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Category: Matt Koehl

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Christendom Matt Koehl Philosophy of history

Faith of the Future, 4

by Matt Koehl

 

IV. Twilight of the West

As we have seen, the ultimate source of the decline of the West lies in the failure of the polar ideology, or mythos, which has formed its foundation. Once the dogmas of the dominant faith were effectively called into question and challenged—an unavoidable development, given the preposterous assertions of Christian doctrine on the one hand and the truth-seeking nature of Aryan man on the other—it was only a matter of time before the entire cultural order which rested upon it was itself called into doubt.
With the loss of belief in its guiding ideology—that is, with the dying out of Christianity—the West has lost faith in itself, and its death becomes inevitable. For the Christian worldview has stood at the very heart and soul of the West, permeating its art and culture. It was no accident, for instance, that in times past the term “Christendom” was synonymous with the West.
Cultures live and die with their gods. That the god of the West should have died was foreordained from the very beginning, and it is in this sense that Nietzsche’s celebrated pronouncement must be understood. For how could a Middle Eastern import permanently satisfy the real spiritual needs of Aryan man? Yahweh/Jehovah could murder Zeus and Jupiter, Odin and Thor. But how could he maintain forever the fiction that he was the real father of their children?
If we disregard all ephemeral revivalism, it can be clearly seen that the culture of the West has now reached the point of practical disbelief and atheism, a fact which is reflected in every field of modern cultural endeavor. Atonality and the eruption of alien rhythms in music, formlessness and insanity in painting and the plastic arts, cheapness and vulgarity in literature and on the stage, vapidity and grotesque ugliness of line in architecture—all of this bears disturbing witness to a spiritual, emptiness and sterility, to disorientation and a lack of direction, to an absence of values and standards and an ethos to inform artistic expression.
It is modern technology, however, which—by assuming a utilitarian function in a soulless, materialistic produce/consume society, rather than serving a higher cultural purpose—offers the conclusive statement that Western culture has nothing more to say. The West, as a culture, has exhausted all of its historical possibilities; it has no new direction in which it can go. This, of course, does not mean that Aryan man himself no longer possesses a creative capability. But this genius and talents must now find expression in a Western context. Western civilization itself cannot experience a rebirth. It has exploited and expended its potential and destroyed its one hope for a resurgence, and now it can only wallow in decadence and die. The Old Order is doomed.
Not only is the final collapse of the West inevitable, but for a New Order to emerge such a collapse is historically imperative. For only out of a new formation can there be the possibility of racial salvation for Aryan man. Indeed, this civilization must die, so that upon its ruins a new and greater culture may now rise. That is the meaning and message of contemporary events. That is the iron will of history.

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Art Bible Catholic Church Christendom Martin Luther Matt Koehl Protestantism Science

Faith of the Future, 3

by Matt Koehl

 

III. The Decline of Christianity


The imposition of Christianity on the Aryan peoples of Northern Europe had one lasting effect. It resulted in an inner tension, a disquiet—an angst—which has been a protruding feature of Western culture from its inception. Throughout the history of the West, there has always existed a soul struggle keenly felt by the more perceptive spirits of the race, occasioned by the contradiction between the inverted values and tenets of an Oriental/Semitic belief system on the one hand and the natural religious feeling of Nordic/Aryan man on the other.
If the former furnished the ideological matrix of the culture, it was the latter which provided the creative inspiration, the divine spark. Indeed, the greatest moments of Western culture as a manifestation of Aryan genius—whether expressed in a specifically Christian or extra-Christian form—occurred despite the stricture of Church dogma, rather than because of it. Dante, Chaucer, [Edmund] Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Schiller, Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Dürer and Rembrandt all testify to this, no less than do Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and Bruckner.
As we have seen, the external character of Christianity was greatly modified in its metamorphosis from a small Jewish cult into the mighty religion of the West. The medieval institution known as chivalry, in fact, with its refined honor code—which save for its Christian trappings more properly reflected the outlook and mores of a pre-Christian time—resulted from this very process, and provided a modus vivendi for opposing spiritual interests during the Middle Ages.
Thus, through a mutual accommodation of sorts was the underlying contradiction largely contained. And yet despite any institutional adjustment, the unease deriving from an alien idea remained latent within the fabric of the culture. The social and intellectual response to this inner tension varied. For their part, the kings, emperors and other secular rulers tended to treat the matter with cynical detachment, accommodating and offering resistance as political requirements dictated.
Among scholars and thinkers, on the other hand, there were those who, like Giordano Bruno, rose in open revolt against Church dogma. More often, however, the stirrings of disquiet were manifested in subtle attempts to orient Christian doctrine toward innate Aryan religiosity. This was particularly true of the mystics of the Middle Ages, like Scotus Erigena, Amalric of Bena and Meister Eckhart, who—going beyond the theology of the Church—looked inward into their own souls and to Nature itself to discover the kingdom of God.
It was with the Renaissance, however, that there appeared the most significant movement to challenge Church doctrine—a movement which would, in fact, set in motion an irreversible chain of events leading ultimately to the discrediting of that very doctrine as the core idea of a culture.
Now, for the first time, was the Promethean impulse able to break out of the clerical mold. Art came to express, not merely a sterile Semitic outlook, but the feelings of a Northern racial soul—a most notable development, which announced that creative vitality had stepped beyond the mythic prescriptions of the culture. The entire Judeo-Christian cosmology was called into question by new discoveries in the natural and physical sciences. Exploration across unknown seas commenced. Perhaps the most revolutionary single development of this time, however, was the discovery of movable type by Johannes Gutenberg, which enabled a much wider circulation of knowledge—knowledge other than that bearing an ecclesiastical imprimatur, knowledge transcending the basic ideology of the culture.

* * *

The most important consequence of the Gutenberg invention is to be seen in the Protestant Reformation, to which it was a contributing factor and whose development it greatly influenced. Up until the time of Martin Luther, the focus of Christian authority was the Papacy, whose word was unquestioned in matters of faith and dogma. Now, with the great schism in Christendom, a direct challenge was presented to ecclesiastical authority. It certainly was not, of course, die intent of Luther and the other dissenters to undermine or eliminate the Christian faith; rather the opposite. They merely wished to reform it. And yet, by challenging the one unifying institution of Christendom and causing a split in Christian ranks, they inadvertently opened the door to disbelief in the Christian mythos itself.
To replace papal authority in matters religious, Luther proposed to substitute the authority of the Book; and so, with the prospect of employing the Gutenberg invention, he undertook the prodigious task of translating obscure Hebrew scriptures into the German language—to the everlasting misfortune of Christianity.
It is ironic that in his quest for spiritual freedom, the Great Reformer should have rejected the despotism of the Papacy only to embrace the tyranny of the Torah and the ancient Jewish prophets. The arcane texts which had remained on musty shelves behind cloistered walls and accessible only to priests and theologians now became universal property. And now, instead of one single authority in matters of Christian exegesis, everyone—and no one—became an authority. Out of this there could be but one result: contradiction and confusion.
The effect on intelligent minds, of course, was devastating. For here it was now possible—in the best Talmudic fashion—to prove mutually exclusive points of view by reference to the same Semitic texts. Not only that, but critical examination of biblical literature gave rise to serious doubt concerning the veracity and validity of the subject matter itself, not to mention the peculiar mentality of its various authors. For the first time, perceptive minds could observe the obvious contradiction between empirical reality and what was claimed as holy writ.
Gradually there grew the inner realization that the faith itself was flawed, and creative genius began to look beyond the ideology of the Church for inspiration and direction. Even in those instances where Christian motifs continued to provide the external form for artistic expression—such as in the works of Bach, Corelli and Rubens, for example—the vital daemon which spoke was clearly extra-Christian and of a religious order transcending Church dogma.
And so even the Counter-Reformation, and the stylistic mode it inspired, succumbed to widening skepsis. A lessening of traditional belief had set in, and Aryan creativity now began to look increasingly in other directions for the divine. At the intellectual level, philosophy—which had long separated itself from theology—pursued its own independent quest for truth, while at the artistic level a succession of stylistic periods—impelled by irrepressible inner tension—sought ever newer forms of expression. Thus, the Baroque, having exploited all of its possibilities, gave way to the Rococo and the Classical, which in turn yielded to the Romantic of the last century and to the Impressionist, which has now been succeeded by the Modem era—which concludes the historical experience of the West.

* * *

Today, Christianity has reached its final stage. From both a spiritual and a scientific standpoint, its fundamental beliefs have become untenable. The advances of Aryan science have forever shattered the old Jewish myths. The cumulative impact of such figures as Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and Darwin could not be eternally suppressed by ecclesiastical edict. When Church dogma, for example, insisted that the earth was the center of the universe and scientific investigation demonstrated otherwise, Aryan man was compelled by his innate regard for the truth to accept the latter at the expense of the former. In so doing, he came to question all other aspects of a once-sacrosanct belief system.
For the modem Church, this poses an impossible dilemma. The more it adheres to its fundamental doctrines, the more preposterous they must appear and the quicker will be its demise. On the other hand, once it attempts to reconcile itself with the findings of science by reinterpreting and redefining its basic tenets, it automatically concedes its moral position and its very reason for existence as an arbiter of truth.
The fact is that Christianity, as the dominant ideology of the West, has failed. It has exhausted all of its historical possibilities. No longer does it carry the emotional, mythic, polarizing force necessary to direct the spiritual life of a culture. Indeed, it is a spent cultural force no longer capable of adapting successfully to new organic realities.
All of this can be readily seen in the emptiness and sterility of modem cultural expression—reflecting the absence of any real spiritual values—as well as in the secularization of the Christian idea itself into liberal democracy and Marxism. Especially is this to be noted in the self-devaluation process of ecumenism and interfaith/inter-ideological dialogue, which constitutes the clearest concession by Christianity that it has failed and no longer has anything vital to offer. For once the Church admits that its doctrines are coequal with those of the nonbeliever, then what reason is there to be a believer?
It is not without significance that while the influence of Christianity is waning in the West, it is—through the sheer force of demographic pressure—gaining souls and expanding among nonwhites. Not only is this particularly true in Latin America, but also in Africa and—to a lesser extent—in Asia as well.
This development has, of course, not escaped the notice of the Church, which—with obsequious interracial posturing and attempts to divorce itself from its historical Western setting—has chosen to redirect the Christian appeal toward the colored world as the primary area of its interest and concern. In abandoning its Western role, however, Christianity has announced its conclusion as a cultural force. And so, whatever it may have traditionally represented for past generations of Europeans and North Americans no longer obtains.
Accordingly, it would be a mistake to assume that the Judeo-Christian idea has anything to offer the white peoples in their contemporary struggle for survival—that it might in any way be capable of addressing the vital needs and concerns of endangered Aryan life on this planet.
What now exists in the name of Christianity—apart from certain nostalgic, retrograde attempts to revive a historical corpse in a world of uncertainty and personal insecurity—is nothing more than fossil formalism and sterile nominalism without genuine vitality or substance, reflecting the marginal relevance of this particular ideology in today’s society. For in the face of modem realities, the Christian worldview simply has nothing more to say. It has fulfilled its historic role; it is now moribund. At best, it is irrelevant. At worst, it is an avowed enemy, a deadly menace to the Aryan race and its survival.
It may well be argued that the worst consequences of such ideological and spiritual error were far less conspicuous before the Second World War. Does the same hold true today, however, when the final effects of that error can be plainly seen? For well over a millennium now, Christianity has held a monopoly as the self-proclaimed custodian of the spiritual and moral well-being of an entire cultural order—for which one must reasonably assume that it has accepted concomitant responsibility.
What, then, are the fruits of its spiritual regime? We see them all around us. They are the symptoms of a diseased civilization: decadence, degeneracy, depravity, corruption, pollution, egoism, hedonism, materialism, Marxism and ultimately atheism. Yes, atheism. By destroying whatever natural religious feeling once existed in the hearts of our people and substituting alien myths and superstitions, it must now bear full responsibility for the diminished capacity for spiritual belief among our folk.
It will perhaps be objected that the Church itself is opposed to all of the above indesiderata. I am sorry: the responsibility for what has been claimed as a divine charge cannot be so easily evaded. Words aside, these happen to be the actual results of its earthly reign.
The Promethean spirit of Aryan man, for its part, must now look in other directions.

Categories
Christendom Indo-European heritage Matt Koehl

Faith of the Future, 2

by Matt Koehl

 

II. Christianity and the West

When Christianity in its Nicene form first made its appearance amongst the Germanic peoples of Northern Europe, the future progenitors of the West greeted the new doctrine with considerable suspicion and less than full enthusiasm. For their part, they felt more comfortable with their own indigenous gods and beliefs than with the strange new import from out of the East. Even with the accretion of Hellenistic and Roman elements during its migration from Judea, Christianity—with its underlying Oriental/Semitic character—remained essentially alien to the personality and disposition of the proud Teuton. Within the soul of our ancient forebears, the very concept of original sin was perceived as unreasonable and perverse, just as calls for pacifism and self-abnegation were regarded as demeaning to their inherent dignity.
The inborn religiosity—Frömmigkeit—of these men of the North involved values of personal honor and loyalty, upright manliness, courage and heroism, honesty, truthfulness, reason, proportion, balance and self-restraint, coupled with pride of race, a questing spirit and a profound respect for the natural world and its laws—ideas representative of a worldview which the early Christian missionaries found incompatible with their own doctrine and which they proceeded to condemn as heathen.
If they displayed but little inclination to embrace the new faith, these early Teutons were by the same token not unaccommodating in their attitude. With characteristic Nordic tolerance in such matters, they were perfectly willing to permit the peaceful coexistence of a foreign god alongside the natural deities of their own folk.
For its part, however, the intruding new doctrine—impelled by a hitherto-unknown Semitic spirit of hatred and intolerance—commenced to demand the elimination of all competitors, insisting that homage be rendered to but one jealous god, the former Jewish tribal god—Yahweh, or Jehovah—and to his son. Alien in its doctrine, the Creed of Love now felt obliged to employ equally alien methods to achieve its purposes. Under the auspices of the sword and accompanied by mass extermination, Christian conversion now made great strides where formerly peaceful persuasion had failed. In this manner, for example, were the tender mercies of the Christian savior disclosed to Widukind’s Saxons and Olaf Tryggvason’s Norsemen. If it was hypocritical and inherently contradictory, it was nevertheless effective, and all of Europe was thereby saved for Christianity

* * *

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that only through force and violence did Christianity prevail. In the propagation of its doctrine and the fulfillment of what it considered to be its holy mission, the Church displayed amazing flexibility and suppleness. It was not loath, for instance, to adopt and adapt for its own purposes as it deemed appropriate certain aspects of ancient heathendom, particularly those which were most firmly rooted in the folk experience of our early forebears. Not only did this serve as an aid in the conversion process, making the Christian notion more palatable to the Nordic prospect, but it was also useful in inducing greater conformity and submission on the part of those already converted.
Especially during the reign of Pope Gregory did this policy receive definitive sanction. Former heathen holy places were appropriated as sites for the new chapels, churches and shrines. The Northern winter solstice celebration, Yule, was arbitrarily selected as the official birthday of the Christian savior. The spring celebration of reawakening Nature, Easter, was designated as the time of the Christian resurrection following the Jewish Passover. The summer solstice celebration, Midsummer, was transmogrified into the Feast of St. John, accompanied by the traditional rites of fire and water. In similar manner were other ancient festivals taken over and transformed: Whitsuntide, or High May, became the Day of Pentecost; the Celtic festival of Samhain became All Hallow’s Eve; and Lent, acquiring Christian coloration, recalled a former season of the same name.
Not only was Christian adaptation confined to sacred days alone, however, it extended to heathen deities, customs and symbols as well. A multiplicity of saints and angels, for example—not to mention demons—came to replace the various gods and heroes of pre-Christian times. Ritual infant-sprinkling became Christian baptism, or christening, just as the salubrious effect of holy water generally was quickly discovered by the new faith. Similarly, the lighted tree and evergreen decoration at Christmas time were taken over virtually intact from previous heathen custom. Even the Cross itself was adapted from pre-Christian sources, replacing the earlier Fish, Dove and Star as the emblem of the faith—a fact which led to considerable distress and controversy when it was first introduced in the early Church!
And so, in addition to those Hellenistic, Roman and Babylonian elements which already overlaid an original Jewish nucleus, a Northern component was now introduced to the spiritual mélange which was to become medieval Christianity. With all of these accretions, however, it was essentially the outer form of the faith which was affected and modified; the inner substance of the doctrine retained its basically Oriental/Semitic character. If the new creed was not particularist like its Judaic parent, this had to do with its conceived leveling function among non-Jews. For what had originally been an exclusively Jewish sect had become—at the instance of the erstwhile Pharisee Saul/Paul—a universal creed directed at the Aryan world, denying the validity of all racial, ethnic and personal distinctions.
Thus it was, that out of this alien germ there emerged the faith which was to form the spiritual mold of Western culture.

Categories
Christendom Indo-European heritage Matt Koehl Philosophy of history

Faith of the Future, 1

by Matt Koehl

(Faith of the Future was originally published
in the Spring 1982 issue of The National
Socialist, and in book form in 1995.)

February 10, 1972, Arlington, Virginia. Matt Koehl, the comander of the White National Socialist Party at a desk talking with the party secratary about recent newspaper reaction to the boicot of the busing.

 

To those who are worthy of him

I. Idea and Civilization
Every great culture, every great civilization—every human order of any significance, in fact—has a polar ideology or mythos, which furnishes the emotional, suprarational foundation for that particular order. The life and destiny of a culture are inseparable from such a nuclear idea. It serves as a formative pole, which during a culture’s vital period provides for a unity of political, religious and cultural expression.
There are numerous examples. In ancient Egypt, the singular concept of the ka found its cultural elaboration in the construction of the pyramids. In a similar manner, Taoism combined with Confucianism and Buddhism to form the spiritual core of traditional Chinese culture, just as the cult life of the Japanese revolved around Shinto, and just as Islam furnished the spiritual matrix for a cultural flowering in the Near East during the Middle Ages. Among Indo-Europeans, it was the Vedic tradition which formed the basis for an exquisite Hindu civilization, while a pantheon of Classical gods and heroes presided over the destinies of ancient Hellas and Rome.
If one now turns to the West, one cannot avoid the conclusion that it is the Christian worldview which stands at the heart of this particular culture.[1] Indeed, its very symbol is the towering Gothic cathedral. In its art, its architecture, its music, literature and philosophy, the West is pervaded by the omnipresence of Christianity. In the magnificent frescoes of Michelangelo, in the polyphonic rhythms of Vivaldi and Bach, the literary masterpieces of Dante, Chaucer and Milton, the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, Kant and Hegel—in all of this, the heavy backdrop of Christianity looms unmistakably against the cultural horizon.
Even figures such as Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and Schopenhauer—even Voltaire and Nietzsche!— whose creative daemon transcended Church dogma in noticeable fashion even they are witness to the ineluctable presence of the Christian idea as a cultural fact. And even if one contends that the works of these personalities had nothing to do with Christian doctrine as such, but derived their ultimate inspiration from other sources, the very fact that such an argument is put forth at all constitutes the most conclusive proof that Christianity is, indeed, the mythos of Western culture, the core idea around which all cultural expression revolves. For even when its fundamental tenets have been challenged and disbelieved, it has continued to qualify the cultural milieu and furnish the central reference point for thought and action.
It is not without significance that those two major languages of Western thought—German and English—should have received their modem form from a translation of the Christian Bible; that the main function of the first Western universities was to teach Christian theology; and that natural science—that domain so uniquely fascinating to the Aryan intellect, which has come to challenge the very foundations of traditional faith itself—began very humbly as the quiet, conscientious study of the world of the Christian creator. All of this is but eloquent testimony that the Christian worldview does, indeed, form the spiritual matrix—the nuclear center—of Western culture.
 
_____________
[1] In referring to the West, we mean that manifestation of European culture which emerged following the collapse of the Classical civilizations of Greece and Rome and which assumed definitive form in the time of Charlemagne around AD 800.

Categories
Constantine Der Antichrist (book) Eduardo Velasco Francis Parker Yockey Friedrich Nietzsche Judea v. Rome Matt Koehl

Purple nationalists

‘Apocalypse for Whites’ (original title, ‘Rome vs. Judea’) explains wonderfully the whys of my obsession with translating Deschner’s work, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums: the criminal history of Christianity. No single racialist text has produced such an absolute eureka! moment in my intellectual life as ‘Apocalypse for Whites’. Compared to this mother of all redpills, all the output from webzines such as The Occidental Observer or Counter-Currents seem like mere purple pills: an intermediate colour between blue and red. They promise to unplug you but in the end they take you back to the Matrix because the editors are still sleeping.
Let’s recognise it: the Spaniard Evropa Soberana is a genius. Not only did he develop the New Racial Classification with a colleague. He also wrote the Sparta essay in addition to the one I just translated with the title of ‘Apocalypse for Whites’. In the 2018 edition of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour, Soberana’s essay will appear with its original title.
The quote from The Antichrist that I put in red in § 24 of the penultimate entry of ‘Apocalypse for Whites’ hits the nail of all the nails: ‘Christians can think of themselves as anti-Jewish without understanding that they are the ultimate conclusion of Judaism’.
Any racist who is under the illusion that his mind no longer has ‘Semitic’ malware installed after Constantine handed over the empire to the Semitic bishops, would do well to remember these lines of Francis Parker Yockey. Who among the white nationalists has really transvalued all his values (Umwertung aller Werte), the last words of The Antichrist before Nietzsche’s Law against Christianity?
But Yockey cannot be considered the embodiment of the new paradigm that supplants Christ (a character that, as it appears in the Gospels, did not even exist). Nor could Nietzsche be considered the Antichrist even though he began to see the light of the tragedy that befell upon the West after Constantine.
Potentially, Adolf Hitler can be the new guiding star—if only white nationalists wake up. But in order for this new religion to embody the transvalued values it is necessary to lay the foundations first.
Before continuing with the translation of the criminal history of Christianity of Deschner I must therefore reproduce, chapter by chapter, the booklet Faith of the Future by Matt Koehl: a prelude to a Hitlerism that should replace the Alt-Right if the race is going to make it.