web analytics

Tag: History

Categories
Alexis de Tocqueville American civil war Blacks George Washington Philosophy of history Racial studies

Heisman’s suicide note, 11

Or:

A key to understanding the ethnosuicidal United States

I had said in the previous post that I would not read beyond page 500. But a friend on Facebook suggested that I read what Heisman says about the Norman Conquest and I have found oil. I wonder if those white nationalist scholars in the history of Britain and the United States know this thesis? Although Heisman was a Jew, in good hands his thesis could be a vital piece to put together the puzzle of the whys of white suicide, which leads the United States of America. Heisman wrote:
 
Remarkably, the Anglo-Saxons and Germans are very closely related in their cultural-ethnic origins. Yet during the Nazi period, the Germans continued a cultural-political path that lead to an idealization of the Jews as their greatest mortal enemies, the destruction of Western cultural values inherited from Christianity, and the systematic genocide of the alleged propagators of those values. The Americans ventured towards the total opposite historical trajectory becoming perhaps the most Christian nation of the developed world, the most culturally compatible nation with the Jews, and the greatest ally of the state of Israel. At the root of this historical divergence between the Anglo-Saxons and the Germans lay the Norman Conquest. […]
An essential inheritance of America’s Anglo-Protestant values is an inclination to forget ethnic origins, national rivalries, and presumptions of hereditary status that were characteristic of the Old World. The Anglo-Saxons planted the model of this morality of turning a blind eye to national origins for all other Americans to follow and this implicated the erasure of everyone else’s ethnic origins as well. The freedom to forget the past appears to be the obverse side of America’s traditionally optimistic vision of the future. But why is this past problematic? Why were hereditary origins an issue in the first place?
The “race problem” should not matter in America, yet somehow it is the most American issue, the most relevant innovation of the entire American experiment. The old answers, moreover, that attempted to account for the entire “race” issue simply do not add up. There is a lack of coherent answer to the question of why race matters.
American historian Gordon Wood observed that

the white American colonists were not an oppressed people; they had no crushing imperial chains to throw off. In fact, the colonists knew they were freer, more equal, more prosperous, and less burdened with cumbersome feudal and monarchical restraints than any other part of mankind in the eighteenth century.

What exactly were the colonists rebelling against, then? What was this world-historical commotion called “revolution” really about?
 
Conquering the Conquest, or, Enlightened Saxon-centrism
The unanswered questions about race and revolution can be concentrated into a single historical question: When did the Anglo-Saxon nation stop being conquered by the Normans? For the sake of empirical accuracy, let us refuse to indulge in vague abstractions or undemonstrated traditional assumptions of assimilation. If we demand a specific, empirical date or period that marks a distinct end to the Conquest, what can the study of history offer?
Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, a descendant of an old aristocratic family from Normandy, wrote in his famous treatise on American democracy, “[g]eneral ideas do not attest to the strength of human intelligence, but rather to its insufficiency.” The holy abstraction of “freedom” has effectually pulled wool over the eyes of those who have mindlessly submitted to the authority of the metaphysics of freedom. Freedom, in this way, seems to grant freedom from rational reflection upon the authority of “freedom.” Instead of being misled by fuzzy, mystical, metaphysical abstractions such as “freedom”, let us ask, specifically and empirically, freedom from what? In its distinctive historical context, what exactly was it about the British political order that radicals such as Thomas Paine sought freedom from?
The very title of Paine’s book, The Rights of Man, might suggest a tendency to abstract or grossly generalize his particular anathema to “hereditary government” in England and France in universal terms. Yet this appearance does not fully stand up to scrutiny. In the case of England, he inquired specifically and empirically into the identity of its hereditary government and followed its very own hereditary logic back to its hereditary origins to discover:

that origin is the Norman Conquest. They are evidently of the vassalage class of manners, and emphatically mark the prostrate distance that exists in no other condition of men than between the conqueror and the conquered.

This means that the “prostrate distance” between the conqueror “class” and the conquered “class” was also a hereditary distance. This kinship discontinuity between rulers and ruled suggests possible grounds for ethnic hostility between the descendants of the aristocracy and the majority population.
In The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity, historian Hugh Thomas documented the ethnic hostility that existed between the native English and Normans following the Conquest. Justifying a common tendency to conflate ‘Anglo-Saxon’ with ‘English’, he maintained that English identity ultimately triumphed over both Norman identity and ethnic hostility. His thesis implies a kind of democratic cultural revolution and a belief in Anglo-Saxon conquest through cultural identity imperialism. If Thomas was right, then we should really date the first “modern” step towards democratic cultural revolution around the beginning of the thirteenth century. But was the Conquest really conquered so easily?
If the Norman Conquest, Norman identity, and ethnic hostility were conquered so easily, then how does Hugh Thomas explain these words of Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man?

The hatred which the Norman invasion and tyranny begat, must have been deeply rooted in the nation, to have outlived the contrivance to obliterate it. Though not a courtier will talk of the curfew-bell, not a village in England has forgotten it.

This is a direct refutation of the Hugh Thomas’s thesis, in The English and the Normans, that ethnic hostility ended by the beginning of the thirteenth century. Paine provided a powerful refutation, not simply as an observer, but as a highly influential embodiment of ethnic hostility against the Norman conquerors and their legacy. So who is right, Hugh Thomas or Thomas Paine?
The historian noted, “[l]ong-standing ethnic hostility would have completely altered the course of English political, social, and cultural history.” This unverified assertion that ethnic hostility did not continue significantly past the period covered by his study (1066-c.1220) was also contradicted by Michael Wood’s recollection of his childhood encounter with Montgomery in the 1960s:

Monty, of course, still bore his name and still carried his flag. And that explained his take on the Conquest. For though he was as English as I was, he saw himself as a Norman—and that’s what counts when it comes to matters of identity… as far as I was concerned, Monty would always be a Norman.

Still, in the twentieth century, the old ethnic identities mattered.
Did “Englishness” mean more than a quirk of geography, and more than “class”, to a hereditary Norman dominion eventually engulfed Ireland and Scotland as well? The label of Englishness certainly triumphed and the very core of the English language re-emerged. Yet England ultimately became something different, neither Norman nor English, but neither and both. Even if we ignore actual hereditary descent, the famous, and distinctively English “class system” dates from the Conquest and can itself be considered a long-term cultural triumph of Norman identity.
Genealogist L. G. Pine attested to the fact that the prestige of a Norman pedigree, associated with the identity of the “best people” or upper class, triumphed to the extent that many ambitious native English wanted to be Normans throughout post-Conquest English history. Ultimately, it was not so much that Normans became English so much that the English became British. The permanent occupation of the conqueror “class” formed the hereditary basis of the “British” Empire. While Thomas is fundamentally wrong, it is fortunate that he has clarified the issue by rightly raising the point that the reality of early post-Conquest ethnic hostility should wake people out of the complacent assumption that Normans and English should ultimately merge into one people.
Cultural assimilation is one thing; genetic assimilation, however, is quite another. Here the deficiency of historical studies that fail to account for biological factors and a general evolutionary perspective becomes most apparent. While Thomas’s scholarship offers many contributions to the debate, especially his balanced judgment on many topics, conclusions about the ultimate effects of the Conquest will remain fundamentally unbalanced if genetic factors are left out of the final equations.
Thomas writes history as if Charles Darwin never lived. Even if the Normans had completely assimilated culturally yet maintained a hereditary monopoly of leading positions within the country, that cannot be called full assimilation. The notion of special political-hereditary rights and privileges passed on from generation to generation that the American revolutionaries fought against in theory are the exact opposite of genetic assimilation.
Thomas’s thesis makes sense only if it can be demonstrated that the Anglo-Saxons are an ethnicity indifferent as to whether their government is or is not representative of “the people.” Thomas’s thesis could be saved only if the evidence verified that Anglo-Saxons are an ethnicity with no sense of the value of liberty, their fawning natural servility allowing them to live together with their new Norman aristocracy happily ever after. In summary, the real question of assimilation is whether the Anglo-Saxons assimilated to the notion that the Normans had a right to conquer them.
As L. G. Pine wrote, “The historian whose unthinking conscience allows them to justify the Norman Conquest, could as easily justify the Nazi subjugation of Europe.” Thomas’s perilous, conciliatory suppression of any negative attitudes towards Normans that could be construed as ethnic hostility led him to acquiesce in a neutral or sometimes even positive attitude of appeasement towards those exemplary Normanitas virtues expressed in ruthless military domination, genocide, and the crushing of all native ethnic resistance (a.k.a. conquest; the antithesis of the rights of man; the negation of the every principle that the most egalitarian of the American founders sought to bring to light in opposition to the founding of the British Empire in 1066).
Michael Mann’s The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing proposed two versions of “We, the people.” He proposed that the liberal version, exemplified by American Constitutionalism, is characterized by individual rights, class, and special interest groups. In the organic version of democracy ethnicity rivals other forms of interest and identity and in some circumstances can express itself in ethnic cleansing. This is the “dark side of democracy.”
In Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union, Mann observed, “democratization struggles increasingly pitted a local ethnicity against a foreign imperial ruler.” The demos was confused with the ethnos. Was America any different? If the Normans conquerors achieved some degree of success in perpetuating their hereditary government over the centuries, and the original ethnic conflict that Thomas documented was not perpetuated with it, then how does one explain that? What would make the impetus of organic and liberal democracy so different from one another?
For the sake of argument, let us entertain this peculiar idea of hereditary separatism, just as John Locke does in his Second Treatise of Government (and try in earnest to assume this has nothing to do whatsoever with the Norman Conquest):

But supposing, which seldom happens, that the conquerors and conquered never incorporate into one people, under the same laws and freedom; let us see next what power a lawful conqueror has over the subdued: and that I say is purely despotical… the government of a conqueror, imposed by force on the subdued… has no obligation on them.

The Declaration of Independence proclaims, “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This assertion implies that the Norman Conquest was illegitimate. The Norman takeover was achieved despite the lack of consent of the governed. That government was instituted with strategic violence against any significant resistance from the governed. From the view of its author, Thomas Jefferson, the Norman Conquest was the institution of an unjust power against the rights of the people. It is thus not a coincidence that the hereditary “English” political tradition was founded in utter violation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
In The Rights of Man, Paine explained, “by the Conquest all the rights of the people or the nation were absorbed into the hands of the Conqueror, who added the title of King to that of Conqueror.” Paine posited a remarkable ambiguity between the “rights of the people” and “the nation.” King was equated with Conqueror. In 1066 there existed a right of conquest, but no “rights of the people.” The modern invention of the latter justified, at long last, the reclamation of Anglo-Saxon “rights” from the “hands of the Conqueror.”
The Declaration of Independence further asserts, “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.” America provided an opportunity to do just that.
Taking full advantage of this opportunity meant that America would truly be different from the old world. As The Rights of Man explained, “In England, the person who exercises this prerogative [as king] is often a foreigner; always half a foreigner, and always married to a foreigner. He is never in full natural or political connection with the country.” A lack of “natural” connection between the political elite and the people was significant for Paine. The contrast with America was clear: “The presidency of America… is the only office from which a foreigner is excluded; and in England, it is the only one to which he is admitted.” The new world would be different.
America, for Paine, was the place where foreigners were excluded from that high office. Democracy meant that “commoners” could finally be admitted. Revolution had turned the old order upside down: the rule of the people meant the triumph of Anglo-Saxon ethnocentrism over the legacy of the Norman-centric aristocracy.
It is unfortunate for believers in the distinct superiority of the liberal form of democracy that the organic and liberal varieties are more equal than they think. Faith in the categorical distinction between the liberal and organic expressions of democracy is only a display of naiveté towards the cunning of ethnocentrism. Democratic Saxon-centrism has prevented an appreciation of the ethnic diversity at the very heart of the American founding.
Are the Anglo-Saxon ethnically superior to ethnocentrism and thus superior to all other peoples on Earth in this respect or has something been overlooked? Is it true that Anglo-Saxons are always superior and never inferior to the power and influence of the Norman Conquest or is it at least possible that this unspoken assumption might have something to do with Anglo-Saxon ethnocentrism? It is as if a conquest of the Conquest has been attempted through an enlightened ethnic cleansing of the Norman impact on world history. The Norman conquerors of history, however, were not conquered so easily.
 
The Peculiar Revolution
For the title of original, permanent English colony in the New World, the Pilgrims of the Mayflower take second place. It was the English settlers of Jamestown, Virginia, who were the first permanent English colonists, thirteen years before the Mayflower. Jamestown was birthplace of the United States, and, it just so happens, the birthplace of American slavery of Africans. In 1619, a year before the landing of the Mayflower, the first black slaves were brought to Virginia.
America was born a land of slavery.
In the Old World, it had been “the Norman” who so often represented tyranny, aristocracy, and inequality. But surely things must have been different in America. In the land of freedom, democracy, and equality, perhaps only Southern slavery posed a truly fundamental challenge to these modern values.
The question nonetheless remains, who were these Southern slave masters?
It is as if recent historians have confidently assumed that, in all of human history, there could not be a case where the issue of race was more irrelevant. Never in human history was the issue of race more irrelevant than in regard to the racial identity of the American South’s essential “master race.” This is a truly fantastic contradiction: the South apparently fought a war in the name of the primacy of race, yet the distinctive racial identity of the South primary ruling race is apparently a matter of total indifference.
Virtually every other people in history, from the Italians, to the Chinese, to the Mayans, to the Albanians, possessed some form of ethnic identity. The French, the Germans, and the Russians did not and do not simply consider themselves to be merely “white.” The original English settlers of the North, moreover, are considered, not simply white, but Anglo-Saxon. Why, then, was the South’s “master race” nearly alone in its absence of a distinctive ethnic identity? Is this state of affairs only a consummation of the Northern victory?
Of course, that blacks possessed a distinctive African ancestry is admissible, but the ancestry of the South’s ruling race is apparently inadmissible. This must be a state of affairs almost more peculiar than slavery itself. Everyone else across the world is permitted a distinctive ethnic or racial identity except the great Southern slave masters. For some peculiar reason, the original Southern slave masters are not allowed to have a distinct ethnic or racial identity. This means that the only people in American history who apparently have no distinct ethnic or racial origins beyond being white are precisely the same people who thought other people could and should be enslaved on the basis of their ethnic or racial origins.
These aristocratic planters must have been the most raceless, bloodless, deracinated, rootless, cosmopolitan universalists ever known to history. We must conclude that of all white people, these aristocrats must have valued heredity or genealogy the very least. The Virginia planters were most peculiar, not for being owners of black slaves, but for being the least ethnically self-conscious white people in world history. Is this an accurate reflection of reality?
This is really one of the great, peculiar paradoxes of world history: the elite Southern planters, one of the most extreme, unapologetic, and explicitly racist groups in history, are precisely those who may have the most obscure racial identity in history. Their claim to fame has been tied to identifying blacks as a race of natural slaves and in identifying themselves as race of natural masters—a “master race” without a racial identity. Perhaps the time has come to recognize that they have also merited a claim to fame simply for the obscurity of their racial identity.
Who were they?
The Englishmen who first settled the North identified themselves as Anglo-Saxons. But what about the “First Families of Virginia”? Virginia’s Tidewater elite largely originated from the geographic entity of England. But did these racists consider themselves specifically Anglo-Saxon? This question must be posed as carefully as possible: did they or did they not specifically identify themselves as members of the Anglo-Saxon race?
Who were these American slave masters?
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the North possessed “the qualities and defects that characterize the middle class”, while the South “has the tastes, prejudices, weaknesses, and greatness of all aristocracies.” There could probably be no greater confirmation that South possessed a genuine aristocracy in the traditional sense. Yet this prescient antebellum observation begs the question: how did young America acquire an old aristocracy?
It is as if, in America, of all places, no explanation is required for this profound cultural difference between North and South. America was supposedly a country defined by “the qualities and defects that characterize the middle class.” But the idea of a slave race assumes the existence of a master race, not a bourgeois or middle-class race. The Union was not threatened by the leadership of poor Southern whites; it was threatened by the leadership of a subgroup of whites with an aristocratic philosophy that mastered the entire cultural order of the South.
If the Civil War was fought against slavery, and to fight slavery was to fight the slave-masters, then the Civil War was fought against the slave-masters. Since the slaves were not guilty of enslaving themselves, the argument that the Civil War was about slavery is practically identical to the argument that the Civil War was about the slave-masters. No matter which way one looks at it, all roads of inquiry into slavery leads to an inquiry into these peculiar Southern slave-masters.
Who were they?
“These slaves”, said Abraham Lincoln, “constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.” Did Lincoln state here that slavery was the cause of the war? No, Lincoln stated that slaves, as property, constituted an interest, and this interest was, somehow, the cause of war. The question then becomes, whose interest did these slaves serve?
To speak of aristocracy is to speak, by definition, of a minority of the population. The original aristocratic settlers of Virginia were called Cavaliers. “[T]he legend of the Virginia cavalier was no mere romantic myth”, concluded David Hackett Fischer in Albion’s Seed. “In all of its major parts, it rested upon a solid foundation of historical fact.”
But who were the Cavaliers?
One year before the outbreak of the American Civil War, in June of 1860, the Southern Literary Messenger declared:

the Southern people come of that race recognized as cavaliers… directly descended from the Norman barons of William the Conqueror, a race distinguished in its early history for its warlike and fearless character, a race in all times since renowned for its gallantry, chivalry, honor, gentleness and intellect.

Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War documented the thesis of Norman/Saxon conflict from a literary perspective. Its author, Ritchie Devon Watson, Jr., interpreted this thesis of Norman-Cavalier identity as “race mythology”, just as historian James McPherson has called this peculiar notion the “central myth of southern ethnic nationalism.” Yet how can this thesis be dismissed as myth without a thorough, scientific, genealogical investigation into the matter? Is it a myth, rather, that the Norman Conquest, the most pivotal event in English history, had no affect whatsoever on America? Is it true that representatives of virtually every ethnicity and race have come to America—with one peculiar Norman exception? Were the descendents of the Norman-Viking conquerors of England the only people in the world who were not enterprising or adventurous enough to try their fortunes in a new land?
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union,” Lincoln explained, “and is not either to save or destroy slavery.” Yet it has become commonplace to disagree with Lincoln and to propagate the myth that the Civil War was first and foremost about the slavery of black people. The repeated claim that the Civil War was about slavery can be deceptive because it serves as a means of avoiding focus upon the slave-masters, which further avoids facing the centrality of the identity of the Norman-Cavaliers. The American Civil War was fought primarily, not over black slavery, but over Norman mastery.
There is a sense, however, in which the Civil War was provoked by the slavery of a race of people. Norman-American George Fitzhugh, the South’s most extreme and comprehensive pro-slavery theorist, clarified the relationship between race, slavery, and the Civil War amidst that violent clash of two Americas:

It is a gross mistake to suppose that ‘abolition’ is the cause of dissolution between the north and south. The Cavaliers, Jacobites, and Huguenots of the south naturally hate, condemn, and despise the Puritans who settled the north. The former are master races, the latter a slave race, the descendants of the Saxon serfs.

This is a key piece of the racial puzzle of America. Fitzhugh implied that the North sided with a black slave race because the Anglo-Saxons themselves are a slave race. Fitzhugh depicted Anglo-Saxons as the niggers of post-Conquest England.
With these words, Fitzhugh verified that the Norman Conquest, in its origins, was a form of slavery of the Anglo-Saxon race. The foundational irreconcilability between North and South is incomprehensible without recognizing that North’s peculiar obsession with “freedom” evolved precisely from the fierce denial that they or their ancestors were, in fact, a Saxon “slave race” born to serve a Norman “master race.”
“True,” Horace Greeley admitted in an issue of his New York Daily Tribune in 1854, “we believe the tendency of the slaveholding system is to make those trained under and mentally conforming to it, overbearing, imperious, and regardless of the rights of others.” Would he have believed, too, that the tendency of the Saxon-holding system in England after 1066 was to make those trained under and mentally conforming to it, overbearing, imperious, and regardless of the rights of others? Could there be any connection between these two very peculiar tendencies?
Could revulsion against the very notion of a slavish Saxon-holding system be the root and source of the inordinately strong Anglo-Saxon tendency toward freedom? The key to understanding the modern fame of the Anglo-Saxons as a free race is to understand the medieval fame of the Anglo-Saxons as a conquered and enslaved race. The Norman-Cavaliers’ belief in the rectitude of slavery was a direct descendant of belief in the rectitude of the peculiar institution of the right of conquest.
Yet, as Fitzhugh made clear, he and other Cavaliers were not the only whites of the South, even if they were as decisive in forming the culture of South as the Anglo-Saxons were in forming the culture of the North. The Jacobites refer to the Scotch-Irish who became the majority of the Southern white population. A smaller population of French Huguenots followed the original Cavaliers and concentrated in South Carolina.
According to the late American political scientist Samuel Huntington, “American identity as a multiethnic society dates from, and in some measure, was a product of World War II.” Huntington believed that America has a Puritan essence. He implied that American identity is rooted in a single ethnic identity and that ethnic identity is Puritan and Anglo-Saxon. If this is true, then it goes without saying that ultimate patriarch among the “founding fathers”, George Washington, must have been a pureblooded Anglo-Saxon. Is this genealogically accurate?
According to one source, the very first Washington in England was originally named William fitzPatric (Norman French for son of Patric). He changed his name to William de Wessyngton when he adopted the name of the parish in which he lived circa 1180 A.D. Another source, the late English specialist in Norman genealogy L. G. Pine, related that George Washington and his family “has plenty of Norman ancestry.” He confirmed that this family was on record as owners of Washington Manor in Durhamshire in the twelfth century and of knightly rank. Since George Washington was the possessor of “a carefully traced decent from Edward I,” this implies that the first president of the United States was also a descendant of William the Conqueror. None other than the twenty-eighth president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, affirmed in his biography of Washington that his Cavalier ancestors “hated the Puritans” and that the first Washingtons in Virginia were born of a “stock whose loyalty was as old as the Conquest… They came of a Norman family.”
George Washington was a Norman-American and a classic representative of the aristocratic, slave-owning, Cavalier culture of Virginia. Unfortunately for Mr. Washington, Samuel Huntington has no room for the kind of diversity represented by America’s first president and his Puritan hating, Cavalier ancestors. Everyone must conform to the Anglo-Saxon, Puritan cultural model if they want to be counted as real Americans—even George Washington. Wasn’t that what the Civil War was about?
How is it even conceivable that Norman conquerors who developed into Southern slave masters could also have played a decisive role in the architecture of American liberty? Huntington, so keen to stress the English roots of American liberty, neglected to point out that Magna Carta was a product of Norman aristocratic civilization. It was the Normans who first invented the formal tradition of constitutional liberty that eventually conquered the world.
So while Washington was an heir to Norman aristocratic tradition, Magna Carta was a part of that tradition. Southern resistance to King George III in 1776 could trace its struggle for liberty to the resistance of Norman barons to King John in 1215 (and this also preserved their special privileges or “liberties” against the tide of assimilation with Anglo-Saxons). It was only in the seventeenth century that Anglo-Saxons exploited and selectively reinterpreted Magna Carta for their own purposes.
The ultimate foil of Hugh M. Thomas’s thesis that ethnic hostility between Normans and Anglo-Saxon went extinct by about 1220 is to be found in the endurance and persistence of Samuel Huntington’s question: Who are we? The “universalism” of the American founding actually emerged out of the attempt to preserve a rather peculiar form of multiculturalism that balanced the democracy-leaning North against an aristocracy-leaning, slaving owning South. The American Civil War resulted in the Northern conquest of the multicultural America that formed the character of the American founding. The Anglo-Saxon conquest of 1865 was the real founding of Samuel Huntington’s presumption of a single Puritan-based American culture.
What Hugh Thomas actually did was to dig up the root of the Anglo-Saxon cultural identity imperialism that late twentieth century multiculturalism began to expose. Thomas’s conclusion that the Anglo-Saxons culturally conquered the Normans in thirteenth century was made seemingly plausible only by nineteenth century conquests of the Normans. Thomas only uncovered the origin of this Anglo-Saxon way of cultural conquest through a struggle against the multicultural England of medieval times.
Multiculturalists who have promoted the contributions of women and minorities at the expense of the usual dead white males of history are following directly in the footsteps of Anglo-Saxon historians who downplayed the Norman impact on their history. The underdog biases of multiculturalism is not an aberration, but only a continuation of the majoritarian bias of democracy itself against a fair assessment of the contributions of Norman aristocracy to world history. William the Conqueror is the ultimate dead white European male in the history of the English-speaking world.
Hugh Thomas’s unspoken assumption is that Anglo-Saxons culturally conquered the Norman Conquest. They, the Anglo-Saxons, were ultimately history’s great conquerors. But is this true? Let this point resound around the entire world with utmost clarity: the issue here is who conquered whom? Did the Normans become victims of conquest by the Anglo-Saxons in modern times through characteristically modern methods?
Is it all possible that Anglo-Saxons might possibly be biased on the subject of the people who once defeated, conquered, and subjugated them? Most humans have submitted to the yoke of a “modern” Anglo-Saxon-leaning interpretation of long-term effects of the Norman Conquest. The repression of the impact of 1066 upon modern times has stifled a rational, evolutionary understanding of liberal democracy in the English-speaking world. The time has come for America and the rest of the English-speaking world to overcome this ancient bloodfeud and reclaim its Norman heritage, a heritage to goes to the very heart of the American founding.
In modern times, the Anglo-Saxon culturally conquered the Normans by Saxoning away their multicultural difference into presumptions of Anglo-Saxon “universalism.” To call America “Anglo-Saxon” is thus tantamount to ethnically cleansing George Washington of his Norman or Cavalier ancestral identity. Was George Washington the victim of a cultural form of ethnic cleansing by the Anglo-Saxon people?
[pages 654-675]

Categories
Athens Autobiography Catholic Church Christendom Darkening Age (book) Destruction of Greco-Roman world Evil Free speech / association Library of Alexandria

Darkening Age, 2


 
INTRODUCTION
Athens, AD 532

‘That all superstition of pagans and heathens should be annihilated is what God wants, God commands, God proclaims.’

— St Augustine

This was no time for a philosopher to be philosophical. ‘The tyrant’, as the philosophers put it, was in charge and had many alarming habits. In Damascius’s own time, houses were entered and searched for books and objects deemed unacceptable. If any were found they would be removed and burned in triumphant bonfires in town squares. Discussion of religious matters in public had been branded a ‘damnable audacity’ and forbidden by law. Anyone who made sacrifices to the old gods could, the law said, be executed. Across the empire, ancient and beautiful temples had been attacked, their roofs stripped, their treasures melted down, their statues smashed. To ensure that their rules were kept, the government started to employ spies, officials and informers to report back on what went on in the streets and marketplaces of cities and behind closed doors in private homes. As one influential Christian speaker put it, his congregation should hunt down sinners and drive them into the way of salvation as relentlessly as a hunter pursues his prey into nets.
The consequences of deviation from the rules could be severe and philosophy had become a dangerous pursuit. Damascius’s own brother had been arrested and tortured to make him reveal the names of other philosophers, but had, as Damascius recorded with pride, ‘received in silence and with fortitude the many blows of the rod that landed on his back’. Others in Damascius’ s circle of philosophers had been tortured; hung up by the wrists until they gave away the names of their fellow scholars. A fellow philosopher had, some years before, been flayed alive. Another had been beaten before a judge until the blood flowed down his back.
The savage ‘tyrant’ was Christianity. From almost the very first years that a Christian emperor had ruled in Rome in AD 312, liberties had begun to be eroded. And then, in AD 529, a final blow had fallen. It was decreed that all those who laboured ‘under the insanity of paganism’—in other words Damascius and his fellow philosophers—would be no longer allowed to teach. There was worse. It was also announced that anyone who had not yet been baptized was to come forward and make themselves known at the ‘holy churches’ immediately, or face exile. And if anyone allowed themselves to be baptized, then slipped back into their old pagan ways, they would be executed.
For Damascius and his fellow philosophers, this was the end. They could not worship their old gods. They could not earn any money. Above all, they could not now teach philosophy. The Academy, the greatest and most famous school in the ancient world—perhaps ever—a school that could trace its history back almost a millennium, closed.
It is impossible to imagine how painful the journey through Athens would have been. As they went, they would have walked through the same streets and squares where their heroes—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle—had once walked and worked and argued. They would have seen in them a thousand reminders that those celebrated times were gone. The temples of Athens were closed and crumbling and many of the brilliant statues that had once stood in them had been defaced or removed. Even the Acropolis had not escaped: its great statue of Athena had been torn down.
Little of what is covered by this book is well-known outside academic circles. Certainly it was not well-known by me when I grew up in Wales, the daughter of a former nun and a former monk. My childhood was, as you might expect, a fairly religious one. We went to church every Sunday; said grace before meals, and I said my prayers (or at any rate the list of requests which I considered to be the same thing) every night. When Catholic relatives arrived we play-acted not films but First Holy Communion and, at times, even actual communion…
As children, both had been taught by monks and nuns; and as a monk and a nun they had both taught. They believed as an article of faith that the Church that had enlightened their minds was what had enlightened, in distant history, the whole of Europe. It was the Church, they told me, that had kept alive the Latin and Greek of the classical world in the benighted Middle Ages, until it could be picked up again by the wider world in the Renaissance. And, in a way, my parents were right to believe this, for it is true. Monasteries did preserve a lot of classical knowledge.
But it is far from the whole truth. In fact, this appealing narrative has almost entirely obscured an earlier, less glorious story. For before it preserved, the Church destroyed.
In a spasm of destruction never seen before—and one that appalled many non-Christians watching it—during the fourth and fifth centuries, the Christian Church demolished, vandalized and melted down a simply staggering quantity of art. Classical statues were knocked from their plinths, defaced, defiled and torn limb from limb. Temples were razed to their foundations and burned to the ground. A temple widely considered to be the most magnificent in the entire empire was levelled.
Many of the Parthenon sculptures were attacked, faces were mutilated, hands and limbs were hacked off and gods were decapitated. Some of the finest statues on the whole building were almost certainly smashed off then ground into rubble that was then used to build churches.
Books—which were often stored in temples—suffered terribly. The remains of the greatest library in the ancient world, a library that had once held perhaps 700,000 volumes, were destroyed in this way by Christians. It was over a millennium before any other library would even come close to its holdings. Works by censured philosophers were forbidden and bonfires blazed across the empire as outlawed books went up in flames.

Fragment of a 5th-century scroll
showing the destruction of the Serapeum
by Pope Theophilus of Alexandria

The work of Democritus, one of the greatest Greek philosophers and the father of atomic theory, was entirely lost. Only one per cent of Latin literature survived the centuries. Ninety-nine per cent was lost.
The violent assaults of this period were not the preserve of cranks and eccentrics. Attacks against the monuments of the ‘mad’, ‘damnable’ and ‘insane’ pagans were encouraged and led by men at the very heart of the Catholic Church. The great St Augustine himself declared to a congregation in Carthage that ‘that all superstition of pagans and heathens should be annihilated is what God wants, God commands, God proclaims!’ St Martin, still one of the most popular French saints, rampaged across the Gaulish countryside levelling temples and dismaying locals as he went. In Egypt, St Theophilus razed one of the most beautiful buildings in the ancient world. In Italy, St Benedict overturned a shrine to Apollo. In Syria, ruthless bands of monks terrorized the countryside, smashing down statues and tearing the roofs from temples.
St John Chrysostom encouraged his congregations to spy on each other. Fervent Christians went into people’s houses and searched for books, statues and paintings that were considered demonic. This kind of obsessive attention was not cruelty. On the contrary: to restrain, to attack, to compel, even to beat a sinner was— if you turned them back to the path of righteousness—to save them. As Augustine, the master of the pious paradox put it: ‘Oh, merciful savagery.’
The results of all of this were shocking and, to non-Christians, terrifying. Townspeople rushed to watch as internationally famous temples were destroyed. Intellectuals looked on in despair as volumes of supposedly unchristian books—often in reality texts on the liberal arts—went up in flames. Art lovers watched in horror as some of the greatest sculptures in the ancient world were smashed by people too stupid to appreciate them—and certainly too stupid to recreate them.
Since then, and as I write, the Syrian civil war has left parts of Syria under the control of a new Islamic caliphate. In 2014, within certain areas of Syria, music was banned and books were burned. The British Foreign Office advised against all travel to the north of the Sinai Peninsula. In 2015, Islamic State militants started bulldozing the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, just south of Mosul in Iraq because it was ‘idolatrous’. Images went around the world showing Islamic militants toppling statues around three millennia old from their plinths, then taking hammers to them. ‘False idols’ must be destroyed. In Palmyra, the remnants of the great statue of Athena that had been carefully repaired by archaeologists, was attacked yet again. Once again, Athena was beheaded; once again, her arm was sheared off.
I have chosen Palmyra as a beginning, as it was in the east of the empire, in the mid-380s, that sporadic violence against the old gods and their temples escalated into something far more serious. But equally I could have chosen an attack on an earlier temple, or a later one. That is why it is a beginning, not the beginning. I have chosen Athens in the years around AD 529 as an ending—but again, I could equally have chosen a city further east whose inhabitants, when they failed to convert to Christianity, were massacred and their arms and legs cut off and strung up in the streets as a warning to others.

Categories
Christendom Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Old Testament Philosophy of history Theology Vegetarianism Welfare of animals

Kriminalgeschichte, 70

Below, an abridged translation from the first volume of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (Criminal History of Christianity). For a comprehensive text that explains the absolute need to destroy Judeo-Christianity, see: here. In a nutshell, any white person who worships the god of the Jews is, ultimately, ethnosuicidal.

 
Augustine sanctions the ‘holy war’
The amantissimus Domini sanctissimus, as the bishop Claudius of Turin of the 9th century called Augustine, recorded, like no one before him, the compatibility between service to war and the doctrine of Jesus.
The father of the Church Ambrose had already celebrated a pathetic instigation of war, and the father of the Church Athanasius had declared that in war it was ‘legal and praiseworthy to kill adversaries’. However, none of them admitted the bloody office with as few scruples and as the hypocrite ‘angel of heaven’ who looks ‘constantly to God’.
Certainly, Augustine did not share the optimism of an Eusebius or an Ambrose, who equated the hope of the pax romana with that of pax christiana as providential, since ‘The wars to the present are not only between empires but also between confessions, between truth and error’. By weaving his web of grace, predestination and angels, Augustine theoretically committed himself in an increasingly negative way before the Roman state.
Every State power based on the libido dominandi rests on sins and for that reason must submit to a Church based on grace, but in fact not free of sin either. This philosophy of the State, which constituted the historical-philosophical basis of the medieval power struggle between the popes and the emperors, was decisively influential until the times of Thomas Aquinas.
Until the year of his death, Augustine not only asked for the punishment of the murderers, but also to crush the uprisings and subdue the ‘barbarians’, taking it as a moral obligation. It was not difficult for him to consider the State malignant but he praised its bloody practices and, like everything else, also ‘attribute it to Divine Providence’ since ‘its way of proceeding’ is ‘to avoid human moral decay through wars’.
Whoever thinks so, in a childlike and cynical way at the same time, obviously interprets in the same sense the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’. That commandment should not be applied to the totality of nature and the animal kingdom. Augustine discusses with the Manichaeans that it does not include the prohibition of ‘pulling a bush’ or the ‘irrational animal world’ because such beings ‘must live and die to our advantage; submit them to you!’
‘Man owns animals’, complains Hans Henny Jahnn in his great trilogy Fluss ohne Ufer. ‘He does not need to try. He just has to be naive. Naive also in his anger. Brutal and naive. This is what God wants. Even if he hits the animals, he will go to heaven’.
Earlier, authors such as Theodor Lessing and Ludwig Klages had persuasively shown that, as the latter affirms, Christianity conceals something with its connotation of ‘humanity’. What it really means is that the rest of living beings lack value—unless they serve human beings! They write: ‘As is well known, Buddhism prohibits the killing of animals, because the animal is the same being as we are. Now, if one scolds an Italian with such a reproach when he torments an animal to death, he will claim that “senza anima” and “non è christiano” since for the Christian believer the right to exist lies only in the human beings’.
Augustine on the other hand believes that the human being ‘even in situations of sin is better than the animal’: the being ‘of lower rank’. And he treats vegetarianism as ‘impious heretic opinion’.
That God can be pleased with arms is shown by the example of David and that of ‘many other righteous’ of that time. Augustine quotes at least 13,276 times the Old Testament, about which he had previously written that he had always found it unpleasant!
But now it was useful. For example: ‘The just will rejoice when contemplating revenge; He will bathe his feet in the blood of the wicked’. And of course all the ‘just’, logically, can make a ‘just war’ (bellum iustum).
It is a concept introduced by Augustine. No Christian had used it before, not even the easy-going Lactantius, whom he read carefully. Soon the whole Christian world made a iusta bella, based upon a ‘just’ reason for war any minimal deviation from the Roman liturgy. Augustine strongly recommends military service, and cites quite a few cases of ‘God-fearing warriors’ from the Bible; not only the ‘numerous righteous’ of the Old Testament, so rich in atrocities, but also a couple of the New Testament.
Augustine experienced the collapse of Roman rule in Africa, when the Vandal hordes invaded Mauritania and Numidia in the summer of 429 and in the spring of 430. He witnessed the annihilation of his life’s work: whole cities were grass of the flames and its inhabitants assassinated. Anywhere the Catholic communities, depleted by the Church and the State, opposed no resistance; at least there is no relation of it.
Augustine died on August 28, 430, and was buried that same day. A year later Hippo, retained by Boniface for fourteen months, was evacuated and partially burned. Augustine’s biographer, the holy bishop Possidius, who like the teacher was a fervent fighter against the ‘heretics’ and the ‘pagans’, still lived some years among the ruins.

 
 

END OF VOLUME I

 

______ 卐 ______

Liked it? Take a second to support this site.

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

Sample chapter

by Tom Goodrich

As we’ve come to appreciate with each passing year, World War Two was the most evil manifestation in human history. No other conflict even comes close in matching that war for its vast and unspeakable crimes. Mass murder of surrendering soldiers, mass starvation of helpless civilians, mass rape of women and children, assembly-line style torture in the tens of thousands, uprooting and expulsion of millions to certain death, the deliberate destruction of ancient cultures—these atrocities and many more add annually to World War Two’s menu of beastly war crimes.
Also, with each passing year, it becomes clearer and clearer that virtually all the major crimes of the Second World War were committed by the Allied powers. Additionally, almost all these crimes took place toward the end of the war. Why is this? Why were these terrible atrocities not only committed by the victors but why did almost all occur at the end of the war? Simple. Late in the war the Allies knew they would win and they thus knew that there was little risk of war crimes trials. The victors—with the Americans in the lead—knew that they could unleash their sadism against a hated, helpless enemy with utter impunity, and they did.

The following is a description of just one such major war crime as listed above. The account comes from my recent book, Summer, 1945: Germany, Japan and the Harvest of Hate. To this day, relatively little is actually known of this great atrocity. And this, of course, is because war criminals not only plan their crimes expertly, but they cover them up expertly, as well.
 
_________
Note of the Editor: Tom has graciously allowed me to publish the sample chapter ‘Island of Fire’ on this site. But with footnotes, it is as almost ten thousand words: too long for a regular WDH entry. However, I have emailed him asking if the chapter is already published on his own website so that I may link it here.
Update: Tom has responded. The sample chapter can already be read at Counter-Currents, here.

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

Summer, 1945

Summer, 1945: Germany, Japan
and the Harvest of Hate

A book review by Thor Magnusson

Sometimes a book comes along that changes the way we think. Sometimes a book comes along that changes the way we act. Sometimes a book comes along that changes the way we think and the way we act. Such a book was Hellstorm–The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947.
That masterpiece by Thomas Goodrich changed forever not only how we would view World War Two, but it changed how we would view the world itself. For the first time since it happened, because of one bold and breath-taking book, the scales fell from our eyes and we were finally able to see free and unfettered what the abomination called World War Two was really all about.
Swept forever into a dark, dirty corner was the filth and disease of seventy years of Jewish propaganda, seventy years of Jewish lies about the so-called “Good War” and the so-called “Greatest Generation,” seventy years of Jewish mendacity about who was bad and who was good. Suddenly, overnight, replacing those lies was an honest, impartial, unbiased, but driving, relentless, and utterly merciless account of the fate that befell Germany in 1945.
As incredible as Hellstorm was, is, and will always remain, we now know it was only half the story. While the bloody obscenity that was World War Two was being acted out against a largely helpless German population by as evil a cast of creatures as ever haunted any hell anywhere, a similar horror show was taking place on the far side of the globe. And what is revealed in Tom Goodrich’s latest book, Summer, 1945–Germany, Japan and the Harvest of Hate, is a story so savage and sadistic as to numb the senses.
While some of the events described in Summer, 1945 will be familiar to readers of Hellstorm, many will not. Clearly, the author did a vast amount of new research for this new book since much material is previously unknown, especially regarding the contributions of the “Greatest Generation” to its already ghastly list of war crimes against Germany. In fact, what was previously revealed about the Americans in Hellstorm, horrific as it was at the time, was only the faintest foretaste of what was to come in Summer, 1945. For example…
Massive, monstrous, staggering as was the scale of Red Army rape in Germany, it now seems clear that the Americans were not far behind, if behind they were at all. Simply put: No one in control cared. Far from trying to halt the nonstop sexual attacks that their men committed against helpless German females, US officers, like Soviet officers, either ignored them, laughed at them, or actively encouraged them. Upon entering their communities, American officers forced Germans to write the age and sex of all occupants in their homes, then ordered the lists nailed to doors.
“The results are not difficult to imagine,” said one horrified priest from a village where women and children were soon staggering to the local hospital after the predictable sexual assaults commenced. Some US generals even blamed the victims themselves for their own gang rape when they dared leave their homes to beg for food. Lt. General Edwin Clarke went further when he announced that the thousands of rape reports in his area were nothing more than a conspiracy by die-hard Nazis to belittle and embarrass his well-behaved and totally innocent troops.
Clarke apparently believed that the hundreds of thousands of beaten, bruised and bleeding women and children were all liars with self-inflicted sex wounds. Also, to drive home German defeat, it was noted that GIs were being ordered by their “political officers” to make the gang rapes as public as possible. Although such brutal attacks were already common on streets and sidewalks, in schools and shops, an audience of family members was the preferred crowd for gang rape. Forcing German men to watch was also favored by the Americans, just as it was by their communist comrades.
Another hideous American war crime, a despicable act of hate and savagery, was the cold-blooded murder of SS and Wehrmacht soldiers the moment they surrendered their weapons. “You will not accept the surrender of any German SS,” announced one American general, demonstrating his commitment to barbarity and a criminal contempt for the Geneva Convention. By the tens of thousands these German soldiers, some of the best fighters the world had ever seen, were shown no mercy by the cowardly US murderers. In one massacre alone over seven hundred SS men were murdered in a matter of minutes; in another massacre, five hundred died, and so on.
“The Americans forced the Germans to walk in front of them with raised hands,” said an eyewitness regarding one group of fifty. “Then they shot the prisoners in their heads from behind.”
Additionally, the unbelievably sick and sadistic torture camps operated by the US Army and European Jews in Germany and Poland was on a psychopathic scale beyond belief. Well over a hundred thousand German men, women and even children suffered brutal deaths in these nightmarish torture pens. One might have imagined, and one would have certainly hoped, that after Hellstorm nothing more could have possibly been added to this perfectly hellish script of torture—victims buried alive, women forced to lay with and kiss rotting corpses–but one would have imagined wrong.
Those few who survived these demonic camps where dying was a thing to be postponed, not hurried, could no longer be called human. Of virtually all German men and boys who somehow survived to reach home, it was noticed all had their reproductive organs destroyed beyond repair.
But horrific as the so-called “peace” in Germany was, perhaps the greatest revelations for readers of Summer, 1945 come in the war chapters devoted to Japan. From the first page forward we readers, especially we Americans readers raised on the mythology of the “Dirty Jap,” will find our world of make believe turned upside down and inside out. Winners do write the history. And never was this more apt and terribly illustrated than in the case of America’s victory over Japan.
With the possible exception of the so-called Jewish “Holocaust,” one of the greatest lies to emerge from WWII and survive for over seventy years in tact, is the one we have been told over and over ever since December 7, 1941, viz., that the Japanese soldier was a mindless, murderous automaton, that he would never surrender, that he would always fight to the death, that he “lived to die” for the Emperor, that suicide was his second nature, and so on. There is no truth to any of these fairy-tales. Such a revelation as I have just stated here should not have come as any great surprise to anyone when they think about it, but it did come as a great shock to me and it will to everyone else, I am sure. When one has been told a “truth” such as this about the “robotic” Japanese soldier, a truth told for so many years from so many sources, one simply believes it as totally, completely and mindlessly as they believe in the Jewish Holocaust or that night follows day. After reading a few pages of Summer, 1945, however, it will be very clear to everyone that never was there a greater falsehood.
While reading what the opposing sides thought, in their own words, it is quickly clear that emotionally there was no appreciable difference between what a Japanese eighteen-year-old wanted and what an American eighteen-year-old wanted. First and foremost, both wanted to live. Both wanted to survive the war so that each might return home and marry that girl they loved so much, to have kids, to get a good job, to buy a car, to raise a small garden, to play in the backyard with pets. The problem for the Japanese was that Americans were taking no prisoners. From the very first battle on Guadalcanal when frightened young Japanese began walking forward with their hands held high to surrender muttering the only English word they knew, “Mercy, mercy,” US Marines began mowing them down… all of them, not just an isolated few here and there… all of them. In countless testimonies, it is readily apparent that Japanese soldiers in hopeless situations would have gladly surrendered, by the thousands, if only they could. The hatred was so great, however, and the propaganda so virulent following President Franklin Roosevelt’s orchestrated attack at Pearl Harbor that American soldiers, sailors and airmen were simply taking no prisoners, nor did the folks back home or their commanders want them to.
“You will take no prisoners, you will kill every yellow son-of-a-bitch, and that’s it,” yelled a marine colonel as he and his men were about to land on one island.
Thus, the manufactured belief after Pearl Harbor that the Japanese always fought to the death and never surrendered worked perfectly into the deep desire of Americans to kill the “sneaky Japs,” kill them all. And so, with no option now but to fight fanatically to the death, the Japanese did. And thus, it was a case where propaganda became a self-fulfilling truth.
Added to the merciless murder of helpless enemy soldiers was the torture and mutilation the Americans inflicted on those who were merely wounded. Ears, noses, fingers, toes, and other body parts were cut off the dead and dying for souvenirs; heads were hacked off and their “cured” skulls then sold to sailors or sent home to friends and family members; even Roosevelt received a letter opener carved from a Japanese arm bone.
“This is the sort of gift I like to get,” beamed the US president proudly.
The few Japanese who were in fact saved for interrogation were kept alive only as long as their information was useful, then they too were shot, bayoneted or pushed from flying aircraft.
Another falsehood that has existed as fact for the past seventy years is that the US military conducted itself properly during the occupation of Japan and helped the defeated nation gently back to its feet during peace. Again, nothing could be further from the truth. From the day they arrived, the Americans took ruthless control of what little remained of the destroyed nation. Women, children and the elderly were thrown into the streets and forced to shift among the ruins as best they could. At every available opportunity, Japanese men suffered humiliation and degradation and many were slapped, kicked and beaten in public “for fun.” All Japanese were treated like third-class citizens for years. Starvation stalked the land even before the conquerors arrived but though the Americans had a surplus to draw from food was denied to the people, just as it was in Germany. As a result, it is likely that millions perished during the first years of occupation. It was noticed that starving children were smaller in 1946 than they were in 1936.
Additionally, just as in Germany, rape reared its filthy head in “peace.” From the moment American troops came ashore on Saipan and Okinawa—two Japanese islands with large civilian populations–rape of females, and sometimes rape of males, began. And just as in Germany following its surrender, the violent sexual assaults in Japan continued unabated for years. No one in power, from General Douglas MacArthur down, was concerned in the least about the despicable, plague-like crime. Indeed, MacArthur was much more concerned with censoring the news of rape from the outside world than stopping rape in Japan itself. It is estimated that over a million Japanese women and children were raped after the war.
There are many other shocking revelations that might be lifted from this blistering book but then, after all, this is only a review of the book and not the book itself. Readers will have to discover the rest of this startling, riveting read for themselves. Truly, Summer, 1945 is aptly subtitled, “the harvest of hate.”
In closing, a few final thoughts on the author himself. Anyone who has read anything by Tom Goodrich knows that he is a passionate man who writes with great power, strength and scope. It is a trademark that sets him apart from others. But his books also reveal the inner-writer; a writer within who displays a large heart and soul. One senses early in a book that Goodrich actually cares about his subjects. There is, of course, the larger focus of each book, the “big picture,” but Goodrich never loses touch with the small, the fragile, the seeming insignificant, the all-but-forgotten.
A touching example is offered in Summer, 1945 when a Japanese adolescent, whose face has been melted beyond recognition by the atomic blast at Hiroshima, makes plans to kill herself rather than be chained for the remainder of her life to the face of a monster. Just as the child is about to commit the final act, she overhears in the next room her anguished father quietly discussing his daughter with her mother. Sadly agreeing that the child’s face is indeed hideous beyond belief, the man then states with both pain and love in each word that he loves his girl so much that her life, not her looks, is all that matters to him. Stunned, never imagining that anyone could ever love her again with such a terrifying face, the words of love were startling to the child, so startling that she suddenly realized that although death would indeed release her from a life of pain and shame, such a selfish act would only add to the heartbreak of her father. The girl matures to womanhood when she decides then and there to accept her fate, deal with her problems herself, and simply be thankful for the love that still blesses her life when so many others are now bereft of all.
Generally, to reach an honest and accurate understanding of an event such as World War Two, one must be so dedicated to the truth that they are prepared to plow through days, weeks, months, and years of dry, sterile material filled with tedious facts, figures and stats. Few of us have the time, patience or stamina for such research. Thankfully, there are those like Tom Goodrich who do have what it takes for the long haul. Ultimately, it is the “long haul” that delivers the details of history from which comes what we know as truth. Without our history, without our truth, we are nothing as a people.
That’s why our enemy is so determined to hide or distort our history; it is also why people like Tom Goodrich are so determined to retrieve our history. Discovering the truth of our history, even after decades of propaganda and lies, is what will ultimately set us free. These two books—Summer, 1945 and Hellstorm–have gone a very long way toward setting us free. And this is what makes Thomas Goodrich’s writing style so special. Almost in spite of ourselves, we sense the truth in his words. We, the readers, are drawn into a Goodrich book before we hardly know it. Truth is like that, like a strong magnet. A day or two later, when one emerges from the book—one “emerges” from a Tom Goodrich book, they never “finish” something that stays with them forever—they feel like they are different people; they have been to places that they never knew existed; they have gone to worlds that they were not supposed to go; they have gained knowledge and understanding that they were never meant to gain. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is an uncanny writing ability. We call it genius.
Summer, 1945—Germany, Japan and the Harvest of Hate has already taken its place with Hellstorm as one of the all-time most memorable and important books ever written, not just on World War Two, but on history in general. If that sounds biased, that’s because it is. We White Nationalists are extremely fortunate to have one of the world’s finest and most dedicated historians fighting on our side. People like Thomas Goodrich are why we are winning and why our victory is just a matter of time.
 
______________
Summer, 1945 and Hellstorm can each be purchased at Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, Booksamillion.com, and through the author’s website at thomasgoodrich.com. For faster delivery, order each book separately via the author’s Paypal at [email protected] ($20 US / $25 Abroad ) or order both books together as one ($40 US / $50 Abroad).

Categories
Christendom Christian art Jesus New Testament St Paul

On the risen Jesus


People do not know how the mind works. Virtually all white nationalists who are Christians believe that the stories of the Resurrection have to do with the empirical world: an event in 1st-century Palestine. Now comes to my mind an oil painting of the risen Jesus that Andrew Anglin chose for his Daily Stormer in the days of Easter a few years ago.
In reality, the stories about Jesus that Christians believe, and revere, have nothing to do with the empirical world but with the structure of the inner self. I’m not going to give a class in this post about what introject means, or how our parents can program us malware without us knowing. Suffice it to say that, in my long odyssey in the fight against dad’s introjects, I had to read a lot of literature to convince myself that what the Gospels say must be questioned.
 
The resurrection of Jesus
 
The ordinary Christian does not have the faintest idea of the studies about the narratives of what they call the Resurrection and the Pentecost apparitions—research by those who have taken the trouble to learn ancient Greek to make a meticulous examination of the New Testament. The way secular criticism sees all these Gospel stories is complicated, but I will summarise it here in the most didactic way possible.
The oldest texts of the New Testament, like one of the Pauline epistles to the Corinthians, better reflect the theology of original Christianity than the late texts. Therefore, it is important to note that Paul does not mention the empty tomb or the ascension of Jesus. Modern criticism says that, if Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians was written by the 60s of our era, in that decade these legends had not yet unfolded.
Of the evangelists, Mark is the oldest and John the latest. (The Christian churches confuse the order in their Bibles by placing the Gospel of Matthew before Mark.) As Matthew and Luke copied and pasted a lot of verses from the Gospel of Mark when putting together their own gospels, these three evangelists are known as the Synoptics to distinguish them from the fourth gospel. Take this very seriously to see how the writers of the New Testament were adding narrative layers throughout the 1st century. To the brief visions that Paul had, collected in his first epistles some three decades after the crucifixion, in the 60s, the Synoptic evangelists were adding greater legends in the following decades and, in the case of John already in the dawn of the 2nd century of our era, more sophisticated Christologies.
I said that the oldest texts of the badly ordained New Testament in the traditional Bible are some of the epistles of Paul, who, while mentioning the ‘risen Christ’, does so within his dense and impenetrable theology. The Paul question is very important. Unlike the apostles, he never met Jesus in flesh; he only claimed that he heard his voice in a rare vision he had on the road to Damascus. And it is this little fellow who never knew Jesus the first one to speak of the ‘risen Christ’ in a chronologically ordered New Testament.
Unlike Paul the author of the Gospel of Mark, who wrote after Paul, does mention the empty tomb; but not the apparitions of Jesus.[1]
Matthew and John, who wrote after Mark, do mention the risen Jesus speaking with his disciples; but not the Ascension to the heavens.
It is Luke who already mentions everything, although he does not develop Christology at such theological levels as those of John the evangelist.
Another thing that uncultured Christians ignore is that Luke wrote his Gospel and Acts of the Apostles as a single book. The way both Catholic and Protestant churches separate the book of Luke is contrived. And it was precisely Luke who popularized the idea of the Ascension of Jesus: an obviously late legend insofar as, had it been historical, such a Hollywoodesque achievement would have been narrated not only by Paul; but by the other writers of the New Testament epistles, and by Matthew and John the evangelist (and let’s not talk about the other John: John of Patmos, the author of the Book of Revelation).
In short, serious scholars see in the diverse New Testament texts a process of myth-making: literary fiction that, in layers, was developed throughout the 1st century of our era. He who knows the chronology when the books and epistolary of the New Testament were written, and reads the texts in that order—instead of the order that appears in the Bibles for mass consumption—can begin to glimpse the evolution of the myth. Ultimately, there is no valid reason to suppose that what is told in the New Testament about Jesus’ resurrection and apparitions was historical.
It took me years to get oriented in the best literature about the Bible, including everything miraculous that is alleged about Jesus. The truth seeker could consult these selected texts.
 
____________
NOTE:
[1] To the bare ‘empty tomb’ narrative of the original Markan text in Greek, the church interpolated the verses that, in the common Bibles, we see at the end of Mark’s gospel; but the exegetes detected that trick a long time ago.

Categories
Child abuse Day of Wrath (book) Human sacrifice Mexico City Pre-Columbian America

Day of Wrath, 16

The Boasian regression

Human beings tend to idealize their parents and carry the burden of the sins of the world: Passover lambs for the unrecognized ills of the parent. This self-reproach for supposed wrongdoing is due to the perennial problem, still unresolved in our species, of the attachment to the perpetrator. The mantras the cultural relativist uses arguing with the psychohistorian is that it is unfair to judge an ancient culture with contemporary standards, or that in those times not even the sacrifice of infants was considered wicked. As Ark pointed out above, this standpoint rationalizes the perpetrator’s behavior at the expense of the victim. It is a no-brainer that it must have been as infernal for a historic boy that his father delivered him to the priests to be incinerated alive, as a parent who burns his child’s face to the point of completely disfiguring him, as we read in the most alarming paper news. In other words, psychohistory is based upon the empathy to the children of all times. The unconscious motivation of many anthropologists, on the other hand, has been to exonerate both the parents of former ages and the non-western cultures of today.
Anthropologists defend the validity of any culture and negate an absolute evaluation unless it is done within the standards of that culture. It was not always so. In the nineteenth century the opposite school dominated British anthropology. Anthropologists argued, in a similar vein to contemporary psychohistorians, that all societies passed through the same evolutionary process, and that non-Europeans were living fossils that could be studied to understand Europe’s past, categorizing the diverse cultures in a progressive set of values from savage, barbarian to civilized. Universal progress was postulated: a sort of unilineal set of values where religion and paleologic thought gave up ground to Aristotelian logic and rational thought, with the subsequent development of social institutions. The difference of this model with psychohistory is that these first anthropologists did not use childrearing as a parameter, but technology from the Stone Age to the modern age, passing through the Iron and Bronze Ages.
The Jewish-German immigrant Franz Boas, the “father” of American anthropology, managed to shift the paradigm. Boasian anthropology considered erroneous the premise that religion had to be defined, historically, more primitive than reason (the opposite to what Arieti says about his schizophrenic patients: that paleologic thought should be considered inferior to the Aristotelian). Boasian relativism resists universal judgments of any kind. All of the work by Boas and his disciples began as a direct opposition to the evolutionary perspective, and with time it became an orthodoxy. Although in the United States there was an attempt to revive the evolutionist ideas in the 1950s and 60s, eventually anthropologists subscribed the ideology of cultural relativism: a school that in the academy became, more than an orthodoxy, axiomatic; and its proponents, staunch supporters of non-western cultures. This relativism, with its vehement phobia to “western ethnocentrism” did not only become the most influential anthropology school originated in the United States, but the dogmatic principle of this international discipline.
In its most extreme version it even considers legitimate, say, the cutting of the clitoris in Africa. A principle that, for the popular mind, apparently originated as a tolerant attitude is being used to find excuses for intolerance. In fact, since the declarations of the anthropologist Melville Jean Herskovits by the end of the 1940s, his colleagues left the political debates of human rights. The anthropologist has great difficulties to fight for the rights of, say, the black women in South Africa. The 1996 team-work Growing Up: A Cross-cultural Encyclopedia, where dozens of anthropologists offered their studies about eighty-seven cultures, is symptomatic. Although they admit that sexual contacts between adults and children are common, including those of the incestuous mothers, they declare that it “would not constitute ‘abuse’ if in that society the behavior was not proscribed.” However, as the academic who sympathized with Ark said, not all anthropologists agree with Boas. Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban confessed that, after twenty-five years of having conducted ethnological research in Sudan, she betrayed her profession by siding those who fight against female genital cutting. She mentioned the case of a Nigerian woman who was granted asylum in the United States since her daughter would have been subjected to involuntary cutting if returning home. The compulsion to recreate on the next generation the wounds received in infancy is such that in our times genital mutilation continues. Despite their theoretical statements to the public, in practice many ethnologists, anthropologists and indigenistas still cling to the Boasian paradigm.
A single example will illustrate it. Keep in mind “A reliable source” published some pages ago. In September of 2007 the Museo del Templo Mayor, a subsidiary of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, organized a seminary in Mexico under the name “New Perspectives on Human Sacrifice Among the Mexicas.” Twenty-eight specialists were invited. According to the national press the Mexican archeologist Leonardo López Luján, who would coordinate the proceedings book of the papers (reviewed in the 2017 “A reliable source”), stated that it was advisable to distance ourselves “from the Hispanists who consider bloody and savage” the sacrificial practice. López Luján presented the paper “Huitzilopochtli and the Sacrifice of Children in Tenochtitlan’s Templo Mayor” (the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan). Among the professionals from abroad who participated were institutions such as Cambridge and the French National Center for Scientific Research. The Mexican Juan Alberto Román presented the conference, “The Role of Infants in the Mexica Sacrificial Practices,” and in a pseudo-eugenicist discourse López Luján stated: “Undernourished children [my emphasis] were sacrificed to eliminate the population that was a burden for the society.” (Cf. what Ark responded to the historian about administering pap to the child: a slow form of infanticide that suggest they were not undernourished accidentally.) Marie-Areti Hers, from the National Autonomous University of Mexico— a campus that the UNESCO declared a World Heritage Site the very week that the symposium was celebrated—, stated that human sacrifice was everything except “an exotic curiosity of backward peoples.”
I contacted Julieta Riveroll, the reporter who covered the event for Reforma and author of the article “Human Sacrifice Prejudices—Demolished.” I asked her if among the speakers of the conferences she attended someone condemned the deadly ritual. Emphatically she responded “No,” that they were “objective experts.” I mention the anecdote because that word, “objective” is the most abused word in academic circles, as we already saw in one of the answers of the academics to Ark. Let us imagine that, among the reporters of the Gulag, to keep objectivity they must refrain from condemning genocide. This does not happen: Stalin’s regime is broadly condemned. But the double standard of allowing condemnation of the white man and virtually forbidding condemning non-whites, is brazen. The month that followed the symposium, in the same Mexico City where the symposium was celebrated the police caught the serial killer José Luis Calva, the “cannibal poet” that horrified the Mexican citizenry. In one of his poems Calva wrote to one of his victims a poem worthy of the ancient Mexicans:
You handed over your parts to me
Your breath, your nails and your longings.
You dressed me of you and I was your bird,
Sing your song that never quiets.
Naturally, unlike the Mexicas who did exactly the same, this man was condemned by the elites.
On the other side of the Atlantic the Europeans deform reality too. In 2008 I visited the museum and archaeological park Cueva Pintada in the town Gáldar of Gran Canaria. The screened documental in the museum denoted the purest Manichaeism. Despite recognizing the widespread infanticide of girls among the tribes, the conquerors appear as the bad guys and the inhabitants of the troglodyte settlement as the noble savages victimized by the sixteenth-century Europeans. Similarly, in another museum, El Museo Canario, the following year I looked up through an academic text the subject of infanticide of these pre-Hispanic white people (curiously, they were blonder than the Spanish but they were barely leaving behind the Neolithic stage). Just as the mentioned María Alba Pastor who saw in the Mexican sacrifices “a reaction to the Conquest,” three Spanish academics postulated that the Canary sacrifice could have been the consequence “of the ongoing military, religious and cultural aggression” inflicted by the conquerors.[1] This interpretation ignores the fact that the practice predated the arrival of the Spaniards.
Unlike these documentaries and academic papers that blame westerners for the sins of non-westerners, I will quote one of the first letters written about the practice of infanticide in the seven Canary Islands. The following description comes from Diego Gómez de Cintra, a Portuguese navigator that wrote what he saw in La Palma:

The father and the mother grab the child and put the head on a rock and take another rock and hit the child on the head shattering the skull, and thus they kill the child, his eyes and brains scattered on the soil, which is a great cruelty of the parents.

Conversely, on page 166 of the mentioned article contemporary academics side the parents by claiming, “The adoption of such an extreme measure is fully justified.”
As Terry Deary put it, “History can be horrible, but historians can sometimes be horribler.” Once the new generations break away from this immoral anthropology, the slaughtering of children will be seen, again, with due compassion as felt by the first chroniclers.
In the case of Mestizo America (and this is important to understand the organizers of the 2007 symposium), the “Latin” American anthropologists were the first ones to embrace the cause of cultural relativism. In fact, the anthropologists have influenced more the society in “Latin” America than in other societies. This is partly explained by the ethnological tradition of Bernardino de Sahagún and Bartolomé de Las Casas. In the twentieth century the study and the glorification of the Indian cultures, called indigenismo, has been the predominant framework of anthropological studies in so-called Latin America. In the particular case of Mexico, since 1917 the government was the first one to recognize the utility of anthropology. Subsequently, and working for the government, anthropologists have tried to implement their policies on the Indian population.
No doubt, deMause and Ark are right about the intellectual charlatanry that represents social anthropology.
NOTE:
[1] Julio Cuenca Sanabria, Antonio Betancor Rodríguez & Guillermo Rivero López: “La práctica del infanticidio femenino como método de control natal entre los aborígenes canarios: las evidencias arqueológicas en Cendro, Telde, Gran Canaria,” El Museo Canario, LI, 1996, p. 124. Fifty pages later the authors repeat this interpretation. In spite of the fact that the long title takes for granted that the etiology of the practice was “birth control,” the same article publishes sentences from some authors who cast doubts about the validity of that explanation.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
The objective of Day of Wrath is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next month I will reproduce another chapter. Day of Wrath is available: here.

Categories
Ethnic cleansing Goths Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Kriminalgeschichte, 60

Below, an abridged translation from the first volume of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (Criminal History of Christianity). For a comprehensive text that explains the absolute need to destroy Judeo-Christianity, see here. In a nutshell, any white person who worships the god of the Jews is, ultimately, ethnosuicidal.

 
The Emperor Theodosius ‘the Great’
Theodosius I (reign 379-395) found in the father of the Church, Ambrose, an energetic travelling companion. ‘There is hardly a year of his reign’, says the Protestant theologian Von Campenhausen, ‘that he does not proclaim a new law or other measures to fight against paganism [Note of the translator: Hellenism] and to suppress heresy and to favour the Catholic Church’. ‘The annihilation of those who thought differently was, from the beginning, the goal of his government, and the ecclesiastical tradition, which describes Theodosius as an indefatigable protector of Catholicism and an enemy of all heresies and paganism [Hellenism], has portrayed him with complete fidelity’.

(Above, a Nummus of Theodosius.) However, the special merit of the Catholic sovereign consisted in a new policy towards the Germans. In his reorganization of the army, seriously severed, he incorporated ‘barbarians’ (they followed a trend that existed since Constantine) even in the leadership: Franks, Alemanni, Saxons and especially Goths, and with this ‘Gothfied’ army he cleansed the Balkans of Goths, that although officially they belonged to the Empire were not citizens but servants. In his first year of reign, he thus won victories over the Goths, the Alans, and the Huns.
Theodosius, as they always say full of ‘magnanimity towards the vanquished’ (Thiess), ‘the last great protector of the Germans on the Roman imperial throne’ (von Stauffenberg), never fought battles following every rule. Following Valens’ hunting of Gothic heads, he carried out a kind of guerrilla warfare, for which he sacrificed ‘unscrupulously or intentionally’ also the Gothic troops themselves (Aubin). The same as Gratian, he sought to annihilate one after another the various groups of ‘barbarians’.
Thus, he attacked isolated Goth contingents where he thought fit, as for example in 386 a troop of Ostrogoths led by Prince Odotheus. In autumn, they had requested permission to cross the river at the mouth of the Danube, although at first Promotus, the Magister militum that ruled Thrace, denied it. However, a dark night drew them to the river to fall into the hands of the Roman army. They set out to cross it with three thousand boats—the river was full of corpses—and were immediately defeated, while the women and children were left in captivity. However, surely the emperor’s Goth policy would have been different if he had had enough strength.
Theodosius hurried to celebrate the feat and on October 12, with his chariot drawn by elephants (a gift of the Persian king), entered triumphantly in Constantinople, where he had a commemorative column of 40 meters high in memory of this and other massacres of ‘barbarians’. Some years later, his general Stilicho caused a serious setback to another group of Goths. Bishop Theodoret informs with joy about ‘killings’ with ‘many thousands’ of ‘barbarians’ massacred. On the other hand, the prisoners of such operations flooded the slave markets throughout the East.
And from then on, thanks to the ‘merits’ of Theodosius, in all the battles of the invasion of the barbarians there are Germans fighting on both sides.

______ 卐 ______

Liked it? Take a second to support The West’s Darkest Hour.

Categories
Charlemagne Christendom Constantinople Evil

Why Europeans must reject Christianity, 14

by Ferdinand Bardamu

 
Christianity is a form of magical thinking. It cannot be disseminated on a large scale through rational persuasion. No one can explain how Christ rose from the dead, how god subsists as three persons in one or how a bible that teaches a geocentric, flat earth cosmology is an infallible guide to universal truth. These are “mysteries.” This is what makes Christianity such a dangerous and destructive cult. Conversion, unless done for gain or under threat of force, is an emotional affair. No one is “reasoned” into Christianity. Either that person must be gullible enough to accept the teachings of the Christian faith without question or he must be forcibly converted using the sword. It was through the latter that Christians were able to spread their gospel beyond imperial frontiers, nominally converting all Europe by the 14th century.
The spread of Christianity cannot be understood apart from the use of force. The barbarians who invaded the western empire had to convert to Christianity as soon as they set foot on Roman territory. Conversion to the religion was a condition of their migration and settlement on imperial soil. They would not have been allowed to participate in Roman society as pagans.
Christian missions located beyond the imperial frontiers would typically focus on converting barbarian rulers and their courts. Once the king was made to accept the new religion, he would then compel his followers to convert along with him. This pattern emerged early in the Christianization of Europe. These kings were the “new Constantines,” because they embraced Christianity, often after invoking Christ for victory in battle, like Constantine during the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, and then imposed the religion on the aristocracy and the common people.
The earliest of these new Constantines included Caedwalla, the 7th century king of Wessex. He invaded the island of Wight and exterminated most of the Jutes who lived there. Caedwalla replaced these with Christian West Saxons and forced the survivors to convert to Christianity at sword-point. Another was Edwin, the 7th century king of Northumbria, who used a mixture of bribery and threats to convert aristocracy and common people to the new religion.
After the collapse of the West, Christianity remained confined between the river Elbe in the north and the Danube in the south on continental Europe, until 1000. Barbarians motivated by greed and lust for power were the driving force behind the renewed territorial expansion of medieval Christendom. They were impressed by the wealth, opulence and might of Constantinople and the Frankish dominions and wanted it for themselves. For the pagan warlord, Christianity was akin to the cargo cults of Melanesia. If only his barbarian court displayed all the trappings of the Christian religion, he would be as rich as the emperor in Constantinople!
In an illuminating anecdote, medieval chronicler Notker the Stammerer accurately captured the mentality of barbarian converts to Christianity. In the 9th century, Danes would flock to the Frankish court of Louis the Pious to undergo baptism. In exchange for conversion, Louis would give each man a set of brand new garments and weapons. Once, when Louis ran out of these articles to give prospective converts, he had a few rags stitched together into a coarse tunic and gave it to an old Dane who had been baptized some twenty times before. “If it was not because I was ashamed of my nakedness, I would give you back both the clothes and your Christ,” the Dane snapped back angrily. The “rice bowl” Christians of the 19th and 20th centuries make it difficult to dismiss this story as just another monkish fable.
The power-mad King Stephen of Hungary forced his subjects to convert to Christianity. He believed that Christianization of his kingdom would make it as powerful and as influential as Byzantium. Laws were enacted forbidding pagan ritual practice. Stephen ordered all Magyars to attend church on Sunday and observe Lent and fast days. Failure to obey this draconian legislation was dealt with harshly. Eating meat during Lent was punished by imprisonment; working on a Sunday was punished by confiscation of one’s tools and beasts of burden. The legal penalty for murmuring during a church service was having one’s head shorn, accompanied by a severe flogging. The “Black” Magyars who resisted Stephen’s forced conversion of Hungary were cruelly suppressed. Many were tortured and then blinded by Stephen’s Christian soldiers, who were angered by the intransigence of their pagan foes. These men preferred death to the shame and dishonor of being forcibly baptized into an alien Semitic religion and culture.
Christianization in Poland unleashed a similar wave of violence. Mieszko I forcibly Christianized Poland to strengthen his grip over the country and avoid forced conversion by the East Franks. Idolatry was suppressed by smashing pagan idols and sanctuaries, confiscating estates and beheading those who refused to convert. Although very little Christian legislation survives from Mieszko’s reign, his successor Boleslaw I, prescribed knocking a man’s teeth out upon refusal to observe Lenten fasting. Fornication was punished by nailing a man’s scrotum to a bridge and giving him the choice between death and castration.
The brutality of these methods led to a great pagan reaction to the Christianization of Poland. Pagans retaliated by killing Christian priests and destroying churches. By the middle of the 11th century, the land was plunged into chaos, the Christian church in Poland nearly wiped out, and Mieszko’s dynasty temporarily driven from power.
The Saxon Wars of Charlemagne, lasting from 772 to 804, was the first time in history that Christianity was used as an instrument of imperialist conquest. Charlemagne initiated formal hostilities by destroying pagan monuments in Saxony. In 782, Charlemagne promptly avenged a Frankish defeat at Saxon hands by massacring 4,500 Saxons in savage reprisal. The Saxon Capitulary of 785 ordered the death penalty for any Saxon caught resisting baptism or observing heathen practices.
Rulers forcibly converted pagans to Christianity for reasons of personal self-aggrandizement. Michael III, emperor at Constantinople, forced the Bulgarian Khan Boris to accept the eastern orthodox rite in 864, after he was defeated in battle. Forced Christianization allowed Michael to expand his sphere of influence in the Balkans. Bulgaria was then flooded with Byzantine clergy who, with the help of Boris’s army, began a nationwide campaign to demolish all pagan holy sites.
The boyars accused the Khan of accepting laws that threatened the stability and autonomy of the state. In 866, they revolted against the khan’s forced Christianization of the country but were suppressed with great cruelty. In the final decade of the ninth century, Boris’s eldest son Vladimir, who became ruler of Bulgaria, tried to eliminate Christianity and restore paganism. In this endeavor, he was supported by the boyars. Vladimir ordered the killing of Christian priests and the destruction of churches. Boris was compelled to leave his monastic retreat and suppress the revolt. Vladimir was deposed, blinded and imprisoned in a dungeon, never to be heard from again.
By the 12th and 13th centuries, crusades were launched to convert the indigenous peoples of Scandinavia and the Baltic region to Christianity. There were crusades against the Wends, Finns, Livonians (Latvians and Estonians), Lithuanians and Prussians. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, a monastic reformer, called for the cultural and physical extermination of northern Europeans who resisted forced conversion to the Christian religion.

______ 卐 ______

Liked it? Take a second to support The West’s Darkest Hour.

Categories
Catholic Church Christendom Destruction of Greco-Roman world Free speech / association

Why Europeans must reject Christianity, 9

by Ferdinand Bardamu

 
Section III: Censorship and the Christian War on Western Culture
The ecclesiastical decision to censor and suppress classical literature was influenced by militant Christian “fundamentalists,” bigoted anti-intellectuals like Ambrose and John Chrysostom. These men, because of their prominence in ecclesiastical affairs and importance for the patristic canon, were able to aggressively push for an agenda calling for the eradication of all pagan artistic, cultural and scientific achievement. The patristic attack on the intellectual foundations of the ancient world was continued by the medieval church. Isidore of Seville, the most influential and widely read author of the Dark Ages, repeatedly warned his flock of the spiritual dangers posed by reading secular philosophy and science. The canon law of the church had long prohibited Christians from reading secular literature, excluding clergy who consulted these writings to combat heresy and paganism.
The Christianization of 4th century Rome made the church sole inheritor of the great storehouses of ancient wisdom that had been accumulated throughout the centuries. As pagans dwindled in numbers and influence, the monastic scriptoria came to dominate textual transmission, especially after 400. Guided by ecclesiastical censure and canon law, the scriptoria, with few exceptions, ceased copying secular writings for over 300 years, severing medieval Europe from the great scientific and technological achievements of the ancient past. During the Dark Ages, nearly all Greco-Roman literature was removed from circulation and replaced with patristic, biblical and liturgical writings. Works of science and philosophy, some well ahead of their time, were discarded by ecclesiastical officials as rubbish. Sometimes they were re-used for mundane purposes; relics were once found wrapped in the pages of Livy’s Histories. Italian Renaissance scholar Pietro Bembo estimated that less than 1% of all Greek literature survived the turmoil and chaos of the Dark Ages. Modern scholars have made similar estimates for the survival of Latin literature.
Christian religionists allege barbarian invasion as a significant factor in the loss of Western scientific and technical knowledge; they neglect to mention that the barbarians who terrorized the western half of the empire were also Christians. At any rate, barbarian invasion played virtually no role in the destruction of the West’s literary heritage; the majority of Greek and Latin literature was still extant by 500 AD, as the age of Germanic migration was drawing to a close. Although there is no evidence of barbarians burning books or libraries, there is an abundance of evidence implicating Christians in the active destruction and censorship of an entire civilization’s repository of secular knowledge. After the Christian destruction of the Library of Alexandria, the second most destructive act of Christian literary vandalism was the burning of over 120,000 manuscripts by crusaders during the sack of Constantinople in 1204.
Apologists for Christianity emphasize the role of economic and material factors in the disappearance of Western culture during the Dark Ages. In their view, most pagan works simply disintegrated because they were written on papyrus, a fragile material. But this is a myth; papyrus is a highly durable medium, able to withstand the centuries under the right conditions. They cannot explain why the fragility of papyrus was never an issue for the transmission of classical texts until after late antiquity, when the Christian church was at the apogee of its power and influence in Europe. Other religionists speculate that the transition from papyrus to parchment in late antiquity made the copying of pagan literature a costly enterprise. This argument fails because the relative cost of papyrus and parchment cannot be ascertained from the available sources; cost is irrelevant anyway because parchment replaced papyrus in Egypt.
The Christian religionist unwittingly reveals another mode of ecclesiastical censorship and suppression: the refusal to recopy pagan works from papyrus to parchment, which happened during the large-scale replacement of papyrus with parchment in the early medieval period. Still, and embarrassingly enough for the Christian religionist, he cannot explain why Christian writings, whether patristic, liturgical or biblical, outnumber pagan writings by a staggering ratio of 25 to 1. Only widespread Christian censorship and suppression of pagan science and philosophy can adequately account for these glaring statistical discrepancies.
Apologists say Islamic conquest of Egypt in 642 disrupted trans-Mediterranean shipments of papyrus, which resulted in the loss of much ancient literature. However, the historical record reveals that the West’s barbarian rulers, as well as the Byzantine emperor, always had access to a steady supply of Egyptian papyrus. Although Egypt came under Moslem rule, papyrus manufacture remained a Christian enterprise, with Moslems now exporting it to Europe. The irony is that, although Byzantine rulers always had access to an abundant supply of papyrus, the Greek and Roman literature in their possession still gradually dropped out of circulation and vanished from library shelves.
In the Latin-speaking West, decline in papyrus as a writing material is related to large-scale abandonment of Roman forms of government. For example, the Code Justinian contains legislation mandating the use of papyrus for government documents. In keeping with Roman bureaucratic norms, the Merovingian chancery used papyrus until the late 7th century. This practice disappeared under the Carolingians, a dynasty originating in the Germanic east. Unlike the Romanized west, which was more urban and centrally administered, the Germanic east was decentralized and rural. For these reasons, parchment gradually supplanted papyrus in Europe.
In the Christian religious mind, Irish monasteries played an instrumental role in the “preservation” of Western scientific and technical knowledge, but this is a risible claim. What work of preservation was there when over 99% of all secular writings were either destroyed or suppressed by the Christian church? There was no preservation. What did manage to survive, did so in spite of Christianity, not because of it.
That almost nothing of this literature managed to survive shows that the Christian church conducted a remarkably successful campaign of censorship and suppression, the most successful in all history. This is further reinforced by statistical data on book production from 400 to 800 AD. In the fifth century, 27% of extant manuscripts copied were pagan, with the rest being works of a largely patristic, biblical or liturgical nature; this declined to 7% in the sixth century, 2% in the seventh century and 1% in the eighth century, out of a grand total of 834 extant Latin manuscripts.
Over a 400-year period, we see classical works being gradually removed from circulation. This is a pattern indicative of widespread and systematic literary censorship and suppression. If the steep decline in the number of classical texts copied had continued uninterrupted, all pagan scientific, technical and philosophical knowledge would have vanished from memory.
Contrary to the bigoted claims of Christian religionists, we do not see “preservation.” Careful examination of the historical record reveals that the Christian church bears sole responsibility for the destruction and suppression of over 99% of Greek and Latin literature.
Christianity’s eradication of the accumulated wisdom of the ages is one of the greatest crimes ever committed against the West. No act of censorship has been more destructive in world history than the one carried out by this institution. Without the life-giving knowledge of the ancient world, maintaining an advanced pre-industrial civilization became virtually impossible. Christian censorship and suppression of secular knowledge is the main reason behind Europe’s descent into the Dark Ages after the collapse of imperial rule in the West.
Apologists foolishly condemn all criticism of the church for suppressing the technical and scientific knowledge of antiquity as anachronistic. The fact of the matter is that progress, curiosity and reason are among Europeans’ most important inheritance from the classical world. Modern Western civilization would cease to exist without these values.
The decision of the scriptoria to discard works of science, mathematics, engineering and philosophy was a complete rejection of progress, intellectual curiosity and reason. It was the rejection of civilization in favor of a prehistoric existence as the Christian ideal. As a direct result of Christianization, the scriptoria nearly ceased copying the writings of antiquity for centuries; for the first time in history, Europe was in danger of losing her ancient storehouse of scientific, technical and philosophic knowledge that would be so crucial for the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution.