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Ancient Rome Deranged altruism Goths Reformation Universalism Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Who We Are, 18

The following is my abridgement of chapter 18 of William Pierce’s history of the white race, Who We Are:

Christianity Spreads from Levant
to Dying Roman Empire,
then to Conquering Germans
Germans ‘Aryanize’ Christian Myths,
but Racially Destructive Ethics Retained

 

During the turbulent and eventful fifth century the Germans largely completed their conquest of the West. In the early years of that century German tribesmen, who had been raiding the coast of Roman Britain for many years, began a permanent invasion of the southeastern portion of the island, a development which was eventually to lead to a Germanic Britain.

In 476 Odoacer, an Ostrogothic chieftain who had become a general of Rome’s armies, deposed the last Roman emperor and ruled in his own name as king of Italy. Meanwhile the Visigoths were expanding their holdings in Gaul and completing their conquest of Spain, except for the northwestern region already held by their Suebian cousins and an enclave in the Pyrenees occupied by a remnant of the aboriginal Mediterranean inhabitants of the peninsula, the Basques.

And throughout the latter part of the century the Franks, the Alemanni, and the Burgundians were consolidating their own holds on the former Roman province of Gaul, establishing new kingdoms and laying the basis for the new European civilization of the Middle Ages. Everywhere in the West the old, decaying civilization centered on the Mediterranean gave way to the vigorous White barbarians from the North.

Oriental Infection. But the Germans did not make their conquest of the Roman world without becoming infected by some of the diseases which flourished so unwholesomely in Rome during her last days. Foremost among these was an infection which the Romans themselves had caught during the first century, a consequence of their own conquest of the Levant. It had begun as an offshoot of Judaism, had established itself in Jerusalem and a few other spots in the eastern Mediterranean area, and had traveled to Rome with Jewish merchants and speculators, who had long found that city an attractive center of operations.

It eventually became known to the world as Christianity, but for more than two centuries it festered in the sewers and catacombs of Rome, along with dozens of other alien religious sects from the Levant; its first adherents were Rome’s slaves, a cosmopolitan lot from all the lands conquered by the Romans. It was a religion designed to appeal to slaves: blessed are the poor, the meek, the wretched, the despised, it told them, for you shall inherit the earth from the strong, the brave, the proud, and the mighty; there will be pie in the sky for all believers, and the rest will suffer eternal torment. It appealed directly to a sense of envy and resentment of the weak against the strong.

Edict of Milan. By the end of the third century Christianity had become the most popular as well as the most militant of the Oriental sects flourishing among the largely non-Roman inhabitants of the decaying Roman Empire. Even as late as the first years of the fourth century, under Emperor Diocletian, the Roman government was still making efforts to keep the Christians under control, but in 313 a new emperor, Constantine, decided that, if you can’t lick ’em, join ’em, and he issued an imperial edict legitimizing Christianity.

Although one of Constantine’s successors, Julian, attempted to reverse the continuing Christianization of the Roman Empire a few years later, it was already too late: the Goths, who made up the bulk of Rome’s armies by this time, had caught the infection from one of their own slaves, a Christian captive whom they called Wulfila.

A Romanticized view of Wulfila
explaining the Gospels to the Goths in ca. 310

Wulfila was a tireless and effective missionary, and the Goths were an uprooted and unsettled people, among whom the new religion took hold easily. Wulfila’s translation of the Bible into Gothic greatly speeded up the process.

Conversion of the Franks. Before the end of the fourth century Christianity had also spread to the Vandals, Burgundians, Lombards, Gepids, and several other German tribes. A little over a century later the powerful nation of the Franks was converted. By the beginning of the second quarter of the sixth century, the only non-Christian Whites left were the Bavarians, Thuringians, Saxons, Frisians, Danes, Swedes, and Norse among the Germans—and virtually all the Balts and Slavs.

One can only understand the rapid spread of Christianity during the fourth and fifth centuries by realizing that, for all practical purposes, it had no opposition. That is, there was no other organized, militant, proselytizing church competing effectively with the Christian church.

Athanaric the Goth. The Christians had many individual opponents, of course: among the Romans several of the more responsible and civic-minded emperors, such as Diocletian, as well as what was left of the tradition-minded aristocracy; and among the Germans many farsighted leaders who resisted the imposition of an alien creed on their people and the abandonment of their ancient traditions. Athanaric, the great Gothic chieftain who led his people across the Danube in 376 to save them from the invading Huns, was notable in this regard.

Athanaric and the other traditionalists failed to halt the spread of Christianity, because they were only individuals. Although there were pagan priests, the traditional German religion never really had a church associated with it. It consisted in a body of beliefs, tales, and practices passed from generation to generation, but it had no centralized organization like Christianity.

Folk-religion. German religion was a folk-religion, which grew organically out of the people and out of the land they occupied. The boundary between a tribe’s most ancient historical legends and its religious myths, between its long-dead heroes and chieftains and its gods, was blurred at best. Because German religion belonged to the people and the land, it was not a proselytizing religion; the German attitude was that other peoples and races likewise had their own folk-religions, and it would be unnatural to impose one race’s religion on another race.

And because German religion was rooted in the land as well as in the people, it lost some of its viability when the people were uprooted from their land. It is no coincidence that the conversions of the Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, Lombards, Franks, and many other German tribes took place during the Voelkerwanderung, a period of strife, disorientation, and misery for many of those involved: a period when whole nations lost not only their ancient homelands but also their very identities.

Fire and Sword. After the Voelkerwanderung ended in the sixth century, the Christianization of the remaining pagan peoples of Europe proceeded much more slowly—and generally by fire and sword rather than by peaceful missionary effort. Whereas the Franks had become Christians more or less painlessly when their king Clovis (Chlodweg) converted for political reasons at the end of the fifth century, it was another 300 years before the Frankish king Charlemagne (Karl the Great) was able to bring about the conversion of his Saxon neighbors, and he accomplished that only by butchering half of them in a series of genocidal wars.

Early Christianity, in contrast to German religion, was as utterly intolerant as the Judaism from which it sprang. Even Roman religion, which, as an official state religion, equated religious observance with patriotism, tolerated the existence of other sects, so long as they did not threaten the state. But the early Christians were inspired by a fanatical hatred of all opposing creeds.

Also in contrast to German and Roman religion, Christianity, despite its specifically Jewish roots, claimed to be a universal (i.e., “catholic”) creed, equally applicable to Germans, Romans, Jews, Huns, and Negroes.

“Every place… shall be yours.” The Christians took the Jewish tribal god Yahweh, or Jehovah, and universalized him. Originally he seems to have been a deity associated with one of the dormant volcanoes of the Arabian peninsula, a god so distinctly Semitic that he had a binding business contract (“covenant”) with his followers: if the Jews would remain faithful and obedient to him, he would deliver all the wealth of the non-Jewish peoples of the world into their hands. Observant Jews even today remind themselves of this by fastening mezuzoth to the door frames of their homes, wherein the verses from their Torah spelling out the Jews’ side of their larcenous deal with Yahweh are inscribed (Deuteronomy 6:4-9, 11:13-21; Yahweh’s reciprocal obligations are in the verses immediately following).

Nevertheless, the early Christian church, armed with an effective organization and a proselytizing fervor, and armored with a supreme contempt for everything non-Christian, was able to supplant Jupiter and Wotan alike with Yahweh.

The Germans, however, recreated the Semitic Yahweh in the image of their own Wotan, even as they accepted the new faith. The entire Christian ritual and doctrine, in fact, were to a large extent “Aryanized” by the Germans to suit their own inner nature and lifestyle. They played down the slave-religion aspects of Christianity (“the meek shall inherit the earth”) and emphasized the aspects which appealed to them (“I come bearing not peace, but a sword”). The incoherence and the multitude of internal inconsistencies of the doctrine made this sort of eclecticism easy.

Yule, Easter, Harvest Festival. In general, the Germans accepted without difficulty the Christian rituals—especially those which, like Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving were deliberately redesigned to correspond to pagan rituals and festivals of long standing—and the myths (parthenogenesis, turning water into wine, curing the blind, resurrection from the dead, etc.), and they ignored the ethics (turn the other cheek, all men are brothers, etc.).

A Frank of the seventh or eighth century would tremble in superstitious awe before some fragment of bone or vial of dried blood which the Church had declared a sacred relic with miracle-working powers—but if you smote him on the cheek you would have a fight on your hands, not another cheek turned.

As for the brotherhood of man and equality in the eyes of the Lord, the Germans had no time for such nonsense; when confronted with non-Whites, they instinctively reached for the nearest lethal weapon. They made mincemeat out of the Avars, who were cousins to the Huns, in the seventh century, and the Christianized Franks or Goths of that era would know exactly what to do with a few hundred thousand rioting American Blacks; they would, in fact, positively relish the opportunity to do what needed doing.

It could not have been expected to be otherwise. In the first place, a totally alien religion cannot be imposed on a spiritually healthy people—and the Germans were still essentially healthy, despite the dislocations caused by the Voelkerwanderung. Christianity had to be modified to suit their nature—at least, temporarily. In the second place, the average German did not have to come to grips with the alien moral imperatives of the Sermon on the Mount. All he had to do was learn when to genuflect; wrestling with Holy Writ was exclusively the problem of the clergy.

It was not until the Reformation, in the sixteenth century, that the laity began studying the Bible and thinking seriously about its contents. Even then, however, the tendency was to interpret alien teachings in a way that left them more or less compatible with natural tendencies.

Slave Morality. But Christian ethics—the slave morality preached in the Roman catacombs—was like a time bomb ticking away in Europe: a Trojan horse brought inside the fortress, waiting for its season. That season came, and the damage was done. Today Christianity is one of the most active forces working from within to destroy the White race.

From the Christian churches came the notion of “the White man’s burden,” along with the missionaries who saw in every African cannibal or Chinese coolie a soul to be saved, of equal value in the eyes of Jehovah to any White soul. It is entirely a Christian impulse—at least, on the part of the average American voter, if not the government—which sends American food and medical supplies to keep alive swarming millions of Asiatics, Africans, and Latins every time they have a famine, so that they can continue to outbreed Whites.

The otherworldly emphasis on individual salvation, on an individual relationship between Creator and creature which relegates the relationship between individual and race, tribe, and community to insignificance; the inversion of natural values inherent in the exalting of the botched, the unclean, and the poor in spirit in the Sermon on the Mount—the injunction to “resist not evil”—all are prescriptions for racial suicide. Indeed, had a fiendishly clever enemy set out to concoct a set of doctrines intended to lead the White race to its destruction, he could hardly have done better.

The “White guilt” syndrome exploited so assiduously by America’s non-White minorities is a product of Christian teachings, as is the perverse reverence for “God’s chosen people” which has paralyzed so many Christians’ wills to resist Jewish depredations.

Moses Replaces Hermann. Not the least of the damage done by the Christianization of Europe was the gradual replacement of White tradition, legend, and imagery by that of the Jews. Instead of specifically Celtic or German or Slavic heroes, the Church’s saints, many of them Levantines, were held up to the young for emulation; instead of the feats of Hermann or Vercingetorix, children were taught of the doings of Moses and David.

Europeans’ artistic inspiration was turned away from the depiction of their own rich heritage and used to glorify that of an alien race; Semitic proverbs and figures of speech took precedence over those of Indo-European provenance; Europeans even abandoned the names of their ancestors and began giving Jewish names to their children: Samuel and Sarah, John and Joan, Michael and Mary, Daniel and Deborah.

Despite all these long-term consequences of Christianity, however, the immediate symptoms of the infection which the conquering Germans picked up from the defeated Romans were hardly noticeable; White morals and manners, motivations and behavior remained much as they had been, for they were rooted in the genes—but now they had a new rationale.

Today’s Christian Patriots. And it is only fair to note that even today a fairly substantial minority of White men and women who still think of themselves as Christians have not allowed their sounder instincts to be corrupted by doctrines suited to a following of mongrelized slaves. They ignore the Jewish origins of Christianity and justify their instinctive dislike and distrust of Jews with the fact that the Jews, in demanding that Jesus be killed, became a race forever accursed (“His blood be on us and on our children”).

They interpret the divine injunction of brotherhood as applying only to Whites. Like the Franks of the Middle Ages, they believe what suits them and conveniently forget or invent their own interpretation for the rest. Were they the Christian mainstream today, the religion would not be the racial menace that it is. Unfortunately, however, they are not; virtually none are actively affiliated with any of the larger, established Christian churches.

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Moses (fictional Hebrew lawgiver) Reformation Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Who We Are, 24

The following is my abridgement of chapter 24 of William Pierce’s history of the white race, Who We Are:

Middle Ages Were Era of Slow, Ordered Evolution
Eastern Europe Had Different Experience With Jews than West
Reformation Resulted in Increased Judaization of Western Europe
Inside the White Citadel, Jews Wreak Havoc on Society
Capitalists, Reds Collaborate Against West

 

This installment continues the history of the interaction of the Jews with the European peoples, begun in the previous installment, and carries it from the Middle Ages into the modern era.

The salient characteristic of the Middle Ages was order. The feudal society of the early Middle Ages (from ca. 700 until ca. 1200) was a highly structured society: not only did every man have his place and every place its man, but the relationship of each man to every other was strictly defined. From the lord of the manor down to the village idiot, every person was bound to others by mutual responsibilities and obligations.

The corporate society which flourished in Western Europe from the mid-12th century until its destruction by the rise of finance capitalism in the 18th century was able to approach the ideal primarily because it was a substantially homogeneous society, and its institutions had developed organically over a very long period of time.

Both in theory and in practice corporatism had its flaws, the principal one being that it gained stability at the expense of innovation: medieval society was extraordinarily conservative, and technical progress came at a somewhat slower pace than it might have in a less-regulated society. On the other hand, a reasonable degree of stability is always a prerequisite for continuing progress, and the medieval compromise may not have been so bad after all.

Insofar as personal freedom was concerned, the socially irresponsible “do your own thing” attitude definitely was not so common as it is today, but neither was there a lack of opportunities for the adventurous element among the population to give expression to its urges. It should be remembered that the most common theme of the folk tales which had their origin in the Middle Ages—exemplified in the Grimm brothers’ collection—was that of the young man setting out alone into the world to make his fortune. Certainly, there was more personal freedom, in practice, in the Middle Ages for the average craftsman than there was in the capitalist period of mass production which followed.

For our purpose here, the essential thing about medieval society was that it was an ordered, structured society, with a population base which was, in each particular region, homogeneous. Thus, it was a society imbued with certain natural defenses against penetration by alien elements.

The Jew in medieval Europe had relatively little elbow room. He did not fit into the well established, well ordered scheme of things. He was an outsider looking into a self-sufficient world which had little use for his peculiar talents.

This was the situation for the better part of a millennium, and throughout that long period the foremost goal of the Jew was to destroy the order, to break down the structure, to loosen the bonds which held European society together, and thereby to create an opening for himself.

Order is the Jew’s mortal foe. One cannot understand the role of the Jew in modern European history unless one first understands this principle.

It explains why the Jew is the eternal Bolshevik: why he is a republican in a monarchist society, a capitalist in a corporate society, a communist in a capitalist society, a liberal “dissident” in a communist society—and, always and everywhere, a cosmopolitan and a race mixer in a homogeneous society.

And, in particular, it explains the burning hatred the Jews felt for European institutions during the Middle Ages. It explains why the modern Jewish spokesman, Abram Sachar, in his A History of the Jews, frankly admits that the universal attitude of the Jews toward medieval European society was, “Crush the infamous thing!”

Yet, even in the Middle Ages the Jews did not do badly for themselves, and they certainly had little cause for complaint, except when their excesses brought the wrath of their hosts down on their heads. As was pointed out in the previous installment, the Jews established an early stranglehold on the commerce of Europe, monopolizing especially foreign trade.

Their real forte, however, was in two staples of commerce forbidden to most Gentiles in Christian Europe: gold and human flesh. Aristotle’s denunciations of usury had influenced the leaders of the Church against moneylending, and the practice was consequently forbidden to Christians on religious grounds—although the ban was not always strictly observed. The field was left almost entirely to the Jews, who, in contrast to the Christians, used their religion as an explicit justification for usury.

Moses, the purported author of this basis for all Jewish business ethics, was speaking from the experience the Jews had already gained in Egypt when he indicated that the ultimate goal of moneylending to the strangers in a land “to which thou goest” was to “possess” the land. When it came to the slave trade, the words of Moses were not just permissive, but imperative: “Both thy male and female slaves, whom thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen [goyim] that are round about you; of them shall ye buy male and female slaves…” (Leviticus 25:44-46). It is truly said by the Jews themselves that the Hebrew spirit breathes in every word of the Old Testament!

In Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean area the guild system did not reach the full development that it did in the West and the North of Europe, and Jews in Russia, Poland, Lithuania, and parts of Italy engaged in a few trades besides moneylending and slave dealing: the liquor business, in particular. Jews eventually owned most of the inns of Eastern Europe. They also monopolized the garment industry throughout large areas of the East and the South, and the Jewish tailor, the Jewish rag-picker, and the Jewish used clothes peddler are proverbial figures.

The relatively greater opportunities for exploitation of the Gentiles in the East, not to mention the strong presence of the Khazar-descended Jews there, led to a gradual concentration of Europe’s Jews in Poland and Russia during the Middle Ages. By the latter part of the 18th century, half the world’s Jews were living in Poland. Their power became so great that many medieval Polish coins, minted during periods when Jews were in charge not only of collecting the taxes, but also of administering the treasury itself, bore inscriptions in Hebrew. The Jews even acquired title to the land on which many Polish and Russian churches stood, and they then charged the Christian peasants admission to their own churches on Sunday mornings.

In the West the Europeans froze the Jews out of the industrial and much of the commercial life of medieval society; in the East the Jews froze the Europeans out. In much of Eastern Europe, Jews became the only mercantile class in a world of peasants and laborers, and they used all their cunning and all the power of their wealth to keep their Gentile hosts down.

Reaction inevitably set in the East, however, just as it had in the West. The 17th century was a period of great uprisings against the Jews, a period when such heroes as the great Cossack hetman and Jew-killer, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, flourished.

In the 18th century the rulers themselves were finally obliged to take strong measures against the Jews of the East, so bad had the situation become. Russia’s Catherine the Great (1729-96), who had inherited most of Poland’s Jews after the partition of the latter country, extended and enforced prohibitions against them which not only limited their economic activity but banned them altogether from large areas.

It is this which goes a long way toward explaining how the Poles, saddled with a communist government consisting almost entirely of Jews after the Second World War, have been able in the last three decades to do what Adolf Hitler could not: namely, make Poland into a country which is virtually Jew-free today. Of more immediate relevance at this point in our story, it is the relatively weaker natural resistance to Jews in the West which suggests why it was relatively easy for the Jews there to take advantage of the breakdown of the medieval order and the dissolution of long-established social structures in order to make new openings for themselves.

The Reformation

Another factor which undoubtedly made the West more susceptible to the Jews was the Reformation, the lasting effects of which were confined largely to Europe’s northwestern regions, in fact, to the Germanic-speaking regions: Germany, Scandinavia, England and Scotland, Switzerland. The Church of Rome and its Eastern Orthodox offshoot had always been ambivalent in their attitudes toward the Jews. On the one hand, they fully acknowledged the Jewish roots of Christianity, and Jesus’ Jewishness was taken for granted. On the other hand, the Jews had rejected Jesus’ doctrine and killed him, saying, “His blood be on us and on our children” (Matthew 27:25), and the medieval Church was inclined to take them at their word.

In addition to the stigma of deicide the Jews also bore the suspicion which naturally fell on heretics of any sort. During the Middle Ages people took Christianity quite seriously, and anyone professing an unorthodox religious belief, whether he actively sought converts or not, was considered a danger to the good order of the community and to the immortal soul of any Christian exposed to him.

What the Protestant reformers did for the Jews was give the Hebrew Scriptures a much more important role in the life of the peoples of Europe than they had enjoyed previously. Among Catholics it was not the Bible but the Church which was important. The clergy read the Bible; the people did not. The people looked to the clergy for spiritual guidance, not to the Bible.

Among Protestants that order was reversed. The Bible became an authority unto itself, which could be consulted by any man. Its Jewish characters—Abraham, Moses, Solomon, David, and the rest—became heroic figures, suffused with an aura of sanctity. Their doings and sayings became household bywords.

It is ironic that the father of the Reformation, Martin Luther, who inadvertently helped the Jews fasten their grip on the West, detested them and vigorously warned his Christian followers against them. His book Von den Jueden und ihren Luegen (On the Jews and their Lies), published in 1543, is a masterpiece.

Luther’s antipathy to the Jews came after he learned Hebrew and began reading the Talmud. He was shocked and horrified to find that the Hebrew religious writings were dripping with hatred and contempt for all non-Jews. Luther wrote:

Do not their Talmud and rabbis say that it is no sin to kill if a Jew kills a heathen, but it is a sin if he kills a brother in Israel? It is no sin if he does not keep his oath to a heathen. Therefore, to steal and rob, as they do with their usury, from a heathen is a divine service. For they hold that they cannot be too hard on us nor sin against us, because they are the noble blood and circumcised saints. We, however, are cursed goyim. And they are the masters of the world and we are their servants, yea, their cattle.

Alas, Luther could not have it both ways. He had already sanctified the Jews by elevating the status of their history, their legends, and their religion to that of Holy Writ. His translation of the Old Testament into German and his dissemination of the Jewish scriptures among his followers vitiated all his later warnings against the Jews. Today the church he founded studiously ignores those warnings.

Luther had recognized the evils in the Christian Church of his day and in the men who ruled the Church. He also recognized the evil in the Jews and the danger they posed to Europe. He had the courage to denounce both the Church and the Jews, and for that the White race will be indebted to him for as long as it endures.

The great tragedy of Luther is that he failed to go one step further and to recognize that no religion of Jewish origin is a proper religion for men and women of European race. When he cut himself and the majority of the Germanic peoples off from Rome, he failed at the same time to cut away all the baggage of Jewish mythology which had been imposed on Europe by Rome. Instead he made of that baggage a greater spiritual burden for his people than it already was.

The consequence was that within a century of Luther’s death much of Northern Europe was firmly in the grip of a new superstition as malignant as the old one, and it was one in which the Jews played a much more explicit role. Before, the emphasis had been on the New Testament: that is, on Christianity as a breakaway sect from Judaism, in which the differences between the two religions were stressed. The role models held up to the peoples of Europe were the Church’s saints and martyrs, most of whom were non-Jewish. The parables taught to children were often of European origin.

Among the Protestants the Old Testament gained a new importance, and with it so did the Hebrew patriarchs as role models, while Israel’s folklore became the new source of moral inspiration for Europe. Perhaps nothing so clearly demonstrates the change, and the damage to the European sense of identity which accompanied it, as the sudden enthusiasm for bestowing Hebrew names on Christian children.

The Reformation did more for the Jews than merely sanctifying the Old Testament. It shattered the established order of things and brought chaos in political as well as spiritual affairs—chaos eagerly welcomed by the Jews. Germany was so devastated by a series of bloody religious wars that it took her a century and a half to recover. In some German principalities two-thirds of the population was annihilated during the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in the period 1618-1648, commonly known as the “Thirty Years War.”

Everywhere during the 17th century the Jews took advantage of the turmoil, moving back into countries from which they had been banned (such as England), moving to take over professions from which they had been excluded, insinuating themselves into confidential relationships with influential leaders in literary and political circles, profiting from the sufferings of their hosts and strengthening their hold, burrowing deep into the rubble and wreckage of medieval society so that they could more easily undermine whatever rose in its stead.

Napoleon_stellt_den_israelitsichen_Kult_wieder_her,_30._Mai_1806

An 1806 French print depicts
Napoleon Bonaparte emancipating the Jews

In the following century came Europe’s next great cataclysm, which broke down what was left of the old order. It was the French Revolution—and it was the first major political event in Western Europe in which Jews played a significant role, other than as financiers. Even so, public feeling against the Jews was such that they still found it expedient to exercise much of their influence through Gentile front men.

Honore Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau (1749-91), the Revolution’s fieriest orator—the spendthrift, renegade son of an aristocrat, disowned by his father and always in need of a loan—was one of these. Another was the bloodthirsty monster Maximilien Marie Isidore de Robespierre (1758-94), dictator of the Revolutionary Tribunal which kept the guillotine busy and spilled France’s best blood into the gutters of Paris while the rabble cheered. Both Mirabeau and Robespierre worked tirelessly for their Jewish patrons, supporting legislation granting new rights and privileges to the Jews of France and denouncing French patriots who opposed the Jewish advances.

It was in the new series of European wars spawned by the Revolution, in which Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) was the leading figure, that the Jews extended the gains they had made in France to much of the rest of Europe. Behind Napoleon’s armies, which were kept solvent by Jewish moneylenders, marched a ragtag band of Jews to oversee the pulling down of all barriers against their brethren in each country in which French arms triumphed. Ghettos were abolished, all restrictions on Jewish activities were declared void, and anyone who spoke out against the Jews was in danger of being put before a military firing squad.

Despite the enormous services he performed for the Jews, it is clear from his comments, on many different occasions, that Napoleon personally despised them. “The Jews are a vile people, cowardly and cruel,” he said in reference to some of the atrocities committed by Jews during the Reign of Terror.

In a letter of March 6, 1808, to his brother Jerome, Napoleon wrote: “I decided to improve the Jews. But I do not want more of them in my kingdom. Indeed, I have done all to prove my scorn of the vilest nation in the world.” And when, in 1807, Napoleon issued decrees limiting the extent to which Jewish moneylenders could prey on the French peasantry, the Jews screamed in rage against him.

But the damage had already been done; Napoleon had pulled down the last of the barriers, and by the time of his disgrace and exile the Jews were solidly entrenched nearly everywhere.

It was those Jews who pushed their way into the professions—into teaching Gentile university students, into writing books for Gentile readers, into composing music for Gentile audiences, into painting pictures and directing films for Gentile viewers, into interpreting and passing judgment on every facet of Gentile culture and society for Gentile newspaper readers—who really got inside the Gentile citadel.

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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”

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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
Axiology Christendom Conservatism Egalitarianism Friedrich Nietzsche Liberalism Reformation Roger Devlin Tom Sunic

Sunic, Devlin & Johnson on Christianity

A couple of recent articles and threads at Counter-Currents about Pierre Krebs’ Fighting for the Essence reminded me what we are now calling “secular Christianity”:


Tom Sunic said…

This book is important because it advises the reader about how to decipher the causes and consequences of our decadent age. Being himself a disciple of European heavyweights such as Homer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger—to name only a few—Krebs correctly traces the root of the problem of White racial decay and cultural decadence not to liberalism and multiculturalism, but to the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Above all, Krebs focuses on the destructive forms of the monotheistic Judaeo-Christian mindset which prevails among both the so-called Leftist and Right-wing intellectuals and their respective disciples. In fact, by using quotes from and commentaries concerning many important, albeit deliberately ignored European scholars, Krebs demonstrates that all political concepts that we take for granted today are basically modified ideas, myths, legends and impostures that originated in the Middle East and that are now making headway into our secular, godless society.

Krebs aptly dissects the discourse and the mindset of modern Marxists and liberals who, in spite of the fact that they often profess to be atheists or agnostics, nonetheless adhere to the monotheistic conceptualisation of the world that was handed down by the Judaeo-Christian tradition, through its secular and postmodern offshoots. In the same vein, Krebs adroitly warns against those modern political neuroses which appear quite often among many so-called Right-wingers, which causes them to rely too much on blaming all the problems of Whites on outsiders; or, in a grotesque flip side, to embrace outsiders at the expense of one’s own. Both manifestations are wrapped up in the same Judaeo-Christian package. How can a White nationalist, a racialist, or a traditionalist, or whatever he may call himself, and regardless of whether he lives in Europe or America, successfully combat hostile and alien worldviews and adopt different methods of conceptualisation, while at the same time revering these same alien referents and the same paradigms which are, ironically, part and parcel of the same non-European mindset he wishes to reject?

The matrix of the West, as Krebs argues, is no longer territorial or political. It lies in the White man’s experiment with Christianity, which began as merely an obscure Oriental cult—a cult which has absolutely nothing in common with the spiritual homeland of the White man: ancient Greece.

The answer Krebs offers to intelligent White readers in America and Europe who are seeking an exit from the modern multicultural straitjacket and the conceptual mendacity of liberalism is simple, although it will require a great deal of courage: the return to our lost pre-Christian European roots. Novus rerum nascitur ordo.


Roger Devlin said…

But Krebs names the heresiarch Pelagius as one of his heroes. In his view, the egalitarian lie is to be blamed not on any perversion of Christianity, but on Christianity itself—or, as he invariably writes, “Judeochristianity.” He cites Nietzsche’s observation that

Christianity, which has sprung from Jewish roots and can only be understood as a plant that has come from that soil, represents the counter-movement to every morality of breeding, race or privilege—it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence.

From this Krebs infers that

every discourse which calls for a European Renaissance without separating itself from Judeo-Christian civilization, its dogmas and its rituals, is condemned to failure in advance, since it is enclosed within the very matrix of decline.

It is a familiar observation that enlightenment thought amounts to a secularized version of Christian doctrine, a displacement of its eschatology into the realm of politics. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn is just one example of a Christian conservative who stressed this connection, citing the Latin proverb corruptio optimi pessima: “the corruption of the best is the worst.”

But Krebs the admirer of Pelagius cannot mean this; his explicit positions would force him to deny that the secularization of Christianity is the essential misstep. Instead he must hold that (1) Christianity itself is responsible for the specific way in which it was negated by the Enlightenment, and that (2) Europe has been in a state of decadence since at least the fourth century AD. This bold interpretation of European history may deserve consideration, but the author has hardly made a case for it in the brief manifesto under review.


Greg Johnson said…

In response to Devlin’s remarks, yes, Krebs is committed to the claims that (1) Christianity is responsible for the trajectory of its secularization, and (2) that Western Civilization has been ruled by decadent values since the fourth century, when the Christianization of the Roman Empire received state power from Constantine. Both of these claims are defensible in Nietzschean terms, and Nietzsche is Krebs’ prime source here.

(1) Christianity is responsible for the trajectory of its secularization, because secular liberalism represents a triumph of Christian values over Christianity itself. Nietzsche argues that the Christian valorization of truth as something worth dying for was turned against the supernatural, faith-based elements of the creed. And once the supernatural, “pie in the sky” elements of Christianity are discarded, then nothing stands in the way of the progressive/utopian realization of Christian values in this world, values like the worth of every human life.

(2) These values were dominant in the West beginning with Constantine, but they were never really taken all that seriously. Spengler is right: the values of the New Testament are the Bolshevism of antiquity, and Christianity was as devastating to ancient pagan civilization as the Bolshevism of the 20th century. But once in power, the church readily compromised with pre-Christian values and social forms because of its essentially otherworldly focus. And they condemned as heretics those who demanded that the Church live by the values of the gospels. When the Reformation triumphed, however, and Christians started actually reading the Bible and thinking of ways to live by it in this world, the corrosive power of Christian values became fully liberated to do their work.


Kim Petrusson said…

Quite evidently it is since Europe was quite fine under traditional Christianity, but have crushed down under the gnostic modernity.


Greg Johnson said…

What you dub “gnostic modernity” is merely Christian axioms being taken to their logical real-world conclusions. And “gnostic modernity” is a rather marginal phenomenon considered alongside the modernizing thrust of the Reformation. What you point to as the heyday of European Christianity was merely, from a Christian point of view, the hypocritical compromise of the church with pre-Christian sensibilities and social forms. When the Reformation actually got Christians reading the Bible and trying to take it seriously, decay really got underway.


Johnnie Appleseeds said…

Greg, I think we need a strong philosophical refutation of Xtianity that is not perceived as vitriolically and mean-spirited as that of Nietzsche. I agree with Nietzsche, but his language turns people off.


Greg Johnson said…

Maybe you are right, but if Nietzsche is right, there is no pretty way to describe the ugly psychological processes that gave birth to and sustain slave morality.