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Julian (novel) Literature

Julian, 5

Julian presiding at a conference of Sectarians
(Edward Armitage, 1875)

 
Priscus to Libanius

Athens, June 380

I send you by my pupil Glaucon something less than half of the Emperor Julian’s memoir. It cost me exactly thirty solidi to have this much copied. On receipt of the remaining fifty solidi I shall send you the rest of the book. I can only assume that the copying you had done in Athens last summer was the work of an admirer who gave you a cut price as a sign of his esteem for your high contributions to philosophy and rhetoric.

I do not share your pessimism about the new Emperor. He is hardly what we would have picked had the choice been ours, but then the choice never has been ours. Julian’s accession was the work of Fortune, a deity notable for her absence in human affairs. We can hardly hope to have another Julian in our lifetime. And that is that.

I have studied the edict since I wrote you last, and though it is somewhat sterner in tone than Constantine’s, I suspect the only immediate victims will be those Christians who follow Arius. But I may be mistaken. I almost always am in political matters, a weakness no doubt of the philosophic temperament.

However, what does give me hope was last year’s appointment of the “poet” Ausonius as consul. Do you know him? I am sure you’ve read him. If not, you have a treat in store. I have lately become rather an expert on his career. He started life as the son of a well-to-do doctor in Bordeaux. His phenomenal luck began when the Emperor Valentinian made him tutor to his son Gratian. As Ausonius himself puts it, he “moulded the tiny mind of the infant prince”.

When the prince became emperor, he rewarded his old tutor by making him praetorian prefect of Gaul as well as consul for last year. I mention all this because Ausonius is inclined favourably to us, and he exerts a considerable influence not only on Gratian (who is far too busy hunting wild boar in Gaul to distress us unduly) but on Theodosius as well. He is obviously the man for you to cultivate.

Not long ago I sent round to the library to see what they had by Ausonius. The slave returned with a wheelbarrow full of books. Ausonius must be read to be believed! As poet, no subject is too trivial for him; as courtier, no flattery too excessive. He did write one passable nature poem on the Moselle, but I’m not keen on rivers. The rest of his work is quite marvellous in its tedium. Particularly those verses he wrote at Valentinian’s request. Among the subjects chosen by the Emperor were the source of the Danube (Ausonius did not locate it but he made a good try), Easter, and (best of all) four odes to the Emperor’s four favourite horses.

I had one of these equine odes copied out and Hippia reads it to me whenever I am depressed. It begins “Oh raven steed, whose fortune it is to spread the golden thighs and Mars-like firm convexities of divine Augustus…” I don’t know when I have enjoyed a poem so much.

I’ll enclose a copy. Anyway, I suggest you see Ausonius as soon as possible. And of course you will remember to express admiration for his work! In a good cause hypocrisy becomes virtue.

I never go to evening parties. The quarter I referred to in my letter was not the elegant street of Sardes but the quarter of the prostitutes near the agora. I don’t go to parties because I detest talking-women, especially our Athenian ladies who see themselves as heiresses to the age of Pericles. Their conversation is hopelessly pretentious and artificial. Their dinners are inedible, and for some reason they all tend to be rather squat with dark vestigial moustaches; no doubt Aphrodite’s revenge on the talking-woman.

I live very quietly at home with an occasional visit to the quarter. Hippia and I get along rather better than we used to. Much of her charm for me has been her lifelong dislike of literature. She talks about servants and food and relatives, and I find her restful. Also, I have in the house a Gothic girl, bought when she was eleven. She is now a beautiful woman, tall and well made, with eyes grey as Athena’s.

She never talks. Eventually I shall buy her a husband and free them both as a reward for her serene acceptance of my attentions, which delight her far less than they do me. But that is often the case with the feminine half of Plato’s ugliest beast. But then Plato disliked sexual intercourse between men and women. We tend of course to think of Plato as divine, but I am afraid he was rather like our old friend Iphicles, whose passion for youths has become so outrageous that he now lives day and night in the baths, where the boys call him the queen of philosophy.

I am sorry to hear that your health grows worse but that is to be expected at our age. The rash you refer to does sound like bad fish. I suggest a diet of bread and water, and not much of either. On receipt of the money, I will send you the balance of the memoir. It will disturb and sadden you. I shall be curious to see how you use this material. Hippia joins me in wishing for your good—or should I say better?—health.

You will note in the memoir that Julian invariably refers to the Christians as “Galileans” and to their churches as “charnel houses”, this last a dig at their somewhat necrophile passion for the relics of dead men. I think it might be a good idea to alter the text, and reconvert those charnel houses into churches and those Galileans into Christians. Never offend an enemy in a small way.

Here and there in the text, I have made marginal notes. I hope you won’t find them too irrelevant.

Categories
Julian (novel) Literature

Julian, 4

Julian presiding at a conference of Sectarians
(Edward Armitage, 1875)

 

Libanius to Priscus

Antioch, April 380

You cannot imagine the pleasure I experienced when your letter was brought to me this evening. So eager was I to hear your voice again, as it were, that I fear I ripped the fastenings and tore the long-awaited page itself. But rest assured, your precious letter will be mended with glue and cherished, since any utterance of your genius is an essential reflection of the Hellenic spirit to be passed on to those who come after.

Let me say right off how pleased I am to learn of your unflagging sexual vigour. It is always inspiring to the rest of us to learn that in certain rare human beings the usual cycle of sad decline does not obtain. You have been indeed favoured by the gods and in your obvious enjoyment of that favour will never sigh at eighty, as did Sophocles, “At last I am free of a cruel and insane master!”

Your master is obviously a good companion, made even more enjoyable by Hippia’s acquiescence. Not many wives of philosophers would allow their husbands freedom to consort with those deliciously civilised ladies of Athens whose evening parties used to delight me in my student days. Now of course my life is devoted to philosophy and affairs of state. I leave to younger men the charms of Aphrodite… to younger men and now, Priscus, to you, who have held at arm’s length the villain time! Fortunate man! Fortunate girls to be so loved!

Since I wrote you last, I have not been idle. Through the office of the praetorian prefect at Constantinople, I have proposed myself for an audience with the Emperor. Theodosius has met very few people of our set, coming as he does from Spain, a country not noted for culture. He also belongs to a military family and there is no evidence that he has ever studied philosophy.

Outside of politics, his principal interest is breeding sheep. But he is only thirty-three and his character, according to the best information available, is mild. Though we should not count on this. How often in the past have we been horrified by princes reputed to be good who, when raised to the throne of the world, have turned monstrous before our eyes! The late Valens for example, or Julian’s own brother, the Caesar Gallus, a charming youth who brought terror to the East. We must be on our guard, as always.

The question that now faces us is: how seriously will Theodosius enforce the edict? It is customary for emperors who listen to bishops to hurl insults at the very civilisation that created them. They are inconsistent, but then logic has never been a strong point of the Christian faith. The extraordinary paradox is the collusion of our princes with the bishops.

The emperors pride themselves on being first magistrates of the Roman imperium, through whose senate they exercise their power; and though in reality we have not been Roman for a century, nevertheless, the form persists, making it impossible, one would think, for any prince who calls himself Augustus to be Christian, certainly not as long as the Altar of Victory remains in the senate house at Rome.

But confusions of this sort are as inconsequential to the Christian mind as clouds to a day in summer, and as a teacher I no longer try to refute them; since most of my students are Christian, I suppose I ought to be grateful that they have chosen to come to me to be taught that very philosophy their faith subverts. It is comedy, Priscus! It is tragedy!

Meanwhile, we can only wait to see what happens. The Emperor grows stronger in health every day, and it is thought that later this spring he may take the field against the Goths, who as usual are threatening the marches of Macedonia. If he decides to go north, that means he will not return to Constantinople till late summer or autumn, in which case I will have to attend him at Thessalonica or, worse, in the field. If so, I am confident the journey will be my last. For my health, unlike yours, continues to deteriorate.

I have coughing fits which leave me weak and longing for the grave. I have also developed a curious rash on the backs of my hands and forearms which may be the result of eating a bad flounder last week (shades of Diogenes and the fatal raw octopus!), or it may be the outward sign of a corruption in the blood. How I wish Oribasius were in Antioch! He is the only physician I ever trusted, in which I follow Julian, who used to say, “The god Asklepios gave Oribasius secrets known only to heaven.”

Over the years I have made a number of notes for a biography of Julian. I have them before me now. All that remains is the final organisation of the material—and of course the memoir. Please send it to me as soon as the copy is ready. I shall work on it this summer, as I am no longer lecturing. I thought it wise to go into seclusion until we know which way the wind blows.

I don’t need to tell you that Antioch has ignored the edict. Never in my memory has Antioch obeyed the imperial authority except at sword’s point. I have often warned the local senate that emperors do not like disobedience, but our people feel that they are beyond law and reprisal. The folly of the clever is always greater than that of the dull. I tremble for Antioch, even though I am currently a beneficiary of its absence of reverence for the decrees of Caesar.

There have been no incidents so far. My Christian friends come to see me as usual (rather a large number of my old students are now bishops, a peculiar irony). Colleagues who are still lecturing tell me that their classes are much as usual. The next move is up to Theodosius, or, to be exact, up to the bishops. Luckily for us, they have been so busy for so long persecuting one another that we have been able to survive. But reading between the lines of the edict, I suspect a bloodbath.

Theodosius has outlawed with particular venom the party of the late Bishop Arius on the grounds that Galileans must now have a church with a single doctrine to be called universal… a catholic church, no less! To balance this, we must compose a true life of Julian. So let us together fashion one last wreath of Apollonian laurel to place upon the brow of philosophy, as a brave sign against the winter that threatens this stormy late season of the world. I want those who come after us to realize what hopes we had for life, and I want them to see how close our Julian came to arresting the disease of Galilee.

Such a work, properly done, would be like a seed planted in the autumn to await the sun’s awakening, and a new flowering.

Apparently, the cost of copying at Athens has gone up incredibly since I had some work done there last year. I find eighty gold solidi exorbitant for what you say is a fragment, or a book of moderate length. Only last summer I paid thirty solidi for a Plotinus which, in length, must be treble that of Julian’s memoir. I send now by a friend who embarks tomorrow for Athens thirty gold solidi and this letter. Again my best wishes to the admirable Hippia, and to you, my old friend and fellow soldier in the wars of philosophy.

Categories
Julian (novel) Literature

Julian, 3

Julian presiding at a conference of Sectarians
(Edward Armitage, 1875)

 
Priscus to Libanius

Athens, March 380

Yes, the edict is well known here, but the general feeling at the University is that despite its severe tone we are not apt to be persecuted. The schools are flourishing. The little Christians flock to us to be civilized, and I find them much like their Hellenist brothers. But then all young people seem to me more and more alike. They ask the same questions and they give you the same answers to the questions they ask you. I despair of teaching anyone anything, least of all myself. I have not had a new idea since I was twenty-seven.

That is why I don’t publish my lectures. Also, too many of us publish out of vanity or to attract students. At seventy-five (I am nine, not a dozen, years older than you) I am an empty flagon. Tap me and you will hear an awful hollow sound. My head is a tomb quite as empty as the one Jesus is supposed to have walked away from. I incline now to Crates and the early Cynics, less to Plato and the rest.

I am not in the least convinced that there is a Divine Oneness at the centre of the universe, nor am I susceptible to magic, unlike Julian, who was hopelessly gullible. I often thought Maximus exploited his good-heartedness. But then I never could endure Maximus. How he used to waste Julian’s time with his séances and arcane gibberish! I teased the Emperor about him once, but Julian only laughed and said, “Who knows through what door wisdom will walk?”

As to your publishing project, I am not at all certain that a sympathetic biography of Julian would have the slightest effect at this time. Theodosius is a military politician, impressed by bishops. He might of course sanction a biography of his predecessor simply because Julian is much admired to this day, though not for his philosophy. Julian is admired because he was young and handsome and the most successful general of our century. The people have a touching admiration for generals who win battles, which is why there are no heroes today.

But if Theodosius did permit a biography, it would have to avoid the religious issue. The bishops would see to that. And for ferocity there is nothing on earth to equal a Christian bishop hunting “heresy”, as they call any opinion contrary to their own. Especially confident are they on that subject where they are as ignorant as the rest of mankind.

Anyway, I don’t want to fight them, because I am one and they are many. And though I am, as you so comfortingly suggest, old and near the end of my life, I enjoy amazingly good health. I am told that I look no different than I did at forty, and I am still capable of the sexual act at almost any time. This vitality repels Hippia, who has aged noticeably in the last few years, but it seems to please various young women in a certain quarter of Athens which you doubtless have heard of—in novels of the Milesian school!

Do I make myself clear? I have no wish to be burned alive or stoned or tacked up to the door of a Christian church, or “charnel house” as Julian used to call them. You may be as brave as you like and I will applaud you in my heart. But I have no intention of writing a single sentence about Julian, fond as I was of him and alarmed as I am at the strange course our world has taken since the adventurer Constantine sold us to the bishops.

Julian’s memoir was written during the last four months of his life. It was begun in March 363, at Hierapolis. Nearly every night during our invasion of Persia he would dictate recollections of his early life. The result is a bit helter-skelter, for both as a writer and as a man he was swift and impulsive. He once told me that he would like to compose an autobiography of the order of Marcus Aurelius to Himself, but he lacked that writer’s discipline.

Julian was also influenced by Xenophon’s The March Upcountry, since Xenophon took much the same route we did seven centuries later. Julian’s interest in history was always lively, and he was a great sightseer. The resulting memoir is something of a hybrid; even so, Julian was often an engaging writer, and if he was not better it is because it is hard to be emperor, philosopher and general all at once. He was also indiscreet about everyone.

I hope you forgive him. I have done so. He suspected that he had very little time and he wanted to get everything said. As for his mysterious death, I have a theory as to what happened, which I will explain to you in due course.

I have never quite known what to do with this work. When Julian died, I took all his personal papers, suspecting that his Christian successors would destroy them. I had no right to these papers, of course, but I don’t regret my theft. I told no one about the memoir until I was back safe in Antioch, where I must have mentioned it to you the day you read us your famous eulogy. I was so moved by your eloquence that I betrayed my own confidence.

I am now having a fair copy made of the manuscript. You are misinformed if you think copying is cheaper here than at Antioch. Quite the contrary. The estimated cost will run to eighty gold solidi, which I suggest you send by return post. On receipt of the full amount, I will send you the book to use as you see fit. Only do not mention to anyone that I had any connection with the matter. I have not the slightest desire to endure martyrdom at this time, or ever.

I thought I had written you about your collection of letters. I did get the book and it was very thoughtful of you to send it to me. We are all in your debt for those letters, especially yours to Julian. They are wise. I know of no other philosopher so sensible of posterity as to keep copies of every letter he writes, realizing that even his most trivial effusion has, in the context of the large body of his work, an eternal value.

Hippia joins me in wishing you good health.

Categories
Julian (novel) Literature

Julian, 2

As to yesterday’s London terrorist attack I agree with Hunter Wallace that “There is nothing new to add here” (at any event, remember that only the news that I consider important will be mentioned at the Addenda). More important is to hammer on our view that the religion of our parents means white genocide. In the first pages of Julian we see a dramatisation of how ancient intellectuals dealt with a hostile takeover of their Hellenic culture by a cult of Levantine extraction:

 

Youth

I

Libanius to Priscus

Antioch, March [A.D.] 380

Yesterday morning as I was about to enter the lecture hall, I was stopped by a Christian student who asked me in a voice eager with malice, “Have you heard about the Emperor Theodosius?”

I cleared my throat ready to investigate the nature of this question, but he was too quick for me. “He has been baptized a Christian.”

I was non-committal. Nowadays, one never knows who is a secret agent. Also, I was not particularly surprised at the news. When Theodosius fell ill last winter and the bishops arrived like vultures to pray over him, I knew that should he recover they would take full credit for having saved him. He survived. Now we have a Christian emperor in the East, to match Gratian, our Christian emperor in the West. It was inevitable.

I turned to go inside but the young man was hardly finished with his pleasant task. “Theodosius has also issued an edict. It was just read in front of the senate house. I heard it. Did you?”

“No. But I always enjoy imperial prose,” I said politely.

“You may not enjoy this. The Emperor has declared heretic all those who do not follow the Nicene Creed.”

“I’m afraid Christian theology is not really my subject. The edict hardly applies to those of us who are still faithful to philosophy.”

“It applies to everyone in the East.” He said this slowly, watching me all the while. “The Emperor has even appointed an Inquisitor to determine one’s faith. The days of toleration are over.”

I was speechless; the sun flared in my eyes; all things grew confused and I wondered if I was about to faint, or even die. But the voices of two colleagues recalled me. I could tell by the way they greeted me that they, too, had heard about the edict and were curious to know my reaction. I gave them no pleasure.

“Of course I expected it,” I said. “The Empress Postuma wrote me only this week to say that…” I invented freely. I have not of course heard from the Empress in some months, but I thought that the enemy should be reminded to what extent I enjoy the favour of Gratian and Postuma. It is humiliating to be forced to protect oneself in this way, but these are dangerous times.

I did not lecture yesterday. I went straight home. I am now living in Daphne, by the way, a charming suburb which I prefer to Antioch proper because of the quiet. As I get older, I find that the slightest sound in the night disturbs me and, once awake, I have difficulty falling asleep again. You can imagine how intolerable my old house in the city became. You remember the house; it was there that I gave the reception for the Emperor Julian when he…

But I forget. You were not there, and you were much missed! My memory plays me odd tricks these days. Even worse, I tend to mislay the notes I jot down as reminders, or (terrible confession!) when I do find them, I am often unable to decipher my own handwriting. Age spares us nothing, old friend. Like ancient trees, we die from the top.

Except for occasional lectures, I seldom go into town, for the people, though my own, distress me with their loud voices and continual quarrelling, their gambling and sensuality. They are hopelessly frivolous. Nights are made day with artificial light, while nearly all the men now use depilatories, which makes it difficult to tell them from women… to think how I once eulogized this city! But I suppose one must be tolerant, recalling that the Antiochenes are the victims of a demoralizingly sultry climate, the proximity of Asia and of course that pernicious Christian doctrine which asserts that a sprinkling of water (and a small donation) will wash away sin, again and again and again.

Now, my old friend, as I sit here in my study surrounded by our proscribed friends (I mean those books of Greece which made the mind of man), let me tell you what thoughts I had last night—a sleepless night not only because of the edict but because two cats saw fit to enliven my despair with the noise of lust (only an Egyptian would worship a cat). I am weary today but determined.

We must fight back. What happens to us personally is not important, but what happens to civilization is a matter of desperate concern. During my sleepless night, I thought of various appeals that might be made to our new Emperor. I have a copy of the edict before me as I write. It is composed in bad bureaucratic Greek, the official style of the bishops, whose crudity of language is equalled only by the confusion of their thought. Not unlike those celebrated minutes of the council at—where was it? Chalcedon?—which we used to read aloud to one another with such delight! Carefree days, never to come again. Unless we act now.

Priscus, I am sixty-six years old and you are, as I recall, a dozen years older than I. We have reached an age when death is a commonplace not to be feared, especially by us, for is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying? And are we not true philosophers who have nothing to lose but that which in the natural course we shall surrender in any case, more soon than late?

I have already had several seizures in recent years which left me unconscious and weakened, and of course my chronic cough, aggravated by an unseasonable wet winter, threatens to choke me to death at any time. I am also losing my sight; and I suffer from a most painful form of gout. Therefore let us, fearing nothing, join forces and strike back at the Christians before they entirely destroy the world we love.

My plan is this. Seventeen years ago when you returned from Persia, you told me that our beloved friend and pupil, the Emperor Julian, had written a fragment of memoir which you had got hold of at the time of his death. I have often thought to write you for a copy, simply for my own edification. I realized then, as did you, that publication was out of the question, popular though Julian was and still is, even though his work to restore the true gods has been undone.

Under the Emperors Valentinian and Valens we had to be politic and cautious if we were to be allowed to go on teaching. But now in the light of this new edict, I say: an end to caution! We have nothing but two old bodies to lose, while there is eternal glory to be gained by publishing Julian’s memoir, with an appropriate biography to be written by either or both of us. I knew his quality best, of course, but you were with him in Persia and saw him die.

So between the two of us, I his teacher and you his philosopher-companion, we can rehabilitate his memory and with close reasoning show the justice of his contest with the Christians. I have written about him in the past, and boldly. I refer particularly to the eulogy I composed just after his death when, if I may say so, I was able to bring tears even to hard Christian eyes.

Shortly afterwards, I published my correspondence with Julian. Incidentally, I sent you a copy and though you never acknowledged this gift, I do hope you found it interesting. If by any chance you did not receive it, I shall be happy to send you another one. I kept all of Julian’s letters to me over the years, as well as copies of my own letters to him.

One can never rely on the great keeping one’s letters; and should those letters vanish, one is apt to be remembered only as the mysterious half of a dialogue to be reconstructed in the vaguest way from the surviving (and sometimes lesser!) half of the exchange. Finally, I am at work on an oration to be called “On Avenging the Emperor Julian”. I mean to dedicate this work to Theodosius.

Let me know as soon as possible if you concur in my plan. I repeat: we have nothing to lose. And the world has much to gain. By the way, as a sign of the times, there is now a Latin Academy at Antioch, with a heavy enrolment. It is enough to chill the blood. The young men are deserting Hellenic studies for Roman law in the hopes of government preferment. My own classes are still large but many of my colleagues are literally starving to death. Recently, a student (Christian, of course) most tactfully suggested that I, Libanius, learn Latin! At my age and after a life-time devoted to Greek!

I told him that as I was not a lawyer there was nothing I needed to read in that ugly language, which has produced only one poem and that a depressing paraphrase of our great Homer. I hope after so many years of silence between us that this letter finds you and your admirable wife, Hippin, in good health. I envy you your life at Athens, the natural centre of our universe. Do I need to add that I will of course defray any expenses you might incur in having Julian’s memoir copied? The price of copying, luckily, is less at Athens than here at Antioch. Books always cost more in those cities where they are least read!

Added: An old rumour has just been confirmed. The Great King of Persia, Sapor, is dead at last. He was over eighty and reigned most of his life. A strange coincidence that the king who struck down our beloved Julian should die just as we are about to restore his memory. I was once told that Sapor had read my Life of Demosthenes and admired it. How marvellous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself. Let us make Julian live again, and for all time!

Categories
Julian (novel) Literature

Julian, 1

Julian presiding at a conference of Sectarians
(Edward Armitage, 1875)

 

Emperor Julian (Latin: Flavius Claudius Iulianus Augustus, 331/332 – 26 June 363) has been considered a hero of the resistance to Christianity. When in 2012 and 2013 I started to reproduce excerpts of Gore Vidal’s novel Julian I was typing directly from my book copy. Now that I have obtained the PDF I’ll be adding the complete text on Sundays. The following is a note that the author himself wrote for the first page of his novel in the early 1960s.

 

Robert Graves, when he came to publish his sequel to I, Claudius, remarked in a somewhat irritable preface that a good many reviewers seemed to think he had simply spun himself a novel from Suetonius’s gossip, which looked to them like a very easy thing to do. In Claudius the God, Graves struck back with a long bibliography, listing nearly every relevant text which has survived from the ancient world. Unfortunately, I have not read as much as all that. But to anticipate those who might think that one’s only source was the history of Ammianus Marcellinus (or even of Edward Gibbon), I have included at the end of the book a partial bibliography.

The Emperor Julian’s life is remarkably well documented. Three volumes of his letters and essays survive, while such acquaintances as Libanius and Saint Gregory of Nazianzus wrote vivid accounts of him. Though I have written a novel, not a history, I have tried to stay with the facts, only occasionally shifting things around. For instance, it is unlikely that Priscus joined Julian in Gaul, but it is useful to the narrative to have him there.

Julian has always been something of an underground hero in Europe. His attempt to stop Christianity and revive Hellenism exerts still a romantic appeal, and he crops up in odd places, particularly during the Renaissance and again in the nineteenth century. Two such unlikely authors as Lorenzo de’ Medici and Henilk Ibsen wrote plays about him. But aside from the unique adventure of Julian’s life, what continues to fascinate is the fourth century itself. During the fifty years between the accession of Julian’s uncle Constantine the Great and Julian’s death at thirty-two, Christianity was established. For better or worse, we are today very much the result of what they were then.

In naming cities, I give the modern rather than the ancient name (Milan, not Mediolanum), except when the original name is more familiar to us (Ephesus, not Selquk). Dates I put in our fashion, A.D. and B.C. Since Julian’s court was a military one, I have used our own army’s way of dating, i.e., 3 October 363. Currency is a tricky matter. No one is quite certain what the exact purchasing power of money was in the fourth century, but a gold solidus was probably worth about five dollars. Julian, Priscus and Libanius, the three narrators of this story, all wrote Greek. Their Latin was rather shaky, as they are quick to remind us, but they occasionally use Latin terms, much the way we do. For those readers who will search in vain for Julian’s famous last words, “Thou hast conquered, Galilean!”, he never said them. Theodoret must take credit for this fine rhetoric, composed a century after Julian’s death.

I should like to thank the American Academy at Rome and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens for letting me use their libraries.

G.V.

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche Literature St Francis

William Gayley Simpson

(1892-1991)

Last year a friend recommended me the great work of William Gayley Simpson, Which Way Western Man? that can be read online. Simpson lived 99 years and wrote that huge work, of 775 pages, throughout most of his life.

I have read some chapters of Which Way Western Man? and was impressed that, before the internet age, Simpson managed to move from an altruistic Christianity to a stance in which he defended Hitler. I will not read the whole book. It is a mixture of disparate writings. One of the earliest dates from 1930, the chapter dedicated to Jesus; another, his already racist view on life, of 1977.

Simpson could have become a B-type bicausalist, blaming Christianity even more than Jewry, since after his Franciscan stage he became a fanatical reader of Nietzsche. For example, on page 18 of Which Way he says about his Franciscan venture: “It was full of Christian pity. It is no less than a crime against life when the superior is sacrificed to the inferior… the kind of thing the great scholar and musical authority Schweitzer did for years in the jungles of Africa”.

This seems to vindicate what I have said about Albert Schweitzer. In another confession, hundreds of pages later (on page 499), we see how Simpson’s Christianity was involved in what Nietzsche calls the inversion of values:

In fairness to myself and to my reader, I must remind him that I approached this question, forty years ago, very definitely from the equalitarian side. In my student days, and for the nine years of my Franciscan venture that followed, with a belief in “universal love” and an outlook on life very like that of St. Francis of Assisi, I quite ignored race, and discounted it. Wherever I went, in our South as in our North, in the Orient as in my own country and among my own kind, I met men as I found them, and valued them for the worth that I sensed in them as individuals, without regard to their race, their nation, their family, class, or any other feature having to do with their origin or their associations. Provided that there was health of body and mind on both sides, I even openly declared my readiness to sanction racial intermarriage.

But it was my Christian tradition and my ignorance that spoke thus.

Let’s jump other hundreds of pages forward. On page 708 Which Way contains a passage summarizing the English Revolution in a couple of paragraphs:

In the reign of Charles I, King of England from 1625 until he was beheaded in 1649, the Jews had already been outlawed from English shores for about 350 years. Driven out of Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, many of them swarmed into Holland, where they soon made Amsterdam the financial capital of the world. Meanwhile England, without any Jews, had prospered mightily, had come to be known as “Merrie England,” had produced Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Age, and had destroyed the Spanish Armada; and by the time of Charles the First was showing signs of that expanding vitality that was to make her the greatest empire-builder in all history. This caused the Dutch Jews to lust for readmission to English soil, inasmuch as no animal makes so desirable a host for parasites as one that is healthy and growing. Cromwell came into a collision with the king that developed into a civil war.

He required money and all things needful for his army. The Jews agreed to be the suppliers on condition that, should he come out on top, he would have the ban against them lifted. In a few years the king’s head rolled, and Jews, mostly from Holland, swarmed in. Within two generations, they became the dominant financial power in the land and, as we have already seen, the Bank “of England” was set up, which, with its acknowledged privilege of enjoying “the interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing,” became the model for all the central banking systems with which the Western world was gradually saddled.

On pages 755-6 Simpson responds to a liberal in such way that he should be cited today:

The very men of whom you have been at such pains to make mock, even in our universities —Gobineau, Chamberlain, Spengler, Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, H.F.K. Guenther—yes, and Adolf Hitler and Lincoln Rockwell, too— we will gather up from the scrap heap where you have thrown them and done your best to bury them, and we will wash them clean that they may be seen in a true light for what they were, and will set them up before us as our exemplars, our teachers, our heroes and our inspirers.

Although Simpson never surpassed his bicausalism type-A, it is worth reading, in 762, how he portrays the Jew:

But in any case, so long as we retain control over our own society, we must establish it as our undeviating and relentless aim to make and to keep our people homogeneous. The Jews, of course, to their last gasp, will resort to their utmost cunning and marshall all their strength to bring any such effort to naught. For they know full well, as already observed more than once, that it has been only by maintaining an attitude of abhorrence toward all mixing with aliens that they have survived the centuries and have come to be the power in the world that they are today. And they are no less aware that the only means by which they can keep a creature of our size in leading strings to them is to get us to swallow the poison that they themselves keep so far away from, until we become a race of enfeebled, fawning, mixed-breed curs.

In that same page Simpson even vindicates nordicism: a taboo subject for the white nationalists of today:

Also, with homogeneity as our goal, we must sternly shut our doors against all immigrants who are not White. Indeed, in my own judgment, we should be wise to reject even those White people who do not stem from the countries of northwestern Europe.

It is a disgrace that books like this one, published in 1978, have not been reedited, translated and found in the bookstores of the West.

Categories
Feminism Liberalism Literature Manosphere

War of the sexes, 30

Freedom’s daughters

 
Harold A. Covington is a neonazi and a novelist. He advocates the creation of a new nation, a white Republic in the Pacific Northwest region of the US as a sanctuary to prevent the extinction of whites. Covington’s five novels present a fictionalized account of the rise of a future Northwest American Republic. This nation secedes from the US, ejects all non-white inhabitants from its territory and becomes a regional superpower, defeating US attempts to re-conquer it.

Corinna Burt (“Axis Sally”) was Covington’s personal assistant, co-host and appeared on his weekly podcasts numerous times. She apparently was screwing black guys while working with white supremacist Covington. After leaving Covington Burt went back to her vomit: bodybuilding and a pornstar job. The bitch even attacked Covington and white supremacy in her blog and in her YouTube channel.

How could this have happened to a novelist that has been compared to Homer by one of the finest Europeans intellectuals? The answer is simple: because Covington believes that in the coming racial wars women are interchangeable with men. He even coined a term for such women in his quintet, “gun bunnies.” If we keep in mind what John Sparks and the blogger have been saying in the last 29 entries we can see how silly this view is from the standpoint of natural science.

The best way to illustrate Covington’s feminist views is simply quoting​ from what he wrote in the last novel of his quintet, Freedom’s Sons, a book of almost a thousand pages. In the prologue he wrote:

Wingfield scowled after her: “I’m sorry if my order to keep our female comrades out of direct combat ruffled their feathers, and I know they’re all as brave as lions or they wouldn’t be here…” [p. xxxvii]

Brave as men. Really? Where’s the historical precedent that soldier women have joined men on the front during the bloody battles that marked the destiny of the nations?

A number of Nationalist soldiers wearing NDF [Northwest Defense Force] tiger-stripes—mostly female, in view of Wingfield’s ban on women in direct combat for the operation—were manning the electronic gear and talking into microphones, wireless phones, and typing on laptops. [p. xli]

From the feminist viewpoint the Northwest American Republic looks like Murka II, and to boot,​ Murkans incorporate second-wave feminism (keep in mind the blogger’s analysis of feminism in the previous posts).

“Okay, comrades, we’re going to have a major troop movement of about four thousand men crossing the enemy’s front, and we need to make sure they don’t get hammered by the heavy stuff,” called out Wingfield. “Who’s hooked up with artillery fire control?”

A woman soldier raised her hand. “I am sir.” [xliii]

Covington is no natural scientist. The point of keeping women away from the front is that their wombs are too precious for the fulfillment of the fourteen words. In addition to their lower strength, lower resistance and lower IQs you simply cannot endanger them as if they were mere grunts.

“Two of ’em at least are gone, sir,” Lieutenant Campbell said. “We have a Threesec spotter doing a Tarzan act up on top of the I-5. She climbed up there onto a beam or something pretty high up, where she can see over what’s left of the buildings along the river. She’s got a set of field glasses, one of our radios she got from somewhere, and a wireless laptop. What she can’t see, she can get off Google and CNN. She has a bird’s eye view of Edgewater golf course, the Arboretum and Delta Park East. She’s calling in to C Battery, that’s the 155s on the corner of Maritime and Columbia, and also to the Sector Two mortar crews’ fire control officer. That’s about twenty-five pieces, eighty-one mils mostly. She’s dropping some heavy shit on those niggers along MLK and all the way down to Bridgeton.”

“She?” shouted Wingfield in exasperation. “Judas priest, did none of you ladies understand my order to stay out of direct contact with the enemy? I thought I was supposed to be a general or something? Army Council says so, anyway. Didn’t any of these mutinous gals get the memo?”

“This girl says she’s Third Section and she knows you, sir,” replied Campbell. “Anyway, she didn’t ask me or anybody else here. She just went out there on her own. First we heard of it was when she started calling in to C Battery a few minutes ago.”

“Pipe it up so I can hear whatever the hell she’s doing,” ordered Wingfield. [p. xliv]

What would a Nazi of the 1930s think of this American neonazi? This fictional liberalism looks like a typical Jewish psyop to sabotage the military of an Aryan nation.

In the first chapter of Freedom’s Sons, “A Madhouse of Ministries” Covington wrote what is perhaps the most offensive lines of his long novel:

The new government department consisted of 32 people plus himself, about evenly split between male and female. [p. 8]

So in Covington’s “Nazi” cabinet more women were appointed than what Donald Trump is appointing for his cabinet this very day! Another offensive line appears a few pages ahead:

“A lot of Christians and general Neanderthal male chauvinist types want to go back to an all-male army.” [p. 23]

The only Neanderthal is he who believes that only the Christians have had all-male armies. You can imagine what would have happened to the Muslims in their battles with us if they harbored armies evenly split between male and female, and let’s not talk about the non-Christian Spartans or the ancient Romans.

“No more. From now on citizenship and the right to vote is something that has to be earned, and right now the only ones who have earned it are those who fought in the NVA [Northwest Volunteer Army] and the NDF. I have been told that there will be ways in which non-NVA veterans may apply for and receive third-class citizenship, which will get you one vote. Us guys who put our lives on the line for our race and our new nation will have two or three votes each, that’s true, but that’s as it should be. And there’s other ways you can get a vote. For example, one of the things they’re talking about at the Convention in Olympia is allowing mothers with children to get third class citizenship right away, so long as you’re willing to take the oath of loyalty to the Republic. We understand that the results of an election that allows only NVA and NDF people to vote would be considered morally questionable, and so for the first couple of years until we can work up a whole new order of society and a whole new way of doing things, we’ll be kind of playing it by ear. [p. 43]

Unlike the Third Reich democracy continues in the Northwest American Republic and to boot women can vote. What would the blogger think (remember that the welfare state is related to women’s suffrage)?

Robert, this is Millie, one of my part-time admin assistants from the high school. She graduates in June and she’ll be doing her Labor Service here at UM along with night school for a teaching degree, and so she’s getting a head start on things now, after school.” [p. 195]

The Northwest American Republic is indeed a sort of the ​second incarnation of Murka. Women are still making careers like any other guy in today’s West. About a hundred pages later we read:

“So what can we throw against these bastards?” asked Morehouse.

“Almost five million men and women under arms, including our regulars, who are the best trained and most highly motivated individual soldiers in the world. [p. 288]

Neonazi women are perfectly interchangeable with neonazi men, even in the army. Let’s jump 235 pages ahead and hit this passage:

With Barrow was his blonde and Canadian-born wife, former NVA Captain Jane Chenault, who was now the senior Permanent Secretary for Education, essentially the senior civil servant working under the Cabinet Minister for that department. For the duration of the war, Jane had reverted to her reserve military rank of colonel, and she had promised her husband that if she were not allowed some role in the conquest of Canada, their future married life would be something to make him shudder. Like all wise husbands who know when their wives really mean it, Frank gave in immediately. Jane was proud and pleased to discover that her statuesque figure could still fit into her old Kevlar vest from her NVA days. [p. 524]

In Covington’s world white women are not only empowered, they are still doing shit tests—and men comply! No wonder why Uncle Harold misjudged the character of Corinna…

The novel actually ends on page 537. The remainder of the book is like the​ sixth novel of Covington’s saga about the creation of an ethnostate. My guess is that since Covington had promised his listeners that Freedom’s Sons would be his last novel, instead of recognizing that it was not the last one he decided to insert the rest of the manuscript under a single cover. But the plot of the rest of the book is so different that a future editor would separate the books.

In the climax of Freedom’s Sons a woman kills Hunter Wallace, the president of the United States, when he was about to nuke the racist ethnostate. Notice that the heroine is a woman.

In the remainder​ of the “fifth” novel, the Republic is consolidated. If you read it all together the remainder represents a big anticlimax. Covington even goes back to the detective fiction genre of the first novel that he wrote of this saga, The Hill of the Ravens. In this “sixth” novel another crime has to be solved within the now safe Republic. The very title of the first chapter of this “sixth” novel betrays that is another book altogether: “32 Years, Seven Months After Longview.” On the very first paragraphs of that chapter Covington wrote:

Colonel Robert Campbell, who at the age of 46 was now the head of the Civil Guard’s Montana regional Criminal Investigation Division, shook his salt- and-pepper head in bemused admiration. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I still can’t wrap my mind around it. Where the hell did you come from again?”

“From down in the number four traverse trench,” replied his daughter-in-law, Allura Myers Campbell, a graduate student in archaeology at the University of Montana. She was wearing khaki shorts, a khaki work shirt, mud-caked work boots and knee socks, and a large floppy straw hat to protect her head from the sun, which in May was already becoming uncomfortably hot in the pine hills of Lost Creek. [543]

Two pages later we learn that this woman is an intellectual:

“Nope, first time for both of us,” said Campbell. “Tom and I are going to be running point on the security aspect of this visitation of foreign eggheads. No offense, honey.”

“None taken,” said Allura with a merry laugh. “I am an egghead.” [p. 545]

Allura is a 22-year-old girl of the ethnostate. So women not only compete with men in the military but in the world of ideas. Covington doesn’t seem to realize that the feminist world he depicts is contradicted with what he himself writes on the next page: “…a wide range of uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins” as if it was possible to have both radical feminism and prolific families within the same society.

Three hundred pages later, on page 852, a female character made me feel skeptical. Not even tough guys have that icy nerves that this woman showed in a mission. A few pages later we see that the novelist pays attention to the education of the girls—multiplying fractions! What about kitchen tasks or preparing them for motherhood? Is this a novel written by a traditionalist? Covington can’t have a cake and eat it. Either these traditional families make their women submit or they become Murka-like feminists. Covington seems to believe that with the liberties of his fantastic ethnostate these career women would simply chose having lots of kids. On page 864 we read:

She had experienced this on her first weekend at the Selkirk spread, when her new sisters and cousins had taken her down to Northwest Butte and gone on a shopping spree, fitting her out with a whole new wardrobe of hats, long dresses with fully sleeves, new lace-up shoes that displayed no immodest ankles, and assorted hats.

It is the women who chose to dress like a pre-1960s western society, not the patriarchal codes what obliges them to do so. Concurrently, Covington wants us to believe that some of the liberated women of his ethnostate would choose to have eight kids! On page 867 we are told, again, that they have the right to vote and what is worse: these little women are now applying to get first-class citizenship.

By the end of the long novel, on page 908 we learn that Nightshade is a national heroine of the ethnostate. I have read the whole saga. When I devoured A Mighty Fortress a scene of this gun bunny, Nightshade, struck me as psycho. She got upset with a comrade in arms and intended to poke a switchblade through his eye. But of course “Nightshade” is a woman and, like the sexually-starved Wyoming males, Covington apparently writes to attract both male and female volunteers.

In conclusion, I stick to everything I published on January 1st about “ethnosuicidal nationalists.” The ideology of today’s racists is both part of the problem and part of the solution. Crossing the river from liberalism to the other side involves several stepping stones: Donald Trump’s Alt Light, the Altright (not yet a direct approach to the Jewish question), white nationalism (or southern nationalism), neonazism (which is but WN with Nazi paraphernalia) and reaching the other side, National Socialism.

I would like to finish this post telling that yesterday I received five books from Ostara Publications: Germania by Tacitus, The Origin and Deeds of the Goths by Jordanes, The Inequality of the Human Races by Arthur de Gobineau, The Racial Elements of European History by H.F.K. Günther and Hitler’s Second Book. How I wish that white nationalists jumped from the final stepping-stone to the safer shore of solid ground.

Categories
Civil war Justice / revenge Literature Mainstream media Sexual "liberation" William Shakespeare

Hamlet vs. Harold

Harold Covington’s novel The Hill of the Ravens is dedicated “To those who shall come after: from the time of struggle, we greet you.”

According to the internal narrative of the story, The Hill of the Ravens is the fourth book of the Northwest Quintet, though it’s the first novel of the Quintet that Covington wrote.

The Ten Principles of National Socialist Thought on pages 187-89 are a gem, of which I’ll excerpt just a few lines:

I. National Socialism above all represents living truth in its purest form

III. No one must be allowed to spoil what Nature created down through aeons of racial evolution. Your highest purpose in life is to carry on that evolution toward a stronger, better, more beautiful mankind

VIII. Every aspect of life must be judged in relation to the survival and improvement of your race; anything hindering these attainments must be ruthlessly rooted out and destroyed

X. Where there is a will, there is a way. Everything falls before the man of indomitable will. Suffering and sacrifice are necessary. We are hardening ourselves for the most decisive struggle in all human history.

These noble principles for elemental racial preservation explain a dialogue on page 278: “‘You a Nazi sir?’ ‘I am’.”

As long as we cannot openly say in the West that we are Nazis, the West, and especially the US (“the fount and wellspring of all that is evil in our time”—page 110) will be suicidal.

Consider principle III, “Every aspect of life must be judged in relation to the survival and improvement of your race; anything hindering these attainments must be ruthlessly rooted out and destroyed.” Compare its living truth to what’s happening to whites.

Throughout the West white birthrates have suffered a catastrophic decline. During this same period, ours has become the most sex-obsessed society in history. As Roger Devlin has demonstrated, these two trends are related. This is what The Hill of the Ravens, page 103, says: “The whole history of our race and our culture tells us that when women of child-bearing age remain unmarried and babies aren’t being born, then that is a sign that something is gravely wrong.” Principle III explains why in the novel’s Day of the Rope right after the revolution, mixed couples, mostly white women and their beasts of pleasure are targeted for destruction.

But not only the blood mixers got what they deserved in Covington’s novel. The traitorous media is beautifully handled. Reporters and media personnel were declared enemy combatants and legitimate military targets. Once the traitors understood that they would be held personally responsible for the content of their reportage, all of a sudden they got restrained. “They would either see the Party’s point of view, or else they’d see me.”

This said, The Hill of the Ravens has a fatal flaw.

On page 253 envious Covington depicts William Pierce as a Fed informant (see full article on this subject: here). Since his younger years Covington has built a fame of defaming his comrades, starting with Ben Klassen.

I have read most of Covington’s Quintet about the creation of a White Republic and found most of it inspiring. But Covington’s character flaw strongly reminds me the epigraph that Laurence Oliver chose for the beginning of his 1948 adaptation of Hamlet:

So oft it chances in particular men
That for some vicious mole of nature in them,
By the o’ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit grown too much; that these men–
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Their virtues else — be they as pure as grace,
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault.

Categories
Literature Table talks (commercial translation)

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 87

the-real-hitler

 

7th February 1942, evening

Books for young people.

 

 
I’ve just been reading a very fine article on Karl May. I found it delightful. It would be nice if his work were re-published. I owe him my first notions of geography, and the fact that he opened my eyes on the world. I used to read him by candle-light, or by moonlight with the help of a huge magnifying-glass. The first thing I read of that kind was The Last of the Mohicans. But Fritz Seidl told me at once: “Fenimore Cooper is nothing; you must read Karl May.” The first book of his I read was The Ride through the Desert. I was carried away by it. And I went on to devour at once the other books by the same author. The immediate result was a falling-off in my school reports.

don-quixoteApart from the Bible, Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe are the two most often read books in the world. Cervantes’ book is the world’s most brilliant parody of a society that was in process of becoming extinct. At bottom, the Spaniards’ habits of life have scarcely changed since then. Daniel Defoe’s book gathers together in one man the history of all mankind. It has often been imitated, but none of these desert-island stories can compete with the original. One Christmas I was given a beautiful illustrated edition. Cervantes’ book has been illustrated by Gustave Doré in a style of real genius.

Categories
Aryan beauty Axiology Christendom Friedrich Nietzsche George Lincoln Rockwell God Kali Yuga Literature Neanderthalism Turner Diaries (novel) William Pierce

Solitude

Below, my comments of the ten threads about Nietzsche’s
prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra in a single entry:


1

Visitors will be surprised to learn that a Spanish edition has more detailed endnotes than the academic English translation of Nietzsche’s magnum opus.

This is because Spaniards are fed up of Catholicism. North Americans have a few centuries experimenting with Christianity. Spain has more than a millennium and a half, and our parents’ religion is on its last dying breaths there.

Andrés Sánchez-Pascual’s scholarly translation of Nietzsche’s books since the early 1970s became so popular that over the decades he has received hundreds of letters from his Spanish-speaking readers. The book’s edition of Así Habló Zaratustra that I purchased this month for example (I lost the old copies that I used to read sporadically in the 1970s and 80s) is its twentieth edition.

So fed up of Catholicism are Spain’s thinking classes that, again, the copies I bought of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums which introduction appears in my compilation The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour, were translated to Spanish for an audience unexpectedly avid of this sort of extraordinarily scholarly material (Deschner’s maximum opus has yet to be translated to English).

Another example. Manu Rodríguez, who has had a place of high honor in this site and in The Fair Race, is also an avid reader of Sánchez-Pascual’s translations of Nietzsche. Thanks to his revaluation of Christian values, Rodríguez overcame his original prejudice against National Socialism in his later posts of La Respuesta de Europa. With the exception of non-Christian geniuses like Revilo Oliver and William Pierce, I have not seen such a metamorphosis of the mind in most of the English-speaking racialists.
 

2

“Could it be possible! This old saint in his woods has not yet heard the news that God is dead!”

This is one of the most quoted passages of Nietzsche’s literature. I abandoned theism long ago. Presently I don’t believe in the existence of a personal god, let alone in the existence of the Jewish god (which would be absolutely dead in the heart of any fanatic of the 14 words if the white nationalist “movement” was not all bluff). That doesn’t mean that I’m an atheist, as Hegel and other philosophers of Classic German Idealism developed a new understanding of God: panentheistic views that I am not prepared to dismiss.

The theological issues of Zarathustra’s encounter with the old hermit aside, I’d rather say something about the soliloquy in the previous post of this fictional character, something related to the very meaning of this blogsite.

The darkest hour is just before the dawn. In the endnotes about the opening soliloquy in Nietzsche’s book, Andrés Sánchez-Pascual interpreted the term Untergehen as follows: “By sinking into his decline, like the sun, Zarathustra moves to the other side. ‘Passing to the other side’ means surpassing oneself and becoming the Overman.”

This is what nationalists have failed to do, and was the message of the last pages of my compilation The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour: white nationalism as a stepping stone at the middle of a river, not as the promised land itself which is beyond the rapid waters.

That was my metaphor.

As to Nietzsche’s metaphor, we could say that today’s whites, including Christian and libertarian white nationalists, have yet to “sink themselves into their sunsets.” Some force may be with them but they’re not overmen yet; they have not surpassed themselves as Hitler’s SS men did (always keep in mind my “Where are the Syssitias?”).

The purpose of this blogsite is to prepare a few metamorphosing men, those in the process of “passing to the other side” (Übergang) from the soul’s darkest night into the coming dawn of the fair race.
 

3

I don’t claim to have reread the Zarathustra since my adolescent infatuation with Nietzsche. But these are surely the words that made a very powerful impression in my mind since my first reading:

“I teach you the Overman. Human being is something that must be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?

What is the ape to a human? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. And that is precisely what the human shall be to the Overman: a laughing stock or a painful embarrassment.

You have made your way from worm to human, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now a human is still more ape than any ape.

Behold, I teach you the Overman!

The Overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the Overman shall be the meaning of the earth!”

The passage “…and you want to be the ebb of this great flood and would even rather go back to animals than overcome humans?” nails perfectly contemporary whites.

This is exactly what they are doing to themselves—white nationalists included, so reluctant to fight (or preparing to fight by saving precious metals before the dollar crashes). As Jack Frost has asked the clueless, feminized males of The Occidental Observer more than once, “Where’s the resistance?” to the anti-white, exterminationist System. Where are the cells for would-be soldiers that treasure William Pierce’s three books as their New Tablets?

I see none of it. And many Jew-wise nationalists are themselves etnosuicidal because they simply ignore that Christianity inverted healthy values—negative values that they themselves subscribe! Cowardice similar to this in the 19th century explains why Nietzsche’s Zarathustra gives the biblical verse an antithetical sense from the original.
 

4

Now Zarathustra looked at the people and he was amazed. Then he spoke thus: “Mankind is a rope fastened between animal and Overman – a rope over an abyss. What is great about human beings is that they are a bridge and not a purpose: what is lovable about human beings is that they are a crossing over and a going under.”

Again, this brings in mind my metaphor of the bridge. This is what I wrote in the final essay of The Fair Race: “White nationalism is only a stone at the middle of the rapid-flowing waters of a dangerous river; a stepping stone that can help us in our endeavor to jump to the other side. I myself used that stone during my crossing from Christianity and Liberalism to National Socialism. In fact, I could even write such a spiritual odyssey in a text that might be titled ‘From St Francis to Himmler’.” But no American white nationalist today is prepared to wear a T-shirt of Herr Himmler, not even in the privacy of their homes.

“I love the great despisers, because they are the great venerators and arrows of longing for the other shore. I love those who do not first seek behind the stars for a reason to go under and be a sacrifice, who instead sacrifice themselves for the earth, so that the earth may one day become the Overman’s. I love the one who lives in order to know, and who wants to know so that one day the Overman may live. And so he wants his going under.” [sinking in his sunset according to Sánchez-Pascual]

This cannot contrast more with today’s white nationalists, so reluctant to sacrifice themselves as Rockwell did. They want it both ways: enjoy their homely comfort zones and try to “save” the race from the ongoing extermination.
 

5

In Ecce Homo Nietzsche wrote:

In this sense Zarathustra first calls the good “the last men”… He finds them the most harmful kind of man, because they secure their existence at the expense of truth just as they do at the expense of the future.

Do “the last men” sound like contemporary whites overwhelmed with guilt? But white nationalists are the Overman’s “last men” too. Think for example of the voices from those self-righteous, Christian and atheist nationalists who recently called a lone wolf “an evil sociopath” in Dixie, basically subscribing the meme “black lives matter.”

White- or Southern nationalism is phony, was phony and will be phony until societal collapse forces the survivors to grow a hairy pair. This is Pierce’s Diaries: “His forehead was then marked with an indelible dye, and he was turned out and could be readmitted permanently only by bringing back the head of a freshly killed Black or other non-White.”
 

6

Just for the record, about 150,000 copies of a specially durable wartime Zarathustra were distributed to the German troops during the First World War.
 

7

“A nice catch of fish Zarathustra has today! No human being did he catch, but a corpse instead!” looks like me trying to convey Nietzsche’s message to a dead race!
 

8

“I want to teach humans the meaning of their being, which is the Overman, the lightning from the dark cloud ‘human being’.”

For some unfathomable causes, this sentence from the previous section, Prologue §7, reminded me my identification with the art of the pre-Raphaelites and Maxfield Parrish. One of the inner realities that distances me from white nationalists is that they don’t seem to love this 14-words art (“That the beauty of…”) as much as I do.
 

9

“It dawned on me: I need companions, and living ones – not dead companions and corpses that I carry with me wherever I want.”

Just what happened to me during my experience in counter-jihad: after these guys didn’t want to hear about the Jewish problem it was like I had to get rid of their corpses—dead companions. But it also happened to me in white nationalism! After these guys didn’t want to hear about the Christian problem it was like I had to get rid of their corpses.

“It dawned on me: let Zarathustra speak not to the people, but instead to companions!”

Pierce did something similar after the calamity of Rockwell’s murder: instead of speaking to the masses he predicated to a smaller group of companions.

“Look at the good and the just! Whom do they hate most? The one who breaks their tablets of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker – but he is the creative one.”

Hitler was the creative one. Read his table talks.

“Companions the creative one seeks and not corpses, nor herds and believers. Fellow creators the creative one seeks, who will write new values on new tablets.”

Less than a handful visitors of this blog share the moral grammar on my New Tablets…

“Fellow creators seeks Zarathustra, fellow harvesters and fellow celebrators Zarathustra seeks: what need does he have of herds and shepherds and corpses!”

…but still no one wants to become a priest of the 14 words in a latter-day “Syssitia” (like the one Rockwell had).

“I do not want to even speak again with the people – for the last time have I spoken to a dead person.”

Occasionally I still comment at The Occidental Observer but even that has to end—the commentariat and even the authors are clueless that Christian axiology enabled the Jewish problem and the Negro problem and the Mestizo problem and even the more recent empowerment of Asia.

“I shall join the creators, the harvesters, the celebrators: I shall show them the rainbow and all the steps to the Overman.”

Hitler and Pierce showed this rainbow but who among us really follows their revaluated axiology? Most white nationalists follow the Old Tablets; atheist nationalists share also the Christian moral grammar and even the neonazis have not really broken the Tablets.

“I want to go to my goal, and I go my own way; over the hesitating and dawdling I shall leap. Thus let my going be their going under!”

This describes me…
 

10

And so Nietzsche’s lyric prologue ends. Below, some snippets from the Cambridge introduction by Robert B. Pippin:

Zarathustra leaves his cave to revisit the human world because he wants both to prophesy and help hasten the advent of something like a new “attempt” on the part of mankind, a post “beyond” or “over the human” (Übermensch) aspiration. Such a goal would be free of the psychological dimensions that have led the human type into a state of some crisis (made worse by the fact that most do not think a crisis has occurred or that any new attempt is necessary).

The problem, then, that Zarathustra must address, the problem of “nihilism,” is a kind of collective failure of desire…

Nietzsche clearly thinks we cannot understand such a possibility, much less be both shamed and inspired by it, except by a literary and so “living” treatment of such an existential possibility. And Nietzsche clearly thinks he has such a chance, in the current historical context of crisis, collapse, boredom, and confusion, a chance of shaming and cajoling us away from commitments that will condemn us to a “last man” or “pale atheist” sort of existence, and of inspiring a new desire, a new “tension” of the spirit…

As noted, the problem Zarathustra confronts seems to be a failure of desire; nobody wants what he is offering, and they seem to want very little other than a rather bovine version of happiness. It is that sort of failure that proves particularly difficult to address, and that cannot be corrected by thinking up a “better argument” against such a failure.

The events that are narrated are also clearly tied to the question of what it means for Zarathustra to have a teaching, to try to impart it to an audience suffering in this unusual way, suffering from complacency or dead desire. Only at the very beginning, in the Prologue, does he try to “lecture publicly,” one might say, and this is a pretty unambiguous failure.

The reminder here of the Prologue appears to indicate that Zarathustra himself had portrayed his own teaching in a comically inadequate way, preaching to the multitudes as if people could simply begin to overcome themselves by some revolutionary act of will…

He had shifted from market place preaching to conversations with disciples in Part I, and at the end of that Part I he decides to forgo even that and to go back to his cave alone.

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