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Christian art Constantinople Eastern Orthodox Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 156

 
The papal revolution fails

The mass of the clergy naturally knew that their power rested above all on the magic of the cause, on the beautiful appearance, on the outward and sensible charm of religious services; therefore they had to stand by the people, who venerated the sacred images.
 

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Editor’s note: This is a continuation of the pages on Byzantine iconoclasm. Religious art is propaganda and the lesson is clear. If you want the masses to change their paradigm, you have to destroy not only their Christian art, but their neochristian art as well (virtually all Hollywood movies, all American music and degenerate Western music of today, etc.). The burning of books should be as public as the Nazis did. But who among the so-called white nationalists thinks so radically? (a clue: they are still Judaeo-Christians or neochristians). Deschner continues:
 

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Gregory’s irritation wasn’t exclusively for theological reasons, but also very specific material reasons. Emperor Leo III successfully defended Constantinople by land and sea (717-718) against the Arabs in one of the most decisive slaughters in world history. And so Asia Minor, which gradually freed itself from Islamic rule in a series of annual campaigns, remained Byzantine and Christian for almost seven centuries. To balance its finances after the war against the Arabs, new taxes had to be imposed; this affected above all the Roman Church, which with its extensive territorial holdings was the leading economic power in Italy…

The monarch had an image of Christ replaced by a cross at the entrance to his palace. But Pope Gregory II was the real leader of Italy in the uprising against his lord, he was ‘the head of the Italian revolution’ (Hartmann). So ‘Be subject to authority’ no longer counted; what counted was ‘It is necessary to obey God rather than men’. And in practice God is always where the pope is! And the pope not only encouraged the patriarch of Constantinople, St Germanus, to fight against the emperor, but he called on the whole world, and so civil war broke out everywhere…

Consequently the exarch Paulus was ordered to depose Gregory from his papal chair. But when the Ravenna militia arrived, the pope opposed them with a league of Italian soldiers and Longboards. Imperial governors and officials were expelled from Venice, Ravenna and Rome, and Byzantine troops in Benevento and Spoleto. The exarch Paulus was eliminated by murderous hands. His generals were also eliminated. Doge Exhileratus and his son Adrian, excommunicated for years by the pope because of irregular marriage, were seized and killed by the Roman militia. The Roman doge Petrus had his eyes gouged out for having written to the emperor ‘against the pope’. The uprising triumphed everywhere: His Holiness and the Longboards rose in common rebellion against the emperor…

But the emperor eventually overpowered the rebellion. He seized all the pope’s patrimony in southern Italy, with Sicily alone representing a loss of 350 pounds of gold.

The dispute over images continued throughout Leo’s reign and became even more acute under his son and successor Constantine V (741-776), called Ikonokiastes, the destroyer of images (and also Kopronymos, for having soiled the water at his baptism, and Caballinus because he liked the smell of horse manure). It is true that when in 742 an iconodule usurper rose, his brother-in-law Artabasdos kept Rome on the side of the iconoclast emperor and had the eyes of the vanquished and his sons gouged out, and Pope Zacharias bequeathed a generous donation of land. Constantine, who took an active part in the long-standing dispute and who showed a remarkable interest in theological questions, had the invocation of the saints and Mary banned and all images of the saints removed or destroyed from the churches.

This emperor especially persecuted the monks, who were all the more fanatical supporters of the cult of images because they had an economic monopoly on the manufacture of icons. The monasteries were expropriated and closed, transformed into barracks and bathing facilities, or destroyed, as was the case with the monasteries of Kallistratos, Dios, Maximinos, and others. Their inhabitants had to choose between giving up their habits and taking wives or being blinded and banished. In Ephesus, nuns and monks were forced to marry and others were executed with the backing of a council held in Constantinople in 754…

The ‘blood and fire’ struggle culminated in the 760s. Abbot Stephanos of Mount Auxentius, leader of the iconodule opposition, was lynched in the streets of Constantinople in November 765. In August 766 alone, sixteen high-ranking officials and officers, supporters of the cult of images, were executed. The following year the head of the patriarch Constantine was also rolled into the palace. The emperor had already had him flogged…

Constantine, clean-shaven and wearing a derisory sleeveless dress, was led through the streets on a donkey to the hippodrome, where he was insulted and spat upon by the entire Christian populace. The donkey was led by the halter by his nephew Constantine, whose nose had been cut off. ‘When he arrived in front of the circus games, they came down from their seats, spat on him and threw filth at him. At the stop in front of the imperial tribune, they threw him off his horse and stepped on the back of his neck’. At the end of the month the man disavowed his belief, and after demanding reparation, he was beheaded. His corpse was dragged through the streets to the slaughterhouse of the executed and his head hung by the ears for three days as a public chastisement.

Isn’t this kind Christianity? Yes: that happened in Byzantium, but how were things in Rome?

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Autobiography Christendom Christian art Constantinople Eastern Orthodox Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Theology

Christianity’s Criminal History, 155

– For the context of these translations click here –

The dispute over images begins

If we are well-informed about the 6th century of Byzantine history, thanks especially to the detailed descriptions of the historian Procopius, the 7th and 8th centuries remain in great obscurity. Only the chronicles of two theologians, both defenders of images and who died in exile—that of the patriarch of Constantinople Nicephorus and, somewhat more extensively, that of Theophanes the Confessor—shed little light on that violent period, within which the late 7th and early 8th centuries are regarded as one of the darkest epochs of Byzantine history.

Emperor Justinian II (685-695, 705-711), who tried so hard to derive imperial power from the will of God, had many thousands of Slavic families, previously deported by him, executed. In 695 he was expelled from the throne and, with his nose cut off, banished to Crimea. Subsequent rulers succeeded one another in rapid succession, and for two decades total anarchy triumphed. In addition, the Bulgars, nomads from the Volga territories, broke into the empire and in 711 advanced under Chan Terwel to the vicinity of Constantinople. In 717 the Arabs reappeared and besieged the capital, although Leo III (717-741) the Isaurian was able to repel them. But it was precisely this saviour of Byzantium, so exalted by Christianity to this day, who was also the author of a bloody Christian quarrel, which shook the Byzantine world for more than a century and more violently than any other religious dispute, and contributed to no small way to the estrangement between eastern and western Rome.

By general estimation the conflict began in 726, when a devastating earthquake in the southern Aegean was interpreted as a ‘judgement of God’ because of the new ‘idolatry’ that had penetrated the Church: the worship of images. Emperor Leo III ordered the removal of all representations of saints, martyrs and angels, and in 730 ordered their destruction, not excluding images of Christ and Mary. Iconoclasm, which caught on not only among the clergy but also among the masses, has often been the subject of study but has been explained perhaps more contradictorily than any other phenomenon in Byzantine history. What is certain is that it shook the empire to hardly imaginable limits. Much more than a mere theological dispute or religious reform movement, it also represented a clash between civil and ecclesiastical power and reduced the state to a heap of ruins; and this at a time of a certain political recovery within and beyond the borders and when the Christological controversies had already ended.

Moreover, the starting point of the dispute over images was a purely theological-dogmatic problem. Already the primitive Indo-European religion was devoid of images, as were the Vedic, Zarathustrian, Old Roman and Old Germanic religions. And so was the Jewish religion in particular. The Old Testament already strictly forbade any worship of images. Nor did early Christianity know of any figurative representation of God. Quite the contrary. Just as ancient Judaism expressly condemned the making of representations and just as the prophets mocked ‘those who make a god and worship an idol’, so also the early church fathers fought long and hard against the worship of images, which was to become so widespread later on.

Even in the 4th century, theologians such as Eusebius and Archbishop Epiphanius of Salamis were against graphic reproductions, while the Council of Elvira forbade the reproduction and worship of images. On the contrary, it was ‘heretics’, the Gnostics, who initiated the change and who introduced the image of Christ and its veneration into Christianity.

Its use spread to the East from the 4th century, and by the 6th century it was as widespread there as it is today. Not only images of Christ were venerated, but also those of Mary, the saints and angels. It was mainly the monks who encouraged this practice for a very specific material reason: iconolatry was part of their business (e.g. the pilgrimages that brought money). The pro-icon theologians (iconodules) justified it all, because according to their interpretation it was not the dead image that was worshipped, but the living God, and, as Nicephorus said, ‘a vision leads to faith’. On the other hand, the destroyers of images (iconoclasts) tried to give renewed validity to the Christian prescriptions, which were unquestionably older.

But the people venerated the icons themselves as bearers of health and miracles. The icon became the content and synthesis of their faith. It was engraved on their furniture, clothes and armour. Thanks to heaven or priestly art, icons began to speak, bleed, to defend themselves when attacked. Moreover, there were eventually icons that represented a real novelty, since they were ‘not made by human hands’ (acheiropoietai).
 

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Editor’s Note: For The West’s Darkest Hour, the only thing that matters is the destruction of Greco-Roman art by Christians (Christians destroying their art is as good for us as BLM destroying the statues of white Christians). In this image we see St Benedict’s monks destroying a statue of Apollo. Regarding those images Karlheinz Deschner speaks of in the last sentence, the supposedly miraculous images ‘not made by human hands’, for two years I researched the most famous relic of this type, the image on the shroud of Turin, and published my findings here. In my humble opinion, the so-called ‘shroud’ of Turin was the last ditch of Christendom’s dying apologetics (the apologetics of American fundamentalists is so ridiculous that no one takes it seriously). Deschner continues:
 

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Thus the believing people increasingly exalted the images, identifying them with the saint they represented. They kissed the statues and the representations, and lit candles and lamps for them. The sick sometimes took coloured and scratched particles from them to obtain health. They were incensed and the faithful knelt before them; in a word, the people treated such objects in exactly the same way as the pagans treated their ‘idols’.

And it was precisely the opponents of iconolatry, the iconoclasts, who interpreted this as a kind of idolatry. They came from the imperial household, from the army and especially from certain regions under the influence of anti-image Islam, such as the territories of Asia Minor. They also lived in the borderlands of the eastern part of the empire, where especially the Paulician admirers of the Apostle Paul were opposed to the worship of the cross and images, ceremonies and sacraments. These were ‘heretical’ Christians, who first appeared in Armenia in the middle of the 7th century and who for more than two centuries were extremely active on the eastern Byzantine frontier.

It is, however, curious, and at the same time sheds some light on the whole controversy, that the emperors and army, who were the most bitter enemies of the cult of images, had earlier been its special promoters. The rulers of the 6th and 7th centuries, taking advantage of the delirium of the masses for images, had used them for their political and especially military purposes. The images were led into countless battles and whole cities were placed under their protection, turning them into fortress defenders.
 

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Editor’s note: This seems like a long time ago. But for me it is very close. When years ago I tried to tell my Catholic father that the Islamisation of Europe was a very alarming phenomenon, and France came into the conversation, he replied triumphantly: ‘Nothing can happen there: there is the Virgin of Lourdes!’

My smiling father’s statement couldn’t be understood without an explanation. In 1883 my great-grandfather Damián Tort Rafols, who could speak French, brought back a bronze replica of the Virgin’s grotto, which he bought in France. The replica became an object of worship for the Tort people of Chiapas and Puebla, and still stands a few metres away from where I am writing. The level at which the ancient Tort worshipped this replica, according to intergenerational anecdotes, has always impressed, and embarrassed, me.

What struck me most about my father’s triumphant declaration is that, more than a thousand years after that Byzantine delirium, there are still people who believe such things as that a specific Virgin can protect a city or nation, be it modern France or any other. Deschner continues:
 

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But all too often they had failed in that function as one city after another fell to the ‘infidels’, which undoubtedly brings us closer to the direct cause of iconoclasm. If the images had performed the miracles expected of them, their destruction would probably never have happened. ‘But the icons hadn’t delivered what the people expected’ (Mango).

The revolt had come mainly from the Eastern episcopate. The iconoclastic party had its main representatives in the minor Asian bishops Constantine of Nakoleia, Metropolitan Thomas of Klaudioupolis and Theodore of Ephesus. The iconoclastic party also had its first fatalities: several of the soldiers sent to remove the images were killed in a popular uprising. The iconodules, the image-worshippers, were found in almost every corner of the empire. In the East they included the nonagenarian Patriarch Germanos of Constantinople (715-730) and the metropolitan John of Symnada, as well as monks. In the West, the cult of images was defended by the great masses, and above all by the papacy, which claimed greater autonomy and even political leadership from the very beginning. It was no coincidence that Byzantine sovereignty succumbed to a considerable extent in central Italy.

The imperial court soon renounced iconoclastic actions in Italy. Although the monarch Constantine V (741-776), a vehement enemy of images, who declared himself a true friend of Christ and a worshipper not of his image but his cross, personally wrote some polemical writings and created his own theology, especially against the representation of Christ, which for him was an expression of Nestorianism or Monophysitism, i.e. the separation or mixing of ‘the two natures’ in Christ. And the Council of Constantinople (757) rejected outright the worship of images as the work of Satan and as idolatry.

Categories
Destruction of Germanic paganism Islam Islamization of Europe Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 151

– For the context of these translations click here –
 

In 718 Charles Martell (depicted left in the French book Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum) ravaged Saxony as far as the Weser and in the same or the following year defeated a detachment at Soissons under the command of the steward Raganfred and Duke Eudo of Aquitaine.

He soon led further campaigns against the Saxons, fighting them until 738, and even then Charles Martell was able to impose tribute and hostages on ‘those incorrigible heathens’. These are the words of our source: ‘The valiant Charles broke through with the Frankish army, encamped according to an intelligent plan at the mouth of the Lippe, by the stream of the Rhine, destroyed most of that strip of land with much bloodshed, made some of that savage people tributary, took many hostages and with God’s help returned home victorious’…

Charles Martell consolidated his power through continuous raids. Year after year he marched on a campaign, not only to secure his frontiers but also to expand them by subjugating and enslaving peoples. He didn’t only advance against the Neustrians; he also fought everywhere against the Alamans, over whom he achieved in 725 and 730 extremely bloody victories, while at the same time making Bishop Pirmin missionary in favour of his hegemony. Martell waged several wars against ‘the savage maritime nation of the Frisians’ (‘one of the main achievements of his life’—Braunfels) and two campaigns, in 733 and 737, ending even with a ‘bold maritime excursion’ and ‘with the right number of ships’ he advanced with his fleet up the Zuider-zee. He completely devastated the country, killed the duke, the ‘crafty councillor’ of the Frisians, and burned the pagan sanctuaries—with the good Christian art of spreading the good news of the gospel. He fought the Saxons, whom he sent Boniface with a letter of recommendation. He marched against the Thuringians and the Bavarians, over Burgundy and Provence.

 
The irruption of Islam

Islam, which sought to re-establish the original religion, the ‘religion of Abraham’, did not see in Moses and Jesus false prophets, but authentic prophets who hadn’t known the whole truth or whose teachings had been falsified by their disciples. Curiously, the new faith was at first regarded only as a ‘heresy’ of Eastern Christianity; nor is it strange that the scholastics still hesitate to designate the Muslims as ‘heretics or pagans’…

Under Abdul Malik (685-705) and his son Al-Walid I (705-715) the Muslims conquered Turkestan, the Caucasus and northern Africa where they ‘converted’ the Berbers. In 681 they reached the Atlantic coast of Morocco and in 697 conquered Carthage. By 698 they had definitively seized all the North African fortifications, and from Tunis, the new capital, the occupiers’ fleet controlled the western Mediterranean. Even before the end of the 15th century, the Arabs possessed the largest territorial empire in the history of the world, larger than the empire of Rome or the empire of Alexander. Their empire eventually stretched from the Aral Sea to the Nile and from the Bay of Biscay to China.

Within a generation, the Church had lost two-thirds of its faithful to Islam. And almost all Islamic conquests, except the territories of Spain and part of the Balkans, have remained Islamic to this day.

The first troops arrived on the Iberian peninsula, a group of about 400 men, in July 710. And the following year an invasion army of 7,000 soldiers arrived, soon reinforced by another 5,000. They entered through Gibraltar (named after the Arab sub-commander Tariq ibn-Ziyad). In the same year the invaders annihilated the army of the Hispanic Visigoths at the Battle of Jerez de la Frontera (Cadiz). By 715 they had occupied all the important cities in the country and in 720, after crossing the Pyrenees, they conquered Narbonne. The infidels were even said to have advanced as far as Tours to plunder the church treasury, stored in the tomb of Saint Martin.

It was there that Charles Martell faced the ‘infidels’ with the army summoned from all over the kingdom: plunderers against plunderers. Before the battle north of Poitiers they stalked each other for seven days, before the defeated Arabs, on 17 October 732, withdrew to Spain…

Charles Martell continued his fight against the Arabs in 735, 736, 737 and 739, repeatedly penetrating into Aquitaine, ‘the land of the Goths’, and Provence, the Roman province Gallia Narbonensis. After taking Avignon by assault, he had the defenders killed. Charles destroyed Nimes with its ancient amphitheatre and ravaged the cities Agde and Béziers. He had the most famous cities razed to the ground; with their houses and city walls, set fire to them and reduced them to ashes. He also destroyed the suburbs and fortifications of that territory. When Charles Martell had defeated the army of his enemies, he, who in all his decisions was guided by Christ, in whom alone is the gift of victory, returned safe to his region, the land of the Franks and the seat of his government…

The first ‘Carolingian’ ruled over the whole kingdom, moving among the Merovingian puppet kings. The sources call him dux and princeps, and the popes occasionally gave him the titles of patricias and sobregulus while for his part Martell accurately proclaimed himself maior domus. But he also financed many of his massacres with ecclesiastical goods—something which modern scholars have often falsely labelled secularisation—and continued to live as a plunderer of the Church. However, Charles Martell was anything but hostile to the Church or the clergy, as is shown by his exaltation by such prominent propagandists of Christianity as Pirmin, Willibrord and Boniface.

Categories
Francisco Franco Real men Sexual degeneracy

Franco, 1

I have been watching documentaries interviewing Spanish academics about Francisco Franco and Franco’s Spain that have given me pause for thought.

The first surprise I got was that the Second Spanish Republic ‘liberated’ women, a Newspeak term meaning that it altered sexual roles in the 1930s through a ‘feminism’ that was reversed during Franco’s regime, when women resumed their role as procreators. Homosexuality was also considered degenerating with the return to family values.

I was also unaware that the Spanish Civil War had been so bloody and that the battles from town to town, village to village had been so prolonged because the Republicans really believed in their ideology and fought, together with the foreigners who came to Spain to fight for the ‘freedom’ of Spain, with extraordinary persistence and faith.

In the mature phase of the war, the huge posters that lined the streets of Madrid with Stalin’s face really surprised me, as did the level of power enjoyed by the Soviets who had come to Spain to advise the Republican government. A picture is worth a thousand words, and those huge faces of Stalin and Lenin in Madrid leave no doubt as to who were the good guys in that war.

The memory of Franco should be revalued. If Hitler and the Germans had not been crushed by the bad guys in our film, the sexual decency that reigned under Franco would still reign in the West today. I recently said in the comments section that if I were to make a political career I would, like Hitler, have to compromise with Christians. And indeed: it is Christians like Matt Walsh in North America, and Agustín Laje in Latin America, who are doing a stupendous battle against the continent’s most florid psychoses when it comes to sexuality.

Today’s Woke monster is the final spawn of a process of inversion of values that began, in its secular phase, with the French Revolution but has only now reached its culmination in the United States whose hegemony influences the entire West, including that projection of the West, ‘Latin America’.

Another thing that has been striking me in the documentaries I watch is the tremendous support from civil society that the generalissimo received throughout his dictatorship. If Americans were to transvalue their values to the sexual decency of the past, they would have to repudiate democracy and consider having their first dictator although, unlike the first dictator in the UK—Cromwell—, without inviting Jews into the nation. (Recall that Protestantism has been more friendly to Jews than old-fashioned Catholicism.)

It is impossible to begin to familiarise oneself with Franco’s dictatorship without feeling that democracy must be repudiated as a body-snatched pod, including freedom of expression. The ceremonies in the big Spanish cities commemorating the historic milestones, so similar to the street ceremonies in Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, with tens of thousands of civilians cheering the Caudillo, are very inspiring about how we should proceed if we were to seize power. What I liked most, when the Nationalists won the war, were the tens of thousands (50,000?) of Reds executed. As long as the white nationalists of America don’t become men—real men kill the enemy—they deserve the System they have. In any case, 50,000 is nothing compared to the 50 million, or more, killed by the Communists in the century in which I was born.

That said, Franco’s Spain cannot be the model of the transvalued racists. Most of its military was rather monarchist, and they disliked the Nazi model because they considered it atheistic and idolatrous. Franco’s Spain never reached the level of Italian fascism. Although the Falange wanted to imitate Mussolini, it was opposed by the army, the monarchists and the Catholic Church hierarchy. Franco’s regime had the air of a fascist state, but in reality it never was. If Hitler had won, the Falange would have had its chance (see what Hitler thought of Franco’s Spain by clicking on the ‘Francisco Franco’ category below this article).

At the end of World War II, the Falange had a million members. We must consider that the Spanish Civil War was a prelude to WW2, as Soviet, German and Italian forces were involved in the form of direct aid to the two Spanish sides. But with the Allied victory over the Axis, Franco’s Spain began to be punished in an isolationist purgatory. It was then that Falangism was defeated in favour of a ‘Christian democracy’, which was fashionable in post-war Europe.

Spain was isolated, and to satisfy international pressure, the fascist salute was abolished. Thus the entry of Catholics into the post-war government in Spain made it clear to the Falangists that their influence would wane. (Only George Lincoln Rockwell would, on the other side of the Atlantic, pick up the torch: an isolated individual.) Only in this way, by proclaiming that the ideology of post-war Spain would be a ‘national Catholicism’, could Spain be more or less tolerated, though not admitted with open arms by the international powers.

An almost medieval clericalism pervaded the mores of Franco’s Spain, along with the exaltation of the national. But therein lay the problem. As we have seen, Christianity had been the ideology that weakened the Visigoths in Hispania by mixing their blood. After the dictator’s death, Spain would be at the mercy of the liberal, deranged West.

Categories
Catholic Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty

Christianity’s Criminal History, 149

– For the context of these translations click here –

 
From the 4th century the bishops also exercised public law functions, and in late antiquity they became ‘lords of the civitas’ (cities), and the foundations of monasteries, increasingly frequent in their cities, further increased their power.

The high clergy steadily seized all possible powers. It took advantage, for example, of the release from military service, which it so inflexibly imposed on others. The same was true of the release from taxes and duties, which it naturally imposed on others. At least until the 5th century, the bishops were exempted from the annual grain tax (annona) and from the land tax on all church property, as well as from the munera sordida (dirty work) and the extraordinaria (special allowances). They fought for emancipation from other public obligations and for new rights, such as the right of asylum for their churches, which was so abused.

They also acquired ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the privilegium fori. And they increasingly extended their juridical authority. They had almost unlimited jurisdiction over their clergy, and in certain cases even over the laity, while they could only be condemned by an episcopal assembly. And secular judges, who without their authorisation pronounced on canon law, were excommunicated.

The clergy needed the bishop’s permission to do anything. The bishop also held sway in the monasteries. It was the bishop who decided on the legates to the monasteries, subjected the abbots in matters of appointment and penalties, and had almost unlimited authority over the monks.

But the influence of the bishops was all the greater because the Germanic kingdoms of the 5th and 6th centuries did not touch the possessions of the Church at all. Moreover, the Church’s possessions were increased by the extensive donations of the kings in the 6th and 7th centuries, as well as by many other transfers of property. In a short period, the Church became ‘the largest landowner after the king’ (Stern/Bartmuss).

 
The throne and the altar

It is true that the growing power and wealth of the Church led to certain tensions and disagreements. But monarchy and episcopate saw that they depended on each other and worked together. The hierarchical structure of the Frankish national church supported the political system, and the political system in turn favoured it. It was the old Do ut des business. A ‘tight intertwining of state and church’ (Aubin) prevailed. It was precisely the most powerful families of the Merovingian kingdom—the lineages of the Waldeberts, the Burgundopharones, the Crodoins, the Arnulfingians and the Pipinids—who reinforced their old privileges through Christianity and even through the work of the saints who came from their ranks, the ‘domestic saints’.

Of course, these princes also recognised the ecclesiastical authority of the pope, who in turn could hardly impose his decisions against the royal will. The Merovingians often had ecclesiastics in their court administration and bestowed episcopal sees as sinecures on meritorious fighters. They showered some prelates with enormous possessions and privileges, but almost all were treated with great veneration.

The most powerful bishops had particularly extensive holdings, occupying an almost feudal position. Some even maintained personal relations with the emperor of Byzantium. They were protected and dominated by Merovingian kings, who became the princes’ godfathers. They not only accepted their violence but supported it, complacently sanctioning their wars and cruelties.

In addition to the ever-increasing Church lands—which represented an enormous and, to say it again, inalienable source of income—there were other financial advantages. Such were, for example, the offerings, the raising of taxes, the tithe, which was invented in the 5th century as a kind of alms until the end of the 6th century when it was transformed from a moral obligation into a legal duty, with corresponding penalties for transgressors. Anyone who refused to pay it was excommunicated. A document, drawn up shortly after the Council of Tours (567) and signed by the metropolitan of the place and three of its bishops, demanded that the faithful pay the tithe, and not only of goods but also of slaves. This is the first time that the tithe is mentioned in a Merovingian text. The Synod of Macon threatened excommunication against anyone who violated the correct application of the tithe. In 779, under Charles ‘the Great’, it became a compulsory tax.

The bishops, who had long since ceased to come from the middle class of society—Chlothar II (584-629) made it a rule that they should be chosen from among the members of the upper nobility—oppressed the people with the rest of the ruling class. Sometimes they ruled like true despots. They hardly fornicated and drank less than the laity. Sitting at the king’s table, they spoke of their perjuries and adulteries; Bishop Bertram of Bordeaux was even suspected of having had something to do with Queen Fredegund. They often appointed their successors themselves.

It happened that some towns even had two bishops at the same time. Thus, in Digne-les-Bains, two bishops divided the ecclesiastical property between them, before a synod deposed them both. Something similar happened in the monasteries, which also represented from the 5th century onwards important points of support in the urban sphere for the episcopal government of the cities, since from the 6th century onwards they multiplied considerably and from the 7th century onwards they belonged to the most important landowners in the country, often becoming richer than the cathedrals of the bishops themselves. At the end of the 7th century, when there were more than four hundred monasteries in the whole kingdom, such monasteries and churches owned a third of Gaul!

Categories
2nd World War Summer, 1945 (book) Thomas Goodrich

Summer 1945 • 7

by Tom Goodrich

Finally, the two machine-guns were reloaded and the order to fire was given. In a moment, as the bullets tore into them, the young Germans standing fell upon the bodies below. Perhaps all three were killed outright; or perhaps, in yet another miracle, perhaps the three were merely wounded and feigned death.

Certain it was that among all the wounded soldiers, their lips prayed silently, under their breath, “Please, dear God, oh, please… please do not let this happen.”

In a short while, newly freed concentration camp prisoners in their striped clothing were handed pistols and ordered by the Americans to go among the stacks of bodies and finish the job. Thus, as .45 caliber slugs mechanically blew open the skulls of all German soldiers, dead and living alike, any miracles at Dachau officially ended.

“We shot everything that moved,” one GI bragged.

“We got all the bastards,” gloated another.

In Henry Morgenthau’s world, there was no room for “miracles”—Germany must perish and all Germans must die.
 

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Editor’s note: The footnotes have been omitted in the quotations above. Summer 1945 is a book that exposes the atrocities committed by the United States in Japan and Germany. If the reader wants a book by the same author that only talks about the allied atrocities in Germany, obtain a copy of Hellstorm, The Death of Nazi Germany: 1944-1947 (sample chapter: here).

Categories
Constantinople Goths Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 114

St. John Chrysostom exhorting Aelia Eudoxia. Note how the Empress—the spouse of the Roman Emperor Arcadius—, in this painting by Jean-Paul Laurens, has people in her Byzantine entourage who are not whites.

Editor’s note: In a nationalist forum last month a commenter said:

A BS narrative that makes no sense. The idea that Jews created Christianity to subjugate the world is absurd and has no basis in historical fact. Anyone with a basic knowledge of history knows that anti-Jewish Rome and Byzantium spread Christianity—to the Jews disfavour. 

It is true that some Jews suffered with the Christian emperors from the times of Constantine, but it cannot be said that the spread of Christianity was unfavourable to them. Quite the contrary: by the time of the reign of Theodosius II only two religions were legal in the Roman Empire: Judaism and Christianity! Not gratuitously I called ‘Apocalypse for Whites’ my translations of Evropa Soberana’s book on Judea vs. Rome.

The mentioned commenter does not seem to understand the double-edged strategy of the Semitic Christians of the Ancient World. Contemporary Jews are capable to withstand the open anti-Semitism of millions of Muslim migrants. Why they do that? Because they want to dilute the blood of the Aryan Man within his own land. In the same way, in the Ancient World they tolerated some repression since Constantine and his successors in order to annihilate the Greco-Roman culture of the Hellenes (i.e., the White culture), their true enemy.

Byzantium took over after the Western Roman Empire collapse. Byzantium had far more riches than Rome and its rule lasted 1,000 years. The Jews were greatly restricted under Byzantium rule. Again, you demonstrate your historical ignorance. 

Does the commenter ignore that in the times of Byzantium (Constantinople) a war was fought—a war of ethnic cleansing of pure Whites instigated by St. John Chrysostom? When Karlheinz Deschner writes below about a mood, ‘typical of the anti-Germanism that prevailed in Constantinople’, one must keep in mind that the xenophobic muds of the old Byzantium disliked the blond Nordics and massacred 7,000 of them, women and children included.

Christian readers of the history of Constantinople, even those who comment in Alt-Right forums, usually don’t care about the ethnicity of the residents of the Mud City that Constantine had founded. Not even Richard Spencer has cared about it when he mentions Byzantium in glowing terms. New visitors of this site who have not read Evropa Soberana’s essay should read it now (see sticky post), together with the only histories about the White race, by William Pierce and Arthur Kemp, that have been written.

Karlheinz Deschner wrote:
 

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The massacre of Goths in Constantinople

Arcadius, who was still a boy, was named Augustus in 383 and in 384 became independent sovereign of the East. He was educated first by his mother Aelia Flaccilla, a strict Catholic, and then by the deacon Arsenius, who came from Rome. Although not without training—even a pagan, Themistius, prefect of Constantinople, had been his teacher—, the monarch always depended on his advisors and also his wife Aelia Eudoxia (mother of St. Pulcheria and Theodosius II): a determined anti-German, that pushed Arcadius against the ‘heretics’ and the followers of the old faith, and who largely directed his internal policy. On August 7, 395, the emperor, who was then seventeen years old, censured the negligence of the authorities in the persecution of idolatrous cults.

General Gainas, an Arian Goth, who rose rapidly in the Roman army, had succeeded in the meantime. He was in 394 in the war against Eugenius; in 395, in the campaign of Stilicho against Alaric. Gainas participated next in the murder of Rufinus, and from 396 to 399, under the command of Eutropius, became et magister utrius que militiae.One day they sent Gainas to the leaders of the party opposed to the Germans, their greatest adversary: the consul Aurelian, the consular Saturninus and the clerk John. However, the Goth only touched them with the sword, manifestly implying that they would have deserved death, and sent them into exile.

Now, after an unfortunate operation in the year 399 against the Goth Tribigild, who had risen in arms, Gainas fell into suspicion. Also in Constantinople, as a reaction to the pillages of the Goths, the tributes of war and all kinds of demagogues, a rigorous national orientation had developed, a remarkable anti-Germanism ‘represented mainly by Orthodox Christians’ (Heinzberger). The people, incited with rumours, hated the Germans, the ‘barbarians’ and the Arian ‘heretics’, who even aspired to have their own church in the capital. For this reason, Gainas maintained a lively polemic with patriarch John Chrysostom, who tried vehemently to ‘convert’ the Goths and who had assigned to the Catholic Goths a temple of their own, the church of Saint Paul, thus becoming ‘the founder of a German national church in Constantinople’ (Baur, Catholic).

However, the bishop strictly banned Arian religious services. He protested before the emperor against the requests of Gainas of a church of his own. Expletives against the Arians and the remaining ‘heretics’ were unleashed. He prayed insistently to the sovereign, dominated by Eudoxia, the anti-German fanatic—since the year 400 she was considered ‘August’—who did not allow the dogs to be thrown at the saint. It is better to lose the throne than to betray the house of God. Compare this to the similar advice given by Chrysostom’s colleague, Ambrose. The intervention of the bishop encouraged the citizens, with whom conflicts had already taken place. They rebelled in the so-called ‘hot summer of the year 400’, probably due to xenophobia, the differences between the two peoples. ‘However, what was decisive was the confessional antagonism; the shedding of blood begins, curiously, when Gainas demands for its Argive Goths the concession of a church’ (Aland).

The national party, which had armed the citizens, attacked along with the Roman garrison and the palace guard, the Goth minority. Gainas was saved with a part of his troops on the night of July 12, 400, when the assault took place at the city gate. However, many of their soldiers, along with their wives and children, were killed or burned inside the ‘church of the Goths’, where they had sought refuge; in total, apparently, more than seven thousand people. It occurred ‘at the instigation of Bishop Chrysostom’ (Ludwig), though perhaps to a greater extent at the behest of the later Bishop Synesius. His manifestations as an emissary are typical of the anti-Germanism that prevailed in Constantinople.

The prestige of St. John Chrysostom ‘was reinforced by these disturbances’. Nevertheless, it was not, as the Catholic Stockmeier thinks, because he was ‘above the parties’ but because he was on the side of the victors. The Catholics, who avoided the open struggle, removed the roof of the church and massacred the ‘barbarians’ with a shower of burning stones and beams, killing every last one of them (thirty-four years before, the procedure had already given good results in Rome in the fight between two popes). After the battle, they sang a thanksgiving to heaven and Chrysostom once again praised the man who directed human destinies in his sermon.

The fugitive Gainas, now officially an enemy of the State, went to Thrace to join his people on the other side of the lower Danube. However, after the annihilation of his army, on crossing the Hellespont on 23 December of the year 400, he was killed and his head sent to Constantinople at the beginning of the following year.

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To contextualise these translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, read the abridged translationof Volume I.

Categories
2nd World War Dwight D. Eisenhower Evil Franklin D. Roosevelt Summer, 1945 (book) Thomas Goodrich

Summer 1945 • 4

by Tom Goodrich

Although cold-blooded and deliberate, the murder of disarmed and helpless German soldiers by the Americans was nothing new; it was a ruthless policy that stretched from the beaches of Normandy all the way through France, Belgium and into Germany. Dachau was only one of thousands of deliberate massacres that had taken place throughout the defeated Reich, on land, on sea and from the air, during the last year of war. If there was any significance at all to the Dachau slaughter, it was that the war, for all intents and purposes, was finally over. As far as any strategic value to the Allied war effort, there was none at Dachau. Nor was there any strategic value to the countless massacres that occurred during the deliberate firebombing of German cities where hundreds of thousands of women and children were burned alive. Nor was there any strategic value to the sinking of numerous refugee ships on the Baltic filled mostly with the very old and the very young. They were, all of them, simply a harvest of hate.

In 1933, after Adolf Hitler came to power, the World Jewish Congress declared economic warfare against Germany. Well aware of Hitler’s plan to end all Jewish influence in Germany—economically, politically, culturally—influential Jews in Europe and America engaged in a vast anti-German propaganda campaign. The campaign, said organizer Samuel Untermeyer of the United States, was a “holy war… a war that must be waged unremittingly… [against] a veritable hell of cruel and savage beasts.” [1]

As a consequence, Germans responded in kind with a campaign of their own. While citizens were encouraged to shun Jewish businesses, a series of laws were enacted designed to not only drive Jews from the German arts, the media and the professions, but laws were passed to force them entirely from the nation as well. As the economic struggle continued, Jewish journalists, writers, playwrights, and filmmakers from around the globe joined the fray. With the outbreak of war in 1939 and the entry of the United States into the conflict two years later, the war of words reached pathological proportions. Increasingly, as rumors of widespread persecution against Jews under Nazi control spread, the propaganda campaign directed at Hitler and National Socialism devolved swiftly into a fanatical cry of extermination. Nowhere was hatred more intense than among American Jews.

“[A] cancer flourishes in the body of the world and in its mind and soul, and… this cancerous thing is Germany, Germanism, and Germans…,” announced Hollywood script-writer and director, Ben Hecht. “That this most clumsy of all human tribes—this leaden-hearted German—should dare to pronounce judgment on his superiors, dare to outlaw from the world the name of Jew—a name that dwarfs him as the tree does the weed at its foot—is an outrageous thing… It is an evil thing.” [2]

“Germany must perish…,” echoed Theodore N. Kaufman in a widely-read book of the same name. “There remains then but one mode of ridding the world forever of Germanism—and that is to stem the source from which issue those war-lusted souls, by preventing the people of Germany from ever again reproducing their kind.” [3]

After years of this and other poisonous propaganda in newspapers, magazines and movies, eventually, in the minds of a sizable percentage of Americans and Britons, little distinction was drawn between killing a Nazi soldier and killing a German child.

On September 15, 1944, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt made the demand for extermination official when he endorsed the so-called “Morgenthau Plan.” Named for Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, but actually conceived by the secretary’s top aide, Harry Dexter White—both of whom were Jewish—the program called for the complete destruction of Germany after the victory had been won. In addition to the dismantling or destruction of German industry and the permanent closure of mines, the Morgenthau Plan called for a reduction of the Reich’s land area by one half. As many calculated, and as Roosevelt, Gen. George C. Marshall and other proponent s of the plan well knew, this act guaranteed that roughly two-thirds of the German population, or fifty million people, would soon die of starvation. With the remnant of the population reduced to subsistence farming, and with the shrunken nation totally at the mercy of hostile European neighbors, it was estimated that within two generations Germany would cease to exist. [4]

“Henry, I am with you 100%,” Roosevelt assured his Treasury Secretary. [5]

“They have asked for it…,” snapped Morgenthau when someone expressed shock at the plan. “Why the hell should I worry about what happens to their people?” [6]

“You don’t want the Germans to starve?” Roosevelt’s incredulous son-in-law asked the president in private.

“Why not?” replied Roosevelt without batting an eye. [7]

In fact, the American president had even greater plans for those Germans who were not starved to death or otherwise murdered.

“We have got to be tough with Germany and I mean the German people, not just the Nazis,” Roosevelt privately assured Henry Morgenthau. “You either have to castrate the German people or you have got to treat them in such a manner so they can’t go on reproducing.” [8]

“The German is a beast,” agreed Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. Not only would the top general give the Morgenthau Plan his whole-hearted support, but he would personally do his utmost to kill as many Germans—soldiers and civilians—as he possibly could. [9]

And thus did the murderous Morgenthau Plan become the undeclared, but understood, American policy toward Germany. From the firebombing of Hamburg in 1943 to the firebombing of Dresden in 1945, the goal of the British RAF and the US Eighth Air Force was now to kill every man, woman and child in every German city and town. Likewise, from their first footfall into Germany, the goal of the Red Army in the east and the American army in the west was to rape, and often murder, every woman they caught, to kill all the men they captured and to destroy or steal virtually everything German they came in contact with.

NOTES

[1] New York Times, August 7, 1933; Ralph Grandinetti, “Germany’s Plan to Resettle Jews in Madagascar,” The Barnes Review 4, no. 3 (May/June 1998), 26.

[2] Ben Hecht, A Guide for the Bedeviled (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), 120, 115, 130, 144, 155, 156.

[3] Theodore N. Kaufman, Germany Must Perish! (Newark, N.J.: Argyle Press, 1941), 6, 7, 28, 86.

[4] Russell D. Buhite, Decisions at Yalta (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1986), 25; Eugene Davidson, The Death and Life of Germany (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1959), 6.

[5] “War Crimes: USA,” Lt. Col. Gordon “Jack” Mohr, AUS Ret., LINK

[6] Buhite,Yalta, 23.

[7] Diary of Henry Morgenthau, entry for March 20, 1945.

[8] “David Irving’s Introduction to the Morgenthau Plan,” The Morgenthau Plan, LINK

[9] Thomas Goodrich, Hellstorm—The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947 (Sheridan, CO: Aberdeen Books, 2010), 167.

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Summer, 1945: Germany, Japan and the Harvest of Hate (Paperback, 2018) is avaliable from Amazon Books: here.

Categories
Catholic Church Catholic religious orders Christendom Darkening Age (book) Destruction of Greco-Roman world Emperor Julian Free speech / Free press Libanius Ovid

Darkening Age, 21

Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Story of Saint Paul: The Burning of the
Books at Ephesus, designed ca. 1529, woven before 1546 (medium:
wool and silk, woven under the direction of Jan van der Vyst).

Editor’s note.Bold-typed emphasis in the last paragraph is mine. In chapter eleven of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey wrote:

In Egypt, a fearsome monk and saint named Shenoute entered the house of a man suspected of being a pagan and removed all his books. The Christian habit of book-burning went on to enjoy a long history. A millennium later, the Italian preacher Savonarola wanted the works of the Latin love poets Catullus, Tibullus and Ovid to be banned while another preacher said that all of these ‘shameful books’ should be let go, because if you are Christians you are obliged to burn them’…

* * *

Before there had been competing philosophical schools, all equally valid, all equally arguable. Now, for the first time, there was right—and there was wrong. Now, there was what the Bible said—and there was everything else. And from now on any belief that was ‘wrong’ could, in the right circumstances, put you in grave danger.

As Dirk Rohmann has highlighted, Augustine said that works that opposed Christian doctrine had no place in Christian society and had scant time for much of Greek philosophy. The Greeks, Augustine said dismissively, ‘have no ground for boasting of their wisdom’. The Church’s authors were greater, and more ancient. John Chrysostom went far further. He described pagan philosophy as a madness, the mother of evils and a disease.

Classical literature was filled with the incorrect and demonic and it came under repeated and vicious attack from the Church Fathers. Atheism, science and philosophy were all targeted. The very idea that mankind could explain everything through science was, as Rohmann has shown, disparaged as folly. ‘Stay clear of all pagan books!’ the Apostolic Constitutions advised Christians bluntly. ‘For what do you have to do with such foreign discourses, or laws, or false prophets, which subvert the faith of the unstable?’ If you wish to read about history, it continued, ‘you have the Books of Kings; if philosophy and poetry, you have the Prophets, the Book of Job and the Proverbs, in which you will find greater depth of sagacity than in all of the pagan poets and philosophers because this is the voice of the Lord… Do therefore always stay clear of all such strange and diabolical books!’…

An accusation of ‘magic’ was frequently the prelude to a spate of burnings. In Beirut, at the turn of the sixth century, a bishop ordered Christians, in the company of civil servants, to examine the books of those suspected of this. Searches were made, books were seized from suspects and then brought to the centre of the city and placed in a pyre. A crowd was ordered to come and watch as the Christians lit this bonfire in front of the church of the Virgin Mary. The demonic deceptions and ‘barbarous and atheistic arrogance’ of these books were condemned as ‘everybody’ watched ‘the magic books and the demonic signs burn’. As with the destruction of temples, there was no shame in this…

What did the books burned on such occasions really contain? Doubtless some did contain ‘magic’—such practices were popular prior to Christianity and certainly didn’t disappear with its arrival. But they were not all. The list given in the life of St Simeon clearly refers to the destruction of books of Epicureanism, the philosophy that advocated the theory of atomism. ‘Paganism’ appears to have been a charge in itself—and while it could mean outlawed practices it could, at a stretch, refer to almost any antique text that contained the gods. Christians were rarely good chroniclers of what they burned.

Sometimes, clues to the texts remain. In Beirut, just before the bonfire of the books, pious Christians had gone to the house of a man suspected of owning books that were ‘hateful to God’. The Christians told him that they ‘wanted the salvation and recovery of his soul’; they wanted ‘liberation’. These Christians then entered his home, inspected his books and searched each room. Nothing was found—until the man was betrayed by his slave. Forbidden books were discovered in a secret compartment in a chair. The man whose house it was—clearly well aware of what such ‘liberation’ might involve—‘fell to the ground and begged us, in tears, not to hand him over to the law’. He was spared the law but forced to burn his books. As our chronicler Zachariah records with pleasure, ‘when the fire was lit he threw the books of magic into it with his own hands, and said that he thanked God who had granted him with his visit and liberated him from the slavery and error of demons’. One of the books removed from the house in Beirut is mentioned: it is very possible it was not magic but a history by a disapproved-of Egyptian historian.

Divination and prophecy were often used as pretexts to attack a city’s elite. One of the most infamous assaults on books and thinkers took place in Antioch. Here, at the end of the fourth century, an accusation of treasonous divination led to a full-scale purge that targeted the city’s intellectuals. By sheer chance, Ammianus Marcellinus, a non-Christian and one of the finest historians of the era, happened to be in the city; a wonderful piece of luck for later historians and wretched luck for the man himself, who was horrified. As Ammianus describes it,

the racks were set up, and leaden weights, cords, and scourges put in readiness. The air was filled with the appalling yells of savage voices mixed with the clanking of chains, as the torturers in the execution of their grim task shouted: ‘Hold, bind, tighten, more yet.’

A noble of ‘remarkable literary attainments’ was one of the first to be arrested and tortured; he was followed by a clutch of philosophers who were variously tortured, burned alive and beheaded. Educated men in the city who had considered themselves fortunate now, Damocles-like, realized the fragility of their fortune. Looking up, it was as if they saw ‘swords hung over their heads suspended by horse-hairs from the ceiling’.

And, once again, there was the burning of books as bonfires of volumes were used as post-hoc justification for the slaughter. Ammianus Marcellinus writes with distaste that

innumerable books and whole heaps of documents, which had been routed out from various houses, were piled up and burnt under the eyes of the judges. They were treated as forbidden texts to allay the indignation caused by the executions, though most of them were treatises on various liberal arts and on jurisprudence. 

Many intellectuals started to pre-empt the persecutors and set light to their own books. The destruction was extensive and ‘throughout the eastern provinces whole libraries were burnt by their owners for fear of a similar fate; such was the terror which seized all hearts’. Ammianus wasn’t the only intellectual to be scared in these decades. The orator Libanius burned a huge number of his own works…

* * *

The Great Library of Alexandria might have attempted to collect books on every topic, but Christianity was going to be considerably more selective…

One surviving Byzantine manuscript of Ovid has been scarred by a series of ridiculous redactions—even the word ‘girl’ seems to have been considered too racy to remain. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jesuits were still censoring and bowdlerizing their editions of the classics. Individual abbots, far from Umberto Eco’s avenging intellectual ideal, sometimes censored their own libraries. At some point in the fifteenth century, a note was left in a mutilated manuscript in Vienna. ‘At this point in the book,’ it records, ‘there were thirteen leaves containing works by the apostate Julian; the abbot of the monastery… read them and realised that they were dangerous, so he threw them into the sea.’

Much classical literature was preserved by Christians. Far more was not. To survive, manuscripts needed to be cared for, recopied. Classical ones were not. Medieval monks, at a time when parchment was expensive and classical learning held cheap, simply took pumice stones and scrubbed the last copies of classical works from the page. Rohmann has pointed out that there is even evidence to suggest that in some cases ‘whole groups of classical works were deliberately selected to be deleted and overwritten in around AD 700, often with texts authored by [the fathers of the Church or by] legal texts that criticised or banned pagan literature’. Pliny, Plautus, Cicero, Seneca, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Livy and many, many more: all were scrubbed away by the hands of believers…

The texts that suffer in this period are the texts of the wicked and sinful pagans. From the entirety of the sixth century only ‘scraps’ of two manuscripts by the satirical Roman poet Juvenal survive and mere ‘remnants’ of two others, one by the Elder and one by the Younger Pliny.

From the next century there survives nothing save a single fragment of the poet Lucan.

From the start of the next century: nothing at all.

Far from mourning the loss, Christians delighted in it. As John Chrysostom crowed, the writings ‘of the Greeks have all perished and are obliterated’. He warmed to the theme in another sermon: ‘Where is Plato? Nowhere! Where Paul? In the mouths of all!’

The fifth-century writer Theodoret of Cyrrhus observed the decline of Greek literature with similar enthusiasm. ‘Those elaborately decorated fables have been utterly banned,’ he gloated. ‘Who is today’s head of the Stoic heresy? Who is safeguarding the teachings of the Peripatetics?’ No one, evidently, for Theodoret concludes this homily with the observation that ‘the whole earth under the sun has been filled with sermons’.

Augustine contentedly observed the rapid decline of the atomist philosophy in the first century of Christian rule. By his time, he recorded, Epicurean and Stoic philosophy had been ‘suppressed’—the word is his. The opinions of such philosophers ‘have been so completely eradicated and suppressed… that if any school of error now emerged against the truth, that is, against the Church of Christ, it would not dare to step forth for battle if it were not covered under the Christian name’…

Much was preserved. Much, much more was destroyed. It has been estimated that less than ten per cent of all classical literature has survived into the modern era. For Latin, the figure is even worse: it is estimated that only one hundredth of all Latin literature remains. If this was ‘preservation’—as it is often claimed to be—then it was astonishingly incompetent. If it was censorship, it was brilliantly effective. The ebullient, argumentative classical world was, quite literally, being erased.

Categories
2nd World War Evil Summer, 1945 (book) Thomas Goodrich

Summer 1945 • 3

Of all the graphic photos I have viewed in my years of research, the most horrific is not the smoldering bodies at Dresden after the fire­ storm, not the German women and children flattened by Soviet tanks on a snowy road in East Prussia, but that of the bodies at Dachau. No, not the bodies; not the emaciated concentration camp inmates who died not from a deliberate policy of extermination—as we have been told for decades now by the victors—not those, not those who had succumbed in the late stages of the war to typhus, diphtheria, dysentery, starvation, and neglect. No, the bodies I speak of were German bodies, German soldiers. And the photo is graphic not merely for the obvious; the photo is hideous more for what is not actually seen, than what is. There is a crushing, paralyzing oppression in the gray tones of the image; there is an overwhelming sense of evil in the very air; there is a terrifying embodiment of hate and malice in the forms of the Americans as they mechanically, and with utter detachment, go about their inhuman business.

As US forces swept through Bavaria toward Munich in late April, 1945, most German guards at the concentration camp near Dachau wisely fled. To maintain control and arrange for an orderly transfer of the 32,000 prisoners to the approaching Allies, and despite signs at the gate warning, “No entrance-typhus epidemic,” several hundred German soldiers obeyed when they were ordered to the prison.

When American units reached the camp the following day, the GIs were horrified by what they saw. Outside the prison were rail cars brim full with diseased and starved corpses. Inside the camp, wrote a witness, were found “a room piled high with naked and emaciated corpses… Since all the many bodies were in various stages of decomposition, the stench of death was overpowering.”

Unhinged by the nightmare surrounding them, conditioned by years of vicious anti-German propaganda, the troops turned their fury on the now disarmed German soldiers. While one group of over three hundred were led away to a walled enclosure, other Germans were murdered in the guard towers, in the barracks, or they were chased through the streets. All were soon caught and many were deliberately wounded in the legs, then turned over to camp inmates who first tortured, then tore limb from limb the helpless men and boys.

A German guard came running toward us. We grabbed him and were standing there talking to him when… [a GI] came up with a tommy-gun. He grabbed the prisoner, whirled him around and said, “There you are you son-of -a-bitch!” The man was only about three feet from us, but the soldier cut him down with his sub-machine gun. I shouted at him, “what did you do that for, he was a prisoner?” He looked at me and screamed “Gotta kill em, gotta kill em.” When I saw the look in his eyes and the machine gun waving in the air, I said to my men, “Let him go.” [1] 

While the tortures and murders were in progress, 350 German soldiers were lined up against a wall, two machine-guns were planted, then the Americans opened fire. Those yet alive when the fusillade ended, including the three young men still standing, were forced to wait amid the bloody carnage while the machine-guns were reloaded.

___________

[1] Howard Buechner, Dachau—The Hour of the Avenger(Metarie, Louisiana: Thunderbird Press, 1986), 75-76.