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Ancient Rome Architecture Christendom Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (book) Destruction of Greco-Roman world Emperor Julian Evil Libanius

Darkening Age, 12

In chapter eight of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey wrote:
 
In Palmyra, what remains of the statue of Athena shows that one single, furious sword-blow had been enough to decapitate her. Though often one blow was not felt to be sufficient. In Germany, a statue of the goddess Minerva was smashed into six pieces. Her head has never been found. In France, a relief of Mithras was smashed into more than three hundred pieces.

Christian writers applauded such destruction—and egged their rulers on to greater acts of violence. One gleefully observed that the Christian emperors now ‘spit in the faces of dead idols, trample on the lawless rites of demons, and laugh at the old lies’. An infamous early text instructed emperors to wash away this ‘filth’ and ‘take away, yes, calmly take away… the adornments of the temples. Let the fire of the mint or the blaze of the smelters melt them down.’

This was nothing to be ashamed of. The first Commandment could not have been clearer. ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,’ it said. ‘Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them,’ it continued, ‘nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.’ The Greek and Roman temples, no matter how ancient or beautiful, were the homes of false gods and they had to be destroyed. This was not vandalism: it was God’s will. The good Christian had a duty to do nothing less.

The speed with which toleration slipped into intolerance and then downright suppression shocked non-Christian observer. The emperor Julian later acerbically observed that, while Constantine robbed the temples his sons overthrew them. In AD 356, it became illegal—on pain of death—to worship images. The law adopted a tone of hitherto unseen aggression. ‘Pagans’ began to be described as ‘madmen’ whose beliefs must be ‘completely eradicated’…

But Julian’s reign was brief and, just half a century after Constantine, it was already too late to reverse the attrition that had begun. Julian, one Christian would tell his flock, was ‘but a cloud which will speedily be dispersed’. He was right.

By the time Theophilus attacked Serapis the laws were on his side. But many other Christians were so keen to attack the demonic temples that they didn’t wait for legal approval. Decades before the laws of the land permitted them to, zealous Christians began to indulge in acts of violent vandalism against their ‘pagan’ neighbours…

Libanius, the Greek orator from Antioch, was revolted by the destruction that he witnessed. ‘These people,’ he wrote, ‘hasten to attack the temples with sticks and stones and bars of iron, and in some cases, disdaining these, with hands and feet. Then utter desolation follows, with the stripping of roofs, demolition of walls, the tearing down of statues, and the overthrow of altars, and the priests must either keep quiet or die… So they sweep across the countryside like rivers in spate.’

Libanius spoke elegiacally of a huge temple on the frontier with Persia, a magnificent building with a beautiful ceiling, in whose cool shadows had stood numerous statues. Now, he said, ‘it is vanished and gone, to the grief of those who had seen it’—and the grief of those who now never would. This temple had been so striking, he said, that there were even those who argued that it was as great as the temple of Serapis—which, he added with an irony not lost on later historians, ‘I pray may never suffer the same fate.’

Not only were the monks vulgar, stinking, ill-educated and violent they were also, said their critics, phoneys. They pretended to adopt lives of austere self-denial but actually they were no better than drunken thugs, a black-robed tribe ‘who eat more than elephants and, by the quantities of drink they consume, weary those that accompany their drinking with the singing of hymns’…

Then, in 399, a new and more terrible law came. It was announced that ‘if there should be any temples in the country districts, they shall be torn down without disturbance or tumult. For when they are torn down and removed, the material basis for all superstition will be destroyed.’

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Alexandria Architecture Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (book) Destruction of Greco-Roman world Evil Library of Alexandria

Darkening Age, 9


Saint Apollonia destroys a Greco-Roman sculpture, Giovanni d’Alemagna, c. 1442-1445.
The saint calmly ascends to the ‘idol’, hammer in hand. Hagiographies frequently praised the flair with which saints smashed ancient temples and centuries-old statues.
In ‘The Most Magnificent Building in the World’, chapter six of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey wrote:
 
At the end of the first century of Christian rule, the Colosseum still dominated Rome and the Parthenon towered above Athens. Yet when writers of this period discuss architecture, these aren’t the buildings that impress them. Instead, their admiration is drawn by another structure in Egypt. This building was so fabulous that writers in the ancient world struggled to find ways to convey its beauty. ‘Its splendour is such that mere words can only do it an injustice,’ wrote the historian Ammianus Marcellinus. It was, another writer thought, ‘one of the most unique and uncommon sights in the world. For nowhere else on earth can one find such a building.’ Its great halls, its columns, its astonishing statues and its art all made it, outside Rome, ‘the most magnificent building in the whole world’. Everyone had heard of it.
No one has heard of it now. While tourists still toil up to the Parthenon, or look in awe at the Colosseum, outside academia few people know of the temple of Serapis. That is because in AD 392 a bishop, supported by a band of fanatical Christians, reduced it to rubble.
It is easy to see why this temple would have attracted the Christians’ attention. Standing at the top of a hundred or more marble steps, it had once towered over the startling white marble streets below, an object to incite not only wonder but envy. While Christians of the time crammed into insufficient numbers of small, cramped churches, this was a vast—and vastly superior—monument to the old gods. It was one of the first buildings you noticed as you sailed towards Alexandria, its roof looming above the others, and one that you were unlikely to forget.
Walk on and, just behind the porticoes of the inner court, you would have found yourself in a vast library—the remnants of the Great Library of Alexandria itself. The library’s collection was now stored here, within the temple precinct, for safekeeping. This had been the world’s first public library; and its holdings had, at its height, been staggering, running into hundreds of thousands of volumes. Like the city itself, the collection had taken several knocks over the years, but extensive collections remained.
Like all statues of this size, Serapis was made of a wooden structure overlaid with precious materials: the god’s profile was made of glowing white ivory; his enormous limbs were draped in robes of metal—very probably gold. The statue was so huge that his great hands almost touched either side of the room…
To the new generation of Christian clerics, however, Serapis was not a wonder of art; or a much-loved local god. Serapis was a demon… Fierce words—but Christians had been fulminating in this way for decades and polytheists had been able to ignore them. But the world was changing. It was now eighty years since a Christian had first sat on the throne of Rome and in the intervening decades the religion of the Lamb had taken an increasingly bullish attitude to all those who refused it…
One day, early in AD 392, a large crowd of Christians started to mass outside the temple, with Theophilus at its head. And then, to the distress of watching Alexandrians, this crowd had surged up the steps, into the sacred precinct and burst into the most beautiful building in the world.
And then they began to destroy it.
Theophilus’s righteous followers began to tear at those famous artworks, the lifelike statues and the gold-plated walls. There was a moment’s hesitation when they came to the massive statue of the god: rumour had it that if Serapis was harmed then the sky would fall in. Theophilus ordered a soldier to take his axe and hit it. The soldier struck Serapis’s face with a double-headed axe. The god’s great ivory profile, blackened by centuries of smoke, shattered.
The watching Christians roared with delight and then, emboldened, surged round to complete the job. Serapis’s head was wrenched from its neck; the feet and hands were chopped off with axes, dragged apart with ropes, then, for good measure, burned.
As one delighted Christian chronicler put it, the ‘decrepit, dotard’ Serapis ‘was burned to ashes before the eyes of the Alexandria which had worshipped him’. The giant torso of the god was saved for a more public humiliation: it was taken into the amphitheatre and burned in front of a great crowd. ‘And that,’ as our chronicler notes with satisfaction, ‘was the end of the vain superstition and ancient error of Serapis.’
A little later, a church housing the relics of St John the Baptist was built on the temple’s ruins, a final insult to the god—and to architecture. It was, naturally, an inferior structure. According to later Christian chronicles, this was a victory. According to a non-Christian account, it was a tragedy…
Nothing was left. Christians took apart the temple’s very stones, toppling the immense marble columns, causing the walls themselves to collapse. The entire sanctuary was demolished with astonishing rapidity; the greatest building in the world was ‘scattered to the winds’. [1]
The tens of thousands of books, the remnants of the greatest library in the world, were all lost, never to reappear…
Far more than a temple had gone. As the news of the destruction spread across the empire, something of the spirit of the old culture died too. As one Greek professor wrote in despair: ‘The dead used to leave the city alive behind them, but we living now carry the city to her grave.’
_________
[1] Note of the Ed.: See the remains today of the Serapeum of Alexandria: here.

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Architecture Catholic Church Charles Martel Christendom Destruction of Greco-Roman world Evil Ferdinand Bardamu Indo-European heritage Islamization of Europe New Testament Theology

Why Europeans must reject Christianity, 15

by Ferdinand Bardamu

 
What has Christianity done for Europe?
Christianity is a violent, destructive, murderous cult. It is dangerous for the following reasons: 1.) the religion promotes the survival of the sick, the weak and the stupid at the expense of good racial hygiene. This drastically lowers population IQ and capacity for civilizational attainment, and; 2.) the cult relies on blind faith instead of rational persuasion, which has resulted in long periods of widespread chaos and bloodshed, especially during the Christianization of Europe. These dangers were even noticed by contemporary pagan writers, who immediately recognized the threat a triumphant Christianity would pose to the survival of Western culture.
Christianity never “civilized” or “domesticated” Europeans. On the contrary, Europeans were forced to endure a Neolithic existence when Christians were at the apogee of their power and influence. The church sent men of genius to monasteries or had them consecrated to the priesthood. This prevented them from passing on their genes, a significant dysgenic effect that lowered the collective European IQ. Only the pagan science and reason of classical antiquity could re-domesticate Europeans after 500 years of total intellectual darkness.
The church successfully defended Europe from invasion, argue some apologists, but nothing could be further from the truth. Charles Martel’s confiscation of church property to defend Europe from Moslem intruders was met with significant ecclesiastical opposition. If the church had succeeded in withholding the necessary funds, all Europe would have been reduced to a province of the Umayyad caliphate. Nevertheless, Martel was unable to pursue the Saracens across the Pyrenees and dislodge them from their Andalusian stronghold. The Moslems would continue their occupation of the Iberian Peninsula for 800 years, until their final expulsion by Ferdinand and Isabella in the late 15th century.
Southwestern France and Italy were periodically raided and sometimes controlled by Moslem invaders. The emirate of Sicily endured for over two centuries. Even after Norman conquest, a significant Moslem presence remained on the island. The Moslems of Sicily were finally expelled by the middle of the 13th century. The crusades to retake the Holy Land from the Saracens (1095-1291), a series of large-scale military operations under the joint leadership of papacy and feudal aristocracy, failed to achieve its primary objective. In 1204, Christian crusaders sacked Constantinople in an orgy of rape, pillage and murder. The crusaders caused so much damage that the Byzantines were unable to resist their Ottoman conquerors in 1453.
Christianity provided no adequate defense of Europe. The church only did enough to maintain herself as a viable institution. In the process, the church weakened Europe, making her ripe for conquest by the Umayyad and Ottoman caliphates.
Apologists tentatively acknowledge that although Christianity hindered scientific and technological progress, it still made “contributions” to fields as diverse as architecture and philosophy. On closer examination, these “contributions” are neither “Christian” nor worthy of being considered “contributions.” The great churches of the Middle Ages are frequently trotted out, but these have their origin in Roman building methods. The dome, the arch and the vault, the typical features of the medieval Romanesque style of architecture are all borrowed from the imperial Roman architecture of pre-Christian times. The basic architectural plan of most medieval churches is the Roman basilica, a public building reserved for official purposes. Even the Gothic style that supplanted Romanesque still employed architectural features of Roman origin. The ribbed vaulting that was typical of Gothic architecture was originally used in Vespasian’s Roman colosseum and by Hadrian in the construction of his Tibertine villa.
While acknowledging Romanesque as an “accomplishment,” the Christian religionist will conveniently ignore the almost total disappearance of Roman building methods from western Europe for almost 300 years. This was a direct result of the church’s active suppression of Western scientific and technical knowledge. From the completion of Theodoric’s mausoleum in Ravenna to the consecration of Aachen in 805, nothing of monumental significance was built in western Europe. During the intervening period, Europeans, like their Neolithic ancestors, had returned to the use of perishable materials for use in building.
Apologists for Christianity will mention Aquinas and scholasticism as the highpoints of not only medieval, but European intellectual development, even though Aquinas set European scientific and technological progress back by hundreds of years. Scholasticism was an object of ridicule and mockery during the Renaissance. Religionists mention the Christian “contribution” of the university, oblivious to the many institutions of higher learning that existed and even flourished in the ancient world. The first universities taught scholasticism, so they were the frontline in the Christian war against the pagan values of intellectual curiosity, love of progress for its own sake and empirical rationality.
In the Christian religious mind, science and technology are of Christian origin because the men doing the discovering and inventing during the Scientific Revolution were nominal Christians, like Galileo and Newton. This argument is just as absurd as arguing that the Greek invention of logic, rhetoric and mathematics were the result of Greek pagan theological beliefs because Aristotle and other ancient scientists and philosophers were pagans. No, these men were “Christians” because public avowals of atheism were dangerous in an age where even the most innocuous theological speculation could smear reputations and destroy careers. It is a glowing tribute to the courage and honesty of these men that they were able to abandon Christianity’s reliance on blind faith, often in the face of public censure, and consciously re-embrace the pagan epistemic values that produced the “Greek miracle” 2000 years before the Scientific Revolution.
Christian religionists claim that the New Testament, a collection of childish scribblings penned by semi-literate barbarians, is a great contribution to Western civilization. As has been pointed out for generations, even by other Christian religionists, the work is notorious for its use of bad grammar and unrefined literary style. Much of it was composed by Jews who were not even fluent in koine Greek. Overall, the New Testament is an inferior production compared to the meanest writers of Attic prose. Even St. Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate, expressed contempt for the crude, unsophisticated literary style of the Bible. He preferred the elegant Latin of Cicero instead.
What has Christianity contributed to Europe? The answer is nothing! No art, culture, architectural monuments, science or technology. Christianity was a massive waste of European intellectual and physical potential. Furthermore, Christianity almost destroyed Europe.
The church discarded over 99% of ancient literature, including works on science, mathematics, philosophy, engineering and architecture. This was the largest campaign of literary censorship and suppression in history, an act of cultural and physical genocide that nearly severed medieval Europe from the great achievements of classical antiquity.
This was cultural genocide because the church nearly wiped out an entire civilization and culture; this was physical genocide because the church’s deliberate eradication of secular knowledge placed millions of lives in danger, unnecessarily subjecting them to the ravages of disease, war, famine and poverty.
Far from being largely benign, the Christian church is a power-mad religious mafia. It bears sole responsibility for perpetrating the greatest crimes in history against Europeans. How long shall the Christian church escape punishment for this criminal wrongdoing? No other religion has caused as much suffering and as much damage to Europe as this spiritual syphilis known as Christianity.

______ 卐 ______

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Ancient Rome Architecture Art Christendom Constantine Destruction of Greco-Roman world Emperor Julian Ferdinand Bardamu Indo-European heritage Theodosius I

Why Europeans must reject Christianity, 13

by Ferdinand Bardamu

 
Christianity: bringer of violence and bloodshed
Word of mouth is notoriously ineffective as a means of spreading religious propaganda. This explains why Christianity’s growth remained largely unspectacular until the early 4th century. Of course, the primary reason for the Christianization of the empire was the conversion of Constantine to the new religion. The influence of Christianity in the empire was continuously reinforced and strengthened by the imperially coercive legislation of his successors. Christianization also sanctioned acts of religious violence against pagans, which contributed significantly to the religion’s spectacular growth in numbers and influence. Christianity unleashed a wave of violence that nearly drowned Europe in an ocean of blood. Without Constantine, and the religious violence of his successors, Christianity would have remained just another competing religion in the provincial backwaters of the empire, like Mithraism or the Eleusinian Mysteries.
The imperial policy of Christianization was further aided by the religion’s intrinsic advantages over rival philosophical and religious belief systems, making it more palatable to the ignorant masses. This facilitated its rapid spread across the empire until, by the reign of Theodosius in the late 4th century, most urban areas were predominantly Christian. These advantages included the egalitarian ethos of the Christian church. Unlike Mithraism, which was elitist, Christianity accepted all potential recruits, regardless of ethno-linguistic or socio-economic difference. The Christians of the first three centuries practiced a form of primitive communism. This attracted the chronically indigent, as well as freeloaders. Another advantage was the child-like simplicity of Christian doctrine.
The Crisis of the 3rd century, where rival claimants fought each other for the title of Caesar, was an internecine conflict lasting for decades. It produced widespread economic instability and civil unrest. This disruption of daily life encouraged men and women to seek refuge in the mystery religions, but also Christianity, which offered easy answers in an increasingly chaotic and ugly world. The Christian religion promised life everlasting to those who successfully endured tribulation on earth.
Passage of the edict of Milan in 313 meant that Christians would go from being a persecuted minority to a persecuting majority. Although persecution of religious dissidents had occurred before Constantine, such events were comparatively rare. Roman “persecution” of Christianity was mild and sporadic. It was not even religious in nature, but political; Christians refused to swear loyalty to the state by offering the pinch of incense to the emperor’s genius. Christians were not so much persecuted as they were subjected to Roman police action for disobeying the laws of the land. In contrast, Christian persecution of pagans and heretics was entirely motivated by religious hatred. It combined the authoritarian anti-pagan legislation of the emperors with the bigotry of the clergy and the violence of the Christian mob.
The first repressive laws against paganism were passed by Constantine. In 331, he issued an edict that legalized the seizure of temple property. This was used to enrich church coffers and adorn his city of Constantinople. He redirected municipal funds from the curiae to the imperial treasury. The curiae used these funds for the construction and renovation of temples, as well as for pagan banquets, processions and festivals. The redirection of municipal funds significantly diminished the influence of paganism in the public sphere. Constantine also showed preference for Christians when considering prospective candidates for government posts. For the first time in the empire’s history, conversion to Christianity was considered an attractive proposition.
Pagan temples and statuary were first vandalized and destroyed under Constantine. Christians believed that this first wave of iconoclasm was in fulfillment of scriptural command: “Ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves; . . . for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God” (Exod. 34.13f). The earliest Christian iconoclasm included the partial destruction of a Cilician temple of Asklepios and the destruction of temples to Aphrodite in Phoenicia (ca. 326 AD).
Constantine’s sons, Constans and Constantius II, followed in their father’s footsteps. In 341, Constans issued an edict banning animal sacrifice. In 346, Constans and Constantius II passed a law ordering the closure of all temples. These emperors were egged on by the Christian fanatic Firmicus Maternus who, in an exhortation addressed to both emperors in 346, called for the “annihilation of idolatry and the destruction of profane temples.” The fact that pagans continued to occupy important posts in the imperial administration made it difficult to legislate the active destruction of temples, statuary and inscriptions without alienating a large segment of the empire’s population. Nevertheless, Constantine’s sons turned a blind eye to private acts of Christian vandalism and desecration.
After the death of Constantius II, Julian was made emperor in 361. Having succumbed to the influence of pagan tutors in his youth, he developed a deep hatred for the “Galilean madness.” Accession to the throne allowed him to announce his conversion to Hellenism without fear of retribution. Julian set about reversing the anti-pagan legislation first enacted by his uncle. He re-opened the temples, restored their funding and returned confiscated goods; he renovated temples that had been damaged by Christian vandals; he repealed the laws against sacrifice and barred Christians from teaching the classics. Julian’s revival of pagan religious practice was cut short in 363, when he was killed in battle against the Persian Sassanids.
His successor Jovian revoked Julian’s edicts and re-established Christianity as most favored religion in the empire. The emperors who came after Jovian were too occupied with barbarian invasion to be concerned with internal religious squabbles; it was more expedient to simply uphold the toleration imposed on pagans and Christians alike by the Edict of Milan. Anti-pagan conflict again came to the forefront with Gratian. In 382 he angered pagans by removing the altar of Victory from the Senate. In the same year, Gratian issued a decree that ended all subsidies to the pagan cults, including priesthoods such as the Vestal Virgins. He further alienated pagans by repudiating the insignia of the pontifex maximus.
In 389, Theodosius began his all-out war on the old Roman state religion by abolishing the pagan holidays. According to the emperor’s decrees, paganism was a form of “natural insanity and stubborn insolence” difficult to root out, despite the terrors of the law and threats of exile. This was followed by more repressive legislation in 391, which re-instated the ban on sacrifice, banned visitation of pagan sanctuaries and temples, ended imperial subsidies to the pagan cults, disbanded the Vestal Virgins and criminalized apostasy. He refused to return the altar of Victory to the Senate house, in defiance of pagan demands. Anyone caught performing animal sacrifice or haruspicy was to be arrested and put to death. In the same year, the Serapeum, a massive temple complex housing the Great Library of Alexandria, was destroyed by a mob of Christian fanatics. This act of Christian vandalism was a great psychological blow to the pagan establishment.
Pagans, dissatisfied with the imperially-sponsored cultural revolution that threatened to annihilate Rome’s ancestral traditions, rallied around the usurper Eugenius. He was declared emperor by the Frankish warlord Arbogast in 392. A nominal Christian, Eugenius was sympathetic to the plight of pagans in the empire and harbored a certain nostalgia for pre-Christian Rome. He restored the imperial subsidies to the pagan cults and returned the altar of Victory to the Senate. This angered Theodosius, emperor in the east. In 394, Theodosius invaded the west and defeated Eugenius at the battle of Frigidus in Slovenia. This ended the last serious pagan challenge to the establishment of Christianity as official religion of the empire.
Apologists for Christianity argue that imperial anti-pagan legislation was more rhetoric than reality; their enforcement would have been difficult in the absence of a modern police state apparatus. This objection is contradicted by archaeological and epigraphic evidence. First, based on stratigraphic analysis of urban temples, cult activity had virtually ceased by the year 400, after passage of the Theodosian decrees. Second, temple construction and renovation declined significantly under the Christian emperors. In Africa and Cyrenaica, temple construction and renovation inscriptions are far more common under the first Tetrarchy than the Constantinian dynasty, when pagans still constituted a significant majority of the empire’s citizens. By the end of the 4th century, the authoritarian legislation of the Christian emperors had seriously undermined the strength and vitality of the old polytheistic cults.
The emperors did not stop with the closure of pagan religious sites. In 435 AD, a triumphant Theodosius II passed an edict ordering the destruction of all pagan shrines and temples across the empire. He even decreed the death penalty for Christian magistrates who failed to enforce the edict. The Code Justinian, issued between 529 to 534, prescribes the death penalty for public observance of Hellenic rites and rituals; known pagans were to seek instruction in the Christian faith or risk property confiscation; their children were to be seized by officials of the state and forcibly converted to the Christian religion.
Imperially mandated closure of all urban temples resulted in the privatization of polytheistic worship. This further exacerbated the decline of the pagan religious cults because of the object-dependent nature of ritual practice, which could not be fully realized in the absence of statuary, processions, festivals, lavish banquets and monumental building. In urban areas, imperial legislation was clearly effective. This was ruthlessly enforced by professional Christians and zealous magistrates, who used the additional muscle of the Roman army to get their own way, especially when preaching and public example failed.
Pagan rites and rituals were still observed at rural sanctuaries and temples for some time after the closure of urban centers of worship. These remained off the beaten track, so to speak, and were harder to shut down.
Churchmen like the fiery John Chrysostom, cognizant of this fact, exhorted the rich landowning class of the east to convert the heathen on their country estates. Those who allowed pagan worship on their rural properties were just as guilty of violating imperial anti-pagan legislation as the pagans themselves. Itinerant Christian evangelists, like Martin of Tours, fanned out across the countryside, winning souls for Christ through a campaign of intimidation, harassment and violence. In the end, aggressive evangelism, privatization of pagan religious practice and social marginalization ensured the death of paganism in rural areas.
Christianization of the empire was complete by 600 AD, although it is unclear to what extent Christ was considered just another deity to be worshipped alongside the old pagan gods.

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Architecture Autobiography Catholic Church Christendom Hate Protestantism

La Santa Furia

Finally, La Santa Furia, the oratorio-opera of my late father, was premiered this Friday, and also today, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes.

La Santa Furia is a tribute to the Dominican Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas. One of the main prelates of the order of the Dominicans crossed the Atlantic, from Rome, to attend the premiere.

After today’s event, at the private banquet with over fifty select guests, I sat at a table with four Catholic priests who attended the opera. Never in my life had I shared the table with so many priests.

About La Santa Furia I have already written a bit on this blog (see e.g.: here) and will expand my criticism in a book. For the moment I would just like to respond to an email that came to me today from a most traditional Christian:

Cesar,

On your blog, you fantasise about burning all Churches to the ground. Did you ever hear Émile Zola’s quote on the issue? ‘Civilisation will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest’.

Of course, I, as a pre-Conciliar Roman Catholic, disagree with you, here. Do we really want to burn down Saint Peter’s—designed by Freemasons Bernini and Michelangelo? Its Egyptian Obelisk? Domed Roof? Do we really want to burn down Pisa Cathedral and other sublime architectural triumphs?

The Notre Dame in Paris was built by Templars. It has the twin towers, of Joachim and Boaz, representing the balance of hatred and love; black and white. Again, this is architecture that contradicts the ‘love your enemies’ slave morality of the Gospels.

A ‘bonfire of the vanities’ would be welcomed by Biblicists and puritans. The Bible—promoting mediocrity in everything—wants you to pray in your closet/inner room. It’s funny that in the KJV, Jesus Christ tells you to go into the closet! The KJV was translated by homosexuals.

I follow the fundamentalist protestants quite closely, and a lot of them only believe in house churches: worshipping Adonai and Messiah at home. Burning a lot of these crypto-Masonic and crypto-druidic edifices would be to play into their hands.

I agree with you: everything derived from Judaism, in Catholicism, needs to be ruthlessly expunged. In the Marcionite version of the myth of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, He shows up, miraculously; in Palestine, condemns Jews, calls for their extermination, and then ascends to Heaven. Crucifixion optional.

Unfortunately, the cause of Marcion did not prevail within the Catholic Church.
C.

Playing into the hands of the Protestants? Hardly: In my little Utopia no Protestant would remain alive.

As to the buildings, even before receiving this letter I had thought about the subject. I would respect the cathedrals, although I would order not to repair them throughout the millenary Reich. With time they would collapse by themselves, in an era when there is no longer any Christian on the face of the Earth.

In the case of St. Peter’s Basilica things are very different. The third article of Nietzsche’s Law against Christianity must be fulfilled: ‘The execrable location where Christianity brooded over its basilisk eggs should be razed to the ground and, being the infamous spot on earth, it should be the horror of all posterity…’

At this point it is necessary to confess something to my readers.

Several times I have said on this site that Day of Wrath is just a selection of Hojas Susurrantes and ¿Me Ayudarás? What I have not clarified with enough emphasis is that these last two books are basically autobiographical, where I tell a family tragedy in which Christianity played a central role. From that family drama, the selection I made for Day of Wrath astutely eluded the tragic narrative. The internet is not the place to tell personal tragedies. (Incidentally, La Santa Furia translated into English reads Holy Wrath.)

The only thing I can say here is that I can only be vindicated with the absolute destruction of Christianity and those I call Neanderthals: something that could only happen posthumously, insofar as I do not have the philosopher’s stone.

But vindication is not only mine. The fate of the Aryan race is closely linked, in a negative way, to the religion of our parents.

Of the living men whose name every pro-white has heard, I only have met two of them personally, both in England. One of them, a traditional Catholic, was not long ago, along with other protesters, in the Jewish quarter of London to protest publicly.

I would never do such a thing. For me it is obvious that the white traitor is worse than the Jew, and that we should focus on the cause instead of the symptom. Without White betrayal there would be no Jews in power. This is even inferred from Rome vs. Judea, as well as in my comments on the Kriminalgeschichte translations. To paraphrase Codreanu, there would be no mosquitoes without the swamps of our sins. Superficially, white nationalists focus on mosquitoes. This site focuses on the swamp.

So instead of going to protest a kike neighbourhood, if I did activism I would do a demonstration never done before in the West. I would do picketing outside the Vatican, or the most important churches in Europe and America, with slogans like Nietzsche’s ‘Transvaluation of all values!’ Or Zola’s quoted above: ‘…until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest!’

No swamps, no mosquitoes. If whites abandoned Christian ethics the JQ would be resolved overnight. In other words: if the tens of thousands of white nationalists were not like Franklin Ryckaert but shared the santa furia of this blog, the non-gentiles would already be trembling.

Obviously I did not say any of these things during today’s meal sitting next to so many priests, including the Dominican who made a special trip from Rome.

I behaved like a saint.

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Ancient Rome Arcadius (Christian Roman emperor) Architecture Art Beauty Christendom Degeneracy Destruction of Greco-Roman world Evil Evropa Soberana (webzine) Goths Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site) Temple of Artemis

Apocalypse for whites • XXXV

by Evropa Soberana

The destruction of the Greco-Roman World – 3

(Fifth century)

401
A crowd of Christians lynched the Hellenists in Carthage, destroying temples and idols. In Gaza, the Hellenists are lynched at the request of Bishop Porphyry, who also orders the destruction of the nine temples still standing in the city. That same year, the 15th Council of Chalcedon commands the excommunication—even after their deaths!—of Christians who keep good relationships with their Hellenist relatives.
St. John Chrysostom, ‘Holy and Father of the Church’, raises funds with the help of rich, boring, idle and resentful Christian women against the patriarchal Roman worship of perfection and war (such women are fascinated by the sickly Christian sadomasochism). Thus financed, he carries out a work of demolition of Greek temples. Thanks to John Chrysostom, the ancient temple of Artemis in Ephesus is demolished.

The immense temple of Artemis in Ephesus was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and had been built in the 6th century BCE over an area considered sacred since, at least, the Bronze Age. Its construction took 120 years and it could be said that it was perfectly comparable to a cathedral. The Christians end the existence of this
almost millennial building.

406-407
Emperor Arcadius returns to launch a decree in which he prohibits all non-Christian cults, which means that at this point so-called ‘paganism’ persists. A group of foederati tribes (federated to Rome, residents within its borders and faithful defenders of the empire), the Vandals, the Swabians and the Alans (the latter of Iranian origin, not Germanic) invaded France, destined for Spain.
408
Emperor Honorius of the Western Empire and Emperor Arcadius of the Eastern Empire ordered together that all Greco-Roman sculptures be destroyed. There are again destructions of temples, massacres and fires of their writings. Around this time, the famous African St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, ‘Saint, Father and Doctor of the Church’ massacred hundreds of adepts of the old ways in Calama, Algeria. (It will not be long before he died at the hands of the Vandals, a Germanic people that doesn’t walk around nonsense.) Augustine also established the persecution of judges who show mercy to the ‘idolaters’.
This same year of 408 the emperor Arcadius dies, being succeeded by the Emperor Theodosius II. To get an idea of the fanaticism, dementia and moral quality of this abortive subhuman, suffice it to say that he ordered children to be executed for playing with pieces of destroyed Greco-Roman statues. According to the same Christian historians, Theodosius II ‘meticulously followed the Christian teachings’.

Emperor Theodosius II. Judging by the quality of the portrait, the
empire was not in good shape under his reign, or perhaps
it is that the old sculptors had been killed.

While all this takes place, this same year of 408 a Roman chief of Germanic origin who had courageously defended the borders of the empire, Stilicho the vandal, is executed by a party of decadent Romans envious of his triumphs. After his unjust death, this party gives a sort of coup d’état and the women and children—we are talking about a minimum of 60,000 people—of the German foederati are massacred throughout Italy by the Christians. After this cowardly act the fathers and husbands of these families (30,000 men who had been faithful soldiers of Rome) went over the ranks of the Visigothic king Alaric, devastated with rage and calling for revenge against the murderers.
409
The Roman Empire collapses in irremissibly crisis, in filthy corruption and overwhelmed by the Germans. But the powerful Christians are in a hurry to eradicate the Greco-Roman legacy before the Germans discover it—lest the Germanised empire becomes Greece-Rome II! That same year, Swabians, Vandals and Alans cross the Pyrenees and invade Spain.
410
An army of Visigoths and other German allies loot Rome itself, continuing later in the south of France, Spain and Africa. From there, they try to dominate the Mediterranean.

Categories
Ancient Rome Architecture Art Aryan beauty Christendom Constantine Ethnic cleansing Evropa Soberana (webzine) Hadrian Jerusalem Judaism Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site) Slavery

Apocalypse for whites • XXIII

by Evropa Soberana

 
Consequences of the Palestinian revolt
The revolt had paramount consequences both for Rome and for Jewry. To begin with, the Roman losses were such that, in addition to Hadrian’s refusing to say in the military offices to the Senate that everything was going well, he was the only Roman leader in history who, after a great victory, refused to return to Rome celebrating a triumph. Titus Vespasianus had only rejected a crown of laurels in his day; Hadrian took it to the next step.
However, if the Roman losses were considerable, the Jewish losses were huge. According to Cassius Dio, 580,000 Jews were killed, 50 cities and 985 Jewish villages were completely destroyed—and they were not rebuilt—and hundreds of thousands of Jews sold as slaves throughout the Empire.
It is not surprising that the Talmud called this process ‘the war of extermination’, and that it even made outrageous statements to mythologize the conflict, such as ‘Sixteen million Jews were wrapped in parchments and burned alive by the Romans’ (Gittin, 58-A). The Jews, in any case, were definitively deprived of the will to rise against Rome by force of arms. On the other hand the Jewish threat, which had caused so many headaches to Rome, was going to increase throughout the Mediterranean due to the greater extension of the Diaspora and the ideal breeding ground that this meant for the expansion of another anti-Roman rebellion: Christianity.
The conditions of the defeat imposed on the Jews were even harsher than the triumph of Titus in the year 70. As measures against the Jewish religion, Hadrian prohibited the Jewish courts, the meetings in synagogues, the Jewish calendar, the study of the religious writings and Judaism itself as a religion! He executed numerous rabbis and burned masses of sacred scrolls at a ceremony on the Temple Mount. He tried to eradicate the very Jewish identity and Judaism itself, sending them into exile, enslaving them and dispersing them away from Judea. This persecution against all forms of Jewish religiosity, including Christianity, would continue until the death of the emperor in 138.
Furthermore, in another attempt to obliterate Jewish identity and dismantle its centre of power, the eastern provinces were restructured, forming three Syrian provinces: Syria Palestina (named in honour of the Philistines: a people of European origin and enemies of Jewry who had inhabited the area); Phoenicia under Roman rule and Coele-Syria.
In the new territorial order decreed by Hadrian, Judea became Syria Palestina, and Jerusalem was turned into Aelia Capitolina: a Greek and Roman city in which the Jews were proscribed. The three Syrias form the Levant: an extremely active and conflictive strip in history, to this day. From there came the Neolithic, the Phoenicians, Judaism and Christianity, and practically all the civilizations of antiquity, creating an ethnic chaos that always ended up in conflicts. Centuries later, these areas would see the establishment of European Crusader States.
As for the city of Jerusalem, Hadrian carried out with it the plans that had unleashed the revolt: the Jewish capital was demolished and destroyed, and the Romans ploughed over the ruins to symbolize its ‘purification’ and its return to the earth. Hadrian finally built the projected Aelia Capitolina over the ruins, introducing a new urban planning, so that even today the old city of Jerusalem coincides with the one built by the Romans.

In the centre of the city a forum was established, which contained a temple dedicated to Venus. In the place of the temple Hadrian had two statues erected, one of Jupiter and another of himself, although he respected the Wailing Wall.
Also, next to Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified, Hadrian placed a statue of Aphrodite. This was intended to symbolize the triumph of Rome over Orthodox Judaism and over Christianity, considered a Jewish sect like so many: another sect that in Rome was persecuted without distinguishing it from official Judaism. For the Greeks and Romans, the statues of their gods were representatives of the divine, solar, luminous and Olympic spirit on earth, while for the Jews, including the Christians, nothing stirred their stomach more than a naked, strong statue, beautiful, of Nordic features and invincible aspect.

To top off the de-Judaization of the city, Hadrian prohibited any Jew from settling in Aelia Capitolina, on pain of death. (This law would only be revoked two centuries later by Constantine, the first Christian emperor.)

Categories
Ancient Rome Architecture Civil war Evropa Soberana (webzine) Jerusalem Josephus Judaism Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site) Vespasian and Titus

Apocalypse for whites • XVIII

by Evropa Soberana

 
Siege and fall of Jerusalem: the destruction of the Second Temple
That same year, 68, Nero was killed in Rome and a civil war broke out. The whole Roman Empire was in check. On the one hand, the numerous Jewish masses, in full boiling mode, challenged the Roman power in Judea and on the other, they did it in the bosom of Rome itself. If the Roman power in the East faltered, the Parthians would have been able to take advantage quickly to conquer Asia Minor and fortify themselves in the area, which would have been a huge catastrophe for Rome.
The government was staggering gently, but Vespasian returned to Rome and fought against Vitellius, who claimed to be Nero’s successor. After defeating the fat Vitellius, Vespasian was named emperor and entrusted his 26-year-old son Titus with the military operations of repression and the siege of the Jewish capital.
Titus surrounded Jerusalem with the four legions, cutting off supplies of water and food. Also, he increased the pressures on the needs of the city by allowing the pilgrims to enter to celebrate the Passover and then preventing them from leaving.

Statue of Titus modelled after the Doryphoros of Polykleitos, 79-81 CE, Vatican Museum. As can be seen, an anti-Hellenist Pope ordered
this and many other Greco-Roman statues to be ‘castrated’
centuries after they were sculpted.

In besieged Jerusalem with famine and epidemics, thousands and thousands of lives were claimed. The Jews who constituted the hard core of the rebellion—the Zealots and the Sicarii—threw down the wall the pacifists or the ‘counter-revolutionaries’ suspected of not communing with the Zionist cause, or of seeking an understanding with Rome to obtain favourable conditions for their people. According to some passages of the very Talmud, the Sicarii and Zealots (leaders such as Menahem ben Ya’ir, Eleazar ben Ya’ir, and Simon Bar Giora) came to commit atrocities against the Jewish civilian population, even preventing them from receiving food, to force them to be obedient and commit to the cause.
The defenders that constituted the active element of the resistance must have been about 60,000 men. They were divided into: the Zealots under the command of Eleazar ben Simon who occupied the Antonia Fortress and the Temple; the Sicarii under the command of Bar Giora, centered in the high city; and the Idumeans and others under John of Giscala. There was an obvious rivalry between the combatant factions, which erupted from time to time in open fighting. The population of the fortified Jerusalem exceeded three million people, of whom most were willing to fight, hoping that their god would lend a hand against the infidels.
While the Romans attacked again and again the fortifications with immense casualties on their part, the Zealots occasionally left the ramparts to make raids in which they managed to assassinate unsuspecting Roman soldiers.
After one of these actions, Titus, using very clear tactics of intimidation, made deploy at the foot of the city his entire army with the aim of intimidating the besieged, and appealed to Josephus, who yelled at the beleaguered a quite reasonable speech. Apparently, for the ears of the Jews dominated by their superstitions and surely awaiting any moment for an intervention of Yahweh, Josephus only managed to get them angrier and was shot with an arrow that wounded his arm.
Josephus descended from a long Sadduceean priestly line related to the Hasmonean dynasty of pre-Roman times. During the Great Jewish Revolt, the Sanhedrin made him governor of Galilee. After defending the Yodfat fortress for three weeks, he surrendered to the Romans who killed almost all of his men. Josephus, who was hid in a cistern with another Jew, was saved by demonstrating his great training and intelligence, and predicting to the general his future appointment as emperor of Rome. Later, he would accompany Titus and the Romans who used him to try to negotiate with the Sanhedrin.
After this, the Jews launched another sudden raid in which they almost succeeded in capturing Titus himself. The Romans were trained for frontal clashes with enemy armies; they were unaccustomed to the dirty fight of guerrilla warfare, in which the chivalry of combat is totally nullified. In May of 70 the Romans opened with their battering rams a breach in the third wall of Jerusalem, after which they also broke the second wall and penetrated like a swarm of wasps into the city.
Titus’s intention was to go to the Antonia Fortress, which was next to the Temple: a vital strategic point of the Jewish defence. But as soon as the Roman troops surpassed the second wall, they were engaged in violent street fighting against the Zealots and the civil population mobilized by them, and despite losing thousands of men to the superiority of legionary training in body to body combat they continued to attack, until they were ordered to retreat to the Temple to avoid useless casualties.
Josephus tried, once again unsuccessfully, to negotiate with the besieged authorities to prevent the bloodbath from continuing to grow. The Antonia Fortress had been built by Herod in honour of Mark Antony, who had supported him. The legions of Titus, faced with a building built with Roman efficiency, had to overcome a thousand calamities to take it.
Several times the Romans tried to break or climb the walls of the fortress without success. Finally, they managed to take it in an undercover assault, during which a small Roman party silently assassinated the Zealot guards who were sleeping. The fortress was then filled with legionaries. Although Titus planned to use the fortress as a base to breach the walls of the Temple and take it, a Roman soldier (according to Josephus, the Romans were enraged against the Jews for their treacherous attacks) threw a torch that set the wall on fire.
The Second Temple was levelled, and to top it all for the Jewish quarter, the flames quickly spread to other residential areas of Jerusalem. When they saw their Temple being burned many Jews committed suicide, thinking that Yahweh had become angry with them, had abandoned them and was sending them to a kind of apocalypse.
At this time the legions quickly crushed the resistance, while some Jews escaped through underground tunnels, and others, the more fanatical ones, barricaded themselves in the high city and Herod’s citadel. After building siege towers, what remained of the combative element was massacred by Roman pilum and gladius, and the city came under effective Roman control on September 8.
 
_________
Editor’s note: Once again, if white nationalists were historically self-conscious (as Jews are), every year they would celebrate this date.

Categories
Architecture Art Catholic Church Italy Martin Luther Paris Table talks (commercial translation)

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 5

the-real-hitler

 

Night of 21st-22nd July 1941

Similarities between Germany and Italy—Dante and Luther—Delightful Italian towns—Rome and Paris.

Luther had the merit of rising against the Pope and the organisation of the Church. It was the first of the great revolutions.

And thanks to his translation of the Bible, Luther replaced our dialects by the great German language! It’s remarkable to observe the resemblances between the evolution of Germany and that of Italy. The creators of the language, Dante and Luther, rose against the oecumenical desires of the papacy. Each of the two nations was led to unity, against the dynastic interests, by one man. They achieved their unity against the will of the Pope.

The Italian people’s musical sense, its liking for harmonious proportions, the beauty of its race! The Renaissance was the dawn of a new era, in which Aryan man found himself anew. There’s also our own past on Italian soil. A man who is indifferent to history is a man without hearing, without sight.

Such a man can live, of course—but what a life? The magic of Florence and Rome, of Ravenna, Siena, Perugia! Tuscany and Umbria, how lovely they are! The smallest palazzo in Florence or Rome is worth more than all Windsor Castle. If the English destroy anything in Florence or Rome, it will be a crime.

Giuseppe Zocchi - The Piazza della Signoria in Florence

I’ve seen Rome and Paris, and I must say that Paris, with the exception of the Arc de Triomphe, has nothing on the scale of the Coliseum, or the Castle of San Angelo, or St. Peter’s. These monuments, which are the product of a collective effort, have ceased to be on the scale of the individual. There’s something queer about the Paris buildings, whether it’s those bull’s-eye windows, so badly proportioned, or those gables that obliterate whole façades. If I compare the Pantheon in Rome with the Pantheon in Paris, what a poor building—and what sculptures! What I saw in Paris has disappeared from my memory: Rome really seized hold of me.

Naples, apart from the castle, might be anywhere in South America. But there’s always the courtyard of the royal palace. What nobility of proportions!

My dearest wish would be to be able to wander about in Italy as an unknown painter.

Categories
Architecture Berlin Frederick the Great Table talks (commercial translation) Third Reich

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 38

the-real-hitler

21st-22nd October 1941, night

SPECIAL GUEST: REICHSFUEHRER SS HIMMLER

The need for decorum—The face of new Berlin—Monuments that will last a thousand years.
 
 
We need an impressive décor, and we ought to create one. More and more we should give our festive occasions a style that will remain in the memory. In England, the traditional forms, which from a distance seem baroque, have retained their full youth. They remain vital because they represent customs that have been observed for a long time and without the slightest interruption.

I regard it as a necessity that our ceremonial should be developed during my lifetime. Otherwise one of my successors, if he has simple tastes, could quote me as his authority. Don’t speak to me of Prussian simplicity! We must remember how Frederick the Great took care of his State’s finances.

Berlin has the monuments of the days of Frederick the Great. Once upon a time it was the sand-pit of the Empire. Nowadays, Berlin is the capital of the Reich. Berlin’s misfortune is that it’s a city of very mixed population; which doesn’t make it ideal for the development of culture. In that respect, our last great monarch was Frederick-William IV. William I had no taste. Bismarck was blind in matters of art. William II had taste, but of the worst description.

What is ugly in Berlin, we shall suppress. Nothing will be too good for the beautification of Berlin. When one enters the Reich Chancellery, one should have the feeling that one is visiting the master of the world. One will arrive there along wide avenues containing the Triumphal Arch, the Pantheon of the Army, the Square of the People—things to take your breath away! It’s only thus that we shall succeed in eclipsing our only rival in the world, Rome. Let it be built on such a scale that St. Peter’s and its Square will seem like toys in comparison!

albert-speer-design

For material, we’ll use granite. The vestiges of the German past, which are found on the plains to the North, are scarcely time-worn. Granite will ensure that our monuments last for ever. In ten thousand years they’ll be still standing, just as they are, unless meanwhile the sea has again covered our plains.

If I try to gauge my work, I must consider, first of all, that I’ve contributed, in a world that had forgotten the notion, to the triumph of the idea of the primacy of race. Secondly, I’ve given German supremacy a solid cultural foundation. In fact, the power we to-day enjoy cannot be justified, in my eyes, except by the establishment and expansion of a mighty culture.

Berlin will one day be the capital of the world.