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Category: Montaigne

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Autobiography Catholic religious orders Deranged altruism Montaigne Music Portugal Pre-Columbian America Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Spain

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 5

It cannot be repeated or emphasised enough: intolerance, religious or philosophical, is characteristic of devotees of ‘man’ regardless of any consideration of race or personality. As a result, it is the real racists who show the greatest tolerance.

No doubt racists demand from their comrades in arms absolute fidelity to the common faith. This is not ‘intolerance’; it is a question of order. Everyone must know what they want, and not adhere to a doctrine and then make reservations about it. Whoever has objections to formulate—and above all, objections concerning the basic values of the doctrine—has only to remain outside the community of the faithful, and not to pretend to be the comrade of those with whom he does not share faith entirely. No doubt also the racist is ready to fight men who act, and even who think, as enemies of their race. But he does not fight them in order to change them, to convert them. If they stay in their place, and stop opposing him and his blood brothers, he leaves them alone—for he is not interested enough in them to care about their fate, in this world or into another.

In the third Book of his Essays, Montaigne laments that the Americas were not conquered ‘by the Greeks or the Romans’, rather than by the Spaniards and the Portuguese. He believes that the New World would never have known the horrors committed to converting the native to a religion considered by the conquerors to be the ‘only’ good, the only true one.

What he does not say; what, perhaps, he had not understood, is that it is precisely the absence of racism and the love of ‘man’ that are at the root of these horrors. The Greeks and Romans—and all ancient peoples—were racists, at least during their time of greatness. As such they found it quite natural that different peoples had different gods, and different customs. They did not get involved in imposing their own gods and customs on the vanquished, under pain of extermination.

Even the Jews did not do this. They so despised all those who sacrificed to gods other than Yahweh, that they were content—on the order of this god, says the Bible—to exterminate them without seeking to convert them. They imposed on them the terror of war—not that ‘spiritual terror’ which, as Adolf Hitler so aptly writes, ‘entered for the first time into the Ancient World, until then much freer than ours, with the appearance of Christianity’.[1] The Spaniards, the Portuguese, were Christians. They imposed terror of war and spiritual terror on the Americas.

What would the Greeks of ancient Greece have done in their place, or the Romans or other Aryan people who would have had, in the sixteenth century, the spirit of our racists of the twentieth? They would undoubtedly have conquered the countries; they would have exploited them economically. But they would have left to the Aztecs, Tlaxcaltecs, Mayans, etc., as well as the peoples of Peru, their gods and their customs. Furthermore, they would have fully exploited the belief of these peoples in a ‘white and bearded’ god, civiliser of their country, who, after having left their ancestors many centuries before, was to return from the East, to reign over them—their descendants—with his companions: men of fair complexion. Their leaders would have acted, and ordered their soldiers to act, so that the natives effectively take them for the god Quetzalcoatl and his army.[2] They would have respected the temples—instead of destroying them and building on their ruins monuments of a foreign cult. They would have been tough, sure—as all conquerors are but they would not have been sacrilegious. They would not have been the destroyers of civilisations that, even with their weaknesses, were worth their own.

The Romans, so tolerant of religion, have on occasion persecuted adherents of certain cults. The religion of the Druids was, for example, banned in Gaul by Emperor Claudius. And there were those persecutions of the early Christians, which we talked about too much, without always knowing what we were saying. But all of these repressive measures were purely political, not doctrinal—not ethical. It was as leaders of the clandestine resistance of the Celts against Roman domination, and not as priests of a cult which might have appeared unusual to the conquerors, that the Druids were stripped of their privileges (in particular, of their monopoly of teaching young people) and prosecuted. It was as bad citizens, who refused to pay homage to the Emperor-god, the embodiment of the State, and not as devotees of a particular god, that Christians were persecuted.

If in the sixteenth century Indo-European conquerors, faithful to the spirit of tolerance which has always characterised their race, had made themselves masters of the Americas by exploiting the indigenous belief in the return of the white god, Quetzalcoatl,[3] there would have been no resistance to their domination, therefore no occasion for the persecution of the kind I have just recalled. Not only would the peoples of the New World never have known the atrocities of the Holy Inquisition, but their writings (as for those who, like the Mayans and Aztecs, had them) and their monuments would have survived.

And in Tenochtitlan, which over the centuries had become one of the great capitals of the world, the imposing multi-storey pyramids—intact—would now dominate modern streets. And the palaces and fortresses of Cuzco would still be admired by visitors. And the solar and warlike religions of the peoples of Mexico and Peru, while evolving, probably, in contact with that of the victors, at least in their external forms, would have kept their basic principles, and continued to transmit, from generation to generation, the eternal esoteric truths under their particular symbolism. In other words, they would have settled in Central America and in the former Empire of the Incas Aryan dynasties, whose relations with the conquered countries would have been more or less similar to those which they formerly had maintained, with the aristocracy and the peoples of India, the Greek dynasties who, from the third century BC to the first after the Christian era, ruled over what is now Afghanistan, Sindh and Punjab.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Note of the Editor: William Pierce’s Who We Are was published after Savitri Devi’s book. She didn’t grasp the full meaning that the Aryans of India would, over many centuries, succumb to what happened to the Iberian Europeans in a few centuries: interbreeding with the Indians. Since Savitri was female, because of her yin nature she couldn’t see tremendously yang issues, like what Pierce tells us about extermination or expulsion.

The yin wisdom of the priestess (her loyal Hitlerism, something that Pierce lacked) must be balanced with the yang input of the priest (an exterminationist drive, something that priestess usually lack).

______ 卐 ______

 
Unfortunately, Europe itself in the sixteenth century had long since succumbed to that spirit of intolerance which it had, along with Christianity, received from the Jews. The history of the wars of religion bears witness to this, in Germany as well as in France. And as for the old Hellenic-Aegean blood—the very blood of the ‘ancient world’, once so tolerant—it was won in the service of the Roman Church: represented, among the conquerors of Peru, in the person of Pedro de Candia, Cretan adventurer, one of Francisco Pizarro’s most ruthless companions.

I will be told that the cruelties committed in the name of the salvation of souls, by the Spaniards in their colonies—and by the Portuguese in theirs (the Inquisition was, in Goa, perhaps even worse than in Mexico, which is not little to say!)—are no more attributable to true Christianity than to Aryan racism as understood by the Führer, unnecessary acts of violence, carried out without orders, during the Second World War, by some men in German uniforms. I am told that neither Cortés nor Pizarro nor their companions, nor the Inquisitors of Goa or Europe, nor those who approved their actions, loved man as Christ would have wanted his disciples to love him.

That is true. These people were not humanitarians. And I never claimed they were. But they were humanists, not in the narrow sense of ‘scholars’, but in the broad sense: men for whom man was, in the visible world at least, the supreme value. They were, anyway, people who bathed in the atmosphere of a civilisation centred on the cult of ‘man’, whom they neither denounced nor fought—quite the contrary! They were not necessarily—they were even very rarely—kind to humans of other races (even theirs!) as Jesus wanted everyone to be. But even in their worst excesses, they venerated in him, even without loving him, Man, the only living being created, according to their faith, ‘in the image of God’, and provided with an immortal soul, or at least—in the eyes of those who in their hearts had already detached themselves from the Church, as, later, to those of so many list colonialists of the eighteenth or nineteenth century—the only living being endowed with reason.

Note of the Editor: Left, a monk pitying and loving a conquered Amerindian (mural by Orozco in Mexico).

They worshipped him, despite the atrocities they committed against him, individually or collectively. And, even if some of them, in the secrecy of their thoughts, did not revere him more than they did love him, not granting him, if he was only a ‘savage’, neither soul nor right soul—after all, there were Christians who refused to attribute to women a soul similar to their own—this does not change the fact that the ‘civilisation’ of which they claimed, and of which they were the agents, proclaimed the love and respect for every man, and the duty to help him access ‘happiness’, if not in this earthly life, at least in the Hereafter.

It has sometimes been maintained that any action undertaken in the colonies, including missionary action, was, even without the knowledge of those who carried it out, remotely guided by businessmen who did not have them in sight, only material profit and nothing else. It has been suggested that the Church itself was only following the plans and carrying out the orders of such men—which would partly explain why it seems to have been far more interested in the souls of the natives than in those of the conquering chiefs and soldiers—who, however, sinned so scandalously against the great commandment of Christ: the law of love. Even if all these allegations were based on historical facts that could be proven, one would still be forced to admit that colonial wars would have been impossible, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century (and especially perhaps in the nineteenth), without the belief, then generally widespread in Europe, that they provided the opportunity to ‘save’ souls, and to ‘civilise savages’.

This belief that Christianity was the ‘true’ faith for ‘all’ men, and that the standards of conduct of Europe marked by Christianity were also for ‘all’ men—the criterion of ‘civilisation’—was questioned by no one. The leaders who led the colonial wars, the adventurers, soldiers and brigands who waged them, the settlers who benefited from them, shared it—even if, in the eyes of most of them, the hope of material profit was in the foreground less as important, if not more, than the eternal salvation of the natives. And whether they had shared it or not, they were nonetheless supported, in their action, by this collective belief of their distant continent, of the whole Christendom.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Note of the Editor: That is very true. For example, in the last decades of his life my very Catholic father became obsessed with the biography of a 16th-century Spanish monk who made several trips from the Old to the New World to protect the rights of the Amerindians; so much so that my father dedicated his magnum opus, La Santa Furia (Holy Wrath), to him. This is a composition with three series of woods, six horns, three trumpets, four trombones and tuba, two harps, piano and timpani, percussion instruments among which were some pre-Hispanic, as well as a solo vocal quartet, a sextet of men and a choir mixed with four voices: 115 choristers in total and 90 orchestral musicians: a one-hour symphonic work that can be watched on YouTube:

It was precisely my father’s behaviour—cf. my eleven books in Spanish—that prompted me to repudiate not only Catholicism but Christian axiology, becoming a true apostate of Christianity. Savitri concludes:

______ 卐 ______

 
It is this belief which—officially—justified their wars which, if they had been waged in the conditions in which they were waged, but solely in the name of profit, or even security (as had been the wars of the Mongolian conquerors in the thirteenth century), would have seemed ‘inhuman’. It was such conquest that, still officially, defined the spirit of their conduct towards the natives. From there this haste to convert him—willingly, by force or using ‘bribes’—to their Christian faith, or to make him share the ‘treasures’ of their culture, in particular to initiate him to their sciences, while making him lose all contact with his own.

_______________

[1] Mein Kampf, German edition of 1935, p. 507.

[2] Or, in Peru, for the god Viracocha. The Peruvians had initially called the Spaniards Viracochas.

[3] Or Viracocha in Peru.

Categories
Christendom Emperor Julian Goethe Julian (novel) Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Montaigne Montesquieu Voltaire

Kriminalgeschichte, 40

Below, abridged translation from the first
volume of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte
des Christentums (Criminal History of Christianity)

 
Christian tall stories
Christians, preachers of love of the enemy and of the doctrine that all authority emanates from God, celebrated the death of the emperor with great public banquets, with festivals in churches and chapels and dances in the theatres of Antioch: the city that, as Ernest Renan says, ‘was full of puppeteers, charlatans, actors, magicians, thaumaturges, witches and religious swindlers’.
The diatribe in three volumes that Julian had written shortly before his death, Against the Galileans, was promptly destroyed, but fifty years later, Cyril, the doctor of the Church still bothered to argue against it: Pro sanela Christianorum religione adversas libros athei Julian in thirty volumes, of which ten have reached us in their Greek text and ten others in Greek and Syriac fragments. Naturally, a bishop like Cyril, an avowed enemy of philosophy who even tried to prohibit its teaching in Alexandria, did not intend to grasp the thought of Julian, but only ‘crush it with maximum energy’ (Jouassard).
The Christians also destroyed all the portraits of Julian and the epigraphs that commemorated his victories, without sparing means to erase from the memory of men the remembrances of him.
During Julian’s life, the most famous doctors of the Church had kept a prudent silence, but shortly after his death, and for a long time more, they dedicated themselves to attacking him.
Ephrem, another saint whose odious songs were repeated by the parishioners of Edessa, dedicated a whole treatise to ‘Julian the Apostate’, the ‘pagan emperor’ and, according to him, ‘frantic’, ‘tyrant’, ‘trickster’, ‘damned’ ‘and’ idolatrous priest’. ‘His ambition caught the deadly release’ that ‘tore his body pregnant with oracles from his magicians’ to send him definitively ‘to hell’. The clerical historians of the 5th century, who sometimes were also jurists, such as Rufinus, Socrates, Philostorgius, Sozomen and Theodoret, speak of Julian in a still worse tone.
While the Christian world defamed the ‘apostate’, as he usually does with its enemies, the Enlightenment corrected that image in the diametrically opposite sense.
In 1699, the Protestant theologian Gottfried Arnold, in his Impartial History of the Church and of Heresy, rehabilitated the figure of Julian.
A few decades later, Montesquieu praised him as a statesman and legislator. Voltaire wrote: ‘Thus, that man who has been described to us horribly was perhaps the most noble of all, or at least the second’. Montaigne and Chateaubriand count him among the greatest historical figures.
Goethe praised himself for understanding and sharing Julian’s animosity against Christianity. Schiller wanted to make him protagonist of one of his dramas.
Shaftesbury and Fielding praised him, and Gibbon believes that he deserved to have owned the world. Ibsen wrote Caesar and Galilee and Nikos Kazantzakis his tragedy Julian the Apostate, premiered in Paris in 1948.

More recently, between 1962 and 1964, the North American Gore Vidal dedicated a novel to him. On the other hand, the Benedictine Baur (representative, in this, of many current Catholics) continues to defame Julian in the 20th century.
After the death of Julian, and having renounced the designated successor, Salutius, a moderate pagan philosopher and prefect of the praetorians of the East who had been a personal friend of Julian, the Illyrian Jovian acceded to the throne.

Categories
Ancient Greece Arcadia Architecture Art Arthur C. Clarke Beauty Child abuse Christendom Civilisation (TV series) Counter-Reformation Degeneracy Demography Europe France Free speech / Free press Friedrich Nietzsche Harold Covington Homosexuality Industrial Revolution Islamization of Europe Italy Kali Yuga Kenneth Clark Mainstream media Martin Luther Michelangelo Montaigne New York Philosophy Philosophy of history Protestantism Raphael Real men Reformation Rembrandt St Francis William Shakespeare

On Kenneth Clark’s “Civilisation”

Kenneth Clark may have been clueless about the fact that race matters. Yet, that our rot goes much deeper than what white nationalists realize is all too obvious once we leave, for a while, the ghetto of nationalism and take a look at the classics, just as Clark showed us through his 1969 TV series Civilisation.

Compared to the other famous series, Clark’s was unsurpassed in the sense that, as I have implied elsewhere, only genuine art—not science—has a chance to fulfill David Lane’s fourteen words.

By “art” I mean an evolved sense of beauty which is almost completely absent in today’s nationalists. Most of them are quite a product of Jewish modernity whether with their music, lifestyles or Hollywood tastes, to a much greater degree than what they think. For nationalism to succeed an evolved sense of female beauty has to be the starting point to see the divine nature of the white race. In Clark’s own words, “For all these reasons I think it is permissible to associate the cult of ideal love with the ravishing beauty and delicacy that one finds in the madonnas of the thirteenth century. Were there ever more delicate creatures than the ladies on Gothic ivories? How gross, compared to them, are the great beauties of other woman-worshiping epochs.”

Below, links to excerpts of most of the chapters of the 1969 series, where Clark followed the ups and downs of our civilisation historically:

“The Skin of our Teeth”

“The Great Thaw”

“Romance and Reality”

“Man—the Measure of all Things”

“The Hero as Artist”

“Protest and Communication”

“Grandeur and Obedience”

“The Light of Experience”

“Heroic Materialism”

Categories
Art Civilisation (TV series) Free speech / Free press Kenneth Clark Martin Luther Montaigne Painting Protestantism Reformation William Shakespeare

Civilisation’s “Protest and Communication”

For an introduction to these series, see here.

Below, some indented excerpts of “Protest and Communication,” the sixth chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark, after which I offer my comments.

Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:

The dazzling summit of human achievement represented by Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci lasted for less than twenty years. It was followed (except in Venice) by a time of uneasiness often ending in disaster. For the first time since the great thaw civilised values were questioned and defied, and for some years it looked as if the footholds won by the Renaissance—the discovery of the individual, the belief in human genius, the sense of harmony between man and his surroundings—had been lost. Yet this was an inevitable process, and out of the confusion and brutality of sixteenth-century Europe, man emerged with new faculties and expanded powers of thought and expression.

In this room in the castle of Würzburg are the carvings of Tilman Riemenschneider, one—perhaps the best—of many German carvers in the late Gothic style. The Church was rich in fifteenth-century Germany, and the landowners were rich, and the merchants of the Hanseatic League were rich; and so, from Bergen right down to Bavaria, sculptors were kept busy doing huge, elaborate shrines and altars and monuments like the famous group of St George in the old church at Stockholm: a supreme example of late Gothic craftsman deploying his fancy and his almost irritating skill of hand.

The Riemenschneider figures show very clearly the character of the northern man at the end of the fifteenth century.

First of all, a serious personal piety—a quality quite different from the bland conventional piety that one finds, say, in a Perugino. And then a serious approach to life itself. These men (although of course they were unswerving Catholics) were not to be fobbed off by forms and ceremonies. They believed that there was such a thing as truth, and they wanted to get at it. What they heard from Papal legates, who did a lot of travelling in Germany at this time, did not convince them that there was the same desire for truth in Rome, and they had a rough, raw-boned peasant tenacity of purpose. Many of these earnest men would have heard about the numerous councils that had tried throughout the fifteenth century to reform the organisation of the Church. These grave northern men wanted something more substantial.

So far so good. But these faces reveal a more dangerous characteristic, a vein of hysteria. The fifteenth century had been the century of revivalism—religious movements on the fringe of the Catholic Church. They had, in fact, begun in the late fourteenth century, when the followers of John Huss almost succeeded in wiping out the courtly civilisation of Bohemia. Even in Italy Savonarola had persuaded his hearers to make a bonfire of their so-called vanities, including pictures by Botticelli: a heavy price to pay for religious conviction.

The Germans were much more easily excited. Comparisons are sometimes an over-simplification; but I think it is fair to compare one of the most famous portraits, Dürer’s Oswald Krell, with Raphael’s portrait of a cardinal in the Prado [above]. The cardinal is not only a man of the highest culture but balanced and self-contained. Oswald Krell is on the verge of hysteria.

Those staring eyes, that look of self-conscious introspection, that uneasiness, marvellously conveyed by Dürer through the uneasiness of the planes in the modelling—how German it is.

Four pages later Clark devotes several pages to Erasmus of Rotterdam, whom Bronowski praised even more in The Ascent of Man. I have quoted Clark at length on the German character because I believe that Nietzsche was spot on in blaming Luther and Protestant hysteria for the restoration of Christianity when Christendom was falling apart in the times of the Renaissance popes. But in the next entry I will try to convey some of my antichristian thinking by taking the Catholic Erasmus to task. Meanwhile let’s continue with Clark’s views:

In 1506 Erasmus went to Italy. He was in Bologna at the exact time of Julius II’s famous quarrel with Michelangelo; he was in Rome when Raphael began work on the Papal apartments. But none of this seems to have made any impression on him. His chief interest was in the publication of his works by the famous Venetian printer and pioneer of finely printed popular editions, Aldus Manutius. Whereas in the last chapter I was concerned with the enlargement of man’s spirit through the visual image, in this one I am chiefly concerned with the extension of his mind through the word. And this was made possible by the invention of printing.

Printing, of course, had been invented long before the time of Erasmus. Gutenberg’s Bible was printed in 1455. But the first printed books were large, sumptuous and expensive. It took preachers and persuaders almost thirty years to recognise what a formidable new instrument had come into their hands, just as it took politicians twenty years to recognise the value of television. The first man to take advantage of the printing press was Erasmus. He poured out pamphlets and anthologies and introductions; and so in a few years did everyone who had views on anything.

This should remind us of our own age! Take heed of the elucidating excerpts from a 2009 interview of James Bowery by Jim Giles.

Bowery said: “We are essentially living under a theocracy. I call it Holocaustianity but other people call it political correctness. It’s essentially a canon of morals that have taken over Christianity, and the primary sins of this religion involve ‘racism’ which is an undefined word, and anti-Semitism (sexism is certainly down their list; it is like a venial sin, not a mortal sin). So people have been indoctrinated in this by the media and the academia. The government has passed legislation about these morals to make them violation of law. So people [in the 21st century] are essentially in a medieval mindset, living in a theocracy. It’s just that it is not operating under that name… Right now people are essentially in a State where there cannot be a Protestant Reformation. You can’t have other religions than this State religion of political correctness” (39:40).

And later during the interview Bowery added: “Let me go back to my point about the theocracy, and the dissolution of the theocracy in Europe. The Gutenberg press created a situation in which the monopoly of the Church on the written word was broken. A large portion of what the Church was about was media control. So through the media control they could indoctrinate the populations and maintain, you know, a revenue stream. The Gutenberg press broke that. Now all of a sudden you get lots of other voices. As I said, I have been working in this Internet stuff since the early days” (1:29:42).

And that is altogether crucial for our cause. Bowery concludes: “I knew this time was coming. The Internet is the new Gutenberg press. And the theocracy is being taken apart because its control of the media is being taken apart. And we are getting a new Protestant Reformation and following on the heels of that, people are going to say: ‘Look: We have our own beliefs… This is the way things should be.’ Even the Jesuits just couldn’t stand up to that. I don’t think the Jews can’t either.” (1:31:35).

That’s exactly why Erasmus was so notable, as the nationalist Internet bloggers will be equally notable from the standpoint of a latter-day Clark in the coming ethno-state, once the current theocracy falls apart.

Both Erasmus and Luther were involved in important translations of the Bible that shaked the medieval worldview. Although in the next episode Clark spoke highly about Counterreformation art, after the last indented quotation he said: “Whatever else he may have been, Luther was a hero; and after all the doubts and hesitations of the humanists, and the hovering flight of Erasmus, it is with a real sense of emotional relief that we hear Luther say: ‘Here I stand.’” However, at the same time Clark was also dismayed that the Protestants smashed the colored glasses of beautiful Catholic churches, and that artistic images of the Virgin were decapitated.

But it had to happen if civilisation was not to wither, or petrify. And ultimately a new civilisation was created—but it was a civilisation not of the image, but of the word.

But even the Protestant reaction had to be triumphed over, this time by secularism.

It is refreshing to see, in the closing remarks of the episode, Clark praising Montaigne as “completely sceptical about the Christian religion” and of Shakespeare as “the first great poet without a religious belief.”