The communism of antiquity, 2
by Alain de Benoist
Editor’s Note:
The epigraph to this February 1977 essay, originally published in French, appears here.
As can be seen in the hatnote that provisionally appears in the latest version of ‘The Wall’, unlike others, this racialist site has as its primary focus Christianity because to save the Aryan from the miscegenation that is destroying him, we must first identify the Enemy.
One of the reasons why the helicopter visitors never come down but leave me preaching in the desert is because I am like the child who says the king is naked.
‘Tell me what your holidays are and I’ll tell you who you really worship: the Aryan or the Jew’. When even white nationalists celebrate the birth of a Jew on December 25th, and also celebrate the year 2025 from the supposed birth of that kike instead of honouring the birth of our Aryan saviour on April 20th, it becomes clear that they are, ultimately, traitorous neonormies…[1]
What the racial right doesn’t yet understand is that it is impossible to avoid getting into trouble as long as we remain in trance with the religion of our parents. Those who believe that by celebrating the birth of the unhistorical Yeshu it is possible to save the Aryan, should ponder the words of their countryman Mark Twain: ‘It ain´t what you know that gets you into trouble. It´s what you know for sure that just ain´t so’.
______ 卐 ______
In his account of the wars against the Persians, Herodotus attributes the success of the small Greek cities against the mighty Iranian Empire to the ‘intellectual superiority’ of their compatriots. Would he also have explained their decline by their ‘inferiority’? The question of why cultures disappear and empires collapse has always preoccupied historians and philosophers. In 1441, Leonardo Bruni spoke of the vacillatio of the Roman Empire; his contradictor, Flavio Biondo, preferred the term inclinatio (which summed up, for Renaissance man, the abandonment of ancient customs). The debate was already set: was the Empire destroyed or collapsed on its own? For Spengler, the alternations that have occurred throughout history are the result of inevitability. The identifiable causes of a decline are only secondary causes. They accentuate, and accelerate a process, but they can only intervene when that process has begun. But it is also possible to think that no internal necessity fixes an end to cultures: when they die, it is because someone kills them. André Piganiol’s opinion is well known: ‘Roman civilisation did not die a natural death. It was assassinated’ (L’Empire chrétien,1947). In this case, the responsibility of the ‘assassins’ is complete. However, we can admit that only structures already very weakened, devoid of energy, abandon themselves to the blow that wounds them, to the enemy on the prowl. Voltaire, who was, after Machiavelli, one of the first to speak of historical cycles, said that the Roman Empire had fallen simply because it existed, ‘since everything must have an end’ (Philosophical Dictionary, 1764).
We will not attempt here to find out whether or not the fall of Rome was irremediable, or even to identify all the factors that contributed to its fall, but to examine what responsibility the nascent Christianity bears for its fall.
It is well known that it was the Briton Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) who first established that responsibility, in chapters XV and XVI of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, six thick volumes of which appeared between 1776 and 1778. Before him, in 1576, Löwenklav had defended Emperor Julian, whose talent, temperance and generosity he praised, thus opening a breach in the doctrine which claimed that Christian emperors had been, by the privilege of their faith alone, superior to pagans. Shortly afterwards, the jurisconsult and diplomat Grotius (1583-1645) endorsed Erasmus’ thesis on the Germanic origin of the Neo-Latin aristocracies. Finally, in 1743, Montesquieu attributed the decline and fall of Rome to various factors, such as the extinction of the old families, the loss of civic spirit, the degeneration of institutions, the collusion between administrative power and business fortunes, the high birth rate of the foreign population, the wavering loyalty of the legions, and so on. Better documented than his predecessors, Gibbon took up all these elements anew, ready to write an ‘unbiased history’. His conclusions, tinged with an irony inherited from Pascal, remain essentially valid.
In the 19th century, Otto Seeck (History of the Decline of the Ancient World, 1894), drawing on an idea of Montesquieu, as well as certain considerations of Burckhardt (in his Epoch of Constantine, 1852-1853) and Taine, insisted on a biological and demographic factor: the disappearance of the elites (Ausrottung der Besten), accompanied by the senescence of institutions and the importance gained by the plebs and the crowd of slaves, who constituted the first clientele of Christian preachers. This thesis was adopted by M.P. Nilsson (Imperial Rome, 1926), after having been confirmed by Tenney Frank, who, after examining some 13,900 funerary inscriptions, concluded that, from the 2nd century onwards, 90% of the population of Rome was of foreign origin (American Historical Review, XXI, 1916, p. 705).
In Marcus Aurelius (1895), Renan made his own one of Nietzsche’s formulas: ‘During the third century, Christianity sucks in ancient society like a vampire’. And he added this sentence, which echoes so many times today: ‘In the third century, the Church, by monopolising life, exhausted civil society, bled it, made it empty. Small societies killed big society’ (pp. 589 and 590). In 1901, Georges Sorel (1847-1922) published an essay on The Ruin of the Ancient World. ‘The action of Christian ideology,’ he argued, ‘broke down the structure of the ancient world like a mechanical force working from within. Far from being able to say that the new religion infused new lifeblood into an ageing organism, we might say that it left it exhausted. It severed the ties between the spirit and social life, and sowed everywhere the seeds of quietism, despair and death’.
For his part, Michael Rostovtzeff (Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, 1926), opposing Seeck on certain points, and also Max Weber (Social Origins of the Decline of Ancient Civilisation, 1896), posed an essential question: ‘Is it possible to extend a high civilisation to the lower classes without lowering its level, without diluting its value to the point of making it disappear? Is not all civilisation, from the moment it begins to penetrate the masses, doomed to decadence?’ Ortega y Gasset was to answer him, in The Revolt of the Masses: ‘The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of subversion, of the empire of the masses, who absorb and annul the ruling minorities and take their place’.
This overview would be incomplete if we omitted to mention three works which appeared at the beginning of the century and which seem to us to herald the rise of modern criticism: L’intoleránce religieuse et la politique (Flammarion, 1911), by Bouché-Leclercq; La propagande chréthienne et les persecutions (Payot, 1915), by Henri-F. Secrétan, and Le christianisme antique (Flammarion, 1921) by Charles Guignebert.
_________
[1] Check out the April 20th posts on the major American racialist forums and webzines, and you’ll see that they don’t celebrate the birth of Uncle Adolf.