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Toxic fandom

Editor’s note: On 18 August 2019 this was originally uploaded as a video in YouTube by YezenIRL under the title ‘Forgiving Game of Thrones: An Unpopular Opinion’:

[Tyrion on the Iron Throne] Disclaimer: The following is not necessarily meant to argue whether or not Season 8 of Game of Thrones was good or bad. But rather to challenge the way we as an audience engaged with the story, and reframe our expectations regarding what value we can take from an imperfect work.

Jon: ‘You can forgive all of them. Make them see they made a mistake. Make them understand’.

Dany [Daenerys Targaryen]: ‘I can’t’.

Okay, so I’m back, and we have to talk about Toxic Fandom.

Since Season Eight ended, the internet’s been flooded with countless takes on the ending of Game of Thrones. From fans insisting they know the story better than the writers, to a petition demanding re-shoots, it’s clear that reactions are mixed. And while criticism is important, I think that if we want to be critical of media we should also be critical of our own opinions.

So, in light of some of the extreme reactions we’ve been seeing…

Youtuber: ‘…the worst, the worst, the worst [emphasis in his voice] finale episode in the history of television!’

…I’m gonna say we need to take a step back as a culture, and take a look at ourselves.

[Cersei on the Iron Throne] This kind of reaction isn’t really exclusive to Game of Thrones. Fandoms actually have a history of toxic backlash when things don’t go their way… Now look, I know we all have a right to our opinion and I realise negative opinions are not the same as bullying, but I do have to ask—how much of this is constructive? Do people understand the thing they’re criticising? And, are we maybe overreacting?
 

Part One: What if we’re overreacting?

It’s hard to talk about fandoms without generalising people, because everyone responds to a story in their own way. Some people loved the ending, some hated it, some hated the ideas, and others hated the way they were executed.

Obviously not everything I say can apply to every single person, so in order to be objective, I’m gonna be a nerd and start with some graphs. Looking at the data, there seems to be a distinct sense from the critical community that Game of Thrones fell apart in the last three or four episodes.

Before that, the show was mostly a critical hit. But was this sudden drop in scores actually fair? For me, the show had been struggling for years to depict organic character development and realistic politics. And to be frank, the books Game of Thrones is based on are way too dense and expansive to be accurately adapted to television. The problem so many had with the ending are problems I’ve been seeing for a while now, and so I’ve come to look at the show as kind of a preview for the books.

[Jorah on the Iron Throne] While I understand people’s frustration with certain sloppily handled twists, I’m also kind of just ‘over it’ and prefer to focus more on the core ideas, like what does the ending say about moral certitude and the glorification of war? Or about power, redemption and choice?

In the backlash, these bigger discussions aren’t really being had. Yet, the show-runners that fans are now calling ‘Dumb and Dumber’ are the same ones who’ve been writing the show since Season One, and had been receiving critical acclaim well after they passed the books—as we saw with episodes like ‘Battle of the Bastards’ and ‘The Winds of Winter’.

Stannis: ‘A good act does not wash out the bad. Nor a bad the good’.

Though many repeat the mantra that ‘the problem isn’t what happened, it’s how it was executed’, I don’t think that sentiment captures the full story behind the backlash. And that’s not to say that everything was well executed, but to say that for several years fans have been forgiving and even applauding sloppy writing, because they liked what was happening. For example, the resolution of the ‘Slaver’s Bay’ storyline and the ‘Battle of the Bastards’ aren’t really set up much better than anything in Season Eight. They just have more popular outcomes.

What changed in the last three episodes is that the outcomes got controversial. For example, many believed that defeating the Night King was Jon’s whole arc, and insist that Jon was robbed of his destiny. But even before he encountered the White Walkers, Jon’s conflict was always framed as Love versus Duty—the human heart in conflict with itself. His arc is about making difficult choices, not accomplishing great feats. And in that, Jon is still a chosen hero. It’s just that his heroism isn’t supposed to be cool, or honourable, or even triumphant. The point is that doing the right thing isn’t always totally awesome.

[Brienne on the Iron Throne] That kind of subversion is classic Game of Thrones. I mean: if we look to the beginning, Ned’s arc seemed to be going South to become Hand of the King and solve the mystery of Jon Arryn’s murder. Yet, not only does Ned die, he also never figures out who the real killer was. The true arc was Ned’s inner struggle, and like Jon, the legacy of his actions on the world isn’t immediately apparent.

Tyrion: ‘Ask me again in ten years’.

Not all, but so many of the complaints around the final season come down to some form of ‘this isn’t what I expected’. From the belief that the Night King was the true threat, through the belief that Jon would sit the Iron Throne, to the belief that Jamie’s ending would be more heroic. Which leads us to question: why did the audience have the expectations they did? And what is it about subverted expectations that’s so hard to accept?
 

Part Two: What if Game of Thrones was never meant to be popular?

Throughout its eight-year run, Game of Thrones became what can only be described as a landmark television drama, pushing the limits of what a show could accomplish in terms of scope and story, and gaining popularity approaching that of Star Wars, Harry Potter, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Simply put, the show reached mainstream status, which is complicated.

So for those who don’t know, Game of Thrones is based on this series of gritty fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin, who’d previously been known for writing really weird niche sci-fi, filled with telepathic hive-minds, body-snatching, and Space Catholicism. The books, as well as the early seasons, trade out straightforward character arcs and cathartic victories for messy, soul-crushing realism. I say this to point out that, unlike Star Wars, Harry Potter or the MCU, Martin’s story was probably never meant to be a big crowd-pleaser.

Shireen: ‘Father, help! Please don’t do this, father!’ [she’s being burned alive at the stake as a plea to the Lord of Light]

But with the growing popularity of the show, Season Six and Seven saw Benioff and Weiss shift gears to a more mainstream narrative. There were probably a lot of reasons for this; some business-related, others to do with the challenges of adaptation. But the story that once built up Joffrey as a villain for four seasons, only to have him poisoned by a relatively minor character, became the show that gave every victory to the fan-favourite character that most wanted it.

So of course people expected Jon and Dany to achieve their goals together. Of course they expected Jaime to save King’s Landing from Cersei. They just watched Sansa execute her rapist, and Arya assassinate everyone who took part in the Red Wedding, and Grey Worm kill the slave masters, and the Stark kids avenge their dad. Suddenly, we were being given a steady stream of good triumphing over evil, and people were eating it up.

So, when we got to the messy George R.R. Martin conclusion, audiences were jarred by the lack of cathartic victory. Thus came a flood of emotions from the fandom. People were upset by the execution and content of what happened, and it became hard to draw the line where one feeling ended and the other began.

[The Hound on the Iron Throne] So people stopped looking past flaws in the show’s execution like they used to, and instead fixated on them directly. After all, people don’t need much justification for stuff like ‘Jon is King now!’ or ‘Dany’s finally coming to Westeros!’ like they do for ‘Jaime goes back to Cersei’. We actually saw this already with Stannis Baratheon, whose tragic ending received highly polarised reactions depending on whether or not viewers had high hopes for the character, with his fans accusing the show-runners of intentional character assassination. And what happened with Stannis is now happening on a much larger scale, with much more popular characters.

While we can say that the tragedies of Ned, Catelyn and Rob were better set up, it’s also important to recognise that, thanks to online spoilers most people knew those characters were doomed within a month of starting the show. So those deaths didn’t really betray the people’s idea of who those characters were or shatter their expectations for what the story was supposed to be…

Due to its emphasis on prophecy and mystery, Game of Thrones actually engages in way more of this kind of theory baiting, with a fan community that’s built on piles of online theory discussions. For millions, speculating about Game of Thrones was a key part of enjoying it. Trust me, as a guy who once wrote a weirdly popular fan theory about Bran possessing Jon’s dead body, I know how it is.

And while that speculation was key to bringing together a dedicated fandom, it also led to fans taking an unwarranted sense of ownership over the story. To get even deeper into it, various fan communities even developed vastly different headcanons and would ridicule each other over their wildly different—and as it turns out—equally incorrect expectations.

[Jaime Lannister on the Iron Throne] People have difficulty accepting that Jon’s parentage is meant to subvert the secret lineage trope, revealing it to be a burden rather than a solution, or accepting that the Night King being defeated before the end is meant to reframe the Dark Lord trope—from being an external evil to an internal consequence of the pursuit of power [the social justice warrior Daenerys Targaryen]. Or accepting that Jamie’s story is an exploration of the limits of redemption arcs.

But we also have to bear in mind that Martin came up with the stuff in the 90’s, well before the internet had developed into what it is today. So we can’t blame him for not expecting fans to come to the conclusions that they did.

But it’s fan entitlement that causes literally a hundred percent of misunderstanding being blamed on the writers. At no point are most people accepting that they might have been wrong about anything. This is because people have projected their own ideas of where the story was headed onto the world and characters, and interpreted everything based on those expectations.

[Sansa on the Iron Throne] Basically, I’m saying that people tend to forgive a story that’s sloppily done if it gives them what they wanted. But those same people get hypercritical if a story subverts their expectations in a way that’s upsetting.

Which brings me to my first ever YouTube callout. I’m sure a lot of you have seen [YouTubber] Think Story’s ‘How Game of Thrones Should Have Ended’.

In this video, Think Story recites his fan-fiction of how the story should have played out—abandoning everything subversive and instead just playing out all the most popular fan theories: Jamie kills Cersei; Bran gets stuck in the Night King’s memories; Jon makes the big sacrifice and is remembered as a hero-King, and queen Dany carries forward his legacy. And of course, this video was wildly popular even though it ditches the tough questions Martin asks about war and power, and just offers a conformist fan-fiction about heroes saving the world from [the bad guy of the movies]. So Think Story, thank you for being such a perfect example of mediocrity!

I bring this up because it exposes the entitlement of fandom.

[Samwell on the Iron Throne] Not every story has to please the mainstream. That’s not what Game of Thrones was ever supposed to be. In a world where stories so often fail due to corporate greed, or a lack of creativity, or pandering too hard to a particular demographic, Game of Thrones is actually being punished for the opposite. It’s being punished for keeping through the artistic vision of its author.
 

Part Three: What if I’m wrong?

Ok, so I’ve made some harsh claims. I’ve said that a lot of people’s reactions are being driven by their attachment to an incorrect idea of what the story was supposed to be. As in, I believe the story was always gonna have Jamie choose to die with Cersei, Dany burn King’s Landing, Jon exiled to the Night’s Watch, and Bran chosen as King. That’s the story Martin was always telling, and for the most part, anything else would have been untrue to it.

But what if I’m wrong? Wrong about what’s driving people’s anger, or wrong about the story Martin is telling, or wrong about what’s good?

Jon to Dany in the finale: ‘What about everyone else? All the other people who think they know what’s good?’

Though my channel’s become most widely known for predicting that Bran would be King, I have to admit that over the years I’ve had a ton of theories, and most of them ended up being wrong. Yet, every time, I was so sure that I’d figured things out; that I knew what was good and what this story was supposed to be. Truth is, I’ve always been a little too certain that I’m right about things, and that’s something that I’ve always had to work on, and maybe so do a lot of us.

[Davos on the Iron Throne] And if you notice, that was a big part of the message of Game of Thrones there at the end. That maybe in the process of being so certain that you know what’s good, you aren’t doing anyone any good. Maybe people are out here pointing out plot holes while missing one of the key messages the show tried to deliver; that it’s destructive to be so stuck in our own perspective that we stopped trying to understand.

I mean, does this kind of backlash really benefit anyone? You know, probably not.

I think this need to direct all of our anger at a particular person when we feel let down tends to miss the bigger picture. With Game of Thrones, it’s Benioff and Weiss even though there are much bigger structural issues with adapting A Song of Ice and Fire into a television format. I mean, George R.R. Martin himself splits the story in half for Books Four and Five: a strategy which would have been impossible to do with the television show. Also, he throws in a bunch more characters, and he spent the last eight years writing the sixth book.

Meanwhile, D&D had to not only condense the story, but do it in a fraction of the time. People call them out on rushing the story, but they went one season beyond their initial plan, and spent an entire two years on the final six episodes. They made mistakes, yes, but they did so because they had a hard job…

This is kind of an obvious statement, but television and film is largely driven by the market, and so what gets made will typically be what can reliably turn a profit. On account of just how much goes into shows and movies today, studios avoid taking risks, leading to our current age of remakes, reboots and adaptations.

[Theon on the Iron Throne] When we punish stories that try to be subversive we’re implicitly telling studios to keep playing it safe. So, for better or worse, I appreciate when people have the courage to try something different. We need more different. Frankly, we need more ‘weird’.

Jon: ‘I think you’re making a terrible mistake’.

Mance Rayder: [smirks] ‘The freedom to make my own mistakes was all I ever wanted’.

Which brings me back to the petition and maybe my most controversial point. In a recent interview, actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau [Jaime Lannister] joked that the final season of Game of Thrones would be remade once the million people who signed the petition could all agree on an ending. And while he makes a great point about how it’s impossible to appease every headcanon out there, I do want to challenge his point just a little bit.

Because I actually think it would have been easy to make an ending that was better received than the one we got. Which is actually why David Benioff and D.B. Weiss deserve some credit. It would have been easy for them to abandon Martin’s vision and do a crowd-pleasing ending that people were expecting: Have Jon sword-fight the Night King; have Jamie heroically kill Cersei; have Dany install democracy, and then fly off into the sunset with Jon.

An ending like that isn’t hard to come up with. After all, that sort of fan-service and wish fulfilment is pretty much exactly what they wrote for ‘Battle of the Bastards’, and it received widespread acclaim. Seriously people, the last two episodes of Season Six are not well written. People just liked watching the heroes win.

So despite everything, I respect D&D for trying. For doing a final season that took big risks.

Do I think it was great? No! But it was ambitious, and to me that’s more important. Now, of course—of course!—there are things I would have done differently. Characters that I don’t think were handled well, and valid criticisms to make. But, we should consider that for everything that the show-runners might have gotten wrong, there were probably a ton of things we had wrong too. And instead of obsessing over plot holes, maybe our energy would be better spent trying to reach a better understanding. And appreciating that, despite being really flawed, the ending we got was genuine; not focus-grouped or test-marketed, but an attempt to explore some tough questions about who we are. Which is why we should forgive Game of Thrones.

[Varys on the Iron Throne] Although I can’t tell anyone how to feel, I can suggest that we also be self-critical. Though I can’t necessarily tell people what ideals to live by, I do suggest we try to understand the ideals present in the media we consume, and then make a choice whether or not to apply those messages in our own lives. And though it’s up to each of us to choose what we like and what we can forgive, maybe we owe it to ourselves, when our favourite stories let us down, to remember all of the things that made them our favourite stories in the first place.

Cersei: ‘Our marriage’.

Robert Baratheon: [laughter]

Thanks for watching. [Music]

Categories
St Paul Tom Sunic

The origins of white guilt

In order to tentatively elicit a convincing answer regarding the pathology of White guilt one needs to raise some rhetorical questions about Christian teachings. Why are White Christian peoples, in contrast to other peoples of other races and other religions on Earth, more prone to excessive altruism toward non-White out-groups? Why are guilt feelings practically nonexistent among non-White peoples?

One answer to these questions may be found in Christian teachings that have made up an important pillar of Western civilization over the centuries. Over the last one hundred years, modern Liberal and Communist elites have aggressively promoted those same feeling of White guilt, albeit in their own atheistic, secular and ‘multicultural’ modalities. One must rightfully reject the Liberal or Antifa palaver about White guilt, yet the fact remains that the Vatican, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the German Bishops’ conference, along with all other Christian denominations in Europe and the US today are the loudest sponsors of non-White immigration to Europe and America, as well as the strongest advocates of White guit. The Church’s ecumenical preaching about a global city under one god with all of humanity is fully in accordance with the early Christian dogma on man’s fall and his eventual redemption.

It must be pointed out that early Christian apostles, evangelists and theologians who foisted the dogma of man’s guilt were all by birth and without any exception non-Europeans (St. Augustine, Tertullian, St. Paul, Cyprian, etc.) from North Africa, Syria, Asia Minor and Judea.

Having this in mind, lambasting Islam or Judaism in the present as the sole carriers of aggressive non-European anti-White ideology, as many White nationalists do, while downplaying the Middle-Eastern birthplace of Christianity, cannot be a sign of neither moral nor intellectual consistency.

The Roman poet Juvenal, describes graphically in his satires the Rome of the late first century, a time when the city was swarming with multitudes of Syrian lowlifes, Chaldean star worshippers, Jewish conmen, and Ethiopian hustlers, all of them offering a quick ride to eternal salvation for some and eternal damnation for others.

Similar messianic, redemptive beliefs about the shining future, under the guidance of prominent early Bolshevik agitators, most of them of Jewish origin, have found their new location, two millennia later, among credulous intellectuals and equality-hungry masses. After the fall of Communism, the same messianic drive to punish the guilty ones who defy modern Liberal and multicultural scholasticism found its loudest mouthpiece among US neocons and antifa inquisitors.

This is not the place to rehash Friedrich Nietzsche’s own emotional ravings at Christians, nor quote dozens of thinkers and scholars who had earlier described the psychological link between early Jewish and Christian zealots of first-century Rome and communist commissars of the early twentieth century. Times have changed but the obsession as to how extirpate or reeducate those who doubt the myths of the System haven’t changed a bit.

The psychological profile of US modern-day Antifa zealots and their college professor supporters bears a close resemblance with early uprooted, largely miscegenated, effeminate Christian masses in the late Roman empire. The Jew St. Paul and later on the North African St. Augustine—judging by their own convulsive contrition—suggest that they suffered from bipolar disorder. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (7:18) may be the key to grasping the modern version of neurotic White self-haters put on display by prominent news anchors and humanities professors today: ‘And I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. I want to do what is right, but I can’t. I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway’.

Walter F. Otto, a renowned author on ancient Greek gods and one of the most quoted Hellenistic scholars, describes the differences between the ancient Greek vs. Christian notion of the sacred. He notes that ancient pagan Greeks laid emphasis on the feelings of shame, unaware of the meaning of feelings of guilt…

At some point Whites will need to realise that a successful healing of their feelings of guilt presupposes a critical reassessment of their Judeo-Christian-inspired origins. If Whites in Europe and the US were once upon a time all eager to embrace the Semitic notion of original sin, no wonder that two thousand years later they could likewise be well programmed to put up with a variety of World War II necrophiliac victimhoods, as well as tune in to fake news delivered by their politicians.

Eventually Whites will need to make a decision about where to choose the location of their identity. In Athens or in Jerusalem.

__________

Read it all: here.

Categories
Film

Forthcoming new series

Today I received the complete series of Game of Thrones in German as part of the course that I have imposed myself on the language. But I can take advantage of the course by posting entries about every bad message I see in the notorious HBO series, about which I have already written several articles, especially criticising feminism.

But before doing so I would like to say that the fans, mostly normies, didn’t see any bad message just as the common normie doesn’t see bad messages in other television series or movies.

My standard for judging the evil or goodness in the seventh art is simply the fourteen words. And from this angle even a movie that contains such beautiful moments as The Sound of Music, which I was talking about in my previous post, contains terrible messages.

The anti-Nazi message from The Sound of Music was the first bit of propaganda I received while going to the cinema, fifty-five years ago! Although it was a huge hit at the time, many of the younger generations haven’t seen the film that catapulted the career of the now-deceased Christopher Plummer. That’s why I prefer to focus on the latest hits.

True: unlike Greg Johnson (Trevor Lynch) I don’t have the stomach to watch today’s TV series or movies, although last November I made an exception for Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit.

However, I chose Game of Thrones for my German course because I have used the finale’s message of the series for this blog, and even in one of my books. And the first thing that comes to my mind is that the normies didn’t grasp George R.R. Martin’s philosophy, as we shall see in a subsequent post.

Categories
Music

Christopher Plummer

Yes: he tore down the Nazi flag in The Sound of Music. But the film’s Ländler represents the cinematic pinnacle of how we should dance with Aryan ladies.

I saw The Sound of Music in 1965, when it was released. I was a boy then and was impressed by the elegance of Plummer (1929-2021) when the bride caught up with him on the stairs on their wedding day.

Music reflects a people’s soul. Just compare how people used to dance in Hitler’s homeland with the fashionable music of Gomorrah today…

Categories
Autobiography Beethoven

My father’s tale

I’ll be busy for a few days and won’t post articles until I finish a course. But I would like to leave these lines during my absence. The thing is, when reading Karlheinz Deschner’s chapter on Pope Gregory I came across this sentence:

Archbishop Maximus did public penance in July 599, prostrate after hours in a street and shouting: ‘I have sinned against God and blessed Gregory’.

The anecdote reminded me of a story that my father told me decades ago. A king had to humble himself for days at the doors of the pope’s residence because he feared for the salvation of his soul: begging the Vicar of Christ to forgive him (I think the pope’s name was Gregory). Finally the pope deigned to open the doors and forgive him. My father told me this with enthusiasm, in the sense that even the most powerful king had to humble himself before the headperson of the Roman Catholic Church. The lad I was didn’t like that story, but only much later did I begin to understand my father’s mind.

One of the milestones in understanding why he was so destructive to me was Silvano Arieti’s book that I have already talked about in Day of Wrath. In Father, the sixth book of my series of eleven I quote some passages from Arieti that astonished me and I’m going to explain them with my own examples. Think of the baby monkeys that are sold as pets, how they cling to the owner as if she were a mother (the instinct is hard-wired in the creature as it’s vital not to fall from the trees). The point is that some adults deal with childhood trauma like these young pets do with their owners: by desperately clinging to authoritarian figures.

Arieti mentions his patients who, to use my example, hung themselves like little apes onto substitute images of their parents: a church, a political party, and even their own spouse. In Father I analyse how, in repressing his childhood traumas, he clung to no less than three defensive mechanisms: religion, nationalism, and his wife. But we are talking about pathological levels of hanging onto the surrogate parent, like an ape who never grows. The example that comes to mind is a biographer of Mary Baker Eddy who recounted that one of her most faithful disciples declared that even if she had seen Mrs. Eddy commit a crime, she wouldn’t believe her own eyes!

That is the level of co-dependent subjugation my father wielded regarding his church, the nationalist myths of the country where he was raised, and his wife. So when in my adolescence my mother went crazy my father went crazy too: what in my books I’ve called the captive mind or folie à deux.

I am not going to explain here everything I said in my sixth book in Spanish. The English speaker can order a copy of my first book to get an idea (see Letter to mom Medusa on the sidebar). What I want to get to is that some insecure people tend to fall into a state of folie à deux not only with the wife, but with the church or political party to which they belong. Analogous cases of Eddy’s disciple are endemic, for example, when I try to argue with those who cannot conceive that Mesoamerican Indians ate their children despite the overwhelming evidence from the first ethnologist of the American continent.

Once the defence mechanism is established, for instance the nationalistic pride of some Mexicans, the subject is capable of the most irrational scepticism before the evidence for the simple fact that what he is doing is protecting a worldview, his ego or substitute parent. From this angle we can understand why even some Jew-wise racialists, as we saw in my post yesterday, don’t tolerate that one fails to honour the god of the Jews. That powerful archetype functions like a surrogate parent.

Arieti’s book is entitled Interpretation of Schizophrenia and, although it deals with psychiatric cases, as I read it I realised that it could apply equally to an enormous number of people who have never been diagnosed psychiatrically.

My father comes to mind. He was enthusiastic about the pious tale of the pope who made a king humble himself in Rome. Now many Americans, equally childish, desire a powerful father in the form of the State and are excited that the country of the First Amendment will soon repudiate that amendment. It doesn’t matter whether the defence mechanism is religious or political: the psychological need is the same. Just as Eddy’s disciple wouldn’t believe her eyes as Mrs. Eddy became a god-like figure, I have met people who deny the historicity of Lenin’s and Stalin’s crimes.

The drive that compels us—to quote the lyrics of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—to believe in ‘a loving Father behind the starry vault’ means that Beethoven had a drunken father who, as a child, often beat him. We are mammals and, as the monkey of the anecdote, the unconscious need to have a surrogate father once our dad fails is infinite: a Christian attempt to heal childhood traumas. But it is deceptive magic because Yahweh is not our father, he’s our enemy.

Those who haven’t read my essay ‘God’, a page from one of my eleven books, could read it now.

Categories
Racial right

On Anon’s comment

The reason whites are dying out can be seen in what an Occidental Dissent commenter said about me today, using not my real name but the nickname one of my nephews used with me when he was six:

‘Chechar is a christophobic, godless, insane fool. Avoid him’.

Although the subtitle of Occidental Dissent now reads ‘Nationalism, populism, reaction’, a few years ago it read ‘Western cultural and racial preservation’. But the truth is that the Christians who comment there are not preserving their race: they are attacking it. If they were defending it they wouldn’t use adjectives like christophobic, which implies that it is irrational to feel a phobia towards the son of the god of the Jews. This is analogous to the hackneyed tactic of the left in labelling ‘phobias’ healthy mental states such as homophobia or Islamophobia.

The same can be said of John Anon’s adjective about calling me godless. Remember the culminating part of the masthead of this site, the essay on how Judea seized the spirit of Rome through Christian subversion. After Emperor Theodosius II, only Christianity and Judaism—religions of Semitic origin—were allowed. Everything inherently Aryan or that came from classical culture was forbidden throughout the empire.

The anonymous commenter calls me godless as if I didn’t admire the archetypes that represented the gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon, or the gods of the Germanic peoples who should have conquered Rome instead of being conquered by Rome. (Remember, in a recent instalment of the Christianity’s Criminal History series, how the proud Visigoths had already succumbed to one form of Christianity before they were reconverted to another type of the same religion, Catholicism.)

According to the theology of John Anon, and I suppose of other commenters of that forum for American racialists, one must only honour the god of the Jews (or they call us godless), and follow the precepts of his son Yeshu (or they call us christophobic and fools). But who are really the fools?

The point is that American racialists practice doublethink by claiming to be aware of the Jewish problem when, figuratively, they continue to kiss Yahweh’s feet (see the footnote of my previous post).

Categories
Catholic religious orders Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 135

– For the context of these translations click here –

 
Left, Mass of St. Gregory, c. 1490, attributed to Diego de la Cruz, oil and gold on panel (Philadelphia Museum of Art).

From Gregory I, the humble servant of servants, until the 20th century it is well known that the popes had their feet kissed. The peculiarities were regulated by the ceremonial books. But, as we also know, the one who was actually being kissed was not his foot, but God’s. That is why all the emperors, including Charles V, also regularly performed this ugly rite on the portico of St. Peter’s basilica.

It is understood that Gregory’s personal conscience was marked by the origin, career and status of his character. He always made himself respected by both the clergy and the laity. In modern parlance it could be said that he was a Law-and-order type, a person of order, a former prefect of police, a judge of the criminal who strongly insisted on obedience and discipline, especially by monks and nuns, taking a special interest in their morality—or immorality—as well as in the observance of their vow of poverty.

Gregory used to call his clerics and officials, whose influence was decisive in the Roman municipal administration, ‘soldiers of Peter’ and also ‘soldiers of the Roman Church’ (milites beati Petri, milites Ecclesiae romanae). The first monk elevated to the pontifical throne administered the Lateran almost in the manner of a monastery, populating it in any case with monks, whom he elected to high offices. But he, who adopted the humble monastic catchphrase of ‘servant of the servants of God’—which after his death became an official title of the popes—naturally wanted to be ‘the first servant in the Church of God’ (Altendorf).

Gregory never used the name of St. Peter without the tag ‘prince of the apostles’. He strictly forbade subjects (subditi) to dare to pass judgment on the life of prelates or superiors (praepositi). Even if they were unworthy and justly deserved to be censured, they should not be reproached. Rather, one had to voluntarily embrace the yoke of reverence.

 
The man of double standards

Where he had power, Gregory exercised it without regard, very proud of his justice in front of his subordinates. Archdeacon Lorenzo, who for his sake was preferred in the papal succession and who could not hide his disappointment, lost his post. A year later, Gregory burned him in a solemn ceremony and in the presence of all the clergy ‘for his pride and other crimes’.

Yet more significant is the following event. The monk Justus, a doctor at the Monastery of Saint Andrew, who cared for the increasingly ill pope, confessed to brother Copious that he had hidden three gold coins. When Gregory found out, he rigorously forbade anyone to treat Justus, that no one from the monastery should visit him on his deathbed or assist him. And after his death his corpse had to be thrown with the three coins into a dunghill while the assembly shouted: ‘To hell with you and your money!’

With such severity Gregory understood the monastic vow although, personally, everything that he hadn’t given to his monasteries he sold, distributing the money among the poor. As a monk he was so wealthy that in 587 he was able to make another donation to the Monastery of Saint Andrew (to which with the expression of owner he called ‘my monastery’). Furthermore, at least thirteen years after becoming a Benedictine monk, he still possessed many rustic goods.

Undoubtedly, the pope was also a man of compromise and double standards. As hard as he was always with the defrocked monks and nuns, forcing them to return to the monastery, in the case of nobles he could make exceptions.

Venantius, a patrician of Syracuse and probably a friend of Gregory, left his monastery in contempt of the ecclesiastical precept. He took home the beautiful and dominant lady Italica who made him the father of two girls, also becoming the epicentre of a circle of anti-monastic literati. But Gregory didn’t force him to return to the monastery. He only tried with great effort to convince him to do it voluntarily, although in vain. What is more, he aided the children born of that anti-canonical marriage, proving once more—as Jeffrey Richards, his modern and often benevolent biographer says—‘that in Gregory’s image of the world was a law for the rich, and another for the poor’…

One last example about Gregory’s double standards: When Bishop Andrew beat a poor woman who lived off ecclesiastical charity so barbarically that she died shortly after, the pope simply forbade him to celebrate Mass for two months—perhaps to the satisfaction of the bishop himself. On the contrary, Gregory had ‘all carnal sinners’ locked up in the prisons of the monasteries, so that a modern researcher (Grupp) writes that this ‘evokes the old slaveholders’, taking such crowds into those monastic houses of repression that according to the monk John Climacus—a contemporary of Gregory, somewhat younger than him—they ‘could hardly take a step’.

______________

Editor’s note. ‘But, as we also know, the one who was actually being kissed was not his foot, but God’s’.

This means that even proud kings had to symbolically kiss the feet of the god of the Jews, since the god of the New Testament is the same as the god of the Old Testament.

When will American white nationalists see something so obvious? Or is it that they don’t realise that the Christian religion of our parents is somehow connected with the empowerment of Jewry?

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Evil Racial right

Bleeding Germany dry, 4

‘These facts must be made public so that the balanced moral under­ standing of justice—this being in a state of uncertainty and wavering within the German population from decades of rabble-rousing and lies—shall be restored to the German people’. —Erich Kern

 

Allied violations of international law

The first Germans who were to suffer from ‘liberation’ were the indigenous ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) living in Yugoslavia. In the principal areas of German settlement, that is Banat, Batschka, Baranya and Syrmia, mass executions began already in October 1944 and spread to the Lower Styria (Untersteiermark) region in May 1945.

These mass shootings and other killings were originally planned at the illegal Second Communist Convention of the so-called Anti­ Fascist Council of the National Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ), during the presidency of Ivan Ribar in Jajce, from 29 to 30 November 1943.

The wire-puller of these planned exterminations was the Stalinist Moshe Puade, an underground Communist who, at this conference, demanded the liquidation of all Germans.

The principal doer and the person chiefly responsible was Josip Broz, who entered the annals of terror under the name of Tito. The actual executioners of the mass shootings, in addition to partisans and private local people, were primarily the so-called Peoples’ Liberation Councils, the secret police (OZNA), the peoples’ courts and the execution units of the Aktion Intelligenzija. The aim of the torturing and the shootings, which also claimed the lives of people in the Yugoslav opposition, was to intimidate the masses through terror while destroying their leadership at the same time, thus rendering them vulnerable.

The nature and extent of the unbelievable atrocities equalled in every way those of the Polish, Czech and Soviet crimes, and in Yugoslavia the actual dirty work was often carried out by gypsies. Erich M., a former member of the Wehrmacht, tells of the first foretaste he got during the retreat from Greece through Yugoslavia in the autumn of 1944. He reported seeing

in the region of Welis and Stib, ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) whose tongues were nailed to the table in their homes. The eyes had been gouged out beforehand. Ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) at another place reported that many of their neighbours had been herded into a school. The partisans then doused the school with gasoline and set it on fire. All the peoples, who attempted to escape through the windows, were shot by the partisans. In Stib, Serbia, we found 40 murdered German soldiers in a tile-making factory, who had been stripped naked. Their eyes had been gouged out, and some of them had their genitals cut off. Nearby lay fifteen or twenty female communications personnel, whose genitals had been cut away and stuffed into their mouths.

Josef Kampf, chairman of agricultural organizations in Deutsch­Zerne, witnessed shootings in his home village. He described these events as follows: On 24 October 1944:

Shootings were carried out in all the German settlements. We were witnesses to executions in Zeme. Sixty-eight men and women were bound with strong ropes and led to the place of execution. Behind each column came gypsy escorts armed with clubs. During the march the gypsies were allowed to attack the victims any way they wanted, and this they did beyond all measure, knocking out the eyes of the bound prisoners and smashing their noses, heads and chins, etc. In the process, the gypsies set great store by tormenting the people just at the moment when they were led past their former homes. When someone lost consciousness, he would be dragged along by the rope by the others and beaten by the gypsies, until he was on his feet again. Every so often, when someone could not go on anymore, he would be thrown onto a wagon and hauled to the execution site.

For sheer mockery, all the church bells were ringing. Mounted Serbian men and boys also rode alongside the procession, ringing cowbells in a cacophonic accompaniment. At the execution site the victims were forced to undress, and those who were unable to do so were stripped by the gypsies. Then they were lined up next to the mass grave, in groups of five or six, and shot from behind with submachine guns, but also with single shot rifles. On the meadow next to the place of torment, hundreds of Serbs gathered to watch. Each group following on had to push the previous shot victims into the hole, insofar as these had not fallen in by themselves after being shot. Many in the grave were still alive, attempting to raise themselves and turning in their death­ throes. This was met with laughter from the onlookers, with some of them remarking that those executed were still performing gymnastics. Two days later, there was still movement detected in the mass grave. They did not cover the bodies with earth, as there had to be space available for the next victims.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Editor’s note: This needs to be repeated after every instalment of this book by Claus Nordbruch until it is understood: The main webzines of white nationalism are almost irrelevant because they omit a central fact of the 20th century: the German holocaust. If the story that we have been telling ourselves for the last decades is false (whites only talk about what happened with Jewry in World War II, and this has been grossly exaggerated), the result is what we see now in the West.

Without putting the above historical facts to the fore, all discourse on racialist-run American webzines becomes hot air. (Again, study the links in the sticky post to grasp what we mean.)

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Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Third Reich

Michael’s schizophrenia

I use the term ‘schizophrenia’ in its popular sense of a divided mind, not in the psychiatric sense.

A week ago I honoured the retired revolutionary ideologue Michael O’Meara in the context that, unlike him, white nationalists are merely reactionaries.

Today I came up with the idea to look in the discussion threads of the webzine where O’Meara used to post his articles to see when was the last time O’Meara discussed one of his articles with the commenters. I found out it was a reply to a commenter in one of the threads from September 2012:

No offense taken. I was pleased that someone had commented on the Catholic aspect of the piece. Another take on religion is my ‘Only a God Can Save Us’, archived here at C-C.

O’Meara refers to his article on Nietzsche originally published in The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 2 (Summer 2008), which Greg Johnson later republished in Counter-Currents on July 1, 2010. This means that O’Meara wrote his article before the Spaniard Evropa Soberana published his long essay on Judea vs. Rome, which I later translated and adopted as the masthead of this site.

O’Meara’s last comment in Johnson’s webzine reminds me that, in another of his articles, O’Meara said things about Hitler that denoted a critical spirit towards what, in my opinion, has been the apex of western history to date: the Third Reich.

Years ago I asked a question in one of the discussion threads of this site. I didn’t understand why Solzhenitsyn, who so longed for the destruction of the USSR, had not sided with the Nazis who wanted to destroy Bolshevism even after writing his two non-fiction books: The Gulag Archipelago and 200 Years Together. How was this possible, taking into account that Solzhenitsyn was a hawk during the Vietnam War (insofar as he wanted to prevent communism from spreading)? Roger, a British commenter with great sensitivity to why we should reject the degenerate music of the past decades, replied that it was due to Solzhenitsyn’s Christianity.

The Briton hit the nail. It was Solzhenitsyn’s orthodox Christianity that made him ‘schizophrenic’ in the sense of not siding with the good guys during the greatest conflagration between Good and Evil in Western history (check out my most recent sticky post).

The same with Michael O’Meara, whose parents I guess were Irish Catholics. Although O’Meara was far more courageous than today’s white nationalists in suggesting that only revolutionary thinking can save us, he fell short in not appreciating the greatest mental revolution of our day, embodied in the figure of Hitler. And since unlike Roger most American racialists are sympathetic to Christianity, they will remain as schizophrenic as Solzhenitsyn and O’Meara until they stop idealising everything related to the god of the Jews.

Michael’s ‘Only a (((God))) can save us’ is truly schizophrenic if he has in mind the god of his Catholic parents (triple parenthesis added).