Solitude – Page 3 – THE WEST'S DARKEST HOUR

Before reading last year J. A. Sexton’s review of Thomas Goodrich’s Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947, I knew nothing of what the Allied forces had done to defenseless Germans during and after the Second World War.

I confess that, throughout most of my adult life, I was infected with anti-Nazi hatred due to my mind having been colonized with films, books that I read, articles and documentaries about the evils of National Socialist Germany. Little did I realize then that the War propaganda has not really ended, which made me demonize the Third Reich in my inner thoughts for many years—the System simply had covered up the history of what actually happened from 1944 to 1947.

Now that thanks to Hellstorm I have awakened to the real world I am moved to, in memory of the millions of men, women and children tormented and murdered by the Allies, keep a moment of silence out of respect for the victims. Freezing this site for a while with this entry at the top will provide visiting westerners in general, and Germans in particular, the opportunity to find out the grim facts about an unheard of Holocaust perpetrated on Germanic people—a real Holocaust in every sense of the word.

As to the perpetrators of the crime of the age, in his Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn, who in his younger years was involved in the rape and murder of civilian Germans, wrote:

There is nothing that so aids and assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one’s own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my captain’s shoulders boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: “So were we any better?” And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me:

“Bless you, prison!”…

In prison, both in solitary confinement and outside solitary too, a human being confronts his grief face to face. This grief is a mountain, but he has to find space inside himself for it, to familiarize himself with it, to digest it, and it him. This is the highest form of moral effort, which has always ennobled every human being. A duel with years and with walls constitutes moral work and a path upward… if you can climb it.

Through tragic personal experience I corroborated that processing the mountain of grief was, certainly, the only way to develop the soul. Only the rarest among the rare have climbed the path. Which is why in no website that I know in this hedonistic age the forced initiation is taken seriously. But there are exceptions… In the comments section of this site, Goodrich wrote:

I wrote the above book…
I died a thousand deaths in so doing…
Yet I felt I had to finish it—for them.
Thanks to Mr. Sexton for his review.
Like himself, I have never been the same man since.
I am sad… but I am also extremely mad… extremely mad.

Last weeks I had to pause during my agonic reading of Hellstorm by talking frequent breaks, but like the author I had to digest the sins that the West committed against itself—and besides feeling outraged paradoxically I also feel strangely calm and liberated now. The psychological causes of self-loathing among present-day westerners had been an enigma. The idea is dawning in my mind that the last words quoted by Goodrich in the last page of his book provide an answer:

We had turned the evil of our enemies back upon them a hundredfold, and, in so doing, something of our integrity had been shattered, had been irrevocably lost.

Alas, since Anglo-Saxons did not examine their conscience but instead still celebrate their having led the “civilized” world in ganging up on Germany, the moral integrity of this subgroup of the white world is gone. Forever gone. And precisely because of the unredeemed character of this sin, what the former Allies did in Hitler’s Germany has created a monster from the Id that has been destroying our civilization since then: a lite Morgenthau Plan for all white people.

It is true that I have abandoned Christianity. But I still believe in the salvific effects of the triad examining conscience, repentance and atonement: the painful soul-building that Solzhenitsyn experienced in his cell (though, it must be said, not as a penalty for his having massacred civilian Prussians). If, unlike him, we haven’t had the opportunity of being committed to a gulag prison, let us experience, in the gloomy solitude of our bedrooms, the same painful yet awakening process through pondering on the historical events exposed in Goodrich’s book.

Prison causes the profound rebirth of a human being… profound pondering over his own “I”… Here all the trivia and fuss have decreased. I have experienced a turning point. Here you harken to that voice deep inside you, which amid the surfeit and vanity used to be stifled by the roar from outside…

Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens from suffering…

Our times are as decadent as the 4th century Rome of the Common Era, an age of treason that dragged our civilization straight into a dark night of the soul that lasted a millennium.

Tom Sunic is surely right in inviting would-be nationalists to become familiar with literature that balances the purely left-hemisphere, intellectual approaches to our western malaise.

The best historical novels ever written are Gore Vidal’s Julian (1964) and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980), which cover the gap that my high school skipped over: the zeitgeist of the peoples during Christendom, with Vidal covering its origins when the “Galileans” conquered state power to advance their cult, and Eco its apex in the fourteenth century.

This is my translation of what I wrote in the novel’s blank pages by the end of 1991, when I read a magnificent, hardcover English-Spanish translation of Julian that my girlfriend gave me as a present in Barcelona.

With pencil I wrote:

Now that I read the book, its antichristian message surprised me. What did the book-reviewers could have said?

I would feel appalled to know if the assassination of Julian was historical. I’ll have to check it out…

But the antichristian message of the last pages represents the moral of the story: the first clearly antichristian novel that I know. I wish that Kubrick makes a film of it instead of his dream about a Napoleon movie.

If I interpret the novel correctly, the emergent Christian authoritarianism was the storms harvested after the sowing of winds (the Roman state had persecuted the Christians before). But what makes me furious is that there were no groups that defended Hellenism with their teeth and nails!

What impressed me the most about the book is that it really makes one hate the Christians. I wish it had been published in those times! However, if the assassination of Julian by a fanatic Christian was not historical, Vidal could be accused of fabricating facts in search for drama. This is the most important event of my reading. I’ll find out next Monday when they open the library or perhaps even write the author.

I did go to the library and wrote to Vidal two decades ago but did not receive an answer. According to the Wikipedia article of today, the novel is historically accurate.

I wish I could know whether other assertions of the novel were historical. For example, Vidal makes Julian say in a specific moment (I only have the Spanish translation that Anabel gave me, so I can’t quote the original text) that “thirty years ago” Rome’s archives contained several contemporary reports about Jesus’ life, but they disappeared, destroyed by instructions from Constantine.

But the real climax of the novel are the words of Libanius, telling to himself in painful soliloquy after his most beloved, young disciple deserted him after converting to Judeochristianity that no invention from man can last forever, not even Christ: man’s most noxious invention.

Libanius was a historical figure, the one who claimed that Julian had been assassinated by a Christian. The novel ends with an aged Libanius feeling utterly alone in a world gone mad, telling silently to himself in the solitude of his study that the light of the world was gone with Julian, the last hope for our civilization; and that there was nothing left but let the darkness fall on the West and await for a new sun. A new day. In the future…