Rorke’s Drift

I think every European should familiarize himself with the battle of Rorke’s Drift. There are many good accounts of the battle – one still in print is Rorke’s Drift by Michael Glover.

The bare facts of the battle are these: approximately one hundred British soldiers defeated a force of Zulus thirty or forty times their number in defense of a barely defensible fortification in South Africa. Extraordinary bravery was exhibited by the defenders. But extraordinary bravery, as Glover points out, was not unusual in the British army. The lasting significance of Rorke’s Drift, for men of European blood, is that a few Christian European men were more than a match for barbarians. And they will always be, 1) if they act like Christian men, and 2) if they dogmatically refuse to even consider that their own culture should not prevail over barbarism.

“Christian” liberals refuse to place any significance, except a negative one, on the European experience in places like Africa and central America, but they are wrong. If they would stop looking for signs of God in the unhallowed charnel houses of academia, they would see Christ in the European past.

Private Alfred Henry Hook stands as a sign of contradiction to the anti-European “Christian” liberal and to the non-Christian world that believes the sacrifice on Calvary was foolishness.

“In the room where I was now there were nine sick men, and I was alone to look after them for some time, still firing away with the hospital burning. Suddenly in the thick smoke I saw John Williams, who had rushed in through a doorway communicating with another room, and above the din of battle and the cries of the wounded I heard him shout, ‘The Zulus are all over the place! They’ve dragged Joseph Williams out and killed him!’

“John Williams had held the adjoining room with Private Harrigan for more than an hour until they had not a cartridge left. The Zulus had then burst in and dragged out Joseph Williams and two of the patients and assegaied them. It was only because they were so busy with this slaughtering that John Williams and two of the patients
were able to knock a hole in the partition and get into the room where I was posted. Harrigan was killed.

“What were we to do? We were pinned like rats in a hole. Already the Zulus were fiercely trying to burst in through the doorway. The only way of escape was the wall itself –by making a hole big enough for a man to crawl through into an adjoining room, and so on until we got outside. Williams worked desperately at the wall with the navy’s pick which I had been using to make some of the loopholes with.

“All this time the Zulus were trying to get into the room. Their assegais kept whizzing towards us, and one struck me in front of the helmet. We were wearing the white tropical helmets then. But the helmet titled back under the blow and made the spear lose its power, so that I escaped with a scalp wound, which did not trouble me much then.

“Only one man at a time could get in at the door. A big Zulu sprang forward and seized my rifle; but I tore it free and slipping a cartridge in, I shot him point-blank. Time after time the Zulus gripped the muzzle and tried to tear the rifle from me, and time after time I wrenched it back, because I had a better grip than they had.

“All this time Williams was getting the sick through the hole into the next room—all except one, a soldier of the Twenty-Fourth named Connolly, who could not move because of a broken leg. Watching for my chance I dashed from the doorway, and grabbing Connolly, I pulled him after me through the hole. His leg got broken again but there was no help for it. As soon as we left the room the Zulus burst in with furious cries of disappointment and rage.

“Now there was a repetition of the work of holding the doorway, except I had to stand by a hole in the wall instead of a door while Williams picked away at the far wall to make an opening to escape into the next room. There was more desperate and almost hopeless fighting, as it seemed, but most of the poor fellows were got through the hole. Again I had to drag Connolly through, a terrific task because he was a heavy man.

“Privates William Jones and Robert Jones during all this time had been doing magnificent work in another ward which faced the hill. They kept at it with bullet and bayonet until six of the seven patients in that ward had been removed. They would have got the seventh—Sergeant Maxfield—out safely but he was delirious with fever and although they managed to dress him, he refused to move. Robert Jones made a last rush to try and get him away like the rest; but when he got back into the room he saw that Maxfield was being stabbed by the Zulus as he lay on his bed.

“We—Williams, and R. Jones and W. Jones and myself—were the last men to leave the hospital after most of the sick and wounded had been carried through a small window and away from the burning, but
it was impossible to save a few of them and they were butchered.”

“Greater love hath no man…” Would a non-European risk so much to get his fellow wounded soldiers to safety in the midst of fire and battle? The barbarians leave their sick and wounded.

Also of special note is the fact that the Natal native contingent cut and ran before the Zulus arrived. You cannot expect non-Europeans to fight for European causes.

The movie, Zulu, was made about Rorke’s Drift in 1960. At that date Hollywood was running scared but was not so scared that they wouldn’t depict British soldiers in a positive light. They did invest the Zulus with a nobility they did not possess, but at least they paid tribute to the brave defenders of Rorke’s Drift.

There is a special scene in the movie that I always used to show to my students to highlight the difference between a Christian people and a barbarian people.

The Zulus, in preparation for a massive attack, are spread out, exhibiting their numbers and chanting their barbaric war songs. Chard, the British commander, seeing that his men are becoming unnerved by the chanting, tells his Welshmen (the soldiers were predominantly Welsh) to start singing. As the barbarians chant, the Welshmen sing, “Men of Harlech.” What a contrast!

Rorke’s Drift has even more significance for the West than Franco’s glorious victory over the communists for the simple reason that Third World barbarism, as depicted in Camp of the Saints, is currently the greatest danger to the West. The only difference between then and now is that we have no men willing to sing “Men of Harlech” as they shoot down the advancing Zulus.

The Ancient Rhythms

It would be difficult to imagine a society more uncongenial to Christianity (save that of Islam) than our present, capitalist, post-Christian society. The capitalist dynamic is diametrically opposed to Christianity. Historically, Christian societies have tended to be agrarian and traditional: “the tilled field and hedgerow, linked to the plowed furrow, the frequented pasture, the lane of evening lingerings, the cultivated garden plot.”

In contrast, Christianity does not do well in societies that,

…pry loose old walls.
Let me lift and loosen old foundations.
Lay me on an anvil O God.
Beat me, hammer me into a steel spike.
Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.
Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into central girders.
Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.

--from “Prayers of Steel” by Carl Sandburg

Although there are those who will advise us that we can have Christian skyscrapers, I think we must reject that advice as either maliciously deceitful or stupid in the extreme. Steel-girder societies based on greed and avarice will never be compatible with societies of evening lingerings.

Resistance to steel-girder capitalism, however, seems doomed to failure, because so much effort must be expended in trying to survive and stay above the lower half of the pyramid that one has no energy for counterrevolution. (I don’t see why Enron executives were singled out for running a pyramid scam when all of our economy is based on one.) Nevertheless, since the only alternative to counterrevolution is a surrender to capitalism, even the tired and poor need to be summoned to the counterrevolutionary ranks. One fights for victory, but even in defeat there is the supreme consolation one has saved his soul through the strife against the dragon. This is not always apparent while the battle is raging, but it becomes clear afterward.

The Scottish Highland culture was seemingly dead forever after Culloden. But whenever the Scots want to feel their culture is in tune with divine rhythms and in opposition to the base, materialist, Whig culture surrounding them, they turn to the bagpipes and play a tune that evokes Prince Charlie and the days of the clan over the corporation, the village over the city, the farm over the factory, and the blood oath over the lawyer’s brief.

Likewise in the South, when Southerners want to feel connected to something and someone greater than themselves, they don’t sing songs and write poetry about how they just sold a worthless piece of real estate to a rich widow. No, they sing of Robert E. Lee, of Forrest, and of the Great Cause.

I see the smug capitalist laughing in the corner. “I’ll permit mere nostalgia. Let the Scotsman play his bagpipe in weekend parades and let the Southerner whistle “Dixie” and go to Civil War re-enactments, but just make sure both men are back in the office on Monday.”

Yes, a counterrevolution must be more than nostalgia. But the nostalgia should prime us for the counterrevolution. From whence comes the nostalgia? Why do we yearn for the evening lingerings? Because we have souls. Capitalism needs men without souls for its steel girders, but our Lord only takes men with souls into His kingdom. A steel spike does not to heaven go.

The White Deer

You may lie
On sweet grass by a mountain stream to watch
The last wild eagle soar or the last raven
Cherish his brood within their rocky nest,
Or see, when mountain shadows first grow long,
The last enchanted white deer come to drink

--Donald Davidson

There is nothing a writer can do to explain what he has written to someone who deliberately wants to misconstrue what he has written. But sometimes, very rarely, people ask for explanations because they genuinely want an explanation. For those people I offer the following.

First, I have never claimed that the Christian Faith is only a white man’s religion. But I have claimed, and will continue to claim, that I do not believe that the Christian Faith has ever penetrated as deeply into the souls of other races as it has penetrated into the soul of the white race. The white Europeans were the only race of people who adopted Christianity as conquerors. They alone saw Christ as worthy of worship because He was gentle, meek, and kind as well as powerful. All the other races adopted Christianity after they had been conquered. They saw Him only as a God of power, not a God of love.

Secondly, I do not believe that because whites have abandoned their cultural heritage it would be a good thing if whites were supplanted by other more “vital races.” I want to see a renewal of the white race, not an extermination.

Thirdly, I take issue with “Christians” who adopt, with glee, the false formula that says, as the white race falls, other races shall rise. In reality, I think the equation reads: as the white race falls, so fall all other races. The idea that white Christian churches can export a new, pure, nonwhite Christianity to other cultures is ludicrous. The Church has not stopped exporting white Christianity to other non-white nations; it has simply stopped exporting healthy, integral Christianity and is instead exporting decadent, liberal Christianity under the guise of a purer, non-racist brand of Christianity.

The myth of the black, noble savage does an injustice to white folk because it implies that the extermination of the white race is a consummation devoutly to be wished. But we must reject that false myth and the much-anticipated (by liberal and conservative whites) invasion of the black Übermenschen. For Western culture is irreplaceable, and it provides the only link to a world that is not of this world. As Christopher Dawson writes:

“And the importance of these centuries of which I have been writing is not to be found in the external order they created or attempted to create, but in the internal change they brought about in the soul of Western man – a change which can never be entirely undone except by the total negation or destruction of Western man himself.”

And the worship of the black Übermenschen will result in the complete negation and destruction of Western man.

Are we, as Christians, obligated to prefer polyglot societies to white societies? The modern Christian says we are, and Brazil is often held up as a model country. But is there some divine intent behind the separation of the races? The fact that the races were separated by God and the fact of the Tower of Babel story seem to indicate to me that God did intend the races to be separate. But of course liberals reject the reality of the Tower of Babel. They must needs reject almost the entire Bible if they are to hold to their view of polyglot universalism because there is no biblical sanction for their hellish vision.

What the racial universalist misses is one of the most essential elements of Christianity. A key building block for the Faith is a love for kith and kin. One can only love the stranger when one has learned to love one’s own kith and kin. To short circuit the kith-and-kin system, which has worked well for thousands of years (why has the Faith diminished as more “enlightened” views of race have gained ascendancy in the churches?), and to replace it with a bloodless racial universalism will ultimately lead to the extinction of the Christian Faith. And we are almost to the point where one could say racial universalism has led to the extinction of the Faith. In the end if the racial universalists get their way, the Christian Faith will be like a preserved corpse: it will still retain its outward form, but there will be no blood in it.

The character of Ratty in The Wind and the Willows is able to appreciate Mole’s love for his home because he himself has such a love for his own river. There is much to be learned from Rat’s devotion to his river. In fact, my own devotion to European culture and to my own race has never been expressed better than by Ratty:

“I beg your pardon,” said the Mole, pulling himself together with an effort. “You must think me very rude; but all this is so new to me. So-this-is-a River!”
“The River,” corrected the Rat.
“And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!”
“By it and with it and on it and in it,” said the Rat. “It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing.”

A hopeless provincialism? No, it is a provincialism that leads to something much greater and more universal than the bloodless utopian universalism that is advocated by the Christian race mixers.

Addendum
Samuel Johnson was supposed to have claimed that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel. I have often thought that mysticism is actually the last refuge of a scoundrel; after losing the debate, just get mystical with your opponent and tell him your argument defies rational constructions.

And yet although often the refuge of a scoundrel, there are mystical arguments that are valid and are not made because one is afraid of being challenged for one’s lack of empirical evidence and one’s lack of rationality. This is the reason many quite decent white “racists” often bring in false evolutionary theories to buttress up their case for the white race. They want something solid and empirical.

But the most compelling argument to me for the preservation of the white race, undiluted by other racial strains, lies not in the realm of evolutionary theory, which I do not believe in, but in the mystical realm.

In making my case for the white man, I am going to relate one example from what is a legion of examples. (And if you think a case for the white man need not be articulated, just listen to what is being said about him in all the citadels of ‘learned opinion’ throughout the world.)

When I worked as a police officer, there was another officer in a neighboring, urbanized borough whom we shall call Dave Mills (not his real name). Dave was a short, stocky, chain-smoking, overweight, fifty-one year-old veteran with over twenty-five years experience in police work. Dave was a white man. To the best of my knowledge, he never attended any church. Dave also, like the other white officers (and the black ones, too, for that matter) called black people ‘niggers.’ Dave was particularly anti-Negro, having been longer on the force than the rest of us.

Now, to the incident. Dave had finished his four p.m.-to-midnight shift and was heading back to his station. He was late because he had to finish up with a fender bender accident. On his way back to the station, he saw a congregation (not a religious one) of young black people. Two blacks in particular caught Dave’s attention, a boyfriend/girlfriend pair in their early twenties. The young black male was screaming at the young black woman, who appeared to be pregnant and was screaming back at the male. The screaming match was taking place on a bridge over a large stream. The stream was shallow enough and the bridge high enough to render someone quite dead if that someone were thrown off the bridge.

Dave’s first thought was to keep on driving – “Why get involved in some domestic dispute when I’m not even on duty? I’ll just tell the guys on the next shift to look into it.”

But Dave’s second thought, when he had driven about two blocks past the bridge, was “There might not be time for me to tell somebody else; that argument could turn violent.”

Dave returned to the bridge. When he got there he saw the same group of black youths as before, but the couple had gone beyond verbal confrontation; the black male had a knife to the woman’s throat and seemed to be trying to throw her off the bridge and/or slice her up.

Dave immediately called for assistance. And then he did something that is certainly not standard procedure but was something Dave often did because of his many years of experience. He unloaded his gun before getting out of the car. Why? Because Dave saw that he couldn’t shoot the assailant (the bullet might go through him and into the woman) and he also saw that he was going to have to grapple with a man decidedly younger and larger than he. If he lost the wrestling match, Dave knew he would be shot with his own gun. Yes, he could still be stabbed to death, but that, he reasoned, would take longer, and help (he hoped) was on the way.

I, being on the midnight-to-eight a.m. shift in a neighboring borough, and two other officers from Dave’s borough responded to Dave’s call for assistance. When we arrived, this fat, chain-smoking, politically incorrect, white male had the black male on his stomach (a black male with whom Dave could not have lasted one round in a boxing match) and was attempting to put handcuffs on him.

With help from the other officers and myself, Dave got the male cuffed. Dave was bleeding from knife wounds on his hands and arms. The woman was bleeding from wounds to the face, arms, and hands.

Dave called the ambulance for the woman and held her head in his arms till the ambulance came.

She recovered from her wounds and delivered her baby a few months later. Dave, whose wounds were minor, did not need to be hospitalized. He had undoubtedly saved the lives of the woman and her baby.

I have often pondered about that incident. Why did Dave bother going back to the bridge? He did not have to go back. No one would have faulted him for not looking into a non-incident. So why did he do it? There was a whole host of black youth who didn’t get involved, and who, in fact, were cheering for the assailant when I and the other officers arrived. So, again, why?

Well, I’m open to charges of mysticism at this point, but I must insist that the answer lies in the mystical realms. Dave, despite the fact that he was not a member of any Christian church and despite the fact that he probably had a rather hazy, nebulous idea about the Deity, was a blood Christian. Because he was a white man, he had the Faith which had been planted and nurtured in the blood of the white man some 1,500 years ago. That Faith can never be totally eradicated from the blood of the white man, and should never be diluted or supplanted by the blood of other races, even if they are actually Christian, or, as is more likely, if they merely call themselves Christian. The white blood is an essential support for Christianity. Without it there would still be Christian churches, but there would be no Faith left on earth.

The Needle’s Eye

They bade me come to the House of Prayer,
They said I should find my Saviour there:
I was wicked enough, God wot, at best,
And weary enough to covet rest.

I paused at th’ door with a timid knock:
The People within were a silken flock—
By their scowls of pride it was plain to see
Salvation was not for the likes of me.

The Bishop was there in his lace and lawn,
And the cassocked priest,--I saw him yawn,--
The rich and great and virtuous too,
Stood smug and contented each in his pew.

The music was grand,--the service fine,
The sermon was eloquent,--nigh divine.
The subject was Pride and the Pharisee,
And the Publican, who was just like me.

I smote my breast in an empty pew,
But an usher came and looked me through
And bade me stand beside the door
In the space reserved for the mean and poor.

I left the church in my rags and shame:
In the dark without, One called my name.
“They have turned me out as well,” quoth He,
“Take thou my hand and come fare with me.

“We may find the light by a narrow gate,
The way is steep and rough and strait;
But none will look if your clothes be poor,
When you come at last to my Father’s door.”

I struggled on where’er He led:
The blood ran down from His hand so red!
The blood ran down from His forehead torn.
“Tis naught,” quoth He, “but the prick of a thorn!”

“You bleed,” I cried, for my heart ‘gan quail.
“’Tis naught, ‘tis naught but the print of a nail.”
“You limp in pain and your feet are sore.”
“Yea, yea,” quoth He, for the nails they were four.”

“You are weary and faint and bent,” I cried.
“’Twas a load I bore up a mountain side.”
“The way is steep, and I faint.”
But He: “It was steeper far upon Calvary.”

By this we had come to a narrow door,
I had spied afar. It was locked before;
But now in the presence of my Guide,
The fast-closed postern opened wide.

And forth there streamed a radiance
More bright than is the noon-sun’s glance;
And harps and voices greeted Him—
The music of the Seraphim.

I knew His face where the light did fall:
I had spat in it, in Herod’s Hall,
I knew those nail-prints now, ah, me!—
I had helped to nail Him to a tree.

I fainting fell before His face,
Imploring pardon of His grace.
He stooped and silencing my moan,
He bore me near to His Father’s throne.

He wrapt me close and hid my shame,
And touched my heart with a cleansing flame.
“Rest here,” said He, “while I go and try
To widen a little a Needles’ Eye.”

--Thomas Nelson Page
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Nevermore

Chilton Williamson Jr. recently stated that “The Hagel-Martinez immigration bill (S.B. 2611) passed in May by the U.S. Senate would, quite simply and certainly, destroy forever the United States, even as the country exists in attenuated form today.”

I agree with Mr. Williamson. And I feel in regards to that bill much as I did when my mother died. I had seen, when growing up, another side to my mother, a non-liberal side. When death came, it cancelled out my hope that somehow the non-liberal side of my mother could be brought into prominence again.

Once the U.S. becomes a non-white nation, there will never be any hope that white Christian culture will be restored. That death might be easier to take if white Europe remained, but the countries of Europe are also passing bills similar to the U.S. Senate Bill 2611.

And all but the worst whites will find it impossible to adjust to the colored world of Babel. So many things halfway-house whites take for granted will disappear. Edgar desperately tried to convince his father that “his life was a miracle.” Well, the half-way house whites who would not be convinced that white European culture was a miracle will sadly learn too late that it was indeed a miracle.

The Christian hearth will be no more. A faith which holds that man is something more than nature will also be replaced. In its stead will be a natural religion, a syncretistic religion of voodoo, Catholicism, charismatic Protestantism, and Aztec devil worship.

I think Poe, with his insistent refrain of ‘nevermore,’ conveyed so well the feeling of desolation felt at the death of a loved one or at the death of something that is sacred. Nevermore.

White Suicide

The casualty statistics of the white nations in World War I are truly staggering. The white race has never recovered from that war. In school they told us that the war was a result of entangling alliances and Kaiser Wilhelm’s failure to sign the reassurance pact with Russia. But those events were only logs on the fire. What really set Europe and its satellites aflame was the Gnosticizing of the Western elites. Throughout Europe, and in America as well, the ruling classes had become Gnostics. Christianity was just an idea to them. And they used the Christian men of Europe as chess pieces in their Gnostic games.

In World War I the ruling parties of both sides were Gnostic, but in our uncivil Civil War, which was a precursor of World War I, only the North had adopted the new Gnostic Christianity, which is not Christianity at all. This is the terrible significance of our Civil War. We saw for the first time, on a large scale, the results of Gnostic Christianity.

Bred in the Bone

In a marvelous short story, “Bred in the Bone,” by Thomas Nelson Page, the main character lives up to the highest ideals of the Christian faith because his Christianity is “bred in the bone.” That is what is lacking in modern Christendom – Christians who have the bred-in-the bone Christianity.

I once encountered a book by a liberal that was titled, Without Marx or Jesus. The author wanted to begin again without those two, in his opinion, false messiahs. I would like to begin, not again, but anew, without Aquinas or Calvin. All change is not, contrary to modern opinion, good. We need to cut down to the bone and rediscover the only Faith that can stand the test of time. But at least it (the Faith) is in our bones. We simply have to abandon the false faiths of the moderns, be they Thomists, Yankees, or psychiatrists. And it is the singular advantage of the white man that he doesn’t have to convert, he only has to revert. The black who has black mischief in his bones, and the Mexican who has the Halls of Montezuma in his bones need to convert.

It is a lonesome road, abandoned by his fellow whites, which the white man with the faith that is bred in the bone must travel. But travel it he must. And at the end of that road he will hear, as Arthur heard,

Then from the dawn it seem’d there came, but faint
As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
Around a King returning from his wars.

Quoting Idiots

Pat Buchanan is fond of quoting a priest who responded to Whittaker Chamber’s lament about the death of the West: “What makes you think the West is worth saving?” Now, I’m supposed to bury my head, cover myself with ashes, and let the third world hordes replace my decadent, godless people. Well, there are many fallacies in that asinine statement of the priest.

1) No matter how decadent a people becomes, if they are your people, you must stand with them. That doesn’t mean you don’t fight them; of course you do. But you don’t hand them over to foreigners. Kipling’s poem “The Stranger” says it all.

2) Yes, Western culture as it stands now is decadent and anti-Christian. But it was the only Christian culture that ever existed. If the barbarian hordes were invading the West in order to restore the older Western culture, you might make a case for the ‘Goodbye, Whitey’ opinion of Buchanan’s priest. But the barbarian hordes hate the older Western culture and have shown themselves to be quite fond of the pornographic culture of the West. They will not Christianize the West; they will simply destroy the white Christian remnant. And only that remnant stands between mankind and the abyss.

3) The people of Europe are my people and, in my opinion, the creators of the greatest culture ever created. But they are not the people of Israel; when they slide, it is not part of God’s plan to let the Assyrians in the guise of Mexicans, blacks and Muslims, come in and chastise them. Buchanan’s priest would have us all meekly submit to the barbarian invasion because it is God’s judgment on decadence. But that’s more than we can know. We have to think with our hearts and ask ourselves if God really would want us to sacrifice our loved ones and the cultural remnant of his civilization to the barbarian hordes. Does it seem likely? My heart recoils from it.

For the Greater Good

I can identify with a writer for Little Geneva Report who claimed he could not listen to Rush Limbaugh for more than a minute. Limbaugh is truly one pig of a man. But he is just a cruder version of Ludwig von Mises and Adam Smith, who both sought to convince the Western world that it was better off with capitalism than it had ever been before under any of the other –isms. And von Mises, because he came after Adam Smith, could show with statistics how much better off Western man was.

The problem with the statistics is they showed an aggregate increase in wealth, but they did not show the increase in poverty and the decrease in the soul of Western man. The great defenses of capitalism from Adam Smith to George Gilder always make the ‘greater good for the greater number’ argument. I don’t think even that argument is correct, but let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that this argument is correct. You know what the answer to it is? All the greater good in the world cannot make up for one eight-year-old boy getting up and going to the coal mines to work. Case closed on capitalism.

And the capitalists have never ceased their efforts to atomize the human race. They want no children, no men, and no women, only atoms. When, for instance, various Christian groups compelled the capitalists to allow children to go to school at age eight instead of to the mines, the capitalists counterattacked. They turned the schools into training grounds for the factories. When the neocon, Mort Zuckerman, brags about the docility of the American workers, he is giving a pat on the back to our public school system, which produces moral eunuchs and functional illiterates but successfully turns out soul-dead zombies fully capable of adjusting to the soulless life style of the ‘free market.’

And where does it all end? In hell, of course.

The Gnostic Confidence Man

Herman Melville’s novel, The Confidence Man, is set aboard a Mississippi riverboat. On board is a confidence man who manages, during the course of the voyage and in various disguises, to bilk most of the passengers aboard the boat.

“I do not jumble them; they are co-ordinates. For misanthropy, springing from the same root with disbelief of religion, is twin with that. It springs from the same root, I say; for, set aside materialism and what is an atheist, but one who does not, or will not, see in the universe a ruling principle of love; and what a misanthrope, but one who does not, or will not, see in man a ruling principle of kindness? Don’t you see? In either case the vice consists in a want of confidence.”

And it struck me while rereading the novel recently that the Confidence Man is, if not the devil, then at the very least, diabolical. He is able to appeal to each passenger’s weakness, be it vanity, greed, or egotistic altruism. And of course the Confidence Man is all head; he has no heart. The emergence of a heart would be suicide for a confidence man or the devil. The Confidence Man must be a Gnostic.

And in various guises the Gnostic devil has plagued mankind since the Garden of Eden. He comes in various disguises, but his object is always the same: To get man to think in the abstract and then to make that abstracted thought an end rather than a means. If pure thought is the ultimate that man can achieve, then the mind of man is God, and Satan can master that mind.

The Gnostic Confidence Man is not so foolish as to use the same disguise twice. In the medieval ages he came disguised as a Dominican Friar, in the 20th century he donned a lab coat and a clipboard, and in the 21st century he comes in the guise of the expert. He wears a different disguise depending on the area of expertise, be it clerical, academic, or general working class, but he is always in the guise of the expert. And through patience, diligence and cunning, the Confidence Man has extended the reign of the expert over the land that once eschewed the expert, be he alchemist or Thomist.

The Confidence Man has perfected his system. There is no aspect of 21st century life in which you will not encounter him. And yet, because he is so well disguised, you will never know you have encountered him. The Catholic neophyte, for instance, enters the Church and quite naturally wants to do things the right way. But the Church leaders have already been duped into adopting the Confidence Man’s system. Thought is the goal. So the neophyte pursues his studies. And who helps him with his studies? The Confidence Man, of course, in the guise of the kindly Father Catechist.

In business the Confidence Man reigns supreme as well. He stands ready to assist with mortgages, taxes, stocks and bonds. So long as he keeps people pursuing the idea of wealth rather than the blessings of sufficiency, he will be the one with whom they have to deal.

And throughout the modern world the Confidence Man appears to Joe Average Citizen. He might be the school psychologist, the local MD, or an Amway salesman. He’ll don whatever disguise fits the occasion. He is always up to the mark. Of course, it is academia in which the Confidence Man prefers to work. That is the very best place to peddle his wares. But in the end, it doesn’t make much difference. He can create an academic environment wherever he goes. He is in fact a “gol’ darn spellbinder.” And this should be no surprise because he studied under the master spellbinder, Old Scratch himself.

The Noose Tightens

I first read about the Kevin Lamb story in June 2005. It was one of those stories that made you say, “I knew things were bad, but I didn’t know they were that bad!”

In case you missed it: Kevin Lamb was the managing editor of Human Events, a supposedly conservative newsweekly. After a phone call from the radical Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the editors of Human Events gave Lamb his walking papers. What terrible skeleton had the SPLC found in Lamb’s closet that made Human Events fire him? Was it an extramarital affair? Was it a murder? No, it was something much worse. In his free time Kevin Lamb was writing and editing some articles for the Occidental Review.

Now, even if Kevin Lamb were dressing up as a Nazi and attending Hitler youth rallies, he should not have been fired. But the Occidental Review? Have you seen that publication? They very humbly and very politely point out that white people have made a few contributions to the civilization that sustains us all.

The rather surprising factor in the Kevin Lamb firing was that it took only one phone call from a radical organization to get him fired at a “conservative” publication. To me the situation emphasizes the fact that things have slid too far to allow for any compromise on the race issue. In the 50’s and 60’s, it was possible to be polite with well-meaning people who really believed all black people were just like the black people in To Kill a Mockingbird and A Patch of Blue. But one can’t be polite to those people any longer. The issue has become too clear, too deadly clear, to permit country club whites to bask in the warmth of Western culture while simultaneously handing that culture and the people who created it over to savages. It is a war, not one we chose, but a war nonetheless. And in war one must choose a side. The Human Events type of white-hating conservatives have chosen to side with the enemies of the white race. I think the old expression, “Well, at least now I know who my friends are,” applies here. Or maybe it would be more appropriate to say, “At least now I know who my enemies are.”

It was not always thus with conservative publications. In the 1950’s and early 1960’s National Review took an editorial position against the Civil Rights Act and regularly published articles by authors who criticized the black movement and defended segregation. That seems like eons ago now. Today only underground papers criticize blacks and support segregation.

The betrayal occurred because the conservatives were not really conservative. To Buckley and his ilk, only the free market counted. Criticism of the black movement was permitted in the early days because the blacks couched much of their criticism of America in socialistic terminology. It was never the white cultural heritage that National Review wanted to defend, it was capitalism. In fact, one could make the case that conservatives are now even more rabidly anti-white than the liberals because the conservatives are more afraid of being called racists than are liberals.

It’s all pretty sickening. Tennyson longed for a leader that would not lie. I long for a leader that is not afraid to be called a racist.

Educated Idiots

“Had Shakespeare been as learned as Ben Jonson, he would have written no better than Ben Jonson.”

--George Fitzhugh

I have always, possibly because America is not a true nation, considered myself free to adopt as my own whatever European tradition to which I felt drawn. If asked to rank my cultural favorites, I would place the 19th century English first, the 18th century Scottish Highlanders second, and the King Arthur Welsh third. Of the so-called Latin nations, I prefer the Spanish to the Italians and French. But to me, they are all my ancestors.

It has been and still is my contention that all the nations of Europe have betrayed their heritage. The first betrayal was made by Greece. The poetic core of that nation, as articulated by Homer and Sophocles, was forced to give way to the philosophical speculators. And it was the philosophical speculators who thought that St. Paul’s vision of the risen Lord was “foolishness.” But it was the children of Homer and Sophocles, the men and women with a poetic core such as St. Luke, who embraced the foolish faith of St. Paul.

Recently I heard from an irate man of Greek ancestry who took me to task for criticizing the Greeks. Well, if he had taken the trouble to read all my articles through, he would have seen that I was criticizing the Greek philosophical tradition, not each and every Greek. But yes, I am criticizing the Greek philosophical tradition. And that does seem to rankle nearly everyone.

[Thomas Molnar, echoing Thomas Hughes, once made the following statement about Voegelin: “Voegelin remains a ‘Greek,’ placing us in the metaxy, the field of force between man and God, but in such a manner that the upward pull remains the experience of a force, not more, rather than the Unknown God, whom Paul met at Athens.” In Dietrich von Hildebrand’s response to Molnar, he said that Plato was the teacher who prepared the way for Christ. He was not, Hildebrand claimed, a roadblock to faith. His reaction was typical of the attitude then and now toward the Greek philosophical tradition.]

But the Greek way, or more accurately, the Athenian way, is the way of death for the individual and for a culture. The Greek way separates the mind of man from his blood. And wisdom is in the blood not the mind. The Christian churches have been supping with the Athenian speculators ever since the 1st century. It seems that only St. Paul was able to keep the Athenian heresy at bay. It is such an appealing heresy. The idea that we can know God and harness His power through our mind is heady stuff. It thrilled Adam and Eve just as it thrilled Satan. In the past the laity always seemed to be the steadying influence on the clergy. The clergy pushed Gnosticism and the laity resisted. It was not until the latter part of the 20th century that the Christian laity became completely Gnosticized, although we see an advance preview of 20th century decadence in 19th century Paris: “In Paris, when they want to disparage a man, they say: ‘He has a good heart.’ The phrase means: ‘The poor fellow is as stupid as a rhinoceros.’” The end result of philosophical speculation is the Parisian sneer and smirk.

H. V. Morton, in his book about Wales (1932), depicts the Welsh people as the most traditional, the most authentically European people in all of Europe. Despite the fact that no great natural boundary separates them from the rest of Britain, they still retained their own very poetic, very musical language. And they retained their own bardic culture. But if we leap forward to the year 2006, we see a newspaper headline about a man being arrested in Wales for handing out Gospel tracts at a gay pride parade. How did we get from Morton’s Wales of 1931 to the Wales of 2006?

Morton supplies us with the answer:

The Englishman in Wales is surprised and rather ashamed to learn that although the idea of a Welsh University was one of Owen Glendower’s dreams in the Middle Ages (his letters about it are preserved in the French archives in Paris), the Welsh people had to wait five centuries before a Parliament sitting at Westminster established the University of Wales in the year 1893! Scotland had St. Andrew’s University in the Middle Ages; Ireland had Trinity College in the Time of Elizabeth…

The Welsh fell victim to what the rest of Europe had fallen victim to: they fell down and worshipped the Golden idol called education. Education breeds the “scientific method” which kills the bardic culture from which genuine religious faith grows. And yes, I know the Athenians thought highly of the university setting, but the truly great thinkers of Greece were Homer and Sophocles, men whose thoughts were in tune with their hearts and with the hearts of their fellow countrymen.

What happens physically when one goes to a university is the same thing that happens spiritually. One physically leaves the bardic village and goes to a cosmopolitan center. And spiritually the mind separates from the blood. One’s former bardic culture is studied; it becomes a thing outside one’s self, a thing disconnected. It no longer lives. And the most important aspect of a man’s being, his mystic connection to God, is severed forever when he goes through the systematic scientizing process that takes place at a university.

Surely I exaggerate? What would happen to science and development if we didn’t have universities? Isn’t it a question of the right kind of thinking vs. the wrong kind of thinking? No, because isolated thought is not thinking. If a man does not think with his blood he is not thinking. It would be different if men were angels, but we are not. Angelic thinking can be good or bad, depending on whether the angel is good or bad. But when humans try to think angelically, the result is always disastrous.

The check on the Gnostic cosmopolitans was always the villager – the rustic, the yeoman, and the peasant. But the university reached out with its giant tentacles and gradually made the village part of the university. Is there any aspect of modern life that does not involve the university? In every aspect of our lives, the expert, with his specialized training at some university, is ever present.

There is a scene in C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle that depicts a contingent of dwarfs who are unable to partake of a glorious feast because all they can see before them is a dark black hole. They “refuse to be taken in” by anyone who tries to tell them there is indeed a feast as well as a provider of the feast. They are too smart. And of course the dwarfs are us. We are too smart to see the feast and the author of the feast.

It is interesting to note that Lewis, in the Narnia books, makes reference to a magic deeper than the deep magic of the White Witch. That magic is, of course, Christianity. But if we perceive reality with the eye rather than through the eye, as the dwarfs and the educators do, we will not have access to the God-man. We will see only what the White Witch and her master want us to see – a black hole. And then our lives will consist of the endless pursuit of commercial interruptions. We will seek out anything that will divert us from the reality of the black hole. But it doesn’t matter what we do; so long as we perceive reality as the ancient Athenians and the educators have perceived it, we will always have the dreaded conviction that beneath the surface of our diversions is a black hole.

It certainly doesn’t appear that European man will abandon the faith of the speculators and return to the older bardic faith of his European ancestors. The speculators have conquered the former Christian Churches and every other major institution of the Western world. And if anyone tries to break through the commercial façade, expose the black hole, and seek out the magic that is deeper than the deep magic, he will find all the forces of the modern world, which are the forces of hell, arrayed against him.

If the modern educators, who pride themselves on their ability to measure and record every aspect of human existence, could put the collective soul of Western man on their soul detection machines, they would not see a single blip on the screen in the last 56 years. There would be no activity; everything would be still.

But one hopes that somewhere, deep in the forest, or high in the mountains, beats a heart that will not yield to the educators nor bend his knee to the White Witch. And that heart will become a flaw in the educators’ machine. And from that flaw will come other flaws. And that great precise recorder of human conformity and sterility will be forced to convey, to the educators, that their perfect, Godless black hole world is crumbling… well, such is the hope. Mere delusion? The ancient faith of Christians is based on such a “delusion.”

_________________________________________________________________

After the Romans had conquered Greece, Athens became the school and center of thought for the civilized world. Men had but one set of ideas, but one set of models to imitate in the whole range of the fine arts. Inventiveness and originality ceased, and genius was subdued. The rule of Horace, Nullius addictus in verba magistri jurare (“Not compelled to swear to the opinions of any master”) was [re]versed and men ceased to think for themselves, but looked to the common fountain of thought at Athens, where the teachers of mankind borrowed all their ideas from the past. Improvement and progress ceased, and imitation, chaining the present to the car of the past, soon induced rapid retrogression. Thus, we think centralization of thought occasioned the decline of civilization. Northern invaders introduced new ideas, broke up centralization, arrested imitation, and begot originality and inventiveness. Thus a start was given to a new and Christian civilization. Now, a centralization occasioned by commerce and fashion threatens the overthrow of our civilization, as arms and conquest overthrew the ancient.

-- George Fitzhugh in Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters

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Sir Walter Scott: Down These Mean Streets

I once heard a Catholic professor of literature explain that one needed to read classic works of literature because they built up the natural man to the point where he was ready to receive the supernatural truths of religion. And I once heard a Protestant educator explain that “we don’t read literature to learn about the truth. We read literature to hear the truth expressed well.” Both the Catholic and the Protestant were blasphemers. They were not blasphemers because they denigrated literature; they were blasphemers because they denounced the truth and the way.

Divine truth does not come to us from outside in predigested church documents. It comes to us from within. The poet – at least the true poet, as distinct from the mere wordsmith – intuits divine truth from listening to the promptings of his heart and by sympathizing with the yearnings in the hearts of his fellow men. There is more wisdom in the fourth verse of Phillip Brooks’s “O Little Town of Bethlehem” than in all the books of philosophy and theology ever written:

How silently, how silently,
The wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of his heaven;

No ear may hear his coming;
But in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive him, still,
The dear Christ enters in.

When a religious expert denies that the heart’s promptings and not the experts’ documents lead us to God, he blasphemes. He blasphemes because he is denying the divinity in man and the humanity in God. The dear Christ cannot enter in to the sterile cold world of the supernatural element devoid of humanity nor through the prophetic element devoid of humanity.

The ancient arduous process of listening and responding to the heart’s promptings has now ceased with the modern European man. But there was a time when men went through the process. And from such “convertites there is much matter to be heard and learn’d.”

There is a reason why there are no great novels written anymore. And the reason is not because the modern world lacks men and women who can write well. No, there are numerous authors who write well. But it takes more than an ability to write well to put together a great novel. An author must believe, as Dostoyevsky believed, that “Man is a mystery; if I spend my life trying to solve that mystery, I will not have lived in vain” if he is going to write great novels. In other worlds, a man must believe that there is something in man worth exploring.

A dogmatic Catholic would not be interested in exploring the soul of man because the dogmatic Catholic would claim he already knew the truth about man. Truth comes from outside of a man, from nature; therefore, there is no need to explore man’s soul; one only has to cultivate it. And the same is true for the dogmatic Protestant who believes “we know the truth, so we only look for books that express the truth well.” The liberal is also part of the anti-humanity triumvirate: “There is no soul; there is only a psyche, so we read fiction in order to interpret the characters’ motives in the light of modern psychology.” The ultimate compliment a liberal can give a novel is to say that it is “full of psychological insights.”

When the external props of Christian civilization were crumbling in the late 18th and 19th centuries, the great authors of that time period went deeper and produced a body of literature, true literature, which has never been equaled and certainly never shall be equaled by the post-Christians of our era. The litany of the greats is too long to list; it begins with Scott and goes on through Le Fanu and Thomas Hughes. All the greats of the 19th century (and I use the term ‘19th century’ loosely because Scott slightly predates it and men such as J. M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, and A. E. W. Mason slightly postdate it) bear witness to the reality of the God-man because they took the mystery that was within seriously. But most of the great authors of the 19th century, such as Dostoyevsky and Dickens, who give us a vision of the God-man, do not give us an anchor to help us hold that vision down to earth. It is always in danger of flying away from us and becoming a phantom or an airy nothing. That is because most of the authors of that magnificent century were fighting modernity from within and without. They were fighting the outside forces: Darwinism, capitalism, feminism, and Marxism, and they were fighting the spirit of modernity that was within them. But the great ones, though tainted with modernity, saw the risen Lord standing above the citadels of modernity. One man, however, was not tainted by modernity, and he can supply us with a vision and an anchor for that vision. That man is Walter Scott.

Scott is generally credited with reviving chivalry, and certainly the chivalric code is seldom missing from a Scott novel, but Scott does not view knight-errantry in the same light as do such authors as Ariosto. He gives the warriors of the Middle Ages their due, but his heroes always adhere to a code that is deeper than the medieval code. Scott, following St. Paul and Shakespeare, shifts the emphasis from the pursuit of fame and honor and directs his heroes’ efforts toward charity. When driven to the wall, Scott’s heroes and heroines reveal to us the wisdom of St. Paul. Jeanie Deans prevails because her faith cannot be broken. It is not based on prophecies which can fail, nor on knowledge which can fail; it is based on that which cannot fail – charity. And Quentin Durward wins the fair maiden not because he prevails in glorious combat but because he forgoes glorious combat in order to perform an act of charity.

It’s not that other 19th century authors do not place charity at the center of their visions. They do. But where Dickens often gets sidetracked by democratic delusions and Dostoyevsky by Russian messianism, Scott never wavers from the path of St. Paul. He admires the Highlanders but he does not place his ultimate hope on their political success. There is only one reign worthy of our undivided support: His reign of charity. In Scott’s view, political systems come and go, and our support or resistance to them should depend on how closely they adhere to His reign of charity.

In his poetry and novels, Scott eschews the classical approach which consists of feeble attempts to recapture the glory of Greece, and instead embarks on a romantic quest through the human heart. There and there alone is the anchor. In our hearts is the imprint of His heart.

It was Scott’s special destiny to take up Shakespeare’s mantle and show European man that the journey through the human heart is not a passive journey but an intensely active one. There are so many dragons along the way that must be slain, the dragons of all the seven deadly sins, but above all, the dragon of intellectual pride.

Scott’s authorial voice speaks loud and clear through the actions of his heroes and heroines. It is charity alone that can anchor our hearts to His. And that charitable center of our heart can not be reached by the spiritually weak or the intellectually proud.

Scott, with characteristic modesty, once told a woman who compared him to Shakespeare that he was not fit to tie Shakespeare’s shoe laces. But there is a great similarity between the two authors. They both bid us look away from the outward pageantry of life to the romance that is within. And that is extremely rare. Few authors have the courage to embark on the inward journey because they fear that which is within. But the inner journey through the human heart is the real journey that the hero must take. Scott gives us the anchor to prevail against all the forces of hell because he himself is the hero Raymond Chandler was looking for: “But down these mean streets a man must go, who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”

To those of us tarnished with modernity and afraid (and who is not?), Walter Scott reaches out over what is really only a short span of years and bids us take heart, as Quentin Durward does. Though exiled from his native land, Quentin prevails because he knows that all the enduring graces of home and hearth he takes with him. “Behold the Kingdom of God is within you.”

Harold the Dauntless

xiv.

“Harold,” he said, “what rage is thine,
To quit the worship of thy line,
To leave thy Warrior God?—
With me is glory or disgrace,
Mine is the onset and the chase,
Embattled hosts before my face
Are wither’d by a nod.
Wilt thou then forfeit that high seat
Deserved by many a dauntless feat,
Among the heroes of thy line,
Eric and fiery Thorarine?—
Thou wilt not. Only can I give
The joys for which the valiant live,
Victory and vengeance—only I
Can give the joys for which they die,
The immortal tilt—the banquet full,
The brimming draught from foeman’s skull.
Mine art thou, witness this thy glove,
The faithful pledge of vassal’s love.”

xv.
“Tempter,” said Harold, firm of heart,
“I charge thee, hence! whate’er thou art,
I do defy thee – and resist
The kindling frenzy of my breast,
Waked by thy words; and of my mail,
Nor glove, nor buckler, splent, nor nail,
Shall rest with thee—that youth release,
And God, or demon, part in peace.”—
“Eivir,” the Shape replied, “is mine,
Mark’d in the birth-hour with my sign.
Think’st thou that priest with drops of spray
Could wash that blood-red mark away?
Or that a borrow’d sex and name
Can abrogate a Godhead’s claim?”Thrill’d this strange speech thro’ Harold’s brain,
He clenched his teeth in high disdain,
For not his new-born faith subdued
Some tokens of his ancient mood:—
“Now, by the hope so lately given
Of better trust and purer heaven,
I will assail thee, fiend!” –Then rose
His mace, and with a storm of blows
The mortal and the Demon close.

xvi.
Smoke roll’d above, fire flash’d around,
Darken’d the sky and shook the ground;
But not the artillery of hell,
The bickering lightning, nor the rock
Of turrets to the earthquake’s shock,
Could Harold’s courage quell.
Sternly the Dane his purpose kept,
And blows on blows resistless heap’d,
Till quail’d that Demon Form,
And—for his power to hurt or kill
Was bounded by a higher will—
Evanish’d in the storm.
Nor paused the Champion of the North,
But raised and bore his Eivir forth,
From that wild scene of fiendish strife,
To light, to liberty, and life!

Washington Irving

Some writers for Middle American News and the Occidental Quarterly have asserted that the United States is not a propositional nation. They say the country is not based on an idea but on European traditions. I would agree that America should not be a propositional nation, but I do not think it is entirely accurate to say it is not founded on propositional premises. Surely the majority of the founding fathers did not view the U. S. Constitution as the French Jacobins viewed their constitution, as a ‘brave, new world’ document, but at least three Americans, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin, did. And it is the propositional view of the nation, which means we do not have a real nation, that has prevailed.

The acceptance of one’s nation as a non-nation, as a propositional nation, does not come unless one has accepted that existence itself is of a propositional nature. The Gnostic, “I think, therefore I am” premise has to become part of the common man’s view of life before a Gnostic’s concept of nation can become the reigning one. The line from Aquinas to Descartes to George Bush signing over the country to Mexico is a straight line.

As America the nation fades into the dust bin of history, it is somewhat of a cathartic experience to go back and look at a man who viewed America as a nation rather than as a New Tower of Babel.

Washington Irving’s success is the very reason that he is often held in slight regard. “He wrote some humorous tales, but nothing profound.” But Washington Irving was the first American writer to enunciate the proper, the genuine American patriotism. In Irving’s view America was European. Europe’s faith was America’s faith, and European customs were American customs. According to Irving, all that was different was the habitation and the names. And in many cases not even the names were very different – New York, New England, etc.

Irving was born in New York City in 1783. He had little formal schooling but came from a family of big readers. Like Walter Scott he studied law as a young man but gave it up to write fairy stories. He spent much of his adult life abroad, first in England and later in Spain. During one trip to Britain he visited Walter Scott at Abbotsford. It was Scott who encouraged him to transfer the folk tales of Europe to American soil. The results of that advice can be seen in Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

It is a shame that few Americans read more than “Rip Van Winkle” and “Sleepy Hollow”; Irving’s tales of Christmas in England, Old Christmas, his commentaries on Shakespeare, and his numerous biographical works reveal a man who saw not a brave, new world here in America, but a world that gave European men and women a chance to spread European traditions across a new continent. It is more than just a pity that Americans have chosen the propositional America of Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin and rejected Irving’s European America.

From Irving’s “Christmas Day”:

On our way homeward his heart seemed overflowed with generous and happy feelings. As we passed over a rising ground which commanded something of a prospect, the sounds of rustic merriment now and then reached our ears: the squire paused for a few moments, and looked around with an air of inexpressible benignity. The beauty of the day was of itself sufficient to inspire philanthropy. Not withstanding the frostiness of the morning, the sun in his cloudless journey had acquired sufficient power to melt away the thin covering of snow from every southern declivity, and to bring out the living green which adorns an English landscape even in mid-winter. Large tracts of smiling verdure contrasted with the dazzling whiteness of the shaded slopes and hollows. Every sheltered bank, on which the broad rays rested, yielded its silver rill of cold and limpid water, glittering through the dripping grass; and sent up slight exhalations to contribute to the thin haze that hung just above the surface of the earth. There was something truly cheering in this triumph of warmth and verdure over the frosty thralldom of winter; it was, as the squire observed, an emblem of Christmas hospitality, breaking through the chills of ceremony and selfishness, and thawing every heart into a flow. He pointed with pleasure to the indications of good cheer reeking from the chimneys of the comfortable farmhouses, and low thatched cottages. “I love,” said he, “to see this day well kept by rich and poor; it is a great thing to have one day in the year, at least, when you are sure of being welcome wherever you go, and of having, as it were, the world all thrown open to you; and I am almost disposed to join with Poor Robin, in his malediction on every churlish enemy to this honest festival

“Those who at Christmas do repine
And would fain hence dispatch him,
May they with old Duke Humphry dine,
Or else may Squire Ketch catch ‘em.”

From Irving’s “Stratford-on-Avon”:

As I crossed the bridge over the Avon on my return, I paused to contemplate the distant church in which the poet lies buried, and could not but exult in the malediction, which has kept his ashes undisturbed in its quiet and hallowed vaults. What honor could his name have derived from being mingled in dusty companionship with the epitaphs and escutcheons and venal eulogiums of a titled multitude? What would a crowded corner in Westminster Abbey have been, compared with this reverend pile, which seems to stand in beautiful loneliness as his sole mausoleum! The solicitude about the grave may be but the offspring of an over-wrought sensibility; but human nature is made up of foibles and prejudices; and its best and tenderest affections are mingled with these factitious feelings. He who has sought renown about the world, and has reaped a full harvest of worldly favor, will find, after all, that there is no love, no admiration, no applause, so sweet to the soul as that which springs up in his native place. It is there that he seeks to be gathered in peace and honor among his kindred and his early friends. And when the weary heart and failing head begin to warn him that the evening of life is drawing on, he turns as fondly as does the infant to the mother’s arms, to sink to sleep in the bosom of the scene of his childhood.

How would it have cheered the spirit of the youthful bard when, wandering forth in disgrace upon a doubtful world, he cast back a heavy look upon his paternal home, could he have foreseen that, before many years, he should return to it covered with renown; that his name should become the boast and glory of his native place; that his ashes should be religiously guarded as its most precious treasure; and that its lessening spire, on which his eyes were fixed in tearful contemplation, should one day become the beacon, towering amidst the gentle landscape, to guide the literary pilgrim of every nation to his tomb!

In the Bleak Midwinter

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, Whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, Whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

--Christina Rosetti

The Ongoing Revolution

G. M. Trevelyan, in the third volume of his History of England, had this to say about the Industrial Revolution:

The great changes in man’s command over nature and consequent manner of life, which began in England in the reign of George III and have since spread with varying degrees of intensity over almost the whole inhabited globe, make bewildering work for the historian. Up to the Industrial Revolution, economic and social change, though continuous, has the pace of a slowly-moving stream; but in the days of Watt and Stephenson it has acquired the momentum of water over a mill-dam, distracting to the eye of any spectator. Nor, for all its hurry, does it ever reach any pool at the bottom and resume its former leisurely advance. It is a cataract still. The French Revolution occupied a dozen years at most, but the Industrial Revolution may yet continue for as many hundred, creating and obliterating one form of economic and social life after another, so that the historian can never say – ‘This or this is the normal state of modern England.’

G. M. Trevelyan wrote those words in 1926. He went on to say that we can’t approve or condemn the Industrial Revolution; we need to see it develop more before we can judge it. Can we judge it now? I think so. There is no defense for it. Its apologists always cite increased standards of living and the impracticality of agrarian economies, but no one except a few Luddites ever condemned the use of every single machine. The original critics of the Industrial Revolution, who have been proven correct, feared that the machine would become a replacement for God, dispensing graces and benefits to mankind in a way that was more efficient and modern than the old-fashioned guy in the Christian story. “A man that has an automobile don’t need Jesus,” became the unspoken creed of modern man. The machine separates us from God in two ways.

First, it anesthetizes us by taking us out of the natural order of creation. One need only look at the infernal abortion machines to see this process at work. “Childbirth produces pain; a machine will take care of it.”

And secondly, the machine age allows us to worship progress. Instead of looking for the return of our Lord, we look for the coming perfection of mankind when – thanks to the machine -- death, war, and hunger will have ceased.

When machines were set free and allowed to make men dance to what increasingly became Satanic tunes, man was doomed to become the slave of a force he could not control or stop.

Of course modern Christians (isn’t that an oxymoron?) never criticize industrialization because they fear ostracization and the Luddite label. But it is not an either-or proposition. Our choices are not ‘rampant, Godless industrialization’ on the one hand, or ‘we all live in caves and eat cave moss’ on the other. It is the revolutionary nature of industrialization that a Christian should hate. If the machine age had grown up organically from the needs of a Christian civilization, it would not have been the harmful hateful thing that we see before us today. The word ‘organic’ is overused today, but it best describes the way in which the machine age should have begun. If a farmer could improve his own family farm through the use of a machine that sprang from his own ingenuity and his own hands, then its use would be legitimate. Compare this to the illegitimate use of a machine: the cotton gin was produced to compete on the mass market with other mass producers. If a physician made use of a machine to perform beneficial operations which would be impossible without one, then the use of such a machine would be legitimate. The machine age ought to have been wedded to the real lives of Christian people. When machines were set free and allowed to make men dance to what increasingly became Satanic tunes, man was doomed to become the slave of a force he could not control or stop.

Chaplin is not my favorite comedian, but in his film, Modern Times, he does give us one of the most enduring and powerful critiques of the industrial revolution. Those giant gears are grinding up more than modern man’s body; they are grinding up his soul.

I See No England

H. V. Morton, in his book, I Saw Two Englands, and in his book, Ghosts of London, saw the Nazi threat as a crisis equal to the Norman invasion. I see no reason to argue with that assessment, but had the Nazi’s defeated the English, it would have been almost inconsequential compared to the current colored invasion that Britain is now undergoing. We need to take a look at the various invasions in order to see why the current colored invasion dwarfs all the rest.

Brutus was the great grandson of Aeneas. He led the subjected Trojans out of Greece through the Mediterranean Sea and eventually settled in Britain. Britain was virtually uninhabited at the time; only a few giants occupied the land. One Briton named Corineus became adept in the art of giant-disposal. Geoffrey of Monmouth gives us a description of his most glorious encounter:

Corineus experienced great pleasure from wrestling with the giants, of whom there were far more there than in any of the districts which had been distributed among his comrades. Among the others there was a particularly repulsive one, called Gogmagog, who was twelve feet tall. He was so strong that, once he had given it a shake, he could tear up an oak-tree as though it were a hazel want. Once, when Brutus was celebrating a day dedicated to the gods in the port where he had landed, this creature, along with twenty other giants, attacked him and killed a great number of the Britons. However, the Britons finally gathered together from around and about and overcame the giants and slew them all, except Gogmagog. Brutus ordered that he alone should be kept alive, for he wanted to see a wrestling-match between this giant and Corineus, who enjoyed beyond all reason matching himself against such monsters. Corineus was delighted by this. He girded himself up, threw off his armour and challenged Gogmagog to a wrestling-match. The contest began. Corineus moved in, so did the giant; each of them caught the other in a hold by twining his arms round him, and the air vibrated with their panting breath. Gogmagog gripped Corineus with all his might and broke three of his ribs, two on the right side and one on the left. Corineus then summoned all his strength, for he was infuriated by what had happened. He heaved Gogmagog up on to his shoulders, and running as fast as he could under the weight, he hurried off to the nearby coast. He clambered up to the top of a mighty cliff, shook himself free and hurled this deadly monster, whom he was carrying on his shoulders, far out into the sea. The giant fell on to a sharp reef of rocks, where he was dashed into a thousand fragments and stained the waters with his blood. The place took its name from the fact that the giant was hurled down there and it is called Gogmagog’s Leap to this day.

All this occurred, according to Geoffrey, around 1240 B. C. [For a defense of the historical accuracy of Geoffrey of Monmouth, I refer you to After the Flood by Bill Cooper, B. A. Hons.]

If we jump ahead to Arthur’s time (450 A.D.), the Britons, later to be called the Welsh, are now Christian and are fighting what will ultimately be, after Arthur’s demise, a losing battle with the heathen Saxons. The Britons are pushed back into what is now called Wales. This is the first tragic change of power in Britain. And the Welsh hatred of the Saxons was so great that they could not bear to Christianize them. That was left to Irish monks who had themselves been converted to Christianity by St. Patrick, who was Welsh. In the whirligig of time, the Christian Saxons became allies of the Christian Welsh.

The Norman Conquest was not as great an upheaval for the Britons as the Saxon conquest had been because the Normans were nominally Christian. In addition the Saxon culture remained the dominant one. The Norman rulers adapted the English language and English customs. After the Norman invasion of 1066, the racial and religious basis of the British nation was set. It was racially Celt, Saxon, French and Dane, all white and all Christian.

So, if the Nazis had invaded and somehow managed to conquer the then-unconquerable Britons, the racial mix would not have changed at all as the Germans were white and Saxon and the Christian Faith was the historic faith of the German people. Hitler’s Nazism would not have survived him.

But if we look at the current invasion of Britain we see something unprecedented in British history. The colored invasion will not be a slight alteration in British customs; it will be the end of Britain. All her history will be lost, and the “blessed plot” of earth will be no more, for the colored invaders, be they devotees of voodoo, disciples of Mohammed, or followers of Hinduism, are all united in their hatred of white, Christian Britain.

Every country of Europe and every country founded by Europeans is going through something similar. From a straight empirical, data-collecting perspective, it looks like there is no hope for white Europeans. But was white Europe built on empiricism? There is hope in the blood. Christianity is in our blood, and a fierce, warlike defiance of heathenism is also in our blood. If we answer that call, there is no one who can predict with certainty that white Europe will die. Nothing that comes from the spiritual dimension in man is subject to the inexorable laws of math. So, to conquer the inexorable we must dive down to the depths of our sacred heritage, pluck from it the European gauntlet, and fling it in the collective face of the invading armies of color.

Augustus Pinochet, R.I.P.

He took his stand and held it, never yielding unto death.

George Fitzhugh – Taking the trouble to write the truth

George Fitzhugh is, in my opinion, the greatest of the native-born American thinkers. R. L. Dabney and Richard Weaver certainly deserve honorable mention, but George Fitzhugh is my hero. On a wide range of topics, including slavery, the Reformation, Shakespeare, and the French Revolution, George Fitzhugh speaks with wisdom.

His defense of the segregated, slave-holding South of the 1850’s is particularly inspired and irrefutable. And yet Fitzhugh’s defense of the South did the South no good. Those without wisdom and without the correct arguments won. Why? I don’t know why truth never wins. Maybe our Lord meant it to be that way. After all, he was the Truth Incarnate and he was crucified.

It is difficult not to just give up any attempt to articulate a coherent true refutation of modernity. “If they didn’t listen to someone like George Fitzhugh, why should I, lacking his eloquence, bother to try to convince the inconvincible?” In other words, why should a man write to mere oblivion? I think a man writes in the hope that in the metaphysical realm his voice is heard. It is a form of prayer, which, as Shakespeare says, “pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself and frees all faults.”

From Fitzhugh:

Our Revolution, so wise in its conception and so glorious in its execution, was the mere assertion by adults of the rights of adults, and had nothing more to do with philosophy than the weaning of a calf. It was the act of a people seeking national independence, not the Utopian scheme of speculative philosophers, seeking to establish human equality and social perfection.

But the philosophers seized upon it, as they had upon the Reformation, and made it the unwilling and unnatural parent of the largest and most hideous brood of ills that had ever appeared at one birth, since the opening of the box of Pandora. Bills of Rights, Acts of Religious Freedom and Constitutions, besprinkled with doctrines directly at war with all stable government, seem to be the basis on which our institutions rest. But only seem to be; for, in truth, our laws and government are either old Anglo-Saxon prescriptive arrange-ments, or else the gradual accretions of time, circumstance and necessity. Throw our paper platforms, preambles and resolutions, guaran-ties and constitutions, into the fire, and we should be none the worse off, provided we retained our institutions - and the necessities that begat, and have, so far, continued them.

And:

We may be doing Mr. Jefferson injustice, in assuming that his "fundamental principles" and Mr. Seward's "higher law," mean the same thing; but the injustice can be very little, as they both mean just nothing at all, unless it be a determination to inaugurate anarchy, and to do all sorts of mischief. We refer the reader to the chapter on the Declaration of Independence," &c., in our Sociology, for a further dissertation on the fundamental powdercask abstractions, on which our glorious institutions affect to repose. We say affect, because we are sure neither their repose nor their permanence would be disturbed by the removal of the counterfeit foundation.

The true greatness of Mr. Jefferson was his fitness for revolution. He was the genius of innovation, the architect of ruin, the inaugurator of anarchy. His mission was to pull down, not to build up. He thought everything false as well in the physical, as in the moral world. He fed his horses on potatoes, and defended harbors with gun-boats, because it was contrary to human experience and human opinion. He proposed to govern boys without the authority of masters or the control of religion, supplying their places with Laissez-faire philosophy, and morality from the pages of Lawrence Sterne. His character, like his philosophy, is exceptional - invaluable in urging on revolution, but useless, if not dangerous, in quiet times.

En-Dor

“Behold there is a woman that hath a familiar spirit at En-dor.” I Samuel, xxviii. 7.

The road to En-dor is easy to tread
For Mother or yearning Wife.
There, it is sure, we shall meet our Dead
As they were even in life.
Earth has not dreamed of the blessing in store
For desolate hearts on the road to En-dor.

Whispers shall comfort us out of the dark—
Hands—ah God!—that we knew!
Visions and voices—look and hark!—
Shall prove that the tale is true,
And that those who have passed to the further shore
May be hailed—at a price—on the road to En-dor.

But they are so deep in their new eclipse
Nothing they say can reach,
Unless it be uttered by alien lips
And framed in a stranger’s speech.
The son must send word to the mother that bore,
Through an hireling’s mouth. ’Tis the rule of En-dor.

And not for nothing these gifts are shown
By such as delight our dead.
They must twitch and stiffen and slaver and groan
Ere the eyes are set in the head,
And the voice from the belly begins.
Therefore, we pay them a wage where they ply at En-dor.

Even so, we have need of faith
And patience to follow the clue.
Often, at first, what the dear one saith
Is babble, or jest, or untrue.
(Lying spirits perplex us sore
Till our loves—and their lives—are well-known at En-dory . . .)

Oh the road to En-dor is the oldest road
And the craziest road of all!
Straight it runs to the Witch’s abode,
As it did in the days of Saul,
And nothing has changed of the sorrow in store
For such as go down on the road to En-dor!

--Rudyard Kipling

Conversion by Spanish cannon

“When Cortes and his small but valiant band of iron men conquered the teeming empire of the Aztecs, he was immediately followed by a train of earnest missionaries, chiefly Franciscans, who began to preach the Gospel to the natives and soon sent home, with naïve enthusiasm, glowing accounts of the conversions they had effected. Their pious sincerity and innocent joy still lives in the pages of Father Shagun, Father Torquemada, and many others. For their sake I am glad that the poor Franciscans never suspected how small a part they played in the religious conversions that gave them such happiness. Far, far more persuasive than their sermons and their book had been the Spanish cannon that breached and shattered the Aztec defenses, and the ruthless Spanish soldiers who slew the Aztec priests at their own altars and toppled the Aztec idols from the sacrificial pyramids.

“The Aztecs, Tepanecs, and other natives accepted Christianity, not because their hearts were touched by alien and incomprehensible doctrines of love and mercy, but because it was the religion of the white men whose bronze cannon and mailclad warriors were invincible.”

-Revilo P. Oliver in Christianity – Religion of the West

Mr. Oliver goes on to make the same point in his essay about the other non-European peoples. They nominally accepted Christianity when the Europeans were powerful and went back to their heathen gods when the Europeans were weak.

I have spent the last thirty years of my life dwelling on that fact. The Europeans are the only race of people who accepted Christ when they were powerful. They truly had a personal relationship with Him. He was the Savior, true God and true Man, the fulfillment of their dream of a Hero-God who was good as well as powerful. All other races saw only Christ’s power, not his goodness. And yet every major academic institution and media center throughout Europe and America bid us look at life as the non-white nations do. Why should we look at life through their eyes? God is not there, at least not the God of love and mercy that Europeans have bent their knees to for almost the last two thousand years.

Whatever Happened to Personality?

“Modern critics say that Charles Dickens exaggerated. He did not. He happened to live in a world that had not heard of standardization in men or material. What we now call eccentricity was in his day the normal expression of a man’s personality; it was an unself-conscious world; a world in which a man was not afraid of being himself. To-day, even in remote villages, outside influences react on a man and tend to whittle down personality to a common denominator. Here and there, however, tucked away in unlikely places, you may find the last outposts of the Dickens world…”

-- H. V. Morton in The Call of England

Democratic Tyranny

It seems that Bush does not have enough cannon fodder, so the hue and cry for a draft is surfacing again, couched in the words of a scoundrels’ last resort – patriotic rhetoric.

It is a sin – in fact, a damnable sin – to waste the lives of American soldiers in an immoral war. The implicit promise that the Commander-in-chief makes to his volunteer soldiers is that he will only ask them to wage war in the country’s national interest and in a way that will not disgrace the uniform they wear. Bush has foully violated that implicit promise.

To draft men to do what is already immoral for volunteers to do is to add an infinity of sins to an infinity of sins. But to expect anything but blasphemy and Godlessness from any politician, Republican or Democrat, in this techno-barbarian anti-nation, is an act of folly unprecedented in the annals of civilization.