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Tag: Karlheinz Deschner

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Catholic Church Judeo-reductionism Tom Sunic WDH radio show

Second thoughts

I’ve been thinking about the relevance of the WDH Radio Show and what I’ve been doing on Saturdays: adding translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s first book on the criminal history of Christianity.

Regarding the radio show, I must confess that I do not recognize myself in what has been said in the four episodes. The reason is obvious. As I have already confessed, my knowledge of English comes basically from reading (on the sidebar, see the photograph of this year of me in my home library). Speaking a language is something entirely different from reading or writing it, and involves even another area of the brain.

I have done inquiries to correct the problem and to be able to speak well in the radio shows. If I wanted to make myself understood immediately, I would have to pay for the services of a simultaneous translator, who would charge me approximately $315 dollars for each episode. But that would only solve the problem artificially. A better solution would require intensive training to get my tongue out in English. Last week I made an appointment with an Aryan woman who in Mexico City presides over the offices of the Berlitz Corporation. The “Private Program,” that is an individualised and intensive program that lets me loose my tongue in three weeks costs $ 1,180 dollars.

The alternative for free would be to find a native English-speaker who is going to study to Spain and desperately needs one of these courses in reverse: to speak fluent Spanish. Through Skype we would train with each other: I trying to speak in English and he or she in Spanish until we both correct the pronunciation to the degree of speaking fluently. But that’s not going to be easy to find. That’s why people usually pay the amounts I quote above when they have the need to do so.

In the radio programs I would like not only arguing, but also making long and elaborate speeches. It is very frustrating not to be able to do it, especially since the voices that have been heard in the four episodes, even those of our guests, do not reflect my ideas. Not being able to argue with them, or with my co-hosts Joseph and Jake, is very frustrating.

What I said in the hatnote of yesterday’s entry on Yeats goes to the heart of the matter. I do not believe that Jewry is the primary factor of white decline. I think it’s the swamps of Aryan sin what have caused the tremendous proliferation of mosquitoes. These must be killed off, of course: but I don’t believe in the “spontaneous generation” of mosquitoes. (For those who have not gotten the memo, this is the Aryan Problem in a nutshell: “A country has the Jews it deserves. Just as mosquitoes can thrive and settle only in swamps, likewise the former can only thrive in the swamps of our sins” —Codreanu.)

And here is where it is clearly seen why I no longer want to prolong the radio episodes indefinitely. If Alex Linder accepts our invitation, the fifth episode will be the last (unless, very unlikely, a sponsor to fund my simultaneous translation for a sixth episode appears). I do not object to the Linderite idea of eliminating mosquitoes, the proposed topic for the next episode. I partly agree with his medicine, but not with the diagnosis. (“Partly” I say because I’m not only an exterminationist of our obvious enemies, but of the greater part of humanity as proposed by Pierce in his immortal novel.) My diagnosis, and here I differ not only from Linder but from almost everyone that I know (with the exception of Tom Sunic), are the swamps of capitalism and Christianity.

Gold over blood is only the most conspicuous sin (read the stories of Pierce and Kemp on the white race to understand this subject in depth). An equally mortal sin, though not as historically old as using non-white labour, is the religion of our parents. And here is where I have second thoughts on the pertinence of continuing to add Saturday translations from Deschner’s books.

It is clear that on Saturdays I am talking to myself! It is assumed that the purpose of blogging is to communicate with others. But even my friends do not seem to be B-type bicausalists; like many they lean toward bicausalism A.

If I believe that Aryan sins—materialism and Christian ethics—engender mosquitoes, and if this bicausalism B is not part of your accepted wisdom (there are even monocausalists in the movement), continuing this Deschner adventure becomes soliloquy. I am not motivated to continue these monologues. Having said that, I would like to confess what I liked about the three volumes of Deschner’s “criminal history” I purchased in 2002.

The late historian showed that most of the Christian martyrs’ stories are legendary. Before reading his books, I already knew that the New Testament is full of internal contradictions; for example, what the Synoptics say compared to John’s gospel. (On the discipline of studying the NT from the secular POV see: here.) But what impressed me greatly in discovering Deschner is that, in later centuries, the church was dedicated to inventing a rosary of martyrs and saints, of which there is very little if any historical evidence! As someone deeply educated in Roman Catholicism, this surprised me because, as a good German scholar, Deschner’s books are full of bibliographical references in several languages, and as far as I know he has not been rebutted on this point.

The making of saints and martyrs is one aspect of the religion of my Catholic parents that I would have loved to expose on this site. Instead, what I have decided is adding other titles of interest to my Daybreak Press. Although I will no longer add translations of Deschner on Saturdays, or Sunday passages from the novel Julian, next Monday I will continue to reproduce those passages that I consider important of Eugenics and Race by Roger Pearson. Pearson was a real catch. His Darwinian science almost reaches my exterminationist POV of the inferior races, going beyond the political correctness of American race realists.

If any of the visitors to this blog, or if my friends Joseph and Jake, do not agree with what I say above do not hesitate to express your criticism below.

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Ancient Rome Arthur Schopenhauer Augustus Claudius Hadrian Judaism Julius Caesar Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Nero Old Testament

Kriminalgeschichte, 9

Below, a translated passage from the first volume of Karlheinz
Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums
(“Criminal History of Christianity”)

 
The Jewish religion, tolerated by the pagan state

But even the masters of Rome were tolerant of the Jews (in whom they found peasants, artisans, workers—at that time they were not yet characterised as merchants), and in some cases showed some sympathy for them. They enjoyed some special privileges, especially in the East, such as Sabbath observance. They had their own jurisdiction and were not obliged to submit to Roman jurisdiction.

Caesar supported them in many ways. Augustus generously endowed the Temple of Jerusalem. According to the terms of the imperial donation, a bull and two lambs were sacrificed there every day “to the highest God.” Agrippa, an intimate friend of Augustus, also favoured the Jews.

On the other hand, Emperor Caligula (37-41)—somewhat eccentric and aspiring to have his own temple, appeared in public clothed with the attributes of various divinities, even female, and lived married to his sister Drusilla and intended that an image of him be erected even in the Holy of Holies of Jerusalem—expelled the Jews of the main cities of Parthia, where they were especially numerous.

But even the emperor Claudius, before persecuting the Jews of Rome, had issued a decree in their favour, in the year 42, granting them a special jurisdiction valid throughout the empire, but at the same time warned them not to abuse imperial magnanimity and that they did not despise the customs of other peoples. Nero’s wife, Poppaea Sabina, was a great protector of Judaism. In general terms, the Roman administration was always ready “to accommodate as much as possible, and even more, with all the demands of the Jews, justified or not” (Mommsen).

Not even after the conquest of Jerusalem did the emperors harass the Jewish faith, which for them was religio licita. Vespasian and his successors corroborated the privileges already granted by Caesar and Augustus. Jews could marry, sign contracts, acquire property, hold public office, possess slaves, and many other things, like any Roman citizen. Jewish communities could manage their own goods and had their own, albeit limited, jurisdiction.

Even after Bar Kokhba’s insurrection, Emperor Hadrian and his successors consented to the public celebration of Jewish cults, and granted the dispensation of common obligations which were incompatible with their religion. Even in the provinces there were almost no restrictions against them; they built synagogues, appointed their trustees, and were exempt from military service in accordance with their beliefs.

And all this because, just as today the primitive peoples do not know, in their beliefs, the claim of exclusiveness of a “superior being,” also the old Hellenism was characteristically tolerant. In polytheism, no deity can claim the exclusive. The native cults amalgamated without problems with the imported ones. In the ancient pantheon prevailed a kind of collegiality or friendly companionship; the faithful could pray to the god they preferred, believed to recognize their own gods under the appearances of others, and certainly did not bother trying to “convert” anyone. Schopenhauer says that intolerance is an essential characteristic of monotheism, that only the one God is

by its nature, a jealous god, that does not want to consent the subsistence of any other. On the other hand, the gods of polytheism are by nature tolerant; Live and let live, and in principle tolerate their colleagues, the gods of the same religion. Later on, that tolerance extends equally to foreign deities.

To the pagans, the belief in a unique God seems to them a poverty of concepts; uniformity, un-sacralisation of the universe, atheism. Nothing more foreign to their way of thinking than the idea that the foreigners’ gods are idols. Nothing sounds to them as incomprehensible as the “thou shalt have no other God but Me” of the Jews; “I am the Lord,” “I am the Lord your God,” an expression that is repeated up to sixteen times in the 19th chapter of Leviticus, to give but one example and not the longest. Paganism knows nothing comparable to the covenant of blood between Yahweh and his “chosen people.” And nothing excited more the antipathy against the Jews than their behaviour on account of their beliefs.

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Christendom

Clarification

Note of 16 July 2018:

This post has been merged within the book preface of my translation of Deschner’s book (here).

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Judaism Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Tacitus

Kriminalgeschichte, 8

Below, translated excerpts from the first volume of Karlheinz
Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums
(photograph below – Deschner’s profile)

 

Chapter 2: Two thousand years
of persecution against Jews begin

Except in Palestine, in the time of paganism the Jews did not have a bad time. It is true that anti-Semitism has ancient roots. The first documentary testimony is found in the Aramaic papyri of Elephantine. In 410 BC, a shrine offered to Yahweh was destroyed in Elephantine, possibly because the Jews were against the Egyptian independence and supporters of the occupying power, that was then Persia. Towards the year 300 BC, anti-Judaism was already widespread. For example, there was already a rumour that the Jews were descendants of lepers. Such enmities were largely religious, and also political, rarely economic and rarely racial.

With their insurrections under Nero, Trajan and Hadrian, the Jews (they accounted for 7% or 8% of the total population of the empire) gained the status of being dangerous to the state. In general, they distrusted them. Among other things, their contemptuous attitude towards other cultures, religions and nationalities, as well as their social isolation upset them. Tacitus, always moderate, censures nonetheless their contemptuous stance before the gods and the country and mentions their strange character and the exclusivism of their customs (diversitas morum).

In Tacitus, as in other pagan writers (whose anti-Jewish manifestations undoubtedly did not cease exerting some influence), such as Pliny the Elder, Juvenal (a “must read” author in medieval schools), Quintilianus (another “must read” classical author at the beginning of the modern era), the impressions of the Jewish war are undoubtedly reflected. But even since Seneca, who committed suicide in 65 AD, that is, a year before the beginning of that war, had written that “the customs of this most abhorrent people have gained so much force that they are introduced everywhere: they, the defeated, have given laws to their winners.”

Categories
Final solution Hadrian Israel / Palestine Jerusalem Judaism Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Kriminalgeschichte, 7

Below, translated excerpts from the first volume of Karlheinz
Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums
(“Criminal History of Christianity”)

 
Bar Kokhba and the “Last War of God” (131-136)

To this new uprising, in 115 C.E. different uprisings were added among the Jews of the diaspora, which were very numerous in the Mediterranean area according to Philo. Only in Alexandria there was more than a million. They were still not disillusioned with the Messianic dream. During the war of Trajan against the Parthians (114-117 C.E.), the rumour of a disastrous defeat of the empire ran, and there was also a great earthquake that destroyed Antioch and other cities of Asia Minor. In the face of these disasters, the Zealots believed their time had come.

In the province of Crete and Cyrene, where 200,000 non-Jews were reported to have died, the “king” and “Messiah” Lukuas destroyed the capital, Cyrenaica. In Cyprus, the insurgents devastated Salamis and, according to the chronicles, killed 240,000 non-Jews, an obviously exaggerated figure. From then on, however, the Jews were barred from access to the island and even the castaways, if they were Israelites, were executed. In Egypt, where the Romans liquidated all the Jews of Alexandria in reprisals, the fighting lasted for years. In all places, the Jewish diaspora was severely punished.

In the same Palestine, the successor of Trajan, Emperor Hadrian (reign 117-138 C.E.), a great devotee of the gods, built a new city on the ruins of Jerusalem, Aelia Capitolina, and on the site of the Temple built an altar to Jupiter And a temple of Venus.

And here it is that in the year 131, Simon ben Kosevah (Bar Kokhba) begins a war of guerrillas so generalized and so deadly, that forces the very emperor to take command of the Roman troops. Bar Kokhba (in Aramaic means “son of the star,” so named after the success of his uprising; in the Talmud, the loser received the name Ben Koseva, “son of lies”) takes power in Jerusalem. His principal counsellor is Rabbi Aqiba, who greets him with a classic messianic appointment calling him “star of Jacob,” the saviour of Israel. He is also supported by the high priest Eleazar, later killed by Bar Kokhba himself because he advised surrender.

There were two years of high morale in Jerusalem, resuming worship in the Temple and proclaiming a new era of freedom until the Emperor Hadrian sent four legions under the command of his best general, Julius Severus, with large numbers of auxiliary troops and a large fleet.

The Romans start regaining ground little by little.

According to Dion Casio, whose exaggerations are notorious, 580,000 Jewish fighters were killed and 50 fortresses destroyed, 985 villages destroyed, and tens of thousands of prisoners sent to captivity. Mommsen believes that these figures “are not unlikely,” since the fighting was fierce and surely led to the extermination of the entire male population.

Women and children flooded the slave markets, leading to lower slave prices. The last population to fall was Beth-Ter (the present Battir), west of Jerusalem, where Bar Kokhba himself died in circumstances not well explained.

The site of the Temple and its surroundings were ploughed with oxen. As for the Zealots, the Romans utterly exterminated them, for at last they understood that the religious fanaticism of the Jews was the true cause of the revolt. “For the next fifty years we did not see the flight of a bird in Palestine,” says the Talmud.

The Israelites were forbidden under penalty of death to enter Jerusalem, and the garrison doubled. Until the fourth century the Jews could not return there to weep once a year, on the 9th day of the Aw month, the loss of the “holy city.” And until the twentieth century, or more precisely until May 14, 1948, they failed to found a Jewish state, Eretz Yisrael.

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Ancient Rome Jerusalem Josephus Judaism Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Nero

Kriminalgeschichte, 6

Below, translated excerpts from the first volume of Karlheinz
Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums
(“Criminal History of Christianity”)

 
The Jewish War (66-70)

The Zealots, a Jewish nationalist group originally constituted, undoubtedly, by a section of the Jerusalem clergy by the year 6, instigated that war as a reaction to the power of the Roman occupier. Despite the existence of notable differences between Zealots and Christians, many points of contact have also been observed. It is no coincidence that one of the apostles of Jesus, a certain Simon, is called in the Gospel of Luke “the Zealot” and in that of Matthew “the Canaanite”: which represents a simple transcription of the Aramaic qannai, “the exalted.”

Among the zealots, to whom current research attributes an important influence in the trajectory of Jesus, abounded apocalyptic rumours, as the oracle which said that, at that time, “one of his own would be king of the world.” Four lustrums before the outbreak of the Jewish war proper, they were already fighting against the Romans, but even more against certain antipatriot Jews.

Their enemies called them “Sicarius,” that means “those of the knife,” because they were armed with the “sica,” with which they stabbed on the back those who they did not like, especially some rich Jews who for reasons of interest agreed with the Romans. It is said (by Eusebius, Church historian) that one of their first victims had been “the high priest Jonathas.”

They committed their murders in full day and in the middle of the city; they took advantage of the festive days to be confused in the agglomerations, and stabbed their enemies with small daggers that were hidden under the tunics. When the victim fell, the murderers added to the commotion and exclamations of consternation, and thanks to this cold blood they were almost never discovered.

Josephus, who in the middle of the war changed sides and favoured the Romans, calls the zealots assassins and bandits, but he does not forget to mention that “they had many supporters, especially among the youth.”

In extremist circles the insurrection against Rome was publicly incited. They read preferably the two books of the Maccabees (whose definitive inclusion in the Sacred Scriptures, let us recall in passing, dates from the Council of Trent; that is, from the sixteenth century), to exalt themselves with those “heroic actions.” They hoped to be able to re-edit before the Romans, with the Lord’s help, the triumphs won against the Greeks. In this way the Bellum ludaicum (66-70) was finally produced: a bloody adventure in which the Romans were forced to throw them out militarily.

The revolt, so pleasing to the eyes of the Lord, led first by Eleazar ben Simon, the son of a priest as well as by Zechariah ben Phalec, then continued by John of Giscala, began at a well chosen time on a Sabbath with the slaughter of the few Roman guards on the Antonia tower in Jerusalem and the powerful fortifications of the royal palace. Before surrendering to the garrison, they promised that they would not kill anyone; then they only pardoned an officer who agreed to be circumcised. (Later Christians would also forgive the Jews who accepted conversion.)

In the Greek cities of the region, Damascus, Caesarea, Ashkelon, Scythopolis, Hippos and Gadara the Hellenes organized in turn a slaughter of Jews: 10,500 or 18,000 only in Damascus, according to an account. At the same time the insurgent Jews, stimulated by the ardour of their faith and by the great memories of the exploits of the Maccabees, were cleansing up all minorities in Judea.

The Romans began to march, first under the orders of the governor of Syria, Cestius Gallus. Nero then sent one of his best generals, the former mule dealer Titus Flavius Vespasianus, whose first military operations were extremely cautious. He found himself in a politically sensitive situation due to the death of Nero and the fall of Galba.

But by the summer of the year 68 they controlled almost all of Palestine; among other things, he ordered the burning of the hermitage of Qumran, on the shores of the Dead Sea, whose important library, which the monks had hidden shortly before in the mountain caves, was not discovered until the middle of the 20th century.

He also decimated the Samaritans, who had taken part in the Jewish insurrection. Cerealis made with 11,600 of them a hecatomb in Mount Gerizim. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, a city of “sad fame” according to Tacitus, to which Vespasian already had in siege, the children of God divided into two parties fought each other; they even came to form a third faction that fought against the other two in the Temple.

The Temple, with its surroundings, was a true fortress, turned into redoubt of the zealots… that continued celebrating the rites even under the siege! While the masses, deprived of provisions, starved to death, the Jews stabbed each other in street fights, or killed the prisoners in the dungeons, while continuing to make common cause against the Romans. These, for their part, also used to pass the prisoners by knife or crucified them. Vespasian had to leave for Rome, since his troops had proclaimed him emperor.

But two years later, in early September 70, his son Titus ended the insurrection with a bloodbath: previously, being in the Caesarean Palestine, in Berytus (Beirut) and elsewhere, he had ordered to throw thousands of imprisoned Jews to the circus beasts, or forced them to kill each other in duels, or burned them alive. The few survivors of Jerusalem, reduced to a single heap of ruins, were stabbed or sold as slaves.

The Temple burned to the foundations, with all its possessions treasured for six centuries, on the anniversary of the destruction of the first one. The struggle continued for several more years in several isolated fortresses, such as Herodion Hill, Machaerus and Masada, until the defenders committed suicide along with their wives and children.

In the year 71, the victor entered triumphantly in Rome, where still today can be seen the Arch of Titus in memory of the feat…

The massacre had cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Jerusalem was devastated as once were Carthage and Corinth, and the country incorporated into the dominions of the emperor. Overwhelming taxes were imposed on the vanquished, until the fifth of the first harvests, and to a greater calamity, the country suffered the plague of bandits. Religious life, on the other hand, and how could it be otherwise, flourished.

Neither in Palestine nor anywhere the Jew was forbidden to practice his religion: “For prudence they abstained from declaring war on the Jewish faith as such” (Mommsen). But there was still ahead a major defeat, a few decades later, as a result of the second attempt of a “last war of God.”

Categories
Antiochus IV Epiphanes Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Kriminalgeschichte, 5

Below, translated excerpts from the first volume of Karlheinz
Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums
(“Criminal History of Christianity”)

 
The Church and the Maccabees
 
Mattathias, the first rebellious leader of the Maccabees, was a priest and assassin whose name means “gift of Yahweh”, of the family of Asmon. Possessed by the “religious zeal” in the traditional biblical way, he killed an Israelite who by order of the royal commissioner intended to celebrate a sacrifice to idols.

Judas Maccabeus generalized the guerrilla struggle and purified the Temple, where he had found “the abomination of desolation” (Daniel 12, 11) imposed by Antiochus Epiphanes; he also nailed the head of the enemy general Nicanor on the gate of the citadel: an event that is still being celebrated today [by Jews] by means of a fixed holiday of the calendar.

Yohanan Hyrcanus (reigned 135-103) undertook great military campaigns, as they had not been known since the time of Solomon. Thus he Judaized by the force of arms the provinces of Idumaea and Galilee. But we should not believe that these were vulgar campaigns of expansion or ambition for power; they were “particularly religious wars called holy wars” (R. Meyer).

Hyrcanus also ravaged Samaria, a region that disappears completely from political history in the Christian era. Samaria, which had been the capital of the kingdom of Israel, enlarged with great splendour by King Amri, always rivalled Jerusalem. The Samaritans, a hybrid people in the middle of Palestine between Jew and idolater, were hated by the Jews more than any other.

Few of the Maccabees died of natural death: Judas Maccabeus, in the field; his brother Jonathan, killed; Simon, murdered; Hyrcanus II, grandson of John Hyrcanus I, executed by Herod, the ally of the Romans; Aristobulus II, poisoned; his son, executed, as well as his brother and the last Asmonean prince. Also the daughter of Alexander, Mariamne, married in the year 37 with Herod, died victim of palatial intrigues, like the mother, Alexandra and their children. “The reign of Herod was, to a great extent, a time of peace for Palestine” (Grundmann).

At the head of these conflicts, imperialist wars, civil wars and various atrocities shines the star, historical or not, of the seven “Maccabean brothers,” seven heroes of the “holy war.” It is thus that these Maccabees deserve not only to be “revered by all,” according to Gregory of Nazianzus, a doctor of the Church, but: “Those who praise them, and those who hear their praise, should better imitate their virtues and, spurred by this example, rise to the same feats. ”

It is a typical opinion. The most famous doctors of the Church rival among each other in praise of the (supposed) proto-martyrs of the insurrection, those “Maccabean brothers” who, according to St. Augustine, “before the Incarnation of Christ already fought for the Law of God to the point of giving their own lives,” or who “erected the magnificent banner of victory,” according to John Chrysostom.

They became symbols of the ecclesia militans and remembered in the three oldest martyrology lists. Once converted the synagogue of Antioch that housed the supposed sepulchres in a Christian church; once transferred their precious “relics” to Constantinople, then to the Roman church of San Pietro in Vincola and to the church of Maccabees in Cologne and celebrated in Germany and France, they are venerated: especially in the Rhine and Rhone valleys. (Below, what are believed to be the Maccabees’ relics.)

The existence of Christian saints before Jesus Christ can only seem absurd to anyone who does not know the Catholic mentality, the sceptical in earnest who insists on taking logic as the sole foundation of any reasoning.

Pagan saints… and holy wars. In the two great insurrections of the first and second centuries, the practice of “holy war” returned with all its savagery and cruelty, with its apocalyptic follies. The “battle of the last days” against the idolatrous Rome searched for, no less, “the Messianic Kingdom of God.”

Categories
Antiochus IV Epiphanes Judaism Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Kriminalgeschichte, 4

Below, translated excerpts from the first chapter of Karlheinz
Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums
(“Criminal History of Christianity”):

 
The sacred warmongering of the Maccabees

Once obtained the high priesthood, Jason established in Jerusalem a gymnasium or ephebeión, and raised the possibility of bringing the political and religious situation in the capital with the numerous Hellenistic cities of the country, turning Jerusalem into a Greek polis.

This provoked a reaction from the traditionalists, who saw a menace for the old Jewish laws and beliefs. Unrest, riots and street altercations grew, all of which triggered strong repressive measures by the energetic Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV, who was trying to consolidate his shaky kingdom by introducing a syncretic religion that unified the peoples.

He also desecrated the Temple in Jerusalem (in 168 he reformed the great altar of burnt offering and laid right there an altar to Olympian Zeus); banned the Jewish religion and burned the city, but not before looting the treasury of the Temple and taking 1,800 talents from it. (Centuries later, the painter Raphael was commissioned by Pope Leo X to solemnize such a significant episode in one of the walls of the Vatican.)

According to Elias Bickermann, if the stringent measures against the Jews by Antiochus IV had taken effect, it would not only have meant the end of Judaism, but also “would have prevented the rise of Christianity and Islam.”

Our imagination almost fails to conceive a world so different…

Categories
Ethnic cleansing Judaism Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Martin Luther

Kriminalgeschichte, 3

Below, translated excerpts from the first chapter of Karlheinz
Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums
(“Criminal History of Christianity”):

 
The ravages of David and the modern translators of the Bible

Samuel, the last judge and first prophet of Israel, fought against the Philistines and defeated them but then, feeling old, anointed Saul as army commander and ordered him in God’s name:

“Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”

The Catholic encyclopedia of many volumes, Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche annotates that the prophet in question was a character “without blemish” and goes even further in praise of his successor: “A great effort in defending the theocracy, the law and the right, was the major garment of character in Saul.” And this king, the first of Israel (1020-1000 BCE) anointed by Samuel, figures typically as a “charismatic” who acted through “the spirit of the Lord” and yet, “was obviously a psychotic depressive, tormented by persecution” (Beck) who energetically continued the tradition of “holy wars.” As the Bible tells, Saul fought “many enemies around him”: Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, the kings of the Philistines and Amalekites. Of course, when according to superior orders they killed all the Amalekites including the infants, but kept the best cattle, he incurred in the wrath of both the Lord and the prophet Samuel, after which he suffered a tremendous defeat at the hands of the Philistines and committed suicide (by the way, this is the first act of this kind mentioned in the Bible).

His successor, David, name that means the chosen one (of God), who bought as wife Saul’s daughter, Michal, for the price of a hundred Philistine foreskins, towards the end of the millennium heralded the beginning of the national state, thus achieved the maximum period of splendor for Israel, which possessions came then from the middle Syria to the borders of Egypt and was the strongest nation among the great empires of Mesopotamia, Hamath and Egypt.

As had happened with Saul, David (1000-961 BCE) was also possessed by “the spirit of the Lord” and made a campaign after another, as many were “oppressors” from the north. And so David said in his hymn of thanksgiving: “I will pursue my enemies, exterminate them; will not turn my back until they are wiped out. I will consume and shatter them all, so they can no longer recover.” “But he never started a war”—St. Ambrose hastens to add, doctor of the Church—without first asking advice of the Lord.

David is admired not only in Jewish theology, but also in Christianity and Islam as a person of outstanding religious significance. “Whenever he went on campaign, David did not leave a man or woman alive… so did David when he dwelt in the land of Philistines.” Other customs of the Lord’s chosen included to cut off the horses’ tendons of the enemy; once he also cut the hands and feet of the enemies themselves. Another hobby of “the divine David, great and softest prophet” (according to bishop Theodoret, a Church historian) was to grind prisoners with saws and iron tongs and burn them in brick kilns, as he did to the people of all cities of the Ammonites.

It is relevant to remember that, in 1956, the Council of the German Evangelical Church and the Union of Evangelical Bible Society agreed in the publication of a Bible “according to the version of Martin Luther in German,” an authorized edition in 1964 and published in 1971, which reproduces as follows the passage just quoted thus: “to the people he brought them out, and put them into slave labor with saws and axes of iron, and brick kilns.”

However, Martin Luther had translated it thus:

“To the people he took away and commanded them to be sawn, passing iron drays, and butcher them with knives, and toss them in the brick kilns.”

This passage corresponds to one of the 1st Book of Chronicles (20,3), where the above Bible authorized by the Council of the German Evangelical Church, “according to the version of Martin Luther,” says, “whose inhabitants he took away, and put them down in labor servitude in the trails, saws and harrows.” But the words Luther chose were:

“Whose inhabitants he took out, and made that drag harrows and chariots armed with cutting scythes ran over them, so that they were made pieces and shattered.”

The approved Bible is a fabrication, and responds to a certain method.

In the course of the last hundred years, the Evangelical Church has proposed no less than three reviews of the Lutheran Bible. Luther did not suspect that his spiritual heirs would amend his words so flatly, so widely—he, whose motto as a translator was that “words must serve the cause, not the cause serve the words.”

When the Evangelical Church announces a Bible “according to the version of Martin Luther in German language,” it actually is selling a gross forgery. Anyway, if the ancients, being idolaters, had been made slaves surely they would not have run a more enviable fate, even the noncombatants as reported by the archaeologist Glueck, who excavated the ruins of Eilat. His report on the slaves who worked in brick kilns was that “the rate of mortality must have been terrific.”

In the Bible, a man named Shimei curses David calling him a “bloodthirsty” and throws stones upon him. Erich Brock and a few others have opined that the words were uttered “for good reason.” Even the Lord himself confirms it: “You have shed much blood, and done many wars.” But yes, it is always “with the Lord,” always moved “by the will of the Lord”; hence, no doubt, “pleased, the Lord watched David” for example after passing on the knife “twenty-two thousand Syrians” or after a massacre of “ eighteen thousand” Edomites. “Do whatever inspires your heart, for God is with you,” he says in another place.

But if God praised the “bloodthirsty” David for keeping his commandments and walk always in the shadow of the Lord, doing only what would please him, and if David praised himself, he is also praised forever, tireless, by the Christian clergy: a clergy that, as I will try to argue, in all ages has been in favor of the great criminals of history if they are useful to the Church. The same bloodthirsty king was the first to encourage the clergy as he could, and so he has set an example for millennia: for being faithful to the Lord, for making war in the name of the Lord, for sanctifying the loot destined to the construction of the Temple. (He who tried to hide the contribution was exposed to the extermination of his entire family, livestock included.)

Categories
Ethnic cleansing Judaism Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Moses (fictional Hebrew lawgiver) Old Testament

Kriminalgeschichte, 2

Below, translated excerpts from the first chapter of Karlheinz
Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums
(“Criminal History of Christianity”):

 
Moses and the book of Judges

But not even this was enough for Moses, a character that a tract of 1598, On the Three Great Liars, blamed for “the largest and most egregious crimes” (summa et gravissime Mosis crimina) insofar as when “angry with the commanders of the army” he asked how they had spared the women and children. “Therefore kill all those men, even the children, and cut the throat of the women that have known a man; keep only girls and all the maids… And it was found that the booty was taken by the army of six hundred and seventy-five thousand sheep, seventy-two thousand oxen, donkeys, seventy-one thousand, and thirty-two thousand female virgins”—tremendous killings and robberies that also were contrary to the fifth and seventh commandments by Moses himself.

In a word, they perpetrated the most horrible atrocities and praise themselves for it, and burned towns and villages to leave no stone unturned. Today, when excavating the ancient Canaanites doublings, it is common to find a thick layer of ash that confirms the destruction by fire. One of the most important Palestinian cities in late Chalcolithic, Tell-Isdud or Ashdod, located in the international route of the sea (via maris) and that would become the capital of the Philistine Pentapolis, disappeared, destroyed by fire in the thirteenth century B.C., like its neighbor Tell-Mor.

Sometimes exterminating whole tribes spread because it was common to throw at the enemy the most severe form of war decreed by the Lord, the accursed (Hebrew herám, which was the negation of life itself, and which root derives from a word meaning “sacred” to the Western Semites): something offered to Yahweh as a kind of vast hecatomb or “ritual sacrifice.” Not by chance the biblical descriptions of “settlement” have been compared with the later campaigns of Islam (not nearly as bloody as those), when it is said that the conquerors should truly feel “custodians of the word of God” and protagonists of a holy war. “Just these, not the profane wars, end the anathema which means the extermination of all living in the name of Yahweh” (Gamm). Precisely, the “destruction at the roots can only be explained by the religious fanaticism of the Israelites.”

Those are the cases where the Lord expressly commands: “For in the towns that you shall not leave a living soul, but without differentiation you shall kill by the sword, namely: the Hittites and the Alamorreo, and the Canaanites and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded you, lest they teach you to make all the abominations that they have used with their gods, and offend your Lord.”

Such excesses of faith had their origin, in the first place, in nationalism of that ancient people, undoubtedly one of the most extremist ever known, combined with the rigor of a monotheism unknown in those regions. Both elements mutually potentiated the claim to be the chosen people.

The Israelites of the pre-Davidic time committed the most terrible crimes, and celebrated the genocide as a pleasing action to the Lord’s eyes, almost as a symbol of faith. And that “holy war,” then and later was carried out with particular vehemence, without admitting negotiations or agreements. Only the extermination of the enemy, the uncircumcised (or unbaptized, the “heretic,” the “infidel”) is “a typically Israelite trait” (Ringgren).

In most respects, the description of the Old Testament book of Judges, dated between 1200 and 1050, i.e., a century and a half after the “settlement,” is a source of information if not entirely reliable, quite valid, and it barely mentions anything but “holy wars.” These always began with blessings, after a period of sexual continence, and usually ended with the total liquidation of the enemy: men, women and children. “The ruins of many villages and towns, repeatedly destroyed during the twelfth and eleventh centuries, provided the most graphic of archaeological commentaries” (Cornfeld / Botterweck).

The Ark of the Covenant, assurance of God’s presence, accompanied the massacres.