible for the destruction of the racial values from Greek and Roman culture;
  • the dogma of hell advanced in the Middle Ages destroyed the free Nordic spirit;

This is absolutely pivotal to understand white demoralisation (and it is a pity that our site is the only racialist site which has accused this doctrine of the havoc it caused among us)!

  • original sin and grace are Oriental ideas that corrupt the purity and strength of Nordic blood;
  • the Old Testament and the Jewish race are not an exception and one should return to the Nordic peoples’ fables and legends;
  • Jesus was not Jewish, but had Nordic blood from his Amorite ancestors.

The latter point of course was another mistake. Neither Rosenberg nor Hitler or anyone at the top of the elites knew that Jesus didn’t even exist. Only recent scholarship has debunked the idea that Jesus, even an all-too human Jesus, existed (read, e.g., this book).

The National Socialist Party program of 1920 included a statement on religion as point 24. In this statement, the National Socialist party demands freedom of religion (for all religious denominations that are not opposed to the customs and moral sentiments of the Germanic race). Also, the paragraph proclaims the party’s endorsement of Positive Christianity. Historians have described this statement as ‘a tactical measure, cleverly left undefined in order to accommodate a broad range of meanings’, and an ‘ambiguous phraseology’.

This is a topic of some controversy. John S. Conway holds that The Holy Reich has broken new ground in the examination of the relation between National Socialism and Christianity, despite his view that ‘National Socialism and Christianity were incompatible’. The National Socialists were aided by theologians, such as Dr. Ernst Bergmann, who committed suicide after the Allied forces captured Leipzig. Bergmann, in his work, Die 25 Thesen der Deutschreligion (Twenty-five Points of the German Religion), expounded the theory that the Old Testament and portions of the New Testament of the Bible were inaccurate. He proposed that Jesus was of Aryan origin, and that Adolf Hitler was the new messiah.

 
Religious beliefs of leading National Socialists

Within a large movement like National Socialism, it may not be especially shocking to discover that individuals could embrace different ideological systems that would seem to be polar opposites. The religious beliefs of even the leading National Socialists diverged strongly.

The difficulty for historians lies in the task of evaluating not only the public, but also the private statements of the National Socialist politicians. Steigmann-Gall, who intended to do this in his study, points to such people as Erich Koch (who was not only Gauleiter of East Prussia and Reichskomissar for the Ukraine, but also the elected praeses of the East Prussian provincial synod of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union), and Bernhard Rust, as examples of National Socialist politicians who also professed to be Christian in private.

 
Adolf Hitler’s religious views

Adolf Hitler’s religious beliefs have been a matter of debate; the wide consensus of historians consider him to have been irreligious, anti-Christian and anti-clerical. In light of evidence such as his fierce criticism and vocal rejection of the tenets of Christianity, numerous private statements to confidants denouncing Christianity as a harmful superstition, and his strenuous efforts to reduce the influence and independence of Christianity in Germany after he came to power, Hitler’s major academic biographers conclude that he was irreligious and an opponent of Christianity.

Historian Laurence Rees found no evidence that ‘Hitler, in his personal life, ever expressed belief in the basic tenets of the Christian church’. Ernst Hanfstaengl, a friend from his early days in politics, says Hitler ‘was to all intents and purposes an atheist by the time I got to know him’. However, historians such as Richard Weikart and Alan Bullock doubt the assessment that he was a true atheist, suggesting that despite his dislike of Christianity he still clung to a form of spiritual belief.

Hitler was born to a practising Catholic mother, and was baptised into the Roman Catholic Church. From a young age, he expressed disbelief and hostility to Christianity. But in 1904, acquiescing to his mother’s wish, he was confirmed at the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Linz, Austria, where the family lived. According to John Willard Toland, witnesses indicate that Hitler’s confirmation sponsor had to ‘drag the words out of him almost as though the whole confirmation was repugnant to him’. Rissmann notes that, according to several witnesses who lived with Hitler in a men’s home in Vienna, Hitler never again attended Mass or received the sacraments after leaving home. Several eyewitnesses who lived with Hitler while he was in his late teens and early-to-mid 20s in Vienna state that he never attended church after leaving home at eighteen.

Nonetheless, in Hitler’s early political statements he attempted to express himself to the German public as a Christian. In his book Mein Kampf and in public speeches prior to and in the early years of his rule, he described himself as a Christian.

As we have seen, the National Socialist party promoted Positive Christianity, a movement which rejected most traditional Christian doctrines such as the divinity of Jesus, as well as Jewish elements such as the Old Testament. From this angle, contemporary Christian nationalists in the US are a century behind compared to Nazi Germany! Consider, for example, how the administrators of Occidental Dissent and The Daily Stormer still subscribe to traditional Christianity, not even to a sort of Positive Christianity (as Hitler said, America is Judaised and negrified to the core).

In one widely quoted remark, Hitler described Jesus as an ‘Aryan fighter’ who struggled against ‘the power and pretensions of the corrupt Pharisees’ and Jewish materialism. While a small minority of historians accept these publicly stated views as genuine expressions of his spirituality, the vast majority believe that Hitler was sceptical of religion and anti-Christian, but recognised that he could only be elected and preserve his political power if he feigned a commitment to and belief in Christianity, which the overwhelming majority of Germans believed in.

Privately, Hitler repeatedly deprecated Christianity, and told confidants that his reluctance to make public attacks on the Church was not a matter of principle, but a pragmatic political move. In his private diaries, Goebbels wrote in April 1941 that though Hitler was ‘a fierce opponent’ of the Vatican and Christianity, ‘he forbids me to leave the church. For tactical reasons’.

Hitler’s remarks to confidants, as described in the Goebbels Diaries, the memoirs of Albert Speer, and transcripts of Hitler’s private conversations recorded by Martin Bormann in Hitler’s Table Talk, are further evidence of his irreligious and anti-Christian beliefs; these sources record a number of private remarks in which Hitler ridicules Christian doctrine as absurd, contrary to scientific advancement, and socially destructive.

Once in office, Hitler and his regime sought to reduce the influence of Christianity on society. From the mid-1930s, his government was increasingly dominated by militant anti-church proponents like Goebbels, Bormann, Himmler, Rosenberg and Heydrich whom Hitler appointed to key posts. These anti-church radicals were generally permitted or encouraged to perpetrate the National Socialist persecutions of the churches. The regime launched an effort toward coordination of German Protestants under a unified Protestant Reich Church (but this was resisted by the Confessing Church), and moved early to eliminate political Catholicism. Hitler agreed to the Reich concordat with the Vatican, but then routinely ignored it, and permitted persecutions of the Catholic Church.

Jehovah’s Witnesses were ruthlessly persecuted for refusing both military service and allegiance to Hitler’s movement. Hitler said he anticipated a coming collapse of Christianity in the wake of scientific advances, and that National Socialism and religion could not co-exist long term. Although he was prepared to delay conflicts for political reasons, historians conclude that he ultimately intended the destruction of Christianity in Germany, or at least its distortion or subjugation to a National Socialist outlook.
 

Rudolf Hess

According to Goodrick-Clarke, Rudolf Hess had been a member of the Thule Society before attaining prominence in the National Socialist party. As Adolf Hitler’s official deputy, Hess had also been attracted to and influenced by the biodynamic agriculture of Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy. In the wake of his flight to Scotland, Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the security police, banned lodge organizations and esoteric groups on 9 June 1941.

The Thule Society took its name from Thule, an alleged lost land. Sebottendorff identified Ultima Thule as Iceland. In The Myth of the Twentieth Century, the most important National Socialist book after Mein Kampf, Alfred Rosenberg referred to Atlantis as a lost land or at least to an Aryan cultural center. Since Rosenberg had attended meetings of the Thule Society, he might have been familiar with the occult speculation about lost lands; however, according to Lutzhöft (1971), Rosenberg drew on the work of Herman Wirth. The attribution of the Urheimat of the Nordic race to a deluged land was very appealing at that time.
 

Heinrich Himmler

Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler: ‘We believe in a God Almighty who stands above us; he has created the earth, the Fatherland, and the Volk, and he has sent us the Führer. Any human being who does not believe in God should be considered arrogant, megalomaniacal, and stupid and thus not suited for the SS’.

This of course was Himmler’s blunder, as theistic visions of the providence stem from monotheistic Judaism. Also, from my point of view, a personal god—i.e., the mythical Judeo-Christian god—should be written thus: (((God))).

On the other hand, credited retrospectively with being the founder of ‘Esoteric Hitlerism’, and certainly a figure of major importance for the officially sanctioned research and practice of mysticism by a National Socialist elite, Heinrich Himmler, more than any other high official in the Third Reich (including Hitler) was fascinated by pan-Aryan (i.e., broader than Germanic) racialism. Himmler’s capacity for rational planning was accompanied by an enthusiasm for the utopian, the romantic and even the occult. Although Himmler did not have any contact with the Thule Society, he possessed more occult tendencies than any other National Socialist leader. The German journalist and historian Heinz Höhne, an authority on the SS, explicitly describes Himmler’s views about reincarnation as occultism.

The historic example which Himmler used in practice as the model for the SS was the Society of Jesus, since Himmler found in the Jesuits what he perceived to be the core element of any order, the doctrine of obedience and the cult of the organisation. The evidence for this largely rests on a statement from Walter Schellenberg in his memoirs (Cologne, 1956, p. 39), but Hitler is also said to have called Himmler ‘my Ignatius of Loyola’. As an order, the SS needed a coherent doctrine that would set it apart. Himmler attempted to construct such an ideology, and to this purpose he deduced a Germanic tradition from history.

In a 1936 memorandum, Himmler set forth a list of approved holidays based on pagan and political precedents and meant to wean SS members from their reliance on Christian festivities. The Winter Solstice, or Yuletide, was the climax of the year. It brought SS folk together at candlelit banquet tables and around raging bonfires that harked back to German tribal rites.

The Allach Julleuchter (Yule light) was made as a presentation piece for SS officers to celebrate the winter solstice. It was later given to all SS members on the same occasion, December 21. Made of unglazed stoneware, the Julleuchter was decorated with early pagan Germanic symbols. Himmler said, ‘I would have every family of a married SS man to be in possession of a Julleuchter. Even the wife will, when she has left the myths of the church find something else which her heart and mind can embrace’.

Only adherents of theories of National Socialist occultism or the few former SS members who were, after the war, participants in the Landig Group in Vienna would claim that the cultic activities within the SS would amount to its own mystical religion. At the time of his death in 1986, Rudolf J. Mund was working on a book on the Germanic ‘original race-cult religion’. However, what was indoctrinated into the SS is not known in detail.
 

National Socialist archaeology

In 1935 Himmler, along with Richard Walther Darré, established the Ahnenerbe. At first independent, it became the ancestral heritage branch of the SS. Headed by Dr. Hermann Wirth, it was dedicated primarily to archaeological research, but it was also involved in proving the superiority of the ‘Aryan race’.

A great deal of time and resources were spent on researching or creating a popularly accepted historical, cultural and scientific background so the ideas about a superior Aryan race could be publicly accepted. For example, an expedition to Tibet was organised to search for the origins of the Aryan race. To this end, the expedition leader, Ernst Schäfer, had his anthropologist Bruno Beger make face masks and skull and nose measurements. Another expedition was sent to the Andes.

When I lived in Gran Canaria, an island off Africa, a Spanish woman told me that Himmler’s researchers had much interest in researching the Nordic aboriginals of the Canary islands: blonder and lighter than the Spaniards themselves.

 
Das Schwarze Korps

The official newspaper of SS was Das Schwarze Korps (‘The Black Corps’), published weekly from 1935 to 1945. In its first issue, the newspaper published an article on the origins of the Nordic race, hypothesising a location near the North Pole similar to the theory of Hermann Wirth (but not mentioning Atlantis).

Also in 1935, the SS journal commissioned a Professor of Germanic History, Heinar Schilling, to prepare a series of articles on ancient Germanic life. As a result, a book containing these articles and entitled Germanisches Leben was published by Koehler & Amelung of Leipzig with the approval of the SS and Reich Government in 1937. Three chapters dealt with the religion of the German people over three periods: Nature worship and the cult of the ancestors, the sun religion of the Late Bronze Age, and the cult of the gods.

According to Heinar Schilling, the Germanic peoples of the Late Bronze Age had adopted a four-spoke wheel as symbolic of the sun ‘and this symbol has been developed into the modern swastika of our own society [NS Germany] which represents the sun’. Under the sign of the swastika ‘the light bringers of the Nordic race overran the lands of the dark inferior races, and it was no coincidence that the most powerful expression of the Nordic world was found in the sign of the swastika’.

Very little had been preserved of the ancient rites, Professor Schilling continued, but it was a striking fact ‘that in many German Gaue today on Sonnenwendtage (solstice days) burning sun wheels are rolled from mountain tops down into the valleys below, and almost everywhere the Sonnenwendfeuer (solstice fires) burn on those days’. He concluded by saying that ‘The Sun is the All-Highest to the Children of the Earth’.
 

SS-Castle Wewelsburg

Himmler has been claimed to have considered himself the spiritual successor or even reincarnation of Heinrich the Fowler, having established special SS rituals for the old king and having returned his bones to the crypt at Quedlinburg Cathedral. Himmler even had his personal quarters at Wewelsburg castle decorated in commemoration of Heinrich the Fowler. The way the SS redesigned the castle referred to certain characters in the Grail-mythos (cf. what I’ve said on this site about Wagner’s Parsifal).

Himmler had visited the Wewelsburg on 3 November 1933 and April 1934; the SS took official possession of it in August 1934. The occultist Karl Maria Wiligut (known in the SS under the pseudonym ‘Weisthor’) accompanied Himmler on his visits to the castle. Initially, the Wewelsburg was intended to be a museum and officer’s college for ideological education within the SS, but it was subsequently placed under the direct control of the office of the Reichsführer SS (Himmler) in February 1935. The impetus for the change of the conception most likely came from Wiligut.