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Christendom New Testament

Christianity:

The communism of antiquity, 4

by Alain de Benoist

 
The ancients believed in the unity of the world, in the dialectical intimacy of man with nature. Their natural philosophy was dominated by the ideas of becoming and alternation. The Greeks equated ethics with aesthetics, the kalôn with the agathôn, the good with beauty, and Renan rightly wrote: ‘A system in which the Venus de Milo is only an idol is a false system, or at least a partial one, because beauty is worth almost as much as goodness and truth. With such ideas, a decline in art is inevitable.’ (Les apótres, p. 372). The ‘new man’ of Christianity professed a very different vision of things. He carried within himself a conflict, not the everyday one that forms the fabric of life, but an eschatological, absolute conflict: the divorce from the world.

Early Christianity extends the messianic idea present in Judaism in an exacerbated form, due to a millennial expectation. In the words attributed to Jesus we find literal quotations from the visions of the Book of Enoch. For the first Christians, the world, a mere stage, a vale of tears, a place of unbearable difficulties and tensions, needed compensation, a radiant vision that would justify (morally speaking) the impotence of here below. That is why the earth appears as the field on which the forces of Evil and Good, the prince of this world and the heavenly Father, those possessed by the devil and the sons of God, confront each other: ‘And this is the victory that has overcome the world: our faith’ (I John V, 4). The idea that the world belongs to Evil, later characteristic of certain Gnostics (the Manicheans), appears frequently in the first writings of Christianity. Jesus himself affirmed: ‘I do not pray for the world…, as I am not of the world’ (John XVII, 9-14). St. John insists: ‘Do not love the world, nor the things that are in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world.’ (I John II, 15-16.) ‘Do not be surprised if the world hates you.’ (Ibid. III,13). ‘We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.’ (Ibid. V, 19.) Later, the Rule of St. Benedict will state as a precept that monks must ‘make themselves strangers to the things of the world’ (A saeculi actius se facere alienum). In the Imitation of Christ we read: ‘The truly wise man is he who, in order to gain Christ, considers all the things of the earth as rubbish and dung.’ (I, 3, 5).

In the midst of the great artistic and literary renaissance of the first two centuries, Christians, as outsiders who pleased to be so, remained indifferent or, more often, hostile. Biblical aesthetics rejected the representation of forms, the harmony of lines and volumes; consequently, they had only a disdainful look on the statues that adorned squares and monuments. For the rest, everything was an object of hatred. The colonnades of temples and covered walks, the gardens with their fountains and domestic altars where a sacred flame flickered, the rich mansions, the uniforms of the legions, the villas, the ships, the roads, the works, the conquests, the ideas: everywhere the Christian saw the mark of the Beast. The Fathers of the Church condemned not only luxury, but also any profane work of art, colourful clothing, musical instruments, white bread, foreign wines, feather pillows (had not Jacob rested his head on a stone?) and even the custom of cutting one’s beard, in which Tertullian sees ‘a lie against one´s own face’ and an impious attempt to improve the work of the Creator.

The rejection of the world became even more radical among the early Christians because they were convinced that the Parousia (the return of Jesus Christ at the end of time) was going to take place immediately. It was Jesus himself who had promised it to them: ‘Assuredly, I say to you, some who are standing here will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.’ (Matthew XVI, 28). ‘Assuredly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have happened.’ (Matthew XXIV, 34). In view of this, they repeated the good news more and more. But the end of all things is at hand (I Peter IV, 7). ‘It is the last time’ (I John II, 18). Paul returns again and again to this idea. To the Hebrews: ‘Therefore cast not away your confidence, which has great reward… For yet a little while, and He that shall come will come, and will not delay’ (Hebrews X, 35-37). ‘Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together… but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the day approaching’ (Ibid., X, 25). To the Thessalonians: ‘Stand firm, for the coming of the Lord is at hand.’ To the Corinthians: ‘Brothers, the time is short; therefore let those who have wives be as though they had none…’ (I Cor. VII, 29). To the Philippians: ‘The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything…’ (Phil. IV, 5 and 6).

In his dialogue with Trypho, Justin affirms that Christians will soon be gathered in Jerusalem, and that it will be for a thousand years (LXXX – LXXXII). In the second century, the Phrygian Montanus declares that he foresees the imminence of the end of the world. In Pontus, Christian peasants abandon their fields to await the day of judgment. Tertullian prays pro mora fines, ‘that the end may be delayed.’ But time passed and nothing happened. Generations disappeared, one after another, without having seen the glorious advent; and faced with the continual delay of its eschatological hopes, the Church, giving proof of prudence, ended by resigning itself to placing the Parousia in an undetermined ‘beyond.’ Today only Jehovah’s Witnesses repeat on a fixed date: ‘Next year in the Jerusalem of heaven.’

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Quotable quotes

Adolf quote

‘The doom of a nation can be averted only by a storm of flowing passion, but only those who are passionate themselves can arouse passion in others’.

—Hitler

Categories
Theology

Myth vision

Editor’s note: I feel compelled to include this recent communication from our friend Gaedhal because on this site, in promoting the work of Richard Miller, I have been using Derek Lambert’s interviews of Miller (Derek vlogs at MythVision Podcast). Miller’s New Testament scholarship is impeccable, but young Derek still has much to learn from the older folks. Gaedhal wrote:
 

______ 卐 ______

 
I include Derek from MythVision on this thread, although I removed him over the Robert Price thing. The Zionist video he released with his ex-military father in the wake of October 7th removed any doubt in my mind that this was the correct choice. Also, on MythVision, some theisms—i.e. The Orthodox Judaism of the likes of Tovia Singer—seem to be more equal than others. I think that even Kipp Davis—arguably an “apologist enabler” himself—recently called Tova Singer’s “scholarship” deplorable. I like Tovia, and, indeed, I learn a lot of Hebrew vocabulary from him, as he can slip seamlessly betwixt English and Ashkenzic Hebrew. Tovia will regularly, from memory, quote the Tenakh in Hebrew from memory. Although I like Tovia, nevertheless, orthodox Judaism is every bit as false and harmful as every other theism.

My view is that all apologists are cynical conmen. I would love to believe otherwise, though. I would love to believe that they were simply the other side of the argument; that there were good sensible reasons to believe in Classical Theism, even if I personally disbelieved in it; that there were good sensible reasons to believe in Christianity, even if I personally disbelieved in it.

However, this is not the case. Of all the theisms, Classical Theism is the most untenable. Of all the revealed religions, the claims of Christianity are extremely untennable indeed. At best, there is no better reason to believe that an Undead Jesus Christ floated off into the sky than that Mohommed flew to Jerusalem on a wingéd horse.

As Pocket locker 86, linked here, points out: there is no honest way to defend something that is untrue.

Thus the grifters, psychotics, psychopaths, morons and fraud-artists who make up the rogues gallery of Christian apologists. I do not, in the slightest, hate Christians or theists. Indeed, I remain a secular Catholic who is uncomfortable with the label: atheist.

Now, to be clear, one can be intelligent, empathetic, sincere, etc. and have a sincere religious faith. However, in my view, the field of apologetics itself being intrinsically fraudulent, it is impossible to be an honest apologist. An honest apologist is, to me at least, an oxymoron.

The fake credentials of some Christian apologists, such as “Doctor” Stephen Boyce—billed as a doctor by MythVision, in its description, at the time of writing!

I linked to Chrissy Hansen’s article questioning Boyce’s doctorate and my comment was deleted.

Pocket locker 86 would say: “whose side are you on!” i.e., are you on the side of us counter-apologists who wish to expose scam artists like Boyce, or are you on the side of the scam artists who are trying to conceal their scam?

And this brings me to another point that Pocket Locker 86 points out: Apologists will only pretend to be your friend, and will only agree to go on your channel, if you pull your punches, and play nice with them. If you point out that their credentials are at best dubious, they will probably demand that such a comment be deleted.

It is interesting that Hansen, a transgender Norse polytheist, has retreated from the limelight following the election of Trump.

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Evil Michael O'Meara

America’s

unpardonable crime

Or:

In committing the matricide of Europe
Americans heaped-up their own funeral pyre

 

On June 5, 2012 I reposted this article, originally posted on Counter-Currents, that is worth reposting in 2025 because I just realised that it was lost when I migrated it from WordPress, and although I just restored it, I just saw on my stats page that one visitor didn’t manage to see it today.

In 2012 I still believed it was possible to save the US, and even considered myself a radical white nationalist. It’s been a dozen years since we reposted it from C-C, and in the comments section of the old incarnation of this site, Sebastian Ronin commented:

As eloquent and penetrating as O’Meara can be, even he is blind to the blind spot, re “At that moment, white Americans will be called on, as New World Europeans.”

Amerika is a racial and cultural abortion. The scalpel of pop culture has performed a lobotomy on racial memory, with the full and eager endorsement of the patient. There can be no “European Amerikans” nor “New World Europeans.”

It’s amazing how I’ve changed since 2012. I now see NS and WN as very different animals. Anyway, Michael O’Meara, the best author C-C had in the past, wrote:
 

______ 卐 ______

 
In the Summer of 1942—while the Germans were at the peak of their powers, totally unaware of the approaching fire storm that would turn their native land into an inferno—the philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote (for a forth-coming lecture course at Freiberg) the following lines, which I take from the English translation known as Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”:[1]

“The Anglo-Saxon world of Americanism”—Heidegger noted in an aside to his nationalist/ontological examination of his beloved Hölderlin—“has resolved to annihilate Europe, that is, the homeland, and that means: [it has resolved to annihilate] the commencement of the Western world.”

In annihilating the commencement (the origins or breakout of European being)—and thus in annihilating the people whose blood flowed in American veins—New World Europeans, unknowingly, destroyed the essence of their own being—by disowning their origins—denigrating the source of their life-form, denying themselves, thus, the possibility of a future.

“Whatever has commencement is indestructible.”

Americans destined their self-destruction by warring on their commencement—by severing the root of their being.

But Europe—this unique synergy of blood and spirit—cannot be killed, for her essence, Heidegger tells us, is the “commencement”—the original—the enowning—the perpetual grounding and re-asserting of being.

Europe thus always inevitably rises again and again—like she and her bull from under the waters, which sweep over her, as she undauntedly plunges into what is coming.

Her last stand is consequently always her first stand—another commencement—as she advances to her origins—enowning the uncorrupted being of her beginning—as she authenticates herself in the fullness of a future which enables her to begin over and over.

______ 卐 ______

 
The opposite holds as well.

America’s annihilation of her commencement revealed her own inherent lack of commencement.

From the start, her project was to reject her European origins—to disown the being that made her who she was—as her Low Church settlers pursued the metaphor of Two Worlds, Old and New.

For Heidegger, America’s “entry into this planetary war is not [her] entry into history; rather, it is already, the ultimate American act of American ahistoricality and self-devastation.”

For having emerged, immaculately conceived, from the jeremiad of her Puritan Errand, America defined herself in rejection of her past, in rejection of her origins, in rejection of her most fundamental ontological ground—as she looked westward, toward the evening sun and the ever-expanding frontier of her rootless, fleeting future, mythically legitimated in the name of an “American Dream” conjured up from the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.

Americans, the preeminent rational, rootless, uniform homo oeconomics, never bothered looking ahead because they never looked back. Past and future, root and branch—all pulled up and cut down.

No memory, no past, no meaning.

In the name of progress—which Friedrick Engels imagined as a “cruel chariot riding over mounds of broken bodies”—American being is dissolved in her hurly-burly advance toward the blackening abyss.

Yet however it is spun, it was from Europe’s womb that Americans entered the world and only in affirming the European being of their Motherland and Fatherhood was there the possibility of taking root in their “New” World—without succumbing to the barbarians and fellaheen outside the Mother-soil and Father-Culture.

Instead, America’s founders set out to reject their mother. They called her Egyptian or Babylonian—and took their identity—as the “elect,” the “chosen,” the “light to nations”—from the desert nomads of the Old Testament—alien to the great forests of our Northern lands—envious of our blue-eye, fair-hair girls—repelled by the great-vaulted heights of our Gothic Cathedrals.

The abandonment of their original and only being set Americans up as the perpetual fixers of world-improvement—ideological champions of consummate meaninglessness—nihilism’s first great “nation”.

______ 卐 ______

 
While Heidegger was preparing his lecture, tens of thousands of tanks, trucks, and artillery pieces started making their way from Detroit to Murmansk, and then to the Germans’ Eastern front.

A short time later, the fires began to fall from the sky—the fires bearing the curse of Cromwell and the scorched-earth convictions of Sherman—the fires that turned German families into cinders, along with their great churches, their palatial museums, their densely packed, sparkling-clean working-class quarters, their ancient libraries and cutting-edge laboratories.

The forest that took a thousand years to become itself perishes in a night of phosphorous flames.

It would be a long time—it hasn’t come yet—before the Germans—the People of the Center—the center of Europe’s being—rise again from the rubble, this time more spiritual than material.

______ 卐 ______

 
Heidegger could know little of the apocalyptic storm that was about to destroy his Europe.

But did he at least suspect that the Führer had blundered Germany into a war she could not win? That not just Germany, but the Europe opposing the Anglo-American forces of Mammon would also be destroyed?
 

______ 卐 ______

 
“The concealed spirit of the commencement in the West will not even have the look of contempt for this trial of self-devastation without commencement, but will await its stellar hour from out of the releasement and tranquility that belong to the commencement.”

An awakened, recommencing Europe promises, thus, to repudiate America’s betrayal of herself—America, this foolish European idea steeped in Enlightenment hubris, which is to be forgotten (as a family skeleton), once Europe reasserts herself [emphasis added by Ed.].

In 1942, though, Heidegger did not know that Europeans, even Germans, would soon betray themselves to the Americans, as the Churchills, Adenauers, Blums—Europe’s lickspittle—rose to the top of the postwar Yankee pyramid designed to crush every idea of nation, culture, and destiny.

That’s Europe’s tragedy.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Once Europe awakes—it will one day—she will re-affirm and re-assert herself—no longer distracted by America’s glitter and tinsel, no longer intimidated by her hydrogen bomb and guided missiles—seeing clearly, at last, that this entertainment worthy of Hollywood conceals an immense emptiness—her endless exercises in consummate meaninglessness.

Incapable therefore of beginning again, having denied herself a commencement, the bad idea that America has become is likely, in the coming age of fire and steel, to disintegrate into her disparate parts.

At that moment, white Americans will be called on, as New World Europeans, to assert their “right” to a homeland in North America—so that there, they will have a place at last to be who they are.

If they should succeed in this seemingly unrealizable fortune, they will found the American nation(s) for the first time—not as the universal simulacrum Masons and deists concocted in 1776—but as the blood-pulse of Europe’s American destiny.

“We only half-think what is historical in history, that is, we do not think it at all, if we calculate history and its magnitude in terms of the length… of what has been, rather than awaiting that which is coming and futural.”

Commencement, as such, is “that which is coming and futural”—that which is the “historical in history”—that which goes very far back and is carried forward into every distant, unfolding future—like Pickett’s failed infantry charge at Gettysburg that Faulkner tells us is to be tried again and again until it succeeds.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
“We stand at the beginning of historicality proper, that is, of action in the realm of the essential, only when we are able to wait for what is to be destined of one’s own.”

“One’s own”—this assertion of ourselves—Heidegger contends, will only come if we defy conformity, convention, and unnatural conditioning to realize the European being, whose destiny is ours alone.

At that moment, if we should succeed in standing upright, in the way our ancestors did, we will reach ahead and beyond to what is begun through every futuristic affirmation of who we European-Americans are.

This reaching, though, will be no “actionless or thoughtless letting things come and go… [but] a standing that has already leapt ahead, a standing within what is indestructible (to whose neighborhood desolation belongs, like a valley to a mountain).”

For desolation there will be—in this struggle awaiting our kind—in this destined future defiantly holding out a greatness that does not break as it bends in the storm—a greatness certain to come with the founding of a European nation in North America—a greatness I often fear that we no longer have in ourselves and that needs thus to be evoked in the fiery warrior rites that once commemorated the ancient Aryan sky gods, however far away or fictitious they have become.

—Winter 2010

_______________

[1] Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’, trans W. McNeill and J. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 54ff.

Categories
Catholic Church Christendom

Christianity:

The communism of antiquity, 3

by Alain de Benoist

 
Christianity, ‘an Eastern religion by its origins and fundamental characteristics’ (Guignebert), infiltrated ancient Europe almost surreptitiously. The Roman Empire, tolerant by nature, paid no attention to it for a long time. In Suetonius’ Life of the Twelve Caesars, we read of an act of Claudius: ‘He expelled from Rome the Jews, who were in continual ferment at the instigation of a certain Chrestos’. On the whole, the Greco-Latin world remained at first closed to preaching. The praise of weakness, poverty, and ‘madness’, seemed to them foolish. Consequently, the first centres of Christian propaganda were set up in Antioch, Ephesus, Thessalonica and Corinth. It was in these great cities, where slaves, artisans and immigrants mingled with merchants, where everything was bought and sold, and where preachers and enlightened men, in ever-increasing numbers, vied to seduce motley and restless crowds, that the first apostles found fertile ground.

Causse, who was a professor at the Protestant theology faculty of the University of Strasbourg, writes: ‘If the apostles preached the Gospel in the village squares, it was not only because of a wise missionary policy, but because the new religion was more favourably received in these new surroundings than by the old races attached to their past and their soil. The true Greeks were to remain alien and hostile to Christianity for a long time. The Athenians had greeted Paul with ironical indifference: “You will tell us another day!” it was to be many years before the old Romans would abandon their aristocratic contempt for that detestable superstition. The early Church of Rome was very little Latin, and Greek was scarcely spoken in it. But the Syrians, the Asiatics and the whole crowd of the Graeculi received the Christian message with enthusiasm’ (Essai sur le conflit du christianisme primitif et de la civilisation, Ernest Leroux, 1920).

J.B.S. Haldane, who considered fanaticism as one of the ‘four truly important inventions made between 3000 B.C. and 1400’ (The Inequality of Man, Famous Books, New York, 1938), attributed its paternity to Judeo-Christianity. Yahweh, the god of the Arabian deserts, is a lonely and jealous god, exclusive and cruel, who advocates intolerance and hatred. ‘Do I not hate those who hate you, O Yahweh, and do I not rage against your enemies? I hate them and regard them as my enemies’ (Psalm 139:21 and 22). Jeremiah implores: ‘You will give them their due, O LORD, and your curse will be upon them! You will pursue them in anger and exterminate them from under heaven’ (Lamentations, 111, 64-66). ‘Surely, O God, you will surely put to death the wicked’ (Psalm 139:19). ‘And in Your mercy You will dispel my enemies, and destroy all the adversaries of my soul…’ (Psalm 143:12). Wisdom, who personifies the infinitely good, threatens: ‘I too will laugh at your misfortune, I will mock when your fear comes upon you’ (Prov. I, 26). Deuteronomy speaks of the fate that must be reserved for ‘idolaters’: ‘If your brother, your mother´s son, your daughter, or the woman who lies in your bosom, or your friend, who is like yourself, should incite you in secret, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods”, whom you do not know…, you shall first kill him; your hand shall be laid upon him first to put him to death, and then the hand of all the people shall be laid upon him. When you hear that in one of the cities which Yahweh grants you to dwell, it is said that unworthy men have arisen who have seduced their fellow citizens, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods!” which you do not know, you shall inquire, and if you see that such an abomination is true, you shall smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword; you shall consecrate it to extermination, as well as all that is in it. You shall gather all its spoil amid its streets, and burn the city and all its prey in the fire to the honour of the LORD your God. Thus it shall become a perpetual heap of ruins, and shall not be rebuilt…’ (Deut. XIII).

In the Gospel, Jesus says, when they come to arrest him: ‘…for all who take the sword will perish by the sword’ (Matthew XXVI, 52). But before that he had said: ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man´s enemies will be those of his household’ (Matthew X, 34-36). He also pronounced the phrase that is the motto of all totalitarianism: ‘He who is not with me is against me’ (Matthew XII, 30).

The early Church will scrupulously apply such slogans. Unbelievers and pagans are subhumans in the eyes of the apostles. St. Peter compares them to ‘irrational animals, born to be taken and destroyed’ (2 Peter II, 12). Jerome advised the converted Christian to kick the body of his mother if she tried to prevent him from leaving her forever to follow the teachings of Christ. In 345, Fermicus Maternus made slaughter a duty: ‘The law forbids, most holy emperors, to spare either son or brother. It forces us to punish the woman we love tenderly and to plunge the iron into her breast. It puts weapons in our hands and orders us to turn them against our closest friends…’

From then on, the evangelical practice of charity will be strictly subordinated to the degree of adherence to mysteries and dogmas. Europe will be evangelized by iron and fire. Heretics, schismatics, freethinkers and pagans will be, renewing the gesture of Pontius Pilate, handed over to the secular arm to be subjected to torture and death. Denunciation will be rewarded with the attribution of the property of the victims and their families. Those who, ‘having understood the judgment of God,’ wrote St. Paul, ‘are worthy of death’ (Romans, I, 32). Thomas Aquinas specifies: ‘The heretic must be burned.’ One of the canons adopted at the Lateran Council declares: ‘They are not murderers who kill heretics’ (Homicidas non esse qui heretici trucidant). By the bull Ad extirpenda, the Church will authorize torture. And, in 1864, Pius IX proclaimed in the Syllabus: ‘Anathema be he who says that the Church has no right to use force, that it has no direct or indirect temporal power’ (XXIV).

Voltaire, who knew how to add up, had counted the victims of religious intolerance from the beginnings of Christianity to his time. Taking into account exaggerations and making a large allowance for the benefit of the doubt, he found a total of 9,718,000 people who had lost their lives ad majorem Dei gloriam. Compared to this figure, the number of Christians killed in Rome under the sign of the palm (a symbol of martyrdom and glorious resurrection in early Christianity) seems insignificant.

‘Gibbon believes he can affirm’ —writes Louis Rougier— ‘that the number of martyrs throughout the entire Roman Empire, over three centuries, did not reach that of Protestants executed in a single reign and exclusively in the provinces of the Netherlands, where, according to Grotius, more than one hundred thousand subjects of Charles V died at the hands of the executioner. However conjectural these calculations may be, it can be said that the number of Christian martyrs is small compared with the victims of the Church during the fifteen centuries: the destruction of paganism under the Christian emperors, the fight against the Arians, the Donatists, the Nestorians, the Monophysites, the Iconoclasts, the Manicheans, the Cathars and the Albigensians, the Spanish Inquisition, the wars of religion, the dragonads of Louis XIV, pogroms of the Jews… Faced with such excesses, we can ask ourselves, with Bouché-Leclercq, ‘whether the benefits of Christianity (however great) have not been more than compensated for by the religious intolerance which it borrowed from Judaism to spread throughout the world’… (Celse contre les chrétiens, Copernic, 1977).

Categories
Quotable quotes

Adolf quote

‘Struggle is the father of all things. It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle’.

—Adolf Hitler

Categories
Sticky post

Tom Goodrich (1947-2024)

Without having read Hellstorm, the darkest hour for the white race will never be understood (book-review here). If you’ve already read it, check out ‘The Wall’.

Categories
Philosophy of history Racial right

Christianity:

The communism of antiquity, 2

by Alain de Benoist

Editor’s Note:

The epigraph to this February 1977 essay, originally published in French, appears here.

As can be seen in the hatnote that provisionally appears in the latest version of ‘The Wall’, unlike others, this racialist site has as its primary focus Christianity because to save the Aryan from the miscegenation that is destroying him, we must first identify the Enemy.

One of the reasons why the helicopter visitors never come down but leave me preaching in the desert is because I am like the child who says the king is naked.

‘Tell me what your holidays are and I’ll tell you who you really worship: the Aryan or the Jew’. When even white nationalists celebrate the birth of a Jew on December 25th, and also celebrate the year 2025 from the supposed birth of that kike instead of honouring the birth of our Aryan saviour on April 20th, it becomes clear that they are, ultimately, traitorous neonormies…[1]

What the racial right doesn’t yet understand is that it is impossible to avoid getting into trouble as long as we remain in trance with the religion of our parents. Those who believe that by celebrating the birth of the unhistorical Yeshu it is possible to save the Aryan, should ponder the words of their countryman Mark Twain: ‘It ain´t what you know that gets you into trouble. It´s what you know for sure that just ain´t so’.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
In his account of the wars against the Persians, Herodotus attributes the success of the small Greek cities against the mighty Iranian Empire to the ‘intellectual superiority’ of their compatriots. Would he also have explained their decline by their ‘inferiority’? The question of why cultures disappear and empires collapse has always preoccupied historians and philosophers. In 1441, Leonardo Bruni spoke of the vacillatio of the Roman Empire; his contradictor, Flavio Biondo, preferred the term inclinatio (which summed up, for Renaissance man, the abandonment of ancient customs). The debate was already set: was the Empire destroyed or collapsed on its own? For Spengler, the alternations that have occurred throughout history are the result of inevitability. The identifiable causes of a decline are only secondary causes. They accentuate, and accelerate a process, but they can only intervene when that process has begun. But it is also possible to think that no internal necessity fixes an end to cultures: when they die, it is because someone kills them. André Piganiol’s opinion is well known: ‘Roman civilisation did not die a natural death. It was assassinated’ (L’Empire chrétien,1947). In this case, the responsibility of the ‘assassins’ is complete. However, we can admit that only structures already very weakened, devoid of energy, abandon themselves to the blow that wounds them, to the enemy on the prowl. Voltaire, who was, after Machiavelli, one of the first to speak of historical cycles, said that the Roman Empire had fallen simply because it existed, ‘since everything must have an end’ (Philosophical Dictionary, 1764).

We will not attempt here to find out whether or not the fall of Rome was irremediable, or even to identify all the factors that contributed to its fall, but to examine what responsibility the nascent Christianity bears for its fall.

It is well known that it was the Briton Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) who first established that responsibility, in chapters XV and XVI of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, six thick volumes of which appeared between 1776 and 1778. Before him, in 1576, Löwenklav had defended Emperor Julian, whose talent, temperance and generosity he praised, thus opening a breach in the doctrine which claimed that Christian emperors had been, by the privilege of their faith alone, superior to pagans. Shortly afterwards, the jurisconsult and diplomat Grotius (1583-1645) endorsed Erasmus’ thesis on the Germanic origin of the Neo-Latin aristocracies. Finally, in 1743, Montesquieu attributed the decline and fall of Rome to various factors, such as the extinction of the old families, the loss of civic spirit, the degeneration of institutions, the collusion between administrative power and business fortunes, the high birth rate of the foreign population, the wavering loyalty of the legions, and so on. Better documented than his predecessors, Gibbon took up all these elements anew, ready to write an ‘unbiased history’. His conclusions, tinged with an irony inherited from Pascal, remain essentially valid.

Portrait of Edward Gibbon (1737-1794).

In the 19th century, Otto Seeck (History of the Decline of the Ancient World, 1894), drawing on an idea of Montesquieu, as well as certain considerations of Burckhardt (in his Epoch of Constantine, 1852-1853) and Taine, insisted on a biological and demographic factor: the disappearance of the elites (Ausrottung der Besten), accompanied by the senescence of institutions and the importance gained by the plebs and the crowd of slaves, who constituted the first clientele of Christian preachers. This thesis was adopted by M.P. Nilsson (Imperial Rome, 1926), after having been confirmed by Tenney Frank, who, after examining some 13,900 funerary inscriptions, concluded that, from the 2nd century onwards, 90% of the population of Rome was of foreign origin (American Historical Review, XXI, 1916, p. 705).

In Marcus Aurelius (1895), Renan made his own one of Nietzsche’s formulas: ‘During the third century, Christianity sucks in ancient society like a vampire’. And he added this sentence, which echoes so many times today: ‘In the third century, the Church, by monopolising life, exhausted civil society, bled it, made it empty. Small societies killed big society’ (pp. 589 and 590). In 1901, Georges Sorel (1847-1922) published an essay on The Ruin of the Ancient World. ‘The action of Christian ideology,’ he argued, ‘broke down the structure of the ancient world like a mechanical force working from within. Far from being able to say that the new religion infused new lifeblood into an ageing organism, we might say that it left it exhausted. It severed the ties between the spirit and social life, and sowed everywhere the seeds of quietism, despair and death’.

For his part, Michael Rostovtzeff (Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, 1926), opposing Seeck on certain points, and also Max Weber (Social Origins of the Decline of Ancient Civilisation, 1896), posed an essential question: ‘Is it possible to extend a high civilisation to the lower classes without lowering its level, without diluting its value to the point of making it disappear? Is not all civilisation, from the moment it begins to penetrate the masses, doomed to decadence?’ Ortega y Gasset was to answer him, in The Revolt of the Masses: ‘The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of subversion, of the empire of the masses, who absorb and annul the ruling minorities and take their place’.

This overview would be incomplete if we omitted to mention three works which appeared at the beginning of the century and which seem to us to herald the rise of modern criticism: L’intoleránce religieuse et la politique (Flammarion, 1911), by Bouché-Leclercq; La propagande chréthienne et les persecutions (Payot, 1915), by Henri-F. Secrétan, and Le christianisme antique (Flammarion, 1921) by Charles Guignebert.

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[1] Check out the April 20th posts on the major American racialist forums and webzines, and you’ll see that they don’t celebrate the birth of Uncle Adolf.

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‘Thank you, and have a great new year. You have brought me a very long way crossing the Rubicon’. —W. R. (January 1st, 2025)