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So-called saints Stefan Zweig

Augustine, 1

Augustine (354-430) was not only a man of his time like the previous ones in this series. Of the five mentioned, this African author had the most significant influence on the civilisation of the white man (he was, for example, the most widely read author in Spain). I will not speak here of his magnum opus, The City of God. His infernal doctrine, which wreaked so much havoc in my young life, is already denounced in several parts of my autobiography. I will confine myself to his most popular book.

It will be remembered that in my article on Goethe I said that Zweig had written about Augustine, but I omitted what he wrote about this so-called Father of the Church. Here is the full passage:

Classical antiquity had as yet no inkling of these mysterious paths. Caesar and Plutarch, the ancients who describe themselves, are content to deal with facts, with circumstantial happenings, and never dream of showing more than the surface of their hearts.

Before he can throw light into his soul, a man must be aware of its existence, and this awareness does not begin until after the rise of Christianity. St Augustine’s Confessions breaks a trail for inward contemplation. Yet the gaze of the famous divine was directed, not so much inward, as towards the congregation he hoped to edify by the example of his own conversion. His treatise was a confession to the community, a model Confession; it was purposeful, teleological; it was not an end in itself, comprising its own answer and its own meaning. Many centuries were to pass before Rousseau (that remarkable man who was a pioneer in so many fields) was to draw a self-portrait for its own sake.

But in previous pages Zweig had observed the obvious: Rousseau’s confessions were not honest either, since he never repented of his sin of having thrown all his children into the orphanage. Precisely because of this sort of thing Zweig said that autobiography is the most difficult of literary arts: one must betray oneself if one wants to tell the pure truth about one’s life, a truth that neither Augustine nor Rousseau really confessed for lack of insight, intellectual honesty and nobility of soul.

The biggest problem I see with the editions that have been made of the Confessions is that they have been prefaced by Christians, including Penguin Books. This bias makes the unsuspecting reader unaware that the accepted wisdom about the book is a myth. There was no such thing as his very famous conversion weeping in the garden of his house. He was always a Christian as I will demonstrate in this article divided into more than one blog posts.

By convention, the thirteen chapters of the Confessions are called books instead of chapters by the publishers:
 

BOOK I: Augustine’s childhood

In this first chapter Augustine mentions his wet nurses. It is pertinent to note that, in referring to his whining as an infant, he already sees it as sinful. The white man’s current seemingly terminal sense of guilt is due to having secularised the Christian notion of sin (now at ethnosuicidal levels throughout the West). Augustine speaks of ‘you’ to his god, which all editions capitalise, ‘God’; he doesn’t use the ‘thou’ when referring to this deity in the Confessions: a sort of epistle to the Christian providence by this Punic theologian.

‘Who shall make me understand the sin of my childhood, since before thee no man is without sin, even a child of a single day on earth?’ Three pages later he confesses: ‘I was still a boy when I began to invoke you as my help and refuge…, I was small, I begged you with no small affection that they wouldn’t whip me at school. Sometimes, for my own good, you didn’t listen to me, and I was laughed at not only by my elders but also by my parents’.

Augustine was unaware, as the vast majority of religious people still are, that the idea of ‘God’ is a sublimation of the parental image. In this anecdote we see that the child Augustine was the victim of beatings at school and of mockery of these beatings in his own home. Since the idea of the deity is a projection, it is not surprising that now, talking in written soliloquies to his parental introject, he tells this ‘deity’ that ‘for his own good’ he didn’t listen to his pleas. Alice Miller calls this poisonous pedagogy in one of her books, translated into English under the title For Your Own Good.

And why was he beaten? On the next page he tells us: ‘I was whipped because I played ball…’ Clearly, the teachers were childhood-breakers, but Augustine doesn’t identify with the wounded child inside him but with the perpetrator: ‘I sinned, Lord, by disobeying my parents and teachers’.[1] The religious introjects had begun in his early childhood:

I was still a child when I heard of the eternal life promised to us by our God, who humbled himself and came down to our pride. And from that time I was marked with the sign of the cross, and from my mother’s womb I was given a taste of his salt.

Then he writes: ‘With what fervour of spirit and with what faith I came to my mother and mother of us all, your Church’ (my emphasis: keep in mind that he is always writing to his god in this epistle-book called the Confessions). He continues:

In truth, I already believed, and my mother believed, and all the house believed, except my father, who, however, could never overcome in me the pious right my mother had over me that I shouldn’t cease to believe in Christ, in whom he didn’t yet believe. For my mother wanted you, my God, to be my father more than he did.

The next page already shows the enormous cognitive distortion that Christianity caused him from an early age: ‘Being such a small boy I was already a great sinner’, and shortly afterwards: ‘I still don´t fully understand today why I abhorred Greek literature’. As I read the following pages I couldn’t restrain myself from writing at the bottom of the page, ‘If what Augustine says is a sin, Tubby of Little Lulu is a sinner!’ Even common curiosity in the Greco-Roman world was sinful:

But my sin was to seek in myself and other creatures, not in him, pleasure, beauty, and truth, thus falling into pain, confusion.

 

____________

[1] What healed Alice Miller of her depressions, she confesses, was to identify with the wounded child inside her; not with the perp.

Categories
London Miscegenation William Shakespeare

Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was also a ‘man of his time’, in that his plays were performed at the London Globe. Compare this with the wretched lives of the ‘men against their time’: so ignored that, in their isolation, they usually suffer psychic annihilation (as would happen to Nietzsche).

On a mainstream television channel last century I caught glimpses of what appeared to be a series of Shakespeare’s complete works. Each drama, comedy or tragedy was performed by native actors—naturally all ethnically pure English—and I was so impressed by the more than beautiful euphony and musicality of Shakespearean English that I immediately fell in love and understood why his poetry represents one of the pinnacles of European art.

Alas, in this century, the last time I visited London, I went to Shakespeare’s Globe to see a performance of Antony and Cleopatra and… I received a horrifying shock: unlike the beautiful images I had seen on television in the previous century, now not only was the casting of the Shakespearean tragedy at the Globe itself replete with blacks, but an Arab was fondling his English girlfriend in the audience!

It is events of this kind that make one abandon the classics and devote oneself to Hitler with the utmost fanaticism! While I can recognise the very high culture represented by the English poet’s theatre, what is the point of being immersed in his dramas if what prevails in England today is the ethnosuicidal tragedy of astronomic self-hatred of the English themselves? I was a tourist in London when this happened, and it should be no surprise that Tyrone Joseph Walsh, mentioned in my previous article, vehemently refused to accompany me to the Globe.

Now Tyrone is rotting in jail for rebelling against his country’s vehement ethnosuicide. Only now do I fully understand why one loses all interest in one’s country’s greatest literary figure when things like what happened to me at the Globe happen.

So, sharing the disinterest of the friend who is now unable to communicate with us, I shall confine myself in this entry to re-posting what I have written in previous years about Shakespeare’s best-known tragedy:

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Of my list of fifty, this was the first film that, as I recount in my autobiography, really made an impression on me when I saw it on television in 1975, with my dad by my side. Precisely in trying to understand how a defect or fault in my father’s character corrupted the whole family dynamics, years later I would ponder much in the words that, in Laurence Olivier’s voice, we listen at the beginning of Hamlet (1948 film):

So oft it chances in particular men
That for some vicious mole of nature in them,
By the o’ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit grown too much; that these men–
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Their virtues else — be they as pure as grace,
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault.

As a teenager watching it at home, I was most impressed by Hamlet’s inward-spiralling soliloquies in one of the early scenes, when he is left alone in the hall and the court guests leave. If instead of the forty-year-old actor Olivier, the director had cast a teenage actor of my age—as he appears in Shakespeare’s tragedy!—I would have connected much more with the character. But even so, his soliloquies near the beginning of the film made a big impression on me because that is what I used to do as a teenager, and precisely because of a family tragedy that no one but me seemed to have any introspection about.

However, it is impossible to critique the film without critiquing not only Shakespeare, but the Christian era of which both Shakespeare and I are a part.

As Alice Miller observed in one of her books, the Judeo-Christian commandment to honour the parent has been fatal to the mental health of Christians (and I would add, of atheistic neochristians alike). Although Christians destroyed the vast majority of the classical world’s plays, tragedies and comedies, in the little that remains it can be seen that in both Iphigenia and Electra it’s clear that there is maddening mistreatment of their children by their parents. But not in Hamlet where an uncle is the bad guy. Nevertheless, for the Elizabethan period Hamlet was a breakthrough in the right direction, although millennia earlier the Greeks had already reached the marrow of the human soul. In sum, for the time Hamlet definitely represented a leap forward to a more self-conscious self.

Another thing that, now grown up, struck me when I rewatched the film was the character of Ophelia when Hamlet wants to grab her: the personification of the eternal feminine that I’ve been talking about on this site, which also appears in Shakespeare when we listen: ‘In her excellent white bosom, these…’ Hamlet’s scenes with Ophelia in the castle should be paradigmatic of how women will be in the future ethnostate, and are worth seeing. But back to what I said above.

Whites won’t mature as long as they are trapped by Judeo-Christian commandments. Even in areas as distinct from racial preservation as mental disorders (in Shakespearean tragedy we read that the teenage Hamlet was said to be deranged), we can never understand each other unless we transvalue our values to the values of the times of the Greek tragedies. Back then, before the commandment to honour our parents, it was easy to see that Clytemnestra’s mistreatment had affected the mental health of her daughter Electra; or that Iphigenia’s sacrifice by Agamemnon had affected Clytemnestra terribly, and so on. Even the tough Spartans wept at these open-air tragedies when they visited Athens because they reflected what was happening in the real world.

So much do Christian ethics permeate the secular world that even in his Dictionnaire philosophique Voltaire says that ‘It is natural for children to honour their parents’, and the so-called mental health professionals of our times feel the same way. In our century, the Judeo-Christian injunction to honour the parent, now secularised, moves writers to shift the villain of the story, for example from father to uncle as in Harry Potter (and Hamlet!) and only through such a shift is audio-visual drama permitted.

To transvalue all values is to recognise that the tragedies of the classical world were more profound and direct than the indirect tragedies of our Christian era. And even though Shakespeare, like Montaigne, set religion aside in their writings, they still moved on the axiological scale of our age, where the mandate to honour the parent is so profound that there is a whole fraudulent profession, psychiatry, which tries to keep the parental figure out in the cases of traumatised children and adolescents at home (cf. my books in Spanish).

 
Hamlet revisited

Though fictional, Hamlet is a character who, asking himself a thousand questions as he wanders the vast halls of the Danish castle, he also struggles with mental illness. In my article ‘Hamlet’ last year [reposted above], I implied that the Greek tragedians knew the human soul better than the great writers of Christendom for the simple reason that the latter have lived under the sky of the fourth commandment, honour our parents, and that this prevented them from seeing that some parents drive their children mad. This is so true that I commented in that article that even Voltaire hadn’t broken with that Christian commandment (it was not until the 20th and 21st centuries that a Swiss writer, Alice Miller, repudiated such a toxic commandment).

But in this entry I didn’t want to talk about the trauma model of mental disorders. I want to put Shakespeare on par with Goethe in the sense that their most famous works, Faust and Hamlet, contain strong Christian residues. Like Goethe, Shakespeare needs to be contextualised.

What could a continental freethinker do in the mid-16th century during the wars between Catholics and Protestants? Become a recluse. A sceptic of Christianity, Montaigne, did exactly that: something that evokes that many contemporary racialists are now recluses because of social ostracism if they dare to come down from their towers. Montaigne impresses me because he was the true representative of the intellectual side of the Renaissance, in sharp contrast to Erasmus who still lived in the thickest medieval darkness (cf. what I wrote about Erasmus in Daybreak).

England was then freer than Montaigne’s France, and that is the background to understanding William Shakespeare. We know that Shakespeare read Florio’s translations of Montaigne and that he was very impressed by him. Kenneth Clark said that Shakespeare was the first great poet of Christendom without religious beliefs.

Hamlet by William Morris Hunt.

However, like Goethe with his Faust, this is not entirely accurate. Shakespeare’s Hamlet has to be placed within the matrix of Elizabethan England: a time when Christian doctrine was still taken very seriously, both in its Anglican and Papist versions. Hamlet suffered a schizogenic struggle. He struggled internally with the command of his father’s ghost, from purgatory, to avenge him; but Hamlet couldn’t condemn himself, should he commit the mortal sin of murdering his uncle if he was, after all, innocent: a dilemma with which he struggles internally throughout the play.

So despite being influenced by the free-thinking ideas of his time, like Goethe Shakespeare was playing with Christian post-mortem doctrine. Nonetheless, from the viewpoint of my trilogy, which tries to fulfil Delphi’s mandate, Hamlet certainly represents a breakthrough in insight: it is the first foray into what we may call the true self (as opposed to the false self: the internal struggles we read in Augustine’s Confessions).

What gives Hamlet such evocative power is that the tragedy doesn’t take place on stage but within Hamlet’s soul. The whole play is a soliloquy, and since I have finished my trilogy these days with a postscript to my own tragedy with my father, I would like to quote a few words from Hamlet’s second scene:

Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven
Or ever I had seen that day, Horatio!
My father!—methinks I see my father.

A couple of minutes of the 1948 film interpretation from this point onwards portrays Hamlet’s inward-spiralling soliloquies very well. Incidentally, when I saw that film with my father in 1975 he had already mistreated me.

Categories
Autobiography Poetry

Dante

Like Cervantes and Goethe, Dante (1265-1321) was a ‘man of his time’, so much so that he was prior of Florence, i.e. one of its senators. So to understand the poet we must contextualise him in the Middle Ages.

In the century in which Dante was born, another Italian who would greatly influence Western civilisation, St Francis, whom my father taught me to admire in my adolescence, had founded an order of mendicant friars. On one occasion, speaking of the saint of Assisi, my father mentioned that in one town he had cast out demons. There are still people who believe that. My mother told an anecdote about some nuns in Coyoacán who said to her that the devil made noises in the convent, but that they laughed because they knew he wasn’t going to tempt them. My mother said this not as the nuns’ hallucination: she accepted their demonological interpretation of the noises.

Francis exorcises the demons at Arezzo, fresco by Giotto.

When Francis died, Thomas Aquinas was born, the Italian who fixed the doctrine of the Catholic Church to the extent that one pope called his theological legacy aeternis patris. We can already imagine Voltaire’s mockery of Aquinas in his Philosophical Dictionary. But from the point of view of the priest of the sacred words—a fancy way of referring to a contemporary National Socialist—Voltairean sarcasm is of little use if the Enlightenment bequeathed us the universal declaration of human rights: neochristianity. But let’s take it one step at a time.

In my article on Cervantes, I asked what was the point of the Golden Age of Castilian letters if the Church didn’t allow them to write freely. In Dante’s time there was already the University of Bologna, but what happened when someone wanted to philosophise free of the theological yoke? When Francis was alive, in Paris in 1210, several readers of Aristotle had concluded that there was no life after death. We can imagine how such ‘heresy’ would affect the control of the European population through the spiritual terror—fear of damnation—with which the Church controlled them. The reaction of the bishop of the city was not long in coming. Ten of the freethinkers were burned at the stake: a ‘hard totalitarianism’ compared to the ‘soft totalitarianism’ of today. (Nowadays they no longer burn the heretic, they only imprison him. Recall that two men who have commented on this site, Tyrone Joseph Walsh and Christopher Gibbons, are serving years in the UK for thoughtcrimes).

By Dante’s time, however, banking and the power of emperors were beginning to emerge, acting as counterweights to the once all-powerful Church, although Pope Boniface VIII tried to bring down that counterweight in Italy. Florence in particular felt the renaissance of the age: its arts were revived in that city with its characteristic tower houses, such as the one in the illustration above (even the tourist of our century can still appreciate something of the medieval air in some Florentine quarters).

Let us recall, in our abridgement of Karlheinz Deschner’s book, how the Church acted as the lobotomist of the Greco-Roman man since Constantine. Here we will only focus on one more example. Due to the translations of Aristotle and Galen, ancient medicine was already becoming accessible. But when, at the end of Dante’s life, a certain Mondino de Liuzzi began to dissect corpses, he came up against ecclesiastical authority. Pietro d’Abano, an illustrious physician, was even persecuted by the Inquisition and, after his death, his body was burned at the stake.

Fides (Faith) by Giotto. In the Middle Ages, Faith had the Aryan mind chained.

And the ‘men against their time’? In a world of hard totalitarianism they simply couldn’t flourish, although we must mention the English Franciscan Roger Bacon (1214-1292), who despite being persecuted attributed a new meaning to natural science and mathematics, which in centuries to come would become the foundation of experimental research. Nor should we fail to mention the Scotsman Duns Scotus (1263-1308), the only intellectual to question the doctrine of eternal damnation in a thousand years of Christendom! But this was the same century in which the Dominican order was founded: an order of learned theologians who were trained to fight the doctrines that the Newspeak of the time called ‘heretical’ (the term for social ostracism which in medieval times was equivalent to the ‘racist’ of our days). From this order came some of the greatest exponents of medieval thought, such as Aquinas.

The Militant Church and the Triumph of the Dominicans, fresco by Andrea Bonaiuti in Florence.

Parallel to this orthodoxy that forced an iron faith on the white man, a ‘little renaissance’ emerged at the time when Dante flourished. The liberal arts such as grammar and rhetoric, or geometry, music and astronomy (or rather astrology) were following their course. Secular music in particular, including troubadour music, moved away from Gregorian chant while retaining a liturgical stamp. Frederick II of Swabia encouraged intense cultural activity.

Compared to our ‘Empire of the yin’ in the 21st century West, the Aryan psyche, specifically the Italian one, was extremely quarrelsome. In paintings we can see crenellated city walls with men at arms. The clashing of swords was an almost daily occurrence in the tumultuous life of the communes. This balance between Yang and yin, militia and arts, also existed in Hitler’s Germany but unlike medieval society was on the verge of breaking with the Christian Era (and would have broken with it for the good had it not been for Anglo-American intervention).
 

Beatrice

Con Beatrice m’era m’suso in cielo
(With Beatrice I was enclosed in heaven).

Dante first met Beatrice in 1274, but it was not until 1283 that he received his first greeting from the lady, who died in 1290, the year Giotto painted the Cross of Santa Maria Novella. A quarter of a century after the death of his platonic love he began the Inferno, although he wrote the Divine Comedy in many different places during his troubled life. At the age of fifty-six, Dante died poor in Ravenna, but his poem was a spectacular success after his death. Only Renaissance ideals and the new tastes they brought would cause Dante’s fame to eclipse. The 19th century, despite its infatuation with the Middle Ages, was heir to this contempt for scholasticism and its theology.

The Comedy transports us, first, to an underground journey, then to the ascent of the mountain where sins are being purged, and finally to an interplanetary flight. Many years ago a friend I knew in a chess park gave me, in three volumes, the best translation of the Comedy into our native language. I lent the first volume, the one on hell, to a girlfriend of my brother’s who was studying Italian but she never returned it to me. I have only a few scraps left of the book of the Purgatorio and only the one on Paradiso I keep in its entirety.

The opening lines of the first song, which can be seen in this codex, are still the most famous: ‘Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark / For the straightforward pathway had been lost’. In my books I have used them to describe how I was for decades after the tragedy of my adolescence which left me without a career, without a job and—for reasons confessed in those books—without a partner. Being lost in a dark forest is a splendid metaphor for how I was before a Beatrice rescued me: the books of Alice Miller on parental abuse, with whom I got to correspond before she died.

Before a Beatrice appeared in my life, at least on an intellectual level, I had tried to get out of the forest through neochristianity, specifically, a religious movement (‘Eschatology’) that emerged in the previous century, inspired by the New Testament: a movement I have already discussed on pages 11-26 of Daybreak. The medieval universe in which my father lived is evident in an anecdote from the early 1980s.

We were having a Sunday lunch at home with Uncle Beto when, for some reason, Eschatology came into the conversation. To scold me publicly my father, a traditional Catholic, alluded to a passage in the Inferno in which Dante had put heretics (Eschatology was schismatic, outside the Catholic Church) in a place where they were quartered. My father imitated with his hands a sort of scythe wielded by a devil to dismember them, in the belief that these heretics had ‘dismembered the Church’. There are many other symbolic passages in the Inferno, such as the twisted landscape and the twisted bodies in the jungle of the suicides (admirably recreated by Doré centuries later).

With apologies to the vox populi, it is a mistake to read the Inferno and stop there. For Salvatore Battaglia, ‘among the three cantigas of the Poem, this one of Purgatorio represents the most truthful presentation of the human condition’. The middle book is flanked by the books of the damned and the blessed. Purgatorio is the realm of poetry, and in my opinion, given that publishing a book in the vernacular language questioning the existence of hell was impossible in the Middle Ages, beauty was the most direct form of therapy against the fear of damnation, while the poet sublimates it in art and the dogma is no longer felt as it was before: it is ‘weathered’ with sublime lyricism (for example, each of the three books ends with the word stelle, stars). As a counterpoint, on 30 December 1995 I made a note in my copy:

I have barely read the summary and I think that the whole Dantean Comedy is bullshit. Why on earth build a beautiful cathedral on false principles? In other words, even supposing it is true what Octavio Paz says, that Dante is the poet of our Age, that is beside the point: what pisses me off is that the poet believed the Christian worldview. A contemporary of his, Duns Scotus, questioned the most psychotic doctrine of the universe; so there is no excuse ‘that at that time it couldn´t be broken’.

The Comedy is a triptych. In the final book, with Beatrice and Dante flying from planet to planet, the traveller enters from heaven to heaven, passing through the sky of Mars and then Saturn. There are very old paintings reflecting these Dantean passages. At the end he arrives at the empyrean, in the centre of which the poet looks face to face with the greatest of mysteries. In reality, this deity is ultimately the god of the Jews and what I wrote thirty years ago still holds: the freethinker cannot bear to be enraptured by the worldview of the Dark Ages.

Avete il Novo e ‘l Vecchio Testamento
e ‘l pastor della Chiesa che vi guida:
questo vi basti a vostro salvamento.

You have the New, the Old Testament
And the pastor of the Church is your guide:
This is enough to your salvation.

And even worse:

ond’ei credette in quella, e non sofferse
da indi il puzzo più del paganesmo;
e riprendíene le genti perverse.

that’s why he believed in her, and didn’t suffer from
the pestilence of paganism,
and reproved the wicked people.

This last passage appears in the song to the Heaven VI, where Dante speaks to those he considers to be righteous spirits. Obviously, the apologists of Christian doctrine had to reside in Dantean heaven.

Sometimes coffee conversations with friends are more profound than the musings of scholars. Many years ago the poet Carlos Mongar remarked to me that, much better than having written the Comedy, Dante would have had Beatrice in his arms and, in sexual intercourse, subject her ‘to the ultimate desecration’ implying that the lady would have been delighted to be possessed / desecrated by a Dante who would never have felt the need to become a poet.

Let us remember what happened to so many Werthers in real life. How many Christian prose and poetry would the white man have been spared if so many young men hadn’t been prevented by circumstances from marrying and procreating as the Gods command?

In the article on Goethe I also quoted an Austrian biographer who said that the most profound level of literary art is autobiography in which the artist betrays himself by daring to confess the truth about his life. Let us betray ourselves a little and confess that, precisely because the tragedy of my adolescence affected me to the extent that I was never able to hold a real Beatrice in my arms, I idealised the eternal feminine and that is what moves me to write.

Categories
Autobiography Literature

Goethe

If Cervantes seems to be the central figure of Spanish literature, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe appears to be the central figure of German literature.

Goethe’s most famous work is Faust, one of the great works of world literature. Its plot reminds us of Satan’s wager with the god of the Jews in the Book of Job. In Goethe’s novel, Mephistopheles makes a pact with God: he says he can divert God’s favourite human being (Faust), striving to learn everything that can be known, away from moral purposes. It also reminds me of the plot of Wagner’s Tannhauser. I have already said on this site that when I first saw the opera I was disappointed because it put Christianity triumphing over paganism (the Virgin Mary over the Goddess Venus). Cervantes and Shakespeare didn’t play into the hands of the Church, and neither did Goethe. But it is clear that like Wagner they never escaped Christian mythology.

I would not like to focus on Goethe’s masterpiece but on what was, at the time, the most popular: The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers): a semi-autobiographical epistolary novel. Considered the book that initiated Romanticism, it brought the young Goethe worldwide fame.

The main character of the novel, Werther, is a sensitive and passionate young man who falls madly in love with Charlotte. In real life, Goethe had fallen in love with a young woman named Charlotte (and in real life, in Manchester, I myself fell in love with a Charlotte who never returned my love!).

So influential was that novel, which Goethe had written in his early twenties, that towards the end of his life travelling to Weimar and visiting the master of German literature was a ritual. In one of his writings Goethe himself mentioned that his youthful suffering was partly the inspiration for the creation of the novel, although unlike the novelist Werther takes his own life at the moment when the midnight bells ring in Wahlheim. Most of the visitors he had in his old age had only read this book and only knew the writer from this novel among all those he wrote! It was very clear what a great impact The Sorrows of Young Werther had on young people in love and depressed.

I wonder what subliminal clues Werther had that a whole generation of young Europeans caught that fever to the point of dressing like the character: with a yellow vest, blue jacket and brown boots. Even some two thousand young Europeans took their own lives! ‘The bullet had entered above the right eye, blowing out the brains’ I read on the penultimate page of the copy of the novel I own. So much did the novel in the form of an epistle catch fire to Europe, that the small town where the fictional events took place became a sort of place of pilgrimage. Napoleon himself carried a copy of Werther in his field backpack!

Already in the 20th century my mother confessed to me that in her early teens this book had made a great impression on her. In my previous article I said that almost all the literary content of the Spanish writers of the Golden Age tasted rancid to me. It is curious to mention what I wrote some years ago on the inside back cover of my copy of Werther (my translation):

Wow!

I barely read the first few words of the book and couldn’t continue. I’d have to see a German film of the novel—if there is one. What matters is that they were committing suicide because ‘In those days parents didn´t listen to their children’, [the words of] Mom.

She didn’t tell me that in relation to Werther, but to a bitter experience she had when she was taken as a child to see The Blue Bird on the big screen: the only occasion, in her entire life, when an indirect criticism of either of her parents came out.

To be frank, I don’t think a teenager who has been treated well by his parents would be capable of committing suicide just because of a love setback. There must something wrong in the lad’s psyche, but to find out we have to dynamite the taboos of the age whose Judeo-Christian commandment to honour the parent has deeply permeated the secular world (Alice Miller has written on this secularization in The Body Never Lies).

That’s why this kind of old literature tastes rancid. Unlike not only the times of Goethe, but the times of my mother (who must have been a little girl when the translated The Blue Bird was released in the country), in this era it is already possible to speak crudely about how we were mistreated at home. So, if the least direct criticism of her parents never came out of my mother’s mouth except for the above quote (which came out indirectly when she was already an old woman), we can imagine on whom she unloaded her pent-up anger. All this has to do with Werther precisely because of the literary genre that I would like people like Benjamin and myself to inaugurate.

The following seven paragraphs I had already posted on this site in January 2015 under the heading ‘New Literary Genre’, but they are worth quoting again:

Stefan Zweig wrote in Adepts in Self-Portraiture that when Western literature began with Hesiod and Heraclitus it was still poetry, and of the inevitability of a decline in the mythopoetic talent of Greece when a more Aristotelian thought evolved. As compensation for this loss, says Zweig, modern man obtained with the novel an approach to a science of the mind. But the novel genre doesn’t represent the ultimate degree of self-knowledge:

Autobiography is the hardest of all forms of literary art. Why, then, do new aspirants, generation after generation, try to solve this almost insoluble problem?

[For a] honest autobiography […] he must have a combination of qualities which will hardly be found once in a million instances. To expect perfect sincerity on self-portraiture would be as absurd as to expect absolute justice, freedom, and perfection here on earth. No doubt the pseudo-confession, as Goethe called it, confession under the rose, in the diaphanous veil of novel or poem, is much easier, and is often far more convincing from the artistic point of view, than an account with no assumption of reserve. Autobiography, precisely because it requires not truth alone, but naked truth, demands from the artist an act of peculiar heroism; for the autobiographer must play the traitor to himself.

Only a ripe artist, one thoroughly acquainted with the workings of the mind, can be successful here. This is why psychological self-portraiture has appeared so late among the arts, belonging exclusively to our own days and those yet to come. Man had to discover continents, to fathom his seas, to learn his language, before he could turn his gaze inward to explore the universe of his soul. Classical antiquity had as yet no inkling of these mysterious paths. Caesar and Plutarch, the ancients who describe themselves, are content to deal with facts, with circumstantial happenings, and never dream of showing more than the surface of their hearts.

Zweig then devotes a long paragraph to St Augustine’s Confessions, the thinker I abhor the most of all Western tradition and whose theology about Hell caused massive psychological damage in my own life (see Hojas Susurrantes). Then he wrote:

Many centuries were to pass before Rousseau (that remarkable man who was a pioneer in so many fields) was to draw a self-portrait for its own sake, and was to be amazed and startled at the novelty of his enterprise. Stendhal, Hebbel, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Amiel, the intrepid Hans Jaeger, have disclosed unsuspected realms of self-knowledge by self-portraiture. Their successors, provided with more delicate implements of research, will be able to penetrate stratum by stratum, room by room, farther and yet farther into our new universe, into the depths of the human mind.

This quote explains why I decided to devise a hybrid genre between the self-portraiture that betrays the author and thus penetrates beyond the strata pondered by Romantic autobiographers. And it is precisely because of this that, if we have tried to reach this level, the previous stages of confessional literature already seem rancid to us, Werther included: they don’t get to the heart of the matter.

That said, there are a few biographical vignettes about Goethe that I wouldn’t want to overlook. For example, he dearly loved his sister Cornelia, the only surviving of his siblings (I will allude to this below in the context of Goethe’s own children).

Johann Kaspar, Goethe’s father had been a well-to-do scholar, and the letters of Katharina Elizabeth, his mother are quite readable. Goethe studied in Leipzig in enviable times when machine noises weren’t yet audible (I write this over the intolerable sound of air conditioning given the temperature outside my study):

A similar image could be added about Weimar, where Goethe took up residence after the publication of Werther. It was in the old Weimar court theatre that the first Goethean dramas, that he directed for a quarter of a century, were presented.

The trip to beautiful Italy had been pivotal in Goethe’s education. In the image above we see Goethe at the window of his home in Rome, a drawing by Tischbein. It was a time when St. Peter’s stood as the tallest building in the city. As I have said, it is impossible for a ‘man of his time’ not to be influenced by these architectural realities. And Goethe was, like Dante, Cervantes and Shakespeare, a man of his time. Only Nietzsche would rebel against the Christian era, but this is another matter altogether.

Goethe even visited Sicily. I, who like Nietzsche am a premature birth of a future not yet verified, when I travel to Europe I notice the purity of the Aryan in the faces (let’s say: the difference between the Italian near Switzerland and the Sicilian). As a man of his time Goethe noticed other things. On January 25, 1788 he wrote to a duke: ‘The great scenes of nature opened my mind and took away my wrinkles; I created for myself an opinion on the value of landscape painting, and saw Claude Lorrain and Poussin with different eyes; with Hackert, who came to Rome, I spent fourteen days in Tivoli’.

I am intrigued that Goethe’s wife Christiane, whom he had married in 1806, had five children with him of whom only the first survived. It reminds me of what Lloyd deMause wrote in several of his books: at that time babies died mainly from maternal neglect.

The surviving August not only had to live in his father’s shadow, but he died two years before Goethe did! I wonder how he was treated by his father: a kind of question that conventional biographers would never ask. From my point of view, that of the new literary genre, that question is more vital than, say, writing about the friendship between Goethe and the poet Schiller (when the latter died, Goethe felt deprived of the one person to whom he had recognised equal intellectual value). I would prefer to know, of the four children who died of undetermined causes a few days after their births, which reminds me of Goethe’s missing siblings, how were those babies treated?

Another fact that reflects that I am not a man of my time is that one of Goethe’s late inspirational women was the nineteen-year-old Ulrike, who was so afraid of sexual intercourse that she would become canonical: something unthinkable in the Aryan state I imagine, where women will have as much obligation to procreate as men to fight ethnocidal wars (like Hitler’s Master Plan East).

Incidentally, it was some words from Faust that inspired me in a phrase that in years past I have posted on this site: Only the eternal feminine leads to the Absolute.

Categories
Axiology Inquisition Literature

Cervantes

I wouldn’t like to start talking about Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra without saying something about my previous post, ‘Lebensborn’.

See my recent exchange with Greg Johnson (screenshot here). In his podcast with Joel Davis, Johnson mentioned the term ‘unnecessary suffering’ to substantiate why he rejects Nazism. Since my sacred words are Eliminate all unnecessary suffering, as can be seen in my latest books which I will translate, I feel compelled to clarify this point.

The sufferings that the Third Reich inflicted on many Caucasoids were necessary, not unnecessary. It is impossible to conquer an entire continent for the pure Aryan—think of Eduardo Velasco’s essay on the Heartland—without inflicting suffering on the ancient aborigines. If the normie Matt Walsh was recently able to glorify the Anglo-Saxon conquest of America to the detriment of the indigenous, why not also glorify the plans to conquer the Heartland for the pure Aryan? If the sufferings of the Amerindians were necessary for the creation of the US, why not see that the sufferings of the ‘half-gook’, as Maurice calls them, were also necessary? After all, the Anglo-Saxon’s intervention to abort Hitler’s Master Plan East has been so catastrophic that the white man is likely to become extinct!

As my books have yet to be translated, the distinction between necessary suffering and unnecessary suffering is unclear. But the axiological gulf that separates me from white nationalists might be better understood if I were to begin to offer my views on the protagonists of Christian civilisation. And since I have dedicated myself to writing in Spanish, what better than to begin with the author of Don Quixote?

Cervantes at the battle of Lepanto, by Augusto Ferrer-Dalmau.

Unlike me—an obscure writer who except for the warm opinions of some visitors living in other countries lives in almost absolute isolation—, Cervantes was a man of his time; so much so that in the neighbourhood of Madrid where he lived other great writers of the time such as Lope de Vega and Quevedo resided. But to understand the writers of the so-called golden age of Spanish literature, it is necessary to contextualize them in their historical moment.

The maximum aspiration of Charles V was to create a Catholic empire: a dream that could never be fulfilled because in his dominions the germ of the Protestant rupture was born. And something similar could be said of Philip II, who tried to make England bend the knee before Rome.

Although of my middle and high school teachers, the only one I remember with respect is Soledad Anaya Solórzano, my literature teacher (who was also the teacher of Octavio Paz, Nobel Prize winner in literature), I confess that despite being high culture, I reject Spanish literature including its classics.

The reason is simple. No one in Spanish literature has challenged the dogma. Exceptions like Eduardo Velasco are exceptions that confirm the rule (and had it not been for me, his work in the blogosphere would have been lost after his death). Why should we admire a literature that, although magnificent in form, has been unable to escape the Christian / neochristian matrix? Let’s recall one of the essays on this site in which the German Albus said that the first great genius to compose degenerate music was Johann Sebastian Bach (see e.g., pages 149-155 of Daybreak). Of course, this criticism could be extended to many other protagonists of Christian civilisation: since it was written by ‘men of their time’, the most popular European and Western literature never question the paradigm in turn.

It is true that, like Shakespeare, Cervantes didn’t play into the hands of the Church and from that point of view their secularized literary output in an era of religious intolerance had its value. But in this age, which requires fanatic priests to unplug whites from the matrix that destroys them, it is literature that already tastes rancid to us. Moreover, there were contemporaries of Cervantes who did play into the hands of the Church. The moralizing content of Mateo Alemán’s work, for example, was ideologically in line with the spirit of the Counter-Reformation; and let’s not even talk about the mystical painting of El Greco.

To give a very obvious example. Neither Cervantes nor other so-called giants of the Spanish Golden Age could have criticised the Church in times when it was celebrating autos de Fe. Throughout the 16th century the Inquisition acted with increasing harshness to repress any outbreak of the so-called Protestant heresy. Those condemned to death were publicly burned alive in an auto de Fe, and there was clemency only in case of recantation, when they were executed by garrote before being burned.

From the POV of the sacred words, which includes not only the 4 words but the 14 words, what real value can literature from ‘men of their time’ have, to use Savitri Devi’s expression?

Philip II, King of Spain when Cervantes was alive, with his son contemplating an auto de Fe in Valladolid in which members of the newly discovered Protestant communities of Seville and Valladolid were burned.

What do I gain by reading Lope de Vega, the ‘monster of nature’ as Cervantes called him due to his abundant literary production, if due to circumstances he was unable to criticise the burning of Protestants in Valladolid? In other words: if someone fights the current paradigm, he also fights his art, be it Lope’s or Bach’s. Although we cannot blame the artist for his circumstances—in the 1590 edition of Cervantes’ first novel we can read on the title page Impresa con licencia de la Santa Inquisición (Printed with license from the Holy Inquisition)—the priest of the sacred words sees little, if any, value coming from the pens of artists whose minds were chained to the worldview of the time.

The Spanish Visigoths had begun to interbreed since the 7th century (see William Pierce’s Who We Are). Compared to the already mixed ethnicity of the Spanish a thousand years later, only the defeat of the Invincible Armada by Elizabeth’s England tipped the balance to a more Aryan side of Europe. Although the English were also infected with Christian ethics and capable of bringing mixed couples to the marriage altar, by the time of Cervantes and Shakespeare their ‘ethics’ hadn’t metastasized to the incredible anti-white levels we see in today’s UK.

In this new series I will be talking about other protagonists of the Christian civilisation from the point of view of the contemporary priest of the sacred words (in plain English, National Socialism after 1945).

Categories
Miscegenation Nordicism Racial right

Lebensborn

‘If we could establish the Nordic race and, from this seedbed, produce a race of 200 million, the world would be ours.’ —Himmler

In heated debates, many commenters on racialist forums continue to discuss Hitler and National Socialism these days, including Greg Johnson (e.g., here).

One of the most recurring themes of Hitler’s critics has been the way the Germans treated the Slavs in WW2. I am enormously struck by the fact that none of them have been able to point out the obvious. It was perfectly natural and laudable that Himmler and his people, who had some Norwegian villages as an almost perfect paradigm of the Aryan, wanted to Aryanise the occupied territories of those who had suffered miscegenation due to the continuous Asian invasions.

Concerned about this issue, while walking through a beautiful little English village I once asked historian Arthur Kemp, author of a book on the history of the white race, a naive question. I asked him what percentage of Russians would be mixed. I say naive as it is obvious that they are already all more mixed than the purest Nordics—the paradigm with which Himmler and his ilk wanted to populate Europe, beautifully portrayed by the American Maxfield Parrish whose paintings now hang on the walls of my studio.

As we said in my anthology ‘On Exterminationism’, a few months after its founding, Himmler’s Lebensborn project opened Heim Hochland, the first home for pregnant women. For this purpose, the National Socialists took over the construction of a Catholic orphanage in Munich. Initially, the institution could accommodate up to thirty mothers and fifty-five children, and the candidates were carefully selected. Only women who met the characteristics of the dominant race were admitted. Candidates had their skulls measured, and only those with the coveted elongated skull, typical of the Nordic type, could be admitted. They also had to meet other requirements, such as blond hair, blue or green eyes and good health. Those who passed the test received the best care.

This fact, that due to the brutal Asian invasions the Slavs’ bloodline was already more compromised than the specimens chosen by Himmler and the SS to repopulate the conquered territories, is completely overlooked by all these critics of Hitler. They overlook it because of their Christian ethics and the mandate of universal brotherhood, so they see all Caucasoids (except Jews) as brothers. It is surreal to admit, but only someone who is not an Aryan, such as myself, has been able to point this fact out over the years in my disputes with white nationalists.

The thing to do is to applaud Hitler’s plans, including his Master Plan East, and only criticise him militarily (easy to say now: he should’ve waited until he had the atomic bomb before venturing into Operation Barbarossa).

What I say in ‘The Wall’ stands, which is why it remains and will remain the featured post of The West’s Darkest Hour. An axiological wall separates National Socialists from white nationalists and very few Americans have crossed it. William Pierce was one of them but it is a wall that very few racialists are, now, willing to cross.

There is something I have perceived and have already said but it is worth reiterating.

In my experience on this site, thanks to the emails sent to me by the more radical commenters I have noticed that only those who were martyred as children or teenagers by their parents have been able to truly break with the values of today’s West. It is difficult to visualize it if you don’t read the autobiography of one of them. But for the sake of understanding I will use an analogy.

Only people like Solzhenitsyn, who suffered years in the Gulag, broke with the ideology of the Soviet state to the extent that, already a refugee in the US, he wanted that state to be destroyed. We can already imagine nationalist Russians in Brezhnev’s time! Despite Stalin’s crimes, it would be unthinkable for them to wish for such a thing because, unlike Solzhenitsyn, they didn’t suffer the horrors of the Gulag.

Only intense suffering makes one break with the paradigm in turn, although I recognise that suffering resulting from parental abuse annihilates psychically almost everyone. That is why I must translate my books into English, something I will restart now that I am beginning to settle down after a very calamitous move.

Categories
Racial right

What

does not work

by Kevin Alfred Strom

 
HISTORICALLY, ethnic nationalism — both the conscious type, which first flowered in Europe in the 19th century, and the unconscious, natural type which has been around among all races since time immemorial — has been tried again and again, hundreds of times, nay, thousands of times throughout history. It is no strong proof against the dangers of miscegenation, or mercantile empire which usually leads to multiculturalism and multiracialism and ultimately miscegenation. It has failed again and again to prevent Jewish infiltration and domination, which are death sentences for any people which tolerate them. In short, ethnic nationalism alone is not enough. It has been tried and it has failed. For a cumulative total of a thousand years and more, it has utterly failed to prevent the existential plight in which the White race finds itself today. Ethnic nationalism on its own is the quintessence of what does not work.

But National Socialism did not fail. That is why it is vilified by our enemies. True, it was defeated in a war — I say a battle in a war that is not yet over [emphasis by Editor]. But, barring war, its trajectory was perfect. In just twelve years: A nation, freed from Jewish usury and destructive influence. A nation, determined to preserve its Aryan racial heritage and carry it, progressively, into the infinite future. A nation, broken free from ossified and dangerous hereditary aristocracy, and broken free from even more dangerous mass “democracy.” A nation, freed from hostile alien media. A nation, freed from the twin evils of international Communism and international banking. A nation, ultimately forged in war as the vanguard and protector of the entire European race. A nation whose titanic sacrifice and immolation at the hands of Jewish power may one day — if we do right — become an element of a religion [emphasis by Editor] which will inspire our people to protect and defend forever our sacred race against all dangers.

It was tried for just twelve years. You could say National Socialism hasn’t really been tried yet, not fully. But in those twelve years, it was the most positive revolutionary force ever seen on this planet. It shows every prospect of success if it can capture the imaginations of enough of our people and become established again. And our enemies certainly know that — that is why they do everything they can, constantly, to prevent its resurgence. And today, buttressed by William Pierce’s discovery of and elaboration of Cosmotheism, it would be even more powerful, being even more imbued with the spiritual essence and Life of our people.

Plain vanilla “ethnic nationalism” equals a thousand years of failure (which fails in the long term even when it “succeeds”; look at Ireland today); that’s the ethnic nationalism of Keith Woods, who wrote a recent article suggesting that nationalists should abandon National Socialism (see the critique of his approach here by Daniel Zakal) — and that failure is embodied in every other White man who refuses the hand of Providence offered by Adolf Hitler and his new creed. An entirely new race-based creed and spiritual outlook to replace the failed and outworn creeds of Christianity and democracy; with great prospects of success — that’s what National Socialism promises.

The triumph of race-based, deeply spiritual, National Socialism means the eternal existence of our race, the total reorientation of society toward racial progress, and the achievement of our cosmic destiny. The triumph of plain-vanilla “ethnic nationalism” means “business as usual” leadership from figures only faintly more race-oriented than Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, and Vladimir Zelensky — and probably significant compromises with such figures. That’s a huge difference.

I wrote of this in my program “A New Religion for Us,” highlighting the spiritual and philosophical depth of National Socialism, which sets it so much higher than the emptiness of mere “ethnic nationalism,” which nearly always merely holds on to whatever creed happens to be popular at the moment — and which today would surely cling to Abrahamic Jew-centered nonsense, as well as holding on to so-called “democracy.” The triumph of such a “nationalism” would get us almost nowhere. I wrote:

With profounder ideals and a stronger will than any other leadership structure of any other society for thousands of years at least, Germany ultimately sought to spiritually shepherd the unique expression of the Life Force and the growing consciousness that is our race through the dangers of the 20th century and beyond. Those dangers include 1) being trapped in an earth-bound Semitic creed designed to ensnare us in universalism, weakness, and worship of our enemies; 2) rejecting that Semitic creed in favor of an atheistic materialism and individualism that destroys our ability to grow and act as a natural biological and spiritual community; and 3) rejecting that Semitic creed in favor of the equally alien, spiritually empty, and equally debilitating equalitarian creed of Marxism.

National Socialism, especially when coupled with a strengthened spiritual aspect that has developed since 1945, saves us from those three dangers.

Savitri Devi wrote of National Socialism as a new life-affirming faith while she was imprisoned for her beliefs after the war:

And Hitler’s words about Christianity, reported by Rauschning in the fourth chapter of his book, would be admired — not criticised — in an Aryan world endowed with a consistently National Socialist consciousness, for they are in keeping with our spirit — and ring too true not to be authentic. [Even though parts of his book were surely forged in an effort to harm Germany and Hitler. — K.A.S.] “Leave the hair-splitting to others,” said the Führer to Hermann Rauschning before the latter turned renegade:

“Whether it is the Old Testament or the New, or simply the sayings of Jesus according to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, it is all the same Jewish swindle. It will not make us free. A German Church, a German Christianity, is a distortion. One is either a German or a Christian. You cannot be both. You can throw the epileptic Paul out of Christianity — others have done so before us. You can make Christ into a noble human being, and deny his divinity and his rôle as a saviour. People have been doing it for centuries. I believe there are such Christians today in England and America — Unitarians, they call themselves, or something like that. It is no use. You cannot get rid of the mentality behind it. We do not want people to keep one eye on life in the hereafter. We need free men, who feel and know that God is in themselves.”

Indeed, however clever he might have been, Rauschning was not the man to concoct this discourse out of pure imagination. As many other statements attributed to the Führer in his book, this one bears too strongly the stamp of sincerity, of faith — of truth — to be just an invention. Moreover, it fits in perfectly with many of the Führer’s known utterances, with his writings, with the spirit of his whole doctrine… [He] knew that we can only win, in the long run, if, wherever essentials are concerned, we maintain that intolerance of any movement sincerely “convinced that it alone is right.” And he knew that, sooner or later, our conflict with the existing order is bound to break out on the religious and philosophical plane as well as on the others. This is unavoidable. And it has only been postponed by the material defeat of Germany — perhaps (who knows?) in accordance with the mysterious will of the Gods, so as to enable the time to ripen and the Aryan people at large, and especially the Germans, to realise, at last, how little Christianity can fulfil their deeper aspirations [emphasis by Editor], and how foolish they would be to allow it to stand between them and the undying Aryan faith implied in National Socialism.

That Aryan faith — that worship of health, of strength, of sunshine, and of manly virtues; that cult of race and soil — is the Nordic expression of the universal Religion of Life. It is — I hope — the future religion of Europe and of a part at least of Asia (and, naturally, of all other lands where the Aryan dominates). One day, those millions will remember the Man who, first — in the 1920s — gave Germany the divine impetus destined to bring about that unparalleled resurrection; the Man whom now the ungrateful world hates and slanders: our Hitler.

Imprisoned here for the love of him, my greatest joy lies in the glorious hope that those reborn Aryans — those perfect men and women of the future Golden Age — will, one day, render him divine honours.

Woods is so wrong when he says “we nationalists” need to reject Hitler and National Socialism in order to more quickly “gain popularity.” I say there is no solution without waking up from the brainwashing. And if you think National Socialism was evil, you have not awakened from the brainwashing. And having a “movement” of supposed “nationalist revolutionaries” who accept 80 or 90 per cent of the Jews’ false world view will quickly be fatal to any state so founded. It’s real revolution, Hitler’s and Pierce’s revolution, or nothing. That is the real choice we face as White people in this hostile world.

And I’ll add two more important points to address the claim that Hitler denigrated and fought against other Aryan nations, who still resent it: 1) Adolf Hitler evolved during the great conflict of World War 2, which he began as a German nationalist and ended as the de facto leader of all Aryans against malevolent Jewish power, with volunteers (including a gigantic Slavic army) from every part of Europe, not just the Germanic or Nordic parts, on his side; and

2) Just because you descend from a nation that, due to historical circumstance, had a conflict with National Socialist Germany, that shouldn’t make you blind to the mythopoeic power of the greatest struggle of all time, between the heroic and spiritually noble National Socialists — for whom the worth of a man was his fidelity to his cosmic and biological destiny — and the crass materialist Jew-dominated capitalists and Communists, for whom the worth of a man was purely economic and who instinctively hate the race-based order we need.

My ancestors, for example, were from Norway. Norway was occupied by German troops. I am sure that some Norwegians were imprisoned by the German National Socialists. Some who made war on Germans were probably killed, as were some Germans in that fight. So what? Should Norwegians hate Germans and everything that has come from Germany on that account, from Hitler to Beethoven? No, that’s absurd. The Norwegians and the Germans need to forget those quarrels and wars of the past. The triumph of National Socialism would mean the Norwegians — and our kindred peoples from across all of Europe — would have a chance to exist eternally, and evolve higher and higher, as Fate and Destiny beckon us. No petty nationalism comes close to that — not by 10,000 miles.

Categories
Quotable quotes

Adolf quote

‘Germany will either be a world power or will not be at all’.

—Hitler

Categories
Philosophy of history

Correction

In my previous post I attributed an insightful comment to an ‘OD [Occidental Dissent] commenter’.

I just realised it was a quote from the article ‘Nationalism without National Socialism is a Hollow Shell’ by Daniel Zakal, republished by National Vanguard here.

Categories
Racial right

Timidity

by OD commenter

[National Socialist critic] Keith Woods advocates weakness, compromise, and intellectual dishonesty.

Keith Woods’ arguments ultimately boil down to a defense of half-measures and ideological timidity, dressed up as pragmatic strategy. His primary concern—that National Socialism carries negative stigma—is nothing more than a fearful retreat into weakness and respectability politics. Rather than standing firmly behind a rigorous, comprehensive, and proven life-affirming ideology, Woods prefers a sanitized nationalism designed to placate enemies who despise our existence regardless.

Nationalism without National Socialism is precisely the half-measure that has repeatedly failed European peoples. It offers neither structural solutions nor ideological coherence. Woods’ belief that the essence of National Socialism—its fundamental commitment to racial health, cultural vitality, economic independence, and disciplined self-overcoming—can be stripped away, leaving behind a vague ethnonationalist shell, is intellectually bankrupt. Such hollow nationalism can never provide the depth of purpose, moral clarity, or strategic vision essential for genuine rebirth and sustained revival.

Woods deliberately misconstrains the complexity of historical events, lazily parroting mainstream tropes without rigorous engagement with primary sources. He misrepresents the nature of Lebensraum, dismisses Slavic collaboration, and leans heavily on mistranslated excerpts from Hitler’s Table Talk. The reality is clear: the table talks—recorded firsthand in German by Picker and Heim—are authentic records, distorted only through English translations. To entirely dismiss them, as Woods does, is intellectually negligent and betrays a lack of scholarly integrity.

Woods’ rejection of National Socialism reveals more than historical ignorance—it exposes his philosophical cowardice. His ideological stance resembles National Bolshevism, a confused hybrid that tries and fails to reconcile nationalism with leftist economic populism, inevitably resulting in ideological paralysis. Woods advocates a path of least resistance, endorsing a nationalism devoid of moral clarity or revolutionary intent. He proposes nothing concrete beyond vague appeals to national tradition, conveniently sidestepping the urgent structural crises—demographic collapse, cultural degeneration, economic subjugation—that demand radical solutions.

In short, Woods represents precisely what must be eradicated from nationalism: timidity, compromise, and a preoccupation with optics. He prioritizes popular acceptance over ideological integrity, fundamentally misunderstanding the reality that true nationalism requires sacrifice, struggle, and unwavering adherence to principles that sustain and elevate life.

The Life Affirming Principle dictates clear solutions: nationalism must be bold, disciplined, and uncompromising. It cannot thrive through half-hearted populism or sanitized historical revisionism. National Socialism is more than Adolf Hitler or the Third Reich; it is a timeless truth, discovered rather than invented [emphasis by Editor]: a guiding philosophy for cultural, biological, and economic health. To reject it is to reject the only fully coherent system capable of achieving lasting strength and survival for our people.

Ultimately, Woods embodies a defeatist mindset. He would rather pursue polite nationalism, begging permission to exist, instead of forging an uncompromising path toward genuine national renewal. His approach offers neither hope nor solutions, only endless retreat. To embrace Woods’ path is to embrace perpetual defeat.