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Category: Liberalism

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Axiology Liberalism

Slave

(Connections, 2nd Season, Episode 20).

I’m not finished with James Burke, and I’d like to add to what I said about him in the comments section on Tuesday.

I have just watched episode 20 of the second season of Connections. I draw the viewer’s attention to what Burke says about the German concept of Lebensraum from this point until the end of the episode.

What impresses me about Burke, as what impresses me about two other Britons of whom in previous years I have spoken much on this site—Kenneth Clark and Tom Holland—is that, while I admire their intelligence and penetration in their observations—artistic and western history (Clark), religious, axiological and historical (Holland) and scientific, technological and historical (Burke)—, all three are prisoners of Christian morality.

If it were possible (obviously no BBC or similar TV service would fund my project) I would make a series of thirteen programmes explaining what Holland says: how the morality of the contemporary atheist, even the radical one, is still dominated by Christian ethics. But I would film that series from an opposite scale of values to that of the neochristian Holland.

In the segment linked above, for example, Burke reproves the doctrine of Lebensraum, which some Germans planned to implement in Africa or Latin America. Because of that scale of values that seems so natural to Burke and virtually all contemporary Britons, I live in a horrid world, and in a Latin American city at that.

What good is brilliance in explaining technological inventions that have revolutionised mankind if Burke remains a slave to Christian morality? Obviously, he has never asked himself this question because there are no transvalued men on his island.

Or are there?

Categories
Deranged altruism Liberalism

Normie historian

It shouldn’t be thought that only neo-Nietzscheans like us, or historians like Tom Holland, believe that today’s secular liberalism is Christian-inspired. On 27 February 2012 I started to write some notes on a series still watchable on YouTube, The Western Tradition by the normie historian Eugen Weber. Those notes, which I wrote a dozen years ago in a notebook that I reread after midnight, mention some white nationalist personalities with whom I had not yet distanced myself. Here is my translation to English of those 2012 notes:

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Absolutely fascinating is Eugen Weber’s programme #43 for understanding our century. Although it deals with the 21st century it sheds enormous light, especially what he said almost halfway through the programme: that in 1848 they emancipated the slaves and that the emancipation of women would still take a long time—which means that Weber moves in the liberal framework of the 20th century.

Fascinating, I say, because now that I’ve posted an entry on The West’s Darkest Hour about the debate in The Occidental Observer about the holocaust, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the monocausalists [those who believe that only the Jews have caused the Aryan decline] are wrong.

How clear. Conservative Swede is right. All that evil started in the French Revolution. Hunter Wallace discovered the same thing with his analysis of the United States. Mark Weber, too, in his quotable quote about the American Constitution, saw the ‘rights of man’ as the virus that infected, and in our century exploded in full force, the West.

The infection comes from whites.

The French Revolution is like Christianity 1,600 years ago: cultural suicides.

Pride. Megalomania. Hubris.

Remember that in programme #43 of Eugen Weber’s series, the historian mentions Rousseau and Shelley, who by the way killed their children [cf. Paul Johnson’s The Intellectuals]. He also recalls that Weber also mentioned the novel Ivanhoe where ‘the heroine is a Jewess’ amid the century of the emancipation of the Judas [a derogatory term in Spanish for Jews]. And remember that Weber said that the common man was more influenced by the novel than by Marx’s texts.

How clear, isn’t it?

Romanticism so understood was another suicidal Christianity. What happened in the 20th century was the culmination of that infection (with Jewish help, of course; but, as Wallace says, white society had already gone down that road).

Actually, despite everything I read in The Occidental Observer, I increasingly blame whites for their own misfortune. If Linder were right, Norwegians wouldn’t be so infected with suicidal liberalism [when I wrote that I had in mind that there were very few Jews in that country].

In episode #44 Weber says: ‘And this point of view which combines empathy, charity and guilt (emphasis in his voice) is very much with us today’.

How clear!

Weber refers to the social projects of the 19th century after the hell that Doré and Dostoyevsky saw in London. Therein lies the root of what was to become ‘deranged altruism’. How clear and transparent!

In this episode #44 Weber speaks for the first time about the white race, and says that with their ideologies whites caused the overpopulation of non-whites in the colonies. He even uses the word ‘stupidity’ and mentions the missionaries!

That only the Judas are the usual suspects is pure bullshit. The virus was already in place before that. Besides, it was at the end of the 19th century that the ‘mass culture’ with its fucking sports and empty heads started. Now it is infinitely worse!

At the end of the penultimate programme of his series, Weber spoke well of the contraceptive pill: as the greatest advance for women, even more than women’s suffrage. Neither he nor other liberals saw the demographic consequences: white suicide!

It is clear that all this axiology/memeplex came not only from the Judas but from the me, me, me generation! In the previous programme, by the way, Weber said that after WWII Europe’s self-confidence had collapsed. Remember what Kenneth Clark said in Civilisation: the loss or gain of confidence is pivotal for a civilisation to flourish…

Categories
Axiology Liberalism

Who’s neo-Christian?

He is the unwary pseudo-apostate, deist or even atheist, who hasn’t realised that by rejecting the ‘all are equal in the eyes of God’ of his Christian parents, and transmuting that doctrine to ‘all are equal before the law’, he is axiologically still a Christian.—C.T.

Categories
Israel / Palestine Liberalism

Lambert

On this site I have several times embedded videos of Derek Lambert interviewing New Testament critics such as Richard Carrier and Richard Miller, but I have also criticised Lambert for his Neo-Christian anti-racism.

There is something very striking about apostates from Christianity. They almost universally embrace a liberal and egalitarian faith even more extreme than the Christian universalist, something we knew from the first incarnation of The West’s Darkest Hour with the post ‘The Red Giant’, originally uploaded when Blogspot hosted my site (then we moved to WordPress and now to the present address).

In his correspondence today, our our learned friend Gaedhal tells us:

Lambert was on [redacted], and I even exchanged a few emails with him. However… I just don’t like him. I have always had an intuitive dislike of him. Now he introduces his father, a volunteer in US-instigated wars of plunder, adventure and regime change.

Again, my anti-war principles are informed by the far-left podcast Citations Needed. I am trying to be fair and balanced as I can. In the same way that I don’t respect the cops, I don’t respect the troops. As I said before, if these wars were in our interest, American troops would be fighting on the North American Continent. British troops would be fighting on the island of Great Britain to defend against the ongoing invasion of that island by ‘boat people’.

I don’t care, in the slightest about the deaths of 1,000 Israeli settlers on Palestinian land. The Jews are fucking around on Palestinian land. Every now and then, some of them are gonna find out. In retaliation, the Israelis have besieged the Palestinian territories, cutting off water and electricity, which is a war crime.

It is curious how the social media are mentioning this, which is true, while omitting that the Allies did exactly the same after 1945 with millions of Germans, who died like flies. Those who haven’t read Sexton’s review of Hellstorm should stop reading this post and read the review now!

They refuse to allow humanitarian channels for the likes of the UN or the Red Cross. If Israel is fighting a total war against the Palestinians, then we can expect, from time to time, the Palestinians to retaliate. If 1,000 Irish Catholics were murdered by Muslims, the Jews wouldn’t care. Indeed, they would immediately redirect and reframe the conversation to ‘I sure hope there isn’t a backlash against the Muslim community.’ When white people are murdered by Muslims in Europe, the Jews always derail the conversation to talk about the evils of Islamophobia. Tucker Carlson is a genius for using this tactic against them. Yeah, sure, the death of a thousand Israelis is tragic, and all, but what about all the Americans who are killed by our own ‘settlers’. As I said before: solidarity is a one-way street, and the Jews have zero solidarity with me, my people, my ethnicity, my country, my continent.

Again, being anti-war is both a right-wing thing and a left-wing thing. Saoradh, from the far left opposes the actions of Israel, and US-instigated wars and I from the radical right do so too. Israel is an abomination, and no real antitheist would shill for them. This is a point that Alan Green brings up: Lambert only seems to be antitheistic towards Christianity and Islam. Judaism—the source of the Abrahamic stream of pure poison—gets treated with kid gloves.

Philo-Semitism is due to the baleful influence that Christianity has had on the Western psyche. On the anti-Semitic right, it is very common for pundits to cherry-pick historical facts such as the expulsion of Jews from various reigns in Christendom. But they omit the main fact: Judaism was ultimately tolerated because the so-called Old Testament appears in both the Jewish and Christian bibles. What was never tolerated after Constantine and the following emperors—except Julian—were the 100% Aryan religions: whether they were the religions of the Greco-Roman world or, later with Charlemagne, of the Germanic world.

Lambert is a real ace at interviewing, say, Richard Miller, and in fact I bought and read Miller’s book thanks to Lambert’s interviews. But non-Nietzschean apostates become, axiologically, atheistic hyper-Christians and, worst of all, many like Lambert become openly philo-Semitic Zionists. That is why, we have said, atheists are even worse than Christians (the key to this apparent mystery is provided by Nietzsche’s epigraph to the post ‘The Red Giant’).

Categories
Axiology Liberalism

Just…

…for the record, what Gaedhal calls ‘Atheistic Hyperchristianity’ is what we have been calling ‘Neo-Christianity’ on this site.

Categories
Liberalism Videos

The homo and the hetero

On the first of this month I commented on an interview that a liberal dude with his hair painted blue did this year with Richard Spencer. Sometimes you need to have the patience to watch such things just to probe what is wrong not only with today’s liberals, but with the racial right. Exactly the same can be said of those who complain about the Woke monster and who, at least for now, YouTube allows them to air their grievances. The best known are people like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson and Matt Walsh for the latter’s documentary What’s a Woman? But other voices are interesting to listen to because all these people don’t realise that they themselves are involved in the genesis of Wokism.

Yesterday I watched a YouTube conversation between a homosexual Englishman, Andrew Doyle, and the American Peter Boghossian.

If we take into account what Tom Holland says in Dominion (for those who don’t want to read the whole book I have highlighted some crucial sentences in bold), which resonates with what Alexis de Tocqueville predicted of the US (that the principle of equality always demands more and more equality), I find it incredible that these people don’t see the elephant in their room.

Doyle for example, who looks like an individual with a higher than average IQ and who has a broad literary and European culture, twice or three times mentioned the Nazis repeating the eternal slogans of our time (and he errs in saying that David Irving is a holocaust denier in his books). While Doyle acknowledged that Woke people don’t understand art and that Greek and Renaissance statuary is superb, he said that our age has moved beyond the way the ancient Greeks treated women (i.e., he tacitly endorsed the feminism of our age). Doyle doesn’t like Huckleberry Finn being taken off library shelves for its racist language, but he believes that today’s West has moved beyond the racial prejudices of the past. I could cite more double-think examples, but the talk between homo and hetero is rife with such things.

But what Peter Boghossian, the straight American, does is a thousand times worse than what the homo said. At the beginning of the conversation I was unaware that Boghossian, a well-known figure in the circle of critics of trans activism, had adopted a Chinese baby. That kind of behaviour is what I have called on this site the sin against the holy spirit of life: an unforgivable sin. (At least the English homo is not causing irreparable damage to the next generation with cuckoldry-like behaviour: raising a child of a foreign race!)

What can be learned from the surreal conversation between the homo and the hetero? While Christian racialists are also scared of the Woke monster, none of them has the slightest insight. To Christian racialists I would remind a passage from gentile David Skrbina quoted in the Neo-Christianity PDF linked above, a few words I highlighted in bold: ‘You Gentile Christians don’t even know what you’re worshipping—which in fact is us [Jews]’. That is: conservatives are afraid of the monster but fail to realise that they fed the monster until it finally grew up. It originated like a mustard seed with Paul’s letters and now the tree is so huge that even birds nest among its branches not because of Jewish subversion, but because whites have given themselves over to evil by believing the Jews who wrote the Bible. Indeed, Holland’s book shows how the seedbed of Christianity grew into the baobab that, following that metaphor from Saint-Exupéry’s book, grew to burst the planet of the little prince.

In the conversation embedded above, the homo and the hetero agree that the Woke tolerate no debate. But do they, the homo and the hetero tolerate it with people to their right, say questioning anti-racism, feminism and the anti-Nazi narrative of the time (e.g., here)? And what about today’s racialists: are they capable of responding to Skrbina or Holland? At least Kevin MacDonald reviewed the former’s book, but the strength of my latest PDF shows how the egalitarian virus of Christianity mutated into the super-egalitarian virus of neo-Christianity (Holland’s book).

When will white nationalists debate these issues?

Categories
Axiology Christendom Dominion (book) Liberalism Tom Holland

Western values are Christian values

by David Lindsay

Tom Holland has written a superb overview [Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World] of the impact of Christianity on the West. He argues we in the West are moored to our Christian past and our morals and ethics derive from Christianity. Holland believes that Christian values permeate Western culture and thinking. If anything, Christianity’s influence has been underestimated. Holland claims that many beliefs that we take for granted have Christian origins. He argues that George W. Bush was mistaken in assuming that Muslims shared a Christian worldview and such values are universal.

Holland does not fully explain what he means by Christian values. Jesus spoke repeatedly about inequality and injustice. He spent a lot of his time helping the poor and society’s outcasts. He wanted his followers to love their enemies. The Bible suggests that God is closer to the poor than to the rich. Matthew 25 states the key test for a disciple is treating the poor and the hungry as if they were Jesus. Professor Richard Hays of Duke Divinity School believes that Christians are meant to direct their energies towards the renunciation of violence, the sharing of possessions, and overcoming ethnic divisions. Holland discusses the impact of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, who were both students of the Bible. They preached a message of non-violence and forgiveness.

Saint Paul claimed that Christ’s church was open to all, slave and free, Greek and Jew, male and female. He taught that everyone is equal before God and we should love one another. These were revolutionary ideas in the Roman world and we still struggle with them today. Holland argues that because God loves each of us unconditionally, we are in turn meant to love and respect our fellow man. Holland discusses the Beatles and he claims that songs like “All You Need is Love” and “Imagine” express Christian beliefs.

Holland has written extensively about Rome, ancient Greece, and Islam. He claims that the more he studied classical antiquity the more alien he found it. Holland concluded that his values were distinctly Christian. Christianity became the dominant religion in Western Europe because of the Romans. Pagan Rome was a barbaric place. It was depraved and violent. The Romans entertained themselves by having criminals eaten alive by wild animals. Rome was also corrupt and materialistic, with only the rich having any rights. Julius Caesar is fondly remembered by classical scholars but he carried out genocide in Gaul. The Romans tended to destroy societies that got in their way. The Romans and Greek philosophers like Aristotle did not care about the poor and the downtrodden, they viewed them as losers. Aristotle justified slavery as natural, claiming some humans were slaves by nature, lacking the moral reason to be regarded as the equals of free men. Christianity must have seemed an attractive option for many ordinary people in the ancient world.

Holland does not believe that God exists but he was raised a Christian. He claims that we in the West have retained our Christian morals and ethics even though many of us have stopped believing in God. The book is not a history of Christianity. He mentions theologians like Irenaeus, Anselm, Origen, Marcion, and Pelagius. It helps to have some knowledge of Christian history to understand their significance.

When the Britain Empire occupied a country it would usually be forced by Christians to ban practices they considered barbaric. In India, Hindu widows would sacrifice themselves by sitting atop their deceased husband’s funeral pyre. The British banned this practice because of pressure from Christian evangelicals. William Wilberforce was a devout Christian, who forced the British Parliament to ban the slave trade in 1807. The Bible did not seem to condemn slavery, but British Christians knew it was wrong. As Western culture has become more liberal we have embraced behavior that the Bible specifically forbids, like divorce, working on the Sabbath, and homosexuality. We are now making our own rules, but they are still rooted in the gospels.

In 2002, the World Humanist Congress affirmed “the worth, dignity, and autonomy of the individual.” Holland views this as a quintessentially Christian idea that finds no parallel in the ancient world, or in other parts of the world today. Humanists believe “that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others.” Holland argues that the source of humanist values is not to be found in science or reason but in Christianity.

Holland suggests that Western secular liberals are deluding themselves in believing that Western views on human rights are universally shared. Western Liberals have insisted that Afghans should embrace gender equality. Holland claims that “To be a Muslim was to know that humans do not have rights. There was no natural law in Islam. There were only laws authored by God.” For some Islamic scholars, such as Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi the idea of equality between men and women, or between Islam and other religions, is “a monstrous blasphemy”. There is no such thing as “human rights” only the laws of Allah; any attempt to impose those human rights on Islamic countries is infidel heresy and will lead to friction.

Holland discusses the dark side of Christian history. Over time, he writes, Christians “have themselves become agents of terror. They have put the weak in their shadow; they have brought suffering, and persecution, and slavery in their wake.” He notes, for example, that the efforts of missionaries to bring Christianity to Africa were undermined by a “colonial hierarchy” in which black people “were deemed inferior.” But he also argues that the very standard by which we condemn colonizers is itself Christian.

Categories
Conservatism Liberalism Racial right Sexual "liberation"

My old metaphor

I watched a recent video of Jordan Peterson arguing with a Woke guy and was surprised that when the Woke guy told him that he knew a trans person who had been successful in life, Peterson acknowledged that in that case his sex change might have been a success story, albeit an exceptional one. Yesterday Tucker Carlson, in criticising the grotesque trans males who show off to children at schools, said in passing that perhaps it was a good thing that the homo community succeeded with the (misnamed) ‘gay marriage’.

Given that Peterson and Carlson are the best-known conservative figures in the media, what they recently said reminded me of my metaphor: that it is really the Left that is in the driving seat, and that the right can only apply the brakes slightly here and there but that both are headed for the cliff.

And what about white nationalists? If we remember my metaphor, while it is true that the nationalists have jumped off the train of the big Leftists and the dwarf rightists, they are heading, at pace, towards the same abyss. Not long ago there was an article on homosexualism in The Unz Review that mentioned Greg Johnson. When in the comments section I wanted to link to an article in The Occidental Observer by Andrew Joyce critical of Johnson’s apology for open and avowed homosexualism, I learned that Kevin MacDonald had deleted it.

Woke people (Jews and Leftists on the driving seat), conservatives who barely apply the brakes, and American racialists who got off the train but are headed in the same direction… What’s wrong with this picture? For those who don’t know this site, see pages 92-95 of Daybreak, ‘Ethnosuicidal Nationalists’, a book linked in the featured post.

Categories
Axiology Deranged altruism Free speech / association Liberalism Mexico City

On Juan María Alponte 


I had planned to publish post 158 of Deschner’s history of Christianity today, but found out that someone I knew personally had died several years ago.

Enrique Ruiz Garcia was the real name of ‘Juan María Alponte’. Ruiz took this alias because of his admiration for José María Apote, Cuba’s first freed slave! Enrique Ruiz, better known as Alponte in Mexico City and Spain, earned a doctorate in history from the University of Madrid and practised journalism in Mexico for half a century. He moved here after fleeing Franco’s regime in 1968; he published many books, and won important international recognition. That Franco’s Spain was the least bad country in Europe in the 1960s can be seen here and that was the Spain from which Alponte fled. Why?

Because Alponte was a perfect Spanish-speaking idiot.

Years ago a commenter told me on this site that the literature written in Spanish is a real disaster, in that all known authors are leftists; not a single one is right-wing. For the same reason, I call Latin America the subcontinent of the blue pill. Here everyone is asleep in the matrix that controls the West, and the projection of the West that is Latin America insofar as it was conquered by the Spanish and Portuguese.

I say that Alponte, who was considered a great humanist in Spanish-speaking intellectual circles, was an idiot because that is what he was along with the rest of the Spanish-speaking intelligentsia, and a single example will suffice for me to prove it.

In this article in Spanish, Alponte writes about Jean-Marie Le Pen siding one hundred per cent with a totalitarian France that doesn’t admit any historical revisionism regarding the Second World War. Alponte, and the rest of the Spanish-speaking intelligentsia, are idiots because it doesn’t occur to them that it is impossible to believe in freedom of speech, and at the same time, to applaud that the French state represses people like Jean-Marie Le Pen with fines and jail.

‘Idiots’ is an understatement. When I once visited Alponte at his home in Coyoacán (I wanted to publish my book and mistakenly believed he would help me), he was so busy that he told the maid that he wasn’t at home. But I peeked into his study and there was Alponte: reading in a study more than saturated with books.

But erudition isn’t directly proportional to wisdom. The case of Alponte and the rest of the Spanish-speaking intellectuals are paradigmatic of the point of view of this site. It was not the Jews who tricked us into subscribing to an anti-white ideology (think of the freed black slave that the idiot Ruiz used to change his name!). It was Christianity, or more precisely insofar as Ruiz/Alponte was a secular man, Christian ethics. I would like to illustrate this point with the latest email Gaedhal has sent to several correspondents:

When one fully deconverts from Christianity, one does not just reject the supernatural claims—nobody but nincompoops believe in Christianity’s supernatural claims. One also deconverts from Christianity’s axiology. Previous generations were content to give up the supernatural claims, and then attempt to out-christian the Christians on axiological matters.

My interpolated note: I, the atheist, am holier than thou, the Christian.

The term ‘axiology’ comes from the Greek word ‘agō’, which means ‘I drive’. Imagine the scales of justice. What is the driving force that balances these scales? This is what axiology asks. It was ex-Catholic César Tort who introduced me to this philosophical concept.

In my view, it is still Christian assumptions such as ‘the sanctity of human life’ and ‘human equality’ that is balancing the scales of justice in the West. The notion that everybody is equal comes from the notion of soul equality. As Alex Linder points out: if you believe that we are all equally created, then it kinda follows that we are all created equal.

However, as Revilo P. Oliver points out, once we reject Yahweh and his ‘special creation of man’, all notions of human equality should be abandoned also. In the same way that no two racehorses are equal, neither are any two humans.

And so even though fewer and fewer people believe in Yahweh, nevertheless, Jehovitic notions such as the sanctity of human life and human equality are still balancing the scales of justice. (In my view, I value blue whales more than most humans, and I value a rainforest more than a city teaming with the human virus.)

It’s a pity that I have so much work to do with correcting the syntax of our books before putting the links back in the featured post. I wish I had finished so that the critique of anthropocentrism in the book by Savitri Devi we recently translated would show, in a more formal way, what Gaedhal said above.

Update of 5:50 pm

When this guy was still living in Spain, the Spanish press was not in the hands of Jews. And yet, without Jews, the idiot changed his name, within Spanish culture, to a sort of virtuous BLM signal for Spanish speakers, decades before BLM emerged in the US. In other words, black lives were of the utmost importance to this neochristian.

Categories
Art Axiology Civilisation (TV series) French Revolution Kenneth Clark Liberalism Napoleon

The fallacies of hope

The best way to realise that it is we rather than the Jews who are responsible for white decline is simply to listen, very carefully, to the great communicators of Western culture.

In my post on Tuesday, in which I reproduced an angel painted by da Vinci, I alluded to Kenneth Clark: who from the time we had a black-and-white television captivated us with his Civilisation series. These days I re-watched ‘The Fallacies of Hope’ while reading the corresponding chapter in the text version of Civilisation. In the TV version, we heard that Clark chose a few bars of the Funeral March from Beethoven’s Eroica to illustrate his disenchantment with Napoleon.

It’s a pity that what Clark told us in the TV version about Napoleon’s secret police doesn’t appear in the book. Why did he leave it out? The audio-visual version is supposed to condense what is written, not vice versa; and the dungeons of Napoleon, who crowned the French Revolution, are not even pictured in the text.

‘The Fallacies of Hope’ is a phrase from the painter Turner, and in the episode referred to we see allusions to various years: France 1830, Spain 1848, Germany 1848, France 1848, Hungary 1848, Italy 1861, France 1871—all these were the naive daughters of the monster that came later—Russia 1917, Spain 1936 (remember what I recently said about Franco), Hungary 1956, France 1968 and Czechoslovakia 1968.

Clark then complains about prisons for political prisoners in Nazi Germany, Franco’s Spain (who was a dictator when the BBC filmed Civilisation) and Hungary, but says not a word about the millions of Russians imprisoned by Lenin and Stalin. Why did Clark omit the most conspicuous?

Civilisation, about which in 2012 I had written several reviews on this site, can serve wonderfully to show how the distorted view of today’s West was generated: liberalism as a product of Christianity (Clark considered the Church of England too secular for his taste). A close reading of Civilisation, as well as careful viewing of the television version, is an excellent passport to penetrate the Christian-liberal zeitgeist.

Here is what Clark, who had a very deep insight into Western art, didn’t know. Since he speaks of the Church as the cornerstone of our civilisation (his series begins with Greek art and continues through the Middle Ages), it is clear that he knew nothing of what we have been translating from Karlheinz Deschner’s book (Clark died three years before the first volume, in German, of Deschner’s history of Christianity came out). Also, in 1969 Civilisation was released in the UK and the US, a few years before The Gulag Archipelago was published. As we have been saying on this site, to be ignorant of the history of Christianity, or communism, is tantamount to being a historical fool. Since I was brought up as a child in the arts that Clark mastered so well, it is easy for me to understand him. But art alone is insufficient to understand what happened: we need to know the dissenting voices.

Still, as I said, Civilisation, in its two versions, is a magnificent gateway to understanding how liberalism is shaped by a Christian scholar. Despite the title of the penultimate episode of Civilisation, ‘The Fallacies of Hope’, Lord Clark never lost hope in the liberal point of view. That same episode, in its television version, shows us images of liberated students in post-’68 Paris, and Clark puts his faith in their struggles never suspecting that, once grown up, those same Sorbonne students would open the gates to mass migration.

But what Clark got absolutely right is that, to understand a culture, you have to understand its art. More recently Tom Sunic has said things in line with this premise, and I have refracted it here by mentioning the novelistic art of some nineteenth-century white authors, such as the European author of Ivanhoe (a pro-Jewish novel), the female author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (a pro-black, anti-racist novel) and Ben-Hur (authored by a pro-Jewish American colonel): great bestsellers of their time.

Rather than the misguided approach of so-called social sciences, to penetrate the deep secrets of art is to understand our soul.