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Tag: Christian question (CQ)

Categories
Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

I’ve changed my mind

I had said that the revised edition of the first volume of our abridged translation of Karlheinz Deschner’s criminal history of Christianity would cover the origins of Judeo-Christianity up to Charlemagne.

Now that I have just finished proofreading up to the time of Emperor Justinian of Constantinople, I realised that it is better to finish the first volume up to that monarch and leave the rest of the High Middle Ages (roughly from the 6th to the 10th century) for the second volume.

As I am thinking in editorial terms for my Daybreak Press, I think the cover of the first volume should have the face of Constantine; and the second volume, the face of Charlemagne.

So the revised edition of the first volume will soon be ready and its PDF will be available on this site, and we will continue working on what we still have to translate for volume II.

To give the visitor an idea of what we have translated so far for this site, here is the table of contents:
 

CONTENTS

Editor’s foreword

Introduction

Forgeries in the Old Testament

The bibles
The five books that Moses did not write
David and Solomon
Joshua and Isaiah
Ezekiel and Daniel
The Jewish apocalyptic
Portrayals of the biblical female world
Opposition to the Old Testament
Forgeries in diaspora Judaism

Forgeries in the New Testament

The scriptures are piled up
God as the author?
Christians forged more consciously than Jews
Neither the Gospel of Matthew, nor the Gospel of John,
nor John’s Book of Revelation come from the apostles to
whom the Church attributes them
Forged epistles of ‘Paul’
The second epistle to the Thessalonians
Colossians, Ephesians and Hebrews
Forged epistles of Peter
Forged John and James
Interpolations in the New Testament

The invention of Popes

There is no evidence of Peter’s stay in Rome
The story of the discovery of Peter’s tomb
The list of fabricated Roman bishops

 
Christianity’s Criminal History:

Background in the Old Testament

Moses and the Book of Judges
The ravages of David and the modern translators
The sacred warmongering of the Maccabees
The Jewish War (66-70)
Bar Kokhba and the ‘last war of God’ (131-136)
The Jewish religion, tolerated by the Roman state

Early Christianity

Interpretatio Christiana
‘Orthodoxy’ and ‘heresy’
First ‘heretics’ in the New Testament
Thirteen good Christians
Saint Jerome and Origen

The persecution of the Christians

Anti-Hellene hatred in the New Testament
The defamation of the Greco-Roman religion
Celsus and Porphyry
The persecution of the Christians
Most of the written statements about the martyrs are false,
but all of them were considered as valid documents
The Roman emperors viewed retrospectively

Saint Constantine: The First Christian Emperor

War against Maxentius
War against Maximinus
War against Licinius
The Catholic clergy increasingly favoured
Constantine as saviour and vicar of God
No longer a pacifist Church
Savage criminal practices
Constantine against Jews and ‘heretics’
Constantine against the Greco-Roman culture

Constantine’s successors

The first Christian dynasty founded
on family extermination
First wars among devout Christians
Constantius and his Christian-style government
A father of the Church who preaches killing
First assaults on the temples

Julian

Hecatombs under the pious Gallus
Emperor Julian
Christian tall stories

After Julian

Rivers of blood under the Catholic Valentinian
Trembling and gnashing of teeth under the Arian Valens

Athanasius, Doctor of the Church

The complicated nature of God
It was not fought for faith but for power
The Council of Nicaea
Character and tactics of a Father of the Church
The death of Arius
The battlefield of Alexandria
Antioch and Constantinople
Shelter with a twenty-year-old beauty

Ambrose, doctor of the Church

Ambrose drives the annihilation of the Goths
Emperor Theodosius ‘the Great’
Against the Hellenist religion

The Father of the Church Augustine

‘Genius in all fields of Christian doctrine’
Augustine’s campaign against the Donatists
The overthrow of Pelagius
Augustine attacks classical culture
Augustine sanctions the holy war
Christianity sanctions the mistreatment of animals

The Christian Book Burning and the
Annihilation of Classical Culture

The annihilation of the Greco-Roman world
The oldest Christianity is hostile to education
The Christian ideal: the inversion of values
The hostility to culture of the first Greco-Christian writers
The hostility to classics in early Latin-Christian writers
The theatre, ‘The temple of the devil’
Natural Science
Everything a person needs to know is contained in the Bible
The Western world darkens more and more

The Catholic ‘children emperors’

The division of the Empire: Two Catholic states emerge
The massacre of Goths in Constantinople
Alaric enters Rome

Justinian (527-565): A theologian on the imperial
throne

Justin: From pigman to Catholic emperor (518-527)
Emperor Justinian, dominator of the Church
The Vandal state
The great beneficiary of all that hell: The Roman Church

 
The Middle Ages

A panoramic view

From convinced subjects to convinced lords

The Christianisation of the Germans

The spread of Christianity in the West
Conversion methods
Jesus becomes the Germanic broadsword
The weed of the past
‘Demonstrative destruction’

Clovis, founder of the Great Frankish Empire

The Rise of the Merovingians
A great bloodbath and the German Church
A moralistic assessment of history?

The sons of Clovis

The division of the kingdom
A saint and murderer
Theudebert I and kings killer

The Invasion of the Lombards

The last Merovingians
The Conversion of the Visigoths to Catholicism

Pope Gregory I (590-604)

The flight from the world
The man of double standards
Thinking differently: a crime worthy of death
Use and abuse of slaves as livestock
The beginning of papal propaganda in England
Pope Gregory’s books

The Christianisation of the idea of king

The Christianisation of the idea of kingship
Mission and slaughter

The Church in the Merovingian Period

A kind of holy cancerous ulcer
Ignorant, criminal and a good Catholic
St Gregory of Tours
The throne and the altar

The Ascension of the Carolingians

Armed mission among the Frisians
The irruption of Islam

St Boniface, ‘Apostle of the Germans’ and of Rome

Deliverance from ‘all uncleanness’
The dispute over images begins
The papal revolution fails

Charles I, known as The Great or Charlemagne

Papal negotiations
The most momentous event of the Middle Ages
Criminal excesses at the papal court
The beginning of the pro-pope warfare
The bloody mission of the Saxons (772-804)
Plunder and Christianisation
The Christian banners enter Saxony
A mission along military shock lines
The butcher of the Saxons
Last uprisings, war of annihilation
Charlemagne’s bloody laws
Karolus serenissimus augustus

 

Appendix: Constantine controversy

‘Response given’ by Hermann Gieselbusch
Deschner responds to Maria R.-Alföldi

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Regarding the way I rearranged Deschner’s books, as can be seen in the index above, he published his Vol. 3, Die Alte Kirche (full title: The Ancient Church: forgery, brain-washing, exploitation, annihilation) in 1990, from which I took the passages of the first couple of chapters of our abridged Vol I. Twenty years later, biblical scholar Bart D. Ehrman published Forged: Writing in the Name of God: Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are, pictured left.

Categories
Racial right Vegetarianism

Jef Costello’s article

The article ‘American Renaissance 2022’ published yesterday on Counter-Currents contains a few passages I would like to say something about:
 
 

What can explain such madness—this moral fanaticism coupled with hatred of one’s own? Taylor noted that white people seem to have a compulsion to throw themselves into virtuous causes… But the real mystery is why whites are attracted to causes that are anti-white—why, as Taylor put it, they ‘make a fetish out of opposing their own people.’ We simply do not see this at all in other races. Is there any other race that campaigns for other races to the detriment of its own? Why are we the only race that gets a dopamine surge from hating ourselves? So far as I can see, Taylor did not really offer a theory that might explain this most mysterious aspect of whites.

One of the things I have noticed is that there is no dialogue between our position, which we call here the priesthood of the 14 words, and the American white nationalists. That which Taylor and Costello find so mysterious has been answered ad nauseam on this site, and the PDFs in the featured post explain our POV didactically.

But let’s say it for the umpteenth time: whites didn’t do these suicidal follies prior to Christianity. There is nothing wrong with the ‘hardware’ of whites: only their ‘software’: the Christian ethics that even atheists suffer from. In his article Costello quotes D. H. Lawrence: ‘In attempting to convert the dark man to the white man’s way of life, the white man has fallen helplessly down the hole he wanted to fill up. Seeking to save another man’s soul [italics added], the white man lost his own, and collapsed upon himself.’

Christian ethics! But Costello doesn’t connect the dots. He also tells us:

A further characteristic they [the leftists] exhibit is hatred—not just hatred for their political enemies, but for strength, health, beauty, achievement, masculinity, femininity, family, hierarchy, religion, meat [italics added], and much else. In short, a hatred for life itself.

Nationalists might argue that The West’s Darkest Hour is such an obscure forum that hardly anyone reads it. But the above passage shows that these American racialists also don’t bother to educate themselves about the big movement that preceded them: German National Socialism. About those words I italicised, does Costello know what Hitler and his close associates thought of Christianity? Or how Hitler wanted to close the slaughter-houses after winning the war? I mention these two things—religion, meat—because Hitler was closer to today’s vegans than to the old-fashioned American racialists, Christian or not, who still sympathise with Christianity and eat meat.

American racialists will continue to tell themselves such things in their conferences (‘Oh mystery! Why are we doing these things to ourselves?’) if they don’t have the decorum to listen to voices other than their own.

I didn’t want to add more entries this month because I’m way behind in proofreading Karlheinz Deschner’s book on the real history of Christianity (I’m only on page 120 in a text of more than 400 pages). But Costello’s article motivated me to respond to him and the racial right of the neighbouring country to the north.

Categories
Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Kriminalgeschichte 2022!

 
EDITOR’S FOREWORD
[pages 5-8 of the forthcoming Edition]

In his after-dinner conversations Hitler said: ‘Christianity is the greatest regression humanity has ever experienced: The Jew has thrown back humanity one and a half thousand years’. And the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, who once described himself as a Hitlerist, wrote: ‘The whole world has forgiven Christianity.’

Well, not the whole world. As I confess in my philosophical autobiography De Jesús a Hitler, Christianity played a central role in the destruction of my teenage life and my twenties, something I will never forgive…
 

Some clarifications

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was a Christian, wisely allowed Edward Ericson to abbreviate The Gulag Archipelago so that the heavy volumes of the original work could reach a wider audience in a single, readable tome. The present book, Christianity’s Criminal History: Volume I is an abridged translation of the first volumes of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums. The original German volumes, and also the Spanish translation I have used, contain thousands of endnotes, which are omitted here. This preliminary translation is only the first step towards a more formal German-English translation of Deschner’s maximum opus.

In this abridged translation I have added a few headings, as well as several illustrations with footnotes explaining them, and brackets translating German or Latin terms. Unlike Ericson’s abridgement of the Archipelago, sometimes I have omitted ellipses between unquoted paragraphs, and I have simplified some sentences. I have also replaced some words. I refer to the phrases where the author uses the word ‘pagan’. I replaced it with terms such as ‘Hellenes,’ ‘defenders of Greco-Roman culture,’ ‘classical culture’ or simply added inverted commas on the word ‘pagan.’

The term I have chosen, Hellenes, requires some clarification. It could not be more significant that before the introduction of the pejorative term pagan to refer to unconverted citizens of the Roman Empire, whites were called héllenes or éthne by 4th-century treatises (the expression hellénon éthne can be translated into modern English as ‘the Greek races,’ i.e. the white peoples). As I am aware of the rhetorical use of language, instead of the author’s pejorative term ‘pagan’ I have sometimes chosen the non-pejorative term common in the 4th century vernacular, ‘Hellenes.’

White nationalists claim to be quite informed on the Jewish question. But very few are aware that Jewish subversion began with Christianity, as Hitler said in the opening lines of this preface. Who among today’s nationalists knows the true history of the religion of their parents? Who is aware that Christian fanatics used violence to destroy the ‘pagan’ (i.e., the Greco-Roman world)? Yes: Deschner wrote in German. But how many English-speaking racialists are familiar with Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, published in 2017?

Independently of the nationalists and the racial right, virtually all Westerners ignore the apocalyptic catastrophe of early Christianity after Constantine handed over the Roman Empire to his bishops. They know only the myths of the martyrs (see the chapter ‘The Persecution of the Christians’ in this book), the pious legends, hagiographies and the New Testament fictional tales we were told as children: topics covered in the first section of this abridged translation.

Karlheinz Deschner (1924-2014) was a liberal German. He spent the first sixty years of his life researching the history of the Catholic Church before beginning the ten volumes of his Kriminalgeschichte series in 1986, which he completed in 2013. The series is an encyclopaedic treatise on the true history of Christianity.

I started reading Deschner at the beginning of this century, when I was a liberal, and I would not wake up to the Jewish question until 2010. But Deschner, like all Germans of our time who aspire to see his books in bookshops, never woke up. In his Kriminalgeschichte he went so far as to harshly criticise the anti-Semites of the Early Church: passages omitted in this abridgement. This said, the difference between Deschner and liberal theologians like Hans Küng (The Church) and conservative historians like Paul Johnson (A History of Christianity) is that Küng and Johnson concealed a great deal of the criminal history of Christianity. It is remarkable how Deschner, a scholar who like me became an apostate, was able to see Church history in a way that Küng, Johnson and a veritable galaxy of other Christian scholars would never dream of. After waking up to the reality of the Christian problem I realised that Deschner’s massive work, despite his liberal bias, could be rescued. It just has to be processed through the prism of someone who is racially awake. Of course: if Germany had won the war, Deschner, shown here in National Socialist uniform as a young man, could have written his story from our point of view.
 

Three German holocausts

More than one holocaust with millions of victims each has been perpetrated against the Germanic peoples. After 1945, the Allies killed millions of defenceless Germans (see, for example, Thomas Goodrich’s Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany: 1944-1947). This is the best-kept secret of modern history. Conversely, the genocide committed in Germany during the Thirty Years’ War by fanatic Catholics is fairly well known (in the next volume of our abridgement we will incorporate those chapters). But who knows about the millions of other Germanic peoples killed by Emperor Justinian, recounted in this volume?

If the Aryan Man is currently committing ethnosuicide, it is because the System has lied to him about his own History.[1] The System’s favourite method is what we might call lying by omission: not saying, for example, a word about what happened to the Germans in 1945-1947, or how Christianity was imposed on the white race by Constantine and his successors. It was not enough for the Imperial Church to destroy the Greco-Roman world in the 4th and 5th centuries. In the 6th century, after the fall of Rome, Justinian, the Emperor of Constantinople went on to commit a gigantic genocide of the Germanic race, which by then had established itself on the Italian peninsula. Deschner’s chapter on this Holocaust appears in his second volume, Die Spätantike (Late Antiquity), published in 1989. The full title in translation is: ‘Late Antiquity. From the Catholic “child emperors” to the extermination of the Arian Vandals and Ostrogoths under Justinian I (527-565).’ These were the two Germanic peoples that were exterminated during the Byzantine Empire’s military incursion into Italy and Africa (no wonder there are few pure Germanic peoples in those regions today).

Finally, Deschner died in the same year that Richard Carrier published a book which will be considered the most important book since Hermann Samuel Reimarus’ critical approach to the Gospels. I refer to Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Deschner did not have the opportunity to evaluate the Christ myth theory in its phase of full exegetical maturity. For a new history of Christianity to be complete, Deschner’s criminal history must be complemented by Carrier’s ongoing work, and even our axiological critique of Christianity (see our booklist on page 3).

César Tort
November 2022

____________

[1] See ‘Foundation Myth’ on pages 90-93 of On Exterminationism.

Categories
Judea v. Rome New Testament St Paul

Dominion, 2

Or:

How the Woke Monster originated

by Tom Holland

Holland’s book in my bedroom—Editor. For the
first instalment of this abridged series see here.

Mission AD 19: Galatia

Only the Jews, with their stiff-necked insistence that there existed just a single god, refused as a matter of principle to join in acknowledging the divinity of Augustus; and so perhaps it was no surprise, in the decades that followed the building to him of temples across Galatia, that the visitor there most subversive of his cult should have been a Jew.

The Son of God proclaimed by Paul did not share his sovereignty with other deities. There were no other deities. ‘For us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live’ (Romans 8.6).

Now, by touring cities across the entire span of the Roman world, Paul set himself to bringing them the news of a convulsive upheaval in the affairs of heaven and earth. Once, like a child under the protection of a tutor, the Jews had been graced with the guardianship of a divinely authored law; but now, with the coming of Christ, the need for such guardianship was past. No longer were the Jews alone ‘the children of God’ (Deuteronomy 14.1). The exclusive character of their covenant was abrogated. The venerable distinctions between them and everyone else—of which male circumcision had always been the pre-eminent symbol—were transcended. Jews and Greeks, Galatians and Scythians: all alike, so long as they opened themselves to belief in Jesus Christ, were henceforward God’s holy people. This, so Paul informed his hosts, was the epochal message that Christ had charged him to proclaim to the limits of the world.

‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3:28-9).

Only the world turned upside down could ever have sanctioned such an unprecedented, such a revolutionary, announcement. If Paul did not stint, in a province adorned with monuments to Caesar, in hammering home the full horror and humiliation of Jesus’ death, then it was because, without the crucifixion, he would have had no gospel to proclaim. Christ, by making himself nothing, by taking on the very nature of a slave, had plumbed the depths to which only the lowest, the poorest, the most persecuted and abused of mortals were confined…

To repudiate a city’s gods was to repudiate as well the rhythms of its civic life. It was to imperil relations with family and friends. It was to show disrespect to Caesar himself.

By urging his converts to consider themselves neither Galatian nor Jewish, but solely as the people of Christ, as citizens of heaven, he was urging them to adapt an identity that was as globalist as it was innovative. This, in an age that took for granted local loyalties and tended to look upon novelty with suspicion, was a bold strategy—but one for which Paul refused to apologise. If he was willing to grant the Law of Moses any authority at all, then it was only to insist that what God most truly wanted was a universal amity. ‘The entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love your neighbour as yourself.”’ (Galatians 5.14) All you need is love.

Paul wrote to a second church, preaching the redemption from old identities that lay at the heart of his message. Corinth, unlike Galatia, enjoyed an international reputation for glamour.

As much as anywhere in Greece, then, Corinth was a melting pot. The descendants of Roman freedmen settled there by Julius Caesar mingled with Greek plutocrats; shipping magnates with cobblers; itinerant philosophers with Jewish scholars. Identity, in such a city, might easily lack deep roots. Unlike in Athens, where even Paul’s greatest admirers found it hard to pretend that he had enjoyed much of an audience, in Corinth he had won a hearing. His stay in the city, where he had supported himself by working on awnings and tents, and sleeping among the tools of his trade, had garnered various converts. The church that he had founded there—peopled by Jews and non-Jews, rich and poor, some with Roman names and some with Greek—served as a monument to his vision of a new people: citizens of heaven.

Among a people who had always celebrated the agon, the contest to be the best, he announced that God had chosen the foolish to shame the wise, and the weak to shame the strong. In a world that took for granted the hierarchy of human chattels and their owners, he insisted that the distinctions between slave and free, now that Christ himself had suffered the death of a slave, were of no more account than those between Greek and Jew. ‘For he who was a slave when he was called by the Lord is the Lord’s freedman; similarly, he who was a free man when he was called is Christ’s slave’ (Corinthians 7.22).

Like the great salesman that he was, he always made sure to pitch his message to his audience. ‘I have become all things to all men, so that by all possible means I might save some’ (Corinthians 9.22). Despite this claim, and despite the convulsive transformation in his understanding of what it meant to be a Jew, in his instincts and prejudices he remained the product of his schooling…

That the law of the God of Israel might be read inscribed on the human heart, written there by his Spirit, was a notion that drew alike on the teachings of Pharisees and Stoics—and yet equally was foreign to them both. Its impact was destined to render Paul’s letters—the correspondence of a bum, without position or reputation in the affairs of the world—the most influential, the most transformative, the most revolutionary ever written. Across the millennia, and in societies and continents unimagined by Paul himself, their impact would reverberate. His was a conception of law that would come to suffuse an entire civilisation. He was indeed—just as he proclaimed himself to be—the herald of a new beginning…

[Left, Paul the Apostle – Catacombs of St. Tecla, c. 380 C.E.—Ed.] Paul was not the founder of the churches in Rome. Believers in Christ had appeared well before his own arrival there. Nevertheless, the letter that he had sent these Hagioi from Corinth, a lengthy statement of his beliefs that was designed as well to serve as an introduction to ‘all in Rome who are loved by God’ (Romans 1.7) was like nothing they had ever heard before. The most detailed of Paul’s career, it promised to its recipients a dignity more revolutionary than even any of Nero’s stunts. When the masses were invited by the emperor to his street parties, the summons was to enjoy a fleeting taste of the pleasures of a Caesar.

But Paul, in his letter to the Romans, had something altogether more startling to offer. ‘The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children’ (Romans 8.16). Here, baldly stated, was a status that Nero would never have thought to share. It was not given to householders filthy and stinking with the sweat of their own labours, the inhabitants at best of a mean apartment or workshop on the outskirts of the city, to lay claim to the title of a Caesar. And yet that, so Paul proclaimed, was indeed their prerogative. They had been adopted by a god.

To suffer as Christ had done, to be beaten, and degraded, and abused, was to share in his glory. Adoption by God, so Paul assured his Roman listeners, promised the redemption of their bodies. ‘And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you’ (Romans 8.11). The revolutionary implications of this message, to those who heard it, could not help but raise pressing questions. In the cramped workshops that provided the Hagioi of Rome with their places of assembly, where they would meet to commemorate the arrest and suffering of Christ with a communal meal, men rubbed shoulders with women, citizens with slaves. If all were equally redeemed by Christ, if all were equally beloved of God, then what of the hierarchies on which the functioning of even the humblest Roman household depended?

The master of a household was no more or less a son of God than his slaves. Everyone, then, should be joined together by a common love. Yet even as Paul urged this, he did not push the radicalism of his message to its logical conclusion. A slave might be loved by his master as a brother, and renowned for his holiness, and blessed with the gift of prophecy—but still remain a slave. Despite his scorn for the pretensions of the Caesars, Paul warned the churches of Rome not to offer open resistance to Nero. ‘Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established’ (Romans 13.1).

If Roman power upheld the peace that enabled him to travel the world, then he would not jeopardise his mission by urging his converts to rebel against it. Too much was at stake. There was no time to weave the entire fabric of society anew. What mattered, in the brief window of opportunity that Paul had been granted, was to establish as many churches as possible—and thereby to prepare the world for the parousia. ‘For the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night’ (I Thessalonians 5.2). And increasingly, it seemed that the world’s foundations were indeed starting to shake…

In AD 66, the smouldering resentments of the Jews in Judaea burst into open revolt. Roman vengeance, when it came, was terrible. Four years after the launch of the rebellion, Jerusalem was stormed by the legions. The wealth of the Temple was carted off to Rome, and the building itself burnt to the ground. ‘Neither its antiquity, nor the extent of its treasures, nor the global range of those who regarded it as theirs, nor the incomparable glory of its rites, proved sufficient to prevent its destruction’ (Josephus Jewish Wars 6.442).

God, whose support the rebels had been banking upon, had failed to save his people. Many Jews, cast into an abyss of misery and despair, abandoned their faith in him altogether. Others, rather than blame God, chose instead to blame themselves, arraigning themselves on a charge of disobedience, and turning with a renewed intensity to the study of their scriptures and their laws. Others yet—those who believed that Jesus was Christ, and whom the Roman authorities had increasingly begun to categorise as Christiani [1]—found in the ruin visited on God’s Chosen People the echo of an even more dreadful spectacle: that of God’s Son upon the gallows.

The gospels written in the tense and terrible years that immediately preceded and followed the annihilation of Jerusalem were different [than Paul’s letters—Ed.]. The kingdom of God was like a mustard seed; it was like the world as seen through the eyes of a child; it was like yeast in dough. Again and again, in the stories that Jesus loved to tell, in his parables, the plot was as likely to be drawn from the world of the humble as it was from that of the wealthy or the wise: from the world of swineherds, servants, sowers.

_____________

[1] Tacitus explicitly states that those condemned by Nero were abusively referred to by the name of Chrestiani.Unsurprisingly, then, neither in Paul’s letters nor in the Gospels does the word appear; but already, by AD 100 at the latest, Christians themselves seem to have begun to appropriate it.

Categories
Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Sponsor

Only PDFs or hardbacks?

Recently an Englishman, who incidentally obtained a copy of the translation of my first autobiographical book and contributed a donation, told me that PDFs weren’t enough: that my books need to be in hardback to make the content more enduring.

As for Christianity’s Criminal History, which we have been translating in abridged form, I must say something.

The PDF available so far consists of the posts of Christianity’s Criminal History on this site from 1 to 100. I have decided to put that manuscript together with posts 101-172 to produce a thicker volume, which for the time being will only be available as a PDF.

Since this book/PDF will be different from the previous edition, which used to be printed by Lulu, Inc. (and for whose cover I had chosen a copy my father made of Doré’s drawing of Cain and Abel before I was born), I have decided that for the second edition I will use another image to distinguish the two editions: probably Constantine’s face. This new PDF will be available soon.

The English gentleman is right. Therefore, I recently spoke to the manager of a print shop in the city where I live, and he will give me an estimate to print twenty copies with the new cover. But even a print run of twenty copies for each PDF in the featured post requires a relatively wealthy sponsor.

I don’t do this for money. If some interested party wants to take a gamble on, say, IngramSpark using all my PDFs and large amounts of his time to design the covers, I wouldn’t mind even if I didn’t get a single penny. What bothers me is that the ideas of The West’s Darkest Hour, which in my opinion could save the white race from extinction if taken seriously, aren’t being disseminated more formallly. And what could be more formal than to have these books in hardback on our bookshelves in anticipation of the day when the Establishment cancels all racialist websites!

But even if I don’t get the funds to form my Daybreak Press a little more professionally, visitors should save the PDFs on their hard drives in anticipation of the fateful day that might be coming.

Before it was published for a short time, I printed out at home the PDF of Who We Are available online and saved it in a ring binder. And I did the same with Hitler’s Table Talk, The Turner Diaries and Covington’s latest novel. Storing books in this way is too cumbersome because the binders take up a lot of space. But it is better than not printing them, as there are books that must be kept in physical form: either as normal books or as homemade printouts. It is the only way to have an in-depth dialogue with the author through underlining and pencil footnotes.

With instalment #172 we thus conclude the first Daybreak Press volume: our abridged translation of Karlheinz Deschner’s magnum opus. The rest of his series, in which Deschner writes about events from the successors of Charlemagne to modern times, are still missing. If I am still alive, I will continue this project and the remaining content will appear in the next volume (or volumes).

As I have said several times, if the Christian problem is solved the Jewish problem would be solved the next day. We can already imagine an American Continent populated not by pious Christians but by Spartans, Vikings and those Romans before the decline brought about by the Punic Wars. My purpose on this site is to make the white man of the future look like them and not like those who, by worshipping the god of the Jews, are incapable of acting as the white man acted in the ancient world.

Categories
Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 171

 

Response given

by Hermann Gieselbusch

– Reinbek, 23 August 1996 Sachbuchlektorat Rowohlt Verlag –

 
(Left, Karlheinz Deschner with his editor Hermann Gieselbusch.) After some thirty years of preparation, the first volume of Karlheinz Deschner’s ten-volume Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (Criminal History of Christianity) appeared in Germany in September 1986. The second volume was published in October 1988 and the third in October 1990. This marked the end of the first epoch: Antiquity.

Three imposing volumes, representing some 1,600 pages, with some 350 scientific notes, around half a thousand names of historical characters and as many place names and thousands of quotations from primary and secondary sources. In all, a veritable Milky Way of names, dates, Christian dogmas, titles and data.

Such a well-founded and fundamental accusation against Christianity—not only against the Church—has never been made before. In any case, the attacked party in principle adhered to Oggersheim’s rule: hold on.

When competent and professional Christians could not ignore it; when tens of thousands of readers devoured every new volume of Deschner’s historical Krimi every two years, when the number of annual departures from the Church was rapidly increasing sixfold and many of the dissidents were giving historical reasons in support of their decision—in particular the cruelties Deschner exposes—then it seemed to the attacked ministers of organised Christianity that the matter had passed the point of no return. And in 1992 they went on a counter-attack.

Hans Reinhard Seeliger, professor of historical theology at the Siegen University of Applied Sciences, organised a conference entitled ‘Criminalisation of Christianity? Deschner’s Church History on the Test Bench’: a three-day symposium at the Katholische Akademie Schwerte am Nordrand des Sauerlandes.

From 1 to 3 October 1992, lectures were given on the twenty-three chapters of the three volumes that have appeared to date, either in general or in particular. Most of the lecturers were professors from Germany and Austria: ordinary, extraordinary, supernumerary, and emeritus, as well as one professor and one honorary professor. Two belong to the Dominican order and one is a Franciscan. The spectrum of specialisations ranges from ancient church history, patrology, Christian archaeology, ancient history, ancient philology and Judaism to historical and systematic theology. The group was joined by a professor of criminal law (because Deschner’s is a criminal history!) as well as a newly qualified doctor of medicine from Freiburg.

Karlheinz Deschner was also invited—a chivalrous gesture—to present ‘the basic and general conception of his work’. One against twenty-two, a very tempting challenge for the combative spirit like Deschner. Nevertheless, he declined the invitation. He had already discussed the proposed topic at length in the general introduction to his work: ‘On the Subject, Methodology, the Question of Objectivity and the Problems of Historiography in General’, which consists of sixty printed pages. To this introduction, as Deschner himself wrote to the organisers, he had nothing to add. [1]

All lectures appeared in book form in the Catholic Traditionsverlag Herder in Freiburg, edited by the initiator Hans Reinhard Seeliger, with a total of 320 pages. On the cover we see the image of the Dominican Savonarola in Florence, painted by Fra Bartolommeo. A joke? (in 1498 Savonarola was burned at the stake). An aspiration? In any case, the editor writes in his introduction that ‘a “beheading” of the author would have been easy to execute’.

Of course, the book published by Herder, which is quite expensive by the way, has not been a bestseller. But even with a limited number of copies it fulfilled its function as a smokescreen. From now on, and with the very erudite reference to this collective volume, is interwoven the verdict that in that book more than twenty experts have shown that Deschner works in an unscientific way and writes with bias. When someone referring to Deschner now asks the Church painful questions, the initiate need only smile with a compassionate expression and refer to the said book—without having read it, of course—and with this magic trick of authority the whole historical mosaic of criminal history is diluted into complacency, and the soul seduced by Deschner must continue to believe that Christianity and its Churches have never had a criminal history, but only and exclusively a sacred history.

The philosopher Hermann Josef Schmidt, a professor in Dortmund, has thoroughly analysed the volume edited by Seeliger in Herder and published his exposé under the title Das ,,einhellige” oder scheinheilige ,,Urteil der Wissenschaf”? Nachdenkliches zur katholischen Kritik an Karlheinz Deschners ,,Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums”.

Deschner assumed that the interested reader can judge for himself which point of view is more convincing, and which author is closer to the critical and historical truth. Deschner, who continually advises his audience to examine what he says, not to ‘believe’ him, believes in the undertow of reason.

But to remain silent in this case would be self-harming and out of touch with reality. Calumniare audacter, semper aliquid haeret: Don’t be shy to slander, there is always something left! A foreign scientist recalled with special emphasis this old, and true, cynicism: Deschner should take a sharp, immediate and clear stand against his Schwerte critics.

The malignant flu in the winter of 1996 made it difficult for Deschner to write the fifth volume of the Criminal History, so he took up the Herder volume again, as a kind of spiritual gymnastics for convalescents, and looked for a modus operandi. To critically analyse the entire three-hundred-page-long text? Impossible. He could only proceed selectively by choosing a single article and analysing it in depth.

Deschner decided on the paper ,,Kaiser Konstantin: ein Grosser der Geschichte?” by Maria R.-Alföldi (the only woman in the Schwerte group). On the face of it, this lecture corresponds to the average level of volume. Some texts yield to all kinds of criticism. A few at least refrain from personal defamation and try to do justice to Deschner’s peculiarities and contribution: Maria R.-Alföldi occupies a middle ground and is therefore representative of the work.

She was born in 1926 in Budapest, received her doctorate in 1949, was appointed professor in Munich in 1961 and worked since then as a scientific advisor and later as a lecturer at the seminar for Greek and Roman history at the University of Frankfurt of Main in auxiliary sciences for archaeology and the history and culture of the Roman provinces (among the auxiliary disciplines of history are epigraphy, papyrology, glyptography and sigillography). Maria Radnóti-Alföldi has mainly published works on numismatics, such as Die constantinische Goldpragung: Untersuchungen zu ihrer Bedeutung für Kaiserpolitik und Hofkunst (1963) and Antike Numismatik: Theorie, Praxis, Bibliographie (1978).

Professor Radnóti-Alföldi is a corresponding member of the Academy of Science and Literature in Mainz. Hans Reinhard Seeliger, at the Schwerte meeting, introduced her as a ‘Constantine researcher of international standing’. Her lecture was received with particular sympathy at Schwerte, but here it seemed like a chorus to torpedo Deschner’s reliability as a historian. How many targets did she make? That is what Karlheinz Deschner discusses in the following reply.

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[1] Editor’s note: Our abridged translation of Deschner’s global introduction to his ten volumes can be read on pages 15-25 of a PDF. Deschner’s response to Professor Radnóti-Alföldi will appear in the next post.

Categories
Charlemagne Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Philosophy of history Racial right

Christianity’s Criminal History, 170

Karolus serenissimus augustus a Deo coronatus magnus pacificas (Charles, most serene emperor, great and peaceful emperor, crowned by God). As the beginning of his prolix title already read in 801, that peacemaking Caesar, crowned by God and reigning also per misericordiam Dei (by the mercy of God), the one who from 802 was also called imperator christianissimus and who (supposedly) died with the words of Psalm 31: ‘Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit’, that man had prepared one slaughter after another, and in his forty-six years of rule—from 768 to 814—he had warred almost continuously with about fifty military campaigns. For only two years (790 and 807) he didn’t fight ‘A happy period for the Church’ (Daniel-Rops).

There is nothing strange about the fact that in the Chanson de geste—the French epic poems of the early Middle Ages—he is already ‘more than two hundred years old’, accompanied by his bravest paladins. He fought against the Lombards, the Frisians, the Bavarians, the Avars, the Slavs, the Basques and the Arabs in Spain, and the Byzantines in southern Italy, with offensive wars almost coldly planned and with which he inflicted death, often cruel and terrible death, on countless people.

And not only did he kill in the wars, but he also had 4,500 prisoners murdered and thousands of families banished. Or, as it is said in one of the oldest liturgical poems in honour of Charles: ‘He struck down thousands, cleansed the earth of the heathen weeds, converted the infidels, broke the statues of the gods, drove out the foreign gods’. For him, according to his biographer Einhard, the wars against the Saxons and the Avars were more important than all other political tasks. Moreover, for certain ecclesiastical circles in the 10th century, the Saxon wars were the most important work he did for the Christian mission.

It is not just that Charles ‘the Great’ in fact killed, subjugated and enslaved without pause (winters generally excepted); that he was nothing but a warrior, conqueror, murderer and predator on the grandest scale—which, as the most learned of scholars have long since taught us, was then so commonplace, so much a part of the ‘Saxon way of life’, was then so commonplace, so much the ‘good’ style of the time, that to criticise it would be a crass anachronism, from our ‘enlightened’ time as well as being arbitrary, rigorist, moralistic and square-jawed in the extreme. No, it is also about the fact that Charles ‘the Great’ carried out all this incredible bloodshed with the most intense participation of Christianity and the Church of his time (which, of course, were also ‘sons of their time’! according to the apologists). And that this Church never protested, but rather took full advantage of it all.

The point is that the Christian feudal state and the Christian feudal Church were one and the same thing—and the same thing in crime.

Charles, whose true ‘book of state’ was the Bible, and whose favourite works included Augustine’s City of God, not only ruled and acted as king of the Franks but also as an enlightened protector of the Church, as an interlocutor and ally of the pope, as evidenced by his legislation, his epistolary correspondence written by ecclesiastics and his closest collaborators. This monarch was a kind of priest-king, he was rector et devotus sanctae ecclesiae defensor et adiutor im omnibus (guide and devoted defender and helper of the Holy Church in all things).

Empire and Church became indissolubly intertwined in the imperium christianum, with hardly any difference between political diets and ecclesiastical councils. Charles convened synods, over which he presided; he chose bishops and abbots as he pleased, and in Saxony he instituted the bishoprics he needed. When he needed an archbishopric for his attacks on the miserly, he had the pope erect the archbishopric of Salzburg. He also disposed of church property, enriching popes and bishops with territories. He granted them numerous privileges of immunity and punished the violation of ecclesiastical immunity with the doubled royal penalty of 600 solids. He freed the bishops from taxes and granted them the right to mint money. He punished the plundering and burning of churches with capital punishment.

But above all, he imposed the universal obligation of tithes on the clergy and demanded tithes for the Episcopal churches at the state level. He also bequeathed three-quarters of his cash to the Church, which he took special care of in his last years (while he left only one-twelfth to his children and grandchildren as a whole, and one-twelfth to the palace servants). And the prelates were also entirely dependent on him, although their influence during his reign—considering him at least all the Frankish bishops as the universal head of the Church—grew considerably: under Charles, they marched to war, acted as judges alongside the counts and were at the head of the royal court.

A 1967 study lists no less than 109 places of worship of St. Charles. These include Aachen (where Charles’ death day, 28 January, is still celebrated in the cathedral today, and where I celebrated my name day as a child), Bremen, Brussels, Dortmund, Frankfurt (one of the main places of Charles’ cult), Fulgem (another of the main places of Charles’ cult), Falkirk (another of the main places of Charles’ cult’), Fulda, Halle, Ingelheim, Cologne, Constance, Lüttich, Mainz, Minden, Münster, Nuremberg, Regensburg, Strasbourg, Trier, Vienna, Würzburg and Zurich. It is also noteworthy that Charles received cultic veneration throughout Saxony. For centuries Charles ‘the Great’, Charlemagne, has been regarded as the ideal model ruler, and for many, for very many, he still is today.

Voltaire and Gibbon stigmatised his barbarism and denied him personal greatness.

At the beginning of the 19th century, Napoleon was exalted to the full extent of his power as a ‘Charlemagne redivivus’. After the founding of the German Reich in the 19th century, Germans rediscovered Charles’ Germanness and his bellicose spirit. In the fascist era, amid the Second World War, the 1200th anniversary of Charlemagne’s birth was celebrated on 2 April 1942, and he was presented as ‘Charles the Unifier’.

The Carolingian empire, the imperiun christianum, as Alcuin called it from 798, the regnum sanctae ecclesiae (Libri Carolini), stretched from the North Sea to the Pyrenees and the Adriatic. It covered what is now France, Belgium, Holland, western Germany, Switzerland, most of Italy, the Marca Hispanica and Corsica. It was approximately 1,200,000 square kilometres in area: almost as large as the Western Roman Empire.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Editor’s Note:

I have been very critical of American white nationalism on this site, but hardly at all of German National Socialism.

It is time to realise that Hitler and the Nazis weren’t perfect. As I implied in my post yesterday, if they had become wise instead of, using chess imagery, gambit the Third Reich against General Winter in Russia, they would have devoted all their efforts to understand the root causes of the dark hour. Karlheinz Deschner, the author of the above text, wouldn’t have hung up his Nazi uniform and become a philo-Semitic liberal because Hitler would have kept his Reich. Deschner could have written his criminal history of Christianity from the point of view of a Germany that had already transvalued its values.

I have said it and it bears repeating: To win the war we must know what we are fighting against. Both the most populist Nazis, like Goebbels, and today’s white nationalists emphasise Jewry. I think Manu Rodriguez, quoted in my post yesterday, was right: the Semitic hydra also includes Christianity and Islam. From time immemorial, anything to do with the Semitic race has been the enemy. Recall that Republican Rome began to decline just after Hannibal and the Carthaginians decimated the flower of the Roman army. That created the spiritual degradation that resulted in the later Roman Empire’s citizens beginning to interbreed with mudbloods. Eventually, the Judeo-Christians took advantage of that opportunity and the rest is history.

After I finish proofreading On Exterminationism, I will start putting together other books-PDFs of the most important entries on this site that show this meta-perspective.

Categories
Charlemagne Swastika Third Reich

Manu’s wise words…

I usually add my comments within the posts of Karlheinz Deschner’s Christianity’s Criminal History (to contextualise this series, click here). But what I am about to say is so vital that I prefer to add it as a separate entry.

If Hitler and his closest associates, some of them anti-Christian, had understood that the Christian Question is far more toxic than the Jewish Question (the white traitor is worse than the kike), they wouldn’t have ventured into the Soviet Union.

The evil lay at home, including Hitler’s admiration for Charlemagne, the butcher of Saxons! So at home was the evil, that it was child’s play for the victorious Allies to brainwash the Germans after the Hellstorm Holocaust, in which more Germans died than Jews in the so-called Jewish Holocaust.

Had they known that the CQ was a more serious matter than the JQ, they would have prepared the German people so that, gradually—as Hitler well saw in his after-dinner talks—the Germans would abandon the religion of our (really asshole) parents. It is worth quoting, again, what the Spaniard Manu Rodríguez told me almost a decade ago:
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Your words have made me rethink this whole period [of the Third Reich—Ed.]. In this period the Aryan people are identified and recognised for the first time in the history of a people. For the first time, our people became aware of themselves, their origin and their nature. Since the emergence of our people (that primitive nucleus) six or seven thousand years ago, there had been nothing like it. It was a dawn, a new dawn. These were sublime moments.

This ‘birth’ has to do with the emergence of Indo-European studies, and the evolutionary and genetic studies of that time. They spread new knowledge about our biocultural being, our race, and our languages and cultures. It was a recognition. It was like looking in a mirror for the first time. We were there in those texts: in the hymns of the Rig Veda, in the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Edda, the Mabinogion. It was us, our blood, our genius, our race, that had generated those texts, those cultures, those worlds.

The swastika, our banner, was not only raised against liberalism and communism… It is only today that we are beginning to understand the greatness and scope of its mission—our mission. To situate it precisely, we can make these words of Saint-Loup our own:

[Hitler was] the man who had thrown down to the world this extraordinary challenge: to attack at the same time Anglo-Saxon capitalism, Red Bolshevism, Jewish racism, international Freemasonry, the Catholic Church, pauperism and social iniquities, the Treaty of Versailles, colonialism and the French disorder.

And the list is not complete.

It was not just Hitler, but Germany as a whole: the entire German people. It was a collective ‘enterprise’.

The German community was born armed, like Athena, the first Aryan community to awaken or be reborn. And it does so to fight against those who have sought to harm it; against a whole counter-cultural environment that denies its being. Spiritually alienated, it has to fight against the Judeo-Messianic delusion, the ‘Christian millennium’. It wasn’t the only Jewish monster that had to confront this newborn Aryan nation: communism also ravaged the population and others. The Jewish hydra had multiplied, had branched out, and had too many faces, too many heads.

It seems that we have had only one enemy throughout history: the Semitic peoples and their discourses (Jewish, Judeo-Messianic Christian and Muslim). They dominate us spiritually. It is the multiple alienations we suffer at the hands of the Semites or Semitic ideologies (religious, political, economic, anthropological, sociological, psychological…). Our enemy possesses us in one way or another. The dreaded Jewish hydra. Typhon. Evil. Our evil.

Was it an awakening, a premature birth? Too young was this community to face this age-old Monster. As a young Hero, it failed in its first attempt to defeat it. Too old and cunning such a monstrosity. It engulfed the child, and the young Aryan community, in a few years.

We must rescue the memory of this period and raise it to the top with pride. We should be proud of this period. We lost a battle, but not the war. We are still alive and active… We will beat them at last. I know that.

The birth of our people is conceived in the years before Hitler came to power. The Aryan consciousness of a whole people saw the light then and received its ‘baptism’ publicly. A whole people recognised itself. 1933 was the year of its birth, the first Aryan community to be recognised as such. It was lost in 1945. We are therefore on the 80th anniversary of its birth, the birth of the first Aryan nation, of the Aryan nation itself.

That period is an unparalleled milestone in our short history. The first appearance of our people in history. We are now a people: the Aryan nation.

Hitler symbolises our first period, our first battle and our first loss. His struggle was our struggle. His loss was our loss. But this defeat hasn’t conquered us in our first open confrontation against evil, against our evil. We were defeated, so what? It was a huge thing to fight. Too many hydra tentacles… The war has just begun.

These anniversaries of Hitler and the birth of our people have been for me like a small rebirth too. Let’s say I see more light, I see more clearly. I have a feeling about the next battle—that there will be another battle. And this time we will have a space from which to advance, a bulwark, a solid base: the Aryan nation itself. We will reconquer our people. We have many great spiritual warriors, well-armed with knowledge and truth. In the end, we will win.

This is my spirit now.

Chechar, I feel I owe this letter to you (and to all those I upset with my harsh words about Hitler and the Nazi period).

Regards,

Manu.

(translated from Spanish)

Categories
Charlemagne Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 169

Charlemagne’s bloody laws

During his struggle, the king issued draconian laws, evidently whenever he believed that he had finally subdued the Saxons and could bring them to ‘order.’ Notable in this respect are the Capitulatio departibus Saxoniae (782) and the Capitulare Saxonicum (797). And as conversions to Christianity were forced by mass baptisms, while the Saxon people secretly persisted in their paganism and abhorred the clergy, Charles imposed a complete change of ideological education based on the total eradication of ancient beliefs and their rites and by the forced baptism of all Saxons.

Of the fourteen provisions of the Capitulatio, which carry the death penalty, ten refer exclusively to crimes against Christianity. He had previously sought the advice of the pope and was clearly guided by the missionary method of the Fulda monks for the extirpation of paganism, which began with unceremonious mass baptisms and the total destruction of their shrines.

A stereotypical morte moriatur (die without remission) threatened everything the heralds of the good news wanted to erase: the plundering and destruction of churches, the cremation of the dead, the rejection of baptism, the secret avoidance of baptism, the mockery of Christianity, the undermining of church property, the offering of pagan sacrifices, the practice of gentile customs (emphasis added!—Ed.), and so on. This was its tenor:

• If anyone violently breaks into a church and steals anything from it, or sets fire to the church, let him die without remission.

• If anyone out of contempt for Christianity does not keep the sacred fast of forty days and eats meat, let him die without remission.

• If anyone, according to heathen custom, causes the body of a deceased person to be destroyed by fire and reduces his limbs to ashes, let him die without remission.

• If anyone in the future among the Saxon people pretends to hide without having been baptised and stops approaching baptism because he wants to remain a pagan, let him die without remission.

• If anyone in agreement with the heathen plots something against the Christians and seeks to maintain hostility against the Christians, let him die without remission.

Even the transgression of the precept of fasting carried the death penalty!

Baptism in the first year of life, church attendance on Sundays and feast days, the taking of oaths in churches and even the observance of the canon law on marriage were ordered. As Alcuin had already criticised, ‘severe penances were imposed for the slightest faults.’

Since the forcibly converted Saxon people cared little or nothing for Christianity, they had to continue to be forced to support the Church. Everyone, noble, free and common, had to give the Church a tithe for the harvest of their fields and all their earnings. In addition, each church was to get two rural estates, as well as one manservant and one maidservant for every 125 inhabitants, so that the mass of the Saxons was exploited as never before.

The aim of Charles’ war could hardly be stated more clearly and convincingly: the destruction of paganism, expansion of Christianity and annexation.

Categories
Axiology Catholic Church Christendom Painting Philosophy of history St Francis Tom Holland

Dominion, 1

Or:

How the Woke Monster originated

See what I wrote on Saturday about Tom Holland’s book Dominion, some of whose passages from the Preface I quote below. Holland contrasts the jovial spirit of the Greco-Roman world with the medieval spirit after the Church infected the minds of Europeans:

Something fundamental had indeed changed. ‘Patience in tribulation, offering the other cheek, praying for one’s enemies, loving those who hate us’: such were the Christian virtues as defined by Anselm. All derived from the recorded sayings of Jesus himself. No Christians, then, not even the most callous or unheeding, could ignore them without some measure of reproof from their consciences. [page 9]

Because the American racial right is ignorant of European history, they don’t realise that the Woke Monster—i.e., the inversion of Greco-Roman values—has been suffered by whites since the Middle Ages, not only in recent years:

God was closer to the weak than to the mighty, to the poor than to the rich. Any beggar, any criminal, might be Christ. ‘So the last will be first, and the first last.’ To the Roman aristocrats who, in the decades before the birth of Jesus, first began to colonise the Esquiline Hill with their marble fittings and their flowers beds, such a sentiment would have seemed grotesque. [page 9]

But Holland is similar to Kevin MacDonald in one respect. Although he has abandoned the faith of his childhood, he is still sympathetic to Christianity in some ways. Holland is a secular historian, and like most secular historians that makes him dangerous: he gives us the impression that he is objective, not what we have been calling a neochristian. For example, in the Preface Holland refers to Nero as a ‘malignant Caesar’ (page 10). If the visitor has read the masthead of this site, the Spaniard’s essay on the Judean war against Rome and how Christians wrote history, he will remember that from the ancient world these Judeo-Christians were engaged in defaming figures like Caligula and Nero because they took anti-Jewish measures. (Believing mainstream historians is akin to believing what CNN has said about Trump.)

In the middle of Dominion, the book contains splendid colour reproductions such as the following, in the context of the reversal of classical to Christian values, with St Peter, the very vicar of Christ on earth, depicted in this way:

No ancient artist would have thought to honour a Caesar by representing him as Caravaggio represented Peter: tortured, humiliated, stripped almost bare. And yet, in the city of the Caesars, it was a man broken to such a fate who was honoured as the keeper of ‘the keys of the kingdom of heaven’. The last had indeed become first… [page 10]

In the Middle Ages, no civilisation in Eurasia was as congruent with a single dominant set of beliefs as was the Latin West with its own distinctive form of Christianity. Elsewhere, whether in the lands of Islam, or in India, or in China, there were various understandings of the divine, and numerous institutions that served to define them; but in Europe, in the lands that acknowledged the primacy of the pope, there was only the occasional community of Jews to disrupt the otherwise total monopoly of the Roman Church. [page 11]

As we have often insisted in discussing the climax of the Spaniard’s essay, the incredible juggling act that the Judeo-Christians performed in a process that culminated with Emperor Theodosius II, was to allow only Judaism and Judeo-Christianity as the religions of the Roman Empire. No other—and under no circumstances the previous religions with Aryan gods!

Well might the Roman Church have termed itself ‘catholic’: ‘universal’. There was barely a rhythm of life that it did not define. From dawn to dusk, from midsummer to the depths of winter, from the hour of their birth to the very last drawing of their breath, the men and women of medieval Europe absorbed its assumptions into their bones. Even when, in the century before Caravaggio, Catholic Christendom began to fragment, and new forms of Christianity to emerge, the conviction of Europeans that their faith was universal remained deep-rooted. It inspired them in their exploration of continents undreamed of by their forefathers; in their conquest of those that they were able to seize, and reconsecrate as a Promised Land… [page 11]

Time itself has been Christianised. [page 12]

If today’s members of the racial right were not charlatans, the first thing they would want to do would be to proclaim that the coming new age is no longer to be measured by the birth of a non-existent Jew (pace Holland, Jesus didn’t exist), but of the Aryan man about whom Savitri Devi wrote: ‘To the god-like Individual of our times; the Man against Time; the greatest European of all times; both Sun and Lightning…’ (see the featured post).

How was it that a cult inspired by the execution of an obscure criminal in a long-vanished empire came to exercise such a transformative and enduring influence on the world? To attempt an answer to this question, as I do in this book, is not to write a history of Christianity. Rather than provide a panoramic survey of its evolution, I have sought instead to trace the currents of Christian influence that have spread most widely, and been most enduring into the present day. That is why—although I have written extensively about the Eastern and Orthodox Churches elsewhere, and find them themes of immense wonder and fascination—I have chosen not to trace their development beyond antiquity. My ambition is hubristic enough as it is: to explore how we in the West came to be what we are, and to think the way that we do… [page 12]

Today, at a time of seismic geopolitical realignment, when our values are proving to be not nearly as universal as some of us had assumed them to be, the need to recognise just how culturally contingent they are is more pressing than ever. To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions. This is no less true for Jews or Muslims than it is for Catholics or Protestants. Two thousand years on from the birth of Christ, it does not require a belief that he rose from the dead to be stamped by the formidable—indeed the inescapable—influence of Christianity. Fail to appreciate this, and the risk is always of anachronism… [page 13]

Remember the negrolatric revolution (BLM riots) that surprised everyone less those who see recent history as the explosion of the Christian sun in its secular, incendiary form: a red giant that I have called neochristianity (although it’s more precise to see it as ‘neofranciscanism’)?

The West, increasingly empty though the pews may be, remains firmly moored to its Christian past. There are those who will rejoice at this proposition; and there are those who will be appalled by it. Christianity may be the most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history, but it is also the most challenging for a historian to write about. [page 13]

One thing I like about Holland’s prose is that he sprinkles his erudite treatise with personal vignettes:

…although I vaguely continued to believe in God, I found him infinitely less charismatic than the gods of the Greeks: Apollo, Athena, Dionysus. I liked the way that they did not lay down laws, or condemn other deities as demons; I liked their rock-star glamour. As a result, by the time I came to read Edward Gibbon and his great history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, I was more than ready to accept his interpretation of the triumph of Christianity: that it had ushered in an ‘age of superstition and credulity’. My childhood instinct to see the biblical God as the po-faced enemy of liberty and fun was rationalised. The defeat of paganism had ushered in the reign of Nobodaddy, and of all the various crusaders, inquisitors and black-hatted Puritans who had served as his acolytes. Colour and excitement had been drained from the world. ‘Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean,’ wrote the Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, echoing the apocryphal lament of Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor of Rome. ‘The world has grown grey from thy breath.’ Instinctively, I agreed. [pages 15-16]

Then Holland says something that reminds me of Yockey’s words in Imperium: that Europeans claim to be based on the Greco-Roman world when in fact they are completely different civilisations:

Yet over the course of the past two decades, my perspective has changed. When I came to write my first works of history, I chose as my themes the two periods that had always most stirred and moved me as a child: the Persian invasions of Greece and the last decades of the Roman Republic. The years that I spent writing these twin studies of the classical world, living intimately in the company of Leonidas and of Julius Caesar, of the hoplites who had died at Thermopylae and of the legionaries who had crossed the Rubicon, only confirmed me in my fascination: for Sparta and Rome, even when subjected to the minutest historical enquiry, retained their glamour as apex predators. They continued to stalk my imaginings as they had always done: like a great white shark, like a tiger, like a tyrannosaur. Yet giant carnivores, however wondrous, are by their nature terrifying. The more years I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, so the more alien I increasingly found it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognised as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls, and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value. Why did I find this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all. That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean that I had ceased to be Christian. For a millennium and more, the civilisation into which I had been born was Christendom. Assumptions that I had grown up with—about how a society should properly be organised, and the principles that it should uphold—were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’, but very distinctively of that civilisation’s Christian past. So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has come to be hidden from view. It is the incomplete revolutions which are remembered; the fate of those which triumph is to be taken for granted. [pages 16-17]

And in the final words of the Preface, Holland tells us:

The ambition of Dominion is to trace the course of what one Christian, writing in the third century AD, termed ‘the flood-tide of Christ’: how the belief that the Son of the one God of the Jews had been tortured to death on a cross came to be so enduringly and widely held that today most of us in the West are dulled to just how scandalous it originally was. This book explores what it was that made Christianity so subversive and disruptive; how completely it came to saturate the mindset of Latin Christendom; and why, in a West that is often doubtful of religion’s claims, so many of its instincts remain—for good and ill—thoroughly Christian. [page 17]