Lord God of Hosts, Be with Us Yet

It appears that the lesser devil, Hillary, is about to be eliminated. That leaves us the demonic Mau Mau vs. the demonic technocrat. It’s difficult to say who will be worse.

I don’t believe, as some Kinists have suggested, that an Obama presidency will ‘wake up and mobilize white people.’ I would like to see that happen, but I don’t believe it will. And I don’t believe it, because Americans are the most conformist people on the face of the earth. They think whatever Big Brother tells them to think. The New Orleans debacle a few years back was a case in point. Despite the obvious fact that the black savages were committing horrible atrocities within the Superdome and throughout the city, white America accepted the verdict of Big Brother: “It’s only natural considering….” and “You must understand their…”

There is nothing that will make the liberal, white post-Christian give up his black-worshipping faith. And as long as the conformist, anesthetized, white Everyman dutifully complies with the “you must understand” instructions of the American hierarchy, there will be no reaction to anything a black barbarian does, whether he is the president, a mayor, or a street punk.

I think the fateful moment on the heath occurred under the pontificate of Pope John XXIII (1). Whether you are fond of the Catholic Church or not (and I’m not particularly fond of it), you must concede that the most visible representative of Christianity on this earth is the Pope. And when Pope John said that he had “no feeling of hatred—only loving charity and forgiveness” for the Congolese troops who tortured and murdered white missionary priests and nuns, the new Christianity, the worship of the black man, was given official sanction. Every single white Catholic who still believed that Christ was God and man should have left the Catholic Church at that moment, for the head of the Church had just announced his atheism. And as each individual Protestant pastor performed similar acts of public atheism, their parishioners should have left their respective churches. It makes sense for Rev. Wright’s black barbarian parishioners to sit and listen to black, satanic ravings (after all Satan is their master), but why should white Christians listen to it? They wouldn’t if they still believed in Christianity. But they have lost their faith. They believe lies because they listen to the Father of all lies as he speaks to them through the mouths of their pastors and the demigods of the media and the academy.

Day after day, week after week, we hear the refrain from white liberals that Obama the great will bring about racial harmony. What does that mean? I suppose if the white liberal thinks about it at all, he envisions a Coca-Cola commercial or a multiracial rock group. He does not envision the New Orleans Superdome, Haiti, Rhodesia, or South Africa. But that is exactly what racial harmony means to the black. It means the harmony that comes after savage blacks have gorged themselves on the blood of the white man. It has always been thus, and it always will be. American and European whites are not immune from the same racial “harmonies” that destroyed Haiti, Rhodesia and South Africa.

Obama’s presidential run is only a symptom of the disease; it is not the disease itself. The white-hating disease will be with us, whether McCain or Obama is president. The white liberals abandoned the Christian faith of their European ancestors for the faith of the sneering intellectuals whose prototype is the Archangel Satan. But the one drawback of a faith that is completely abstract is that it is bloodless. So they infused the blood of the black man into their sterile, abstract faith and came up with a new religion. I think a rather appropriate symbol for the new faith might be a white head, something like the head of the late Adlai Stevenson, on top of the body of some black athlete. But of course that is the white man’s new faith. The black man has a different vision. His god is all black and his racially harmonious world does not include any white man.

I know that the right wing pagan would have us counter the black faith with either our superior intellects (but the liberals have that) or with a faith in our blood alone (but the blacks have that). No, it is only through our faith in a God to whom we are connected with our spirit and our blood that we can hope to remove the virulent black plagues from the lands of the European people.

The upcoming presidential election presents us with an “any way you look at it you lose” situation. It’s not the lady or the tiger; it’s the tiger or the crocodile. The right wing democracy gurus would have us look to our local elections. “Put local congressmen in who will resist the policies of a McCain or an Obama.” Yes, we can do that so long as the local elections provide us with any candidates who differ from Obama or McCain, but how likely is that, considering how dependent every local candidate is on the good will of his party leaders?

If I sound like a broken record on the subject of democracy, it is because I have been listening to a broken record for my entire life. Over and over again I hear the voices of practical men telling me that we can turn the corner if we only will unite behind Candidate X. And sometimes our candidate wins and inevitably disappoints by what he fails to achieve, and more often, our candidate loses and his opponent disappoints us in what he does achieve.

When we were children and complained that we were bored, what did our mothers say? Well, admittedly my mother often said, “Then I’ll find something for you to do.” But just as often she said, “Use your imagination.” In other words, “Be a white man.” The black man has no imagination, and the white technocrat has abandoned the imaginative life of the spirit for the fun-filled life of the empirical man of science. But scientific thinking is just another form of voodoo. Throughout the Old Testament, continuing through the New Testament, and then through the history of Christian Europe, we see that God reveals himself only to those who see life in the mode of the fairy tale. In the fairy tale, evil is real and is embodied in the devil. And God is real as well and He is the Christ, the Son of the living God. The fairy tale hero does not see life compartmentally. He sees it in its entirety. There is not a practical, worldly realm and an otherworldly, spiritual realm. There is only one realm, the spiritual realm, in which all living creatures play a part in the great conflict between good and evil. The hero doesn’t ask, “Is this practical?” or “Is this politically correct?” He asks, “Is it God’s will that I give battle?” And if it is God’s will, the fairytale hero gives battle, and he lets his imagination, grounded in his heartfelt vision of His Lord, determine the means he will use to fight whatever evil he encounters. “Alfred the Great is past history. You can’t do what he did anymore; it isn’t practical!” the sensible, politically-minded men tell us. Of course, we can’t do exactly what Alfred the Great did, but we can see what Alfred the Great saw behind the material façade of this world. And we can feel the same love for the same God that Alfred the Great loved. And then we can use that vision and that love to defeat those same forces of evil that Alfred defeated. The façade of the enemy and the physical state of the battlefield are always different, but the spiritual components are always the same. It is the same old story: God vs. the Devil. If we give passive assent to the Devil by refusing to fight outside the parameters of the democratic structures of the Devil, we will be unworthy of our European ancestors. They joined their blood with His and fought on whatever ground the enemy fought on, and fought whatever enemy their Lord commanded them to fight. How does that old hymn go? “The Son of God goes forth to war… Who follows in His train?”
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(1) The fact that the Mother Church has become a whore gives me no pleasure. But it does little good to deny it. Christ has been replaced, in the Catholic Church, by the great black Buddha. And the Protestant churches differ only in degree, not in kind. They, too, have enshrined the Black God in the hallowed place once reserved for Christ.

Our Economy

According to the experts, our economy is not doing well right now, but I don’t think it has been doing well for a long time. It all depends from what viewpoint you look at our economy. From my standpoint, our economy was terrible in the supposedly good years of the Clinton administration, and it is terrible now. What do I base that assessment on? Our economic system is anti-family. Although many modern Christians, who are not Christians, think a family can be anything at all – two women, two men, etc. – the Christian family is only one thing: it is a patriarchal family. And by this I do not mean the 1950s patriarchal family in which the father earns the money, plays catch on Saturdays, and leaves the education of the children to the State. Nor is the patriarchal family the one envisioned by the Muslims wherein femininity itself is seen as evil.

I refer to the patriarchy described by St. Paul:

Wives, submit yourselves until your own husbands, as unto the Lord.

For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.

Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.

Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word.

And to the patriarchy described by Katrina, the repentant shrew:

A woman mov’d is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty;
And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee

All non-Christian patriarchies, like those of the Muslims, take the first part of St. Paul’s injunction, “Wives submit,” and leave out the second part, “Husbands, love your wives.”

What then is so anti-patriarchal about our present economic system? The unskilled male (and by unskilled, I mean unskilled in the latest technology) cannot, if he can find work at all, support a wife and children on the wages doled out by the capitalist financiers. We are constantly told how the average family income is going up, but the average family income is only going up because it is taken as a given that the wife as well as the husband must work for wages. Often the man has two minimum wage jobs and the woman at least one. “And why not?” asks the capitalist. “Are we not all economic units who live to serve the market Moloch?”

We are quickly going back to those evil days (halcyon days, to the capitalist) when children and women worked in the “satanic mills” because they could be gotten cheaper than men.

Following the logic of capitalism always leads to the transformation of human beings with family, racial, national, and religious bonds, into single digit economic units without ties to any religious, family, or racial group. Theoretically one can do what one wants in one’s “free” time, but how can one raise a family when denied the means to do so, or when one must spend one’s entire waking existence fighting for the minimum material needs of one’s family?

One of the biggest lies told by the free-market conservatives is that they are pro-family. How can the advocates of a market society that makes no distinction between parent and child, illegal immigrant and native-born, male and female, be pro-family? Only the communists, those children of the capitalists, have been as consistently anti-family as the free-market conservatives.

And what about the labor unions? Have not they, with the support of the churches, been a humanizing influence on capitalism? Yes, they have, but the churches, along with labor, made a crucial error. They sold their birthright for a large pot of lentils. Capitalism is an intrinsically evil system; it cannot be humanized. In exchange for a share of the capitalists’ booty, labor joined the diabolists, thinking they could sup with the devil with impunity. But the capitalists have gone global in their unremitting war against labor. The no-borders policy has killed the small farmer, and the ‘move-the-plant-to-Mexico-or-China’ policy is destroying labor.

There should be no compromise with capitalism. It must be replaced from without, not temporized with from within. Father Luigi Ligutti, the leader of the Catholic agrarian movement, always stressed that you could not teach your children good solid family values and then send them out into the anti-family capitalist world. The vast majority of children will become what the world is – which is why Father Ligutti stressed the need for a Christian agrarian world in which Christian children would stay pro-family and Christian.

Now those men who have made it in the capitalist world, the diesel engine types like Josiah Bounderby of Coketown and Rush Limbaugh of conservative fame, will assert that the capitalist system is the very best possible system and that only envious ‘sickies’ (see Ernest Van den Haag’s book, Capitalism: Sources of Hostility in which he asserts precisely that), who can’t ‘cut the mustard’ criticize capitalism. But the diesel engine types achieve their success at the cost of others’ livelihoods and at the cost of their own souls. And even many of the diesel engines must worry about losing their high tech jobs to lower paid techies from another country. After all, the “free” market is no respecter of persons.

Our economy fails to support the patriarchal family, and it also fails on another important level. The work done in our economy kills the souls of the men and women doing the work. The family farm has been replaced by the large, corporate farm, and the family cobbler has become a factory worker in a Payless Shoe Store. But lest we despair, we are told that there are plenty of jobs left at MacDonald’s and Taco Bell. Even the high tech jobs that pay well generally consist of making products that are unnecessary, and then convincing people that they will die without them. The type of lying that goes on to sell useless products, which has become second nature to us, debases our culture. C. S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers were the last people I’ve read who still talked about the soulless nature of work in the 20th century. If a man works at his computer for a company that makes replacement buttons for tuxedoes, or if another man works in a factory putting one piece of machinery into a machine with thousands of parts, will either man really have a soul left at the end of his working life? Or if a woman is forced to work outside the home and devote her energies to serving millions every day at MacDonald’s, will she still be able to claim a soul that is her own?

The ultimate dream of the capitalist is to wake up in the morning, walk out on his balcony, and see an array of Wal-Marts, hamburger franchises, corporate farms, and ball-bearing factories, all owned by him and controlled by him through the Internet. He will also be a supporter of family values, in the broadminded sense of the term, of course.

We have lived with the notion that there are only two economic systems, communism and capitalism, for so long that we forget that both ‘isms’ are relatively new. Frank Owsley’s work on the pre-Civil War South and Walter Scott’s various historical books and historical novels all give us glimpses of societies that at least attempted to arrange their economic lives as if the Christian God had once visited this earth.
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“The national dustmen, after entertaining one another with a great many noisy little fights among themselves, had dispersed for the present, and Mr. Gradgrind was at home for the vacation.

“He sat writing in the room with the deadly statistical clock, proving something no doubt—probably, in the main, that the Good Samaritan was a Bad Economist.”

--Charles Dickens in Hard Times

Christ or Thor

What a bother all this explaining is! I wish we could get on without it. But we can’t. However, you’ll all find, if you haven’t found it out already, that a time comes in every human friendship, when you must go down into the depths of yourself, and lay bare what is there to your friend, and wait in fear for his answer. A few moments may do it; and, it may be (most likely will be, as you are English boys) that you never do it but once. But done it must be, if the friendship is to be worth the name. You must find what is there, at the very root and bottom of one another’s hearts; and if you are at one there, nothing on earth can, or at least ought to sunder you. – Thomas Hughes

There is only a tiny remnant of white people willing to speak up for and defend the white race. For this reason, the white Kinist pagans and the white Kinist Christians have been (for the most part) very careful to avoid excessive criticism of their allies’ metaphysics. I think that is a wise policy. So I will name no names in what follows, but I will (to the best of my ability) lay before the right wing pagan the reason why Christ, and not Thor, should lead the Kinist movement.

The pagan right wing place the blame for the demise of the white man on Christianity, claiming it is responsible for white guilt, racial universalism, and egalitarianism. And they are right, up to a point. Organized Christianity, in the latter part of the 20th century, was the inspiration for racial universalism and egalitarianism. If there had been no Christian churches, there would have been no integration, no Mau Mau running for president, and no black people, who were not servants, in England, France, Holland, etc.

The case seems to be closed: Christianity is guilty. But what if I bring up the white Southern Christians of the 19th century? Were they universalists and racial egalitarians? And what about the British in the 18th and 19th centuries? They were Christian, and yet they were not universalists and egalitarians. In fact for the most part, Christian Europeans were opposed to racial egalitarianism throughout most of their history. They viewed Christianity as an apartheid faith. Anthony Jacob speaks for most European Christians of the past when he writes:

Naturally, abominations such as these could never supplant established religion—particularly the religion, Christianity—unless race-mixing were to succeed. None the less people already quite commonly repeat that all religions are fundamentally the same; which they most certainly are not. Politically we already have our full-fledged hybrid faith. Politically we are already the sacrificial victims on the altar of Equality, the victims of the Cult of the Underdog, whose armies of misshapen votaries are chanting their liberal paeans in the Temple of Humanity, and whose brazen deity, a Hinduesque eight-legged Mongrel, is leering down upon us triumphantly through swirling clouds of sanctimonious incense and pseudo-scientific nonsense; representing the victory of quantity over quality, of hybridism over nobility, of shapelessness over shapeliness.

It is surely not wise for the Church to pander to this idolatry. Even if Christianity were to be the religion only of a select few, it would be none the worse for that. Has it ever been anything else but the religion of a select few, and can it ever be anything else? Christianity is the religion of the White and not the non-White peoples, who debase it even where they accept it. They might pay lip-service to it where the white man is strong and his institutions accordingly respected, or where it has obtained a form of superstitious hold over them. But they can no more accept and comprehend essential Christianity than the white man can accept Shamanism. This, above all, makes it all the more reprehensible that the Church, instead of recognizing this, should swing round viciously upon the white man and hold him to blame for it—that white man upon whose unadulterated identity Christianity exclusively depends.

But the right wing pagan intellectual has an explanation for the seeming contradiction between 20th century Christianity and the Christianity of the preceding centuries. The right wing pagan agrees with the modern liberal and declares that the modern Churches are preaching the correct Christianity; they believe it is people like me and like Jacob who have misinterpreted Christianity. Of course the right wing pagans prefer the conclusions I draw from Christianity to the one’s the liberals draw, which is why they disagree with me politely. But they do disagree. Why? They give the following reason for their disagreement: They claim that the original Christianity was a universalist, racially egalitarian faith, and the Germans (by which they mean most of the Europeans) changed, when they embraced Christianity, the faith from a universalist, egalitarian religion, to a home, hearth, and nation type of religion. The Germans, they claim, fashioned a new image of Christ based on their image of the hero-God.

The Nordic religion was not a religion of dread, or of magic formularies to propitiate hostile powers. Instead of covering its temples with frescoes of the tortures of the damned, it taught people not to be afraid of death. Its ideal was the fellowship of the hero with the gods, not merely in feasting and victory, but in danger and defeat. For the gods, too, are in the hands of fate, and the Scandinavian vision of the twilight of the gods that was to end the world showed the heroes dying valiantly in the last hopeless fight against the forces of chaos—loyal and fearless to the last. It is an incomplete but not an ignoble religion. It contains those elements of character which it was the special mission of the Nordic peoples to add to modern civilization and to
Christianity itself. – Trevelyan

I certainly prefer the Germanic Christ to the modern churches’ vision of Christ, and so do the Kinist pagans. But the Kinist pagans claim that the Germanic Christ is not the Christ of “primitive” Christianity but the Christ of German or European addition. This is false. The Christianity that was preached to the Europeans was not primitive apostolic Christianity, it was Greek philosophic Christianity. The churchmen of the 5th, 6th, and 7th centuries had adopted the Greek philosophical mode of apologetics. These churchmen forgot that St. Paul had failed to convert the Greek intellectuals who wanted to make Christianity into a philosophical treatise. “To the Greeks, foolishness.” The Germans did not change primitive, apostolic Christianity; they redirected philosophical Greco-Roman Christianity back to its original primitive apostolic origins and away from the bloodless sterility of Greek philosophy. The Germans certainly never completely purged the Church of its Greek element -- the intellectuals were always waiting in the wings to intellectualize the faith to death -- but they did place Christ the Hero-God back in His proper place as the head of the Church.

In essence, the Kinist pagans agree with the modern liberal Christians: the Christianity that we see espoused in the modern churches (they say) is the true Christianity. What evidence can I show to the contrary? First, there is my own witness. Christ the Hero-God is the God I see when I look “through the eye.”

Secondly, there is the witness of our European forefathers. The Kinist pagan respects their creativity in fashioning themselves a new type of Christianity, but he does not respect their intuitive grasp of reality. To them, Christ was real. He spoke to their inmost hearts; He was not a figment of their imaginations.

And thirdly, the Old Testament, the Gospels, and the epistles of St. Paul all confirm the faith of the Europeans. God is presented in the Bible as a Hero-God, not as a philosopher or theologian. You cannot sever the old European from the Faith, because his Faith and the apostolic Faith are one.

We must ask ourselves why the Kinist pagan calls the Greco-Roman Christianity of the 5th, 6th, and 7th centuries the ‘primitive Christianity.’ Why does he not call it what it was: namely, Greco-Roman Christianity. I think the answer lies in the pagan Kinists’ obsession with intelligence tests. The pagan Kinist bases his case for the separation of the races on the superior intelligence of the white man. So, if he denounces the Greek philosophical tradition, he renounces what he views as the distinct, unique feature of European man: his intelligence. But intelligence is a very superficial attribute. It is European man’s deep, heartfelt intuitions about the mystery of existence that sets him apart from the other races. His greatness does not consist in the bridges he has built, in the buildings he has constructed, nor in the machines he has invented; it consists in his vision of God. He saw the true Hero-God and he made Him the focal point of his civilization.

Most alliances where there is no shared religious faith are very tenuous. The Kinist pagan is always worried that the Kinist Christian is going to perceive that modern Christianity is the ‘true’ Christianity and then abandon the Kinist cause, saying, “Lord, I’ve seen the light. I once was a racist, but now I’m saved.” And to do the pagan Kinist justice, I must say that I’ve seen such conversions from Kinist Christian to Universalist Christian. On the other side, the Kinist Christian is always worried that the materialist philosophy of the pagan Kinist will ultimately put him in the camp of his materialist, philosophical, liberal cousins.

The problem with the pagan Kinist and the liberal Christian is the same. They see existence through the blinders of philosophical abstraction. Their eyes can only see straight-forward logic. “A religion can only be universalist or local and clannish; it cannot be both.” But the poet sees existence quite differently. The poet, who is the true European man, sees that Noah’s sons were all his sons but they were not all on an equal footing. Shem and Japheth were separate and distinct from Ham. And St. Paul called all men to believe in Christ and attain salvation, but He showed no desire to abolish hierarchical structures and distinctions between slaves and masters. (See Dabney’s book, A Defense of Virginia and the South.)

The European at his best always thinks in poetic images. He overcame, in his poetic imagination, the difficulties which the Greek mind had with the Incarnation. The European saw that far from being foolishness, Christ was the only possible solution to the riddle of existence. That a man, who was both man and God, could conquer death and all the forces of hell out of love for a people, whom He loved not as abstractions but as distinct personalities, was logically impossible; but poetically it spoke to the European at the deepest recesses of his being. What is more Kinist than to desire the immortality of the kith and kin we love? And what cause is more important than keeping the vision of the Hero-God who guarantees their (and our) immortality. Let’s give the last word to the Gentle Bard.

Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,
Which I by lacking have supposed dead,
And there reigns love and all love's loving parts,
And all those friends which I thought buried.
How many a holy and obsequious tear
Hath dear religious love stol'n from mine eye
As interest of the dead, which now appear
But things removed that hidden in thee lie!
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,
Who all their parts of me to thee did give;
That due of many now is thine alone:
Their images I lov’d I view in thee,
And thou, all they, hast all the all of me.

-- William Shakespeare

Surrendering to the Enemy

The term ‘culture war’ has been circulating for the past 20 years. I really think it is not applicable to our present society. The term ‘war’ implies that there are at least two forces in opposition to each other, and in the U.S.A. of today, there is no counterculture resistance to the democratic, racial, Babylonian culture. When I see packed auditoriums of plus-40-year-old white people cheering hysterically for Barack Obama, I know there is no culture war in the U.S.A. We have achieved cultural harmony.

The socialists and anthropologists have their own definitions of culture. I would define ‘culture’ as the enfleshment of faith. A people gives flesh in their art, their public ceremonies, and in their general way of life to their religious faith. So when a people make drastic changes in their culture, it is a sure sign that they have changed their religious allegiance as well.

It is particularly disheartening to see that the story-telling tradition of Christian Europe has been jettisoned. One can’t point to one work and say, “If a person doesn’t know that story he is no longer European,” but one does get a sense out there in racial Babylon that Satan’s minions have done a pretty thorough brain- and soul-washing. In the last six months, for instance, I have made casual reference to Mother Hubbard, Annie Laurie, Tom Sawyer, the Hound of the Baskervilles, Moses, and the Ancient Mariner. Blank looks were the response to all six references. Again, it is not a question of “I don’t know who the Ancient Mariner is, so I can’t get into heaven.” The seamless garment of European culture has been torn asunder. And if one is not in contact with that culture, one cannot get into heaven; because it is His culture, and no man cometh unto the Father except through Him.

We need to see our faith embodied in a Christian culture. Why did our Lord take flesh and dwell among us if not to show us the Truth enfleshed. And why has Satan chosen the black man as the symbol of Satan’s reign on earth? Because he knows we need to see our beliefs enfleshed, and the worship of the black man is Satanism enfleshed. There is no culture war, but there should be. The choice is clear. It is God or the devil. The old white culture is our Lord’s and the new black culture is Satan’s.

There are moments in the story-telling tradition of the European people when the materialist veil is removed from our eyes, and we see, in the human heart, the image of Christ: God in humanity. We say, when we see such images in a story like Pericles or Pickwick Papers, “Ah, I have seen that reality myself and felt it as well. I’ll follow that vision through death and beyond.”
Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a perfect illustration of the European’s desire to enflesh their faith. The image of the ancient Mariner has haunted the European imagination ever since Coleridge penned it in 1797, because the poem depicts man’s original sin and his redemption in Christ. Let me highlight two magnificent ‘white moments’ from the poem.

In the first, we see the Mariner condemned to carry the albatross around his neck. He has been unable to pray because of the terrible guilt he feels. He knows complete and total loneliness:

Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.

The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on ; and so did I.

I looked upon the rotting sea,
And drew my eyes away;
I looked upon the rotting deck,
And there the dead men lay.

I looked to heaven, and tried to pray;
But or ever a prayer had gusht,
A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust.

Then, out if his desolation, he sees the lowest order of God’s creation: some water snakes. But even those lowly creatures assuage his loneliness and he blesses them:

O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.

Then, comes the miracle:

The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.

Later, much later – “Having penance done, and penance more to do”– the Mariner achieves dry land. The first thing he does is ask to confess. No one who has truly felt the weight of his own sinfulness and yearned for genuine forgiveness can be unmoved by this part of the Mariner’s narrative:

‘O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!’
The Hermit crossed his brow.
‘Say quick,’ quoth he, ‘I bid thee say--
What manner of man art thou ?’

Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale;
And then it left me free.

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In Shane, the finest novel of the American West, there are numerous white moments to choose from. But my favorite is not the final showdown, which is admittedly quite splendid. My favorite is the summation by Bob, now a man, in which he tells us of the effect Shane had on him. We can tell by the way Bob speaks about Shane that the effect has been enormous. It would not be an overstatement to say that Shane, by his heroic self-sacrifice, has pointed Bob toward the ultimate hero of Western civilization.

And what was Shane’s self-sacrifice? Well, in part it was his willingness to risk his life in the gunfight with the hired killer, Wilson. But there was more than that to Shane’s self-sacrifice. Shane underwent a crucifixion when he went out to face Wilson. The life of a farmer, a husband, and a father was closed to him the moment he returned, for the sake of the Starret family, to the ways of a gunfighter. But he chose the way of self-sacrifice, and by doing so, he left a permanent legacy in young Bob’s heart which Bob discloses to us at the end of his narrative:

And always my mind would go back at the last to that moment when I saw him from
the bushes by the roadside just on the edge of town. I would see him there in the road, tall and terrible in the moonlight, going down to kill or be killed, and stopping to help a stumbling boy and to look out over the land, the lovely land, where that boy had a chance to live out his boyhood and grow straight inside as a man should.

And when I would hear the men in town talking among themselves and trying to pin him down to a definite past, I would smile quietly to myself. For a time they inclined to the notion, spurred by the talk of a passing stranger, that he was a certain Shannon who was famous as a gunman and gambler way down in Arkansas and Texas and dropped from sight without anyone knowing why or where. When that notion dwindled, others followed, pieced together in turn from scraps of information gleaned from stray travelers. But when they talked like that, I simply smiled because I knew he could have been none of these.

He was the man who rode into our little valley out of the heart of the great glowing West and when his work was done rode back whence he had come and he was Shane.

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In order to fully appreciate a white moment from the work of Herman Melville we need to know a bit of his spiritual history as revealed in his works.

In Moby Dick Melville rebels, through Ahab, against God. Ahab’s hatred for the white whale is justified in so far as Moby Dick is a surrogate for an impersonal, remote God in the clouds. But Ahab isn’t for anything. Where is Christ? Melville is still looking for Him at the end of Moby Dick. And he despairs of ever finding him as he writes Pierre, Bartleby, and The Confidence Man.

The years go by, and Melville, great heart that he is, keeps looking for Christ. In “Clarel,” a narrative poem about a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Melville finds Christ:

Yea, ape and angel, strife and old debate --
The harps of heaven and the dreary gongs of hell;
Science the feud can only aggravate --
No umpire she betwixt the chimes and knell:
The running battle of the star and clod
Shall run for ever -- if there be no God.
Degrees we know, unknown in days before;
The light is greater, hence the shadow more;
And tantalized and apprehensive Man
Appealing—Wherefore ripen us to pain?
Seems there the spokesman of dumb Nature’s train.

But through such strange illusions have they passed
Who in life's pilgrimage have baffled striven --
Even death may prove unreal at the last,
And stoics be astounded into heaven.

Then keep thy heart, though yet but ill-resigned --
Clarel, thy heart, the issues there but mind;
That like the crocus budding through the snow --
That like a swimmer rising from the deep --
That like a burning secret which doth go
Even from the bosom that would hoard and keep;
Emerge thou mayst from the last whelming sea,
And prove that death but routs life into victory.

+ + +

I do not make a big distinction between literature and film. I regard both as legitimate vehicles for the story-telling tradition of the West. The story is the thing. Having said that, let me proceed to two white moments from film, the first from Walt Disney’s Fantasia and the second from the 1938 David O. Selznick production of Tom Sawyer.

The white moment in Fantasia comes after the devil’s dance around Witch Mountain. The devil seems haughty and powerful during the dance, but then, suddenly, a look of fear appears on his face. And well he should be fearful, because the candlelight procession has begun. The devout, with candles bright, processing to the hymn, “Ave Maria,” are banishing the devil from the world, in the name of Him. What an incredible image!

In the second film, Tom Sawyer, we also see the director using light to great advantage. Tom Sawyer has just, in a wonderfully suspenseful and dramatic scene, killed Injun Joe. But it still remains doubtful whether Tom and Becky will ever find their way out of the cave in which they are lost. And then, Tom sees light. He climbs up toward the light and miraculously finds a way out of the cave for him and Becky. As Tom climbs toward the light, one cannot help but draw the obvious conclusion about the scene’s significance. Newman described it best:

Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead thou me on;
The night is dark, and I am far from home,
Lead thou me on.

This scene with the light takes on even more significance because of the previous scene with Injun Joe, who is so filled with pure hatred that he appears like the devil incarnate. If one has faced the devil and complete darkness, then one is more readily able to appreciate the “Kindly Light’ than if one has only faced semidarkness and moderate liberals. Why do you think so many Christian converts came out of the horror of the Spanish Civil War?

+ + +

In European white moments, the human and divine meet and we see an image of Christ. Two such moments occur respectively in Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure.

In Merchant of Venice, Portia is the beautiful and rich Venetian heiress, but she is also, when she assumes the disguise of the learned Balthazar, a stand-in for Christ. Portia, disguised as Balthazar, reveals to us the Divine Nature. We all stand condemned, like Antonio, by “a stony adversary.” Yet, at the last moment, Antonio is delivered from his stony adversary, as we hope to be. God is not a lawyer; He is not a Pharisee. His mercy and His justice are compatible. “For charity itself fulfills the law, And who can sever love from charity?” Portia pleads for mercy in that famous speech, which should never be memorized without first reading the play which gives the speech its significance:

The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
’Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway,
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s,
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.

The plea is not hearkened to, for Shylock wants only justice. But then we see, revealed as by lightning before our eyes, that justice and mercy, like God’s humanity and divinity, are linked. Shylock can no more separate justice from mercy than he can take Antonio’s heart without shedding a drop of blood. What a moment! What a revelation!

Portia. A pound of that same merchant's flesh is thine.
The court awards it and the law doth give it.

Shylock. Most rightful judge!

Portia. And you must cut this flesh from off his breast.
The law allows it and the court awards it.

Shylock. Most learned judge! A sentence! Come, prepare.

Portia. Tarry a little; there is something else.
This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood:
The words expressly are 'a pound of flesh.'
Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh;
But, in the cutting it, if thou dost shed
One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods
Are, by the laws of Venice, confiscate
Unto the state of Venice.

Gratiano. O upright judge! Mark, Jew. O learned judge!

Shylock. Is that the law?

Portia. Thyself shalt see the act;
For, as thou urgest justice, be assur'd
Thou shalt have justice, more than thou desir'st.

In Measure for Measure, quite arguably Shakespeare’s most explicitly Christian play, we again see a character, Vincentio, the Duke of Vienna, who is also a stand-in for Christ. He goes throughout his kingdom in disguise, learning the secrets of individual hearts, and at the end of the play (or more appropriately at the Last Judgment) he steps forward to judge, reward, and extend mercy.

One individual, Isabella, has been accused falsely of all sorts of heinous crimes, yet without false pride in her virtue but with true humility, she has held fast to her faith that “truth is truth to the end of reckoning,” and must be fought for in the name of Him who said, “I am the truth and the way.”

One saint who says, like Isabella, that truth is truth to the end of reckoning and then backs it up, is worth more in the Kingdom of Heaven than all the false piety and scandalous formalism ever conceived by the pride of men.

Isabella (“when hope seems nearly gone”) witnesses the transformation of Vincentio from humble friar to Duke and receives her pardon and reward:

Duke. Come hither, Isabel.
Your friar is now your prince. As I was then
Advertising and holy to your business,
No changing heart with habit,
I am still
Attorney’d at your service.

Ah, how truly Shakespeare has captured in Vincentio’s double role, the heart of Christ. He is prosecutor and judge, but He is also our most aggressive advocate. He knows all the inmost, sinful desires of our mercenary little hearts, sinful desires that we present to the world as virtues. But He also knows the hidden virtues of our heart, virtues which are not recognized or known by the world or oftentimes even ourselves. And if the current of our life runs, like Isabella’s, toward Him, He forgives the detours and welcomes us to the marriage feast.

Those white moments from the story-telling traditions of Europe are just tiny snippets from a tradition, which, when viewed in its entirety, constitutes a resounding hosanna to Him.

Satan has dismantled the older white European civilization and replaced it with a black civilization that stands diametrically opposed to anything remotely connected to His civilization. And he has been awfully clever about it. So clever, in fact, that the European people now find themselves the losers in a war they didn’t even know had taken place, which was won without a shot fired. The war doesn’t have to remain so one-sided, however. Satan is not invincible. He does, after all, have an exact opposite who said all things are possible if they are done in His name. The fight for Christian Europe is, and always will be, the only fight worth fighting.

Westerns, Continued

[This is a continuation of an earlier post entitled “Westerns”]

The incarnational culture of Europe was carried across the ocean by men of European blood. With them came the Enlightenment heresy of the disembodied brain as well. In the old Westerns, we see that conflict played out between the men with the code, written on their hearts, and the brainy businessmen with no code and no hearts but many avaricious schemes.

I don’t think I could trust any man or woman whose heart didn’t warm up to the old Western pictures. And as a corollary, I don’t think I could trust any man or woman who actually liked the decadent Clint Eastwood Westerns.

There are so many Westerns filmed during the golden era of Westerns, 1935-1959, that deserve to be mentioned. Let me just list a few.

1. Good Day for Hanging, starring Fred MacMurray. Fred MacMurray’s character insists, despite the opposition of almost the entire town, that a low-life snake is indeed just that, a low-life snake who must be hanged for the murder he claims he didn’t commit but which he did. The liberal worldview that says evil is a mirage and we are all products of our environment is shown, in this movie, to be pure gas.

2. Last of the Comanches. The title of this movie is a bit misleading. It is not a movie about the last Comanches; it is a reworking of John Ford’s The Lost Patrol. Broderick Crawford keeps a small group of soldiers and civilians together as they face an infinity of hostile (is there any other kind?) Comanche Indians. As in The Lost Patrol, the desert brings out the best and the worst in men.

3. Any Randolph Scott movie. Nobody could stand tall like Randolph Scott. If Trent Lott had seen and absorbed into his blood enough Randolph Scott movies when he was young, he would have said to the media jackals the day after Strom Thurmond’s birthday: “I said it and I meant it.”

Randolph Scott was great as the reluctant gunfighter. In countless Westerns, he played a man who wanted to hang up his guns but whose commitment to his friends always drew him back. In Gunfighters, a sweet young thing begs him to run away with her and forget the bad guys who have murdered his friends. “I can’t. There are too many empty saddles on the fence,” Scott replies.

In The Tall T, Maureen O’Sullivan (of Tarzan fame) also begs Scott to ride away from the bad guys who have killed his friends. The reply: “There are some things a man can’t ride around.”

4. Hopalong Cassidy pictures. In sixty-plus pictures, Hoppy adhered to the code. With humor and with grace, he faced down the bad guys. What more could you ask for?

5. Lawless Empire. I single out this B-Western starring Charles Starrett, not because it is better than all the rest, but because there is a defining moment in it that highlights the strength of the B-Western. Without any heavy-handed preachiness, the cowboys get together and start singing a Christian hymn. They are not in church; they are simply going about their work and singing. The naturalness of the scene highlights the fact that the religion of the God-man is in their blood, which is why one B-Western is worth more than the combined output of the French, Italian, English, American, etc., filmmakers for the past 30 years.

The Death of Fatherhood

David Popenoe’s stated purpose in Life Without Father: Compelling New Evidence That Fatherhood and Marriage Are Indispensable for the Good of Children and Society (Harvard Univ Pr, 1999) is to provide “an analysis of the American experiment of fatherlessness. Drawing from the social sciences, history, and evolutionary psychology, [the book] examines the nature and meaning of fatherhood and reviews the trend, the evidence, and the social consequences of the removal of fathers from families and the lives of their children. Regrettably, as I shall point out, America is the vanguard of social trends and impulses that are affecting fatherhood and children in all modern societies.”

I find it truly amazing that Mr. Popenoe attempts to prove, through research, what we should already know from tradition, revelation and commonsense: Fathers are necessary. But since we have abandoned tradition, revelation and commonsense, Popenoe tries to fill the void with research.

Is he successful? Well, his research seems convincing to me. But I already believe fathers are essential. I don’t think research is going to convince feminists and our feminist society that fathers are necessary, but necessary they are, according to Popenoe. He cites massive statistics that support the view that children (boys and girls) need their biological father to be present in the home and to be an active participant in the child-rearing process. Children who do not have fathers in their daily lives are much more likely (should this be a surprise to anyone?) to become criminals, nymphomaniacs, drug users, and so on.

In Part I (Chapters 1 & 2), Mr. Popenoe discusses the “remarkable decline of fatherhood and marriage” and the devastating effects the decline has had on our society:

The decline of fatherhood is one of the most basic, unexpected, and extraordinary social trends of our time. The trend can be captured in a single telling statistic: in just three decades, from 1960 to 1990, the percentage of children living apart from their biological fathers more than doubled, from 17% to 35%. If this rate continues, by the turn of the century nearly 50% of American children will be going to sleep each night without being able to say good night to their dads.

In Part II (Chapters 3 & 4), Popenoe talks about the father figure in history. He makes many interesting observations in these chapters. For instance, he contends that the father in pre-industrial societies had more moral authority in the home than the industrial age father. From the Victorian age on, fathers began to spend more and more time away from the home. They became breadwinners only. And when their breadwinning capacity was challenged by the feminists in the 1960’s, fathers were seen as superfluous dinosaurs of a bygone era. The seeming strength of the nuclear family in the 1950’s was a mirage. Once fathers were seen as breadwinners and breadwinners only, they were bound to fade out.

In Part III, the author seeks to explain through “evolutionary psychology” why fathers are necessary. In Part IV, he offers his plan for re-inventing fatherhood. In my opinion, these are the weakest parts of the book. Popenoe takes man’s descent from the apes as a given in Part III and seeks to defend fatherhood as an evolutionary necessity. Fatherhood should be defended, but it does not need help from evolutionary clap-trap theories. In Part IV, Popenoe describes his plan for reinventing fatherhood. Part of that plan involves the acceptance of male-female cohabitation as a prelude to marriage. Why? Because in industrial societies, men and women cannot marry till they are thirty when they have had time to acquire technical training for the industrial world, and it is not possible to remain chaste that long. Well, from a Christian standpoint, if certain actions are sinful, they must remain prohibited even if the dictates of industrial society suggest they be sanctioned.

The last example really highlights the weakness of the book: Mr. Popenoe wants more fathers to stay with their families; however, he mentions Christianity only in passing and makes it clear that he doesn’t want a restoration of the Christian, patriarchal family. The question is: Is there any way to restore fatherhood without returning to the Pauline concept of fatherhood? Of course, there isn’t. Popenoe is like the late pope John Paul II in more than name. He, like the Pope, wants the results of a Christian social order without the imposition of a Christian social order. But feminism is a religion, and one religion can only be supplanted by another religion; it can’t be supplanted by research.

A Christian, however, should give the issues Popenoe raises some thought. Why has Christianity in general and Christian fatherhood in particular, done so poorly in industrial society? The answer seems obvious. In industrial society man is seen as a finite object. He is a “steel girder” in the industrial skyscraper. In Christianity, the real Christianity, man is seen as a recipient of God’s grace and a personality of infinite worth.

I was struck by the fact when I was a teacher that so many young men with some masculinity left in them wanted to join the army. They tragically saw no particular virtue in marriage and fatherhood, because they saw only the value our society places on marriage and fatherhood, which is, of course, no value. But it is precisely now, when the barbarians have breached the wall and are among us, that we need Christian men who are willing to fight for the hearth rather than for the neocons. The neocons need mercenaries to fight for their capitalist faith. Christian Europe needs young men who have discovered the moral, counterrevolutionary role of fatherhood.

The European Past is the Present

Every Christmas I have to go through an ordeal for the sake of a few friends and relatives. What is the ordeal? Well, it is not sending out Christmas cards; I don’t mind that. And it is not wrapping presents; my wife does that. The ordeal is a trip to the Witch of Endor’s little shop of horrors.

Maybe she isn’t literally the Witch of Endor, but she gives every indication of being a near relation. The Witch of Endor is a horrible old lady who runs a local book store. Now, most people who run book stores are to the left of center, but very few would rather follow you up and down the aisles trying to interest you in the latest, radical tome from the academy than make a sale. But the Witch of Endor is such a woman. She is a retired academic who doesn’t need to make a living from selling books, so she proselytizes. And unfortunately, for me, she has the only book store that sells Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. So if I want to give a friend or relative a copy, I must venture into the witch’s cave.

I put up with the witch for 5 straight Christmases without telling her off, and I did not refrain from speaking up because I was afraid she would cast a spell on me. I refrained because I was brought up to respect my elders, even if they weren’t my betters. This year, however, I broke down slightly. I didn’t curse at the old hag or drive a stake through her heart, but I did tell her in no uncertain terms that with the exception of certain books such as A Child’s Christmas in Wales, my reading tastes did not go past the nineteenth century. The witch then went into a witchy tirade about the evils of living in the past.

That one cannot, and should not, desire to live in the past is an unchallenged assumption of our culture. If you declared your intention to do so you would be classified as mentally unstable. But nevertheless, I would like to challenge the “You can’t live in the past” orthodoxy of our modern Babylonian culture.

In a country based solely on a materialistic view of life, such as the modern U.S.A., living in the past is viewed as insanity. How can one, outside of a science fiction novel, live in the past? One can’t in a purely material way. Even Miss Havisham could not physically stay in the past. Time moves on, as the materialists tell us ad nauseum. But time is not supreme in the spiritual realm. C. S. Lewis wisely depicts Narnia as being outside the sphere of mortal time. And Tennyson places God outside of “our bourne of Time and Place.”

Certainly a man has to acknowledge that he lives in a particular place and at a particular time, just as one must acknowledge that his earthly body needs food and sleep. But he does not have to, nor should he, live, in the spiritual sense, in a totally debased, soulless, materialistic culture. The human soul needs communion with other souls. And where there is no quickening spiritual life, there is no communion. A man must, if he has a soul, look to the past, the European past, if he wants to live a life of the spirit. The past contains all that makes life redeemable: truth, beauty, honor, love, and faith. Without a spiritual connection to the past, we are doomed to be forever bound on the Promethean rock with multi-racial birds of prey tearing at our livers.

The non-European does not have to be connected to his past in order to thrive, because the worship of dumb nature is impersonal. His ancestors worshipped the savage gods of the bush and so does he. He is connected with his ancestors in faith even if he doesn’t know them.

It is different for the white man. He turned from the nature gods to a personal God above nature. If he denies his past and seeks to return to the nature gods, he will lose his identity; he will cease to exist. The modern white liberal and his neocon cousin are perfect examples of the new, non-existent European. They deny any kinship with the Europeans of the past but are unable to return, much as they would like, to the nature gods of the barbarians. They can’t be fully barbarian because of their past, which they deny, and they can’t be fully Christian because they hate the people and the God of old Europe. So, they have become a non-people. We have only a remnant of Europeans to work with because the rest have become what is virtually a new species.

We must live in the past because that is where He lives. When Heidi’s grandfather comes down from the mountain, he finds faith and comfort with the Christian people of Dorfli. When the seven brothers, portrayed by the Finnish novelist Aleksis Kivi, come out of the forest to be reconciled with the men and women of Toukola, they find Christian men and women to be reconciled with. This is not possible in our modern world, and (what is especially sad) it is not possible in our modern churches. The Protestant and Catholic churches have divorced themselves from the past. They might retain a rite or a hymn from the past, but the spirit, the whole mode of viewing existence which marked the old European, is gone from the churches today as it is gone from the modern world.

Our European ancestors came as conquerors, but still they bent their knees to Christ. They were heroes who were not too proud to acknowledge the true Hero. How is it possible to forsake those heroes for barbarian heroes or technocratic heroes? If we align ourselves with any part of the modern world, we will surely die.

The immortal part of man, his spirit, cannot live with the barbarian or the technocrat. In the past, which is always spiritually in the present, is life, abundant life. Nothing is impossible if we stay linked to the European past. One of my heroes, Sir Walter Scott, once wrote a short novel called the The Surgeon’s Daughter. The young surgeon’s daughter has the misfortune to be captured by Moslems. One man loves her enough to face the entire Moslem world alone, armed only with his love and his faith:

‘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.

I quote those lines often because I think they express what sets the European apart from all other races. Because he bent his knee, unreservedly, without let or hindrance, to Christ, he was able to understand the miracle of love. The European saw that human love and divine love were intertwined and that the type of miracle which confounds the devil and defeats the evil empires of this world comes only to those whose love is grounded in Him, who is to be found in the European past. If we refuse to sever our link to that past, we will never be bereft of those things the modern world is bereft of: faith, hope, and charity.

The English Women

“Women may fall, when there’s no strength in men.” – Shakespeare

A friend recently sent me an interesting newsletter, published in the 1980’s by a group of Englishwomen. It is called, appropriately, The English Magazine. The women’s contention, which I completely agree with, is that there is nothing after the early 1960’s that is redeemable in movies, literature, etc.

Some people say that one has only to see a few seconds of a film made in the 1930s to get from it a strong impression of ‘period’—of a world that is, in its style and mannerisms, very different from one’s own. I have the opposite experience. Some time ago, I visited the house of a friend who uses a television machine for watching old films. While watching the film, I was unconscious of any sense of ‘period’, but when the film ended (we watched the credits because the music was so delightful), for a few seconds while my friend fumbled with the ‘off’ switch, I saw a modern young announceress and was at once infused by a powerful sense of period. Here was someone from a world quite other than my own, with a manner and style which, while not entirely unfamiliar, marked her out as belonging to a particular age—the 1980s…

I mention these things to illustrate something of which I imagine most of you are already aware: the fact that people have changed very considerably over the past few decades—that there is such a thing as ‘the modern person’, and that he speaks, thinks, moves, stands and acts differently from his counterpart before the last great war, or even before the ‘cultural revolution’ of the 1960s.

The women also place their finger on something that is overlooked by those hard-charging, right-wing political parties. What the hard-charging politicians overlook is the fact that no counterrevolution will be successful unless a fundamental shift in attitude takes place in the European people. They must fall out of love with modernity and learn to once again love the ‘evening lingerings’ of old Europe. Nothing is more hopeless than trying to get people who actually prefer Clint Eastwood movies to Gary Cooper movies or Harry Potter books to Chronicles of Narnia to support right-wing, eleventh hour candidates.

A friend of ours recently came to us in great depression of spirits. She had been tidying an old trunkful of pamphlets, mostly of late-1960s vintage. They had covered a variety of subjects, from Church affairs to decimalization and immigration. Nearly all of them had proclaimed that this was the Eleventh Hour, that the Time for Action was Then, and that, in the words of another poet: --‘Unless something drastic is done…’

Twenty years on it all seemed rather futile. They had mostly been right in their way, of course. Nothing drastic was done, because those who cared had not the power to do anything effective, and most of the predicted disasters came to pass as predicted. Let us have the courage to admit that it is the same today. Traditionalist campaigning of nearly every sort is a waste of effort. In some ways the position is better; in many ways it is worse. We do not deny that the prospects for the middle-term future are distinctly less bleak; or at least, the possibility of some sort of restitution is not quite so closed as it was in those days; but as to the effectiveness of campaigning on large public issues: --that has not changed at all.

If we wish to take advantage of the breaking-up of the great ice-floe of the ‘liberal consensus’, we will do so not by wasting our energies on doomed campaigns, but by preparing a new mode of consciousness, by discussing and developing new ideas and by bringing those ideas into the way we live our lives, from our dress, décor, speech and entertainment to our philosophy, our reading, our moral conduct and our art, so that they may develop into a true ethos.

The ladies are right to insist that nothing worthwhile will be accomplished until we change “our reading, our moral conduct and our art.” But they are wrong, I believe, on one central point. One must -- at least a man must -- still fight the rearguard actions that the ladies view as hopeless. I would be in complete agreement with the Englishwomen if they had said, “It is not a woman’s place to get involved in eleventh hour, political movements; we must work on changing hearts and minds through our art, our moral conduct, etc.”

The problem with eleventh hour groups such as the British National Party and like-minded U.S. groups is that they do not regard their political movements as rear guard movements; they regard their political movements as the main counterattack, which has been disastrous. They keep campaigning and they keep losing because they have put no effort into developing what the Englishwomen call an “anti-modern ethos.” (1) I think this is often because many of the right-wingers are too fond of certain aspects of modernity, such as the change in sexual mores and the technological revolution, to feel comfortable in advocating a return to more traditional ways of living. But I digress; let me proceed with my one caveat regarding the Englishwomen.

Kipling correctly informs us in his poem, “The Female of the Species,” that the female is “launched for one sole issue.” And of course Kipling is referring to giving birth and the rearing of children. But he also is making the point that women are single-issue oriented. They are less able than a man to divide their time and loyalties, which is one of the reasons the feminist movement, by forcing women to divide their loyalties between work and family, has been so harmful to women.

The cultural issue, the restoration of a European mindset and a European heart, is the main issue. And the Englishwomen of The English Magazine have made that issue their baby, for which they are to be commended. But they err in failing to see that a man has a different role (2). He must keep the central fact before him that the cultural issue, the ‘evening lingerings’ if you will, is the main issue, while at the same time fighting the rear-guard political and military actions. And he must do so because one of the requirements of a counterrevolution is that the people who will constitute the vanguard must stay alive. Let me use the immigration issue, which the English ladies mention, as an example.

Presumably the anti-modern English ladies have roofs over their heads and do not have to sit and write with semi-automatic machine guns on their laps in anticipation of an immediate invasion. But many whites in countries like Rhodesia and South Africa do not have roofs over their heads, and the ones that do live in constant fear of home invasions. And the white technocratic rulers of the U.S.A. and the various European nations have all announced their intentions of moving toward the model of South Africa and Rhodesia. So anything a man can do, by supporting a rear-guard political candidate or by organizing a local undercover vigilante group, is a necessary delaying action. Roland knew he couldn’t win the war by his stand, but he hoped to delay the enemy long enough to give Charlemagne time to mobilize and thus win the war. By all means, we must make it our major focus to form an anti-modern ethos, but we can’t neglect the delaying actions. A counterrevolution must be fought on many different levels. We must know what books to read as well as what ammunition to use.

The Englishwomen are correct about the main issue, and we should keep their insight before us at all times: We have come to the point where we have to hide in basements and where no political candidate even dares talk about white identity, because we have treated the poetic core of European culture as a charming little frill on the sleeve of Europe. But that charming little frill is Cyrano’s white plume. It is European culture. It’s what we fight for and are willing to die for. The technocratic white has lost the ability to see the white plumed rider of Europe, and the barbarian has never seen Him. And we will cease to see Him if we look at the world through the eyes of our enemies. No counterrevolution can succeed if we see with the eyes of the new, enlightened, European technocrat instead of through the eyes of the antique European.
____________________________________
(1) The “practical right wingers” remind me of George Boas, a famous professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. During World War II he suggested that the colleges should suspend teaching the liberal arts so that students could “get to the business of learning trigonometry and physics and chemistry.” Russell Kirk’s response to Boas is worth quoting:

It might not be surprising to hear the headmaster of a military preparatory school expounding a doctrine which exalts above his victim the legionary who slew Archimedes; but to listen to this cry of "sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife" coming from the ivory tower is another matter. It is an opinion which differs only in degree from an important article of faith in the credo of those states now contesting with us for the mastery of the earth, whose intellectual principles we profess to despise. [Kirk had written this essay in 1944.] Before commencing our work of world reformation, it might pay us to consider whether we are going to beat the Nazis and enlighten them, or beat the Nazis and join them. We are fit to weigh this question only if we retain some
vestige of the liberal learning so quickly cast aside in one crowded hour of glorious life; and it is to be feared that a smattering of trigonometry and physics and chemistry is not sufficient to make the mind liberal. The physical sciences have their place, a respectable one; but they, primarily, do not win wars; the human spirit still does that; and physical sciences certainly cannot suffice for the men who are to make and maintain a peace, who are to establish liberty and justice, who are to set free the body and the mind.

Some things never change. A few years back I was teaching English literature at a junior college. On my first day on the job, I walked from the parking lot to the main building with another professor. Having ascertained that I was a new instructor, but not having ascertained what subject I taught, he launched into his apologia for the “hard sciences” and the elimination of the liberal arts.

As we parted, each to our respective classrooms, he asked me, “What subject do you teach?”

“English literature.”

He never spoke to me after that. I actually agree with him about abolishing the liberal arts, but not for the same reason that he wanted to abolish them. I think liberal arts courses, such as English literature, should be abolished because they have become mere adjuncts of the psychology and sociology departments. The liberal arts, especially literature, deals with the soul. If they are scientized, they become demonic.

(2) I think the author P. G. Wodehouse, whom the English ladies quote approvingly, illustrates the plusses and minuses of The English Magazine’s stance. Wodehouse was put under house arrest during World War II for suspicion of being a German spy, which was of course utter nonsense. The real reason for his house arrest was that the Brits in the War Office were miffed with him because of his complete indifference to the war effort. He cared about Bertie, Jeeves, Blanding’s Castle, and nothing else. Certainly in the grand scheme of things, Blanding’s Castle was more important than the British War Office, but if one grants the greater importance of Blanding’s Castle, can we not at least see why the War Office was upset with Wodehouse? Even if the war was an absurdity, with no clearly delineated right side to be on, Britain was fighting ‘in defense of.’ The nation’s survival was at stake, and therefore Wodehouse had a stake in the war.

I can identify with the feelings of the War Office more now than I could have some thirty years ago, when I was a single man. During the recent election primaries it meant a great deal to me whether McCain or Ron Paul (and when Ron Paul failed to gain votes, whether Romney or McCain) won the Republican nomination for President. Yes, I realized all the men were terribly modern, and terribly flawed, but the difference between the contenders and McCain were significant enough to make me passionately in favor of either contender against McCain. I was extremely annoyed with some friends who expressed a Wodehousian indifference to the whole election. They had no children, so one hundred years of war didn’t bother them. Like Mercutio, they were able to jest at scars, having never felt a wound.