A Cross Can Be a Beautiful Thing

Ever since my third oldest son was knee-high to that old grasshopper, he has always wanted to know, whenever I showed a movie to the family, "Who is the hero?" It did my heart good when he asked that question, because I knew that a child with a thirst for heroes was heading in the right direction. And my son did not disappoint me. He has stayed with Walter Scott and P. C. Wren as he entered his teens.

Unfortunately the modern world is very much against heroes in general and against the particular heroes of my son. Why? Because my son's heroes are all knights of Christendom. Some might wear cowboy boots and a white hat instead of armor, but they are all heirs of King Arthur.

When conservatives talk about how we are turning the corner and winning the battle for the hearts of our young, I usually have to fight back the urge to vomit. American popular theater is the movies, and the type of movie hero that our young people pay money to see is not a Christian hero. This does not bode well for our already sick-beyond-belief nation, because only a hero can save us. But if we have lost our appetite for, and our belief in, genuine heroes, then it is quite probable if a true hero did emerge he would be rejected like the one who stands as the ultimate hero of Western culture. As Andrew Lytle tells us, "The hero's most perfect image is, of course, Christ, the man-God."

There are two types of heroes who appear in the modern movie, and neither is a Christian hero. The first type is the sensitive, politically correct man that emerged in the 1960s. He saves whales, fights racism and sexism, goes to sensitivity seminars, and has had a vasectomy. But the new liberal hero is a very dull bird. For the sake of the box office, he has been modified.

The second type of hero is the pagan-liberal. Liberals will allow Joe Sixpack to watch white men do some heroic punching, shooting, and derring-do under one or all of the following conditions:
1) The white hero must be fighting against politically incorrect bad guys such as Nazis (always popular), Klansmen, Southern sheriffs, sexists, Indian fighters, or fundamentalist Christians. Harrison Ford's character in Raiders of the Lost Ark is an example of a hero from that genre.
2) The white hero must have a black best friend who accompanies him and shares in the heroic deed-doing. Chuck Norris' Texas Ranger T.V. series and the older Magnum P.I. series are examples.
3) The white hero must have a female partner who is not feminine and who equals if not surpasses the male hero in every aspect of heroism. Fill in whatever movie you want in this category for they are legion.

The movies with white male heroes are few enough. And when the few ones that do have white male heroes depict them as defenders of liberaldom, the result is not good for the individual viewer or for society as a whole. Contrary to what the "We-are-turning-the-corner" conservatives say, you cannot have a public theater that glorifies only liberal heroes and expect conservative Christian principles to prevail.

I hold to the view that Christendom officially ended after the reign of Charles of Austria of the House of Hapsburg; Christendom had been declining for some time, but it officially ended then. However, remnants of a Christian worldview still survived in Europe and in this country until the 1960s.

Our own popular theater offers proof of the survival of some Christian instincts after the demise of Christendom and before 1965. Looking specifically at the Christian hero, one can see that Hollywood was not so dominated by liberal themes back then as it is now. Consider some of the movies that were once mainstream, popular movies: Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), Shane (1953), High Noon (1952), Ivanhoe (1952), The Quiet Man (1952), Stagecoach (1939), The Garden of Evil (1954), Gunga Din (1939), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Beau Geste (1939), The Fighting O'Flynn (1949), and the list goes on and on. What is distinctive in all of the movies listed, and hundreds of others from 1930 through 1965, is that the hero either implicitly or explicitly supports a Christian world view. True, Shane doesn't sermonize, but it is clear when he is advising Bob to grow up clean and straight, he is not advising him to grow up and become a Tibetan monk or a psychologist.

And in some of the movies, the hero makes it explicit. I must call your attention to a remarkable movie that features the actor who most often played a Christian knight – Gary Cooper. The movie I refer to is The Garden of Evil. Gary Cooper plays a former sheriff who finds himself in a bar in a no-where town in Central America. Enter a damsel in distress. Her husband is trapped in a mine shaft somewhere, surrounded by hostile Indians. She will pay a lot of money (it's a gold mine) to any man willing to help her rescue her husband. An assortment of no-goods and half-goods accompany her. We gradually find out that one, Gary Cooper, has not gone along for the money. We find out his real reasons for going, when late in the picture the wife, now a widow, looks for some reason why her husband was placed on a cross to be tortured to death by the Indians. I'm skipping much of the plot, but suffice it to say that Gary Cooper, without growing a halo and without excessive sentimentality, tells her, "A cross isn't always an ugly thing; it can be a beautiful thing. We all have one."

A simple 1950s pot-boiler? I don't think so. In the movie, Gary Cooper's character rose to heroic heights to which no modern movie hero could every come close. The heroes that inspire us, the stories we tell, are the real test of how our society stands. And our society doesn't stand; it wallows. Until we have heroes that once again see beauty on a cross, we will continue to wallow.

Hitler Revisited

If made-for-T.V. movies and documentaries are any indication of the public's interest and fascination with a subject, then Adolph Hitler is the subject liberals are most fascinated with. Seldom does a week go by without some special on the Führer. Yet for all their fascination with Hitler, the liberals have no understanding of his life or of what he represents.

It used to strike me as strange that the liberals had so little understanding of Hitler, but then I realized that in order for the liberals to understand him and the Nazi phenomenon, they would have to examine their own metaphysic. This they dare not do, because their metaphysic, although diverging at a fork in the road, emanates from the same city as Hitler's metaphysic.

Hitler was not some alien monster from outer space, nor was he a gangster like Stalin or a barbarian like Idi Amin. Hitler was a pagan, as Julian the Apostate was a pagan. Hitler was raised by a devout Catholic mother and an indifferent Catholic father. His childhood was not an unhappy one, but the Christian vision did not inspire him. In this he was not unlike other Austrian and German youths of the early 1900s – Christianity did not inspire them either.

"If men will not have a religion of Christ," William Blake told us, "they will have a religion of Satan." Hitler chose one of Satan's religions for his own, much like his fellow apostate countrymen. The only difference between the apostate Hitler and his apostate countrymen was that he was totally devoted to his new religion, while most of them were indifferent apostates. Hitler chose, like Nietzsche and Wagner (whom he adored), the religion of the ancient Greeks. Of course I don't mean he literally adopted the entire Greek pantheon of gods as his own, but that he adopted pagan naturalism as his own. He sought a return to the gods of the hunt, the field, and the stream. Hitler believed that Christianity had emasculated the German people, and that he, Adolph Hitler, could bring them back to their former glory. This is a very old heresy; the previously-mentioned Julian the Apostate wanted to do the same thing for the Roman empire, namely, restore the empire to its pre-Christian, glory days.

Is this, then, the reason the liberals hate Hitler? Because he wanted to destroy Christianity? Of course not. The liberals also want to destroy Christianity. Do they hate him because he killed a great number of people? No, they do not hate him for that reason either. Stalin and Mao Tse-tung killed more people than Hitler, and the liberals do not hate them. In addition, the liberals have killed more people than Stalin and Mao by way of legalized abortion. So, a little blood for a great cause does not appall the liberals. What does appall them is an anti-Christian ideology that opposes their own anti-Christian ideology. Hitler and the liberals are fighting cousins. What the liberals object to in Hitler is his preference for the racial myth over the liberals' egalitarian, universalist myth.

I think Hitler failed because he did not understand the European people. You can sway most, if not all, non-white cultures by simply appealing to their lust for power. "Follow me and I'll make our race the dominant race in the world," says the non-white demagogue. But white people need something more to inspire them. The pagan Europeans who conquered Rome had power; they had the world in their hands and they found it lacking in substance. They needed something more. And they found something more in the God-Man.

Hitler couldn’t mobilize enough European support because he failed to frame his heresy in the form that Europeans were used to. The democratic heresy and the Marxist heresy, because they were post-Christian heresies, were more appealing to the bulk of the European people. So the post-Christian democracies joined with the post-Christian communists to defeat Hitler.

Personally, I prefer the manliness of Hitler's victory-or-death paganism to Stalin's and Roosevelt's slimy universalism, but that, for a Christian, is not really the point. A Christian is not permitted to choose the lesser of two evils. The proper Christian response during World War II should have consisted of a two-front war, against Russian communism (and its twin sister, American democracy) on the one front, and against Hitler's paganism on the other front. But two-front wars are difficult; only a resolute Christian warrior can maintain such a war. We all tend to pick the lesser of two evils and join in with the more congenial devil. But Christians should know better. In the pre-war days of Hitler's era, the historical record shows that the upper ranks of the pro-monarchy, Austrian-German nobility did know better. They opposed Hitler and the Marxists. (It seems there is some advantage to having a European cultural education that includes more than the catechism. After all, Hitler knew his catechism.)

It is something that gives one pause, this very human tendency to make a pact with the lesser devil. I've never seen it work. The Christian Democratic parties in Latin America and Europe are a disgrace, and I needn't mention the slimy, now largely defunct Christian Coalition in our own country. It is much better to go down fighting a large group of anti-Christian enemies arrayed against you than to be stabbed in the back by a coalition member who suddenly, on the day of battle, decides he hates you more than his other enemy. Or better yet, when one's prayers are pure, because they are not soiled by the desire to please unbelievers, perhaps God will give the victory to the few. Who knows? It's happened before.

Are we now too far afield from the late Führer of the Third Reich? I think not. Hitler is a man we dare not make common cause with, but let us not be deceived into thinking his enemies are creatures of light. They reside in the same city as Hitler – the City of Man-without-God. The Marxist and the Americanist are moving toward a secularized Zion; their eschatology is similar to Christianity except (and the exception is everything) for the absence of Christ. And Hitler bids us return to the Sturm und Drang of paganism.

Hitler seems like the lesser of two evils because, after all, at least in paganism there is a reverence for nature and for something outside of man. Yes, but we must realize that Hitler's paganism, was a post-Christian paganism. The ancient pagan was stuck with paganism until the God-Man came to destroy the pagan gods. Hitler chose the pagan gods over Christ. That is a crucial distinction which we should always have before us. Hitler, if he truly knew Christianity, would not have rejected Christ. In addition, if he truly knew paganism, he would have embraced Christ. Why? Because the two greatest lights of pagan culture – Sophocles and Virgil – both told anyone who bothered to read them that life was meaningless without a God that stood above nature, who guaranteed the spiritual continuance of every creature doomed to go the way of pure nature. Sophocles and Virgil bore witness to the eternal qualities of the human personality. If there was no Christ, then there was nothing but the hell of dumb nature without the life-giving spirit.

In both Oedipus at Colonus and The Aenid there are indications that Sophocles and Virgil intuited the coming of the Messiah. If Hitler had really understood pagan antiquity, he would have rejoiced to have lived to see the coming of the Lord, and he would have wielded the sword on behalf of Christian Germany instead of Nietzsche's Übermensch.

Unlike the liberals, I have not had a life-long fascination with Hitler, but a good biography of him by Marlis Steinert (Hitler, W. W. Norton, 1997) has set me thinking about the man, or actually I should say, about the boy. It is the young Hitler, not the Führer, who interests me. He had depth of soul; he was not as far gone (and I mean this sincerely) as many students I have had. Hitler had a great thirst for beauty and for the transcendent. He was neither a sadist nor a sensualist. And a boy with Hitler's thirst for beauty is easier to reach than a modern student who has no such thirst.

The question is, why did Hitler find his vision of the Third Reich more beautiful than the Christian faith? Well, there is free will, and Hitler ultimately bears the responsibility for his rejection of Christianity, but he was not alone in his rejection. Europeans have for the most part followed Hitler in this rejection of Christianity. They have not all followed Hitler's way, but most have pursued their own godless courses. In Hitler's case, I wonder if the case for Christianity was ever presented to him; was he ever exposed to Chateaubriand's "The Faith is true because it is beautiful" form of apologetics? Was he ever taught that what was good in German culture, including the half-pagan, half-Christian Wagner, was a product of Christian culture? I doubt it.

The sad fact is that when the Christian faith is presented in only a catechistical way, it does seem to be a great polluter of life. Many Christians seem to feel that just as poetry had no place in Plato's Republic, it has no place in the Christian churches. But that is throwing the baby out with the bath water, as the saying goes. The poetic of Christianity is the soul of Christianity. If we take out the beautiful and true story of Christ's death and resurrection in favor of a stripped-down, streamlined version more compatible with the bureaucratic-structured man of today, what will be left of Christianity?

Again, Hitler must answer for his own soul as we all must some day, but I, at the risk of being completely misunderstood, must claim that what I see in Hitler's soul, as evil as it was, is not half as frightening as what I see in the souls of so many of our modern "educated" young people. How can it be otherwise – their gods are even more fearsome than Hitler's pagan gods.

The Hitler movies will keep coming. The liberals need him. They need him to continually prove to the world that they, the liberals, are necessary. Without them, the liberals tell us, we will all either become Nazis or be killed by Nazis.

But the dirty little secret that the liberals hide even from themselves is that Hitler is their child. He does not live in the sanctuaries of the right-wing Christians; he lives with the liberals. And they remain fascinated and appalled by Hitler because he is their own wayward child. They are like the free-love advocate who is appalled when his daughter actually practices what he teaches. "Christ is not risen," scream the liberals.

"Then I will resurrect the old German gods," Hitler replies.

"Why wasn't he able to settle for wine-and-cheese parties?" the liberals lament.

The legions of Satan are diverse; once you have rejected Christ, there is no rule that you must choose the politically-correct version of Satanism. Hitler's great sin was that he chose Apollo over Christ, and his minor virtue was that he was not politically correct.

The Southern Tradition

Book Review: The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism by Eugene D. Genovese, Harvard University Press, 1994

Mr. Genovese, a former Marxist but excellent historian nonetheless, brings before us an array of Southern agrarians who should be studied but who are generally ignored by mainstream conservative-liberal pundits. Genovese does justice to the varied opinions of M. E. Bradford, Andrew Lytle, Alan Tate, and Richard Weaver while also focusing on the common ideas shared by all the agrarians. While they differed on the subject of what a just government should be, all the Southern agrarians were united in their critique of capitalism – the religion of the Yankee conservatives.

The agrarian critique of capitalism is, in my opinion, irrefutable. The problem with the free-market capitalism of the Buckleys, the Novaks, the Gilders, and the Limbaughs, is that an unrestrained free-market completely destroys the traditional values necessary to sustain a free-market economy. If families, neighborhoods, and God himself is made subject to the free-market, then all is cheerless, dark, deadly, and chaotic. People will turn to socialism or fascism to escape the capitalistic nightmare. And it is indeed a nightmare. Capitalism has shown itself to be more devastatingly destructive of hearth and home than communism or socialism. As dreadful as Poland was under communism, the Polish people did not face as great a danger to their faith and their families as they now face in the form of the democratic capitalism so adored by the late Michael Novak, Wall Street, and Rush Limbaugh. Our benighted nation, far from holding out a beacon light to the rest of the world, instead illustrates the terrible dangers of unchecked human pride. We are indeed a "city built on a hill" – we are a satanic city built on a hill of technology and dead souls.

Yet the free-market conservatives drone on and on, preaching happiness for all, if we would just support the capitalist crusade in Iraq and adopt the flat tax.

The free marketers wish no one ill, but their happy dream of a well ordered international economy of morally indifferent affluence for many and misery for those who cannot compete – a dream that constitutes my own private nightmare – is becoming a reality. We may indeed be on the threshold of a brave new world of affluent depravity for a good many people, perhaps even a majority of Americans. If so, I am glad to be too old to have to live with the worst of what is coming.

I have no quarrel with Mr. Genovese's presentation of the Southern agrarian case against capitalism. I do disagree with him on the issue of racism. While admiring the agrarians, Mr. Genovese deplores their racist support of segregation. Donald Davidson is especially singled out for his opposition to integration. Mr. Genovese is schizophrenic. He fails to understand that without segregation, the values of white Southerners whom he admires, such as Donald Davidson, would be no different from the values of the Northern capitalists, whom he deplores. New south "conservatives" like Newt Gingrich can be part of the New World Order because they are willing to trade Christian civilization for the new multi-racial, free-market world. But it is a spiritually impoverished world that Newt and the integrationists love, and it will come crashing down on everyone's head regardless of color. And then there will be, oh rapture of raptures, equality – albeit the equality of the dung heap.

The Sons of Martha

I reject the modern Catholic-Quaker notion that Christianity is a pacifistic religion. Christianity is a fighting faith. However, we Christians fight in "defense of" rather than to "stomp on." And I think a Christian must always put himself at that part of the fort at which the enemy has chosen to launch the main body of his troops. It does no good to defend the south wall when the north wall is being besieged.

Currently, it is the white European wall of the fort that is being attacked. Everywhere, the idea that white Europeans, cooperating with God's grace, created a civilization that is worth emulating is under attack, which is why I subscribe to so-called 'racist' publications. The men behind the magazines have good instincts, and they sense where the good lies. But they are Sons of Martha. They need a leader from the ranks of the Sons of Mary who can show them that the bastardized Christianity which has destroyed all that is good and noble in the West can only be defeated by a true, noble, heroic Christianity. Neo-Darwinism and fascism are not sufficient to defeat post-Christian satanism.

The Line Has Been Crossed

I had enjoyed reading those esprit de corps military books like Beau Geste when I was a boy, and I had always thought that I would enter the military when I got older. But by the time I got out of high school, I considered myself a radical, due to the influence of a very charismatic, political science teacher and the book, All Quiet on the Western Front. It's just as well; had I remained a Beau Geste romantic and entered the military, I would have been quite disappointed because the line had been crossed.

What line? Well, the dates are not written in stone, but they are basically accurate. After World War I (1919), the European peoples (which include the American people) ceased to be Christian on a conscious level. But they still maintained the basic values of Christians; they behaved as if Christianity was true. If you had joined the foreign legion or fought for European values, you could have justified it by saying you were fighting for Christian civilization.

But by the 1960s people no longer acted according to Christian values. The chasm between a Christian's behavior and beliefs and that of a secularist was immense. I need only mention legalized abortion and sexual promiscuity as two examples of the chasm. A secularist of the 1940s was the progenitor of the 1960s secularists, but he would have more in common in the way he behaved with the Christian. Many older liberals were very uncomfortable with the sixties radicals, but what could they say when challenged? They had no metaphysical underpinning for their 'do nots,' which is why the sexual revolution gave way to the pragmatic sexual revolution; if you can't be moral, at least be safe.

I did get a shot at Beau Geste-ing it later when I was a policeman in my twenties. There were moments, on the midnight shift, when I felt I was a soldier of the night, standing against the barbarians with a few stalwart lads. It was a good feeling. But it was all airy nothings. My stalwart fellow officers would just as soon knock an abortion protestor on the head as a Negro barbarian. The shared ethos was not there. I came to feel more like a hooker than a soldier.

When the line has been crossed, there is nothing a man can do to support his society that feels noble. His work must be contra mundum in a society that has crossed the line or his soul will drown in the slush.

The Return of Cybele

The post-Christian can never re-enter the pagan world. Christ, mercifully, changed that world. But post-Christians do ape the pagans with intellectualized versions of the old cults. Thus Hitler crafted his new German myth onto the old pagan ones, and the Christian churches have adopted, in intellectualized form, the old religion of Cybele.

A goddess of the earth, called Mâ or Cybele, was revered as the fecund mother of all things, the "mistress of the wild beasts" that inhabit the woods. A god Attis, or Papas, was regarded as her husband, but the first place in this divine household belonged to the woman, a reminiscence of the period of matriarchy…

In the midst of their orgies, and after wild dances, some of the worshippers voluntarily wounded themselves and, becoming intoxicated with the view of the blood, with which they besprinkled their altars, they believed they were united themselves with their divinity. Or else, arriving at a paroxysm of frenzy, they sacrificed their virility to the gods as certain Russian dissenters still do today. These men became priests of Cybele and were called Galli. Violent ecstasis was always an endemic disease in Phrygia. As late as the Antonines, montanist prophets that arose in that country attempted to introduce it into Christianity.

from Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism by Franz Cumont (1911)

All this proves the old cliché, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." In the later half of the 20th century, Cybele finally was introduced and accepted by the Christian churches.

Pax Americana

The Muslims are to be condemned for their attacks on innocent people, but we should be clear about the cause of the attacks: The US has spent the latter part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st meddling in everybody's business in the name of democracy and free markets. Isolationists such as Patrick Buchanan are regularly excoriated by the power brokers in Washington and the media, but it is democratic capitalism that breeds war.

Good Muslims will always hate the infidel, but they would not have killed thousands of Americans if the US was a nation committed to one race (the white one) and one religion (Christianity), without the aspiration to spread a satanic creed (democratic capitalism) around the world.

Which brings me to the subject of patriotism. I agree with Frank Owsley's statement that a country must consist of a people with a common race and religion if it is to be a true nation. The old South qualified as a 'nation' because it was Christian and it was white. But our current, multi-ethnic, multi-faith country is not a nation; we live in an anti-nation. And our anti-white, anti-Christian anti-nation has gone to war against an evil, anti-Christian nation, which does not leave us with anybody to root for.

Fields Without Dreams

Book Review: Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Ideal by Victor Davis Hanson, Free Press, 1997

Hanson's contention is that the small farm is dead and that capitalism killed it. For those who say, "So what," Hanson would answer that Greek democracy and Jeffersonian democracy all depend on the existence of small farms manned by trusty yeomen. Can we abandon the agrarian principles on which our country was founded and still maintain our country? Hanson says we cannot. Wendell Berry echoes the same thoughts in his book, Another Turn of the Crank.

The small farmer is not asking for government handouts, but he is asking for protection from large corporations and protection from unfair foreign trade. Why should the small farmer be protected? Hanson maintains that the small farmer should be protected because he is the heart and soul of the American democratic experiment. The small farmer is in a dilemma when it comes to politics. He is usually a conservative on issues such as pornography, divorce, and sexual permissiveness, but he has done better economically under Democratic regimes instead of Republican. Hanson addresses this dilemma:

Oh, it is true that most farmers now say they 'like' such Republican constriction, the hard dollar, low wages, predictable prices, stasis, and all that. I won't argue with farmers that skeptical Republican administrations may be smarter in dealing with drugs, welfare, the lazy and criminal, and other social ills. But raisin farmers, even conservative farmers, usually – predictably – go broke voting Republican, hating the rare Democratic administrations as they become prosperous. So much for homo economicus … Tell a farmer that: he almost punches you in the face, citing rains, luck, and all sorts of extraneous, superfluous factors for the Carter extravaganza of the late 1970s. He hates you for saying what he knows in his black heart to be true:
Democrats inflate and expand; Republicans deflate and constrict. Democrats enrage farmers with their farrago of entitlement and permissiveness; Republicans excite with their stern talk and get-tough threats. But Democrats make farmers rich; Republicans make them go broke.

Hanson makes his case against the unrestricted free market by describing the tragedy of his own small, ancestral farm. His mother, his father, and now he and his brothers have all had to get jobs outside the farm (Hanson works as a Professor of Greek) just to keep it alive. The great raisin crash (depicted in great detail in the book) of 1983 ended the last hope the Hansons had of making a living from their land. Nor does Hanson confine himself to just the story of his own farm. He tells the stories of many other small farmers who were unable to compete with the leviathan. To the Limbaughs who would call Hanson and his fellow farmers 'liberal whiners' who just couldn't cut it in a free-market economy, Hanson replies with this:

All the free-market economists I met who lectured on productivity while ignoring obscene commissions, dividends, and salaries, the Ivy League careerists who pontificated about market corrections and the stabilizing, healthy effect of buyouts, shutdowns, and bankruptcies, were themselves quite a sorry bunch. A pampered lot they were, terrified of the ghetto across the freeway, struck dumb by a hammer and nails, left pale and stammering before the formidable blue-collar white repair man. They preached an awfully stern Darwinism. But even those tanned and fit on their Nautilises would be the first to go in any jungle their own models might create.

No doubt because of a second career (Hanson considers himself a farmer first) spent with Aeschylus and Sophocles, Mr. Hanson does not feel obligated to end his work on an optimistic note. He makes a few suggestions about things that could be done, but he makes it clear that he doesn't believe anything will be done to help the small farmer. Like a soothsayer from one of Sophocles' tragedies, Hanson tells us, without commercial break, that there will be hell to pay for our destruction of the agrarian way of life.*

Now, let me mention the major flaw of the book. Hanson's critique of the free-market is just; his defense of the agrarian way of life is noble. However, I would quarrel with the gods he invokes. He states in his preface that he rejects the more romanticized vision of farming presented by Virgil in The Georgics in favor of the bleaker vision presented by Hesiod in Works and Days. Throughout the book, when he talks about 'Western Civilization' he clearly refers to the Greeks. Well, the Greeks were a fine bunch of fellows, and we owe them much, but the Incarnation is a fact. The Western monks preserved the Greek and Roman works because there was much in them that deserved to be preserved, but to ignore the colossal change in our institutions, in our art, and in our morals that took place since the Incarnation is at best second-rate thought. Agrarianism needs to be defended because it was under an agrarian economy that Christendom flourished, not because the Greeks (as Hanson suggests) flourished under an agrarian system. So, this is a good book, but not on a par with Andrew Lytle's Eden to Babylon, in which Lytle defends the agrarian idea from a Christian viewpoint.

*The poisoned food from China is part of the hell we are paying.

Politically Incorrect T.V. Shows

The liberals, you may have noticed, throw terms around like racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, homophobic and fascist in the same way pre-Vatican II popes used to hurl anathemas. The pre-Vatican II popes, however, usually had very meticulously detailed reasons to explain why they felt compelled to hurl their anathemas. The liberals can never explain their anathemas; indeed, questioning the validity of the liberals' anathemas only proves to them that you are completely outside the ken of Liberaldom and therefore outside the realm of humanity. Thus, if you question the wisdom of the civil rights movement, pointing out the meteoric rise in crime that has accompanied it, you are, ipso facto, a racist. If you maintain that a woman's place is in the home and near the hearth, you are, ipso facto, a sexist. If you maintain that any organized body opposed to the Mystical Body of Christ is one that bears watching, particularly since organized Jewry has never been a friend to the Christian West, you are, ipso facto, an anti-Semite. If you maintain that sodomy is not a legitimate life option, you are, ipso facto, a homophobe. And if you think there are better forms of government than that of the American democratic system, then you are, ipso facto, a fascist.

In order to restore some balance to the political correctness debate, I would like to propose some politically incorrect television shows. If we start production on them immediately, they should be ready for the fall season.

1. The Segregationist – In a small town in Mississippi lives a God-fearing white man named Billy Bob McCoy. Billy Bob's town is virtually crime-free because it is racially homogenous and because almost every male in the town carries a firearm. However, in the neighboring town trouble rears its ugly head. A liberal bitch from the local area has gone on to Hollywood and become a famous actress. She has just bought the town next to Billy Bob's, and she plans to import blacks into the town. Billy Bob, from the time he was knee high to a grasshopper (he's 36 years old now), has been sending money to churches in Africa in order to feed little black children who have, according to the ads, never eaten. But Billy Bob knows what happens to towns that integrate. He has a wife and four children and he loves his neighborhood. By making a few strategic visits with some of his friends to the actress's house, Billy Bob manages to head off the plans for integration.

At the end of the first episode, we see Billy Bob sitting on the front porch of his Andy-of-Mayberry-type house, playing the guitar and singing "Jimmy Cracked Corn" to his children and some neighbors. In subsequent episodes, Billy Bob journeys to a nearby city and helps his friends keep their golf course segregated. He also thwarts a plan for forced busing from his town to the big city.

[Advice to the Director: It's important to always portray Billy Bob and his friends as kindly, good-natured fellows, and to portray the integrationists as mean-spirited bigots who look on themselves as divinely-appointed ambassadors for integration.]

2. The Wife Beater – When John Wolford married Jan McKensey, he thought his life would be one of peaceful contentment. Jan was pretty, God-fearing, and traditional-minded. But after six years of marriage, something was wrong. While John was at work, Jan had started taking the kids, a boy of two years, and a girl of four, with her to some local meetings for women. Every time Jan went to one of these meetings, John noticed she came back seething with resentment toward him and the children.

In the opening episode, John comes home from work early one day and finds his wife in the upstairs bedroom with one of her "lady" friends. John says nothing, but merely closes the door, goes downstairs, gathers up the children, and drives to the rectory of his parish church. He asks to talk with the older, retired priest in residence, named Father O'Connor, who is 86 years old. John, for obvious reasons, does not tell Father Mark, age 28, who answers the door of the rectory, why he wants to talk to Father O'Connor. Father O'Connor has to get around with the aid of a walker, and he wears a hearing aid, but he still has all of his considerable mental powers intact. It should be noted that Father O'Connor has not gone to any of the Church 'Renewal' courses. When his superiors got around to ordering him to attend, he pleaded ill health, and nobody ever bothered to pursue it any further.

John tells Father O'Connor about his marital problems. Father O'Connor listens and then asks John, "Do you still love her?"

John says, "Yes, I do."

"Then," Father O'Connor says, as he places his hand over John's hand, "you must beat her."

"But how, Father, can I hit my wife?"

"You will not only hit her, you will beat her, that is, if you really love her. If you do not beat your wife, you will be committing the sin of Adam. You will be trying to please your wife outside of God's law. If you do that, you will be placing yourself and your wife permanently outside of God's loving orbit."

As John leaves the rectory, he turns and asks Father O'Connor one last question. "Father, what shall I beat my wife with?"

Father O'Connor replies, "You should beat her with a big, brown belt."

That night John Wolford beats his wife and locks her in the cellar. Two days later, he lets her out of the cellar and beats her again. After four months of living in the cellar and being beaten, Jan comes out of the dark cellar and walks into the light. Together Jan and John receive the Holy Eucharist, and except for a few lingering sore spots, Jan is a spiritually and physically restored woman. Every day of Jan's life, she thanks God for sending her a husband that loved her enough to beat her.

In subsequent episodes, Jan and John help other husbands learn to overcome their fears and to beat their wives.

3. Zorro Rides Again – In the pilot episode, we meet the great, great, great, great-grandson of Zorro, who starts riding throughout the Los Angeles area, cutting off the heads of doctors who perform abortions. In one episode, the Pope, at the instigation of the liberals, visits Los Angeles and urges Zorro to stop his violent activities and turn himself in to the legitimate government of the U. S. Zorro replies, by means of a flaming arrow, that he will turn himself into the legitimate U. S. government as soon as the country acquires one. In the meantime, Zorro says, "Si, Papa; No, Ratzinger; I will fight to the death."

Every subsequent episode will show Zorro killing abortion doctors and escaping just as the law dogs seem to be closing in on him.

4. The Fascist – In this series, we will follow the efforts of a retired American army officer to infiltrate the ranks of the U. S. Army, infuse an elite band of troops with his Fascist ideology, and then lead a counter-revolutionary offensive against the U. S. government.

You get the general idea. Other shows will have such winning titles as Jack Brito and the Anti-Sodomite Legionnaires, The Knights of the Cross Fight Zionism, and so on.

Tune in this fall to see all these (and more) exciting shows!

When Black Weds White

It's been over ten years since the O. J. Simpson murder case. The liberals then, and now, took no note of the real significance of the case. The case was not an example of how rich celebrities are favored by our court system but of how black juries will never convict black men no matter how hideous their crime. The only difference between O. J. Simpson's murder case and the cases of other black murderers was that Simpson had to wait longer to hear his 'not guilty' verdict than most black murderers have to wait because of his celebrity status. I thought then, and I still think so now, that there were some striking parallels between the Simpson drama and Shakespeare's Othello.

Othello is a warrior. In fact, it is Othello's tales of his exploits in the wars that wins Desdemona's love. "She loved me for the dangers I had past." However, having won Desdemona's love, Othello does not ask Desdemona's father, Brabantio, for Desdemona's hand in marriage. Instead, Othello sneaks off with Desdemona and marries her without Brabantio's consent. Desdemona, by agreeing to marry without her father's approval, helps bring about her subsequent murder at the hands of her black husband. By betraying her father, she plants a seed of doubt in Othello's mind; Brabantio warns Othello: "Look to her, Moor, if thou has eyes to see: She has deceived her father, and may thee."

What role does the state play in the tragedy? The state is an accomplice to Desdemona's murder. When Brabantio appeals to the Duke to annul the marriage, the Duke supports Othello because Othello has done good service in the wars, and the Duke needs Othello to do further service in the new wars. The marriage is not annulled, and Othello goes off with Desdemona.

What follows is quite predictable. Iago, who has a grudge against Othello, starts planting suggestions in Othello's mind that Desdemona is not a faithful wife. And the main stratagem Iago uses is to dwell upon Desdemona's betrayal of her father. "She did deceive her father, marrying you... She that, so young, could give out such a seeming, To seal her father's eyes up close as oak." Othello, finally after a series of contrivances by Iago, believes Desdemona is unfaithful. He kills Desdemona and then himself.

Othello is generally regarded as a magnificent play about the devastating effects of jealousy upon the human soul. However, as is always the case with Shakespearean criticism, the general opinion does not do justice to the complexity of the play. Othello is certainly about jealousy, but it is about so much more. There are two major themes always ignored when the play is discussed. The first is Desdemona's betrayal of her father. It is not fashionable to seek one's father's approval before marriage, so modern critics do not look on Desdemona's refusal to get her father's permission to marry as a fault. But we do regard it as a fault, and so did Shakespeare, and so did Othello. While certainly not deserving to be murdered for her fault, Desdemona is an unwitting accomplice to her own murder.

The second theme ignored is that of blackness. Do not misunderstand me. The fact that Desdemona is white and Othello is black is always noted by the critics, but the black vs. white theme is noted only as it relates to the jealousy theme. The difference in race is advanced as one of the reasons Othello is so susceptible to Iago's suggestions. However, there is another aspect of Othello's blackness that is always ignored, and it should not be. Did Shakespeare choose to make Othello black for a reason? I think he did. Othello's complete transformation over a short period of time from a respected soldier citizen into a primitive savage suggests that the primitive element, present in all men, is closer to the surface in the black man. He can ape the white man's ways, but not having absorbed the white man's religion on any deep level, the black man can very easily revert to his jungle ways.

It is significant that the other two black characters in Shakespeare's plays, Aaron in Titus Andronicus and the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice, are both men, like Othello, who can ape white customs but who at heart are savages who view courtship and marriage as an extension of tribal warfare. Thus Aaron asserts:

Madam, though Venus govern your desires,
Saturn is dominator over mine.
What signifies my deadly-standing eye,
My silence and my cloudy melancholy,
My fleece of wooly hair that now uncurls
Even as the adder when she doth unroll
To do some fatal execution?
No, madam, these are no venereal signs.
Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand,
Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.

And the Prince of Morocco argues:

Where Phoebus fire scarce thaws the icicles
And let us make incision for
your love,
To prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine.

In all three plays, Shakespeare warns us about the dangers of race-mixing. Tamora in Titus Andronicus and Desdemona in Othello link their destinies with savage blacks. Portia in The Merchant of Venice rejects her black suitor, which is why the two former plays are tragedies and the latter is a comedy.

O. J. Simpson, like Othello, had been a warrior. Unlike Othello, however, O. J. Simpson had not fought for his country but for money. Nicole Brown presumably was attracted to O. J. Simpson because of his exploits on the football field and because of the wealth he had acquired while performing there. However, there is another reason now why a white women marries a black man, and that is to assuage white guilt. No one can accuse a white woman of prejudice if she marries a black man. Anyone who went to college in the late sixties and early seventies could observe this phenomenon in its infancy when it became very chic for young white women to have their own black man.

Nicole Brown, unlike Desdemona, did not marry without her father's consent, but she did start her marriage off with an act of betrayal. She betrayed her race and her heritage, about which, presumably, her parents had never bothered to teach her. By doing this she was an accomplice to her own murder. One thing that the liberals never seem to grasp about race relations is that no black really respects a white person who betrays his own people. A Gordon Scott Tarzan movie comes to mind (previously discussed here). The white survivors of a plane crash in the jungle are faced with the difficult task of making their way through an area peopled (much like our American cities) with hostile natives. A great white hunter comes and offers to lead them safely through the jungle. Tarzan also has come along and has offered to help them, too, but the white hunter and Tarzan differ as to the safest route to take. Now, if I had to make a choice between Tarzan and a dubious white hunter, I would choose Tarzan, but the white survivors go with the white hunter. The white hunter, as we could have predicted, already has made a deal with the natives. In exchange for ivory, he will lead the whites to the natives' kitchen pots. When the white hunter delivers up the white people, he gets a surprise. The black chief tells him that he will be the first one killed. "Why?" asks the white hunter. "Because," says the chief, "You betrayed your own people; you will betray us." With her initial betrayal of her race, Nicole Brown put the thought in O. J. Simpson's mind: "You betrayed your own people; you will betray me."

Nicole Brown would not have seen her marriage to O. J. Simpson as a betrayal of her race because of her liberal upbringing, but O. J. Simpson would have seen it that way. If one lists the true hierarchy of cultures present in America, it would run like this:
1. Christian
2. Pagan (Greco-Roman)
3. Savage or barbarian
4. Post-Christian

O. J. Simpson came from the Barbarian class and Nicole Brown came from the post-Christian class. A post-Christian is extremely interested in the savage class but has no interest in the Christian or pagan classes, because the post-Christian has descended too far to be touched by a higher culture. It is the savage's religion of sex and blood that offers post-Christians some hope to escape the vapidity of their passionless lives. Most young whites are post-Christian; they have no interest in Christianity or paganism. Their only aspiration is to someday rise to the class of savages. Their idols are the black athletes or celebrities of the moment.

But a savage will never understand a post-Christian. To a post-Christian, there is no such thing as religion or race; hence, the idea of loyalty to anything is alien to the post-Christian. The savage, lacking knowledge of the highest loyalty – pieta – does have a rudimentary knowledge of racial loyalty. So, when a black marries a white woman, he delights in his ability to lord it over the white man by sleeping with a white woman, but in the deep recesses of his soul, he has contempt for a white woman who betrays her race by marrying a black man.

I mentioned that the state, represented by the Duke in Othello, was an accomplice to Desdemona's murder. So too was the state an accomplice in the murder of Nicole Brown. In America, as we know, we have no concrete state; we are governed by "The People." And the spokesman for "The People" is the liberal, elitist assortment of professors, media persons, psychoanalytical witch-doctors, lawyers, and other aliens from the human race. This strange liberal elite, which runs our country, has decreed that it is a very good thing for blacks and whites to marry. Forget all the historical wisdom against such marriages, forget the tragedy of broken homes and violent deaths that result from such liaisons; all these things must be swept aside to satisfy the liberals' need for a multi-racial, universalist Christianity without Christ and without humanity. Nicole Brown was fed on such ideas. Should it be a surprise then that she thought she was performing a noble act when she married O. J. Simpson?

Though parallel in many aspects, there is one very great contrast between Othello and Desdemona's marriage and that of O. J. Simpson and Nicole Brown. Othello and Desdemona's story is the stuff of tragedy. Desdemona descends from the Christian plane to marry a seemingly noble pagan who reverts to the level of a savage under the evil influence of Iago, the post-Christian. Iago is the post-Christian equivalent to the modern, satanic, technocratic Christians. Both Othello and Desdemona have some depth of soul.

In stark contrast stand O. J. Simpson and Nichole Brown. Their story is a sad one – nobody should have to die as she did – but it lacks the dimension of tragedy, because O. J. and Nicole Brown lacked Othello and Desdemona's depth of soul. Their story only assumes tragic dimensions when we view the two cultures they represent. Simpson represented a savage culture cut adrift by a white culture that should have remained a stern parent to the savage child-culture. Nicole Brown represented a once-Christian race that has descended, except for a small remnant, to a level below that of the savage. From this level, the white, post-Christian looks up at the black savage and alternately views him as his ally against the white Christians and also worships him as the harbinger of death.

A Tale of Three Idiots

Seven years into the 21st century, it might be useful to look at the three men of the 19th century who had the greatest influence on the centuries that followed. The three men were, and are: Darwin, Marx, and Freud. While no one holds to all of the details of their mad philosophies, all liberals and most conservatives share the basic core assumptions of the infamous trio. What were their assumptions?

Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin is the father of Freud and Marx. Without Charles Darwin there could be no Marx or Freud. Darwin claimed to be a scientist, but like Freud and Marx he was really a philosopher. His basic premise was quite simple: Man's origin can be explained by simply collecting enough facts about mankind's biological life on earth. Darwin claimed he had the facts and was ready to reveal them. The "facts" Darwin "discovered" were these: Man had somehow managed, without outside help, to fashion himself into a hairy ape; then, becoming dissatisfied with his appearance, he decided to make himself into a man. In the course of switching from apehood to manhood, and in doing other odd jobs necessary for survival, man is brought into conflict with other men. This conflict creates "natural selection," which is the process by which the race of man weeds out weak individuals. This fabulous new doctrine was welcomed by the liberals as a refreshing relief from the old (fantastical?) notions of God. Now man was free to live, love, and laugh.

How this new doctrine made man free is not clear to a rational individual. A rational individual would say, "Instead of being created in the image of God with an immortal soul and an eternal destiny, I am now, you tell me, an extraordinary ape with no soul and no eternal destiny. Oh joy, oh bliss." The Russian philosopher Lev Shestov cut right to the heart of the matter when he summed up Darwinism with the following statement: "Man is a monkey, therefore we must all love one another."

Darwin made no scientific discovery. He advanced a philosophic theory as a solution to the riddle of man's existence. As theories go, Darwin's theory ranks as one of the stupidest to come down the pike. Yet, the pseudo-intellectuals and the mass media of the day bought it. In fact, they lapped it up. Why? There are two major reasons. The first I'll call "The Man in the White Smock with a Ph.D." phenomenon. Modern man will believe almost anything if it is presented to him by a scientific expert as a new breakthrough for science. If Joe, the 19th century grocer, tells Mike, the 19th century butcher, that he has a new theory about the origins of man and that it involves monkey bones and evolutionary clap-trap, Mike the Butcher is likely to advise the grocer's wife to have good old Joe packed off to a loony bin. But, if a newspaper man tells Mike the Butcher that a scientific expert with a Ph.D. has just discovered that man is really a monkey, Mike the Butcher will be very impressed and start spouting the new theory to everyone he meets, because he will not want people to think he is out of touch with the latest "scientific discovery."

Why is Mike the Butcher, and why are we, Mike's spiritual heirs, so afraid of appearing unreceptive to the latest scientific discoveries? It is because of Zeus's curse. When Our Lord, the one true God, destroyed Zeus's pantheon of nature gods, Zeus left a curse. "If this God loves man so much as to give him dominion over my nature gods, then let men fight over the mechanical means to control nature, and let them be so fascinated by the mechanisms by which they control nature that they forget the God above nature who gave them the means to control it." Thus spake Zeus.

And thus we sit, like a 6th grade school boy who has learned to simulate a fart by strategic placement of his hands over his mouth, delighted by our ability to pull levers and push buttons. When we talk about God at all, we cloak our language in scientific jargon so that the personal God, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God who took flesh and dwelt among us, is obscured by a foul-smelling gaseous fog. And from gaseous fogs come gasbags. That is the origin of Charles Darwin.

The second reason for the wide acceptance of Darwinism is the "Fear of Hell" reason (also known as the "I Don't Look Good in a Puritan Hat" reason). There comes with a belief in Christ a belief in hell. A person with a virile belief in Christ puts the fear of hell well below the love of Christ in his priorities, but a disordered soul usually places the fear of hell at the top of his list. To such a person and to similar collective persons, the doctrine of Darwinian monkeyism came as a relief. If we are all monkeys, then we need not fear hell. Lurking in the heart of many a liberal who proclaims his firm belief in evolution is a secret fear that hell just might be a real place.

Acceptance of the Darwinian solution divests man of his fear of hell, but he also loses his hope of heaven. It would seem to be a rather penny-wise, pound-foolish view of existence, but the Darwinian view of existence is the preferred view of modern man. Even the theologians who wish to reject the logical atheism of the Darwinian solution (Teilhard de Chardin, etc.) hedge their bets by using Darwinian jargon to explain their theories.

So the old gasbag really stumbled onto something with the evolution shell game; and Herr Sigmund continued Darwin's work from a different angle.

Sigmund Freud
Freud was one of the most prolific writers of all time. His works fill library shelves in all corners of the earth, but there is no need to summon every work forth. Freud started with the Darwinian assumption that man was an ape whose essence could be discovered through research. Freud called his research scientific, yet his most significant work as pertains to his religious views, Moses and Monotheism, was, by his own admission, "more of a novel" than a work of research.

Moses and Monotheism was written late in Freud's life. I first read the book as a freshman in college; it is a very easy read. Freud accepts as fact the Oedipus myth, and this acceptance was at the core of his psychoanalytical theory. The myth, as we know, was about a man, Oedipus, who killed his father and slept with his mother. Freud claims that the first group of sons on earth killed their father and slept with their mother. This, according to Freud, led to the racial guilt that all men share. Right away, one runs into a problem. I remember asking my religion professor, "Let us accept, for the sake of argument, that Freud's theory is true: the first sons killed their father and slept with their mother. Why should they feel guilty? Guilt is a Christian concept, and man, according to Freud, is an animal. So, why the guilt?" My teacher could not answer my question. Indeed the question is not answerable by reference to any biological theory of man's origin.

Freud, accepting the Oedipus premise as true, went on to theorize about Moses. Moses, Freud claimed, was not a Jew but an Egyptian. This Egyptian Moses led a band of Hebrew slaves into the desert, and once in the desert, the Hebrew slaves slew their Egyptian leader, thus reenacting primal man's murder of his father. Christianity, said Freud, helped alleviate man's guilt by creating a religion where the son offered himself up as a sacrificial victim to the father. Some Christians have praised Moses and Monotheism because Freud presents the Christian religion as an improvement over Judaism, Christianity being better equipped to assuage racial guilt. Such praise is ludicrous. Freud still presents Christianity as an illusory religion, which I hope would always bring out the fighting blood in Christians.

Although few modern psycho-witch doctors accept all of Freud's theories, they do accept his premise that religious belief is illusory and that it is only healthy or unhealthy according to how well it helps an individual "cope" or "become the best he can be" or achieve orgasm or some other nonsense.

We witness the phenomenon of sickness casting judgment on health. Freud really did want to murder his father and sleep with his mother, but that was his problem, not ours. Is Christianity false because Freud was sick? Yet we continue to slavishly kow-tow to Freud's successors. To whom do the Christian churches send their clergymen to determine their "mental fitness"? In our schools, whose language do we use to define personality types? Freud's basic premise remains unchallenged in the citadels of what should be the main opposition.

Karl Marx
While Darwinism remains strong, and psycho-babble mumbo-jumbo has become part of Western culture, it would seem that Marxism is a dying ember. This is not quite the case. While most of Marx's details have been rejected, his basic core assumption has been accepted in virtually every nation in the world. Marx's core assumption was that man was an ape who was controlled completely by economic forces. This is a principle held by both American capitalists and Chinese communists. The only disagreement between the American capitalist and Karl Marx is over the best way to deliver the economic goods.

Can Karl Marx be credited with any positive contribution to Western Culture? No. His critique of capitalism was incorrect. Capitalism deserves the harshest criticism; it is no less godless and atheistic than Marxism, but Marx didn't criticize capitalism for its godlessness. He criticized it for being unable to deliver the economic goods to the great mass of people. On this score, capitalism proved quite superior to Marxism. The legitimate criticism of capitalism has come from the older Christian tradition, from such authors as Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and the Southern agrarians. Their critique emphasized the inhumanity of treating man as a cog in the wheel of the godless GNP. Read Rob Roy, Les Miserables, Hard Times or So Red the Rose to read a legitimate critique of capitalism.

So, the essentially materialistic, mechanistic view of man expounded from different angles of the same triangle by Darwin, Freud, and Marx is still very much with us in the twenty-first century. Is it possible to remain fascinated for so long by the ability to simulate farts? Apparently it is.

Unyielding

"There are many other ways in which men sin against the Holy Ghost, but this is the worst – to destroy deliberately, for the sake of any kind of gain, that which Christ bought so dearly. How can a man ask for mercy, or how can mercy help him, who would wickedly and willfully extinguish mercy?"

-- William Langland

The difference between the European civilization prior to the 20th century and every other civilization is the difference between heaven and hell. There is an impassable chasm between European culture and all other cultures. And the new European-hating Europeans and the people from cultures of color recognize the distinctiveness of European culture, but they view European distinctiveness quite differently than me. The white-hating whites and their colored minions see the older European culture as distinctively evil. Indeed, they view it as the fount of all evil. And if you believe in a worldwide system of democracy, in which all peoples of every nation and every color vote, then Europe does stand condemned. But in a higher court than world opinion, European culture stands alone in the light, while all the other civilizations (which can't really be called civilizations) stand shrouded in hellish night.

The distinctiveness of pre-20th century European culture does not consist of its material achievements – its science, its exploration, etc. European culture is distinct because of its spiritual depth. During the years I taught English literature, I had many opportunities with my students to view staged productions of Shakespeare's King Lear. The students' varied reactions to the play were amazing. Some slept, some made jokes, some were artificially attentive because they thought I'd punish them if they weren't, and some wept and understood. Well, the Europeans wept and understood Christ's passion play, while those of other cultures were either indifferent, hostile, or artificially attentive (like the defeated Aztecs) because of the Europeans' power.

There are numerous theories as to why the Europeans embraced Christ. Some historians point out that the pagan gods of the central and northern Europeans were more humane than the pagan gods of Asia Minor and Rome. Thus, according to this theory, the Europeans were more open to the concept of a loving God than were those of other cultures. And some assert it was simply God's choice: the Europeans were predestined to be the Christ-bearers. But whatever reason, the central fact is this: the Europeans rejected the cruel gods of sacrifice and embraced the God of love and mercy. European civilization was a response to God's love. Certainly, it was imperfect in comparison to God's love for us, but when compared to all the other civilizations… well, there is no comparison.

We are now engaged in a war quite different from the one Stoddard depicts in his book about Haiti. Then, the war was still largely one of white civilization vs. the barbarians of color. Since then, white folk have been engaged in a civil war with a new breed of Gnostic whites, and they have lost the civil war and become a conquered people.

Shelby Foote once stated that the two great geniuses of America's civil war were Abraham Lincoln and Nathan Bedford Forrest. I concur. And the difference between those two geniuses was the difference between the new utopian world and the antique Christian world. Lincoln articulated, as only a genius could articulate, the utopian theory at the heart of the American experiment in democracy, which "brought forth on this continent a new nation, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." And if all men are not equal, then equality will be forced on the unequal.

In contrast, Forrest represented those early adventurers and Southern cavaliers of whom Thomas Nelson Page wrote. Forrest's wisdom was in his blood, and his wise blood told him that the white man and his culture was inherently unequal to all other men and to every other culture.

Forrest's genius, a genius of the blood, was grounded in the particular. Lincoln's genius was grounded in the universal. And the universal won. Despite Lincoln's personal abhorrence for race-mixing, it became an inevitable necessity in a world of universals. There can be no black or white, no man or woman, no child or father in the universal world of brotherhood-without-kinship, sexuality-without-masculinity-or-femininity, and families-without-patriarchal-authority.

Lincoln was a mild lamb compared to the white-hating whites who were to follow him. Each successive generation has become more demonic. And why do so many white men hate their own? Because in the new faith, there is no such concept as "these are my people" or "this is my own, my native land"; everything is a walking universal in the new faith. There is an idea about what constitutes the human, but there is no humanity. Therefore, the white-hating heirs of Lincoln must destroy anything that stinks of humanity. And who is more human than the Incarnate God? The new white man must destroy flesh-and-blood white men, because they are the last conduits of a culture that saw salvation in the God-Man who saved particular men and women from sin and death. Flesh-and-blood white men do not accept the culture that worships a satanic messiah promising to free men's minds from the prison of their own humanity and God's incarnate humanity.

The white-hating whites and their colored lackeys will not defeat us unless we cease to maintain our distinctiveness. We are the men of the enchanted forest not the barbarian jungle, the men of the sacred hearth not the cannibal's stewpot, and the men of bardic Europe not scientific Europe. Ah, there's the rub. Being the conduits of God's grace has placed us closer to God but also closer to satanic lightning. If we see our distinctiveness in our intellects instead of our European hearts, we will be completely ineffectual in the great battle against the white-hating whites and their barbarian armies of the night, for we will be like unto them.

To stay distinct, white men must stay true to incarnational, non-abstract Europe. We must be true to the civilization of mercy. What Robert Frederick said of Shakespeare, the most European of poets, is equally true of Europe:

"What the world owes to other poets can be estimated. What it owes to Shakespeare can no more be measured than what it owes to the light of heaven. The withdrawal of the one from the material, or of the other from the world, would alone enable us to understand our obligations to either."

It is not possible to take white, incarnational European culture out of the world and still have a civilization – and by civilization, we mean that which enshrines such things as faith, love, honor, and beauty. The past and the future of mankind on this earth, without old Europe, would be and will be nothing less than a city without light, without hope, and without mercy.

Although I have Welsh ancestors, they are not the main reason I chose to use "Cambria Will Not Yield" as the title for my blog. The lines, "Keep these fighting words before you, Cambria will not yield," speak directly to the European condition. We must keep the vision of Europe, His Europe, before our eyes, and never yield. His Europe is sacred Europe. His Europe is the only Europe for men who have a tragic sense of life, men who realize that mere sacrifice is not enough.

Our civilization, at its heart, is one great prayer for mercy. When the white satanists bid us drink the multi-racial, anti-European brew, they bid us join them in the ultimate sin against the Holy Ghost, for they ask us – no, they demand it of us – to destroy the civilization of mercy. There can be only one answer to such a demand: Cambria Will Not Yield!