web analytics

Tag: History

Categories
Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Psychohistory

Caligula, 3

Marble portrait bust of the emperor Gaius, known as Caligula, A.D. 37–41.

The West’s Darkest Hour isn’t a news site. But it is still difficult not to say at least a word about what has happened in the last few hours regarding Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny in Russia. Media misinformation is such that it is as difficult to know exactly what is happening this very day as it is to make a reliable biography of Caligula: both sources, some from the 1st century and some from the 21st century, are compromised by propaganda.

But back to our topic these days. José Manuel Roldán received his doctorate in 1968 and a few years later obtained the Chair of Ancient History at the University of Granada, and later that of Salamanca. His work has focused on the history of Rome. Despite his credentials, the Spanish historian is a normie. Unlike what William Pierce wrote in Who We Are, much of what we read in Calígula isn’t useful to us. Nevertheless, the book allows me to explain some very important issues.

If the conquest of Germania up to the Elbe was regarded by Caligula as an un-renounceable family legacy (his father wanted to avenge Rome for the defeat of Hermann), the positive image I had of him, after reading that sentence by Eduardo Velasco quoted in the first instalment of this series, immediately collapses. I confess that on this site I stopped quoting Gore Vidal’s novel Julian when I came across the pages in which Julian the Apostate fought against the Germans. (If we recall Who We Are, as quoted in The Fair Race, the pure Aryans were the Germans, not the 4th-century Romans.)

Calígula is reminding me of what Tom Holland said in Dominion: that, although he was an absolute fan of the Greco-Roman world, when he began to study it he noticed some barbaric customs. Pages 40-41 of Calígula for example describe the essential triumphal ceremony in Rome, where white bulls whose horns were gilded and entwined with garlands were then immolated. Caligula himself, at the age of five, went to one of these ceremonies in the triumphal chariot when his father Germanicus was honoured in Rome. But even as emperor the number of animal victims sacrificed during the first three months of his reign has been calculated at one hundred and sixty thousand (page 139 of Calígula).

Regarding humans, an anecdote collected by Tacitus alarmed me. When Tiberius punished the remaining sons of the traitor Sejanus, an innocent daughter of Sejanus repeatedly asked for what crime she was being dragged off for. Historians of the time say that being a virgin she couldn’t suffer capital punishment, so the executioner raped her and then he could legally strangle her! Furthermore, influenced by the histories of William Pierce and Arthur Kemp, I have always sided with Republican Rome and against Imperial Rome. But on pages 178-179 of Calígula we are informed that gladiatorial combats, of Etruscan origin, had been introduced in the middle of the 3rd century b.c.e. And by the end of the 2nd century b.c.e. they had become so popular that the Senate found it necessary to admit them among the public spectacles!

This is not to say that I am, like Holland, making concessions to Christian morality insofar as what we, in Day of Wrath, have called psychogenic emergence is a development of empathy that evolved without the need for Semitic religions. But it’s clear that both Eduardo Velasco, who blogged in his webzine Evropa Soberana, and William Pierce, were wrong to believe that Sparta was the model for the Aryan man when the obvious choice was none other than Hitler’s Third Reich. See what I wrote on pages 481-482 of The Fair Race about the Vikings and the extreme Yang exemplified in Sparta (exactly the same could be said about the ancient Romans).

This prompted me this day to publish a new page, ‘The Sacred Words’ which can be read in red letters at the very top of this site, as well as changing the subtitle once again to The West’s Darkest Hour (the site of the priest of the sacred words).

Precisely because I am a priest of those words, Roldán’s Calígula is having a very different impact on me than I imagined when I bought it (funnily enough, it was the last copy they had at Amazon Books, so I had no choice but to buy it). If anyone has already assimilated my version of Psychohistory in Day of Wrath, he will understand my repudiation of much of classical culture in favour of Hitler’s Third Reich. It is obvious that recent advances in psychogenesis have determined me, and this reminds me of the seminal essay ‘The Red Giant’ (collected in my anthology On Exterminationism), in which a Swede said that some values had to be transvalued to Greco-Roman values and other values to more recent times (say, to Jane Austen’s world).

Like Tom Holland, familiarity with the dark side of the classical world makes me see things about it that I find disturbing and unacceptable. But unlike Holland, I reiterate, I do so not because of Christian morality but because of what we in Day of Wrath call psychogenesis.

Categories
Caligula

Caligula, 2

Marble portrait bust of the emperor Gaius, known as Caligula, A.D. 37–41.

 

Foreword: Caligula, A Historical Enigma

by José Manuel Roldán

Thirty stab wounds ended the life of Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus on 24 January 41, barely four years after he succeeded Tiberius, Augustus’ heir to the imperial throne. He had not yet reached the age of thirty, which was, however, more than enough time for his memory to be stigmatised forever as a paradigm of cruelty, under the nickname that his father’s soldiers had given him in his childhood: Little boot.

The life and reign of Caligula have been a topic of unresolved debate and controversy since antiquity, although it seems impossible to banish from the popular imagination the gloomy and disturbing image that his name alone arouses. And yet, this image of an inept, bloodthirsty, unpredictable and monstrous tyrant that tradition has handed down to us seems more like a melodramatic and simplifying label, invented not so much to define the character as to avoid a coherent explanation of the apparent contradictions in his behaviour: a simplification that has pontificated with the diagnosis of madness the many nooks and crannies of a complex personality.

This diagnosis has served to ‘explain’ the dozens of anecdotes with which the ancient literary tradition has traced the outline of the emperor, converted into as many examples of erratic and perverse behaviour, as support for a trivial stereotype: the bloodthirsty monster, capable of any outrage, about whom there has been no scruple in inventing even imaginary crimes to give greater consistency and morbidity to the character, already condemned from the beginning to play this role. Examples are the descriptions offered by Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, later plastically recreated in a well-known BBC television series; the image of the emperor in a 1953 film, The Robe; Albert Camus’ drama Caligula; Pepe Cibrián’s Argentine musical Calígula; or the shameful monstrosity of Tinto Brass in a pornographic film produced for Penthouse. Titles and titles of so-called ‘historical’ novels have piled up with Caligula as the protagonist. Thus, Calígula, una novela sobre el perverso emperador romano, by P.J. Franceschini and P. Lundel; Calígula, el dios cruel, by S. Obermeier, or Calígula, by M.G. Silato, to offer only examples published in Spanish.

The label, on the other hand, was quite simple. It was hard enough to follow faithfully the outlines drawn by the Roman literature of the imperial period itself, which was unanimous in its vilification of Gaius. But are these sources reliable? A preliminary step, therefore, in approaching the life of Gaius would be to take this tradition into account and look into it objectively. Only two authors knew Caligula during his lifetime: the writer Seneca and Philo, a Jewish philosopher from Alexandria. The former, an intriguing and quarrelsome courtier, was nearly condemned to death by Gaius; the latter went to Rome as spokesman for a delegation of Alexandrian Jews to the emperor and left his impressions in the pamphlet Embassy to Gaius. The rest wrote their works after Caligula was dead: Flavius Josephus, a Pharisee Jew of the Flavian period, included in his Antiquities of the Jews, published in 93, numerous facts about the reign, though in connection with problems of his people; the Annals of the great historian Cornelius Tacitus, a few years later, can only be used to illustrate the youth of Gaius, because the books on his reign—VII and following—have been lost; the Life of Gaius, by Suetonius, secretary for a time to the emperor Hadrian, is the only complete biography of Caligula, but its tendency to sensationalism forces many of its facts to be called into question; finally, Dion Cassius, the Anatolian writer, between the 2nd and 3rd centuries, in his Roman History, while providing a good deal of information about Caligula’s rule, is too far removed from the events and therefore influenced by the sources he used in his account.

But in the analysis of these sources one decisive point must be borne in mind: by whom they were written and for what audience. Except for the two Jewish writers, Philo and Josephus, whose interlocutors were their fellow countrymen in Alexandria and Jerusalem respectively, the rest wrote mainly for the Roman social elites and, more specifically, for their most influential representatives, the members of the Senate, to which they all belonged, except Suetonius, otherwise closely linked to the circle of a conspicuous senator of the Trajanic period, Pliny the Younger. In the case of a clearly anti-senatorial figure like Caligula, this finding is highly significant. The audiences of these writers would not have entirely accepted a representation of Gaius that portrayed him in a positive light. A sentence from Tacitus’ Annals is illuminating in this respect: ‘The deeds of Tiberius and Gaius, as well as those of Claudius and Nero, were falsified out of fear while they were alive; and written, after their death, with hatred still fresh’.

But at the same time, regardless of the true intentions of their authors, these sources are an invaluable source of evidence for understanding the emperor’s views. Views, as we shall see, marked by the aspiration to move away from the elaborate, but also mistaken, political construction devised by Augustus—an autocracy disguised in republican garb in favour of open monarchical domination. All the emperors who tried to advance in the logical deployment of the powers implicit in the Principate were stigmatised, as opposed to those who prudently maintained the fiction of separation, however illusory, of powers between the prince and the Senate. Thus was born the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ emperors, which, overcoming the barriers of antiquity, still continues to influence our own judgement.

Caligula undoubtedly occupies a prominent place in the second group, not so much for his governmental action as for his manifest hostility towards the senatorial collective, which took revenge, after his death, by heaping rubbish on his memory and denying him the essential element that distinguishes the human being: reason. Caligula was treated as a madman for persecuting the aristocracy. But his successor, Claudius, who tried to respect the aristocracy, was considered an imbecile.

Nevertheless, and as a predictable reaction, since the beginning of the 20th century historical research, aware of the partiality of the documentary sources, has tried to correct this negative image. A long article by H. Willrich, published in 1903, first drew attention to the positive aspects of Caligula’s work and his motivations, over and above the simplistic label of madness. Subsequent studies have taken up this point of view, with new or more substantiated arguments, to become, on occasions, veritable apologies, as far removed from the historical truth as the very sources they seek to correct. Thus, it is not surprising that there is also no shortage of works which, while accepting Gaius’ madness without further ado attempt to explain it using psychoanalysis or clinical points of view, thereby indirectly recognising the reliability of the ancient sources.

These sources are certainly full of inconsistencies and difficulties in their correct interpretation, but it is also true that it is not possible to do without them as a guiding thread. It is the task of the historian to winnow out the fictional elements they contain, to separate them from the consistent data with which a plausible picture can be reconstructed. Plausible, but not authentic. And that is precisely the greatness and the misery of the historian.

Potsdam

______ 卐 ______

 

Editor’s note: Emphasis is mine. It perfectly portrays what I meant in the last paragraph of my previous post on Caligula.

Categories
Ancient Rome Caligula Tacitus

Caligula, 1

Marble portrait bust of the emperor Gaius, known as Caligula, A.D. 37–41.

Because the book Neo-Christianity is finally available (even if only in PDF for the moment), I have changed both the sticky post and the featured post. In both I used the symbol from George R.R. Martin’s fantasy novels about the Weirwood tree (a tree that, if a greenseer touches it, he can paranormally see into the past of Westeros). I would like to exemplify what I meant in the sticky and the featured posts with a new series on the figure of Emperor Caligula. As can be read on pages 16-17 of Neo-Christianity:

The Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, who governed Palestine from 26 to 36 AD, was known for his aggressive treatment of the Jews. But things grew even worse for them after his removal from power and the ascension of Emperor Caligula in Rome. Hayim Ben-Sasson writes, “The reign of Caligula (37-41 AD) witnessed the first open break between the Jews and the Empire… Relations deteriorated seriously during this time.”

Years later, Emperor Claudius issued his third edict, Letter to the Alexandrians, in which he accused those Jews of “fomenting a general plague which infests the whole world.” This is a striking passage; it suggests that Jews all over the Middle East had succeeded in stirring up dangerous agitation toward the empire. It also marks the first occurrence in history of a “biological” epithet used against them. By the year 49, Claudius had to undertake yet another expulsion of Jews from Rome.

All this set the stage for the first major Jewish revolt, in the year 66. Also called the First Jewish-Roman War (there were three), this event was a major turning point in history.

This reminds us of what Eduardo Velasco wrote in the essay on Judea vs. Rome, which we translated for The Fair Race, book #2 on the list of thirteen books in the new featured post:

In 41, Caligula, who already promised to be an anti-Jewish emperor, was assassinated in Rome, which unleashed the violence of his German bodyguards who had not been able to prevent his death and who, because of their peculiar sense of fidelity, tried to avenge him by killing many conspirators, senators and even innocent bystanders who had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Claudius, the uncle of Caligula, would become the master of the situation and, after being appointed emperor by the Praetorian Guard, ordered the execution of the assassins of his nephew, many of whom were political magistrates who wanted to reinstate the Republic.

This is the probable cause of the unprecedented historical defamation of this emperor: the texts of Roman history would eventually fall into the hands of the Christians, who were mostly of Jewish origin and viscerally detested the emperors. Since, according to Orwell, ‘he who controls the past controls the present’ the Christians adulterated Roman historiography, turning the emperors who had opposed them and their Jewish ancestors into disturbed monsters.

Thus, we do not have a single Roman emperor who has participated in harsh Jewish reprisals who has not been defamed by accusations of homosexuality, cruelty or perversion. The Spanish historian José Manuel Roldán has dismantled many of the false accusations against the historical figure of Caligula.

Well, two months ago I received the book in Spanish by José Manuel Roldán Hervás, PhD in classical philology. Already in the prologue of Calígula, el Autócrata Inmaduro (Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2012), Roldán quotes a sentence from Tacitus’ Annals: ‘The deeds of Tiberius and Gaius [Caligula], as well as those of Claudius and Nero, were falsified, out of fear, while they lived; and written, after their deaths, with hatred still fresh’.

In the next entry I will translate the whole prologue to Roldán’s book. For the moment I would just like, as I said, to illustrate what I alluded to in the sticky and featured posts: that the System demoralises the white man through historical lies.

For example, I recently interrupted the Netflix series on Caligula when I saw that they cast him, even before he was emperor, as the poisoner of Tiberius, the previous Roman emperor. One cannot contrast more that tale ‘with hatred still fresh’ with what we read in Roldán’s biography.

If we recall what Catherine Nixey wrote about the burning of entire libraries of the classical world by Christians, it cannot be more unfortunate that of Tacitus’ Annals, originally sixteen books on the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, the entire reign of Caligula has been lost. Unlike the writers who wrote with hatred, Tacitus is known to have been more objective.

Now back to our metaphor. Unlike Martin’s fiction about the oldest religion of Westeros, its Weirwood trees and the gifted greenseers who saw the past when they touched them, in the real world we have no such window to know, with absolute precision, what happened in the time of those emperors of the first century c.e. But if I still use the metaphor it’s because books like Roldán’s are the closest we have to a truer history of what might have happened.

Categories
Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Roman Catholic popes

Christianity’s criminal history, 182

– For the context of these translations click here –

 

The papacy in the middle of the 9th century

The Vatican becomes a castle and a holy pope a fortification builder

When in August 846 seventy-five Saracen ships appeared at the mouth of the Tiber, around 11,000 men and 500 horses fell on the districts of Rome on the right bank of the Tiber, eleven thousand men and five hundred horses fell on the districts of Rome to the right of the Tiber, completely sacking the church of St Peter outside the wall of Aurelius as well as the basilica of St Paul and taking prisoner all those who had not fled, ‘including the inhabitants of the monasteries, men and women’ (Annales Xantenses), the contemporaries saw it as a punishment of Providence against the corruption that was invading Rome.

After the surprise attack, it was the defeat, the disgrace provoked by Saracens and pagans, which inflamed the faithful. Why had Saint Peter not been better defended? A capitulary blames the sins of Christianity and points out the remedies: to fight against one’s wickedness, against the sins of the flesh and the theft of the ecclesiastical patrimony! In addition, Lothair I ordered alms to be collected throughout the empire and imposed a special tax for the reconstruction of the church of St Peter and its protection, to which the emperor and his brothers contributed ‘not a few pounds of silver’.

In the meantime, Pope Sergius II had died. And on the very day of his death, his successor was elected: a Roman, educated from childhood in the Benedictine monastery of St Martin and an ‘exemplary religious’ (Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche). It was Leo IV (847-855), who after a six-week interpontificium was consecrated pope, and again without imperial approval, which had been necessary since 824. It seems that the crisis caused by the Arab pirates didn’t permit any delay, although the oath of allegiance to the emperor was subsequently demanded of him.

Pope Leo IV and the Fire in the Borgo. The fresco is believed
to have been designed by Raphael, but was likely painted
by Giulio Romano and others in Raphael’s workshop
between 1514 and 1517 when Pope Leo X was pontiff—Ed.

This saintly father achieved a reputation as a master builder of fortifications that can be said to have lasted until the present day. He transformed the suburbs of Rome on the right bank of the Tiber, the entire neighbourhood of the Vatican, into a castle in an undertaking that was important for centuries. It was a plan that Leo III had already been contemplating, but which only Leo IV brought to fruition. In a work of years, personally inspected by him on foot or horseback, he reinforced the old city walls, created new fortifications and thus became the creator of the civitas leonina, to which he modestly gave his name ‘city of Leon’. Between 848 and 852 he built a wall almost forty feet high and as many feet thick, reinforced with 44 towers.

The work of fortifying required abundant materials and numerous workers, who had to contribute to cities and monasteries of the Papal State, dominions and militias. But the papal stronghold also cost large sums of money, which came mainly from the Frankish Empire—something the papal biographer completely omits—on the orders of the very obliging Lothair,  with the strange effect that it was due to the pope and his position vis-à-vis the emperor!

The devastated St Peter’s was again lavishly decorated. On the high altar were placed sheets of gold enamelled with precious stones, each weighing 216 pounds; a gold cross, embossed with pearls and emeralds, weighed 1,000 pounds, and a silver ciborium or baldachin over the altar weighed 1,606 pounds. As St Paul’s and many temples, even in the provinces, were also expensively decorated, it could be seen how immensely rich the Church was, for which collections were already being made everywhere because of its ‘poverty’ (as they still are today).

It is understandable that the ‘sons of Satan’, who came from Sardinia, appeared at the mouth of the Tiber as early as 849, long before the fortification of Leon was erected. At last, they had seen what was hidden in those Christian temples and what was piled up at St Peter’s. ‘The imagination cannot comprehend the richness of the treasures piled up there’ (Gregorovius).

Categories
James Mason Racial right

A new story

Or:

On putting the chariot before the horse

There is something important I would like to add to my Thursday post, in which I used a 1993 interview between Tom Metzger and James Mason to say something about Richard Spencer.

On this site I have been very critical of James Mason and his epigones for admiring Charles Manson: the mastermind behind the stabbing to death of the beautiful English rose Sharon Tate (and other Hollywood showbiz personalities).

In Siege Mason compiles his articles from the journal he wrote in the early 1980s. In vain, when I was reading Siege, did I find the reasons why Mason admired Manson, insofar as the latter’s intentions in devising his crimes weren’t racial. But now that I re-watched his interview with Metzger I detected something I had missed the first time I saw it. But before this revelation about the mind of James Mason I would like to digress a little.

Unlike Metzger’s audio-visual interviews, the podcasts of Greg Johnson, one of the leading promoters of American white nationalism, are audio-only. Metzger, let alone Mason, not properly ‘white nationalists’, were infinitely closer in character to the Germans of the Third Reich than Johnson and Spencer. But in one of his podcasts Johnson said something that piqued my interest. He mentioned the decades immediately before the internet as the darkest era, in that the Establishment had virtually absolute control over the narrative. This is very true: and the new generations have no idea how impossible it was for us to find even dissident authors, to the extent that in the past we could never rebel. (Since I grew up in the 1960s and 70s I couldn’t rebel intellectually because of this absolute control of information, as I recount in the third volume of my autobiography.)

Now let’s get back to Mason’s infatuation with Manson. What I detected in the interview with Metzger, which I had missed the first time I saw it, was that the desperation of national socialists like Mason in the face of the System’s absolute control of the media meant that he began to fix his attention on the news of those who broke the law with crimes to shock public morals. It was, it seemed, the only escape valve from an Establishment that was entirely successful in suppressing dissenting opinion.

This revelation came to me in understanding Mason when Metzger asked him why he admired Charles Manson. From Mason’s response, Metzger commented that, given the impasse on all sides due to the absolute grip of the System, the whole thing had to be blown up. (Recall that Charles Manson is not the only criminal to whom James Mason devotes articles in Siege: he also discusses other criminals who, at the time, shocked public morals even though, like Manson, weren’t acting out of racial ideals either.)

That doesn’t mean that, having understood the point James Mason wanted to get across, I now approve of the behaviour of Charles Manson and company. But it does mean that what I didn’t understand years ago when I read Siege directly, I understand now having watched the splendid interview with Metzger again. As I said, for new generations it is almost impossible to imagine the prolonged despair, a suffocation of ideas I dare say, that it meant for noble-minded boomers that there was no relevant information anywhere!

But back to James Mason. While I don’t join his enthusiasm for criminals who acted without racial ideology, what about those who break the law with racial ideology: say, someone like Breivik or Tarrant? In the 2020 discussion thread on the Metzger/Mason interview, one of the commenters chided me because I said that any revolutionary action is premature:

You sound like an old and grumbling geezer.

It’s futile and unfair to accuse the youth of ardour and impatience and narrow tunnel vision. Many of them are sincerely actuated by a heroic impulse to over with this shameful state of things, this disgraceful status quo. Their hearts volcanically explodes with lava of despair and hatred for the world of their worthless parents and cowardly ancestors. Yes, the lives of foolhardy men usually end not well. And tragic triumph is a fate of exceptional ones.

But the young soul has no time to wait, be it in love or war. So, be lenient towards suicidal behaviour of the youth and do not impute to passionate youngsters the carelessness concerning those fucking Austrian economists! All this cultural and historic noise–million words in billion posts–is not a groundwork or an earnest or a linchpin or a promise of coming transvaluation of values.

They dread reaching your age, Caesar, and face their death, especially after a very long life, and realize that all their efforts failed to produce results, moreover the situation has got worse. They know some examples of lustrous persons, whose deeds were vain in spite of their “strategic thinking”. By the way, traitors often justify their betrayal with strategical manoeuvring for the sake of a lofty goal in long-term planning.

The destiny occurs HERE AND NOW, and if this “here and now” is stolen, I will not judge the glowing souls with the destructive power of dynamite inside their cores.

I confess that, now that I re-read my comment years later, I see that I responded to this commenter in a very, very poor way! I would like to reply to him now, even though so much time has passed.

It is not for the youth to make the most important decisions of a state. In a healthy world for the Aryans, as was Sparta, and Republican Rome, it was up to very mature adults. Recall that, for Plato, the philosopher-king had to be a man in his sixties.

To be impetuous, fiery, determined or bold against the System is precisely what President Joe Biden wants to tighten the screws even further (remember his inaugural speech in which he declared war on us). We shouldn’t indulge him because his administration is doing everything it can to commit suicide. The situation in 2023 has changed a lot from the days when, in 2020, the commenter mocked what I said about Austrian economists. Now, after Biden’s blunder with the confiscation of Russian funds abroad due to Putin’s military action in Ukraine, several nations have realised that their funds aren’t safe in dollars and many, even in the MSM, are already openly talking about the last days of the dollar. In other words, my restraint not to rush into revolutionary actions as impetuous youths love, but to wait for the System to collapse on its own, is being vindicated by recent historical events.

But there are even more profound reasons why I think James Mason’s ideology—something like having the System in siege with a multiplication of actions à la Charles Manson—is flawed. And here we come back to what Spencer said in his recent interview: that we need a new story or, as I would say using Jungian language, a story that manages to activate the collective Self that will produce, in the white man, the new galvanising myth. Ironically, in this respect James Mason did hit the nail on the head: ‘Someone did say that prior to 1945 we were a party, since 1945 we have been a religion.’

Indeed. The Jews have their religion, their story: what Christians call the Old Testament: ‘Ethnocentrism for me’ as Kevin MacDonald reads it in the first book of his trilogy on Jewry. That’s why they always win. It doesn’t matter that their story, what we read in the OT, is literary fiction. It is a myth they believe in and that’s why they will continue to win.

Conversely, whites didn’t write their story, the New Testament. The Jews wrote it for them: ‘Universalism for thee.’ And liberalism, which has mutated into Wokism, the secular neo-Christianity of our day, is an epiphenomenon of that NT story.

The moral is simple: it’s whites themselves who must rewrite their own history. They mustn’t allow another race to write it for them. If one reads the first anthology published by us, The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour, one will discover seminal texts by William Pierce, and Eduardo Velasco in his now-defunct webzine Evropa Soberana, which depict this story written by whites for whites.

And now I can answer properly to the commenter who criticised me. ‘All this cultural and historic noise–million words in billion posts–is not a groundwork or an earnest or a linchpin or a promise of coming transvaluation of values’ he said.

Actually, it is. Any revolutionary action that is not backed by a new story, a new way of understanding the Self, is doomed to failure. James Mason’s own life demonstrates this. After the Metzger interview, Mason went astray with so-called Christian Identity. A dozen years after the interview Metzger himself commented, on 17 May 2005: ‘Unfortunately he turned away from his best thoughts back toward some Christian thing. I don’t know where he is now, but I promote and sell his great book.’

The eclipse of James Mason is symptomatic not only of would-be revolutionaries, but of non-revolutionaries who subscribe to white nationalism. They lack a story to serve as cement and a platform for further action. The fact that very few have read the history of the white race from Pierce’s pen, and that even that book isn’t published (even privately) so that you can read it comfortably in your living room, speaks for itself.

This is the response of a sixty-four-year-old man to the young commenter:

You are putting the chariot before the horse. First goes the horse—the new story that will galvanise the white man’s collective unconscious—and then goes the chariot (the holy racial wars). Reversing the sequence yields results such as what happened to James Mason and his unfortunate epigones, inasmuch as Mason was completely ignorant of the real history of Christianity (which we are telling on this site thanks to the work of Karlheinz Deschner).

The central mission of The West’s Darkest Hour is that, when the System panics and cancels the internet, there remain on my visitors’ hard drives the PDF books from my humble Daybreak Press, which provide the new story the white man must tell himself.

Anyone who hasn’t read The Fair Race should read it now. The rest follows from it.

Categories
Carolingian dynasty Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s criminal history, 181

– For the context of these translations click here –

 

The Slavic worm and the Frankish people of God

The 46 years of Charlemagne’s reign were an almost uninterrupted war with nearly fifty military campaigns. To mention only the Saxons, the ‘super-pagans’, he fought them mortally for thirty-three years! So what was happening on the periphery of the great and ever-expanding predatory empire was not something that affected the internal ‘peace.’ Quite the contrary. The more ‘peace and order’ there was within, the better the slaughter, enslavement and annexations outside the borders worked. However, the ‘everywhere abundance and joy’ didn’t exist even in the interior of the kingdom. It was enjoyed only by the ridiculously small stratum of the possessors, the nobility and the clergy, who swam in the blood-soaked riches of others, while chronic malnutrition ravaged the ignominiously deprived people themselves. Misery and famine wiped out a third of the population of Gaul and Germania in 784.

Under Charlemagne’s grandsons, foreign war was simply replaced by internal war, by the so-called civil war.

Perhaps the Treaty of Verdun wasn’t yet, as some early historians (Waitz, Droysen, Giesebrecht) believed, a kind of ‘birth date’ of the German and French nationalities, of two peoples in whose interests it was certainly not agreed. But a German history and a French history are emerging: nations are beginning to emerge from older tribes, from the populations of certain countries, and the pre-national consciousness of the tribes will eventually become the national consciousness.

In addition, the emergence of other national kingdoms, for example in England, Spain, Scandinavia, Poland, Bohemia and Hungary, marked the early Middle Ages politically. Certainly, throughout the whole of the 9th century, there was still no thought of nationalist categories, no people still felt themselves to be a ‘national unit’ and no one felt themselves to be ‘German’ or ‘French’; perhaps not even in the 10th century, although this was the immediate transitional phase.

That division of the Carolingian empire, which was followed by further divisions and reunifications in the 9th century, was a compromise imposed by circumstances. For the time being, it certainly put an end to the tradition of rushing against each other; but it also meant that the empire gradually lost its pre-eminent position vis-à-vis the papacy, that the triple division of Germany, France and Italy was prepared, and that the old unity never reappeared, if we leave aside the episode of Charles the Fat.

The Slavs were pagans, and even in Christian countries such as Thuringia, Hessen and the East-Franconian cantons they remained ‘infidels’ for longer than the rest of the population. Their culture was demonstrably higher than is sometimes assumed. We must bear in mind that for a long time, from the 7th to the 11th century, Franco-German accounts of the Slavs came almost without exception from Christian priests, who moreover were often not eyewitnesses but had second- or third-hand accounts. And, as was almost always the case, the Christians were at war with the Slavs and mocked them. But when they were regarded as allies, they were suddenly well-liked and sometimes even remarked that they were ‘wonderfully worthy’ of any sympathy.

The Carolingian and Ottonian historiographies also differ in their judgement, although a certain popular hatred, if not hereditary hostility, has long prevailed, due in large part to religious motives, to the opposition of pagans and Christians. This had been the case since Merovingian times. Later, the Slavs were willingly condemned across the board. The more Christian the world becomes, the worse the others become. They are all ‘evil’, i.e. people separated from God; they are all ‘infidels’, which in the medieval view derived from Augustine is equivalent to ‘minions of the devil, who must be annihilated by all means if they do not convert to the cause of God’ (Lubenow).

In the eyes of the Christians, the Slavs were useful only as slaves: a word derived directly from slavus or as pure targets of death; people who were mocked as ‘worms’ and ‘mowed down like the grass of the meadow’ by pious Catholics, for whom they were just that, subhuman beings, animals. ‘What do you want with those toads? Seven, eight, even nine of them I used to skewer on my spear and shake them around, muttering something to myself.’ The Slavs were also radically false and treacherous. ‘The Wendos broke their word in their usual disloyalty to Louis’, comments not only the Annales Bertiniani.

According to the ecclesiastical conception, every Christian prince had to fight the pagans within the country and on the borders. Indeed, according to the dominant Augustinian doctrine concerning the expansion of the kingdom of God on earth, it was necessary to conquer the Slavic East to ‘convert’ it. It is no coincidence that Charlemagne’s favourite reading was Augustine’s magnum opus, The City of God. And Charles himself, the Carolingians, the Frankish aristocracy at one with the other classes of landowners, all without exception, were all the more interested in the ‘plunder’, robbery and tribute of the East when in their own country the agricultural productivity was low and the prospects of increasing land and estates insignificant. The Slavic territories were also always a breeding ground for auxiliary troops and slaves.

The Christian nobility didn’t always view the Slavic mission with unreserved joy; and naturally for a very selfish reason. With the acceptance of Christianity by the pagans, at least as far as the Saxon noble class bordering directly on Christian territories was concerned, a pretext for attack, subjugation and plunder disappeared. ‘Although the Christianisation of the Slavs didn’t entail the complete depletion of an important source of income, it certainly at least made it more difficult for the Saxons to plunder their neighbours’ (Donnert). And of course for the Christians their bloodletting was always more important than the gospel; the Catholic princes were concerned above all with power, greed, the increase of their agrarian possessions and feudal rents, for as Abbot Reginus said ‘the hearts of kings are greedy and always insatiable.’ Archbishop William of Mainz said that the claim of his father Otto ‘the Great,’ that it was about the spread of Christianity, was an excuse. And in the Slavonic chronicle of Helmhold, referring to Henry the Lion, it is later stated in no uncertain terms: ‘There was never any talk of Christianity, but only of money.’

The Temple of a Slavic god (painting in oil by V. Ivanov).

But it is not simply ‘that Christianity first gained a foothold beyond the Elbe and the Saale in connection with the war’ (Fleckenstein). No, the Christian Church, and of course, the German Church, was also a ‘driving force’ in this highly aggressive eastward expansion: a force for which faith was also a means to an end; a force, writes Kosminski, that

was on the hunt for tithes, goods and personal services and saw the conversion of the heathen as a highly profitable business. It was most energetically aided in this by the papacy, which was one of the main organisers of the military campaigns against Eastern Europe, hoping to extend its sphere of influence and increase its income.

An independent ecclesiastical mission, such as that of Bishop Ansgar, bought boys in Denmark and Sweden to make clerics of them: the mission of Bishop Adalbert of Prague at the end of the 10th century or that of Günther of Magdeburg among the Luthites at the beginning of the 11th century. As these attempts at conversion met with little success, the Church opted for a second way: spreading the Good News through state armies, by blood and fire or by bribery. In any case, acceptance of Christianity was for the Slavs ‘tantamount to slavery’ (Herrmann), and acceptance would be all the easier the more effective weapons could demonstrate the power of the God of the Christians and the impotence of the old gods.

Categories
Carolingian dynasty Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Roman Catholic popes

Christianity’s criminal history, 177

– For the context of these translations click here –

 
Pope Paschal, who gouges out eyes and cuts off heads, is declared a saint

Why did Leo III enter the Roman martyrology in the 17th century? Why was this monstrous murderer declared a saint?

He wasn’t canonised for his brutality, nor for his liquidations, and still less for his genuflection before Charles ‘the Great’ to whom alone he owed his survival. He was canonised because at Christmas 800 he had placed the crown on Charles’ head; because he had so impressively forced the passion for domination, the never-satiated desire for supremacy of the popes; because, with that radiant sign through the ages, with that ‘trait of genius’ (de Rosa), he had inscribed once and for all in the sad book of history the aspiration of the popes for absolute leadership. This is also the reason why Franz Xaver Seppelt, the Catholic historian of the popes, sees the name of Leo III shining in the ‘catalogue of saints,’ despite all the fatalities of his long pontificate and all the corpses that litter his path: ‘Saint, saint, saint’ (his feast day, 12 June).

His successor Stephen IV, a Roman nobleman educated from boyhood at the Lateran, elected pope after ten days without consulting the emperor, ruled only a few months; but his illustrious family provided in the century two other popes.

Paschal I (817-824), Stephen’s successor, immediately had the Pactum Hludowicianum established with his predecessor confirmed by the emperor, i.e. the full extent of the promises of donation and the actual donations made by Pippin and Charlemagne, grandfather and father respectively of Louis, as well as the autonomy of the state from the Church, the papal rights of sovereignty and above all the free election of the pope.

Two of the highest papal officials, Theodore, belonging to the high nobility (and still in 821 a pope ambassador at the Frankish court) and his son-in-law the nomenclator Leo ‘because of his loyalty to Lothar’ (Astronomus); because, according to the Imperial Annals, ‘they remained loyal to the young emperor Lothar’, were blinded and beheaded by the pope’s servants in the Lateran Palace without any legal process. Everything was attributed to the pope or ‘to his approval’, says Astronomer.

Mosaic of Paschal at Santa Prassede.

The whole affair is somewhat reminiscent of the bloody proceedings of St. Leo III in 815. But in 823 the monarch also sent his judges to Rome, retiring for the rest of the summer and in the autumn to the district of Worms to hunt in the Eifel region. Paschal, however—so beloved of the Romans that at the very burial of his corpse they provoked a riot—, refused any complicity and escaped the trial, perhaps with good reason, by publicly taking the oath of cleansing in the presence of thirty-four bishops and five priests and deacons. This was a ‘means of proof’, already used by St. Leo III in December 800, and especially frequent among ecclesiastical officials. At the same time, he anathematized the murdered men as high treason, declared their death an act of justice since they had received their due as criminals of lèse majesté, and took the assassins as servants of St. Peter (of the family Sancti Petri), granting them ‘his most resolute protection’ (Annales regni Francorum).

Emperor Louis resigned himself. And Pope Paschal I died in 824 amid the family Sancti Petri. The man was cunning while Ludwig was superior and tough. When Paschal I was alive and the monks of Fulda brought him unpleasant news, he had them imprisoned without delay and threatened their abbot Mauro with excommunication. In Rome itself, they abhorred his rigorous rule which completely disrupted the state. And since not only his planned burial but also the subsequent papal election were under the sign of serious turmoil, Paschal’s body remained unburied for a long time until his successor could give him a burial, although not in St. Peter’s.

Much later, however, at the end of the 16th century, Paschal’s name managed to enter the saints’ calendar of the Catholic Church (his feast day, 14 May) through the work of the historian Caesar Baronius, an Italian cardinal of the Catholic Church.

Categories
Carolingian dynasty Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s criminal history, 176

– For the context of these translations click here –

Louis the Pious and the death
of the king of Brittany.

Foreign policy

Louis the Pious waged war almost year after year, as befitted a Christian and believing ruler, mainly because of dynastic conflicts and internal political problems. But again and again, he also crossed the frontiers or had them crossed: as a universal ruler, he hardly ever took part in the campaigns himself but had others fight for him. This had long been the method of all rulers in the biggest massacres of the time. Pacts were scarcely of any interest any more.

In 815 a Saxon-Obotrite army attacked the Danes; but, after a series of devastations everywhere, it returned with forty hostages without having achieved anything. In 816 Louis sent his troops against the Sorbs. This time they ‘efficiently carried out’ (strenue compleverunt, Imperial Annals) the emperor’s orders and attacked them, as the sources say, ‘as swiftly as easily with the help of Christ’, and ‘with the help of God they gained the victory.’ The emperor, however, ‘gave himself up to hunting in the Vosges forest.’ At the other end of the empire, on the northern slopes of the Pyrenees, the Basques revolted and were ‘completely subdued’ (Annales regni Francorum).

Louis repeatedly waged devastating campaigns against the Breton Levantines, whose princes claimed the title of king at various times. On several occasions, he attacked the ‘mendacious, proud and rebellious people’, whom even his father hadn’t managed to subdue completely and whom the Merovingians, before Charles and Pippin, had repeatedly tried to subdue. In the summer of 818, he marched in person—almost his only military campaign as emperor—with an army of Franks, Burgundians, Alamans, Saxons and Thuringians against the ‘Breton rebels, who in their audacity dared to name one of their own, named Morman, king, refusing all obedience’ (Anonymous).

The pious sovereign, of whom his contemporary Bishop Thegan carefully exalts that ‘he progressed from day to day in sacred virtues, the enumeration of which would lead too far’, crushed the Bretons with his arrogance. He reduced to ashes all the buildings except the churches, and amid all the fires and murders he had the monasticism of the country widely reported by the Abbot of Landévennec. To kill and to pray, to pray and to kill; so everything went well and everything was permitted, at least in the war, as long as it was in favour of the ‘orthodox’ side.

A great multitude was taken prisoner, plentiful cattle were taken from them, and the Bretons submitted ‘to the conditions imposed by the emperor, whatever they were… And such hostages were selected and taken as he ordered, and the whole territory was organised at his will’, writes Astronomus.

In 819 Louis sent an army across the Elbe against the Obotrites. Their deserting prince Sclaomir (809-819) was captured and taken to Aachen, his territory occupied and he was exiled. Shortly afterwards they defeated him again, but while still in Saxony he succumbed to an illness and in the meantime received the sacrament of baptism. The Slavic people on the banks of the Elbe were still totally pagan, and the supremacy of Louis was still exposed to serious uprisings in the years 838 and 839.

On the other side of his borders, the counts of the Spanish March penetrated across the Segre ‘as far as the interior of Spain’ and ‘from there happily returned with a great booty’, having ‘ravaged and burned everything’, as Astronomus writes. The imperial analyst also notes the devastation of fields, the burning of villages and ‘no small booty’, adding: ‘In the same way, after the autumn equinox the counts of the Breton Mark raided the possessions of a rebellious Breton named Wihomarc and devastated everything with blood and fire.’

In 824 the monarch marched again with three army groups—he personally commanded one—against the Bretons and their prince Wihomarc, Morman’s successor.

In forty days, according to Frankish sources, Louis the Pious ravaged ‘the whole country with blood and fire’, ‘punished it with a great devastation’ (magna plague). He was ‘the most pious of emperors’, as the chorepiscopus Thegan praises him, ‘for even before he respected his enemies, fulfilling the word of the evangelist who says ‘Forgive and you will be forgiven.’ Louis destroyed fields and forests, annihilated a good part of the flocks, killed many Bretons, took many prisoners and returned with hostages ‘of the disloyal people.’ King Wihomarc was soon afterwards surrounded in his own house by the people of Count Lambert of Nantes, who beat him to death.

Categories
Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s criminal history, 175

– For the context of these translations click here –

 

Louis the Pious had his enemies’ eyes gouged out and made a public confession of his sins

The first rebellion against Louis’ new order, which was to ensure the unity of the Empire and the Church, of the throne and the altar, came from Bernard of Italy. The only son of King Pippin, the predator of the Avars’ treasure, educated after his father’s death (810) in the monastery of Fulda, officially adopted the title of ‘king of the Longboards’ after the imperial assembly of Aachen (September 813).

When, under the Ordinatio Imperii, he had to submit to Lothair I, son of Louis, as he had previously submitted to his grandfather Charlemagne and Emperor Louis, he rebelled with numerous magnates of his kingdom. The sources are unanimous in stating that this initiative did not come from the young sovereign, who was then in his early twenties, but from his advisors.

A few months after the publication of the Ordinatio Imperii of 817, Bernard, together with ‘some wicked men’ (Annales regni Francorum)—including the court poet Bishop Theodulf of Orleans, Bishops Anselm of Milan and Wolfold of Cremona, as well as some abbots, according to an ancient source—mounted an uprising which was widespread but poorly organised. The aim was to dethrone Louis and put Bernard in his place. But everything suggests that it was not so much a question of dethroning as of ensuring the continued existence of Bernard’s small kingdom.

The emperor mobilised large contingents of troops, and demanded that the abbots and abbesses ‘do military service’ because ‘by Satan’s cunning King Bernard had prepared for sedition.’ He set off southwards at full speed and passed over the Alps into Italy. But even before the uprising had properly begun, and without even having crossed swords, Bernard appeared with his loyalists at Chalon-sur-Saône, apparently of his own free will. He laid down his arms and threw himself at the emperor’s feet. Bernard’s great ones acted similarly, who ‘as soon as the first interrogation began, they openly and motu proprio declared the whole course of the affair’.

In vain. Louis had them arrested, sent them to Aachen and there, in the spring of 818, during the imperial assembly, in a delicate manner—as the imperial analyst repeats—and only after ‘the fasting time of Lent had passed’ he had them sentenced to death, at least all those considered civilians, and then ‘pardoned’ the death penalty by the cruel punishment of plucking out their eyes. ‘They were simply deprived of their sight’ which was ‘legally irreproachable’ (Boshof).

King Bernard, whom Louis had earlier called his son, and who in turn had just fathered a child named after his grandfather Pippin, was severely punished. He died with his eye sockets emptied ‘notwithstanding the emperor’s clement manner,’ two days later, on 17 April 818. His treasurer and advisor Reginhard, as well as Reginhar, the grandson of a Thuringian rebel against Charlemagne, also defended themselves and succumbed to the terrible procedure, for ‘not having endured with sufficient patience to have their eyes gouged out’ (Anonymi vita Hludovici).

Louis penitent in Attigny

In August 822 Louis made a public confession of his faults at the imperial diet of Attigny. He regretted his crime against his young nephew Bernard, who died miserably; he regretted the hardness of his heart against his little half-brothers, on whom he imposed the clerical tonsure, and against Adalhard and Wala, his father’s cousins. This was a singular procedure in the history of the Franks, a humiliation of the emperor by the clergy, behind which were perhaps in a very special way Charlemagne’s cousins who had been deeply humiliated in the past.

Categories
Christendom Daybreak Publishing Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) New Spain

‘Krimi’ – 2022 edition!

After much work, the PDF of the revised first volume of our translation of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminal-geschichte des Christentums (Krimi they call this work in Germany), Christianity’s Criminal History: Volume I, is finally ready.

Compared to the foreword I published last month, I added several paragraphs to that foreword (grey letters mean that those sentences also appeared in the previous foreword):

One thing I have noticed about virtually all dissident right-wing intellectuals and commentators, including the racialists, is that they do not try to reinvent the history of the white race as William Pierce did in Who We Are. They do the opposite: they rely on Christian or secular authors ignorant of the real history of the West. So-called dissidents do not seem to realise that, to understand their darkest hour, it is necessary to make a clean sweep of everything that is taught in universities about the humanities and to start rewriting history from scratch.

That is why I chose the weirwood tree as the symbol of my website. It reflects that what we should focus on is the historical past of the white race, the true past (read The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour listed on page 3), not on what is said even in the (semi-normie) forums of the racial right. Whoever is able to touch the millenary tree and see the past not as we are told it happened, but as it actually happened—especially the history of Christianity!—changes his worldview all at once. In his after-dinner conversations, Hitler, who had touched the sacred tree, said: ‘Christianity is the greatest regression humanity has ever experienced.’ Alas, as the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, who once described himself as a Hitlerist, wrote, ‘The whole world has forgiven Christianity.’

Well, not the whole world… As I confess in my philosophical autobiography De Jesús a Hitler, Christianity played a key role in the destruction of my teenage life and my twenties, something I will never forgive. The tragedy that destroyed several members of my family motivated me to embark on a long odyssey in search of the sacred tree in order to, retrocognitively, visualise my past. But Karlheinz Deschner’s ten-volume tree has too many branches and whispering leaves in which those who have barely taken their vows can get lost…

Which is why I have abridged it.

Such is the importance of seeing the historical past as it really happened, that I will put Deschner’s book second on the list in a new featured post!

Although the next book of my Daybreak Press will be Savitri Devi’s Reflections of an Aryan Woman that we translated from French, we will continue to upload entries from Deschner’s magnum opus until we can publish the second volume of Krimi.

I take this moment to remind my racialist visitors that The West’s Darkest Hour provides a different paradigm from white nationalism for understanding the decline of the West. While the Jewish problem, in our view, is a catalyst, it is not the active substance that is poisoning the white man. The active substance is Christian ethics.

Let me illustrate it by comparing Mexico to the US. It is less bad to live in a place like the 21st-century Woke US than Catholic New Spain of 1521-1821, which thanks to the Spanish Inquisition controlled Jewry to prevent subversive activities. Ironically, thanks to the heat that Americans are already beginning to feel due to the strong Jewish catalyst, the ‘frog’ is realising that they want to kill it. By contrast, without that powerful catalyst in New Spain, after three centuries the ‘frog’ ended up burned because it didn’t even feel the heat. Pure Christian ethics without Jewish subversion was enough to mongrelize the Iberian whites south of the Rio Grande without them even noticing it. In other words, the CQ is the actual poison; the JQ, a mere catalyst. Thank you, kikes, because your catalyst is so strong that it’s beginning to awaken Americans from their lethargy (cf. Greg Johnson’s article published today about the Kanye ‘Ye’ West controversy)!

Incidentally, there is a chance that an online friend will publish the above-linked PDF as the print version of Christianity’s Criminal History: Volume I on IngramSpark. It is a book that deserves to be on our bookshelves as a hard copy. (I cannot do it myself because I don’t have the time to master the software to design book covers.)