web analytics
Categories
Julian (novel) Literature

Julian, 58

– IX –

Julian Augustus

It was mid-October when I arrived in Milan. The weather was dry and the air so clear that one could see with perfect clarity those blue alps which separate civilization from barbarism, our world of sun from that melancholy green forest where dwells Rome’s nemesis.

Just before the city’s gate we were met by one of Constantius’s eunuchs, a gorgeous fellow with many chins and an effortless sneer. He did not salute me as is proper, a bad omen. He gave the commander of my guard a letter from the Emperor. When I saw this, I began to recite the first of the passwords I should need when I arrived in the kingdom of the dead. But I was not to be dispatched just yet. Instead I was taken to a house in one of the suburbs. Here I was imprisoned.

Imprisonment exactly describes my state. I was under heavy guard. During the day, I was allowed to stroll in the atrium. But at night I was locked in my bedroom. No one could visit me, not that there was anyone in Milan I wanted to see or who wanted to see me, excepting the Empress Eusebia. Of my household, I was allowed to keep only two boys and two men. The rest were transferred to the imperial palace. There was no one I could talk to. That was the greatest hardship of all. I should have been pleased to have had even a eunuch for company!

Why was I treated this way? I have since pieced the story together. While I was in Athens, a general named Silvanus was proclaimed Augustus in Gaul. I am convinced that at heart he was innocent of any serious desire to take the purple, but the enmity of the court eunuchs drove him to rebellion.

As soon as this happened, Constantius arrested me because he was afraid that I might take advantage of the defection of Gaul to rise against him in Attica. As it turned out, before I reached Milan, Silvanus was dead at Cologne. Constantius’ luck in civil war had proved itself again.

But the death of Silvanus did not solve the problem of Julian. While I was locked up in that suburban villa, the old debate was reopened. Eusebius wanted me put to death. Eusebia did not. Constantius kept his own counsel.

I prepared several letters to Eusebia, begging her to intercede with the Emperor that I might be allowed to return to Athens. But I finally decided not to send her any message, for Constantius’s suspicions were easily aroused, to say the least, and any exchange between his wife and his heir presumptive would not only be known to him but would doubtless turn him against both of us. I did the wise thing.

At dawn, on the thirteenth day of my captivity, my life altered forever. I was awakened by a slave banging on the bedroom door. “Get up, Lord! Get up! A message from the Augustus!” Fully clothed, I leapt out of bed. I then reminded the slave that until someone unlocked the door I could hardly receive the imperial messenger.

The door flew open. The commander of my guard was beaming. I knew then that the divine will had begun its work. I was to be spared.

“A messenger, sir. The Emperor will receive you tonight.” I stepped into the atrium and got my first taste of what it is like to be in favour. The house was now full of strangers. Fat eunuchs in gaudy silk; clerks from various government offices; tailors; sandalmakers; barbers; youthful officers drawn to what might be a new sun and source of honour. It was dizzying.

The messenger from Constantius was no other than Arintheus, who serves with me now in Persia. He is remarkably beautiful, and the army loves him in that fervent way armies have of loving handsome officers. He is auburn-haired and blue-eyed, with a strong, supple body. He is completely uneducated, but brave and shrewd in warfare. His only vice is an excessive fondness for boys, a practice I usually find unseemly in generals. But the men are amused by his sensuality. Also, he is a cavalry man and among cavalry men pederasty is a tradition. I must say that day when Arintheus approached me, blue eyes flashing and ruddy face grinning, I nearly mistook him for Hermes himself, streaming glory from Olympus as he came to save his unworthy son. Arintheus saluted me briskly; then he read aloud the letter summoning me for audience. When he had finished reading (with some difficulty, for he has never found reading easy), he put the message away, gave me his most winning smile and said, “When you are Caesar, don’t forget me. Take me with you. I prefer action.” He patted his sword hilt. I dithered like a fool. He departed.

Then began a new struggle. My beard would have to go, also my student’s clothes. I was now a prince, not a philosopher. So for the first time in my life my beard was shaved. It was like losing an arm. Two barbers worked on me while I sat in a chair in the centre of the atrium as the morning sun shone on a spectacle which, looking back, was perfectly ludicrous. There was I, an awkward twenty-three-year-old philosophy student, late of the University of Athens, being turned into a courtier.

A slave girl trimmed my toenails and scrubbed my feet, to my embarrassment. Another worked on my hands, exclaiming at the inkiness of my fingers. The barber who shaved my beard also tried to shave my chest but I stopped him with an oath. We compromised by letting him trim the hair in my nostrils. When he was finished, he brought me a mirror. I was quite unable to recognize the youth who stared wide-eyed from the polished metal—and it was a youth, not a man as I had thought, for the beard had been deceptive, giving me an undeserved look of wisdom and age. Without it, I resembled any other youngster at court.

I was then bathed, oiled, perfumed and elaborately dressed. My flesh shrank from the lascivious touch of silk, which makes the body uncomfortably aware of itself. Today I never wear silk, preferring coarse linen or wool.

I have only a vague memory of the rest of that day. I was carried to the palace through crowded streets. The people stared at me curiously, uncertain whether or not it was right to applaud. I looked straight ahead as I had been instructed to do when on view. I tried not to hear conversations in the street. Desperately I tried to recall the eunuch’s instructions.

At the edge of the city’s main square the palace, grey and forbidding behind its Corinthian colonnade, rose before me like fate itself. Troops were drawn up in full dress on either side of the main door. When I stepped out of the litter, they saluted.

Several hundreds of the people of Milan drew close to examine me. In every city there is a special class whose only apparent function is to gather in public places and look at famous men. They are neither friendly nor unfriendly, merely interested. An elephant would have pleased them most, but since there was no elephant, the mysterious Prince Julian would have to do. Few of them could identify me. None was certain just what relation I was to the Emperor. It is amazing how little we are known to our subjects. I know of places on the boundaries of the empire where they believe Augustus himself still reigns, that he is a great magician who may not die. Of course, the fact each of us calls himself Augustus is a deliberate attempt to suggest that the continuity of power emanating from Rome is the one constant in a world of flux. Yet even in the cities where there is widespread literacy, the average citizen is often uncertain about who the ruler is. Several times already I have been addressed as Constantius by nervous delegations, while one old man actually thought I was Constantine and complimented me on how little I had changed since the battle at the Mulvian bridge!

Inside the palace, curiosity was mingled with excitement and anticipation. I was in favour. I read my good fortune in every face. In the vestibule they paid me homage. Heads bobbed; smiles flashed; my hand was wrung with warmth, kissed with hope. It was disgusting… in retrospect. At the time, it was marvellous proof that I was to live for a while longer.

I was delivered to the Master of the Offices, who gave me a final whispered briefing. Then, to the noise of horns, I entered the throne room.

Categories
Sword

A lyric piece by Guillaume Faye

Our century will be a century of iron and storms. It will not resemble those harmonious futures predicted up to the 1970s. It will not be the global village prophesied by Marshall MacLuhan in 1966, or Bill Gates’ planetary network, or Francis Fukuyama’s end of history: a liberal global civilization directed by a universal state.

The Third Age of European Civilization commences, in a tragic acceleration of the historical process, with the Treaty of Versailles and end of the civil war of 1914-18: the catastrophic twentieth century. Four generations were enough to undo the labor of more than forty. Europe fell victim to its own tragic Prometheanism, its own opening to the world and universalism, oblivious of all ethnic solidarity.

The Fourth Age of European civilization begins today. It will be the Age of rebirth or perdition. The twenty-first century will be for this civilization, the fateful century, the century of life or death.

Let us cultivate the pessimistic optimism of Nietzsche. “There is no more order to conserve; it is necessary to create a new one.” Will the beginning of the twenty-first century be difficult? Are all the indicators in the red? So much the better. They predicted the end of history after the collapse of the USSR? We wish to speed its return: thunderous, bellicose, and archaic. Islam resumes its wars of conquest. China and India wish to become superpowers. And so forth. The twenty-first century will be placed under the double sign of Mars, the god of war, and of Hephaestus, the god who forges swords, the master of technology and the chthonic fires. This century will be that of the metamorphic rebirth of Europe, like the Phoenix, or of its disappearance as a historical civilization and its transformation into a cosmopolitan and sterile Luna Park.

The beginning of the twenty-first century will be the despairing midnight of the world of which Hölderlin spoke. But it is always darkest before the dawn. Let us prepare our children for war. Let us educate our youth, be it only a minority, as a new aristocracy.

Today we need more than morality. We need hypermorality, the Nietzschean ethics of difficult times. When one defends one’s people, i.e., one’s own children, one defends the essential. Then one follows the rule of Agamemnon and Leonidas but also of Charles Martel: what prevails is the law of the sword, whose bronze or steel reflects the glare of the sun.

(Excerpted from “Mars & Hephaestus: The Return of History”)

Categories
Obituaries

Guillaume Faye (1949-2019)

Counter-Currents will publish several memorial tributes to Faye in the coming days. In the meantime, I wish simply to draw your attention to Greg Johnson’s ‘Remembering Guillaume Faye: November 7, 1949–March 7, 2019’.

Categories
Deranged altruism Name of the Rose (novel) St Francis

On empowering birds feeding on corpses

‘Christian ethics was like a time bomb ticking away in Europe, a Trojan horse waiting for its season’. —William L. Pierce

‘1945 was the year of the total inversion of Aryan values into Christian values’. —Joseph Walsh

The articles of The Occidental Observer are academic. But Tobias Langdon’s article yesterday on how the left has begun to devour itself is fascinating.

Yesterday I was also watching Monster Bug Wars. As I dream to exterminate all the arachnids in my Parrishesque paradise, it gives me pleasure to see fights to the death between them. The war that is currently waged on the left, as narrated in Langdon’s article, also gives me pleasure: it is like seeing two different species of spiders fighting to the death: whoever wins devours, still alive, the other.

Langdon’s article deals with the cultural war that transgender men are winning over radical feminists—including mulatto, lesbian and Jewish feminists that one would imagine are, in the inverted epoch of today, the most powerful.

Currently, trans men have begun to place themselves at the top of the pyramid thanks to Orwell’s observation: all men are equal but some are more equal than others. These men only have to declare themselves women and in several states of the US they are allowed to enter their bathrooms, changing rooms and showers. Langdon mentions a tranny, who still has a penis and a couple of balls, who is very interested in the feminine tampons that pubertal girls leave in the baths. Of course: in our sick society he’s untouchable…

Tucker Carlson and the radical feminists complain a lot that trans men are also beginning to dominate women’s sports. The most impressive phrase of the article by Langdon in the Observeris that ‘Stale pale males who were at the very bottom of the victimhood hierarchy have leapt to the very top of it in a single bound, thanks to the superpower of transgenderism’. So true: the radical feminists who dare to criticise these trans men are now being deplatformed from social media with typical accusations that their complaints are ‘hate’.

The whole freak show really looks like the videos of two arachnids fighting to the death with the fittest cocooning the other alive and, after injecting a poisonous cocktail into the beaten spider, sucking its body as a protein shake. Read Landon’s article and then watch a clip of Monster Bug Wars!

A woman commented about Langdon’s article at the Observer: ‘We need no further proof that Satan rules the world…’ I would argue the opposite: at last Christ rules. Why? Because white nationalists have a rather superficial idea of the history of Christianity. Their knowledge of our parents’ religion does not go beyond historical books at the level of those Reader’s Digest books for families of pious Christians that I find in the library my father left behind.

A deeper look beyond the Reader’s Digest level reveals that the reversal of the scale of values that has now maddened the West originated nothing less than in the Gospel. Every time some Christians wanted to apply the Gospel message in its purity, the medieval Church, in all its wisdom, crushed them: they knew how dangerous that would have been for the health of pre-Reformation Europe.

I am not asking white nationalists to read the ten volumes of Karlheinz Deschner on the history of Christianity. If they only read the best historical novel that has been written about the period to which I refer in the previous paragraph, they would realise what I mean. The Name of the Rose of Umberto Eco, contains a passage that throws great light on what happens today with the empowering of trans men: until recently, the most dispossessed creatures of the kingdom of God.

Adso: ‘But you were speaking of other outcasts; it isn’t lepers who form heretical movements’.

William of Baskerville: ‘The flock is like a series of concentric circles, from the broadest range of the flock to its immediate surroundings. The lepers are a sign of exclusion in general. Saint Francis understood that. He didn’t want only to help the lepers; if he had, his act would have been reduced to quite a poor and impotent act of charity. He wanted to signify something else. Have you been told about his preaching to the birds?’

Adso: ‘Oh, yes, I’ve heard that beautiful story, and I admired the saint who enjoyed the company of those tender creatures of God’, I said with great fervour.

William of Baskerville: ‘Well, what they told you was mistaken, or, rather, it’s a story the order has revised today. When Francis spoke to the people of the city and its magistrates and saw they didn’t understand him, he went out to the cemetery and began preaching to ravens and magpies, to hawks, to raptors feeding on corpses’.

Adso: ‘What a horrible thing! Then they were not good birds!’

William of Baskerville: ‘They were birds of prey, outcast birds, like the lepers. Francis was surely thinking of that verse of the Apocalypse that says: “I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven: Come and gather yourselves together at the supper of the great God; that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them…!’’’

Adso: ‘So Francis wanted to incite the outcasts to revolt?’

William of Baskerville: ‘No, that was what Fra Dolcino and his followers wanted [the violent and revolutionary wing of the Fraticelli], if anybody did. Francis wanted to call the outcast, ready to revolt, to be part of the people of God. If the flock was to be gathered again, the outcasts had to be found again. Francis didn’t succeed, and I say it with great bitterness. To recover the outcasts he had to act within the church; to act within the church he had to obtain the recognition of his rule, from which an order would emerge, and this order, as it emerged, would recompose the image of a circle, at whose margin the outcasts remain’.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

The dialogue between these two Franciscan monks of the 14th century hits the nail regarding the POV of this site: the two epigraphs that appear at the top of this entry.

The season of the horse of Troy of which Pierce wrote, that is to say the complete inversion of Aryan values into Gospel-inspired values such as those of a St. Francis, has finally arrived. Following the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI in 2013, a papal conclave elected the Argentinean Jorge Mario Bergoglio as his successor. As Bergoglio chose Francis as his papal name in honour of St. Francis of Assisi, my father, a great fan of the saint of Assisi, expressed a few words of surprise. He wondered while watching the 2013 ceremony how it was possible that only until the 21st century did an elected pope choose the name of the most beloved saint for Catholics? Short answer: because the Catholic Church was not openly suicidal as it is today.

Since the native language of this Argentinean pope is Spanish, when I hear him speak I understand him better than those who don’t know the language. It really seems to me that, for the first time in the history of the Church, the purest message of the Gospel has reached the Vatican. I remember very well, for example, the occasion when Bergoglio, already Pope, declared that the theme of poverty (the lepers of yore) was at the very core of the Gospel. I also remember his words about homosexuals (Bergoglio is the first pope to use the Newspeak term ‘gay’: a word that was not used to designate them when he and I were children) and the trans men who visited him in the Vatican.

What they say in the forums of white nationalism is false: that the Pope has betrayed his principles. On the contrary: The dream of gathering again the ravens, magpies and birds feeding on corpses has been fulfilled.

When I discovered white nationalism the term used to designate the enemy was the very generic ‘liberalism’. In his Observer article Langdon uses the term currently in vogue, ‘cultural Marxism’. Recently I suggested that the most accurate term would be ‘neo-Christian’. This term covers the scale of values of both Christians and liberals: the last (e.g., the tranny) shall be the first and the first shall be the last. After all, Francis wanted to call the outcast, ready to revolt, to be part of the people of God. If the flock was to be gathered again, the outcasts had to be found again. Francis didn’t succeed, and I say it with great bitterness. To recover the outcasts he had to act within the church; to act within the church he had to obtain the recognition of his rule, from which an order would emerge, and this order, as it emerged, would recompose the image of a circle, at whose margin the outcasts remain. 

Categories
Summer, 1945 (book) Thomas Goodrich

1945 (VII)

Finally, the two machine-guns were reloaded and the order to fire was given. In a moment, as the bullets tore into them, the young Germans standing fell upon the bodies below. Perhaps all three were killed outright; or perhaps, in yet another miracle, perhaps the three were merely wounded and feigned death.

Certain it was that among all the wounded soldiers, their lips prayed silently, under their breath, “Please, dear God, oh, please… please do not let this happen.”

In a short while, newly freed concentration camp prisoners in their striped clothing were handed pistols and ordered by the Americans to go among the stacks of bodies and finish the job. Thus, as .45 caliber slugs mechanically blew open the skulls of all German soldiers, dead and living alike, any miracles at Dachau officially ended.

“We shot everything that moved,” one GI bragged.

“We got all the bastards,” gloated another.

In Henry Morgenthau’s world, there was no room for “miracles”—Germany must perish and all Germans must die.
 

Categories
Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Beauty George Lincoln Rockwell Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Nazism Lite

For the 14 words the humanities are more important than the sciences. Greece and Rome were able to flourish thanks to a deep contact with their religion, history, art, language and architecture. The scientific method as we know it now would only begin until the 17th century. Our treacherous era prioritises hard sciences and technology at the expense of the arts and the humanities to demoralise and control the blond beast.

Among the humanities, the most important is that which tells the facts: History. As I have said repeatedly on this site, only two stories of the white race have been written: one by William Pierce and another by Arthur Kemp. Pierce died before I woke up to the real world, but I visited Kemp a few years ago at his home in a town in England.

One might think that the only American book (Pierce’s) that deals with the subject of the history of the white race would be an immense bestseller in the circles of white nationalism in North America. Today I realised that Amazon Books has vaporized all references to Pierce’s book. But that is not the worst. The worst is that Who We Are is very rarely mentioned in white nationalist forums. What is currently sold in white nationalism is a genre we could call Nazism Lite. For example, on this day, the Metapedia page has the Arktos Media Ltd. publishing house as its featured article. A glance at the titles is enough to see the ideological lukewarmness of that publisher whose books the white nationalists buy.

I see things in this way: In the English-speaking world what is closer, chronologically speaking, to the Third Reich was the noblest and true. That which is furthest removed by time, represents an attempt at a schizophrenic compromise between the 14 words and Americanism. From this angle, the only truly noble politician in the US was George Lincoln Rockwell. And the only non-schizophrenic intellectuals were William Pierce and Revilo Oliver. None of them, as far as I know, called themselves ‘white nationalists’. That is a term that originated after Rockwell and Oliver had died, and when Pierce only had a few more years in this world.

It speaks a lot about the so-called white nationalism that the content of Who We Are is currently only available, on paper, in abridged form in my The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour compilation (see the image at the top of the sidebar). It is as if every member of the Nazism Lite had decided to cut off a testicle from their bodies compared to the two-testicled racists of yesteryear.

Putting aside white nationalism, and speaking as racists spoke in more civilized times, just remember that the people with the longer memory are the people with the longest future (cf. Jews). Hitler, in one of his table talks, said: ‘Our history goes back to the days of Arminius and King Theodoric, and among the German Kaisers there have been men of the most outstanding quality; in them they bore the germ of German unity. This fact is too often forgotten, because since the 15th century it is only in Austria that the history of ancient Germania has been taught’.

That’s the spirit. The Nazis knew that we must reconnect with religion, literature and an architecture uncontaminated with Semitic religions. Remember that the Führer wanted to become an artist, either a painter or an architect. How many among the white nationalists of today have the same artistic proclivities? How many have websites appealing to the aesthetic instinct of the former Aryan?

In the Ancient World, the Spartan ephebes assiduously studied Homer, whose many verses they could recite. What should move to protect the culture of whites is the beauty of the Aryan woman. We can already imagine the Spartan women parading naked in a public event to invite marriage: those women had the reputation of the most beautiful in Greece. (Remember, the Doric Spartans did not contaminate their blood with the muds of the Mediterranean.) Precisely because beauty is the splendour of truth, the first thing the Judeo-Christian Semites did centuries later was to destroy the Greek statues.

The reason that Who We Are is not a bestseller is because Pierce’s pure neo-Nazism was not schizophrenic as white nationalism is. If the white nationalists have not published Pierce’s book to sell it in all their events, this is because the book does not make any concession to Americanism: it is not the chimera that has parts of a lion and parts of a bird.

Who We Are says things that are currently taboo in the chimera of today. For example, it is a Nordicist book. After the section ‘Unending Struggle Between European and Asian’, it is clear that even many Russians and Europeans from the Balkans mixed their blood with Asians and Turks respectively. In addition, Who We Are has some passages in which Pierce seems to promote the removal or extermination of the inferior races: the greatest taboo in those who have cut off one of their testicles. The book puts Christianity in its place, as a Levantine infection that grabbed the soul of the Aryan race. (‘It appealed directly to a sense of envy and resentment of the weak against the strong’. ‘But Christian ethics was like a time bomb ticking away in Europe, a Trojan horse waiting for its season’.) As if that were not enough, it isn’t a mono-causal book in the sense that it not only blames the Jews: the blunders that whites have committed throughout history, for example by placing economic gain above racial preservation, are conspicuous.

There is a way that the movement called white nationalism could be redeemed, and it is precisely that they abandon that term and embrace National Socialism. The bridge to do so in America is precisely the memory of politicians like Rockwell and geniuses like Pierce. Since Rockwell-like politics is no longer allowed in the US (cf. Charlottesville), at least a few Americans could be educated in private. Always remember what we have reiterated more than once:

We need to create the Aryan community—an ecclesia—, which whites never had. The Aryan ecclesias need to thrive in our towns and cities (think of the image at the top of this article). Our priests, for lack of a better word, are not experts in theology but in history, anthropology and Indo-European linguistics. They must be skilled in the various Indo-European traditions, with emphasis in Greece and Rome.

Categories
Axiology Mauricio (commenter)

Feels lonely sometimes


This morning I was looking for another of Linder’s archived quotable Gab quotes and, while finding this one—:

The theory that “exposing the jews” would solve the problem was first put out there by Henry Ford. We now have 100 years to judge “how’s that theory working out for you, White man?” 

—at the same time I was listening to the first episode of Black Wolf Radio: two voices of English men I’ve met personally. In the podcast, one of them used the word ‘Marxist’ repeatedly.

(Left, Soviet Union stamp commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Manifesto.) Luis Salazar, a Marxist teacher of the Madrid School (a school founded by those Spaniards who fled the Franco regime), taught us Marxism in Mexico City in the middle 1970s. This word has changed so much since the 70s that presently it means something altogether different.

In white nationalist circles, it now means the ideology of white genocide through the inversion of values. I still remember pretty well the content of the Communist Manifestothat we had to study at the Madrid School, and thus I believe that the term ‘neo-Christian’ would better describe the ideology of white genocide.

Of course: ‘cultural Marxism’ is the term in fashion in white nationalist circles after the old term ‘liberalism’, in the sense of liberalism ran amok, fell into disuse. But since classical liberalism and classical Marxism weren’t ideologies aimed at the extermination of whites, the priest of the 14 words should try to develop a more concise vocabulary. From the POV of the priest, white nationalism uses terms very loosely because it has failed to settle accounts with Christianity.

If one cries ‘Marxist’, the impression on the listener is that things were going on well until Karl Marx in the 19th century. But the French Revolution enforced egalitarian principles before Marx was even born. And long, long before the French Revolution white culture was overwhelmed by an ideology of Semitic origin that erased almost all vestiges of the original Greco-Roman world.

The terms used by white nationalists only convey the level of awakening in the movement, and this includes Linder’s quote above. Yes: some of those who destroyed the Greco-Roman world were anti-Semites, but the virus of enforced egalitarianism in the Ancient World (that could only be implemented by destroying everything noble that whites had created) was far more destructive for classical culture than to Judaism.

This is White history, as every regular visitor of this site should already know. Alas, as Mauricio said, ‘The leap from level 5 to level 6 is astronomical due to the Xtian malware rejection.Feels lonely sometimes’.

Categories
Athens Julian (novel) Literature

Julian, 57

Julian Augustus

Those marvellous days in Athens came to an abrupt end when an imperial messenger arrived with orders that I attend Constantius at Milan. No reason was given. I assumed that I was to be executed. Just such a message had been delivered to Gallus. I confess now to a moment of weakness. Walking alone in the agora, I considered flight. Should I disappear in the back streets of Athens? Change my name? Shave my head? Or should I take to the road like a New Cynic and walk to Pergamon or Nicomedia and lose myself among students, hide until I was forgotten, assumed dead, no longer dangerous?

Suddenly I opened my arms to Athena. I looked up to her statue on the acropolis, much to the astonishment of the passers-by (this took place in front of the Library of Pantainos).

I prayed that I be allowed to remain in Athena’s city, preferring death on the spot to departure. But the goddess did not answer. Sadly I dropped my arms. Just at that moment, Gregory emerged from the library and approached me with his wolf’s grin.

“You’re leaving us,” he said. There are no secrets in Athens. I told him that I was reluctant to go but the Emperor’s will must be done.

“You’ll be back,” he said, taking my arm familiarly.

“I hope so.”

“And you’ll be the Caesar then, a man of state, with a diadem and guards and courtiers! It will be interesting to see just how our Julian changes when he is set over us like a god.”

“I shall be the same,” I promised, sure of death.

“Remember old friends in your hour of greatness.” A scroll hidden in Gregory’s belt dropped to the pavement. Blushing, he picked it up.

“I have a special permit,” he stammered. “I can withdraw books, certain books, approved books…”

I laughed at his embarrassment. He knew that I knew that the Pantainos Library never allows any book to be taken from the reading room. I said I would tell no one.

The proconsul treated me decently. He was a good man, but frightened. I recognized at once in his face the look of the official who does not know if one is about to be executed or raised to the throne. It must be cruelly perplexing for such men. If they are kind, they are then vulnerable to a later charge of conspiracy; if they are harsh, they may live to find their victim great and vindictive. The proconsul steered a middle course; he was correct; he was conscientious; he arranged for my departure the next morning.

My last evening in Athens is still too painful to describe. I spent it with Macrina. I vowed to return if I could. Next day, at first light, I left the city. I did not trust myself to look back at Athena’s temple floating in air, or at the sun-struck violet line of Hymettos. Eyes to the east and the morning sun, I made the sad journey to Piraeus and the sea.

Categories
Ancient Rome Christendom Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 115

Editors’ note: To contextualise these translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, read the abridged translation of Volume I.
 
Head hunting

Christendom liked to contemplate the heads of defeated enemies; the rulers found pleasure in it and also the governed. It was customary to send throughout the Empire the heads of the notable men who had been punished, as trophies of war. As Mark Twain said in The Mysterious Stranger, ‘They all did their best—to kill being the chiefest ambition of the human race and the earliest incident in its history—but only the Christian civilization has scored a triumph to be proud of. Two or three centuries from now it will be recognized that all the competent killers are Christians…’

Already Constantine, the first Christian ruler, made that in the year 312, after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, his troops took the head of the emperor Maxentius in the triumphal procession, throwing stones and excrement, and then sent to Africa. Also the head of the usurper Julius Nepotianus, who rebelled probably at the behest of Constantinople, was paraded in the year 350 in Rome, the 28th day of his government.

Three years later, in many provinces of the Empire they could contemplate the head of the usurper Magnentius; as a sign of Christian victory, the heads of Procopius, a relative of Emperor Julian, in 366; of Magnus Maximus in 388, and of Eugene in 394. At the end of the 4th century or the beginning of the 5th century, the heads of Rufinus, Constantine III, Jovin, Sebastian and even, at times, the relatives of fallen persons in disgrace were exposed.

In addition to their hostile policy to the Goths, the governments of Arcadius and Honorius were characterised for persecuting so-called ‘pagans’ and ‘heretics’, and for taking even more stringent measures than those of their father, who in 388 still greeted the priests of classical culture in Emona, belonging at that time to Italy.

Categories
Free speech / association

Amazon purge

This week Amazon Books vaporized not only some of the best titles of Counter-Currents, but also four books of Jared Taylor.

Several videos interviewing Greg Johnson (pic left) have recently been uploaded to YouTube about this purge and it is unnecessary to link them here.

It all started with the vaporization of Johnson’s manifesto, which today I tried to request directly from Counter-Currents but for some reason the software did not accept my MasterCard. Have any of the visitors of The West’s Darkest Hour read Johnson’s manifesto? I mention this because the worst of the Amazon purge is that they also vaporized the readers’ reviews about those books. All of Amazon’s reviews of the purged books went to the Orwellian memory hole too!

I know what it feels like because in 2017 the same thing happened with all my Daybreak Press titles, even those written in Spanish that do not touch the racial issue (but criticize psychiatry and child abuse, as I have done in the previous entries).