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Tag: Middle Ages

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Moses (fictional Hebrew lawgiver) Reformation Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Who We Are, 24

The following is my abridgement of chapter 24 of William Pierce’s history of the white race, Who We Are:

Middle Ages Were Era of Slow, Ordered Evolution
Eastern Europe Had Different Experience With Jews than West
Reformation Resulted in Increased Judaization of Western Europe
Inside the White Citadel, Jews Wreak Havoc on Society
Capitalists, Reds Collaborate Against West

 

This installment continues the history of the interaction of the Jews with the European peoples, begun in the previous installment, and carries it from the Middle Ages into the modern era.

The salient characteristic of the Middle Ages was order. The feudal society of the early Middle Ages (from ca. 700 until ca. 1200) was a highly structured society: not only did every man have his place and every place its man, but the relationship of each man to every other was strictly defined. From the lord of the manor down to the village idiot, every person was bound to others by mutual responsibilities and obligations.

The corporate society which flourished in Western Europe from the mid-12th century until its destruction by the rise of finance capitalism in the 18th century was able to approach the ideal primarily because it was a substantially homogeneous society, and its institutions had developed organically over a very long period of time.

Both in theory and in practice corporatism had its flaws, the principal one being that it gained stability at the expense of innovation: medieval society was extraordinarily conservative, and technical progress came at a somewhat slower pace than it might have in a less-regulated society. On the other hand, a reasonable degree of stability is always a prerequisite for continuing progress, and the medieval compromise may not have been so bad after all.

Insofar as personal freedom was concerned, the socially irresponsible “do your own thing” attitude definitely was not so common as it is today, but neither was there a lack of opportunities for the adventurous element among the population to give expression to its urges. It should be remembered that the most common theme of the folk tales which had their origin in the Middle Ages—exemplified in the Grimm brothers’ collection—was that of the young man setting out alone into the world to make his fortune. Certainly, there was more personal freedom, in practice, in the Middle Ages for the average craftsman than there was in the capitalist period of mass production which followed.

For our purpose here, the essential thing about medieval society was that it was an ordered, structured society, with a population base which was, in each particular region, homogeneous. Thus, it was a society imbued with certain natural defenses against penetration by alien elements.

The Jew in medieval Europe had relatively little elbow room. He did not fit into the well established, well ordered scheme of things. He was an outsider looking into a self-sufficient world which had little use for his peculiar talents.

This was the situation for the better part of a millennium, and throughout that long period the foremost goal of the Jew was to destroy the order, to break down the structure, to loosen the bonds which held European society together, and thereby to create an opening for himself.

Order is the Jew’s mortal foe. One cannot understand the role of the Jew in modern European history unless one first understands this principle.

It explains why the Jew is the eternal Bolshevik: why he is a republican in a monarchist society, a capitalist in a corporate society, a communist in a capitalist society, a liberal “dissident” in a communist society—and, always and everywhere, a cosmopolitan and a race mixer in a homogeneous society.

And, in particular, it explains the burning hatred the Jews felt for European institutions during the Middle Ages. It explains why the modern Jewish spokesman, Abram Sachar, in his A History of the Jews, frankly admits that the universal attitude of the Jews toward medieval European society was, “Crush the infamous thing!”

Yet, even in the Middle Ages the Jews did not do badly for themselves, and they certainly had little cause for complaint, except when their excesses brought the wrath of their hosts down on their heads. As was pointed out in the previous installment, the Jews established an early stranglehold on the commerce of Europe, monopolizing especially foreign trade.

Their real forte, however, was in two staples of commerce forbidden to most Gentiles in Christian Europe: gold and human flesh. Aristotle’s denunciations of usury had influenced the leaders of the Church against moneylending, and the practice was consequently forbidden to Christians on religious grounds—although the ban was not always strictly observed. The field was left almost entirely to the Jews, who, in contrast to the Christians, used their religion as an explicit justification for usury.

Moses, the purported author of this basis for all Jewish business ethics, was speaking from the experience the Jews had already gained in Egypt when he indicated that the ultimate goal of moneylending to the strangers in a land “to which thou goest” was to “possess” the land. When it came to the slave trade, the words of Moses were not just permissive, but imperative: “Both thy male and female slaves, whom thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen [goyim] that are round about you; of them shall ye buy male and female slaves…” (Leviticus 25:44-46). It is truly said by the Jews themselves that the Hebrew spirit breathes in every word of the Old Testament!

In Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean area the guild system did not reach the full development that it did in the West and the North of Europe, and Jews in Russia, Poland, Lithuania, and parts of Italy engaged in a few trades besides moneylending and slave dealing: the liquor business, in particular. Jews eventually owned most of the inns of Eastern Europe. They also monopolized the garment industry throughout large areas of the East and the South, and the Jewish tailor, the Jewish rag-picker, and the Jewish used clothes peddler are proverbial figures.

The relatively greater opportunities for exploitation of the Gentiles in the East, not to mention the strong presence of the Khazar-descended Jews there, led to a gradual concentration of Europe’s Jews in Poland and Russia during the Middle Ages. By the latter part of the 18th century, half the world’s Jews were living in Poland. Their power became so great that many medieval Polish coins, minted during periods when Jews were in charge not only of collecting the taxes, but also of administering the treasury itself, bore inscriptions in Hebrew. The Jews even acquired title to the land on which many Polish and Russian churches stood, and they then charged the Christian peasants admission to their own churches on Sunday mornings.

In the West the Europeans froze the Jews out of the industrial and much of the commercial life of medieval society; in the East the Jews froze the Europeans out. In much of Eastern Europe, Jews became the only mercantile class in a world of peasants and laborers, and they used all their cunning and all the power of their wealth to keep their Gentile hosts down.

Reaction inevitably set in the East, however, just as it had in the West. The 17th century was a period of great uprisings against the Jews, a period when such heroes as the great Cossack hetman and Jew-killer, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, flourished.

In the 18th century the rulers themselves were finally obliged to take strong measures against the Jews of the East, so bad had the situation become. Russia’s Catherine the Great (1729-96), who had inherited most of Poland’s Jews after the partition of the latter country, extended and enforced prohibitions against them which not only limited their economic activity but banned them altogether from large areas.

It is this which goes a long way toward explaining how the Poles, saddled with a communist government consisting almost entirely of Jews after the Second World War, have been able in the last three decades to do what Adolf Hitler could not: namely, make Poland into a country which is virtually Jew-free today. Of more immediate relevance at this point in our story, it is the relatively weaker natural resistance to Jews in the West which suggests why it was relatively easy for the Jews there to take advantage of the breakdown of the medieval order and the dissolution of long-established social structures in order to make new openings for themselves.

The Reformation

Another factor which undoubtedly made the West more susceptible to the Jews was the Reformation, the lasting effects of which were confined largely to Europe’s northwestern regions, in fact, to the Germanic-speaking regions: Germany, Scandinavia, England and Scotland, Switzerland. The Church of Rome and its Eastern Orthodox offshoot had always been ambivalent in their attitudes toward the Jews. On the one hand, they fully acknowledged the Jewish roots of Christianity, and Jesus’ Jewishness was taken for granted. On the other hand, the Jews had rejected Jesus’ doctrine and killed him, saying, “His blood be on us and on our children” (Matthew 27:25), and the medieval Church was inclined to take them at their word.

In addition to the stigma of deicide the Jews also bore the suspicion which naturally fell on heretics of any sort. During the Middle Ages people took Christianity quite seriously, and anyone professing an unorthodox religious belief, whether he actively sought converts or not, was considered a danger to the good order of the community and to the immortal soul of any Christian exposed to him.

What the Protestant reformers did for the Jews was give the Hebrew Scriptures a much more important role in the life of the peoples of Europe than they had enjoyed previously. Among Catholics it was not the Bible but the Church which was important. The clergy read the Bible; the people did not. The people looked to the clergy for spiritual guidance, not to the Bible.

Among Protestants that order was reversed. The Bible became an authority unto itself, which could be consulted by any man. Its Jewish characters—Abraham, Moses, Solomon, David, and the rest—became heroic figures, suffused with an aura of sanctity. Their doings and sayings became household bywords.

It is ironic that the father of the Reformation, Martin Luther, who inadvertently helped the Jews fasten their grip on the West, detested them and vigorously warned his Christian followers against them. His book Von den Jueden und ihren Luegen (On the Jews and their Lies), published in 1543, is a masterpiece.

Luther’s antipathy to the Jews came after he learned Hebrew and began reading the Talmud. He was shocked and horrified to find that the Hebrew religious writings were dripping with hatred and contempt for all non-Jews. Luther wrote:

Do not their Talmud and rabbis say that it is no sin to kill if a Jew kills a heathen, but it is a sin if he kills a brother in Israel? It is no sin if he does not keep his oath to a heathen. Therefore, to steal and rob, as they do with their usury, from a heathen is a divine service. For they hold that they cannot be too hard on us nor sin against us, because they are the noble blood and circumcised saints. We, however, are cursed goyim. And they are the masters of the world and we are their servants, yea, their cattle.

Alas, Luther could not have it both ways. He had already sanctified the Jews by elevating the status of their history, their legends, and their religion to that of Holy Writ. His translation of the Old Testament into German and his dissemination of the Jewish scriptures among his followers vitiated all his later warnings against the Jews. Today the church he founded studiously ignores those warnings.

Luther had recognized the evils in the Christian Church of his day and in the men who ruled the Church. He also recognized the evil in the Jews and the danger they posed to Europe. He had the courage to denounce both the Church and the Jews, and for that the White race will be indebted to him for as long as it endures.

The great tragedy of Luther is that he failed to go one step further and to recognize that no religion of Jewish origin is a proper religion for men and women of European race. When he cut himself and the majority of the Germanic peoples off from Rome, he failed at the same time to cut away all the baggage of Jewish mythology which had been imposed on Europe by Rome. Instead he made of that baggage a greater spiritual burden for his people than it already was.

The consequence was that within a century of Luther’s death much of Northern Europe was firmly in the grip of a new superstition as malignant as the old one, and it was one in which the Jews played a much more explicit role. Before, the emphasis had been on the New Testament: that is, on Christianity as a breakaway sect from Judaism, in which the differences between the two religions were stressed. The role models held up to the peoples of Europe were the Church’s saints and martyrs, most of whom were non-Jewish. The parables taught to children were often of European origin.

Among the Protestants the Old Testament gained a new importance, and with it so did the Hebrew patriarchs as role models, while Israel’s folklore became the new source of moral inspiration for Europe. Perhaps nothing so clearly demonstrates the change, and the damage to the European sense of identity which accompanied it, as the sudden enthusiasm for bestowing Hebrew names on Christian children.

The Reformation did more for the Jews than merely sanctifying the Old Testament. It shattered the established order of things and brought chaos in political as well as spiritual affairs—chaos eagerly welcomed by the Jews. Germany was so devastated by a series of bloody religious wars that it took her a century and a half to recover. In some German principalities two-thirds of the population was annihilated during the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in the period 1618-1648, commonly known as the “Thirty Years War.”

Everywhere during the 17th century the Jews took advantage of the turmoil, moving back into countries from which they had been banned (such as England), moving to take over professions from which they had been excluded, insinuating themselves into confidential relationships with influential leaders in literary and political circles, profiting from the sufferings of their hosts and strengthening their hold, burrowing deep into the rubble and wreckage of medieval society so that they could more easily undermine whatever rose in its stead.

Napoleon_stellt_den_israelitsichen_Kult_wieder_her,_30._Mai_1806

An 1806 French print depicts
Napoleon Bonaparte emancipating the Jews

In the following century came Europe’s next great cataclysm, which broke down what was left of the old order. It was the French Revolution—and it was the first major political event in Western Europe in which Jews played a significant role, other than as financiers. Even so, public feeling against the Jews was such that they still found it expedient to exercise much of their influence through Gentile front men.

Honore Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau (1749-91), the Revolution’s fieriest orator—the spendthrift, renegade son of an aristocrat, disowned by his father and always in need of a loan—was one of these. Another was the bloodthirsty monster Maximilien Marie Isidore de Robespierre (1758-94), dictator of the Revolutionary Tribunal which kept the guillotine busy and spilled France’s best blood into the gutters of Paris while the rabble cheered. Both Mirabeau and Robespierre worked tirelessly for their Jewish patrons, supporting legislation granting new rights and privileges to the Jews of France and denouncing French patriots who opposed the Jewish advances.

It was in the new series of European wars spawned by the Revolution, in which Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) was the leading figure, that the Jews extended the gains they had made in France to much of the rest of Europe. Behind Napoleon’s armies, which were kept solvent by Jewish moneylenders, marched a ragtag band of Jews to oversee the pulling down of all barriers against their brethren in each country in which French arms triumphed. Ghettos were abolished, all restrictions on Jewish activities were declared void, and anyone who spoke out against the Jews was in danger of being put before a military firing squad.

Despite the enormous services he performed for the Jews, it is clear from his comments, on many different occasions, that Napoleon personally despised them. “The Jews are a vile people, cowardly and cruel,” he said in reference to some of the atrocities committed by Jews during the Reign of Terror.

In a letter of March 6, 1808, to his brother Jerome, Napoleon wrote: “I decided to improve the Jews. But I do not want more of them in my kingdom. Indeed, I have done all to prove my scorn of the vilest nation in the world.” And when, in 1807, Napoleon issued decrees limiting the extent to which Jewish moneylenders could prey on the French peasantry, the Jews screamed in rage against him.

But the damage had already been done; Napoleon had pulled down the last of the barriers, and by the time of his disgrace and exile the Jews were solidly entrenched nearly everywhere.

It was those Jews who pushed their way into the professions—into teaching Gentile university students, into writing books for Gentile readers, into composing music for Gentile audiences, into painting pictures and directing films for Gentile viewers, into interpreting and passing judgment on every facet of Gentile culture and society for Gentile newspaper readers—who really got inside the Gentile citadel.

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Antiochus IV Epiphanes Catholic Church Christendom Individualism Indo-European heritage Inquisition Jerusalem Kevin MacDonald Philosophy of history Racial studies Universalism

Kevin MacDonald’s trilogy

The second book of Kevin MacDonald’s study on Jewry, Separation and its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (1994/2002), the first of his trilogy to be translated to German, is my favorite of MacDonald’s three academic works that I read in more than two years. Professor MacDonald is the foremost scholar on the Jewish question. In Separation and its Discontents (hereafter SAID) he wrote:

Western societies, unlike prototypical Jewish cultures, do not have a primitive concern with racial purity. Rather, concern about racial purity emerges only in the late stages of Jewish-gentile group conflict…

Despite a great deal of commonality among Western anti-Semitic movements, there was a great difference between the universalistic, assimilatory tendencies of traditional Western Christianity and the exclusivistic, racialist program of National Socialism. Indeed, we have seen that beginning in the 19th century an important aspect of German anti-Semitic ideology was a criticism of Western universalism and the development of peculiarly German conceptions of Christianity. A critical component of official National Socialist ideology, as represented in the thought of Alfred Rosenberg, was the idea that “the twin forces of disintegration, namely universalism and individualism, act in perpetual conflict with the Germanic concept of race.” In this regard, National Socialism was indeed profoundly anti-Western. In rejecting both universalism and individualism, National Socialism resembled, much more closely than did medieval Western collectivist Christianity, its mirror image rival, Judaism. [page 196]

In a previous chapter MacDonald had written:

We shall see that with the rise of the National Socialist movement in Germany, the universalist themes of Western Christianity were completely overthrown in favor of a full-blown racialist ideology of the ingroup. In Chapter Five I will argue that National Socialism is a true mirror-image of Judaism. Not surprisingly, it was also the most dangerous enemy that Judaism has confronted in its entire existence. [page 133]

One of the hypothesis advanced in SAID provides food for thought. MacDonald wrote, “I propose that the Christian church in late antiquity was in its very essence the embodiment of a powerful anti-Semitic movement…” (page 112). This is something I had never heard of, and reminds me my first readings of psychohistory and Lloyd deMause’s insights on why the Christ archetype galvanized the population of the ancient world, although MacDonald’s hypothesis is totally distinct and is presented from an altogether distant point of view. But after digesting what both deMause and MacDonald say, for the first time I feel I am starting to comprehend facets of Christianity that would have never occurred to me from a conventional reading to history. If MacDonald is right, the Roman Catholic Church was the earliest attempt toward a type of society that we may call collectivism for European-derived peoples.

Although Christianity always held universalist ideals at its core, it nonetheless fulfilled its role of impeding, as did the Muslim nations, that Judaism became a destructive force for the indigenous culture of the Late Roman Empire and the Early Middle Ages. One of the facts that I learnt in SAID is that most restrictions enacted against Jewry, initiated in the period from Eusebius to Justinian, were still active throughout Christendom until the French Revolution hit the continent with its egalitarian fury. It was precisely the so-called Enlightenment (that presently some Western dissidents are starting to call “the Dark Enlightenment”) what inspired the founding fathers of the United States of America. And contrary to those white nationalists who still insult the memory of Adolf Hitler and the movement he created, I would claim that the mortal sin of the French Revolution, the emancipation of Jewry, was not properly atoned in Europe until the arrival of a specifically racial ideology: National Socialism.

But not only Nazi Germany has been demonized in the public mind. The Inquisition is widely regarded as a black page in the history of the Church even by the most Catholic individuals that I know. In contrast to such view MacDonald presents us with a radical reevaluation of what was precisely the role of the Inquisition. On page 147 he states: “I here develop the view that the Spanish Inquisition was fundamentally an authoritarian, collectivist, and exclusionary movement that resulted from resource and reproductive competition with Jews, and particularly crypto-Jews posing as Christians.” One could even argue that, thanks to the Inquisition, for three-hundred years before the movement of independence that gave birth to Mexico, New Spain (1521-1821) was Judenfrei.

While reading SAID I could not escape the thought that whites are un-insightful because, unlike the Jews and with the exception of William Pierce and Arthur Kemp (see the long chapters in this book quoting them), very few have knowledge of the history of their race. If we take into account that, in one of their holydays, New York Hassidic Jews celebrate their victory over the ancient Greeks who tried to assimilate them millennia ago, a basic question comes to mind: Why don’t we celebrate the victory of Antiochus IV over the Jews, or Titus’ conquest of Jerusalem?

Bust of Antiochus IV

We do not celebrate these victories precisely for the reason that both Kemp and Pierce explain so well: neither the Greeks nor the Romans exist today. What we call contemporary Greeks or Romans are the product of centuries of blood mixing that devalued not only the genotype of the original Indo-European population, but their extended phenotype as well: the Greco-Roman hard ethos and their galvanizing mythos mostly reflected in the Homeric tales. The Greeks and Romans who embraced Christianity were a totally different breed of the pure Aryans of Sparta or the austere Latins of the Roman Republic (see e.g., the essays that I translated from Evropa Soberana in later chapters of this book).

MacDonald himself acknowledges on page 190 that “the Jews have continued as a creative race into the present, while the Greeks gradually merged with the barbarians and lost their distinctiveness—a point remarkably similar to Chamberlain’s ‘chaos of peoples’ in which the decline of the ancient world is attributed to loss of racial purity.” Conversely, I would say that since the Jews have conserved their genotype almost intact throughout the millennia they are able to celebrate their Maccabean revolt as if it was yesterday. In other words, had whites preserved their genes intact, some of us might still be celebrating Antiochus’ victories over the subversive tribe; or, if we knew our history with the same passion that Jews know theirs, we might still be celebrating the fall of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD, or the more recent expulsion of the tribe from the Iberian peninsula.

What conventional historians ignore is that, once the Church lost its power to sell a worldview after the late 18th and early 19th centuries, our genetic individualism placed us at the mercy of a collectivist tribe.

Fortunately, the ethno-traitorous West has committed financial blunders in the 20th and 21st centuries. The dollar and all fiat currencies of the West will crash probably in this decade (I am reviewing this essay in 2014), which means that there is hope that some of us will start to understand the Jewish problem in a post-crashed world. On page 10 of SAID MacDonald says that “in congruence with the results of social identity research, anti-Semitism is expected to be most prominent among those most in competition with the Jews and during times of economic crisis.”

Although most readers of MacDonald treasure The Culture of Critique, the third and last of his trilogy on Jewry as their favorite book of this collection, I believe that MacDonald’s work should be read from the beginning. A People that Shall Dwell Alone, Separation and its Discontents and The Culture of Critique can help us, using William Pierce’s metaphor, to “see the forest” with crystal-clear vision.

Remember Pierce’s words? If we don’t try to understand the Jews we can never really understand what is happening to our race and our civilization. Professor MacDonald’s voluminous texts have done the hard work for us—both the trilogy and his webzine The Occidental Observer—in a scholarly and yet entertaining way.

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Ancient Greece Arcadia Architecture Art Arthur C. Clarke Beauty Child abuse Christendom Civilisation (TV series) Counter-Reformation Demography Free speech / association Friedrich Nietzsche Homosexuality Industrial Revolution Islamization of Europe Kali Yuga Kenneth Clark Mainstream media Martin Luther Michelangelo Montaigne New York Philosophy Philosophy of history Protestantism Real men Reformation Rembrandt St Francis William Shakespeare

On Kenneth Clark’s “Civilisation”

Kenneth Clark may have been clueless about the fact that race matters. Yet, that our rot goes much deeper than what white nationalists realize is all too obvious once we leave, for a while, the ghetto of nationalism and take a look at the classics, just as Clark showed us through his 1969 TV series Civilisation.

Compared to the other famous series, Clark’s was unsurpassed in the sense that, as I have implied elsewhere, only genuine art—not science—has a chance to fulfill David Lane’s fourteen words.

By “art” I mean an evolved sense of beauty which is almost completely absent in today’s nationalists. Most of them are quite a product of Jewish modernity whether with their music, lifestyles or Hollywood tastes, to a much greater degree than what they think. For nationalism to succeed an evolved sense of female beauty has to be the starting point to see the divine nature of the white race. In Clark’s own words, “For all these reasons I think it is permissible to associate the cult of ideal love with the ravishing beauty and delicacy that one finds in the madonnas of the thirteenth century. Were there ever more delicate creatures than the ladies on Gothic ivories? How gross, compared to them, are the great beauties of other woman-worshiping epochs.”

Below, links to excerpts of most of the chapters of the 1969 series, where Clark followed the ups and downs of our civilisation historically:

“The Skin of our Teeth”

“The Great Thaw”

“Romance and Reality”

“Man—the Measure of all Things”

“The Hero as Artist”

“Protest and Communication”

“Grandeur and Obedience”

“The Light of Experience”

“Heroic Materialism”

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Art Civilisation (TV series) Free speech / association Kenneth Clark Martin Luther Montaigne Painting Protestantism Reformation William Shakespeare

Civilisation’s “Protest and Communication”

For an introduction to these series, see here.

Below, some indented excerpts of “Protest and Communication,” the sixth chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark, after which I offer my comments.

Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:

The dazzling summit of human achievement represented by Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci lasted for less than twenty years. It was followed (except in Venice) by a time of uneasiness often ending in disaster. For the first time since the great thaw civilised values were questioned and defied, and for some years it looked as if the footholds won by the Renaissance—the discovery of the individual, the belief in human genius, the sense of harmony between man and his surroundings—had been lost. Yet this was an inevitable process, and out of the confusion and brutality of sixteenth-century Europe, man emerged with new faculties and expanded powers of thought and expression.

In this room in the castle of Würzburg are the carvings of Tilman Riemenschneider, one—perhaps the best—of many German carvers in the late Gothic style. The Church was rich in fifteenth-century Germany, and the landowners were rich, and the merchants of the Hanseatic League were rich; and so, from Bergen right down to Bavaria, sculptors were kept busy doing huge, elaborate shrines and altars and monuments like the famous group of St George in the old church at Stockholm: a supreme example of late Gothic craftsman deploying his fancy and his almost irritating skill of hand.

The Riemenschneider figures show very clearly the character of the northern man at the end of the fifteenth century.

First of all, a serious personal piety—a quality quite different from the bland conventional piety that one finds, say, in a Perugino. And then a serious approach to life itself. These men (although of course they were unswerving Catholics) were not to be fobbed off by forms and ceremonies. They believed that there was such a thing as truth, and they wanted to get at it. What they heard from Papal legates, who did a lot of travelling in Germany at this time, did not convince them that there was the same desire for truth in Rome, and they had a rough, raw-boned peasant tenacity of purpose. Many of these earnest men would have heard about the numerous councils that had tried throughout the fifteenth century to reform the organisation of the Church. These grave northern men wanted something more substantial.

So far so good. But these faces reveal a more dangerous characteristic, a vein of hysteria. The fifteenth century had been the century of revivalism—religious movements on the fringe of the Catholic Church. They had, in fact, begun in the late fourteenth century, when the followers of John Huss almost succeeded in wiping out the courtly civilisation of Bohemia. Even in Italy Savonarola had persuaded his hearers to make a bonfire of their so-called vanities, including pictures by Botticelli: a heavy price to pay for religious conviction.

The Germans were much more easily excited. Comparisons are sometimes an over-simplification; but I think it is fair to compare one of the most famous portraits, Dürer’s Oswald Krell, with Raphael’s portrait of a cardinal in the Prado [above]. The cardinal is not only a man of the highest culture but balanced and self-contained. Oswald Krell is on the verge of hysteria.

Those staring eyes, that look of self-conscious introspection, that uneasiness, marvellously conveyed by Dürer through the uneasiness of the planes in the modelling—how German it is.

Four pages later Clark devotes several pages to Erasmus of Rotterdam, whom Bronowski praised even more in The Ascent of Man. I have quoted Clark at length on the German character because I believe that Nietzsche was spot on in blaming Luther and Protestant hysteria for the restoration of Christianity when Christendom was falling apart in the times of the Renaissance popes. But in the next entry I will try to convey some of my antichristian thinking by taking the Catholic Erasmus to task. Meanwhile let’s continue with Clark’s views:

In 1506 Erasmus went to Italy. He was in Bologna at the exact time of Julius II’s famous quarrel with Michelangelo; he was in Rome when Raphael began work on the Papal apartments. But none of this seems to have made any impression on him. His chief interest was in the publication of his works by the famous Venetian printer and pioneer of finely printed popular editions, Aldus Manutius. Whereas in the last chapter I was concerned with the enlargement of man’s spirit through the visual image, in this one I am chiefly concerned with the extension of his mind through the word. And this was made possible by the invention of printing.

Printing, of course, had been invented long before the time of Erasmus. Gutenberg’s Bible was printed in 1455. But the first printed books were large, sumptuous and expensive. It took preachers and persuaders almost thirty years to recognise what a formidable new instrument had come into their hands, just as it took politicians twenty years to recognise the value of television. The first man to take advantage of the printing press was Erasmus. He poured out pamphlets and anthologies and introductions; and so in a few years did everyone who had views on anything.

This should remind us of our own age! Take heed of the elucidating excerpts from a 2009 interview of James Bowery by Jim Giles.

Bowery said: “We are essentially living under a theocracy. I call it Holocaustianity but other people call it political correctness. It’s essentially a canon of morals that have taken over Christianity, and the primary sins of this religion involve ‘racism’ which is an undefined word, and anti-Semitism (sexism is certainly down their list; it is like a venial sin, not a mortal sin). So people have been indoctrinated in this by the media and the academia. The government has passed legislation about these morals to make them violation of law. So people [in the 21st century] are essentially in a medieval mindset, living in a theocracy. It’s just that it is not operating under that name… Right now people are essentially in a State where there cannot be a Protestant Reformation. You can’t have other religions than this State religion of political correctness” (39:40).

And later during the interview Bowery added: “Let me go back to my point about the theocracy, and the dissolution of the theocracy in Europe. The Gutenberg press created a situation in which the monopoly of the Church on the written word was broken. A large portion of what the Church was about was media control. So through the media control they could indoctrinate the populations and maintain, you know, a revenue stream. The Gutenberg press broke that. Now all of a sudden you get lots of other voices. As I said, I have been working in this Internet stuff since the early days” (1:29:42).

And that is altogether crucial for our cause. Bowery concludes: “I knew this time was coming. The Internet is the new Gutenberg press. And the theocracy is being taken apart because its control of the media is being taken apart. And we are getting a new Protestant Reformation and following on the heels of that, people are going to say: ‘Look: We have our own beliefs… This is the way things should be.’ Even the Jesuits just couldn’t stand up to that. I don’t think the Jews can’t either.” (1:31:35).

That’s exactly why Erasmus was so notable, as the nationalist Internet bloggers will be equally notable from the standpoint of a latter-day Clark in the coming ethno-state, once the current theocracy falls apart.

Both Erasmus and Luther were involved in important translations of the Bible that shaked the medieval worldview. Although in the next episode Clark spoke highly about Counterreformation art, after the last indented quotation he said: “Whatever else he may have been, Luther was a hero; and after all the doubts and hesitations of the humanists, and the hovering flight of Erasmus, it is with a real sense of emotional relief that we hear Luther say: ‘Here I stand.’” However, at the same time Clark was also dismayed that the Protestants smashed the colored glasses of beautiful Catholic churches, and that artistic images of the Virgin were decapitated.

But it had to happen if civilisation was not to wither, or petrify. And ultimately a new civilisation was created—but it was a civilisation not of the image, but of the word.

But even the Protestant reaction had to be triumphed over, this time by secularism.

It is refreshing to see, in the closing remarks of the episode, Clark praising Montaigne as “completely sceptical about the Christian religion” and of Shakespeare as “the first great poet without a religious belief.”

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Beauty Crusades

Civilisation’s “The Great Thaw”

For an introduction to these series, see here.

Below, some indented excerpts of “The Great Thaw,” the second chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark, after which I offer my comments.

Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:

There have been times in the history of man when the earth seems suddenly to have grown warmer or more radio-active… I don’t put that forward as a scientific proposition, but the fact remains that three or four times in history man has made a leap forward that would have been unthinkable under ordinary evolutionary conditions. One such time was about the year 3000 BC, when quite suddenly civilisation appeared, not only in Egypt and Mesopotamia but in the Indus valley; another was in the late sixth century BC, when there was not only the miracle of Ionia and Greece—philosophy, science, art, poetry, all reaching a point that wasn’t reached again for 2000 years, but also in India a spiritual enlightenment that has perhaps never been equalled.

But what people don’t always realise is that it all happened quite suddenly—in a single lifetime.

In the brainwashed United Kingdom of the late 1960’s it would not have occurred Clark that another great awakening had occurred in Germany during his lifespan, just thirty years before; and that it was crushed by the forces of evil led by the government of his country. Speaking about Christendom at the beginning of the second millennium of the Common Era, on the next page Clark continues:

How had all this suddenly appeared in Western Europe? Of course there are many answers, but one is overwhelmingly more important than the others: the triumph of the Church.

And here Clark omitted to mention what he implied in the previous chapter: that in the first millennium the role of the Church was destructive, as surmised in his paragraph about St. Gregory who destroyed entire libraries of classical knowledge (search for “St. Gregory” here). After starting to describe the medieval period that our silly high schools completely ignore, six pages later Clark mentioned the most emblematic feature of the age:

On the physical side this took the form of pilgrimages and crusades. I think they are among the features of the Middle Ages which it is hardest for us to understand. Pilgrimages were undertaken in hope of heavenly rewards. How can one hope to share this belief which played so great a part in medieval civilisation?

Later in the series I loved to see Clark saying that he never bothered to understand economics, because this is one of the things that contemporary historians, so alienated by Marxism will never understand.

In my childhood I received a medieval education from my father. When during my adolescence he started to abuse me, the doctrine of eternal damnation that he had inculcated me since childhood metamorphosed into an internal persecutor. It didn’t matter that I managed to escape my parents’ home and moved to San Rafael in the US: the internal persecutors accompanied me throughout my twenties.

When I asked for help to the organization known as Fundamentalists Anonymous by regular mail I received a dumb reply that greatly offended me, as I recount in my last book of Hojas Susurrantes. Although technically I had already abandoned the faith I then asked for help, always through regular mail, to John J. Heaney who taught theology at Fordham University. It was the Christian Heaney, not the silly rationalists of Fundamentalists Anonymous, who immediately understood what my inner agonies really meant and tried to help, at least in the modest form of an epistle. (These were times before the electronic mail became fashionable.)

Modern rationalists who find pilgrimages hard to understand lack elemental empathy toward the Other. Even Clark, when he talks of pilgrimages undertaken “in hope of heavenly rewards,” understates what a brutally-honest historian would have said instead: undertaken in hope of saving one’s soul from the eternal fire.

I mention this personal vignette because, despite claims to the contrary, history will never be understood “objectively.” We need the subjective experiences of the survivors of a given culture, even if such experiences were written by latter-day Christians and apostates: a sphere of knowledge altogether alien for the naïve historian who’s afraid to enter the tragic, subjective universes.

But Clark was infinitely superior to the Mr. Spock historian who currently controls the universities. On the next page he states:

Of course the most important place of pilgrimage was Jerusalem. After the tenth century, when a strong Byzantine empire made the journey practicable, pilgrims used to go in parties of 7,000 at a time. This is the background of that extraordinary episode in history, the First Crusade.

The crusades aside, several pages later Clark speaks of the author of The Heavenly Hierarchies:

He argued that we could only come to understand absolute beauty, which is God, through the effect of precious and beautiful things on our senses. He said: ‘The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material.’ This was really a revolutionary concept in the Middle Ages. It was the intellectual background of all sublime works of art in the next century and in fact has remained the basis of our belief in the value of art until today.

“Today” still meant 1969, when Clark’s body language and voice were recorded by the BBC. Not anymore. Presently many whites seem to loathe traditional works of art not only by labelling them “kitch” but by praising instead degenerate forms of cultural expression. That this happens even among white nationalists, the watchdogs of the West, should be enough to convince the honest reader that something really odd is gong on in the white psyche, and that we hardly can blame the Jews for all our problems.

Following next Clark takes us to that place where the dull mind, even the atheist’s mind, rises indeed through the matter, Chartres Cathedral:

Chartres was the centre of a school of philosophy devoted to Plato, and in particular to his mysterious book called the Timaeus, from which it was thought that the whole universe could be interpreted as a form of measurable harmony.

Figures had been made into columns since the Cnidian treasury at Delphi, but never so narrowly compressed and elongated as they are here. I fancy that the faces which look at us from the past are the surest indication we have of the meaning of an epoch.

Once more the chronicles describe how people came from all over France to join the work, how whole villages moved in order to help provide for the workmen; and of course there must have been many more of them this time, because the buildings was bigger and more elaborate, and required hundreds of masons, not to mention a small army of glass-makers.

Chartres is the epitome of the first great awakening in European civilisation.

Absolute beauty, the God of the post-Christian, not evil music or Hollywood treason has a chance to bring into being another great awakening…

Categories
Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Art Beauty Charlemagne Civilisation (TV series) Islamization of Europe Kali Yuga Kenneth Clark Literature Mainstream media Philosophy of history

Civilisation’s “The Skin of our Teeth”

For an introduction to these series, see here.

Below, some indented excerpts of “The Skin of our Teeth,” the first chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark, after which I offer my comments.

Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:


I am standing on the Pont des Arts in Paris.

What is civilisation? I don’t know. I can’t define it in abstract terms—yet. But I think I can recognize it when I see it; and I am looking at it now.

If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a Minister of Housing or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the buildings. But this doesn’t mean that the history of civilisation is the history of art—far from it. Great works of art can be produced in barbarous societies.

Whatever its merits as a work of art, I don’t think that there is any doubt that the Apollo embodies a higher state of civilisation than the mask. They both represent spirits, messengers from another world—that is to say, from a world of our own imagining. To the Negro imagination it is a world of fear and darkness, ready to inflict horrible punishment for the smallest infringement of taboo. To the Hellenistic imagination it is a world of light and confidence, in which the gods are like ourselves, only more beautiful.

It is not my intention to insult white nationalists. But what they ignore is that, presently, with their rock music and media tastes they themselves, like the overwhelming majority of the white population are, spiritually, far closer to the Negro mask than to the Apollo of Belvedere. For Lord Clark it would have been unthinkable to consider civilised the popular forms of cultural expression such as heavy metal and the movies that today are watched even by white nationalists throughout the West.

As we saw in some of my latest entries, other self-destructing forms of cultural expression already occurred in the times of the fall of the Roman Empire. Clark said:

The same architectural language, the same imagery, the same theatres, the same temples—at any time for five hundred years you could have found them all round the Mediterranean, in Greece, Italy, France.

What happened? It took Gibbon six volumes to describe the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, so I shan’t embark on that. But thinking about this almost incredible episode does tell one something about the nature of civilisation. It shows that however complex and solid it seems, it is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed. What are its enemies? Well, first of all fear—fear of the supernatural, which means that you daren’t question anything or change anything. The late antique world was full of meaningless rituals, mystery religions, that destroyed self-confidence.

Unlike Gibbon and Nietzsche, before his TV audience Clark didn’t dare to point the finger at Christianity. But later in the program, Clark spoke about Islam:

In a miraculously short time—about fifty years—the classical world was overrun [by the Muslim conquests]. Only its bleached bones stood out against the Mediterranean sky. The old source of civilisation was sealed off, and if a new civilisation was to be born it would have to face the Atlantic.

But something very odd happened to Man’s self-image in the early medieval world facing the Atlantic in what today is Ireland. According to Clark:

The subject of Mediterranean man was man. Two hundred years have passed—perhaps a little more—and man has almost vanished.

Crude as this imago hominis may be when compared to the Apollo, presently some white nationalists advertise their blogs with soft-porn pics of semi-nude women: something far more degrading for the divine human figure than the image of 8th century insular art in the Echternach Gospels.

To my mind—and, like Clark, I must say that this is only my personal view­—, the imago hominis only means a psychogenic regression in Man’s understanding of himself compared to the Greeks and the Romans. However, the white nationalists’ soft porn spits on the avatar of God, even if I don’t believe in the existence of a personal god.

After the above image chosen by Clark for the first episode of his program, in the following pages of the book version Clark mentions how St. Gregory destroyed entire libraries of the classical world (I quoted part of it in my recent antichristian series, here), and on the next page he states that even in those obscure days the Europeans fought strenuously against their enemies:

All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war. The Romans were the best organised and most ruthless fighters in Latium. So it was with the Franks. Clovis and his successors not only conquered their enemies, but maintained themselves by cruelties and tortures remarkable even by the standards of the last thirty years.

Without Charles Martel’s victory over the Moors at Poitiers in 732, western civilisation might never have existed, and without Charlemagne’s tireless campaigns we should never have had the notion of a united Europe.

Charlemagne was the first great man of action to emerge from the darkness since the collapse of the Roman world. The old idea that he saved civilisation isn’t far wrong. On the whole, our whole knowledge of ancient literature is due to the collecting and copying that began under Charlemagne.

If we compared ourselves with the franks, what could it be said about present-day nationalists? Many of them don’t even let our most serious fighter discuss in their forums (by “serious fighter” I mean someone who’s actively planning a revolution). Didn’t the Führer say that those who want to live, let them fight, and that those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live? Do whites and white nationalists deserve to live? If so, where are the Charles Martels in today’s islamized Europe, in America’s mexicanized states?

I am not proposing to do something stupid in a world which media is a hundred percent dominated by the Enemy. But at least be prepared for the tough, revolutionary times that are coming after the dollar crashes.

Categories
Ancient Rome Art Christendom Civilisation (TV series) Constantine Free speech / association Kenneth Clark Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Zeus

The fall of Rome

“But the advances made by Jewish theology were more dangerous than the disorder of the streets and the robber.”

—Theodor Mommsen, in Provinces of the
Roman Empire, from Caesar to Diocletian


1.

Constantine the Great, also Saint Constantine (Emperor from 306 to 337 C.E.) has been described as a monster even for the standards of the ancient world. Catholic historian Paul Johnson wrote about him: “Constantine had no respect for human life, and as emperor he executed his eldest son, his own second wife, his favorite sister’s husband.”

The Roman Emperor inaugurated the Christianization of public life. He sanctioned with death penalty, instead of the traditional exile, those who published anonymous libels. His dispositions for death penalty were extremely severe, and I would like to know if it is true what I have read in a book: that under Constantine tortures such as pouring molten lead into the mouths of some women who had violated certain laws accompanied death penalty.

In 330 Constantine condemned the Neoplatonic School. Sopater of Apamea, a distinguished Neoplatonist philosopher was one of many who were put to death by Constantine.

Under Constantine’s reign pagans were referred to as “foolish,” “people without morals,” and their religion “a hotbed of discord,” “a fatal error,” “empire of darkness,” and “madness that has ruined whole nations.” However, while Julian said that Constantine was a “destroyer of ancient and venerable constitutions,” throughout the centuries Constantine has been much praised by Christian apologists.

Constantine was the first Roman Emperor who ordered the destruction of the intellectual work of Porphyry, the best mind of his age, whose work I briefly discussed in a recent entry. During his campaign of looting of the sculptures and shrines, Constantine did not even respect the famous tripods for the pythia of the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi. The historian Kornemann notes that this was “a larceny of works of art never seen in Greece before.”

After Constantine’s death, his sons Constans and Constantius shared the empire of their father for some time, and only aggravated the all-out, state-sponsored assault on the Hellenic culture.

Under Constans the first destructions, not only loots, of the temples themselves were perpetrated, albeit sporadically. Under Constantius, who appears well described in Gore Vidal’s novel, the most fanatic Christians attacked the altars and temples. The deacon Cyril of Heliopolis, for example, became famous with his actions. The Arethusa in Syria, the priest Marco demolished an ancient shrine. At Caesarea in Cappadocia, the Christian community razed a temple of Zeus, the patron of the city, and another of Apollo.

Under the reigns of both Constantius and Constans, Firmicus Maternus preached the looting: “Out of all pagan temples ornaments! The mint and the crucible with the metal of the idolatrous statues, melt them in the heat of the flames!” In one of his pamphlets Firmicus incited extermination of the pagan cults, including those of Dionysus-Bacchus and Aphrodite.

But most of the temples of the classical world were still upright. The Christian agitator declaimed: “Take away without fear the ornaments of the temples! Melt the figures of gods and coin your money! The Lord has called to the task of annihilate all temples!” Always invoking the god of the Jews, this Sicilian lawyer from upper nobility claimed being an heir of biblical hecatombs as no Christian had done before.

In a subsequent post we shall see what happened to our civilization after this war of cultural extermination inspired by the cult that repudiated the Greco-Roman Gods, and adored instead the zealous, “no other gods before me” god of the Jews.

(Source: Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, Vol. I, 1986, by Karlheinz Deschner)

2.

“In discussing Barbarism and Christianity I have actually been discussing the Fall of Rome.”

—Edward Gibbon

All Roman emperors after Julian would be Christians. Theodosius “the Great” and the subsequent emperors only completed the destruction of the Greco-Roman spirit that had started with Constantine and his sons. Not only the magnificent temples of worship of antiquity were destroyed almost everywhere, irreplaceable buildings of artistic value that transmitted like nothing else the soul of Hellenic culture, but even until the tenth century the fanatical worshipers of the god of the Jews continued smashing the statues that depicted the divinity of Man like no other art before.

But the most tremendous destruction occurred in the field of education. From the time of St. Paul at Ephesus, church censorship was devoted to the burning of books. After Julian the flourishing book trade disappeared in antiquity, whilst the activity of the monasteries was purely receptive. In the universities the hypertrophy of Aristotelianism aborted any possibility of independent research. In the Middle Ages what I call “real history” was completely unknown, and the sciences were drowned.

With this knowledge I venture to answer a question that has perplexed historians since the Enlightenment: What caused the fall of Rome?

German professor Alexander Demandt published a collection of two hundred theories on why Rome fell. Everything has been postulated—from lead poisoning and environmental degradation to Toynbee and many others’ diverse economic explanations—except the most obvious explanation. The simple truth is that the spirit of an alien, Semitic god undermined the soul of Classical Antiquity. After all, Gibbon himself assigned a major portion of the responsibility for the loss of civic virtue in Rome, and the ensuing decay of the Roman Empire, to the influence of Christianity. I would go further and claim that those unfamiliar with this work, which remains a literary landmark, lack the framework to understand why the Jew-god worshipers and their secular offspring are responsible for the ongoing Fall of the West. (Yes: I am blaming the Christians and the secular Christians who tolerate the Jews far more than I blame the Jews themselves.)

It is true that Rome’s eastern half survived almost a thousand years, until the Muslim conquests. But it was already a thoroughly petrogenic culture under the Medusan spell of Christian dogma. In fact, with its mongrelized citizens the population looked very different from the Latin Rome of the Republic.

3.

“The Skin of our Teeth” was the very first chapter of Kenneth Clark’s 1969 Civilisation. About the loss of historical consciousness, in the first chapter of Civilisation, Clark said:

Civilized man, or so it seems to me, must feel that he belongs somewhere in space and time; that he consciously looks forward and looks back. And for this purpose it is a great convenience to be able to read and write.

For over five hundred years this achievement was rare in Western Europe. It is a shock to realise that during all this time practically no lay person, from kings and emperors downwards, could read or write.

St. Gregory, who looks so intensely devoted to scholarship on a tenth century ivory, is credited with having destroyed many volumes of classical literature, even whole libraries, lest they seduced men’s minds away from the study of holy writ. And in this he was certainly not alone. What with prejudice and destruction, it’s surprising that the literature of pre-Christian antiquity was preserved at all. And in fact it only just squeaked through. In so far as we are the heirs of Greece and Rome, we got through by the skin of our teeth.

(Page 17 of the printed, Harper & Row book.)