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Tag: Genuine spirituality

Categories
Axiology Eschatology Mainstream media Turner Diaries (novel) William Pierce

A postscript to Dies Irae

Or

On the morality of dispatching
500 million of degenerate whites

The following are excerpts from Andrew Hamilton’s November article, “Flawed Racism,” potentially the most axiological-shattering article that, without the knowledge of its readership including the author himself, has been published at Counter-Currents:
 

1

The depth of evil

The mass media and state-controlled education have displaced the family in the formation and transmission of attitudes, beliefs, behavior, and culture. In addition, the mass media winnows candidates for public office at every level, thereby exerting effective control over the (formerly) democratic political process.

There are many unexplored reasons why TV, movies, video games, pop music, and other forms of media exercise such tremendous influence over our ideas and behavior. A “simple” one, I believe, is the (literal) hypnotic effect they have on us.

The Jews, as William Pierce recognized, control the mass media of news and entertainment (which he invariably denominated the “controlled media”). There is perhaps no other truism of modern life that he emphasized so repeatedly. It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that he never developed, or at least never publicly articulated, a theory of media control, or analyzed the nexus between media messages and human psychology and behavior. Instead, he stated his case axiomatically:

By permitting the Jews to control our news and entertainment media we are doing more than merely giving them a decisive influence on our political system and virtual control of our government; we also are giving them control of the minds and souls of our children, whose attitudes and ideas are shaped more by Jewish television and Jewish films than by parents, schools, or any other influence… To permit the Jews, with their 3000-year history of nation-wrecking, from ancient Egypt to Russia, to hold such power over us is tantamount to race suicide…

William Pierce also taught that the vast majority of whites are neither good nor evil; they will think and behave in whatever manner the powers that be direct them to. Most people that is, will conform and obey, no matter what. (Pierce called them “lemmings.”)

Only a tiny handful, he said, are truly good or evil—he estimated 1 to 3 percent in either direction. For some reason he believed the number of “good” people, though exceedingly small, was roughly double the number of intrinsically bad people.

My own inclination is perhaps closer to the Christian belief that humans are afflicted with original sin, and can only be saved (become good) through a process of change and redemption.

What I failed to realize for many years was the depth of the evil and the resistance to individual redemption. Obviously, if people are evil when evil people rule, and good only when good people rule, they are not really good.

Nevertheless, people’s beliefs and behaviors can change radically. Change (for the worse) during my lifetime has been massive. Of course, it is easier to destroy than to build.

Unfortunately, if Pierce’s assumptions are correct—and, apart from his optimistic overestimation of the number of good to evil people, they appear to be—then it is comparatively easy with modern technology and dedicated ruthlessness for a small, domineering elite to continuously identify and destroy the tiny handful of good people on the margin, as they did under Communism and have continued to do in the post-WWII era.

As a result, whites opposed to genocide or totalitarianism have failed to gain any traction.

2

My thoughts

“What I failed to realize for many years was the depth of the evil and the resistance to individual redemption. Obviously, if people are evil when evil people rule, and good only when good people rule, they are not really good,” wrote Hamilton.

In other words, people, including the overwhelming majority of whites, are not really good.

If they are not good what could be wrong with the genocidal fantasy in my “Dies Irae”, with a vindictive Star Child calling home 500 million whites (and of course, all non-whites, including Jews) to, paradoxically, make sure that Lane’s words be fulfilled?

Had the Star Child spared the degenerate whites, how could we be sure that, say, a deranged liberal would not advance the idea of freezing a few of the non-white dead bodies for future cloning to recreate the multiracial utopia—with another surviving white, say a Christian billionaire, sponsoring the project after no non-whites were left alive in the world?

The fact is that, insofar as moral values are inverted throughout the West, the depth of evil among present-day whites is something that, with the honorable exception of William Pierce, no white advocate that I am aware of has been willing to digest.


3

From Pierce’s immortal novel

Then we formed the people into labor brigades to carry out a number of necessary functions, one of which was the sanitary disposal of the hundreds of corpses of refugees. The majority of these poor creatures were White, and I overheard one of our members refer to what happened to them as “a slaughter of the innocents.”

I am not sure that is a correct description of the recent holocaust. I am sorry, of course, for the millions of White people, both here and in Russia, who died—and who have yet to die before we have finished—in this war to rid ourselves of the Jewish yoke. But innocents? I think not. Certainly, that term should not be applied to the majority of the adults.

After all, is not man essentially responsible for his condition—at least, in a collective sense? If the White nations of the world had not allowed themselves to become subject to the Jew, to Jewish ideas, to the Jewish spirit, this war would not be necessary. We can hardly consider ourselves blameless. We can hardly say we had no choice, no chance to avoid the Jew’s snare. We can hardly say we were not warned.

Men of wisdom, integrity, and courage have warned us over and over again of the consequences of our folly. And even after we were well down the Jewish primrose path, we had chance after chance to save ourselves—most recently 52 years ago, when the Germans and the Jews were locked in struggle for the mastery of central and eastern Europe.

We ended up on the Jewish side in that struggle, primarily because we had chosen corrupt men as our leaders. And we had chosen corrupt leaders because we valued the wrong things in life. We had chosen leaders who promised us something for nothing; who pandered to our weaknesses and vices; who had nice stage personalities and pleasant smiles, but who were without character or scruple. We ignored the really important issues in our national life and gave free rein to a criminal System to conduct the affairs of our nation as it saw fit, so long as it kept us moderately well-supplied with bread and circuses.

And are not folly, willful ignorance, laziness, greed, irresponsibility, and moral timidity as blameworthy as the most deliberate malice? Are not all our sins of omission to be counted against us as heavily as the Jew’s sins of commission…?

I cannot think of any segment of White society, from the Maryland red-necks and their families whose radioactive bodies we bulldozed into a huge pit a few days ago to the university professors we strung up in Los Angeles last July, which can truly claim that it did not deserve what happened to it. It was not so many months ago that nearly all those who are wandering homeless and bemoaning their fate today were talking from the other side of their mouths.

Not a few of our people have been badly roughed up in the past—and two that I know of were killed—when they fell into the hands of red-necks: “good ol’ boys” who, although not liberals or shabbos goyim in any way, had no use for “radicals” who wanted to “overthrow the gummint.” In their case it was sheer ignorance.

But ignorance of that sort is no more excusable than the bleating, sheep like liberalism of the pseudo-intellectuals who have smugly promoted Jewish ideology for so many years; or than the selfishness and cowardice of the great American middle class who went along for the ride, complaining only when their pocketbooks suffered.

No, talk of “innocents” has no meaning. We must look at our situation collectively, in a race-wide sense. We must understand that our race is like a cancer patient undergoing drastic surgery in order to save his life. There is no sense in asking whether the tissue being cut out now is “innocent” or not. That is no more reasonable than trying to distinguish the “good” Jews from the bad ones—or, as some of our thicker-skulled “good ol’ boys” still insist on trying, separating the “good niggers” from the rest of their race.

The fact is that we are all responsible, as individuals, for the morals and the behavior of our race as a whole. There is no evading that responsibility.

4

From “Why the West will go under”

The essential aspect of what is happening to the West is spiritual. It is decadence which has sealed the fate of the West, not the birthrate in the Third World. It is the absence of a common purpose which has sapped the West’s viability, not just the scheming of the Jews. It is the loss of racial consciousness which has left the West defenseless, not the growing strength of our enemies.

What is important is that the corruption of the West’s spirit will continue in the years ahead—perhaps for decades—while the increasing anarchy, the more frequent breakdowns of order and flareups of violence, the economic disintegration, will be only incidental. There undoubtedly will come a great bloodletting, a time of mass throat-cutting and mass rape, when the West’s internal enemies will have free rein for a while. But the West will already have sunk before then.

And most of the inhabitants of the West will have sunk too, to the point where little of value will be left to be lost in the bloodletting. This is a point worth emphasizing again: the majority will perish with the civilization to which they are inseparably bound.

The problem is not to cull out the mongrels, the Judaized, the degenerates, the moral prostitutes from a healthy mass, so that the cull can be destroyed and the mass saved. The problem is to pick the few who embody the best of what the West once was and to take the necessary measures to see that that which they embody does not perish with the mass.

Those who would survive—more correctly, those who would have a hand in determining which genes and which values survive, for the time scale of the West’s sinking is such that no individual now alive can be sure of living to see the new age dawn—must have these qualities:

They must be both willing and able to fight for the right to determine the shape of the future; the meek and the disarmed will vanish without a trace.

They must be free of the superstitions and prejudices of this age; those who are mentally bound to this age will go down with it.

They must be pure in spirit and strong in will; this is the age of egoism and materialism, of self-indulgence and permissiveness, but the passage into the new age demands both selflessness and self-discipline.

They must be united in an organization which combines their strengths and focuses their wills; in this age of atomized individuals, where each person is submerged in the mass, without identity and without power, only those who are united can prevail.

They must be motivated by a single purpose, the overwhelming importance of which is always foremost in their minds; it has been the purposelessness of this age on which the West has foundered, but the new age will be illuminated and shaped by a common purpose transcending all other considerations: namely, the purpose of bringing forth a higher type of man and attaining thereby a higher level of consciousness in the universe.

Defaulted mourning

I am tempted to permanently freeze this site with this entry because I don’t see any grieving process among white nationalists at both sides of the Atlantic regarding the Crime of the Age, as explained in my previous post.

It is truly amazing that potentially the most revolutionary subject in the whole pro-white movement—the real history of what happened during and after the Second World War—is of little or no interest to those who claim to be rebelling against the anti-white regimes of the West.

September 27 postscript

Some misunderstandings about this brief post (see thread below) move me to add a postscript:

I’m not sure what you expect. You make a post and expect people to fall over themselves in reaction to it?

Of course not. Since I have the habit of indulging myself in long soliloquies, I assumed (wrongly it now seems) that readers were guessing my thoughts.

Forget this blog. When I said that white advocates at both sides of the Atlantic are not interested in this subject I meant that the necessary, soul-healing mourning about the monstrosity committed by the Allies was defaulted; and that the default has led the West into this sort of Morgenthau Plan “lite” for all whites throughout the entire West.

Solzhenitsyn said something similar in his great book. He complained that, since there was no Nuremberg Trial for the much larger crimes committed in his country, Mother Russia has defaulted moral healing. With his book Solzhenitsyn tried to do a late mourning so to speak, to make people feel the pain of the enormity of what had happened decades before in Russia when no actual mourning was allowed to occur.

It is true that the Americans and even those who grant Nobel prices supported Solzhenitsyn in the Cold War. Alas, unlike the Russian, Goodrich is a perfect unknown and thus I am not blaming the millions of westerners for ignoring what happened in Germany. We are all victims of ubiquitous propaganda (which means that, in a sense, the Second World War continues).

However, now that books like Goodrich’s are still in print and unlike Holocaust denial uncensored, the subtle message of my latest entries was clear to me: let us atone for the sins of our culture by means of a late mourning; let us face our painful history (which is why I’ll be quoting extensively from Kemp and Pierce’s books in my other blogs). We don’t have the power of the publishing houses that sponsored Solzhenitsyn. The only thing I can do is to freeze this blog with the Hellstorm posts on the first page so that anyone who hits it will have the opportunity to discover Goodrich and the other authors.

I firmly believe that, in order to expose the Morgenthau Plan “lite” that has been imposed on the white race after the the Second World War we all must know the real facts, the actual happenings and events during and after the war. Since it is a process that horribly pains the soul it may be considered mournful (just as it is so painful to read the Gulag). But I am convinced that that’s the only way to heal the rotten soul of present-day westerners, just as the only way to heal a congested heart is open surgery.

Let me use a final example. The experience I have had with cults that forbid mourning and bereavement among the faithful is peculiar: the mind only represses the pain and pathologic symptoms appear. Pace traditional religious teaching, forgiveness and forgetfulness are a very toxic magic: the pain just remains congested and unprocessed deep within our heart. That’s why all healthy cultures recommend a period of mourning after a loss—a surgery for the soul—and believe me: what we all lost after the War is still unprocessed.

We got to process it if we are to heal spiritually.

Categories
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Autobiography Evil Holocaust Kali Yuga Solitude Thomas Goodrich

The ascent of the soul

Before reading last year J. A. Sexton’s review of Thomas Goodrich’s Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947, I knew nothing of what the Allied forces had done to defenseless Germans during and after the Second World War.

I confess that, throughout most of my adult life, I was infected with anti-Nazi hatred due to my mind having been colonized with films, books that I read, articles and documentaries about the evils of National Socialist Germany. Little did I realize then that the War propaganda has not really ended, which made me demonize the Third Reich in my inner thoughts for many years—the System simply had covered up the history of what actually happened from 1944 to 1947.

Now that thanks to Hellstorm I have awakened to the real world I am moved to, in memory of the millions of men, women and children tormented and murdered by the Allies, keep a moment of silence out of respect for the victims. Freezing this site for a while with this entry at the top will provide visiting westerners in general, and Germans in particular, the opportunity to find out the grim facts about an unheard of Holocaust perpetrated on Germanic people—a real Holocaust in every sense of the word.

As to the perpetrators of the crime of the age, in his Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn, who in his younger years was involved in the rape and murder of civilian Germans, wrote:

There is nothing that so aids and assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one’s own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my captain’s shoulders boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: “So were we any better?” And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me:

“Bless you, prison!”…

In prison, both in solitary confinement and outside solitary too, a human being confronts his grief face to face. This grief is a mountain, but he has to find space inside himself for it, to familiarize himself with it, to digest it, and it him. This is the highest form of moral effort, which has always ennobled every human being. A duel with years and with walls constitutes moral work and a path upward… if you can climb it.

Through tragic personal experience I corroborated that processing the mountain of grief was, certainly, the only way to develop the soul. Only the rarest among the rare have climbed the path. Which is why in no website that I know in this hedonistic age the forced initiation is taken seriously. But there are exceptions… In the comments section of this site, Goodrich wrote:

I wrote the above book…
I died a thousand deaths in so doing…
Yet I felt I had to finish it—for them.
Thanks to Mr. Sexton for his review.
Like himself, I have never been the same man since.
I am sad… but I am also extremely mad… extremely mad.

Last weeks I had to pause during my agonic reading of Hellstorm by talking frequent breaks, but like the author I had to digest the sins that the West committed against itself—and besides feeling outraged paradoxically I also feel strangely calm and liberated now. The psychological causes of self-loathing among present-day westerners had been an enigma. The idea is dawning in my mind that the last words quoted by Goodrich in the last page of his book provide an answer:

We had turned the evil of our enemies back upon them a hundredfold, and, in so doing, something of our integrity had been shattered, had been irrevocably lost.

Alas, since Anglo-Saxons did not examine their conscience but instead still celebrate their having led the “civilized” world in ganging up on Germany, the moral integrity of this subgroup of the white world is gone. Forever gone. And precisely because of the unredeemed character of this sin, what the former Allies did in Hitler’s Germany has created a monster from the Id that has been destroying our civilization since then: a lite Morgenthau Plan for all white people.

It is true that I have abandoned Christianity. But I still believe in the salvific effects of the triad examining conscience, repentance and atonement: the painful soul-building that Solzhenitsyn experienced in his cell (though, it must be said, not as a penalty for his having massacred civilian Prussians). If, unlike him, we haven’t had the opportunity of being committed to a gulag prison, let us experience, in the gloomy solitude of our bedrooms, the same painful yet awakening process through pondering on the historical events exposed in Goodrich’s book.

Prison causes the profound rebirth of a human being… profound pondering over his own “I”… Here all the trivia and fuss have decreased. I have experienced a turning point. Here you harken to that voice deep inside you, which amid the surfeit and vanity used to be stifled by the roar from outside…

Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens from suffering…

Categories
God Turner Diaries (novel) William Pierce

Turner Diaries quote (5)


“I understand now why we cannot fail, no matter what we must do to win and no matter how many of us must perish in doing it. Everything that has been and everything that is yet to be depend on us. We are truly the instruments of God in the fulfillment of His Grand Design.

These may seem like strange words to be coming from me, who has never been religious, but they are utterly sincere words.”

Listen to the Audiobook: here

Categories
Art Degenerate art Music

­Advanced beings prefer advanced music

Vienna-State-Opera-in-1912No other biocultural entity has developed heavenly music quite like the White race has. Your European ancestors couldn’t be bothered with jungle music. Why ignore their wisdom? Why spit upon your heritage by tolerating “fat beats” for even one second? Tunes like that are the rhythm that savages slither and writhe to. Cacophony of the most vulgar and loathsome kind. Do everything in your power to de-familiarize yourself and others with it. One might be tempted to ask “If it’s so awful why is it so popular?”

Here’s the answer kiddies: positive association. Constantly inundating the airwaves with jungle music forces us unconsciously to connect it with events happening at the time of hearing. So help de-program your kin and turn off that trash!

♣

Originally posted at freedomcobra.wordpress
(that blog has been removed)

Categories
Art Beauty Maxfield Parrish Metaphysics of race / sex

Maxfield Parrish Poster Book

Or:

The ten books that made an impact in my life
before I became racially conscious
1.- Maxfield Parrish Poster Book
(discovered in 1978)



No need to use many words why this book profoundly affected my life. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Parrish’s paintings made me discover something already existent in my inner soul: the potential divinity of the white race, the world we have to fight for with all our might (what eventually became Dave Lane’s fourteen words: “That the beauty of the white Aryan women shall not perish from the earth.”)

♣

For the other nine books see here.

Matt Parrott’s definition of metaphysics

Jason,

What does it really mean to have a metaphysical orientation, other than being spacey?

In the most sparse and generic terms, it entails truly and integrally believing in something which transcends self.

The ramifications of that are tremendous. It’s that special sauce distinguishing a woman who purses her lips and concludes “I agree that we definitely need to have more children, but we simply can’t afford to have any more in this economy…” and a woman who actually has more kids. It’s the difference between a man who concludes “White genocide is wrong, and I’m going to blog anonymously about it…” and a man who concludes “White genocide is wrong, and I’m going to speak forcefully against it in church tomorrow…”

On some fine day in the future, being pro-White will be the way to be to bag that good job or make a good impression on that babe in Accounting. One day, I’ll be able to boast that I was pro-White before it was cool. You’ll insist that you were the “Jason Speaks” guy on that blog who argued passionately in support of White Survival. Nobody will believe you, because five other people will be claiming to be that guy.

But seriously, right now being pro-White is indubitably a matter of sacrifice. Only those who value something greater than self, those with a metaphysical orientation of one stripe or another, are willing and able to make those sacrifices.

There are a handful of exceptions, and there are special cases where men have found ways to protect their worldly stations while being pro-White. With the exception of autism-spectrum folks who are congenitally immune to social pressure and outcasts who latch on to racialism and antisemitism as a more provocative alternative to Satanism, nobody with their selfish interests at heart are going to speak out. Only people who have managed to “transcend self” are going to win what Evola calls the inner war necessary to win the outer war.

♣

Source: Comment in “Review of Hyperborean Home”

Categories
Ancient Greece Arcadia Architecture Art Arthur C. Clarke Beauty Child abuse Christendom Civilisation (TV series) Counter-Reformation Demography Free speech / association Friedrich Nietzsche Homosexuality Industrial Revolution Islamization of Europe Kali Yuga Kenneth Clark Mainstream media Martin Luther Michelangelo Montaigne New York Philosophy Philosophy of history Protestantism Real men Reformation Rembrandt St Francis William Shakespeare

On Kenneth Clark’s “Civilisation”

Kenneth Clark may have been clueless about the fact that race matters. Yet, that our rot goes much deeper than what white nationalists realize is all too obvious once we leave, for a while, the ghetto of nationalism and take a look at the classics, just as Clark showed us through his 1969 TV series Civilisation.

Compared to the other famous series, Clark’s was unsurpassed in the sense that, as I have implied elsewhere, only genuine art—not science—has a chance to fulfill David Lane’s fourteen words.

By “art” I mean an evolved sense of beauty which is almost completely absent in today’s nationalists. Most of them are quite a product of Jewish modernity whether with their music, lifestyles or Hollywood tastes, to a much greater degree than what they think. For nationalism to succeed an evolved sense of female beauty has to be the starting point to see the divine nature of the white race. In Clark’s own words, “For all these reasons I think it is permissible to associate the cult of ideal love with the ravishing beauty and delicacy that one finds in the madonnas of the thirteenth century. Were there ever more delicate creatures than the ladies on Gothic ivories? How gross, compared to them, are the great beauties of other woman-worshiping epochs.”

Below, links to excerpts of most of the chapters of the 1969 series, where Clark followed the ups and downs of our civilisation historically:

“The Skin of our Teeth”

“The Great Thaw”

“Romance and Reality”

“Man—the Measure of all Things”

“The Hero as Artist”

“Protest and Communication”

“Grandeur and Obedience”

“The Light of Experience”

“Heroic Materialism”

Categories
Arcadia Architecture Civilisation (TV series) Kenneth Clark Renaissance

Civilisation’s “Man—the Measure of all Things”

For an introduction to these series, see here.

Below, some indented excerpts of “Man—the Measure of all Things,” the fourth chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark, after which I offer my comments.

Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:

The Pazzi Chapel, built by the great Florentine Brunellesco in about 1430, is in a style that has been called the architecture of humanism. His friend and fellow-architect, Leon Battista Alberti, addressed man in these words: ‘To you is given a body more graceful than other animals.’

There is no better instance of how a burst of civilisation depends on confidence than the Florentine state of mind in the early fifteenth century. For fifty years the fortunes of the republic, which in a material sense had declined, were directed by a group of the most intelligent individuals who have ever been elected to power by a democratic government. From Salutati onwards the Florentine chancellors were scholars, believers in the studia humanitatis, in which learning could be used to achieve a happy life.

In Florence the first thirty years of the fifteenth century were the heroic age of scholarship when new texts were discovered and old texts edited. It was to house these precious texts, any one of which might contain some new revelation that might alter the course of human thought, that Cosimo de Medici built the library of San Marco. It looks to us peaceful and remote—but the first studies that took place there were not remote from life at all. It was the humanist equivalent of the Cavendish Laboratory. The manuscripts unpacked and studied under these harmonious vaults could alter the course of history with an explosion, not of matter, but of mind.

The discipline of trade and banking, in its most austere form, was beginning to be relaxed, and life—a full use of the human faculties—became more important than making money.

The dignity of man. Today these words die on our lips. But in the fifteenth century Florence their meaning was still a fresh and invigorating belief. Gianozzo Manetti, a humanist man of affection, who had seen the seamy side of politics, nevertheless wrote a book entitled On the Dignity and Excellence of Man. And this is the concept that Brunellesco’s friends were making visible.

Gravitas, the heavy tread of moral earnestness, becomes a bore if it is not accompanied by the light step of intelligence. Next to the Pazzi Chapel are the cloisters of Santa Croce, also built by Brunellesco. I said that the Gothic cathedrals were hymns to the divine light. These cloisters happily celebrate the light of human intelligence, and sitting in them I find it quite easy to believe in man. They have the qualities that give distinction to a mathematical theorem: clarity, economy, elegance.

Alberti, in his great book on building, describes the necessity of a public square ‘where young men may be diverted from the mischievousness and folly natural to their age.’ The early Florentine Renaissance was an urban culture, bourgeois properly so-called. Men spent their time in the streets and squares, and in the shops.

Elsewhere I’ve talked about how the modern world of money is inimical to racial interests. As to date, no white nationalist that I know has criticized the barbarous architecture, symptomatic in the worshiping of the new god of capitalism, so well epitomized in both London and New York: the subject of the last episode of Civilisation.

Together with the degenerate music, TV and Hollywood tastes and sexual lifestyles of some nationalists, architecture is another facet where the uncorrupted individual can read the signs of a decadent society; and why he cannot blame non-gentiles for all our problems when even the nationalists themselves are part of this problem.

Remember Clark’s words in the first episode? “If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a Minister of Housing or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the buildings.” One only has to contrast the completely soulless edifices we see everyday going to work with Raphael’s town square and see how extremely degraded, Mammonesque in fact our large cities have become.

In the popular imagination, the extreme examples of this degeneracy are the Foundation novels of Asimov and the latest Star Wars films, where a whole planet has become metropolis: the exact opposite of the most humane sci-fi novels by Arthur C. Clarke where, like the Florentines, the white people lived in small Elysian towns. Architecture today is so degenerate that even Roger Scruton in Why Beauty Matters—a 2009 BBC documentary that, unlike Clark’s Civilisation, is marred by the constant presence of non-whites—pays special attention to the sterile architectural forms of today’s world.

I wish young nationalists became believers in the studia humanitatis and familiarise themselves with those intellectuals in the movement that (like Clark) have a much broader sense of European culture than the common white nationalist blogger. I refer to people like Tom Sunic in Europe and Michael O’Meara in America. Both could help us to leave behind the provincial scene so common in the nationalist sphere as well as the simplistic single-cause hypothesis.

It is true that, unlike the Athenians, fifteenth century Florentines were chiefly interested, like contemporary western man, in making money. But like the Athenians the Florentines… loved beauty. Of the landscapes whose beauty mostly caught my attention during a trip through Europe by train, I still remember the Italian, about which Clark said:

Looking at the Tuscan landscape with its terraces of vines and olives and the dark vertical accents of the cypresses, one has the impression of timeless order. There must have been a time when it was all forest and swamp—shapeless, formless; and to bring order out of chaos is a process of civilisation.

Then, in the first years of the sixteenth century, the Venetian painter Giorgione transformed this happy contact with nature into something openly sensual. The ladies who, in the Gothic gardens, had been protected by voluminous draperies, are now naked; and, as a result, his Fête Champêtre opens a new chapter in European art. Giorgione was, indeed, one of the inspired, unpredictable innovators who disturb the course of history; and in this picture he has illustrated one of the comforting illusions of civilised man, the myth of Arcadia, which had been popularised some twenty years earlier by the poet Sannazaro. Of course, it is only a myth. Country life isn’t at all like this, and even on a picnic ants attack the sandwiches and wasps buzz round the wine glasses. But the pastoral fallacy had inspired Theocritus and Virgil, and had not been unknown in the Middle Ages. Giorgione has seen how fundamentally pagan it is.

True, but I don’t believe that the pastoral fallacy is childish. Pace Arthur Clarke, achieving Arcadia is an essentially psychogenic endeavour rather than a technological one. And I sincerely believe that utopia is feasible: only human primitivism, and especially the “monsters from the Id” currently affecting the white peoples, prevent it.

It has long seemed to me wise thinking about an ideal to direct our efforts toward it. It doesn’t matter if the ideal encounters numerous pitfalls: our will should incessantly be directional toward the worlds of the Florentine Fête. If the will of a sufficiently massive amount of white people is noble, the outside world can and will only represent the nobility of that will. Clark said:

With Giorgione’s picnic the balance and enjoyment of our human faculties seems to achieve perfection. But in history all points of supposed perfection have a hint of menace; and Giorgione himself discovers it in that mysterious picture known as the Tempesta.

What on earth is going on? What is the meaning of this half-naked woman suckling a baby, this flash of lightening, this broken column? Nobody knows; nobody has ever known.

To me the meaning is obvious. Even since the Renaissance artists started to see that the cities, more inclined to Mammon than to Raphael’s square, were places of tribulation in contrast to the madonna and her child with the man standing in contrapposto. Broken pillars often symbolize death (that bucolic world was about to die), and the painting’s storm in the background could be interpreted to symbolize urban turmoil.

Categories
Beauty Crusades

Civilisation’s “The Great Thaw”

For an introduction to these series, see here.

Below, some indented excerpts of “The Great Thaw,” the second chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark, after which I offer my comments.

Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:

There have been times in the history of man when the earth seems suddenly to have grown warmer or more radio-active… I don’t put that forward as a scientific proposition, but the fact remains that three or four times in history man has made a leap forward that would have been unthinkable under ordinary evolutionary conditions. One such time was about the year 3000 BC, when quite suddenly civilisation appeared, not only in Egypt and Mesopotamia but in the Indus valley; another was in the late sixth century BC, when there was not only the miracle of Ionia and Greece—philosophy, science, art, poetry, all reaching a point that wasn’t reached again for 2000 years, but also in India a spiritual enlightenment that has perhaps never been equalled.

But what people don’t always realise is that it all happened quite suddenly—in a single lifetime.

In the brainwashed United Kingdom of the late 1960’s it would not have occurred Clark that another great awakening had occurred in Germany during his lifespan, just thirty years before; and that it was crushed by the forces of evil led by the government of his country. Speaking about Christendom at the beginning of the second millennium of the Common Era, on the next page Clark continues:

How had all this suddenly appeared in Western Europe? Of course there are many answers, but one is overwhelmingly more important than the others: the triumph of the Church.

And here Clark omitted to mention what he implied in the previous chapter: that in the first millennium the role of the Church was destructive, as surmised in his paragraph about St. Gregory who destroyed entire libraries of classical knowledge (search for “St. Gregory” here). After starting to describe the medieval period that our silly high schools completely ignore, six pages later Clark mentioned the most emblematic feature of the age:

On the physical side this took the form of pilgrimages and crusades. I think they are among the features of the Middle Ages which it is hardest for us to understand. Pilgrimages were undertaken in hope of heavenly rewards. How can one hope to share this belief which played so great a part in medieval civilisation?

Later in the series I loved to see Clark saying that he never bothered to understand economics, because this is one of the things that contemporary historians, so alienated by Marxism will never understand.

In my childhood I received a medieval education from my father. When during my adolescence he started to abuse me, the doctrine of eternal damnation that he had inculcated me since childhood metamorphosed into an internal persecutor. It didn’t matter that I managed to escape my parents’ home and moved to San Rafael in the US: the internal persecutors accompanied me throughout my twenties.

When I asked for help to the organization known as Fundamentalists Anonymous by regular mail I received a dumb reply that greatly offended me, as I recount in my last book of Hojas Susurrantes. Although technically I had already abandoned the faith I then asked for help, always through regular mail, to John J. Heaney who taught theology at Fordham University. It was the Christian Heaney, not the silly rationalists of Fundamentalists Anonymous, who immediately understood what my inner agonies really meant and tried to help, at least in the modest form of an epistle. (These were times before the electronic mail became fashionable.)

Modern rationalists who find pilgrimages hard to understand lack elemental empathy toward the Other. Even Clark, when he talks of pilgrimages undertaken “in hope of heavenly rewards,” understates what a brutally-honest historian would have said instead: undertaken in hope of saving one’s soul from the eternal fire.

I mention this personal vignette because, despite claims to the contrary, history will never be understood “objectively.” We need the subjective experiences of the survivors of a given culture, even if such experiences were written by latter-day Christians and apostates: a sphere of knowledge altogether alien for the naïve historian who’s afraid to enter the tragic, subjective universes.

But Clark was infinitely superior to the Mr. Spock historian who currently controls the universities. On the next page he states:

Of course the most important place of pilgrimage was Jerusalem. After the tenth century, when a strong Byzantine empire made the journey practicable, pilgrims used to go in parties of 7,000 at a time. This is the background of that extraordinary episode in history, the First Crusade.

The crusades aside, several pages later Clark speaks of the author of The Heavenly Hierarchies:

He argued that we could only come to understand absolute beauty, which is God, through the effect of precious and beautiful things on our senses. He said: ‘The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material.’ This was really a revolutionary concept in the Middle Ages. It was the intellectual background of all sublime works of art in the next century and in fact has remained the basis of our belief in the value of art until today.

“Today” still meant 1969, when Clark’s body language and voice were recorded by the BBC. Not anymore. Presently many whites seem to loathe traditional works of art not only by labelling them “kitch” but by praising instead degenerate forms of cultural expression. That this happens even among white nationalists, the watchdogs of the West, should be enough to convince the honest reader that something really odd is gong on in the white psyche, and that we hardly can blame the Jews for all our problems.

Following next Clark takes us to that place where the dull mind, even the atheist’s mind, rises indeed through the matter, Chartres Cathedral:

Chartres was the centre of a school of philosophy devoted to Plato, and in particular to his mysterious book called the Timaeus, from which it was thought that the whole universe could be interpreted as a form of measurable harmony.

Figures had been made into columns since the Cnidian treasury at Delphi, but never so narrowly compressed and elongated as they are here. I fancy that the faces which look at us from the past are the surest indication we have of the meaning of an epoch.

Once more the chronicles describe how people came from all over France to join the work, how whole villages moved in order to help provide for the workmen; and of course there must have been many more of them this time, because the buildings was bigger and more elaborate, and required hundreds of masons, not to mention a small army of glass-makers.

Chartres is the epitome of the first great awakening in European civilisation.

Absolute beauty, the God of the post-Christian, not evil music or Hollywood treason has a chance to bring into being another great awakening…