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Tag: History

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Charlemagne Christendom Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 168

Frankish expansion from 481 to 814

 
Last uprisings, war of annihilation and ‘the serene height of the staff’

The war of the Saxons, which lasted for more than ten years, didn’t, however, affect the foreign sovereignty of the Franks, or even Christianity as such. Rather, it was directed primarily against their representatives and institutions, against the Church, their rigorous attacks on private property, and their brutal collection of tithes, of which Alcuin, Charles’ Anglo-Saxon adviser, had already complained, seeing predators (praedones) in the missionaries rather than preachers (praedicatores). ‘That tithes had destroyed loyalty and faith’ seems to have been a proverbial saying among the Franks. The northern Albigensians then fought the Church with the same harshness that the latter had shown. Everywhere the new temples were destroyed, the ecclesiastics were expelled, and not infrequently the Christian Saxons were murdered and their possessions plundered. In short, the entire ecclesiastical organisation north of the Elbe was completely eradicated.

The uprising grew into a war of annihilation lasting more than ten years, with extreme cruelty on both sides. The counter-offensive, which was only resumed in the autumn of 794 and in which Charles took several relics with him, consisted of simple raids of destruction. Several times he even used pagan Slavs, such as the Wilzos and the Obrodites, whose King Witzin was attacked and killed by the Saxons at the Elbe crossing. Charles plundered, destroyed and ravaged everything he could find, mainly with the use of firebrands, and killed thousands of people. After a victory at Kiel, it seems that 4,000 Saxon corpses littered the battlefield. And year after year he made large numbers of hostages, taking every third males—‘as many as he wanted’ the chronicler says—most of whom he ‘regularly killed’ (Bullough). Until 799 the ‘apostle of the Saxons’, ‘he who preached the gospel with a bronze tongue’ (Bertram), marched annually against them. In 802 he sent out another army, while he spent the whole summer in the Ardennes indulging in the pleasures of hunting. In 804 he returned in person to the battlefield, where the Saxons finally succumbed to his power.

To make any uprising impossible, he ended up ordering mass deportations with frightful large-scale population transplants, such as the Byzantine Christians had already practised. ‘He took out such several hostages as had never been seen in his day, nor the days of his father, nor in the days of the Frankish kings’, says one chronicler. The man who, as early as 794 at the synod of Frankfurt, openly presented himself as ‘head of the Western Church’, had his army settle thousands of Saxons with their wives and children in the years 795-799 and 804, totalling 160,000. Even today, the event is still remembered by some place names on Frankish soil, such as Sachsenfahrt and Sachsenmühie.

Many of the deportees, however, were placed in closely guarded camps and had to spend the rest of their lives there. One source even speaks of ‘total extermination’. And not a few Saxons, who had certainly not yet been cleansed of all pagan filth by the sacred bath of baptism, were sent in the course of the war to Verdun, the great slave emporium.

Thus, in the North, the relations of ownership and possession were completely changed. For even the territory stolen from the Elbe was again divided among bishops, priests and his lay vassals. And in the 9th century, numerous monasteries were founded in Saxony at the expense of private nobles.

Thus, using a thirty-three-year war, Charles had convinced ‘the most heathen’ of the idea ‘that there is still something superior to fighting and victory, superior to death on the battlefield’, as Cardinal Bertram, the encourager of two world wars and Hitler’s assistant, assures us. Charles had ‘planted the victorious and beneficent cross in the virgin soil of the Saxon country’. And, finally, most importantly, ‘the serene height of the staff acted beneficently and alongside the power of the royal sceptre and sword’.
 

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Editor’s immodest note: It is right here that you may notice not only the gulf between us and the white nationalists but even with the Nazis.

Hitler allowed, it seems to me amid the world war, a homage to be paid to Charlemagne because he had Germanic blood (as we shall see when I review one of the chapters of Tom Holland’s Dominion).

While Hitler and those closest to him were already aware of the Christian problem, they, like today’s anti-Christian racialists, didn’t realise that it was far more serious than the Jewish problem.

As we review Holland’s book you will see what I mean. For the moment I can only repeat my metaphor. The active substance that has been killing the white man since Constantine is Christian ethics (cf. the process of miscegenation in the Byzantine Empire and the Americas under Iberian rule). Jewry is only a catalyst that accelerates an ethnocidal process that already existed, albeit slower, in Christendom.

Even Hitler didn’t know that the main enemy was Christianity rather than Judaism: the modern catalyst of Christian ethics. Can you begin to glimpse why the message of The West’s Darkest Hour is the most important of all?

Categories
Bible Final solution Judaism Philosophy of history Racial right Who We Are (book)

How Yahweh conquered Rome, 3

Jews in Rome before the Jewish Wars

Long before it was repackaged for the Gentiles, the Big Lie was a Jewish self-delusion. As I have detailed at the end of my long article ‘Zionism, Crypto-Judaism and the Biblical Hoax,’ in the sixth and the fifth century BC in Babylon, a priestly elite from Jerusalem decided that Yahweh, the national god of Israel, although apparently vanquished, was in fact the only real god, and, by way of consequence, the Creator of Heaven and Earth. A laughable claim, but when the Persians conquered Babylon, those Jews, who found themselves in a favourable position after helping the Persians, set out to pretend that their theoclastic monotheism, based on the exclusion of all other gods, was identical to the tolerant monotheism of the Persians; in other words, that their tribal god Yahweh was Ahura Mazda, the God of Heaven. I have shown that the deception is clearly apparent in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah, where only Persians are portrayed as believing that Yahweh is ‘the God of Heaven,’ while for the Israelites he is just ‘the god of Israel.’

What the priestly Jews achieved in Babylon in the fifth century BC was a preliminary stage for what another generation of the same priestly cast would start planning in the first century AD in Rome, after having been brought there in similar conditions of captivity. While Yahweh seemed again vanquished, he set out to conquer his victor from within. The conspiracy of Babylon’s Jews to fool the Persians with their phony monotheism was the blueprint for the more sophisticated conspiracy of Rome’s Jews to fool the Romans with Christianity.

Between those two stages, Jews seem to have convinced a portion of the Roman aristocracy that they were the first true monotheists, the worshipers of the true God. For Greeks and Romans, the supreme Creator was a philosophical concept, while religious cults were polytheistic by definition. That’s why, around 315 BC, the Aristotelian Theophrastus of Eresus thought of the Jews as ‘philosophers by birth,’ although he was troubled by their primitive holocausts. Some Jewish writers (Aristobulus of Paneas, Artapanos of Alexandria, or even Philo of Alexandria) had even succeeded in bluffing some Greeks with the wild claim that Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato had been inspired by Moses.[8]

Jews are mentioned in Rome as early as the second century BC. It has been surmised that they were mostly converted Phoenicians. Martin Bernal defends that thesis in Jews and Phoenicians, with the argument that ‘there is no evidence of Jews in the West Mediterranean before the destruction of Carthage [146 BC],’ but ‘after that date, they were widely reported there,’ while Phoenicians faded from the pages of history.

Phoenicians and Jews’ languages and cultures were virtually identical.[9] Peter Myers brings additional light in his well-sourced article ‘Carthaginians, Phoenicians & Berbers became Jews’, arguing that, ‘After the destruction of Carthage by Rome, many Carthaginians and Phoenicians converted to Judaism, because Jerusalem was the only remaining centre of West Semitic civilization.’

The Encyclopedia Judaica’s article on Carthage, quoted by Myers, supports that hypothesis, adding that the Phoenicians, by converting to Judaism after their political decline, ‘preserved their Semitic identity and were not assimilated by the Roman-Hellenistic culture which they hated.’ This theory, which also explains the mysterious origin of the Sephardim in Spain—a Carthaginian colony—, is of obvious importance to comprehend the attitude of Jews towards the Roman Empire, destroyer of the Phoenician civilization.

(Left, Flavius Josephus highlights the ancient affinity between Phoenicians and Jews.) In 63 BC, Rome’s Jewish community was enlarged with thousands of captives brought back from Judea by Pompey, and progressively freed (Philo of Alexandria, Legatio ad Caium, 156). It is believed that Julius Cesar introduced legislation to guarantee their religious liberty, and that the law was confirmed by Augustus, who also exempted them from military service. Emperor Claudius (41-54 AD) is said to have expelled the Jews from Rome (Suetonius, Claudius xv, 4; Acts 18:2), or at least forbidden them to congregate (Cassius Dio lx, 6). But they seem to have known favourable times under Nero (54-68), whose wife Poppaea Sabina is regarded as an Esther-type secret Jewess in Jewish tradition, because Jewish historian Flavius Josephus calls her ‘a God-worshipper’ (Antiquities of the Jews, xx, 195) and mentions her support for the release of Jewish priests prosecuted in Rome (Vita 16).[10]
 

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Editor’s note: When Greg Johnson criticised William Pierce’s Who We Are years ago, he argued that Pierce, with his suggestion that the ancient Aryans should have exterminated the non-Aryans, was saying something monstrous. Johnson even called ‘whites’ those mudblood Cauacsoids whom we now assume had Semitic, though not Jewish, blood.

White nationalism would be greatly enriched by admitting that the Judean war against Rome has been in reality a psychological war of the Semites (including non-Jews, such as the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians who survived the Third Punic War) against the Aryans. It is a great pathology that infects even white nationalism not want to see the macro-dynamics of the clash between Semites and Aryans that has been going on for millennia.

I blame Christian ethics for that. (Recall, for example, that a dozen years ago Johnson delivered homilies at his church in San Francisco. He has since abandoned Christianity and is now a pious neochristian—just read his The White Nationalist Manifesto.) If Christian ethics is to blame, for transvaluing Semitic values Pierce’s book should be the textbook of American racialists. But I understand that the copyright holders, the National Alliance, haven’t yet published it.

Or am I wrong?

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[8] Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt, From Rameses II to Emperor Hadrian, Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 48-49, 66.

[9] Martin Bernal, Geography of a Life, chap. 45, ‘Jews and Phoenicians,’ pp. 386-394.

[10] Nahum Goldmann, Le Paradoxe juif. Conversations en français avec Léon Abramowicz, Stock, 1976, p. 36; Heinrich Graetz, Histoire des Juifs, A. Lévy, 1882 (on fr.wikisource.org), tome I, p. 413-428.

Categories
Charlemagne Christendom Evil Justice / revenge Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 166

The butcher of the Saxons

While Charles was making his conquests in northern Spain and losing them again—the only defeat suffered by a Frankish army under his command—Widukind, a Westphalian nobleman who had returned from Danish emigration (and who is first named in 777, when he failed to attend the Diet of Paderborn), advanced with his Saxons south to Fulda and west to Koblenz and Deutz. Feudal castles and churches were destroyed and villages burned and annihilated in a rampage that was not so much for booty as for revenge.

In 779 Charles advanced to the Weser, and in 780 to the Elbe. Again not only the East Saxons but even the Wenden on the other side of the Elbe and ‘people from the north’ were baptised. Again there were pledges of allegiance and new hostages were taken. At a national assembly in Lippspringe, the sovereign tried ‘explicitly to promote [the spread of Christianity in Saxony] and thus accelerate the development of feudal relations’ (Epperlein). Christian priests spread the new ‘enlightenment’ among the occupied burghs. ‘They carried crosses and sang pious songs; soldiers heavily armed with all kinds of weapons were their escorts, who by their determined gestures accelerated Christianisation’ (De Bayac).

The plundered territory continued to be distributed to bishops and abbots, missionary dioceses were created, churches were built and even minor monasteries, such as those of Hersfeit, Amorbach, Neustadt on the Main, were incorporated by Charles into the conversion of the pagans. And above all, of course, Fulda, whose abbot Sturmi held ecclesiastical and military command over the Saxon fortress of Erasburg until shortly before his death. In the northwest, the propaganda was carried out by Bishop Alberic of Utrecht, who had destroyed the remnants of paganism in West Frisia. On his orders and backed by Charles’ military power, Alberic’s monks smashed the statues of the gods and plundered the pagan shrines and everything of value they could find. The monarch gave part of the treasures of the temples to the bishop for ecclesiastical purposes. The Anglo-Saxon St Wilehad, who had already indoctrinated the Frisians, albeit without much success, organised the northern part of subjugated Saxony on Charles’ behalf from 780 onwards. Similarly, St Liudger worked in Central Frisia at Charles’ request.

But when the East Frisians, and also large sections of the population of Central Frisia, rose in revolt against the Saxons, destroyed the churches and turned to their former beliefs, the Christian preachers left the country in haste. The Englishman Wilehad, who shortly afterwards was consecrated bishop for the Saxon mission and first prelate of Bremen, fled to Rome and then devoted himself—according to Echternach—‘for two years to study and prayer’ (Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche). St Ludger, later Bishop of Münster, took refuge in Rome and Monte Cassino. Without the protection of the Frankish arms, the heralds of the good news couldn’t survive. But as soon as the occupiers regained control of the countryside, the ecclesiastical lords also returned with their swords to the propaganda front. Wilehad took up his seat in Bremen and St Liudger established himself, on Charles’ orders, east of the Lauwers. There, with the backing of royal power, he destroyed the pagan shrines (fana), advanced to the islands and, with the support of Frankish soldiers, devastated the sacrificial places of the Frisian god Phoete in Heligoland.

For the rest, many churchmen must have returned only reluctantly among the rebellious Saxons. And when the Saxons, along with the Vendeans, rose again under Widukind, their fury was focused on the clergy and Christianity, with many of the churches being set on fire, while the priests fled. A Frankish army was wiped out at Süntel, ‘almost to the last man being slain by the sword’ according to the Annals, which adds: ‘The Frankish loss was even greater than the figures might indicate’. Two dozen nobles also perished in the slaughter. But before Charles arrived, the Saxon nobility and some Frankish troops had already crushed the rebellion. The Saxon ‘nobles’ surrendered the rebels. And then Charles intensified the expansionist and missionary war until the famous beheading of Verden on the Aller and then, as usual, celebrated Christmas and Easter, the birth and resurrection of the Lord.

Even in the 20th century, ‘professionals’ in the Catholic and Protestant camps have sometimes tried to deny the orgy of cruelty and barbarism. Episcopalian devotionalists and some ‘specialised theologians’ worked shoulder to shoulder on this subject, especially during the Nazi period.

In 1935, the ecclesiastical spokesman of the Osnabrück bishopric spoke of ‘the fable of the Verden blood trial’. Similarly, the Protestant professor of Church History at the University of Munich, Kari Bauer, claimed in 1936 that the verb decollare (to cut the throat), which appears in the sources, was a misspelling instead of the original delocare or desolare (to banish); consequently, 4,500 Saxons were only expelled from the place. It must be said, however, firstly, that this verb or a similar one isn’t used in the various sources; and secondly, that four yearbooks of the time speak of the ‘slaughter’ (decollare / decollatio) of the Saxons. Such are the royal Annals, the Annales Amandi, the Annales Fuldenses and finally, in the first half of the 9th century, also the Annales Sithienses. And the chroniclers all from the most diverse places would have committed in a highly mysterious way the same ‘errata’.

And it would be a very different ‘misprint’ if, as one researcher suspected earlier, the author of the sources ‘as a result of a false reading of the original had removed a couple of zeros’ (H. Ullmann). On the contrary, Donald Bullough rightly observes: ‘But not to believe the king capable of such an action was tantamount to making him more virtuous than almost all the Christian kings of the Middle Ages’. The stabbing of a vanquished enemy on the battlefield was then commonplace unless one expected more profit from the slaves and the ransom money. And one thing is also easily forgotten: that most of the hostages, which the king took year after year, were regularly killed, as soon as those whose obedience the hostages guaranteed rose against the king again.

One day in the late autumn of 782, there stood 4,500 Saxons, squeezed like animals in the slaughterhouse and surrounded by their own ‘nobles’, who had handed them over, and by the paladins of the great Charles, ‘the pilot light of Europe’, as a manuscript from St Gallen of the 9th-10th centuries calls him. By his sentence, they were beheaded and thrown into the Aller, which swept them into the Weser and then into the sea. ‘There were 4,500 of them and that is what happened’ (quod ita et factum est), as the royal analyst laconically puts it, ‘and he celebrated Christmas’, just where the future ‘saint’ soon had a church built (not an expiatory chapel, but rather a triumphal chapel) and where the cathedral of Verden stands today: literally, on rivers of blood.

Just imagine: 4,500 people beheaded—and then the canonisation of the murderer! ‘It is true that he eliminated 4,500 Saxons’, writes Ranke, adding later, ‘but later on the serene tranquillity of a great soul stands out in him’.
 

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Editor’s note: Can we finally see why we should tear down the churches in Europe and behead the pope and his cardinals? Without avenging the crimes that the religion of the Semitic god perpetrated on the brave defenders of the Aryan religion, there is no mental salvation for the West. The cancer that’s killing us goes back long before the Jews took over our media, and I find it incredible that white nationalists not only refuse to see it, but continue to worship the enemy god.

Categories
Charlemagne Christendom Evil Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 164

The Christian banners enter Saxony

Charles’ armies—which in the larger campaigns consisted of just 3,000 horsemen and between 6,000 and 10,000-foot soldiers—sometimes numbered more than 5,000 or 6,000 warriors. Unlike in the time of his grandfather Charles Martell, the core of the army was made up of heavy cavalry. The horsemen were armed with chain mail, helmet, shield and shin guards, with lance and battle-axe (worth approximately 18 to 20 oxen). And all this for Jesus Christ. The foot companies, still numerous, fought with mace and bow. (Only from 866, under Charles the Bald, was every Frank who owned a horse obliged to military service so that the infantry ceased to play an important role in the army.) Moreover, in the Carolingian wars, no soldiers were paid: the spoils of plunder were shared out.

The Christian butchery (‘mission by the sword’), with which Charles continued his father’s Saxon wars, began in 772. The ‘gentle king’, as he is repeatedly called in contemporary royal annals, then conquered the frontier fortress of Eresburg (today’s Obermarsberg, next to the Diemel), an important starting point of his military operations during the first half of the Saxon wars. And he destroyed (probably there) the Irminsul, the Saxon national shrine, consisting of an extraordinarily large tree trunk, which the Saxons venerated as ‘the pillar supporting the Universe’ in a sacred grove in the open air. Later Charles entrusted Abbot Sturmi of Fulda with the command of the fortress of Eresburg, which had been recaptured, again and again, lost, destroyed and rebuilt.

But other bishops and abbots also provided Charles with military services. Like the counts, they were also obliged to maintain a camp, an obligation which was also incumbent on the abbesses. Even at that time, clerical troops accompanied the Frankish army, so that, according to Sturmi’s biographer, ‘through sacred instruction in the faith, they might subject the people, bound from the beginning of the world with the chains of demons to the gentle and light yoke of Christ’. Exactly from that year onwards, Charles used a seal with the inscription: ‘Christ protects Charles, King of the Franks’.

After the Christians had completely plundered the place of worship, set fire to the sacred grove and destroyed the pillar, they left with the sacred offerings piled up there and with abundant treasures of gold and silver, ‘the gentle King Charles took the gold and silver he found there’, as the Royal Annals succinctly state. And soon after, on top of the plundered and destroyed gentile sanctuary, a church was built ‘under the patronage of Peter’ (Karpf), the gatekeeper of heaven, displacing the Saxon god Irmin (probably identical to the Germanic god Saxnoth / Tiwas). What progress!

Heinrich Leutemann’s Destruction of
the Irmin Column by Charlemagne

In the following years, ‘the gentle king’ fought mainly in Italy. Through the emissary Peter (that was the name of the envoy), Pope Adrian had invited him ‘for the love of God and in favour of the right of St Peter and the Church to help him against King Desiderius’ (Annales Regni Francorum). But already in 774, barely back from the plunder of the Longobard kingdom, the good King Charles sent four army corps against the Saxons: three of them ‘were victorious with the help of God’, as the royal analyst once again reports, while the contingent corps returned without even having fought, but ‘with great booty and without loss’ to the sweet home.

And then Charles himself somehow introduced ‘Christian banners into Saxony’ (Groszmann), with the result that ‘the war became more and more the war of faith’, as Canon Adolf Bertram acknowledged in 1899.

Concerned about the further course of the war, Charles had consulted an expert by courier if there was any sign that Mars had accelerated his career and had already reached the constellation Cancer. He conquered Sigibur on the Ruhr and crossed the Weser, ‘many of the Saxons being slain there’, advancing towards Ostfalia, intending ‘not to give up until the defeated Saxons had either submitted to the Christian religion or had been completely exterminated’. It was the programme of a thirty-three-year war ‘with an increasingly religious motivation’ (Haendier). Indeed, in its planning, it represented something new in the history of the Church, ‘a direct missionary war, which is not a preparation for missionary work but is itself a missionary instrument’ (H.D. Kahl).

This was precisely the decade in which the prayer of a sacramentary (a missal) openly called the Franks the chosen people. Charles’ wars against the Saxons were already regarded as wars against the heathen and were therefore considered just. ‘Rise, thou chosen man of God, and defend the Bride of God, the Bride of thy Lord’, the Anglo-Saxon Alcuin, one of his closest advisors, urged him. And later the monk Widukind of Corbey wrote: ‘And when he saw how his noble neighbouring people, the Saxons, were imprisoned in vain heresy, he strove by all means to lead them to the true way of salvation’.

By all means. As far as the year 765 is concerned, the royal Annals make it lapidary clear: ‘After having taken hostages, seizing abundant booty and three times provoking a bloodbath among the Saxons, the aforementioned King Charles returned to France with the help of God (auxiliante Domino)’.

Booty, bloodbaths and God’s help are things that keep coming back, and the good God is always on the side of the strongest. In 776, ‘God’s strength justly overcame theirs… and the whole multitude of them, who in panic had fled one after another, killing one another… succumbed to the mutual blows, and so were surprised by God’s punishment. And how great was the power of God for the salvation of the Christians no one can say’. In 778, ‘A battle began there, which had a very good end. With God’s help the Franks were victorious and a great multitude of Saxons were slaughtered’. In 779, ‘with the help of God’, etc. And between the regular mass murders in the summers, sometimes in this palace estate and sometimes in that city, the so-called peaceful king celebrated Christmas…

The heathen were being fought, and that justified everything. Groups of clergymen accompanied the beheader. Miracles of all kinds took place. And after each campaign, they returned with abundant booty. In the principality of Lippe, there were mass baptisms, especially of nobles: the Saxons came with women and children in countless numbers (inumerabilis multitudo) and had themselves baptised and left as many hostages as the king demanded.

And at the brilliant national assembly, held at Paderborn in 777 they again thronged and solemnly abjured ‘Donar, Wotan and Saxnot and all evil spirits: their companions’ and pledged faith and allegiance ‘to God the Father almighty, to Christ the Son of God and the Holy Spirit’.
 

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Editor’s Note: Can you see why WDH is the only worthwhile site among our forums? So-called anti-Semitic racialists are unable to see that overthrowing the Aryan Gods and putting the Jewish god in their place is the ultimate treason!

Categories
Ethnic cleansing

Mexico’s independence

Editor’s note: The war of Mexican independence from Spain began on 16 September 1810, when an ethnic Jew, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, uttered the so-called ‘Cry of Dolores’, stirring up the Indians against the Spaniards.

The Breve Historia de México, which José Vasconcelos wrote in 1936, runs on a premise: as long as a civilisation of Spanish, Criollo origin (ethnic Spaniards with no Indian blood born in the American continent), dominates in Mexico, there is prosperity; when native barbarism imposes itself, disasters befall inhabitants of that country. However, as Vasconcelos was a Catholic, he never realised that the ideas of equality weren’t only English ideas, whom he blames for what happened in the War of Independence, but Christian ideas mutated into secular ideology.

Without adding ellipses between unquoted paragraphs, in this post I translate a passage from Vasconcelos’ book. The brackets are mine:
 

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In Bustamante’s medal we can read: ‘Siempre Fieles – Siempre Unidos – 1838’. And Alamán narrates that in all of Mexico there was rejoicing, when the Argentines triumphed over the English, when Spain rose against the French. And there was an offer of resources or volunteers for war to the common enemy who later suggested to Hidalgo, to Morelos, the criminal war, the disloyal slaughter, precisely of the Spaniards, of our fathers, of our brothers. And there were still loose in our squares and streets, the demagogues with Criollo mezcal eloquence shouting in favour of abstractions: liberty, equality, fraternity.
 

The perverse doctrine

Father Mier, who is presented to us as the inspirer of the Independence movements, developed his propaganda in London, always in the pay of the British Admiralty. He claimed, in effect the English doctrine, that Mexico was separating from Spain because the pacts of the Conquest [of the Aztec Empire] had been violated. What were these pacts? Who thought they existed, and, if they did, how was it that the phenomenon of Latin American independence gained the most momentum in Argentina, where there were no Indians to enter into such pacts? Why was Mexico, the typically Indian country, precisely the one that showed the least enthusiasm for Independence?

Mier suspected none of this, and propagated the thesis of the traditional interventionists, the hypothesis of the indigenous claims that were then being asserted against the Spaniards and that were later wielded against the Criollos and today are used to dispossess, to persecute those who speak Spanish, with no exceptions for the Indians. Indeed, there is talk of indigenous claims as if at the time of Cortés’ arrival the Indians had been owners, as if property and the Christian concept of the rights of the human person had not appeared precisely with the conquest.

But the truth is that the independence of New Spain was promoted by the Criollos and the Spaniards of New Spain, Mexicans of the most recent generation, and not to recover usurped rights of any kind. On the contrary, the descendants of Moctezuma, as well as those of many other characters of Aztec times, lived in Spain as nobles and opposed the independence that would make them lose their titles and their advantages. But to speak of indigenous demands in the name of a nationalism that never existed is something that could not have been born in the heart of the Mexican people, but was inspired from outside, like a poison destined to poison their future.
 

Mexican loyalty

Alamán rightly observed that ‘it was ungenerous to pretend to turn away from a nation with which Mexico had been linked for three centuries’. Hidalgo himself evoked the name of Ferdinand the Seventh, perhaps thinking that once Spain had been freed from the French invasion, Independence would follow. They did not come to Mexico, as they did to Colombia, with Bolivar, with English battalions and foreign general staffs, no doubt because Spanish sentiment was stronger among us.

Independence—achieved without bastard advisors like those who led Hidalgo and Morelos astray—was already being achieved. But that was not what the British wanted. What they wanted was to drive the Spaniards out of their dominions in America, to dominate the natives at once as one dominates flocks without a shepherd… [The movement] was diverted, by iniquitous foreign pressure, into the ignorant and destructive caudillismo of the Morelos and Guerreros, whose programme in essence went no further than the demand to kill gachupines [Spaniards], the natural slogan of the English.

Independence in Mexico did not fight battles. There have never really been battles on our soil, but bloody hecatombs of civil war. And it has had to resort, as we shall see in another chapter, to the dangerous system of exalting defeats. For all our foreign warlords are, after all, defeated. But to be specific in the case of Independence, it is an auspicious fact that no great battles were fought, that there were no great armies, and that Calleja, as he constantly repeated with all loyalty, was waging war against the warlords of Independence exclusively with Mexican troops. We Mexicans wanted independence but we were loyal. We did not want independence for the benefit of the British, but the benefit of our homeland. That is why the nation, in its conscious sectors, did not follow Hidalgo, did not follow Morelos. Everyone must have been suspicious of that eagerness to kill gachupines and that insistence on recruiting pure Indians and blacks from the coast of Guerrero, to throw them on the populations to plunder, to destroy, which is the only thing that the improvised leader who has no plan and no vision achieves.

To realise the tactics of Hidalgo and Morelos, tactics of the forerunners of the American party, tactics which produced friendships in the United States and promises of aid, such as driving Hidalgo northward, such as moving Morelos to dispose of Texas, let us imagine a similar case in another nation. Suppose that the French who aided American independence, instead of meeting with superior men like Franklin, like Washington, like Hamilton, men who knew how to take advantage of foreign aid, but without submitting to its ends, turned it rather to their service, had had recourse in the United States to the mulatto population, ignorant and degraded, and, therefore, predisposed to treachery. To these half-breeds of black and white the French agent, the enemy of all things English, would have said, and rightly so:

‘You have been ruled for three centuries by an aristocracy of hypocritical Quakers who presume to be righteous, and here they are seizing all the land, all the wealth, keeping millions and millions of blacks in slavery. The battle cry must be “Death to the British”, and every time you occupy a village, shoot all the subjects of England you manage to capture’.

What would the leaders of American Independence have done in the face of such propaganda? They would have taken no more than five minutes to have those who listened to such propaganda shot! What would Washington himself have done if the overseer of the slaves on his farms went into rebellion to kill Englishmen? At that very moment, Washington, who was well-born, would have felt English and would have sought first to beat first the traitors of his blood and then the agents of the oppressive power that was England. Well, that explains why so many did not follow Hidalgo and Morelos but let them be executed, without prejudice to continue working for Independence, without prejudice to consummate independence, but no longer to the cannibalistic cry of ‘Death to the Gachupines!’

I ask the pure Indians of my country, and my compatriots already educated and clear of mind and heart: Was there or was there not oppression, abuse, or slavery of the blacks in the region of America colonised by the English? And yet, what would have happened if the warlords of American Independence, instead of fighting against the English troops, summoned the blacks, called them and told them: ‘Now to kill the British’? Is it true or not true that the United States would have become supper for blacks?

We have just said that the fate of Mexico would have been different if its national leaders at the time of Independence had had the cultural and human stature of the Franklin, the Hamiltons, and the Adamses. We had one or two in that period who can be compared with the best of any country. Bishop Abad y Queipo and the civilian Don Lucas Alamán. A character of constructive stature could perhaps have been developed with the figure of Licenciado Verdad, Mayor of Mexico. But there was a lack of intelligence in the wealthy, enlightened class.

The greatest crime in history is to dress up in tinsel events that have been the cause of the backwardness and decadence of nations. And this is what we have done with the legend of Independence: to erect as a cult and a religion what was a disastrous mistake and the beginning of all our misfortunes. It is better to have no idols than false ones.
 

The precursor movements

From the beginning, Pereyra notes, the purely Spanish Criollismo will carry the banner of Indianism against the Metropolis; it will be called Aztequismo in Mexico, Incaismo in South America, Mosquismo in New Granada, Caribdismo in Venezuela. Each country will find in a remote pre-Columbian glorification the starting point of its national aspirations.

But all this was not only artificial and absurd, it was part of the British programme which, together with wages, taught a lesson to the forerunners and actors of the great insurrectionary movements.

An obscure Indian rebellion aimed at suppressing the work tributes was magnified into a continental banner. It happened that the rebel cacique Condorcanqui was baptised by those who had sold their souls to England with the name of Tupac Amaru, the name of the Inca executed by the Spaniards. And he was presented as the would-be Emperor of all America, when, Pereyra rightly says, his ancestor, the real Tupac Amaru, never had any pretensions to conquer even as far as Bogota. All the new Tupac did before he was soundly defeated was to slit the throats of men, women and children. In Calca he wiped out all the whites. This indicates the trend of the insurrection. And so the question arises again: What would the Americans have done with an uprising which, under the pretext of national independence, would have launched the redskins of the Cañada against the outposts of the thirteen primitive colonies? They would have done what Calleja did when there was no more war cry and no more plan than to kill gachupines: beat them to death.

The documents drafted by the British were no more effective in achieving the purpose that would serve as the basis of the war: the spread of hatred between Criollos and Spaniards. This was the origin of the contemporary imperialist action that stirred up the hatred of the mestizos against the Criollos and of the Indians against the mestizos.

Rather than French egalitarian and liberal, the ideas of the forerunners of Independence were borrowed from the Intelligence Service of the English Admiralty; they were fabricated by the enemies of Spain who coveted our territories. They were ideas of social derangement, useful to produce what would soon define American imperialism, more practical and more outspoken than English imperialism: the extermination of the inferior mixed races that Spain had produced and the conquest of the land without the men, ‘the cage without the bird’. In other words, the tactic that the Americans applied in their territories, ‘A good Indian is a dead Indian’. In our countries, the Spaniard had to be wiped out first because the Spaniard had married the Indian, allied himself with the Indian and had come to form the powerful mestizo bloc. It is by attacking them in the head, by destroying their aristocracies, that the enemy races are best and soonest destroyed. That is why the war cry, a hypocritical and disloyal cry, was from one end of the continent to the other and even there where there were no Indians to claim a single right: ‘Up with the Indians, the Tupac Amaru of operetta and… let the gachupines die!’

Miranda dreamed, as Bolivar dreamed at first, that by simply establishing freedom, all the republics of America would live in peace. He did not see the American danger, added to the English danger. And if Bolivar did see it, it was when, already in decadence and exile, the lucidity of one who has failed in an enterprise he judged noble came to his spirit.

Miranda also fell into the childishness of wanting to give the government of a vast American state to the descendant of the Inca. So we can see how even the men of genius of the movement served the Anglo-Saxon plan to eliminate the Spanish from the territories they were preparing to conquer. And yet Miranda had not a drop of indigenous blood in him. He was merely a soul mediated by the influence of the English.

Where is the judgement of all these men we revere as fathers of the fatherland? If Miranda, a man of the world, enlightened, almost brilliant, offered the provinces, what is so strange that Morelos, lacking in enlightenment, spoke naturally of offering Texas to the United States in exchange for a few rifles?

Aaron Burr, too, an American character who later fell into disgrace, was preparing an expedition down the Mississippi. Its object, proclaimed by Jefferson, was the conquest of New Spain. It was not carried out because Spain was behind it. When we lacked Spain, the disaster of 1947 occurred.
 

The War of Independence

The Viceroy, in the meantime, organised a new army which he placed under the command of Don Félix María Calleja, a royalist general. On the plains of Aculco, northwest of the capital, Calleja waited with ten thousand men for Hidalgo’s one hundred thousand. They were a poorly armed rabble, composed mostly of Indians, and Calleja succeeded in destroying them.

The insurgent defeat was total. From that moment on Hidalgo’s only thought was flight. On his way north he was apprehended near Monclova. From there he was taken to Chihuahua, where he was executed after publicly recanting his entire enterprise.

On his passage through Michoacán, Hidalgo had received the support of the priest Don José María Morelos, his former pupil at the seminary of Valladolid. Morelos was not very enlightened. His ideas about his movement were those communicated to him by Hidalgo, who was confused about them. Hidalgo viewed the unmotivated slaughter of the Spaniards with distaste. Morelos, less educated, was more easily infected by the irritation of the mestizos and Indians against the Spanish. On Morelos’ side, American agents gained considerable influence. One of these agents, according to Alamán, was shot by Calleja. But not before he had witnessed with satisfaction the hecatombs of Spanish prisoners consummated by Morelos. The destruction of the Spaniards was necessary to destroy the country.

The lust for booty drove the multitudes against the Spaniard, for the dispossessed always hates he who has. The United States would have degenerated instead of prospering if, like us, they were engaged in persecuting Englishmen. On the contrary, Yankee policy has been to favour the immigration of English and Nordic people of all races related to their own. And the power of Argentina and Brazil is due to the fact that they continued to receive Spaniards and Portuguese respectively, at the same time that we were killing and expelling Spaniards. It was a drain on our ethnic aristocracy.

If on these and similar facts there is not the slightest doubt. If Morelos cannot be a model, neither as a military man nor as a patriot nor as a gentleman, why these unlimited glorifications? To raise to the highest summit of patriotic fame one who suffers from such scourges, takes away authority to demand from the officials and caudillos of the day, the elementary virtues of the man of honour. Because how can we ask from the common official what is not demanded of the hero? On the other hand, there is nothing sadder than a people whose history is not even clean. To keep it dirty is not the fault of the characters who appear in it, but the fault of the crowd of intelligentsia hired out to the vilest powers of the moment, who repeat legends and bestow thoughtless or perniciously motivated consecrations, often to cover up and justify the crimes of the present.

Categories
Autobiography Charlemagne Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 161

– For the context of these translations click here –

The Frankish king Charlemagne was a devout Catholic who maintained a close relationship with the papacy throughout his life. In 772, when Pope Adrian I was threatened by invaders, the king rushed to Rome to provide assistance. Shown here, the pope asks Charlemagne for help at a meeting near Rome.

Anti-juridical sovereignty of Charles and the beginning of the pro-pope warfare

Shortly before Pope Stephen died at the end of January 772, Carloman had died (after having made large donations to churches and monasteries, and especially to the cathedral of Rheims and the abbey of Saint-Denis) on 4 December 771, near the beautiful forests of Laon where he liked to hunt. He was only twenty years old. Such a misfortune probably triggered a fratricidal war that was already in the offing. Charles, then probably in his early thirties, became ruler of the entire Frankish kingdom in flagrant violation of the law, as he deferred the inheritance rights of Carloman’s two sons, both of whom were still children, and in a swift act of plunder, he took over his brother’s kingdom.

This was a centuries-old Christian tradition, both in the East and in the West. And it ran in the family, since Charles Martell, Charles’s grandfather and also a bastard, had already excluded the direct heirs in a very similar way. And in 754, didn’t Charles’ father Pepin tonsure the sons of his brother, the deposed Carloman, locking them up in a monastery and burying their right of inheritance there forever?

The founders of Europe!

Strangely enough, we know almost nothing about Charles’ childhood and youth.

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Editor’s note:

The autobiographical genre I want to inaugurate, analysing our abusive parents, sheds great light on these issues.

Anyone who has read my De Jesús a Hitler will know that my father was picked on in Catholic schools. The priests perpetrated a tremendous psyop on him (remember that the Jesuits say that if you give them a child at six, mentally he will be theirs forever).

In one of the sources Deschner himself quotes, Charlemagne is said to have been educated in a monastery. That is the key to understanding everything he did when he left that place.

As bizarre as it may seem, analysing the mad father who mistreated us sheds intense light on historical figures who caused the darkest hour that the white man is currently suffering from. But who’s interested in this new literary genre?

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Even the year of his birth is disputed. The new Lexicón des Mittelalters (still unfinished), however, gives per other sources that are supposedly second-rate the date 2 April 747. The specific date comes from an old calendar from the monastery of Lorsch.

For a long time Charles was also considered to have been born out of wedlock; it was believed that he was born before the marriage of his parents, Pepin and Bertrada, daughter of Count Charibert of Laon, a relationship that only years later became a real marriage. Einhard wrote his famous book, Vita Karoli Magni, fifteen or twenty years after Charles’s death; but twenty years before that date he was already living in the palace of the then fifty-year-old king. He soon became part of his innermost family circle, sitting at his table and becoming his confidant; so it is completely implausible that he had heard nothing about his hero’s childhood and youth—especially when Einhard says that Charles spoke almost continuously, that he could be considered a ‘chatterbox’.

Pope Stephen’s successor was Pope Adrian I (772-795), who reigned longer than any of the popes who preceded him.

Adrian, who belonged to the Roman nobility, was already the third pope of the house of Colonna, and at the same time a strong supporter of his relatives, who held the most important offices of state. In foreign policy Adrian broke with the pro-Bardic attitude that had been maintained by his predecessor. He soon mounted a front against Desiderius, who refused to return to the Roman Church some of the cities and territories that had been the fruit of Pepin’s wars of plunder. By papal order, as soon as Paulus Afiarta, a supporter of the Lombards, returned from their court, he was seized by Archbishop Leo of Ravenna, who had him tortured and executed.

The elimination of the leaders of the pro-Lombard faction of the curia again provoked the Lombard king’s threats and attacks on the Church-State, with the obligatory arson, plunder and robbery. And so again came the Pope’s cries for help. He openly reminded Charles of the example of Pepin. He repeatedly urged and pressed him to intervene ‘against Desiderius and the Lombards in the service of God, in favour of the rights of St Peter and for the consolation of the Church’, and to ‘complete the preservation of the holy Church of God’. In this way he prepared the way for Charles’ intervention in Italy, who would later march south five times, anticipating the numerous Italian campaigns that the Germanic emperors would carry out in the future.

Einhard says: ‘At the request of Bishop Adrian of Rome he [Charles] launched the war against the Lombards. The pope, whose enlisted troops on all sides could not even remotely cope with the military might of his enemies, was burning with impatience for Charles’ intervention…’

It seemed almost impossible to take the passes that the Lombards had closed and to cross the gorges, ‘the Gates of Italy’. Walls, fortifications and towers enclosed the gorges of the valleys between mountain and mountain. The Franks were pinned between steep walls, their cavalry still less able to manoeuvre than their foot troops. Charles, huddled and sulky in his tent, held one council of war after another with his military, parleyed with the Lombards, and softened his demands more and more; but in vain. Then a skilful deacon, sent by Archbishop Leo of Ravenna, led a scara francisca over a high, undefended ridge, which centuries later, with the ruins of such fortifications still standing would be called the ‘Path of the Franks’. Surprised to suddenly see the Franks in their rear, the Lombards thought they were surrounded and abandoned their positions in disarray. It was a ruse that Charles often used in the war against the Saxons.

The aggressor first conquered Turin and then his army, crossing the Po plain ‘like an immense tide of floating ice’ (Stormer), fell on Pavia. Charles rejoined the other army corps and at the end of September laid siege to the Lombard residential town, which was heavily fortified and well supplied with soldiers, arms and supplies.

Charles prepared for a long siege, had his sons brought from the far-off homeland and also his wife Hildegard, who was fourteen years old. And when he heard that Adalgis, son of Desiderius, had taken refuge with Carloman’s widow and children in Verona, then undoubtedly the most fortified city in Italy, he set out at once with a small troop.

Whether due to treachery or regular surrender, Verona soon capitulated. The kinsmen, Gerberga with her sons, passed at Charles’ disposal but the sources are silent about their fate. At best—as twenty years earlier with the beloved relatives of his father Pepin—they were tonsured into monasteries. In any case, they disappeared from history.

Categories
Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 160

– For the context of these translations click here –

 
Criminal excesses at the papal court with the change of power in the Frankish kingdom

Pope Stephen II, who at the decisive moment had generously granted himself the ‘Constantinian Donation’, died on 26 April 757. At his death, he left a considerably large territory, which for the time being remained in his family. Paul I (757-767), in fact, Stephen’s successor, was also his younger brother, and the second Orsini pope to occupy the Lateran palace. Pope Paul, to whom his unofficial biographer constantly attributes a propensity for clemency, wanted a permanent war against the Longobards…

Scarcely had Paul I closed his eyes on 28 June 767, practically abandoned by all those close to him, when a violent revolt broke out in Rome, as so often before. Already the next day Toto, Duke of Nepi and head of a powerful family, stormed into Rome with his armed colonists and had his brother Constantine, a layman, elected as Paul’s successor. The foundation of the church-state, the papacy’s strengthened position of power, made it increasingly attractive to the nobility. Constantine seized the Lateran, received the relevant clerical orders and within six days was the pope. In St Peter’s Basilica, he was solemnly consecrated by the bishops of Palestrina, Albano and Porto…

Constantine II (767-768), although elected in an anti-canonical manner, occupied the discredited throne for thirteen months without particular difficulty, conducted business, ordained clergy and even presided over a synod. But then he succumbed to a conspiracy of influential people, chief among them his chancellor and provost Christophorus, head of the papal officials, and his son, the chaplain Sergius. Placed under house arrest, at Easter 768 they both preferred to move to a monastery in Spoleto, San Salvatore in Rieti. They undertook to remain there by oath but fled to take refuge with the Longobard king. With the king’s permission, they gathered reinforcements in Rieti, and at the end of July 768, these forces marched on Rome under the orders of the priest Waldipertus. There, one of the city gates was opened to them and a series of bloody street battles ensued; but a traitor, a creature of Christophorus, the ecclesiastical archivist Gratiosus, stabbed Duke Toto in the back. Pope Constantine fled from church to church, until he and his closest entourage were captured and imprisoned…

Cardinals and bishops had their eyes and tongues gouged out. Constantine, deposed and discovered by chance, was dragged through the streets of Rome in an ignominious procession, locked up in a monastic prison and tortured there under the orders of the ecclesiastical archivist Gratiosus, also the murderer of Duke Toto (and later himself a duke). No less bloody was the persecution of his closest supporters, who were mutilated and blinded. Bishop Theodore, who supported Pope Constantine to the end, had his eyes and tongue torn out and was imprisoned in the monastery of Clivus Scauri where he soon succumbed in horrible pain. Passivus, Toto’s brother was also imprisoned in the monastery of St Silvestre, and all his property was seized. Likewise, the priest Waldipertus, the agent of the Longobards who had placed Philip on the papal throne, was given a short trial. True, he sought asylum in a sacred place, the church of Santa Maria Maggiore; but he was torn from there with the image of the Madonna to which he was embraced, and thrown into a dungeon of the Lateran, where he died mutilated.

At Easter 769 a synod was held at the Lateran; in addition to twenty-four Italian bishops, it was attended for the first time by thirteen Frankish bishops. This underlined, as His Holiness said in his opening speech, the ecumenical character of the cause. Constantine, already blind, was led and interrogated on 12 and 13 April in the basilica. In the first session, he confessed to having more sins than there was sand in the sea. He prostrated himself in the dust but declared that the people had made him pope by force because they were not satisfied with the harsh regime of Paulus…

The assembled fathers threw themselves furiously upon Constantine, slapped the pope whom they had already deposed and threw him out of the church. They burned the acts of his pontificate, including those of his election, which Stephen himself had signed. But the pope then intoned a kyrie eleison and all fell to the ground and confessed themselves, sinners, for having held communion with the reprobate Constantine. He was condemned to lifelong penance and probably spent the rest of his life in a monastic prison.

Again and again, it becomes clear that Christians have a compassionate heart; not all enemies are eliminated at once. Here, too, people live and let live… The policy of pope Stephen III concentrated on preventing any understanding between the Franks and the Longobards.

Categories
Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 157

 
The formation of the Church-State by wars and pillage

‘But be vigilant, my children, strive earnestly to take part in what we desire! For you know that he who is on the other side will be excluded from eternal life’. —Pope Stephen II

‘The struggle for Christ and the Church is assigned to the Franks as their historic vocation’—John Haller


Plaque marking the casket containing Liutprand’s
bones in San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro in Pavia.

 

Papal negotiations between Byzantium, Longobards and Franks

While the dispute over the images was raging in Byzantium and its repercussions were shaking Byzantine Italy, King Liutprand was trying to seize the opportunity to extend the Longobard kingdom throughout Italy, especially in Emilia and Romagna. He systematically annexed Byzantine territory, conquered castle after castle, and strengthened his authority over the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. In short, he continually increased his political power within and beyond his borders. And when in 732 (or 733) Liutprand first conquered Ravenna—which had been in Byzantine hands for almost two hundred years and the exarch fled to the Venetian lagoons—the ally proved too dangerous for the Papacy…

Liutprand was a pious person, a faithful Catholic, a friend of the priests and an outspoken promoter of the Church. He erected a domestic chapel in his palace and was the first Longobard king to procure private chaplains. He instituted ecclesiastics ‘to celebrate daily divine service for him’ (Paul the Deacon). One of his relatives was the bishop of Pavia. He was generous with the clergy. He founded monasteries, built many churches which he decorated and practised the superstitious cult of relics. A prologue to his laws opens with a biblical quotation. And in a later prologue he expressly presents himself as a defender of the Roman Catholic faith. Gregory II fought against the return of the nuns to civil life, and Liutprand supported him with a relevant law…

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Editor’s note: Contrary to what we were told as children, Christianity was imposed on whites through royal power. This vindicates what I said yesterday: that only a brutal iconoclasm ordered by a Fourth Reich could cure the white man from the mental virus that is Christianity.

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Transamundus II had forcibly deposed his father Farvald in 724, imposing on him the tonsure and entry into the clerical state. When Liutprand advanced against him (738-739), set fire to the Pentapolis and ravaged Spoleto, Transamundus took refuge with the pope, who put the Roman army at his disposal against Liutprand. Liutprand in turn stormed into the Roman duchy, sacking it and conquering its castles on the northern frontier. And war broke out everywhere, both in Roman territory and in the lands of Ravenna. It is true that Transamundus provisionally (in December 740) conquered its capital and killed the new duke Hilderic, instituted by Liutprand. But the pope, who also used his bishops in the Longobard kingdom against his sovereign, was wary of the king’s power and appealed to the Frankish prince Charles Martell, who was far away but strong.

The Frankish steward, who from 720 undisputedly controlled the whole kingdom and fought almost without pause—also involving the Church to a large extent and using the monasteries as bridgeheads (Schwarzach, Gengenbach, Schuttem, the abbey of Reichenau)—saw the expansion of his authority and the spread of Christianity as inextricably linked. To put it briefly, Charles had become the most powerful man in Europe, and so accustomed was he to war and conquest that, as contemporary sources expressly note, there was hardly a year without war (namely 740). And that man appeared precisely as the true patron and protector of Christ’s representative.

So Gregory III tried repeatedly in 739 and 740 to incite Charles Martell against Liutprand, although the two were personal friends. The pope dreamed of unshackling Rome from the Byzantine empire and offered Charles the collation of the Roman consulship as well as the rank of patrician. Gregory III, who persisted in his efforts until his death (‘In no age’, a Frankish chronicler comments flatteringly, ‘was such a thing ever heard of or seen’) appealed in vain to Charles. The latter, who was little devoted to the Church, who was genealogically related to the Longobards, who was allied with and a friend of Liutprand, who in 737 adopted his son Pipin, remained completely deaf to the first call for papal help and died before a second could eventually reach him.

Among the ancestors of the Carolingians, Charles is the only one whom later ecclesiastical authors condemn, casting him into hell for all eternity because of the systematic reduction of the ecclesiastical patrimony due to him (precaria verba regis). In his lifetime this was interpreted in a completely different way, even if he had one of his ecclesiastical relatives beheaded, Abbot Wido, who, according to the monastic chronicle, was more fond of hunting and war than of divine service. Of course, he didn’t have him beheaded for that, but a conspiracy against Charles. What we know for sure is that he was far from being a stubborn enemy of the Church. We know of eight donations of goods, which he made to him personally.

Categories
Christian art Constantinople Eastern Orthodox Church 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?

Categories
Autobiography Christendom Christian art Constantinople Eastern Orthodox Church 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.