Categories
– For the context of these translations click here –
Frankish bishops humiliate the emperor
The bishops strove to subjugate the state and in 829 in Paris, going back to the arrogant teachings of Pope Gelasius I, they demanded that no one could judge them, that they would be responsible only to God and that the other great ones, on the other hand, would be subject to them: the bishops. Indeed, their auctoritas was even above the potestas of the king and the emperor, who would otherwise become a tyrant and any moral right would disappear with his rule.
Their arrogance, sometimes clothed in the rhetoric of apparent modesty and false humility—the notorious sanctimonious hypocrisy—could hardly be greater. They praised, and rightly so, the humility of the emperors, because they always found humility in others very praiseworthy. But they always presented themselves as those on whom the Lord bestowed the power to bind and unbind, and recalled the supposed words of Emperor Constantine to the bishops (according to Rufinus’ ominous history of the Church): ‘God has made you priests and has given you the power to judge us also. Therefore we shall be rightly judged by you, whereas you cannot be judged by men.’
Too beautiful to be true.
The Empress Ermengarde had borne three sons to the sovereign: Lothair (795), Pippin (797) and Louis (806). When she died on 3 October 818 in Angers after about twenty years of marriage, it was feared that the pious widower would shut himself away in a monastery. And, naturally, for the clergy, it was preferable to have ‘a monastic mentality on the throne… rather than an emperor in monastic habit within the walls of a monastery’ (Luden).
The first uprising of 830 against the sovereign opened a decade of continuous palace rebellions and civil wars in the pious and family-friendly West. Understandably, the emperor’s eldest sons were irritated by the course of events. Especially Lothair, whose kingdom was seriously diminished in favour of Charles, and who saw his future supremacy in jeopardy. But also the younger couple of Pippin and Louis were threatened by another loss of territory. The ecclesiastical hierarchy, concerned about the unity of the empire, also feared its idea of unity.
Bernard, a descendant of the high Frankish nobility and son of William—Count of Toulouse, who was highly regarded under Charles I and who, on the advice of his friend Benedict of Aniane, became a monk of great asceticism—had little inclination for the Emperor’s tastes. It seems that he was much more attracted, according to especially episcopalian gossip, to the bed of the young empress. And Louis the Pious had protected the man from an early age, had him baptised at his baptism and later made him Count of Barcelona.
At the head of the conspiracy were former supporters of the emperor, some of his advisors, the then chancellor Elisachar, the arch-chancellor and abbot Hilduin of Saint-Denis, Bishop Jesse of Amiens and, above all, Abbot Wala, the spiritual leader of the uprising and Louis’ most dangerous enemy. He coined the slogan Pro principe contra principem and his monastery in Corbie became the de facto centre and headquarters (Weinrich) of the rebels. (Over the centuries, some Catholic monasteries became the headquarters of conspirators, as happened for example during the Second World War.)
The rebels wanted not only to drive away Bernard and the young empress and her entourage, but also the old emperor, and if possible to put Lothair in his place. After various tortures Judith, the second wife of Louis the Pious, was even threatened with death and a promise was extracted from her that she would force the emperor to have her hair tonsured and enter the monastery, and she had to shave her hair and go into seclusion among the nuns of the Holy Cross (Sainte-Croix) in Poitiers.
Lothair, who was viciously persecuting the supporters of the reclusive princess, avoided depriving her father of all power at the Imperial Diet of Compiégne (May 830). He contented himself with annulling his dispositions of the last year, or that he had the upper hand. But while the great men became more and more at odds with each other, each seeking his advantage, far from improving the situation distrust of the new government grew, and the emperor succeeded in setting his two younger sons against the elder. He offered Louis and Pippin an extension of their kingdoms, which quickly attracted them to his side and divided the allies, especially since the brothers felt that the supremacy of Lothair was no less oppressive than that of their father. For all these reasons the coup d’état failed.
Since Lothair was now confined to Italy, the emperor assigned in February 831 roughly equal kingdoms (regna) to his other sons Pippin, Louis and Charles.
But in early 833 the three elder brothers allied to attack their father with greater military force, trampling on their oaths of vassalage and filial duties. They appealed to the people ‘to establish a just government.’ For even Louis the Germanic (who had already risen again and again in 838 and 839) and Pippin of Aquitaine felt themselves to be under attack and threat. With a hastily mobilised army, Lothair marched into Burgundy together with Pope Gregory IV (827-844), who had tried to win over the Frankish clergy even from Italy. The archbishops of the region, Bernard of Vienne and Agobard of Lyon, immediately went over to his camp. The latter was the rabid enemy of the Jews, who now, disregarding also the fourth commandment, published a manifesto advocating the right of the children against the father.
Lothair re-joined his brothers and once again took the lead of the rebels.
As Louis was in danger of defeat, fewer and fewer prelates stood by his side. The pope mocked his haughty and foolish writings, and especially disputed the reproach which the imperialists had everywhere levelled at him, saying that he had become a mere instrument of the sons to launch the excommunication against their enemies.
The pope had to justify the uprising in the eyes of the masses and win over the rest of the wavering rebels to his side. Just after his return to the brothers’ camp almost the whole of Louis’ army (despite his additional oath of loyalty to fight against his sons as against the enemy) treacherously switched to the latter’s side ‘like an impetuous torrent,’ writes the Astronomer, ‘partly seduced by the gifts and partly terrified by the threats.’ The clergy on Lothair’s side recognised this as a divine miracle. And then almost all the bishops, who had previously threatened Gregory IV with deposition, also changed front so that the pope, who had fulfilled his obligation, was able to return to Rome with Lothair’s approval.
But the old emperor had to surrender unconditionally that summer. He was then regarded as overthrown by the hand of God, as a ‘non-king’, as a second Saul, and the bishops and others ‘did him much harm’, as Thegan puts it.
To begin with, Lothair had taken him through the Vosges, via Metz and Verdun, to Soissons, where Louis was imprisoned in the monastery of Saint-Médard. Prince Charles, who was barely ten years old, was taken from him and placed in the monastery of Prüm in the Eifel region under a severe prison regime as if he were a great criminal, as Charles would later say, although he was not made a monk. But the brothers of the empress were tonsured and sent to Aquitaine, Pippin’s territory, while she was immediately taken with Gregory to Italy and banished to Tortona.
With papal approval, the transfer of the empire from the hands of the old emperor—now designated by the bishops as ‘the old emperor’, ‘the venerable man’ and also ‘Lord Louis’—to those of Lothair was decreed.
Stained glass depiction of
Lothair, Strasbourg Cathedral
For his part, Rabanus Maurus, abbot of Fulda and one of the champions of the unity of the empire, embraced the party of Louis the Pious and in a treatise dedicated to him wrote that it was ‘totally inadmissible for sons to rebel against their father and subjects against their sovereign’. Rabanus showed the injustice of the plot against Louis. Neither Lothair was authorised to dethrone his father, nor could the episcopate condemn and excommunicate him.
But how was Louis’ defeat interpreted by the prelates gathered at Compiègne, who with all the grandees had sworn an oath of loyalty to Lothair? The say him as a consequence, of course, of his disobedience to the exhortations of the priests. He had committed many evils against God and man and had brought his subjects to the brink of catastrophe. And so he was declared ‘tyrant,’ while his victorious son and successor was proclaimed ‘friend of Christ the Lord’. They, the ‘representatives of Christ,’ the ‘bearers of the keys of the kingdom of heaven,’ demanded from the old ruler a general confession of his sins: a renunciation of the world and presented him with a document of his crimes, so that ‘as in a mirror he might behold the abominable deeds’.
In his recent History of the Councils, Wilfried Hartmann observes: ‘Such procedures were only possible because the Frankish episcopate had already formulated certain theses in Paris in 829 which envisaged a kind of control of the political sovereign by the bishops.’ Thus, canon 55 proclaimed: ‘If someone governs with piety, justice and clemency, he is deservedly called a king; but those who govern in an impious, unjust and cruel manner are not called kings but tyrants.’ But whether a king is to be called just or unjust is naturally determined by… the prelates.
Louis must have been deeply humiliated at the Abbey of Saint-Médard de Soissons, where the prelates read him the card again, having to prostrate himself three or more times before the bishops and a multitude of other clerics, having to confess all that they had instilled in him with precise words—what is still called brainwashing today—and having to ask for their forgiveness.
To savour his wickedness, the hierarchs had staged this spectacle before the altar of the monastery’s St. Mary’s Church. In the presence of a large crowd of the people, they had the confession of his sins, which they had drawn up, read three or four times to the emperor ‘aloud and amidst a copious stream of tears,’ lying in a penitential garment of manes.
The whole process was, on the one hand, intended to morally annihilate the emperor and render him incapable of returning to the throne and even of bearing arms: canon law excluded him, as Louis knew very well, after a public canonical penance. On the other hand, the unbelievable degradation had to demonstrate the total superiority of the bishops.
It was 33 years since Charlemagne had judged Pope Leo III. Now the Frankish episcopate was judging the emperor! With the deplorable ceremony, the greatest opprobrium in Louis’ life and one of the deepest humiliations that any prince could have suffered, far worse than that of Canossa, Louis the Pious was also excluded from ecclesiastical communion and henceforth could only treat and speak with a few chosen persons.
Archbishop Otgar of Mainz acted as the jailer of the deposed Louis.
The leading role in this tragedy, which triggered a series of civil wars between 833 and 843, was played by Archbishop Ebon of Rheims, a close friend of Agobard of Lyons and a true prototype of ecclesiastical ingratitude and perfidy, as well as a man of notable missionary success. Years earlier, in fact, ‘on the advice of the emperor and with the authorisation of the pope, he left for the country of the Danes to preach the gospel, having converted and baptised many.’ This prelate, appointed by Pope Paschal I as the legate of the north in the framework of the Scandinavian policy of the Carolingians, is considered to be the initiator of the Nordic mission.
Categories
Jesus the Jew?
I am glad that, at last, the Christian Question (CQ) is beginning to be discussed in earnest in the forums of the racial right. On Monday, for example, The Occidental Observer (TOO) published Thomas Dalton’s article ‘Jesus the Jew’ (screenshot: here), and on the same day it was reposted on The Unz Review.
At the time of writing, the latter webzine has 444 comments on the article and TOO only nine. I confess that I’d rather have a few commenters airing their views (as in The West’s Darkest Hour) than the long threads of sites like Ron Unz’s webzine or Stormfront. It is easier to discuss these issues with relatively few commenters than in a tower of Babel. However, regarding Dalton’s article, a commenter on The Unz Review hit the nail on the head by mentioning a work we’ve been promoting on this site. The commenter said:
I’m glad that you mentioned Dr. Carrier’s work. The longer, more scholarly, peer-reviewed book is On the Historicity of Jesus, a more popular book is Jesus from Outer Space, essentially a condensed version of the earlier, longer work. Dr. Carrier’s estimate of one chance in three that a historical Jesus existed was made by taking all favorable probabilities of the evidence for existence. If one goes the other way and takes all unfavorable probabilities of the evidence of existence, the odds are about 12,000 to one. The (probably forever undiscoverable) truth is somewhere in between. Dr. Carrier now says that he no longer pays much attention to Christian apologists, since faith-based belief is essentially unrefutable…
And Paul and the earliest Christians didn’t have to be liars. They may have sincerely believed in a celestial Jesus, whose death and resurrection occurred in heaven. The gospels may have been literary parables, intended to instruct the ordinary believers until they could be initiated into the oral traditions. Check the fourth chapter of Mark, which may be giving the game away.
What Carrier says about Christian apologists is important, and we can apply it to those on the racial right who are still Christians. They are not so much interested in historical truth as in how to combine their faith with racial preservation. If they were interested in historical truth they would start following the white rabbit, the links I posted yesterday in the comments thread of the TOO article.
But back to Dalton’s article. What I believe, and we have said it on several occasions, is far more sinister than a historical, Jewish Jesus. If we start from Carrier’s work (Dalton doesn’t mention it in his piece), it is clear that the evangelist Mark took up the distant, heavenly Jesus devised by Paul to, through his literary art, throw at us the apocryphal story of a worldly Jesus in Galilee: a story in which the evangelist inverted the values of the god of the Romans to the interests of Jewry.
This is fundamental to understanding not only the true origins of Christianity (Nietzsche was the first to intuit these realities in the 1880s), but the subsequent inversion of values, so well told by Tom Holland in his book Dominion.
In short, it is not that Jesus the Jew said things subversive to the Romans. He simply didn’t exist (Dalton, just for the sake of argument, assumes well into his article that Jesus did exist). This literary character, actually his whole figure, is an invention of Paul and Mark (the latter concocted his literary fiction right after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple by Titus because he was pissed off at the Romans). And as learned people who have read the literary criticism of the New Testament since the 19th century know, Matthew, Luke and John only added verses of their own authorship to Mark’s original text.
I would remind the visitor of what we have said here about a book that, for incomprehensible reasons, became very popular on the racial right: Joseph Atwill’s Caesar’s Messiah, which deals with an alleged Roman conspiracy to invent Jesus. For those who cannot distinguish between solid scholarship and crank scholarship, I recommend Richard Carrier’s ‘Atwill’s Cranked-up Jesus’.
Simply put, the Romans didn’t invent Jesus. It was the Jews.
David Skrbina, mentioned in the TOO discussion thread, says in his book that all the authors of the New Testament were Jews. I recently mentioned another thread in which several Christians recently commented on Counter-Currents. I left out that one of these Christians claimed that Luke was Greek. This is what Skrbina says on one of the pages at the end of his book:
“It’s not clear that all the Gospel authors, apart from Matthew, were Jews. John certainly was not.”
As I’ve replied earlier, the Gospel of Mark was written for a Gentile audience and thus takes on the superficial appearance of a Gentile work. There is a strong consensus that Mark himself was Jewish. The extensive OT references in all four Gospels argue strongly for Jewish authorship. There is no real evidence that Luke was a Gentile save his name, but as we know from Paul, it was not unheard of for Jews to change to Gentile names. The scattered anti-Jewish statements in all the Gospels—especially John—more reflect an internal Jewish battle over ideology than an external, Gentile attack. Paul is clearly and obviously Jewish.
And come to think of it, maybe it’s not so incomprehensible that the American racial right is a fan of Atwill’s discredited book. They see Jews everywhere but where they are: right under their noses, in the origins of their Christian religion! Thank goodness these issues are starting to be discussed a bit more in TOO (previously only Tom Sunic had tried to discuss them in that webzine).
Let’s be clear: if The West’s Darkest Hour focuses on CQ, it’s only because I want to save the Nordic race from extinction. And I find it impossible to do so unless the diagnosis of white decline is accurate. I am not doing this to unnecessarily provoke American racialists. Once they have an accurate diagnosis, they will begin to revolt against the reversal of Roman values that the Jew Mark initiated.
The rest follows from there.
Categories
Pierce on Christianity
Editor’s note: Ten years ago, I quoted a few paragraphs from William Pierce’s article ‘Christianity’. Today I reread it in its entirety in a National Alliance article. Although I am more radical than Pierce when it comes to the religion of our parents, I reproduce it below because it stands in stark contrast to the secular sympathisers of Christianity on today’s racialist forums.
Pierce wrote:
THE NATIONAL ALLIANCE IS not a religious organization, in the ordinary sense of the term. It does, however, have to concern itself with religious matters, because religions influence the behavior of people, society, and governments. The doctrines of various religious groups—Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, et al.—deal with temporal as well as spiritual matters and therefore often conflict with National Alliance doctrine.
Christian doctrines are of much greater concern to the National Alliance than the doctrines of other large religious groups, because Christianity is the most influential religion in the United States, Europe, and the rest of the White world. Most members of the National Alliance come from families which are, or a generation ago were, at least nominally Christian, and very few come from families which practice, or practiced, Islam, Buddhism, or other religions. Furthermore, the history of our race for the last thousand years has been inextricably bound up with Christianity. The National Alliance really cannot avoid taking positions regarding Christian beliefs and practices, despite the complications this causes in our work.
The immediate and inevitable fact which forces us to come to grips with Christianity is that the mainstream Christian churches are all, without exception, preaching a doctrine of White racial extinction. They preach racial egalitarianism and racial mixing. They preach non-resistance to the takeover of our society by non-Whites. It was the Christian churches, more than any other institution, which paralyzed the will of White South Africans to survive. It is the Christian establishment in the United States which is preeminent in sapping the will of White Americans to resist being submerged in the non-White tide sweeping across the land. Most Christian authorities collaborate openly with the Jews, despite the contempt and abuse they receive in return, and the rest at least follow Jewish policies on the all-important matter of race. The occasional anomaly—a Catholic bishop in Poland speaking out angrily against Jewish arrogance, a few Protestant groups in the United States expressing sympathy for oppressed Palestinians—does not invalidate the rule.
We are obliged, therefore, to oppose the Christian churches and to speak out against their doctrines. But we do not, as some groups have done, accuse the Christian leaders of being false Christians. We do not say, “We are the real Christians, because we stand for the values which the mainstream churches stood for a century ago, before they were subverted.” We do not reach for our Bibles and point to verses which seem to be in accord with the policies of the National Alliance and contrary to the present policies of the Christian churches. A diligent Bible scholar can find in the Judeo-Christian scriptures support for—or ammunition against—virtually any policy whatsoever.
Beyond the immediate conflict between us and the Christian churches on racial matters, there is a long-standing and quite fundamental ideological problem with Christianity. It is not an Aryan religion; like Judaism and Islam it is Semitic in origin, and all its centuries of partial adaptation to Aryan ways have not changed its basic flavor. It was carried by a Jew, Saul of Tarsus (later known as Paul), from the Levant to the Greco-Roman world. Its doctrines that the meek shall inherit the earth and that the last shall be first found fertile soil among the populous slave class in Rome. Centuries later, as Rome was succumbing to an internal rot in which Christianity played no small part, legions of Roman conscripts imposed the imported religion on the Celtic and Germanic tribes to the north.
Eventually Christianity became a unifying factor for Europe, and in the name of Jesus Europeans resisted the onslaught of Islamic Moors and Turks and expelled the “Christ-killing” Jews from one country after another. But the religion retained its alien mind-set, no matter how much some aspects of it were Europeanized. Its otherworldliness is fundamentally out of tune with the Aryan quest for knowledge and for progress; its universalism conflicts directly with Aryan striving for beauty and strength; its delineation of the roles of man and god offend the Aryan sense of honor and self-sufficiency.
Finally Christianity, like the other Semitic religions, is irredeemably primitive. Its deity is thoroughly anthropomorphic, and its “miracles”—raising the dead, walking on water, curing the lame and the blind with a word and a touch—are the crassest superstition.
We may have fond memories of the time before the Second World War when pretty, little girls in white dresses attended all-White Sunday schools, and Christianity seemed a bulwark of family values and a foe to degeneracy and indiscipline. We may cherish the tales of medieval valor, when Christian knights fought for god and king—if we can overlook the Christian church’s bloodthirsty intolerance, which stifled science and philosophy for centuries and sent tens of thousands of Europeans to the stake for heresy or witchcraft.
We may even find Christian ethics congenial, if we follow the standard Christian practice of interpreting many of its precepts—such as the one about turning the other cheek—in such a way that they do not interfere with our task. But we should remember that nothing essential in Christian ethics is specifically Christian. Any successful society must have rules of social conduct. Lying and stealing were shunned in every Aryan society long before Christianity appeared. Our pagan ancestors did not need Christian missionaries to tell them how to behave or to explain honor and decency to them—quite to the contrary!
Historians may argue the pros and cons of Christianity’s role in our race’s past: whether or not the unity it provided during a period of European consolidation outweighed the loss of good genes it caused in the Crusades and the bloody religious wars of the Middle Ages (and through the Church’s policy of priestly celibacy); whether the splendid Gothic cathedrals which rose in Europe during four centuries and the magnificent religious music of the 18th century were essentially Christian or essentially Aryan in inspiration; whether Christianity’s stand against the evils of self-indulgence—against gluttony and drunkenness and greed—was worth its shackling of the human mind in superstition or not. One thing already is clear, however: Christianity is not a religion that we can wish on future generations of our race.
We need ethics; we need values and standards; we need a world view. And if one wants to call all of these things together a religion, then we need a religion. One might choose instead, however, to call them a philosophy of life. Whatever we call it, it must come from our own race soul: it must be an expression of the innate Aryan nature. And it must be conducive to our mission of racial progress. Christianity, as the word is commonly understood, meets neither of these criteria.
The fact is that, completely aside from the racial question, no person who wholeheartedly believes Christian doctrine can share our values and goals, because Christian doctrine holds that this world is of little importance, being only a proving ground for the spiritual world which one enters after death. Christian doctrine also holds that the condition of this world is not man’s responsibility, because an omnipotent and omniscient deity alone has that responsibility.
Although some Christians do believe Christian doctrine wholeheartedly, however, most do not. Most instinctively feel what we explicitly believe, even if they have repressed those feelings in an effort to be “good” Christians. Because of this many nominal Christians, even those affiliated with mainstream churches, can, under the right circumstances, be persuaded to work for the interests of their race. Other nominal Christians—especially those who stand apart from any of the mainstream churches—have interpreted Christian doctrine in such an idiosyncratic way that the contradictions between their beliefs and ours have been minimized.
For these reasons we want to avoid conflict with Christians to the extent that we can. We don’t want to give unnecessary offense, even when we speak out against the doctrines of their churches. We don’t want to ridicule their beliefs, which in some cases are sincerely held. Some of these people later will reject Christianity’s racial doctrines. Some will reject Christianity altogether. We want to help them in their quest for truth when we can, and we want to keep the door open to them.
Members who want to study the subject of Christianity and its relationship to our task in depth should read Which Way Western Man?, by our late member William Simpson. The book’s initial chapters describe the spiritual odyssey of a man of exceptional spiritual sensitivity, who was far more intensely a Christian than nearly any Christian living today and who eventually understood the racially destructive nature of Christianity and rejected it.
______ 卐 ______
[Kevin Alfred Strom comments:] One of the most important statements William Pierce made on the subject was 1982’s “On Christianity,” published in the National Alliance BULLETIN and now available on nationalvanguard.org, in which he says
______ 卐 ______
No honest, conscientious Alliance member can maintain his membership in the Alliance and also in an organization which is fundamentally opposed to the goals and principles of the Alliance. [A] former member who belongs to the Moral Majority acted correctly in resigning from the Alliance, and the same applies to others: Any Alliance member who is also a member of a church or other Christian organization which supports racial mixing or Zionism should decide now where he stands, and he should then resign either from his church or from the Alliance.
In fact, the great majority of Alliance members who originally had some Christian church affiliation have already made their decisions and left the churches….
If, despite everything above, there are Alliance members or prospective Alliance members who still consider themselves Christians, then it must be in the sense that they value the specifically White elements of Christianity which have been added since its origins—the great art, the great music, and the great architecture produced by White men during the centuries in which the Christian churches ruled Europe—and that they also share the White spiritual feelings which have been eloquently expressed by many men and women who were Christians and who applied the adjective “Christian” to feelings which, in fact, came from deep within the White race-soul and existed long before the advent of the Christian church. Such Christians we can call our comrades and be proud to have in our ranks.
– For the context of these translations click here –
Pope Paschal, who gouges out eyes and cuts off heads, is declared a saint
Why did Leo III enter the Roman martyrology in the 17th century? Why was this monstrous murderer declared a saint?
He wasn’t canonised for his brutality, nor for his liquidations, and still less for his genuflection before Charles ‘the Great’ to whom alone he owed his survival. He was canonised because at Christmas 800 he had placed the crown on Charles’ head; because he had so impressively forced the passion for domination, the never-satiated desire for supremacy of the popes; because, with that radiant sign through the ages, with that ‘trait of genius’ (de Rosa), he had inscribed once and for all in the sad book of history the aspiration of the popes for absolute leadership. This is also the reason why Franz Xaver Seppelt, the Catholic historian of the popes, sees the name of Leo III shining in the ‘catalogue of saints,’ despite all the fatalities of his long pontificate and all the corpses that litter his path: ‘Saint, saint, saint’ (his feast day, 12 June).
His successor Stephen IV, a Roman nobleman educated from boyhood at the Lateran, elected pope after ten days without consulting the emperor, ruled only a few months; but his illustrious family provided in the century two other popes.
Paschal I (817-824), Stephen’s successor, immediately had the Pactum Hludowicianum established with his predecessor confirmed by the emperor, i.e. the full extent of the promises of donation and the actual donations made by Pippin and Charlemagne, grandfather and father respectively of Louis, as well as the autonomy of the state from the Church, the papal rights of sovereignty and above all the free election of the pope.
Two of the highest papal officials, Theodore, belonging to the high nobility (and still in 821 a pope ambassador at the Frankish court) and his son-in-law the nomenclator Leo ‘because of his loyalty to Lothar’ (Astronomus); because, according to the Imperial Annals, ‘they remained loyal to the young emperor Lothar’, were blinded and beheaded by the pope’s servants in the Lateran Palace without any legal process. Everything was attributed to the pope or ‘to his approval’, says Astronomer.
Mosaic of Paschal at Santa Prassede.
The whole affair is somewhat reminiscent of the bloody proceedings of St. Leo III in 815. But in 823 the monarch also sent his judges to Rome, retiring for the rest of the summer and in the autumn to the district of Worms to hunt in the Eifel region. Paschal, however—so beloved of the Romans that at the very burial of his corpse they provoked a riot—, refused any complicity and escaped the trial, perhaps with good reason, by publicly taking the oath of cleansing in the presence of thirty-four bishops and five priests and deacons. This was a ‘means of proof’, already used by St. Leo III in December 800, and especially frequent among ecclesiastical officials. At the same time, he anathematized the murdered men as high treason, declared their death an act of justice since they had received their due as criminals of lèse majesté, and took the assassins as servants of St. Peter (of the family Sancti Petri), granting them ‘his most resolute protection’ (Annales regni Francorum).
Emperor Louis resigned himself. And Pope Paschal I died in 824 amid the family Sancti Petri. The man was cunning while Ludwig was superior and tough. When Paschal I was alive and the monks of Fulda brought him unpleasant news, he had them imprisoned without delay and threatened their abbot Mauro with excommunication. In Rome itself, they abhorred his rigorous rule which completely disrupted the state. And since not only his planned burial but also the subsequent papal election were under the sign of serious turmoil, Paschal’s body remained unburied for a long time until his successor could give him a burial, although not in St. Peter’s.
Much later, however, at the end of the 16th century, Paschal’s name managed to enter the saints’ calendar of the Catholic Church (his feast day, 14 May) through the work of the historian Caesar Baronius, an Italian cardinal of the Catholic Church.
Categories
On Neo-normies
‘A WN platform which is anti-Christian is dead before it begins.’ —A Counter-Currents commenter.
I already had half a year of not stopping by Counter-Currents. Now that I visited one of its discussion threads, it confirms my hypothesis that The West’s Darkest Hour (WDH) receives very few visits and comments, compared to the other racialist forums, because almost all of them are either Christians or sympathetic to Christianity whereas I believe that Christian ethics is the main cause of our misfortune.
A few years ago, at least some very young visitors of WDH trolled those sites sympathetic to Christianity but now no one, that I know of, links us to them. It seems to me that these people—Christians and secular sympathisers—completely ignore our arguments, recently expounded in our commentary to Dominion.
I would think that Europeans, far removed from the religion of our parents, would be more interested in WDH than Americans, but they aren’t. Not many of them are fans of this site.
At any event, I will continue doing my job even though the flow of traffic is carried away by those guys that I call ‘semi-normies.’
8:13 a.m. update:
Before falling asleep I had titled the post ‘On semi-normies’ but I woke up thinking it was better titled ‘On Neo-normies’ because, as time goes by, the racial right seems to me more and more normie compared to our POV. Anyway, not long ago Hunter Wallace of Occidental Dissent defined himself as a ‘neo-normie’: a perfect expression!
– For the context of these translations click here –
Louis the Pious and the death
of the king of Brittany.
Foreign policy
Louis the Pious waged war almost year after year, as befitted a Christian and believing ruler, mainly because of dynastic conflicts and internal political problems. But again and again, he also crossed the frontiers or had them crossed: as a universal ruler, he hardly ever took part in the campaigns himself but had others fight for him. This had long been the method of all rulers in the biggest massacres of the time. Pacts were scarcely of any interest any more.
In 815 a Saxon-Obotrite army attacked the Danes; but, after a series of devastations everywhere, it returned with forty hostages without having achieved anything. In 816 Louis sent his troops against the Sorbs. This time they ‘efficiently carried out’ (strenue compleverunt, Imperial Annals) the emperor’s orders and attacked them, as the sources say, ‘as swiftly as easily with the help of Christ’, and ‘with the help of God they gained the victory.’ The emperor, however, ‘gave himself up to hunting in the Vosges forest.’ At the other end of the empire, on the northern slopes of the Pyrenees, the Basques revolted and were ‘completely subdued’ (Annales regni Francorum).
Louis repeatedly waged devastating campaigns against the Breton Levantines, whose princes claimed the title of king at various times. On several occasions, he attacked the ‘mendacious, proud and rebellious people’, whom even his father hadn’t managed to subdue completely and whom the Merovingians, before Charles and Pippin, had repeatedly tried to subdue. In the summer of 818, he marched in person—almost his only military campaign as emperor—with an army of Franks, Burgundians, Alamans, Saxons and Thuringians against the ‘Breton rebels, who in their audacity dared to name one of their own, named Morman, king, refusing all obedience’ (Anonymous).
The pious sovereign, of whom his contemporary Bishop Thegan carefully exalts that ‘he progressed from day to day in sacred virtues, the enumeration of which would lead too far’, crushed the Bretons with his arrogance. He reduced to ashes all the buildings except the churches, and amid all the fires and murders he had the monasticism of the country widely reported by the Abbot of Landévennec. To kill and to pray, to pray and to kill; so everything went well and everything was permitted, at least in the war, as long as it was in favour of the ‘orthodox’ side.
A great multitude was taken prisoner, plentiful cattle were taken from them, and the Bretons submitted ‘to the conditions imposed by the emperor, whatever they were… And such hostages were selected and taken as he ordered, and the whole territory was organised at his will’, writes Astronomus.
In 819 Louis sent an army across the Elbe against the Obotrites. Their deserting prince Sclaomir (809-819) was captured and taken to Aachen, his territory occupied and he was exiled. Shortly afterwards they defeated him again, but while still in Saxony he succumbed to an illness and in the meantime received the sacrament of baptism. The Slavic people on the banks of the Elbe were still totally pagan, and the supremacy of Louis was still exposed to serious uprisings in the years 838 and 839.
On the other side of his borders, the counts of the Spanish March penetrated across the Segre ‘as far as the interior of Spain’ and ‘from there happily returned with a great booty’, having ‘ravaged and burned everything’, as Astronomus writes. The imperial analyst also notes the devastation of fields, the burning of villages and ‘no small booty’, adding: ‘In the same way, after the autumn equinox the counts of the Breton Mark raided the possessions of a rebellious Breton named Wihomarc and devastated everything with blood and fire.’
In 824 the monarch marched again with three army groups—he personally commanded one—against the Bretons and their prince Wihomarc, Morman’s successor.
In forty days, according to Frankish sources, Louis the Pious ravaged ‘the whole country with blood and fire’, ‘punished it with a great devastation’ (magna plague). He was ‘the most pious of emperors’, as the chorepiscopus Thegan praises him, ‘for even before he respected his enemies, fulfilling the word of the evangelist who says ‘Forgive and you will be forgiven.’ Louis destroyed fields and forests, annihilated a good part of the flocks, killed many Bretons, took many prisoners and returned with hostages ‘of the disloyal people.’ King Wihomarc was soon afterwards surrounded in his own house by the people of Count Lambert of Nantes, who beat him to death.
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Three basic texts
Three Books, 1887 is a painting by Vincent Van Gogh
Perhaps the title of our next anthology of essays will be Neo-Christianity, which will include the recently cited Dominion.
Sexton’s review of Hellstorm together with Eduardo Velasco’s essay on Judea and Rome, both in The Fair Race and now the explanation of how the neochristian monster arose thanks to Tom Holland’s Dominion, constitute three basic texts for understanding the POV of this site.
Savitri’s book is in another category, in that it is a kind of manifesto for how we should think after the catastrophe of 1945. (As for National Socialism before 1945, after Neo-Christianity and Christianity’s Criminal History Vol II, our new translation of Uncle Adolf’s after-dinner conversations, which we have already begun, will be the next project.)
– For the context of these translations click here –
Louis the Pious had his enemies’ eyes gouged out and made a public confession of his sins
The first rebellion against Louis’ new order, which was to ensure the unity of the Empire and the Church, of the throne and the altar, came from Bernard of Italy. The only son of King Pippin, the predator of the Avars’ treasure, educated after his father’s death (810) in the monastery of Fulda, officially adopted the title of ‘king of the Longboards’ after the imperial assembly of Aachen (September 813).
When, under the Ordinatio Imperii, he had to submit to Lothair I, son of Louis, as he had previously submitted to his grandfather Charlemagne and Emperor Louis, he rebelled with numerous magnates of his kingdom. The sources are unanimous in stating that this initiative did not come from the young sovereign, who was then in his early twenties, but from his advisors.
A few months after the publication of the Ordinatio Imperii of 817, Bernard, together with ‘some wicked men’ (Annales regni Francorum)—including the court poet Bishop Theodulf of Orleans, Bishops Anselm of Milan and Wolfold of Cremona, as well as some abbots, according to an ancient source—mounted an uprising which was widespread but poorly organised. The aim was to dethrone Louis and put Bernard in his place. But everything suggests that it was not so much a question of dethroning as of ensuring the continued existence of Bernard’s small kingdom.
The emperor mobilised large contingents of troops, and demanded that the abbots and abbesses ‘do military service’ because ‘by Satan’s cunning King Bernard had prepared for sedition.’ He set off southwards at full speed and passed over the Alps into Italy. But even before the uprising had properly begun, and without even having crossed swords, Bernard appeared with his loyalists at Chalon-sur-Saône, apparently of his own free will. He laid down his arms and threw himself at the emperor’s feet. Bernard’s great ones acted similarly, who ‘as soon as the first interrogation began, they openly and motu proprio declared the whole course of the affair’.
In vain. Louis had them arrested, sent them to Aachen and there, in the spring of 818, during the imperial assembly, in a delicate manner—as the imperial analyst repeats—and only after ‘the fasting time of Lent had passed’ he had them sentenced to death, at least all those considered civilians, and then ‘pardoned’ the death penalty by the cruel punishment of plucking out their eyes. ‘They were simply deprived of their sight’ which was ‘legally irreproachable’ (Boshof).
King Bernard, whom Louis had earlier called his son, and who in turn had just fathered a child named after his grandfather Pippin, was severely punished. He died with his eye sockets emptied ‘notwithstanding the emperor’s clement manner,’ two days later, on 17 April 818. His treasurer and advisor Reginhard, as well as Reginhar, the grandson of a Thuringian rebel against Charlemagne, also defended themselves and succumbed to the terrible procedure, for ‘not having endured with sufficient patience to have their eyes gouged out’ (Anonymi vita Hludovici).
Louis penitent in Attigny
In August 822 Louis made a public confession of his faults at the imperial diet of Attigny. He regretted his crime against his young nephew Bernard, who died miserably; he regretted the hardness of his heart against his little half-brothers, on whom he imposed the clerical tonsure, and against Adalhard and Wala, his father’s cousins. This was a singular procedure in the history of the Franks, a humiliation of the emperor by the clergy, behind which were perhaps in a very special way Charlemagne’s cousins who had been deeply humiliated in the past.
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