Category Archives: History

The Norman Hypothesis

The Puritan hypothesis is a main plank of neoreaction, but the English Civil War itself didn’t arise out of the vacuum.

I came across this article:

Indeed, such attempts to root Northerners, particularly those from the Northeast, and Southerners in antagonistic bloodlines went back at least as far as 1837, when another anonymous writer in The Messenger wrote, “We, too, of the South, and especially we of Virginia, are descendants, for the most part, of the old cavaliers — the enemies and persecutors of those old puritans — and entertain, perhaps, unwittingly something of an hereditary and historical antipathy against the children, for the fathers’ sake.”

It seems many southerners (and northerners) prior to the civil war believed themselves to be the descendents of the Normans (and Anglo-Saxons, respectively). Here’s an 1846 journal article from a J. Quitman Moore in DeBow’s Review arguing the Norman heritage of Dixie.

I can’t find anything on how factual this myth of Norman heritage is, but according to Jayman the Cavaliers believed themselves to be descended from the Normans. But if it is genetic fact it is interesting.

The Normans were Catholic Vikings who had settled Northern France, while the Anglo-Saxons were Germanics who displaced the original Celtic Britons. Interestingly, given the later alliance of the Cavaliers and Scots-Irish in both the English and American civil wars, the Irish and Scots were also invaded and ruled by the Normans who became “more Irish than the Irish themselves” and were eventually integrated. The Norman’s were, being vikings, a rather violent people.

It is possible the roots of modern political differences are genetic in origin, extending past the American civil war, before the Glorious revolution, and back the conflict between the Norse Normans and the Teutonic Anglo-Saxons. Even more speculatively, could this go deeper to a genetic legacy from the split of the Germanic peoples or even the corded ware/battle axe culture era.

Now, I’m no expert in this area and from my understanding, nobody really knows for sure, this is all speculative but the possibility is interesting to think about. Maybe someone like HBD Chick could give this a closer look.

Guest Post From Europe: Historical Divorces

Today, we have another guest post from our European reader, with some musings on history, divorce, and mythology:

1.Victory is sweet, even though it tends to take a long time. I SUSPECT that my my self-estranged & self-separated wife will find herself in the Maria Callas’ Mother situation quite soon. Maria Callas, the OPERA singer, was born in 1923 in New York of Greek immigrant parents. When Maria was about 11 the Mother humped off back to Greece with “HER” children while telling the father to keep the dollars’ tsumanai flowing. The Mother told EVERYBODY else (including the children) that the father was an abusive drunk. When Maria Callas found out why she (Maria Callas) had NO Father, she, (Maria Callas) NEVER EVER spoke to the Mother again. Granted, the parents were somewhat reconciled on the Mother’s death-bed, but Maria Callas STILL refused to speak to her Mother.

2. The most famous divorce ever, as you know, is the divorce by Henry VIII of England, of his wife Catherine of Aragon. When Catherine, in 1527, first heard that Henry, planned to divorce her, she went to Confession. Henry, as you know said that his marriage to Catherine was invalid, as Catherine had previously been married to his brother Arthur, two years Henry’s senior, and three years Catherine’s junior. It is true that the above situation, had been a law of the early Church, as Henry always claimed, but it had been modified, as the Church expanded to say that provided the wife and brother A had done nothing inside the bedroom, she could marry brother B. She claimed to the priest in Confession in 1527, that on their wedding night, in 1501, Arthur was legless drunk, and had to be almost physically carried upstairs. She then said that once the bedroom door closed, Arthur collapsed on the bed to sleep it off. She then sat on the bed beside him. She said that she later fell on top of Arthur and dozed off, but she adamantly maintained that they got no further. Arthur left the next morning for Wales, and died soon after. During the Divorce Court hearing in 1529, Catherine repeated, the exact same story as she knelt in front Henry. As Catherine lay dying in 1536, aged fifty, quite old for that time, she again went to Confession, having sent for a priest, and repeated the exact same story. She had the priest write down her Confession in 1527 and 1536. She then had it sent to her nephew King Charles 1 (Carlos Primero) of Spain. Both statements, with absolutely no difference in what Catherine had said, turned up years later. In view of the fact that Catherine’s story NEVER wavered, and Henry varied his story to suit different circumstances and audiences, I think that we can now say that Catherine was telling the truth and Henry was not.

3. Similarly, in 1520, the then twenty year old Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V was persuaded to allow a totally unknown German monk called Martin Luther address the Diet or Parliament in Worms, the following year, 1521, on Luther’s religious views. Charles was a devout Catholic. He was Emperor of what we would now call Holland, Belgium Luxemburg, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Western Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia Northern and Eastern France, plus the far north of Italy, roughly ‘the hammer’ of Italy connecting the far SE of France and Slovenia. When his political advisors heard about this plan, they were outraged, and wanted him to kill Luther, problem solved. But Charles refused, saying that he could not break his word, once given. So in May 1521, he sent one of his knights to meet Luther at a pre-arranged spot, just as he had promised. The knight then escorted Luther on the two weeks’ journey to Worms, where the Diet was held. This in modern terms would have been the equivalent of allowing him address the European Parliament, or putting him on the Euro News today. Luther said his piece, and while the knight was escorting him back to the pre-arranged spot, Luther’s supporters, not trusting Charles, kidnapped him. No evidence has ever emerged to suggest that Luther knew of the kidnapping, or that Charles planned to break his word, or was planning to allow anybody else do so. Charles, who was also Charles 1, King of Spain, Carlos Primero, retired from his different royal duties between 1554 and 1556, and died in a monastery outside Salamanca in 1558, aged 58. To the end of his days, nobody, but absolutely nobody could accuse him of dishonesty. Conclusion: Keep YOUR end of the bargain. Let the other chap break his end of the bargain. History will vindicate you.

4. There is a story, along the same lines from America. When the American Constitution was being written, some of the Founding Fathers wanted the US Senators to be appointed for life to enable them to put the national interest first, and resist populist pressure. Eventually the compromise reached was that the Senators were almost like Ambassadors, appointed to represent their State in Washington, to the Federal Government. Senators were popularly elected after 1912, I think. After the US Civil War, the Northern twenty seven States were dominated by the Republican Party. The Republican Party was divided into the ‘Lincolnites’ who wanted reconciliation with the defeated twelve Southern States, and the ‘Radicals’ who wanted to exploit the defeated South until it was bled dry, and then start again. In 1866 Kansas recalled one of its Senators, a Lincolnite and replaced him with Edmund G. Ross. Ross was a Radical. No matter how harsh the exploitation of the defeated South was, it was never enough for Ross. He was the most belligerent, extremist, hardline, unreasonable politician of the belligerent, extremist hardline, unreasonable politicians of the Radical Republicans. No matter what was done he was not satisfied that it was tough enough on the South. President Johnston, nothing to LBJ was a Lincolnite. He was the only Southern Senator who had stood with the Union/Northern side. He had been a Democratic Senator from Tennessee. He was on Lincoln’s ticket in the 1864 Presidential election, and became President after Lincoln was murdered. In 1867, the Radical Republican leaders decided that they would impeach the President, as he had constantly used his veto to stop their plans. To do that they needed a simple majority in the House of Representatives, after which the President was tried before the Senate, and had to be found guilty by a two-thirds majority of the full Senate, not just those there on the day. They got their House majority, no problem. At that time there were fifty four Senators, two from each State. There were forty two Republicans and twelve Democrats. It was assumed that the Democrats would back the President in the Senate vote and this happened. Quite soon into the proceedings in the House, six long-serving Republican Senators announced that as the reckoned that the whole thing was a joke, they were going to vote to acquit the President. This meant that the Radical Republicans could not afford to lose any more votes. By all the rules Ross should have been Impeachment Vote No. 1. However his remark ‘Now that we have him in the dock, we must give him a fair trial’ to Senator Sprague of New Jersey was merely the start of his problems. The Radical leaders threatened him with loss of his Senate seat, and the end of his political career, bankruptcy and jail, on false charges. All this happened. A few days after his vote to acquit the President, the Kansas State Assembly recalled him. He ended up a jailed, bankrupt fraudster, soon afterwards. When he was released from jail, he was sleeping on the streets. But in 1872 the US Supreme Court stated that he had been correct. Conclusion: History ALWAYS vindicates those who do the right thing.

5. I have no doubt but you have heard of Cronos, a mythical King in Ancient Greece. He overthrew and killed his father. After learning that he, Cronus, was destined to be overcome by his own sons, just as he had overthrown his father, he devoured all of his children as soon as they were born, to pre-empt the prophecy. When the sixth child, Zeus, was born, Zeus was hidden and later fulfilled the prophecy. Conclusion; No matter how ALL-POWERFUL a Tyranny may appear to be it will EVENTUALLY be overthrown.

6. I have NO DOUBT but you heard of Icarus, the bird-man of Greek legend. His father, Daedalus made two pairs of wings out of wax and feathers for himself and his son Icarus so they could escape from Crete where they were held prisoner. Daedalus tried his wings first, but before taking off from the island, warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, nor too close to the sea, but to follow his (Daddy’s) path of flight. Overcome by the giddiness that flying lent him, Icarus soared through the sky curiously, but in the process he came too close to the sun, which melted the wax. Icarus kept flapping his wings but soon realized that he had no feathers left and that he was only flapping his bare arms, and so Icarus fell into the sea and drowned. Conclusion: ALL Ponzi Schemes crash in the end, the bigger the Ponzi Scheme, the bigger the Crash Mess.

7. I have NO DOUBT but you heard of Procrustes, a rogue smith and bandit of Greek myth. Procrustes physically attacked people by stretching them or cutting off their legs, so as to force them to fit the size of an iron bed. Conclusion: Facts CANNOT be changed to suit a pre-existing theory.

8. Before he invaded Russia, Napoleon said “Apres trois mois, la Russie me demandera la paix/After three months, Russia will ask me for peace” to one of his generals. In June 1941, as Germany prepared to invade Russia, German officers on the ground (as opposed to the Nazi leadership) told the troops that the serious fighting would last 6 weeks, that the Germans would be at the Urals in 14 weeks and that they would all be back home in Germany for Christmas. As a matter of FACT the Germans destroyed the ENTIRE Soviet Air Force in a week.

9. In 1941, as Hitler’s armies were racing towards Moscow, Stalin summoned Ivan Stamenev, the Bulgarian Ambassador to Moscow to the Kremlin, and asked him to mediate with the Germans, as Bulgaria was neutral. Stamenev refused saying ‘Even if you have to retreat to the Urals, you will beat them in the end’,in reply to Stalin a prediction, that Time, proved correct. Men and families are now back at the Urals. However, do NOT worry as this toxic tsumanais called ‘Family Law’ & ‘Feminism’ in Western countries WILL come to an end. If you had said ‘This is the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union’ on December 24, 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, you would have been the butt of EVERY joke as people rolled around the streets laughing at you. We all now KNOW that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan WAS the beginning of the end of the Soviet Empire. Slowly, men and families are moving westward. We are NOT QUITE YET in the position of the Soviet trooper Sgt. Alyosha Kovalyov who on May 02, 1945, hoisted the Soviet flag over the Reichstag in the famous photograph from our History books, but we are getting there.

10. The day WILL come when Families hoist the Flag of Freedom over the TOXIC MT EVERSTS called ‘Family’ Law’ & ‘Feminism’ in Western countries. Within twenty years in Western countries, we will see some of the cheerleaders for the Feminist/Liberal/Child Abuse Agenda doing the General Deboi & Julius Streicher Act.

Julius Streicher

Julius Streicher 1885 – 1946 was a Nazi newspaper owner in post WW1 Germany. His racist newspaper even by Nazi standards spewed forth the most vile virulent hatred of Jews. He incited Germans to the persecution and to the extermination Jews. For “the persecution and the extermination Jews” you may read “the persecution and the extermination of the family & fathers” in Western countries including modern Ireland. Hitler was NOT tough enough on the Jews for him. After WW2 he claimed to know NOTHING of any anti-Semitic campaigns NEVER MIND any Death Camps. He was tried at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial and executed by hanging.

General Deboi

After Stalingrad, the Russians captured 22 four-star German generals. One of these generals, General Deboi was appointed group spokesman as he could speak French, Europe’s international language of that time. Deboi was born in 1893 in Vienna and in 1912 he joioned the GERMAN Army. During the Russian-organized press conference Deboi stressed ‘Je suis autrichien, je ne suis pas allemand’ constantly, to anybody who would listen.

Jim Crow

Lynching Deaths 1882-1968 (87 Years)

Whites: 1297 – 14.9/year
Blacks: 3445 – 39.6/year

Homicides 2013:

Black on Black: 2245
Black on White: 409
White on Black: 189
White on White: 2509

Homicide Rates 1964 (per 100,000)

Nonwhite: 22.9
Whites: 2.7

Homicide Rates 2015 (per 100,000)

Black: 31.4
White: 4.5

Imprisonment Rate 1926 (per 100,000)

Black: 106
White: 36

Imprisonment Rate 2012 (per 100,000)

Black: 463  (198251/42,750,000)
White: 88   (172,843/195,148,000)

Poverty Rate 1959

Black: 55.1
White: 18.1

Poverty Rate 2013

Black: 27%
White: 10%

Bastardry Rate 1965

Black: ~25%
White: ~5%

Bastardry Rate 2013

Black: 72%
White: 36%

Children in Broken Homes Rate 1965

Black: 25%
White: ~8%

Children in Broken Homes Rate (Unmarried minus Cohabiting) 2013

Black: 44%
White: 13%

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During Jim Crow, blacks were generally safer, had stronger families, and were less likely to commit a crime or be jailed, but had double the poverty rate they do now. If so, how can the social dysfunction be blamed on poverty? Also, are they necessarily better off?

Cultural Genocide

Cultural genocide has been in the news in Canada recently due to a report on the Canadian treatment of aboriginals. According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission:

“Cultural genocide is the destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group,” the report reads. “States that engage in cultural genocide set out to destroy the political and social institutions of the targeted group. Land is seized, and populations are forcibly transferred and their movement is restricted. Languages are banned. Spiritual leaders are persecuted, spiritual practices are forbidden, and objects of spiritual value are con?scated and destroyed. And, most signi?cantly to the issue at hand, families are disrupted to prevent the transmission of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next.

That’s seems a fair and workable explanation of the concept, but today, I’m not planning to talk on the aboriginal cultural genocide.* I’m planning to talk about this:

As you’re probably aware, the Cathedral has been whipping up hatred against the symbol of the South. A bunch of private corporation have been banning the battle flag at the Cathedral’s behest. This is just the latest in anti-Southern activities whipped up by the North.

We all know of the Civil War, where the Yankees, primarily at the behest of the abolitionists of Massachusetts, refused to let the South to either run their own affairs or be independent. After killing almost half a million confederates, Massachusetts conquered America.

Of course, the US Civil War did not spring out of nowhere, but goes much earlier, to the English Civil War, where the roundheads and cavaliers fought over whether power should be held by the king or by the parliament. These groups carried their quarrels and ideologies over to the new continent. The North was settled by roundheads, a group of puritans, proto-anarcho-socialists, levellers, and apocalyptic Christians. The South was settled by royalists, cavaliers, and loyal Scotsmen. The northern puritans continues to wage their ancestral war on the cavaliers to this day.

After the US civil war, the US began reconstruction to ‘destroy the political and social institutions’ of the South and force the federal government’s agenda on it. Carpetbaggers swarmed the South to politically manipulate, seize land, loot the South, and forcibly conquer churches.

This has not ended. The Yankees continue to use their power to import foreign populations into the South. They continue to force their religious values on the South and suprress Southern religious values.  They continue to attack and ban symbols of the South. They enforce schooling where southern children are taught Yankee values. They use their media power to continually denigrate the South and southerners.

The descendents of the Roundheads are waging a very quiet, slow, and low-key cultural genocide against their historical enemies. Keeping it soft and slow prevents the South from realizing and rebelling against it (again). One flag, one religious desecration, one child, one small denigration at a time, the Yankees are gradually destroying Dixie culture to eventually turn them into good little puritans.

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* Maybe I will a little, here’s a quick rundown: Yes, whites committed cultural genocide on aboriginals. No, it wasn’t because they hated aboriginals, but because they wanted to civilize aboriginals (the white man’s burden). Yes, it was wrong for Europeans to destroy traditional aboriginal cultures, excepting in cases where they were wholly evil (ex. the Aztec’s culture of human sacrifice probably needed destroying). No, modern whites don’t hold any guilt for it. Yes, aboriginals have a right to be angry, but what is done can’t be undone and fixing their own situation rather than complaining would be more beneficial to them. Yes, their current situation is, on an individual level, their own fault, but evil institutions such as INAAC need to be destroyed. As for what should be done, the same as with blacks and Jews, give them a fair allotment of land, and let them set up independent aboriginal states.

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This was mostly written before NBS put up his piece on white genocide. I’m not sure how much traction the concept of cultural genocide gets in the US, but up here it’s a pretty big in intellectual/midbrow circles due to aboriginal issues. The WN’s may seem more reasonable and be more influential if they start calling it “white cultural genocide”, although I think “Western cultural suicide” is far more apt.

I think Steves is partially wrong. Whining about white genocide accomplishes nothing, but conservative/moderates whites do need to be informed of the ongoing cultural genocide/suicide and how leftists are purposefully carrying it out.

I also think NBS is wrong on this:

If you indict Cultural Marxists for White Genocide, then you can indict European Americans for the genocide of Native American and Australian peoples for exactly the same reasons. Strong peoples out-compete weak peoples. They always have and always will.

Just because something is does not mean that something is right. Dead European Americans are guilty of the cultural genocide, but those who committed the acts are mostly dead, those currently living are not guilty of the sins of their fathers and in fact have bent over backwards, too far backwards, to atone for them.

McCarthy & Fisher

I was just reading on McCarthy on Wiki and came across this:

In what played out to be the most dramatic exchange of the hearings, McCarthy responded to aggressive questioning from Army counsel Joseph Welch. On June 9, 1954, day 30 of the hearings, Welch challenged Cohn to give McCarthy’s list of 130 subversives in defense plants to the office of the FBI and the Department of Defense “before the sun goes down”.[24] In response to Welch’s challenge, McCarthy suggested that Welch should check on Fred Fisher, a young lawyer in Welch’s own Boston law firm whom Welch planned to have on his staff for the hearings. McCarthy then mentioned that Fisher had once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), a group which Attorney General Brownell had called “the legal bulwark of the Communist Party”.

Welch revealed he had confirmed Fisher’s former membership in the National Lawyers’ Guild approximately six weeks before the hearings started.[27] After Fisher admitted his membership in the National Lawyers’ Guild, Welch decided to send Fisher back to Boston. His replacement by another colleague on Welch’s staff was also covered by The New York Times. Welch then reprimanded McCarthy for his needless attack on Fisher, saying that “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” McCarthy, accusing Welch of filibustering the hearing and baiting Cohn, dismissed Welch’s dissertation and casually resumed his attack on Fisher, at which point Welch angrily cut him short:

“Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyer’s Guild… Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Welch excluded himself from the remainder of the hearings with a parting shot to McCarthy: “You have brought it out [the Fisher/NLG affair]. If there is a God in heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good!” After Welch deferred to Chairman Mundt to call the next witness, the gallery burst into applause.

Fisher was relatively unscathed by the incident and went on to become a partner in Boston’s prestigious Hale & Dorr law firm and organized its commercial law department. He also served as president of the Massachusetts Bar Association and as chairman of many committees of the American and Boston bar associations. He was a former trustee of the National Institute of Trial Advocacy and chairman of the Franklin N. Flaschner Foundation in Waban, Mass., while Welch’s maneuvering helped to ruin McCarthy’s life and career. McCarthy died at the relatively young age of 48.
…
After hearing 32 witnesses and two million words of testimony, the committee concluded that McCarthy himself had not exercised any improper influence on behalf of David Schine, but that Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief counsel, had engaged in some “unduly persistent or aggressive efforts” on behalf of Schine. The conclusion of the committee also reported questionable behavior on the part of the Army: That Secretary Stevens and Army Counsel John Adams “made efforts to terminate or influence the investigation and hearings at Fort Monmouth”, and that Adams “made vigorous and diligent efforts” to block subpoenas for members of the Army Loyalty and Screening Board “by means of personal appeal to certain members of the [McCarthy] committee”. Before the official reports were released Cohn had resigned as McCarthy’s chief counsel, and Senator Ralph Flanders (R, Vermont) had introduced a resolution of censure against McCarthy in the Senate.

Despite McCarthy’s acquittal of wrongdoing in the Schine matter, the Army–McCarthy hearings ultimately became the main catalyst in McCarthy’s downfall from political power.

Remember, this all happened a year after the Korean War, the year after Stalin died, and only a few years before the Great Leap Forward.

McCarthy is hunting possible traitorous supporters of mass-murdering communist regimes in the Army. An investigation is found in which the army is found to have committed questionable behaviour in stymieing these investigations, while McCarthy is found to be free of any wrong-doing.

During the trial, McCarthy calls out a lawyer who was a part of a known communist organization and McCarthy is painted as the bad guy. McCarthy ends up losing his career over this trial; the communist later ends up as President of the Massachusetts Bar Association and has major roles in the organizations for training new lawyers.

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Also interesting: Fisher was a part of the Signal Corps in WW2 and the whole hearing was about McCarthy investigating the Signal Corps.

End of the World

Chapters 7 & 8 of Chesterton’s the Everlasting Man are one of the best things I’ve read in a while. Here’s an excerpt:

For the shepherds were dying because their gods were dying. Paganism lived upon poetry; that poetry already considered under the name of mythology. But everywhere, and especially in Italy, it had been a mythology and a poetry rooted in the countryside; and that rustic religion had been largely responsible for the rustic happiness. Only as the whole society grew in age and experience, there began to appear that weakness in all mythology already noted in the chapter under that name. This religion was not quite a religion. In other words, this religion was not quite a reality. It was the young world’s riot with images and ideas like a young man’s riot with wine or love-making; it was not so much immoral as irresponsible; it had no foresight of the final test of time. Because it was creative to any extent it was credulous to any extent. It belonged to the artistic side of man, yet even considered artistically it had long become overloaded and entangled. The family trees sprung from the seed of Jupiter were a jungle rather than a forest; the claims of the gods and demigods seemed like things to be settled rather by a lawyer or a professional herald than by a poet. But it is needless to say that it was not only in the artistic sense that these things had grown more anarchic. There had appeared in more and more flagrant fashion that flower of evil that is really implicit in the very seed of nature-worship, however natural it may seem. I have said that I do not believe that natural worship necessarily begins with this particular passion; I am not of the De Rougemont school of scientific folk-lore. I do not believe that mythology must begin with eroticism. But I do believe that mythology must end in it. I am quite certain that mythology did end in it. Moreover, not only did the poetry grow more immoral, but the immorality grew more indefensible. Greek vices, oriental vices, hints of the old horrors of the Semitic demons began to fill the fancies of decaying Rome, swarming like flies on a dung-heap. The psychology of it is really human enough, to anyone who will try that experiment of seeing history from the inside. There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of ‘pretending’; when he is weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the cat. There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilization when the man is tired at playing at mythology and pretending that a tree is a maiden or that the moon made love to a man. The effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason. They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the priests of Baal. They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares.

At that stage even of paganism therefore the peasant songs and dances sound fainter and fainter in the forest. For one thing the peasant civilization was fading, or had already faded from the whole countryside. The Empire at the end was organized more and more on that servile system which generally goes with the boast of organization; indeed it was almost as servile as the modern schemes for the organizations of industry. It is proverbial that what would once have been a peasantry came a mere populace of the town dependent for bread and circuses; which may again suggest to some a mob dependent upon doles and cinemas. In this as in many other respects, modern return to heathenism has been a return not even the heathen youth but rather to the heathen old age. But causes of it were spiritual in both cases; and especially the spirit of paganism had departed with its familiar spirits. The heart had gone out of it with its household gods, who went along with the gods of the garden and the field and the forest. The Old Man of the Forest was too old; he was already dying. It is said truly in a sense that Pan died because Christ was born. It is almost as true in another sense that men knew that Christ was born because Pan was already dead. A void was made by the vanishing of the whole mythology of mankind, which would have asphyxiated like a vacuum if it had not been filled with theology. But the point for the moment is that the mythology could not have lasted like a theology in any case. Theology is thought, whether we agree with it or not. Mythology was never thought, and nobody could really agree with it or disagree with it. It was a mere mood of glamour and when the mood went it could not be recovered. Men not only ceased to believe in the gods, but they realized that they had never believed in them. They had sung their praises; they had danced round their altars.

They had played the flute; they had played the fool. So came the twilight upon Arcady and the last notes of the pipe sound sadly from the beechen grove. In the great Virgilian poems there is already something of the sadness; but the loves and the household gods linger in lovely lines like that which Mr. Belloc took for a test of understanding; incipe Parve Puer risu cognoscere matrem. But with them as with us, the human family itself began to break down under servile organization and the herding of the towns. The urban mob became enlightened; that is it lost the mental energy that could create myths. All round the circle of the Mediterranean cities the people mourned for the loss of gods and were consoled with gladiators. And meanwhile something similar was happening to that intellectual aristocracy of antiquity that had been walking about and talking at large ever since Socrates and Pythagoras. They began to betray to the world the fact that they were walking in a circle and saying the same thing over and over again. Philosophy began to be a joke; it also began to be a bore. That unnatural simplification of everything into one system or another, which we have noted as the fault of the philosopher, revealed at once its finality and its futility. Everything was virtue or everything was happiness or everything was fate or everything was good or everything was bad; anyhow, everything was everything and there was no more to be said; so they said it.

Everywhere the sages had degenerated into sophists; that is, into hired rhetoricians or askers of riddles. It is one of the symptoms of this that the sage begins to turn not only into a sophist but into a magician. A touch of oriental occultism is very much appreciated in the best houses. As the philosopher is already a society entertainer, he may as well also be a conjurer. Many moderns have insisted on the smallness of that Mediterranean world; and the wider horizons that might have awaited it with the discovery of the other continents. But this is an illusion; one of the many illusions of materialism. The limits that paganism had reached in Europe were the limits of human existence; at its best it had only reached the same limits anywhere else. The Roman stoics did not need any Chinamen to teach them stoicism. The Pythagoreans did not need any Hindus to teach them about recurrence or the simple life or the beauty of being a vegetarian. In so far as they could get these things from the East, they had already got rather too much of them from the East. The Syncretists were as convinced as Theosophists that all religions are really the same. And how else could they have extended philosophy merely by extending geography? It can hardly be proposed that they should learn a purer religion from the Aztecs or sit the feet of the Incas of Peru. All the rest of the world was a welter of barbarism. It is essential to recognize that the Roman Empire was recognized as the highest achievement of the human race; and also as the broadest. A dreadful secret seemed to be written as in obscure hieroglyphics across those mighty works of marble and stone, those colossal amphitheaters and aqueducts. Man could do no more.

For it was not the message blazed on the Babylonian wall, that one king was found wanting or his one kingdom given to a stranger. It was no such good news as the news of invasion conquest. There was nothing left that could conquer Rome but there was

also nothing left that could improve it. It was the strongest thing that was growing weak. It was the thing that was going to the bad. It is necessary to insist again and again that many civilizations had met in one civilization of the Mediterranean sea; that it was already universal with a stale and sterile universality. The peoples had pooled their resources and still there was not enough. The empires had gone into partnership and they were still bankrupt. No philosopher who was really philosophical could think anything except that, in that central sea, the wave of the world had risen to its highest, seeming to touch the stars. But the wave was already stooping; for it was only the wave of the world.

That mythology and that philosophy into which paganism has already been analyzed had thus both of them been drained most literally to the dregs. If with the multiplication of magic the third department, which we have called the demons, was even increasingly active, it was never anything but destructive. There remains only the fourth element or rather the first; that which had been in a sense forgotten because it was the first. I mean the primary and overpowering yet impalpable impression that the universe after all has one origin and one aim; and because it has an aim must have an author. .What became of this great truth in the background of men’s minds, at this time, it is perhaps more difficult to determine. Some of the Stoics undoubtedly saw it more and more clearly as the clouds of mythology cleared and thinned away; and great men among them did much even to the last to lay the foundations of a concept of the moral unity of the world. The Jews still held their secret certainty of it jealously behind high fences of exclusiveness; yet it is intensely characteristic of the society and the situation that some fashionable figures, especially fashionable ladies, actually embraced Judaism. But in the case of many others I fancy there entered at this point a new negation. Atheism became really possible in that abnormal time; for atheism is abnormality. It is not merely the denial of a dogma. It is the reversal of a subconscious assumption in the soul; the sense that there is a meaning and a direction in the world it sees. Lucretius, the first evolutionist who endeavored to substitute Evolution for God, had already dangled before men’s eyes his dance of glittering atoms, by which he conceived cosmos as created by chaos. But it was not his strong poetry or his sad philosophy, as I fancy, that made it possible for men to entertain such a vision. It was something in the sense of impotence and despair with which men shook their fists vainly at the stars, as they saw all the best work of humanity sinking slowly and helplessly into a swamp. They could easily believe that even creation itself was not a creation but a perpetual fall, when they saw that the weightiest and worthiest of all human creations was falling by its own weight. They could fancy that all the stars were falling stars; and that the very pillars of their own solemn porticos were bowed under a sort of gradual Deluge. To men in that mood there was a reason for atheism that is in some sense reasonable. Mythology might fade and philosophy might stiffen; but if behind these things there was a reality, surely that reality might have sustained things as they sank. There was no God; if there had been a God, surely this was the very moment when He would have moved and saved the world.

The life of the great civilization went on with dreary industry and even with dreary festivity. It was the end of the world, and the worst of it was that it need never end. A convenient compromise had been made between all the multitudinous myths and religions of the Empire; that each group should worship freely and merely give a sort of official flourish of thanks to the tolerant Emperor, by tossing a little incense to him under his official title of Divus. Naturally there was no difficulty about that; or rather it was a long time before the world realized that there ever bad been even a trivial difficulty anywhere. The members of some Eastern sect or secret society or other seemed to have made a scene somewhere; nobody could imagine why. The incident occurred once or twice again and began to arouse irritation out of proportion to its insignificance. It was not exactly what these provincials said; though of course it sounded queer enough. They seemed to be saying that God was dead and that they themselves had seen him die. Ibis might be one of the many manias produced by the despair of the age; only they did not seem particularly despairing. They seemed quite unnaturally joyful about it, and gave the reason that the death of God had allowed them to cat him and drink his blood. According to other accounts God was not exactly dead after all; there trailed through the bewildered imagination some sort of fantastic procession of the funeral of God, at which the sun turned black, but which ended with the dead omnipotence breaking out of the tomb and rising again like the sun. But it was not the strange story to which anybody paid any particular attention; people in that world had seen queer religions enough to fill a madhouse. It was something in the tone of the madmen and their type of formation. They were a scratch company of barbarians and slaves and poor and unimportant people; but their formation was military; they moved together and were very absolute about who and what was really a part of their little system; and about what they said, however mildly, there was a ring like iron. Men used to many mythologies and moralities could make no analysis of the mystery, except the curious conjecture that they meant what they said. All attempts to make them see reason in the perfectly simple matter of the Emperor’s statue seemed to be spoken to deaf men. It was as if a new meteoric metal bad fallen on the earth; it was a difference of substance to the touch. Those who touched their foundation fancied they had struck a rock.

Three Truths

There are three ways something can be considered true.

  1. Fact truth – Fact truth is mundane reality. A fact truth is empirical, it explains or describes a natural phenomenon but goes no deeper than that. “The sky is blue” would be a fact truth. Science is the best developed way of establishing this type of truth.
  2. Social truth – A social truth is something socially accepted as being true. A social truth is something true in relating to and within a society. Social truths can be both mundane and transcendental. “It is rude to spit on the sidewalk” would be a mundane social truth; “the American Dream” would be a transcendental social truth.
  3. Primal truth – Primal truth is transcendental truth. It is Truth. Truth speaks to the core of our human essence; to who and what we are. It is never mundane.

Of these, fact truth is empirically real, primal truth is the most viscerally real, and social truth is that which is most firmly embedded in a man.

A man needs all three truths to be fully realize his humanity. It is in stories and myths that a man finds these truths and his place in the world.

A story with none of those truths will fail; nobody wants a story that does not talk of these truths, even in opposition. Only a broken nihilist can like a story without truth.

There are no stories of solely fact truth; if there was it would simply be a textbook. Man can not derive meaning from mundane naturalism. This is where economists and new atheists go wrong; economists view all human society and interaction through the fact truth of supply and demand, ignoring social and primal truths, while new atheists try to make fact truths into social and primal truths, something which it can not be. It is no wonder they often come across as spergy; autists are naturally unable to grasp social and primal truths.

Most stories, including almost all popular culture, are the stories of social truths. These truths may not strike us to the core as the deeper stories do, but they can entertain and leave a small implicit moral.

A story of primal truth, of Truth, strikes much deeper. These go to the very soul, to the essence of what it means to be human. These stories can remain popular for millennia and people across cultures and time can appreciate them. We still listen to the Greek myths today because they speak these primal truths.

Myths are something that are both primally and socially true, but not necessarily factually true. They are True, even if they aren’t mundanely true. For example, the Iliad is not factually true, but for the Greeks it was socially and primally true. For us, Greek myths persist because they are primally true, even though we don’t accept them as socially true. When we read them and hear them, we recognize they speak to us on a primal level; they reach into our humanity and teach us something True about war, manhood, life, and death, even if it is not necessarily true.

All societies need myths, a society without myths is dying.

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Our cultural malaise can be attributed to our society lacking in myth.

America had myths: George Washington freeing Americans from the British; the founding fathers drafting the constitution; the frontier heroes of Daniel Boone, Sam Houston, and Davy Crockett; the freeing of the slaves (or the War of Northern Aggression); the American Dream; all men are equal; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; America keeping the world safe for freedom; and so on.

These myths of civic religion were added to the Christian religious myths and bound Americans together in a common story. These myths created an ideal for Americans to aspire to. It gave them a sense of place, a sense of purpose. They succeeded because they were socially true, primally true, and, to some degree, factually true. They spoke to people.

But these myths are rapidly being destroyed: the founding fathers were hypocritical slave owners; the frontier heroes were racist, genocidal, imperialists; the American Dream has morphed into a consumerist farce; the constitution has been gutted; freedom is eroding. The religious myths have been entirely rejected. They’ve all been destroyed.

Those that haven’t have been mutated into perversions by Whig history. The constitution was no longer about protecting republican freedom, but promoting democracy and diversity. Equality has transformed from a metaphysical myth to a concrete fact. The civil war, probably the most internally dividing myth, was once spoken of as a regrettable, bitter war of brother against brother, but is now merely a righteous crusade against evil bigots. Life & liberty have been subjugated to happiness and happiness that is now guaranteed rather than simply being pursued.

The Whigs have added new myths: the melting pot, the immigrant nation, the defenders of democracy, the sexual revolution.

They’ve tried to enforce these perverted and new myths as social truths and have been mostly successful, but they do not function well as myths. These perverted and new national myths is they are not primally true; in many cases they are not even factually true.

Social truths do not necessarily have to be factually true. Some cultures, such as the Japanese, even make a specific distinction between social (tatamae) truths and factual truths (honne). People can accept some dissonance between the two, especially if the social myths are primally true. Americans though have always been pragmatic folks and have had less tolerance for dissonance between the two. The primarily American phenomenon of Christian fundamentalism and atheist fundamentalism illustrates this. Unable (or unwilling) to distinguish the primal Truth of scripture from the fact truth of scripture, the fundamentalists on both sides rage over the Bible, particularly Genesis, as if reading from a textbook.

But even Americans can accept some dissonance, but not this much, and not without the primal truths.

Equality, democracy, diversity, hedonism; none of these are primally true. No ancient myths celebrate letting every idiot vote; nobody believes in their soul, in their heart, that they are the equal to both the saint and damned, the genius and the retard, the hero and the fool; no one really feels true kinship to the other; and no one can be moved in their soul by sticking their dick in every available orifice.

Despite progressive attempts to enforce Whig values, there is no primal truth, or even factual truth, in these attempts at whig mythology, but this whig mythology is the only accepted social truth; all other social truths are purged.

So our young men, our young women, are brought up in Whig mythology. They know, on a primal level, they aren’t truth, but they have no alternatives. They are part of a story that doesn’t feel right to them, but they have no other story.

They aren’t fully realizing their humanity. They are adrift, disconnected, unhappy, without meaning, and alone. Their gods are dead, their stories hollow. They are searching for meaning and returning empty.

This then is what reactionaries must do: create new myths. Myths that are primally true, that are factually true.

We must give young men and women a story they can fit themselves into, where they can find meaning and community.

Man lives in myth, he is a creature of myth.

We need myth.

Thankfully, as reactionaries, we already have thousands of years of myth from which to draw.

The Holocaust: God Loves the Jews

Bryce questions why the holocaust has received such an inordinate amount of attention given that the deaths of a few million is not particularly uncommon.

The most telling reason is found withing what is contained, or rather not contained, within Bryce’s essay. Bryce, as with almost everyone who writes of the holocaust, focuses on the Jews, of which 4-6 million were killed (I don’t care what the exact number is). Given that slavs, particularly Poles, were the largest victims of the nazi cleansings and the largest planned targets,it is interesting that the Jewish killings are the only ones focused upon. We can ascertain it is not the nazi killings themselves which are the focus, but the killings of the Jews in particular.

This means that the obvious neoreactionary analysis, the Whig interpretation of history Bryce mentions, is likely incorrect, or at least incomplete. If it were simply Whig history, then surely the progressives would have been happy to throw the 12M-or-so slavs into the list of crimes of the right.

There are a few other obvious material explanations, some of which Bryce mentions: Jewish predominance in western media, financing, and academia leading to the preeminent position of Jewish historical events, the Western nature of the event (most other modern genocides have been outside the West, in uncivilized places such as Russia and SE Asia), the ruthless Germanic effeciency of modern, organized mass murder technique used, and the historical controversy over the position of Jews in European Christendom.

Instead, I am going to focus on the spiritual aspects.

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If we look to the Old Testament, the Jewish and Christian scriptures, we find the same story played out repeatedly. Biblical Israel presents one of the greatest known examples of cyclical history.

Almost the entirety of the Old Testament, from Moses to Nehemiah, spanning a millenium, is the same story, repeated again and again, with only the names and details changed.

Yahweh loves the Israelites, chooses them from among the nations, and blesses them. Israel prospers, but turns from Yahweh, whoring after foreign idols. God sends prophets, famine, and, particularly, the foreign sword in attempts to draw Israel back into the covenant. In distress, Israel repents and cries for mercy. God, in His compassion and mercy relents and blesses His chosen. Israel prospers yet again, but yet again forgets and whores after foreign idols once more.

The same cycle repeated endlessly. This stiff-necked, stubborn people always spurning their blessing and turning against the God who loves them in favour of the fallen gods of their enemies.

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But the cycle was finally to end: the Jewish messiah comes to Israel. The salvation of Israel is at hand. Yet Israel rejects Him; the Jewish leaders compel the Roman officials to commit deicide. The Jewish messiah is murdered upon the cross while Israel cries, “His blood be on us, and on our children.”

The cycle has not ended.

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God loves the Jews, but the Jews have rejected Him. They have murdered His Son and sworn that His blood be upon their children.

God’s chosen have never repented this crime.

Yet God loves His chosen the same.

He yearns for them, He desires them return unto His love and mercy.

Yet, these stiff-necked, stubborn people refuse His love, reject His mercy.

So God does what He has always done for His chosen, he calls to them.

Through fire and sword he whispers His love and His desire for reconciliation.

Through temporal discipline, he displays His eternal love for His own.

During the Shoah, God replaced famine and sword with gas and bullet.

If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land. Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayer that is made in this place. For now I have chosen and consecrated this house that my name may be there forever. My eyes and my heart will be there for all time. – 2 Chronicles 7:14-16 (ESV)

God calls to His chosen to repent and turn to Him, for He loves them. The Holocaust was the most recent manifestation of God’s love for Israel.

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This spiritual aspect is the reason for the west’s disproportionate focus on the Shoah. Whatever the west’s fallen state, it is still primarily Christian in origin and thought.

The story of the Shoah is compelling for it is western civilization’s founding mythos acting itself out for our modern age.

Most westerners in this degenerate age may not understand it intellectually, but on a cultural level, they know this: the Old Testament was brought to life in all its gory glory.

The eternal story from which western civilization was birthed was and is being told and we can not turn away.

Most will deny the spiritual implications, as our age is one of materialism, of denial of the spirit and of God. Some of the spiritual will deny that it was God’s hand, for they deny the Christian story; they look only unto God’s mercy, forgetting that without God’s judgment, God’s mercy is worthless. But those who have eyes will see and those who have ears will hear.

Those who are unable to hear and those who are unable to see, are also unable to ignore. The truth, even when denied, draws them.

That is the reason the Shoah is the target of such disproportionate focus: it touches our civilizational mythology and tugs at our dwindling Christian spirit.

The Jew may refuse to repent, but cannot turn away.

The gentile Christian sees his own story played out on the Jew writ large and cannot turn away.

The non-Christian see the Lord calling him to be His own through the Jew and, though he may reject the call, can not turn away.

We can not help but look at God’s love and judgment poured out.

Deep spiritual truths from the days of old played themselves out for us in an unforgettable manner. The story of Elijah, of Moses, of Joshua, of the Prophets enacted before our very eyes. Even if we choose not see.

Blessed be the Lord our God.

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They remembered not his hand, nor the day when he delivered them from the enemy.

How he had wrought his signs in Egypt, and his wonders in the field of Zoan.
…
And he led them on safely, so that they feared not: but the sea overwhelmed their enemies.

And he brought them to the border of his sanctuary, even to this mountain, which his right hand had purchased.

He cast out the heathen also before them, and divided them an inheritance by line, and made the tribes of Israel to dwell in their tents.

Yet they tempted and provoked the most high God, and kept not his testimonies:

But turned back, and dealt unfaithfully like their fathers: they were turned aside like a deceitful bow.

For they provoked him to anger with their high places, and moved him to jealousy with their graven images.

When God heard this, he was wroth, and greatly abhorred Israel:

And delivered his strength into captivity, and his glory into the enemy’s hand.

He gave his people over also unto the sword; and was wroth with his inheritance.

The fire consumed their young men; and their maidens were not given to marriage.

Their priests fell by the sword; and their widows made no lamentation.

Then the Lord awaked as one out of sleep, and like a mighty man that shouteth by reason of wine.

And he smote his enemies in the hinder parts: he put them to a perpetual reproach.

Moreover he refused the tabernacle of Joseph, and chose not the tribe of Ephraim:

But chose the tribe of Judah, the mount Zion which he loved.

And he built his sanctuary like high palaces, like the earth which he hath established for ever.

He chose David also his servant, and took him from the sheepfolds:

From following the ewes great with young he brought him to feed Jacob his people, and Israel his inheritance.

So he fed them according to the integrity of his heart; and guided them by the skilfulness of his hands.

Psalm 78: 43-43, 53-72