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Der Antichrist (book) Friedrich Nietzsche Richard Wagner

Year 100 P.C.

I read ‘Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist: Looking Back From the Year 100’ in late 1993, in a hard copy issued in the winter of 1988/1989: one of the back copies of Free Inquiry that arrived in the mail when I discovered that organisation of freethinkers.

I met the author, Robert Sheaffer, at the 1994 CSICOP conference. If memory serves, he wore sandals, was dressed casually and had a beard. Last year I exchanged some correspondence with him.

Sheaffer is anything but a Hitlerite. However, the article that I abridge below is perfect for understanding a central part of esoteric Hitlerism. I mean that Uncle Adolf’s anti-Christianity, which wasn’t revealed to the masses of Germans (hence the epithet ‘esoteric’), already had antecedents in Germany.

Sheaffer’s complete article can be read here. Red emphasis is mine:

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Secular humanists have not infrequently criticized the beliefs and practices of the Christian religion, and its harmful effects on civilization and culture. Unfortunately, their voice is seldom heard. The proponents of the Christian world-view vastly outnumber secularists both in number and in activity. While humanists wonder what they they can do to more effectively convey their criticisms of religion, most of them have never read, and indeed have barely even heard of, a book written exactly a century ago containing the most devastating and complete philosophical attack on Christian psychology, Christian beliefs and Christian values ever written: Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist.

1888 was the final productive year of the life of Friedrich Nietzsche, but it was a year of incredible activity. He wrote five books during a six-month period in the latter part of that year. After that, he wrote nothing. Nietzsche’s works of 1888 have not received enough attention, especially given the inclination of many to concentrate primarily on the flamboyant and somewhat confusing Also Spracht Zarathustra, a book of intricate allegories and parables which requires that one already understand the principal elements of Nietzschean thought in order to decipher its hidden relationships and meanings. Zarathustra will be clearer if it is read at the end of a course of study of Nietzsche, not at the beginning.

The first book of 1888 was The Case of Wagner, in which Nietzsche set forth his aesthetic and philosophical objections to the music and the writings of his former close friend Richard Wagner… Next came The Twilight of the Idols (in German, Die Gotzen-dammerung, an obvious parody of Wagner’s Die Gotterdammerung, “The Twilight of the Gods”), in which he criticizes romanticism, Schopenhauer’s pessimism, German culture, Socrates’ acceptance of death as a “healing” of the disease of life, Christianity, and a good many other things. Then, in September of 1888, Nietzsche wrote Der Antichrist.

Unlike Zarathustra, there can be no mistaking the language or the intention of Der Antichrist, a work of exceedingly clear prose and seldom-equalled polemics. Even today, the depth of Nietzsche’s contempt for everything Christianity represents will surprise and shock many people, and not only devout Christians. Unlike other critics of religion, Nietzsche’s attack extends beyond religious theology to Christian-derived concepts that have spread out far beyond their ecclesiastical origins, to the very core of the value-system of Western, Christianized society.

Der Antichrist begins with a warning that “This book belongs to the very few,” perhaps to no one yet living. Nietzsche hints that only those who have already mastered the obscure symbolism of his Zarathustra could appreciate this work. Warnings aside, he begins by sketching the idea of declining vs. ascending life and culture. An animal, a species, or an individual is “depraved” or “decadent” when it loses its instincts for that which sustains its life, and “prefers what is harmful to it.” Life itself presupposes an instinct for growth, for sustinence, for “the will to power”, the striving for some degree of control and mastery of one’s surroundings. Christianity sets itself up in opposition to those instincts, and hence Christianity is an expression of decadence, a negation of the will to life [Antichrist, section 6].

“Pity”, says Nietzsche, is “practical nihilism”, the contagion of suffering. By elevating pity to a value—indeed, the highest value—its depressive effects thwart those instincts which preserve life, establishing the deformed or the sick as the standard of value. [A 7] To Nietzsche, the rejection of pity did not proscribe generosity, magnanimity, or benevolence—indeed, the latter are mandated for “higher” types—; what is rejected is to allow the ill-constituted to define what is good. Nietzsche was not hostile to the sick—Zarathustra bids the sick to “become convalescents”, and expresses sympathetic understanding of their unhappy frame of mind [Z I 3]—but what he opposed was the use of the existence of sickness and other afflications to thereby claim “life is refuted” [Z I 9].

No doubt Nietzsche’s attack on “pity” was triggered in part by his revulsion against Wagner’s blatantly irrational opera Parsifal, in which the formerly irreligious Wagner returned once again to pious Christian themes. In Parsifal, a series of calamities occur because a once-holy knight succumbs to “sins of the flesh,” and it is prophesied that the situation cannot be remedied by any act of self-directed effort, but only by one “through pity made wise, a pure fool.” Nietzsche’s contempt for the limp Christianity in Parsifal and for “the pure fool” knew no bounds. The already-strained bond between the two men, who were once extremely close, was irreparably broken.

Nietzsche explains that the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer is, like Chrisitanity, decadent. Schopenhauer taught that since it is impossible to satisfy the desires of the will, one must ceaselessly renounce striving for what one wants, and become resigned to unhappiness. In the late 19th century Schopenhauer’s doctrines were extremely popular, especially among the Wagnerians. Wagner’s monumental Tristan and Isolde is an expression of Schopenhauerian nihilism, as the lovers sing of the impossibility of earthly happiness, and of their expected mystical union in the realm of “night” after their death. The opera closes with Isolde’s famous liebestod, or “love-death”, as she sings of a vision of her dead lover gloriously and mystically transfigured in the nether-regions, then dies to join him. Schopenhauer was hostile to life, says Nietzsche, “therefore pity became for him a virtue.” [A 7]

Nietzsche charges that Christianity denigrates the world around us as mere “appearance”, a position grounded in the philosophy of Plato and Kant, and hence invents a “completely fabricated” world of pure spirit. However, “pure spirit is pure lie,” and hence the theologian requires one to see the world falsely in order to remain a member in good standing in the religion. The Christian outlook was, he says, immensely bolstered against the attacks of the Enlightenment by Immanuel Kant, whose philosophy renders reality unknowable. (For Kant a virtue is something harmful to one’s life, a view Nietzsche could never accept. If you want to do something, Kant would say your action cannot possibly be virtuous; any action which contains an element of self-interest is by definition not virtuous.) Nietzsche summarizes, “anti-nature as instinct, German decadence as philosophy—that is Kant.” [A 8-11]

Nietzsche praises the skeptic (or “free spirit”) who rejects the priestly inversion of “true” and “untrue”. He says we skeptics no longer think of human life as having its origins in “spirit” or in “divinity”, but recognize the human race as a natural part of the animal kingdom… [A 12-14].

Returning to the theme of Christian doctrine as misrepresentation, Nietzsche charges that “in Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.” The religion deals with imaginary causes (such as God, soul, spirit) and imaginary effects (sin, grace, etc.), and the relationships between imaginary beings (God, souls, angels, etc.). It also has its own imaginary natural science (wholly anthropormorphic and non-naturalistic), an imaginary human psychology (based on repentance, temptation, etc.), as well as an imaginary teleology (apocalypse, the kingdom of God, etc.). Nietzsche concludes that this “entire fictional world has its roots in the hatred of the natural” world, a hatred which reveals its origin. For “who alone has reason to lie himself out of actuality? He who suffers from it” [A 15]. Here is the proof which convinced Nietzsche that Christianity is not only decadent in its origins, but rotten to its very core: no one reasonably satisfied with his own mind and abilities would wish to see the real world replaced with a lie.

Comparing religions, Nietzsche came to the conclusion that in a healthy society, its gods represent the highest ideals, aspirations, and sense of competence of that people. For example, Zeus and Apollo were obviously powerful ideals for Greek society, an image of the mightiest mortals projected into the heavens. Such gods are fully human, and display human strengths and weaknesses alike. The Christian God, however, shows none of the normal human attributes and appetites. It is unthinkable for this God to desire sex, food, or even openly display revengefulness (as did the Greek gods). Such a God is clearly emaciated, sick, castrated, a reflection of the people who invented him. If a god symbolizes a people’s perceived sense of impotence, he will degenerate into being merely “good” (an idealized image of the kind master, as desired by all slaves), void of all genuinely human attributes. The Christian God represents the “divinity of decadence,” the reduction of the divine into a God who is the contradiction of life. Those impotent people who created such a God in their own image do not wish to call themselves “the weak,” so they call themselves “the good.” [A 16-19].

Nietzsche next compares Christianity to Buddhism. Both, he says, are religions of decadence, but Buddhism is a hundred times wiser and more realistic. Buddha does not demand prayer or aesceticism, demanding instead ideas which produce repose or cheerfulness. Buddhism, he says, is most at home in the higher and learned classes, while Christianity represents the revengeful instincts of the subjugated and the oppressed. Buddhism promotes hygiene, while Christianity repudiates hygiene as sensuality. Buddhism is a religion for mature, older cultures, for persons grown kindly and gentle—Europe is not nearly ripe for Buddhism. Christianity, however, tamed uncivilized barbarians, needing to subjugate wild “beasts of prey,” who cannot control their own “will to power.” The way it did so was to make them sick, making them thereby too weak to follow their destructive instincts. Thus Buddhism is a religion suited to the decadence and fatigue of an ancient civilization, while Christianity was useful in taming barbarians, where no civilization had existed at all. [A 20-22].

Nietzsche next emphasises Christianity’s origin in Judaism, and its continuity with Jewish theology. He was fond of pointing out the essential Jewishness of Christianity as a foil to the anti-Semites he so despised, effectively taunting them, “you who hate the Jews so, why did you adopt their religion?”. It was the Jews, he asserts, who first falsified the inner and outer world with a metaphysically complete anti-world, one in which natural causality plays no role. (One might of course object that such a concept considerably predates Old Testament times.) The Jews did this, however, not out of hatred or decadence, but for a good reason: to survive. The Jews’ will for survival is, he asserts, the most powerful “vital energy” in history, and Nietzsche admired those who struggle mightily to survive and prevail. As captives and slaves of more powerful civilizations—the Babylonians and the Egyptians—the Jews shrewdly allied themselves with every “decadence” movement, with everything that weakens a society, not because they were decadent themselves, but in order to weaken their oppressors. Thus, Nietzsche views the Jews as shrewdly inculcating guilt, resentment, and other values hostile to life among their oppressors as a form of ideological germ warfare, taking care not to become fully infected themselves. This technique was ultimately successful in defeating stronger parties—Babylonians, Egyptians, and Romans—by in essence making them “sick,” and hence less powerful. (The Romans, of course, succumbed to the Christian form of Judaism, in this view.) This parallels St. Augustine’s comment, quoting Seneca, that the Jews “have imposed their customs on their conquerors.” [A 23-26; De Civitate Dei VI 11]

“On a soil falsified in this way, where all nature, all natural value, all reality had the profoundest instincts of the ruling class against it, there arose Christianity, a form of mortal hostility to reality as yet unsurpassed.” The revolt led by Jesus was not primarily religious, says Nietzsche, but was instead a secular revolt against the power of the Jewish religious authorities. The very dregs of Jewish society rose up in “revolt against ‘the good and the just’, against ‘the saints of Israel’.” This was the political crime of Jesus, a crime of which he was surely guilty, and for which he was crucified. Nietzsche examines the psychology of Jesus, as is best possible from the Biblical accounts, and detects a profound sense of withdrawl: resist not evil, the kingdom of God is within you, etc. He sees parallels in the psychology of Christ not with some hero, but with Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. (Dostoyevsky is not mentioned here by name, but we know from other sources that this is the “idiot” Nietzsche had in mind.)

Nietzsche deduces that the earliest Christians sought to retreat into a state of extreme withdrawl from “the world”, undisturbed by reality of any kind. They rejected all strong feelings, favorable or otherwise. Their fear of pain, even in infinitely small amounts, “cannot end otherwise than in a religion of love.” Thus Nietzsche sees early Christianity as promoting an extremely dysfunctional state resembling autism, a defense mechanism for those who cannot deal with reality. Noting Christianity’s claims to deny the world, and its stand in opposition to every active virtue, Nietzsche asks how can any person of dignity and accomplishment not feel ashamed to be called a Christian? [A 27-30; 38]…

By placing the center of life outside of life, in “the beyond”, Nietzsche says we deprive life of any focus or center whatsoever. The invention of the immortal soul automatically levels all rank in society: “‘immortality’ conceded to every Peter and Paul has so far been greatest, the most malignant attempt to assassinate noble humanity”. Thus “little prigs and three-quarter madmen may have the conceit that the laws of nature are constantly broken for their sakes,” thereby obiliterating all distinctions grounded in merit, knowledge or accomplishment. Christianity owes its success to this flattering of the vanity of “all the failures, all the rebellious-minded, all the less favored, the whole scum and refuse of humanity who were thus won over to it.” For Christianity is “a revolt of everything that crawls upon the ground directed against that which is elevated: the gospel of the ‘lowly’ makes low.” Here we clearly see Nietzsche’s repudiation of Christianity’s attitudes as well as its theology: as he pointedly noted in Ecce Homo, “no one hitherto has felt Christian morality beneath him”. All others saw it as an unattainable ideal. [A 43; EH 4 (“Why I Am a Fatality”) 8] Pre-Christian thinkers did not, of course, see poverty as suggestive of virtue, but rather of its absence. One point Nietzsche was unable to either forgive or forget was that the enemies of the early Christians were “the intelligent ones”, persons far more civilized, erudite, and accomplished than themselves, people who Nietzsche felt more fit to rule than the Christians.

Nietzsche sees the Gospels as proof that corruption of Christ’s ideals had already occurred in those early Christian communities. They say “Judge Not!”, then send to Hell anyone who stands in their way. Arrogance poses as modesty. He explains how the Gospel typifies the morality of ressentiment ( a French term Nietzsche used in his German texts), a spirit of vindictiveness and covert revengefulness common among those who are seething with a sense of their own impotence, and hence must hide their desire for vengeance. “Paul was the greatest of all apostles of revenge,” writes Nietzsche [A 44-45]…

At this point, Nietzsche advises the reader to “put on gloves” when reading the New Testament, because one is in proximity to “so much uncleanliness.” It is impossible, he says, to read the New Testament without feeling a partiality for everything it attacks. The Scribes and the Pharisees must have had considerable merit, to have been attacked by the rabble in such a manner. Everything the first Christians hate has value, for theirs is the unthinking hatred of the rabble for everyone who is not a wretched failure like themselves. Nietzsche sees Christianity’s origins in what Marxists would call “class warfare,” and sides with those possessing learning and self-discipline against those having neither. [A 46].

He next turns to a point essential for the understanding of Nietzschean thought: the inevitability of a “warfare” between Christianity and science. Because Christianity is a religion which has no contact with reality at any point, it “must naturally be a mortal enemy of ‘the wisdom of the world,’ that is to say, of science.” Here “science” is not to be understood as merely the physical sciences, but as any rigorous and disciplined field of human knowledge, all of which are potentially threats to Christian dogma. Hence Christianity must calumniate the “disciplining of the intellect” and intellectual freedom, bringing all organized secular knowledge into disrepute; for “Paul understood the need for the lie, for faith.” Nietzsche refers to the Genesis fable of Eve’s temptation, asking whether its significance has really been understood: “God’s mortal terror of science”? The priest perceives only one great danger: the human intellect unfettered. Continuing the metaphor of science as eating from the tree of knowledge:

Science makes godlike—it is all over with priests and gods when man becomes scientific. Moral: science is the forbidden as such—it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the original sin. This alone is morality “Thou shalt not know”—the rest follows.

The priest invents and encourages every kind of suffering and distress so that man may not have the opportunity to become scientific, which requires a considerable degree of free time, health, and an outlook of confident positivism. Thus, the religious authorities work hard to make and keep people feeling sinful, unworthy, and unhappy. [A 47-49]

In previous works, Nietzsche had emphasised the necessity of struggling hard to uncover truth, of preferring an unpleasant truth to an agreeable delusion. [The Gay Science 344; Beyond Good and Evil 39] Consequently, he sees another reason for being suspicious of Christianity in its notion that “faith makes blessed,” that is, creates a state of pleasure in harmony with God. He re-iterates that whether or not a doctrine is comforting tells us nothing about its truth. Nor does the willingness of martyrs to suffer and die for a belief constitute any proof of veracity, suggesting that a visit to a madhouse will suffice to demonstrate the fallaciousness of such arguments. Martyrdoms have, in fact, been a great misfortune throughout history because “they have seduced” us into questionable doctrines. “Blood is the worst witness of truth”. [A 50-51, 53]

Christianity, says Nietzsche, needs sickness as much as Hellenism needed health. (To understand this point, compare a Greek statue of a tall, handsome, naked God with a Christian religious image of an unhygenic, slovenly figure suffering greatly.) One does not “convert” to Christianity, but rather one must be made “sick enough” for it. The Christian movement was, from its beginning, “a collective movement of outcast and refuse elements of every kind,” seeking to come to power through it. “In hoc signo decadence conquered.” Christianity also stands in opposition to intellectual, as well as physical, health. To doubt becomes sin. Nietzsche defines faith as “not wanting to know what is true,” a description which strikes me as stunning, and quite exact. [A 51-52]…

Nietzsche now turns to consider why the lie is told. Once again, Christian teachings are compared to those of another religion, that of Manu, “an incomparably spiritual and superior work.” Unlike the Bible, the Law-Book of Manu is a means for the “noble orders” to keep the mob under control. Here, human love, sensuality, and procreation are treated not with revulsion, but with reverence and respect. After a people acquires a certain experience and success in life, its most “enlightened,” most “reflective and far-sighted class” sets down a law summarizing its formula for success in life, which is represented as a revelation from a deity, for it to be accepted unquestioningly. Such a set of rules is a formula for obtaining “happiness, beauty, benevolence on earth.” This aristocratic group considers “the hard task a privilege… life becomes harder and harder as it approaches the heights—the coldness increases, the responsibility increases.” All ugly manners and pessimism are below such leaders: “indignation is the privilege of the Chandala” (Indian untouchable). What is bad? “Everything that proceeds from weakness, from revengefulness.” [A 57]

Thus Nietzsche holds that the purpose for the lie of “faith” makes a great difference in the effect it will have on society. Do the priests lie in order to preserve (as in the book of Manu, and presumably Greek myth), or to destroy (as in Christianity)? Thus Christians and socialist Anarchists are identical in their instincts: both seek solely to destroy. The Roman civilization was a magnificent edifice for the prosperity and advancement of life, “the most magnificent form of organization under difficult circumstances which has yet been achieved”, which Christianity sought to destroy because life prospered within it. These “holy anarchists” made it a religious duty to “destroy the world”, which actually meant, “destroy the Roman Empire”. They weakened the Empire so much that even “Teutons and other louts” could conquer it. Christianity was the “vampire” of the Roman Empire. These “stealthy vermin,” shrouded in night and fog, crept up and “sucked out” from everyone “the seriousness for true things and any instinct for reality.” Christianity moved truth into “the beyond”, and “with the beyond one kills life.”

Before charging Nietzsche with possibly irresponsible invective, compare the above with Gibbon’s summary of the role of Christianity in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of a military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers’ pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.

On the positive side, Gibbon notes that even though Christianity clearly hastened the demise of Rome, it “mollified the ferocious temper of the conquerors”. This would seem to parallel Nietzsche’s view that Christianity seeks to control the uncivilized not by teaching them the self-discipline needed to control their own impulses, but by making them too “sick” to do a great deal of harm. [A 58; Gibbon, Chapter 38 ]

“The whole labor of the Ancient World in vain!”: thus does Nietzsche overstate the magnitude of the calamity. (Our civilization’s heritage from classical antiquity is obviously far from nothing!). Nonetheless, no one who prefers civilization to barbarism can be indifferent to the point here raised. Nietzsche emphasises that the foundations for a scholarly culture, for science, medicine, philosophy, and art, had all been magnificently laid in antiquity, only to be destroyed by the advent of Christianity. Today, he says, we have certainly made great progress, but each of us still retains bad Christian habits and instincts which we must work hard to overcome. Two thousand years ago, we had acquired that clear eye for reality, patience, attention to detail, seriousness in even small matters—and it was not obtained by “drill” or from habit, but flowed naturally from a civilized instinct. All this was lost! And it was not lost to some natural disaster or destroyed by “Teutons and other buffalos” (Nietzsche’s contempt for German nationalism and militarism knew no bounds!) but it was “ruined by cunning, stealthy, invisible, anemic vampires. Not vanquished-merely drained. Hidden vengefulness, petty envy become master.” Everything that was miserable and filled with bad feelings about itself came to the top at once. [A 59]…

The meaning and significance of the Renaissance is considered in this next-to-last section of Der Antichrist. “The Germans have cheated Europe out of the last great cultural harvest which Europe could still have brought home—that of the Renaissance.” Nietzsche views the Renaissance as “the revaluation of Christian values,” that is, the repudiation of life-denying Christian values and their replacement with secular values which emphasise art, culture, learning, and so on. With the Renaissance in Italy, Christianity was being repudiated at its very seat. “Christianity no longer sat on the Papal throne! Life sat there instead!”

Nietzsche envisions the immortal roar of laughter that would have risen up from the gods on Mount Olympus had Cesare Borgia actually succeeded in his ruthless quest to become Pope. (The notorious murderer and poisoner Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, spread his power ruthlessly across Italy. Father and son appointed or poisoned Cardinals as needed to position the son for election as the next Pope. However, the plan went awry when they accidentally tasted some wine that had been “prepared” to rid themselves of a wealthy cardinal! The father died, and the son became gravely ill, and was hence in no position to coerce the selection of his father’s successor.)

Nietzsche laments that this great world-historical event—life returning to Western culture—was ultimately undone by the work of “a German monk,” Martin Luther, who harbored the vengeful instincts of “a failed priest.” Through Luther’s Reformation, and Catholicism’s answer to it, the Counter-Reformation, Christianity was restored. [A 60] One might be tempted to dismiss Nietzsche’s dramatic interpretation of the Renaissance, except that his view meshes with that of Jacob Burckhardt, the single most influential historian of Renaissance civilization who ever lived. Burckhardt’s monumental work, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), has influenced the study of that period as much as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall did that of ancient Rome. Neitzsche and Burckhardt were colleagues at the University of Basle, and friends as well. In the first section of his Civilization, Burchkardt writes that the greatest danger ever faced by the Papacy was its secularization during the Renaissance.

The danger that came from within, from the Popes themselves and their nipoti (relativies, “nepotism”), was set aside for centuries by the German Reformation… The moral salvation of the papacy was due to its mortal enemies… Without the Reformation—if indeed it is possible to think it away—the whole ecclesiastical state would have passed into secular hands long ago.

Pope Julius II, powerfully anti-Borgia, was “the savior of the Papacy,” who put an end to the practice of the buying and selling of Church positions. However, the Counter-Reformation “annihlated the higher spiritual life of the people,” according to Burckhardt. Nietzsche would have said this was because they had become Christian once again.

The final section of Der Antichrist contains “the most terrible charge” against the Christian Church that “any prosecutor has ever uttered… I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty—I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.” Nietzsche suggests that instead of calculating time from the “unlucky day” on which this “fatality” arose, time should be measured instead from its last day: “from today.” [A 62].

Needless to say, Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist did not prove to be the dagger in the heart of Christianity he hoped it would. After finishing this work (which was not actually published until 1895), Nietzsche wrote Ecce Homo, a philosophical autobiography, in which we first see signs of the self-aggrandizing delusions which were to characterize his incipient mental collapse. The final major work of 1888 was Nietzsche Contra Wagner, containing more polemics against the “decadence” and anti-Semetism of Wagner’s followers, much of which was taken from his earlier published works. Nietzsche’s philosophical writings end there, in the closing weeks of 1888. No doubt the breakdown which followed was hastened by the frantic pace of work during that period. Living in Turin, Italy, alone as was his habit, he continued to send letters to his family and friends.

Early in January, 1889, Nietzsche collapsed on the street in Turin. Some local people helped him back to his room, and he was soon alone again. On January 6 he sent letters to Burckhardt and to Franz Overbeck, another friend and colleague at the University of Basle, displaying obvious signs of insanity. Burckhardt, quite concerned, consulted Overbeck, who was soon on a train headed for Turin to assist his friend. Overbeck brought Nietzsche back to his mother in Germany. He was placed in an institution for a few months, and was then released to the care of his family, where he lived another eleven years as an invalid. Nietzsche actually died twice: his mind died in 1889, while his body lived on helplessly until 1900…

If Nietzsche’s polemically effective suggestion had been adopted—to begin counting time from the start of Christianity’s presumed demise, the writing of Der Antichrist—then I would now be writing these words in the year 100 P.C., the hundredth year of the post-Christian era. It would obviously be premature to expect such a calendar to gain widespread acceptance today! Yet the failure of Nietzsche’s impossibly high expectations should not cause us to overlook the significance of this monumental work, with its searing insights into the psychology of Christian belief. All those who wish not to renounce life but to affirm it, all who seek to proclaim a triumphant “yes” to human prosperity, knowledge, and happiness, will find in Der Antichrist invaluable insights on how those goals can be achieved—and on what stands on the way of them.
 

Notes:

There are two excellent English translations of Der Antichrist readily available, one by R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Classics, 1968), the other by Walter Kaufmann (in Kaufmann’s The Portable Nietzsche, Penguin Books, 1978).

Categories
Quotable quotes

Transvaluation

‘What Christianity does is that it takes the concrete real-world salvation of the Old Testament, and spiritualises it. Instead of being saved, here and now, on planet earth, which is what the Jews believe, in Christianity, one is saved in the sky after he/she dies’. —Gaedhal

Categories
Bible Tom Holland

Slave cult for Goyim

by Gaedhal

I have laboured under the delusion that ‘Sieg Heil!’, in German, meant ‘praise victory!’ I thought that ‘Heil’ was an imperative verb. Aber nein! (But no!) Heil is a noun. Thus, what ‘Sieg Heil’ actually means is: ‘Victory [in this life is] Salvation!’ And this is an extremely antichristian sentiment. In Christianity, it is God who avenges. When Job said:

‘For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth’ (Job 19:25 KJV).

He could very easily be saying: ‘I know that my avenger liveth’, as the Hebrew word: ‘goʔel’ can mean both: ‘avenger’ and ‘redeemer’. ‘Redemption’ and ‘vengeance’ are similar concepts.

Anyhow, in Christianity, it is victory in the life to come that is salvation.

However, the Jews have the correct idea: ‘salvation’ or in Hebrew: ‘shewangah’ is simply: ‘the ability to live in an ethnostate in one’s ancestral homeland’. The Jews care not for post-mortem paradises in the skies. Neither do Nazis. Nazis want their own homogenous ethnostate in their ancestral homelands.

‘No pride, no honour!’—Aron Ra (a leftist).

Indeed! Pride is tabooed by Christianity. However, what was the slogan of the SS?

‘Meine Ehre heisst Treue’ (‘My honour is called loyalty’).

In Nazism, pride is a good thing, whereas in Christianity, it is the worst of sins. Indeed, ‘Ehrmann’, the name of a prestigious American Bible scholar—although, the final ‘n’ is truncated from how he spells it—means: ‘honourable man’.

This is why I think that saint Paul equivocates when he says:

‘For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part has happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob’ (Romans 11:25 KJV).

In my view, what he is saying is that by ‘saving’ the Goyim, by converting them to an auxiliary slave cult that promises a mythical post-mortem paradise, then the Jews will be saved in the sense that Jews understand it, i.e., they will have a homogenous ethnostate in their ancestral homeland of Palestine.

Thanks, largely to Christianity, the Jews were indeed ‘saved’ in the sense that they understand it, in 1947 with the creation of the state of Israel.

The reason why the Jews are bombing the living daylights out of the luckless Palestinians is because they are perfecting their salvation. There still exist filthy Goyim dogs in both Judea and Samaria, and Gaza. The Jews will not consider themselves fully saved, until the Goyim are either exterminated or evicted from the West Bank and Gaza.

Who lets the Jews get away with this? The Christians. Biden is a Zionist Catholic. Catholicism is the largest sect of Christianity. Michael Johnson will not countenance calls for an Israeli ceasefire. Thus, it is not sufficient for antitheists just to criticise Christianity and Islam. The root of this rotten Abrahamic tree, i.e. Judaism, must also be strenuously criticised.

In short, I think that Tom Holland is largely correct. Nazism was a repudiation of Christian moral axiology. Christianity is otherworldly. Nazism, like Judaism, want Sieg or Shewangah in this life! Christianity sees humanity as fallen and incapable of good. Nazism says: you can act, even without the grace of a Jewish desert god, with faithfulness and honour. Thus, Nazism is Pelagian i.e. it posits that man has no need of the gods to act in a virtuous way. Christianity says Pride is a Sin. Nazism says: My Pride is called Faithfulness.

The slave cult for Goyim, in both Romans and in the Petrine epistles demands passivity in the face of government tyranny. Nazism starts revolutions in beerhalls. When the Nazis had an uprising or Putsch then they were directly disobeying Romans 13. This is a point that Andrew Seidel brings up concerning the American Revolution in The Founding Myth. When the American Revolutionaries rebelled, they defied Romans 13. Thus, Seidel argues, that the American Revolution was also antichristian in spirit.

Funnily enough, both the American Revolution and the German Revolution seemed to begin in beer halls. In America, seemingly, it was the Green Dragon Tavern. It is a talking point on the left that the American Revolution, and its subsequent westward expansion inspired the Nazis.

Categories
Art

On John Milton

This entry should be understood based on what, in Daybreak, I said about Johann Sebastian Bach: that, while I am capable of appreciating the art of the father of classical music in recent centuries, a priest of the sacred words repudiates religious works such as his St Matthew Passion.

Octavio Paz used to say that Dante was the poet of the West par excellence. That’s true only if we refer to Western Christian Civilisation, but not to European Civilisation in general. The matrix created by Christianity so permeated the soul of the common Westerner that even a non-Christian like Paz was able to say what he said about Dante.

I repudiate Dante for the same reason I repudiate Bach: his art is Christian propaganda. And the same can be said of cathedrals, despite their beauty. And the same can be said of the Dante for the English, John Milton. Once one breaks with the paradigm of the day everything seems retarded, and even iniquitous to the mental health of the Aryan man.

Milton’s parents intended him for the church and the young poet grew up in a very puritanical environment. Milton was twenty-one when he created his first masterpiece, an ode to the nativity of Christ. He later rebelled against ideas of free will and predestination, which is why some consider Milton, the contemporary of Hobbes and Kepler, a Renaissance man. I find that claim grotesque (see what I say about Erasmus and the real Renaissance in Daybreak).

Milton travelled to Italy and visited Galileo when the latter was an old man and a prisoner of the Inquisition. Looking through the telescope, young Milton saw for the first time the new conception of space (in the medieval worldview the Moon was believed to be immaculate, incapable of scarring). That did him no good, since years later, in his masterpiece, although he paid homage to his experience with Galileo, Milton was always a slave to his parental introjects by making Satan perform a terrible and daring flight through the cosmos, from the lavas of hell to the new world created by the God of the Jews for Man. In other words, it is the structure of the inner self—how it had been programmed from childhood—that counts, not the facts of the empirical world, pace Galileo. Milton never left the matrix of his time.

In 1649 Charles I of England was beheaded and Milton became the point man for the new regime of Cromwell, who brought the Jews back to the island. But Milton found himself in trouble after the fall of Cromwell, when his body was exhumed and hanged for public shame. To make matters worse, in 1665 he fled London because of the plague, and the great fire of 1666 destroyed the house where his parents had instilled Christian Puritanism in him: his only important property. But Milton had already amalgamated the religious parental introject with his mind.

Twice widowed, after half a century of existence in this world Milton was lucky enough to marry a woman of twenty-four. Returning to London, he published his great poem in 1667 (Paradise Lost is a complete cosmological system!). Two years later, that first edition of thirteen hundred copies was out of print.

Milton, now blind, forced his daughters, Mary and Deborah, to read books to him and dictated his verses to them. The two girls were condemned to a test of patience as they read to their father in foreign languages they didn’t understand. In recent posts, I linked to videos that explain the narcissistic personality. Milton was one of them, and he considered his daughters, to whom he had given biblical names, tools of the trade.

Milton’s masterpiece, his epic poem, Paradise Lost written in blank verse, influenced the generation of English Romantics. William Blake, poet and painter, is considered the most inspired and congenial of Milton’s illustrators. He has a famous drawing in which God the Father embraces God the Son, who has offered himself for Redemption.

If any of my readers did a close reading of my Day of Wrath, he would recall that in the Mesoamerican pantheon, the parent Gods reward the Children Gods who sacrificed themselves by throwing themselves on the stake to become the Sun and the Moon. In that book, my analysis was that the opposite was Zeus, who, instead of submitting to the will of primitive gods (like the Christian god and the Mesoamerican gods), rebelled against the tyrant father, Cronus. If there is one thing that the intellectual sympathisers of American racialism still don’t understand, it is that psychohistorically the Jewish deity represented a regression from the level to which the Aryan had already reached in the Greco-Roman world.

Some notable apostates from Christianity realised this to some extent. In his Candide for example, Voltaire alludes to Milton as a ‘barbarian’, and Ezra Pound branded Paradise Lost as ‘asinine’ sanctimony and beastly Hebraism. I would go further.

In The Fair Race we can read that, if the Aryan is saved from extinction, in the new ecclesias where values are transvalued, young Aryans will be taught Indo-European culture. This obviously excludes the classics of Western Christian Civilisation. The poems of Dante and Milton ultimately reinforce the churches: the opposite of the Indo-European ecclesia that Julian the Apostate, and Hitler, wanted to restore. In the future Aryan state Christian propaganda should be suspended regardless of its aesthetic value.

Categories
Racial right

The Gatekeepers

—White Nationalists—

‘The refusal to talk about violence, ever,
and not even ironically, metaphorically, or
theoretically is White Nationalism 101…’
—Travis LeBlanc (Counter-Currents author)

‘Nearly every White Nationalist info source
is cleverly scripted towards re-pacifying Whites
into the Christian, pro “justice system” fold.’
—An old tweet by Young White Family.

Thinking about the metaphor of ‘The Wall’, the current featured post on this site, a revelation came to me today.

All Aryans south of the Wall are committing ethnic suicide, including white nationalists, whose role has been to act as gatekeepers to keep whites from crossing to the other side. These kinds of radical revelations I only developed over the years.

Tyrone Patten-Walsh is one of two Englishmen who this month were jailed in the UK for thoughtcrime, as we alluded to in my other post this day.

It had been right in his flat in London when Tyrone told me things I had never read on American racial right forums. For example, I was flabbergasted when Tyrone told me that virtually all whites have an unconscious ethnosuicidal wish. I didn’t know what to say back then, but back in my home country, I kept thinking for years about those words, especially since what I saw on racialist forums seemed too degenerate compared to Hitlerism.

I was in Tyrone’s flat almost ten years ago: the same flat that the UK thoughtpolice stormed, breaking down the door, the day they arrested him.

Let’s follow the metaphor of my featured post about white nationalists not having transvalued their values but being stuck south of the Wall. Following Tyrone, no matter how close they are to the Wall, they are still committing ethnic suicide. Failure to cross it to the ideals of National Socialism is tantamount to a mortal sin since such behaviour leads to their extinction. A single example will suffice for me to illustrate this.

Jared Taylor, whom Greg Johnson once called ‘the granddaddy of the Alt-Right’, was raised by parents so fanatical that they emigrated to Japan to convert the heathen to the gospel written by Jews, the New Testament. Taylor has repeatedly said that every race deserves its nation, its homeland and its culture; its human rights—not just whites (David Duke, a white nationalist Christian, used to say the same thing). That cannot contrast more with what William Pierce, who unlike Taylor repudiated Christian morality, tells us in Who We Are: that for the conquest of a territory to work there must be either extermination or expulsion of non-whites.

Pierce came to these conclusions because he made a good reading of the history of his race, and how it failed in India; failed with the Asian conquests of Alexander the Great, and failed after the catastrophic Peloponnesian War and the Punic Wars as the Greeks and Romans consented, after those wars, to interbreeding. And it failed again with the Spanish and Portuguese because they did the same but this time throughout the newly discovered continent. In the case of blacks imported to Lisbon when Christianity hadn’t yet been ‘subverted by Jewry’—the myth of the white nationalists!—, Portugal suffered miscegenation with blacks (see ‘The black man’s gift to Portugal’ in The Fair Race).

If we compare the love for all featherless bipeds that Jared Taylor professes, a love that in Hitlerism should be exclusive to Aryans, we will understand what the metaphor of stagnating on the south side of the Wall means. As I have already said—and visitors who haven’t read the articles on Greece and Rome in The Fair Race should now read them—, whites in the Ancient World didn’t give a damn that Titus and Hadrian were perpetrating real holocausts of Semites during Rome’s wars against Judea. It was only after the New Testament transvalued classical values to the values the Jews wanted to inculcate in us that these genocides were viewed with moralizing scruples.

English historian Tom Holland is right: all whites, whether Christian or neo-Christian, find themselves worshipping the Cross. Christians worship it with the image of the crucified rabbi (Jesus). Atheist neo-Christians worship it with the outcast Coloured or the outcast Transsexual—that which is equivalent to the crucified Jews of other times! Taylor may have abandoned his parental worship of the crucified rabbi. Alas, by axiological inertia, he still loves non-whites to the degree that he doesn’t long to expel them in terrible wars of ethnic cleansing—or even exterminate them in new Auschwitz concentration camps on this side of the Atlantic. And the rest of the white nationalists think like him. Or am I wrong?

Who thinks in terms of The Turner Diaries? In no nationalist forum do I see a prominent author openly talking about Pierce’s prescription in Who We Are: either extermination or expulsion.

Tyrone, now serving a seven-year sentence for thoughtcrime (and I think it’s more since he didn’t respond to my last emails of 2023—would he have already been imprisoned even before hearing the sentence?), was right. All whites, racialists included, suffer from an unconscious death wish. Otherwise, and here comes my metaphor, they would try to cross the fucking Wall: to think as the Greeks, Romans and Vikings thought before the greatest catastrophe of all time: the imposition of the Cross on the Aryan psyche.

The West’s Darkest Hour invites those who have reached the foot of the Wall to cross it. Only those who cross it will have a chance of saving their little race from extinction. Incredible as it may seem, the gatekeepers, the white nationalists, are now my enemies in that, because of their Judaeo-Christian programming, they are now preventing the Aryan adventurer who has reached the Wall from crossing it.

Following one of the first paragraphs of my featured post, one might think that I should be grateful to the racialists who, a dozen years ago, found my own way to the North and I was able to reach the Wall. But it’s just that years after I ventured across it I realised that they weren’t going to make it. Now I see that by their reluctance to abandon Christian morality these racialists have become a liability, not an asset, to the fourteen words.

Categories
Israel / Palestine War!

A final solution…

to the Palestinian problem

Above, Davidster (Star of David) by Dick Stins, a holocaust memorial in The Hague. The text at the side in Dutch and Hebrew is from Deuteronomy 25:17, 19: ‘Remember what Amalek has done to you, do not forget.’ On the other hand, about the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Netanyahu has said: ‘You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible’, which is based on 1 Samuel 15:3:

Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

What the Jews are doing doesn’t shock me. What is fascinating from the POV of The West’s Darkest Hour is that American evangelicals see nothing wrong with this Palestinian Holocaust, simply because the victimisers are the chosen ones (remember what I recently quoted from Tom Sunic). Had the victimisers been pure Aryans, like these evangelicals or what Himmler and his henchmen did—God forbid!: i.e., the god of the Jews, which is why, when I talk about genuine spirituality, I don’t use any more the word ‘God’ but ‘Gods’ in the plural in reference to the words in Delphi’s oracle; this is what transvaluing all the values means.

Just look at the Xtian hawks in the American Congress: they don’t care about the Palestinians, only about the chosen ones! Is it clear now why we have been saying since 2012 that the Christian problem ‘encompasses’ the Jewish problem?

Categories
Mauricio (commenter)

Veritas

by Mauricio

Christianity is the Root of the Rot.

We had our priorities straight when we valued the Paternal Gods, and not a God of Love.

We were on the Natural Path, where our top priority, our mission, was to seek War and destroy the other races. This is what Nature intended.

Veritas is Chronos’ daughter, and Time will unearth the Truth. The truth is that Christianity is the Path of White Destruction, and this truth will be unearthed when Whites are nearing extinction.

By that time, we will not worship Paternal Gods, because their avatars, our fathers, betrayed us with their Gods of Love.

We will value only the Gods of Destruction.

Death to all White Traitors,

Ave Kalki!

Categories
Exterminationism Racial right

Troll ’em all!

I’m not finished with Counter-Currents because I find that webzine a real tidbit to show the principle of this site: that the value scale of white nationalists, who mistakenly perceive themselves as Jew-wise, isn’t wise at all in that it drags the tail of morality bequeathed to us by Judeo-Christianity.

Earlier I had quoted some more or less critical comments in the Counter-Currents comments section on Greg Johnson’s article ‘Palestinians & Jews, again’ where Johnson simply replied with flat statements; that is, he took Judeo-Christian morality so much for granted that he didn’t even bother to try to rebut his critics with arguments. Well, recently another C-C commenter posted a comment that demonstrates just what we have been saying, and in no uncertain terms:

Ahh, but isn’t this [Johnson’s stance—Ed.] merely a “Paretian” old Christian residue? I agree with your ethical position, but that is because a) I was raised Christian, and b) would someday like to become Christian again, provided I can resolve to my satisfaction the various philosophy-of-religion problems that originally led me away from the faith. In the meantime, I mostly hue to the old moral codes, first, because I’m psychologically and culturally oriented towards them, and second, because, in Pascalian fashion, I believe such a course would be pleasing to (and perhaps even required by) God, should He in fact exist.

As always, the fear of eternal damnation, with which our idiotic parents raised us (that’s why my autobiographical books are so important!), haunts the psyche of the Aryan to keep the commandments that the god of the Jews dictated for us Gentiles.

But if one does not believe in God, what is the meaningful ground of ethics? Eat or be eaten is the primordial law of life. Among animals, there is no ethics—and even that behavior which merely mimics human-understood ethics is limited to genetically similar creatures. Social animals, like chimps and humans, are tribal in nature. Such tribal structures mightily contribute to their members’ reproductive fitness. What imaginative philosophers might characterize as “ethical” behavior within such tribes are instinctively cooperative actions which strengthen the tribe as a whole, or else sanctions against ‘antisocial’ actions which weaken the tribe. Within a naturalistic metaphysics, from whence would be derived inter-tribal ethics?

And once again, Johnson responds with a flat, non-argumentative statement; though he now concedes that that is a discussion for another time:

No, I don’t think the only foundation of ethics is religion. Nor do I think Social Darwinism is a valid moral code. I think it is just post hoc rationalization for criminality. But that’s a conversation for another place.

Criminality? The only foundation of Western ‘ethics’ is the Judeo-Christian religion! The key is that, before Christianity, exterminationist genocide wasn’t considered criminal by the Aryans. That was malware that Constantine and his bishop minions (many of Semitic origin) began to implant in the Aryan psyche long ago. See the very important Neo-Christianity PDF of our featured post. Those new visitors who haven’t read it should read it now.

It seems to me intellectual quackery not to know that the morality with which we Westerners were all educated ultimately comes from a so-called new testament for Gentile consumption written by Jews. For now, I would just like to quote from page 83 of another of our PDFs, On Exterminationism:

What is certain is that the Holocaust would not have produced any debilitating psychological effect on non-Christian whites. (By Christianity I mean ‘Christian morality.’ Most atheists in the West are still Christian, even if they don’t believe in God or Jesus.) Being emotionally affected by the Holocaust presupposes that you think: (1) Victims and losers have intrinsically more moral value than conquerors and winners, (2) Killing is the most horrendous thing a human can do, (3) Killing children and women is even more horrendous and (4) Every human life has the same value.

None of these statements ring true to a man who has rejected Christian morality. Even if the Holocaust happened, I would not pity the victims or sympathise with them. If you told the Vikings that they needed to accept Jews on their lands or give them gold coins because six million of them were exterminated in an obscure war, they would have laughed at you!

What can the priest of holy words do in the face of so much Christian and neo-Christian swarming American white nationalism? Rather than despair, simply Troll Em All with Nietzsche’s maxim: Umwertuung aller Werte!

Categories
Tom Holland

Antipodes

Michael Jones and Tom Holland

Almost at the beginning of this interview, Tom Holland said: ‘Christianity has so kind of saturated the meaning of words in English that it was incredibly difficult to use them’ in his books, ‘and get back to a pre-Christian world’. So saturated that ‘even being opposed to Christianity has Christian roots’! We can see this among those racialists who are ostensibly secular but who ultimately subscribe to Christian morality. Holland even claims: ‘Atheism… is very very Christian in its impulse.’

This is why I hate atheists.

Then up to minute 22, Holland says that the notion that anything secular has existed in the West is a delusion: that the secular and the religious have always been two sides of the same coin. Westerners have been unable to see this because they don’t realise that, axiologically, secular values are essentially religious values. (Holland mentions Richard Dawkins, whom he accuses of unconsciously moving within a matrix of Protestant values.)

After 37 minutes, Holland talks about how difficult it was for Anglo-American Christians to tolerate racialised slavery in their colonies. For, according to Christian teaching, all human beings are equal. First, the Quakers began to hammer away at this issue, then Evangelical Episcopalians followed until abolitionism emerged.

‘Slavery is a monstrous sin,’ says Holland rephrasing the Christians of another age. But this is where you see that even contemporary white nationalism is, still, a Judaic creature. I have already mentioned, and it is worth mentioning again, that in a discussion between two of them it seemed very obvious to the ‘secular’ racialist that the Christian racialist’s question was beyond the pale: ‘What’s wrong with slavery?’ referring to Old Dixie.

The sad truth is that the anti-Semites on the WN forums are still servants of the Jews. They obey Judeo-Christian-inspired precepts which, from their origins, were always aimed at demoralising the pagan Roman and convincing him that he had better worship the god of the Jews. From this angle, The West’s Darkest Hour is the only authentically Jew-wise site in existence today. Even the critics of Christianity on the racial right are not authentically Jew-wise because they fail to recognise that any Aryan who subscribes to Christian morality is even worse than a subversive Jew, for the internal traitor is worse than the external enemy.

After 42 minutes, the interviewer asks Holland a central question: What would the world be like if Rome had not succumbed to Christianity? After an historical prologue, by the 47th minute Holland answered: ‘Why do black lives matter? Because historically in the United States, black people were enslaved… Or why there are trans rights roiling countries of Christian heritage in a way that they’re not roiling in countries with other [emphasis in Holland’s voice] heritage?’ Given that values have been inverted throughout the West because of Christianity, Holland adds that it is their victimhood what ‘gives them credit; being a victim becomes a source of privilege.’

Then Holland talks about his forthcoming book on his trilogy on Rome, but he is completely unaware of the work of scholars that we have summarised here challenging the historicity of Jesus. This is a terrible gap in Holland’s intellectual baggage and reminds me that white nationalists also ignore this issue. Immediately afterwards during the interview with Michael Jones, Holland makes the same mistake in discussing the origins of Islam.

The other issue that Holland doesn’t seem to address in the interview or his book Dominion is that the sexual mores and customs of Sparta, Republican Rome and ancient Germans were different from those of Imperial Rome. Holland seems to judge the entire pre-Christian world by the standards of pagan degeneracy, not when they were healthy.

But after 1:08 Holland confesses something vital that makes him our ideological enemy. While it is clear that we can use Dominion to show that liberalism is a direct child of Christianity and that atheists are de facto neo-Christians, we repudiate what he says: ‘I would say I am much more of a Christian than a theist… uhm, I’ve come to recognise that I am pretty much completely Christian in my values and my assumptions. The problem I have is believing that there is a God, ha!’

Holland even confesses that he only feels God—I would say the god of the Jews—during Passover and Christmas, but that the rest of the year he remains sceptical. But even on those remaining 363 days that is the same problem of white nationalists who presume to be secular: the scale of values of these so-called anti-Semites comes directly from a religion of Semitic origin.

For new visitors, my Dominion excerpts can be found here. Just compare Holland’s position in the above interview with my position at the end of that link. We are antipodes!

Categories
Dominion (book) Tom Holland

Dominion, 40

The following quotes are taken from the final pages of ‘Woke’, the final chapter of Tom Holland’s Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.

I have sought, in writing this book, to be as objective as possible. Yet this, when dealing with a theme such as Christianity, is not to be neutral. To claim, as I most certainly do, that I have sought to evaluate fairly both the achievements and the crimes of Christian civilisation is not to stand outside its moral frameworks, but rather—as Nietzsche would have been quick to point out—to stand within them.

Holland is a liberal, not a priest of the sacred words.

The people who, in his famous fable, continue to venerate the shadow of God are not just church-goers. All those in thrall to Christian morality—even those who may be proud to array themselves among God’s murderers—are included among their number. Inevitably, to attempt the tracing of Christianity’s impact on the world is to cover the rise and fall of empires, the actions of bishops and kings, the arguments of theologians, the course of revolutions, the planting of crosses around the world. It is, in particular, to focus on the doings of men. Yet that hardly tells the whole story. I have written much in this book about churches, and monasteries, and universities; but these were never where the mass of the Christian people were most influentially shaped. It was always in the home that children were likeliest to absorb the revolutionary teachings that, over the course of two thousand years, have come to be so taken for granted as almost to seem human nature. [pages 534-535]

I have omitted several paragraphs from these final pages in which Holland writes several autobiographical vignettes about how he was brought up by his godmother in the Anglican church. In those pages Holland correctly states that Christianity has been passed down from parents to their offspring for two millennia: it’s programming just as we program our computers. These autobiographical paragraphs are very important in that they explain how whites have been axiologically programmed for many generations, and anyone who wants to read them should simply buy Holland’s book. (I already knew that, although the difference between Holland and me is abysmal in that Christianity didn’t destroy his life.)

‘There is nothing particular about man. He is but a part of this world.’ Today, in the West, there are many who would agree with Himmler that, for humanity to claim a special status for itself, to imagine itself as somehow superior to the rest of creation, is an unwarrantable conceit. Homo sapiens is just another species. To insist otherwise is to cling to the shattered fragments of religious belief.

What Savitri Devi calls anthropocentrism.

Yet the implications of this view—which the Nazis, of course, claimed as their sanction for genocide—remain unsettling for many. Just as Nietzsche had foretold, freethinkers who mock the very idea of a god as a dead thing, a sky fairy, an imaginary friend, still piously hold to taboos and morals that derive from Christianity. In 2002, in Amsterdam, the World Humanist Congress affirmed ‘the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual and the right of every human being to the greatest possible freedom compatible with the rights of others’. Yet this—despite humanists’ stated ambition to provide ‘an alternative to dogmatic religion’—was nothing if not itself a statement of belief. Himmler, at any rate, had understood what licence was opened up by the abandonment of Christianity.

The humanist assumption that atheism and liberalism go together was just that: an assumption. Without the biblical story that God had created humanity in his own image to draw upon, the reverence of humanists for their own species risked seeming mawkish and shallow. What basis—other than mere sentimentality—was there to argue for it? Perhaps, as the humanist manifesto declared, through ‘the application of the methods of science’. Yet this was barely any less of a myth than Genesis. As in the days of Darwin and Huxley, so in the twenty-first century, the ambition of agnostics to translate values ‘into facts that can be scientifically understood’ was a fantasy. It derived not from the viability of such a project, but from medieval theology. It was not truth that science offered moralists, but a mirror. Racists identified it with racist values; liberals with liberal values. The primary dogma of humanism—‘that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others’—found no more corroboration in science than did the dogma of the Nazis that anyone not fit for life should be exterminated. The wellspring of humanist values lay not in reason, not in evidence-based thinking, but in history.

Now that instalment 40 concludes this series, I will include these quotes and my published comments about Dominion in a new PDF book that I may eventually title Paradigm Shift for Racialists. Incidentally, I’ll change the cover to another book we have published here, On Exterminationism, although I haven’t yet decided which image to use. It seems clear to me that if, like the Nazis, I have become an exterminationist and white nationalists don’t, it is because they still obey the Jews who wrote the New Testament, which is clear from what Holland went on to write in the final pages of his book:

When, in an astonishing breakthrough, collagen was extracted recently from the remains of one tyrannosaur fossil, its amino acid sequences turned out to bear an unmistakable resemblance to those of a chicken. The more the evidence is studied, the hazier the dividing line between birds and dinosaurs has become. The same, mutatis mutandis, might be said of the dividing line between agnostics and Christians. On 16 July 2018, one of the world’s best-known scientists, a man as celebrated for his polemics against religion as for his writings on evolutionary biology, sat listening to the bells of an English cathedral. ‘So much nicer than the aggressive-sounding “Allahu Akhbar”,’ Richard Dawkins tweeted. ‘Or is that just my cultural upbringing?’ The question was a perfectly appropriate one for an admirer of Darwin to ponder. It is no surprise, since humans, just like any other biological organism, are products of evolution, that its workings should be evident in their assumptions, beliefs and cultures. A preference for church bells over the sound of Muslims praising God does not just emerge by magic. Dawkins—agnostic, secularist and humanist that he is—absolutely has the instincts of someone brought up in a Christian civilisation.

Today, as the flood tide of Western power and influence ebbs, the illusions of European and American liberals risk being left stranded. Much that they have sought to cast as universal stands exposed as never having been anything of the kind. Agnosticism—as Huxley, the man who coined the word, readily acknowledged—ranks as ‘that conviction of the supremacy of private judgment (indeed, of the impossibility of escaping it) which is the foundation of the Protestant Reformation’. Secularism owes its existence to the medieval papacy. Humanism derives ultimately from claims made in the Bible: that humans are made in God’s image; that his Son died equally for everyone; that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. Repeatedly, like a great earthquake, Christianity has sent reverberations across the world. First there was the primal revolution: the revolution preached by Saint Paul. Then there came the aftershocks: the revolution in the eleventh century that set Latin Christendom upon its momentous course; the revolution commemorated as the Reformation; the revolution that killed God. All bore an identical stamp: the aspiration to enfold within its embrace every other possible way of seeing the world; the claim to a universalism that was culturally highly specific. That human beings have rights; that they are born equal; that they are owed sustenance, and shelter, and refuge from persecution: these were never self-evident truths.

The Nazis, certainly, knew as much—which is why, in today’s demonology, they retain their starring role. Communist dictators may have been no less murderous than fascist ones; but they—because communism was the expression of a concern for the oppressed masses—rarely seem as diabolical to people today. The measure of how Christian we as a society remain is that mass murder precipitated by racism tends to be seen as vastly more abhorrent than mass murder precipitated by an ambition to usher in a classless paradise.

This is absolutely fundamental to understanding the darkest hour of the white man.

Liberals may not believe in hell; but they still believe in evil. The fear of it puts them in its shade no less than it ever did Gregory the Great. Just as he lived in dread of Satan, so do we of Hitler’s ghost. Behind the readiness to use ‘fascist’ as an insult there lurks a numbing fear: of what might happen should it cease to be taken as an insult. If secular humanism derives not from reason or from science, but from the distinctive course of Christianity’s evolution—a course that, in the opinion of growing numbers in Europe and America, has left God dead—then how are its values anything more than the shadow of a corpse? What are the foundations of its morality, if not a myth?

A myth, though, is not a lie. At its most profound—as Tolkien, that devout Catholic, always argued—a myth can be true. To be a Christian is to believe that God became man and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it—the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe—that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilisation to which it gave birth. Today, the power of this strangeness remains as alive as it has ever been. It is manifest in the great surge of conversions that has swept Africa and Asia over the past century; in the conviction of millions upon millions that the breath of the Spirit, like a living fire, still blows upon the world; and, in Europe and North America, in the assumptions of many more millions who would never think to describe themselves as Christian. All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross…

Crucifixion was not merely a punishment. It was a means to achieving dominance: a dominance felt as a dread in the guts of the subdued. Terror of power was the index of power. That was how it had always been, and always would be. It was the way of the world. For two thousand years, though, Christians have disputed this. Many of them, over the course of this time, have themselves become agents of terror. They have put the weak in their shadow; they have brought suffering, and persecution, and slavery in their wake. Yet the standards by which they stand condemned for this are themselves Christian; nor, even if churches across the West continue to empty, does it seem likely that these standards will quickly change. ‘God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.’ This is the myth that we in the West still persist in clinging to. [pages 537-542, bold type added]

Dominion! The paradigm shift proposed by The West’s Darkest Hour is simple: Christian morality is the primary cause of Aryan decline, not Jewish subversion. White nationalists will never solve the Jewish problem because, unlike Himmler, they are programmed by Judeo-Christian morality.

It is paradoxical, but as long as they believe that the JQ is the primary cause they will never settle accounts with Jewry. Settling accounts involves transvaluing all Christian values for pre-Christian values (it’s impossible to solve the Jewish problem using a framework of values that is itself utterly Judeo-Christian!). Transvaluation means repudiating all of Western history from Constantine onwards as well as having the spirit of Hitler, and the coming Kalki, as the avatars to follow as Savitri rightly said in her book we translated.