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Category: Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

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Franks Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty

Christianity’s criminal history, 129

– For the context of these translations click: here–

 

CHAPTER 2

CLOVIS, FOUNDER OF THE GREAT FRANKISH EMPIRE

‘One of the most outstanding figures in universal history’. —Wilhelm von Glesebrecht, historian

‘And it is certain that he knew himself to be a Christian, and a Catholic Christian, something that is manifested over and over again in the various performances of his reign’. —Kurt Aland, theologian

 
The Rise of the Merovingians

The original land of the Franks, whose name was associated at the beginning of the Middle Ages with the concepts of ‘brave’, ‘audacious’ and ‘daring’, was in the Lower Rhine. These people, which lacked a unitary leadership, arose probably from the coalition of numerous small tribes throughout the 1st and 2nd centuries c.e., between the rivers Weser and Rhine. They are mentioned for the first time just after the first half of the 3rd century, when they fought fierce struggles against the Romans that would continue throughout the 4th and 5th centuries. The Franks settled on the right bank of the river and then breached the Roman line of defence of the Rhine, which some had probably already overcome before by infiltrating the border region. They advanced on Xanten, that the Roman population had evacuated towards 450, having occupied it later by the small Frankish tribe of Chatuarii. They then entered the territory between the Rhine and the Moselle; the Franks took Mainz and Cologne, a city that, on occupying it definitively around 460, became the centre of an independent Frankish state, immediately on the left bank of the great river. Little by little they annexed more territory. During the first half of the 5th century they conquered the city of Trier four times and the Romans recovered it as many times, until in 480 it became definitively owned by the Franks. The number of its inhabitants, from about 60,000 in the 4th century, dropped to a few thousand in the 6th century.

The invaders founded small Frankish principalities in Belgium and northern France, each subject to a kinglet or little king. As early as 480 the entire Rhenish region between Nijmegen and Mainz, the Maas territory around Maastricht, as well as the Moselle valley from Toul to Koblenz, belonged to the Frankish territory. The Romans allowed the Franks to settle on the condition that they rendered certain military services as foederati (allies) and they became their most loyal comrades in arms of all Germans, although they were generally torn apart amid fierce tribal strife. But in the end it was the Merovingians who bid for all of Roman Gaul…

King Childeric died in 482. Almost twelve hundred years later, in 1653, a doctor from Antwerp discovered his tomb at Tournai, endowed with such wealth and sumptuousness that it far surpassed the more than 40,000 tombs of the Merovingian period uncovered by archaeologists. At the death of Childeric in 482 he was succeeded by Clovis I (466-511), aged sixteen and apparently an only child. Allied with different sister tribes, Clovis expanded the Salic territory around Tournai, which was insignificant and reduced to a small part of northern Gaul in Belgium Secunda, though he continued the plunder, assassinations and wars, increasingly widespread over the regions from the Roman province to the left bank of the Rhine.

Such attacks reached first as far as the Seine, then as far as the Loire and finally as far as the Garonne, bringing the Gallo-Romans under the rule of the Franks. Even then, that was called ‘having the Franc as a friend, and not as a neighbour’.

Such a bellicose people, over which the reputation of disloyalty also floated, was attractive to the Christian clergy from the beginning. The Arians, and even more so the Catholics, sought to win over their leader. In fact all the notable princes of that time in the West were Arian or heathen. Thus, as soon as Clovis was appointed King of Tournai, he was addressed by the Bishop of Reims, St. Remigius, a man of ‘eminent science’ and resurrector of the dead, according to the praise of Bishop Gregory who simultaneously highlights both traits…
 

A great bloodbath and the first date in the history of the German Church

Clovis soon passed from Soissons to Paris, which became the most important city and, at least since the 7th century, the true epicentre of the Frankish kingdom, in which almost all the Merovingian kings are also buried…

The Alemanni (or Suebi), first named in 213, had emigrated from the Elbe region and probably by the end of the 2nd century had made themselves strong in the Main region through various incorporations of German emigrants and soldiers. The name ‘Alemanni’ would mean what anyone who knows some German can still understand today: all males (alie Manner). The Alamanni, who were pressing on the Rhine and the line of fortifications on the frontier of the Roman Empire, broke in 406, accompanied in part by Vandals and Alans, dispersing through Gaul and Hispania.

When they tried to advance north-west from there, they clashed with the Franks, and in particular with the Francorans, who dominated the Moselle region. They had already allied with the Burgundians in 475 against the Alemanni, without clearly prevailing around 490 in a battle near Cologne, where the local kinglet Sigobert was wounded in one knee. Reason enough for Clovis to attack: in around 496-497 the Alaman king of unknown name died on the battlefield of Toibiacum. Clovis advanced into the German territory of the right bank of the Rhine and annihilated a good part of its still pagan inhabitants.

It is true that a decade later, around 506, they rose again; but again they suffered a bloody defeat, probably near Strasbourg, the Alaman king dying in battle again. Pursued by the Franks, they fled south to the pre-Alpine regions: Raetia Prima (province of Chur) and Raetia Secunda (province of Augsburg): territories under the influence of the Ostrogoth king Theodoric, who restrained his brother-in-law Clovis and who settled to the fugitives in Retia, Pannonia and northern Italy. But in the southern part of the Rhenish Hessen, in the Palatinate and the basins of the Main and Neckar the Alemanni were victims of the direct arrogance of Clovis. And from there the Franks later spread eastward to the Saale, the Upper Main and almost to the Bavarian Forest…

King Clovis had himself baptised in Reims with great pomp and with the assistance of numerous bishops. According to some, it ran annus 496-497, according to others 498-499; while according to some researchers, who put the war against the Alemanni in 506, we should think of the years 506-508. ‘It is the first date in the history of the German Church’ (Kawerau). Curiously, the event is linked to a great bloodbath and constitutes one of the most important events of the early Middle Ages.

The baptism of Clovis was a great feast. Streets and churches sparkled with their ornamentation. The baptismal church was filled with a ‘heavenly fragrance’, to the point that the attendees believed they were transferred ‘to the pleasant perfumes of paradise’.

Clovis was venerated as a saint in France.

Gregory of Tours refers that the king ‘advanced to the baptismal bath like a new Constantine’, and the comparison is terribly accurate, ‘to purify himself in the clean water of old leprosy and the dirty stains, which he had from ancient [pagan] times’. And Remigius, ‘the saint of God’, spoke to him with eloquent words: ‘Sigambrer, meekly bend your neck and worship what you burned and burn what you worshiped (adora quod incendisu, incende quod adorasli)’.

Who was this saint, who so arrogantly incited persecution, as did his colleague Avitus in his time? St. Remigius, like most of the prelates of that time (and not only of then), was of ‘illustrious’ lineage, and already at the age of twenty-two promoted to bishop of Reims. His older brother, Principius, was also bishop (of Soissons) and a saint too (their relics were to be burned by the Calvinists in 1567). Remigius, the apostle to the Franks, preached Catholicism to pagans and Arians with fervent zeal, something that clearly developed a ‘radical war’ (Schuitze), in which, according to a council of Lyon, ‘smashed the altars of idols everywhere and vigorously spread the true faith with many signs and miracles’…

Catholic Clovis made his own converts, pagans or Arians, so that the entire house of the Franks ended up being Catholic. Henceforth, a close ‘alliance between monarchy and episcopate’ (Fleckenstein) was created. The princes of the Church occupy the position of honour in the surroundings of Clovis and exert the maximum influence over him, especially Avitus and Remigius. And naturally the clergy are generously rewarded with the war spoils of the Merovingian. He rewards the prelates with largesse and splendour through foundations and donations of land… Since then ‘monarchy and church acted together for the further spread of Christianity’ (Schultze)…

From the research that we have today, it can well be argued that in reality the conversion of Clovis was a political, as that of Constantine had been before. Unlike the other Germanic peoples, the king and his people accepted Catholicism because it provided in advance a link between the conqueror and the Gallo-Romans who were subjected or who were to submit; linkage that did not occur in the rest of the Germanic kingdoms. Clovis, a sympathiser of the Church from an early age, became a Catholic to subdue the Arian Germanic tribes and win over neighbouring Gaul more easily with his strong majority of Roman Catholics…
 

Are we to free ourselves from a moralistic assessment of history?

After Clovis had won the war against the Visigoths with the help of the Francorans, between 509 and 511, the last years of his life, he achieved royal dignity over them. In any case, it forced the fusion of the Francorenan tribes with the Salian Franks.

He first instigated Chlodoric, son of King Sigobert of Cologne, to get rid of his father. ‘Look, your father has grown old and is limping with a crippled leg’. Sigobert ‘the Lame’, a former companion of Clovis, had limped since the battle of Toibiacum against the Alemanni, in which he had been wounded. At the hands of a hired assassin the prince eliminated his father in the beech forest. Through a delegation, Clovis congratulated the parricide and through it, he crushed his skull. The German historian Ewig describes all this with an elegant expression, too elegant we would say, of ‘diplomacy of intrigues’. After the double act, Clovis went to Cologne, the residential city of Sigobert, solemnly proclaimed his innocence in both crimes and, joyfully welcomed by the people, seized the ‘kingdom and the treasures of Sigobert’ (Gregory).

Then he fell on the Salian kings, with whom he was related. Such was the case, for example, of a Frankish king, Chararic, who had not once fought against Syagrius. With tricks Clovis seized him and his son. Later he locked them up in a monastery, had their hair cut off (the tonsure was a sign of the loss of royal dignity), forced Chararic to be ordained a priest and his son a deacon, and after having them beheaded he took over their treasures and kingdom.

Another relative, King Regnacar of Cambrai, his first cousin, was defeated by Clovis after having won over his entourage with a great amount of gold, which later turned out to be fake. After the battle, he mocked Regnacar, who was led into his presence in chains and who in 486 had helped him in the war against Syagrius: ‘Why have you humiliated our blood to that point and allowed yourself to be put in chains? You’d be better off dead!’ And he smashed his head off with an ax. They had also arrested Richar, the king’s brother: ‘If you had helped your brother, we would not have taken him prisoner’, Clovis rebuked him and killed him with another blow. ‘The named kings were close blood relatives of Clovis’ (Gregory of Tours). He also had their brother, Rignomer, liquidated in the vicinity of Le Mans. ‘Clovis thus strengthened his position throughout the Frankish territory’, to quote again the historian Ewig, thus summarising the existing situation.

The victims of Clovis’ consolidation of power throughout the Frankish territory were, it seems, several dozen Frankish cantonal princes. The tyrant had them murdered, seized their land and wealth, without ceasing to complain that he was alone:

‘Woe to me, now I find myself as a stranger among strangers and none of my relatives could help me, if calamity befalls me!’ But this was not meant because he was sorry for their death, but by cunning, in case perhaps there was still someone he could kill.

Such is the comment of St. Gregory, for whom Clovis was a ‘new Constantine’, and who embodied ‘his ideal of the ruler’ (Bodmer) and to whom he frequently appeared ‘almost like a saint’ (Fischer). Without shame the famous bishop adds:

But day after day God brought down his enemies before him and he increased his kingdom, because he walked with a right heart in His presence and did what was pleasing to His divine eyes.

This, as the context shows, also applies to Clovis’ murders of relatives. All is holy in the extreme, even the extreme crimes!

Such, then, was the primus rex francorum (Salic law), the king who ruled following to the letter the words of St. Remigius at his baptism: ‘Worship what you burned and burn what you worshiped’. Such was the Catholic king, that no longer tolerated any pagan vestige, although he commanded almost like an absolute tyrant and was bursting with hypertrophic brutality and rapacity, showing himself cautious and cowardly in front of the strongest and mercilessly crushing the weakest; the king who did not back down from any treachery and cruelty, who waged all his wars in the name of the Christian and Catholic God; the king who, with a sovereign power like few others and at the same time as a good Catholic, combined war, murder and religious piety, who ‘began his Christian reign with all premeditation on December 25’, who with his booty built churches everywhere, then he splendidly endowed and prayed in them, who was a great devotee of St. Martin, who carried out his ‘wars of the heretics’ against the Arians of Gaul ‘under the sign of an intense veneration of St. Peter’ (K. Hauck), and whom the bishops at the National Council of Orleans (511) exalted as ‘a truly priestly soul’ (Daniel-Rops).

That was Clovis. A man who, hearing the passion of Jesus, seems to have said that had he been there with his Franks, no such injustice would have been committed against the Lord. In the words of the old chronicler, he was as ‘an authentic Christian’ (christianum se verum esse adfirmat—Fredegar). And as the current theologian Aland also says: ‘And it is certain, and again and again he manifests it in the different performances of his reign, that he felt of himself as a Christian, and certainly a Catholic Christian’. In a word, that man who made his way ‘with the ax’ to climb the absolute rule of the Franks—as Angenendt graphically puts it—was no longer simply a military king, but thanks precisely to his alliance with the Catholic Church became the ‘representative of God on earth’ (Wolf). A man who, in the company of his wife St. Clotilde, finally found his last resting place in the Parisian Church of the Apostles, which was later called Sainte Geneviéve, when he died in the year 511, just turning forty: a great criminal, devious and ruthless, who established himself on the throne and, according to the historian Bosi, ‘a barbarian, who civilised and cultivated’.

The theologian Aland qualifies Clovis as akin to Constantine and euphemistically says that both were men of power, violent sovereigns and believes that justifiably: ‘Such rough times could only be controlled by such men’. But is it tough times that make tough men? Or is it not rather the other way around? One and the other are intimately united. And already St. Augustine had corrected the stupid accusation of the times: ‘We are the times; which are we, that’s the way the times are’. Aland wants to leave open the question of whether Constantine and Clovis were Christians:

Because both the sons of Constantine and Theodosius were rulers, of whose Christian confession there can be no doubt, and yet committed perfectly comparable acts of blood. If we want to understand them, we must free ourselves from such a moral assessment of history. Well, who among us whose people have a history of 1,500 years behind under the sign of Christianity, can say that he is Christian? Luther speaks of Christianity, which is always being made and which is never finished.

The Merovingian chroniclers glorify Clovis mainly for two reasons: for his baptism and his many wars. He became a Catholic demolishing and depredating everything around him he could destroy or prey. And thus, from an insignificant territorial principality, he created a powerful German-Catholic imperium, sealed in France the alliance between the throne and the altar, and became the chosen instrument of God who day after day struck down his enemies before him— :

because before God he walked with an upright heart, doing what was pleasing to His eyes.

—according to the enthusiastic praise of the bishop, St. Gregory.

As long as history is viewed in this way, as long as it remains outside of its ‘moral’ valuation and the vast majority of historians continue to crawl before such hypertrophic beasts of universal history with respect, reverence and admiration… history will continue to unfold as it does.

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Carolingian dynasty Catholic Church Catholic religious orders Destruction of Germanic paganism Franks Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty

Christianity’s criminal history, 128

– For the context of these translations see here –

 

VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 1

THE CHRISTIANISATION OF THE GERMANS

‘The introduction of Christianity among the Germans was the most precious gift from heaven’. —Pastoral letter from the German episcopate, June 7, 1934

 

The spread of Christianity in the West

At the end of Antiquity and during the succeeding centuries, Christianity conquered the Germanic world. By armies and merchants it had spread beyond northern Gaul to the Rhine. In the old Rhineland provinces probably there were Christian communities as early as the end of the 3rd century; churches were erected from Constantinian times in Bonn, Xanten, Cologne and, especially, in Trier: the official residence of Caesar since 293. At the end of the 4th century, Christianity was already the dominant religion in some Rhineland areas because ‘the laws of Theodosius, Gratian and Valentinian II imposed its entry into those lands…’

In the late 5th century evangelisation of the Franks began; at the end of the 6th century that of the Anglo-Saxons and the Lombards; in the 9th century the Christianisation of northern Europe was undertaken and, at the end of the millennium, that of the Czechs, Poles, and Hungarians. Since Christianity was no longer a despised religion as it had been in pre-Constantinian times, but the official religion of an empire, the popes no longer trapped some individuals but entire peoples in their net. They also annihilated entire towns ‘leaving neither green nor withered’, as the father of the Church, Isidore, boasts. Such was the case, for example, with the Ostrogoths and the Vandals, of whom the Marseillaise monk Prosperus Tironis provided an insightful picture of the Middle Ages, and who were often the subject of ‘cruel propaganda’ (Diesner).

Conversion methods

The Christianisation of the Germanic peoples—designated in the sources as nationes, gentes, populi, civitates, etc.—not only took place at very different times but also in very different ways. Two typical Christian activities converged in the Germanic mission: preaching and destruction. In Merovingian times, preaching was not the primary instrument of mission. There was a more eloquent method to demonstrate to the pagans the impotence of their Gods and the supreme power of the Christian god: the destruction of the Gentile sanctuaries… Of course it was not only destroyed; often, the so-called Christianisations were ‘simply’ arrived at. In other words, Gentile temples were transformed into Christian churches, expelling evil spirits through rites of exorcism and re-consecrating the buildings. The church transformed and incorporated everything that seemed useful, destroying everything else as a nefarious work of the devil.

An important motive in the conversion of the pagans, and also in the mentoring of those already converted, was without a doubt the constant infiltration of scruples and fears in an alarmist attitude that sowed fear for centuries. Fear, in effect, was ‘the characteristic state of the common man in the Middle Ages: fear of the plague, fear of invasion by foreign armies, fear of the tax collector, fear of witchcraft and magic and, above all, fear of the unknown’ (Richards). The priests of many religions feed on the fear of those whom they lead, and especially Christian priests. It is very significant that St. Caesarius of Arles (died in 542), an archbishop absolutely faithful to Rome, in almost all his propaganda interventions, which number more than two hundred, scares the readers with ‘the final judgment’. Whatever the occasion of his homiletical effusions, he rarely fails to insistently evoke the ‘court of Christ’, the ‘eternal judge’, his ‘harsh and irrevocable sentence’, etc.

The conversions of pagan Germans to Christianity were frequently due to purely material motives, already acting for ‘reasons of prestige’, especially when they came under the tutelage of Christian neighbours. Illustrious Gentiles could be chased ‘like dogs’ from the banquets of their princely courts, because Christians were forbidden to sit at the same table with pagans. It is symptomatic that also among Bavarians, Thuringians and Saxons, the nobility was the first to immediately prostrate themselves before the cross…

Jesus becomes the Germanic broadsword

With its acceptance by the Germans, Christianity was also nationalised and Germanised from the beginning. And not only in epic poems did Christ appear to German eyes as a kind of popular and cantonal king. The Franks were immediately seen as his special courtship, his chosen and preferred people. Warriors clustered around him, just as they clustered around princes. The saint is also now felt as the herald of Christ and god. Traditional Christian concepts are filled ‘with totally new content: Germanic, aristocratic and warrior content’ (Zwolfer). ‘From the religion of patience and suffering, from the flight and denial of the world, the medieval Germans made a warlike religion; and of the Man of Sorrows a Germanic king of the armies, who with his heroes travels and conquers the lands and who must be served through struggle. The German Christian fights for his Lord Christ, as he fights for the landlord he follows; even the monk in his cell feels like a member of the militia Christi’ (Dannenbauer). And naturally the clergy knew how to make the Germans proud of having converted to the Roman cross. In the prologue to the Salic law, the oldest hereditary right of the Franks, the fact of conversion is thus exalted:

Unclean people of the Franks, created by God himself, brave with arms, firm in the covenant of peace, profound in counsel, of great corporal nobility, of uncontaminated purity and superior complexion, bold, prompt and fiery—become to the Catholic faith, free from heresy.

Indeed, according to Christian doctrine, all peoples have been created by god; but flattery is always greatest where it is most needed. In this way the Franks appear here occupying the place of the chosen people of the Bible, of the people of Israel. And in a more recent prologue to the aforementioned Salic law, Christ also appears as the legitimate sovereign of the gens Francorum. He appears ‘personally before the Franks’. He loves those who are far superior to the old world power, ‘the chosen people of a new alliance’. ‘They have defeated the Romans and they have broken the Roman yoke’…

Undoubtedly, many German princes converted for purely political reasons. They worshiped in Christ the ‘strong God’, and especially the superior captain, to whom he granted victory. Thus the Frankish Clovis, Edwin of Northumbria and the Vikings converted—all of whom were baptised after having cast a vow and carried out a slaughter. And just as old Odin was considered a ‘God and lord of victory’ and Wotan (Odin’s name in the south) was considered a warrior God, so Christ is now seen as the same. He occupies the place of the ancient Gods of battle, he is politicised and mythologised, presenting him ‘almost as a national God’ (Heinsius). And from now on it will be a matter of honour for each Christian king to fight ‘the barbarians, who by their very condition as pagans are out of the order of the world’.

The Franks, educated in believing fanaticism, considered it their duty and right to ‘fight for Christ’ (Zollner). And still in the 7th and 8th centuries the Frankish Christians had themselves buried with their weapons, under the old pagan belief of survival after death. On a tombstone found in the Frankish cemetery of Niederdollendorf, near Bonn there is even a risen Christ holding in his right hand the spear, the Germanic sign of sovereignty, instead of the staff of the cross.

It is understandable that the Old Testament, often so bloody, was in tune with the men of the Middle Ages better than the partly pacifist New Testament; and it is understood that the Old Testament kings were exalted by proposing them as models of the Frankish princes, who liked to compare themselves with them. For the historian Ewig, this constitutes a new stage ‘in the Christianisation of the idea of the king’…

Among the Carolingians, decisive victories were frequently attributed to the attendance of St. Peter. ‘But now rest assured’, declares Pepin to the papal legate Serge in the battle against the Bavarians, ‘because due to the intervention of St. Peter, Prince of the Apostles, by divine decree Bavaria and the Bavarians belong to the sovereignty of the Franks’. Even minor achievements, such as the conquest of a fortress or even the discovery of a fountain during the war against the Saxons in 772 are presented as great divine miracles. But when misfortune befell—and it happened so often!—the priests were never troubled. Then the misfortune, the catastrophe, was a punishment from god for little faith and the overflow of vices. With this theology the Church has been deceiving itself until today through vicissitudes of all kinds…
The weed of the past

As a rule the Germans did not convert individually, but rather in a cooperative and tribal way. And that because, unlike the Greeks and educated Romans, the ‘barbarians’ easily accepted the Church’s tutoring without the cultural and historical-religious depth with which their Christian ‘converters’ presented the stories… In a not excessively laborious way, a great many ‘barbarians’ were subdued, who soon revered respectfully all the ‘holy’ priests and monks and were deeply impressed by exorcisms, ceremonies and miracles. With faith they welcomed such strange mysteries, dogmas and with fearful devotion put themselves at the service of that arrogant southern shamanism, seemingly animated only by the desire to make the Church rich and powerful, for the salvation of their souls, out of the horror of fire from hell and longing for paradise.

______ 卐 ______

Editor’s interpolated note: For a clip within a movie
depicting the baptism of an ancient Germanic see: here.

______ 卐 ______

Evangelism took place unevenly, outside the cities at a slower pace, for although the pagan Franks did not usually put up much resistance, from time to time, and especially in the countryside, they stubbornly indulged in the destruction of their town idols. In the religious field, man is especially conservative. And just as the peasants still do today—the inhabitants of the towns remain more firmly in Christianity—, so also at the end of Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages it was the peasants who persisted the longest in paganism. The Germans were mostly peasants, and in Austria the pagan Franks and Germans were more numerous than the native Christians. This religion was an urban religion and since it became a state religion it was also the religion of the feudal and ruling circles, who sought above all their own benefit. For a long time the peasants persisted in their traditional beliefs, in their divinities, and above all in their Gallic triad: the cult of Jupiter, Mercury and Apollo. And even after they had ‘converted’ they returned again and again to the veneration—undoubtedly much more beautiful and coherent—of trees, stones and fountains.

For centuries synods lashed out at pagan customs, from the Council of Valence (374) until well into the 9th century. Only between the synod of Orleans (511) and that of Paris (829) did the canons of at least nineteen episcopal assemblies launched diatribes against the beliefs and practices of peasant paganism, which preserved the tradition with much greater tenacity than the accommodative nobility. The Germans had a natural piety, so to speak, not camouflaged or imposed, but identical to their lifestyle. They had a natural religion with clearly pantheistic features, marked by the worship of the Gods of the forest, the mountain, the fountains, the rivers and the sea, the veneration of the Sun, light, water, trees and springs; deep down, as it has been known today, a thousand times more coherent veneration than the Christian faith in spirits, at whose dictates a technocratic and hypertrophic civilisation has brought nature almost to ruin…
‘Demonstrative destruction’

During the Merovingian period certain problems of the power of the Christian god often came to the fore in evangelisation: on the one hand, ‘miracles’; on the other, the destruction of pagan places of worship. The images of the Gods—through unpunished annihilation—were easily demonstrated as the powerless work of man, while the ‘spiritual’ Christian god reigned untouchable over the clouds of heaven. Besides, the pagan Franks were generally tolerant and did not have a priestly caste as they faced a fanatical ecclesiastical organisation, which did not back down from forced baptisms, although it is true that at least in the beginning it was fair enough for the church that a formal condemnation of the old beliefs was uttered with a confession from the lips of the new faithful. R. W. Southern accurately describes medieval Europe as a coercive society, in which each person triumphed by baptism. But that was not all; soon the demolition of pagan temples and altars began as well…

St. Gal, an uncle of Saint Gregory of Tours and later Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, being a priest and ‘companion’ of Theuderic I, the eldest son of Clovis, reduced to ashes in Cologne a pagan temple with all the ‘idols’, and only with great difficulty could the king save him from the fury of the peasants… Around 550 Deacon Wulflaicus induced the peasants of the city of Trier to demolish an imposing statue of Diana (originally no doubt of Ar-duinna, the Celtic Goddess), whom the people adored. As he was too weak the peasants did it for him, after he had ceaselessly weakened the will of ordinary people. ‘Well, the other images, which were smaller, he had already smashed them personally’. Without a doubt, miracles also happened there.

Some of the Christian saints known in the fight against paganism became arsonists and robbers. In Tyrol St. Vigilius, Bishop of Trent, worked ‘with fervent zeal for the spread of Christianity’ (Sparber) until one day he destroyed in Rendenatal a highly revered one, which stood on a steep rock, a statue of Saturn. About four-hundred irritated peasants, ‘heathen, stubborn and ferocious’ stoned him. In Italy many dozen churches are dedicated to him. In Monte Cassino St. Benedict (died 543), the ‘father of the western monasticism’, and whose severity caused several assassination attempts against him by his first monks and a Florentine priest, went on rage against the ancient temple of Apollo, the last temple of that God that history remembers. Benedict still found pagans there, cut down their sacred groves and destroyed the sculpture and the altar; but still in 1964 Pope Paul VI named him patron of Europe…

One of the fiercest fighters against paganism in Western Europe was Martin of Tours (died 397). Despite the stubborn resistance sometimes manifested by the peasants, with the help of his henchmen of his monastic horde he razed the temples, tore down the stones of the Druids and cut down sacred oaks, often viciously defended. ‘He trampled on altars and idols’ according to Sulpicius Severus. And yet the saint was ‘a man of admirable meekness and patience; from his eyes radiated a gentle serenity and an imperturbable peace…’ (Walterscheid, with imprimatur). This champion of faith undoubtedly had the best requirements for the annihilation of paganism. He had crowned a storming career in the Roman army (Julian being the emperor) and had started his Christian career as an ejector of demons. Significantly, he believed he saw the devil in the figure of Jupiter, Mercury and even Venus and Minerva, having otherwise the firm conviction that Satan was hiding in the ‘idols’.

Due to his ‘resurrections of the dead’ Martin of Tours became a bishop, later becoming the saint of the Merovingian kings and Carolingian emperors, to end up being the patron saint of the French. Even today 425 villages in France bear his name. The name of an arsonist, a thief, who ruined what was holiest and destroyed all the temples, became the ‘symbol of the Frankish imperial church’ and, even more, ‘an integral part of the imperial culture of the Franks’ (Bosi).

His international fame was owed to the murderous king Clovis, who had enormous veneration for Martin; for his cause he beat a soldier of his own to death, who had caught some hay in the fields of the man of god: ‘Where are our prospects of victory if we offend Saint Martin?’ On their military expeditions the Merovingian princes wore this man’s legendary cloak as a holy relic. Oaths were formulated on it and alliances were made. The place in which the cloak was kept was called capella (diminutive of cape), and the clerical who watched over it capellanus. Such is the origin of the words ‘chapel’ and ‘chaplain’, that with small variations have entered all modern languages… And, as in all the places where Martin of Tours had razed pagan centres of worship he immediately had Christian buildings built on the ruins, including the first Gallic monastery (Ligugé), still considered today as ‘the precursor of Western monasticism’ (Viller Rahner). The destruction of Gentile temples is certified by many ecclesiastical sources.

The monasteries were preferably built on the ruins of destroyed pagan temples. Thus arose, for example, Saint Bavo Church in Ghent, Saint Médard in Cambrai, the monastery of Wulfilaic in Eposium or Fleury-sur-Loire, which occupied the place of an ancient Druid sanctuary of the Gauls. The Martyrium of St. Vincent de Agen, erected as early as the 4th century, evidently stood on a pagan plot of consecrated ground. In Cologne, where perhaps Irenaeus of Lyons preached Christianity, a vast pagan necropolis has been found under the church of Saint Ursula.

Although in the West many temples and many altars were simply removed, among Franks, Saxons and Friesians the Church burned or completely destroyed the pagan sanctuaries, turned the places of sacrifice into cattle gullies and cut down sacred trees… Together, State and Church promoted the spread of the new faith and the annihilation of the old beliefs. Thus King Childebert I states, in a constitution of the year 554 ‘in agreement, no doubt, with the bishops’ (A. Hauck): ‘The pagan idols of the fields and the images dedicated to the demons must be removed immediately, and no one can prevent bishops from destroying them’.

In the following century Pope Boniface V (619-625) spread Christianity throughout England and wrote to Edwin, King of the Angles, in these terms: ‘You should destroy those whom you have hitherto considered Gods, being made of earthly material, with all zeal they must be smashed and shattered to pieces’. And so, shortly thereafter, in 627, Coifi, converted archpriest of Northumbria, broke a spear in a temple.

(Left, the high priest Coifi profanes ‘the Temple of the Idols’, from James William Edmund Doyle’s A Chronicle of England.)

The Concilium Germanicum, the first council convened in 742-743 in the Germanic territory of the Frankish empire, also provided that ‘the people of God should not promote anything pagan, but reject and abhor all filthiness of the Gentiles’.

Categories
Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s criminal history, 127

 

INDEX TO THE FOURTH VOLUME

 

Panoramic view

Chapter 1. The Christianisation of the Germans

Chapter 2. Clovis, founder of the great Frankish empire

Chapter 3. The sons of Clovis

Chapter 4. The invasion of the Lombards

Chapter 5. The last Merovingians

Chapter 6. The conversion of the Visigoths to Catholicism

Chapter 7. Pope Gregory I (590-604)

Chapter 8. Brunichilde, Clotaire II and Dagobert I

Chapter 9. The Church in the Merovingian period

Chapter 10. The rise of the Carolingians

Chapter 11. Saint Boniface, ‘apostle of the Germans’

Chapter 12. Papacy insurrection and iconoclastic struggles

Chapter 13. The formation of the Church-State through war

Chapter 14. The ‘Donation of Constantine’

Chapter 15. Charles I, called Charlemagne

Chapter 16. Charlemagne and his wars

Categories
Carolingian dynasty Catholic Church Charlemagne Constantinople Destruction of Germanic paganism Eastern Orthodox Church Franks Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty

Christianity’s Criminal History, 126

For the context of this translation see
the previous instalment of this series.

Volume 4. Early Middle Ages

From King Clovis (ca. 500) to the
death of Charles ‘the Great’ (814)

‘For a long time Christ had already taken a look at the Germanic peoples… A new spring dawned on the sky of the Church’. —Leo Rüger, Catholic theologian

‘The life of medieval Christianity is impregnated, and even completely saturated, in its relations by religious conceptions. There is no thing or action that is not constantly related to Christ and the faith. Everything is built on a religious conception of reality, and we find ourselves before an incredible development of inner faith’. —Johan Huizinga

 

PANORAMIC VIEW

The divisions in historical times are not fixed in advance. They were not decreed in a ‘higher’ place, to be carried out later by humanity. Rather, the history of man is an unheard-of chaos of stories, and later he tries to put a certain order in the zigzagging course of events and the bewildering diversity of tendencies, reducing everything to perfectly clear schemes. It introduces structures and caesuras, and thus the whole appears as an expression of forces that act coherently, and in this way everything is presented as if it had to be that way and could not have been otherwise; as if, for example, the Roman Empire would only have occurred so that Europe could inherit it. That is a vision that favours our taste for periodisation, and that can undoubtedly also encourage it. In reality, all this delimitation and temporal ordering, all these supposed fixed points, indicative data and evolution lines are nothing more than the result of certain—or, better to say, very uncertain—points of view, of precarious attempts at orientation: pure constructions to which people have accommodated, either by giving them meaning or not.

The ‘High Middle Ages’, a period that runs from approximately the 6th to the 10th centuries, is a period of violent change and transformation. But it is also a time of compromises or, to put it more elegantly, of assimilation, of continuity, a period of decadence and transition, of old heritage and a new beginning: in it the constitution of the West, of Europe, takes place, and of Germany, the intertwining of ancient Christian and Germanic traditions, the separation of Byzantium, the Eastern Church, and the arrival of Islam. And it is an age in which politics and religion are inseparable.

The alliances of the popes with the states also change. But, as always when they turn and change direction with time, Rome continually seeks to cling to the strongest power: Byzantium, the Ostrogoths, the Lombards, the Franks, and it takes advantage of them…
 
From convinced subjects to convinced lords

In Rome the temples collapsed, the imperial palace collapsed, in the theatres and the gigantic baths the ruins piled up and the weeds and ivy grew. And the priests took advantage. The old bath chairs became Episcopal chairs, the sumptuous alabaster and porphyry bathtubs became baptismal fonts and dubious urns of martyrs. Marble wall coverings, precious mosaic floors, beautiful columns, and stones were removed from ancient villas to enrich Christian temples. The pagan temples became Christian churches and the Rome of the Caesars became a clerical city, in which the religious (or what was considered as such) prevailed; and in which all civil festivals disappeared in favour of ecclesiastical festivities. The belief in the imminent end of the world was generalised to such an extent, and such proportions acquired the privileges of the priests, that Emperor Maurice forbade in 592 the entry of soldiers into monasteries and civil servants into the clerical state.

The civil power of the popes—which was the basis of the future pontifical state or the Church—sprouted from ruins: from the rubble of the Western Roman Empire, thanks to the impotence of Byzantium and an ever-growing curial ambition for dominance. Already in the 5th century the bishops of Rome, supposed successors of Jesus who did not want any kingdom of this world or that his disciples carry money in the bag, were the largest landowners of the Roman Empire. And the collapse of that empire only accelerated the rise of the bishops of Rome inheriting entirely the decadent imperial structure.

Under the Merovingians, in the early days of the Byzantine Empire, bishops gained power and influence also in ‘worldly’ or civil affairs, throughout the communal sphere. They control state jobs and trades, urban fortifications, the supply of troops; moreover, they intervene in the appointment of provincial governors.

All disgrace and decay are transformed by the Roman bishops into their prosperity, each failure is turned into a personal advantage, whether it is a disaster in the kingdom of Caesar or the kingdom of God. And even from the misery of the Longobard invasion they know how to make a fortune. First they distance themselves from Byzantium with the help of the Longobard swords—and Byzantium was weakened by the multiple pressure of the ‘barbarians’—; later they will destroy the Lombards thanks to the Franks… always on the side of the robbers, with a parasitic strategy, such as the world had never known.

It is true that even up to 787 the popes date their letters by the years of the reign of the Byzantine emperors, but already under Gregory II (715-731) the Byzantine governor was expelled from Rome on the occasion of the ‘Roman revolution’, just as the Byzantine army of Benevento and Spoleto was expelled with the help of course of the Lombard troops. After the Lombards had contributed to the excessive power of the popes, they used the Franks to annihilate them. From then on they collaborated and prospered with the Frankish emperors. And when they felt strong enough, they wanted to be the lords of the empire too.

Until 753 the Roman pope was a devoted subject (to a greater or lesser degree) of Constantinople. But soon in Rome time is no longer counted for the emperor’s years, imperial coins are no longer minted, imperial images are removed from churches, and the emperor’s name is no longer mentioned in liturgical service. The pope, on the contrary, allies himself with the Germanic king against those who had hitherto been his sovereigns. And to the Germanic king the pope confers imperial privileges, among which there are some completely new ones, and even offers him the imperial crown. It is a policy that benefits the pope above all, since it almost makes him the ‘father of the ruling family’.

The imperial coronation of Charles in 800 in Rome by Pope Leo III was an unlawful act, a provocation to the Byzantine emperor, until then the only legal supreme head of the Christian world, and in Constantinople it could only be interpreted as a rebellion. In fact, the turn of the popes towards the Franks caused the definitive break with Byzantium.

And although in 812 Emperor Michael I Rhangabe recognised Charles ‘the Great’ as imperator of the West and as a peer sovereign, deep down Byzantium always considered the Western empire as a usurpation. At Lothair’s coronation in 823, the pope gave him the sword for the defence and protection of the Church: and gradually Rome brought the Roman-Germanic kings under his influence. Indeed, after the fall of the western Roman monarchs, new symbioses were introduced with the new rulers, with Theodoric, Clovis, Pepin, and Charles. But also the future great Germanic empires of Alfred (871-899), Otto I (936- 973) and Olaf the Saint (1015-1028), who promoted the spread of Christianity with barbaric methods, could only be established on a Christian basis, not to mention the medieval Germanic empire.

That Holy Roman Empire certainly had hardly anything Roman and absolutely nothing sacred and holy, unless (with good reason) like Helvétius, Nietzsche and others the compendium of the criminal is seen in the sacred. Be that as it may, by liquidating the relative achievements of Arians and pagans and by obtaining a state of its own, the papacy achieved the constant enlargement of both its power and its possessions.

Especially at the beginning of the Middle Ages the chaining of State and Church was very close. Not only did civil and canon law have the same basis, but clerical wishes and demands also found expression in civil law. The decrees of the ‘mixed council’ were valid for the State and the Church alike.

The bishops also came from the aristocracy and were related to it as brothers, nephews and children of the civic nobility. And with it they shared the same political and economic interests. Consequently, throughout the Middle Ages they were also drawn into the struggle of the lords, they fought with the kings against the emperor and with the emperor against the pope, and with one pope against the other for 171 years. They fought with the diocesan clergy against the monks and also against their colleagues, giving them battle in the field, in the streets and the churches with the dagger and with the poison and in every imaginable way. High treason and rebellion were for the clergy, according to the Catholic theologian Kober, ‘a completely common phenomenon’.

Faced with the States and the so-called authorities, the great Christian Church had in practice no other principle than this: it always pacts with the most profitable power. In all its state contacts the Church was only guided by taking advantage of the situation (in her language, guided by ‘God’). Opportunism was always the supreme principle. Only when that Church achieved what it wanted was it also willing to give something and naturally as little as possible, even if it promised a lot. ‘You annihilate the heretics with me, and I will annihilate the Persians with you’, the patriarch Nestorius invited the emperor in his inauguration speech in 428 without imagining that he himself would soon be condemned as a ‘heretic’…

And with their sights set on their own power, the fought Catholic emperors and princes also kept Church and State closely united, despite tensions, conflicts and confrontations of all kinds, from the end of the Old Age to the time of the Protestant Reformation. Throughout more than a millennium the history of the two institutions could not be separated. Furthermore, ‘At the epicentre of all interests, whether they were spiritual or political, was the Church; to her belonged the action and omission, politics and legislative power, all the driving forces of the world were at her service and from her they derived their prerogatives. The culture and history of the Middle Ages are confused with the Church’.

With its powerful material protection, its organisational strength and participation in the legal and political-state life, its influence grew continuously. The pre-Constantinian Catholic Church strictly forbade clergymen to accept public office; but already in late antiquity a bishop of Gaul was entrusted with certain military options, such as building a fortress. And what was lost in the south to the Arabs, the ‘infidels’, was offset by the spread of Christianity northward.

Under the Merovingians, Christianity became the ideological deciding power. There were almost formal dynasties of bishops, to the point that Chilperic I famously uttered the phrase: ‘No one governs more than the bishops; that is our glory’.

Also among the Arian Ostrogoths the episcopate assumed state functions. In early Middle Ages England, ecclesiastical prelates are members of the diets, statesmen, and field marshals. Together with the regent they define the law, they are his first advisers; they elect the kings, overthrow them and raise them. Also in Italy bishops and abbots acted, along with the counts, as administration officials and, together with the lords of the civil aristocracy, acted as legislators. It is evident that from the middle of the 6th century to the end of the 7th century, public life there was totally marked and dominated by the Church.

Also later, if we look beyond the period to which we are referring, the Church survived its allies and overcame all the collapses. One power was sinking, and she was already rising with the next; or at least she was prepared for it. It was indeed only a state together with other states, but her ‘metaphysics’ was ahead of all of them. And while she always pretended the religious, the spiritual visions while proclaiming to the whole world, she aspired to the political dominion of the world.

Relatively early, popes and bishops had already tried to make the state their bailiff, submitting it to themselves. Some Church Fathers, such as Ambrose or John Chrysostom make it clear that way. But it is Pope Gelasius I (492-496) who only a few generations later proclaims with the greatest arrogance his ‘doctrine of the two powers’, which was to have such relevance in world history. Shortly after, the royal power will have to ‘piously submit the neck’ to the sacred authority of the bishops.

Augustine, however, does not yet know the doctrine of subordination of the State. At a time when the Church lived in harmony with it, the saint was able to assure—heaven knows how many times—that the Christian faith reinforced the loyalty of citizens to the state and that it created obedient and willing subjects. It was totally indifferent about who the ruler was. ‘What does it matter which government man lives under, who must die anyway? The only thing that matters is that the rulers do not induce him to impiety and injustice!’ It is true that if ‘justice’ was lacking, and that means here the Church, the bishop, for Augustine governments were hardly anything other than ‘great gangs of robbers’.

But in the Middle Ages the ambition of the clergy to dominate grew along with their power… If at the beginning the papacy defended the doctrine of the two powers or authorities, the auctoritas sacra pontificum and the regalis potestas which complemented each other, then the doctrine of the ‘two swords’ was later introduced (duo gladii). According to the Roman affirmation, Christ would have granted to the papacy the two swords, the spiritual and civil power; in a word, it would have given her hegemony. For when the Roman pontiffs seized power and became sovereigns of a State, they no longer needed a strong hereditary Germanic monarchy, nor did they need the monarchical unity of Italy, which for the same reason they fought with all means to its scope, even by force of arms.

The objective of the papacy was then the political domination of the world under spiritual slogans. While it exercised a spiritual guardianship over the masses and while it referred the whole of life to a future kingdom of God and the obtaining of eternal happiness, it did not stop pursuing more and more material interests. The papacy emancipated itself from the western empire and in a secular struggle it made the Hohenstaufen bite the dust to become sovereign of everyone and everything. A true parasite, who after having drunk the blood of others, after having perched on high with lies and falsehoods and after having been eliciting more and more rights and powers, stripped them and even took up arms, and with celestial speeches continued to worry about its earthly power in an extremely brutal way.

In theory, the Pauline doctrine of the divine institution of authority and the duty of general submission became fundamental for relations with the State. The obedience that is preached there, the absolute docility of the subjects, contrasts openly with the hatred against the State so widespread among the first Christians, but it has continued to be decisive to this day. In this way the Church wins over the respective rulers, with whom it has to collaborate to keep itself in power.

With Gregory VII (author of the Dictatus papae), who in 1076 began the fight against the emperor, who claimed rights over Corsica and Sardinia, over the Norman kingdom of southern Italy, over France, Hungary, Dalmatia, Denmark and Russia, there are already perceived certain resonances of a theory, according to which the pope has all power, including the right to dispose of the States. Gregory and his successors claim at least one indirect potestas indirecta in temporalice that the bull Unam sanctam (1302) of Boniface VIII raises to a potestas directa in temporalia on which the Lateran Council of 1517 still insists, and from which only in 1885 will Leo XIII officially distance himself.

According to Gregory VII and his successors in the late Middle Ages, and always in connection with Augustine’s thought, imperial power has its origin in the devil. It is a ‘carnal’ power as are generally all worldly principalities. But the diabolical power can be turned into blessing through the forgiving, healing and saving power of the papacy, through subordination to the Priest-King. Furthermore, the founding of every new state in this world tyrannised by the devil is only legitimised by papal recognition. The pope appears there as the sole supporter of truth and justice, as the sovereign lord and judge of the world. Everything must render obedience to the successor of Peter. This is how the pope wrote:

Whoever is separated from Peter cannot obtain any victory in the struggle or any happiness in the world, for with rigour as hard as the steel he destroys and smashes everything that comes his way. Nobody and nothing escapes its power.

Categories
Judea v. Rome Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty

Christianity’s Criminal History, 125

Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums
(Christianity’s Criminal History)

As I said recently, the masthead to understand the direction of this site is the essay translated into English ‘Rome against Judea; Judea against Rome’. This text is not academic but an essay that a Spaniard published for his website under the penname of Evropa Soberana. Those who doubt the historical veracity of Soberana’s essay can read some passages that we have translated from Karlheinz Deschner (1924-2014) about the first centuries of Christianity.

But like Soberana’s essay, our translation of those passages taken from Deschner’s work, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, does not include the hundreds of footnotes, with their respective bibliographic references, that appear in the German historian’s maximum opus. My idea is not to translate Kriminalgeschichte but to show in this translation of Deschner that what Soberana says can be supported by academic references. The serious scholar interested in verifying the facts mentioned in ‘Rome against Judea; Judea contra Roma’ can acquire the first volumes of Deschner’s work in German and work from the primary sources that the author cites.

Unlike the more formal translations, my purpose in this humble blog has been simply to popularise the true history of Christianity. Thus, our translations of Deschner are a bridge, so to speak, between the revealing yet relatively short essay of Soberana—a ninety-page book—and Deschner’s massive ten-volume study.

(Laocoön and His Sons. The sculpture that once was in the palace of Emperor Titus represents the tragic agony of the Ancient World: classic, athletic, wise, beautiful, courageous and close to the gods, at the hands of the Eastern serpent.)

My Spanish-English translation of ‘Rome against Judea; Judea against Rome’ ends with the defeat of the classical world by the Judeo-Christians during the reign of Theodosius II, a spiritual heir of the absolute intolerance of Yahweh before any cult that was not Hebrew. From the next entry of Christianity’s Criminal History on we will begin the translation of some passages from Deschner’s fourth volume that begins in the High Middle Ages: a book that covers from King Clovis to the death of Charlemagne. (Clovis founded the first dynasty of France, the Merovingian, and was also the first Christian king. This is why most of the French kings were called Louis, a modern form of Clouis.)

The fact that partial or full translations of Deschner’s ten volumes have been published in Italian, Spanish, Greek, Polish and Russian but not in English* speaks about the addicted state in which English speakers find themselves concerning the religion of their parents.

___________

(*) The translation that this site provides cannot reach bookstores or libraries in North America, the UK or Australia.

Categories
Catholic Church Charlemagne Christian art Constantinople Destruction of Greco-Roman world Fair Race’s Darkest Hour (book) Friedrich Nietzsche Goths Individualism Judea v. Rome Karlheinz Deschner Kevin MacDonald Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Martin Luther Miscegenation Old Testament Painting Portugal Racial right Reconquista Reformation Richard Carrier Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Kevin MacDonald’s apologetics

Update of September 16, 2020: This essay has been edited for inclusion in my book Daybreak. I would suggest reading the much-corrected text instead of the text below (see ‘Two essential books’, which contains a link to the Daybreak PDF).
 

______ 卐 ______

 

Kevin MacDonald’s Preface to Giles Corey’s
The Sword of Christ (originally published: here)

Slightly edited, this entry copies and pastes the previous entries from the first to facilitate the visitor to read them in due order.
 

§ 1

In this first entry about such book-review I just want to comment on a couple of subjects: the painting that appears in MacDonald’s book-review (see above) and what a commenter said on Counter-Currents.

As we can see in the comments section, several Counter-Currents commenters are either Christians or sympathetic to Judeo-Christianity, so they liked McDonald’s pro-Christian essay-review and some of them even have requested Corey’s book. One exception was commenter Asdk:

If we were to apply Kevin Macdonald’s perspective on the culture of critique to modern ideologies, Christianity would be very easily understood. Christianity is an ideology created by Jews to benefit the Jewish people, to break the feeling of tribal union of the peoples who are rivals to Jewish hegemony…

We can already imagine how different white nationalism would be if the webzine admins of Counter-Currents and The Occidental Observer were like Asdk!

Regarding Giovanni Gasparro’s painting, The Martyrdom of St. Simon of Trento reproduced at the beginning of this entry, it was painted this very year in old baroque style. The idea to create such painting reminds me of one of my favourite paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, reproduced below. The idea is the same: the bad guys—Jews—surround the child to be sacrificed or the divine rabbi to be crucified!

Gasparro’s 2020 painting at the top of this article measures seven by five feet, and references a blood libel that led to the execution of several Jews in 1475. The scandal (some would call it moral panic) started around the disappearance and death of a Christian boy in Trento named Simonino. He was later made a saint and the day of his death, March 24, was included in the Roman martyrology—hence the cherubs in Gasparro’s painting—until its removal in 1965.

In his article MacDonald tells us ‘This [blood libel] is a topic that I have never written about… However, we should not be surprised to find that such practices occurred’.

I am not going to take issue with him because what I want is to answer his Christian apologetics, not this new approach to the JQ. I will limit myself to point out that on the subject of blood libel I had already written in 2013 commenting on a brainwashing, politically-correct and philo-Semitic Spanish TV series, Isabel (Isabella I of Castile): times when MacDonald was apparently more sceptical about libel claims.
 

§ 2

MacDonald starts his review with these words:

Giles Corey has written a book that should be read by all Christians as well as white advocates of all theoretical perspectives including especially those who are seeking a spiritual foundation that is deeply embedded in the history and culture of Europeans.

White advocates of all theoretical perspectives? What would Revilo Oliver and William Pierce, geniuses so critical of Christianity, have opined about Corey’s book? What would Alex Linder opine today? Spiritual foundation embedded in European culture? MacDonald ignores the difference between Western Christian Civilisation and European civilisation, as explained in an article so old in this site (‘The Red Giant’) that it already appeared in the previous incarnation of it (in Blogspot, in the previous decade).

MacDonald also says about Corey’s book: ‘This is excellent scholarship’. If the scholarship is excellent, blood libel had to be historical. But as I said in my previous post I don’t want to discuss the Jewish Question but the Christian Question. MacDonald wrote: ‘Corey is well aware that contemporary Christianity has been massively corrupted’.

Completely false. Christianity today is as legitimate a form of Christianity as the others. Previous Christianisms were based on St. Augustine, and in the case of the Catholic Church, also on St. Thomas Aquinas. The Christianity of Pope Francis today, like the Christianity of the medieval St. Francis of Assisi, is based more on the direct message of the gospel. There is no true Christianity and an heretic Christianity: only Christians use anathemas and excommunicate each other, always claiming that their faction is the true Christianity. For non-Christians like us, St. Francis was as authentic Christian as St. Augustine, however different they were in their politics.

On the Counter-Currents thread, commenter Asdk added the following:

It sounds ridiculous, but in the middle of the Christian era, the Pope did it with the pre-Columbian natives; today the descendants of such an aberration populate most of Latin America and soon they will be the new majority of North America.

What happened in Latin America is relevant: something that I have said so many times in the racialist forums that I gave up because nobody was listening.

And they don’t listen for the simple reason that the miscegenation on a colossal scale in this American continent, perpetrated by the Spanish and Portuguese since the 16th century, just when they persecuted the Jews and the crypto-Jews, is such a demonstration that there is a Christian problem that it doesn’t even have to be argued: only to point out the events that occurred in the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking parts of the continent.

Last month I reproduced this image of a Spaniard
marrying an Indian with the approval of the Church.

MacDonald says the corruption is recent. How does he explain the greatest genetic catastrophe that occurred in his continent, when Jewry was being persecuted by the Inquisition? The trick MacDonald and white nationalists do has been to ignore history south of the Rio Grande—and history north of the Rio Grande I should say insofar New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California and Texas, before the 1840s war, belonged to Mexico and previously to New Spain!

For MacDonald to say that Christianity has been ‘massively corrupted’ he must be ignoring, of necessity, the history of those states that now belong to his country, since the New Spaniards never forbade interbreeding. Why doesn’t MacDonald see that more than half a billion mestizos in Latin America are the direct result of marriages between Iberian whites, Indians and blacks—marriages that both the Spanish crown and the Church approved?

The answer is clear: if he dared to see the history of New Spain his paradigm would collapse immediately, since it would be obvious that alongside a Jewish problem there has existed a huge Christian problem.

In the 1530s a Pope bull allowed the bachelor Iberians in the continent to marry Amerind women. This happened only a decade after the conquest of the Aztec Empire. As Asdk says, Christianity is blind to racial matters. And the Church did not give a damn about the biological havoc that such bull would cause. Incidentally, the Catholic Church was so powerful in New Spain that by the end of the 17th century it owned more than half of its territories. Like today’s elites, it was in the Church’s interest to rule over low-breed mestizos rather than high-IQ Aryans.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. This epigram by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in 1849 means ‘The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing’. Yes, there is no such a thing as ‘contemporary Christianity has been massively corrupted’ as MacDonald wrote. Only an ignorant of history in the American continent can say such a thing.
 

§ 3

Comment by Robert Morgan

C.T.: ‘I would be very interested to know what you think of that article (KMD’s review of Corey’s book)’.

The first thing that stands out is that MacDonald appears to have changed his opinion. I recall him writing at one point something to the effect of “Christianity isn’t necessarily the way forward”. Now he enthusiastically endorses a Christian revival, writing “I agree entirely with Corey’s conclusions and recommendations for a revival centered around the adaptive aspects of Christianity…”

C.T.: What strikes me as incredible is that Tom Sunic and others have told MacDonald that it is time to look at the role Christianity played in white decline. But KMD doesn’t seem to have the slightest intention of responding to these criticisms. He just ignores them’.

Yes, that’s true. His monomaniacal focus on Jews leads him astray, and he has always been loathe to examine the weakness of his philosophical underpinnings. Reading him, I get no sense that anything except what the Jews are doing is important. White people seem to exist for him only to be victims of the Jews.

I’ve already written about the inherent weakness of the Christian worldview, which is essentially a psychotic view of reality. Corpses come back to life, people aren’t really their bodies, but instead are “souls” trapped inside those bodies, demons not only exist but can somehow possess or take over those souls and bodies, things are conjured out of thin air, etc. Yet this is the worldview that MacDonald thinks is unequivocally good and “adaptive” because, after collapsing Western civilization once, and after a thousand years, it led historically to, among other things, the Enlightenment, the Age of Exploration, colonization of the New World, and science and high technology.

But these developments contained within themselves racially destructive consequences. Colonization of the New World caused race mixing, and out of control technology is causing mass extinctions of plant and animal species, perhaps irreversibly damaging the climate and ecosystem. This is supposed to be adaptive? Or again, consider the cultural consequences of scientific birth control technologies and abortion, which have done more to bring about the destruction of the nuclear family than any amount of Jewish animus. How was that adaptive?

From a philosophical point of view, MacDonald is being exceedingly naive, if not disingenuous. Whatever he approves of is adaptive. Anything he disapproves of isn’t. It’s the same approach he uses to Christianity. If Kevin MacDonald personally approves of it, it’s “good” Christianity (e.g., Luther’s disparaging comments about Jews, or Chrysostom’s), whereas if it’s a Christian ideology he doesn’t find it to his taste (e.g. the Scofield Bible, Christian Zionism, Christian churches sponsoring immigration, etc.) it’s been “corrupted”. These verdicts are absolute and eternal, too.

There’s no sense here that conditions may change, and behavior that was once adaptive may later be maladaptive; no sense that some of the “bad” things may have benefits, just as the supposedly “good” things contained racially destructive consequences. Christianity itself, notably, may be the most prominent of the things that were “bad” but had benefits; something that once was of use, but now is only an impediment. MacDonald’s view of it is static, not dynamic, and that’s a weakness.

No one can tell what is adaptive or maladaptive in advance. One can only pass judgement on that in retrospect, and even that judgement will unavoidably be from a particular point of view containing various assumptions and moral values. It’s not too surprising then that MacDonald, with his Christian moral values, praises Christianity as the way forward.
 

§ 4

MacDonald wrote:

Until the twentieth century, Christianity served the West well. One need only think of the long history of Christians battling to prevent Muslims from establishing a caliphate throughout the West—Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours, the Spanish Reconquista, the defeat of the Turks at the gates of Vienna. The era of Western expansion was accomplished by Christian explorers and colonists. Until quite recently, the flourishing of science, technology, and art occurred entirely within a Christian context.

In recent posts I have been talking about the need to rewrite history. This paragraph was only made possible by centuries of misinformation when it comes to historical facts.

I have read the only two stories that in English have been written from the point of view of racial preservation, that of William Pierce and that of Arthur Kemp. Since Pierce died before I woke up, I was only able to visit Kemp when he lived in a beautiful little town in England.

The only two stories that have been written under the POV of white advocacy run under one premise: Western civilisations have fallen due to the imperial phase that inevitably leads to miscegenation. (Of the two stories, only Pierce recommends extermination or expulsion of non-whites after having learned the tough lessons of history.)

One of my huge surprises when reading those two stories, Who We Are and March of the Titans, is that starting with a pro-white POV inverts many values that we had taken for granted in the more academic and conventional stories.

For example, it is striking to learn that the Greeks of the Dorian period were pure Nordids who came to the peninsula from the North. And something similar could be said of the first tribes that created the Roman Republic in the other European peninsula: they also were unmiscegenated Nordids. (He who wants to learn about the Nordic component of the founders of Greece and Rome in a single article could read a piece originally published in an American Renaissance periodical that I reposted: here.)

All of this had been kept from me by conventional historians simply because most of them have been Christians. And concerning more recent secular historians, they live under the sky of the ideas that led to the French Revolution regarding the equality of men: a doctrine breathed even in the American Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator…’

Only when the reader of history repudiates this egalitarian premise he is ready to understand history. Otherwise he might be a scholar but his historical knowledge will be contaminated with such a false worldview that distortion is unavoidable. And conventional books of history are so replete of distortions that after the Nazi period and the two preliminary stories referred to above we must, like them, start from scratch.

I don’t think MacDonald has read the Pierce or Kemp books. If he had read any of them, he would have realised that what he says in the paragraph above cannot be sustained from this scratching point of view.

The following is what MacDonald seems to ignore:

The Christian era began with a hostile takeover of classical culture—that is, white culture—by a sect of Levantine origin. In the 4th and 5th centuries of the common era, in a destructive outburst like the one ISIS has perpetrated in more recent times, the temples of the white gods and sculptures displaying Aryan beauty, were destroyed by Judeo-Christian fanatics along with entire libraries of ancient wisdom. Karlheinz Deschner devoted his entire life to studying the true history of Judeo-Christianity and I translated several passages from his ten-volume Christianity’s Criminal History (here). If someone does not have the time to read this translated book, let him read a single article that summarises the white apocalypse that the ancient world suffered at the hands of this Semitic cult (here).

I must say something about Charles Martel mentioned by MacDonald and the Spanish Reconquista. Given my Hispanic origins, the history of Spain as told by Pierce and Kemp powerfully caught my attention several years ago, when I read their books. Both mention something that left me cold: the Iberian Visigoths—pure whites of the Nordid type—were deceived by Christians to commit miscegenation: a little piece of information that won’t be easy to find in conventional histories.

Remember that the Goths were a Germanic people who played a major role in the fall of the Western Roman Empire. In the first centuries of our era the Iberian Goths burned at the stake their fellow whites that dared to mix their precious blood with mudbloods. But the king of Hispania Recceswinth committed the greatest blunder in Iberian history: a blunder still unrecognised by normie intellectuals and normie historians as a blunder: but a gigantic blunder nonetheless. By converting to Christianity Recceswinth abolished the long ban on miscegenation (which reminds me of the rigorous Spartan ban against miscegenation), which resulted in the immediate mongrelisation of the Visigoths. The king of Hispania’s decision allowed any person of any racial origin, as long as he professed Christianity, to intermarry with the Germanic Goths. Such rupture of the ancestral prohibition against miscegenation and worship of the enemy god (the god of the Jews) occurred just a few decades before their territories… were invaded by the Moors!

If you worship thine enemy’s god, thou art defeated;
Adopt the religion of his fathers, thou wilt be enslaved;
And if thou propagate with his daughters, thou art destroyed

This crucial page in the history of Spain would have to be studied in far greater depth than the preliminary ‘stories’ of Pierce and Kemp. But I suspect that the Visigoths would have been invincible if, with the benefit of hindsight, they had expelled or exterminated the mudbloods—mainly peoples of Hispania of Semitic origin (non-Jewish Semites had begun to invade the Iberian peninsula since the times of the Carthaginians!).

Hispania aside, if the Roman Empire had not decayed, and let us remember that Gibbon blames the Christians for it, Islam wouldn’t even have had a chance of its spectacular conquests that only the gates of Vienna stopped, that MacDonald mentions. By subscribing to the official story, MacDonald is viewing Christianity as our saviour before Islam, not as the cause of the power gap that occurred after the Christians destroyed the classical world (or tricked the Visigoths), leaving the remaining whites at the mercy of a primitive Arabic tribe.

On the Western achievements that MacDonald mentions in the quote above, he is framing them as achievements of the Christian spirit. Nothing farther from the truth!

The white man had to fight for centuries against the prohibitions of the Church to regain his right to scientific research, technology, and art uncontaminated with biblical passages or the lives of the saints. Now my history teacher comes to mind, whose brothers were blond, at Colegio Madrid. She told us that in New Spain they used the trick of putting covers of lives of saints on secular books imported from Europe so they could pass through customs. And this happened until the beginning of the 19th century! Again, MacDonald is ignorant about history down the south of Rio Grande.

Above I linked a PDF with my translations of some passages from Christianity’s Criminal History. Below I would like to quote pages 291-293 of that book to counter MacDonald’s naïve vision:

The Western world darkens more and more

Culture was highly esteemed in the 4th and 5th centuries. It was one of the legacies of antiquity and enjoyed an ‘almost religious veneration’ (Dannenbauer). Still in the year 360 a law of the emperor Constantius could declare that education was the supreme virtue. And really many noble families of that time, Gallic and Roman, were consecrated to it and particularly in the bosom of the Senatorial proceedings. But they were already simple custodians of the culture, to which they did not enrich. And everywhere there were circles and social forces of a very different kind, even in the highest positions. The Christian king Theodoric the Great was no longer able to write his own name on the documents: neither could most of the Christian princes. Theodoric wrote the four letters LEGI (‘I read it’) by means of an aureus mold expressly forged for him. The instruction of the Goth children was practically forbidden by him, since, as he seems to have said, he who trembled before the master’s blows would never know how to despise the cuts and rushes of the sword in battle.

In Gaul, apparently, where the school system had flourished from the beginning of the 2nd century until the end of the 4th century, public schools are disappearing over the course of the next century, no matter how much here and there, in Lyon, Vienne, Bordeaux and Clermont there still are schools of grammar and rhetoric in addition to, naturally, the private ones. But all the teachings, at least the literary, served exclusively for the collection of material for sermons and treatises, to deal with the Bible and for the consolidation of the faith. Scientific inquiry was already a thing of the past: it no longer counted or was appreciated. The knowledge of Greek, which for centuries was the requirement of every authentic culture, became a rarity. Even the Roman classics, such as Horace, Ovid and Catullus, were cited less and less.

Libanius, the champion of Hellenistic culture, the most famous professor of rhetoric of the century, complains about the aversion aroused by that profession. ‘They see’, he says, referring to his students, ‘that this cause is despised and thrown on the floor; that does not bring fame, power or wealth but a painful servitude under many lords, parents, mothers, pedagogues and other students, who put things upside down and believe that it is the teacher who needs them. When they see all this they avoid this depreciated profession like a boat the pitfalls’.

In the time of Augustine there are hardly any schools of philosophy in the West. Philosophy is frowned upon, it is a thing of the devil, the original father of all ‘heresy’, and it causes fear to the pious. Even in a centre of culture as important as Bordeaux philosophy is no longer taught. And even in the East, the largest and most important of the universities of the Roman Empire, that of Constantinople, has only one chair of philosophy out of a total of 31. The knowledge of something that had existed for a long time was lost in almost all areas. The spiritual horizon became increasingly narrower. Ancient culture languished from Gaul to Africa, while in Italy it practically disappeared. The interest in natural science vanished. Also jurisprudence, at least in the West, suffers ‘havoc’, an ‘astonishing demolition’ (Wieacker).

The bishop Paulinus of Nola, who died in 431, never read a historian: a typical attitude of the moment. Whole eras fall in the oblivion, for example, the time of the Roman emperors. The only renowned historian in the late 4th century is Ammianus Marcellinus, a non-Christian. Entire synods forbid the bishops to read ‘pagan’ books. In short: scientific research ceases; experimental testing stops; people think increasingly with less autonomy. A few decades later no doctor could heal Bishop Gregory de Tours, a man with a mind full of superstitions, but he could miraculously be healed through a drink of water with some dust taken from the tomb of St. Martin.

Only clerics will still read.
 

§ 5

St. John Chrysostom exhorting Aelia Eudoxia. Note how the Empress—the spouse of the Roman Emperor Arcadius—, in this painting by Jean-Paul Laurens, has people in her Byzantine entourage who are not whites.

Kevin MacDonald wrote:

Such individualism was not disastrously self-destructive. As Corey notes, “Christian universalism historically posed little to no danger to white survival because it was preached by whites living in a world ruled by whites; it was only in the multicultural Egalitarian Regime inseminated in the mid-twentieth century that Christian sacrifice was transformed into a call for racial suicide.”

Precisely because MacDonald, like most white nationalists who do not follow Pierce and Kemp, knows little of true history, he is unable to see that healthy religions promote the good of a tribe, and unhealthy religions, a phenomenon that appears in the imperial phase of a civilisation, forget what’s good for the tribe and start to speak solely and exclusively in individualistic terms, of ‘individual salvation’. Richard Carrier, whose book appears on the sidebar, has studied this phenomenon in several Mediterranean religions at the time of the decline of the Roman Empire, and MacDonald and those who believe that any form of universalism was not ‘disastrously self-destructive’ should become familiar with his work.

That religious individualism was toxic from the beginning is evident in the fact that in shifting from the good of the group to individualism (the Christian must think above all about the salvation of his soul), the foundations for miscegenation are laid. Once Constantine changed the name of the old Byzantium to Constantinople, the new capital of the Empire became a melting pot for all the races of the Mediterranean, in which the pure Nordid blood of the patrician Romans was forever lost.

MacDonald wrote:

Instead, Corey advocates a revitalization of Medieval Germanic Christianity based on, in the words of Samuel Francis, “social hierarchy, loyalty to tribe and place (blood and soil), world-acceptance rather than world-rejection, and an ethic that values heroism and military sacrifice.” This medieval Christianity preserved the aristocratic, fundamentally Indo-European culture of the Germanic tribes. This was an adaptive Christianity…

Adaptive Christianity, really? Some historians say Medieval Germanic Christianity started with Charlemagne, right? Kemp told me that he would rate Charlemagne well up in the top five most evil characters of European history. I recommend Thomas Hodgkin’s The Life of Charlemagne to those who have swallowed the Christian version of this evil man. If we keep in mind Deschner’s Christianity’s Criminal History we will see that even after the Aryan apocalypse of the 4th and 5th centuries, there were still many Germanic tribes in the 6th and 7th centuries who refused to worship the god of the Jews. Charlemagne forced these uncontaminated Nordids to worship the enemy god: a historical milestone related to that tardive metastasis, the philo-Semitic stage that the US is currently suffering.

MacDonald wrote:

My view, developed in Chapter 3 of Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism is that traditional Christian theology was fundamentally anti-Jewish and was developed as a weapon which was used to lessen Jewish economic and political power in the Roman Empire. Here Corey describes the writings of the fourth-century figure, St. John Chrysostom [see painting at the top of this § 5], who has a chapel dedicated to him inside St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome as well as a statue outside the building. His writings on Jews are nothing less than scathing and reflect long-term tensions between Jews and Greeks in Antioch. And Chrysostom was far from alone in his hatred… The traditional Church was certainly far from friendly toward Jews.

Despite the fact that the Muslim Jihadists are anti-Jewish, many contemporary Jews promote the Islamisation of Europe for the simple fact that the best goyim (whites) must be destroyed according to them. Jews are willing to have some of their own fall in order to win their ultimate battle against the Aryans.

Something similar happened with the hostile takeover of the classical world by Judeo-Christians, many of whom had Semitic blood. Their anger was directed against the white world. They didn’t care that those fanatics MacDonald talks about committed anti-Jewish acts. What mattered was to overthrow the classical world at all costs.

MacDonald ignores that what was ultimately at stake, as explained in the climax of ‘Rome against Judea; Judea against Rome’ in The Fair Race, was this: ‘435 CE: In this year occurs the most significant action on the part of Emperor Theodosius II: He openly proclaims that the only legal religion in Rome apart from Christianity is Judaism! Through a bizarre, subterranean and astonishing struggle, Judaism has not only persecuted the old culture, and Rome, its mortal archenemy, adopts a Jewish creed—but the Jewish religion itself, so despised and insulted by the old Romans, is now elevated as the only official religion of Rome along with Christianity!’ That diabolical political game of different kinds of Semites is what MacDonald has failed to see.

MacDonald speaks highly of St. John Chrysostom, as if this ‘anti-Semite’ was a champion for the Aryan cause. What did this saint, so revered among clueless white nationalists do? Do nationalists know what happened to the immense Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World?

It was built near Ephesus in the 6th century BCE over an area considered sacred since, at least, the Bronze Age. Its construction took 120 years and it could be said that it was comparable to a cathedral.

St. John Chrysostom and his henchmen flattened it in 401 following a Christian emperor’s edict—the year after Chrysostom had instigated the massacre of 7,000 blond Goths in Constantinople! The stones were used for a tomb and a bath-house and a cross was raised on the spot where Diana’s statue had stood. What remains today of the temple can be seen: here.

It was the religion of the pure white that had to be flattened at all costs, not the Judaism that survived the Aryan apocalypse of the ancient world.

It is clear that history must be rewritten from the POV of the priest of the 14 words, and that stupid books like Corey’s must be vehemently repudiated if we want to save the race from extinction. Not only books of this type are bad history: they are as toxic reading of history as that which we could read from a Jew. But Christians are artificial Jews, right?
 

§ 6

MacDonald wrote:

And although Protestantism was generally far more amenable to Jewish interests even before its current malaise, there certainly are exceptions. Here Corey emphasizes Martin Luther’s writings on Jews. Luther emphasizes Jewish hatred toward Christianity and their sense of superiority vis-à-vis Christians, seeing the latter as “not human; in fact, we hardly deserve to be considered poor worms by them.”

I’ve been saying that people like MacDonald don’t know the stories of the white race written not by charlatans like Giles Corey, but by genuine racialists. Let’s read what William Pierce says in Who We Are about Luther:

The Reformation. Another factor which undoubtedly made the West more susceptible to the Jews was the Reformation, the lasting effects of which were confined largely to Europe’s northwestern regions, in fact, to the Germanic-speaking regions: Germany, Scandinavia, England and Scotland, Switzerland. The Church of Rome and its Eastern Orthodox offshoot had always been ambivalent in their attitudes toward the Jews. On the one hand, they fully acknowledged the Jewish roots of Christianity, and Jesus’ Jewishness was taken for granted. On the other hand, the Jews had rejected Jesus’ doctrine and killed him, saying, “His blood be on us and on our children” (Matthew 27:25), and the medieval Church was inclined to take them at their word. In addition to the stigma of deicide the Jews also bore the suspicion which naturally fell on heretics of any sort. During the Middle Ages people took Christianity quite seriously, and anyone professing an unorthodox religious belief, whether he actively sought converts or not, was considered a danger to the good order of the community and to the immortal soul of any Christian exposed to him.

What the Protestant reformers did for the Jews was give the Hebrew Scriptures a much more important role in the life of the peoples of Europe than they had enjoyed previously. Among Catholics it was not the Bible but the Church which was important. The clergy read the Bible; the people did not. The people looked to the clergy for spiritual guidance, not to the Bible. Among Protestants that order was reversed. The Bible became an authority unto itself, which could be consulted by any man. Its Jewish characters—Abraham, Moses, Solomon, David, and the rest—became heroic figures, suffused with an aura of sanctity. Their doings and sayings became household bywords. It is ironic that the father of the Reformation, Martin Luther, who inadvertently helped the Jews fasten their grip on the West, detested them and vigorously warned his Christian followers against them. His book Von den Jueden und ihren Luegen (On the Jews and their Lies), published in 1543, is a masterpiece. Luther’s antipathy to the Jews came after he learned Hebrew and began reading the Talmud. He was shocked and horrified to find that the Hebrew religious writings were dripping with hatred and contempt for all non-Jews…

Alas, Luther could not have it both ways. He had already sanctified the Jews by elevating the status of their history, their legends, and their religion to that of Holy Writ. His translation of the Old Testament into German and his dissemination of the Jewish scriptures among his followers vitiated all his later warnings against the Jews. Today the church he founded studiously ignores those warnings…

The great tragedy of Luther is that he failed to… recognize that no religion of Jewish origin is a proper religion for men and women of European race. When he cut himself and the majority of the Germanic peoples off from Rome, he failed at the same time to cut away all the baggage of Jewish mythology which had been imposed on Europe by Rome. Instead he made of that baggage a greater spiritual burden for his people than it already was. The consequence was that within a century of Luther’s death much of Northern Europe was firmly in the grip of a new superstition as malignant as the old one, and it was one in which the Jews played a much more explicit role. Before, the emphasis had been on the New Testament: that is, on Christianity as a breakaway sect from Judaism, in which the differences between the two religions were stressed. The role models held up to the peoples of Europe were the Church’s saints and martyrs, most of whom were non-Jewish. The parables taught to children were often of European origin. Among the Protestants the Old Testament gained a new importance, and with it so did the Hebrew patriarchs as role models, while Israel’s folklore became the new source of moral inspiration for Europe. Perhaps nothing so clearly demonstrates the change, and the damage to the European sense of identity which accompanied it, as the sudden enthusiasm for bestowing Hebrew names on Christian children.

The Reformation did more for the Jews than merely sanctifying the Old Testament. It shattered the established order of things and brought chaos in political as well as spiritual affairs—chaos eagerly welcomed by the Jews. Germany was so devastated by a series of bloody religious wars that it took her a century and a half to recover. In some German principalities two-thirds of the population was annihilated during the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in the period 1618-1648, commonly known as the “Thirty Years War.” Everywhere during the 17th century the Jews took advantage of the turmoil, moving back into countries from which they had been banned (such as England), moving to take over professions from which they had been excluded, insinuating themselves into confidential relationships with influential leaders in literary and political circles, profiting from the sufferings of their hosts and strengthening their hold, burrowing deep into the rubble and wreckage of medieval society so that they could more easily undermine whatever rose in its stead. / End of Pierce’s quote

Pierce fell short. Nietzsche saw beyond what Pierce saw: Luther revitalised Christianity when it had begun to die in Rome itself! Had Cesare Borgia reached the papacy in a world without Luther, the transvaluation of values—the salvation of whites!—could’ve started from the Renaissance in Rome. But exactly the opposite happened: the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation vindicated Christianity. One thing is clear: MacDonald is not a reader of Nietzsche. If there is a quote that I have quoted more than once, it is what Nietzsche says about Luther (skip until you see § 61: here).

MacDonald wrote:

Mainstream Christianity from traditional Catholicism to mainstream Protestantism was fundamentally adaptive in terms of creating a healthy family life.

Here MacDonald is not only ignoring the subject mentioned in §2: that a cohesive family is useless to our cause if marriages in Catholic Latin America have been, for half a millennia, between white and non-white. And regarding Europe MacDonald is also ignoring the catastrophe that occurred in Portugal. After their forays into Africa the Portuguese not only imported blacks to the Iberian Peninsula, but unlike the Anglo-Germans in North America who originally did not marry them, the Portuguese immediately proceeded to stain their blood forever, courtesy of an Iberian, Recceswinth-like Christianity that didn’t care about racial preservation.

MacDonald writes about the traditional family in Christendom ignoring what happened in immense territories where Catholicism had a grip on the white psyche. And even in the US where miscegenation was not perpetrated for quite some time, the havoc that Puritans caused for their infatuation with the sacred book of the Jews can be seen in the names they gave their white children. Pierce is worth quoting again. He wrote:

Even before the Reformation a few Jewish names had been adopted by Europeans, but they were in most cases variations of the names of Christian saints of Jewish race: John (Heb. Johanan), Matthew (Heb. Mattathiah), Mary (Heb. Miriam), Ann (Heb. Hannah, supposedly the name of the maternal grandmother of Jesus). In addition, a few other purely Hebrew names had come into fairly common usage in parts of Christian Europe prior to Luther’s time: Adam, Daniel, David, Michael, Elizabeth, and Sarah are examples. During the l7th century, however, practically every name from the Old Testament came into general use. The madness reached its height among the Puritans, who scorned the names of their own ancestors and christened their offspring with such atrociously alien appellations as Israel, Amos, Ezekiel, Lemuel, Deborah, Reuben, Esther, Abner, Samuel, Nathan, Noah, Ephraim, Gideon, Jesse, Rachel, Susannah, Leah, Elihu, Abigail, Benjamin, and Abraham. The Puritans brought this pernicious habit with them to America, and Hebrew names were more common in the New World than European names during the Colonial period. / End of William Pierce’s quote

Don’t be surprised, professor MacDonald, that the US became the #1 philo-Semitic country of the world! So what’s the primary cause of white decline, Judaism or Christianity? What’s worse: the external enemy—the Jew—or the traitor—the Christian?
 

§ 7

Comment by Vig

Reading the comments here it shows how quickly attention steers away from the core topic and gets into the distraction of details.

As I have understood the issue here is that a reputed academic scholar has made significant statements as a result of a serious psychological research into the causes of the downfall of the culture and influence of the white Europeans. All this clearly under the banner of a conservative and right wing oriented view, which led him to the conclusion that Jewdom is the ultimate culprit of the (our) downfall.

Then the question arises, as Cesar has put forward on many occasions, that a man of such academic reputation as KMD has not dared to make the next logical step in his research and expose the phenomenal similarity between Judaism and Christianity?

Lack of courage, unwillingness or just lack of depth? Respectable as he may be he did not have the guts to be like a Nietzsche and dig till rock bottom, and criticize his own paradigms.

If you ask me the whole thing of academic debate especially in the field of the “alpha sciences” like psychology, is very often sheer sophistry. To see what the words really stand for you have to meet the author in person. Then why is this Christianity again and again creeping around the corner?

Because it is so deeply ingrained in our value system that it has become sub conscious. Then the question arises how much suffering will be needed to bring this festering wound to the surface?

If the more representative figures of the white nationalist movement fail to open up to the issue of the corrupting influence of Christianity, that means they did not have the existential experience that allowed you and me to understand the human psyche on a deeper level than the level that they are mentally operating on.

On that basis indeed white nationalism is a flawed initiative.

What I mean here is that traumatic experiences can initiate an emotional maturity that is beyond the retarded state that western humanity is in at the moment.

I think it is not negation but simple incapacity from their side.

The fact that there will come no answer from that side is because their whole social life has been narrowed down to the verbal, intellectual Hegelian discourse and exchange of ideas, while the answer to our crisis cannot be addressed on this level at all.

It is an ego problem. The ego blocks the expression of certain inner states that, if expressed, would indicate that one is emotionally and instinctively degenerated if at all recognized as such.

To have an authentic knowledge of one’s emotional and instinctive nature that makes the use of intellectual projections absolutely unnecessary, has become very rare for western man. Eine Kulturkrankheit.
 

§ 8

Kevin MacDonald wrote:

As I write this in the summer of 2020, we are experiencing what feels like the end game in the Jewish conquest of white America.

End game of the Jewish conquest or of the Christian conquest of the Aryan soul? Has MacDonald read the words of Joseph Walsh on the sidebar?: The deep-seated death-wish that seems to have taken hold of the collective subconscious psyche of the Aryan race after Hitler’s death is I believe a consequence of centuries of Jewish brainwashing via Christianity and its secular offshoots.

Once the majority of Aryans had rejected Hitler they embraced what remained of Christianity, Christian ethics, with a vengeance. Aryans are aware of what our race is capable of becoming from the photos and films of NS Germany and many of them hate and fear their own race’s potential for greatness due to attachment to an irrational morality and so our race is in a sort of self-destruct mode.

If the National Socialists had won the Second World War our race would not have entered into this intense struggle to overcome the oldest and most effective weapon of the Jews, Christianity. So this post-1945 struggle with the mental disease of Christianity does serve a purpose in that it will either destroy us for good or make us even stronger.

Before Aryans can annihilate the biological Jew on the physical level they must destroy the alien Jewish mind virus on the mental level by overcoming Christian morality. /End of Walsh’s quote

But MacDonald wrote:

I agree entirely with Corey’s conclusions and recommendations for a revival centered around the adaptive aspects of Christianity…

And what are Giles Corey’s conclusions and recommendations? Corey wrote, as quoted by MacDonald:

We must not tolerate subversion. Liberalism must go; we cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the Enlightenment. We cannot afford to countenance any further anti-American, anti-family, anti-white speech, and this should be reflected in a new Constitution. Just as conservatism was not enough, the United States Constitution was not enough, with gaps that left it gaping wide for judicial “interpretation.” For another thing, we must circle the wagons and inculcate the Männerbund, restraining our individualism at least for the time being. For another, we must return to (((our Lord and Savior))).

I have added the triple parentheses to MacDonald’s quote of Corey. What these guys don’t know is that, as a commenter put it, thinking you can aid in saving the white race while, at the same time, bending the knee to Jewish deities—Yahweh and Yeshua—is some kind of combination of insane, dishonest, cowardly, naive, or very stupid. To bottom line it, it won’t and can’t work (see Ferdinand Bardamu’s complete essay that MacDonald rejected for his webzine: here).

This demolition that I have made of such a respected figure in white nationalism moves me to leave this site with these last entries for a period of time without adding new entries, although I will be answering the comments that don’t get off the subject of MacDonald and the Christian question.

Finally, even though I left the essay by a Spaniard, ‘Rome against Judea; Judea against Rome’ linked in a sticky post for a long time, it doesn’t seem that many visitors have noticed that that essay appears in Part I of The Fair Race, the PDF of which can be accessed on the sidebar. So I have no choice but to publish it in PDF separately and put it back in a sticky post. It is a shame that people like MacDonald have not read an essay that I consider central to understanding this site.

Especially the ‘Judea against Rome’ section of that essay explains the Jewish question better than any article MacDonald has published on The Occidental Observer, as the Spanish writer goes to the historical roots of the darkest hour in the West.

Categories
Deranged altruism Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Amalric de Droevig on Christianity

‘The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity’. —Hitler.

I barely had finished my previous post and found out that Kevin MacDonald had just published, today, a critical article on Christianity, Amalric de Droevig’s ‘The Way Forward: A New Christianity, Partition, and a General Operational Plan’ of which I’ll quote most of it and offer my comments:

Other things are not so easy for Whites to let go. They are deeply embedded in our lives, our culture, and our psyche, yet they are destroying us. The two most prominent examples are Christianity and Americanism in their present corrupt state. These two things are poisons corroding the soul of our people.

So, firstly, we must separate the White Western tradition from Christianity.

As we will see, Amalric de Droevig doesn’t seem to be familiar with the violent history of the first centuries of Christianity.

Northern and Eastern Europe weren’t fully Christianized until the twelfth century, and some parts of Europe were arguably never truly Christianized. The White West has arguably been non-Christian longer than it has been Christian. Indeed, the most glorious and prolific periods of White Western history were distinctly non-Christian. The Ancient Greeks and the Romans were non-Christian. Greek civilization was particularly intellectually prolific, and Roman civilization was incredibly successful militarily and administratively. Moreover, the Renaissance and the explosion in human knowledge that has taken place from the Renaissance to the present day has occurred as Christianity has gradually withered. I doubt that is an accident.

Modern Christianity is a significant net negative to White interests. If some form of Christianity might be worth preserving, it must be a religion far different from modern Christianity.

If Droevig was familiar with the violent history of the early centuries of Christianity, he would make no distinction between modern and ancient Christianity in terms of toxicity to our cause.

For Christianity to be an acceptable religion, a useful religion for Whites, it must abandon many of its universalistic aspects. It must emphasize the local, the hierarchical, and the traditional. It must deemphasize the global, the novel, and the egalitarian. Christianity can take and has taken many forms throughout history, but rightist dissidents must make clear that certain forms of it are neither moral nor conservative, but are instead a kind of civilizational poison, eating away at the soul of our people and the societies we built.

Droevig doesn’t seem to have read what Robert Morgan has insisted so many times: that it is impossible to Aryanize a universalist religion like Christianity, to make it tribal. Even the Nazis couldn’t do it convincingly despite the efforts of the so-called positive Christianity.

When die-hard Christian corporate leaders like Dan Cathy of chicken joint Chik-Fil-A are invoking Christianity’s call to repent while literally shining the shoes of Black rappers on TV, you know something has gone horribly awry with the Christian creed. Furthermore, even if you wish to lay the ultimate blame for Christianity’s obvious numerical and moral decline at the feet of leftism, the fact is the Christian religion has a disturbing tendency to degrade and deform itself to the prevailing forces around it. It is very accommodating to power, accommodating in a way that Whites simply cannot afford any longer. We have no more ground to give as a people.

Christianity must immediately abandon its pacifistic, highly conciliatory orientation for it to be a religion Whites would do well to preserve. Frankly, I don’t see that happening, but time will tell. It is difficult to see how a religion that views us all as “god’s children” and fundamentally “equal in the eyes of God,” makes its way back to a more practical, natural, and traditional place on race. Although there are passages in Biblical scripture that are sympathetic to our views and our political objectives, those passages are consistently ignored by modern theologians, or cleverly explained away.

Which passages? Is Droevig referring to Old Testament passages that advance Jewry’s tribal spirit? That doesn’t apply to the Aryan man and he knows it.

The Christian folks and forces which possessed and cultivated more nuanced and less perfectly egalitarian positions on race, have long since been driven from the pews and the lecterns. It is difficult to see a way back to sanity.

Every day I witness Christian Whites turning the other cheek and loving their enemies and welcoming invaders and spreading softness upon softness. That level of domesticity is really hurtful to our interests as a people. A little bit of violence and rage often works. See Islam. Incessant meekness only emboldens bullies like those in BLM and Antifa. Wherever Whites are making concessions to Blacks, for example, there is either some leftist nut or some Christian nut with a microphone explaining why it is so important for Whites to give Black people ground or goodies, no matter how unreasonable their demands or rooted in delusion their complaints. That is not helpful to anything, least of all the interests of Whites.

Christianity has become one hundred percent Christ and zero percent Charlemagne, and that is a serious problem.

This is what happens when a white nationalist who wants to start criticising Christianity does not subscribe to new posts on this site. Two months ago I wrote: The only living historian for whom I have respect told me that he would rate Charlemagne well up in the top five most evil characters of European history. I recently acquired Thomas Hodgkin’s The Life of Charlemagne, which I recommend to those who have swallowed the Christian version of this evil man.

If we keep in mind the message of the historical sections in The Fair Race, we will see that even after the Aryan apocalypse of the 4th and 5th centuries, there were still many Germanic tribes in the 6th and 7th centuries who refused to worship the god of the Jews. Charlemagne forced these uncontaminated Aryans to worship the enemy god: a historical milestone related to the philo-Semitic state that the entire West is currently suffering. We could imagine a parallel world in which at least part of the Aryan populations had not been worshiping, for more than a millennium, the volcanic demon that appeared to Moses in a desert…

White Christian leaders frequently tell their flock that living on your knees is the way into heaven. I fear, however, that if Whites do not stand up for themselves and refuse to kowtow to those that hate them—and soon, the White race itself is next to be crucified. All the systemic forces in the modern West are thoroughly anti-White, and those forces reward anti-White malice handsomely. Imagine thinking you live in a “White supremacist” society where a White person can’t even politely disagree with a Black person without being labeled “racist”. It is madness, frankly. I can not help but think Americans would be walked all over a whole lot less if there were more Vikings amongst us to stand up to leftist would-be tyrants and anti-White bullies. Christian leaders tell us that our meekness is Christlike and noble and a symbol of our goodness, but the reality is that our meekness, our dovishness, our conscientiousness, these supposedly good traits are all facilitating the ruination of our people. Those traits are further entrenching us in a state of vassalage.

Pro-White rightist dissidents must actively take a hard line against modern Christianity and expose it for being what it has become, namely an appendage of the Cultural Marxist American state, and a religion that serves the multicultural, multiracial non-White masses, rather than the people and the civilization that founded and spread it.

Precisely because Droevig ignores the history of Christianity, he is seeing things backwards. The so-called cultural Marxism didn’t breed the ethno-suicidal version of Christianity today. It was the axiology of Christianity, as Oswald Spengler already saw, that spawned Marxism.

Once upon a time, when Whiteness was coextensive with Christendom, Christianity’s interests were more or less identical to the interests of Whites. Over the last four or five hundred years, however, Christianity has spread wildly, becoming a global religion, a religion for all peoples.

Since Droevig hasn’t read the ten volumes of Karlheinz Deschner’s Criminal History of Christianity he ignores that there has been no Christianity friendly to our cause. It is a universalist and egalitarian religion that sides the untermensch and vilifies the Ubermensch, or at least treat both as equal. Remember what I said this Tuesday about the conquest of most of the American continent by the very Christian Spaniards and Portuguese.

The problem therein is that the interests of the Third World and the interests of Whites are simply not aligned. Thus, the religion’s interests are no longer linked to our people’s interests. The Third World is feeding on the White race right now. It is feasting on the fruits of White genius and our penchant for charity. Third Worlders are taking over our lands and our governments and our cultures and are turning them into theirs. The lives of White people are thoroughly worse for it. As it stands, Christianity can not serve both its increasingly diverse flock and also the race that founded it and made it relevant. The religious must be made to choose.

If White Christians, on balance, continue to choose religion over the race, the religion may have to be discarded altogether for Whites to survive. How can Whites thrive, or even survive, if one third of our people are anti-White leftist lunatics, and two thirds of the remaining two thirds are Christian nutjobs who place fellow Christians above their own coethnics?! If Whites cannot shape Christianity to serve our people, what good is it for our people? Christianity must accommodate Whiteness and White interests, not vice versa.

This won’t happen because Christianity, the religion of eternal damnation, is an inherently evil ideology: a Semitic religion that cannot be reformed for the Aryan cause, only abolished.

Yet today things are exactly the other way around. Whites are constantly bending over backwards and making excuses for the flaws in Christian theology and the folly of Christian leaders. But what does Christianity do for Whites? When does the Christian religion ever stand up for White people? All I see from church leaders are empty egalitarian bromides, claims that White racial advocacy is a sin, and ever more obnoxious capitulation to aggressive, covetous non-Whites. At best religious leaders ignore us, and at worst they intentionally marginalize us. Whites, in truth, must learn to be more like the Jews. Jews put the tribe first and belief second, and they’re impervious to criticism. That is arguably the key to Jewish success. For Whites, ideology and belief come first. We are an impractical, idealistic race—prone to moral crusades (all our wars have been justified on moral grounds, and the current anti-White zeitgeist is framed as a moral imperative). That is a problem if we wish to survive. At the absolute least, Whites must strengthen their attachment to Whiteness, and dilute their attachment to Christianity.

It is quite possible moreover to remain morally consistent whilst putting the tribe first. As Jared Taylor is fond of saying, “I believe in the same principles for all peoples,” All peoples deserve self-determination. All peoples deserve ethnostates, as the Chinese and the Jews and the Nigerians have. All peoples have the right to prefer their own and to advance their own interests, certainly in moderation. Yet Whites are today denied these fundamental privileges in the modern West.

Neither the Jews nor the Chinese nor the Muslims nor the Indians of India nor the mestizos of Latin America love the white man. But as a pious neochristian, Droevig continues to love the Other to the extent of wishing them a prosperous life in their ethnostates!

Ultimately, we must accept that Christianity is not good. Certain forms of it are perhaps good…

Which ones?

…but certain forms of it are clearly bad, much like streptococcus pneumoniae and certain other strains of bacteria. Once we have cemented that position in the psyche of the political right, religious conservatives can begin recreating Christianity in a sensible form.

Again, this is a fool’s errand. It’s like trying to reform Judaism so that in this reformed Judaism the best of the gentiles won’t be exterminated!

Doing so will also lay the groundwork for defectors (atheists and agnostics) to defect on the grounds that the religion is not advancing their long-term cultural and genetic interests, which it isn’t. This kind of defection may force the religion to evolve and concede ground to the pro-White Alt-Right, or it may continue doing what is has been doing, namely reacting by doubling down on its destructive, modern form. Christian leaders today do not seem to care if White defectors are replaced with 70-IQ African believers. Like Western oligarchs, they seem more interested in quantity than quality. The pro-White dissident right is way too soft on Christianity.

Very true!

We must be much harder on it. By continually accommodating Christian power structures, we do not force Christian leaders to make hard choices. We continue to accommodate those who accommodate our enemies, those who give our enemies more and more ground, and more and more power at our expense. That is folly.

The same is true of the dissident right’s approach to the GOP. We demand nothing of them and so we get nothing from them. We must press the bastards to gain anything from them. GOP oligarch puppets, like retrograde Christian leaders, are not charitable, benevolent people, by and large. You must squeeze and threaten them, and be willing to harm yourself to some degree if you want anything from them. You cannot simply ask nicely or play nice and expect anything in return.

If we can induce a schism between modern Christians (Christians) and traditional Christians (alt-Christians), a reformation of sorts may follow. That schism will serve our movement, if only by catapulting our movement to the foreground in the public eye. We must ask, “why is Christianity not serving our people?” and “who is serving our people?”

Droevig fails to understand what’s happening with Christianity. In my previous post I talked about Conservative Swede and ‘The Red Giant’, which is worth quoting here: ‘We are witnessing the historical demise of Christianity. When a star dies, in its last phase it expands into a red giant, before it shrinks into a white dwarf. Liberalism is the red giant of Christianity. And just as a red giant is devoid of its core, it expands thousandfold [e.g., the recent negrolatric great awakeing] while losing its substance and is about to die’.

That must be the Alt-Right’s approach to everything. The White race’s interests must be on the ballot as well.

Today’s West will not allow the existence of an openly racist party. What’s Droevig’s plan? Pacific methods apparently:

We could set up a Black ethnostate in the American South, a White ethnostate somewhere in the American middle, and perhaps a number of other states with different governmental or demographic structures. However, in order to get there we need to normalize the idea of partition and related ideas. We can actually do that, but we have to be talking about them constantly. Partition has to be the locus of our memes, and our articles, and our political advocacy. Pro-White leaders must be advocating for the peaceful [my italics] partition of America as a serious solution to our intractable problems.

After knocking down the statues representing the white man who founded modern nations, what some BLM members are starting to say is that the next step will be to do that with flesh-and-blood whites. But Droevig still loves the enemy…

The most important thing we must weaken, however, if partition is to be possible, and if our movement’s broader goals are to be realized, is the White American commitment to America itself. Whites are, by and large, patriotic Americans. They are loyal to a government that is hell-bent on destroying them. That is, in a word, insane. What patriotic White Americans must become, before it is too late, is patriotic Alt-Americans, committed to the ideals of the Founding Fathers and to traditions of America prior to the cultural revolution of the 1960’s, but attached to an Alt-American / Post-American identity. We can not remain attached to a political arrangement that is hostile to our very existence, but we may be able to preserve an American identity and Americana in some limited respects.

Droevig started his essay saying that we have to criticise Americanism and now he defends it!

Robert S. Griffin is right that it is wise to root our arguments in America’s historic political and cultural ideals, but we must be careful to do so without legitimizing the modern American state or modern American ideals. Traditional American ideals and values are fine to exploit and employ, but not the ideals that have been foisted upon us since the 1960s, no matter their persuasiveness to normietards…

That’s exactly what I believed before July 24, 2009 when I was arguing with Conservative Swede. Since that month I realised I was naïve by believing that in the 1950s everything was great (cf. again ‘The Red Giant’). The wrong turn for the white race didn’t occur in the 60s. It started more than a millennium before, in the 4th century of the common era.

In this way we can reconcile the competing approaches to “America” and American identity. We can thread the needle as it were. We can retain an American identity, while still setting ourselves off and apart from modern America and the modern American state.

Here Ferdinand Bardamu is correct in his sentence from my other post today: ‘America must die because the Whites who once formed her civilizational backbone are deracinated, alienated and milquetoast cosmopolitans’.

They won’t stop failing us because we enlist in the military in greater numbers or become more religiously radical. Our institutions must change or they must go. Whites must adapt or perish. The sooner Whites recognize this harsh reality, the sooner will we get on with rescuing ourselves from our current debauched state as a race. Whites rightly pride themselves on being tenacious folk, and I understand that well-being a tenacious bastard myself, but sometimes to survive, you must let go.

Amalric Droevig’s piece, so radical to the palates of white nationalists that MacDonald disabled the comment section on that article, shows just how blue-pilled (or shall I say purple-pilled?) the commentariat of that webzine is.

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Daybreak Publishing Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

2020 edition!

In addition to the already published text, the Second Edition of Christianity’s Criminal History incorporates entries 101-124 of the series on this website that do not appear in the First Edition, which only contains the first hundred entries.

He who doesn’t want to purchase a hard copy can read the PDF.

I’m releasing the PDF for free because Christianity’s Criminal History is another of the books that I consider basic to reach the lands of National Socialism. Just see how American white nationalists, so reluctant to go full Nazis, are stagnated in the middle of the psychological Rubicon, as I explained a couple of days ago.

While knowledge of the Jewish question could be the ideal platform to have a good grasp of the Christian question, even secularists in the movement refuse to see the latter in full light. If they weren’t so programmed by their parents to bend their knee to Jewish deities (and this is where the usefulness of my autobiographical philosophy is apparent), in the most natural way they would migrate from the JQ to understanding the CQ.

Categories
Catholic Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 124

‘The Catholic clergy has a good part of the responsibility for unleashing the wars of extermination of the time. The influence of the Church reached the last village’.

—Berthold Rubin, Das Zeitalter Iustinians (1960).

Editors’ note: Here I reproduce some translated excerpts from a chapter about the extermination of two Germanic peoples in the 6th century: one of the unheard of crimes of Christianity because, until now, almost all church historians had been Christians (like the Jews, Christians lie by omission). To contextualise this entry see instalments 121, 122 and 123 of the same series.
 

______ 卐 ______

 

The Catholic clergy in favour of a crusade against the Vandals

In June 533, a fleet of 500 transport ships and 92 warships were brought to the sea by order of Emperor Justinian carrying 15,000 to 20,000 combatants on board. Huns were also part of them. The patriarch of Constantinople, Epiphanius, had impregnated in the same port the blessing of heaven for a company so pleasing to God. He blessed the troops himself and pronounced ‘the habitual prayers’ (Procopius) of the farewells. The general in chief was Belisarius, a good Catholic, a good soldier, ‘a gentlemanly Christian, in whom the teachings of his Saviour had penetrated not only in his head, but in his blood’ (Thiess). […] The troops disembarked at the beginning of September of 533, two hundred kilometres south of Carthage. […]

After the victory, most of the Vandal men lost their lives. Women and children were made slaves. The [Germanic] king was taken to [the mud capital] Constantinople and presented in the summer of 534 at the racecourse during the triumph held there. Stripped of the purple he had to kiss the dust before the imperial throne. He ended his days as a vassal in a large property in Galatia. The king declined the conversion to Catholicism, despite all the honours that made it more appetising. His captive companions were framed in the Roman army and went mostly to the Persian border. Five regiments were formed, the so-called Vandali justiniani. One regiment, however, fled back to Africa after reducing the crew of the ship that was to transport them from the island of Lesbos. […]

The pope congratulated the emperor for his zeal in the expansion of the Kingdom of God. In spite of all the throat-cutting, Arianism was still far from its eradication in Africa, much less since it could penetrate the troops of Belisarius thanks to the Arian Goths. But also they (who were deceived in the distribution of the lots of lands and subjugated from the religious point of view, together with the surviving Arian vandals) had to bite the dust after hard and long struggles. Even the Vandal women who had married them were deported. ‘Of the Vandals, what remained in their homeland’, writes Procopius, ‘there remained no trace of my time. Being few, they were crushed by the border barbarians or voluntarily mixed with them so that they disappeared to their very name’. ‘In this way’, the archbishop Isidore of Seville writes triumphantly, ‘it was exterminated, in 534, the Vandal kingdom until the last sprout, a kingdom that lasted 113 years from Gunderic until the fall of Gelimer’.

But the times that took control of Africa, also in its political and religious aspect, were everything but peace. The Byzantine administration was largely corrupted, the fiscal oppression was such that the population sadly longed for the liberality of the Vandals. The settlers were now much worse treated than under the domain of the ‘barbarians’. […]

In the meantime Vitiges had already, until March 538, a long year attacking Rome with his Goths, with rolling towers, assault scales and battering rams. Again and again he restarted his rush, and again and again the Hungarian and Moorish riders made dangerous outings. The surroundings of the city, farms, villas and sumptuous buildings were totally razed. In Rome, the most beautiful Greco-Roman creations, irreplaceable masterpieces, were demolished to kill the Goth raiders with their stones. To this were added the ravages of asphyxiating heat, hunger and epidemics. Senators paid disgusting meat sausages of dead mules with gold. A relief army from Constantinople reinforced the besieged. But 2,000 horsemen, under the command of Chief John ‘The Bloodthirsty’ (epithet of the chroniclers), were merciless in Piceno against the Gothic women and children, whose husbands and fathers stood before the walls of Rome. After almost seventy rejected assaults Vitiges withdrew in the middle of terrible losses caused by Belisarius who, with tactical and technical superiority, came on his heels and occupied almost the entire country to the plain of the Po.

In the winter of 538 to 539, when the Byzantines expelled all the Goths of Emilia and Vitiges repaired the walls of Ravenna, a severe famine ravaged the northern part of central Italy, with thousands and thousands of people succumbing. Procopius, an eyewitness, reports the death of approximately fifty thousand people in the Piceno alone and even more in the northern regions.

What people looked like and how they died is something I want to tell in more detail for having seen it with my own eyes. They were all skinny and pale because their flesh, according to the old proverb, ate itself for lack of nutrition and the gall, which because of its excessive weight now had power over all bodies, produced in them a greenish paleness. And it progressed, human bodies lost all their moods so that their skin, completely dry, resembled leather, presenting the appearance of being firmly attached to the bones. Their pale colour was blackening so that they looked like teas that had burned too much. Their faces had an expression of horror, their gaze resembled the insane who are contemplating something awful… Some among them, totally dominated by hunger, came to commit atrocities against others. In a small village in Ariminus, it seems, the only two women left devoured seventeen men. Well, the strangers who came their way used to spend the night in their homes, then they killed them while they slept and ate their flesh… Driven by hunger, many threw themselves on the grass and tried to tear it off on their knees. But in general they were too weak, and when they were totally lacking in strength they fell exhaling the last breath. Nobody buried them, because nobody was interested in burying. However, not a single bird came to the bodies, although there are many species that would devour them with pleasure, as there was nothing to bite in them. Well, as already said, all the meat was totally dried out by hunger.

Around the same time Milan was also going through a horrible hardship. Dacius, the archbishop of the city—which according to Procopius was, after Rome, the first city in the West due to its size and number of inhabitants and prosperity—, went to Rome in the third year of war, informed Belisarius about the anti-Goth uprisings throughout Liguria and the Byzantine re-conquest of the territory, urging him to occupy Milan. An occupation was carried out although it supposed to break the armistice with Vitiges in April of 535. Very soon, however, the nephew of Vitiges, Uriah, surrounded Milan with a strong army supported by 10,000 Bergonds sent by the king of Theudebert’s Francs. He wanted above all to probe the situation to his advantage. From there, little by little, the famine ravaged the city frightfully. The inhabitants eat dogs, rats and human corpses. At the end of March 539 the Roman garrison capitulated obtaining a security retreat.

As far as the city is concerned, Procopius writes, ‘the Goths left no stone upon stone. They killed all men, from teenagers to the elderly in a number not less than three hundred thousand. They turned women into slaves and gave them to the Bergonds as a reward for their alliance. J.B. Bury describes the Milan massacre as one of the worst in the long series of premeditated atrocities in the annals of mankind: ‘Attila’s life path does not register such an abominable war action’. All the churches were also destroyed: the Catholic churches at the hands of the Arian Vandals; the Arian churches at the hands of the Bergond Catholics. A truly progressive ecumenical cooperation: they call it a history of redemption… The personalities of the high social hierarchy, including the prefect, brother of the pope, were torn to serve as food for the dogs. Bishop Dacius, the real cause of that hell, had set foot in dusty time.

As soon as the Bergonds returned to their land, well loaded with loot, Theudebert himself fell on Liguria, in the spring of 539, at the head of an army. Already at the beginning of the conflict, Justinian had summoned the Franks to the ‘great fight against the Goths’, as the Catholic Daniel-Rops says in the 20th century. […]

But when it seemed to him that the Goths were getting too strong he fell on them in the back, in the spring of 539, with some 100,000 francs that crossed the Alps from the south of Gaul. He devastated with his hosts Liguria and Emilia and when crossing the Po, Procopius writes, ‘they tore apart how many Goth children and women on whom they could put their hands on, and as an offering they threw their bodies into the river as first fruits of war’. The Goth warriors fled like an exhalation to Ravenna to ran into Roman swords. However, hunger and epidemics decimated Theudebert’s army in such a way that he had to leave Italy after losing a good part of it. Surrounded by sea and land, Ravenna fell in May 540 by the work of a traitor. This one burned at the request of Belisarius the barns of the city so that Vitiges had to surrender. […]

Rome itself, from which the entire Arian clergy is expelled, and in which an atrocious hunger reigns, falls twice in 546 and 550. All the walls of the squares are demolished so that no enemy can get on it and that their inhabitants will be forever free from the torture of the siege. The Romans themselves recognise after the fall of the city in 546 that Totila lived among them as a father with his children. Even the Byzantine soldiers themselves, whose pay had been subtracted, are passed on to him, and, in greater numbers still, the tenant peasants are expelled from their lands. All this enabled the hatred of the great landowners, the Catholic Church, which, like it once did in Africa with the Vandals, now spreads frightening stories about the cruelty of the Goths. […]

The year 552, in a decisive battle next to Busta Gallorum, in the vicinity of Taginae, Via Flaminia, north of Spoleto, with the support of by 3,000 Heruli and 5,500 Lombards the Goth army is completely destroyed. King Totila is killed in the flight and also the victors show off his head by shaking it at the tip of a spear. And in October of 553 the last Goth king, Teia, also falls with his army’s core after a desperate sixty-day fight at the foot of Vesuvius. And in 554, in Volturnus, next to Capua, Narses liquidates in a bloodthirsty battle other considerable troops of Franks and Alemannen who wanted to take advantage of the Goth debacle by conquering Italy. They were stabbed like cattle. The rest must have died in the waters of the river. It is assumed that only five men of seventy thousand returned alive. The castrated Narses, received by the clergy with songs of glory in the stands of St. Peter, knelt to pray on the supposed tomb of St. Peter and urged his unbridled soldiery to cultivate piety and the continued exercise of weapons. The last Goth stronghold resisted in the Apennines until 555. In the north it was not possible to take Verona and Brescia until 562 (with Merovingian help). From now in Ravenna would reside an imperial governor. The Ostrogoths would disappear from history too.

In the final phase of his extermination, Justinian took advantage of a dynastic complaint in the Visigothic kingdom to initiate a new invasion with troops led by the patrician Liberius, militarily inexperienced and more than octogenarian. In Spain, where the powerful and rich Catholic bishops reluctantly admitted their subordination to the ‘heretics’, the noble Athanagild had risen against King Agila. And as in Africa and Italy, Catholics now welcomed the intervention of the Catholic sovereign, which began a war between Byzantium and the Visigoths, a war that would last more than seventy years. In any case, Justinian did not achieve total extermination here, but his weak contingent managed to conquer the Balearic Islands, and the main port cities and strongholds in the southeast of the country.
 

Cui bono? The great beneficiary of all that hell: The Roman Church

The Gothic wars, with their twenty years of duration, turned Italy into a smoking ruin, a desert. According to L. M. Hartmann, who is still probably the foremost German connoisseur of that time, the injuries caused by that conflict to the country were worse than those suffered by Germany in the Thirty Years’ War. The blood tribute presumably rises to millions of victims. Entire shires were depopulated, almost all cities suffered one or more sieges and their inhabitants were more than once killed in their entirety. Many women and children were captured as slaves by the Byzantines and the men on both sides died at the edge of the sword as enemies and ‘heretics’. Rome, the millionaire city, conquered and devastated five times, ravaged by the sword, hunger and plague, had only 40,000 inhabitants. The big cities of Milan and Naples became depopulated.

Concurrently with depopulation, a horrific impoverishment spread everywhere, caused mainly by the desertification of the fields but also by the frequent slaughter of the herds. Aqueducts and damaged hot springs fell into total abandonment. Many works of art and culture of unrecoverable value were ruined. Everywhere could be seen the same spectacle of corpses and ruins, of epidemics and famines that caused the death of hundreds of thousands. Only in the Piceno region, writes Procopius, an eyewitness, about fifty thousand people died of hunger in a single year, in 539, whose bodies were so dry that not even the vultures themselves deigned to approach them. The ‘good hope’ of the emperor had been fulfilled, that ‘God, well in his grace, may grant that we recover again what the ancient Romans possessed of their borders of both oceans and lost because of later neglect’. In the year 534 Justinian could give himself the ostentatious nicknames of ‘Victor of the Vandals’ and ‘Conqueror of the Goths’.

Even the Jesuit Hartmann Grisar acknowledges that ‘what the Byzantines established in substitution of the Gothic regime was not freedom but the image of it in negative […] that amounted to subjugate the free development of personality, a system of servitude’, while ‘among the Goths authentic freedom had its own homeland there’. […]

The Arian ‘heresy’ was eradicated from Africa. Italy also disappeared as an independent kingdom while, in that general chaos, the ‘State of the Church’ was growing as an immense parasite. The ancient privileges of Rome were restored and Justinian increased the power and prestige of the Roman bishop. […]

The one especially benefited by the war was the Ravenna church, whose regular income was estimated at that time at some twelve thousand solidi (pieces of gold). Its territorial possessions, that reached Sicily, continuously increased through the donations and the inheritance legation. Wealthy bankers built and equipped many, let’s call them, houses of God. But, above all, the Bishop of Ravenna benefited especially from the appropriation of the churches and Arian goods whose number was particularly increased in the surroundings of the ancient Goth capital. […]

But while it is true that the emperor did not precisely wage his wars, lasting more than twenty years ‘for the freedom of the subjects’, he did it for the ‘right faith’. For the sake of this, as it is firmly stated, he had sacrificed and erased two peoples from the Earth. For the recuperatio imperii, so amazing for many contemporaries and for Justinian himself, consisted essentially of the bloody re-conquest of northern Africa and Italy in favour of Catholicism. The despot thus became ‘champion of the Roman Church’ (Rubin). […]

The chronicler of the time, Procopius, a model of Byzantine historiography, incessantly accuses the emperor of murder and robbery of his subjects. Procopius’s accusations culminate in the 18th chapter, which presumably adheres to the truth essentially in spite of some exaggerations, especially as regards the figures, or when using hyperbole like this: ‘It would be easier to count all the grains of sand than the victims sacrificed by this emperor’.

Of Libya, of such extensive dimensions, he plunged it into such a ruin that even a long walk would hardly give one the surprise of meeting a person. And if there were at first 80,000 vandals in arms, who could estimate the number of women, children and servants? How could anyone enumerate the multitude of all Libyans (Romans) who previously lived in cities or engaged in agriculture, navigation or fishing as I myself could see far and wide with my own eyes? And all of the Numidia population, even more numerous, perished with women and children. And finally the land housed many Roman soldiers and their companions of Byzantium. So whoever indicated for Africa the figure of five million dead would fall somewhat short of reality [emphasis by Ed.].

Italy, at least three times larger than (the province of) Africa, is, in large regions, even more depopulated than this one so that it will not be very difficult to guess the number of those who perished there. […] Before that war, Gothic power extended from Gaul to the borders of Dacia, where the city of Sirmium is located. The Germans (the Franks!) seized many territories in Gaul and Venice, when the Roman army arrived in Italy. Sirmium and its surroundings were occupied by the Gepids, but everything, said briefly, is now depopulated. […]

Such were, therefore, the consequences of the war in Africa and Europe.

When the tyrant died the people were not free and the Empire was economically exhausted, on the verge of bankruptcy. For the papacy, on the other hand, the Justinian era—due to the re-conquest, the extermination of two powerful Arian towns, and the dissolution of the autonomous kingdom of Italy—proved to be extremely advantageous in material and legal terms.

Categories
Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 123

Editors’ note: Footnotes have been omitted. To contextualise this section of Vol. II of Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10 volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, see the abridged translation of Volume I (PDF: here, hard copy: here), which reproduces a syntactically corrected edition of instalments 1-100 on this site. Instalments 101-122 can also be read on this site.
 

The Vandal state

Gaiseric created the first independent Germanic state on Roman soil. This Germanic state had its richest and most fertile provinces: Mauretania Tingitana, Africa Zeugitana, Byzacena and Numidia Proconsularis. Gaiseric also became the owner of Corsica and Sardinia, whose forests were cut down by workers under forced labour to build his ships. By 455 he added the Balearic Islands, which he had already sacked in 425. He dominated the seas from Gibraltar to Constantinople and did not even give nominal recognition to the Byzantine emperor, although in pledge of peace he had to send his son Huneric to Italy. […]

The rich churches and monasteries were sacked, as they were ‘bastions of Roman domination’ (Diesner). It is understood that, in general, the Catholic civilian population offered no resistance anywhere, remaining indifferent or sympathising with the invaders. Some of them even converted to Arianism despite Gaiseric’s attacks which were particularly brutal against clerics, monks, and nuns who were often raped. […] Occasionally, as happened after the occupation of Carthage, the king appropriated all the property, furniture and real estate of the adversary clergy. He also ordered that all churches be closed, handed over to the Arian clergy and used as barracks. […]

As comprehensible as the outrage of the Catholic chroniclers against Gaiseric is, one of them at least concedes something. The Father of the Salvian Church of Marseille praises Gaiseric’s fight against ‘impurity’. Well, this blood-stained Christian was tremendously puritan: a very frequent combination, as we know. He not only fought against pederasty but also against brothels, even forcing all prostitutes to marry.

The king of the Vandals, who, if necessary, was not intimidated by any bloody action, experiences such disgust at the plague of public sexual lewdness—a plague characteristic of the big cities—, and considers it such an abomination for his compatriots, that he proposed to eradicate it from end to end. And everything indicates that he achieved it while he lived.

The history of the Vandal State has only been bequeathed to us, almost exclusively, by Catholic clerics. Even the few historical testimonies of a profane nature are strongly influenced by them. Therefore, it is more than likely to have been distorted by their biases […]. Despite all the exaggerations, even falsifications, of the history by the Catholic tradition, there can be no doubt that the proceeding of Gaiseric towards the Catholic clergy was very tough and sometimes bloodthirsty. That clergy was, of course, not only a bitter adversary of Arianism. Arianism increasingly became an enemy of the State. […]

Gaiseric died very old at the beginning of the year 477. His son and successor was Huneric (477-484), whose wife, daughter of Valentinian III to which Gaiseric abducted from Rome in 455, fled in 472 to Jerusalem: presumably by aversion to her husband’s Arian faith […]. Huneric succumbed early, in December of the year 484, victim of a disease. The Catholics welcomed the news joyfully as every time one of their adversaries dies.