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Category: Protestantism

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Catholic Church Charlemagne Christendom Franks Inquisition Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Philosophy of history Protestantism

Kriminal

Below, translated excerpts from the first pages of Deschner’s 10-volume Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, published in German in 1986.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Introduction

To begin, I will say what the reader should not expect. As in all of my criticisms of Christianity, here there will be missing many of the things that also belong to history, but not to the criminal history of Christianity that the title indicates. That, which also belongs to history, may be found in millions of works that fill up the libraries, archives, bookstores, academies and the lofts of the parish houses. He who wants to read those materials can do so long as he has life, patience and faith.

This religion has thousands, hundreds of thousands of apologists and defenders; it has books in which many boast of ‘the luminous march of the Church through the ages’ (Andersen), and that the Church is ‘one’ and ‘the living body of Christ’ and ‘holy’ because ‘its essence is holiness; sanctification its end’ (the Benedictine von Rudloff). It is understood, on all this, that the unfortunate side details (religious wars, persecutions, fighting, famine) happened in the designs of God; often inscrutable, always just, full of wisdom and salvific power. Given the overwhelming predominance of the silly, misleading and deceitful glorifying, was it not necessary to show the opposite view insofar as it is much better proven? At any event, those who always want to see the bright side are shielded from the ugly side, which is often the truest.

The distinction between the Church and Christianity is relatively recent. As is known, there is a glaring contradiction between the lives of the Christians and the beliefs they profess: a contradiction which has always been downplayed by pointing to the eternal opposition between the ideal and the real. Nobody dares to condemn Christianity because it has not fulfilled all its ideals, or has fulfilled half of them, or not at all. But such an interpretation ‘equals to carry too far the notion of the human and even the all too human, so that when century after century and millennium after millennium someone does the opposite of what he preaches then becomes, per share and effect of all his history, epitome and absolute culmination of worldwide and historical criminality’ as I said during a conference in 1969 which earned me a visit to the courthouse.

Because that is really the question. Not that they have failed the ideals in part or by degrees, no: it is that those ideals have been literally trampled, without which the perpetrators lay down, for a moment, their claims of self-proclaimed champions of such ideals, nor stop their self-declaration of being the highest moral authorities in the world.

Western Christianity, in any case, ‘was essentially created by the Catholic Church’; ‘the Church, organised from the papal hierocracy down to the smallest detail, was the main institution of the medieval order’ (Toynbee).

Part of our question are the wars started or commanded by the Church, the extermination of entire nations: the Vandals, the Goths, and the relentless slaughter of East Slav peoples—all of them, according to the chronicles of the Carolingian and the Ottos, criminals and confused peoples in the darkness of idolatry that was necessary to convert by any means not excepting betrayal, deceit and fury. Of the fourteen legislated capital crimes by Charlemagne after subduing the Saxons by blood and fire, ten offenses relate exclusively to the religious camp. Under the old Polish criminal law, those guilty of eating meat during the Easter fast were punished by pulling their teeth out.

We will also discuss ecclesiastical punishments for violations of civil rights. The ecclesiastical courts were increasingly hated. There are issues that we will discuss extensively: sacrificial practices (the stolen goods from the Church to be repaid fourfold, and according to Germanic law up to twenty times); ecclesiastical and monastic prisons, especially of the ergastulum type (the coffins were also called ergastula), where they were thrown both ‘sinners’ as the rebels and madmen, and usually installed in basements without windows or doors, but well equipped with shackles of all kinds, racks, handcuffs and chains. We will document the exile punishment and the application of it to the whole family in case of the murder of a cardinal; which extended to the male descendants up to the third generation. Also very fashionable were torture and corporal punishment, especially in the East where it became furiously popular to mutilate limbs, pull out eyes and cut off noses and ears.

It is quite plausible that not all authorities indulged themselves in such excesses, and certainly not everyone would be as insane as the Abbot Transamund, who tore off the eyes of the monks of the Tremiti Convent, or cut their tongues (and, despite this, enjoyed the protection of Pope Gregory VII, who also enjoyed great notoriety). Without a doubt, the churches, particularly the Roman Church, have created significant cultural values, especially buildings, which usually obeyed no altruistic reasons (representing power), and also in the domain of painting, responding to ideological reasons (the eternal illustrations of biblical scenes and legends of saints). But aside from such opted love of culture that contrasts sharply with paleo-Christianity—that with eschatological indifference contemplated the ‘things of this world’, as they believed in the imminent end of all (a fundamental error in which Jesus himself fell)—, it should be noted that most of the cultural contributions of the Church were made possible by ruthlessly exploiting of the masses, the enslaved and the impoverished, century after century. And against this promotion of culture we find further cultural repression, cultural intoxication and destruction of cultural property.

The magnificent temples of worship of antiquity were destroyed almost everywhere: irreplaceable value buildings burned or demolished, especially in Rome itself, where the ruins of the temples served as quarries. In the 10th century they still engaged in breaking down statues, architraves, burning paintings, and the most beautiful sarcophagi served as bathtubs or feeders for pigs. But the most tremendous destruction, barely imaginable, was caused in the field of education. Gregory I, the Great, the only doctor Pope of the Church in addition to Leo I, according to tradition burned a large library that existed on the Palatine. The flourishing book trade of antiquity disappeared; the activity of the monasteries was purely receptive. Three hundred years after the death of Alcuin and Rabanus Maurus, the disciples were still studying with manuals written by them. Even St. Thomas Aquinas, the Church’s official philosopher, writes that ‘the desire for knowledge is a sin when it does not serve the knowledge of God’.

In universities, the Aristotelian hypertrophy aborted any possibility of independent research. Philosophy and literature were subject to the dictation of theology. History, as a science, was completely unknown. The experimentation and inductive research were condemned; experimental sciences were drowned by the Bible and dogma; scientists were thrown into the dungeons, or sent to the stake. In 1163, Pope Alexander III (remember in passing that at that time there were four anti-popes) forbade all clerics studying physics. In 1380 a decision of the French parliament forbade the study of chemistry, referring to a decree of Pope John XXII. And while in the Arab world (obedient to Muhammad’s slogan ‘The ink of scholars is more sacred than the blood of martyrs’) the sciences flourished, especially medicine, in the Catholic world the bases of scientific knowledge remained unchanged for more than a millennium, well into the 16th century. The sick were supposed to seek comfort in prayer instead of medical attention. The Church forbade the dissection of corpses, and sometimes even rejected the use of natural medicines for considering it unlawful intervention with the divine. In the Middle Ages, not even the abbeys had doctors, not even the largest. In 1564 the Inquisition condemned to death the physician Andreas Vesalius, the founder of modern anatomy, for opening a corpse and for saying that man is not short of a rib that was created for Eve.

Consistent with the guidance of teaching, we find another institution, ecclesiastical censure, very often (at least since the time of St. Paul in Ephesus) dedicated to the burning of the books of pagans, Jews or Saracens, and the destruction (or prohibition) of rival Christian literature, from the books of the Arians and Nestorians until those of Luther. But let us not forget that Protestants sometimes also introduced censorship, even for funeral sermons and also for non-theological works, provided they touched on ecclesiastical matters or religious customs.

The above is a selection of the main issues that I refer to in my history of the crimes. And yet, it is only a tiny segment of the overall history.

History!

Like any other historian, I only contemplate a history of the countless possible histories, a particular one, worse or better defined, and even this biased aspect cannot be considered the whole ‘complex of action’: an absurd idea, given the volume of existing data; theoretically conceivable, but practically impossible and not even desirable. The author who intends to write a criminal history of Christianity is constrained to mention only the negative side of that religion which weight has exceeded ultimately that of the perceived or real positives. Those who prefer to read about the other aspects ought to read other books: The Joyful Faith, The Gospel as Inspiration, Is it True that Catholics are No Better Than the Others?, Why I Love My Church?, The Mystical Body of Christ, Beauties of the Catholic Church, Under the Cloak of the Catholic Church, God Exists (I Have Known Him), The Way of Joy Toward God, The Good Death of a Catholic, With the Rosary to Heaven, SOS from the Purgatory, The Heroism of Christian Marriage.

The pro-Christian literature! More numerous than the sands of the sea: against 10,000 titles just one of the style of this Criminal History of Christianity, not to mention the millions of issues if we add the countless religious periodicals.

It turns out that truly there are among Christians men of good will, as in all religions and in every game, which should not be taken as data in favour of those religions and parties, because if that were allowed how many crooks would testify against such belief? And good Christians are the most dangerous, because they tend to get confused with Christianity, or to borrow the words of Lichtenberg, ‘unquestionably there are many righteous Christians, only that it is no less true that in corpore their works as such have never have helped much’.

What is the basis of my work? As with most historical studies, it is based on sources, tradition, contemporary historiography; especially texts. But when I expose my subjectivity bluntly, my ‘point of view’ and my ‘positioning’, I think I show my respect to the reader better than the mendacious scribes who want to link their belief in miracles and prophecies; in transubstantiations and resurrections from the dead; in heavens, hells and other wonders with the pretence of objectivity, accuracy and scientific rigor. Could it not be that, with my confessed bias, I am less biased than them? Could it be that my experience, my training, did not authorise me to form a more independent opinion about Christianity? At the end of the day I left Christianity, despite having been formed in a deeply religious household, as soon as it ceased to seem real.

Let’s face it: we are all ‘partial’, and he who pretends denying it is lying. It is not our bias what matters, but confessing it, without the pretence of impossible ‘objectivities’. We are all biased. This is particularly true in the case of historians who are more bent on denying it, because they are the ones who lie the most—and then they throw to one another the dogs of Christianity. How ridiculous, when we read that Catholics accused the Protestants of ‘bias’; or the Protestants accusing the Catholics, when thousands of theologians of various confessions throw over each other so common reproach; for example, when the Jesuit Bacht wants to see in the Protestant Friedrich Loofs ‘an excess of zeal against monastic status as such’, for which ‘his views are too one-sided’. And how would not the Jesuit Bacht opine with partiality when he refers to a reformed; he, who belongs to an order whose members are required to believe that white is black and black white, if mandated by the Church? Like Bacht, unquestioning obedience is imposed upon all Catholic theologians in the habit through baptism, dogma, the chair, the ecclesiastical license to print and many other obligations and restrictions. And so they live year after year, enjoying a steady income in exchange for advocating a particular view, a particular doctrine, a particular interpretation of history strongly impregnated with theology… not so much to deceive themselves but to continue cultivating the deception of others. For example, by accusing of bias the opponents of their confession and pretending to believe that Catholics are safe from such defect; as if it didn’t exist, for two thousand years, another bias sneakier than the Catholic.

Historiography is no more than the projection into the past of the interests of the present. The conservative historian who compared his job to that of the priest (for heaven’s sake!) and issued for himself reports of maximum impartiality and objectivity, claimed that he ‘erased his subjectivity’! This unshakable faith for objectivism, called ‘ocularism’ by Count Paul York Wartenburg and lampooned as a proposal for a ‘eunuch objectivity’ by Droysen (‘only the unconscious can be objective’), is illusory. Because there is no objective truth in historiography, nor history as it happened. ‘There can only be interpretations of history, and none is definitive’ (Popper). All historiography is written against the background of our personal vision of the world. It is true that many scholars lack such a worldview and thus are often considered, if not markedly progressive, at least notably impartial, honest and truthful. Those are the champions of ‘pure science’, the representatives of an alleged stance of neutrality or indifference as to value statements. They reject any reference to a particular point of view, any subjectivity, as if they were unscientific sins or blasphemies against the postulate of the true objectivity they advocate; against that sine ira et studio [without anger and affection] which they have as sacrosanct and that, as Heinrich von Treitschke ironizes, ‘nobody respects, let alone the speaker himself’.

The fiction of the concealment of the ideological premises of the historical presentation can serve to conceal many things: an ethical relativism and a cowardly escapism fleeing categorical decisions on principles—which still is a decision: irresponsibility on behalf of scientific responsibility! For a science that does not make assessments, whether they like it or not, is an ally of the status quo: it supports the dominating and hurts the dominated. Its objectivity is only apparent, and in practice it means nothing but love to one’s own tranquillity, security and attachment to a career. Our life does not run value-free, but full of it; and scientists, insofar as they start from life, if they claim they are value-free incur in hypocrisy. I have had in my hands works of historians who were dedicated to the wife who had died in the bombings, or perhaps dedicated to two or three fallen sons on the fronts; and yet, sometimes, these people want to keep their writing as ‘pure science’, as if nothing had happened.

That’s their problem. I think otherwise. Even if it existed, and I say it does not, a totally apolitical historical research, oblivious to all kinds of judgments, such an investigation would serve no purpose but to undermine ethics and make way for inhumanity. Moreover, it would not be true ‘research’ because it would not be dedicated to revealing the relationships between the factors; as much as it would be mere preparatory work, the mere accumulation of materials, as noted by Friedrich Meinecke.

Now, to what extent does the reality of history coincides with my statement? I prefer life on principle to science, especially when it starts to become apparent as a threat to life in the broadest sense. It is often objected that ‘science’ is not to blame, but only some of the scientists (the problem is that there are many, at worst almost all): quite a similar argument that says that we should not take Christianity to task for the sins of Christendom. All this does not mean that I am a supporter of pure subjectivism, which does not exist. A limited capacity of conviction would have my thesis of the criminal character of Christianity if, to prove it, I confined myself to only some examples. But, being a multi-volume work, no one will say that these are isolated or inconclusive examples. Because I write ‘out of hostility’ the story of those I describe has made me their enemy. And I would not consider myself refuted by having omitted what was also true, but only when someone proves that something I have written is false.

There are even those who believe that it is very wrong to criticise, especially when they are criticised, although the latter they would never confess. Quite the contrary, they always claim they have nothing against criticism: that all critiques are welcome but, yes, provided they are positive critiques, constructive; not negative or deleterious. With swollen anger they set those high standards, precisely against the ‘mania of judging’ (Aitmeyer), and display their scandal with ‘scientific’ trims when an author dares to ‘value’; when ‘the historian, given his inability as a moralist, assumes the role of prosecutor’. Is it not grotesque that the sworn representatives of an ancient mystery cult, those who believe in trinities, angels, demons, hell, virgin births, celestial assumptions of a real body, conversion of water into wine and wine into blood, want to impress us with their ‘science’? And could it not be the height of grotesqueness that such people continue to receive the honours of the scientific world itself?

We are invited to take care on behalf of the ‘zeitgeist’ so that we understand and forgive. But precisely Goethe satirised it in his Faust: ‘What you call the spirit of the times, is ultimately the spirit of the masters’. If we are not worth the testimony of the poet for being notoriously anti-Christian and not less anticlerical, let us go to St. Augustine: ‘Times are hard, miserable times, people say. Let us live well, and times are good. Because we ourselves are the times that run; so that how we are, so will our time be’. In his other sermons, Augustine reiterated this idea that there is no reason to accuse the times or the ‘zeitgeist’, but the very humans that (as the historians of today) blame everything on the times: those miserable, difficult and murky times. Because ‘time does not offend anyone. The offended are men, and other men are the ones who inflict the offenses. Oh, pain! It offends men who are robbed, oppressed, and by whom? Not by lions, snakes or scorpions but by men. And so men live the offenses on pain, but will not themselves do the same, if they can, and as much as they have censored it?’ Augustine knew what he meant, as he himself fits perfectly in the last sentence of the quotation (see the last chapter of this volume). As this, ultimately, cannot be denied by the apologists, they object that sometimes—i.e., every time it was necessary, whatever the historical period under consideration—the agents ‘were not true Christians’.

But look, when there were true Christians? Were they the bloodthirsty Merovingians, the Franks so fond of plundering expeditions, the despotic women of the Lateran period? Was Christian the great offensive of the Crusades? Was it the burning of witches and heretics? The Thirty Years War? The First World War, the Second or the war of Vietnam? If all those were not Christians, then who was it? In any case, the spirit of the times was not ever the same at each particular time. While Christians were spreading their gospels, their beliefs and dogmas; while they were transmitting their infection to always larger territories, there were not a few men, such as the first great debunkers of Christianity in the 2nd century, Celsus; and Porphyry in the third, who knew how to raise a comprehensive and overwhelming criticism, which we still feel justified. As Christianity was guilty of appalling outrages, Buddhism, which never had a Western-style organised church in India or central authority dedicated to homogenise the true faith, gave signs of a much higher tolerance. Non-priest believers contracted no exclusive commitment, nor were forced to recant other religions, or converting anyone by force. Their peaceful virtues can be seen, for example, in the history of Tibet, whose inhabitants, a warrior nation among the most feared of Asia, became one of the most peaceful under the influence of Buddhism. In every century there was a moral conscience, even among Christians, and not less among ‘heretics’. Why should we not apply to Christianity its own scale of biblical standards, or even occasionally patristic standards? Do not they themselves say that ‘by their fruits ye shall know them’?

For me, history (and what I said is but a drop in an ocean of injustices) cannot be cultivated sine ira et studio. It would be contrary to my sense of fairness, my compassion for men. He who has not as enemy many enemies, is the enemy of humanity. And is not anyone who pretends to contemplate history without anger or affection similar to the one who witness a large fire and sees how victims suffocate and does nothing to save them, limiting himself to take note of everything? The historian who clings to the criteria of ‘pure’ science is necessarily insincere. He wants either to deceive others or deceive himself. I would add: he is a criminal, because there can be no worse crime than indifference.

And if the sentence of St. John Chrysostom retains its validity today, ‘he who praises the sin is guiltier than he who commits it’, would then praising the crimes of history and glorifying the criminals be even worse than these crimes? Would not human affairs be better, and also the affairs of history, if historians (and schools) illuminated and educated the public based on ethical criteria, condemning the crimes of the sovereigns rather than the praising? But most historians prefer to spread the faeces of the past as if they had to serve as fertiliser for the future havens.

An example of it, to cite only one, is the daily glorification of Charlemagne (or Charles the Great). The worst looting expeditions and genocides of history come to be called expansions, consolidation, extension of the catchment areas, changes in the correlation of forces, restructuring, incorporation domains, Christianization, pacification of neighbouring tribes. When Charlemagne oppresses, exploits, and liquidates what is around him, that is ‘centralism’, ‘pacification of a great empire’. When there are others who rob and kill, those are ‘raids and invasions of enemies across the borders’ (Saracens, Normans, Slavs, Avars) according to Kampf. When Charlemagne, with bags full of holy relics, sets fire and kills on a large scale, thus becoming the noble smith of the great Frank empire, the Catholic Fleckenstein speaks of ‘political integration’. Some specialists use even safer, more peaceful and hypocritical expressions as Camill Wampach, professor of our University of Bonn: ‘The country invited immigration, and the neighbouring region of Franconia gave inhabitants to newly liberated lands’.

The law of the jungle, in a word: the one which has been dominating the history of mankind to date, always where a State intended it (or another refused to submit), and not only in the Christian world, naturally. Because, of course, we will not say here that Christianity is the sole culprit of all these miseries. Perhaps someday, once Christianity disappears, the world remains equally miserable. We do not know that. What we do know is that, with it, everything will necessarily remain the same. That’s why I have tried to highlight its culpability in all cases I have found it essential, trying to cover as many cases as possible but, yes: without exaggeration, without taking things out of proportion, as those could judge who either do not have idea about the history of Christianity, or have lived completely deceived about it.

 

Categories
Individualism Liberalism Protestantism

Individualism

by Dominique Venner

Europe since earliest antiquity has always been ruled by the idea that each individual is inseparable from his community, clan, tribe, people, city, empire, to which he is linked by a bond more sacred than life itself. This unquestioned belief, of which the Iliad offers the oldest and most poetic expression, took various forms. Think of the worship of ancestors for whom the city owed its existence, or the loyalty to the prince who was its visible expression.

The first threat was introduced by the individualism of early Christianity. The idea of a personal god emancipated men from the hitherto unquestioned authority of ethnic gods of the city. Yet the Church itself reimposed the idea that the individual will could not order things as it pleased.

Yet the seed of a spiritual revolution had been sown. It reappeared unexpectedly in the religious individualism of the Reformation. In the following century, the rationalist idea of absolute individualism was developed forcefully by Descartes (“I think, therefore, I am”). The philosopher also made central the biblical idea of man as the master and possessor of nature. No doubt, in Cartesian thought, man was subject to the laws of God, but God set a very bad example. Unlike the ancient gods, He was not dependent on a natural order anterior and superior to him. He was the single all-powerful and arbitrary creator of all things, of life and nature itself, according to His sole discretion. If this God was a creator free of all limits, then why not man, who is made his image, as well?

Set in motion by the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries, this idea has no known limits. In it lies what we call “modernity.” This idea assumes that man is his own creator and he can recreate the world as he pleases. There is no other principle than the will and pleasure of each individual. Consequently, the legitimacy of a society no longer depends on its compliance with the eternal laws of the ethnos. It depends only on the momentary consent of individual wills. In other words, society is legitimate only as a contract resulting from a free agreement between parties who are pursuing their own advantage.

Still, despite this individualistic and materialistic logic, we have long maintained communal ties of birth and fatherland and all the obligations these imply. These ties have been progressively destroyed across Europe in the decades following World War II, while the triumphant consumer society arrived from the United States. Like other European countries, France has gradually ceased to be a nation (based on nationality, common birth) to become an aggregate of individuals united by their pleasures or the ideas they have of their interests. The former obligation to “serve” has been replaced by the general temptation to “serve oneself.” This is the logical consequence of the principle that founds society solely on human rights, thus on each individual’s interests.

And now, before our eyes, this repulsive logic faces a revolt from the depths. We are witnessing the unexpected awakening of all those who, through atavistic reflexes, feel deep down that unquestionable ancestry is what make a clan, a people, or a nation.

(Excerpted from a Counter-Currents article)

Categories
Americanism Axiology Christendom New Testament Old Testament Protestantism Tom Sunic Universalism

Bicausal formula

Now that I have been translating articles and letters of the Spanish blogger Manu Rodríguez for The West’s Darkest Hour a thought arrived to my mind today.

Couldn’t the Protestant, specifically the Puritanical version of Christianity that the Early Founding Fathers brought to this continent be the perfect operating system, complete with an in-built bug, to undermine the Aryan spirit?

Judge it by yourselves my dear readers. It was the Yankees sans Jews the ones who horribly betrayed their kinsmen during the American Civil War on behalf of the Negroes: the seeds of what would happen big time in the next century with American betrayal of Germany on behalf of the Jews.

silly evangelical

After all it was the American Puritans, as Tom Sunic demonstrated in his latest book, the ones who introduced Old Testament (OT) values in the Low Culture: something that explains the runaway Zionism in the contemporary evangelical scene. If in addition to the Holy Book of the Jews subtly introduced to the Aryan psyche after the Reformation you add the New Testament’s (NT) non-ethnic but universal message, Love your neighbor, help the poor and disadvantaged, etc., the perfect recipe for Indo-European suicide has been formulated, right?

OT + NT = White suicide

If this interpretation of Western history is correct, Christianity in general, and Murka in particular, must burn to save whites from extinction.

Any objection to this reading of Western history (before jumping to the below thread please read at least this text by Sunic and this one by Rodríguez)?

Categories
Catholic Church Charlemagne Christendom Franks Goths New Testament Protestantism Reformation

Kemp on Christianity



Excerpted from
March of the Titans:
A History of the White Race
by Arthur Kemp:


Although originating within the Semitic world, the religion of Christianity has played such a major role in the post Roman European world that its origins must be clearly dealt with for the sake of understanding its later influence.



Genocidal evangelism

Coercive Christianity takes root

With the use of violent and bloody coercion, Saxon and German paganism was quite literally killed off, and most of the survivors became Christians more out of fear than out of genuine conviction. Christianity finally spread to the Goths themselves, through a Christian slave named Wulfila, who translated the Bible into Gothic.

Before the end of the fourth century, Christianity had spread to the Vandals, the Burgundians, the Lombards and other German tribes within the direct sphere of influence of the Western Roman Empire.

By the year 550 AD, the only non-Christian tribes were to be found in Bavaria and those parts of Germany north from there—including virtually all of the Danes, Scandinavians, Balts and Slavs to the east.


Charlemagne organizes the murder of all non-Christians under his control

In 768, Pepin’s son, Charlemagne (Charles the Great), inherited the Frankish kingdom. It was this king who was directly responsible for the introduction of Christianity to the Germans.

To destroy German paganism, Charlemagne proclaimed harsh laws applicable to those Germans under his control who refused to be baptized into Christianity. Eating meat during Lent, cremating the dead and pretending to be baptized were all made punishable by death.

In 768, Charlemagne started a 32 year long campaign of what can only be described as genocidal evangelism against the Saxons under his control in western Germany.

The campaign started with the cutting down of the Saxon’s most sacred tree, their version of the World Tree or Yggdrasil (the symbol of the start of the earth and the source of all life in the ancient Indo-European religions) located in a sacred Saxon forest near present day Marburg.

Yggdrasil_by_Ludwig_Burger

The norns Urðr, Verðandi,
and Skuld beneath
the world tree
Yggdrasil

Charlemagne quickly turned to violence as a means of spreading the Christian word. In 772, at Quierzy, he issued a proclamation that he would kill every Saxon who refused to accept Jesus Christ, and from that time on he kept a special detachment of Christian priests who doubled as executioners, and in every Saxon village in which they stopped, these priests would execute anybody who refused to be baptized.

Then in 782, at Verden, Charlemagne carried out the act for which he is most notoriously associated—he ordered the beheading of 4,500 Saxons in one day who had made the error of being caught practicing paganism after they had agreed to be Christians.

Charlemagne’s constant companion and biographer, the monk Einhard, vividly captured the event in his biography of the Frankish king. In it is written that the King rounded up 4,500 Saxons who “like dogs that return to their vomit” had returned to the pagan religions they had been forced to give up upon pain of death.

After having all 4,500 Saxons beheaded “the king went into winter camp, and there celebrated mass as usual.”

Twelve years later, in 794, Charlemagne introduced a law under which every third Saxon living in any pagan area was kidnapped and forced to resettle and be raised amongst Christian Franks.

Teutonic Knights exterminate the last white pagans

The only significant grouping of Whites left in Europe who were not—nominally at least—Christians by the year 1000 AD were to be found in the Baltic and Eastern European regions. To destroy this last bastion of paganism the Church employed the services of some of the most fanatic Christians of all—the Teutonic Knights.

By 1198, however, these knights had changed from being purely passive and took an active part in the war against the non-White Muslims, becoming known as the Teutonic Knights. Membership in the order was strictly limited to Christian German noblemen. The Teutonic Knights received official recognition from Pope Innocent III in 1199, and adopted the official uniform of a white tunic with a black cross.

Soon their deeds on behalf of Christendom became famous. In 1210 they were invited to Hungary by the king of that country to participate in a war against the non-Christian pagan tribes in Eastern Europe.

The Teutonic Knights jumped at the chance, and by using violence and mass murder, soon became known as effective Christianizers amongst the pagan Whites of Eastern Europe. This genocidal evangelism soon became the sole obsession of the Teutonic Knights—by 1226 the order had set up permanent settlements in north eastern Europe.

In 1226, the Holy Roman Emperor granted the Teutonic Knights control over what was then Prussia (today northern Poland) to rule as a fiefdom on condition that they convert all the locals to Christianity. In 1234, Pope Gregory IX granted the Knights control over any other territory that they might conquer from the pagans. The Teutonic Knights soon built a series of imposing castles to defend their new territory, some of which still stand today.

From the safety of these castles they waged their own brand of evangelicalism, which was limited to the Frankish king Charlemagne’s recipe—once a number of pagans had been captured, they were offered the choice of either being baptized and accepting Christianity, or being killed on the spot.

Unsurprisingly, almost all chose conversion. The price for being caught practicing paganism after being baptized, was instant death.

The Teutonic Order in 1260

As was the case with the genocidal evangelicalism of Charlemagne, the first one or two generations of converts were in all likelihood not genuine—usually they paid lip service to Christianity in order not to be killed. By about the third generation however, the children knew no other religion, and in this way Christianity replaced the original Indo-European religions.

The Teutonic Knights also encouraged already Christianized Germans to settle in Prussia. This served a double purpose—not only could the new arrivals police the new converts, but also the Teutonic Knights realized very clearly that the easiest way to change the nature of a society was to change its inhabitants.

By 1300, the Teutonic Knights were one of the most powerful organizations in Germany, controlling territory which stretched from the Baltic Sea into central Germany, a private empire which saw them engaging in, on average, eight major wars every year.

However, the Teutonic Knights slowly ran out of pagans to convert. By 1386 the last of the major non-Christian tribes in the north, the Lithuanians, had all more or less been converted, and the order started to lose the reason for its existence.


Later Christianity

So it was that Christianity came to be the dominant religion of Europe—the first religion to convert by mass murder.

The original White religion had never tried to convert followers upon pain of death, and had never waged a war in its name—and as such it was psychologically unprepared to do battle with a Middle Eastern religion which engendered a genocidal fanaticism amongst its followers.

Once the Christians had run out of pagans to kill, they turned upon themselves in a violent and bloody fratricidal conflict which saw the Church split and the various protagonists kill each other in a crazed blood lust.

Fully one third of the entire White race was killed in a series of major Christian Wars in Europe—these events are dealt with in a later chapter, along with the effect of Christianity upon the development of science, history, art and social life.


The Dark Ages

The Dark Ages was a period in European history which has been arbitrarily set at between approximately 800 AD and lasting until the Renaissance. Although this is by no means a fixed definition, the common thread throughout this period of history was the total dominance of Christianity and the repression of all art, science and progress that was not Christian in nature.

In this way the great scientific, philosophical and cultural works of the thousands of years of pre-Christian civilization were suppressed, all being ascribed to the work of pagans and therefore of devil authorship. The era became known as the Dark Ages because of the introduction of theocracy as the only guideline in all fields of endeavor. This created a halt to all progress and centuries of cultural stagnation, which marked the time between the glory of Classical antiquity and the rebirth of that glory in the Renaissance and the beginnings of the modern world.

In the field of the study of history, the dominance of the Church had a massive effect. The Lux Ex Orient (“the Light Comes from the East”) doctrine was established which said that all civilization originated in the Middle East, as this was where the events of the Bible had supposedly been played out. The Lux Ex Orient doctrine is still to this day the “popular” interpretation of history, with most people having been taught that “civilization originated in the fertile river valleys”.


Racial effects of the age of theocracy

The spread of Christianity unquestionably affected the growth of the European peoples: particularly in the policy, still held in the Catholic Church to this day, of celibacy for leading church officials.

Although this policy of enforced celibacy amongst the priesthood, monks and nuns only ever applied to a relatively small number of Whites, it was nonetheless often the most intelligent members of society who became monks or nuns. This was so because during the Dark Ages, only the cleverest candidates were allowed to enter the priesthood: as the keepers of the arts and writing, the only way to gain any sort of education was to join the priesthood.

Although there can be little doubt that, given human nature, the celibacy rule was broken, it must also be so that the policy of deliberate celibacy saw many thousands of Europe’s cleverest people dying childless, their genes lost forever. The persecution of these great minds with the accusation of paganism also unquestionably stripped Europe of many of its cleverest people: the cumulative effect of the Dark Ages was to set Europe back centuries in development.


The Christian Wars

In the New Testament, Jesus Christ is quoted as saying that he had come to bring the sword, to “set father against son and mother against daughter” (Luke 12:53) and called on his followers to “But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me” (Luke 19:27).

These words have, in the history of Christianity, been enacted in bloody reality many times—starting when an important political rebellion against the Roman Catholic Church took on a religious slant—leading to the split in European Christendom between Catholic and Protestant. This split sparked off a series of religious wars which were ultimately to be responsible for the death of nearly a third of the entire White race.

The Reformation is the name given to this 16th century religious uprising. Its major outpouring happened in the middle of the Renaissance, there can be little doubt that the two events were linked: added to this was a political problem which the countries in Northern Europe had with the all powerful role the pope had assumed from Rome.

Emerging European nationalism objected to the fact that the pope—usually an Italian—had to approve the appointment of any head of state everywhere else in Europe. The pope’s ability to even charge tax from foreign countries to support the Church headquarters in Rome also irked those living thousands of miles from Rome. It has been estimated that the Church ended up owning as much as one third of all the land in Europe in this manner: what the various national states must have secretly thought of this does not need to be imagined.

[After a few pages describing the religious wars, Kemp writes:]

The Danes were defeated: the Catholics followed up their victory with another Danish defeat in August of that year at Lutter am Barenberge, Germany.

The Danes fled back north, and the Catholic armies set about pillaging, looting and destroying every Protestant north German town they seized. Catholic victory seemed complete: in March 1629, the Catholic king issued the Edict of Restitution which effectively nullified all Protestant titles to all Roman Catholic property expropriated since the Peace of Augsburg in 1555.

The German Protestant city of Magdeburg then rose in revolt: it was besieged by a German Catholic army and crushed in May 1631, with every single Protestant inhabitant—tens of thousands of people—being massacred by the victorious Catholics. The city was also virtually burned to the ground in the looting that followed.


Racial consequences of the Thirty Years’ War – One Third of German population killed

The racial consequences of the Christian Wars, and in particular the Thirty Years’ War, were vast. The German population was reduced by at least one third, and probably more: when combined with the effects of the Great Plague of the 1300s, the German population actually shrunk by over 50 per cent in the course of 300 years: a massive decline which, if avoided, would certainly have changed the course of world history.

When the history of the Christian Wars is read in conjunction with the suppression of learning and science caused by the Christian Dark Ages, and the division the White populations into opposing Christian camps, then no other conclusion is possible except to say that the introduction of Christianity has to count as the single greatest ideological catastrophe to ever strike Europe.


Note:

For excerpts of all chapters of Kemp’s book see: here.

Categories
Ancient Rome Axiology Charlemagne Christendom Demography Deranged altruism Egalitarianism Franks Goths Hermann (Arminius) Philosophy of history Protestantism Reformation Universalism Who We Are (book) William Pierce

On Christianity

by William Pierce

To avoid replication of texts, I have moved the content of this entry: here

Categories
Blacks Catholic Church Demography Deranged altruism Emigration / immigration Ethnic cleansing Madison Grant Miscegenation Neanderthalism Protestantism Racial studies Universalism

The European Races in Colonies



Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, published in 1916, is a classic in race studies. Below, a few excerpts from the chapter, “The European Races in Colonies” (no ellipsis added):


For reasons already set forth there are few communities outside of Europe of pure European blood. The racial destiny of Mexico and of the islands and coasts of the Spanish Main is clear. The white man is being rapidly bred out by Negroes on the islands and by Indians on the mainland. It is quite evident that the West Indies, the coast region of our Gulf States, perhaps, also the black belt of the lower Mississippi Valley must be abandoned to Negroes. This transformation is already complete in Haiti and is going rapidly forward in Cuba and Jamaica. Mexico and the northern part of South America must also be given over to native Indians with an ever thinning veneer of white culture of the “Latin” type.

In Venezuela the pure whites number about one per cent of the whole population, the balance being Indians and various crosses between Indians, Negroes and whites. In Jamaica the whites number not more than two per cent, while the remainder are Negroes or mulattoes.

In Mexico the proportion is larger, but the unmixed whites number less than twenty per cent of the whole, the others being Indians pure or mixed. These latter are the “greasers” of the American frontiersman.

Where two distinct species are located side by side history and biology teach that but one of two things can happen; either one race drives the other out, as the Americans exterminated the Indians and as the Negroes are now replacing the whites in various parts of the South; or else they amalgamate and form a population of race bastards in which the lower type ultimately preponderates. This is a disagreeable alternative with which to confront sentimentalists but nature is only concerned with results and neither makes nor takes excuses. The chief failing of the day with some of our well-meaning philanthropists is their absolute refusal to face inevitable facts, if such facts appear cruel.

In the Argentine white blood of the various European races is pouring in so rapidly that a community preponderantly white, but of the Mediterranean race, may develop, but the type is suspiciously swarthy.

In Brazil, Negro blood together with that of the native inhabitants is rapidly overwhelming the white Europeans, although in the southern provinces German immigration has played an important role and the influx of Italians has also been considerable.

Throughout history it is only the race of the leaders that has counted and the most vigorous have been in control and will remain in mastery in one form or another until such time as democracy and its illegitimate offspring, socialism, definitely establish cacocracy and the rule of the worst and put an end to progress. The salvation of humanity will then lie in the chance survival of some sane barbarians who may retain the basic truth that inequality and not equality the law of nature.

Australia and New Zealand, where the natives have been virtually exterminated by the whites, are developing into communities of pure Nordic blood and will for that reason play a large part in the future history of the Pacific. The bitter opposition of the Australians and Californians to the admission of Chinese coolies and Japanese farmers is due primarily to a blind but absolutely justified determination to keep those lands as white man’s countries.

In Africa, south of the Sahara, the density of the native population will prevent the establishment of any purely white communities, except at the southern extremity of the continent and possibly on portions of the plateaux of eastern Africa. The stoppage of famines and wars and the abolition of the slave trade, while dictated by the noblest impulses of humanity, are suicidal to the white man. Upon the removal of these natural checks Negroes multiply so rapidly that there will not be standing room on the continent for white men, unless, perchance, the lethal sleeping sickness, which attacks the natives far more frequently than the whites, should run its course unchecked.

The Negroes of the United States while stationary, were not a serious drag on civilization until in the last century they were given the rights of citizenship and were incorporated in the body politic. These Negroes brought with them no language or religion or customs of their own which persisted but adopted all these elements of environment from the dominant race, taking the names of their masters just as to-day the German and Polish Jews are assuming American names.

Looking at any group of Negroes in America, especially in the North, it is easy to see that while they are all essentially Negroes, whether coal-black, brown or yellow, a great many of them have varying amounts of Nordic blood in them, which has in some respects modified their physical structure without transforming them in any way into white men. This miscegenation was, of course, a frightful disgrace to the dominant race but its effect on the Nordics has been negligible, for the simple reason that it was confined to white men crossing with Negro women and did not involve the reverse process, which would, of course, have resulted in the infusion of Negro blood into the American stock.

The United States of America must be regarded racially as a European colony and owing to current ignorance of the physical bases of race, one often hears the statement made that native Americans of Colonial ancestry are of mixed ethnic origin.

This not true. The Nordic blood was kept pure in the Colonies because at that time among Protestant peoples there was a strong race feeling, as a result of which half-breeds between the white man and any native type were regarded as natives and not as white men.

Concentration of whites in the American Continent


In the Catholic colonies, however, of New France and New Spain, if the half-breed were a good Catholic he was regarded as a Frenchman or a Spaniard, as the case might be. This fact alone gives the clew to many of our Colonial wars where the Indians, other than the Iroquois, were persuaded to join the French against the Americans by half-breeds who considered themselves Frenchmen. The Church of Rome has everywhere used its influence to break down racial distinctions. It disregards origins and only requires obedience to the mandates of the universal church. In that lies the secret of the opposition of Rome to all national movements. It maintains the imperial as contrasted with the nationalistic ideal and in that respect its inheritance is direct from the Empire.

Race consciousness in the Colonies and in the United States, down to and including the Mexican War, seems to have been very strongly developed among native Americans and it still remains in full vigor to-day in the South, where the presence of a large Negro population forces this question upon the daily attention of the whites.

In New England, however, whether through the decline of Calvinism or the growth of altruism, there appeared early in the last century a wave of sentimentalism, which at that time took up the cause of the Negro and in so doing apparently destroyed, to a large extent, pride and consciousness of race in the North. The agitation over slavery was inimical to the Nordic race, because it thrust aside all national opposition to the intrusion of hordes of immigrants of inferior racial value and prevented the fixing of a definite American type.

There has been little or no Indian blood taken into the veins of the native American, except in States like Oklahoma and in some isolated families scattered here and there in the Northwest. This particular mixture will play no very important role in future combinations of race on this continent, except in the north of Canada.

The native Americans [i.e., whites] are splendid raw material, but have as yet only an imperfectly developed national consciousness. They lack the instinct of self-preservation in a racial sense. Unless such an instinct develops their race will perish, as do all organisms which disregard this primary law of nature. Nature had granted to the Americans of a century ago the greatest opportunity in recorded history to produce in the isolation of a continent a powerful and racially homogeneous people and had provided for the experiment a pure race of one of the most gifted and vigorous stocks on earth, a stock free from the diseases, physical and moral, which have again and again sapped the vigor of the older lands. Our grandfathers threw away this opportunity in the blissful ignorance of national childhood and inexperience.

The result of unlimited immigration is showing plainly in the rapid decline in the birth rate of native Americans because the poorer classes of Colonial stock, where they still exist, will not bring children into the world to compete in the labor market with the Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian and the Jew. The native American is too proud to mix socially with them and is gradually withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to these aliens the land which he conquered and developed. The man of the old stock is being crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners just as he is to-day being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews. These immigrants adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals and while he is being elbowed out of his own home the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race.

As to what the future mixture will be it is evident that in large sections of the country the native American will entirely disappear. He will not intermarry with inferior races and he cannot compete in the sweat-shop and in the street trench with the newcomers. Large cities from the days of Rome, Alexandria, and Byzantium have always been gathering points of diverse races, but New York is becoming a cloaca gentium which will produce many amazing racial hybrids and some ethnic horrors that will be beyond the powers of future anthropologists to unravel.

Categories
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”

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 / association 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.”

Categories
Literature Lord of the Rings Protestantism

The scouring

of the Shire

by Greg Johnson

After the destruction of the Ring and the downfall of the Dark Lord, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin return to the Shire only to find that it has been seized by aliens who have enslaved and robbed the hobbits and ravaged the land.

The returning veterans rouse their people to rebellion, killing many of the usurpers and driving the rest away. Then they discover who was behind it: the fallen wizard Saruman, who is banished from the Shire. Before he can leave, however, he is killed by his servant in crime, the treacherous Wormtongue, who is then felled by three hobbit arrows.

This chapter was omitted from Peter Jackson’s film trilogy (as well as Ralph Bakshi’s animated version), although Jackson does allude to it in two places. In The Fellowship of the Ring, when Frodo peers into Galadriel’s mirror, he has a vision of the hobbits enslaved and the shire blighted by dark satanic mills. In the extended version of The Return of the King, after the fall of Isengard, Merry and Pippin discover that Saruman’s storehouses contain products from the Shire, indicating some sort of contact.

But Jackson moved the deaths of Saruman and Wormtongue to the fall of Isengard. Wormtongue still kills Saruman, but he is dispatched by an arrow from Legolas. [see YouTube clip here] Thus when Frodo and company return to the Shire, they find it unchanged. Thus in Jackson’s telling, Frodo’s vision was just one possible future foreclosed by the death of Saruman at Isengard.

Still, I think it a shame that “The Scouring of the Shire” was not filmed, for it is a potent political allegory that remains relevant today. Most commentators simply note that the Scouring is based on Tolkien’s personal experience of returning from the trenches of World War I to find England a changed place. But the Scouring goes far beyond anything in Tolkien’s experiences. It is a work of imagination, a political allegory that far more closely resembles the experiences of German soldiers returning from the Great War to find a radically new, alien-dominated regime.

The Shire was subjugated as follows. After the fall of Isengard, Saruman was reduced to a wandering “beggar in the wilderness,” a refugee. But when he enjoyed power, the wandering wizard developed a far-flung network reaching all the way to the Shire, where he cultivated the friendship of Lotho Pimple.

The Shire was an agrarian, autarkic society of independent small farmers and merchants. Pimple, however, was sufficiently alienated and ambitious that he wished to change this social order. He wanted more land than he could work himself, and he wanted hirelings to work it, so he could grow rich by growing cash crops for export. In short, he wanted to be a big shot with a plantation.

By means of mysterious infusions of capital from outside the Shire (obviously from Saruman) Pimple managed to target economically troubled small holders for takeover (perhaps by loaning them money at usurious rates and then foreclosing when they could not pay), reducing them to employees on what was once their own land. Thus Pimple became a big man, styling himself Chief Shirrif and then just Chief. When Saruman and Wormtongue arrived as refugees, naturally Pimple took them in.

Having elevated the rootless and greedy Pimple to power, Saruman cozied up with the Chief and began to institute a new order. He brought in racially indeterminate aliens to intimidate and terrorize the hobbits. He also recruited hobbits of defective character — people who wanted to act big and meddle in other people’s business (in the internet age, we call them trolls) — to vastly expand the police force. This was necessary, because Saruman also vastly expanded rules and regulations in order to yoke and mulct the hobbits. Naturally there was discontent, so a vast network of spies and informants was created, as well as a courier service to swiftly convey reports and orders. Dissidents were thus easily ferreted out and imprisoned.

Society was collectivized. Private homes were replaced by ugly, cramped, ramshackle housing developments. Rationing was introduced to crush the hobbits’ spirits and lower their standard of living, freeing resources to be consumed by their new overlords or to be exported for cash. Leisure was restricted and work expanded. Handcrafts, which were fine for an aesthetically refined and ecologically sustainable subsistence economy, were replaced by heavy industry to produce exports for cash.

This industry was fueled by wholesale deforestation and fouled the water and the air. But the desecration of nature went far beyond the bounds of even economic necessity, betraying a hatred of nature and beauty as such. Saruman’s real goal was less to create a new world than to destroy the old.

Finally, to cement his rule, Saruman had his collaborator Pimple secretly killed once he had outlived his usefulness.

It is simply an error to reduce this all to an allegory of the endogenous rise of capitalism in England. For the role of Saruman indicates that this process was far from endogenous in the Shire. Nor was it in England, for that matter. Saruman represents an alien influence, specifically the Jewish spirit — rootless, alienated, materialistic, and ultimately nihilistic — which is incarnated both in Jewry and its extended phenotype, Calvinism and low-church Protestantism. (It was the Puritan Revolution that brought the Jews back to England.)

Yet Saruman’s takeover and elimination of Pimple does not resemble anything that happened in England. But it does resemble the revolution that deposed the Kaiser, followed by various Judeo-Bolshevik Putsches and ultimately the Jewish-dominated Weimar Republic. Furthermore, Saruman’s totalitarian system of spies and informants and his expropriation of small farms and seizure of their produce did not take place in England or Germany, but it did happen in Soviet Russia, leading to some of history’s greatest crimes against European man.

Thus “The Scouring of the Shire” is a political allegory applicable not just to England but to all forms of Jewish subversion of traditional society.

But it is also an allegory of how a people might regain control of its destiny. The hobbits have lost their freedom through salami tactics. Each day a little more of their freedom was sliced off, but not enough to cause a general rebellion, just a lot of passive grumbling, until finally, when the meaning of what was happening dawned on them, it was too late. Frodo and company, however, returned home after a long absence, and the change hit them all at once. It did not slowly demoralize and enervate them. It made them fighting mad.

And as war veterans, they knew something about fighting. The Shire was also lost because the hobbits were disunited and fearful, ultimately because they had enjoyed a soft and easy-going lifestyle. Frodo and his comrades, however, had been tested and hardened in the crucible of war. They were not cowed by alien bullies, no matter what their stature. They immediately resolved to rally their people and scour the Shire of the usurpers. The hobbits had been long groaning under the new regime. The veterans were the spark to the tinder.

A few opening skirmishes led to a climactic battle at Bywater, which left nearly 70 of the alien interlopers dead and the rest in chains or flight. Nineteen hobbits also lay dead. The hobbits then marched to Bag End to depose Saruman and send him packing without penalty. The prisoners were also sent on their way unharmed. These foolishly gentle policies toward murderers were justified by Frodo with effusions of moral and metaphysical clap-trap that remind us that, after all, this is children’s literature. Best we ignore him when our own enemies are at our mercy.

The closest historical analogy to “The Scouring of the Shire” comes from Germany, where various Freikorps groups — militias of demobilized veterans — put down Judeo-Bolshevik Putsches in Prussia and Bavaria. Furthermore, the successor of the Freikorps was the NSDAP, also led and staffed by veterans, which finally put an end to the Weimar Republic. It is a model worth contemplating today as thousands of white veterans return from a Jewish-instigated war in Iraq to face 30 percent unemployment in a homeland overrun and despoiled by non-white immigrants. They are a constituency just waiting for a leader.