Category: Revilo Oliver

and the survival of the West, 2

by Revilo Oliver (1973)

Chapter Two: THE ORIENT
 

We Indo-Europeans have been Christian for about half of our recorded history, and our whole culture was so intimately connected with our religion that we called our world Christendom. Today, however, our religion and hence our understanding of ourselves and the world about us have been drastically affected by three distinct developments that have no necessary relation to one another and that we should be careful not to confuse, viz.:

(1) The catastrophic decline of religious faith and belief among our own people during the past century and a half or two centuries. That is a phenomenon which, although perhaps slightly accelerated by alien influences, arose within our culture and was simply a revival of the tendency of our Western philosophy before the appearance of Christianity. It is therefore a separate topic that we must postpone for later consideration.

(2) The now obvious failure of our efforts to communicate Christianity to the primitive races, which we discussed briefly in our opening chapter.

(3) The futility of all our efforts to export our Occidental religion to the old and civilized nations of the Orient. This is really the most striking phenomenon of all.

Among the biologically and mentally primitive Congoids, Capoids, and Australoids, Christian missionaries attained for a while some specious semblance of success. One can only marvel, however, at the illusions that Christendom obstinately entertained, century after century, despite its constant and virtually total failure to win converts among the highly intelligent and subtle Orientals, both white and yellow, who had elaborate cultures of their own.

Since we are, on the whole, a rational race, there was some basis for those illusions. The sacred books of Christianity did not originate in the West. The Old Testament deals almost entirely with the activities of Israelites and Jews. The events of the New Testament, to be sure, took place in a Roman province in Asia Minor, and largely in Galilee, a small territory inhabited by a conglomerate population that the Jews despised as inferiors, but the first apostles, whatever their race, were certainly not Europeans, and Paul was admittedly a Jew. It was known, furthermore, that in the early centuries there had been some small Judaeo-Christian sects,[1] and that it was not until later that the new religion attracted votaries that could be identified as authentically Greek, Roman, and Celtic. Although Europeans knew the Christian scriptures only in Greek and Latin, and during the Middle Ages only in Latin, the Asiatic origins created a supposition that Christianity, the religion of Europe, was not European, even when everyone knew that it had no adherents outside Europe except in the territories of the Byzantine Empire, and that Byzantine Christianity was so adulterated with Levantine elements that it was unacceptable to the West.

The differences between Western and Oriental Christianity were so profound and fundamental that repeated attempts made before 1453 to effect a union of the two churches were utter failures despite the Byzantines’ desperate need for military aid from the West, despite the West’s idealistic notion that its religion was “universal,” and despite a generous amount of hypocrisy on both sides. After the capture of Constantinople by Mohammed II, most of the surviving Byzantines devoutly thanked their god that they had fallen under the rule of Moslems (with whom they had much in common) instead of European Christians, who would have tried to impose on them an alien religion. It is significant that the abyss between the two religions that called themselves Christian was too wide to be bridged, even though the conglomerate and partly Levantine population of the Byzantine Empire had inherited the culture and learning of the ancient (and extinct) Greeks.[2]

Ever since it was founded, the Christian Church has labored incessantly to convert Jews, using every method from flattering exhortations and cash rewards to legislative pressure and armed coercion, and it has failed utterly. That failure, furthermore, was conspicuous in every city and almost every town of Christendom, year after year and century after century. It was known even to the most ignorant and isolated peasant.

In Christendom, as elsewhere, the international race planted its colonies wherever there was money to be got from the natives, and it always followed the standard procedure that it used, for example, in Alexandria in the fourth century B.C. The colonists filtered in in small groups until their numbers were sufficient to take over a part of the city for themselves to establish their own ghettos, from which the natives of the country were informally, but effectively, excluded. But the main body of colonists, ostentatiously exclusive, was usually or always accompanied by a number, smaller or greater as the occasion demanded, of Marranos, i.e., Jews who feigned conversion to the religion and culture of the nation in which they had come to reside. As they had professed Greek philosophy in Alexandria, so in Mediaeval Europe they professed Christianity. They, so to speak, covered the flanks of their less versatile congeners.

Here and there in Europe, Christians sometimes tried to dislodge and expel the Jewish colonies, but they never succeeded. By violence or threats of violence some cities and territories were able to drive Jews from their ghettos for a few years, but invariably, except in Spain and Portugal, the ostentatiously alien Jews returned sooner or later and industriously restored their ghettos. The Marranos, sheltered by their professed “conversion,” eluded all efforts to control them, and in Spain and Portugal, at least, they not only entered the highest offices of the state but, despite the frantic efforts of the Inquisition, they filled even the Church with nuns, priests, bishops, and archbishops who solemnly celebrated in public the rites of a religion they despised and, when they met in their secret conclaves, laughed at the stupidity of the gullible goyim.

The amazing versatility of subtlety of the Marranos, especially in “most Christian” Spain and Portugal, has been described by many distinguished Jewish scholars. A History of the Marranos, by Professor Cecil Roth of Oxford, is a concise survey; the recent work by Haim Beinart, Anusim be-Din ha-Inqwizisiah (Tel Aviv, 1965), unfortunately not available in English, is a highly detailed study of a single community at one point in its history.

Was a Jew ever converted to Christianity? The learned and candid Rabbi Solomon Schindler,[3] addressing a Christian audience in Boston, was certain that no Jew could “submit conscientiously” to so inferior a creed. “There never was a Jew,” he said, “converted to Christianity who conscientiously believed in the doctrines of his adopted religion. They were all hypocrites, who changed their creed for earthly considerations merely.” And the acute, sagacious, and earnest Maurice Samuel,[4] after diligent and conscientious study, concluded that “Obviously you do not make a gentile of a Jew by baptizing him any more than you would make an Aryan of a negro by painting him with ocher.” Such sweeping generalizations may be too absolute, and there seem to be some certain instances of Jews who sincerely defected to Christianity, but they are few. On the whole, the failure of Christians to allure or compel Jews has been total and spectacular.

Christians often explain that failure by attributing to the Jews some peculiar perversity or malevolence, the result of either a divine curse or of conscious collaboration with Satan. But in the interests of both fairness and objectivity, we should consider respectfully and dispassionately the testimony of the erudite and discerning Jews who have earnestly studied and pondered the many and profound differences between their people and ours, and who assure us, as courteously as they can, that to their minds our religion and most of the standards of our culture appear ludicrous or repulsive and sometimes utterly incomprehensible. How can we expect or require a man to believe what is to his mind mere nonsense? Would not that be as absurd as to expect the Jews who reside in our country to consult our interests rather than their own?

So long as Christendom knew only the Jewish colonies in its territory and the Semitic and Hamitic Moslems on its southern borders, some theory of an obduracy or perversity peculiar to Jews and Moslems could perhaps be maintained, but surely Christians should have perceived, as their geographical horizons expanded, that their religion has no appeal for any Oriental people.

The name of Christ, to be sure, is used by certain Monophysite cults in the Near East and Malabar and by other sects in Egypt and Abyssinia, of which vague rumors reached Mediaeval Europe and inspired the romantic legends of Prester John. But actual contact with those sects in the Sixteenth Century brought disillusion; the reading of their sacred books in Syriac, Coptic, and Geez showed how vastly those conceptions of religion differed from the European; and missionaries were dispatched to convert those “Christians” to Western Christianity—efforts that always ended in failure and sometimes in bloody failure.

With the exceptions of such isolated and minor cults as the Mandeans and the Yezidis, the Semitic peoples of Asia have found their aspirations and their religiosity fully satisfied by Islam, and all the exhortations of our missionaries for a millennium induced only a handful of Moslems to profess Christianity. In India, where the blood of the Aryan conquerors was blotted up long ago, a few outcasts and famished drudges became “rice Christians,” and some educated babus said they were converts so long as “conversion” seemed likely to expedite their advancement in the bureaucracy of British India; and the Hindus sent us in return hundreds of sloe-eyed swamis to convert us and care for our souls—especially the souls of wealthy dowagers. In China and Japan the seeds of the Gospel, though sown over and over again by generations of earnest and often martyred missionaries, produced no better harvest.

In sum, experience has shown us that the Jews, though unique as an international race, do not differ from other Orientals in their resistance to the “glad tidings” (euangelium) of Christianity. In Asia, as in Africa, though for far different reasons, Christianity is evaporating as rapidly as dew in the morning sun, and there is every reason to believe that, with a few possible exceptions, the remaining Asiatic “Christians,” including native clergymen and bishops, are simply Arab, Hindu, Chinese, or Japanese Marranos and profess a Western religion for business or diplomatic reasons.

We have an unbroken record of failure in all our efforts to export Christianity to other peoples. That failure has nothing to do with the decline of faith among our own people in very recent times as a result of a skepticism based on our science and technology. Uniformly since the foundation of the Western Church, Christianity failed to attract and convince other races, and in the great Age of Faith in Europe that failure was as complete as it is today. Christendom should have understood the reasons for that inevitable failure long ago.

For centuries our clergymen had the strange custom of looking through all the other religions and cults of the whole world to find superficial similarities that they would then adduce as somehow corroborating our religion. They clutched eagerly at every ghost story in the world and used it to “prove” that a belief in immortality was “universal.” What all the other doctrines and myths really proved was that our belief in immortality was something peculiar to ourselves and probably incomprehensible to other races.

We Aryans have a deep and innate longing to endure forever. But the immortality of which the atheist despairs and for which the Christian hopes is a personal immortality—the survival of the individual consciousness complete with all its memories of life on earth. For each of us, immortality is the prolongation of his consciousness after the death of his body. Although we, if not spiritually sick, desire the survival of our race and culture, that is not what we mean by immortality; even if we felt assured that our people would eventually own the whole earth and all the other peoples in it, that would seem to us to have nothing to do with the question whether or not you and I as individuals will live after death. Again, we can believe that at death a man will be either annihilated or become a single disembodied consciousness: we cannot believe that he will become five or six different and widely scattered pieces of a ghost. Again, if some psychic spark of ourselves should survive death but be unconscious, having no knowledge or memory of what we were in life, to us that fate would be annihilation, not immortality. Again, if I am to live after death, so must my wife: no number of houris could reconcile me to a Paradise attained by many millions of men but only four women and one dog. Furthermore, we can imagine reincarnation, but only reincarnation as ourselves. If my wife has been Napoleon and Richard the Lion-Hearted, she is nothing that I have ever known or loved. And if I was ever Aspasia and Nell Gwyn, then I do not exist even now: I am just an illusion.

The kinds of “immortality” posited by the other major religions are inacceptable to us: meaningless, absurd, or repulsive to our racial instincts. But obviously such notions of a future life are not only satisfactory to other peoples but represent what they instinctively desire. To the great majority of the world’s inhabitants our conception of immortality is meaningless, absurd, or repulsive. That is simply a fact that we cannot change.

Christianity embodied all the moral instincts of our race, such as our concepts of personal honor, of personal self-respect and integrity, of fair play, of pity for the unfortunate, of loyalty—all of which seem preposterous to other races, at least in the form and application that we give to them. They simply lack our instincts. We think that it makes a great difference whether we kill a man in a fair fight or by treacherously stabbing him in the back or by putting poison in the cup that he accepts from our friendly hand; to at least one other race, we are simply childish and irrational: if you are to kill a man, kill him in the safest and most convenient way. Again, we, whether Christians or atheists, have an instinct for truth, so that if we lie, we have physical reactions that can be detected by a sphygmomanometer (often called a polygraph or “lie detector”). When officers of American military intelligence tried to use that device in the interrogation of prisoners during the Korean War, they discovered that Koreans and Chinese have no reaction that the instrument can detect, no matter how outrageous the lies they tell. We and they are differently constituted.

We can no longer be so obtuse as to ignore the vast differences in mentality and instinct that separate us from all other races—not merely from savages, but from highly civilized races. The differences are innate, and to attempt to change their way of thinking with argument, generosity, or holy water is as absurd as attempting to change the color of their skins. That is a fact that we must accept. However one may relate that fact to Christian doctrine, if we, a small minority among the teeming and terribly fecund populations of the globe, call all other peoples perverse or wicked, we merely confuse ourselves. If we are to think objectively and rationally, we must do so in the terms used by Maurice Samuel, who, after his discerning and admirably candid study of the “unbridgeable gulf that separates Indo-Europeans from Jews, had to conclude that “This difference in behavior and reaction springs from something more earnest and significant than a difference of beliefs: it springs from a difference in our biologic equipment.”

We cannot reasonably expect beings differently constituted to have our instincts or to believe as we do, any more than we can expect dogs to climb trees or cats to bark at intruders. And let us beware of the word “superiority.” If it means that we are superior in terms of our own values, it is mere tautology; if it has an objective and practical meaning, it poses a question that can only be answered only when the future has proved which peoples will survive and which will go under in the proximate struggle for possession of an overcrowded globe.

This is not a matter of doctrine or wishes, and it does not depend on our faith or lack of faith. Whatever may be the meaning of certain passages in the Old Testament, the earth is not flat. Whatever may be the meaning of certain passages in the New Testament, Christianity was not for “all the world.” The earth is spherical. Christianity is an Indo-European religion.
 
_________

[1] The Ebionites and the Cerinthians were the most important of these sects, but there were others, most of which are catalogued in the seven-volume edition of Adolf von Harnuck’s History of Dogma. I need scarcely add that the term “Judaeo-Christian” is correctly used only with reference to these sects and their antecedents.

[2] We cannot here analyze the effects of that supposition on Mediaeval Christendom. A concise and incisive treatment of that subject may be found in Lawrence R. Brown’s brilliant work, The Might of the West (New York, 1963). It will here suffice to note that even during the high-tide of Christian faith marked by the Crusades, that supposition prevented our ancestors from drawing the correct deductions from their manifest and perpetual failure to extend Western Christianity beyond the borders of the West.

[3] Solomon Schindler, Messianic Expectations and Modern Judaism, with an introduction by [the Reverend] Minot J. Savage. Boston, Cassino, 1886.

[4] Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles. New York, Harcourt-Brace, 1924.

and the survival of the West, 1

by Revilo Oliver (1973)

Contents

The Religion of the West
The Orient
Christianity Today
The Predictable Future
The Consequences
Succedaneous Religion
Postscript

The mission of this generation is the most difficult that has ever faced a Western generation. It must break the terror by which it is held in silence, it must look ahead, it must believe when there is apparently no hope, it must obey even if it means death, it must fight to the end rather than submit… The men of this generation must fight for the continued existence of the West.

—Francis Parker Yockey (1948)

 

Chapter One: THE RELIGION OF THE WEST

YOU, WHO ARE NOW reading these lines, and I are strangers. I have no means of knowing whether you are a Christian or an atheist. That, however, will not matter, so long as we talk about facts and not wishes.

The observed and verifiable facts of the world about us are not affected by religious faith or the lack of faith. Christians and atheists must find themselves in perfect agreement when they affirm that lead is more malleable than steel, that the earth is an oblate spheroid rotating on its axis, that whales are mammals, that Germany was defeated and devastated by the many nations allied against her in 1945, and that the Chinese are Mongolians. About such matters there can be no dispute among Western men, who instinctively accept the reality of the world about us and cannot believe, as do many Orientals, that it is merely an illusion in the mind of a dreamer.

If we would salvage and restore our civilization—the Occidental culture that is peculiarly our own and that now seems to be disintegrating and rotting before our very eyes—we must do so as Western men, by observing reality objectively and by reasoning from it dispassionately. And when we try to compute what resources remain to us, we need first of all to determine the actual strength of the Christian tradition at the present time.

It is a fact, which Christians will regard with satisfaction and some atheists may deplore, that Western civilization, for about half of its recorded history, has been a Christian civilization in the sense that the great majority of the people belonging to it (though never, at any time, all of them) believed implicitly in the truth of the Christian revelation. That religious unanimity was for a long time so nearly complete that, after the fall of the Roman Empire and the evanescence of hopes for its restoration, we of the West regarded our religion as the bond that united us and distinguished us from the rest of the human species. During the Middle Ages, our ancestors occupied the greater part of Europe, and, until they discovered the American continents, they lived only in Europe, but despite that geographical unity, they did not generally refer to themselves as the Europeans. For all practical purposes, furthermore, our ancestors belonged to the same division of the white race: they, like the true Greeks and the true Romans before them, were all members of the great race that we now call Indo-European or Aryan, but they had in their languages no word to designate their blood relationship and biological unity. Thus, when they referred to the unity of which they were always conscious as something transcending the constantly shifting territorial and political divisions of Europe, they called themselves Christendom. And for many centuries that word was adequate and misled no one.

For many centuries the West was Christendom and its civilization was indubitably Christian: that, whether you like it or not, is an historical fact. There is a complementary historical fact that was less obvious at the time and that even thoughtful men overlooked or tried to ignore until the events of the past two decades made it indubitable: Christianity is a religion of the West, and, for all practical purposes, only of the West. It is not, as its polemical adversaries so often charge, a Semitic cult, for it has never commanded the adhesion of any considerable number of Semites, and it is not, as Christians once generally believed, a universal religion, for experience has proved that it cannot be successfully exported to populations that are not Indo-European.

Experience has also proved that it does not do the slightest good to deny ascertained facts. The men of Classical antiquity knew, of course, that the earth is spherical, and Eratosthenes in the third century B.C. calculated its circumference as 24,663 miles. But the early Fathers of the Church, living in the age of growing ignorance that shrouded the last century of the Roman Empire, decided, on the basis of some statements in the Old Testament, that the earth ought to be flat or, at least, no more curved than a shield. Lactantius was the most eloquent and probably, therefore, the most influential of the many who assiduously demanded that the earth be flat and so imposed on their contemporaries the conviction that it was. In the Middle Ages, to be sure, there were some learned men, such as Buridan, who knew that the globe is a globe, but they, like learned men today, who all know very well that talk about the equality of races is utter nonsense, usually refrained from publicly denouncing fashionable delusions. It was not until the Fifteenth Century that the truth became again inescapable, but when it did, the Christians, being men of the West, who do not deny the lessons of experience, surrendered the comfortable error in which they had once generally believed; and since that time, no rational Christian has doubted that the earth is spherical.

Today, as in the Fifteenth Century, Western men have had to discard a congenial assumption to bring their conception of the world into conformity with observed reality. So long as we of the West held unquestioned dominion over the whole earth, we permitted ourselves to assume that our civilization in general, and our religion in particular, could be exported and made universal. We did not sufficiently observed that talent for mimicry is common to all human beings and indeed to all anthropoids; that all human beings stand in awe of those who have power over them; and that a genius for dissimulation and hypocrisy is hereditary in the most intelligent Orientals. Even with these oversights, the evidence against our assumption was fairly clear, but in the pride of our power we felt that we could indulge an assumption that was so congenial to the romantic generosity that is a peculiarity of our race. But the events of half a century, and especially of the last two decades, have shown us, beyond peradventure of doubt, the shape of the world in which we live. We now know what our prolonged missionary effort, cultural as well as religious, accomplished—and how its visible effects were produced.

When Cortés and his small but valiant band of iron men conquered the teeming empire of the Aztecs, he was immediately followed by a train of earnest missionaries, chiefly Franciscans, who began to preach the Gospel to the natives and soon sent home, with naive enthusiasm, glowing accounts of the conversions they had effected. Their pious sincerity and innocent joy still lives in the pages of Father Sahagun, Father Torquemada, and many others. For their sake I am glad that the poor Franciscans never suspected how small a part they played in the religious conversions that gave them such happiness. Far, far more persuasive than their sermons and their book had been the Spanish cannon that breached and shattered the Aztec defenses, and the ruthless Spanish soldiers who slew the Aztec priests at their own altars and toppled the Aztec idols from the sacrificial pyramids. The Aztecs, Tepanecs, and other natives accepted Christianity, not because their hearts were touched by alien and incomprehensible doctrines of love and mercy, but because it was the religion of the white men whose bronze cannon and mail-clad warriors were invincible.

That was early in the Sixteenth Century and even then there were not wanting indications that should have given pause to a critical mind, but we of the West went on repeating that fond mistake for four centuries, as the missionaries whom we sent to all parts of the world wrote home glowing reports of the number of “hearts” they had “won for Christ.” It was only after our enemies’ campaign of “anti-colonialism” really got under way that most of us realized that what had won all those hearts was primarily the discipline of British regiments and the manifest power of the white man.

We now know what happened. On many a shore of Africa, for example, missionaries eager to “win souls for Christ” ventured to land alone, and the aborigines, after mutilating and torturing them for a good communal laugh, ate them, cooked or raw according to the custom of the local cuisine. Usually, a few weeks or a few months later, a British cruiser hove to off shore and lobbed half a dozen 4.5 shells into the native village, and, if not pressed for time, landed half a company of marines to beat the bushes and drag out a dozen or so savages to hang on convenient trees. Consequently the tribe, if not very obtuse, took the hint and respected the next bevy of missionaries as somehow representing the god of thunder and lightning. And if the men of God distributed enough free rice and medical care with their sermons, they were able to make “converts,” as the natives learned to utter the words that Christians like to hear.

That is, in essence, the whole history of “winning souls” among the savages. There were, of course, many local variations. If the first missionaries were preceded by troops or white settlers, the blacks had already been convinced of the virtues of Christian rifles and had learned that white men should not be regarded as esculent comestibles. It often happened, however, that the natives, even after many years of preaching and conversion, rejected the white man’s odd rites very emphatically, and a fresh supply of missionaries was needed. In 1905, for example, the Maji-Maji conspiracy in Tanganyika murdered all the missionaries and almost all the white men and women in the entire territory, and it required a German regiment and several companies of marines to restore the teachings of the Gospel. That was done by giving some forty or fifty thousand demonstrations that a Mauser bullet could penetrate even a black hide that had been most carefully anointed with the grease of a boiled baby.

The Christian missionaries did teach a ritual and often inculcated a superstition that had some superficial resemblance to their religion, but as for teaching the spiritual substance of Christianity, they might as well have followed the example of St. Francis and preached sermons to the birds. That is why the many, many thousands of devoted Christians who expended their whole lives to “save souls” built only an edifice of cardboard and tinsel that is now gone in the wind.

What the vanishing of that flimsy facade has made obvious was predictable from the first. The religion of the West has never been comprehensible to the rudimentary minds of Congoids, Capoids, and Australoids, races so primitive that they were congenitally incapable of inventing a wheel and even of using one without supervision—races that could not develop for themselves even the first and simplest preliminaries of a civilization. When the missionaries invented systems of writing the crude languages of the primitives, they had also to invent words to express such concepts as “God,” “soul,” “justice,” “morality,” and “religion”—invent them by either creating new words or by perverting to such meanings sounds that in the native jargons conveyed impressions that were faintly and remotely analogous. That fact alone should have made us think. It was clear, furthermore, that the “converts,” even those who had been most thoroughly imbued with an awe of the god of repeating rifles and locomotives, would conform to the white man’s morality only under coercion, and that whenever they escaped from the white man’s supervision they spontaneously reverted not only to their own mores but also to whatever form of voodoo they had practiced before. Even if earlier experience had not been conclusive, what happened in Haiti at the very beginning of the Nineteenth Century should have removed the last lingering doubt. But the missionaries did not learn, and the “Ladies’ Missionary Society” went on contributing their mites, plying their needles, and glowing with tender emotion for the sweet little savages depicted by their romantic imaginations.

Although it is true that in some places in the former colonial possessions missionaries are still tolerated, if they are obsequious to the natives and pay very well, we have at last learned that the Gospel follows the British regiments in the white man’s ignominious and insane retreat from the world that was his.

The PDF of Revilo Oliver’s article
on Christianity is now available here.

A religion for sheep, 1

by Revilo P. Oliver
Published by Liberty Bell Publications in 1980,
under Oliver’s nom de guerre Ralph Perier.

OUR contemporaries are coming to a radically new understanding of the Jewish problem. One by one, and independently of one another, several of our best minds have re-examined the historical record or analysed the forces that are today driving our race to suicide. And each of them has come spontaneously to the conclusion that Christianity was a Jewish invention, devised for the specific purpose of enfeebling and paralysing the civilised peoples of the world, on whom the Jews were preying in antiquity and have preyed ever since.

A century ago, Nietzsche perceived that our civilisation, although it seemed to have an absolute mastery of the whole world, was infected by a degenerative disease, a cancer of the spirit that would destroy it, if our people did not have the intelligence and the fortitude to excise the malignancy. He came to the conclusion that Christianity was a “transvaluation of values,” a mental virus cunningly invented and propagated by the Jews to implement “Jewish vengeance and hatred, – the deepest and sublimest hatred in human history.” Our contemporaries, whether or not they have read the Genealogy of Morals, reason largely from events that have occurred or from historical evidence that became available since Nietzsche’s day. They come to substantially the same conclusion.

The origins of Christianity are extremely obscure. No historical record of its beginnings has survived, and scholars can only draw deductions from the earliest historical references to it and inferences from its confusing and incoherent mythology.

One thing is certain. Christianity was originated by Jews and based on oral traditions about one or, more probably, several of the Jewish agitators and miracle-mongers who bore the extremely common Jewish name of Jesus and called themselves christs. The word ‘christ’ comes from a Greek word that means ‘oil, grease,’ but which was used in the Jews’ uncouth dialect of Greek to mean ‘a messiah,’ that is, a man appointed by the Jews’ tribal god to lead his Chosen barbarians to a definitive victory over the civilised peoples, whom they implacably hated. One of the cleverest tricks of the Fathers of the Church in promoting their cult was to give to non-Jews the impression that ‘christ’ was the name of a person, and even to this day many Christians ignorantly believe that their god was a man who was baptised “Jesus Christ.”

Nietzsche saw that successful promotion of Christianity depended on a pretence of reciprocal hostility between Christians and Jews. It depended on making the Jewish cult, when peddled to the goyim, seem non-Jewish and even anti-Jewish. “Was it not,” he asked, “a necessary feature of a truly brilliant politics of vengeance, a far-sighted, subterranean, slowly and carefully planned vengeance, that Israel had to deny its true instrument publicly and nail him to the cross like a mortal enemy, so that ‘the whole world’ (meaning all the enemies of the Jews) might naively swallow the bait?” This policy, however, produced an unexpected backlash, which was only with difficulty brought under control.

It would take a volume even to summarise the scandalous and scabrous history of Christianity from its known beginnings around the middle of the second century to the triumph of a particularly shrewd and aggressive sect in the fifth century. There were hundreds of sects, each with its own bundle of gospels, peculiar doctrines, and adroit theologians, but among them there were dozens of sects that took seriously the purported antagonism of the Jews to the new religion.

One of the earliest of the Christian sects of which we have some record, and for almost two centuries one of the largest, was the Marcionites. It is noteworthy, by the way, that until quite recently, the earliest extant inscription from a Christian church came from a Marcionite church that was built in 318 and, of course, destroyed when the victorious sect got the power to persecute.

The Marcionites believed that the Jews were “the synagogue of Satan.” They denied that their Jesus had been a Jew. They saw that it was preposterous to claim that an incarnate god could die or would foolishly have himself crucified. They held that it was outrageous to identify the supreme god, who was a just god and loved all mankind, with the capricious, ferocious, and highly immoral god described in the Jews’ story-book, which Christians now call “the Old Testament.” The Marcionites naively thought those stories historical, but regarded them as a chronicle of the crimes perpetrated by the Jews and their supernatural accomplice, a much inferior deity whose abused power the supreme god had justly revoked. Other Christian sects took the logical step of frankly identifying the Jews’ god with Satan. This plausible identification commended itself to goyim who had to live with Jews and suffer their depredations.

We have no means of estimating numbers, but it is possible that early in the third century, taking the numerous sects as a whole, a majority of the Christians repudiated the notion that the wily Jews were God’s People and that the Jesus who was divine could have been a Jew. The anti-Jewish sects, however, appear to have thought of themselves as merely religions and to have believed what was said in their scriptures about love, faith, and peace. Content to believe certain dogmas and to observe rules that would assure them postmortem bliss, they seem to have had no interest in political intrigue and conspiracy, for which they had no talent. So they eventually fell victims to a gang of crafty, ruthless, and tightly-organised theologians, who are now known as the Fathers of the Church and given a prominence they cannot have had in their own time, when they must have appeared to be just another clique of salvation-hucksters.

When the Fathers of the Church finally got their hands on the police powers of the state, doubtless with much covert help from the Jews, they extirpated the anti-Jewish Christians with fire and sword, the natural instruments of Christian love as understood by ambitious holy men. Despite all the pious massacres in the fifth century, the anti-Jewish “heresy” has reappeared from time to time in later ages. It is found today in certain “fundamentalist” churches and, most clearly, in the group of loosely affiliated sects called “British Israel,” whose members probably have never even heard of the Marcionites or their other ancient precursors.

“British Israel” may be another ploy that backfired. It began in England at the time when Disraeli was crawling up to the British Prime Ministry and peerage. In its original form, it taught that the “ten lost tribes” supposedly taken captive by the Assyrians had been Anglo-Saxons, who migrated en masse from Assyrian territory to the British Isles. A handsome genealogy was concocted to show that Queen Victoria was a lineal descendant of a bandit chief named David. It followed, therefore, that God’s Own People, to-wit, the Anglo-Saxons and the Jews, reunited at last after many centuries, should jointly rule the world. That notion, however, imposed too great a strain on even Christian credulity.

Today, the “British Israelites” accept the story that the “ten tribes” were Anglo-Saxons or, at least, Nordics, and hot-footed it from Assyrian territory to the British Isles or, at least, northern Europe. They further claim that the Jesus of Holy Writ was an Aryan, despite his distinctively Jewish name and the distinctively Jewish (or conceivably Egyptian) name of his supposed mother. They rely principally on some of the early Christian forgeries which explicitly describe that Jesus as having had blue eyes and blond hair and beard. They do not use, and seem not to know, the tradition, attested as early as any of the other Christian tales, that one of the Jesuses was the son of a Jewess by a soldier named Pandara/Panthera, who probably was not a Jew and could well have been a Macedonian or other Greek in a Seleucid or Roman army.

We must feel a considerable sympathy for the “British Israelites” of the present. They candidly recognise the Jews as the eternal enemies of our race. They are the best of the Christians and are making a valiant effort to free their religion from its Jewish trammels and make it conducive to the survival of our race. Unfortunately, their doctrine is historically preposterous and, what is even worse, demoralising. It makes our race the accomplices and beneficiaries of the ferocious god, Yahweh, who, according to the “Old Testament,” helped his pets swindle, plunder, torment, and butcher their betters in Egypt and Canaan.