Satanic Legions

‘Twas the hour when rites unholy
Call’d each Paynim voice to prayer,
And the star that faded slowly,
Left to dews the freshen’d air.

Day his sultry fires had wasted,
Calm and cool the moonbeams shone;
To the Vizier’s lofty palace
One bold Christian came alone.

-Sir Walter Scott

The recent torture murder of the young white couple and the white reaction to it was quite representative of what has been happening in the white European world for the past fifty years. Generally the white victims’ deaths are met with silence. In some rare cases, such as that of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, there is a small protest by some courageous white men. That protest is always accompanied by a larger protest from white-hating whites, many of whom call themselves Christian.

It’s difficult to fathom how someone can claim to be Christian and then come out in favor of brutal murder and torture, but that is now the case, and has been for the past fifty years, in the nations that used to comprise Christendom. But are the white haters really Christian? Of course not. And it is a waste of time and effort to dialogue with them, first, because they have the whip hand as the North did after the Civil War, and those holding the whip are not going to dialogue with those under the lash. And second, you cannot dialogue with non-Christians, because such individuals have no desire to seek the truth. They have only a desire to achieve power.

I think the late Pope John’s reaction to the torture-murders of some of his own Catholic missionaries in Africa – he was saddened but full of loving kindness for the perpetrators – is the supreme example of the type of professed Christianity that is not Christianity at all. Indeed I think it no less than the worship of Satan.

If you side with Pope John and the white-hating whites who protested against the white protestors in Knoxville, you are standing with the sneering, Christ-hating, Gnostic man-devils that have plagued Christendom throughout its long history. The dauntless European, the true Christian, who follows St. Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 13, has always sought to protect the helpless and punish home when the helpless were massacred. To punish home. That is a Christian sentiment. All the Gnostic verbiage by sacrilegious popes and Protestant ministers cannot wash that desire out of the blood of a true Christian.

We must face the reality, however, that there are very few Christians left. The vast majority of whites have united with the colored races to form a culture that can only be described as the incarnation of Satan. It should be clear to us now. We fight against the forces of hell. They are an enemy without mercy, without pity, without love. They are fueled by a hate that passeth all understanding. It is impossible to understand how Satan, who was in daily contact with the Lord God, could still hate Him and hate him enough to form a kingdom opposed to everything holy and Christlike. Where Christ was gentle, Satan was harsh; when Christ rebuked sin, Satan praised it; in everything Satan opposed Christ. And there is an exact parallel in our own times. Whereas the old Europeans adhered to the code of chivalry, the new Europeans call such a code sexist. While the old Europeans believed that Christian men had to fight in the name of the God of mercy against merciless barbarism, the new European sides with the merciless barbarians. Everything is reversed; we live in hell.

And for practical purposes, leaving the dispositions of their souls to God, we must assume that the vast majority of whites will remain implacably opposed to white European Christians. They have been exposed to Christianity through the great poets of the West and in the faces of their European ancestors. And they have spoken with the voice of those who are legion, and they have said, “We prefer barbarism.” Granted, it is a kind of techno-barbarism they prefer, with themselves at the top of the social order. The white-hating techno-barbarian could not live for one day with the Aztec or the African in their native environments; what he envisions is a kind of multi-racial series of condos or housing developments with himself in the nicest one. And he certainly doesn’t envision that he, the epitome of satanic enlightenment culture, will be devoured by those lower on that satanic food chain which he has substituted for Christian Europe.

In a very real sense, former white Christians have become Judaized, and by that I mean they hate Christians with a hatred that is fueled by religious zeal. Shakespeare has depicted this kind of hatred in Merchant of Venice. When Shylock is offered thrice the bond, he refuses – he will have his pound of flesh:

“I pray you, think, you question with the Jew.
You may as well go stand upon the beach
And bid the main flood bate his usual height;
You may as well use question with the wolf
Why he hath made the ewe bleat for the lamb;
You may as well forbid the mountain pines
To wag their high tops and to make no noise
When they are fretten with the gusts of heaven;
You may as well do any thing most hard,
As seek to soften that – than which what’s harder? –
His Jewish heart.

And just as a northern Copperhead can be more southern than a southern liberal, so could a Jew be more Christian than a Christian if, like Shylock’s daughter, he converted to the religion that requires mercy and not sacrifice. But the vast majority of professed Christians are now like the vast majority of Jews: they hate the things of Christendom with a passion.

I liken the white Christian’s situation to that of the old Western good guy who walks out to fight the bad guy in the final shootout. But when he faces the bad guy, he discovers that there are two more bad buys armed with Winchester rifles behind him, one lurking behind the saloon door and the other poised behind the bedroom window of one of the loose women of the town. Now, if the hero is a man with a fervent belief in the power of democracy and dialogue, he will plead with the bad guy and tell him that “By golly, this just ain’t fair.” And when that fails, which of course it will, because the bad guy does not believe in fair play and chivalry (that’s why he’s a bad guy), the hero will plead to all the silent citizens of the town hiding behind locked doors. “Don’t you know these are bad guys? Don’t you know if you let them kill me that you will be next?” But the “good” citizens already know that the bad guy is a bad guy -- that’s why the majority of them like him and why the rest are too afraid to oppose him. So the gunfight takes place and the hero takes two rifle bullets in the back and six Colt .45 slugs in the belly, delivered by the bad guy standing over his body.

But there is another scenario that could also take place. Let’s suppose our hero is not one who believes in dialogue or democracy. He knows that the bad guy is deaf to any appeal stemming from the Christian honor code. And he also knows that the townspeople either are against him or are indifferent. So what does he do?

Well, he still goes out to face the bad guy, but being forewarned by his wise blood, he takes measures to ensure that if the match won’t be totally equal, at least it will be one in which he has a fighting chance. That’s all he wants, a fighting chance, and then let God do the rest.

I’m not far afield when I take us out into the mean streets of the Old West. The Western hero has his roots in Europe. And the European hero is filled with a love for the God-Man, who loves with a love beyond all understanding of the satanic intellect. The zeal which that love inspires can overcome Satan and all his legions. It has in the past.

The Racial Link to God

In J. J. Pollitt’s book, Art and Experience in Classical Greece, he points out that after Greece’s Golden Age, which was terminated by a plague and the Peloponnesian War, Greek art did not reflect the tragedies that had befallen Greece as a whole nor individual members of their nation. Instead, their art reflected a new obsession with detailed vase painting and ornate, flowery and superficial sculpture. The message was clear: “Humanity equals pain; let us seek refuge in technique and superficiality and block out the horrors associated with humanity.”

I definitely see this escape from humanity taking place in the Christian churches of today. We have supped full of horrors, but instead of responding to the horror, churchmen give us formulaic solutions to life’s problems that have been worked out in committee by scientists, psychologists, and the Hallmark Greeting Card Company. The church leaders have fled from the man of flesh, blood, and bone, the man who must die, and have taken refuge in an abstracted, utopian vision of man. But their dream man has no concrete existence. He exists only in their abstracted minds.

It is impossible to overstate the negative effect of the shift in the Christian churches from a reality-based faith to a utopian-based one. All the proofs of God’s existence hatched from the great minds of the West and all the sacramental rites have their basis in our trust in His humanity. If that vital link to His humanity is severed, we will be men without hope, desperately and pathetically clinging to technique and technology to save us from the void.

I see only one remaining link to the older Christians who believed in a non-abstract, a non-utopian Christianity. That link is race. Yes, I know. To even suggest that there is a racial component to Christianity is to invite comparisons to Mussolini and Hitler. But I would ask those inclined to shout “racism” to look at the bloodless faith of the modern Christian universalists and then ask themselves if such a desiccated faith can really be the true faith. Maybe it is time to examine the claims of those who advocate a blood faith.

At face value, it seems like those who shout racism every time the words white and Christian are coupled are correct. Is not the Faith universal? Are we not ultimately spiritual beings whose bodies shall return to the dust while our immortal souls go to heaven or hell?

Yes, we are spiritual beings, but how has God chosen to reveal that truth to us? He took flesh and became man. He revealed himself to us through the blood. Those who believed in Christ became united to Him spiritually, but the incarnation also taught us that God does not disdain to pass spiritual gifts through the blood.

The European peoples, the white race, accepted Christ en masse and in depth. They built a civilization based on their belief in the incarnation, birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, true God and true man. Other peoples of other races have believed the same thing, but no other race has built a civilization centered on that belief. There is a racial wisdom in the blood of the white man that must remain untainted and untouched by the blood of other races lest that blood wisdom disappear from the earth. And when white men do not respond to the call of the blood and they seek other gods, they are traitors to their blood.

What about the other races? What about our mutual descent from Adam? Doesn’t that mean we are all brothers and that skin color doesn’t matter? Well, that sounds nice, but it seems to me that we always end up with a blasphemy if we start with a universal and work our way down to the particular. If we start with the particular and the provincial, and then move to the universal, we are more likely to arrive at the truth. And the truth is that Christ started His earthly work with a particular woman, a particular family, and a provincial people. And yes, He extended His message to all peoples, but He did not denounce the prophets or the true and the good among His own people in order to advance the Faith. He denounced the Pharisees who had hardened their hearts against the true spirit of their own faith, but He did not denounce His heritage, divine or human. That is the key difference between what Christ did and what the Christian universalists are doing today. They are not denouncing the modern scribes and Pharisees, the academics of church and school; they are denouncing the good and true Christians of old Europe. And of course one wouldn’t expect them to denounce the modern Pharisees because, behold, they are the modern Pharisees.

Let me speak frankly because there is no time left to temporize on this most important point. Anyone that truly knows Christ knows only a European Christ. That is because the essential Christ, the real Christ, is revealed only in the European tradition. In the past, the convertite, whether he was an African, a Chinaman, or a Red Indian, saw a European Christ when he converted. But this has all changed. The convertite is just as likely now to see a black Christ or an Indian Christ or a Chinese Christ (usually presented through a liberal European prism), which means that the convertite has converted to some religion other than Christianity. And this is because only the European formed a culture that was intimately connected to Christ.

Paradoxically if Christianity loses its provincial character, it will lose its universal character. In point of fact, this has already happened. One is more likely to find a man with some of the antique Christian virtues intact in a “racist” organization than in any of the Christian churches. And how could it be otherwise? Without pieta there can be no Christianity.

I don’t think one should need any other reason to support the white race than the reason that it is one’s own race. But in truth our Lord is not a cruel practitioner of liberal “either-or” politics. The liberal white-hating whites tell us that white Christians must self-destruct in order to advance the black man. But if we are stubbornly provincial and racist and support our race, we will be supporting a universal church that offers a vision of a personal god to all races. But if we turn away from our European heritage, which of course we have, and participate in the mongrelization of the white race, then we will witness the creation of a Christ-less Kingdom of Babel.

And all of this stems from a desire, like the one of the vase-painting Greeks of the post-classical period, to flee from the harshness of reality. The Greeks, however, had no comforter. They can be forgiven for seeking to flee from the dark, sinister woods. But the European woods are different. Why did we ever listen to those false prophets who told us to leave the woods? The European woods are sacred because they bring us in contact with hearth, home, and kin, all of which bring us closer to Him. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

The Revisionists’ Mother Goose

The liberals hate everything traditional. One of their pet passions is children’s literature. If they had their way (come to think of it, they have had their way), everything good in children’s literature would be banned or rewritten. Following are some Mother Goose rhymes the liberals have already condemned or rewritten, or ones they will condemn or rewrite soon:

Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son: The man who beat Tom for stealing the pig was sent to prison for two years, and Tom was sent back out on the street. Tom became a repeat pig thief, and then one day he shot a pig merchant.

Robin Hood and Little John: “Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Telling his beads…" The rosary beads violate the liberal doctrine of the separation of church and state. In the new version, Robin has worry beads.

Jack Sprat: The man who could eat no fat and his wife who could eat no lean both go to a diet counselor, and Jack is told to divorce his obsessive –compulsive wife.

Humpty Dumpty: Sued the King and all the King’s Men for not putting a guard rail on the wall.

Georgie Porgie: The boy who kissed the girls and made them cry was charged with sexual harassment.

The Old Woman Under a Hill: She failed to keep her hill dwelling up to the residential building codes; her home was condemned. Rabbits live there now.

The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe: She is now serving a jail sentence for child abuse and for failing to use family planning services.

Bobby Shafto: Bobby Shafto is forbidden to go to sea. That is sexist. His sister goes instead. However, an insensitive tidal wave kills Sister Shafto and all hands on deck. Bobby Shafto opens up a beauty shop and combs down his yellow hair.

Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater: Peter is now serving time for spousal abuse. Imagine, putting one’s wife in a pumpkin shell! Serves Peter right if he never gets out. One odd footnote to the whole sordid affair – Mrs. Peter Pumpkin Eater says she was never happier than in those days when Peter used to slap her around and put her in the pumpkin shell. Odds life.

Just Like Me:

“I went up one pair of stairs.”
“Just like me.”
“I went up two pairs of stairs.”
“Just like me.”
“I went into a room.”
“Just like me.”
“I looked out of a window.”
“Just like me.”
“And there I saw a monkey.”
“Just like me.”

The implicit racism of this rhyme is obvious.

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary: The mere suggestion that a female could be contrary is indefensible.

Black Hell

The brutal (brutal is too polite of a word, but words fail me) torture murders of the white Knoxville couple, Channon Christian and Christopher Newscom, at the hands of black savages was not unusual. It has been going on in Africa for the past 60 years (see Anthony Jacob’s book, White Man Think Again) and in this country for the last forty years. And it will not end until white people become a clan.

I was very disheartened recently when I received an email from a white man who was responding to an article I wrote entitled, “To Win or Die with Europe.” In the article I made the point that white people needed a spirit of clannishness rather than a spirit of “democratic humanity.” The emailer thought that our common European heritage was an insufficient starting point for a call to arms. Well, if it isn’t a starting point, I would like to know what is. Europe and America have destroyed themselves with internecine warfare. Surely it is time to turn our faces to the enemy (they’ve seen our backs) and stop devouring our own.

I don’t know if there is anyone else who feels this way, but I must add that I am sick to the very depths of my soul with the ‘wise’ counsel of those who suggest we write petitions and support the Republican Party. What has democracy ever done for my people, for white people? Democracy only makes sense if your society is entirely white; voting then means you are only deciding which group of white people to elect. But when the brutish apes outnumber the whites (which, if you count the whites who have betrayed their race, is the case in the United States) then democracy is not an option. Oh, you might write a petition or file a law suit as a delaying tactic, as the communists do when they are not in power, but ultimately the goal is counter-revolution, not democratic reform.

The white-hating whites who even bother to take note of new, brutal murders will tell us that we must understand, we must be patient, we must recognize the complexities of black culture. But it is the antique white man who does understand. “Here they come, black as hell and thick as grass,” were the words of Private Wall, one of the brave defenders of Rorke’s Drift. The linking of blackness and hell is appropriate. The Scots believed that when the devil visited earth he did so in the form of a black man. If not literally correct, the Scots were certainly metaphysically accurate. A society that lets black savages run rampant to rape, murder, and torture is so close to hell itself that one need not quibble over which is the more hellish. They are one. Lieutenant Chard, also at Rorke’s Drift, in very simple words tells us what we must do in the face of black savagery: “Never say die or surrender.”

We are all exiles

The South took the hit for every white American back in the 1860s. Now, it should be obvious to all Yankees that we are all Southerners now. We are all exiles.

from "The Beaufort Exile's Lament"

Your noble sons slain, on the battle-field lie,
Your daughters' mid strangers now roam;
Your aged and helpless in poverty sigh
O'er the days when they once had a home.

"Going home! going home!" for the exile alone
Can those words sweep the chords of the soul,
And raise from the grave the loved ones who are gone,
As the tide-waves of time backward roll.

"Going home! going home!" Ah! how many who pine,
Dear Beaufort, to press thy green sod,
Ere then will have passed to shores brighter than thine--
Will have gone home at last to their God!

Anon.

The Soul of Honor

My name is and was Matt Collins. Well, my full name is Matthew Edward Collins. My death was a bit of surprise to me. I was pretty darn fit for a 61-year-old man. I jogged five miles four times a week, and didn’t smoke, drink, or eat fatty foods. But still I had a heart attack while playing tennis at the Club, and there I was dead. Dead, dead, dead! It was quite depressing. And then came some more bad news. I got the news that there was a heaven but I didn’t qualify. If you think flunking an exam or being told you didn’t get some job you wanted is bad, just try dying and being told you don’t qualify for heaven. And the rap on me wasn’t so much that I had behaved abominably while on earth, but that I had not, and I quote, “made any commitment to the good.” Well, apparently I wasn’t the only one. I was lined up with thousands of others in the same stewpot I was in. (Of course, I don’t mean an actual stewpot.) Some angelic type of being gave us all the rundown. It was wall-to-wall people, all jockeying for better positions in order to hear the angelic type guy.

“You have not merited heaven or hell. You are in a kind of limbo right now. You can do nothing more for yourselves. You need a champion to fight him.” I looked in front of me and saw an enormous dragon right out of The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad movie.

The angelic type being explained, “Unless a champion comes forth to slay yon dragon, the Dragon of Detached Indifference and Materialism, you will all be sent to hell. Should a champion emerge and defeat the dragon, you will be sent to purgatory, and although you will suffer much there, you will eventually go to heaven. From the time I turn this glass over, you have exactly one hour.”

It was a long hour. I didn’t have a wristwatch, but judging by the amount of sand left in the hourglass I would guess that we were down to our last minute.

Then he appeared, on horseback, saber in hand, and dressed in the garb of a 19th century British soldier. There was no hesitation as he charged the dragon.

The dragon spit fire and knocked our champion off his horse. But that didn’t deter our champion. As the horse took off in the opposite direction, the soldier charged the dragon again. On foot he seemed even less of a match for the dragon than he had on horseback. But the battle, we are told, does not always go to the strongest. The soldier overwhelmed the dragon. He would strike at it with his sword, and before the dragon could retaliate, he would maneuver to another point and strike again. Finally it was the dragon that fell, not the soldier. The champion severed the dragon’s head from its body.

Our champion simply waved and slipped away in the mist as we all found ourselves transported to our own little purgatories. Not very pleasant places these purgatorial dwellings, but we now have great hope for the future, thanks to our champion.

“Who was he?” I asked the angelic being, before being escorted to purgatory. The angelic being smiled.

“Well, he was not the Lone Ranger, nor was he one of our angels. He was the last knight of Europe, and his name is Percival Christopher Wren.”

_________________________________________________

His actual pen name was P. C. Wren. There is much that could be said against Wren’s novels from a literary standpoint, but I won’t say those things because a writer, like a man, must be taken “for all and all,” And taken for all and all, P. C. Wren stands as a towering figure in world literature because he took the beau ideal of chivalry further than any other author. The description that best suits him is the one he used to describe the hero of his novel, Soldiers of Misfortune: “He loved Chivalry, Truth and Honor, Freedom and Courtesy But Was Head-Strong, Stubborn, Romantical, and Most Unwise.”

The Wren heroes possess a sacred sense of honor. They mix with Muslims, Chinese, and Hindus, and they find men and women with great nobility of soul in these other cultures. But the Wren hero knows the hierarchy: There is one culture and one code that stands above the rest – the culture of the European (especially, of course, that of the Briton) and the code of chivalry. The pagan and the Christian virtues cannot be neatly separated from each other in the human heart, but a man finally belongs, in essence, to either the Christian God-Man or to the pagan gods. Wren, like his heroes, does not preach much about it, but it is Christ and not Apollo who inspires him. The great Wren heroes might admire the Vikings and fight with equal ferocity, but their souls are gentle, and their deaths, like their lives, are Christian.

Wren is often described as a “mere adventure writer,” and therefore is considered to be of little consequence. But the overt adventure in Wren’s novels is only a metaphor for the more intimate adventure of the human soul. Wren is, above all else, a metaphysician. Like Dostoevsky and Shakespeare, it is the human soul that interests him. The military settings that he frequently uses are merely a means to an end, the probing of the human soul. And like Shakespeare, Wren does not probe from an Olympian height. He leads with his heart. Like a fighter who could win with speed and finesse but who chooses instead to stand toe-to-toe and slug it out, Wren suffers with his characters and with us.

Wren is able, in the best of his novels – Beau Geste, Valiant, Dust, The Bubble Reputation, Soldiers of Misfortune, Man of a Ghost, Worth Wile, and The Disappearance of General Jason – to give us a portrait of the truly good man, as distinct from the merely religious man. He does that by starting from within, with that initial intuition about the spiritual life, and working outward.

In this he differs from the more superficial writers such as Waugh, who start from without and give us a highly stylized portrait of what a religious man, based on the external evidence, should be like. In contrast, Wren makes us say, when reading about the struggles of one of his heroes, “The action of my life is like it, which I’ll keep, if but for sympathy.” The type of authors labeled Catholic or Christian generally write from the script, “I think, therefore I am.” Wren has a different code: “I feel, therefore I am.” And it works because it is closer to reality than the Descartesian code. When some theological statement is wrung from a Wren hero, it comes out organically and stands as an irrefutable truth, because it has come out of the fiery furnace of existence, the same furnace faced by Shadrach, Meshack, and Abednego.

In Beau Ideal, while they are awaiting execution, a fellow legionnaire, a secularized Jew, tries to get John Geste to explain why he was kind to a man who betrayed him and placed him in the executioner’s block. The Englishman in the following passage is John Geste, brother of the incomparable Beau Geste.

“Tell me,” said Jacob the Jew (or Jacopi Judescu, the Roumanian gipsy). “What was really your reason for the sloppy feeble ‘kindness’ to Ramon Gonzales? ... I am a philosopher and a student of the lowest of the animals called Man… Was it to please your Christian God and to acquire merit? … Or to uphold your insolent British assumption of an inevitable and natural superiority? ... You and your God—the Great Forgivers! ... ‘Injure me—and I’ll forgive you and make you feel so damned uncomfortable that you’ll be more injured than I am.’ … Aren’t you capable of a good decent hate or…”

“Yes, I hate your filthy voice, dear Jacob,” replied the Englishman.

“No. Tell me,” persisted Jacob. “I loathe being puzzled… Besides, don’t’ you see I’m going mad? … Talk, man… These corpses… Why did you behave like that to Ramon Gonzales? … He betrayed you, didn’t he? … I would have strangled him… I would have had his eyes… Didn’t he betray and denounce you after you had found him in the desert and saved his life? … To Sergeant Lebaudy?”

“Yes. He recognized me—and did his, ah—duty,” was the reply.

“For twenty-five pieces of silver! … Recognized you as one of the Zinderneuf men he knew at Sidi, and promptly sold you? … Consigned you to sudden death—or a lingering death—for twenty-five francs and a Sergeant’s favor! … And here the Judas was—wondrously delivered into your hand—and you ‘forgave’ him and comforted him! … Now why? … What was the game, the motive, the reason, the object? Why should a sane man act like that? … What was the game?”

“No game, no motive, no reason,” answered the Englishman. “He acted according to his lights—I to mine.”

“And where do you get your ‘lights’? What flame lit them?”

“Oh—I don’t know… Home… Family… One’s women-folk… School… Upbringing… Traditions… One unconsciously imbibes ideas of doing the decent thing… I’ve been extraordinarily lucky in life… Poor old Ramon wasn’t… one does the decent thing if one is—decent.”

“You don’t go about, then, consciously and definitely forgiving your enemies and heaping coals of fire on them because you’re a Christian.”

“No, of course not… Don’t talk rot…”

“Nor with a view to securing a firm option on a highly eligible and desirable mansion in the sky—suitable for English gentlemen of position—one of the most favorable residential sites on the Golden Street…”

“Not in the least… Don’t be an ass…”

“You disappoint me. I was hoping to find, before I died, one of those rare animals, a
Christian gentleman—who does all these funny things because he is a Christian—and this was positively my last chance… I shall die in here.”

“I expect Christianity was the flame that lit those little ‘lights,’ Jacob… Our home and school and social customs, institutions and ideas are based on the Christian ideal, anyhow… And we owe what’s good in them to that, I believe… We get our beau ideal quite unconsciously, I think, and we follow it quite unconsciously—if we follow it at all…”

“Well, and what is it, my noble Christian martyr?”

“Oh, just to be—decent, and to do the decent thing, y’know.”

“So, indirectly, at any rate, you returned good for evil to Judas Ramon Gonzales because you were a Christian, you think?”

“Yes… Indirectly… I suppose… We aren’t good at hating and vengeance and all that… It’s not done… It isn’t—decent…”

“But you puzzle me. What of Ramon the Judas… Ramon who sold you? He was a great Christian, you know… A staunch patron of your Christian God… Always praying and invoking your Holy Family.”

“There are good and bad in all religions, Jacob… I have the highest admiration for your great people—but I have met rotten specimens… Bad as some of my own…”

Silence.

“Look here, Christian,” began Jacob the Jew again. “If I summoned up enough strength, and swung this chain with all my might against your right check, would you turn the other also?”

“No. I should punch you on the nose,” said the Englishman simply.

Silence.

“Tell me. Do you kneel down night and morning and pray to your kind Christian God, Englishman? The forgiving God of Love, Who has landed you here?” asked Jacob the Jew.

“I landed myself here,” was the reply. “And—er—no… I don’t pray—in words—much… You won’t mind asking questions for fear of being thought inquisitive, will you, gentle Jacob?”

“Oh, no… Let’s see now… You forgive the very worst of injuries because you are a Christian, but not because you’re a Christian… You do as you would be done by, and not as you’ve been ‘done’ by… You don’t pray in words and hold daily communion with your kind Christian God—you regard Him as a gentleman—an English gentleman, of course—who quite understands, and merely desires that you be—decent, which of course, you naturally would be, whether He wished it or not… And you’ll punch me on the nose if I smite you on the cheek—but you don’t even do that much to any one who betrays you to a dreadful death… And really, in your nice little mind, you loathe talking about your religion, and you are terrified lest you give the impression that you think it is better than other people’s, for fear of hurting their
feelings…”

“Oh, shut up, Jacob. You’d talk the hind leg off a dog.”

“What else is there to do but talk? … And so you are perfectly certain that you are a most superior person, but you strive your very utmost to conceal the awful fact… You’re a puzzling creature… What is your motivating force? What is your philosophy? What are you up to? …”

“Well, at the moment, I’m going to issue the water-ration… Last but one…” said the Englishman.

“I can’t understand you English…” grumbled Jacob.

“A common complaint, I believe,” said the Englishman. The quiet American laughed.

Then later in the same scene, a French legionnaire lies dying:

He desired the services of a priest, that he might “make his soul.” On the other side of him, the Englishman and the American did what they could to soothe his passing, and Jacob the Jew produced his last scrap of biscuit for the nourishment of the sick man… He offered to chew it for him if he were unable to masticate…

“It’s a privilege to die in your society, mes amis,” said the Frenchman suddenly, in a stronger voice. “To die with men of one’s own sort… Officers once, doubtless, and gentlemen still… I am going to add to the burden of debt I owe you… But I am going to give you something in return… My dying assurance that you are going to live… I most clearly see you walking in the sunshine, free and happy… Walking towards you a woman—a truly beautiful woman… She loves you both—but one far more than the other… You fight on her account… your weapons are generosity, unselfishness, sacrifice, self-abnegation, the love of a man for his friend…”

The Frenchman has articulated Wren’s beau ideal and it is a Christian beau ideal. In Soldiers of Misfortune when Otho Belleme takes it upon himself to leave Oxford to care for a girl “in trouble” whom he has not gotten in trouble, and who is not in any way romantically involved with him, the Dean of Students recognizes whom it is that Otho is imitating:

Otho’s interview with the Dean was as peculiar as he had expected, if less painful.

He frankly and fully stated the facts of the necessity for his leaving Oxford, and having done so, he added the truth concerning Victoria, so far as he knew it. The Dean had heard many strange tales in the course of his long and wide experience, and he wondered if this were not the strangest.

“And where are you taking this girl, Mr. Belleme?” he expostulated.

“To my mother, Sir,” replied Otho. “I hope and believe that she’ll sleep under my mother’s roof to-night.”

“Well, well, well,” mused the Dean, his elbow on is desk, his great head resting on his
hand, as he toyed with a pencil and stared unseeingly at the big sheet of blotting-paper spread before him. “I really do not know what to say, or to think, Mr. Belleme. Have you—er—any—er—personal and private interest in this girl—if I may ask the question?”

“None whatever, Sir.”

“You are not what is—er—called—ah—in love with her?”

“Not in the slightest, Sir.”

“Are you quite sure it is just the purest altruism—the highest and most disinterested charity, Mr. Belleme? … And aren’t you undertaking something more serious than you realize it to be—something of which no one can foresee the end—in making yourself responsible for this poor girl?”

The Dean watched him curiously—his fine and powerful face wearing a look of deep interest.

“Do you quite realize what you are doing in making yourself responsible for her?” he
continued. “You know that the world and his wife, —especially his wife, —will think and say and do… They will certainly ‘revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you—falsely’—falsely, I firmly believe.”

“It may be folly, Sir,” said Otho, “but…”

“It is folly,” interrupted the Dean. “Great folly… nearly as great as the worldly and social folly of some of those who have left all and followed…”

There are white moments in Wren’s novels during which one is taken to that sacred glen where everything is quiet. And in that place, one hears, very faintly but distinctly, the beating of that sacred heart which sustains the world. What more can you ask from a storyteller?

Speaking of God

I once read a debate between John Calvin and a Thomist. I agreed with the Thomist on some points and with Calvin on some others, but when I finished reading the whole debate I was left with a vague feeling of disgust. As with so many things that one reads, I tucked that little debate and my reaction to it back into the recesses of my mind, but it has surfaced again. And now, some 25 years later, I have a better understanding of that vague feeling of disgust. Both St. Thomas and Calvin were brilliant men, and they seem to be in favor of Christianity. But I wonder if either of them is a very good spokesman for it. And I don’t mean to be flippant, but I must say that I don’t understand, when reading St. Thomas or John Calvin, why God would bother with mortals such as we. He seems so terribly self-sufficient and content without us in Thomism and Calvinism. I don’t see God the lover, the God who weeps, in either Thomism or Calvinism. What Richard Weaver said of Socrates – “One should not talk about one’s gods that way” – could also be said of St. Thomas and Calvin. Did St. Paul talk about Christ the way they did? Did Christ talk about Himself that way?

The Rev. Hislop makes a very good critique of the pagan, Greco-Roman structures of the Roman Catholic Church, but he fails to see the other subcurrent. St. Patrick and thousands like him did not set Europe aflame with tales of Babylon or the Greek philosophers. They set Europe aflame with the Christ story.

What was good and pure about the Protestant Reformation was the attempt to know Christ the lover again, to know Him as St. Paul and as St. John knew him. But He cannot be put into the golden bowl of a narrow theology. The analytic mind cannot comprehend God; He is unknowable when approached by way of the syllogism, but He has made Himself accessible to us through the human heart. George Fitzhugh has written eloquently of that mode of perception: “The problem of the Moral World is too vast and complex for the human mind to comprehend; yet the pure heart will, safely and quietly, feel its way through the mazes that confound the head.”

It’s truly remarkable that when we want to get serious about God, we bring out the theologians and start to talk in the mumbo-jumbo of the dialectic. There is no time for that kind of talk anymore. European culture is facing extinction because the intellectual hierarchy of the Christian churches have turned the God of Abraham, Isiah, Jacob, and St. Paul into a solution to a riddle in a philosophical parlor game. In the face of death we need the Christ of whom the elder Thomas Campbell spoke in 1828. He was moved to write an essay, “Christianity is Neither a Theory Nor a Philosophy,” after recovering from an illness that had brought him to the brink of death.

The vain pride of attempting to improve Christianity in the external exhibition of it in the churches, that it might vie in splendor with the pompous exhibition of the Jewish and pagan religions, and the presumptuous folly of explaining its mysteries according to the notions of the heathen philosophy, and finally, of reducing the whole subject of divine revelation into the form of a rational, systematic science, [italics added - Ed.] an attempt this, which rendered it as unfit for its primary purpose, the salvation of mankind, as the chemical process of distillation does our vegetable productions for the sustentation of animal life. The sublime productions of Aquinas, Maestricht, and Turretine, are exquisite monuments of this egregious folly. As well might we attempt to imbibe vital heat by embracing a corpse, as to derive spiritual life, light, or comfort, from the perusal of those voluminous works. Do you ask, why? The reason is obvious: these are the works of men, not of God. Not from heaven, to make us spiritually wise unto salvation; but from the pride and folly of man, to make us metaphysically and logically wise unto disputation. Vain man would be wise,
though man be born a wild ass’s colt (Job XI: 12). Wise, indeed, in his own way; wise above what is written; yea, constructively wiser than God, for he would improve upon his works.

I think Thomas Campbell has honed in on the terrible error we make when we set the Christian God within the confines of pagan philosophy. His uniqueness is blurred when we do that, and consequently we turn hearts of fire into dead embers. Men and women who should be aflame for Christ turn to alternative gods.

The marriage between Christ and Europe has ended in divorce not because He has ceased to love us, but because Europeans have ceased to see Christ as distinct from Socrates and other great thinkers. And wasn’t that inevitable when the “best” theologians talk about Him within the context of pagan philosophy?

Pat Buchanan talks about putting a moratorium on immigration. I would certainly like to see that. But there is another moratorium that I would also like to see, and that is one on mumbo-jumbo, scientistic God-talk. And then we might be able to see the Christ, the son of the living God, as St. Paul saw Him on the road to Damascus. And then “your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.”

Dreams

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.—

The Tempest

It’s been a year now since the death of my mother and I’ve noticed something peculiar, or maybe not so peculiar. When my mother was alive, I occasionally dreamt that she was dead. When I awoke, I was greatly relieved to find it was only a dream. I usually found some pretext to call her after such dreams just to see how she was doing. Naturally, I didn’t tell her that I had dreamt that she was dead.

Now, in the past year, I have dreams at least twice a week in which my mother is alive. And of course when I awake there is a great sadness for the obvious reason that reality sets in and I realize, all over again, that my mother is dead.

Now, I’m not saying that the fact that I dream about my mother being alive is some kind of proof that she is alive. But then again, why do we dream such things? Shakespeare’s oft-quoted line, “We are such stuff As dreams are made on…” can be given, and often has been given, a negative interpretation. But I have never viewed the quote in that light. If we are such stuff as dreams are made on and we dream that the dead are alive, how can that be something negative? Yes, a dream can also be a nightmare. But then Prospero is pretty explicit that it is a dream. And he concedes that our ending could be despair, but then bids us look up with that incredible, “unless I be reliev’d by prayer…”

Our dreams and our prayers -- Shakespeare, through Prospero, links them. When viewed in that light, it is very comforting, at least to me, to think that we are such stuff as dreams are made on.

The Four Feathers

The Four Feathers
By A. E. W. Mason (Grosset & Dunlap: New York, 1901)

I would be hard pressed to come up with a major author who does not, in some aspect of his work, deal with a military theme. This is quite understandable. Human souls, when placed in the extremities of combat, are often more fully revealed than they are in less intense situations. And it is an author’s business to lay bare the soul of man.

But many books with a military theme and setting fail to give us any kind of spiritual revelation. They are often boring, documentary-style books, giving us mere facts about the military; or they are propaganda books designed to show us either an unrealistically horrible or an unrealistically glorious view of the military.

The Four Feathers fits none of these categories, and it contains the best depiction of the military experience outside of Shakespeare that I have ever read.

There are men who fight and fight courageously in this book who are nevertheless moral cowards. And there are men who fight reluctantly and with great fear and trepidation who rise to heroic heights. What A. E. W. Mason really has done, through his protagonist, Harry Feversham, is to show us the moral dimension of heroism. Without that moral dimension, heroism is mere guts, which is pagan, not Christian.

One might admire the pagan hero’s courage, but it is the Christian hero who gives us a glimpse of the living God. It is the difference between Robert E. Lee and G. Gordon Liddy. Or in film, it’s the big difference between the heroes depicted by Gary Cooper and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and the heroes depicted by Clint Eastwood and Arnold Schwartzenegger. The former are Christian heroes, the latter are merely pagan ones.

I love Harry Feversham. He strikes a blow for every armchair warrior and poet who believes that the warrior bard will ultimately prevail against the foreign Turk and the brutish homegrown bore.

A work like Mason’s The Four Feathers could not be written today because our Western culture has been eradicated by the dialectic. Masculinity means only one thing now – aggressiveness, and it is permitted and admired only when it appears in the female. And femininity means only one thing now – passivity, and it is permitted only when it appears in the male.

In contrast to the modern, obscene, dialectic depiction of human beings, Mason paints a portrait of human beings with souls, working out their eternal destinies in a world that has not yet surrendered to the dialectic.

There is a passage of incredible poignancy in the book which I must quote. Feversham, in disguise, has gotten himself thrown into an Arab prison in order to rescue a fellow countryman. His countryman, Colonel Trench, is about to strike Feversham because he fears that he will be knocked to the floor and trampled if he doesn’t hold his own in the crowded prison.

“Back!” he cried violently, “back, or I strike!” and, as he wrestled to lift his arm above his head that he might strike the better, he heard the man who had been flung against him incoherently babbling English.

“Don’t fall,” cried Trench, and he caught his fellow-captive by the arm. “Ibrahim, help! God, if he were to fall!” and while the crowd swayed again and the shrill cries and curses rose again, deafening the ears, piercing the brain, Trench supported his
companion, and bending down his head caught again after so many months the accent of his own tongue. And the sound of it civilized him like the friendship of a woman.

Ah, how could a modern appreciate that passage? The modern does not believe that there are differences in cultures. How could the sound of a language associated with Christian things hearten and humanize a man? And stranger still to the modern – how could the friendship of a woman civilize a man? The modern knows only viragos and hard-eyed business women. “Surely, Mason must be from Mars.” No, not Mars, but Christian Europe, which to the modern is more remote than Mars.

Judge Priest

Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People (Grosset and Dunlap: New York, 1912)
and
Old Judge Priest (George H. Doran Co.: New York, 1916) by Irvin S. Cobb

The setting of these tales is Kentucky in the early 1900s. The Civil War is a living memory to many of the older inhabitants of the region and is still a significant event to the younger members of the communities. All the stories center around one Judge Priest, a portly judge in his mid-sixties, who fought with Forrest during the War for Southern Independence.

In his autobiography, Exit Laughing (1941), Cobb tells us of Judge Priest’s origins:

Now Judge Priest, who became a mainstay and a breadwinner for the Cobb family over a stretch of thirty years or longer, was a consolidated likeness, into which I diagrammed elementary parts of three separate persons. In him, as he ambled across a border southern terrain, was a trace of my father, but only mental attitudes here, not bodily aspects; and an occasional touch taken from my former fellow townsman and crony, Hal Corbett, who made a briefened appearance among these strolling memories chapter before last. But predominantly he was a reincarnation of the late Judge William S. Bishop and physically almost altogether was Judge Bishop—the high bald forehead, the pudgy shape, the little white paintbrush of a chin whisker, the strident high-pitched voice which, issuing from that globular tenement, made a grotesque contrast, as though a South American tapir had swallowed a tomtit alive and was letting the tomtit do the talking for him. The habits and the traits embodied in this triple-sided composite portrait mainly were his too: his exterior dovelike gentleness under which deceiving surface lurked a serpent’s shrewdness; his deftly concealed manipulations of local politics; his cultivated affectation of using a country jake vernacular when off the bench and his sudden switch to precise and stately English when on it; his high respect for the profession that he followed and for the office that he held so many years; his divine absent-mindedness; his utterly unreasonable fear of thunderstorms.

Touching on these two last-named peculiarities, tales were told. Once when company was present in his home a sudden forked flash in the murky heavens and a great thunderclap sent him fleeing to an umbrella closet under the front stairs where he fastened the door behind him and cowered among the galoshes. His wife pursued him there and through the keyhole she said: “Judge Bishop, I am ashamed of you—you a brave soldier of the war, to behave like a veritable coward before our guests. Don’t
you know, Judge Bishop,” –the good lady was very religious –“don’t you know that if the Lord wants to smite you dead, He will find you, no matter where you hide?”

“Maybe so, Madam, maybe so,” came back the muffled answer. “But by Gatlins, I’ll put Him to as much trouble as possible!”

In midsummer he went to a bar association meeting upstate. As he was leaving, Mrs. Bishop said: “Judge, I’ve packed six clean shirts for you and six clean collars so don’t you go mooning around, like you usually do, and forget to change every morning.” (In those days, before pajamas were ever dreamed of and nightshirts were regarded as being fussy, not to say effeminate, many a cultured Southern gentleman slept by night in the hard-bosomed back-buttoning linen which he had worn through the day.)

When he came home she was waiting for him at the depot with the family buggy.

“You look warm,” she said.

“Warm?” he echoed. “I’m parboiled. I’m cooking in my own gravy. I’m broken out with nettle rash like a baby. I think I’m fixing to die.”

“Why, the weather here has been very seasonable,” she said.

“It wasn’t too warm in Frankfort, either,” he said. “That’s the funny part of it. Seemed to me I got hotter and hotter all the time. Maybe I’m sickening for a stroke or something. Right now I’m sweating like a free nigger at election.”

“Right now? Why there’s a cool breeze blowing… Judge Bishop, bend over here and hold still!”

She undid a wilted collar and ran an exploratory finger down inside his neckband—down inside six neckbands, to be exact. Obeying orders, he had each morning put on a clean shirt. Only one detail he had inadvertently skipped. He forgot to take off the
shirt he’d slept in.

Although set in the 1900s, the best and noblest characters in the tales are the old Confederate veterans and the men and women who support the old ways. The good ‘darkies’ are the ones who also support the old South. (Cobb is a bit unrealistic on that subject, in contrast to Caroline Gordon’s None Shall Look Back and Stark Young’s So Red the Rose.) The villains are the mean-spirited souls of both races and the new breed of capitalist whites.

Not all the stories sing as sweetly as “A Beautiful Evening” and “When the Fighting Was Good,” but taken as a whole, the Judge Priest stories give us a pleasant glimpse of a place where community still existed, fragile and disappearing, but still living.

I recommend reading the stories; but even greater (much greater) than the stories is the movie loosely based on the story, “Words and Music.” The movie, called appropriately enough, Judge Priest, is directed by (who else) John Ford. Will Rogers, a contemporary and close friend of Irvin Cobb, plays Judge Priest. The movie is far and away the best movie ever made about the South and the Great Cause. I don’t see how it is possible for one to view the movie without forever being a die-hard Southern partisan.

The Equality of the Dung Heap

An essential part of our heritage is becoming Negroized. Tin-Tin in Africa is banned from sale in the U.S., and Doctor Dolittle is rewritten to appease blacks. Howard Pyle’s fairy tales are rewritten with blacks rather than white characters, the musical version of Oliver Twist has a black Oliver, A Christmas Carol gets an all-black cast, Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour Lost has interracial couples, and the list goes on. I’m sure readers could supply hundreds more examples.

It doesn’t take a heroic, knightly act of superhuman courage to oppose such assaults on the European cultural heritage. If white people would just refuse to buy new Negroized versions of older classic works and refuse to buy tickets to Negroized movies of Doctor Dolittle, Oliver Twist, and Love’s Labour Lost, they could force the white capitalists who produce such mongrelized works of art to cease and desist. But that would require a racial solidarity that whites don’t possess.

And I should add that the black productions of white works would not be nearly so offensive if they made some attempt to preserve the spirit of the old works, but they don’t. The Negroized versions become new jazzy, be-bop works that insult the original ones.

I remember eating a souvlaki in a Greek restaurant a few years back. It was the Christmas season, and the proprietor of the restaurant, an older Greek fellow, had the radio tuned to a station playing Christmas carols. After a wonderful rendition of “Silent Night” finished playing, a Negroized, be-bop version of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” came on the radio. The Greek proprietor listened in disbelief for a minute and then turned it off.

“Imagine,” he said, “Taking a wonderful song like that and destroying it. It shouldn’t be permitted.”

And of course the proprietor of the restaurant was correct. Such things shouldn’t be permitted. But the complete Negroization of white culture has been mandated. The “separate but equal” accommodation, articulated in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), was the South’s way of dealing with the fact that an inferior capitalist society had conquered their culturally superior one and had mandated the infusion of Negroes into their society. By providing separate schools, restaurants, swimming pools, and so on, and calling them separate but equal, Southerners hoped to stave off the tragedy of racial integration.

But the liberals, north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line, were not buying “separate but equal.” Separate is inherently unequal, the liberals reasoned, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). And although it is morally wrong to mandate integration, the liberals were right in saying that separate is inherently unequal. Any culture of value is unequal to other cultures. Nineteenth-century European culture is superior to twentieth-century European culture, the Southern culture of the 19th century was superior to the Northern culture, European culture is superior to African culture, and so on.

There can only be an equality in barbarism, because there is no value in barbarism. No one can be higher, in the cultural sense, than someone else in a barbaric culture that has no concept of ‘the higher.’ In barbarism there are people in power, of course, but they are all equal in the cultural sense. Everyone is equal: they are barbaric. And that is the moral evil of integration. The infusion of barbarism into a civilized society does not elevate the barbarian, it brings down the civilized people.

Twenty-five years ago I first saw a white person listening to Negro rap music. He was retarded. Now, I see white youths listening to Negro rap music on a regular basis; this is called equality.

At its onset, integration was presented by the liberals as the enfranchisement of the disenfranchised. What Christian could object to that? The most courteous, respectful (at least outwardly) Negroes were pushed forward to show the reasonableness of integration and the unreasonableness of segregation. But once the barrier of segregation is broken, a radical change takes place. Joe Louis evolves into Muhammed Ali, and Jackie Robinson becomes Darryl Strawberry. Our whole concept of sports, leisure, and religion has been radically altered as a result of the integration of Negroes into society.

Occasionally some liberal, now a neoconservative, like Charlton Heston, will say, “Gee, when I held hands with Martin Luther King, Jr., I didn’t think I was assenting to the complete dismantling of civilization.” But that is exactly what Mr. Heston, who at least had the courage to oppose that dismantlement, was consenting to. Integration is death for civilizations with value. Indeed, everything of value in those civilizations will be destroyed.

Our leaders tell us that we must adjust. We must learn to love the dung heap. No, that is something I will not do. I stand with Alexander Smollet, who, when enjoined to surrender to the seemingly invincible barbarians, said:

“Now you’ll hear me. If you’ll come up one by one, unarmed, I’ll engage to clap you all in irons, and take you home to a fair trial in England. If you won’t, my name is Alexander Smollet, I’ve flown my sovereign’s colours, and I’ll see you all to Davy Jones.”

The Hero

Eugene O’Neill is one of American’s greatest playwrights. Although a professed enemy of all organized religion, his plays are permeated by Christianity. His characters are, like O’Neill himself, Christ-haunted and looking for redemption. Three of his later plays, “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” “Hughie,” and “A Touch of the Poet,” are especially well-written plays with great spiritual depths.

It is the play, “A Touch of the Poet” that I would like to use to begin a discussion of the hero. In the play there is one central character (Cornelius Melody) and two major supporting characters (Nora Melody, his wife, and Sara Melody, his daughter). Cornelius Melody had been a military hero in the old country. He now, at age forty-five, runs a tavern in Boston. The year is 1820. Talk of Andrew Jackson and the ‘common man’ is always in the air. Melody, however, will have none of that. He drinks alone and rides alone on a special charger. When he rises in the morning and feels depressed after a night of heavy drinking, he puts on his old military uniform and recites from Lord Byron in front of the mirror:

I have not loved the World, nor the World me;
I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed
To its idolatries a patient knee,
Nor coined my cheek to smiles, nor cried aloud
In worship of an echo; in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such – I stood
Among them, but not of them.

Cornelius Melody needs a vision of himself as a hero. No matter how low he sinks he can always face the world as long as he believes he is still the hero that he was at the battle of Talavera.

Through a long series of events, Con Melody ceases to see himself in a heroic light and is shattered by the experience. His daughter, who had always sneered at her father’s attempt to maintain his heroic image, is surprised to find that her view of existence is altered for the worse when her father ceases to believe in his own heroic image. And of course this was because she had always, despite her outward contempt, believed, in the deepest regions of her soul, that her father was a hero.

It is easy to deprecate Con Melody’s rather pathetic attempts at maintaining a heroic self-image. And O’Neill certainly doesn’t try to give us a happy ending to the play by showing us Con Melody making a successful ‘comeback’ attempt. But what O’Neill does is to lay bare an essential truth of existence: our religious vision, our raison d’etre so to speak, is tied up to our belief in, and our vision of, the Hero. If we lose that vision and belief, we have lost our faith.

I’ve commented on the demise of the Christian hero before, but I’m returning to the subject again because I believe it is of paramount importance. Our belief in heroes is linked to our belief in Christ himself. And I would submit to you that we do not believe in Christian heroes anymore. We have the straight liberal type like Gandhi (so admired by the late John Paul II) and the liberal-pagan type like Eastwood and Stallone, who use their male chromosomes in defense of liberal causes. But the Christian hero? He no longer walks down the ‘mean streets,’ which is why the back alley-type of mean streets have become the main streets, traveled by pagan punks, liberal leeches, and capitalistic carnivores.

The Christian hero springs from a culture that is either essentially Christian or from a culture that at least still has a positive image of a Christian society that used to exist. The Zorro figure in Johnston McCulley’s The Mark of Zorro (1919) springs from an imagination that remembers what a Christian hero should be. Only Walt Disney Studios (the real Disney) managed to recreate Zorro with his Christianity intact. What distinguishes the Christian hero from the modern, liberal and pagan heroes? Well, let’s look at McCulley’s Zorro.

First, Christianity is in his blood. Zorro doesn’t have to consult a moral theology book before he acts, because according to the code of chivalry or (to use the exact term which McCulley uses) the code of the cavalier, right and wrong are self-evident. Years of adhering to a tradition that is bred in the bone and in the blood have made an honorable man’s course of action clear.

For instance, when Captain Ramon insults Zorro’s swordsmanship, he is content, in contrast to the pagan hero who would kill for such an insult, to merely wound Ramon as punishment. But when Ramon dares to press his attentions on a Spanish lady, Zorro kills the disreputable captain, in contrast to the modern liberal Christian who knows nothing of chivalry and who thinks Christianity and pacifism are synonymous.

Zorro spares Ramon when only a personal insult is involved, and he kills him when the code of the cavalier has been breached. And he does all this without consulting an expert in moral theology or biblical exegesis. Wise blood is always superior to the syllogism. It is also more practical because when you carry your faith in your blood, your hands, unencumbered by heavy tomes of philosophy and theology, are free to carry a sword and dagger.

The second element of a Christian hero like Zorro that is not present in the modern liberal hero is a deep respect for the special mission of women. They are the life-bearers and the nurturers, as well as the inspiration for the hero. The female counterpart to the hero inspires by her fidelity to virtues of the hearth. The hero is the good woman’s support and comfort because he defends her rights as wife and mother. But he is seen as the hated oppressor by evil women because he denies them access to the world outside the hearth.

Try to find an image of the hero in any realm of the church or in the world today that excludes the female from the male realm; because not excluding her hurts the female as well as the male. “What about the priesthood?” you say. “Is the female not excluded from that role?” Yes, she is. But only for legal reasons. Christ was a male, so the church authorities have reluctantly kept the priesthood a male domain. But they have given away all the rest of the Pauline teaching. They have supported the role of women in secular society and in the church. They have not defended the women of the hearth nor have they attacked the dragon ladies who have abandoned the hearth.

And we also must distinguish between the Christian and Gnostic view of women. The Gnostic sects, such as the Society of St. Pius X, are spiritually akin to the Muslims, who hate femininity itself. Both deny the spiritual nature of women. They believe women must be kept out of the male sphere of action, not because they have an exalted calling in another sphere, but because their femininity is evil in itself. In their eyes, there is no legitimate Eros, there is only the evil, fleshly act. The act must be tolerated because male warriors and male priests are needed, but the sex that is most intimately connected to the fruits of intercourse must be denied their spiritual role as nurturers and fair ladies who inspire heroic deeds. There is an excess of sex in the Gnostic sects but there is no Eros, and the soul that goes to Gnostic heaven is a masculine one, but one devoid of true masculinity because it is without chivalry.

The third trait of the hero is that he has the ability to properly direct his efforts. He does not worship action in and of itself. His actions must support the reign of charity or else he will not act. The capitalist thinks the Christian hero is lazy because he will not compete in the free market arena. And the pagan considers him cowardly for refusing to enter the lists in order to prove his manhood. Like Don Diego Vega, the Christian hero fights only when issues that directly affect the reign of charity are involved. And then, Zorro rides.

It is important to note that the Christian man of action is not necessarily a military man. In times when the state is Christian, the hero fights for king and country, but when the state is at war with Christ, the Christian hero is an outlaw, such as Zorro, Rob Roy, and William Tell. No matter how bravely a man fights, he is not a hero if he places his sword at the service of an unholy cause.

And finally, whether the hero is Zorro, Shane, Forrest, or von Stauffenberg, he turns our face towards Him. By self-sacrifice, by putting the spiritual above the temporal, the hero, at the last trump, in the twinkling of the eye, when all hope seems gone, rescues us from a purely material vision of life which is death to the soul. The plight of Señorita Lolita Pulido illustrates this point. But to appreciate her dilemma we must try to imagine what it is like to be a Spanish maiden who actually believes death is preferable to the forced attentions of a man without honor, a man who is not a cavalier.

The señorita must be forgiven for lacking the modern enlightened notion that sex is mere friction and of little consequence one way or the other. She finds herself trapped and alone with the evil Captain Ramon.

She fought him, striking and scratching at his breast, for she could not reach his face. But he only laughed at her, and held her tighter until she was almost spent and breathless, and finally he threw back her head and looked down into her eyes.

“A kiss in payment, señorita!” he said. “It will be a pleasure to tame such a wild one.”

She tried to fight again, but could not. She called upon the saints to aid her. And Captain Ramon laughed more, and bent his head, and his lips came close to hers.

But he never claimed the kiss. She started to wrench away from him again, and he was forced to strengthen his arm and pull her forward. And from a corner of the room there came a voice that was at once deep and stern.

“One moment, Señor!” it said.

Captain Ramon released the girl and whirled on one heel. He blinked his eyes to pierce the gloom of the corner; he heard Señorita Lolita give a glad cry.

Then Captain Ramon, disregarding the presence of the lady, cursed, once and loudly, for Señor Zorro stood before
him.

When we get our last fatal illness we will all hope for a cure, a last minute reprieve from the clutches of death. But in our last illness, the reprieve will not come. Señor Zorro will not be there. Or will he? An embrace is not a kiss. When Señor Death tries to claim his kiss, will we hear the greatest cavalier of all say, “One moment, señor!”?

Without the hero, we would be forever doomed, like Sisyphus, to push the materialist rock up the very material hill. The hero enables us to see beyond the rock and beyond the hill, to a glass mountain of fair ladies and grand endeavors, presided over by the Hero.

When Only One Side Fights a War

On May 20, 1995, an article by Paul Sheehan was printed in The Sydney Morning Herald, an Australian newspaper. The article was entitled, “The Race War of Black Against White.”

The longest war America has ever fought is the Dirty War, and it is not over. It has lasted 30 years so far and claimed more than 25 million victims. It has cost almost as many lives as the Vietnam War. It determined the results of last year’s congressional election.

Yet the American news media do not want to talk about the Dirty War, which remains between the lines and unreported. In fact, to even suggest that the war exists is to be discredited. So let’s start suggesting, immediately.

Mr. Sheehan then goes on to list the horrible carnage that has taken place in the black war against whites. The statistics merely confirm what all whites know, but it is chilling to read the actual body count.

Sheehan concludes with an accurate account of the American establishment’s culpability in the white genocide:

When all the crime figures are calculated, it appears that black Americans have committed at least 170 million crimes against white Americans in the past 30 years. It is the great defining disaster of American life and American ideals since World War II.

All these are facts, yet by simply writing this story, by assembling the facts in this way, I would be deemed a racist by the American news media. It prefers to maintain a paternalistic double-standard in its coverage of black America, a lower standard.

When I published Sheehan’s article about 12 years ago, a gentleman wrote me to ask if I could think of any time in history when there was a war in which only one side was fighting. I couldn’t think of any example. Indeed, I think our situation (along with the other European nations) is unique. And of course it is unique because Europeans are unique. We were the Christ-bearers, the only people to accept Christianity in depth and breadth. When we believed in our civilization and the God-Man who inspired it, we were strong and we protected our sacred civilization and our people. And we were respected and feared by the colored people. But as we ceased to believe in our God, we ceased to believe in our civilization and consequently were no longer willing to take the measures necessary to defend ourselves. The coloreds passionately believe in their various pagan faiths but we no longer believe in our Faith. And please spare me the ridiculous suggestion that we jettison Christ and go back to our Greco-Roman heritage. No, we are irretrievably linked to Him, and a curse on those who would wish it otherwise, and as our passion for Him declines so will our love for European civilization decline. In his book, In Search of England, H. V. Morton has this to say about Tintagel:

I have all my life thought of Tintagel as one of those places which no man should see. For eight hundred years the story of that king who rides down history on a harpstring has soaked itself into the imagination of the English people. Charlemagne for France; Arthur for England. The story grew here. On this grey rock above the sea, Uther Pendragon took that lovely queen, Igerne; and so began the story that ran through medieval Europe challenging the imagination of poet and writer, gathering strength and beauty, to break at last in the splendid climax of the ‘Grail’ music…

Tin-tagel!...

At night, with the moon, falling over the tumbled walls, Tintagel seems more dead than ever: the ruins of Egypt leap to life in the moonlight, so do many of our castles and abbeys; but Tintagel is to be found only within the covers of a book. And I thought, as I looked down on it from the other side of the valley, saw the thin line of light run along the walls, picking out a gateway here and a crumbled corner there, that most of us have belonged to that Round Table – so many of us, in fact, that if Arthur came back to give us youth again and called us out to joyous adventures he would have an army great enough to ride from Camelot to the conquest of the earth.

But he could not make that claim today. Arthur could not find an army to ride with him. In order to do that European man would have to throw away his little paper gods, his constitutions and his catechisms. He would have to place his hand on the sword and swear to fight without ceasing until the heathen were driven into the sea and the true King was on the throne. “But of course that’s just silly, impractical nonsense,” says the empirical man. Well, it might seem impractical, but it really is the only genuine solution to the white man’s dilemma. We have all read the Death of the West books, from Burham to Buchanan. And in the statistical realm, the empirical realm, we are dead. The colored hordes are upon us and they outnumber us. But numbers only matter in the world of the white techno barbarians and the colored barbarians. Since when has a European Christian knight ever been deterred by mere numbers? What did Sir Galahad say?

My good blade carves the casques of men
My tough lance thrusteth sure,
My strength is as the strength of ten,
Because my heart is pure.

Look who is at the heart of European civilization. Nothing was impossible for the Europeans, from Charles Martel, to Cortez, to Gordon, and the endless legion of the red cross knights of Europe who rode under His banner to do battle with the barbarian hordes. The blood red tide is loosed because we have attempted to stop the bleeding wounds of Europe with democratic antiseptic instead of a fiery cross. Place the cross on the wound, it will heal. However, to do that we need faith. But I think faith comes from love. If we look at Europe, the real Europe, the Europe of the Christian hearth, the evening lingerings, we will love it. And then we will up and ride, and we will fight, not as the heathen fights, until tired or sated, but we will fight without ceasing until Europe is European again and America is European again.

Betraying the Code

There was much hoopla over the anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s infiltration of the previously all-white sport of baseball. And of course the liberals are right – it was an epoch shattering event. But the liberals are wrong when they view it as a good thing. Robinson’s enfranchisement accelerated the Negroization of American sports. And that development resulted in the end of sportsmanship. Sportsmanship, as practiced by Americans, had its roots in the British sporting tradition, which took its inspiration from the principles of Christian chivalry. Winning, in the British tradition, was not as important as adhering to the code. A loser who lived up to the code was more honored than someone who won, but who broke the code.

Jackie Robinson brought his own code, the barbarians’ code, into the game of baseball. He took bench jockeying to a new low. Statements about the opposing players’ sisters and mothers, which had previously been considered beyond the pale, were part of Jackie Robinson’s repertoire.

And of course those black athletes who followed Jackie Robinson were even worse. But the larger the pool of players to choose from, the better your chance of winning and making money. So the marriage between the capitalist and the Negro was consummated with Jackie Robinsons’ entry into baseball. And what a happy marriage it has been for them.

But what about the white folk? Should we give our blessing to that marriage by watching and attending sporting events where black athletes and white commentators degrade all the virtues of the heart and the soul that white people used to hold dear? When capitalism, the Negro, and sport are combined, the watching of sporting events becomes a vulgar indulgence akin to pornography. Presumably one would refuse to watch a film which approvingly depicted black cannibals cooking and eating white missionaries; why then should we watch all the values of our civilization being undermined in pagan rituals called sporting events?

In Walter Scott’s novel, Old Mortality, he depicts a period of Scottish history when the Covenanters felt that Charles II was not keeping his promise to grant them religious liberty. They regarded themselves as disenfranchised. The Crown sought to force them to feel enfranchised by requiring them to participate in state sanctioned sporting events. The Crown’s effort failed because it only strengthened the Covenanters’ resolve not to participate in the sporting events.

Two things emerge from Scott’s description of the mandatory participation edict of Charles II:

1) Sports are an integral part of a nation’s soul. They reflect the very essence of what the nation stands for. If you are at odds with your nation you must divorce yourself from that nation’s sporting life.

2) The seductive feminine approach (the Gingerbread House technique) is more likely to make converts than the straightforward masculine approach. Instead of forcing the Covenanters to participate in the sporting events, Charles II should have hired a marketing guru to put the proper spin on the events. Maybe a little Scripture reading at the beginning of the events and a few comely maidens, not too indecorous, to give out the prizes… You get the picture.

In point of fact, the Covenanters had nowhere near the cause that we have for divorcing ourselves from our nation’s (or more accurately our non-nation’s) civic sporting life. But we have eaten the soul-numbing honey of the locusts for so long that we are completely anesthetized. We truly love ‘Big Brother.’

Recently a “conservative” military man published a book equating God, the war in Iraq, and football. How telling. Sport is linked to our Faith. What, if we look at American sports, do Americans revere? They revere capitalism and Negroes.

How did we get from the sporting life exemplified in Tom Brown’s School Days and The Chariots of Fire to the pagan spectacles of today? We got there by the same process a man follows when, lured by the prospect of gold, he places a ladder into a mineshaft and climbs down, rung by rung. But surely by now we should see that the gold mine is a pit, and it stinks of sulphur.