If initially Hindu and Bactrian traders had dominated the Silk Road trade, between the 5th and 8th centuries the Sogdians and, after the Muslim conquests, the Arabs and Persians would do so. At the western end of the route, Byzantium was the first European power to realise that the Heartland was a geopolitical reality to be taken into account. Alternating diplomacy and war with the peoples of the steppe (Avars, Pechenegs, Kipchaks and others), Constantinople could prolong its existence for a millennium after the fall of Rome.
Closely intertwined with the history of Byzantium is that of the Varangians (as the Slavs called the Vikings of Sweden), who moved up the great Russian rivers from the Baltic to the Black Sea basin and allied with the Slavs in an attempt to defeat the Khazars—a steppe confederation in southern Russia that had adopted Judaism as its official religion and is probably the ancestor of much of Ashkenazi Jewry. The Varangians took Kiev, the southernmost of the cities on the Dnieper, which allowed them to maintain constant contact with Byzantium, and eventually conquered the Khazar capital, Sarkel, not far from present-day Volgograd. In doing so, they came to dominate the trade corridor where the Don and Volga rivers come closest, jumping from the Black Sea basin to the Caspian basin—thus to the Heartland—and establishing themselves as a sort of second Byzantine Empire to connect Europe with Asia. The history of the Russias begins, clustered around cities like Kiev, Novgorod, Vladimir, Suzdal, Pskov or Muscovy, in generally heavily forested territories, where the Orthodox faith will eventually prevail.
Red: areas subject to Viking colonisation. Green: areas subject to Viking influence. Russia was born as an intermediary between the Scandinavian and Byzantine worlds, just as Germania was born as an intermediary between the Scandinavian and Roman worlds. The Vikings, as the founders of the first Russian states, laid the foundations of the only power capable of dominating the Heartland in the long run and connecting it with Eastern Europe. Although the core of historic Russia was born in Kiev, it slowly moved northwards, passing through cities such as Smolensk, Novgorod, Vladimir, Suzdal, Moscow and St Petersburg.
Genghis Khan, a tall, white, red-haired, blue-eyed man, was in many ways the Asian and medieval counterpart of Alexander the Great. His extraordinary personality succeeded in uniting the tribes and clans of Mongolia and in seizing control of the Silk Road, so that by his death in 1227 he was ruler of an empire stretching from the Sea of Japan to the Caspian, ruled from the Mongol capital of Karakorum (not to be confused with the mountain range of the same name). The strongly continental character of these domains was brilliantly portrayed when the Mongol invasion of Japan failed: the steppe horsemen, who had never seen the sea before, suffered severe seasickness and vomiting in their naval adventure, and what the Japanese called kamikaze or ‘divine wind’ caused such heavy losses to the Mongol fleet that the invasion failed. Other environments where Mongolia was never able to make its dominance felt emphatically were the mountains and forests—the Mongols were a people of plains and steppes, and both Siberia and the Russian principalities had huge forest masses. Indeed, at the time of the ‘Mongol yoke’, during which the Russias were tributary to the Tartars, the khanate of the Golden Horde ended where the steppe gave way to the forests of the North. From these closed and impenetrable spaces, Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoi, Peresvet and other national heroes of Russian history forged the greatness of the future Principality of Muscovy.
The Mongols’ military adventures reached Syria, Poland, Hungary and the gates of Vienna, but they were unable to cross the Sea of Japan or other maritime spaces. You don’t have to be a lynx to appreciate that the Mongol Empire drew its power from the dominance of the Heartland. In the West, the Mongols were able to advance thanks to the excellent information provided at all times by the Venetian merchant intelligence network. One of these agents was Marco Polo’s father.
For better or worse, the Mongol conquests provided the Pax Mongolica (or Pax Tatarica) and a relatively stable territorial continuity from the Near East and Eastern Europe to China. Thanks to it, from 1245, on the occasion of the First Council of Lyon, we can find European emissaries sent to the Mongol dominions by order of the Pope and the King of France: Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, Ascelin of Lombardy and André de Longjumeau. The aim was, on the part of the Papacy, to gain influence in Asia, especially by winning over the ancient communities of Nestorian Christians and, on the part of France, to forge links between Louis IX of France and Güyük Khan and to solidify a Franco-Mongol alliance, supposedly to make common cause in the Levant (the time of the Crusades).
In 1253, the Flemish Franciscan monk William of Rubruk was able to cross all of Central Asia and reach Karakorum, where he found French, Russian and Hungarian captured in Hungary. The friar also reported the presence of German prisoners working in iron mines in Central Asia—it seems that Stalin was not the first to capture Germans in Eastern Europe and deport them as slaves to the Heartland. In Mongolia, Islam, Buddhism, Manichaeism and Nestorian Christianity were already flourishing under the religious tolerance of the Khans. Rubruk returned to Europe with a detailed report for King Louis IX of France, entitled Itinerarium fratris Willielmi de Rubruquis de ordine fratrum Minorum, Galli, Anno gratia 1253 ad partes Orientales.
Travels of Friar William of Rubruk. At the time, Sarai played the same role that the Khazarian Sarkel had played before and the Soviet Stalingrad would play later: to serve as a bridge between the Don and Volga rivers, between the Black Sea and Caspian basins—and thus between Europe and the Heartland.
Later in the same century, the brothers Niccolo and Maffeo Polo, Venetian merchants, were able to establish prosperous trading emporiums in Constantinople and in Sudak or Soldaia (see map of the Mongol conquests above), where the presence of the powerful Venetian thalassocracy was strong. Encouraged by the wealth of the Golden Horde khanate, the Polo brothers eventually settled in its capital, Sarai, already within the confines of the Eurasian Heartland. Sarai was located in southern Russia, close to ancient Khazarian Sarkel and modern-day Volgograd, shared with these cities its role as a hinge between the Black Sea and Volga basins (the latter being part of the Heartland) and, with 600,000 inhabitants, was one of the largest and wealthiest cities of the 13th century. There, the Polo brothers became acquainted with the customs of the Tartars, the world of the steppe and the information brought back by foreign traders about distant routes further east. Following these indications, the Venetians proceeded to Bukhara, present-day Uzbekistan, where they lived for three years. They travelled up the Silk Road to Dadu (Beijing), where the throne of Kublai Khan, Genghis’s grandson, was located. The Asian monarch provided them with a Mongol ambassador to the Pope in Rome, safe conduct to travel throughout the Mongol dominions, and a letter to the Pope asking for a sample of oil from the lamp of the Holy Sepulchre, as well as a hundred ‘wise men’ to teach Christianity and Western customs in China. Sino-Roman relations, which had never been able to take shape in antiquity, were beginning to take shape in the middle Ages thanks to Venice, the Papacy and the Mongol conquests.
Pope Gregory X received the missive from the Mongol Khan in 1271, sending only two Dominican friars with the Polo brothers, this time accompanied also by Niccolo’s seventeen-year-old son Marco. The friars did not complete the journey out of fear, while the Venetian merchants completed the Silk Road from one end to the other, arriving in the capital of the Khanate in 1274, three years after their departure. Welcomed by the Khan, they lived under his hospitality for se¬¬venteen years before returning to Europe. The Polo voyages would never have been possible without the existence of a single state from the Middle East to the Pacific; thanks to this, Europe was able to read Marco Polo’s accounts, accessing first-hand testimony about what lay at the heart of Eurasia.
Thanks to the stability of the Pax Mongolica, Marco Polo was not the last European to set foot in Eurasia. In 1318, four years after the dissolution of the Order of the Temple, the Franciscan friar Odorico da Pordenone embarked on an impressive journey that took him from Venice to Armenia, Persia, India, China, Indonesia, and other places in the Far East. He even described Tibet as ‘where the Pope of the idolaters dwells’.
Several events ultimately brought the Pax Mongolica to an end:
• The virulent spread of the Black Death in the 1340s. Originating in Central Asia, the plague spread along both land and sea trade routes, affecting Europe as well as China, India and Arabia and introducing terror, distrust and the quarantining of entire cities along the trade routes.
• The Mongol horsemen were becoming fat, comfortable and decadent, and the Chinese, seasoned in palace intrigue, seized power, driving out the Mongol Yuan dynasty and other foreign (including European and Christian) influences and founding the Ming dynasty in 1368. The coup d’état in China was heavily influenced by a secret society: the White Lotus.
• The fleeting rise of Tamerlane, the last great steppe conqueror, who annihilated the Nestorian Christians of Persia and attacked the khanate of the Golden Horde (southern Russia), causing Muscovy, then ruled by Vasily I, to stop paying tribute to the Tatars. Yet in 1382, Moscow was still sacked by the Tatars.
• Buddhism, a new cultural and ideological trend very different from the ancestral paganism that the Mongols had hitherto professed, had penetrated Mongolia itself. It would take a couple of centuries for Buddhism to gain a foothold in the country. Still, it was only a matter of time before the new monks would win over the local shamans, winning over the Mongol aristocracy and erecting monasteries at crossroads and in the great pasture lands where large numbers of herdsmen gathered to perform sacrifices and other rituals. It has always been rumoured that it was the Chinese who favoured the introduction of Buddhism into Mongolia, hoping that the new creed would defuse the ancient warrior mentality of the Mongols and in turn ease the pressure on the Great Wall fringe; in fact, the White Lotus was a Buddhist society. The process would culminate centuries later, in 1568, when Altan Khan granted the head of the Tibetan lineage, Gelug, the title of ‘Dalai Lama’.
But if the Black Death, Tamerlane’s raids and the collapse of the Khanate had cut off communications between East and West, a new and at first-sight unfortunate event was to restore them: the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 closed the ‘Varangian route’. It blocked the natural maritime outlet to the steppes, while many Greek immigrants migrated in stages from Constantinople across the Black Sea to Ukraine and eventually Moscow. Europe became an island, surrounded to the west by the Atlantic, to the south by the Mediterranean, to the southeast by the Ottoman Empire and the east by the Golden Horde and other khanates. In this situation, the only states capable of breaking Europe’s insularity and reuniting it with the Greater East by land were the Russian principalities. So the catastrophe of 1453 forced the peoples of Russia to turn eastwards to conquer the Tatar dominions, just as it forced the peoples of the West to turn to the Atlantic to conquer the new world. Both European movements, East and West, initially had a similar goal: to reconnect with Stasia. However, while Europe’s western thrust would accentuate its insularity and maritime character, the eastern thrust would emphasise its terrestrial character.
If in the West we have inherited legends of Atlantis—a wealthy maritime trading state that, for its sins, was punished by the gods to perish beneath the sea—the East is also rife with mentions of lost lands. In the vast Buddhist regions of Central Asia, there are myths galore of underground cities and hidden valleys, such as Shambhala, where the ancient traditional and spiritual powers of the world would have retreated, waiting to manifest themselves in the final war between the spirits of good and the spirits of evil. The Mongols identify Shambhala with various valleys in southern Siberia, while in Altaic folklore, the gateway to the secret city is hidden in the Altai mountain range’s Mount Beluja, where legend has it that Genghis Khan was buried.
The Kalachakra, a Tibetan Buddhist tantric scripture with strong Hindu influences, states that when the world degenerates into a maelstrom of war and greed, out of Shambhala will emerge Kalki (‘white horse’, or ‘destroyer of filth’), a kind of messiah who will form an army and fight the demonic forces, killing by the millions the ‘barbarians’ and the ‘thieves who have usurped the royal power’. Gathering all the Brahmins of the world, he would find a new race to populate the golden age to come. In their shamanic past, the Turkic-Mongol peoples spoke of Ergekenon, an isolated valley supposedly located in the Altai, where their ancestors were imprisoned for four centuries until a blacksmith succeeded in melting the barrier that enclosed them. The myth of Ergenekon would later be used strategically by Turkish nationalism to promote pan-Turanianism.
From China, tradition had it that Lao Tse (‘wise old man’, the founder of Taoism) rode out of the country on a white buffalo to the West, i.e. to Central Asia, perhaps to the Kunlun Shan Mountains, where the sources of the Yellow River were located, a place considered holy by monks and hermits, where the air was pure and energising, where healing herbs grew and huge glaciers advanced, where schools of martial arts were born and in whose rivers long-lived fish lived. Taoist folklore explained that in this kind of spiritual Eden, in the ‘mountain at the centre of the world’, royal men found the drink of immortality in ancient times, and that King Mu (a millennium b.c.e.) found there the jade palace of the Yellow Emperor, the founder of Chinese civilisation. Mythologically speaking, the mountain range connected Earth with Heaven and somewhere in its bosom stood a jade palace where Xiwangmu, the ‘Queen Mother of the West’, dwelled. Like an Eastern version of the Greek myth of the garden of the Hesperides, a huge tree grew there, bearing peaches of immortality every three thousand years.
The Kunlun Shan mountain range.
In the West, the interior of Eurasia was also viewed through a prism of legend. In Histories, Herodotus speaks of a place ‘to the north-east’, beyond the Sea of Hyrcania (the Caspian) and the Scythians, where there are vast quantities of gold guarded by griffins. Buran (a strong winter wind from the north, equivalent to the Greek Boreas), blew there strongly from a mountainous cavern in the so-called Zungaria Gate, which separates Uiguristan (also called Chinese Turkestan or Xingjiang) from the rest of Central Asia. Beyond this domain was the ‘land of the Hyperboreans’, whose territory reached the sea (probably the Arctic Ocean). In the Byzantine myths, Alexander the Great found no other solution to the hordes of ‘Gog and Magog’ (barbarians from the continental interior, sometimes assimilated to the Scythians and destined to fall upon the rest of the world in the future) than to contain them with a wall of iron or adamantium. This is probably the Caspian Gates in southern Russia, where centuries later an army of Slavs and Vikings would annihilate the Khazar kingdom and found the first Russian state. The metaphorical content of the construction of the Caspian Gates was served—especially since, in Central Asian folklore, an ‘iron gate in a lake’ or a ‘hole in a mountain’ is considered the origin of the winds. After the ill-fated Macedonian campaigns in northern India, a Hellenistic story reached the West and circulated the idea that deep in Central Asia there was a valley carpeted with diamonds and patrolled by birds of prey and ‘deadly looking’ serpents. At the time of the silk trade, Rome knew of the existence of the Beings, a tall, long-lived and healthy people (possibly the Tocari) located in Serica, the ‘land of silk’, which would correspond to Uyghuristan. These myths and rumours somehow embodied Europe’s desire not to lose its connection with the East.
In medieval times, Rome, Byzantium and the Crusader states alike spoke of the kingdom of Prester John, a monarch who maintained order in the lands of Gog and Magog by ruling over a Christian country isolated between Muslim and ‘pagan’ (read Buddhist, Hindu and shamanistic and animistic ancestral religions) domains. Gnostic traditions considered that the Magi came from this country, where the Holy Grail, obtained by Parzival in Monsalvat and carried to the Great East in ships with white sails and red crosses, was to be found along with other holy relics of Christianity… ‘John’ was probably a corruption of ‘jan’ or khan: the title of the Tatar kings. The character in question was probably a Nestorian khan-bishop of Mongol origin eager to forge closer ties with the West, but the situation soon became enveloped in symbols and archetypes in the collective European imagination. Marco Polo, who could not be missing in this writing, would place Gog and Magog north of Cathay (China), i.e. in Mongolia or Siberia. In China itself, the imperial authorities did something similar to Alexander the Great, writing off the Heartland as impossible and settling for erecting the Great Wall to protect the kingdom from barbarian incursions from the North.
Still in the 19th century, Russian settlers in Siberia, men and women of outstanding human qualities in every sense, had the idea of Belovodye, a mythical place of ‘white waters’ in eastern Siberia, which played the role of the Promised Land in their religious imagination and probably had an important influence on the flow of ethnically European populations to the East, establishing colonies ever closer to the Sea of Japan and the borders with China and Mongolia. As Russia conquered Central Asia, Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, founder of the Russian philosophical trend of cosmism, located Shambhala in the Pamir, present-day Tajikistan. Central Asia would become increasingly popular in the West thanks to Jules Verne’s Michael Strogoff, the incipient geopolitical science, Ferdinand Ossendowsky’s Beasts, Men and Gods and the rise of occult currents that idealised Central Asia as a sanctuary of tradition and wisdom. In the 1920s, the Russian painter, archaeologist and esotericist Nikolai Roerich also did his bit by describing an extraordinary expedition throughout Central Asia, including his visits to more than fifty monasteries and his encounters with Buddhist lamas.
Mongolia.
As can be seen, the more recondite areas of Central Asia were seen as a source of mystery, fantasy and uncertainty by the societies that gathered their influence. They were also seen as a hornet’s nest of men and animals, which could be diked but should not be stirred. All the myths we have seen agree in presenting the heart of Eurasia as a place, to say the least, interesting and worth visiting for the brave and the noble. The present article will deal with this vast space inhabited by questions and infinite possibilities yet to be unveiled, a potential new world, a huge, closed, inaccessible, impregnable, jealously traditional fortress, folded in on itself in countless valleys, mountains, plains, forests, steppes and deserts, which could not be conquered by Alexander the Great, nor by Rome, nor by Byzantium, nor by the Chinese emperors, nor by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, nor by the Portuguese Jesuits, nor by Napoleon, nor by the British Empire, nor by Hitler, nor by Japan, nor by the mafia oligarchs of the ex-Soviet space, nor by the multinationals and banks of capitalist-neoliberal globalisation—in the long run not even by the Asian khans or the terrible Soviet Bolshevism—but only by two extraordinary peoples: the Vikings and the Cossacks, who, like Alexander the Great before them, brought Greek culture (Cyrillic characters, Byzantine heritage) to the heart of Asia.
Since the dawn of history, whoever possesses the Heartland moves in it like a fish in water, for it is an ocean of land, but whoever does not possess it will crash against its walls again and again, and can only content himself with besieging it…
Without attempting a scientific classification of the inhabitants of Eurasia, it is sufficient to describe the three main races. The first are the yellow-skinned, straight black-haired, black-eyed, round-skulled Mongols and Mongoloids massed in central and eastern Asia north of the Himalayan system.
To the west of them, and merged with them, lie the Alpines, also characterized by dark, but not straight, hair, dark eyes, relatively short stature, and round skulls. These Alpines are thrust like a wedge into Europe between the Nordics and the Mediterraneans, with a tip that reaches the Atlantic Ocean. Those of western Europe are derived from one or more very ancient waves of round-skulled invaders from the East, who probably came by way of Asia Minor and the Balkans, but they have been so long in their present homes that they retain little except their brachycephalic skull-shape to connect them with the Asiatic Mongols.
South of the Himalayas and westward in a narrow belt to the Atlantic, and on both sides of the Inland Sea, lies the Mediterranean race, more or less swarthy-skinned, black-haired, dark-eyed, and long-skulled.
On the northwest, grouped around the Baltic and North Seas, lies the great Nordic race. It is characterized by a fair white skin, wavy hair with a range of color from dark brown to flaxen, light eyes, tall stature, and long skulls.
These races show other physical characters which are definite but difficult to describe, such as texture of skin and cast of features, especially of the nose. The contrast of mental and spiritual endowments is equally definite, but even more elusive of definition.
It is with the action and interaction of these three groups, together with internal civil wars, that recorded history deals.
While, so far as we know, these three races have occupied their present relative positions from the beginning, there have been profound changes in their distribution.
The two essential phenomena, however, are, first, the retreat of the Nordic race westward from the Grasslands of western Asia and eastern Europe to the borders of the Atlantic, until it occupies a relatively small area on the periphery of Eurasia.
The second phenomenon is of equal importance, namely, the more or less thorough Nordicizing of the westernmost extensions of the other two races, namely, the Mediterranean on the north coast of the Inland Sea, who have been completely Aryanized in speech, and have been again and again saturated with Nordic blood, and the even more profound Nordicization in speech and in blood of the short, dark, round-skulled inhabitants of central Europe, from Brittany through central France, southern Germany, and northern Italy into Austrian and Balkan lands. So thorough has been this process that the western Alpines have at the present time no separate race consciousness and are to be considered as wholly European.
As to the Alpines of eastern and central Europe, the Slavs, the case is somewhat different. East of a line drawn from the Adriatic to the Baltic the Nordicizing process has been far less perfect, although nearly complete as to speech, since all the Slavic languages are Aryan. Throughout these Slavic lands, great accessions of pure Mongoloid blood have been introduced within relatively recent centuries.
East of this belt of imperfectly Nordicized Alpines we reach the Asiatic Alpines, as yet entirely untouched by western blood or culture. These groups merge into the Mongoloids of eastern Asia.
So we find, thrust westward from the Heartland, a race touching the Atlantic at Brittany, thoroughly Asiatic and Mongoloid in the east, very imperfectly Nordicized in the centre, and thoroughly Nordicized culturally in the far west of Europe, where it has become, and must be accepted as, an integral part of the White World.
As to the great Nordic race, within relatively recent historic times it occupied the Grasslands north of the Black and Caspian Seas eastward to the Himalayas. Traces of Nordic peoples in central Asia are constantly found, and when archæological research there becomes as intensive as in Europe we shall be astonished to find how long, complete, and extended was their occupation of western Asia.
During the second millennium before our era successive waves of Nordics began to cross the Afghan passes into India until finally they imposed their primitive Aryan language upon Hindustan and the countries lying to the east.
All those regions lying northwest of the mountains appear to have been largely a white man’s country at the time of Alexander the Great. In Turkestan the newly discovered Tokharian language, an Aryan tongue of the western division, seems to have persisted down to the ninth century. The decline of the Nordics in these lands, however, began probably far earlier than Alexander’s time, and must have been nearly completed at the beginning of our era. Such blond traits as are still found in western Asia are relatively unimportant, and for the last two thousand years these countries must be regarded as lost to the Nordic race.
The impulse that drove the early Nordics like a fan over the Himalayan passes into India, the later Nordics southward into Mesopotamian lands, as Kassites, Mitanni, and Persians, into Greece and Anatolia as Achæans, Dorians, and Phrygians, westward as the Aryan-speaking invaders of Italy and as the Celtic vanguards of the Nordic race across the Rhine into Gaul, Spain, and Britain, may well have been caused by Mongoloid pressure from the heart of central Asia. Of course, we have no actual knowledge of this, but the analogy to the history of later migrations is strong, and the conviction is growing among historians that the impulse that drove the Hellenic Nordics upon the early Ægean culture world was the same as that which later drove Germanic Nordics into the Roman Empire.
North of the Caspian and Black Seas the boundaries of Europe receded steadily before Asia for nearly a thousand years after our era opened, but we have scant record of the struggles which resulted in the eviction of the Nordics from their homes in Russia, Poland, the Austrian and east German lands.
By the time of Charlemagne the White Man’s world was reduced to Scandinavia, Germany west of the Elbe, the British Isles, the Low Countries, and northern France and Italy, with outlying groups in southern France and Spain. This was the lowest ebb for the Nordics and it was the crowning glory of Charlemagne’s career that he not only turned back the flood, but began the organization of a series of more or less Nordicized marches or barrier states from the Baltic to the Adriatic, which have served as ramparts against Asiatic pressure from his day to ours. West of this line the feudal states of mediæval Europe developed into western Christendom, the nucleus of the civilized world of to-day.
South of the Caspian and Black Seas, after the first swarming of the Nordics over the mountains during the second millennium before Christ, the East pressed steadily against Europe until the strain culminated in the Persian Wars. The defeat of Asia in these wars resulted later in Alexander’s conquest of western Asia to the borders of India.
Alexander’s empire temporarily established Hellenic institutions throughout western Asia and some of the provinces remained superficially Greek until they were incorporated in the Roman Empire and ultimately became part of early Christendom. On the whole, however, from the time of Alexander the elimination of European blood, classic culture, and, finally, of Christianity, went on relentlessly.
By later Roman times the Aryan language of the Persians, Parthians, and people of India together with some shreds of Greek learning were about all the traces of Europe that were to be found east of the oscillating boundary along the Euphrates.
The Roman and Byzantine Empires struggled for centuries to check the advancing tide of Asiatics, but Arab expansions under the impulse of the Mohammedan religion finally tore away all the eastern and southern coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, while from an Arabized Spain they threatened western Europe. With the White Man’s world thus rapidly receding in the south, a series of pure Mongol invasions from central Asia, sweeping north of the Caspian and Black Seas, burst upon central Europe. Attila and his Huns were the first to break through into Nordic lands as far as the plains of northern France. None of the later hordes were able to force their way so far into Nordic territories, but spent their strength upon the Alpines of the Balkans and eastern Europe.
Eastern Germany, the Austrian states, Poland, and Russia had been Nordic lands before the Slavs emerged after the fall of Rome. Whether the occupation of Teutonic lands by the Wends and Slavs in eastern Europe was an infiltration or a conquest is not known, but the conviction is growing that, like other movements which preceded and followed, it was caused by Mongoloid pressure.
That the western Slavs or Wends had been long Nordicized in speech is indicated by the thoroughly Aryan character of the Slavic languages. They found in the lands they occupied an underlying Teutonic population. They cannot be regarded as the original owners of Poland, Bohemia, Silesia, or other Wendish provinces of eastern Germany and Austria. The Teutonic Marcomanni and Quadi were in Bohemia long before the Czechs came in through the Moravian Gate in the sixth century. Pomerania and the Prussias were the home of Teutonic Lombards, Burgunds, Vandals, and Suevi, while the Crimea and the northwestern coast of the Black Sea were long held by the Nordic Goths, who, just before our era, had migrated overland from the Baltic by way of the Vistula.
No doubt some of this Nordic blood remained to ennoble the stock of the later invaders, but by the time of Charlemagne, in the greater part of Europe east of the Elbe, the Aryan language was the only bond with Europe.
When the Frankish Empire turned the tide and Christianized these Wendish and Polish lands, civilization was carried eastward until it met the Byzantine influences which brought to Russia and the lands east of the Carpathians the culture and Orthodox Christianity of the Eastern or Greek Empire.
The nucleus of Russia was organized in the ninth century by Scandinavian Varangians, the Franks of the East, who founded the first civilized state amid a welter of semi-Mongoloid tribes. How much Nordic blood they found in the territories which afterward became Russia we have no means of knowing, but it must have been considerable because we do know that from the Middle Ages to the present time there has been a progressive increase in brachycephaly or broad-headedness, to judge from the rise in the percentage of round skulls found in the cemeteries of Moscow and elsewhere in Russia.
Such was the condition of eastern Europe when a new and terrible series of Mongoloid invasions swept over it, this time directly from the centre of Asia.
The effect of these invasions was so profound and lasting that it may be well to consider briefly the condition of eastern Europe after the elimination of the Nordics and its partial occupation by the so-called Slavs. Beginning with Attila and his Huns, in the fourth century, there was a series of purely Mongoloid tribes entering from Asia in wave after wave.
Similar waves ultimately passed south of the Black and Caspian Seas, and were called Turks, but these were long held back by the power of the Byzantine Empire, to which history has done scant justice.
In the north these invaders, called in the later days Tatars, but all essentially of central Asiatic Mongol stock, occupied Balkan lands after the expansion of the south Slavs in those countries. They are known by various names, but they are all part of the same general movement, although there was a gradual slowing down of the impulse. Prior to Jenghiz Khan the later hordes did not reach quite as far west as the earlier ones.
The first wave, Attila’s Huns, were followed during the succeeding centuries by the Avars, the Bulgars, the Hunagar Magyars, the Patzinaks and the Cumans. All of these tribes forced their way over the Carpathians and the Danube, and much of their blood, notably in that of the Bulgars and Magyars, is still to be found there. Most of them adopted Slavic dialects and merged in the surrounding population, but the Magyars retain their Asiatic speech to this day.
Other Tatar and Mongoloid tribes settled in southern and eastern Russia. Chief among these were the Mongol Chazars, who founded an extensive and powerful empire in southern and southeastern Russia as early as the eighth century. It is interesting to note that they accepted Judaism and became the ancestors of the majority of the Jews of eastern Europe, the round-skulled Ashkenazim.
Into this mixed population of Christianized Slavs and more or less Christianized and Slavized Mongols burst Jenghiz Khan with his great hordes of pure Mongols. All southern Russia, Poland, and Hungary collapsed before them, and in southern Russia the rule of the Mongol persisted for centuries, in fact the Golden Horde of Tatars retained control of the Crimea down to 1783.
Many of these later Tatars had accepted Islam, but entire groups of them have retained their Asiatic speech and to this day profess the Mohammedan religion.
The most lasting result of these Mongol invasions was that southern Poland and all the countries east and north of the Carpathians, including Rumania and the Ukraine, were saturated anew with Tatar blood, and, in dealing with these populations and with the new nations founded among them, this fact must not be forgotten.
The conflict between the East and the West—Europe and Asia—has thus lasted for centuries, in fact it goes back to the Persian Wars and the long and doubtful duel between Rome and Parthia along the eastern boundary of Syria. As we have already said, the Saracens had torn away many of the provinces of the Eastern Empire, and the Crusades, for a moment, had rolled back the East, but the event was not decided until the Seljukian and Osmanli Turks accepted Islam.
If these Turks had remained heathen they might have invaded and conquered Asia Minor and the Balkan States, just as their cousins, the Tartars, had subjected vast territories north of the Black Sea, but they could not have held their conquests permanently unless they had been able to incorporate the beaten natives into their own ranks through the proselytizing power of Islam.
Even in Roman times the Greek world had been steadily losing, first its Nordic blood and then later the blood of its Nordicized European population, and it became in its declining years increasingly Asiatic until the final fall of Constantinople in 1453.
Byzantium once fallen, the Turks advanced unchecked, conquering the Alpine Slav kingdoms of the Balkans and menacing Christendom itself.
In these age-long conflicts between Asia and Europe the Crusades seem but an episode, although tragically wasteful of Nordic stock. The Nordic Frankish nobility of western Europe squandered its blood for two hundred years on the desert sands of Syria and left no ethnic trace behind, save, perhaps, some doubtful blond remnants in northern Syria and Edessa.
If the predictions of Mr. Stoddard’s book seem far-fetched, one has but to consider that four times since the fall of Rome Asia has conquered to the very confines of Nordic Europe. The Nordicized Alpines of eastern Europe and the Nordicized Mediterraneans of southern Europe have proved too feeble to hold back the Asiatic hordes, Mongol or Saracen. It was not until the realms of pure Nordics were reached that the invaders were turned back. This is shown by the fact that the Arabs had quickly mastered northern Africa and conquered Spain, where the Nordic Goths were too few in number to hold them back, while southern France, which was not then, and is not now, a Nordic land, had offered no serious resistance. It was not until the Arabs, in 732, at Tours, dashed themselves to pieces against the solid ranks of heavy-armed Nordics, that Islam receded.
The same fate had already been encountered by Attila and his Huns, who, after dominating Hungary and southern Germany and destroying the Burgundians on the Rhine, had pushed into northern France as far as Châlons. Here, in 376, he was beaten, not by the Romanized Gauls but by the Nordic Visigoths, whose king, Roderick, died on the field. These two victories, one against the Arab south and the other over the Mongoloid east, saved Nordic Europe, which was at that time shrunken to little more than a fringe on the seacoast.
How slender the thread and how easily snapped, had the event of either day turned out otherwise! Never again did Asia push so far west, but the danger was not finally removed until Charlemagne and his successors had organized the Western Empire.
Christendom, however, had sore trials ahead when the successors of Jenghiz Khan destroyed Moscovy and Poland and devastated eastern Europe. The victorious career of the Tatars was unchecked, from the Chinese Sea on the east to the Indian Ocean on the south, until in 1241, at Wahlstatt in Silesia, they encountered pure Nordic fighting men. Then the tide turned. Though outnumbering the Christians five to one and victorious in the battle itself, the Tatars were unable to push farther west and turned south into Hungary and other Alpine lands.
Some conception of the almost unbelievable horrors that western Europe escaped at this time may be gathered from the fate of the countries which fell before the irresistible rush of the Mongols, whose sole discernible motive seems to have been blood lust. The destruction wrought in China, central Asia, and Persia is almost beyond conception. In twelve years, in China and the neighboring states, Jenghiz Khan and his lieutenants slaughtered more than 18,500,000 human beings. After the sack of Merv in Khorasan, the “Garden of Asia,” the corpses numbered 1,300,000, and after Herat was taken 1,600,000 are said to have perished. Similar fates befell every city of importance in central Asia, and to this day those once populous provinces have never recovered. The cities of Russia and Poland were burned, their inhabitants tortured and massacred, with the consequence that progress was retarded for centuries.
Almost in modern times these same Mongoloid invaders, entering by way of Asia Minor, and calling themselves Turks, after destroying the Eastern Empire, the Balkan States, and Hungary, again met the Nordic chivalry of western Europe under the walls of Vienna, in 1683, and again the Asiatics went down in rout.
On these four separate occasions the Nordic race and it alone saved modern civilization. The half-Nordicized lands to the south and to the east collapsed under the invasions.
Unnumbered Nordic tribes, nameless and unsung, have been massacred, or submerged, or driven from their lands. The survivors had been pushed ever westward until their backs were against the Northern Ocean. There the Nordics came to bay—the tide was turned. Few stop to reflect that it was more than sixty years after the first American legislature sat at Jamestown, Virginia, that Asia finally abandoned the conquest of Europe.
One of the chief results of forcing the Nordic race back to the seacoast was the creation of maritime power and its development to a degree never before known even in the days of the Phœnicians and Carthaginians. With the recession of the Turkish flood, modern Europe emerges and inaugurates a counter-attack on Asia which has placed virtually the entire world under European domination.
Wikipedia has the problem that many of its editors and administrators are either white traitors to the West or Jews like those of deMause’s journal. Although some scholars contribute to editing it, there is always an anti-westerner who censures the passages opposing the anti-white zeitgeist. For example, regarding the articles on infanticide I edited in 2008, a couple of Australian administrators from the English Wikipedia abused their powers. Not only did they eliminate most of the section on Australia within the article “Infanticide.” They went so far as to erase, from that online encyclopedia, an entire article that another editor had started. This last article focused on expanding the subject of the infanticide committed by aboriginal Australians. (Part of what was censored by Wikipedia is covered in this chapter, in the section on Australia.) Almost a decade later I learned that, since the 1970s, it has been a common practice in that continent to censor studies on infanticide, insofar as the aborigines have been idealized. Rewriting the history of the natives by vaporizing, in Stalin’s style, part of the collective memory of a nation misinforms visitors to the encyclopedia. But not all Wikipedia editors have behaved like that pair of administrators, so zealous in idealizing the natives in their country. In the archived Wikipedia talk page of Psychohistory, Loren Cobb said:
In my view, the psychohistory of Lloyd deMause is indeed a notable approach to history, in the sense in which Wikipedia uses the term “notability.” I am not personally involved in psychohistory—I am a mathematical sociologist—but here are some thoughts for your consideration.
Psychohistory as put forth by deMause and his many followers attempts to explain the pattern of changes in the incidence of child abuse in history. This is a perfectly respectable and non-fringe domain of scientific research. They argue that the incidence was much higher in the past, and that there has been an irregular history of improvement. This is a hypothesis that could just as easily have been framed by an epidemiologist as a psychologist. DeMause proposes a theory that society has gone through a series of stages in its treatment and discipline of children.
Again, this is well within the bounds of social science. None of these questions are pseudoscientific. Even the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, a bastion of scientific epidemiology, is interested in these kinds of hypotheses.1
I exchanged a few e-mails with Cobb, who like me is very critical of the psychoanalytic tail in deMausean legacy, and his position piqued my interest.
This chapter summarizes the data collected in the first exhaustive study on infanticide: a book by Larry Milner, Hardness of Heart, published in the last year of the 20th century. That so many researchers have produced astronomical figures on the extent of infanticide moves me to think that Milner’s initiative to devote ten years of his life researching the topic should be undertaken by others. Only then can we be sure if such large numbers are accurate.
Joseph Birdsell believes in infanticide rates of 15-50 percent of the total number of births in prehistoric times.2 Laila Williamson estimated a lower rate ranging from 15-20 percent.3 Both believe that high rates of infanticide persisted until the development of agriculture.4 Some comparative anthropologists have estimated that 50 percent of female newborn babies were killed by their parents in the Paleolithic.5 These figures appear over and over in the research of other scholars.
Paleolithic and Neolithic
Decapitated skeletons of hominid children have been found with evidence of cannibalism. Neanderthal man performed ritual sacrifices of children. As shown in the bas-reliefs of a Laussel cave, a menstruating goddess is appeased only by the sacrifice of infants.6
Marvin Harris, the creator of the anthropological movement called cultural materialism, estimated that in the Stone Age up to 23-50 percent of newborns were put to death. However, Harris conceived a rational explanation. In his book Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures, published in 1977, he says that the goal was to preserve the population growth to 0.001 percent. This explanation of more “civilized” cavemen than us has not been taken seriously among other scholars. But the renowned geneticist James Neel surpasses him. Through a retroactive model to study the customs of contemporary Yanomami Indians he estimated that in prehistoric times the infanticidal rate was 15-20 percent. However, Neel wrote: “I find it increasingly difficult to see in the recent reproductive history of the civilized world a greater respect for the quality of human existence than was manifested by our remote ‘primitive’ ancestors.” Ark would have scoffed at this claim. The fact that Neel published such praise for the infanticidal cavemen in Science,7 one of the most prestigious scientific journals, shows the levels of psychogenic regression that we suffer in our times.
Ancient World
As we have seen, the sacrifice of children was much more common in the Ancient World than in present times. Three thousand bones of young children, with evidence of sacrificial rituals, have been found in Sardinia. Infants were offered to the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. Pelasgians offered a sacrifice of every tenth child during difficult times. Syrians sacrificed children to Jupiter and Juno. Many remains of children have been found in Gezer excavations with signs of sacrifice. Child skeletons with the marks of sacrifice have been found also in Egypt dating 950-720 B.C. In Carthage “[child] sacrifice in the ancient world reached its infamous zenith.”8 Besides the Carthaginians, other Phoenicians, and the Canaanites, Moabites and Sepharvites offered their first-born as a sacrifice to their gods.
Carthage. Charred bones of thousands of infants have been found in Carthaginian archaeological sites in modern times. One such area harbored as many as 20,000 burial urns. It is estimated that child sacrifice was practiced for centuries in the region. Plutarch (ca. 46-120 AD) mentions the practice, as do Tertullian, Orosius, Diodorus Siculus and Philo. The Hebrew Bible also mentions what appears to be child sacrifice practiced at a place called the Tophet (from the Hebrew taph or toph, to burn) by the Canaanites, ancestors of the Carthaginians, and by some Israelites. Writing in the 3rd century B.C., Kleitarchos, one of the historians of Alexander the Great, described that the infants rolled into the flaming pit. Diodorus Siculus wrote that babies were roasted to death inside the burning pit of the god Baal Hamon, a bronze statue.9
Greece and Rome. In the Persian mythology of Zoroastrianism, at birth some children are devoured by their parents: a fable reminiscent of Cronus. Rhea hid Zeus and presented a stone wrapped in strips, which Cronus took as a swaddled baby and ate it. Cronus represents the archaic Hellas.
The historical Greeks considered barbarous the practice of adult and child sacrifice.10 It is interesting to note how conquerors like Alexander are diminished under the new psychohistorical perspective. If we give credence to the assertion that Thebes, the largest city in the region of Boeotia, had lower rates of exposure than other Greek cities, its destruction by Alexander was a fatal blow to the advanced psychoclass in Greece. A few centuries later, between 150 and 50 B.C. an Alexandrian Jew wrote Wisdom of Solomon, which contains a diatribe against the Canaanites whom he calls perpetrators of “ruthless murders of their children.” (Note how the biblical classics, the 16th-century chroniclers, and the 19th-century anthropologists wield value judgments, something banned in an academy under the shadow of Franz Boas.)
In The Histories Polybius was already complaining in the 2nd century B.C. that parents severely inhibited reproduction, and by the 1st century there were several thinkers who spoke out against the exposure of babies. Epictetus wondered “A sheep does not abandon its own offspring, nor a wolf; and yet does a man abandon his?” In the Preface we saw that in the same century Philo was the first philosopher to speak out against exposure.11
“The greatest respect is owed to a child,” wrote Juvenal, born in 55 AD. His contemporary Josephus, a Romanized Jew, also condemned exposure. And in Heroides, an elegiac poem that he wrote before his exile, Ovid asked, “What did the child commit, in so few hours of life?” However, two centuries after Augustus, in times of Constantine Rome struggled with a decreased population due to exposure. The legend of Romulus and Remus is also revealing: two brothers had been exposed to die but a she-wolf saved them. Romulus forced the Romans to bring up all males and the first female and forbade killing them after a certain age. As Rhea saving his son Zeus, this legend portrays the psychogenic landmark of classical culture compared with other cultures of the Ancient World. But even so, exposure was practiced. A letter from a Roman citizen to his wife, dating from 1 B.C., demonstrates the casual nature with which infanticide was often viewed:
Know that I am still in Alexandria. […] I ask and beg you to take good care of our baby son, and as soon as I received payment I shall send it up to you. If you are delivered, if it is a boy, keep it, if a girl, discard it.12
In some periods of Roman history it was traditional for a newborn to be brought to the pater familias, the family patriarch, who would then decide whether the child was to be kept and raised, or left to death by exposure. The Twelve Tablets of Roman law obliged him to put to death a child that was visibly deformed. Infanticide became a capital offense in Roman law in 374 AD but offenders were rarely if ever prosecuted.13
Hebrew people. Although the Bible says many Hebrews sacrificed their children to pagan gods, Judaism prohibits infanticide (I will approach the subject of the recent studies on the Israelites in the last chapter). Tacitus recorded that the Jews “regard it as a crime to kill any late-born children.”14 Josephus, whose works give an important insight into first-century Judaism, wrote that God “forbids women to cause abortion of what is begotten, or to destroy it afterward.”15
Pagan European tribes. John Boswell believed that in ancient Germanic tribes unwanted children were exposed, usually in the forest. “It was the custom of the pagans that if they wanted to kill a son or daughter, they would be killed before they had been given any food.”16 In the most influential archeological book of the 19th century, Prehistoric Times, John Lubbock invented the terms Paleolithic and Neolithic. He described that burnt bones indicated the practice of child sacrifice in pagan Britain.17
The Christian Era
Something goes completely unnoticed for the modern mind. In a world plagued by sacrifices like the Old World, the innocent son has to die ordered by his father: a well-known practice. It is impossible to understand the psychoclass that gave rise to Christianity by overlooking this reality converted into a powerful symbol. This is true despite, as I have stated in the previous pages, that forms of upbringing should have suffered, in general terms, a regression throughout the Middle Ages. The Teachings of the Apostles or Didache said: “You shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born.”18The Epistle of Barnabas stated an identical command.19 So widely accepted was this teaching in Christendom that apologists Tertullian, Athenagoras, Minucius Felix, Justin Martyr and Lactantius also maintained that exposing a baby to death was a wicked act. In 318 AD Constantine considered infanticide a crime but reinstated the practice of selling one’s own children. The West took its time to consider criminal the late forms of infanticide. The author of the Codex Theodosianus complained in 322 AD:
We have learned that in provinces where there are shortages of food and lack of livelihood, parents are selling or pledging their children. Such an ignominious act is repugnant to our customs.
Towards 340 AD Lactantius argued that strangling newborns was sinful. Already within the historical period known as Christendom, infanticide was not officially banned in Roman criminal law until 374 AD when Valentinian I mandated to rear all children (exposing babies, especially girls, was still common). However, both exposure and child abandonment continued in Europe.
Middle Ages. The practice was so entrenched, as well as the sale of children, that it had been futile to decree the abolition of such customs. Until 500 AD it could not be said that a baby’s life was secure. The Council of Constantinople declared that infanticide was a homicide, and in 589 AD the Third Council of Toledo took measures against the Spanish custom of killing their own children.20 Whereas theologians and clerics preached to spare their lives, newborn abandonment continued as registered in both the literature record and in legal documents.21 More archaic forms of infanticide, such as sacrifice, were practiced by the Gauls, Celts and the Irish. “They would kill their piteous wretched offspring with much wailing and peril, to pour their blood around Crom Cruaich,” a deity of pre-Christian Ireland.22 Unlike other European regions, in the Middle Ages the German mother had the right to expose the newborn.23 In Gotland, Sweden, children were also sacrificed.24 According to William Langer, exposure in the Middle Ages “was practiced on a gigantic scale with absolute impunity, noticed by writers with most frigid indifference.”25 By the end of the 12th century, notes Richard Trexler, Roman women threw their newborns into the Tiber River even in daylight.26 In Russia, peasants sacrificed their sons and daughters to the pagan god Perun. Some residents of rural areas got rid of their babies by throwing them to the hogs. In Medieval Russia secular laws did not deal with what, for the church, was a crime.27 The Svans killed the newborn females by filling their mouths with hot ashes. In Kamchatka, babies were killed and thrown to wild dogs.28
The darkness of Europe would begin to fade in the 12th century. As explained above, the “little Renaissance” of that century reminds me the famous series of Kenneth Clark, the first of its kind that showed us the personal view of an intellectual in a television series. Other cultures would be arrested in their ways of treatment of women and children.
China and Japan. The American explorer George Kennan noted that among the Koryaks, a Mongoloid people of north-eastern Siberia, infanticide was still common in the 19th century. One of the twins was always sacrificed.29 Since the 17th century Jesuit missionaries had found thousands of babies, mostly women, abandoned on the streets of China. Marco Polo, the famed explorer, saw newborns exposed in Manzi.30 China’s society promoted gendercide. The philosopher Han Fei Tzu, a member of the ruling aristocracy of the 3rd century B.C., who developed a school of law, wrote: “As to children, a father and mother when they produce a boy congratulate one another, but when they produce a girl they put it to death.”31 Among the Hakka people, and in Yunnan, Anhwei, Szechwan, Jiangxi and Fukien a method of killing the baby was to put her into a bucket of cold water, which was called “baby water.” 32 Even before feudal Japan infanticide was performed. The common slang for infanticide was mabiki which means to pull plants from an overcrowded garden. It has been estimated that 40 percent of newborn babies were killed in Kyushu.33 A typical method in Japan was smothering through wet paper on the baby’s mouth and nose.34Mabiki persisted in the 19th and early 20th centuries.35
India and Pakistan. Female infanticide of newborn girls was systematic in feudatory Rajputs in India. According to Firishta (approx. 1560-1620), as soon as a female child was born she was holding “in one hand, and a knife in the other, that any person who wanted a wife might take her now, otherwise she was immediately put to death.”36 The practice of female infanticide was also common among the inhabitants of Kutch, Kehtri, Nagar, Gujarat, Miazed, Kalowries and also among the Sind in Pakistan.37 It was not uncommon that parents threw a child to the crocodiles in the Ganges River as a sacrificial offering. The British colonists were unable to outlaw the custom until the beginnings of the 19th century.38
Arabia and Islam. Female infanticide was common all over Arabia during pre-Islamic Arabia, especially by burying alive the newborn female.39 Later it would be explicitly prohibited by the Koran: “And do not kill your children for fear of poverty; We give them sustenance and yourselves too; Surely to kill them is a great wrong.”40 However, in spite of this emergent psychoclass, if compared with their infanticidal neighbors of the Arabian peninsula, the forms of childcare and the treatment of women in Islam would be stagnant for centuries.
Tribes
Infanticide in tribal societies was, and in some tribes still is, more frequent than infanticide in both Western and Eastern civilizations.
Africa. In this continent newborns were killed because of fear that they were an evil omen or because they were considered unlucky. Twins were usually put to death in Arebo; as well as by the Nama Hottentots of South West Africa; in the Lake Victoria Nyanza region; by the Tswana in Portuguese East Africa; among the Ilso and Ibo people of Nigeria; and by the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert.41 The Kikuyu, Kenya’s most populous ethnic group, practiced ritual killing of twins.42 Lucien Lévy-Brühl noted that, as a result of fearing a drought, if a baby was born feet first in British East Africa, she or he was smothered.43 The Tswana people did the same since they feared the newborn would bring ill fortune to the parents.44 Similarly, William Sumner noted that the Vadshagga killed children whose upper incisors came first.45 If a mother died in childbirth among the Ibo people of Nigeria, the newborn was buried alive. It suffered a similar fate if the father died.46 In The Child in Primitive Society, Nathan Miller wrote in the 1920s that among the Kuni tribe every mother had killed at least one of her children.47 Child sacrifice was practiced as late as 1929 in Zimbabwe, where a daughter of the tribal chief used to be sacrificed as a petition of rain.48
Oceania and the Pacific Islands. Infanticide among the autochthon people in the Oceania islands is widespread. In some areas of the Fiji islands up to 50 percent of newborn infants were killed.49 In the 19th-century Ugi, in the Solomon Islands almost 75 percent of the indigenous children had been brought from adjoining tribes due to the high incidence rate of infanticide, a unique feature of these tribal societies.50 In another Solomon island, San Cristóbal, the firstborn was considered ahubweu and often buried alive.51 As a rationale for their behavior, some parents in British New Guinea complained: “Girls […] don’t become warriors, and they don’t stay to look for us in our old age.”52
Australia. According to Bronislaw Malinowski, who wrote a book on indigenous Australians in the early 1960s, “infanticide is practiced among all Australian natives.”53 The practice has been reported in Tasmania, Western Australia, Central Australia, South Australia, in the Northern Territory, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. Anthropologist Géza Róheim wrote:
When the Yumu, Pindupi, Ngali, or Nambutji were hungry, they ate small children with neither ceremonial nor animistic motives. Among the southern tribes, the Matuntara, Mularatara, or Pitjentara, every second child was eaten in the belief that the strength of the first child would be doubled by such a procedure.54
Family units usually consisted of three children. Brough Smyth, a 19th century researcher, estimated that in Victoria about 30 percent of the births resulted in infanticide.55 Mildred Dickeman concurs that the figure is accurate in other Australia tribes as a result of a surplus of the birthrate.56 Cannibalism was observed in Victoria at the beginning of the 20th century. The Wotjo tribe, as well as the tribes of the lower Murray River, sometimes killed a newborn to feed an older sibling.57 Thomas Robert Malthus said that, in the New South Wales region when the mother died sucking infants were buried alive with her.58 In the Darling River region, infanticide was practiced “by a blow on the back of the head, by strangling with a rope, or chocking with sand.”59 In Queensland a tribal woman only could have children after the age of thirty. Otherwise babies would be killed.60 The Australian Aranda tribes in the Northern Territory used the method of choking the newborn with coal, sand or kill her with a stick.61 According to James George Frazer, in the Beltana tribes in South Australia it was customary to kill the first-born.62 Twins were always killed by the Arrernte in central Australia.63 In the Luritcha tribe occasional cannibalism of young children occurred.64 Aram Yengoyan calculated that, in Western Australia, the Pitjandjara people killed 19 percent of their newborns.65 In the 19th century the native Tasmanians were exterminated by the colonists, who regarded them as a degenerate race. Richard H. Davies (fl. 1830s-1887), a brother of Archdeacon Davies, wrote that Tasmanian “females have been known to desert their infants for the sake of suckling the puppies,” which were later used for hunting.66 Like other tribal Australians, when the mother died the child was buried as well.67
Polynesia. In ancient Polynesian societies infanticide was fairly common.68 Families were supposed to rear no more than two children. Writing about the natives Raymond Firth noted: “If another child is born, it is buried in the earth and covered with stones.”69 In Hawaii infanticide was a socially sanctioned practice before the Christian missions.70 Infanticidal methods included strangling the children or, more frequently, burying them alive.71 Infanticide was quite intense in Tahiti.72 Methods included suffocation, neck breaking and strangulation.73
North America. Infanticide and child sacrifice was practiced in the New World at times when in Western Europe it had been largely abandoned. There is no agreement about the actual estimates of the frequency of newborn female infanticide in the Eskimo population. Carmel Schrire mentions diverse studies ranging from 15-50 percent to 80 percent.74 Polar Eskimos killed the child by throwing him or her into the sea.75 There is even a legend in Eskimo folklore, “The Unwanted Child,” where a mother throws her child into the fjord. The Yukon and the Mahlemuit tribes of Alaska exposed the female newborns by stuffing their mouths with grass before leaving them to die.76 In Arctic Canada the Eskimos exposed their babies on the ice and left them to die.77 Female Eskimo infanticide disappeared in the 1930s and 1940s after contact with the Western cultures of the South.78 The Handbook of North American Indians reports infanticide and cannibalism among the Dene Indians and those of the Mackenzie Mountains.79 In the Eastern Shoshone there was a scarcity of Indian women as a result of female infanticide.80 For the Maidu Native Americans in the United States twins were so dangerous that they not only killed them, but the mother as well.81 In the region known today as southern Texas, the Mariame Indians practiced infanticide of females on a large scale. Wives had to be obtained from neighboring groups.82
South American tribes. Although data of infanticides among the indigenous people in South America is not as abundant as data from North America, the estimates seem to be similar. The Tapirapé indigenous people of Brazil allowed no more than three children per woman, and no more than two had to be of the same sex. If the rule was broken infanticide was practiced.83 The people in the Bororo tribe killed all the newborns that did not appear healthy enough. Infanticide is also documented in the case of the Korubo people in the Amazon.84
While Capacocha sacrifice was practiced in the Peruvian large cities, child sacrifice in the pre-Columbian tribes of the region is less documented. However, even today studies on the Aymara Indians reveal high incidences of mortality among the newborn, especially female deaths, suggesting infanticide.85 Infanticide among the Chaco in Paraguay was estimated as high as 50 percent of all newborns in that tribe, who were usually buried.86 The infanticidal custom had such roots among the Ayoreo in Bolivia and Paraguay that it persisted until the late 20th century.87
Conclusion
As can be gathered from the above data, it is possible to support psychohistory’s cornerstone, the idea of an infanticidal psychoclass, with sources other than those used by deMause. The main criticism of historian Julie Hofmann Kemp to the deMausean model has, therefore, been solved.
References
1 Loren Cobb signs under a penname in Wikipedia. His post appeared in the talk page of Psychohistory (03:41, April 3, 2008).
2 Birdsell, Joseph, B. (1986), “Some predictions for the Pleistocene based on equilibrium systems among recent hunter-gatherers,” in Richard Lee and Irven DeVore, Man the Hunter, Aldine Publishing Co., p. 239.
3 Williamson, Laila (1978), “Infanticide: an anthropological analysis,” in Kohl, Marvin, Infanticide and the Value of Life, New York: Prometheus Books, pp. 61-75.
4 Milner, Larry S. (2000). Hardness of Heart / Hardness of Life: The Stain of Human Infanticide. Lanham/New York/Oxford: University Press of America, p. 19.
5 Hoffer, Peter, N.E.H. Hull (1981). Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and America, 1558-1803. New York University Press, p. 3.
6 Simons, E. L. (1989). “Human origins.” Science, 245: p. 1344.
7 Neel, James. (1970). “Lessons from a ‘primitive’ people.” Science, 1: p. 816.
8 Milner: Hardness of Heart (op. cit.) p. 324.
9 Brown, Shelby (1991). Late Carthaginian Child Sacrifice and Sacrificial Monuments in their Mediterranean Context. Sheffield Academic Press, pp. 22s. See also: Stager, Lawrence, Samuel R. Wolff (1984). “Child sacrifice at Carthage—religious rite or population control?” Biblical Archaeology Review 10: pp. 31-51.
10 Hughes, Dennis D. (1991). Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece. Routledge, p. 187.
11 Philo (1950). The Special Laws. Harvard University Press, Vol. VII, pp. 117s, 551, 549.
12 Naphtali, Lewis, ed. (1985), “Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 744,” Life in Egypt Under Roman Rule, Oxford University Press, p. 54.
13 Radville, Samuel X. (1974), “A history of child abuse and infanticide,” in Steinmetz, Suzanne K. and Murray A. Strauss, Violence in the Family, New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., pp. 173-179.
14 Tacitus (1931). The Histories. London: William Heinemann, Vol. II, p. 183.
15 Josephus (1976). The Works of Flavius Josephus, “Against Apion.” Cambridge: Harvard University Press, II.25, p. 597.
16 John Boswell (1988). The Kindness of Strangers. New York: Vintage Books, p. 211.
17 Lubbock, John (1865). Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages. London: Williams and Norgate, p. 176.
18 Robinson, J. Armitage (translator) (1920), “Didache,” Barnabas, Hermar and the Didache, Vol. D.ii.2c, New York: The MacMillan Co., p. 112.
19 Ibid., Epistle of Barnabas, xix. 5d.
20 Radbill, Samuel X. (1974), “A history of child abuse and infanticide,” in Steinmetz, Suzanne K. and Murray A. Straus, Violence in the Family, New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., pp. 173-179.
21 John Boswell (1984). “Exposition and oblation: the abandonment of children and the ancient and medieval family.” American Historical Review 89: pp. 10-33.
22 Dorson, Richard (1968). Peasant Customs and Savage Myths: Selections from the British Folklorists. University of Chicago Press, p. 351.
23 Westrup, C.W. (1944). Introduction to Roman Law. Oxford University Press, p. 249.
24 Turville-Petre, Gabriel (1964). Myth and Religion of the North: The Religion of Ancient Scandinavia. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, p. 253.
25 Langer, William L. (1974). “Infanticide: a historical survey.” History of Childhood Quarterly, 1, pp. 353-366.
26 Trexler, Richard (1973). “Infanticide in Florence: new sources and first results.” History of Childhood Quarterly, 1: p. 99.
27 Ransel, David (1988). Mothers of Misery. Princeton University Press, pp. 10-12.
28 McLennan: Studies in Ancient History (op. cit.), pp. 105s.
29 Kennan, George (1986 [originally published in 1871]). Tent Life in Siberia. New York: Gibbs Smith.
30 Polo, Marco (1965). The Travels. Middlesex: Penguin Books, p. 174.
31 Yu-Lan, Fung (1952). A History of Chinese Philosophy. Princeton University Press, p. 327.
32 Yao, Esther S. Lee (1983). Chinese Women: Past and Present. Mesquite: Ide House, p. 75.
33 Kushe, Helga and Peter Singer (1985). Should the Baby Live? Oxford University Press, p. 106.
34 Shiono, Hiroshi and Atoyo Maya, Noriko Tabata, Masataka Fujiwara, Junich Azumi and Mashahiko Morita (1986). “Medico-legal aspects of infanticide in Hokkaido District, Japan.” American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, 7: p. 104.
35 Vaux, Kenneth (1989). Birth Ethics. New York: Crossroad, p. 12.
36 Westermarck, Edward (1968). A Short History of Marriage. New York: Humanities Press, Vol. III, p. 162.
37 Panigrahi, Lalita (1972). British Social Policy and Female Infanticide in India. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, p. 18.
38 Davies, Nigel (1981). Human Sacrifice. New York: William Morrow & Co, p. 18.
39 Milner: Hardness of Heart, (op. cit.), p. 59. See also: Smith, William Robertson (1903). Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia. London: Adam & Charles Block, p. 293.
40 The Koran, XVII:31. See also LXXXI:8-9, XVI:60-62, XVII:42 and XLII:48.
41 Milner: Hardness of Heart (op. cit.) pp. 160s.
42 LeVine, Sarah and Robert LeVine (1981), “Child abuse and neglect in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Korbin, Jill, Child Abuse and Neglect, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 39.
43 Lévy-Brühl, Lucien (1923). Primitive Mentality. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., p. 150.
44 Schapera, I.A. (1955). A Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom. Oxford University Press, p. 261.
45 Sumner, William (1956 [originally published in 1906). Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals. Oxford University Press, p. 274.
46 Basden, G.T. (1996). Niger Ibos. New York: Barnes & Noble, pp. 180-184, 262s.
47 Miller, Nathan (1928). The Child in Primitive Society. New York: Bretano’s, p. 37.
48 Davies: Human Sacrifice (op. cit.), p. 143.
49 McLennan, J.F. (1886). Studies in Ancient History, The Second Series. New York: MacMillan & Co., Ltd., pp. 90s.
50 Guppy, H.B. (1887). The Solomon Islands and Their Natives. London: Swan Sonnenschein, p. 42.
51 Frazer, J.G. (1935). The Golden Bough. New York: MacMillan Co., pp. 332s.
52 Langness, L.L. (1984), “Child abuse and cultural values: the case of New Guinea,” in Korbin, Jill, Child Abuse and Neglect: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 15.
53 Malinowski, Bronislaw (1963). The Family Among the Australian Aborigines. New York: Scocken Books, p. 235.
54 Róheim, Géza (1962). “The Western tribes of Central Australia: childhood.” The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, 2: p. 200.
55 Smyth, Brough (1878). The Aborigines of Australia. London: John Ferres, p. 52.
56 Dickeman, Mildred (1975). “Demographic consequences of infanticide in man.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 6: p. 121.
57 Howitt, A.W. (1904). The Native Tribes of South-East Australia. MacMillan & Co., Ltd., pp. 749s.
58 Malthus, Thomas Robert (1963). On Population. New York: The Modern Library, I.III, p. 170.
59 Bonney, Frederic (1884). “On some customs of the aborigines of the River Darling.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 13: p. 125.
60 Cowlishaw, Gillian (1978). “Infanticide in aboriginal Australia.” Oceania, 48: p. 267.
61 Murdock, G.P. (1971). Our Primitive Contemporaries. New York: Macmillan, p. 34.
62 Frazer, James George (1963). The Dying God. New York: Macmillan, p. 180.
63 Murdock: Our Primitive Contemporaries (op. cit.), p. 34.
64 Spencer, Baldwin, F.J. Gillen (1904). The Northern Tribes of Central Australia. London: MacMillan & Co., p. 475.
65 Yengoyan, Aram (1972). “Biological and demographic components in aboriginal Australian socio-economic organization.” Oceania, 43: p. 88.
66 Roth, H. Ling (1899). The Aborigines of Tasmania. Halifax: King & Sons, pp. 162s.
67 Murdock: Our Primitive Contemporaries (op. cit.), p. 7.
68 Ritchie, Jane and James Ritchie (1979). Growing Up in Polynesia. Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, p. 39.
69 Firth, Raymond (1983). Primitive Polynesian Economy. London: Routledge, p. 44.
70 Dibble, Sheldon (1839). History and General Views of the Sandwich Islands Mission. New York: Taylor & Dodd, p. 123.
71 Handy, E.S. and Mary Kawena Pukui (1958). The Polynesian Family System in Ka-’U, Hawaii. New Plymouth, New Zealand: Avery Press, p. 327.
72 Ritchie: Growing Up in Polynesia (op. cit.), p. 189.
73 Oliver, Douglas (1974). Ancient Tahitan Society. Honolulu: University Press of Hawii, Vol. I, p. 425.
74 Schrire, Carmel and William Lee Steiger (1974). “A matter of life and death: an investigation into the practice of female infanticide in the Artic.” Man: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, 9: p. 162.
75 Fridtjof, Nansen (1894). Eskimo Life. London: Longmans, Green & Co., p. 152.
76 Garber, Clark (1947). “Eskimo Infanticide.” Scientific monthly, 64: p. 98.
77 Langer: “Infanticide: a historical survey” (op. cit.), p. 354.
78 Balikci, Asen (1984), “Netslik,” in Damas, David, Handbook of North American Indians (Arctic), Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, p. 427.
79 Savishinsky, Joel and Hiroko Sue Hara (1981), “Hare,” in Helm, June, Handbook of North American Indians (Subarctic). Smithsonian Institution, p. 322. See also: Gillespie, Beryl (1981), “Mountain Indians,” in Helm, June, Handbook of North American Indians (Subarctic). Smithsonian Institution, p. 331.
80 Shimkin, Demitri, B. (1986), “Eastern Shoshone,” in D’Azevedo, Warren L., Handbook of North American Indians (Great Basin). Smithsonian Institution, p. 330.
81 Riddell, Francis (1978), “Maidu and Konkow,” in Heizer, Robert F., Handbook of North American Indians (California). Smithsonian Institution, p. 381.
82 Campbell, T.N. (1983), “Coahuitlecans and their neighbors,” in Ortiz, Alonso, Handbook of North American Indians (Southwest). Smithsonian Institution, p. 352.
83 Johnson, Orna (1981), “The socioeconomic context of child abuse and neglect in native South America,” in Korbin, Jill, Child Abuse and Neglect, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 63.
84 Cotlow, Lewis (1971). The Twilight of the Primitive. New York: Macmillan, p. 65.
85 de Meer, Kees, Roland Bergman and John S. Kushner (1993). “Socio-cultural determinations of child mortality in Southern Peru: including some methodological considerations.” Social Science and Medicine, 36: pp. 323, 328.
86 Hastings, James (1955). Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. NY: Scribner’s Sons, Vol. I, p. 6.
87 Bugos, Paul E. and Lorraine M. McCarthy (1984), “Ayoreo infanticide: a case study,” in Hausfater, Glenn and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Infanticide, Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives, New York: Aldine, p. 510.
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The objective of Day of Wrath is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next time I will reproduce the penultimate chapter. Day of Wrath will be available again in printed form.
When Yahweh your Lord brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you other peoples… when Yahweh has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must crush and destroy them totally; make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy… This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred images, cut down their sacred forests and burn their idols. For you are a people holy to Yahweh your Lord (Deuteronomy, 7: 1-7).
Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?… but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, He has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong (I Corinthians, 20, 27).
Christianity and the fall of the Empire
On the basis of what happened during this bloody history, there is a laborious process of adulteration, falsification and distortion of religious teachings: firstly, many centuries before Jesus at the hands of Jewish prophets, judges and rabbis; and then at the hands of the apostles and fathers of the Church (St. Paul, St. Peter, St. Augustine, etc.), usually of the same ethnic group. There existed an ethnic base of those conflicts, which we have already discussed in the previous chapters.
The Eastern Mediterranean (Asia Minor, the Aegean, Carthage, Egypt, Phoenicia, Israel, Judea, Babylon, Syria, Jordan, etc.) was formerly a fermenting melting pot for all the good and bad products of the Ancient World: the confluence of all slaves, the downtrodden and banished; criminals, trampled peoples and pariahs of Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Hittite Empire and the Persian Empire. That melting pot, so full of different characters, was present in the foundations and the origins of Judaism. Its vapours also intoxicated many decadent Greeks of Athens, Corinth and other Hellenic states centuries before the Christian era.
When Alexander the Great conquered the Macedonian Empire, which extended from Greece to the confines of Afghanistan and from the Caucasus to Egypt, the entire area of the Persian Empire, the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa received a strong Greek influence: an influence that would be felt on Asia Minor, Syria (including Judea), and especially Egypt with the city of Alexandria, founded by Alexander in 331 BCE.
This inaugurated a stage of Macedonian hegemony called Hellenistic, to differentiate it from the classical Hellenic (Dorians, Ionians, Corinthians). Alexander fostered knowledge and science throughout his empire, sponsoring the various schools of wisdom; and after his death his Macedonian successors continued the same policy. Many centuries later, in the lower Roman Empire, after a terrible degeneration we could distinguish in the heart of Hellenism two currents:
(a) A traditional elitist character, based in the Egyptian, Hellenistic and Alexandrian schools, which advocated science and spiritual knowledge, and where the arts and sciences flourished to a point never seen before; with the city of Alexandria being the greatest exponent.
Such was the importance and ‘multiculturalism’ of Alexandria—included the abundance of Jews who never ceased to agitate against paganism—as the world’s largest city before Rome, that it has been called ‘the New York of ancient times’. The Library of Alexandria, domain of the high castes and vetoed to the plebe, was a hive of wise Egyptians, Persians, Chaldeans, Hindus and Greeks; as well as scientists, architects, engineers, mathematicians and astronomers from all over the world. The Library stood proud of having accumulated much of the knowledge of the Ancient World.
(b) Another countercultural and more popular current: liberal, sophist and cynical (more freely established in Asia Minor and Syria), had distorted and mixed ancient cults. It was directed to the slave masses of the Eastern Mediterranean: preaching for the first time notions such as ‘free democracy for all’, ‘free equality for all’ and ‘free rights for all’. This was characterised by a well-intentioned but ultimately fateful multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism that enchanted the minds of many educated slaves; by the exportation of Greek worldview and culture to non-Greek peoples, and by the importation of Jewish culture to non-Jewish peoples.
This last current was the Hellenistic background that, disfigured, united with Judaism and the decomposing Babylonian matter, formed Christianity: which, let us not forget, was originally preached exclusively in the Greek language to masses of serfs, the poor and commoners in the unhealthy neighbourhoods of the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean.
The first Christians were exclusively Jewish blood communities, converted into cosmopolitans with their enforced diaspora and Hellenistic contacts. To a certain extent, these ‘Jews from the ghetto’—of which Saint Paul is the most representative example—were despised by the most orthodox Jewish circles.
The Seven Churches mentioned by John of Patmos in the New Testament (Book of Revelation, 1:11): Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum,
Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea. As can be seen,
all of them located in Asia Minor.[1]
This geographic core is to Christianity what Bavaria is to Nazism: the centre in which the new creed ferments and its expansion is invigorated. This area, so strongly Hellenized, densely populated and the seat of a true ethnic chaos, is where the apostles, in Greek language, were inflated to preach; and here also took place important Christian theological councils (such as Nicaea, Chalcedon or Ancyra).
Christianity, which to expand itself took the advantage offered by the dispersion of Semitic slaves throughout the Roman Empire, represents an Asian ebb spilled all over Europe.
____________________ [1]Editor’s Note: It is very significant that the last word that the Christian Bible confers to an author is the word of John of Patmos. Most likely, the author of the Book of Revelation was Jewish, as his hatred of Rome seems absolute (which he calls ‘Babylon’). The Bible ends with the dream of this John of Patmos about a New Jerusalem just in those days when the Romans had destroyed Old Jerusalem to build, on its ruins, Aelia Capitolina.
The ultimate downfall of the Nordic conquerors in Asia, just as in the Mediterranean world, can be traced to an economic consideration and to an error in human judgment.
The economic consideration was that a conquered population, just like the land itself or the gold and other booty seized by the conquerors, had real value. Whether the people were enslaved or merely taxed as subjects, they were an economic resource which could be exploited by the conquerors. To drive them off the land or wipe them out completely would, from a strictly economic viewpoint, be akin to dumping captured gold into the ocean.
Such an action could be justified to a conquering tribe of Indo-Europeans only if they were willing to subordinate all economic considerations to the goal of maintaining their racial integrity into the indefinite future—and if they also had a sufficiently deep understanding of history to foresee the inevitability of racial mixing wherever two races are in close proximity. Unfortunately, even where the will for racial survival was very strong, the foresight was insufficient. Measures which were quite adequate to prevent racemixing for a few generations, or even for a few centuries, broke down over the course of a thousand years or more.
The foregoing remarks are especially well illustrated by the fate of a related group of Indo-European tribes whose members called themselves Aryans. Although the name “Aryan” is sometimes used to designate any person of Indo-European ancestry, it applies especially to the tribes which, beginning probably in the third millennium B.C., migrated eastward and southeastward from the ancient Nordic homeland, some going down through Turkistan and into Iran from the northeast—and some into the more easterly foothills of the Hindu Kush, in what is now Afghanistan.
The high Iranian plateau, much of it covered with grass, provided an ideal territory for the horsemen from the northern steppes. They multiplied and prospered, raiding their non-Indo-European neighbors in the Zagros Mountains or on the edge of the Sumerian plain from time to time, collecting slaves and booty. They maintained their racial purity scrupulously enough, however, so that, as late as the middle of the first millennium B.C., King Darius the Great could still proudly and truthfully boast: “I am an Aryan, the son of an Aryan.”
But Semites and other aliens became more numerous in Iran as the might and wealth of the Aryan Persians grew. In the reign of Darius’ son Xerxes, as we know from the Old Testament’s Book of Esther, Jews were already quite influential there. Today, 2,500 yeas later, the Iranians are no more Aryan than their Semitic neighbors, so thoroughly have the genes of the various races in that part of the world been mixed.
_______________ Note: The above quotations of William Pierce’s book are contextualized in The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour (available: here). If life permits, next week I will quote another passage from the pen of the American ‘Raven’.
The future 3-Eyed Raven
beside the Heart tree at Winterfell.
Generally white nationalists see me as a very rare fellow since, without being Aryan, I proclaim nordicism. They ignore that it is precisely because my ancestors lost their Aryan blood what motivates me to warn others not to lose it.
I’m not the weird one in promoting nordicism. They are the freaks. A reading of William Pierce’s book immediately uncovers the fact that over the millennia whites tried to preserve their race through a religion (as in India) or through a harsh political system based on iron laws (as in Sparta) or putting public notices so that the blacks did not pass from a certain geographic latitude (as in Egypt) or burning alive the Aryan that married a mudblood (as did the Visigoths in Spain before Christianity deceived them).
What is more, what is labelled ‘nordicism’ is, in fact, orthodoxy in racial studies from Gobineau and Chamberlain to Grant and Günther and the National Socialists. The latter, for example, took nordicism for granted to the extent that they prevented the Germans from marrying those Slavs whose bloodline was compromised (Richard Spencer did exactly the opposite in his personal life). Even today’s scholars share the nordicist premise (see, for example, Kevin MacDonald’s review of the book Raciology by Vladimir Avdeyev here or here).
Only in recent times, when in the mid-1990s the term white nationalism started to be used, its supporters wanted to make tabula rasa of the knowledge accumulated in the last centuries and tried to reinvent the wheel starting from scratch. Many of these people are so ignorant that they do not even want to read books: they just watch the news of what is happening in the world from the point of view of racist internet sites. Something as elementary as ordering Pierce’s book from Amazon Books and studying it is foreign to them in their superficial way of acting in the world.
Moreover, even the most educated white nationalists suffer from this problem. Like pedantic university students these nationalists quote charlatan Aleksandr Dugin, but at the same time they are incapable of recognizing elemental patterns in the history of the white race.
Yesterday evening, for example, I discovered an interview with Richard Spencer with a mongrel in which Spencer asserted that the ethnic state of his dreams could absorb mulattos and mestizos, as long as they believed in the Western cause!
Presumably Spencer would admit these mongrels, mestizos and mudbloods as ordinary citizens, who would have the right to marry whites. ‘Race is a big family’ Spencer said, in the sense that he is not ‘Puritan’ to the extent of rejecting black and Amerindian blood within the gene pool of the white state. Spencer added that the numbers of mongrels are very small although earlier in the interview the interviewer had released the data that interracial couples consist of 10 percent of the population.
In Who We Are Pierce wrote:
Before we deal with the next Indo-European peoples of the Classical Age—the Macedonians and the Romans—let us review briefly the history of our race to this point, and let us also look at the fate of some Indo-Europeans who, unlike those we have already studied, invaded Asia instead of Europe.
Pierce then explains how the ‘Indo-Europeans’, that is the Nordish peoples, conquered the Middle East but perished through racemixing precisely because they held the view that Spencer now holds. According to Pierce it happened to the Hittite Empire, the Persian Empire and in India. Unlike what Spencer and most white nationalists believe, ‘only total separation can preserve racial quality’.
My prediction is not only that white nationalists will continue with their ethnosuicidal ideology. They will continue to ignore the classics of racial studies whose names I cited above, even the American Madison Grant. In their pride they will continue to see themselves as superior to the nationalist socialists of the last century, when their inferiority is obvious.
The frontiers of Europe and Asia—Success justifies everything—Our right to fertile lands—The Russian flood must be dammed.
It’s absurd to try to suppose that the frontier between the two separate worlds of Europe and Asia is marked by a chain of not very high mountains—and the long chain of the Urals is no more than that. One might just as well decree that the frontier is marked by one of the great Russian rivers. No, geographically Asia penetrates into Europe without any sharp break.
The real frontier is the one that separates the Germanic world from the Slav world. It’s our duty to place it where we want it to be.
If anyone asks us where we obtain the right to extend the Germanic space to the East, we reply that, for a nation, her awareness of what she represents carries this right with it.
It’s inconceivable that a higher people should painfully exist on a soil too narrow for it, whilst amorphous masses, which contribute nothing to civilisation, occupy infinite tracts of a soil that is one of the richest in the world. We painfully wrest a few metres from the sea, we torment ourselves cultivating marshes—and in the Ukraine an inexhaustibly fertile soil, with a thickness, in places, often metres of humus, lies waiting for us.
We must create conditions for our people that favour its multiplication, and we must at the same time build a dike against the Russian flood. If this war had not taken place, the Reich would scarcely have increased its population during the next ten years, but the Russian population would have grown vigorously.
If to-day you do harm to the Russians, it is so as to avoid giving them the opportunity of doing harm to us. God does not act differently. He suddenly hurls the masses of humanity on to the earth, and he leaves it to each one to work out his own salvation. Men dispossess one another, and one perceives that, at the end of it all, it is always the stronger who triumphs. Is that not the most reasonable order of things?
If it were otherwise, nothing good would ever have existed. If we did not respect the laws of nature, imposing our will by the right of the stronger, a day would come when the wild animals would once again devour us—then the insects would eat the wild animals, and finally nothing would exist on earth but the microbes.
The perpetual menace of Asia—
A living wall—Justifiable claims.
Asia, what a disquieting reservoir of men! The safety of Europe will not be assured until we have driven Asia back behind the Urals. No organised Russian State must be allowed to exist west of that line. They are brutes, and neither Bolshevism nor Tsarism makes any difference—they are brutes in a state of nature. The danger would be still greater if this space were to be Mongolised. Suddenly a wave comes foaming down from Asia and surprises a Europe benumbed by civilisation and deceived by the illusion of collective security!
Since there is no natural protection against such a flood, we must meet it with a living wall. A permanent state of war on the Eastern front will help to form a sound race of men, and will prevent us from relapsing into the softness of a Europe thrown back upon itself.
The points we have reached are dotted along areas that have retained the memory of Germanic expansion. We’ve been before at the Iron Gates, at Belgrade, in the Russian space.
As regards myself, I shall never live to see it, but one day my successors must be in a position to bring out from a drawer every historical date that justifies a German claim.
Recurrent Asiatic assaults—
Preparations for German dominion.
It was the destiny of all the civilised States to be exposed to the assault of Asia at the moment when their vital strength was weakening.
First of all it was the Greeks attacked by the Persians, then the Carthaginians’ expedition against Rome, the Huns in the battle of the Catalaunian Fields, the wars against Islam beginning with the battle of Poitiers, and finally the onslaught of the Mongols, from which Europe was saved by a miracle—one asks what internal difficulty held them back. And now we’re facing the worst attack of all, the attack of Asia mobilised by Bolshevism.
A people can prove to be well fitted for battle even although it is ill fitted for civilisation. From the point of view of their value as combatants, the armies of Genghiz Khan were not inferior to those of Stalin (provided we take away from Bolshevism what it owes to the material civilisation of the West). Europe comes to an end, in the East, at the extreme point reached by the rays of the Germanic spirit.
The Bolshevik domination in European Russia was, when all is said, merely a preparation (which lasted twenty years) for the German domination. Prussia of the time of Frederick the Great resembled the Eastern territories that we are now in process of conquering.
Frederick II did not allow the Jews to penetrate into West Prussia. His Jewish policy was exemplary.
