These days the World Chess Championship is being played between the world champion Magnus Carlsen (Norway) and the challenger Ian Nepomniachtchi (Russia), organised by FIDE (International Chess Federation). In the picture we see a red-haired chess Grandmaster commenting on the game played today, with pictures of the old Soviet-era world champions. Note that the USSR flag doesn’t bother the fans. As I have already said, the idol of my adolescence was Alexander Alekhine who had to flee, even as world champion, to Portugal after the defeat of Germany (Alekhine played several tournaments under the auspices of the Third Reich). We can already imagine a Nazi flag, with Alekhine’s picture, in a retrospective account of chess in the 1930s commented by the same red-haired master…
In The Human Side of Chess I said that I might play another FIDE tournament after sixteen years of not playing tournaments endorsed by the FIDE. But chess is no easy matter: one has to keep up to date, during preparation, with books on the latest opening analyses, where the authors often make use of computers. And it is true that I bought some books since I translated The Human Side of Chess into English. But those are not books that can be read like a novel. Rather, they resemble the maths books we had in junior and high school, when one had to do lots of exercises to assimilate mathematical concepts.
It seems to me a crime to spend so much time in chess when I should be acting as a priest of the fourteen words. I don’t mean I’m going to abandon the project of playing next year, but in an ideal world one would have to relegate the study of chess to a minimum. And this made me fantasize this morning what I would do if I had a special sponsor who would send me, for about a decade, enough money to order books to honour the sacred words.
My mind flew to the Open University of the UK (OU) books on the history degree, or rather, the classical studies degree. On this site I have translated the texts of a Spaniard on Sparta and Republican Rome. But formal study requires not only the basics of a BA (I wouldn’t have to formally subscribe to the OU, just order their books), but more specific studies about Sparta and Republican Rome.
Largely, studying chess is nothing more than a lack of funds, since one spends tons of time digesting a single chess book; it’s cheap to study this game at the amateur level. On the other hand, studying history is more expensive. Unlike the metaphor I have been using on this site, that of the three-eyed raven who in an inhospitable cave on the other side of the Wall can see the past paranormally, in the real world one needs not only the money to have a good collection of the Loeb Classical Library, but the time to read them, the security of sustenance and a roof over our heads. That is the only way to ponder what the Aryan race really was in the pre-Christian world.
There is something else. Recently I was thinking that, given that Christianity and secular neochristianity are axiologically the same, a neologism should be coined to encompass these two concepts in one. Upon reflection, I remembered the term ‘Jew obeyer’ which I first used on this site in 2018.
Indeed: Christians obey the precepts of the Jews who wrote the New Testament, and atheists indirectly obey them, albeit wrapped in the ideology born with the French Revolution (‘human rights’, etc.—cf. what Savitri said on anthropocentrism in today’s other post).
The only way for the priest of the 14 words to prove definitively that Christian ethics and the ethics of Western atheists are two sides of the same coin, is to steep himself in classical culture. In an ideal world I would inherit the fortune of a relatively wealthy man. With the proper funds it would no longer make sense to study, even a little, chess as long as I could ‘see’ the past through my classical studies.
After a few years of studying the classics, the question of whether there was anything like these ‘Jew obeyers’ among the Aryans of pre-Christian Europe would begin to dawn on me.
Presently, it seems to me that there was not: that there was nothing so much as an egalitarian hysteria where the last (the poor, the blacks, the trans) will be first and the first (the proud Aryans) will be last. My working hypothesis is that all this madness that has metastasised in our secular world today had, as its first cancerous cell, Mark’s gospel as we have been saying on this site when talking about Richard Carrier’s book. But we would have to be as sure of that as Carrier is now about Mediterranean religion in the first centuries of our era.
If I can’t do that formal study, it would be great if someone else could do it in the future. The premise that the ‘ethical’ system that is killing the Aryan originated from the mental virus of Christianity can be formally addressed by studying pre-Christian Europe.
I would like to use this post to thank a sponsor who sends me a fixed amount per month. If I had more such sponsors I could surely abandon the couple of chess books I am reading for a better cause.