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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?

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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).
 

______ 卐 ______

 

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.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
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.

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Islam Islamization of Europe 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 Sex

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.

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Catholic Church 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!

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Summer, 1945 (book) Thomas Goodrich

1945 (VII)

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.