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Alaric Ancient Rome Constantinople Demography Goths Huns Indo-European heritage Mongols Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Germanic People and the Romans (3)

Excerpted from the 17th article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:


The Gothic nation, as was mentioned in the previous installment, had established itself on the southern shore of the Baltic, around the mouth of the Vistula, before 300 B.C. Prior to that the Goths had lived in southern Sweden.

Conquest of the Steppe

The Goths west of the Dniester—the Visigoths—moved down into the Danubian lands west of the Black Sea, where they inevitably came into conflict with the Romans. They conquered the Roman province of Dacia for themselves, after defeating a Roman army and killing a Roman emperor (Decius) in the year 251.

For the next century and a quarter both the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths prospered, while the fortunes of the Roman Empire continued to decline. The Goths, who were excellent seamen, raided the Black Sea coastal cities of Asia Minor at will, and Rome was also hard pressed to defend other portions of her long border with the Germans.

Peaceful Coexistence

Toward the end of the third century, during the reign of Diocletian, the Empire was divided into eastern and western halves, for administrative and military purposes. The progressive breakdown of communications led eventually to separate de facto powers, one centered in Rome and the other in Byzantium (later renamed Constantinople).

During the first three-quarters of the fourth century, despite occasional raids, a state of relatively peaceful coexistence between Goths and Romans pervaded. Especially in the eastern half of the Empire, diplomacy and bribery were used to hold the Goths at bay. During the reign of Constantine (306-337) 40,000 Goths were recruited into the Roman army, and they thenceforth were the bulwark of the Eastern Empire.

It was in the reign of Emperor Valens, in the year 372, that the greatest menace to the White race, both Germans and Romans, since the beginning of recorded history suddenly appeared on the eastern horizon. From the depths of Central Asia a vast horde of brown- skinned, flat-nosed, slant-eyed little horsemen—fast, fierce, hardy, bloodthirsty, and apparently inexhaustible in numbers—came swarming across the steppe around the north end of the Caspian Sea. They were the Huns.

The first to feel their impact were the Alans, living south of the Don between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. The Hunnic horde utterly crushed the Alans, some of whose remnants retreated southward into the Caucasus Mountains, while others fled westward in confusion, seeking refuge among the Goths. In the Caucasus today traces of the Nordic Alans are found in the Ossetes, whose language is Indo-European and who are taller and lighter than the Caucasic-speaking peoples around them.

End of the Ostrogoths

Next the Huns fell upon the Ostrogoths and routed them. The aged Ostrogothic king, Hermanric, slew himself in despair, and his successor, Vitimer, was killed in a vain effort to hold back the Brown flood. The Ostrogothic kingdom disintegrated, and its people streamed westward in terror, with the Huns at their heels. Athanaric, king of the Visigoths, posted himself at the Dniester with a large army, but the Huns crossed the river and defeated him, inflicting great slaughter on his army.

Thus, the Visigoths too were forced to retreat westward. Athanaric petitioned Valens for permission for his people to cross the Danube and settle in Roman lands to the south. Valens consented, but he attached very hard conditions, which the Goths, in their desperation, were forced to accept: they were required to surrender all their weapons and to give up their women and children as hostages to the Romans.

Oppression and Rebellion

The Goths crossed the Danube in 376 and settled in the Roman province of Lower Moesia, which corresponds roughly to modern Bulgaria. There the Romans took shameful advantage of them. Roman-Jewish merchants, in return for grain and other staples, took the hostage children of the Goths as slaves.

The Goths secretly rearmed themselves and rose up. For two years they waged a war of revenge, ravaging Thrace, Macedonia, and Thessaly. Finally, on August 9, 378, in the great battle of Hadrianople, the Gothic cavalry, commanded now by Fritigern, annihilated Valens’ infantry (most of whom were also Goths), and the emperor himself was killed. This was the worst defeat Rome had suffered since the Goths defeated and killed Decius 127 years earlier, and the battle decisively changed the conduct of future wars. Heretofore, Roman infantry tactics had been considered unbeatable, but Fritigern’s Goths had shown what heavy cavalry could do to infantry unprotected by its own cavalry.

The emperor of the eastern half of the Empire who succeeded Valens took a much more conciliatory stance toward the Goths, and they were confirmed in their possession of much of the territory south of the Danube which they had seized between 376 and 378. The Huns, meanwhile, had occupied Gothic Dacia (present-day Romania), as well as all the lands to the east.

Loss of a Homeland

The ancient homeland of the Nordic race was now in the hands of non-Whites. For more than four millennia wave after wave of White warriors had come out of the eastern steppe to conquer and colonize Europe: Achaeans, Dorians, Latins, Celts, Germans, Balts, Slavs, Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, and uncounted and unnamed peoples before all these. But the Sarmatians were the last; after the Huns drove them and the Goths out, no other White barbarians were to come riding out of the east.

For the next thousand years the eastern steppe which had been the breeding ground of the Nordic race became the invasion route into Europe for periodic waves of non-White hordes from Asia: Huns, Avars, Turks, Magyars, Mongols.


German vs. German

The Huns contented themselves, for the time being, with that portion of Europe between the Carpathians and the Danube, leaving the Romans and the Germans elsewhere to their own devices. Rome, a hollow shelf peopled largely by Levantines and ruled in effect by a gaggle of filthy-rich Middle Eastern moneylenders, speculators, and merchants, depended for her continued existence upon cleverness and money rather than real strength. Germans menaced her and Germans defended her, and the Romans concentrated their energies on playing German off against German.

The game succeeded in the Eastern Empire, more or less, but not in the Western Empire. A Frank, Arbogast, was the chief adviser—and effective master—of Western Emperor Eugenius in the year 394, having assassinated Eugenius’ predecessor. The emperor of the East, Theodosius, sent his Gothic army against Arbogast, and Arbogast called on his fellow Franks for support. The two German armies fought at Aquileia, near modern Venice, and the Goths defeated the Franks.

Alaric the Bold

Two of the leaders of Theodosius’ army were Alaric the Bold, a Gothic prince, and Stilicho, a Vandal. After the battle of Aquileia Stilicho, nominally subordinate to Theodosius, became the effective master of the Western Empire. Alaric was chosen king of the Visigoths by his tribe and decided to challenge Stilicho, but as long as Stilicho lived he was able to hold Alaric at bay.

The emasculated and Levantinized Romans, unable to face the Germans man to man, bitterly resented their German allies as much as they did their German enemies. This resentment, born of weakness and cowardice, finally got the better of the Romans in 408, and they conspired to have their protector, Stilicho, murdered. Then the Romans in all the Italian cities butchered the wives and children of their German allies—60,000 of them.

This foolish and brutal move sent Stilicho’s German soldiers into Alaric’s arms, and Italy was then at the Goth’s mercy. Alaric’s army ravaged large areas of the peninsula for two years in revenge for the massacre of the German families. Alaric demanded a large ransom from the Romans and forced them to release some 40,000 German slaves.

Fall of Rome

Then, on the night of August 24, 410, Alaric’s Goths took Rome and sacked the city. This date marked, for all practical purposes, the end of the capital of the world. Rome had endured for 1,163 years and had ruled for a large portion of that time, but it would never again be a seat of power. For a few more decades the moribund Empire of the West issued its commands from the fortress city of Ravenna, 200 miles north of Rome, until the whole charade was finally ended in 476. The Empire of the East, on the other hand, would last another thousand years.

Categories
Christian art My pinacoteca

Annunciation (detail)

Painting of the day:

Maestro de la Seo de Urgel
Annunciation (detail) ~ 15th century
National Art Museum of Catalonia

Categories
Ancient Rome Demography Goths Hermann (Arminius) Indo-European heritage Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Germanic People and the Romans (2)

Excerpted from the 15th and 16th articles of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:


The philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca, also writing in the first century, shared Tacitus’ respect for the Germans’ martial qualities: “Who are braver than the Germans? Who more impetuous in the charge? Who fonder of arms, in the use of which they are born and nourished, which are their only care?”

Caesar, Tacitus, and other writers also described other attributes of the Germans and various aspects of their lives: their shrines, like those of the Celts and the Balts, were in sacred groves, open to the sky; their family life (in Roman eyes) was remarkably virtuous, although the German predilection for strong drink and games of chance must have been sorely trying to wives; they were extraordinarily hospitable to strangers and fiercely resentful of any infringements on their own rights and freedoms; each man jealously guarded his honor, and a liar was held in worse repute than a murderer; usury and prostitution were unknown among them.

[Here Pierce recounts the clash between the Germanics and the Romans under Caesar, Augustus and Tiberius. Then he adds:]

Five Decisive Things

During the 401 years between Hermann’s victory in the Teutoburger Forest and the sacking of the city of Rome by a German army in August 410, a great many things of historical importance occurred. We will be able to look at only a few of them in detail, however; we do not want to be distracted from our history of the race by the minutiae of political history, no matter how important.

Five things which happened or were ongoing during this period stand out as decisive, from a racial viewpoint. First, there was the continued decadence of the Romans, a matter we have already treated. Second, there was the growing Germanization of the Roman army. Third, there was the migration of the Goths from their home in Scandinavia back to the ancient Indo-European homeland in southern Russia. Fourth, there was the invasion of Europe by a non-White horde from the Far East: the Huns. And fifth, there was the final undermining of Roman strength by the spread of a new religion from the Levant—an Oriental religion of pacifism and egalitarianism which also began to have an effect on the Germans.

When Marcus Aurelius, the last Roman emperor able to inspire any real fear or respect in the Germans, tried to recruit troops to defend Rome’s Danubian border in 168, not even the threat of death induced Italians to enlist in the legions. The emperor finally resorted to conscripting all of Rome’s gladiators, most of whom were Celtic or German prisoners of war, into the army, whereupon the Roman masses, as addicted to their spectator sports as America’s masses are to their TV, threatened insurrection. “He deprives us of our amusements,” the populace cried out in anger against the emperor, “in order to make us philosophers like himself.” As they had become less martial, the Romans—or, rather, the Jews, Syrians, Egyptians and debased Greeks of the Empire who unworthily bore that once-honorable name—had grown ever more fond of the cruel blood sports of the Colosseum.

All-Volunteer Army

Until the end of the third century law prohibited the enlistment of foreigners in the Roman army. Although the law was often violated, it resulted in most of Rome’s soldiers being recruited from among the Celts and Germans of the conquered provinces during a period of about 150 years. By the time of Constantine not even the provinces could provide enough soldiers to defend the degenerate Roman Empire, and the greatest source of military manpower became the free Germans, who enlisted for purely mercenary motives.

By the middle of the fourth century, the Roman army was Roman in name only. Germans not only filled the ranks, but most of the officers, up to the highest levels of command, were Germans as well. Thus, the more or less continual state of war which existed between the free Germans and the Roman Empire during the third, fourth, and fifth centuries—up until 476, when the last Roman emperor was deposed and banished and a German leader ruled Italy as king—was not fought between Germans and Romans, but between Germans on the one side and Germans on the other.

Gold for Blood

The Romans bought their protection instead of fighting for it. Gold paid for blood for more than 200 years, but in the end all their money and their civilized cleverness were not enough.

If the Germans could have added a stronger sense of racial solidarity to their other virtues, they could have put an end to the sewer that was Rome 200 or even 300 years sooner than they did. They would not only have avoided spilling torrents of their own blood, but they could have stamped out a source of poison that, allowed to continue festering, ultimately would infect them.

Declining Rome’s many wars with the Germans involved a number of tribes. The incursions across the Danube into Pannonia that Marcus Aurelius bloodily repulsed in the second century were by tribes confederated with the Marcomanni, for example. During the third and fourth centuries the Franks raided across the Rhine into Gaul, and the Saxons harassed the coasts of that country and Britain. But it was the Goths above all the others who wrote the final chapters of the struggle between Germany and Rome.

Gothic Victory

After several skirmishes between Goths and Romans along the lower Danube, in the year 251 the Goths inflicted the worst defeat on the Romans they had suffered since the Hermannschlacht, annihilating a Roman army and killing its commander, the emperor Decius.

Within two more decades Rome had abandoned all claim to Dacia, and the province which Trajan had conquered 150 years earlier was thenceforth firmly in German hands, with the Danube once again the border between Rome and Germany.

Categories
Ancient Rome Demography Indo-European heritage Racial studies Tacitus Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Germanic People and the Romans (1)

Excerpted from the 15th article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:


Closely related to the Celts, whose fortunes we traced in the previous installment, and settled into the area of Europe directly north of them, were the Germans. Like the Celts, they immigrated into northern Europe over a period of many centuries. It would be incorrect, of course, to refer to these earliest Nordic immigrants as “Germans.” All that can be said of them, just as of those immigrants south of them who later gave birth to the Celts, is that they were Indo-Europeans.

Celtic Buffer

Was there some quality which distinguished the Germans from the Celts, so that the former were able to prevail over the decaying civilization to the south and the latter were not? Certainly not initially, for the two were of the same stock. Nevertheless, the Germans had two enormous advantages over the Celts.

First, the proto-German homeland was buffered from the imperialistic designs of the Romans by the Celts; the latter took the full brunt of the Roman armies, while the German homeland remained relatively inviolate. And yet the Germans, unlike the Balts and the Slavs, had just enough contact with the Romans to serve as a stimulus for their later invasions and conquest of the Roman Empire.

The death struggle between Latins and Germans began even before Caesar’s subjection of Gaul. Late in the second century two neighboring German tribes, the Cimbrians and the Teutons, left their homes in the Danish peninsula because, they said, of the sinking of much of their low-lying land into the sea. Some 300,000 in number, they headed south, crossing the Tyrolese Alps into northern Italy in 113 B.C., where they asked the Romans for permission either to settle or to cross Roman territory into the Celtic lands to the west.

A Tragic End

The Roman consul, Papirius Carbo, attempted to halt them, and they defeated his army. The Germans then proceeded westward into Gaul and went as far as Spain, where they raised havoc. Ten years later, however, they returned to northern Italy.

(Part of the Cimbrian War)

This time they were met by a more competent Roman general, the consul Gaius Marius. In two horrendous battles, in 102 and 101 B.C., Marius virtually exterminated the Teutons and the Cimbrians. So many Teutons were massacred at Aquae Sextiae in 102 that, according to a contemporary Roman historian, their blood so fertilized the earth that the orchards there were especially fruitful for years afterward, and German bones were used to build fences around the vineyards.

More Conflict

At Vercelli the Cimbrians met a similar fate the following year; more than 100,000 were slaughtered. When the German women saw their men being defeated, they first slew their children and then killed themselves in order to avoid the shame of slavery.

The annihilation of these two German nations was followed by a few decades in which Italy remained relatively safe from further incursions from the north. The Germans’ territory was bounded, roughly, on the east by the Vistula and on the south by the Danube. In the west the boundary was less definite, and the Germans west of the Rhine came into repeated conflict with Roman armies in Gaul.

Tacitus on the Germans

The Romans were naturally curious about the teeming tribes of fierce, warlike people beyond the Rhine who dared contest their conquest of the lands in northern Gaul, and several Roman writers enumerated them and described their way of life, most notably the historian Gaius Cornelius Tacitus. Writing in a first-century Rome which was thoroughly mongrelized, Tacitus was strongly impressed by the Germans’ apparent racial homogeneity:

I concur in opinion with those who deem the Germans never to have intermarried with other nations but to be a pure and unmixed race, stamped with a distinct character. Hence, a family likeness pervades the whole, though their numbers are so great. Their eyes are stern and blue, their hair ruddy, and their bodies large, powerful in sudden exertion, but impatient of toil and not at all capable of sustaining thirst and heat. They are accustomed by their climate to endure cold and hunger.

Tacitus added: “Traitors and deserters are hanged; cowards and those guilty of unnatural practices are suffocated in mud under a hurdle.” Subject to the same punishment as cowards and homosexuals were draft dodgers: those who failed to present themselves for military service when summoned.

The education of the German youth stressed not only bravery and skill in arms, but loyalty in the highest degree. Tacitus gives an interesting description of the mutual obligations between a German leader and his companions in arms:

The Germans transact no business, public or private, without being armed, but it is not customary for any person to assume arms until the state has approved his ability to use them. Then, in the midst of the assembly, either one of the chiefs, or the father, or a relative, equips the youth with a shield and a spear. These are to them the manly gown (toga virilis); this is the first honor conferred on youth. Before, they are considered as part of a household; afterwards, of the state.

Categories
Conspiracy theories David Irving Final solution Heinrich Himmler Holocaust Holodomor Red terror Third Reich

New approach to the holocaust

Himmler_advert


If there’s a moral of the story on the recent debate at The Occidental Observer about the so-called “holocaust” that can only be that most white nationalists are cognitively immature. I find it scandalous that I was the only one who linked Greg Johnson’s piece as an important article, as can be ascertained at the bottom of the TOO article (5 trackbacks to “Dealing with the Holocaust”): four trackbacks to this blog and the other one to my nationalist blog in Spanish.

One example is Carolyn Yeager’s recent podcast “Should White Nationalists leave the Holocaust alone?”, where the possibility that millions of Jews could indeed have died as a result of the harsh treatment they received in the Third Reich is not even considered as a remote possibility.

Just contrast most of the nationalists’ dogmatic stance on the “holocaust” with the intellectual trajectory of David Irving, who a few years ago acknowledged that at least more than two millions of Jews died in the camps (source, National Alliance News):

According to an article in the extremist leftist Guardian newspaper in Britain, historian David Irving has backtracked on his earlier views about the Holocaust myth and now accepts that the Nazis engaged in mass extermination of Jews in certain camps.

Irving says that his views on the Holocaust have crystallized rather than changed. He says that he believes the Jews were responsible for what happened to them during the Second World War and that the “Jewish problem” was responsible for nearly all the wars of the past 100 years: “The Jews are the architects of their own misfortune, but that is the short version A-Z. Between A-Z there are then 24 other characters in intervening steps.”

He says that a document, which he is 80% sure is genuine, suggests that 2.4 million Jews were killed in Poland, but goes on to claim that the gas chamber at Auschwitz was fake. “It was not the centre of the killing operations—it has only become a focus because it is the site that is best preserved. Much of what is shown [to] the tourists there is faked postwar—watchtowers, even the famous gas chamber.”

He added: “In my opinion now the real killing operations took place at the Reinhardt camps west of the Bug river. In the three camps here [Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka] Heinrich Himmler’s men (mostly Ukrainian mercenaries) killed possibly as many as 2.4 million in the two years up to October 1943. There is now nothing to be seen of the Reinhardt camps, neither stick nor stone, so few tourists go there. I have visited all four sites earlier this year.”

Pressed as to whether this change undermined his previous stance, Irving replied: “It is a crystallization of my view.” Asked if he now accepts there had been a Holocaust against the Jewish people he said he was “not going to use their trade name.”

He added: “I do accept that the Nazis quite definitely, that Heinrich Himmler, organized and directed a program, a clandestine program, for the liquidation of European Jews… and that in 1942-43 alone over 2.5 million Jews were killed in those three camps.” He added that Hitler was “completely in the dark” about the program.

This of course doesn’t mean that Irving is guilt-tripping whites for what happened in Poland. Like me he’s only concerned with facts and honesty.

I find it pathetic that this holocaust guilt could have been overcome decades ago by simply pointing to the fact that the Jewish Bolsheviks started the genocide by killing more White civilians than what Himmler did with the Jews as a prophylactic response. If the astronomic amount of time spent by nationalists and non-nationalists in researching paranoid conspiracy theories like 9/11 would have been spent researching real historical facts, like what happened in the Gulag under Stalin’s willing executioners, the tide could have been turned in our favor long ago.

I look forward for a new generation of nationalists who leave behind “holocaust” denialism, 9/11 and JFK conspiracy theories, monocausalism and even their infatuation with rock music and degenerate, Jew-controlled Hollywood films (yes, this includes Nolan’s silly Batman trilogy that presently is being hysterically praised in some nationalist blogs).

Categories
Ancient Rome Celts Demography Indo-European heritage Julius Caesar Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul

Excerpted from the 14th article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:


Celtic bands continued to whip Roman armies, even to the end of the second century B.C., but then Roman military organization and discipline turned the tide. The first century B.C. was a time of unmitigated disaster for the Celts. Caesar’s conquest of Gaul was savage and bloody, with whole tribes, including women and children, being slaughtered by the Romans.

By the autumn of 54 B.C, Caesar had subdued Gaul, having destroyed 800 towns and villages and killed or enslaved more than three million Celts. And behind his armies came a horde of Roman-Jewish merchants and speculators, to batten on what was left of Gallic trade, industry, and agriculture like a swarm of locusts. Hundreds of thousands of blond, blue-eyed Celtic girls were marched south in chains, to be pawed over by greasy, Semitic flesh-merchants in Rome’s slave markets before being shipped out to fill the bordellos of the Levant.

Last Effort

Then began one, last, heroic effort by the Celts of Gaul to throw off the yoke of Rome, thereby regaining their honor and their freedom, and—whether consciously or not—reestablishing the superiority of Nordic mankind over the mongrel races of the south. The ancestors of the Romans had themselves established this superiority in centuries past, but by Caesar’s time Rome had sunk irretrievably into the quagmire of miscegenation and had become the enemy of the race which founded it.

The rebellion began with an attack by Ambiorix, king of the Celtic tribe of the Eburones, on a Roman fortress on the middle Moselle. It spread rapidly throughout most of northern and central Gaul. The Celts used guerrilla tactics against the Romans, ruthlessly burning their own villages and fields to deny the enemy food and then ambushing his vulnerable supply columns.

Vercingetorix

For two bloody years the uprising went on. Caesar surpassed his former cruelty and savagery in trying to put it down. When Celtic prisoners were taken, the Romans tortured them hideously before killing them. When the rebel town of Avaricum fell to Caesar’s legions, he ordered the massacre of its 40,000 inhabitants.

Meanwhile, a new leader of the Gallic Celts had come to the fore. He was Vercingetorix, king of the Arverni, the tribe which gave its name to France’s Auvergne region. His own name meant, in the Celtic tongue, “warrior king,” and he was well named. Vercingetorix came closer than anyone else had to uniting the Celts. He was a charismatic leader, and his successes against the Romans, particularly at Gergovia, the principal town of the Arverni, roused the hopes of other Celtic peoples. Tribe after tribe joined his rebel confederation, and for a while it seemed as if Caesar might be driven from Gaul.

Tragedy of Alesia

But unity was still too new an experience for the Celts, nor could all their valor make up for their lack of the long experience of iron discipline which the Roman legionaries enjoyed. Too impetuous, too individualistic, too prone to rush headlong in pursuit of a temporary advantage instead of subjecting themselves always to the cooler-headed direction of their leaders, the Celts soon dissipated their chances of liberating Gaul.

Finally, in the summer of 52 B.C., Caesar’s legions penned up Vercingetorix and 80,000 of his followers in the walled town of Alesia, on the upper Teaches of the Seine. Although an army of a quarter-million Celts, from 41 tribes, eventually came to relieve besieged Alesia, Caesar had had time to construct massive defenses for his army. While the encircled Alesians starved, the Celts outside the Roman lines wasted their strength in futile assaults on Caesar’s fortifications.

Savage End

In a valiant, self-sacrificing effort to save his people from being annihilated, Vercingetorix rode out of Alesia, on a late September day, and surrendered himself to Caesar. Caesar sent the Celtic king to Rome in chains, kept him in a dungeon for six years, and then, during the former’s triumphal procession of 46 B.C., had him publicly strangled and beheaded in the Forum, to the wild cheers of the city’s degraded, mongrel populace.

After the disaster at Alesia, the confederation Vercingetorix had put together crumbled, and Caesar had little trouble in extinguishing the last Celtic resistance in Gaul. He used his tried- and-true methods, which included chopping the hands off all the Celtic prisoners he took after one town, Uxellodunum, commanded by a loyal adjutant of Vercingetorix, surrendered to him.

Next: Germanic Expansion

Caesar did not live long enough to wreak the same havoc in Britain which he had in Gaul, but other Roman generals finished what he had started. During the first century A.D. Roman Britain was bloodily expanded to include everything in the British Isles except Caledonia (northern Scotland) and Hibernia (Ireland).

Decadent Rome did not long enjoy dominion of the Celtic lands, however, because another Indo-European people, the Germans, soon replaced the Latins as the masters of Europe.

Categories
Christian art My pinacoteca

Mourning of Christ (detail)

Painting of the day:

Giovanni Bellini
Mourning of Christ (detail) ~ 1500
Pinacoteca Vaticana

Categories
Ancient Rome Celts Human sacrifice Indo-European heritage Julius Caesar Psychohistory Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Romans and Celts

Excerpted from the 14th article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:


Both the fossil remains and the eyewitness accounts of Classical authors confirm that all these Indo-European peoples were racially Nordic. Because they settled in different areas after leaving the original homeland, and because they subsequently mixed with different races and to different extents, there are noticeable differences in various racial characteristics among their descendants today. But originally, Celt, German, Balt, and Slav were indistinguishably Nordic.

The Celts were the first group to make an impact on the Classical world, and so we will deal with them first.

The reason the Celts interacted with the Greeks and Romans before the other groups did is that their wanderings took them farthest south. They invaded and settled in a great crescent stretching across central Europe from eastern Hungary and Czechoslovakia through Austria, southern Germany, Switzerland, and France into the British Isles. At the eastern and western ends of their range, respectively, isolated bands of Celts penetrated into central Asia Minor and the Iberian peninsula, while in the center quite substantial numbers crossed the Alps into northern Italy.

The Roman conquest of southeastern Europe, Gaul, and Britain destroyed the greater part of Celtic culture, as well as doing an enormous amount of racial damage; the effects of the later German and Slavic incursions were largely limited to linguistic and other cultural changes.

But the Celts themselves, as much as anyone else, were responsible for the decline of their racial fortunes. They settled in regions of Europe which, although not so heavily Mediterraneanized as Greece and Italy, were much more so than the German, Baltic, and Slavic areas. And, as has so often been the case with the Indo-Europeans, for the most part they did not force the indigenous populations out of the areas they conquered, but made subjects of them instead. Thus, many people who think of themselves as “Celts” today are actually more Mediterranean than Celtic. And others, with Latin, Germanic, or Slavic names, are actually of nearly unmixed Celtic descent.

Fastidious, Fair, and Fierce

The early Celts were not literate, and we are, therefore, dependent on Classical authors for much of what we know about Celtic mores, lifestyles, and behavior, as well as the physical appearance of the Celts themselves. The fourth-century Byzantine writer, Ammianus Marcellinus, drawing on reports from the first century B.C., tells us that the Celts (or Gauls, as the Romans called them) were fastidious, fair, and fierce:

The Gauls are all exceedingly careful of cleanliness and neatness, nor in all the country… could any man or woman, however poor, be seen either dirty or ragged.

Nearly all… are of a lofty stature, fair and of ruddy complexion: terrible from the sternness of their eyes, very quarrelsome, and of great pride and insolence. A whole troop of foreigners would not be able to withstand a single Gaul if he called his wife to his assistance, who is usually very strong and with blue eyes…

The early Celts were not an urban people. Their dwellings, typically of timber construction, tended to be isolated farmsteads or, at most, clusters of a few buildings surrounded by a palisade.

In pre-Christian Ireland there was an intellectual class which had a social status approximately equal to that of the warrior-landowners. This class consisted of druids (priests), bards, physicians, artists, and skilled craftsmen, who moved freely from petty kingdom to petty kingdom in a way that was not possible for any other class, thereby helping to maintain cultural unity throughout a wide area. A similar class served the same functions on the continent.

Dark Side of Druidism

By the time of the Roman conquest, however, many extraneous elements had become inseparably blended into Celtic religion. The druids practiced not only solar rites, but some rather dark and nasty ones of Mediterranean origin as well. [Chechar’s note: today it’s known that the rites were not of Mediterranean origin—see below]

Celts, Germans Closely Related

Many later writers have not been as careful as Caesar was and tend to lump all Celtic-speaking populations together as “Gauls,” while sharply distinguishing them from the Germans. As a matter of fact, there was a much greater affinity between the Celts and the Germans, despite the language difference, than there was between the truly Celtic elements among the Gauls and the racially different but Celtic-speaking Mediterranean and Celtiberian elements.

In the British Isles the racial effects of the fifth-century B.C. Celtic invasions varied. In some areas indigenous Nordic populations were reinforced, and in others indigenous Mediterranean or mixed populations diluted the fresh Nordic wave.

Brennus Sacks Rome

Around 400 B.C. Celts invaded northern Italy in strength, establishing a permanent presence in the Po valley, between the Alps and the Apennines. They pushed out the resident Etruscans and Ligurians, founded the city of Milan, and began exploring possibilities for further expansion south of the Apennines.

In 390 B.C. a Celtic army under their chieftain Brennus defeated the Roman army and occupied Rome. The Celts were not prepared to stay, however, and upon payment of an enormous ransom in gold by the Romans they withdrew again to northern Italy. In the following centuries there were repeated clashes between adventurous Celts and the people of the Classical civilizations to the south.

But the Celts, unfortunately, despite their mobility and their intelligence, never formed a unified whole; they remained a collection of distinct tribes, as often hostile to one another as they were to non-Celts. This lack of unity brought their downfall.

Man against man, a Celt could usually beat a Roman; the Celts were at least as brave and as skilled in arms as the Romans, and the former were bigger and stronger, on the average, for the latter had by this time mixed for too many generations with southern races and lost most of the Nordic qualities of their forefathers. But the Romans had the supreme advantage of organization, without which little of lasting impact has ever been wrought in this world.


My comment:

With only the Romans’ word to go on human sacrifices performed by the Druids—the ancient Celts left no written record of their own—it has been easy for historians to dismiss such tales as wartime propaganda.

Recent archeological findings however are starting to unearth evidence of Druid sacrifices, sometimes on a massive scale. According to my “psychogenic” point of view (cf. my research on psychohistory), at the time of Caesar’s conquests of Gaul the Romans belonged to a more evolved “psychoclass” than the Gauls, which not only means more culturally evolved but also more integrated psychologically (with time the psychic development of the two psychoclasses, Celts and Latins, became homogenized).

An objective appraisal on the conflict between Romans and Aryan “barbarians” of more than two thousand years ago, therefore, ought to consider these two factors in any future study of the epoch: psychohistory and racial studies such as the one pioneered by Pierce.

Categories
Christian art My pinacoteca

Madonna of Foligno (detail)

Painting of the day:

Raffaello Sanzio
The Madonna of Foligno (detail) ~ 1511-1512
Pinacoteca Vaticana

Categories
Holocaust

The Holocaust—Listening to both sides

The controversy at The Occidental Observer about the Holocaust has continued since my last entries in this blog mentioning it. It has now reached 700+ comments at TOO and it might reach 800.

Below I reproduce two opposite book-reviews from Amazon Books about Thomas Dalton’s Debating the Holocaust: A New Look At Both Sides.


Attorney speaks:

As a skeptic of both sides of the Holocaust debate I’ve long hoped for a book that would shed light where there was only heat. Debating the Holocaust comes as close as I can hope for, and it is a remarkable accomplishment.

Rather than writing a review longer than the book itself, I’ll just first note that with Thomas Dalton’s book, the biggest single problem has finally been addressed: that it has been impossible to grasp the big picture of the holocaust because of the incoherence of the story.

The goals of Nazi policy, the means by which it was ordered and carried out, major events and where they happened (nobody really knows where the burial and cremation grounds of Chelmno are), the technical challenges that would come with a mass extermination effort, even something as basic as the death totals; nothing about the Holocaust story is consistent from one source to another. Over the decades figures, testimonies and documents have been exaggerated, reduced, misrepresented, changed or even disappeared, and in many cases with the obvious goal of keeping certain details a mystery so that awkward questions don’t come up (Saul Friedländer: I’m talking to you!). When Dalton writes that he found “a Holocaust story in tatters” he simply states the truth, and it is easy to see why two important historians, Michel De Bouard and Jean-Claude Pressac, remarked that the historical record of the Holocaust is “rotten”.

To deal with this, Dalton introduces a remarkable (and easy!) analytic tool which he calls the death matrix, a technique that combines various tables into a single analytic field that clearly demonstrates the properties of any account of the six alleged extermination camps. It can be done by anybody who has a spreadsheet option on his or her computer. Not unique to Dalton, it’s a common tool in several technical fields, and you have to wonder why anti-revisionist John Zimmerman, who is a professor of accounting and has to use similar tools in transaction analysis, never used it in his various refutations.

For the reader, this means a book where you have to take pen to paper and do some homework of your own, but that is a refreshing change to Holocaust books which don’t just ask but demand that you swallow whatever they say without question.

Dalton’s results when he applies his death matrix are clear, transparent and easily understood, but Dalton clearly states that certain data rests on questionable assumptions and that his use of the tool is preliminary and needs refinement (I could already suggest a revision where Dalton credits Krema II at Auschwitz with cremating 11,000 bodies at a time when it was out of service, the six weeks from the beginning of May through June 12 of 1943). It’s a terrific tool, something that becomes clear when the tables reveal that the combined work of exhumations and cremations at Belzec had no choice but to run at a rate of 92,000 per month. That’s better than 3,000 per day, 125 per hour, a corpse dug out of the ground and thawed and burned to fragments and ground to powder every 30 seconds; and on wooden pyres in the dead of a Polish winter when weather conditions would have frozen the ground rock-solid and rendered many days impossible for work.

That account is ridiculous; whatever the truth is, it’s something else. Why didn’t somebody think of this technique before?

Avoiding the dreary name-calling, Dalton divides the two camps into “traditionalists” and “revisionists”, and then divides the revisionists into the “agitators” and “academics”. Another good idea where ideas are sorely needed; when it comes to the revisionists Dalton intelligently ignores the “agitators” and concentrates on the solid arguments of the academics. Revisionists who have made it some sort of holy crusade to challenge the Holocaust will not be happy with this book. Dalton clearly states that the Holocaust cannot be dismissed as a hoax, a fraud or a conspiracy (the financial exploitation of it and the loathsome criminalization of challenging it are another matter). Something awful happened, but exactly what it was, and how it fits into the even bigger picture of the Second World War is impossible to determine with the history that we have.

As accessible as a book that addresses technical issues can be, Debating the Holocaust would make an excellent high school textbook, teaching young people about the story while challenging them to accept nothing until they’ve applied their own brains to it. Certainly a better choice than The Diary of Anne Frank, a book which has nothing in it about the Holocaust but nevertheless is required (forced?) reading on the subject.

While my review lists five stars, I’m actually giving it four and a half, with half a star taken off for listing a large percentage of the deaths at Majdanek as “natural causes” in one of the tables. This is insensitive to say the least. In their 2003 book on the camp (one of only two studies ever made!) revisionists Carlo Mattogno and Jurgen Graf, no defenders of the Holocaust, are themselves aghast at the way some 40,000 people died slow deaths of exposure standing in the open, sewage soaked fields. These are not “natural causes”. As a police worker I know that “Official Indifference” is a crime that American police, fire and rescue workers can be charged with, so even if the Nazis didn’t intend to kill these people they are responsible, at the very least, for mass manslaughter.

With that unfortunate beauty mark addressed, I can finish with a preview of Dalton’s epilogue, which is depressing. Dalton points out that there is an appreciable amount of common ground between traditionalists and revisionists; no academic revisionist has ever denied that tragic atrocities happened, and the best (and bravest) traditionalists have themselves noted that there is something terribly wrong with the history, which suggests that a combined effort between the two camps holds an excellent possibility of finally bringing to light a clear and coherent picture of what the events of the 1940’s really were.

But it ain’t gonna happen. As B’nai Brith director Ian Kadegan ominously crows, “The memory of the Holocaust is central to The New World Order”, and goes on to obscenely call it “Western Civilization’s greatest failure” (that would actually be the Congo Corvée, something that only die-hard Mark Twain fans have heard about). The traditional story of the Holocaust is a multi-billion dollar cash cow that enriches some of the most corrupt institutions on Earth, and has truly become an idolatrous religion that too many people are staked in. If the traditional story falls, not only reputations and livelihoods but power will be lost, for the traditional Holocaust story is used as a club to dictate what morality is by people who have no authority to do so, and to intimidate them not to question that authority.

Which means reading this book may actually qualify as a revolutionary act. The enemies of free speech can exact a price, but they can’t stop you. That’s why the right is called unalienable. Not even God can take it away. Thanks for the book Thomas.



Prosecutor speaks:

While this book definitely raises a few interesting points, the problem with it starts right on the cover. Thomas Dalton does not exist, and thus, has no verifiable Ph.D. or teaching record in any university.


In fact, the evidence suggests that Michael Santomauro, the editorial director of Thesis and Dissertations Press, is probably the author (and he has no Ph.D, meaning the entire description of Thomas Dalton’s “career” is a fabrication). Thesis and Dissertations Press is owned by Castle Hill Publishers, which was founded by a long time Holocaust opponent, Germar Rudolf. So in the interest of full disclosure, when you buy this book, 1/3 of the profits go to Germar Rudolf, whose full-time agenda is to refute the holocaust by any means necessary (an “agitator” in the parlance of this book).

No one can read the things Michael Santomauro has written and believe for a minute that he is a neutral observer simply examining all side of the issue. Mr. Santomauro is the publisher, and probably the author, of this book, and yet, if you go to the last page of reviews, you will find him reviewing his own book without disclosing any of this information (under the title “Banned in 15 countries”). This, at the very least, is intellectual dishonesty, and should cast serious doubt on the “neutral analysis” claim of the book.

So be forewarned, a book with this much deception on the cover is not going to present all sides of the issue fairly. In my opinion, this is a very carefully constructed attack on the holocaust which presents carefully constructed arguments for the holocaust, then skillfully, craftily and systematically takes them apart. The problem is that it does not present all of the evidence for the holocaust, it carefully slants claims about the holocaust, leaves out critical bits of information (such as the fact that over three million of the “six million” Jews who died in World War II concentration camps have been identified by name, and more names are being tracked down and verified each year), and builds very careful straw men (Hitler issued a written order to exterminate the Jews), then knocks them down (can’t find the written order), all while ignoring evidence from mouths of Hitler’s own men that such a program, with or without written orders from Hitler, did exist.

Another example of the “neutrality” of this book: Zyklon B is a pesticide used to kill lice, not to exterminate people. True, but then what are we to make of the statements of Rudolf Hoss, the director of Auschwitz, when he told how they used the Zyklon B to kill people, paraphrased here:

There were 2 bunkers, and between them they held about 2000 people. The doors were screwed shut and solid pellets of Zyklon B were dropped into the chambers through vents, releasing the Zyklon B gas. About one third of the victims died immediately (presumably those closest to the vents), and everyone within was dead in about 20 minutes.

If Zyklon B was not used to kill people, then why did the director of Auschwitz give a very detailed account of how they did use it to kill people? Was he also conspiring to promote the “myth” of the holocaust?

It is true that there are some problems with some of the things said about the holocaust, but the problems are not as glaring as this book makes out. It is possible, for example that only 4 or 5 million Jews died, not 6 million (as 3 million are already documented), but would that really make this less of a holocaust if Hitler and his regime only succeeded in hunting down and murdering 4 or 5 million? While there may be some over-estimates on the part of the Holocaust survivors (not actually proven, by the way), there is extreme under-estimates taking place in this book.

Just beware, as this book is not even remotely as fair and balanced as the 5 star reviews here would lead us to believe. Only those who don’t actually know the facts of the holocaust will be swayed by this book. To those aware of the independent research, filmed and photographic evidence, and the true historical record found in hundreds, maybe thousands of well-researched reports, this comes off as nothing more than one of the most carefully crafted attacks on the holocaust ever to make it into print.

Although I’m not sure this book deserves it, it will be interesting to see if anyone takes the time to do a thorough rebuttal. I, for one, would love to see that, if only to eliminate, once and for all, the idea that this book is even remotely neutral, balanced or fair.



My comment:

In the Amazon Books site a scholarly controversy continued in the comment section of this particular review.

Incidentally, I won’t discuss the details in the comment section of this blog. I am no expert on the topic and have not even read Dalton’s book.

Taking into account my courtroom analogy in my aggregations at The Occidental Observer, my sole purpose here is to show what would be an actual “listening” of the evidence or lack thereof on both sides of the debate. (The debate at TOO is replete of personal attacks and even ad hominems.)

Those who want to debate the details of Holocaust claims and counter-claims may be interested to visit the Amazon reviews of the book and post their opinions there. Here my only point is to show how difficult it is for the layman to side either the “attorney” or the “prosecutor” without actual listening to their whole, technical presentation in a “courtroom” (something that could take months as in the O.J. Simpson trial and even that is no assurance of a fair verdict).