Category: Philosophy of history

Who We Are, 26

Post author By C .T.
Post date December 1, 2012

– The West’s Darkest Hour –

The following is my abridgement of “The Race’s Gravest Crisis Is at Hand,” the last chapter of William Pierce’s history of the white race, Who We Are:

Since the end of the Second World War the situation and the prospects of the White race have plummeted, both morally and materially.

As bad as the moral condition of the race was before the war, it became incalculably worse afterward. Not since the Thirty Years War had White men murdered one another with such religiously motivated ferocity and on such a scale. But this time the superstitions which had been employed to justify all the killing were not so deep-seated as they had been 300 years earlier.

When the bomber-sown fire storms which had incinerated hundreds of thousands of German women and children in Dresden, Hamburg, and a dozen other cities had cooled; when the last mass shooting of prisoners of war by the Americans was over; when the British had finished delivering hundreds of thousands of anti-communist Croats and Cossacks at bayonet point to their communist executioners in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union; when the roving gangs of rapists in Soviet-occupied Berlin had finally become sated; when the orgies of murder in Paris and Prague and the other capitals of “liberated” Europe had died down; when the war and its immediate, bloody aftermath were over and the White men of America and Britain had an opportunity to survey their handiwork and reflect on it, the first doubts came.

One of those most directly responsible for the catastrophe, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, expressed those doubts more bluntly and succinctly than the rest. As he contemplated Britain’s problematic future in a postwar Europe overshadowed by the new grown Soviet colossus during one of his rare moments of sobriety, he blurted out: “We killed the wrong pig.” This was the same Churchill who a few months earlier, in a less sober moment, had symbolized his contempt for the defeated Germany by ostentatiously urinating into the Rhine in the presence of a group of newsmen.

Many of the Western leaders who had been involved in the war had no more moral compunction or sense of responsibility for what they had done than did Churchill. Their hue and cry about “German war crimes” was often the most effective way of diverting attention from their own crimes and the crimes of others.

The details of the history of the postwar era varied in Britain, in America, in France, and in the other Western nations, but the general trends were the same everywhere. The following paragraphs refer specifically to the United States, but the conclusions to which they lead apply to the West generally.

♣

Civil Rights. And then, before anyone could catch his balance and figure out what it meant and where it would lead, the “civil rights” phenomenon burst upon postwar America. What would have been impossible before the war gathered momentum in the late 1940’s and carried all before it in the next two decades. When the smoke began to clear late in the 1960’s, White Americans found that they had bamboozled themselves out of their most precious and fundamental civil right: the right of free association.

No longer could they pick and choose their neighbors, taking reasonable measures to ensure that the racial makeup of the communities in which they lived would not deteriorate; any attempt to do so had become illegal and was punishable with a term of imprisonment in a Federal penitentiary.

No longer could they send their children to schools, supported by their own taxes, which were attended by other children of their own race.

No longer could those of them who were employers hire men and women of their own choosing.

Every place and every social grouping in which the White men and women of America had associated freely with their own kind—residential neighborhoods and workplaces, schools and recreation areas, restaurants and cinemas, military units and municipal police forces—was now open to non-Whites, and the latter were not slow to push their way in.

Multiracial Pseudo-nation. What had been accomplished in the astonishingly short time of a little over two decades was the transformation of the strongest, richest, and most advanced country on earth from a White nation, in which racial minority groups had been effectively excluded from any significant participation in White society except as laborers, to a multiracial pseudo-nation, in which non-Whites not only participated but were a privileged and pampered elite.

The magnitude of the transformation is not apparent to many Whites who were born after it began, but it can be comprehended easily enough by surveying the cultural records of the earlier era. A comparison of magazine advertisements or photographed street scenes, of popular fiction or elementary school textbooks, of motion pictures or faces in high school yearbooks from 1940 with those of the last decade tells the story in stark terms.

Not only was this radical dispossession of White Americans carried out in the name of “justice” and “freedom,” but hardly a shot was fired in the process: all together no more than a dozen Whites fell in the weak and utterly ineffectual resistance mounted against it. More than anything else, this lack of resistance indicates the moral state of the race in the postwar era.

It is true, of course that the Jews, who planned and played a large part in directing the dispossession, had prepared well. A few years prior to the war there were still major segments of the American news and entertainment media in the hands of racially conscious Whites. Major publishers in the 1920’s and 1930’s published books dealing frankly with eugenics, with racial differences, and with the Jewish problem. America’s foremost industrialist, Henry Ford, for a while in the 1920’s was presenting purchasers of his automobiles with complimentary copies of The International Jew, a strongly anti-Jewish book which had earlier been serialized in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent.

In the 1930’s Father Charles Coughlan, an independent-minded Catholic priest with a radio program which was heard by millions, spoke out strongly against Jewish political scheming, until he was silenced by an order from the Vatican.

But by the war’s end the Jews had fastened their grip so tightly on the media that dissent against their policies was denied any large-scale public hearing. No major newspaper, motion picture company, radio broadcasting network, or popular magazine was left in the hands of their opponents.

Some institutions, most notably the Christian churches, already contained in themselves the seeds of racial destruction and required relatively little effort to be brought into alignment with Jewish schemes. Others (the Ford Foundation is a striking example) were infiltrated, taken over, and turned in a direction diametrically opposite to that intended by their founders.

Profound Moral Illness. In the final analysis, however, none of these things changes the fact of profound moral illness on the part of the White populations of the Western nations in the postwar era. It is an illness with roots deep in the past, as has been pointed out in earlier installments, but in postwar America it bloomed.

It is difficult to analyze the witches’ brew and place exactly the proper amount of blame on each ingredient. There was the trend toward an ever more vulgar and dishonest democracy, which began well before the war and reached a new depth with the advent of Franklin Roosevelt on the national political stage in 1932.

There were the loss of rootedness and the concomitant increase in alienation stemming from the greater mobility of a motorized population.

There was the powerful new propaganda medium of television, with its frightening ability to mesmerize and manipulate.

But it was the unspeakably atrocious crime of the war itself and its effect on those who participated in it which served as the catalyst, causing all the elements to react with one another, and the disease itself to metastasize.

The evil spirit of the immediate postwar period was, at the time, apparent only to an especially sensitive few, while most could not see beneath the superficial glitter of change and motion.

The present threat to the survival of the White race is physical as well as moral: while the numerical balance of the races is shifting rapidly from White to non-White, both in the world as a whole and in most of the formerly White nations of the northern hemisphere, the average racial quality of those in the White camp is declining.

The world racial balance has shifted from 30 per cent White in 1900 to just under 20 per cent White in 1982. By the end of the next decade the world will be less than 16 per cent White. The population explosion in the southern hemisphere which is responsible for this racial shift is largely the consequence of the export of White science and technology, which have dramatically reduced death rates in Africa, India, and other non-White areas of the world.

Postwar racial mixing has been accompanied by an enormous increase in miscegenation. Prior to the war, marriage between Whites and Blacks in the United States was nowhere socially acceptable, and it was illegal in many states. The few mulatto offspring produced were nearly always born to Black mothers and remained in the Black racial community. After the war an unrelenting propaganda brought down all legal and most social barriers to miscegenation, and the second generation of mixed-race offspring is now approaching breeding age.

Grim Recapitulation. To recapitulate the present situation of the White race:

White geographical expansion, which was the rule for the last four centuries, has not only been halted in the 20th century, with the end of European colonialism, but it has been reversed in the period since the Second World War.

There are now more than four non-Whites for every White living on the planet, and the ratio is shifting toward an even greater non-White preponderance at an accelerating rate.

The prognosis is grave. If the present demographic trends continue unabated for another half-century, and if no sustained effort to ensure an alternative outcome is made during that time by a determined and farsighted minority of people of European ancestry, then the race whose history we have traced in these 26 installments will have reached the end of its long journey.

It may linger another century or more in isolated enclaves, such as Iceland, and its characteristic features or coloring will recur with diminishing frequency in individuals for the next millennium, but before the middle of the 21st century it will have reached its point of no return.

Then, gradually or quickly, the race which built the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, which conquered the earth and established its dominion over every other race, which unlocked the secret of the atom and harnessed the power which lights the sun, and which freed itself from the grasp of gravity and reached out to new worlds will vanish into the eternal darkness.

And the present demographic trends will continue so long as the political, religious, and social concepts and values which presently circumscribe the thinking of the Western peoples and their leaders continue to have a determining role. For at root it is a moral defect which threatens the race’s survival.

If the will to survive existed among the White masses, and if they were willing to take the necessary measures—which would require that they act contrary to the dictates of the religion—, then the physical threat could be overcome, certainly and quickly. Non-White immigration could be halted immediately, with relatively little effort. Undoing the effects of earlier non-White immigration and of miscegenation would be a much larger task, involving major economic readjustments and undoubtedly a substantial amount of bloodshed as well, but it would be a task well within the physical capabilities of the White majority.

These things could be accomplished, even at this late date. And once accomplished in one major country, they could be extended worldwide, though perhaps not without another major war and its attendant risks. But, of course, they will not be accomplished, because the will to survive does not exist, and has not existed in the White population of any major power since the end of the Second World War. The race’s last chance to overcome its problems in this relatively painless manner died in January 1943, at Stalingrad.

So, much will inevitably be lost during the next few decades. The population balance everywhere will shift even more rapidly toward the non-Whites, the mongrels, and the unfit. The world will become a poorer, uglier, noisier, more crowded, and dirtier place. Superstition, degeneracy, and corruption will be pervasive, even among those Whites of sound racial stock, and much of the best stock will disappear forever through racial mixing.

And repression will certainly increase everywhere: those who stand for quality over quantity and for racial progress will be denied the right of dissent and the right of self-defense, in the name of “freedom” and “justice.”

Ultimately, however, none of these losses need be decisive or even significant, frightening though they may be to contemplate now, and terrible though they may be to experience in the dark years immediately ahead. All that is really important is that a portion of the race survive, keep itself pure physically and spiritually, continue propagating itself, and eventually prevail over those who threaten its existence, even if this take a thousand years; and to ensure this outcome is the urgent task of the racially conscious minority of our people in these perilous times.

A Few Guidelines. A detailed elaboration of this task here would take us beyond the intended scope of this series, which, as stated in the prologue to the first installment, has been merely to provide for its readers a better understanding of their own racial identity. It may be appropriate, however, to conclude the Who We Are series by drawing on its lessons in order to set out a few very concise guidelines for addressing ourselves to the task ahead:

1) The duration of the task will be decades, at the least, and perhaps centuries. History has a very great inertia; a historical process of long duration may culminate suddenly in a single, cataclysmic event, but every major development in the history of the race has had deep roots and has grown in soil thoroughly prepared for it by preceding developments. The course of history now, so far as our race is concerned, is steeply downward, and to change its direction will be no overnight matter, nor will this be accomplished by any gimcrack scheme which promises success without first building a foundation for that success, block by carefully laid block.

2) The workers at the task will be only a tiny minority of the race. Any program which envisages an “awakening of the masses” or which relies on the native wisdom of the great bulk of our people—which is to say, any populist program—is based on a false vision and a false understanding of the nature of the masses. No great, upward step in all of our long history has ever been accomplished by the bulk of any population, but always by an exceptional individual or a few exceptional individuals. The masses always take the path of least resistance: which is to say, they always follow the strongest faction. It is important to work with the masses, to inform them, to influence them, to recruit from among them; but they must not be counted on for determinative, spontaneous support until after a small minority has already, by its own efforts, built a stronger force than that of any opposing faction.

3) The task is inherently fundamental, and it will be accomplished only through a fundamental approach. That is to say, those who devote themselves to it must be pure in spirit and mind; they must understand that their goal is a society based on quite different values from those underlying the present society, and they must be committed wholeheartedly and without reservation to that goal; they must be prepared to outgrow all the baggage of superstition and convention inherent in the present society. Thus, the task is not one for conservatives or right wingers, for “moderates” or liberals, or for any of those whose thinking is mired in the errors and in the corruption which have led us to the downward course, but it is a task for those capable of an altogether new consciousness of the world.

The task is a biological, cultural, and spiritual one as well as an educational and political one. Its goal has meaning only with reference to a particular type of person, and if this type cannot be preserved while the educational and political aspects of the task are being performed, then the goal cannot be achieved. If the task cannot be completed in a single generation, then there must exist, somewhere, a social milieu which reflects and embodies the cultural and spiritual values associated with the goal, and serves to pass these values from one generation to the next. The preservation of a social milieu, just as the preservation of a gene pool, requires a degree of isolation from alien elements: the longer the duration of the task, the higher the degree. This requirement may be difficult of fulfillment, but it is essential. What should be envisaged, then, is a task with both an internal, or community-oriented aspect, and an external, or political-educational-recruiting aspect. As the task progresses and both external and internal conditions vary, the relative weight given to the two aspects will undoubtedly vary as well.

♣

The task set out here is a very large one, and accomplishing it will require greater will, intelligence, and selflessness than demanded from the race in any previous crisis. The danger we face now, from the enemy within our gates as well as the one still outside, is greater than the one we faced from the deracinated Romans in the first century, the Huns in the fifth century, the Moors in the eighth century, or the Mongols in the 13th century. If we do not overcome it, we will have no second chance.

What we must do, however, is understand that all our resources in the coming struggle must come from within ourselves; there will be no outside help, no miracles. If this Who We Are series has helped even a few of us better understand ourselves and the resources therein, then it has accomplished its purpose.

________________________________

Wm. Pierce’s final note: “The 26 installments of Who We Are will be amplified, edited, and consolidated into an illustrated book, which will be published by the National Alliance in the next few months. Watch for an announcement of its appearance in National Vanguard.”

Evil Kali Yuga Philosophy of history Who We Are (book) William Pierce

The West’s Darkest Hour

To avoid replicating the texts,
I’ve moved the content of this post: here

Tags 2nd World War

Antiochus IV Epiphanes Catholic Church Christendom Individualism Indo-European heritage Inquisition Jerusalem Kevin MacDonald Philosophy of history Racial studies Universalism

Kevin MacDonald’s trilogy

Post author By C .T.
Post date November 21, 2012
14 Comments on Kevin MacDonald’s trilogy

The second book of Kevin MacDonald’s study on Jewry, Separation and its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (1994/2002), the first of his trilogy to be translated to German, is my favorite of MacDonald’s three academic works that I read in more than two years. Professor MacDonald is the foremost scholar on the Jewish question. In Separation and its Discontents (hereafter SAID) he wrote:

Western societies, unlike prototypical Jewish cultures, do not have a primitive concern with racial purity. Rather, concern about racial purity emerges only in the late stages of Jewish-gentile group conflict…

Despite a great deal of commonality among Western anti-Semitic movements, there was a great difference between the universalistic, assimilatory tendencies of traditional Western Christianity and the exclusivistic, racialist program of National Socialism. Indeed, we have seen that beginning in the 19th century an important aspect of German anti-Semitic ideology was a criticism of Western universalism and the development of peculiarly German conceptions of Christianity. A critical component of official National Socialist ideology, as represented in the thought of Alfred Rosenberg, was the idea that “the twin forces of disintegration, namely universalism and individualism, act in perpetual conflict with the Germanic concept of race.” In this regard, National Socialism was indeed profoundly anti-Western. In rejecting both universalism and individualism, National Socialism resembled, much more closely than did medieval Western collectivist Christianity, its mirror image rival, Judaism. [page 196]

In a previous chapter MacDonald had written:

We shall see that with the rise of the National Socialist movement in Germany, the universalist themes of Western Christianity were completely overthrown in favor of a full-blown racialist ideology of the ingroup. In Chapter Five I will argue that National Socialism is a true mirror-image of Judaism. Not surprisingly, it was also the most dangerous enemy that Judaism has confronted in its entire existence. [page 133]

One of the hypothesis advanced in SAID provides food for thought. MacDonald wrote, “I propose that the Christian church in late antiquity was in its very essence the embodiment of a powerful anti-Semitic movement…” (page 112). This is something I had never heard of, and reminds me my first readings of psychohistory and Lloyd deMause’s insights on why the Christ archetype galvanized the population of the ancient world, although MacDonald’s hypothesis is totally distinct and is presented from an altogether distant point of view. But after digesting what both deMause and MacDonald say, for the first time I feel I am starting to comprehend facets of Christianity that would have never occurred to me from a conventional reading to history. If MacDonald is right, the Roman Catholic Church was the earliest attempt toward a type of society that we may call collectivism for European-derived peoples.

Although Christianity always held universalist ideals at its core, it nonetheless fulfilled its role of impeding, as did the Muslim nations, that Judaism became a destructive force for the indigenous culture of the Late Roman Empire and the Early Middle Ages. One of the facts that I learnt in SAID is that most restrictions enacted against Jewry, initiated in the period from Eusebius to Justinian, were still active throughout Christendom until the French Revolution hit the continent with its egalitarian fury. It was precisely the so-called Enlightenment (that presently some Western dissidents are starting to call “the Dark Enlightenment”) what inspired the founding fathers of the United States of America. And contrary to those white nationalists who still insult the memory of Adolf Hitler and the movement he created, I would claim that the mortal sin of the French Revolution, the emancipation of Jewry, was not properly atoned in Europe until the arrival of a specifically racial ideology: National Socialism.

But not only Nazi Germany has been demonized in the public mind. The Inquisition is widely regarded as a black page in the history of the Church even by the most Catholic individuals that I know. In contrast to such view MacDonald presents us with a radical reevaluation of what was precisely the role of the Inquisition. On page 147 he states: “I here develop the view that the Spanish Inquisition was fundamentally an authoritarian, collectivist, and exclusionary movement that resulted from resource and reproductive competition with Jews, and particularly crypto-Jews posing as Christians.” One could even argue that, thanks to the Inquisition, for three-hundred years before the movement of independence that gave birth to Mexico, New Spain (1521-1821) was Judenfrei.

While reading SAID I could not escape the thought that whites are un-insightful because, unlike the Jews and with the exception of William Pierce and Arthur Kemp (see the long chapters in this book quoting them), very few have knowledge of the history of their race. If we take into account that, in one of their holydays, New York Hassidic Jews celebrate their victory over the ancient Greeks who tried to assimilate them millennia ago, a basic question comes to mind: Why don’t we celebrate the victory of Antiochus IV over the Jews, or Titus’ conquest of Jerusalem?

Bust of Antiochus IV

We do not celebrate these victories precisely for the reason that both Kemp and Pierce explain so well: neither the Greeks nor the Romans exist today. What we call contemporary Greeks or Romans are the product of centuries of blood mixing that devalued not only the genotype of the original Indo-European population, but their extended phenotype as well: the Greco-Roman hard ethos and their galvanizing mythos mostly reflected in the Homeric tales. The Greeks and Romans who embraced Christianity were a totally different breed of the pure Aryans of Sparta or the austere Latins of the Roman Republic (see e.g., the essays that I translated from Evropa Soberana in later chapters of this book).

MacDonald himself acknowledges on page 190 that “the Jews have continued as a creative race into the present, while the Greeks gradually merged with the barbarians and lost their distinctiveness—a point remarkably similar to Chamberlain’s ‘chaos of peoples’ in which the decline of the ancient world is attributed to loss of racial purity.” Conversely, I would say that since the Jews have conserved their genotype almost intact throughout the millennia they are able to celebrate their Maccabean revolt as if it was yesterday. In other words, had whites preserved their genes intact, some of us might still be celebrating Antiochus’ victories over the subversive tribe; or, if we knew our history with the same passion that Jews know theirs, we might still be celebrating the fall of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD, or the more recent expulsion of the tribe from the Iberian peninsula.

What conventional historians ignore is that, once the Church lost its power to sell a worldview after the late 18th and early 19th centuries, our genetic individualism placed us at the mercy of a collectivist tribe.

Fortunately, the ethno-traitorous West has committed financial blunders in the 20th and 21st centuries. The dollar and all fiat currencies of the West will crash probably in this decade (I am reviewing this essay in 2014), which means that there is hope that some of us will start to understand the Jewish problem in a post-crashed world. On page 10 of SAID MacDonald says that “in congruence with the results of social identity research, anti-Semitism is expected to be most prominent among those most in competition with the Jews and during times of economic crisis.”

Although most readers of MacDonald treasure The Culture of Critique, the third and last of his trilogy on Jewry as their favorite book of this collection, I believe that MacDonald’s work should be read from the beginning. A People that Shall Dwell Alone, Separation and its Discontents and The Culture of Critique can help us, using William Pierce’s metaphor, to “see the forest” with crystal-clear vision.

Remember Pierce’s words? If we don’t try to understand the Jews we can never really understand what is happening to our race and our civilization. Professor MacDonald’s voluminous texts have done the hard work for us—both the trilogy and his webzine The Occidental Observer—in a scholarly and yet entertaining way.

Tags Germany, History, Jewish Question (JQ), Middle Ages, National Socialism, Spain, United States

Ancient Greece Demography Iliad (epic book) Indo-European heritage Miscegenation Philosophy of history Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Nordic invasion precedes rise of Classical Civilization

Post author By C .T.
Post date July 16, 2012
3 Comments on Nordic invasion precedes rise of Classical Civilization

Excerpted from the tenth article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:

Greece was invaded by Greek-speaking Northerners several times during prehistory. Those who arrived in the period 2,100-1,900 B.C. founded the great Mycenaean civilization, which flourished from the end of the l6th century until about 1,200 B.C.

Homer, whose Iliad and Odyssey describe Mycenaean Greece, refers to the Greeks, or Hellenes, inclusively as “Achaeans.” In fact, however, the Achaeans were only one of the Hellenic tribes which were in Greece in Mycenaean times.

Aeolians and Ionians

In addition to the Achaeans, who occupied most of the Peloponnesus (the southern peninsula of Greece, in which Mycenae was located), there were the Aeolians and the Ionians, who occupied other portions of the mainland, many of the Aegean islands, and the west coast of Asia Minor. The Ionians, in particular, settled in Attica and were the founders of Athens.

These tribal divisions apparently predate the arrival of the first Hellenes in Greece, and it seems likely that the Achaeans, Aeolians, and Ionians invaded the Aegean region separately, over a period of several centuries.

And there were also the non-Greek Pelasgians, the Mediterranean aborigines, who occupied the lowest stratum of Greek society and substantially outnumbered the Hellenes in Mycenaean times. As pointed out in the last installment, the Mycenaean Greeks were influenced culturally by these Mediterraneans—and, as time passed, racially as well.

Divine-Born Heroes

In the late 14th and early 13th centuries B.C. more Greek-speaking Indo-Europeans arrived, coming westward across the Aegean in ships. They were Homer’s “divine born” heroes, the fathers and grandfathers of the warriors who sacked Troy about 1,250 B.C.: golden-haired Achilles, the sons of Atreus, and the other princes and kings of the Iliad. They settled in Greece, founded dynasties, and lived in a manner remarkably like that of northern Europe’s feudal lords more than 20 centuries later.

A couple of generations after the fall of Troy—exactly 80 years afterward, according to Greek tradition—a new group of divine-born warriors swept down on Greece, this time from the north. They were the Heraclidae, the supposed descendants of the blond demigod Hercules, and with them came the Dorians, the last of the major Hellenic tribes to reach the Aegean region.

Dorian Invasion

The Dorians, who had settled in central Greece a few years earlier, proceeded to conquer the Achaeans, occupy the Peloponnesus, and extinguish Mycenaean civilization. But, in so doing, they prepared the way for the rise of a new civilization which would greatly surpass the old one.

The Dorian invasion was actually a more complex phenomenon than the preceding lines might suggest. It involved repeated interactions with other peoples on a protracted journey which, although generally southward, included a number of detours, loops, and rest stops. And their legendary leaders, the Heraclidae, had already been south once before, prior to the Trojan war.

It also involved the displacement of other peoples, and it came during a period when lesser Greek-speaking tribes were undertaking invasions of their own to the south. Displaced Achaeans, Aeolians, and Ionians migrated to new areas, sometimes displacing those people already there and sometimes amalgamating with them.

Blond but Rude

The Dorians were blonder than the Achaeans they conquered, but that is only because the Achaeans had been mixing with the Mediterranean aborigines for several centuries before the Dorians arrived; originally the two tribes had been of the same racial composition.

But the Achaeans were certainly more civilized than the rude, new arrivals from the north, and it was 400 years before Greece recovered from the cultural shock of the Dorian invasion. When the civilization of Classical Greece bloomed in the seventh century B.C., it comprised some elements of the old, Mycenaean culture and some which were the consequence of the social, political, and demographic changes wrought by the newcomers.

Dark Age

The four centuries between the Dorian invasion and the flowering of the literate Classical civilization are referred to by most historians as “the Dark Age,” for much the same reasons that the period between the fall of Rome, more than 15 centuries later, and the flowering of Mediaeval civilization is also called “the Dark Ages.”

In both cases a people of an older civilization, who had begun to succumb to racial mixing and decadence, was overwhelmed by a more vigorous and racially healthier but culturally less advanced people from the north. And in both cases a period of gestation took place over a dozen generations or so, during which a synthesis of old and new elements, racial and cultural, occurred, before a new and different civilization arose from the ruins of the old.

Historians’ Bias

Unfortunately, most historians tacitly assume that the records of political and cultural activity which have come down to us from periods of civilized literacy provide all the data needed to yield an understanding of the historical process. The state of development and degree of organization and complexity of city life are taken as a yardstick by which to evaluate the significance or historical importance of a particular period. And if one’s standards of value are geared to such things as the volume of commerce, the gross national product, or even the intensity of scientific, literary, and artistic activity, such a yardstick may seem, at first glance, to be proper.

Racial Values

But there are other standards of value, such as those of the National Alliance, which differ somewhat from the customary ones. For it is not in the external forms of organization and activity of a people that we see the most important criteria for making a judgment as to the significance of a particular period, but rather in the actual racial constitution of a people and in the dynamic processes which, for better or worse, are influencing that racial constitution.

Although the basic racial constitution of a people is always intimately related to that people’s achievements in commerce, science, industry, art, politics, and warfare, still the two sets of criteria can lead to fundamentally different evaluations of a given historical period.

This is a consequence of the fact that race building and decay are usually strongly out of phase with civilization building and decay.

Rise and Fall of Races

Thus, the long ages between the periods of maximum civil activity—ages which the historian customarily ignores as being of only slight importance—may very well be periods of the greatest interest from a standpoint of racial dynamics.

It is, of course, true that the periods of maximum civil activity are precisely those which yield a maximum of written records, artifacts, and the other raw materials from which the historian builds his tale. But relative abundance of evidence should not be interpreted as equivalent to relative historical significance, regardless of the historian’s value criteria.

The record of the rise and fall of pure races constitutes the primary history of mankind, and the rise and fall of civilizations occupy a place of secondary importance. This statement may seem self-evident to those already accustomed to looking at history from a racial viewpoint, but it is by no means generally accepted by historians today. Until it is, much historical writing will continue to be flawed in a fundamental way.

Tags History

Arthur de Gobineau Aztecs Blacks Crusades Intelligence quotient (IQ) Liberalism Madison Grant Marriage Mayas Napoleon Philosophy of history Pre-Columbian America Racial studies Science

Will Durant on race

Chapter IV of Will and Ariel Durant’s The Lessons of History is titled “Race and History.” Although one of my favorite books is Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy (1926), the Durants were already in the train on its way to political correctness when, after the ten first volumes of their monumental The Story of Civilization (1935-1967), they published The Lessons of History in 1968.

It is symptomatic that in the blogosphere people like to quote chapter passages where the Durants subscribed to political correctness in racial maters (search for “Chapter IV” here): blaming the environment, not blacks, for the poor cultures at Sub-Saharan Africa and concluding the chapter with the sentence that “racial antipathies” cannot be cured except by “a broadened education.”

Apparently the Durants were completely ignorant about IQ studies and HBD in general (see this splendid interview of Henry Harpending by Craig Bodeker). Also, when in the chapter on race in The Lessons of History they write about Mayan and Aztec cultures they completely ignore that both cultures were based on organized serial killing. (See for example my own book chapter on pre-Columbian cultures, a subject that I am far more knowledgeable than the Durants.)

If any “lesson of history” has been learnt it is that you can write ten or eleven thick volumes about civilizations and, still, be totally immersed in the Matrix of your own age and culture.

Below, the complete Chapter IV, where the Durants try to rebutt the theory of Madison Grant:

There are some two billion colored people on the earth, and some nine hundred million whites. However, many palefaces were delighted when Comte Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, in an Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853-55), announced that the species man is composed of distinct races inherently different (like individuals) in physical structure, mental capacity, and qualities of character; and that one race, the “Aryan,” was by nature superior to all the rest:

Everything great, noble, or fruitful in the works of man on this planet, in science, art, and civilization, derives from a single starting point, is the development of a single germ; … it belongs to one family alone, the different branches of which have reigned in all the civilized countries of the universe… History shows that all civilization derives from the white race, that none can exist without its help, and that a society is great and brilliant only so far as it preserves the blood of the noble group that created it.

Environmental advantages (argued Gobineau) cannot explain the rise of civilization, for the same kind of environment (e.g., soil-fertilizing rivers) that watered the civilizations of Egypt and the Near East produced no civilization among the Indians of North America, though they lived on fertile soil along magnificent streams. Nor do institutions make a civilization, for this has risen under a diversity, even a contrariety, of institutions, as in monarchical Egypt and “democratic” Athens. The rise, success, decline, and fall of a civilization depend upon the inherent quality of the race. The degeneration of a civilization is what the word itself indicates—a falling away from the genus, stock, or race. “Peoples degenerate only in consequence of the various mixtures of blood which they undergo.” Usually this comes through intermarriage of the vigorous race with those whom it has conquered. Hence the superiority of the whites in the United States and Canada (who did not intermarry with the Indians) to the whites in Latin America (who did). Only those who are themselves the product of such enfeebling mixtures talk of the equality of races, or think that “all men are brothers.” All strong characters and peoples are race conscious, and are instinctively averse to marriage outside their own racial group.

In 1899 Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman who had made Germany his home, published Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century), which narrowed the creative race from Aryans to Teutons: “True history begins from the moment when the German with mighty hand seizes the inheritance of antiquity.” Dante’s face struck Chamberlain as characteristically German; he thought he heard unmistakably German accents in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians; and though he was not quite sure that Christ was a German, he was confident that “whoever maintains that Christ was a Jew is either ignorant or dishonest.” German writers were too polite to contradict their guest: Treitschke and Bernhardi admitted that the Germans were the greatest of modern peoples; Wagner put the theory to music; Alfred Rosenberg made German blood and soil the inspiring “myth of the twentieth century”; and Adolf Hitler, on this basis, roused the Germans to slaughter a people and to undertake the conquest of Europe.

An American, Madison Grant, in The Passing of the Great Race (1916), confined the achievements of civilization to that branch of the Aryans which he called “Nordics”—Scandinavians, Scythians, Baltic Germans, Englishmen, and Anglo-Saxon Americans. Cooled to hardness by northern winters, one or another tribe of these fairhaired, blue-eyed “blond beasts” swept down through Russia and the Balkans into the lazy and lethargic South in a series of conquests marking the dawn of recorded history. According to Grant the “Sacae” (Scythians?) invaded India, developed Sanskrit as an “IndoEuropean” language, and established the caste system to prevent their deterioration through intermarriage with dark native stocks. The Cimmerians poured over the Caucasus into Persia, the Phrygians into Asia Minor, the Achaeans and Dorians into Greece and Crete, the Umbrians and Oscans into Italy. Everywhere the Nordics were adventurers, warriors, disciplinarians; they made subjects or slaves of the temperamental, unstable, and indolent “Mediterranean” peoples of the South, and they intermarried with the intermediate quiet and acquiescent “Alpine” stocks to produce the Athenians of the Periclean apogee and the Romans of the Republic. The Dorians intermarried least, and became the Spartans, a martial Nordic caste ruling “Mediterranean” helots. Intermarriage weakened and softened the Nordic stock in Attica, and led to the defeat of Athens by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, and the subjugation of Greece by the purer Nordics of Macedonia and Republican Rome.

In another inundation of Nordics—from Scandinavia and northern Germany—Goths and Vandals conquered Imperial Rome; Angles and Saxons conquered England and gave it a new name; Franks conquered Gaul and gave it their name. Still later, the Nordic Normans conquered France, England, and Sicily. The Nordic Lombards followed their long beards into Italy, intermarried, and vitalized Milan and Florence into a Renaissance. Nordic Varangians conquered Russia, and ruled it till 1917. Nordic Englishmen colonized America and Australia, conquered India, and set their sentinels in every major Asiatic port.

In our time (Grant mourned) this Nordic race is abandoning its mastery. It lost its footing in France in 1789; as Camille Desmoulins told his cafe audience, the Revolution was a revolt of the indigenous Gauls (“Alpines”) against the Teutonic Franks who had subjugated them under Clovis and Charlemagne. The Crusades, the Thirty Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, the First World War depleted the Nordic stock and left it too thin to resist the higher birth rate of Alpine and Mediterranean peoples in Europe and America. By the year 2000, Grant predicted, the Nordics will have fallen from power, and with their fall Western civilization will disappear in a new barbarism welling up everywhere from within and from without. He wisely conceded that the Mediterranean “race,” while inferior in bodily stamina to both the Nordics and the Alpines, has proved superior in intellectual and artistic attainments; to it must go the credit for the classic flowering of Greece and Rome; however, it may have owed much to intermarriage with Nordic blood.

Some weaknesses in the race theory are obvious. A Chinese scholar would remind us that his people created the most enduring civilization in history—statesmen, inventors, artists, poets, scientists, philosophers, saints from 2000 b.c. to our own time. A Mexican scholar could point to the lordly structures of Mayan, Aztec, and Incan cultures in pre-Columbian America. A Hindu scholar, while acknowledging “Aryan” infiltration into north India some sixteen hundred years before Christ, would recall that the black Dravidic peoples of south India produced great builders and poets of their own; the temples of Madras, Madura, and Trichinopoly are among the most impressive structures on earth. Even more startling is the towering shrine of the Khmers at Angkor Wat. History is color-blind, and can develop a civilization (in any favorable environment) under almost any skin.

Difficulties remain even if the race theory is confined to the white man. The Semites would recall the civilizations of Babylonia, Assyria, Syria, Palestine, Phoenicia, Carthage, and Islam. The Jews gave the Bible and Christianity to Europe, and much of the Koran to Mohammed. The Mohammedans could list the rulers, artists, poets, scientists, and philosophers who conquered and adorned a substantial portion of the white man’s world from Baghdad to Cordova while Western Europe groped through the Dark Ages (c. 565-c. 1095).

The ancient cultures of Egypt, Greece, and Rome were evidently the product of geographical opportunity and economic and political development rather than of racial constitution, and much of their civilization had an Oriental source. Greece took its arts and letters from Asia Minor, Crete, Phoenicia, and Egypt. In the second millennium b.c. Greek culture was “Mycenaean,” partly derived from Crete, which had probably learned from Asia Minor. When the “Nordic” Dorians came down through the Balkans, toward 1100 b.c, they destroyed much of this proto-Greek culture; and only after an interval of several centuries did the historic Greek civilization emerge in the Sparta of “Lycurgus,” the Miletus of Thales, the Ephesus of Heracleitus, the Lesbos of Sappho, the Athens of Solon. From the sixth century b.c. onward the Greeks spread their culture along the Mediterranean at Durazzo, Taranto, Crotona, Reggio Calabria, Syracuse, Naples, Nice, Monaco, Marseilles, Malaga. From the Greek cities of south Italy, and from the probably Asiatic culture of Etruria, came the civilization of ancient Rome; from Rome came the civilization of Western Europe; from Western Europe came the civilization of North and South America. In the third and following centuries of our era various Celtic, Teutonic, or Asiatic tribes laid Italy waste and destroyed the classic cultures. The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.

Attempts to relate civilization to race by measuring the relation of brain to face or weight have shed little light on the problem. If the Negroes of Africa have produced no great civilization it is probably because climatic and geographical conditions frustrated them; would any of the white “races” have done better in those environments? It is remarkable how many American Negroes have risen to high places in the professions, arts, and letters in the last one hundred years despite a thousand social obstacles.

The role of race in history is rather preliminary than creative. Varied stocks, entering some locality from diverse directions at divers times, mingle their blood, traditions, and ways with one another or with the existing population, like two diverse pools of genes coming together in sexual reproduction. Such an ethnic mixture may in the course of centuries produce a new type, even a new people; so Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Normans fused to produce Englishmen. When the new type takes form its cultural expressions are unique, and constitute a new civilization—a new physiognomy, character, language, literature, religion, morality, and art. It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people; circumstances geographical, economic, and political create a culture, and the culture creates a human type. The Englishman does not so much make English civilization as it makes him; if he carries it wherever he goes, and dresses for dinner in Timbuktu, it is not that he is creating his civilization there anew, but that he acknowledges even there its mastery over his soul. In the long run such differences of tradition or type yield to the influence of the environment. Northern peoples take on the characteristics of southern peoples after living for generations in the tropics, and the grandchildren of peoples coming up from the leisurely South fall into the quicker tempo of movement and mind which they find in the North.

Viewed from this point, American civilization is still in the stage of racial mixture. Between 1700 and 1848 white Americans north of Florida were mainly Anglo-Saxon, and their literature was a flowering of old England on New England’s soil. After 1848 the doors of America were opened to all white stocks; a fresh racial fusion began, which will hardly be complete for centuries to come. When, out of this mixture, a new homogeneous type is formed, America may have its own language (as different from English as Spanish is from Italian), its indigenous literature, its characteristic arts; already these are visibly or raucously on their way.

“Racial” antipathies have some roots in ethnic origin, but they are also generated, perhaps predominantly, by differences of acquired culture—of language, dress, habits, morals, or religion. There is no cure for such antipathies except a broadened education. A knowledge of history may teach us that civilization is a co-operative product, that nearly all peoples have contributed to it; it is our common heritage and debt; and the civilized soul will reveal itself in treating every man or woman, however lowly, as a representative of one of these creative and contributory groups.

Tags Asia, Europe, History

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

On Kenneth Clark’s “Civilisation”

Post author By C .T.
Post date April 25, 2012

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”

Tags Degeneracy, Europe, France, Genuine spirituality, Germany, History, Italy, Materialism / capitalism, Middle Ages, National Socialism, Renaissance

Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Art Beauty Charlemagne Civilisation (TV series) Islamization of Europe Kali Yuga Kenneth Clark Literature Mainstream media Philosophy of history

Civilisation’s “The Skin of our Teeth”

Post author By C .T.
Post date April 12, 2012
1 Comment on Civilisation’s “The Skin of our Teeth”

For an introduction to these series, see here.

Below, some indented excerpts of “The Skin of our Teeth,” the first chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark, after which I offer my comments.

Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:

I am standing on the Pont des Arts in Paris.

What is civilisation? I don’t know. I can’t define it in abstract terms—yet. But I think I can recognize it when I see it; and I am looking at it now.

If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a Minister of Housing or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the buildings. But this doesn’t mean that the history of civilisation is the history of art—far from it. Great works of art can be produced in barbarous societies.

Whatever its merits as a work of art, I don’t think that there is any doubt that the Apollo embodies a higher state of civilisation than the mask. They both represent spirits, messengers from another world—that is to say, from a world of our own imagining. To the Negro imagination it is a world of fear and darkness, ready to inflict horrible punishment for the smallest infringement of taboo. To the Hellenistic imagination it is a world of light and confidence, in which the gods are like ourselves, only more beautiful.

It is not my intention to insult white nationalists. But what they ignore is that, presently, with their rock music and media tastes they themselves, like the overwhelming majority of the white population are, spiritually, far closer to the Negro mask than to the Apollo of Belvedere. For Lord Clark it would have been unthinkable to consider civilised the popular forms of cultural expression such as heavy metal and the movies that today are watched even by white nationalists throughout the West.

As we saw in some of my latest entries, other self-destructing forms of cultural expression already occurred in the times of the fall of the Roman Empire. Clark said:

The same architectural language, the same imagery, the same theatres, the same temples—at any time for five hundred years you could have found them all round the Mediterranean, in Greece, Italy, France.

What happened? It took Gibbon six volumes to describe the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, so I shan’t embark on that. But thinking about this almost incredible episode does tell one something about the nature of civilisation. It shows that however complex and solid it seems, it is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed. What are its enemies? Well, first of all fear—fear of the supernatural, which means that you daren’t question anything or change anything. The late antique world was full of meaningless rituals, mystery religions, that destroyed self-confidence.

Unlike Gibbon and Nietzsche, before his TV audience Clark didn’t dare to point the finger at Christianity. But later in the program, Clark spoke about Islam:

In a miraculously short time—about fifty years—the classical world was overrun [by the Muslim conquests]. Only its bleached bones stood out against the Mediterranean sky. The old source of civilisation was sealed off, and if a new civilisation was to be born it would have to face the Atlantic.

But something very odd happened to Man’s self-image in the early medieval world facing the Atlantic in what today is Ireland. According to Clark:

The subject of Mediterranean man was man. Two hundred years have passed—perhaps a little more—and man has almost vanished.

Crude as this imago hominis may be when compared to the Apollo, presently some white nationalists advertise their blogs with soft-porn pics of semi-nude women: something far more degrading for the divine human figure than the image of 8th century insular art in the Echternach Gospels.

To my mind—and, like Clark, I must say that this is only my personal view—, the imago hominis only means a psychogenic regression in Man’s understanding of himself compared to the Greeks and the Romans. However, the white nationalists’ soft porn spits on the avatar of God, even if I don’t believe in the existence of a personal god.

After the above image chosen by Clark for the first episode of his program, in the following pages of the book version Clark mentions how St. Gregory destroyed entire libraries of the classical world (I quoted part of it in my recent antichristian series, here), and on the next page he states that even in those obscure days the Europeans fought strenuously against their enemies:

All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war. The Romans were the best organised and most ruthless fighters in Latium. So it was with the Franks. Clovis and his successors not only conquered their enemies, but maintained themselves by cruelties and tortures remarkable even by the standards of the last thirty years.

Without Charles Martel’s victory over the Moors at Poitiers in 732, western civilisation might never have existed, and without Charlemagne’s tireless campaigns we should never have had the notion of a united Europe.

Charlemagne was the first great man of action to emerge from the darkness since the collapse of the Roman world. The old idea that he saved civilisation isn’t far wrong. On the whole, our whole knowledge of ancient literature is due to the collecting and copying that began under Charlemagne.

If we compared ourselves with the franks, what could it be said about present-day nationalists? Many of them don’t even let our most serious fighter discuss in their forums (by “serious fighter” I mean someone who’s actively planning a revolution). Didn’t the Führer say that those who want to live, let them fight, and that those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live? Do whites and white nationalists deserve to live? If so, where are the Charles Martels in today’s islamized Europe, in America’s mexicanized states?

I am not proposing to do something stupid in a world which media is a hundred percent dominated by the Enemy. But at least be prepared for the tough, revolutionary times that are coming after the dollar crashes.

Tags France, History, Ireland, Middle Ages

Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Christendom Der Antichrist (book) Friedrich Nietzsche Martin Luther Philosophy of history St Paul

Nietzsche on Christianity

Post author By C .T.
Post date March 24, 2012
18 Comments on Nietzsche on Christianity

Last pages of The Antichrist, which Nietzsche finished on September 30, 1888 but was not published until 1895. Though ellipsis are in the original, I omitted adding more of them between unquoted sentences:

The order of castes, the highest, the dominating law, is merely the ratification of an order of nature, of a natural law of the first rank, over which no arbitrary fiat, no “modern idea,” can exert any influence.

The order of castes, the order of rank, simply formulates the supreme law of life itself; the separation of the three types is necessary to the maintenance of society, and to the evolution of higher types, and the highest types—the inequality of rights is essential to the existence of any rights at all. A right is a privilege. Every one enjoys the privileges that accord with his state of existence. Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. Life is always harder as one mounts the heights—the cold increases, responsibility increases. A high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity.

Whom do I hate most heartily among the rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists, the apostles to the Chandala, who undermine the workingman’s instincts, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his petty existence—who make him envious and teach him revenge…. Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of “equal” rights…. What is bad? But I have already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from revenge. The anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry…

♣

The harvest is blighted overnight… That which stood there aere perennis, the imperium Romanum, the most magnificent form of organization under difficult conditions that has ever been achieved, and compared to which everything before it and after it appears as patchwork, bungling, dilletantism—those holy anarchists made it a matter of “piety” to destroy “the world,” which is to say, the imperium Romanum, so that in the end not a stone stood upon another. The Christian and the anarchist: both are décadents; both are incapable of any act that is not disintegrating, poisonous, degenerating, blood-sucking; both have an instinct of mortal hatred of everything that stands up, and is great, and has durability, and promises life a future… Christianity was the vampire of the imperium Romanum—overnight it destroyed the vast achievement of the Romans: the conquest of the soil for a great culture that could await its time. Can it be that this fact is not yet understood?

The imperium Romanum that we know, and that the history of the Roman provinces teaches us to know better and better—this most admirable of all works of art in the grand manner was merely the beginning, and the structure to follow was to prove its worth for thousands of years. To this day, nothing on a like scale sub specie aeterni has been brought into being, or even dreamed of! This organization was strong enough to withstand bad emperors: the accident of personality has nothing to do with such things—the first principle of all genuinely great architecture. But it was not strong enough to stand up against the corruptest of all forms of corruption—against Christians… These stealthy worms, which under the cover of night, mist and duplicity, crept upon every individual, sucking him dry of all earnest interest in real things, of all instinct for reality—this cowardly, effeminate and sugar-coated gang gradually alienated all “souls,” step by step, from that colossal edifice, turning against it all the meritorious, manly and noble natures that had found in the cause of Rome their own cause, their own serious purpose, their own pride.

One has but to read Lucretius to know what Epicurus made war upon—not paganism, but “Christianity,” which is to say, the corruption of souls by means of the concepts of guilt, punishment and immortality. He combatted the subterranean cults, the whole of latent Christianity—to deny immortality was already a form of genuine salvation. Epicurus had triumphed, and every respectable intellect in Rome was Epicurean—when Paul appeared… Paul, the Chandala hatred of Rome, of “the world,” in the flesh and inspired by genius—the Jew, the eternal Jew par excellence… What he saw was how, with the aid of the small sectarian Christian movement that stood apart from Judaism, a “world conflagration” might be kindled; how, with the symbol of “God on the cross,” all secret seditions, all the fruits of anarchistic intrigues in the empire, might be amalgamated into one immense power. “Salvation is of the Jews.” Christianity is the formula for exceeding and summing up the subterranean cults of all varieties, that of Osiris, that of the Great Mother, that of Mithras, for instance: in his discernment of this fact the genius of Paul showed itself.

This was his revelation at Damascus: he grasped the fact that he needed the belief in immortality in order to rob “the world” of its value, that the concept of “hell” would master Rome—that the notion of a “beyond” is the death of life… Nihilist and Christian: they rhyme in German, and they do more than rhyme…

♣

The whole labour of the ancient world gone for naught: I have no word to describe the feelings that such an enormity arouses in me. And, considering the fact that its labour was merely preparatory, that with adamantine self-consciousness it laid only the foundations for a work to go on for thousands of years, the whole meaning of antiquity disappears!… To what end the Greeks? to what end the Romans? All the prerequisites to a learned culture, all the methods of science, were already there and had been there for two thousand years! All gone for naught! All overwhelmed in a night, but not by a convulsion of nature! But brought to shame by crafty, sneaking, invisible, anæmic vampires! Not conquered,—only sucked dry!… Hidden vengefulness, petty envy, became master! Everything wretched, intrinsically ailing, and invaded by bad feelings, the whole ghetto-world of the soul was at once on top! One needs but read any of the Christian agitators, for example, St. Augustine, in order to realize, in order to smell, what filthy fellows came to the top.

♣

Here it becomes necessary to call up a memory that must be a hundred times more painful to Germans. The Germans have destroyed for Europe the last great harvest of civilization that Europe was ever to reap—the Renaissance. Is it understood at last, will it ever be understood, what the Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christian values: an attempt with all available means, all instincts and all the resources of genius to bring about a triumph of the opposite values, the more noble values…

To attack at the critical place, at the very seat of Christianity, and there enthrone the more noble values—that is to say, to insinuate them into the instincts, into the most fundamental needs and appetites of those sitting there… I see before me the possibility of a perfectly heavenly enchantment and spectacle: it seems to me to scintillate with all the vibrations of a fine and delicate beauty, and within it there is an art so divine, so infernally divine, that one might search in vain for thousands of years for another such possibility; I see a spectacle so rich in significance and at the same time so wonderfully full of paradox that it should arouse all the gods on Olympus to immortal laughter: Cæsar Borgia as pope!… Am I understood?… Well then, that would have been the sort of triumph that I alone am longing for today: by it Christianity would have been swept away!

What happened? A German monk, Luther, came to Rome. This monk, with all the vengeful instincts of an unsuccessful priest in him, raised a rebellion against the Renaissance in Rome… Instead of grasping, with profound thanksgiving, the miracle that had taken place: the conquest of Christianity at its capital—instead of this, his hatred was stimulated by the spectacle. A religious man thinks only of himself. Luther saw only the depravity of the papacy at the very moment when the opposite was becoming apparent: the old corruption, the peccatum originale, Christianity itself, no longer occupied the papal chair! Instead there was life! Instead there was the triumph of life! Instead there was a great yea to all lofty, beautiful and daring things!… And Luther restored the church.

♣

With this I come to a conclusion and pronounce my judgment. I condemn Christianity; I bring against the Christian church the most terrible of all the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul.

This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found—I have letters that even the blind will be able to see… I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough,—I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race…

And mankind reckons time from the dies nefastus when this fatality befell—from the first day of Christianity!—Why not rather from its last?—From today?—

Umwertung aller Werte!…