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Category: Tree

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Daybreak Publishing Tree

Under the Redwoods

In the footnote to the PDF American Racialism I said: ‘After publishing this book I will put together a couple of shorter PDFs: one that collects some passages from Richard Weikart’s Hitler’s Religion, and a new translation of the Introduction to the German edition of Hitler’s after-dinner talks.’(*) The first of these PDFs, Weikart’s Hitler’s Religion with my 2023 comments can already be read here.

Following the metaphor of crossing the psychological Rubicon, whoever can assimilate this kind of reading is not even a few steps away from the wetland of the beach, but a few steps away from the dry shore on our side of the river. Under the big trees, everything is much more pleasant, but there is a problem…

Away from the beach, the traveller now has even lost sight of the statuary of racialists stuck halfway across the Rubicon, unable to move because of their reluctance to transvalue Judeo-Christian values to pre-Christian values. While the majesty of the Redwoods on this side of the river doesn’t exist on the other side, except him there are no human beings. There is a trace, yes, of Savitri Devi who passed through here some decades ago but since her death, apparently there is no one else.

That’s the problem with following the call of what Jung called the Self. It may lead to the truth but the price is loneliness since, after 1945, the white man decided to betray himself. And this side can only be inhabited by those who have stood firm, the priests of the sacred words who Savitri used to call ‘the religion of the Strong’.

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(*) Next week update. I had almost forgotten that this latest PDF was already ready since last year. Thus, in addition to my excerpts of Hitler’s Religion with my 2023 aggregations linked above (but linked again here), the translation of the introduction to Hitler’s Table Talk from a serious German edition, can be read here.

Categories
Dominion (book) Tree

Dominion, 7

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

Tom Holland titles the next section of his book ‘Christendom’ (the previous section, ‘Antiquity’). The first chapter of this second section (‘Conversion: 754’) opens with vignettes from the life of a so-called saint:

As dawn broke, the camp on the banks of the river Boorne was already stirring. Boniface, its leader, was almost eighty, but as tireless as he had ever been. Forty years after his first journey to Frisia, he had returned there, in the hope of reaping from its lonely mudflats and marshes a great harvest of souls. Missionary work had long been his life. Born in Devon, in the Saxon kingdom of Wessex, he viewed the pagans across the northern sea as his kinsmen. In letters home he had regularly solicited prayers for their conversion. ‘Take pity upon them; for they themselves are saying: “We are of one blood and bone with you.”’ Now, after weeks of touring the scattered homesteads of Frisia, Boniface had summoned all those won for Christ to be confirmed in their baptismal vows. It promised him a day of joy.

The first boats arrived as sunlight was starting to pierce the early morning cloud. A mass of men, after clambering onto dry land, walked up from the river and approached the camp. Then, abruptly, the glint of swords. A charge. Screams. Boniface came out of his tent. Already it was too late. The pirates were in the camp. Desperately, Boniface’s attendants fought back. Not the old man himself, though. Christ, when he was arrested, had ordered Peter to put up his sword; and now Boniface, following his Lord’s example, commanded his followers to lay down their weapons. A tall man, he gathered his fellow priests around him, and urged them to be thankful for the hour of their release. Felled by a pirate’s sword, he was cut to pieces. So violently did the blows rain down that twice a book he had in his hands was hacked through. Found long afterwards at the scene of his murder, it would be treasured ever after as a witness to his martyrdom. [pages 201-202]

The book which Saint Boniface, the ‘Apostle of the Germans’, reputedly held up to defend himself from the swords of the Frisians who killed him (Hessisches Staatsarchiv Darmstadt). This image appears in Holland’s book.

It was not the inheritance of Roman imperialism that inspired them, but the example of Patrick and Columbanus. To experience hardship was the very point. Fearsome stories were told of what missionaries might face. Woden [Wotan], king of the demons worshipped by the Germans as gods, was darkly rumoured to demand a tithe of human lives. [page 203]

Let’s compare this demonised vision of Wotan with the Wotan we just saw in the Wagnerian tetralogy (and let’s remember that for the Christians who destroyed the statues of Apollo and other Greco-Roman gods, they also said they were ‘demons’).

In the Low Countries, prisoners were drowned beneath rising tides; in Saxony, hung from trees, and run through with spears. Runes were dyed in Christian blood. Or so it was reported. Such rumours, far from intimidating Anglo-Saxon monks, only confirmed them in their sense of purpose: to banish the rule of demons from lands that properly belonged to Christ.

As vividly as anyone, they understood what it was to be born again. ‘The old has gone, the new has come!’ The tone of revolution in Paul’s cry, the sense that an entire order had been judged and found wanting, still retained a freshness for men like Boniface in a way that it did not in more venerable reaches of the Christian world. [page 203]

In the following pages Holland talks about something we have already seen in our translation of Deschner’s books: the felling of the sacred tree of the Saxons (here). He added:

To banish the past, to overturn custom: here was a fearsome project, barely comprehensible to the peoples of other places, other times… Barely a decade after Boniface’s arrival in the Low Countries, missionaries had begun to calculate dates in the manner of Bede: anno Domini, in the year of their Lord. The old order, which to pagans had seemed eternal, could now more firmly be put where it properly belonged: in the distant reaches of a Christian calendar. While the figure of Woden bestowed far too much prestige on kings ever to be erased altogether from their lineages, monks did not hesitate to demote him from his divine status and confine him to the remote beginnings of things. The rhythms of life and death, and of the cycle of the year, proved no less adaptable to the purposes of the Anglo-Saxon Church. So it was that hel, the pagan underworld, where all the dead were believed to dwell, became, in the writings of monks, the abode of the damned; and so it was too that Eostre, the festival of the spring, which Bede had speculated might derive from a goddess, gave its name to the holiest Christian feast-day of all. Hell and Easter: the garbing of the Church’s teachings in Anglo-Saxon robes did not signal a surrender to the pagan past, but rather its rout. Only because the gods had been toppled from their thrones, melted utterly by the light of Christ, or else banished to where monsters stalked, in fens or on lonely hills, could their allure safely be put to Christian ends. The victory of the new was adorned with the trophies of the old. [page 204]

The old incarnation of this site featured a Weirwood tree, straight out of the novels of George R.R. Martin, as the symbol of The West’s Darkest Hour (scroll down to the very bottom of e.g. this PDF). Since the theme of this new incarnation doesn’t allow displaying images in a sidebar, the Weirwood image no longer appears. However, in my mind it is still the symbol of this site, and I would like to explain why.

As past visitors know, I began my literary career by writing several books about the tragedy in my family. Unlike other victims who have already died because of such tragedy—my sister and two of my first cousins—I realised that only by telling myself the deep past could I heal.

That meant delving into our biographical past with the work equivalent of several doctorates, and the result was my series From Jesus to Hitler. But once I developed the gift of seeing the family past in a very different way than the family normies see it—with all their denials and repressions—, I realised that I could use that ‘gift’ to begin to see the authentic past of the West.

That’s why Martin’s fiction about the Weirwood trees appealed to me so much. If a greenseer touched them, he could paranormally see into Westeros’s past (what parapsychologists call retrocognition). It struck me greatly that I used to touch the trunk of the big tree in our backyard the way, in the television version of Martin’s books, Bran the Broken touched the Weirwood trees—but I did that decades before Martin began his novels.

The difference, of course, is that in the real world retrocognition probably doesn’t exist, and as a kid I didn’t see the past paranormally. But I touched the tree just as Bran would do decades later on an HBO series, and as a teenager I sensed that there was something numinous about it.

In order not to make this autobiographical vignette too long, the tree symbolises seeing the past as it happened, not as the normies believe it happened. That’s why Goodrich’s book is first on my list in ‘Our Books’. And the second book shows us the true history of Greece, Rome and how the Judeo-Christians ended that culture. (After all, the books that saved me were made from material taken from trees.)

Touching the Weirwood tree is what saves us, as long as the person touching it is a greenseer. For this reason, both Boniface and the invaders in Martin’s prose, the first thing they did was cut down the sacred trees. Holland ends that section with the following paragraphs:

As well as the Pope, he [Boniface] had won the backing of Charles Martel. The Frankish warlord, no less keen to break the eastern marches to his own purposes than the Anglo-Saxon bishop, had found in Boniface a man after his own heart. Tortured though Boniface was by the need to curry favour at court, and by his frustrated yearning to save the souls of pagans, he had succeeded, by the end of his life, in shaping the churches east of the Rhine to something like his own image. Returning, in the last year of his life, to the mission that had always been closest to his heart, he had done so as the dominant figure in the Frankish church…

Yet even as Boniface was being cut down amid the reeds and mud of Frisia, the lead given by missionaries in the spread of Christianity eastwards was passing. A new and altogether more militant approach to paganism was being prepared. The willingness of Boniface to meet death rather than permit his attendants to draw their swords was not one that the Frankish authorities tended to share. Three days after his murder, a squad of Christian warriors tracked down the killers, cornered them and wiped them out. Their women and children were taken as slaves. [pages 206-207]

Categories
Destruction of Germanic paganism Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) So-called saints Tree

Christianity’s Criminal History, 153

– For the context of these translations click here –

 The beatissimus dominus took care of women of ‘the tribe of the Angles’. His kinswoman Leoba, a whole generation younger than himself, he appointed abbess in the see of the archbishopric; Thecla, a relative of Leoba, he made abbess of Vitzingen and Ochsenfurt-on-the-Main. And all certainly for the great cause, the mission of all Germany, for the one whom Gregory III called ‘the apostle of the Germans’ (in reality: of Rome) and whom he appointed archbishop on a further journey to the Catholic capital (732), all for ‘the very advantageous business’ (talis commercii lucro) as is explicitly stated in such a context. Hence, the pope, with the whole Church, victoriously vindicated the apostle.

Of course, ‘business’ doesn’t mean the ‘pinch of silver and gold’ (argenti et auri tantillum), which Boniface occasionally donated to the holy father, but the conversion of ‘paganism and heterodoxy to the knowledge of the true faith’. From Hesse to Friesland he destroyed everywhere, ‘more as a conqueror than as a converter’ or missionary, the pagan places of worship, and on their ruins, with their very stones and timber, he erected Christian churches. He demolished the idols of Stuffo, Reto, Bil, the goddess Astaroth and so on. He tore down their altars, and felled the sacred trees in the Hessian forest, probably where, because they were under the direct protection of the Frankish fortress of Büraburg, they were in no personal danger, such as the oaks of Donar in Geismar, the tribal shrine, erecting with their wood a chapel to St. Peter, ‘his first sign of victory’ (Haller).
 

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Editor’s Note: It is these kinds of historical facts that have moved me in the past to obsess on this site about Game of Thrones. As no normie is going to study Deschner’s ten books, the most astute way to start conveying the most important facts of Aryan history is precisely novels in which these facts are alluded to fantastically, with castles, princesses and dragons. As we saw in past years with my countless entries on the TV series Game of Thrones, in the universe of novelist George R.R. Martin the fanatics of the new religion felled the sacred trees of Westeros.

This is the language the normie understands, and it’s a shame that the Jews who directed both Game of Thrones and the new prequel that has just been released betray fundamental facts of Martin’s prose. In a world where real Aryans took Martin to television, these outrages of the new religion perpetrated on the sacred trees of the old religion could be filmed in such a way that the message would be inspiring to whites.
 

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But Boniface also had to see no less than thirty churches and chapels destroyed in Thuringia. In Rome, however, the apostle didn’t only fight paganism, but at least as much, and probably even more, the sort of Christianity which wasn’t obedient to Rome, as among the Bavarians and the Alamanni. That was the second and shorter, though more important, phase of his activity.

Bavaria, where Boniface reformed (739) the church with the help of duke Odilus, after his relations with Charles Martell had cooled, had already been Christianised much earlier, though not Romanised. Thus, Roman Christianity and the Scottish missionary, ‘the first ‘Von-Rom Movement’ (far from Rome!)’ (Behn), ‘clashed violently’ in Bavaria (Schieffer). But there and in Thuringia Boniface, at the behest of Gregory II, eliminated as far as possible the old Christianity which had developed without violence. He tried to wrest the communities from the successors of these ecclesiastics and, with the help of state power, to bring them unceremoniously under the pontifical yoke.

But the papal legate also and especially fought against the Frankish clergy, who had preserved their autonomy vis-à-vis Rome and whose reformer he had avoided, if not fought against. In 738 Gregory III therefore strongly recommended obedience to his man regarding the bishops of Bavaria and Swabia, and at the same time insisted: ‘You must detect, prevent and annihilate the pagan customs and doctrines of the Bretons who roam everywhere, or of false and heretical priests and all their depravities’.

Boniface, who met with the ‘fierce resistance’ of many freemen (Epperlein), who was rude in his foreign manners, had no compunction and always went about with a large retinue; he was as obliging as they could wish for in Rome and more papist than the pope. He never asked why; he simply had to obey, as he had been taught. He was in fact ‘the heir of the Roman Church in England’ (Lortz).

The ‘apostle of the Germans’ was so unsure of his faith and so imbued for life with his tendency to sin, that he continually sent real questionnaires to Rome ‘as if we were kneeling at your feet’, to receive answers to the supreme questions of conscience.

Gregory II, who on 22 November 726 calmed his apostle’s eagerness to ask questions, let him know ‘the position in our Church’. An example: if parents have already deposited their sons or daughters ‘within the walls of the monastery’ (inter septa monasterii) at an early age, under no circumstances may they later leave the monastery and marry. ‘We strictly forbid it, because it is a sin to loosen the reins of pleasure on children, who were consecrated to God by their parents’. What barbarism beats in that answer, or behind this one: ‘You have also asked the question whether, when a contagious disease or mortality invades a church or a monastery, those who haven’t yet been affected can flee from that place to avoid the danger. That seems utterly foolish, for no one can escape the hand of God’ This rhetoric has not always, but quite often in everyday practice, been a function of minimisation, discharge and beautification. Theologians and historians, thanks to their phrase ‘link to the times’, don’t need to call the crimes and criminals of the Church and the State crimes and criminals.

Those were times when some served two sides, attended the Christian liturgy and at the same time offered sacrifices to Wotan; they ‘ate bulls and goats sacrificed to the pagan gods’, which could in no way harm either Christ or Wotan.

Categories
Poetry Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Technology Tree Welfare of animals

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 90

It is again verses of Leconte de Lisle—that nostalgic singer of all the beauties destroyed by the inexorable march of Time—that come back to my memory when I think of ‘this worm weaker than the grasses’ of the ancient Forest, but strong in the omnipotence of its intelligence dedicated to the work of disintegration, the diabolical work (‘in reverse’ of the ideal order). The poet addresses the Forest, which seemed to last forever, and says:

Like a swarm of ants on a journey,
That one crushes and burns, yet still they march,
The floods will bring the king of the last days to you;
The destroyer of woods, the man with the pale face. [1]

Words that are only too true but if the White Man was indeed, until the middle of the 20th century, the ruthless destroyer of the forest as well as of the fauna—the massacrer of forty million bison in North America—, and who emptied North Africa and the former Asia of their lions, and India of most of its tigers and leopards, the Negro’ and the swarthy man of every hue, have, with grim enthusiasm, hastened to follow suit and pursue, with a neophyte’s relentlessness, the war of man against tree and animal.

They put themselves in the service of the White Man not necessarily and not always Aryan, and believed his lies, accepted his money, and assisted him in the work of destruction. They killed for him the elephants whose ivory he traded; hunted or trapped the big cats, whose magnificent skins he wanted. And, imbued with the anthropocentrism newly learned in his schools, and proud to possess at least some of his techniques, they continued the butchery after he had grown weary of it—even after belated remorse or awakening of his sense of self-interest had prompted him to ‘protect’ endangered species from now on.

It is all mankind that is guilty of the usurpation of the soil at the expense of the forest and its ancient inhabitants—all except the few individuals or groups, always in the minority, who have protested against it all their lives, and proved, by everything they have said, written or done that they had taken a stand for the animal and for the tree against man, of whatever race he might be.

At the root of this indefinite usurpation is, without doubt, technology, which is, it must be admitted, the most inferior but an expression nonetheless of Aryan genius. Even in Roman times, when unfortunate wild animals were captured by the hundreds and thousands, to be sent to their deaths in circuses, the massacre of African, Asian (and European) fauna[2] never reached the proportions it was destined to reach in our time thanks to modern methods of hunting, and in particular to firearms.

But technology in all its forms, including this one, has developed only as an advantageous—sometimes the only possible—solution to the problems of survival of increasingly compact masses of men. It is only beyond a certain numerical limit that man, of whatever race, becomes a scourge to all that lives on the land he inhabits—and if he is of one of the inferior races (generally, alas, the most fertile), a dangerous rival to the nobler races: a veritable plague, in every respect.

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[1] Leconte de Lisle, ‘La Forêt Vierge’, (Poèmes Barbares).

[2] And American. It is impossible here not to refer to the slaughter of seals, especially seal pups, so atrocious that many of our contemporaries themselves have been outraged.

Categories
Kali Yuga Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Tree Welfare of animals

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 88

You, who are one of us—sons and fathers of the Strong and Beautiful—, look around you without prejudice and passion, and say what you see! From one end of the earth to the other, the strong are retreating before the weak, armed with ingenious malice; the beautiful, before the ungainly, the deformed, the ugly, armed with deception; the healthy, before the sick, armed with recipes for combat taken from the demons with whom they have made a pact. The giants give way to the dwarfs, holders of divine power usurped through sacrilegious research. You see all this more clearly than ever since the disaster of 1945.

But don’t think that this dates from 1945. Certainly not! The collapse of the Third German Reich and the persecution of the Religion of the Strong, which has been raging ever since, are but the consequence of a desperate struggle, as old as the fall of man and the end of the ‘Age of Truth’. They are the recent phases of a gradual and inexorable loss of ground, which has been going on for millennia, and is only more apparent since our fruitless effort to stop it.
 

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Editor’s note: As I said yesterday in the comments section, Savitri lived at a time when the real history of Christianity was still unknown. Had she known it, she wouldn’t have needed to dip into Hindu mythology to speculate about a purported decadence of many thousands of years old. Occam’s razor is applicable here, and we can point to Christian ethics, even in its secular form, as the inversion of values that in our day has culminated in the West’s darkest hour.

 

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Consider the trees. Among the Strong, they are the oldest. They are our elder brothers: old kings of Creation. For millions of years, they alone possessed the Earth. And how beautiful was the Earth in the time when, aside from some giant insects and the life born amidst the oceans, it nourished only them!

The Gods know what enthusiasm seized me, on my return to Germany in 1953, at the sight of the resurrected industries of the Ruhr basin! In every cloud of nitrogen peroxide that billowed in fiery volutes from the chimneys of rebuilt factories, I greeted a new and victorious challenge to the infamous Morgenthau plan. And yet… an image haunts and fascinates me: that of the Ruhr basin at the time when the future coal which, along with iron, makes it rich today, existed ‘in potential’ in the form of endless forests of tree ferns.

I think I can see them, these fifty-metre-high ferns, endlessly crowded together, competing in their strength in their push towards the light and the sun. It was night between their innumerable shafts, so thick was the evergreen ceiling of their entangled leaves: a humid night, heavy with the vapours arising from the warm blackish mud in which their roots were immersed; a night that the wind, blowing through the gigantic foliage, filled with a harmonious wailing, or that the torrential rains filled with a din. Everywhere one finds coal mines today such forests then extended.

But there is, for me, an even more nostalgic image. It is that of the forest of many species, populated by colourful birds, reptiles beautifully marked with brown, pale yellow, amber and ebony, and mammals of all kinds—especially felines: the most beautiful of all living creatures—, the forest of the hundreds of millennia before man appeared on our planet, and the forest of the time when man, few in number, was not yet the harmful beast he has become. The domain of trees was then almost everywhere. And it was also the domain of animals. It included the domain of the oldest and most beautiful civilisations. And man, to whom the dream of ‘dominating Nature’ and overturning its balance for his benefit would then have seemed absurd and sacrilegious, found his numerical inferiority normal. In one of his most suggestive poetic evocations of ancient India, Leconte de Lisle has one of his characters say:

I know the narrow, mysterious paths
That lead the river to the nearby mountains.
Large tigers, striped and prowling by the hundred… [1]

In the hot and humid forests of the Ganges (or Mekong) there were tigers, leopards and elephants. In the north of Asia and Europe, it was aurochs and wolves, by the thousands, by the millions. The first hunters—the first herders, rivals of the four-legged predators—certainly killed some of them, to keep the flesh of the domesticated herds for themselves. But from the boundless forest others emerged. The natural balance between the species had not yet been broken, nor was it to be broken for long. It was not until the forest, or the savannah, definitely retreated before man when ‘civilisation’ encroached on it without interruption.

For centuries, however, man was destined to remain confined to very small areas. In ancient times, in Egypt as well as in Assyria, Mesopotamia, Syria, North Africa and even in Southern Europe, lions were found within a few kilometres of cities. All the accounts of the ancients, from those reported in the Bible to those of the adventures of Androcles (how recent, in comparison!) bear witness to this. Unfortunately, these beasts were hunted, and there is abundant evidence of this in the written and sculpted testimonies. Personally, I have always been outraged when reading the inscription that relates the success of the young Amenhotep III, who supposedly killed ‘one hundred and four’ of these royal beasts in a single hunt. And the famous bas-reliefs in the Oxford Museum, which, with that frightening realism of which Assyrian art has the greatest secret, represent Assurnasirpal and his retinue piercing with arrows a whole army of lions—of which some, their backs broken, twist and seem literally to howl in pain—inspire me to nothing less than a burning hatred of man.

And yet… I must admit that, no more at the dawn of the 14th century than during the 9th before the Christian era, this primate had not yet become, on the scale on which it was soon to be, the scourge of the living world. It hunted, it is true, as did other predators. And it had the arrow which strikes from afar, instead of the honest claw and tooth, which only reach up close. But he didn’t exterminate whole species as it was destined to do later, and like no other beast of prey did.

The forest, the endless savannah, the desert—the space which he couldn’t occupy entirely, and in which he was not even able to make his presence felt in a more or less permanent way—remained the free, if not inviolate, domain of non-human life. No civilisation had yet monopolised for the benefit of ‘man’ all the territory on which it flourished. Egypt itself, whose people were by far the most prolific in antiquity, kept, in addition to its luxuriant palm groves, its fauna of lions, crocodiles and hippopotami. And, what is more, thanks to its theriomorphic representations of the divinity, and especially thanks to the pious love with which it surrounded certain animals—such as the innumerable cats, fed and pampered by the priestesses of the Goddess Bastet[2]—it maintained with this fauna a link of a more subtle and stronger order, comparable to the one that still exists today between the Hindu and the Cow, certain monkeys and certain snakes, among other symbolic animals.

It would have seemed to a superficial observer that, despite the hunting, the sacrifices, and the extensive use of wood in the construction of houses as well as ships, the animal species and the forest species could count on an indefinitely prosperous future.

However, even at that relatively early date, man had become ‘the only mammal whose numbers continue to increase’.[3] In other words, the balance that had been maintained for so long between all living species, including man, had been upset in favour of the latter for several centuries.
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[1] Leconte de Lisle, ‘Çunacépa’ (Poèmes Antiques).

[2] These cats were mummified after their death. Hundreds of thousands of them have been found in the necropolises where they had been deposited.

[3] ‘der einzige Säuger, der sich in ständiger Vermehrung befindet’ (Tier, 11th year, No. 5, page 44. Article ‘Die Uberbevölkerung droht als nahe Weltkatastrophe’).

Categories
Deranged altruism Destruction of Germanic paganism French Revolution Liberalism Racial right Tree

Yggdrasil

Yggdrasil, in Norse cosmology, is an immense and central sacred tree. Around it exists all else, including the Nine Worlds. Speaking metaphorically, Judeo-Christianity destroyed it.

The translation of the fourth section of Ferdinand Bardamu’s essay about the toxicity of Christianity for the white race is available in the German section of this site (here). The English original can be read at the end of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour (see sidebar).

I would like to add something to my previous post.

Christians might object to what I said this afternoon (‘It is the Christian idea of the human soul that’s screwing the Aryan race’) arguing that it is in secular countries that the ethno-suicidal zeal of whites has reached its zenith; and that the belief in the afterlife of the past never reached today’s ethno-suicidal hysteria. That is very true, but still the idea of man as the centre of creation had, as Savitri said, Christian inspiration.

I have been trying to find, on the internet, a treatise on the history of the American white nationalist movement. I was impressed that in an old review in The Occidental Observer, an author recommended Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream, by Leonard Zeskind. The Observer reviewer recommended it not because he shared the Jewish author’s point of view, but because the book is so well researched (when I can afford it I’ll order it).

Then I tried to look for a text that came from the pen not of an enemy, but a friend of the white cause. But apparently none of the pundits of contemporary white nationalism has written it. Or at least none that I can recall in the Observer’s reviews of new books (correct me if I’m wrong).

Searching, then, in my home library, I remembered A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement which I read eleven years ago: a small 77-page book with no date or author, but which was probably written in 2007 by Harold Covington. It’s a terrible book that you can read online. Hadding Scott unmasked Covington’s horrendous slanders of racialist competition; for example, what Covington says about Ben Klassen.

So I find myself in no man’s land: the scholarly book by a foe and the crude pamphlet of a novelist who thought he would have a following if only he could make them believe that only he, Covington, was an exemplary racist and the rest of the movement scum.

As I pulled Covington’s spiral-bound text from one of the high shelves of my library (so much so that I had to climb a step to reach it), I came across no less than the first of my spiral-bound collection of articles I read when I had just discovered American white nationalism.

The spiral-bound, which contains many texts from The Occidental Quarterly Online, is dated by my pen September 11, 2009. And when I started reading it, the next day at 1:35 a.m., I was in Spain where I had lived for almost a year (it was a return trip to the American continent). The article I began to read, on the ground as the plane had not yet taken off, was entitled ‘The Seven Pillars of White Nationalism’ and was written by Yggdrasil (elsewhere the author revealed himself as John Gardner). At the time my immature mind was transiting from Normieland to NS, and WN was a very useful stepping stone in crossing the psychological Rubicon.

Yggdrasil, in that first article I read in printed form when I first dipped my feet in the metaphorical river (I was actually about to cross, literally, the Atlantic), wrote something that does answer the Christian objection above:

Surprisingly, I was unable to find any coherent and helpful works in English translation from the Third Reich explaining how National Socialism might save us. Most of the major works of that period, including Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century and Hitler’s Mein Kampf are dreadful tomes, which fail to recognize our basic predicament. The best explanation I can find of National Socialism is Lincoln Rockwell’s White Power.

On the next pages Yggdrasil adds:

The enlightenment secularized and neutered Christianity as a force in public life in response to the slaughters of the religious wars in Europe.

In place of Christianity, the enlightenment substituted a brand new faith—the brotherhood of man, in the vain hope that it would end intra-European violence. Of course, this new faith, based as it was upon demonstrable falsehoods, could only progress and be sustained with violence, and true to form, the blood began to flow almost immediately with the French revolution in 1791.

This new faith was tailor made to justify imperial wars of conquest, designed to bring the message of human equality and the material betterment of trade to those in need of uplift.

But it has always been resistance to that new faith from European groups that has prompted the most savage outbreaks of bloodshed, from the U.S. Civil War, to the Boer War, to the Revolution in 1918 in Russia, and ultimately, the German reaction to that threat.

The prosperity that followed WW II has reduced the inclination of Euros to resist the human equality mania en-mass, resulting instead in localized witch hunts, including war crimes prosecutions and hate crime laws.

As I have stated in prior posts, our challenge to this false god—the brotherhood of man [Editor’s note: the bastard son of Christianity]—must be adapted to the circumstances existing at the time.

It is completely clear that this particular delusion—like the crusading spirit of 1090 AD—is not merely a matter of internal belief, but rather external display adopted for the purpose of acquiring status through careless disregard of self interest and racial survival.

A few pages before Yggdrasil had written:

In our modern multi-cultural societies, this universalized image of the brotherhood of man has filtered down into the lower ranks, as individual clergymen translate the Sermon of the Mount to mandate a standardless tolerance of all things—turning one’s cheek to all manner of vice and overt attacks—a tolerance that is useful, so the modern clergy believe, for keeping pawns full on Sundays without regard to race, creed, national origin, or sexual orientation.

This was published a few days before my return trip, but we still need a treatise about the history of American white nationalism authored by a non-Jew. Incidentally, I believe it was Yggdrasil himself who in the middle 1990s coined the term ‘white nationalism’.

Categories
3-eyed crow Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Philosophy of history Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Tree

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 25

Perhaps the notion of the irrevocable ‘existence’ of the past is of little consolation to those tormented by nostalgia for happy times, lived or imagined. Time refuses to suspend its flight at the plea of the poet enamoured of fleeting beauty—whether it be an hour of silent communion with the beloved woman (and, through her, and beyond her, with the harmony of the spheres), or an hour of glory, i.e. communion, in the glare of fanfares or the thunder of arms, or the roar of frenzied crowds, with the soul of a whole people and, through it and beyond it, again and again, with the Divine: another aspect of the Divine.

It is possible, sometimes, and usually without any special effort of memory, to relive, as if in a flash, a moment of one’s own past and with incredible intensity, as if one’s self-consciousness were suddenly hallucinated without the senses being the least bit affected. A small thing—a taste, very present, like that of the petite Madeleine cited by Proust in his famous analysis of reliving; a furtive odour, once breathed in; a melody that one had thought forgotten, a simple sound like that of water falling drop by drop—is enough to put, for an instant, the consciousness in a state that it ‘knows’ to be the same as the one it knew, years and sometimes decades, more than half a century earlier; a state of euphoria or anxiety, or even anguish, depending on the moment that has miraculously re-emerged from the mist of the past: a moment that had not ceased to ‘exist’ in the manner of things past, but which suddenly takes on the sharpness and relief of the present, as if a mysterious spotlight directed the daylight of the living actuality.

But these experiences are rare. And if it is possible to evoke them, they do not last long, even in very capable people of evoking their memories. Moreover, they only concern—except in very exceptional cases—the personal past of the person who ‘revives’ such a state or such an episode, not the historical past.

Yet there are people who are much more interested in the history of their people—or even that of other people—than in their own past. And although scholars, whose job it is to do so, succeed in reconstructing as best they can, from relics and documents, what at first sight appears to be the ‘essentials’ of history, and although some scholars sometimes astonish their readers or listeners by the number and thoroughness of the details they know about the habits of a particular character, the intrigues of a particular chancellery, or the daily life of such and such a vanished people, it is no less certain that the past of the civilised world—the easiest to grasp, however, since it has left visible traces—escapes us.

We know it indirectly and in bits and pieces, that our investigators try to put together, like a game of patience in which half or three-quarters of the puzzle are missing. And even if we possessed all the elements, we would still not know it, because to know is to live, or re-live, and no individual subjected to the category of Time can live history. What this individual can, at most, know directly, that is to say, live, and what he can then remember, sometimes with incredible clarity, is the history of his time insofar as he himself has contributed to making it; in other words, his own history, situated in a whole that exceeds it and often crushes it.

This is undoubtedly a truer story than the one that scholars will one day reconstruct. For what appears to be the ‘essence’ of an epoch, studied through documents and remains, is not. What is essential is the atmosphere of an epoch, or a moment within it: the atmosphere that can only be grasped through the direct experience of someone who lived it: one whose personal history is steeped in it. Guy Sajer, in his admirable book The Forgotten Soldier, has given us the essence of the Russian campaign from 1941 to 1945.

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s Note: This is absolutely true. One of the reasons why I prefer lucid essays like the one by Evropa Soberana on the Judean war against Rome (the masthead of this site) to the scholarly book that Karlheinz Deschner wrote about that epoch, is that Soberana transports us to that world—as in another literary genre Gore Vidal’s Julian has transported us to 4th-century Rome. Academic books are extremely misleading in that they don’t transport us back in time. We desperately need the visuals of what happened. That’s why I like the metaphor of the last greenseer, Bloodraven: the man fused to a tree that could see the past.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
He was able to put in his pages such a force of suggestion, precisely because, along with thousands of others in this campaign of Russia in the ranks of the Wehrmacht, then in the elite Grossdeutschland Division, it represents a slice of his own life.

When, three thousand years from now, historians want to have an idea of what the Second World War was like on this particular front, they will get a much better idea by reading Sajer’s book (which deserves to survive) than by trying to reconstruct, with the help of sporadic impersonal documents, the advance and retreat of the Reich’s armies. But, I repeat, they will acquire an idea of it, not a knowledge, much in the way we have one today of the decline of Egypt on the international scene at the end of the 20th Dynasty, through what remains of the juicy report of Wenamon, special envoy of Ramses XI (or rather of the high priest Herihor) to Zakarbaal, king of Gebal, or Gubla, which the Greeks call Byblos, in 1117 BC.

Nothing gives us a more intense experience of what I have called in other writings the ‘bondage of Time’ than this impossibility of letting our ‘self’ travel in the historical past that we have not lived, and of which we cannot therefore ‘remember’. Nothing makes us feel our isolation within our own epoch like our inability to live directly, at will, in some other time, in some other country; to travel in time as we travel in space.

We can visit the whole earth as it is today, but not see it as it once was. We cannot, for instance, actually immerse ourselves in the atmosphere of the temple of Karnak—or even only one street in Thebes—under Themose III; to find ourselves in Babylon at the time of Hammurabi, or with the Aryas before they left the old Arctic homeland; or among the artists painting the frescoes in the caves of Lascaux or Altamira, as we have somewhere in the world in our own epoch, having travelled there on foot or by car, by train, by boat or by plane.

And this impression of a definitive barrier—which lets us divine some outlines but prohibits us forever a more precise vision—is all the more painful, perhaps, because the civilisation we would like to know directly is chronologically closer to us, while being qualitatively more different from the one in whose midst we are forced to remain.

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s Note: In my fantasy that such a thing as the Wall existed, and have the last greenseer as our tutor, I imagine that I would spend an inordinate amount of time visiting ancient Sparta, and other cities where the Norse race remained unpolluted for centuries. I would visit all the temples of classical religion not only in Greece but in Rome, trying to capture through their art the Aryan spirit in its noblest expression.

But above all I would pay close attention to the human physiognomy of living characters before they mixed their blood with mudbloods.

Only he who actually sees the past as it was, has a good grasp of History.

The saddest thing of all is that pure Nordids still exist, but the current System is doing everything possible to exterminate them (as in Song of Ice and Fire the children of the forest was a species on the verge of extinction).

______ 卐 ______

 
History has always fascinated me: the history of the whole world, in all its richness. But it is particularly painful for me to know that I’ll never be able to know pre-Columbian America directly… by going to live there for a while; that it will never again be possible to see Tenochtitlan, or Cuzco, as the Spaniards first saw them, four hundred and fifty years ago, or less, that is to say yesterday. As a teenager, I cursed the conquerors who changed the face of the New World. I wished that no one had discovered it so that it would remain intact. Then we could have known it without going back in time; we could have known it as it was on the eve of the conquest, or rather as a natural evolution would have modified it little by little over four or five centuries, without destroying its characteristic traits.

But it goes without saying that my real torment, since the disaster of 1945, has been the knowledge that it is now impossible for me to have any direct experience of the atmosphere of the German Third Reich, in which I did not, alas, live.

Believing that it was to last indefinitely—that there would be no war or that, if there were, Hitlerian Germany would emerge victorious—I had the false impression that there was no hurry to return to Europe and that, moreover, I was useful to the Aryan cause where I was.

Now that it is all over, I think with bitterness that only thirty years ago[1] one could immerse oneself immediately, without the intermediary of texts, pictures, records, or comrades’ stories, in that atmosphere of fervour and order, of power and manly beauty, that of Hitlerian civilisation. Thirty years! It is not ‘yesterday’, it is today: a few minutes ago. And I have the feeling that I have missed very closely both the life and the death—the glorious death, in the service of our Führer—that should have been mine.

But one cannot ‘go back’ five minutes, let alone 1500 years or 500 million years, into the unalterable past, now transformed into ‘eternity’—timeless existence. And it is as impossible to attend the National Socialist Party Congress of September 1935 today as it is to walk the earth at the time when it seemed to have become forever the domain of the dinosaurs… except for one of those very few sages who have, through asceticism and the transposition of consciousness, freed themselves from the bonds of time.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s Note: ‘I saw your birth, and that of your lord father before you. I saw your first step, heard your first word, was part of your first dream. I was watching when you fell. And now you are come to me at last, Brandon Stark, though the hour is late’…

‘Time is different for a tree than for a man. Sun and soil and water, these are the things a weirwood understands, not days and years and centuries. For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction. The lives of trees are different. They root and grow and die in one place, and that river does not move them. The oak is the acorn, the acorn is the oak’ (Boodraven to his pupil in George R.R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons).

[1] This was written in 1969 or 1970.

Categories
Neanderthalism Nordicism Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Tree Welfare of animals

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 20

This is not to say that, statistically, the Aryan is not closer to the ‘idea of the perfect man’ than the man of the other races, even the noble ones, just as within the Aryan race itself the Nordic is statistically closest to the same ‘idea’, in the Platonic sense of the word. Warrior courage is perhaps one of the virtues most equally prevalent in both the purebred (or nearly purebred) Aryan and the non-Aryan.

But there are traits which, while not exclusive to the Aryan or more particularly to the Nordic, are undoubtedly more common in the latter than elsewhere. I will mention three of them: physical beauty, which counts as soon as one speaks of a visible being; the fact that he can be relied upon, that he doesn’t promise what he cannot give, that he doesn’t lie (or lies less than most nationals of other races) and finally, the fact that he has more respect than they generally have for the animal and the tree, and more kindness than they have towards all living beings.

And this last trait seems to me essential. I cannot, indeed, consider as superior any race—any human community, however outwardly beautiful and gifted it may be—if too large a percentage of the individuals composing it despise and treat ‘like things’ the beautiful living beings who, by nature, cannot take a stand for or against any cause, and whom, therefore, it is impossible to hate.

The superior man—the candidate for superhumanity—can not be the torturer or even the shameless exploiter of living nature. He will be the admirer—I would even say, the adorer; the one who, to use the words of Alfred Rosenberg, ‘sees the Divine in all that lives: in the animal; in the plant’.[1] He can be—indeed, he must be—merciless towards man, the enemy of this natural Order, with which he has identified himself, and whose beauty he is enamoured of.

But far from inflicting pain on an innocent creature, or allowing others to inflict it directly or indirectly, if he can prevent it he will, whatever is in his hands, ensure that every beast he meets lives happily; that every tree that grows in his path escapes, too, from the innate barbarity of the inferior man, ready to sacrifice everything for his own benefit, his own comfort, or for the benefit and comfort of his own, even of ‘humanity’.

Any overestimation of oneself is a sign of stupidity. All anthropocentrism is an overestimation of the collective ‘self’ of the two-legged mammal, all the more blatant as this self doesn’t exist; they are only collective selves each corresponding to more or less extensive and more or less homogeneous human groups. Hence it follows that all anthropocentrism is a sign of double stupidity, and generally of collective stupidity.

What are we reproached with when we say that we ‘deny man’? We are reproached for rejecting anthropocentrism. We are reproached for placing the notion of the elite—living aristocracy, human or non-human—above the notion of any man, and for sacrificing not only the sick to the healthy, the weak to the strong, the deficient to the normal individual or above normal, but also the mass to the elite. We are reproached for taking the elite of our Aryan race as the end, and the mass (all human masses, including those in our Aryan countries) as the means. And when I say ‘mass’ I do not mean people, but average and below-average humanity, not so much as to what its representatives know, but as to what they are: as to their character and their possibilities. Our Führer came from ‘the people’, but did not belong to ‘the mass’.

We are reproached for our disgust with the failed creature who has irrevocably turned his back on the ideal archetype of his race, our horror of the morbid, the quirky, the decadent, of everything that deviates without return from the crystalline simplicity of elementary form, absolute sincerity and deep logic. We are reproached for our militant nostalgia for the time when the visible order of the world faithfully reflected the eternal order, the divine order; for our fight for the reestablishment, at whatever cost, the reign of eternal values—our fight against the tide of Time.

_________

[1] Quoted by Maurice Bardèche in Nuremberg ou les faux-monnayeurs, first edition, p. 88.

Categories
Bible Destruction of Germanic paganism Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Tree

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 6

This claim of historical Christianity, as indeed of Islam, to be ‘the one true faith’ is a legacy of Judaism, whose tradition serves (in part) as the basis of both religions.

The ancient world—including that of peoples related to the Jews by blood, such as the Canaanites, Amorites, Jebusites, Moabites, Phoenicians and, of course, the Carthaginians—was, as Adolf Hitler wrote in the quote reported above, a world of tolerance. Racine, undoubtedly without realising that he was paying homage to the enemies of the ‘people of God’, underlined this fact when, in the first scene of the third act of Athalie, he put in the mouth of this queen, worshiper of the Gods and Goddesses of Syria, the words she addresses to Joad, High Priest of the Jews:

I know, about my conduct, and against my power,
How far your speeches go in the direction of licentiousness;
Yet you live; your temple stands…

The daughter of Ahab understood by this that if, in her place, the Jews had had the power, it was not they who would have left the sanctuaries of the Baalim standing, nor who would have let their faithful live, let alone their priests. The end of the tragedy—where we see the queen traitorously locked up in the temple of Yahweh, and slaughtered mercilessly by order of Joad—and the whole history of the Jews as reported in the Old Testament, confirms her clairvoyance.

What does the Holy Bible say to the Jews about this? ‘When the Lord your God brings you into the land which you are to inherit, and drives out before you many peoples—the Hittites the Jerjessites, the Amorites the Canaanites, the Perizzites the Hévites and the Jebusites, seven peoples, more important and stronger than you—and when He delivers them into your hands, you must crush them and destroy them with violence; not make treaties with them, nor show them pity; you must not unite with them. Nor shall you give your daughters to their sons, nor shall you take their daughters as wives for your sons, for they will turn away from me and worship other gods’… ‘This is how you should deal with these peoples: you will overthrow their altars and smash their statues; and you shall cut down their sacred groves, and burn their carved images with fire, for you are the holy people in the sight of the Lord your God. He has chosen you, that you may be the chosen people among all the peoples of the earth’.[1]

And once after a conquest that surpassed (by far!) in atrocities those led by other peoples, both in antiquity and closer to us, the Jews finally established themselves in Palestine. Once there were two more or less stable Jewish kingdoms: one in Judea, the other in the north of the country. The Jewish Scripture became ‘holy’ Scripture in the eyes of so many people, for the only reason that their religion is based on the tradition and history of Israel. And how does this Scripture characterise each of the kings who succeed their father on the throne of Jerusalem or Samaria?

Oh, it’s very simple! It declares the king was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ without nuances of judgment, and even without reference to his political behaviour. ‘Good’, if he worshipped Yahweh, the god of the Jews, never bowing his forehead to other deities. Even if he persecuted the faithful of all cults other than his own; if he razed the sacred woods of the ‘false’ Gods, destroyed their images, prohibited the celebration of their mysteries and killed their priests.[2] ‘Bad’ if, on the contrary, the king showed a spirit of benevolent tolerance, and especially if he himself sacrificed to the Baalim or to the Mother Goddesses, according to the custom of the peoples whom the Jews had driven out before them, from the thirteenth to the eleventh century BC, during the conquest of the promised land.

The alternation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ kings is impressive in its monotony. Every story of a reign begins in the same way, with the same phrases, depending on whether Scripture praises or blames the king. ‘And he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord, and followed in the footsteps of his ancestor David. He suppressed the worship of Baal in the high places, and smashed the statues and cut down the sacred trees’.[3]

This is Hezekiah, son of Ahaz, king of Judea, but it could just as well be any ‘good’ king, as the Jewish Scripture understands that word. And this is the description of the reign of Manasseh, the son and successor of Hezekiah, who was twelve years old when he came to the throne, and who ruled Judea for fifty-five years.

‘He did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, and followed the abominations of the peoples whom the Lord had cast out before the children of Israel. He restored the high places which his father, Hezekiah, had laid waste, and raised altars to Baal, and planted a sacred tree, as had done Ahab king of Israel; and he bowed his knee before all the host of heavenly bodies, and worshipped them’.[4] It is identical to all the early accounts of ‘bad’ reigns found in the Old Testament—‘bad’ simply because tolerance was practised there, according to the spirit of all people of antiquity.


Editor’s Note: I doubt anyone understood my initiative to have added so many entries about Game of Thrones on this site. Since almost no one in white nationalism is interested in, say, the books of the old Aryan religions that Arthur Kemp is re-editing, my idea was to use a popular television series for the normie to take his first baby steps towards the other side of the river through George R.R. Martin’s imagery. In Martin’s universe, the fanatical invaders who brought their new religion to Westeros destroyed the Weirwood trees south of the Wall with the same fanaticism as Hebrews and Christians did in real history. Savitri continues:

It should be noted that the mass of ancient Jews in no way seems by nature to have had that intolerance that has played such a far-reaching role in the history of Israel. The ‘average Jew’ before, and perhaps even more so after, the conquest of Palestine, tended to regard all the Gods of the neighbouring peoples as ‘gods’. The similarities of these deities to their own Yahweh, their god, held much more attention, apparently, than the differences which separated them. And it took all the curses of the prophets and all the severity (often bordering on cruelty) of ‘good’ kings, to prevent them from occasionally offering sacrifices to these foreign gods.

It was Moses, the prophets, and some of the Jewish kings—such as David, or Hezekiah—who, by marking it with the sign of religious intolerance, cut off Israel from the community of the peoples of the desert—from the ‘Semitic’ peoples, as they are called—and who, by cultivating at home the myth of the ‘chosen people’, indissolubly linked to the worship of the ‘jealous god’, prepared them for the unique role that, from the fourth century, Christ played in the world.

It is they who are, in the final analysis, responsible for all the violence committed over the centuries, in the name of the exclusive ‘truth’ of the religions of Judaism, in particular, of all the atrocities perpetrated in the name of Christianity, from the dreadful murder of Hypatia in the year 415, to the massacre of four thousand five hundred Germanic chiefs faithful to the Paganism of their race, in Verden, in the year 782, and to the stakes of medieval Europe and conquered America.

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[1] Deuteronomy, Chapter 7, Verses 1 to 7.

[2] See at the end of Chapter 12 of the Second Book of Samuel, the treatment inflicted by the ‘good’ King David on the prisoners after the capture of the city of Rabbah, capital of the Ammonites.

[3] The Bible, Kings II, Chapter 18, verses 3 and following.

[4] The Bible, Kings II, Chapter 21, verses 2 and following.

Categories
Catholic religious orders Destruction of Germanic paganism Tree

Semitic tail in National Socialism

In this morning’s post we saw that Karlheinz Deschner used the word ‘Gentiles’ not to refer to the Jewish-Gentile dichotomy, but in the context that Pope Gregory despised unconverted whites, ‘Gentiles’. We also translated a phrase from Deschner’s book like this: ‘And in 598 he ordered Agnelo of Terracina to seek out the tree worshipers and punish them so that “paganism” would not be passed on to others’. Compare that phrase to a poem I collected for On Beth’s Cute Tits:

Not in cold marble stones,
Not in temples dull and dead:
In the fresh oak groves
Weaves and rustles the German God.

Not long ago I ordered fifteen booklets from Third Reich Books: Translations of the Originals. Although I have been quoting the phrases of one of them, yesterday I discovered that another booklet published under the Nazi regime contained a Semitic tail. That caught my attention, but that schizophrenic tail supports the thesis of this site: Without a proper diagnosis of the aetiology of Aryan decline, it will be impossible to elaborate the medicine to save the fair race from its current psychosis.

The booklet I’m referring to is titled Looking East: Germany Beyond the Vistula which contains several essays, all very short, but the tail only appears in the first essay written by Erich Maschke: a German historian and professor during the Nazi regime.

The best way to show that even in the Third Reich a Semitic tail lingered is to remember that Christianity forced all whites to worship the god of their ethnic enemies. The ancient Germans, a noble people as Tacitus saw it, were reluctant to worship it. Alas, Maschke was a Christian. For this reason he was blind to the most elemental historical reality. In his short essay Maschke used the pejorative term ‘heathen’ eleven times to refer to the Germans who resisted abandoning the Aryan Gods to worship a Semitic god.

The best way to revalue what Maschke wrote is simply to substitute his term ‘heathen’ for ‘whites reluctant to worship the god of the Jews’. I’ll use italics when replacing Maschke’s Christian Newspeak with Oldspeak:

The Teutonic Order and its Significance in History of East Prussia

Seven centuries have passed since the Knights of the Teutonic Order crossed the Vistula and began the conquest of Prussia and the preaching Christianity; seven centuries since towns and cities rose and German peasants turned with their ploughs the sods which till then the iron had not stirred from their primaeval rest.

Battle is the beginning of Prussian history. The Knights of the Brotherhood were summoned to the aid of a Masovian duke who could no longer defend himself from the Prussians reluctant to worship the god of the Jews. By force of arms must the Brothers subdue or drive out the tribes reluctant to worship the god of the Jews and for their reward the lordship of the land was to be theirs. And yet that was not the real object of the fight which the Knights of 1231 now began. What their aim was can be seen in a letter addressed to the Brotherhood by Pope Gregory IX in the previous year. ‘To win the land from the Prussians’, he writes, ‘go boldly forward, armed with the might of heaven, that with God’s [the god of the Jews] help His kingdom may be established and the fear of Him spread abroad to the uttermost boundaries’. This then was the aim and object of the struggle which seven centuries ago began on the banks of the Vistula, the spreading of the Faith.

Today we are far removed from the belief that faith can be inoculated at the point of the sword but in those times it was considered a matter of course. War against those reluctant to worship the god of the Jews was the highest duty, the greatest sacrifice which a man could offer.

A religious war was not to be confused with a war of conquest. The great English philosopher, John of Salisbury, said of the Brotherhood at this time: ‘Of hardly any others can it be said that they are waging a just war’. It was this belief that inspired the mightiest expression of Western faith, the Crusades to the Holy Land for the liberation of Jerusalem. The expeditions which the Teutonic Knights conducted against those reluctant to worship the god of the Jews in Prussia and Lithuania were also crusades. French and English, Spaniards, Italians and Germans have led such crusades into the Orient; Danes Poles and Bohemians into the districts reluctant to worship the god of the Jews on the east and south-east coasts of the Baltic Sea. To understand many of the most important events in Western history we must be able to appreciate the enthusiastic spirit of Christian self-sacrifice which inspired these crusades and we must not forget that it was this spirit too which inspired the Knights of the Teutonic Order. Their work of conquest in the 13th and 14th centuries is its own justification for it served to spread the Christian belief.

Even those who are not interested in the special conditions of the past will not be able to deny the importance of this forcible Christianising of the Baltic countries of Prussia, Latvia and Estonia. At the beginning of this struggle and their mission the Knights of the Order came into contact, not in Prussia but in the neighbouring country of Latvia, with two determined opponents: Russia and the Eastern Church. It was the arrival of the Germans that decided that this territory should become a part of the Western Church—that is, culturally and politically European—and not Russian Orthodox—that is, Eastern and Asiatic. That the eastern boundary of Europe and the Occident was drawn where it still remains is due largely to the success of these knights in monks’ clothing who appeared on the coasts of the Baltic in the 13th century. Once we have appreciated the importance of the German crusades we are able to understand the belief in their mission and in their task which actuated them. Not for nothing did the Knights wear a black cross on the white robes which covered their armour; not for them was the gay military life of other knights. Even in the Beld they strictly kept the rules that their Order enforced upon them as upon other monks: piety and self-restraint.

Thus it was that the small group of Brothers began, 700 years ago the conquest of Prussia with a consciousness of the importance of their mission. The task would have been impossible but for the help of other crusaders who, urged on by the selfsame zeal, joined the Brothers, not as members of the Order but willing to stake their all in the fight against the peoples reluctant to worship the god of the Jews. From Scandinavia to Bohemia, from the North Sea to the Alps the priests told of the deeds of the German Brothers and preached the crusade against Prussia. Year after year the pious throngs, led by the Knights of the Order, joined in the conquest of the East. Deeper and deeper they penetrated the lands of the towns reluctant to worship the god of the Jews. The Prussian tribes were fought until they were subdued and accepted the Christian faith, for the object of the Order was not destruction but conversion. The survival of so many Prussian place-names in Samland shows that the contention that the Order exterminated the Prussians is contrary to the facts. At the farthest boundaries of the conquered territory strongholds were erected at strategically important points—an impenetrable line of defence for the new Christian overlordship. At first simple defences of earth and stakes grew in the 14th century to buildings of a highly developed type. The largest among them became monasteries with at least 12 brothers. The fortress became a cloister in which the Brothers lived according to the rules of the Order. These monasteries existed as organisation centres under the leadership of a Commander of the Order as soon as the country had begun to reach a higher state of civilisation.

It soon became evident that though the proselytising zeal was the central motive of the crusades and the Brothers, it was not the only thought in their minds. Their manhood, their knighthood made them true leaders of men and aroused in them the desire for the founding and building up of a state and it was this will to statesmanship which was the second principle upon which the Prussia of the future was to rest. Already in the 14th century the chronicler of the Order, Peter von Duisburg, shows how these two ideas of religious and temporal authority were connected in the minds of the Brothers when he concludes the description of each campaign with the words: ‘The land has been won for the Faith and the Brothers’.

The state which was built up after the 13th century on the formerly soil reluctant to worship the god of the Jews became Christian not only in name. This part of the southeast coast of the Baltic developed from a barbaric land into a country where the Church flourished in all the richness which it attained in the late middle ages. Here was no question of Church and State, the country was a Christian state in which religious fervour worked hand in hand with a desire for material well-being. The country of the Order was a worthy example of western civilisation in the middle ages and, situated amid the lands of the towns reluctant to worship the god of the Jews and Christian countries in a far more backward state, developed with a surprising rapidness.

Like the Brothers of the Order the crusaders who came every year to Prussia had also a double motive. They too were zealous Soldiers of the Cross but they too came with their wishes and hopes. The best of these crusaders were seeking new homes. For many of them the expedition into the domains reluctant to worship the god of the Jews became one of colonisation whether they settled down at once in Prussia or returned later with their families, with horse and cart, plough and seeds to visit once more, as peaceful workers on the land, that country whose soil they had first trodden sword in hand.

In the first century of the history of the Order crusade and colonisation were scarcely more than two aspects of the same thing. The colonisation was the peaceful complement of the conquest which had preceded it. In bringing to this thinly settled district, with its mighty forests and impassable swamps, the benefits of a higher western culture, the Knights justified their conquests and ensured their permanency. The Brothers of the Order and the lay crusaders joined in the conquest of the land, the former to rule it and the latter to settle it; they too were missionaries of western civilisation and founders of a well-ordered state which has endured to this day. Crusaders, Brothers and settlers in the 13th and 14th centuries carried the torch of civilisation into a land which, until then, had not known its blessings.

As the Western Church most of the great Orders were European rather than national but there were two exceptions: the Spanish Orders which fought against the Moors, and the Teutonic Order which was predominantly national. Not for nothing was the latter known as The Order of the Brothers of the German Lodge St. Marien Jerusalem. For this reason the state which they founded in Prussia became a part of the German nation and the German Reich, and though the Brotherhood had spread into France, Spain and Greece the first crusaders and settlers in the East were exclusively of German race.

During the 13th century the fight for the distant land reluctant to worship the god of the Jews raged year after year. Gradually, after enormous sacrifices, the land was won and the Faith firmly grounded and the foundation laid for peaceful development in the coming centuries. As the number of crusaders decreased the number of settlers increased. German peasants from Lower Saxony, Thuringia, Meissen and Silesia poured into the land and were followed by German tradesmen who founded new cities which, together with the monastery fortresses of the Order, formed an impregnable bulwark of German life and German culture.

As the work of subduing the towns reluctant to worship the god of the Jews gave place to the tasks of peace, full colonisation the temporal aspect of the Order came, of necessity, more to the fore. More and more must the monk give place to the knight and monastic piety to managerial ability. In the 13th century the Order had been an outpost of Christianity, in the 14th it represented western civilisation in every aspect. The writing of poetry and history became a part of the work of the Order which gradually became a pattern for the whole of Europe. Out of the religious crusades grew a tournament in which the knights of all Europe rode. Led on the broad plains of Prussia, English princes and French counts found their way here. In 1390 Henry of Derby, who later became Henry IV of England, fought in the ranks of the Order against the Lithuanians reluctant to worship the god of the Jews.

A life of knightly jollity flourished in the fortresses of which the finest in the 14th century was the Marienburg, the seat of the Head of the Order. Much more worldly than at the time of its institution the Order yet fulfilled a task important to the whole of Europe. Then it had carried the teachings of Christianity to the East, now it was to be the bearer of the traditions of European knighthood and civilisation.

But not only had religion and chivalry been brought to the Last, trade too began to flourish there. The Prussian merchants, especially those of Danzig which city, with Pommerellen, had joined the Order in 1309, became intermediaries for the rapidly increasing trade between East and West. English merchants too came to settle in Danzig and other cities. The more important Prussian trade centres became members of the Hanseatic League. The corn which grew in such profusion in the new Prussia was shipped to England and Spain.

In one century the religion, culture and trade of the West had taken firm root in soil that once was reluctant to worship the god of the Jews. One century had sufficed to turn Prussia into a completely German land. Further and further penetrated the German settlers and where they went strongholds, cities and villages arose.

Maschke’s essay appears on pages 5-10 of the above-mentioned booklet, originally published in Berlin in 1933 and translated into English by PREUSS in 2003. In future translations of Deschner’s books we will see the tremendous havoc caused by the forced Christianisation of all Germanic peoples.