web analytics
Categories
Ancient Rome Christendom Emperor Julian Free speech / association Homer Jesus Judaism Libanius Moses (fictional Hebrew lawgiver) New Testament Old Testament St Paul

Julian on Christianity

“Why were you so ungrateful to our gods as to desert them for the Jews?”

—Julian (addressing the Christians)



Below, excerpts from the remains of the book by Julian the Apostate (Roman Emperor from 361 to 363 C.E.), Against the Galileans. Remains I say, because the totalitarian Church did not even respect the writings of one of their emperors if the emperor himself dared to criticize Christianity!

About the literary remains of Against the Galileans, Hitler said: “The book that contains the reflections of the Emperor Julian should be circulated in millions. What wonderful intelligence, what discernment, all the wisdom of antiquity! It’s extraordinary.”

Julian only reigned twenty months. In 364, his friend Libanius stated that Julian had been assassinated by a Christian. The Roman Emperor had written (ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages):




Now I will only point out that Moses himself and the prophets who came after him and Jesus the Nazarene, yes and Paul also, who surpassed all the magicians and charlatans of every place and every time, assert that [Yahweh] is the god of Israel alone and of Judaea, and that the Jews are his chosen people.

Though in Paul’s case this is strange. For according to circumstances he keeps changing his views about god, as the polypus changes its colours to match the rocks, and now he insists that the Jews alone are god’s portion, and then again, when he is trying to persuade the Hellenes to take sides with him, he says: “Do not think that he is the god of Jews only, but also of Gentiles: yea of Gentiles also.”

Now of the dissimilarity of language Moses has given a wholly fabulous explanation. For he said that the sons of men came together intending to build a city, and a great tower therein, but that god said that he must go down and confound their languages.

And then you demand that we should believe this account, while you yourselves disbelieve Homer’s narrative of the Aloadae, namely that they planned to set three mountains one on another, “that so the heavens might be scaled.” For my part I say that this tale is almost as fabulous as the other. But if you accept the former, why in the name of the Gods do you discredit Homer’s fable?

For I suppose that to men so ignorant as you I must say nothing about the fact that, even if all men throughout the inhabited world ever employ one speech and one language, they will not be able to build a tower that will reach to the heavens, even though they should turn the whole earth into bricks. For such a tower will need countless bricks each one as large as the whole earth, if they are to succeed in reaching to the orbit of the moon.

Why do we vainly trouble ourselves about and worship one [the god of the Jews] who takes no thought for us? For is it fitting that he who cared nothing for our lives, our characters, our manners, our good government, our political constitution, should still claim to receive honour at our hands?

Certainly not. You see to what an absurdity your doctrine comes. For of all the blessings that we behold in the life of man, those that relate to the soul come first, and those that relate to the body are secondary. If, therefore, he paid no heed to our spiritual blessings, neither took thought for our physical conditions, and moreover, did not send to us teachers or lawgivers as he did for the Hebrews, such as Moses and the prophets who followed him, for what shall we properly feel gratitude to him?

For you would be worshipping one god instead of many, not a man, or rather many wretched men [the Hebrew people in the Bible]. And though you would be following a law that is harsh and stern and contains much that is savage and barbarous, instead of our mild and humane laws, and would in other respects be inferior to us, yet you would be more holy and purer than now in your forms of worship.

But now it has come to pass that like leeches you have sucked the worst blood from that [Jewish] source and left the purer. Yet Jesus, who won over the least worthy of you, has been known by name for but little more than three hundred years: and during his lifetime he accomplished nothing worth hearing of, unless anyone thinks that to heal crooked and blind men and to exorcise those who were possessed by evil demons in the villages of Bethsaida and Bethany can be classed as a mighty achievement.

As for purity of life you do not know whether he so much as mentioned it; but you emulate the rages and the bitterness of the Jews, overturning temples and altars, and you slaughtered not only those of us who remained true to the teachings of their fathers, but also men who were as much astray as yourselves, “heretics,” because they did not wail over the corpse [the dead Jesus] in the same fashion as yourselves.

But these are rather your own doings; for nowhere did either Jesus or Paul hand down to you such commands. The reason for this is that they never even hoped that you would one day attain to such power as you have.

Why were you so ungrateful to our Gods as to desert them for the Jews?

But if this that I assert is the truth, point out to me among the Hebrews a single general like Alexander or Caesar! You have no such man. Further, as regards the constitution of the state and the fashion of the law-courts, the administration of cities and the excellence of the laws, progress in learning and the cultivation of the liberal arts, were not all these things in a miserable and barbarous state among the Hebrews? What kind of healing art has ever appeared among the Hebrews, like that of Hippocrates among the Hellenes, and of certain other schools that came after him?

Consider therefore whether we are not superior to you in every single one of these things, I mean in the arts and in wisdom and intelligence; and this is true, whether you consider the useful arts or the imitative arts whose end is beauty, such as the statuary’s art, painting, or household management, and the art of healing derived from Asclepius.

For if any man should wish to examine into the truth concerning you, he will find that your impiety is compounded of the rashness of the Jews and the indifference and vulgarity of the Gentiles. Nay, it is from the new-fangled teaching of the Hebrews that you have seized upon this blasphemy of the Gods who are honoured among us; but the reverence for every higher nature, characteristic of our religious worship, combined with the love of the traditions of our forefathers, you have cast off.

And let us begin with the teaching of Moses, who himself also, as they claim, foretold the birth of Jesus that was to be. For the words “A prophet shall the lord your god raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me; to him shall ye hearken,” were certainly not said of the son of Mary. And the words The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a leader from his loins,” were most certainly not said of the son of Mary, but of the royal house of David, which, you observe, came to an end with King Zedekiah. And certainly the Scripture can be interpreted in two ways when it says “until there comes what is reserved for him,” but you have wrongly interpreted it “until he comes for whom it is reserved.”

It is very clear that not one of these sayings relates to Jesus; for he is not even from Judah. How could he be when according to you he was not born of Joseph but of the holy spirit? For though in your genealogies you trace Joseph back to Judah, you could not invent even this plausibly. For Matthew and Luke are refuted by the fact that they disagree concerning his genealogy.

You are so misguided that you have not even remained faithful to the teachings that were handed down to you by the apostles. And these also have been altered, so as to be worse and more impious, by those who came after. At any rate neither Paul nor Matthew nor Luke nor Mark ventured to call Jesus god. But the worthy John, since he perceived that a great number of people in many of the towns of Greece and Italy had already been infected by this disease, John, I say, was the first to venture to call Jesus god.

However this evil doctrine did originate with John; but who could detest as they deserve all those doctrines that you have invented as a sequel, while you keep adding many corpses newly dead [the martyrs] to the corpse of long ago?

Categories
Adversus Christianos (book) Ancient Rome Celsus Christendom Final solution Free speech / association Porphyry of Tyre

Porphyry

The following excerpts are taken from the introduction and epilogue of Joseph Hoffman’s book, Porphyry’s Against the Christians. Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:


wanderer
Persecution is a slippery term in the annals of the early church. An older generation of church historians, using the martyrologies and writings of the church fathers as their sources, believed that the era from Nero to Constantine was one of almost unremitting slaughter of professing Christians. Their opinion was enfeebled somewhat by the certainty that the Romans could have tried a “final solution” to the Christian problem much earlier, if they had wanted, and the fact that along with boasting of their many martyrs, church writers like Origen also bragged that rich folk, high officials, elegant ladies, and illuminati were entering the church in great numbers. The pagan writers tried to counter this trend in their insistence that Christianity was really a religion for the lazy, the ignorant and superstitious, and the lowborn—“women, yokels and children,” Celsus had sneered. But the ploy was ineffective. Diocletian’s persecutions revealed that Christianity had crept into the emperor’s bedroom: his wife, his daughter, their servants, the treasury official Audactus, the eunuch Dorotheus, even the director of the purple dye factory in Tyre, were Christians or Christian sympathizers. Insulting the new converts did not stop the process of conversion. The political solution of the third century, therefore, was an attempt to scare people off—to make being a Christian an expensive proposition. Persecution was the strong-arm alternative to failed polemical tactics by the likes of Celsus, Porphyry and Hierocles.

In 250 Decius decreed simply that Christians would be required to sacrifice to the gods of Rome by offering wine and eating sacrificial meat. Those who refused would be sentenced to death. To avoid this punishment, well-to-do Christians seem to have given up this new religion in substantial numbers, becoming in the eyes of the faithful “apostates,” a new designation derived from the Greek word revolt. The apostates also numbered many bishops, including the bishop of the important region of Smyrna, as well as Jewish Christians who rejoined the synagogue, as Judaism was not encompassed in the Decian order.

In the reign of Valerian (253-260) the focus shifted from the practice of the Christian faith to the church’s ownership of property. In August 257, Valerian targeted the wealth of the clergy and in 258 the riches of prominent Christian lay persons. The tactic was obviously intended to make upper-crust Romans think twice before throwing their wealth in the direction of the “beggar priests” as Porphyry called them.

On 31 March 297, under the emperor Diocletian, the Manichean religion was outlawed. Like Christianity it was an “import” of dubious vintage. More particularly, it was Persian, and Rome was at war with Persia. Holy books and priests were seized and burned without much ado. Professing members of the cult were put to death without trial. The most prominent Roman Manicheans (the so-called honestiores) were spared, but their property was confiscated and they were sent to work in the mines. The process against the Manicheans boded worse things to come for the Christians.

Diocletian published his first decree against the Christians in February 303. The edict to stamp out (“terminate”) the Christian religion was issued. Diocletian had hoped to cripple the movement. Termination would have meant extermination. But the survival tactics of the movement made police work difficult. Christians had become sly. The enthusiasm of martyrdom was now paralleled by accomplished doubletalk.

Executions increased, especially after rumors reached Galerius that plots against the throne were being fomented in Christian circles. New edicts were issued with regularity, each a little more severe than the one before. The fourth edict (304) required that all the people of a city must sacrifice and offer libations to the gods “as a body,” Christians included. Diocletian abdicated, in declining health. Galerius issued an edict of toleration.

Maximinus Daia, who had an active retaining program in place, designed to reeducate lapsed Christians in their pagan heritage. But the life was going out of the movement to repress Christianity. The pagan critics had not succeeded in stemming the popularity of the movement, and the “persecuting” emperors (except perhaps Diocletian himself) had miscalculated both the numbers and the determination of the faithful. The movement was Rome’s Vietnam, a slow war of attrition which had been fought to stop a multiform enemy. Even at their worst under Diocletian, the persecutions had been selective and, in their intense form, short-lived. And (as has been known since the seventeenth century) the number of martyrs was not great.

The goal of the fourth edict against the Christians in 304, in fact, had been to compel loyalty to unpopular rulers, and in 308 the greatly detested Maximinus tried the same tactic, “to offer sacrifices and wine-offerings.” The tactic was ineffectual, Eusebius says, because even the enforcers had lost their heart to impose the penalties and to support the machinery required for the “sacrifice factories” Maximinus tried to set up.

Unhappy with this failure, he sponsored a literary attack, circulating forged gospels and memoirs containing the stock slanders against Jesus. These were posted in public gathering-places and schoolteachers were required to assign portions of them to children as lessons. To substantiate charges against the moral habits of the Christians, Maximinus then hired agents (duces) to round up prostitutes from the marketplace in Damascus. Tortured until they confessed to being Christians, they then signed statements to the effect that the churches routinely practiced ritual prostitution and required members to participate in sexually depraved acts. These statements were also distributed to the towns and cities for public display.

Desperate times, desperate men, desperate measures.

By the time Galerius issued his edict of toleration in favor of the Christians on 30 April 311 three waves of attack had failed: the erratic policies of emperors Nero and Marcus Aurelius; the literary and philosophical attacks, carried on in collusion with imperial sponsors; and the more sustained persecutions of the third century, ending in 311. Paganism was dying. Maximinus’ plan for “reeducating” Christians in the religion of their ancestors had failed.

After Constantine’s conversion—whatever it may have been—only Julian (332-363), his nephew, remained to pick up the baton for the pagan cause. Julian did his best to reestablish the old order. He reorganized the shrines and temples; outlawed the teachings of Christian doctrine in the schools, retracted the legal and financial privileges which the Christians had been accumulating since the early fourth century; wrote polemical treaties against the Christians himself, and—in a clever political maneuver—permitted exiled bishops to return to their sees to encourage power-struggles and dissention within the church. Naturally, the Christians despised him. The distinguished theologian Gregory of Nazianzus had been Julian’s schoolmate in Athens, where both learned a love for the classical writers (but where Julian had been converted to Greek humanism). Cyril of Alexandria wrote a long refutation of Julian’s Adversus Christianos (Against the Christians), parts of which hark back to Porphyry and Hierocles. All in all, this pagan interlude—never really a renaissance—lasted only three years, until Julian’s death in June 363.

In the middle of this period we have just described stands Porphyry of Tyre. Born in 232, Porphyry was eighteen when the persecution broke out under emperor Decius. Twelve years later, his dislike for Christianity was firmly established. Porphyry had heard Origen preach, studied the Hebrew scripture, especially the prophets, and the Christian gospels, and found them lacking in literary quality and philosophical sophistication. He had joined a “school” in Rome (ca. 262) run by the famous neoplatonic teacher, Plotinus, where he remained until about 270. In Sicily, following Plotinus’ death, and back again to Rome, Porphyry developed an intense dislike of popular religion—or superstition, as the Roman intellectuals of his circle preferred to call it, regarding Christianity as the most pernicious form of a disease infecting the empire. In a work titled Pros Anebo he pointed out the defects in the cults. Then he tackled Christian teaching in a work. Popular under the rescript of Galerius in 311, the work was targeted for destruction by the imperial church, which in 448 condemned all existing copies to be burned.

The first thing to say about Porphyry’s fifteen books against the Christians is that they are lost. The exact title is not known, and its popular title, Kata Christianon, can be dated securely only from the Middle Ages. Opinions radically differ over the question whether the books can be substantially restored. A few facts can be stated succinctly, however. First, the church was unusually successful in its efforts to eradicate all traces of Kata Christianon from at least 448. Not only were Porphyry’s books destroyed, but many of the works of Christian writers incorporating sections of Porphyry’s polemic were burned in order to eliminate what one critic, the bishop Apollinarius, called “poison of his thought.”

Second, the ninety-seven fragments gathered by Harnack, half of which were taken from the fourth-century writer Macarius Magnes, are enough—if barely enough—to give us shape of Porphyry’s critique. That Macarius does not name his opponent and sometimes seems to characterize rather than quote his opinions could easily be explained as a strategic decision by a Christian teacher who wished his defense to survive. Naming his adversary—or quoting him too precisely—would have almost certainly guaranteed the burning of Macarius’ defense. Put appositely, anyone wishing to write a defense of the faith in the fourth or fifth century would have been foolhardy to identify the enemy as Porphyry.

[Third], I think we owe it to Porphyry and his “interpreters” to permit them speak to us directly. Having been buried—more or less successfully—since 448, the words should be permitted to breathe their own air.

Categories
Christendom St Paul Theology

On St. Paul

I have just reread chapters 13 and 14 of The Myth-Maker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity by New Testament scholar Hyam Maccoby, after twenty-four years that I read the whole book, and I still find them fascinating. He wrote:


As we have seen, the purposes of the book of Acts is to minimize the conflict between Paul and the leaders of the ‘Jerusalem Church,’ James and Peter.

Peter and Paul, in later Christian tradition, became twin saints, brothers in faith, and the idea that they were historically bitter opponents standing for irreconcilable religious standpoints would have been repudiated with horror. The work of the author of Acts was well done; he rescued Christianity from the imputation of being the individual creation of Paul…

Yet, for all his efforts, the truth of the matter is not hard to recover, if we examine the New Testament evidence with an eye to tell-tale inconsistencies and confusions, rather than with the determination to gloss over and harmonize all difficulties in the interests of an orthodox interpretation.

Categories
Adversus Christianos (book) Christendom New Testament Newspeak Porphyry of Tyre St Paul

Porphyry on Christianity

From the dust jacket of Porphyry’s Against the Christians: The Literary Remains, translated by Joseph Hoffmann (Prometheus Books, 1994):

Throughout its first three centuries, the growing Christian religion was subjected not only to official persecution but to the attacks of pagan intellectuals, who looked upon the new sect as a band of fanatics bent on worldwide domination, even as they professed to despise the things of this world. Prominent among these pagan critics was Porphyry of Tyre (ca. 232–ca. 305 C.E.), scholar, philosopher, and student of religions. His book Against the Christians (Kata Christianon), condemned to be burned by the imperial Church in 448, survives only in fragments preserved by the cleric and teacher Macarius Magnes.

Of Hoffmann’s translation of Porphyry I’ll quote only a few excerpts:




Critique of the gospels
and their authors

Apocrit. II.12-II-15

The evangelists were fiction writers—not observers or eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus. Each of the four contradicts the other in writing his account of the events of his sufferings and crucifixion.

Apocrit. III.1-III.6

[John 5.46-7] “If you believed Moses, then you would believe me. For he wrote about me.” The saying is filled with stupidity! Even if Moses said it, nothing of what he wrote has been preserved; his writings are reported to have been destroyed along with the Temple. All the things attributed to Moses were really written eleven hundred years later by Ezra and his contemporaries.

Poverty saves. It seems unlikely to me that these words belong to Christ. They ring untrue to the ear. They seem to be rather the words of poor people who wish to deprive the rich of their property. Why, only yesterday Christian teachers succeeded—through quoting the words, “Sell what you have and give it to the poor and you shall have treasure in heaven”—in depriving noble women of their savings. They were persuaded to squander what they had on the beggars, giving away what was rightly theirs and making themselves beggars in return. They were turned from having to wanting, from rich to poor, from freedom to slavery and from being wealthy to being painful! In the end, these same women were reduced to going from door to door to the houses of the well-off to beg—which is the nethermost point of disgrace and humiliation. [Hoffmann’s notes that the view that women are duped by Christian “beggars” is conventional in anti-Christian polemics of the age]

[Matt. 14.25; Mark 6.48] Another section in the gospel deserves comment, for it is likewise devoid of sense and full of impossibility; I mean that absurd story about Jesus sending his apostles across the sea ahead of him after the banquet, then walking [on the water] “at the fourth watch of the night.” It is related that they had been working all night to keep the boat adrift and were frightened by the size of the storm surging against the boat.

Those who know the region will tell us that, in fact, there is no “sea” in the locality but only a tiny lake which springs from a river that flows through the hills of Galilee near Tiberias. Small boats can get across it within two hours. And the lake is too small to have whitecaps caused by storm. Mark seems to be stretching the point to its extremities when he writes that Jesus—after nine hours had passed—decided in the tenth to walk across to his disciples who had been floating about on the pond for the duration!

As if this isn’t enough, he calls it a “sea”—indeed, a stormy sea—a very angry sea which tosses them about in its waves causing them to fear for their lives. He does this, apparently, so that he can next show Christ miraculously causing the storm to cease and the sea to calm down, hence saving the disciples from the dangers of the swell.

It is from fables like this one that we judge the gospel to be a cleverly woven curtain, each thread of which requires careful scrutiny. [“each thread of which requires careful scrutiny” is nothing less that the science of New Testament analysis that, because of the fierce persecution, would not start until the publication of Reimarus’ Apologie fifteen centuries later]


The attack on Peter the apostle

Apocrit. III.19-III.22

[Acts 5.1-11] Peter is a traitor on other occasions: In the case of a man named Ananias and his wife, Sapphira, Peter put them to death for failing to surrender the profit from the sale of their land and retaining for their own use—even though they had done no other wrong. How can it been wrong for them to retain a little of what belonged to them instead of giving it all away?


The attack on Paul the apostle

Apocrit. III.30-III.36

Anyone saying both “I am a Jew” and “I am a Roman” is neither, even if he would like to be.

The man who hypocritically pretends to be what he is not makes himself a liar in everything that he does. He disguises himself in a mask. He assaults the soul’s comprehension by various tactics, and like any charlatan he wins the gullible over to his side.

[1 Corinthians 9. 20-22: “To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people…”]

Whoever accepts such principles as a guide for living cannot but be regarded as an enemy of the worst kind—the kind who brings others to submission by lying to them, who reaches out to make captives of everyone within earshot with his deceitful ways. And if, therefore, this Paul is a Jew one minute and the next a Roman, or a student of the Jewish law now, but an another time an enemy of the law—if in short, Paul can be an enemy to each whenever he likes by burglarizing each, then clearly he nullifies the usefulness of each tradition.

We may conclude that Paul is a liar. He is the adopted brother of everything false, so that it is useless for him to declaim, “I speak the truth of Christ, I do not lie” [Rom. 9.1]; for a man who one day uses the law as his rule and the next day uses the gospel is either a knave or a fool in what he does in the sight of others and even when hidden away by himself.

I am astonished at this man’s pious regard for the law, since it is occasioned by his need to get donations from those who listen to his words.

The same man who writes, “The law is spiritual” to the Romans, and “The law is holy and the commandment holy and just” now puts a curse upon those who obey what is holy! Then, as of to confuse the point further, he turns everything around and throws up a fog so dense that anyone trying to follow him inevitably gets lost, bumping up against the gospel on the one side, against the law on the other, stumbling over the law and tripping over the gospel—all because the guide who leads them by the hand has no idea where he is headed.

Categories
Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Christendom Der Antichrist (book) Friedrich Nietzsche Martin Luther Philosophy of history St Paul

Nietzsche on Christianity

Last pages of The Antichrist, which Nietzsche finished on September 30, 1888 but was not published until 1895. Though ellipsis are in the original, I omitted adding more of them between unquoted sentences:




The order of castes, the highest, the dominating law, is merely the ratification of an order of nature, of a natural law of the first rank, over which no arbitrary fiat, no “modern idea,” can exert any influence.

The order of castes, the order of rank, simply formulates the supreme law of life itself; the separation of the three types is necessary to the maintenance of society, and to the evolution of higher types, and the highest types—the inequality of rights is essential to the existence of any rights at all. A right is a privilege. Every one enjoys the privileges that accord with his state of existence. Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. Life is always harder as one mounts the heights—the cold increases, responsibility increases. A high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity.

Whom do I hate most heartily among the rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists, the apostles to the Chandala, who undermine the workingman’s instincts, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his petty existence—who make him envious and teach him revenge…. Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of “equal” rights…. What is bad? But I have already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from revenge. The anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry…

The harvest is blighted overnight… That which stood there aere perennis, the imperium Romanum, the most magnificent form of organization under difficult conditions that has ever been achieved, and compared to which everything before it and after it appears as patchwork, bungling, dilletantism—those holy anarchists made it a matter of “piety” to destroy “the world,” which is to say, the imperium Romanum, so that in the end not a stone stood upon another. The Christian and the anarchist: both are décadents; both are incapable of any act that is not disintegrating, poisonous, degenerating, blood-sucking; both have an instinct of mortal hatred of everything that stands up, and is great, and has durability, and promises life a future… Christianity was the vampire of the imperium Romanum—overnight it destroyed the vast achievement of the Romans: the conquest of the soil for a great culture that could await its time. Can it be that this fact is not yet understood?

The imperium Romanum that we know, and that the history of the Roman provinces teaches us to know better and better—this most admirable of all works of art in the grand manner was merely the beginning, and the structure to follow was to prove its worth for thousands of years. To this day, nothing on a like scale sub specie aeterni has been brought into being, or even dreamed of! This organization was strong enough to withstand bad emperors: the accident of personality has nothing to do with such things—the first principle of all genuinely great architecture. But it was not strong enough to stand up against the corruptest of all forms of corruption—against Christians… These stealthy worms, which under the cover of night, mist and duplicity, crept upon every individual, sucking him dry of all earnest interest in real things, of all instinct for reality—this cowardly, effeminate and sugar-coated gang gradually alienated all “souls,” step by step, from that colossal edifice, turning against it all the meritorious, manly and noble natures that had found in the cause of Rome their own cause, their own serious purpose, their own pride.

One has but to read Lucretius to know what Epicurus made war upon—not paganism, but “Christianity,” which is to say, the corruption of souls by means of the concepts of guilt, punishment and immortality. He combatted the subterranean cults, the whole of latent Christianity—to deny immortality was already a form of genuine salvation. Epicurus had triumphed, and every respectable intellect in Rome was Epicurean—when Paul appeared… Paul, the Chandala hatred of Rome, of “the world,” in the flesh and inspired by genius—the Jew, the eternal Jew par excellence… What he saw was how, with the aid of the small sectarian Christian movement that stood apart from Judaism, a “world conflagration” might be kindled; how, with the symbol of “God on the cross,” all secret seditions, all the fruits of anarchistic intrigues in the empire, might be amalgamated into one immense power. “Salvation is of the Jews.” Christianity is the formula for exceeding and summing up the subterranean cults of all varieties, that of Osiris, that of the Great Mother, that of Mithras, for instance: in his discernment of this fact the genius of Paul showed itself.

This was his revelation at Damascus: he grasped the fact that he needed the belief in immortality in order to rob “the world” of its value, that the concept of “hell” would master Rome—that the notion of a “beyond” is the death of life… Nihilist and Christian: they rhyme in German, and they do more than rhyme…

The whole labour of the ancient world gone for naught: I have no word to describe the feelings that such an enormity arouses in me. And, considering the fact that its labour was merely preparatory, that with adamantine self-consciousness it laid only the foundations for a work to go on for thousands of years, the whole meaning of antiquity disappears!… To what end the Greeks? to what end the Romans? All the prerequisites to a learned culture, all the methods of science, were already there and had been there for two thousand years! All gone for naught! All overwhelmed in a night, but not by a convulsion of nature! But brought to shame by crafty, sneaking, invisible, anæmic vampires! Not conquered,—only sucked dry!… Hidden vengefulness, petty envy, became master! Everything wretched, intrinsically ailing, and invaded by bad feelings, the whole ghetto-world of the soul was at once on top! One needs but read any of the Christian agitators, for example, St. Augustine, in order to realize, in order to smell, what filthy fellows came to the top.

Here it becomes necessary to call up a memory that must be a hundred times more painful to Germans. The Germans have destroyed for Europe the last great harvest of civilization that Europe was ever to reap—the Renaissance. Is it understood at last, will it ever be understood, what the Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christian values: an attempt with all available means, all instincts and all the resources of genius to bring about a triumph of the opposite values, the more noble values…

To attack at the critical place, at the very seat of Christianity, and there enthrone the more noble values—that is to say, to insinuate them into the instincts, into the most fundamental needs and appetites of those sitting there… I see before me the possibility of a perfectly heavenly enchantment and spectacle: it seems to me to scintillate with all the vibrations of a fine and delicate beauty, and within it there is an art so divine, so infernally divine, that one might search in vain for thousands of years for another such possibility; I see a spectacle so rich in significance and at the same time so wonderfully full of paradox that it should arouse all the gods on Olympus to immortal laughter: Cæsar Borgia as pope!… Am I understood?… Well then, that would have been the sort of triumph that I alone am longing for today: by it Christianity would have been swept away!

What happened? A German monk, Luther, came to Rome. This monk, with all the vengeful instincts of an unsuccessful priest in him, raised a rebellion against the Renaissance in Rome… Instead of grasping, with profound thanksgiving, the miracle that had taken place: the conquest of Christianity at its capital—instead of this, his hatred was stimulated by the spectacle. A religious man thinks only of himself. Luther saw only the depravity of the papacy at the very moment when the opposite was becoming apparent: the old corruption, the peccatum originale, Christianity itself, no longer occupied the papal chair! Instead there was life! Instead there was the triumph of life! Instead there was a great yea to all lofty, beautiful and daring things!… And Luther restored the church.

With this I come to a conclusion and pronounce my judgment. I condemn Christianity; I bring against the Christian church the most terrible of all the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul.

This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found—I have letters that even the blind will be able to see… I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough,—I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race…

And mankind reckons time from the dies nefastus when this fatality befell—from the first day of Christianity!—Why not rather from its last?—From today?—

Umwertung aller Werte!…

Categories
Axiology Christendom Conservatism Deranged altruism Friedrich Nietzsche Judeo-reductionism Liberalism Michael O'Meara Protestantism

The Jewish Question revisited

Note of September 2017:
The first half of this post,
“Wuthering Heights,”
has been relocated: here.

 

In a recent radio podcast Mark Weber, a revisionist historian and current director of the Institute for Historical Review, said (ellipsis omitted between unquoted sentences):

Americans pride themselves of not having an ideology (“We are not fooled by fascism, communism or Nazism or any other ‘isms’”). Well, in fact, America does have an ideology. It has a kind of core idea and a core narrative of itself that is widely accepted by Americans, whether they call themselves conservatives or liberals. And it is so engrained in the American mentality that it is not often expressed very openly.

The core of the American ideology is in the birth certificate, as it were, of the United States of America, the Declaration of Independence. You all know that the Declaration of Independence lays out, I think, what Americans assume about what this country stands for, what it really means and in cases of doubt we turn back to it: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And to this end “Governments are instituted.”

Now that’s an essential kind of belief that Americans more of less accept. Liberals emphasize much more than conservatives the equality part of that. And conservatives tend to emphasize the point of individual life, liberty and the pursue of happiness. That is a very core kind of thing and with that there is a kind of narrative of American history.

The narrative of American history is that although it’s true that we didn’t have real equality when America was founded that is what we are aiming for: that’s our goal [emphasis in Weber’s voice]. And it is true that our founding fathers did not practice it well. But we are all trying to practice it. We are trying to reach that goal, that goal of real equality.

In his speech Weber also said that in keeping with that goal, in the past Americans decided that distinctions between Christians and non-Christians were not very important and stopped discriminating against the latter. Also, in keeping with the very same principle of non-discrimination, according to Weber the equality between women and men was enshrined. And the same could be said about how Jews and blacks got fantastically empowered in the US.

The social engineering that has transformed the West in general and America in particular has at its core this idea of equality and its corollary, the principle of non-discrimination as the most unquestioned, inviolable axioms of our moral universe. For example, Weber also noted that nowadays no conservative would ever dream of taking away the women’s right to vote. On the contrary: the equality commandment has now metastasized beyond unthinkable limits for our grandparents and, Weber pointed out, many are now saying: “Well, the next bastion is to make sure that gay people are equal too,” always in an endless pursuing of an amplifying spiral for an ever more encompassing equality.

This is a narrative “not only for liberals but of conservatives too,” who “may resist in one point but once it’s in place [women’s rights/affirmative action/Jews controlling the MSM] they don’t object it.” To boot, in the academia and in the mainstream media, including the film industry, this spiraling axiology is been made retroactive, and presently the world of my beloved grandmas is increasingly demonized precisely because even conservatives accept the narrative. Just compare this suicidal ethos that both liberals and conservatives subscribe with what I say in the manifesto: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that men and cultures are created un-equal, and that only an ethno-state will save our race from extinction.”

Christianity and Secular Christianity are based on the inversion of the most vital values. An ethnostate, by definition, would not only revoke the non-discriminatory principle but transvaluate it. Discrimination would be, again, considered the most basic, commonsensical ruling principle of our society. Hence the Nietzschean call for an Umwertung aller Werte, or transvaluation of Christian values back to Greco-Roman values: the only way to place, again, axiology upright.

After listening to Weber’s speech several times, I found it impossible not to think in my recent posts where both Christianity and what we are now calling Secular Christianity are harshly criticized. Which brings me to the Jewish Question and, specifically, to my debate with the monocausalists about whether or not the Jewish problem is the only causative factor of Western malaise.

Five months ago Michael O’Meara published what has been perhaps the most controversial article at Counter-Currents, “White Nationalism is Not Anti-Semitism”, of which O’Meara commented in the discussion thread:

“I’m certain most people read my piece with a good deal of negative emotion. But re-read my piece without emotion and look at what I actually try to say.”

As to Jewish monocausalism is concerned, in the threaded discussion O’Meara said that he could make an equally convincing argument to “prove” that, say, Catholicism and Protestantism “were more influential in legalizing the formal de-Europeanization of the American people.” This, of course, reminds me Hitler’s criticism of Christianity. Readers of his table talks are always amazed by the fact that those who knew Hitler intimately often listened harsher words from the Führer’s lips directed against Christianity than against Judaism itself. See for example my latest post quoting Hitler’s private talks here.

Uncle Adolf had a point. For instance, it would be nonsense to say that Mr. Earnshaw loved Heathcliff and altruistically punished his eldest son “as a result of Jewish influence in early Victorian England” (even Kevin MacDonald would agree with me that that sort of behavior, however fictional, would qualify as “altruistic punishment”). And the same could be said about Catherine’s lasting infatuation with the dark-skinned gypsy. Both attitudes symbolize the westerners’ fondness for the “New Jesus,” what I am starting to call Secular Christianity. Or at least they symbolize what they are failing to do: an outright, revolutionary repudiation of the intruders and the traitorous elites. This is what Hindley intended in his early teens before his father irreparably damaged the emotional state of his most natural, legit heir by means of a series of altruistic punishments that ended in that the gypsy inherited the entire estate of Wuthering Heights. (Reread Brontë’s novel. The plot moved me to constantly swear, in exasperating soliloquies, against the deranged altruists of the Yorkshire.)

Yes: it is time for westerners to give up their self-destructive philo-Semitism. But Christianity and its secular incarnation that mandates us to love these later-day “gypsies” as the First Commandment must be torn to pieces too. Perhaps it’s suitable to end this post with the opening words of chapter 56, “Old and New Tables” of Thus Spake Zarathustra:

Here do I sit and wait, old broken tables around me and also new half-written tables. When cometh mine hour?

Umwertung aller Werte!

Categories
Christendom Monologe im Führerhauptquartier Renaissance

Hitler on Christianity (1941)

From David Irving’s web page:

The Table Talks’ content [originally written in shorthand] is more important in my view than Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and possibly even more than his Zweites Buch (1928). It is unadulterated Hitler. He expatiates on virtually every subject under the sun, while his generals and private staff sit patiently and listen, or pretend to listen, to the monologues.

The first excerpt is taken from what Hitler said in a night of July of 1941 (ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages):



Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944

His Private Conversations

Part I

1941




When National Socialism has ruled long enough, it will no longer be possible to conceive of a form of life different from ours. In the long run, National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together.

(On a question from C. S., whether this antagonism might mean a war, the Führer continued:)

No, it does not mean a war. The ideal solution would be to leave the religions to devour themselves, without persecutions. But in that case we must not replace the Church by something equivalent. That would be terrifying! It goes without saying that the whole thing needs a lot of thought. Everything will occur in due time. It is a simple question of honesty, that’s what it will finally boil down to.

The German people’s especial quality is patience; and it’s the only one of the peoples capable of undertaking a revolution in this sphere. It could do it, if only for the reason that only the German people have made moral law the governing principle of action.

The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. Bolshevism practises a lie of the same nature, when it claims to bring liberty to men, whereas in reality it seeks only to enslave them. In the ancient world, the relations between men and gods were founded on an instinctive respect. It was a world enlightened by the idea of tolerance. Christianity was the first creed in the world to exterminate its adversaries in the name of love. Its key-note is intolerance.

Without Christianity, we should not have had Islam. The Roman Empire, under Germanic influence, would have developed in the direction of world-domination, and humanity would not have extinguished fifteen centuries of civilisation at a single stroke.

Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things. The result of the collapse of the Roman Empire was a night that lasted for centuries.

The Romans had no dislike of the Germans. This is shown by the mere fact that blond hair was fashionable with them. Amongst the Goths there were many men with dark hair.


23rd September 1941, evening

To make death easier for people, the Church holds out to them the bait of a better world. We, for our part, confine ourselves to asking man to fashion his life worthily. For this, it is sufficient for him to conform to the laws of nature. Let’s seek inspiration in these principles, and in the long run we’ll triumph over religion.


10th October 1941, midday

Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.


14th October 1941, midday

Special Guest: Reichsfuehrer Himmler

It may be asked whether concluding a concordat with the churches wouldn’t facilitate our exercise of power.

On this subject one may make the following remarks: Firstly, in this way the authority of the State would be vitiated by the fact of the intervention of a third power concerning which it is impossible to say how long it would remain reliable. In the case of the Anglican Church, this objection does not arise, for England knows she can depend on her Church. But what about the Catholic Church?

I’m convinced that any pact with the Church can offer only a provisional benefit, for sooner or later the scientific spirit will disclose the harmful character of such a compromise. Thus the State will have based its existence on a foundation that one day will collapse.

An educated man retains the sense of the mysteries of nature and bows before the unknowable. An uneducated man, on the other hand, runs the risk of going over to atheism (which is a return to the state of the animal) as soon as he perceives that the State, in sheer opportunism, is making use of false ideas in the matter of religion, whilst in other fields it bases everything on pure science.

That’s why I’ve always kept the Party aloof from religious questions. I’ve thus prevented my Catholic and Protestant supporters from forming groups against one another, and inadvertently knocking each other out with the Bible and the sprinkler. So we never became involved with these Churches’ forms of worship. And if that has momentarily made my task a little more difficult, at least I’ve never run the risk of carrying grist to my opponents’ mill. The help we would have provisionally obtained from a concordat would have quickly become a burden on us. In any case, the main thing is to be clever in this matter and not to look for a struggle where it can be avoided.

Being weighed down by a superstitious past, men are afraid of things that can’t, or can’t yet, be explained—that is to say, of the unknown. If anyone has needs of a metaphysical nature, I can’t satisfy them with the Party’s programme. Time will go by until the moment when science can answer all the questions.

So it’s not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the Churches. The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death. A slow death has something comforting about it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble.

Nobody has the right to deprive simple people of their childish certainties until they’ve acquired others that are more reasonable. Indeed, it’s most important that the higher belief should be well established in them before the lower belief has been removed. We must finally achieve this. But it would serve no purpose to replace an old belief by a new one that would merely fill the place left vacant by its predecessor.

It seems to me that nothing would be more foolish than to re-establish the worship of Wotan. Our old mythology had ceased to be viable when Christianity implanted itself. Nothing dies unless it is moribund. At that period the ancient world was divided between the systems of philosophy and the worship of idols. It’s not desirable that the whole of humanity should be stultified—and the only way of getting rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little.

Science cannot lie, for it’s always striving, according to the momentary state of knowledge, to deduce what is true. When it makes a mistake, it does so in good faith. It’s Christianity that’s the liar. It’s in perpetual conflict with itself.

One may ask whether the disappearance of Christianity would entail the disappearance of belief in God. That’s not to be desired. The notion of divinity gives most men the opportunity to concretise the feeling they have of supernatural realities. Why should we destroy this wonderful power they have of incarnating the feeling for the divine that is within them?

I envisage the future, therefore, as follows: First of all, to each man his private creed. Superstition shall not lose its rights. We’ll see to it that the Churches cannot spread abroad teachings in conflict with the interests of the State. We shall continue to preach the doctrine of National Socialism, and the young will no longer be taught anything but the truth.


19th October 1941, night

The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity.

Christianity is a prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilisation by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society. Thus one understands that the healthy elements of the Roman world were proof against this doctrine.

Yet Rome to-day allows itself to reproach Bolshevism with having destroyed the Christian churches. As if Christianity hadn’t behaved in the same way towards the pagan temples!


21st October 1941, midday

When one thinks of the opinions held concerning Christianity by our best minds a hundred, two hundred years ago, one is ashamed to realise how little we have since evolved. I didn’t know that Julian the Apostate had passed judgment with such clear-sightedness on Christianity and Christians. You should read what he says on the subject.

Originally, Christianity was merely an incarnation of Bolshevism the destroyer. Nevertheless, the Galilean, who later was called the Christ, intended something quite different. He must be regarded as a popular leader who took up his position against Jewry. Galilee was a colony where the Romans had probably installed Gallic legionaries, and it’s certain that Jesus was not a Jew. The Jews, by the way, regarded Him as the son of a whore—of a whore and a Roman soldier.

The decisive falsification of Jesus’ doctrine was the work of St. Paul. He gave himself to this work with subtlety and for purposes of personal exploitation. For the Galilean’s object was to liberate his country from Jewish oppression.

On the road to Damascus, St. Paul discovered that he could succeed in ruining the Roman State by causing the principle to triumph of the equality of all men before a single God—and by putting beyond the reach of the laws his private notions, which he alleged to be divinely inspired. If, into the bargain, one succeeded in imposing one man as the representative on earth of the only God, that man would possess boundless power.

Nobody was more tolerant than the Romans. Every man could pray to the god of his choice, and a place was even reserved in the temples for the unknown god. Moreover, every man prayed as he chose, and had the right to proclaim his preferences.

St. Paul knew how to exploit this state of affairs in order to conduct his struggle against the Roman State. Nothing has changed; the method has remained sound.

The religious ideas of the Romans are common to all Aryan peoples. The Jew, on the other hand, worshipped and continues to worship, then and now, nothing but the golden calf. The Jewish religion is devoid of all metaphysics and has no foundation but the most repulsive materialism.

It’s since St. Paul’s time that the Jews have manifested themselves as a religious community, for until then they were only a racial community. St. Paul was the first man to take account of the possible advantages of using a religion as a means of propaganda. If the Jew has succeeded in destroying the Roman Empire, that’s because St. Paul transformed a local movement of Aryan opposition to Jewry into a supra-temporal religion, which postulates the equality of all men amongst themselves, and their obedience to an only god. This is what caused the death of the Roman Empire.

It’s striking to observe that Christian ideas, despite all St. Paul’s efforts, had no success in Athens. The philosophy of the Greeks was so much superior to this poverty-stricken rubbish that the Athenians burst out laughing when they listened to the apostle’s teaching. But in Rome St. Paul found the ground prepared for him. His egalitarian theories had what was needed to win over a mass composed of innumerable uprooted people.

Whilst Roman society proved hostile to the new doctrine, Christianity in its pure state stirred the population to revolt. Rome was Bolshevised, and Bolshevism produced exactly the same results in Rome as later in Russia.

Yesterday, the instigator was Saul: the instigator to-day, Mardochai. Saul has changed into St. Paul, and Mardochai into Karl Marx. By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea.


25th October 1941, evening

Special Guests: Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler and SS General (Obergruppenfuehrer) Heydrich

From the rostrum of the Reichstag I prophesied to Jewry that, in the event of war’s proving inevitable, the Jew would disappear from Europe. That race of criminals has on its conscience the two million dead of the First World War, and now already hundreds of thousands more. Let nobody tell me that all the same we can’t park them in the marshy parts of Russia! Who’s worrying about our troops? It’s not a bad idea, by the way, that public rumour attributes to us a plan to exterminate the Jews. Terror is a salutary thing. The attempt to create a Jewish State will be a failure.

The book that contains the reflections of the Emperor Julian should be circulated in millions. What wonderful intelligence, what discernment, all the wisdom of antiquity! It’s extraordinary.

With what clairvoyance the authors of the eighteenth, and especially those of the past, century criticised Christianity and passed judgment on the evolution of the Churches!

People only retain from the past what they want to find there. As seen by the Bolshevik, the history of the Tsars seems like a blood-bath. But what is that, compared with the crimes of Bolshevism?

There exists a history of the world, compiled by Rotteck, a liberal of the ’forties, in which facts are considered from the point of view of the period; antiquity is resolutely neglected. We, too, shall re-write history, from the racial point of view. Starting with isolated examples, we shall proceed to a complete revision. It will be a question, not only of studying the sources, but of giving facts a logical link. There are certain facts that can’t be satisfactorily explained by the usual methods. So we must take another attitude as our point of departure. As long as students of biology believed in spontaneous generation, it was impossible to explain the presence of microbes.

What a certificate of mental poverty it was for Christianity that it destroyed the libraries of the ancient world! Graeco-Roman thought was made to seem like the teachings of the Devil.

Christianity set itself systematically to destroy ancient culture. What came to us was passed down by chance, or else it was a product of Roman liberal writers. Perhaps we are entirely ignorant of humanity’s most precious spiritual treasures. Who can know what was there?

The Papacy was faithful to these tactics even during recorded history. How did people behave, during the age of the great explorations, towards the spiritual riches of Central America?

In our parts of the world, the Jews would have immediately eliminated Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Kant. If the Bolsheviks had dominion over us for two hundred years, what works of our past would be handed on to posterity? Our great men would fall into oblivion, or else they’d be presented to future generations as criminals and bandits.

I don’t believe at all in the truth of certain mental pictures that many people have of the Roman emperors. I’m sure that Nero didn’t set fire to Rome. It was the Christian-Bolsheviks who did that, just as the Commune set fire to Paris in 1871 and the Communists set fire to the Reichstag in 1932.


5th November 1941, evening

Special Guests: SS Colonel (Standartenfuehrer) Blaschkeand Dr. Richter

The great trick of Jewry was to insinuate itself fraudulently amongst the religions with a religion like Judaism, which in reality is not a religion. Simply, the Jew has put a religious camouflage over his racial doctrine. Everything he undertakes is built on this lie.

The Jew can take the credit for having corrupted the Graeco-Roman world. We can live without the Jews, but they couldn’t live without us. When the Europeans realise that, they’ll all become simultaneously aware of the solidarity that binds them together. The Jew prevents this solidarity. He owes his livelihood to the fact that this solidarity does not exist.


Night of 1st December 1941

I’m convinced that there are Jews in Germany who’ve behaved correctly—in the sense that they’ve invariably refrained from doing injury to the German idea. It’s difficult to estimate how many of them there are, but what I also know is that none of them has entered into conflict with his co-racialists in order to defend the German idea against them.

Probably many Jews are not aware of the destructive power they represent. Now, he who destroys life is himself risking death. That’s the secret of what is happening to the Jews. Whose fault is it when a cat devours a mouse? The fault of the mouse, who has never done any harm to a cat?

This destructive rôle of the Jew has in a way a providential explanation. If nature wanted the Jew to be the ferment that causes peoples to decay, thus providing these peoples with an opportunity for a healthy reaction, in that case people like St. Paul and Trotsky are, from our point of view, the most valuable. By the fact of their presence, they provoke the defensive reaction of the attacked organism. Dietrich Eckart once told me that in all his life he had known just one good Jew: Otto Weininger, who killed himself on the day when he realised that the Jew lives upon the decay of peoples.

It is remarkable that the half-caste Jew, to the second or third generation, has a tendency to start flirting again with pure Jews. But from the seventh generation onwards, it seems the purity of the Aryan blood is restored. In the long run nature eliminates the noxious elements.


13th December 1941, midday

Special Guests: Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, Goebbels, Terboven and Reichsleiter Bouhler

The war will be over one day. I shall then consider that my life’s final task will be to solve the religious problem. Only then will the life of the German native be guaranteed once and for all. I don’t interfere in matters of belief. Therefore I can’t allow churchmen to interfere with temporal affairs. The organised lie must be smashed. The State must remain the absolute master.

But Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery.

When all is said, we have no reason to wish that the Italians and Spaniards should free themselves from the drug of Christianity. Let’s be the only people who are immunised against the disease.


14th December 1941, midday

Special Guests: Rosenberg, Bouhler, Himmler

Kerrl, with the noblest of intentions, wanted to attempt a synthesis between National Socialism and Christianity. I don’t believe the thing’s possible, and I see the obstacle in Christianity itself.

I think I could have come to an understanding with the Popes of the Renaissance. Obviously, their Christianity was a danger on the practical level—and, on the propaganda level, it continued to be a lie. But a Pope, even a criminal one, who protects great artists and spreads beauty around him, is nevertheless more sympathetic to me than the Protestant minister who drinks from the poisoned spring.

Pure Christianity—the Christianity of the catacombs—is concerned with translating the Christian doctrine into facts. It leads quite simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely whole-hearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics.


End of 1941

Categories
Axiology Christendom Conservatism Egalitarianism Friedrich Nietzsche Liberalism Reformation Roger Devlin Tom Sunic

Sunic, Devlin & Johnson on Christianity

A couple of recent articles and threads at Counter-Currents about Pierre Krebs’ Fighting for the Essence reminded me what we are now calling “secular Christianity”:


Tom Sunic said…

This book is important because it advises the reader about how to decipher the causes and consequences of our decadent age. Being himself a disciple of European heavyweights such as Homer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger—to name only a few—Krebs correctly traces the root of the problem of White racial decay and cultural decadence not to liberalism and multiculturalism, but to the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Above all, Krebs focuses on the destructive forms of the monotheistic Judaeo-Christian mindset which prevails among both the so-called Leftist and Right-wing intellectuals and their respective disciples. In fact, by using quotes from and commentaries concerning many important, albeit deliberately ignored European scholars, Krebs demonstrates that all political concepts that we take for granted today are basically modified ideas, myths, legends and impostures that originated in the Middle East and that are now making headway into our secular, godless society.

Krebs aptly dissects the discourse and the mindset of modern Marxists and liberals who, in spite of the fact that they often profess to be atheists or agnostics, nonetheless adhere to the monotheistic conceptualisation of the world that was handed down by the Judaeo-Christian tradition, through its secular and postmodern offshoots. In the same vein, Krebs adroitly warns against those modern political neuroses which appear quite often among many so-called Right-wingers, which causes them to rely too much on blaming all the problems of Whites on outsiders; or, in a grotesque flip side, to embrace outsiders at the expense of one’s own. Both manifestations are wrapped up in the same Judaeo-Christian package. How can a White nationalist, a racialist, or a traditionalist, or whatever he may call himself, and regardless of whether he lives in Europe or America, successfully combat hostile and alien worldviews and adopt different methods of conceptualisation, while at the same time revering these same alien referents and the same paradigms which are, ironically, part and parcel of the same non-European mindset he wishes to reject?

The matrix of the West, as Krebs argues, is no longer territorial or political. It lies in the White man’s experiment with Christianity, which began as merely an obscure Oriental cult—a cult which has absolutely nothing in common with the spiritual homeland of the White man: ancient Greece.

The answer Krebs offers to intelligent White readers in America and Europe who are seeking an exit from the modern multicultural straitjacket and the conceptual mendacity of liberalism is simple, although it will require a great deal of courage: the return to our lost pre-Christian European roots. Novus rerum nascitur ordo.


Roger Devlin said…

But Krebs names the heresiarch Pelagius as one of his heroes. In his view, the egalitarian lie is to be blamed not on any perversion of Christianity, but on Christianity itself—or, as he invariably writes, “Judeochristianity.” He cites Nietzsche’s observation that

Christianity, which has sprung from Jewish roots and can only be understood as a plant that has come from that soil, represents the counter-movement to every morality of breeding, race or privilege—it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence.

From this Krebs infers that

every discourse which calls for a European Renaissance without separating itself from Judeo-Christian civilization, its dogmas and its rituals, is condemned to failure in advance, since it is enclosed within the very matrix of decline.

It is a familiar observation that enlightenment thought amounts to a secularized version of Christian doctrine, a displacement of its eschatology into the realm of politics. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn is just one example of a Christian conservative who stressed this connection, citing the Latin proverb corruptio optimi pessima: “the corruption of the best is the worst.”

But Krebs the admirer of Pelagius cannot mean this; his explicit positions would force him to deny that the secularization of Christianity is the essential misstep. Instead he must hold that (1) Christianity itself is responsible for the specific way in which it was negated by the Enlightenment, and that (2) Europe has been in a state of decadence since at least the fourth century AD. This bold interpretation of European history may deserve consideration, but the author has hardly made a case for it in the brief manifesto under review.


Greg Johnson said…

In response to Devlin’s remarks, yes, Krebs is committed to the claims that (1) Christianity is responsible for the trajectory of its secularization, and (2) that Western Civilization has been ruled by decadent values since the fourth century, when the Christianization of the Roman Empire received state power from Constantine. Both of these claims are defensible in Nietzschean terms, and Nietzsche is Krebs’ prime source here.

(1) Christianity is responsible for the trajectory of its secularization, because secular liberalism represents a triumph of Christian values over Christianity itself. Nietzsche argues that the Christian valorization of truth as something worth dying for was turned against the supernatural, faith-based elements of the creed. And once the supernatural, “pie in the sky” elements of Christianity are discarded, then nothing stands in the way of the progressive/utopian realization of Christian values in this world, values like the worth of every human life.

(2) These values were dominant in the West beginning with Constantine, but they were never really taken all that seriously. Spengler is right: the values of the New Testament are the Bolshevism of antiquity, and Christianity was as devastating to ancient pagan civilization as the Bolshevism of the 20th century. But once in power, the church readily compromised with pre-Christian values and social forms because of its essentially otherworldly focus. And they condemned as heretics those who demanded that the Church live by the values of the gospels. When the Reformation triumphed, however, and Christians started actually reading the Bible and thinking of ways to live by it in this world, the corrosive power of Christian values became fully liberated to do their work.


Kim Petrusson said…

Quite evidently it is since Europe was quite fine under traditional Christianity, but have crushed down under the gnostic modernity.


Greg Johnson said…

What you dub “gnostic modernity” is merely Christian axioms being taken to their logical real-world conclusions. And “gnostic modernity” is a rather marginal phenomenon considered alongside the modernizing thrust of the Reformation. What you point to as the heyday of European Christianity was merely, from a Christian point of view, the hypocritical compromise of the church with pre-Christian sensibilities and social forms. When the Reformation actually got Christians reading the Bible and trying to take it seriously, decay really got underway.


Johnnie Appleseeds said…

Greg, I think we need a strong philosophical refutation of Xtianity that is not perceived as vitriolically and mean-spirited as that of Nietzsche. I agree with Nietzsche, but his language turns people off.


Greg Johnson said…

Maybe you are right, but if Nietzsche is right, there is no pretty way to describe the ugly psychological processes that gave birth to and sustain slave morality.

Categories
Axiology Christendom Demography Eschatology Ethnic cleansing Jesus Miscegenation

Blonde aunt

or:

Christian axiology, our main enemy

Mi-tia-Blanquita




My (late) aunt Blanquita
Her son was my classmate
in a Mexico City
grammar school






In my life I have declined a couple of marriage proposals for the simple reason that the Mexican ladies were not pure whites. And last year I lost an internet friend, the Catholic administrator of the paleoconservative site La Sexta Redoma: a Spaniard who, when I confessed that I had just rejected one of such proposals, commented:

But you would have whitened her descendants. That is what Spaniards did in the XVI-XVIII [centuries] in Mexico.

So here we go again after half a millennia! While 16th-century Spaniards were extremely tough on Jews they were, at the same time, fairly tolerant of the natives—with Pope Paul III recognizing in 1537 that Amerindians had souls and declared them fit to marry the bachelor conquerors!

This astronomical blunder caused the mess that any racially-conscious visitor can see with his own eyes in the city where I studied grammar school with my blond cousin (Blanquita’s eldest son). I refer to the thoroughgoing mestization of Mexico, with overwhelming Indian blood over the European: the primary cause of Mexico’s backwardness and ultimate historical demise in the coming decades.

Alas, like my former friend who claims to strenuously defend the West (his blog receives many thousands of hits from very conservative Spaniards each day), Protestants are also tolerating massive miscegenation at the North of Río Grande. Some of the most devout, particularly the Evangelicals, are actually saying: “Racism is the worst sin.” A flabbergasted Paul Gottfried who has met them comments: “I don’t know why ‘racism is the worst sin,’ even in terms of the Bible.”

This suicidal behavior of both Catholics and Protestants moved me to reproduce, in my previous entry, a 10,000-word post collecting blog comments blaming Christian meta-ethics for the ongoing destruction of our gene pool. Here I will re-quote some of the phrases by Conservative Swede that in that post I gathered under the title “The Red Giant”:

Our progressivist paradigm is based on Christian ethics. The Left is all about Christian ethics. What the left-wing is doing is not destroying Western civilization, but completing and fulfilling it: what I call “The Finish of the West.” The current order is the last and terminal phase of Western Christian civilization.

Among the bloggers who claim to defend the West, Swede’s worldview strikes me as the antithesis of Tanstaafl’s point of view. Tanstaafl is perhaps the foremost critic of those who believe that westerners are committing racial and cultural suicide. It’s not suicide, Tanstaafl tell us, but homicide: the nefarious influence of the Jews in our civilization. Con Swede, on the other hand, dismisses Judaism as a truly substantial factor. He believes that Christianity’s moral grammar, and more specifically secular Christianity, is the basic etiology of Western malaise.

I believe that strictly monocausal explanations of our current predicament are myopic. At least from the religious viewpoint the etiology is basically twofold: both Christianity and Judaism are the culprits. Der Juden merely represent a very strong catalyst of a chemical reaction that had started since their emancipation by the gentiles during the French Revolution. However, since the homicidal interpretation of our problems has become almost orthodoxy in white nationalism, let’s continue to quote Swede, whose suicidal POV is virtually unknown in the white movement:

It’s the Western Christian civilization that feeds all these processes (population explosion etc.). So the Western Christian civilization is in fact the worst enemy of what I call European civilization: another reason for wanting the Western Christian civilization to go away. For the very same reason that Christian ethics abhors infanticide, [presently] it causes the population explosion in the world.

Incidentally, I’ve written a whole book on infanticide through history and the heroic role played by Christianity in the abolition of it in Europe (see e.g., here). In this year I’ll publish rest of the English translation in this blog.

But Christian ethics cannot stand the sight of little brown children dying. They must help them, or they will freak out. According to Christian ethics it is forbidden and unthinkable to think in terms of not saving every little brown child across the planet. But the consequences of this mindset are catastrophic, not only to us but also to them, as I have already explained. But since people are so programmed according to Christian ethics, what I’m saying does not seem to enter their heads. The thought is too unthinkable to be absorbed. It’s an utter taboo.

Absolutely. In fact, recently a white nationalist woman said in a very well known white nationalist radio podcast that abortion of non-whites is immoral: the opposite of what the Nazi Germans, who had revaluated Christian values, did: legalizing abortion in such cases.

This is derived from the deepest moral grammar of Christianity. The population explosion is not caused by liberalism, it is caused by Christianity in its most general form.

My emphasis above! Obviously, blaming everything on the Jews is a crude form of ideological myopia. This is why Swede believes that “the fall of the Western Christian civilization should be celebrated,” and that “this is the paradigm that stands in the way of our saviour.”

However, it must be noted that in the threaded discussion Swede got mad at me when I pointed out that the logical conclusion of his worldview would be to restore the image of Hitler and the Nazis before our brainwashed psyches. His outrage when I confessed my views surprised several commenters precisely because of the Nietzschean stance that Swede had manifested in that very thread:

It’s not until the westerners thoroughly revise their view on World War II that a change of paradigms can take place.

Strange that when I just tried to do that the Swede started to insult me. But he’s right about one thing: Christian axiology is our main enemy today. If this is so, fuck Christianity. After all, no Jew has real power in Muslim countries precisely because Islam doesn’t preach the craziest inversion of values: Love your alien neighbor, and even your enemy!

What we badly need throughout the West after the coming financial crash is what Nietzsche called the Umwertung aller Werte, the transvaluation of the most toxic Christian and Secular Christian values back to the Greek, and particularly Roman, values: precisely what Mussolini and Hitler tried to do. This is the crux in the Swede’s gospel:

With Christ as part of the equation, the Christian ethics of the Gospels became balanced. Humans were seen as imperfect and it was Christ who covered for us with his self-sacrifice. In Secular Christianity each person has to be like Jesus himself, doing self-sacrifice, since there’s no other way to realize Christian ethics. On top of that, with the Industrial Revolution and the surplus it created in our societies, we came to the point where all the good deeds of Christian ethics could finally be executed by giving off our surplus to all the poor and weak foreign people around the world: food, Western medicine, and other aid.

We should remember that our progressivist paradigm, which is always going left, is based on Christian ethics. And Christian ethics means the inversion of values. So it’s the weak that is considered good, while the strong is considered evil.

How Nietzschean (and again, the emphasis is mine)!

The only people that are guaranteed to survive until the end of days in Christianity are the Jews. Swedes, Italians etc., are of no significance whatsoever. We see all these tenets of Christianity manifested around us today: even in how the struggle for ethnic survival of the Jews is accepted within our current paradigm, while it is not accepted for the other people of our civilization.

Each ethnic group needs her great mythological narrative, starting with the birth of her people and guaranteeing their existence until the end of times. Without such a narrative the dissolvement of the ethnic group eventually becomes self-fulfilling: there’s nothing holding it together.

The Swede is not only wrong in rejecting Nazism out of hand. I’d go as far as, in all seriousness, propose that we replace the calendar era introduced by Dionysius Exiguus in the 6th century, traditionally identified with Anno Domini in reference to a Jew called Jesus (real Hebrew name: Yeshu). Instead of the conception of Yeshu, with AD counting years after his birth, the new era may use the year of 1945, when the most tragic Aryan character that ever walked the earth died and his corpse set on fire. Remember the final words of William Pierce’s masterpiece: “But it was in [that] year, according to the chronology of the Old Era—just 110 years after the [death] of the Great One—that the dream of a White world finally became a certainty.”

Leaving Christian ethics has nothing to do with becoming secular (as I explained above). To the contrary, it makes it worse! What is needed is to introduce another great mythological narrative into the minds of the Germanic people. This is the only way to replace the moral grammar of Christianity. Something with roots in our long history. This must be done by political means, by a regime with such a focus.

Which, of course, reminded me the National Socialists’ infatuation with Wagner. The Swede continues:

What I have suggested is: 1) A new great mythological narrative where our own ethnic group is given the pivotal position; 2) A constitution where citizenship is reserved for people of our ethnic group. 3) Alien ethnic groups, typically from the Third World, that do not identify with our ethnic group, will have to be removed one way or the other.

Spain’s Counter-Reformation experiment in the Americas was an utter disaster: the best refutation of the Judeo-reductionist trends in white nationalism I can think of, since the Jews were not involved in promoting massive mestization. Had the Swede’s program been implemented in the conquered Aztec Empire that my former friend mentioned—the Catholic Spaniard who ethno-suicidally advised me “to whiten her descendants”—, no brown swarms would presently inundate the streets of the town I happen to live in. However, after the dollar crashes and the world falls into chaos, what will happen to these Untermenschen? The Swede concludes:

So the concrete effect of Christian ethics here is to make the number of people that will die in starvation and suffering as high as possible once [the dollar collapse] hits (we are speaking of billions thanks to Christian ethics). Only the devil himself could think out such a brutally cruel scheme, and Christian ethics of course, in which case it’s according to the idiom “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Will “billions die and we will win”? I find it hilarious that in a nationalist German blog I have been scolded by a commenter who has pointed out that I liked the final solution fantasies of a New Yorker. Hilarious I said, because it looks like we won’t need much staining of our hands with mud blood. No. As will become apparent in a forthcoming post, Mother Nature will probably wipe them out, just as the Swede predicted.

My wildest dream is that, in the future, the female inhabitants of Mexico, a nation that might revert to the name it had when pure whites were in charge—New Spain—will look like my aunt Blanquita.

Meanwhile I shall remain a bachelor…

Categories
Axiology Friedrich Nietzsche Liberalism Philosophy of history

The Red Giant

“In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there. —We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.” —Nietzsche

Editor’s note: The below text has been excerpted from an August 2007 blog entry by a blogger who used the pen name ‘Conservative Swede’ and a long July 2009 exchange on the forum Gates of Vienna. Conservative Swede said:
 
stellan_skarsgard

We are witnessing the historical demise of Christianity. When a star dies, in its last phase it expands into a red giant, before it shrinks into a white dwarf. Liberalism is the red giant of Christianity. And just as a red giant is devoid of its core, it expands thousandfold while losing its substance and is about to die. The world I live in consists of Christians and liberals. It’s their world and I do not belong to them. I leave their limited wars, knee-jerk Islam apologism and World War II mythology to them. They are not about to change. On the contrary, they are continuously generating new problems with their way of acting.

There were certain sites, certain bloggers, even certain countries, that I had put hope in. But now it has become clear that they are all part of the same big train of lemmings. Bye bye! Denmark, nope. Brussels Journal, nope. View from the Right, nope. Gates of Vienna, nope. This is the way it goes in the world of liberals and Christians. It’s their world. I can do nothing but sit on the side and laugh at it. They are too stuck in their inner fears and hang-ups to be able to do anything useful. They will do what they are programmed to do: demise. These people are just not prepared for a proper fight. They are too much driven by superstitious fear and emotions. And there is not exactly anyone else around.

So what’s the future for people like me? Because even if I belong nowhere politically, I belong somewhere socially and ethnically. Well, the world is being homogenized. Tomorrow the whole world will be like the Third World. People like me, of European ethnicity, will have no home, no nation. We will live like the Jews as elites in other people’s nations (preferably a non-Muslim nation).

* * *

I have written: “People today live in a historyless, now-bubble-world, and have forgotten about all previous such complete [axiological] reversals, many of which happened in the last century,” therefore the widespread and deep sense of hopelessness, I forgot to add.

It’s hard to conceptualize a situation outside of the bubble, or the bubble not being there, when living inside of the bubble. However, history provides us with numerous examples of such reversals, of bubbles bursting, and of course new bubbles being built (we are bubble mammals after all). This is my happy message, my gospel. People just need to let go their precious beliefs and myths, these huggy teddy bears. When deeply invested in the core beliefs of the bubble, it becomes impossible to look outside of the bubble, to think of a world without the bubble, and everything looks utterly hopeless. Well, it’s not. On the contrary, the bubble will burst.

Unlike how it is presented, the relation between left and right is not symmetrical. Instead the left is the norm, and the people to the left are the holy people of secular Christianity. The right is just dancing along, effectively not being much more than an alibi for the whole setup, dancing in circles around the left, who is the one setting up the direction of “progression.” Occasionally pulling the break, but never setting up a new general course. The direction of the course is built into the paradigm, and never fundamentally questioned by the right.

Another evidence for the asymmetry between left and right is how right-wingers fear and loathe to be associated with any person or organization even slightly to the right of themselves (they feel that this would totally undermine their reputation), while willing to make connections magnitudes further into the left. Such as appearing in left-wing media, which often makes these right-wingers hilarious, since they feel they have gotten a stamp of approval thereby; while they can be paralyzed by fear of the thought of being published in a right-wing magazine just slightly to the right of themselves.

America is seen as right-wing in the current political theater. However, historically America together with France has been the main force in pushing our civilization to the left.

After World War II European patriotism was seen as the root of the evil, which had to be held down. The only permitted patriotisms were American and Israeli. Britain and France got away with some, but after the Suez crisis in 1956 they were effectively out of the picture too. Now offensive military actions were only accepted from America and Israel.

In the 1950s and the 60s America and Israel were celebrated as model countries of progressivism. European conservatism had been rooted out in the cultural revolution imposed by America in Western Europe. But the Europeans learned fast. First they learned to follow the American example and see America as the model country. The Europeans could pick this up fast since the ideas were rooted in the Christian gospels. But soon they learned that America didn’t live up to code of moral goodness that they had imposed on the Europeans. And left-wing anti-Americanism was born. And to be precise, even anti-Americanism wasn’t born in Europe but also imported from the US. The problem for America was that in their quest to end all “evil” empires, they had effectively become the big empire themselves, for example by inheriting the role of maintaining the Pax Britannica. Then they had to do all the sort of things they had taught the Europeans were wrong. The Europeans soon learned to beat the Americans in their own game, becoming the leading in progressivism and “holier than thou.” And curiously enough, thus America ended up being seen as right-wing. The original right-wing had been rooted out in a collaboration between America and the European socialists in the wake of World War II. The turning point came by the end of the 1960s—the Vietnam war and the Six-Days war. The image of America and Israel shifted, and they were no longer seen as the model countries of progressivism but as “evil” right-wing countries.

We should remember that our progressivist paradigm (which is always going left) is based on Christian ethics. And Christian ethics means the inversion of values. So it’s the weak that is considered good, while the strong is considered evil. In World War I and World War II America had defeated all the strong (and therefore evil) European empires. The job was completed in the Suez crisis in 1956 by turning against their former allies. But you can never win with Christian ethics, because now America became the strong one, and therefore the evil one. So now American and Israeli patriotism becomes highly questioned and opposed, though not based on restoring any other patriotism but by going even deeper into deranged progressivism. Thus, in effect, American and Israeli patriotism are still the only permitted patriotisms. Surely now the holiest priests of our leftist paradigm condemn the actions of America and Israel. But in effect it is tolerated, while if any other (white) country acts militarily offensively it’s seen as a major global crisis (e.g. Serbia, Russia). So this gives a background to why Geert Wilders, Vlaams Belang, etc., have a pro-American and pro-Israeli profile, and even stress these patriotisms more than their own.

When the threat of Islam is added to the historical situation I gave above, there are westerners who wake up from their deranged progressivism. But they generally revert back to the 1950s (myself I reverted to before World War I). In the face of the Islamic aggression their patriotism gets heightened. But this is a patriotism based on a narrative of hate of Germany and Russia.

So when intensifying this American patriotism in order to build-up the necessary hate against Islam, the hate against Russia and Germany heightens simultaneously. There does not seem to be a way to slide this parameter up without this happening. NATO was after all built on the motto of “Keeping Russia out, Germany down, and America in.” And since this narrative in its previous step is based on the de-legitimization of European patriotism in general, and how hate and demonization of Germans is the blueprint for white guilt and self-hatred, we have a more general problem here too.

* * *

There’s surely no way to stop the chaos coming. But just as surely, from the ashes of the chaos, a fantastic renaissance will grow. We will prevail, severely hurt yes, but with an ironclad inspired spirit. I just hope the chaos will start soon enough, so that I will be able to live when the turnaround happens.

My conclusion is that we’ll have to revert far back in history in order to find something sustainable to build on, to cut off the rotten and infected areas. For some things a hundred years, for some a thousand years. It’s definitely not enough to revert the social revolution of the ’68.

Gates of Vienna’s Ned May said:

Part of the modern Liberal ideal is the foolish notion that we can simply abolish by fiat millions of years of evolution, thousands of years of culture, and centuries of tradition.

Conservative Swede responded:

This is a very important sentence which conveys so very much, if we just examine it closely. Not only the liberals, but also most people (anti-liberals), who see and fear the fall of the liberal world order, have forgotten that these things cannot be erased.

But neither the rise nor the fall of liberalism can take away millions of years of evolution, thousands of years of culture, and centuries of tradition. This is what Chechar refers to as my optimism. It’s just following the conservative principle you gave here. But unfortunately the effect of the current belief system is so strong even on anti-liberals, that they cannot see that.

So it’s the liberal layer (on top of evolution, culture, and traditions) that will get peeled off, together with those traditions that led to liberalism in the first place.

The fall of this liberal world order will hit us hard (together with the destruction that liberalism has already caused). But we won’t suddenly just disappear. And as long as we are around we have millions of years of evolution, thousands of years of culture, and centuries of tradition on our side.

Even if there would be only 100 millions left of us, we are the best people in the history of mankind. As Huntington pointed out, we have always been superior in the ability to apply organized violence. As soon as the will power is there, we can achieve anything we please. We can rule any continent where we choose to live, as long as the liberal layer gets peeled off. And it’s bound to come off, since it’s just a cosmetic layer. The reason that it has not come off yet is that it has not yet become obvious to the collective mind that it has failed. But that is about to change.

* * *

Norse mythology is a much more useful mythological narrative than Christianity, which does not only mean adherence to universalist individualism and the importation of a foreign god (and in its final stages the importation of a lot of other immigrants), but also has a mythological narrative where the survival of our own people hold no significance whatsoever.

The only people that are guaranteed to survive until the end of days in Christianity are the Jews. Swedes, Italians etc., are of no significance whatsoever. We see all these tenets of Christianity manifested around us today: even in how the struggle for ethnic survival of the Jews is accepted within our current paradigm, while it is not accepted for the other people of our civilization. Each ethnic group needs her great mythological narrative, starting with the birth of her people and guaranteeing their existence until the end of times. Without such a narrative the dissolution of the ethnic group eventually becomes self-fulfilling: there’s nothing holding it together.

We see this happening around us in the very now with eager work to dissolve our countries and ethnic groups. In Christianity the Germanic people cannot (as a people) have a relation with god, only the Jewish people has. Germanic (and other) people can only have a relation with god as individuals. People are directed by myths more than anything else, so with a narrative where your ethnic group is of no importance, it will eventually become self-fulfilling (i.e., the opposite effect of self-confidence as a group).

A commenter said:

In that case, I would be very interested to hear what you propose should be done to save western civilisation.

Conservative Swede responded:

And there is your assumption again: that the Western Christian civilization should be saved, that it can be reformed, be mended; while I’m assuming that the current order, the current belief system, will self-implode. And as the current order is the last and terminal phase of Western Christian civilization, which has reached a dead end, this means the end of Western Christian civilization as such. Yes, we are seeing something like the fall of Rome before us.

I’ve been clear about this from the very beginning. For example, three days ago I wrote: “Likewise many people, who are ideologically invested in the current paradigm instead of in their ethnic group, will see the fall of the Western Christian civilization as the end of the world; commit suicide etc. But instead the fall of the Western Christian civilization should be celebrated. This is the paradigm that stands in the way of our saviour. This is the key knot in need to be untied.”

Yes: the Western Christian civilization is exactly the problem, and the problem is solved by it going away.

What we should hold on to are our ethnic groups and European civilization and culture in the deeper sense. Western Christian civilization is a novelty and now it failed. Western Christian civilization is just the tip of that iceberg. It’s just a way of politically organizing our peoples. We should not save this format, but save the matter.

The Western Christian civilization is what happened when Germanic people met Christianity. But nothing lasts forever. Quite as the Roman Empire it can be compared with a fruit, going through all the stages: bud, flower, incipient fruit, green fruit, ripe fruit, overripe fruit, rotten fruit. With this I’m saying: (1) indeed Western Christian civilization has meant many good things, and (2) it’s all over now.

It is unsustainable for Germanic people to keep Christianity. It would indeed mean their death. And since the Western Christian civilization is all about Germanic people meeting Christianity, the necessary turnaround for Germanic people also means the definitive end of Western Christian civilization. Africans and Italians sticking to Christianity does not make a Western Christian civilization.

When I talk of Christianity I use it in the same sense as Huntington or Qutb. That is, it doesn’t matter those who claim to be atheists, they are equally much Christians in this perspective. In fact, you will find that they stick to Christian ethics even stronger than the nominal Christians: trying to be holier than thou, as if trying to get in line before the nominal Christians to the heaven they don’t believe in.

Medieval Catholicism was nicely mixed and balanced with Roman and Greek components. The explosive and revolutionary message of the gospels was kept secret from the general public. The Protestant Reformation changed that. Christianity became purified into its Hebrew component, and the explosive and revolutionary message of the gospels were set free. This purification was taken even further, and completed, by the Puritans and the Quakers that left across the Atlantic, to found America. And these are the people who rule our civilization today.

There are several reasons why Christianity leads to secularism in its latter phases. Let me get back to that if there is interest, since this is becoming very long as it is.

Secular Christianity has thrown out god and Christ, but keeps the Christian ethics (inversion of values etc.). And the Christian ethics actually gets heightened and unfettered in Secular Christianity. (I have written much about that in my blog.) With Christ as part of the equation, the Christian ethics of the Gospels became balanced. Humans were seen as imperfect and it was Christ who covered for us with his self-sacrifice. In Secular Christianity each person has to be like Jesus himself, doing self-sacrifice, since there’s no other way to realize Christian ethics. On top of that, with the Industrial Revolution and the surplus it created in our societies, we came to the point where all the good deeds of Christian ethics could finally be executed by giving off our surplus to all the poor and weak foreign people around the world: food, Western medicine, and other aid.

Thus the Western Christian civilization caused the population explosion in the Third World. It is entirely caused by the Western Christian civilization, since these Third World countries were completely unable to do this themselves. Christian ethics commands that every single human life should be saved if possible. Before, more than half of the children in Third World countries died. Now virtually all survive, and we have the population explosion.

What this will lead to is the following:

With the dollar collapse and the complete breakdown of our economical (and then political) world order, mass starvation will spread like a wildfire across the southern hemisphere. This since their population numbers are not supported by themselves, but entirely backed by us. It will all fall apart.

So the concrete effect of Christian ethics here is to make the number of people that will die in starvation and suffering as high as possible once it hits (we are speaking of billions thanks to Christian ethics). Only the devil himself could think out such a brutally cruel scheme, and Christian ethics of course, in which case it’s according to the idiom “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

But that’s not enough. This mass starvation, where we can expect something like two thirds of the people dying in the Third World countries, will slash these societies into pieces, and they will meet a complete breakdown.

In the alternative scenario, where the Christian ethics would have kept its fingers away, these countries would have supported themselves: every year many children would have died at a pretty constant pace. But this is a stable phenomenon that does not at all threaten the stability of their societies. When the Western economical order falls apart, they would not be the least affected.

But Christian ethics cannot stand the sight of little brown children dying. They must help them, or they will freak out. They cannot keep their fingers away. So they are dooming them to mass starvation in the billions and complete breakdowns of their societies. This is the concrete effect of Christian ethics.

At this point it wouldn’t help putting back god and Christ into the equation. Instead we need to leave Christian ethics.

I have already stated how Western Christian civilization = Germanic people + Christianity. I will now clarify why specifically Germanic people need to leave Christianity.

Look at the phenomenon of clan mentality around the world. In many places around the world it is strong, in Europe it is not. But even within Europe there are clear differences. Indeed we find clan mentality in Southern Europe, while there’s none of it in Northern Europe (among Germanic people).

There are historical reasons for this. In the cold north people lived far apart. Human contacts were few, and strangers were therefore treated with friendliness. This was the best survival strategy in this context. However, the Mediterranean area was crowded, and there was always competition about land and resources. The best survival strategy in such a context was to stick to your clan, in this tight competition.

The whole point of Christian ethics, when it works well, is to have a balancing effect on the morality of people. In the Mediterranean area it had a balancing effect on the natural clan mentality, leaving a good result. However, Germanic people, as described above, have a natural altruism. When combined with the unfettered Christian ethics of the latter stages of the Western Christian civilization, it creates an interference that goes completely out of bounds. The morality of Germanic people has reached a point where it has to be balanced back, or we will perish. To create this balance Germanic people have to leave Christian ethics. (Romance and Slavic people can keep Christianity. It’s not a matter of life or death for them.)

What we are witnessing in the present time is the great tragedy of Germanic people.

With the lack of clan mentality, we find that Germanic people are the ones that most faithfully turn their loyalty towards the nation. But due to the inherent universalism of Christianity, we see in the current incarnation of Western Christian civilization how nations are considered illegitimate and gradually being dissolved. The nationalist loyalty of the Germanic people becomes redirected to universalist loyalty; still lacking of clan mentality.

Germanic people do not use the power of their family to solve problems. They go to a higher level, the authorities. To use the power of your family to solve a problem is here considered a sin, we are supposed to abide to the law. In Italy or Spain people do use the power of their family to solve problems.

There is an abundance of stories in blogs from Northern Europe of kids who go through their whole school time being beaten up by Muslim on a weekly basis. The furthest the parents of these children would do is to bring up the problem with the authorities (and possibly having a “dialog” with the Muslim parents). Which of course will do nothing about it, since the belief system of the authorities doesn’t allow for it. And even so the parents never use the power of their family to deal with the problem. They are programmed to abide to the law and the order.

I cannot see this happening in Italy or Spain. There is a whole different mentality. There would be an outrage, and the whole family would be engaged in the matter. Mostly not going into mafia methods, but in some places yes.

Germanic people are simply wired the wrong way to being able to survive in a multiethnic context. Or to be exact: Germanic people adhering to Christian ethics are. We managed fine in the age of the great migrations and as Vikings.

Now we are entering a world of multiethnic societies at a planetary level. And the Germanic people adhering to Christian ethics are constitutionally unfit for this. Unless we leave Christian ethics, we will perish. Or rather, those who cling to Christian ethics will perish, according to the law of the survival of the fittest.

Leaving Christian ethics has nothing to do with becoming secular (as I explained above). To the contrary, it makes it worse! What is needed is to introduce another great mythological narrative into the minds of the Germanic people. This is the only way to replace the moral grammar of Christianity. Something with roots in our long history. This must be done by political means, by a regime with such a focus. But given that focus, it’s not such a big thing to achieve. There are numerous historical examples of how to do it. And it only takes a generation to make the change (even less). And in a dire situation, after a major trauma, it will be even easier.

And thus we are speaking of the deepest level of a paradigm change here. Our very concept of good and bad, our moral grammar, has to be transformed. In sort of perspective, even the apparent moral tautology “We should strive for what is good, and fight against what is bad” no longer holds true.

Our very concepts of good and bad is what has to be transformed. It’s hard to think outside of this box. But that’s the whole point of the word paradigm. It’s a box that it is virtually impossible for people in general to think outside of. I recommend reading Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for a deeper understanding of the concept paradigm. It’s truly a mental box we are trapped within. In the same way we are about to witness the transformation of our whole grammar of morality, quite as our grammar of morality was different before the Age of Christianity.

When the paradigm shifted from Newton to Einstein, it didn’t mean the end of science. I just meant the end of a scientific era, which became replaced with a new one. In the same manner the fall of the Western Christian civilization does not mean the end of European civilization in the larger sense. It just means a new era. Quite as when the Roman-Greek civilization was replaced by the Western Christian.

Commenter said:

The latter, being literalists, conceived of themselves as the direct successors to the ancient Israelites who had been given divine authority to kill the Canaanites and establish Israel. The Protestants looked on themselves as the New Israelites and the Native Americans as the New Canaanites to be wiped out.

Conservative Swede responded:

It’s sad indeed that Christians have to imagine themselves as Israelites in order to become truly good fighters, which implies effective total war, and the psychology of will power to win at any cost.

Once again it is the same pattern of Christianity that I discussed above, when discussing permitted patriotisms. Our own ethnicity is utterly insignificant in the Christian narrative, while the Jewish ethnicity holds a pivotal position. So Christians have to use this substitute ethnicity to find true confidence and strength.

Good total war has been waged by Christians when imagining themselves as Israelites aiming for building the New Jerusalem. They can also fight limited war in the name of the universal good, or for the sake of Israel (for example the crusades).

But war by Christians in the name of their own ethnicity is considered illegitimate; well, not even of importance. In Christianity we cannot be ourselves. We have to pretend we are someone else.

I still think the Russians can use their Christianity in an efficient way, just since their Christianity hasn’t been washed through the Enlightenment, quite as the American pilgrims and the Boers, discussed above, hadn’t. Nor Spain of La Reconquista, of course. But we can stay assured that the Christians having been washed through the Enlightenment—and then the Industrial Age, liberalism and secularism—won’t be able to see themselves as Israelites. So this strength is not coming back within the context of Christianity.

Why not be ourselves instead? Replace the current mythological narrative with one where we are ourselves. After all, that is the simple truth: We are ourselves. Christianity is based on deception and distortion of reality. Another way to go, for those unable to imagine themselves as the Israelites, is at least to make Christianity universal instead of Jewish. Such as we saw recently here at Gates of Vienna in how many people in Poland for example do not see Jesus as Jewish. There’s no way to win within the frames of Christianity…

Commenter said:

I agree that Christianity is at the end of its tether and is unable to assert itself without breaking its own value system. Probably something similar must have happened in India during Muslim invasions, where Buddhist ideas of compassion and Karma (you get what you deserve, because you produced the cause) left them completely defenseless. They indeed had no narrative that would support their collective existence.

Conservative Swede responded:

This is an excellent historical comparison. An universalist religion of goodness is replaced with the original national gods, when faced with a threat of existential magnitude.

Commenter said:

Altogether, yours is the most complete argument for the death of Christianity I can imagine, certainly more complete than what Nietzsche has ever written.

Conservative Swede responded:

Thanks, that’s a very nice thing to say. Of course, I had an unfair advantage, since I could read Nietzsche but he couldn’t read me.

Commenter said:

I am always impressed by the fact that the further North you go in Europe, where people are more Germanic, the more harmonious mastery of mind over nature you can see.

Conservative Swede responded:

Yes, we have focused on fighting nature instead of each other. All due to our historical situation. If we didn’t fight nature we died. If we hadn’t isolated our house and stored up well for the winter we died. Out of this a special kind of cooperation between people grew. A traditionalist form of egalitarianism, which apart from Sweden and Norway we only find in America (this is an interesting topic in itself, but no time for that now). However, if you put unfettered Christian ethics on top of that…

* * *

A necessary condition for such a Germanic project—and for the renaissance of Europe altogether!—is the return of Germany. Germany today is the planetary bully victim, bound and caged in many layers of chains and bars. Not permitted to show even a single shred of national self-confidence. We won’t see that until American troops have left Germany and the whole NATO regime has been reversed. But it will come. Rest assured.

Above is the first step, and, let’s say, how far I think we’ll come in this century. We will be in a situation with China as the great power. There will also be competition with Russia. Probably China will be first in occupying the oil fields around the Persian Gulf, but we will be competing with them about it.

America together with France and Britain will be utterly discredited, seen as the guilty ones for the greatest treason in the history of mankind against their own people (as Fjordman put it); while Germany was completely innocent in this, and will hold the morally superior position.

France might no longer exist, having first been overrun by Muslims, and then reconquered by Germanic people.

The United States will no longer exist. But the Confederation of the Northern US States will be a natural ally to the Germanics.

Maybe there will be something as a Germanic empire at this point. Or maybe even two, one German speaking and one English speaking. But I’m not as sure about the English speaking one (I’m not saying people won’t speak English, only that there might not be a separate empire with English as the official language).

Will American troops reside in Germany forever? No. When it comes to the imminent fall of the current order, there are too many factors in motion at the same time that each alone has the potential of making it fall: dollar collapse, ethnic civil war, Iranian nukes, weak and paralyzed leadership.

I find Germanic people boring and square, but sort of brilliant (history clearly shows that). After about a decade out in the cold, I have once again taken Germanic people to my heart because I can see their great tragedy. I think I can see their dilemma and how to solve it while at the same time it makes perfect sense for Poles, Spaniards and Celts to take an interest in this for the political stability it would give to all of Europe, once the current order falls. Without it there would be a huge power vacuum.

Who would expand into that? Russia, China, Islam? Or first Islam, then Russia, and finally China? That’s the good thing with the day the American troops leave Germany, because at that time the Germanic European will be forced to immediately build a strong military power. And you could imagine how many of the good things that we have discussed here would be catalyzed by that.

When I say that I want Christian ethics to go away, it’s not because I want to see a 180 degree turn away from it. Instead it is Christianity that ended up in steep imbalance. What I want to do is to balance things back. So what I have suggested is:

1) A new great mythological narrative where our own ethnic group is given the pivotal position; 2) A constitution where citizenship is reserved for people of our ethnic group. 3) Alien ethnic groups, typically from the Third World, that do not identify with our ethnic group, will have to be removed one way or the other.

* * *

I think it is clear that the people won’t turn away from the current belief system with less than a major catastrophe.

But this time the catastrophe is not something as benign as a “Western civil war,” but something of a higher magnitude, and of real external threats (which we are not the least prepared for). If we had only been facing something as harmless as World War I or World War II, I wouldn’t have been speaking of the end of the Western Christian civilization. If there only had been two strong sides of the West fighting each other to death, we wouldn’t have been facing this discontinuity of our civilization.

But now it is our very belief system that makes us unable to fight and defend our civilization. And the threat is external, and when we lose, it means this discontinuity. Losing here means losing our dominant position, not that everything is lost.

Our current empire will fall, that is, America, and not to another Western empire as before—since this time there is no one standing in line—but to external forces.

If we do not meet a major catastrophe within the next twenty years, we will be silently walking into our demographic eclipse, something that could indeed mean the end European civilization and the values that you have talked about. The demographic forces in motion are so great, yes exponential. Not so much our declining birth rates, but the population explosion in the Third World that we are causing and the mass immigration and demographic Jihad in our own lands. If this process continues we will end up in Diaspora as the Jews. And with white people as a mere 2-3% of the world’s population and without our own homeland, that’s indeed the end of European civilization altogether, and we can say goodbye to the manifestation of all these values that you and I cherish.

It’s the Western Christian civilization that feeds all these processes (population explosion etc.). So the Western Christian civilization is in fact the worst enemy of what I call European civilization: another reason for wanting the Western Christian civilization to go away. If it would continue a few decades more it will mean the definitive goodnight for all of us.

So to summarize: When I speak of civilization as in the Western Christian civilization, I speak of a concrete manifestation, an empire. And when I speak of civilization as in European civilization, I speak of the existence and self-government of white people, and the values and life style that is integral in our beings. But now we have come to a point where the former is the greatest threat to the latter.

In Aristotelian terms European civilization is the matter to the Western Christian civilization, which is the form. That is, white people is the matter for the current Western Christian “empire.” But now the form is suffocating the matter.

Chechar said: [1]

“It’s the Western Christian civilization that feeds all these processes.” Why do you say this? Wasn’t everything relatively okay up to the 1950s, before the radical feminists almost took away our highest divine right from us: women? If lots of women would still be with us at home having lots of beautiful kids, as the Pope likes, the present problem wouldn’t exist, would it? Doesn’t the sexual revolution is to blame for the demographic winter? And isn’t Islamization of the West a mere by-product of our dwarfing ethnicity? If so why do you blame Western Christian civilization? Rome fell precisely because infanticide (the abortion of classical times) and contraception was practiced massively since the times of Julius Caesar. However, since Constantine and Theodosius the Church made enormous efforts to stop infanticide.

I agree that a major catastrophe is needed. That’s why, as I have iterated elsewhere, every morning I wake up with yearning dreams of mushroom clouds above Western cities to wake me up—and waking up the West. But couldn’t we reject the 1960s revolution without America necessary falling?

Yes: I know you want to delve deeper into the root cause. But I still think that solid arguments based on demographic winter show us that the West took a really wrong turn in the middle ’60s. In mean, the West was still healthy the year in which I was born! (maybe because you were born after that you haven’t seen the healthy West with your own eyes). We tried to trick the god Eros through contraception and the liberation of women. We are suffering now for having messed with the laws of Nature. Our present problems with a revived Islam are Venus’ revenge. Curious, eh, that I am not a Christian—like Tannhäuser I look for the grotto of Venus—yet I admire conservative Protestants and Catholics on this issue?

Conservative Swede responded:

You need to read more carefully, because you missed my point. I repeat what I said:

The demographic forces in motion are so great, yes exponential. Not so much our declining birth rates, but the population explosion in the Third World that we are causing and the mass immigration and demographic Jihad in our own lands. It’s the Western Christian civilization that feeds all these processes.

Our declining birth rates have a slow effect in comparison with the exponential growth that the population explosion and demographic Jihad means. And it’s exactly because of Christian ethics that people, like for example you, entirely look at our own birth rates (narrowly blaming feminism etc.), instead of focusing on the much bigger and alarming problem caused by us: the population explosion in the Third World.

For the very same reason that Christian ethics abhors infanticide, it causes the population explosion in the world. It’s a deeply held doctrine within Christian ethics that every single human life across the planet must be saved if possible. According to Christian ethics it is forbidden and unthinkable to think in terms of not saving every little brown child across the planet. But the consequences of this mindset are catastrophic, not only for us but also for them, as I have already explained. But since people are so programmed according to Christian ethics, what I’m saying does not seem to enter their heads. The thought is too unthinkable to be absorbed. It’s an utter taboo.

You asked, “Wasn’t everything relatively OK up to the 1950s?” Sure it was. But the better our lives got, the more we destroyed, and the faster we destroyed it. It was exactly in the ’50s that this problem started. In the ’50s people of European descent was 30% of this planet, today we are just a little more than 10%. Not by us decreasing (in fact we are more than in the ’50s) but by the rest of the planet exploding in numbers, from 3 to 7 billion people—all caused by us.

The population of Africa is four and a half times higher than in 1950. And the population in Asia almost three times higher.

As I have already explained: With a highly developed industrial society, the Western people got a huge surplus of resources, and much more time at their hands. Since Christian ethics mandates what it does, they have since went around the world to save every single little life that they could: using Western medicine, modern fertilizers, GMO crops, and all other means possible, in order to keep as many alive as possible. Thus the population explosion.

This is derived from the deepest moral grammar of Christianity. But it took all these centuries until we had an industrialized society that made it possible to enact. And because of that Christian ethics mandated that we caused this Third World population explosion. Something that could never have achieved themselves, which makes our deed so deeply irresponsible in so many ways, just because it’s artificial. Which means (1) they are not adapting their life-style accordingly but continue and continue to explode in numbers, and (2) they are completely depending on us, which means their societies will totally break apart once our economic world order collapses.

That means that we will have to remove the industrial society, if we want to keep Christian ethics. Think over which one you appreciate the most.

You asked, “But couldn’t we reject the ’60s revolution without America necessary falling?… the West took a really wrong turn in the middle 1960s.” No, this is not a matter of reverting the ’60s revolution. It goes far deeper than that. You know, the ’60s revolution wasn’t brought to us by extraterrestrials. There is an internal logic to our civilization, and its ideals, that led to that. It wasn’t an accident. Start looking at the French Revolution.

In general your answer is about rejecting the ’60s and going back to older Christian values, rejecting for example abortion and contraception. But this is just a stronger version of the Christian dogma to save every single human life possible. If anything it would just make the Third World population explosion worse! The population explosion is not caused by liberalism: it is caused by Christianity in its most general form. And if you bring in more deeply Christian people, it will only make it worse.

Chechar commented:

When I studied a thick biology text at college, the photo of a Western doctor in the book caught my attention. He was vaccinating dozens upon dozens of black children in Africa!

Instantly I harbored the thought to drop out. How on Earth would a sane person do that, I told myself silently? That deranged altruism was, to my heart, like an industrial factory that produced hundreds of thousands of poor people, like a clone army: future adults who’d have a miserable life anyway. “How am I studying a hard science when the values of mankind are so, er, psychotic,” continued my soliloquy. Of course, it’s impossible that the liberal mentality understands the mind of a post-Christian individual.

Conservative Swede said:

First the dollar bubble will burst, and soon after, the population explosion bubble. At this point people will see that Christian ethics caused this whole thing, and it will be utterly discredited.

This narrow-minded dogma of saving every possible life, will instead have caused more death and suffering than if Christian ethics hadn’t meddled with the situation in the first place. It’s like a plan the devil had thought out. To give birth to billions of people that could then be killed in one single blow in mass starvation.

What this Christian dogma hasn’t taken in consideration is that each society needs to be self-dependent. Because sooner or later there comes hard times. And if we have made them utterly dependent on us what they will face then is death since they cannot support themselves.

So what this Christian dogma will have caused is the death of societies. So much simultaneous death will kill also the societies. This would never have happened if this Christian dogma hadn’t entered the picture in the first place. A constant degree of child deaths, while being self-dependent in the traditional way, would have been the best thing for these societies. And wouldn’t have hurt them; and neither have hurt us.

I think that once it has happened, people will see this point clearly, and change their ways.

“Feed the world” beats saving the resources of our planet (i.e. actually saving the planet), according to the moral grammar of our current belief system. Quite as multiculturalism and Islamophilia beats for example feminism (as they say: “Race beats gender”). Our moral grammar is full of such hierarchies, from which the priorities are derived, once the objectives end up in conflict with each other. To save every single possible human life is one of our deepest dogmas, but try to discuss overpopulation with these anti-CO2 freaks (i.e. 90 percent of the Westerners). Even when believing in their theory about “global warming by human CO2” it would be clear that this problem would be strongly connected to overpopulation. But to address that as a problem is an utter taboo for these people.

And just a general note: People here at Gates of Vienna focus on the immigration problem. But mass immigration is just the local projection of this much larger and more fundamental problem of which I’m talking of here, that is, the planetary population explosion and our attitudes towards it (which also caused it). It won’t help to address the immigration problem without addressing this global problem. That is, it won’t help to be a lonely, purely Polish, if surrounded by Arabs, Pakistanis and Africans all along the border.

What is happening across the world is the large scale version of what is happening within our countries. Our relative numbers are diminishing by theirs increasing exponentially, in both cases.

Things will not be able to turn around until the current belief system breaks apart, and makes a 180 degree turn. The main thing we can do today is to thoroughly prepare for that moment. These preparations also help protecting ourselves from violence and hardships in any sort of context. So no matter what future scenario one envisions, I’d say that the breakdown of the current belief system is not that far away.

I’d give it around a decade.

__________

Note:

[1] Editor’s note: I asked this question when I was still very naïve and admired the US.