The Rational Lodger

“You have got a rational lodger, who knows how to attend upon himself.” – LeFanu

In the trial scene in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, the Jewish merchant expresses his delight with the judge’s verdict, which grants him his pound of flesh, with these words: “A Daniel come to judgment! Yea, a Daniel! O wise young judge, how I do honour thee!”

But when the “upright” judge pushes Shylock’s plea for justice to its logical conclusion and condemns Shylock, it is Antonio’s friend Gratiano who has the last word.

Gratiano: A Daniel, still say I, a second Daniel! I thank thee, Jew, for teaching me that word.

In the same spirit that Gratiano thanked Shylock, I must thank Thomas Fleming for using the words “infantile ravings’ to describe those who were concerned about the survival of the white race. With those words Thomas Fleming summed up liberaldom’s brief against Christianity. Please note that I do not say a ‘brief against Kinists’ or a ‘brief against Europeans’ but a ‘brief against Christianity,’ because Christianity is synonymous with those who adhere to the Kinist, European vision of Christ.

I have heard this liberal case against Christianity all my life, so let me translate Fleming’s words for the reader: “There is a higher, purer religion than Christianity as it is presented in the Gospels. The mature, thinking man knows that there is a force beyond the tribal, clannish God of the Bible, and that force can be comprehended by human reason. To interpret the Gospels too literally on subjects like the resurrection of the dead and the divinity of Christ is foolish and childish. A grownup doesn’t do such things.”

This was the first liberal’s argument. He told Adam and Eve it was infantile and foolish to adhere to an arbitrary commandment of a primitive, archaic God when they could use their rational powers to tap into a higher, purer power than God. The Athenians told St. Paul the same thing. It has always been thus. Satan attacks us by appealing to our intellectual pride. “By God, I’m no dummy. I’m not a stupid baby – I’ll adopt the higher religion.” Of course, Satan never uses the same disguise twice. He might appear in a lab coat, a priest’s cassock, or the cashmere sweater of a conservative columnist. But he always uses the same method. He appeals to man’s rational faculties divorced from his heart and blood.

In a magnificent short story called “The Mysterious Lodger” Joseph Sheridan LeFanu presents us with a portrait of the devil that is in keeping with Scripture and the great Christian poets. (1) The devil, when he wants to destroy a family or a community, always takes up lodgings disguised as a rationalist.

A few days after, on my return, I found my poor little wife agitated and dispirited. Mr. Smith had paid her a visit, and brought with him a book, which he stated he had been reading, and which contained some references to the Bible which he begged of her to explain in that profounder and less obvious sense in which they had been cited. This she had endeavoured to do; and affecting to be much gratified by her satisfactory exposition, he had requested her to reconcile some discrepancies which he said had often troubled him when reading the Scriptures. Some of them were quite new to my good little wife; they startled and even horrified her. He pursued this theme, still pretending only to seek for information to quiet his own doubts, while in reality he was sowing in her mind the seeds of the first perturbations that had ever troubled the sources of her peace.

At the heart of the Reformation was a desire to hold on to a basic, elemental faith in the divinity and humanity of the man called Jesus. The rationalist pretensions of the scholastics had sown doubts in the minds of the faithful, which they sought to assuage by returning to their apostolic and European roots. They were only temporarily successful in their efforts because, as Fitzhugh has described for us (2), the philosophical speculators stepped in and rationalized the Protestant protest against rationalism.

It is not, as the rationalist critics of bred-in-the-bone Christianity maintain, that there is no rational component in the bardic or kinist Christianity. There is. But ultimately Christianity is beyond reason. Whenever we try to limit its parameters to what is rational, we destroy that which makes Christianity wholly true and wholly unique.

Our chroniclers, the European poets, have shown us that in every age the devil, disguised as a rationalist, is always present. He claimed the European “intellectuals” first, and then in the 20th century, he claimed the European folk or ‘volk.’ In centuries prior to the 20th, the Christian warrior always rallied the folk against the rationalist elite. However, now that there are no folk, the Christian braveheart stands alone. But then again, not quite alone. He stands in line with noble antique hearts, living still, in the arms of our Lord. What kind of advantage, if any, does that give the modern Christian knight over his liberal antagonists? A great advantage, if he doesn’t break faith with the blood of his ancestors. But if he steps away from his ties of blood and decides to be clever, as Toad does when he motors away from Toad Hall, he will place the devil in a “can’t lose’ situation. If the conservative is a rationalist and the liberal is a rationalist, both are in the devil’s camp. The devil wants all of man’s existence to be confined by the rules and parameters of academic study, because he knows that if a man studies the thing he loves on a purely rational basis, he will soon cease to love the object of his study. This is why literary critics know less about literature than anybody else and the reason why modern clerics know nothing about God. Being rationalists they have lost the wisdom of the heart that is necessary for a proper understanding of existence.

In Great Expectations, Mr. Wopsle is not taken seriously when he disputes the pompous Pumblechook, who has a theory about the robbery. He is not taken seriously because “he has no theory.” But Wopsle is correct. The bardic Christian is in the position of Mr. Wopsle. He is correct: race and blood are the building blocks of religious faith. But in a rationalist age, or to be more accurate, a satanic age, only the theoretical is real; concrete reality is considered false. The temptation for the Christian is to come up with a theory to combat the liberals’ theories. But if we succumb to that temptation, we will no longer be among them but not of them; we will be of them. When the Flemings of liberaldom tell us that it is unChristian, infantile, and irrational to concern ourselves with the survival of the white race, we will not run and find a theory to justify our existence. We will hold to our ancestors’ faith, the faith that transcends theory, and become even more recalcitrant and unyielding in defense of our race and our faith.

The liberals think they have reached the final, higher stage of faith. They have gone beyond race, beyond the ties of kith and kin that used to bind ‘unenlightened’ Europeans to each other. But the fruits of their higher faith are hideous. You have to be a soulless mutant to live in our modern rationalist anti-culture and actually view that anti-culture as the summit of man’s achievements on this earth. Only a sick, demented rationalist who has concluded, after much research and careful study, that hell is heaven and heaven is hell could possibly rest content with our unholy present.

The gentle bard is right: a man can never say with certainty that he is at the worst. He is worse than ere he was. But the extent of the de-evolution of European man from Christian to rationalist cannot be measured on any human scale. The fall was from heaven to hell. The European had Christ in his heart and blood. He possessed heaven. When he forsook his blood, he lost heaven and gained hell.

Thomas Nelson Page described the white man’s instinct to preserve his race as an instinct “beyond reason.” To the modern liberal that is heresy. But the liberal is married to hell, and there is no instinct beyond reason in hell, because there is no love in hell. The rational lodger is terrified of that loving instinct of God which compelled Him to reach out to man. And he is also afraid that man will respond to God’s overture with a loving instinct that is beyond reason. When the Europeans did in fact respond to God’s love, Satan became the mortal enemy of the European people. He has no desire to destroy the non-white races because they have steadfastly refused to believe that spirit and blood, God and Man, can be joined. They have always preferred religions of sacrifice to the religion of mercy.

The rational lodger can never rest until the white man ceases to exist, because the white man’s blood was animated by His spirit. This is why he lodges in the formerly Christian churches of the white man. He wants them all to be rational so that they will slavishly worship the colored races and destroy the white race, all in the name of God. And that is the key. If man’s reason alone is the final arbiter, then reason is God. That is the way liberals think. Reason meant something quite different to the apostles. They were not Thomists! To the apostles, reason was subordinate to the heart. It was used as an aid in articulating the faith, not as a substitute for it. “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” (I Peter 3:15).

Yes, something must be in you. There must be an instinct in your heart and blood that is beyond reason which enables you to resist the seductive heresies of the rational lodger and to champion the God born in a manger. The third dumb brother in the fairy tales always in the end triumphs over the rational, clever brothers, because the third dumb brother has that within him which transcends reason: a heart connected to His heart.

In common, everyday English when we say a person is acting “irrationally” we mean to say that he is acting in a way that is not right. “You can’t deal with a person who is not rational.” And when we say a person is acting rationally we usually mean that he is acting in a proper way. But in the metaphysical realm, it is quite a different story. Stavrogin, in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, is perfectly rational when he commits suicide. The Negro savages who tortured and murdered the Catholic nuns in the Congo were acting rationally; it was in their self-interest to murder the whites. And Pope John XXIII was acting rationally when he forgave the murderers; it was in his best interest, the interest of his rational, satanic, faithless faith, to support the colored race and jettison the white.

In the incredibly prophetic Greek myth, Prometheus, because he loves mankind, steals fire from the gods and gives it to man. And he is punished for his act of charity. In the Christian myth, the true myth, God Himself gives fire to man. He descends to earth and sets hearts on fire. And like Prometheus, He suffers because of His act of charity, but unlike Prometheus, He suffers because He wills it, not because the gods decree it.

The Greeks replaced their cruel gods with a rational philosophy. But then, from whence comes the Promethean fire? There is no fire in rationalism. The Christian hearth contains the fire that lights the world. If you kill the white man’s love for that hearth, the world will be plunged into darkness. And if the rationalist were not blinded by his reason, he could see that the only patches of light left on earth are in those places where ancient European hearth fires are still burning. The fires are kept alive by the love of our race, the Christ-bearing race. If we hearken to the new religion of rationalism and vitalism, we will separate ourselves from God. But if we stay close to the European hearth we will be able to counter the assault of the rationalists and the barbarians. We will counter their assault with fire, the fire from the center of the European hearth. +
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(1) On the basis of two works, the short story “The Mysterious Lodger” and his novel Uncle Silas, LeFanu deserves to be placed in the top rank of Christian poets.

(2) “A Washington, a Peel, or a Wellington, never ‘writes himself down an ass’ by appealing to abstract principles to justify measures which are rendered necessary by a thousand minute and peculiar circumstances of the hour, which common sense and experience instinctively appreciate, but which philosophy in vain attempts to detect or to generalize. Common sense never attempts ‘to expel’ nature,’ but suggests and carries through a thousand useful reforms by recurrence to and comparison with the past, and by cautious experimentation. Common sense sometimes errs by excess of conservation; but it is better to err with Pope, who thought ‘Whatever is, is right,’ than with Jefferson, whose every act and words proves that he held that ‘Whatever is, is wrong.’ The Reformation was not the thought and the act of Luther, Calvin, Cranmer, and Erasmus; but the thought and the act of society—the vox Populi, vox Dei. Popes and cardinals are not infallible, but society is. Its harmony is its health; and to differ with it is heresy or treason, because social discord inflicts individual misery; and what disturbs and disarranges society, impairs the happiness and well-being of its members.” – Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters by George Fitzhugh

Of Mongrels and Commies

Book Review: Hollywood Party: The Untold Story of How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 30s and 40s, by Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2000

First of all, the book’s title is a bit of a misnomer. It should be titled, “How Communism Failed to Seduce the American Film Industry in the ’30’s and ’40’s but Succeeded in Doing So in the ’60’s and ’70’s,” for what Kenneth Billingsley presents is a rather surprisingly ineffective campaign on the part of the communists to have a major impact on the type of films Americans viewed. Plenty of screenwriters did become communists, but they never could bring themselves to write the communist propaganda that the Party demanded, mainly because the few propaganda pictures that did get into theaters bombed. Propaganda films were bad box office.

What Billingsley does document for us is the communist influence among Hollywood personalities in the 1930’s and 1940’s. It really is nothing different from what was going on at the universities at the time. The communists would seek out left-leaning liberals like Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart and get them to shill for nice-sounding organizations that were really communist front organizations. In fact, the majority of actors and writers at that time were to the left of center. Walt Disney, John Wayne, Adolph Menjou, Robert Montgomery, Robert Taylor, and Ward Bond were notable exceptions.

The book is a “just the facts, ma’am” type of book. The author doesn’t draw any conclusions but does present the reader with enough information to draw his own conclusions. The book is advertised as the “untold story,” but the story has been told often by conservatives, albeit not as often as the leftist version is told by the liberals. Which is why this book is useful: it sets the record straight about the so-called bad old blacklisting days.

However, I must admit that the facts as Billingsley presents them led me to conclude that the House Un-American Activities Committee was one of the stupidest ideas ever conceived. The 1960’s and 1970’s witnessed a huge increase in mainstream communist propaganda films because anyone who opposed them was tarred with the same brush as the ineffectual House Committee and McCarthy.

The old adage that you either have to kill a rat or let it alone should be applied to communists. Either kill them or let them alone. But don’t give them an opportunity to claim martyr status for having suffered a few anxious moments before a toothless board of inquiry.

Quite revealing is Billingsley’s account of the treatment accorded ex-communists who talked to the Committee. Men like Edward Dmytryk and Elia Kazan were victims of an anti-anti-communist blacklist that was far harsher than any so-called right-wing blacklist. Indeed, as Billingsley shows, there was no great persecution. Blacklisted writers could use assumed names, and repentant communists were welcomed back into the fold by the film industry. Only Ward Bond, tough guy that he was, was against letting even repentant communists back into the film industry.

The liberals have turned the blacklisting era into a major propaganda triumph, but this book shows any objective reader that there were real communists in Hollywood during that era who tried to use the film industry to advance their agenda. That they failed was more a tribute to the ’30’s and ’40’s moviegoer who preferred the movies of Alfred Hitchcock (a man hated by the communists) and Westerns to commie propaganda films. Yet, sappy propaganda films did capture the popular imagination during the 1960’s and 1970’s, so perhaps the inability to appreciate a good story goes hand in hand with communism.

This book is valuable in what it can elicit from the reader. I would hope that thoughtful readers would ask themselves why so many actors, directors, and creative people are leftist, and why conservative views do not seem to inspire creative types. I would suggest it is because 20th century conservatives lack a metaphysic. In centuries prior to the 20th, there were always men of the right in the arts and in the military willing to champion the cause of God, King, and country. But no one with any poetic instincts wants to champion free markets and greed. Marxism is a delusion from which great poets such as Whittaker Chambers eventually walk away. But it has an enduring appeal to the lesser poets who quite rightly see nothing inspirational in capitalism.

There is no question the seeds of communist dissension were being planted in the 1930’s, 1940’s, and 1950’s, but the Christian morality of the American populace had not been sufficiently contaminated to produce tangible results. Two things were necessary to make Americans more tolerant of communism. One was a breakdown in sexual mores, which did indeed take place in the 1960’s, and the second was a major change in the United States immigration policies, which also took place in the 1960’s. White technocrats make up the communist elite, but the major resistance to communism also comes from white people. When a nation is mongrelized, there is no longer any resistance to communism.

Paul Hill – Lest We Forget

The liberals quite naturally are making a fuss over Tim Russert. He was one of their own.
It is easy to forget, because we live among them and constantly hear them lauding themselves, just how reprehensible liberals are. They do things, in the name of some higher good, that are clearly the work of Satan. Russert supported pro-abort Democrats all his life, and yet he was still lauded as a great family man and a “devout Catholic.” (1) He even got to shake hands with the Pope.

The banality of evil is a fitting epitaph for Tim Russert. He calmly, with a good-natured grin, supported Satanism. In stark contrast to Tim Russert is Paul Hill. It’s been nearly five years now since he was executed for killing a state-sanctioned mass murderer. “You won’t kill any more babies,” he told the executioner before killing him. There was no appeal for clemency by Pope John Paul II, who routinely begged for clemency for child molesters, when Paul Hill was tried. There were no media representatives at his funeral to talk about what a fine man he was. But there is a higher court than the U. S. Court, and in that court Paul Hill is honored and revered.

There are two sections of the Gospels that come to mind when reflecting on Paul Hill. The first passage is one that Paul Hill must have read and pondered over a great deal: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” (Matthew 25:40)

And the second passage that comes to my mind when I think of Paul Hill is: “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the Gospels’ the same shall save it.” (Mark 8:35)

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(1) I am sick to death of pro-abort liberals being lauded as devout. That Christian father who had his home taken away from him by the federal government for publishing the names of abortion doctors on the Web is devout, not Tim Russert. But of course if we redefine “devoutly religious” to suit Satan’s specifications, then the liberals are devout Christians.

White-Hating Whites

Humanity must perforce prey on itself,
Like monsters of the deep.

--King Lear

In the older westerns and jungle pictures of the 1930’s, 1940’s, and 1950’s, the white men who sold guns to the Indians or betrayed the whites to the black cannibals were portrayed as morally reprehensible individuals. But in the 1960’s the movies started depicting whites who betrayed their fellow whites as moral giants, far beyond the ken of ordinary, sinful whites. The treacherous, evil gunrunner became the dedicated social worker, and the traitorous white hunter (see Tarzan and the Lost Safari) became the self-righteous cleric damning all whites who opposed integration.

The Hollywood movie moguls are always slightly in advance of the average American, but not by much, because they want to make money. If they were too far away from the mainstream, they wouldn’t make money. The new movies of the late 1960’s reflected the change in the way white people viewed themselves and other cultures. Movies of the ‘30’s, ‘40’s and ‘50’s, by and large, show us a people who were tolerant of the “lesser breeds” but still holding on to the belief that white civilization and the whites who created it were the right sort of people who deserved to be emulated, not demonized.

Of course from the late 1960’s on, the constant, unrelenting theme of our popular movies has been the evil of whites and the goodness of the non-white. Given the enormity of the propaganda against the white race, it is surprising that a black wasn’t nominated for President even sooner. Maybe the forty years from 1968 to 2008 were needed in order for the old “racist” whites to die out.

I don’t know if it’s true that rats flee a sinking ship, but humans certainly do. From the late 1960’s on we have been treated to the disgusting spectacle of whites trying to disassociate themselves from white culture by pinning the racist label on other whites or by claiming victim status for their white ethnic group. Thus, the editors of Southern Partisan magazine spent all their time writing about the evils of segregation and the hypocrisy of those damn Yankees who were, after all, “a lot more prejudiced than we are.” Take for another example my parish priest who regularly told his black parishioners that being Irish he considered black people to be his people and not those hideous white WASPs.

With all the white backstabbing going on, one gets the impression he is in a Grade B horror film. One minute, you are standing next to a normal-looking white person and in the next moment, that normal-looking white person has a mouth full of fangs and is trying to bite you in the neck. Just the other day, for instance, I was having a perfectly normal conversation with a man named Patrick Buchanan, when suddenly, without warning, he sprouted fangs and tried to bite me. I quickly got out of range of his fangs and ran home to try and find a suitable wooden stake. Must it be a wooden stake? There simply is no telling who will turn next!

Using the colored races to defeat a white enemy is not something new. The French used Indians against the British in the French and Indian War; Franco used Moorish troops against the communists; and the North used black troops against the Southern whites. But with the exception of our own Civil War, the use of non-European people against Europeans was not an admission, on the part of the European country using colored troops, that the European and the colored were equals. It was simply a breach in the honor code. “I’ll use any tactic to defeat my enemy!”

In the later half of the 20th century, something quite different than a breach in the honor code was taking place. The issue of the colored races became a religious one. It was not a case of “The colored can be used to give us victory over our white enemies.” It was not a case of “We must convert the heathen.” Nor was it a case of “We must grant the colored races the same rights and privileges which we accord to the whites.” None of those cases express the late 20th and 21st century reality. The reality is that it is now required that the colored races, particularly the black race, the race most antithetical to the white race, be worshipped and the white race be demonized. That is the reigning orthodoxy. If a white man wants to remain viable in politics, religion or society in general, he must demonize his own race. Patrick Buchanan is a classic example. It is sad to see a man so desperate for media air time and publishers that he rushes to join in with the demonizers of the white race.

The deifying of the colored and the demonizing of the white was codified in the late 20th century, but it has been a lurking little devil of an idea, waiting to come to fruition, for many centuries. The root of it is to be found in Satan’s intellectual temptation of Adam and Eve. And its formal entry into the heart of the church came with the advent of scholasticism, which reduces Christianity to a propositional, dialectical faith, in which the personality of God and the personality of man are rendered subservient to the idea of faith. Thus, with genuine sincerity and zeal for his faith, James II of England, Scotland, and Wales, could elevate a black man to a status above all the white Protestants of his realm:

Indeed the King’s rage for making converts was driven to such a height by his obsequious ministers, that an ignorant negro, the servant or slave of one Reid, a mountebank, was publicly baptized after the Catholic ritual upon a stage in the High Street of Edinburgh, and christened James, in honour, it was said, of the Lord Chancellor James Earl of Perth, King James himself, and the Apostle James.

-- from Walter Scott's Tales of a Grandfather

Is faith that simple? Does it only entail the acceptance of a few intellectual propositions and a subsequent ritual purification to make one a Christian? Or is there something else that is necessary? A tradition that predates the scholastics, the tradition of the Gospels and the first European converts, stresses the need for a deeper, more intense involvement with the deity than can be obtained by mere acceptance of whatever official party line is ruling Christendom at the particular moment. Theology changes with the weather, but a deep-seated, heart-felt faith, based on a spirit and blood relationship with one’s kith and kin and one’s God does not change. It endures.

I view the Protestant Reformation, at its deepest level, as a longing to hold on to an unchanging faith. The faithful felt that the Hero God, whom the apostles saw on the way to Emmaus, whom St. Paul saw on the road to Damascus, and whom their Germanic ancestors saw and rescued from the maze of Greco-Roman theology, was in danger of becoming a vague theory about God rather than the living God. Of course, the Protestant theologians quickly returned to theory and away from faith. That is the curse of Adam: we are indeed, as Chateaubriand points out, “more deeply tinctured with the pride of science than with the pride of love.”

I think the phrase, “pride of science,” is very apt. It conjures up images of a man in a lab coat, studying his fellow men, and God as well, as if they and He were insects in a jar. It is in Satan’s best interest to keep Western man focused on the things he can quantify, calculate, and collect rather than on the things he intuits when the poetic flame is blazing.

And since that poetic flame only blazed in the European hearth, Satan’s main task is to keep that hearth fire extinguished. Satan knows what the European once knew when the hearth fire was ablaze: The spirit of God comes to man through the blood. Without that conduit, all white men become soulless, bloodless zombies, worshipping the blood of the coloreds in an attempt to reclaim their lost vitality. But the attempt is always futile because the blood of the barbarian has no animating spirit in it. Yet the swinish white men rush headlong over the cliff in their frenzy to worship at the altars of the colored races.

American, pride-of-science whites are not alone in their frenzied rush for the abyss; the European whites have joined them, but it is in America that we can see two very striking examples of the coalition that has destroyed European civilization. In Presidential candidate McCain, we see the white-hating white who has embraced the soulless, bloodless faith of the pride-of-science men. In Presidential candidate Obama, we see the personification of the soulless faith of blood. Blacks love him because his faith is their faith, and whites worship him because he has the blood that they have denounced.

Liberaldom does not just consist of those who are pro-choice and in favor of immigration ‘reform,’ it also includes all those whites who see no animating spiritual presence in the blood faith of the antique Europeans. When they tell us that we must renounce those “infantile” ties of blood which bind us to a higher civilization than the modern liberal could possibly know, we must renounce them and realize that we are involved in a religious war, not a minor disagreement.

Christians who spout race-mixing propaganda and hurl jeremiads at Kinists are not Christians. They have become Jews, a people hardened against Christ’s reign of charity. You cannot argue or debate with such people; you can only war with them.

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

--The Merchant of Venice

We can expect more defections from white people who either give up fighting because of cowardice or give up fighting because the white liberals have converted them with their unrelenting propaganda. But the white European of the old stock will never betray his own blood, because he is still connected, through his blood, to the older Europe whose people were united in spirit and in blood to Him. And in that Europe He still is the only King with rights of memory.

“Of the Same Blood”

“A Man should, whatever happens, keep his own caste, race and breed”

– Rudyard Kipling

Have you ever had an experience in your life that affected you profoundly but that you couldn’t write about because you felt you just couldn’t do justice to the experience? That has been my feeling about a certain visit I made to Britain some thirty years ago when I was a young man. I still don’t feel I can adequately describe it, but I’m now old enough to realize that I’ll never be able to do the theme justice, so let me at least stammer at what cannot be adequately articulated.

It was the mid-1970’s. I had been in Italy, Greece, and France and found those countries to be beautiful. The Parthenon was fascinating, the Pieta and the Sistine Chapel were moving, and the Louvre in Paris was magnificent. But nothing in Southern Europe affected me as much as the mere act of stepping on British soil did. I felt like Mole in The Wind in the Willows (Chapter 5, Dulce Domum): I was home. I was in the country of Shakespeare, Kipling, Scott, Grahame, Dickens, and others, men of my own tongue, of my own flesh and blood, who were wedded in spirit and blood to the same heritage that I was wedded to. The day I was married and the individual births of my six children have been the only moments in my life that can compare with the day I set foot on British soil.

I wasn’t born and raised in a cave, so I didn’t expect every Brit I met to quote Shakespeare or to say, ‘Pip, pip, cheerio,’ but I did hope to meet some real Brits. I don’t know if the ghosts of Britain alone could have kept my enthusiasm at a fever pitch if I hadn’t met some living representatives of the great ghosts of Britain. I was fortunate. The young men and women of my own age were burnt-out cases without personal identities, citizens of a new international community of soulless automatons. But I was able to meet some older Britons who did indeed live up to the finest traditions of the nation of Shakespeare, Kipling, and Scott. One couple in particular made a lasting impression.

I was wandering through the Lake District of England, quite lost but not particularly nervous about it because I had water, cheese, and bread and it was summertime. If worse came to worse, I could sleep out in the woods. Toward evening though, I came upon an elderly woman tending a garden in front of a modest cottage. A cottage in the woods! I asked for directions to the nearest youth hostel. She asked her husband to come out of the house; “He gives much better directions than I do.” The husband was just as cordial as his wife. After exchanging a few pleasantries, he informed me that the nearest youth hostel was much too far away to reach before dark and that I should spend the night at their house.

I first I declined, for the usual reasons: “I just couldn’t impose on you like that. And besides, I’m a stranger.”

The husband’s reply still makes me feel like Ratty on the river. “You’re no stranger, you Yanks are the same blood as us.” Ah, the “same blood.” Thomas Fleming would not approve. This ‘infantile’ old man was talking about ties of blood! But that old Brit was correct. We were of the same blood. I slept in his study that night, surrounded by our common heritage: Treasure Island, King Lear, Hamlet, The Christmas Carol – you know the list. That encounter with a true-born Englishman has stayed with me all my life. It affected me much like the reading of The Wind and the Willows had. I felt that I knew why God chose to reveal Himself to man through the blood.

The philosopher, the scientist, and the barbarian all separate the life of the spirit from the life of the blood. The philosopher and the scientist see the true life of the spirit in the mind, while the barbarian sees no spiritual dimension in his life, only the blood. But a Christian knows that spirit and blood are not meant to be separated. Christ is our spiritual father and our blood brother. When a man ceases to care about ‘little things’ like home, blood, and race, he ceases to be Christian, because it is through those little things that God reveals Himself to man.

Suppose a black man had approached my British friend and asked for directions. And let’s say the black man was a naturalized British citizen and a professed Christian. I can say with certainty the black man would have been offered food, he would have been given directions to the youth hostel, but he would not have been asked to stay under the same roof as the English couple. Why? Because the old Brit’s Christianity was bred in the bone. He knew that a Christian renders aid as the Good Samaritan did, caring for the stranger but not admitting the stranger to his dwelling.

So much hinges on this question of the stranger. A few years back I read a “conservative” Catholic journal that zealously proclaimed that the sign of the true Christian was the amount of respect which he accorded the stranger. I don’t believe that respect for the stranger is the penultimate of Christianity. But let’s assume it is. Does respect for the stranger include respect for his heathen religion? Were the Spanish wrong to tear down the altars of the Aztecs? Were the British missionaries wrong to try and convert the African headhunters? And were the British wrong to forbid the Suttee and other colorful customs of the Hindus?

Let’s take this argument to the next step. What happens when the African , the Indian, or the Aztec converts to Christianity? Aren’t we then obligated to treat them as equals? The Northern European Protestants did not think so. They did not think that the mere affirmation of Christianity made a non-European any less of a stranger. Their Christian faith did not countenance race-mixing. The Spanish and Portuguese Catholics did mix bloodlines with the stranger, but they did so more from a weakness of the flesh than from a belief in the principle of racial egalitarianism. And when they mixed with the stranger, the mulatto was not put on the same level as the white. Until the later half of the 20th century, with more exceptions in the Catholic countries, the general consensus of the European people was that an espousal of Christianity did not mean an African or an Indian could become a European. And certainly not a Muslim or Hindu. What has changed? How did we get from Thomas Nelson Page’s declaration that preserving the integrity of the white race was our primary duty to Thomas Fleming’s assertion that those who raved about the survival of the white race were infantile?

We came to this pass because the intellectual elite of Europe abandoned the wisdom of their race and persuaded enough of the peasants (obviously when I use the term, peasant, I am not referring only to those who till the soil) to follow in their train. The liberal liberal and the conservative liberal all prostrate themselves before ancient Greece, but they fail to learn from the Greeks. They look on the rationalist tradition of the Greeks as a sure foundation from which to launch their utopian schemes and plans. They completely disregard the moral of the Greek experience because they disregard the wisest of the Greeks, Sophocles. In Oedipus Rex, Sophocles depicts a man intelligent enough to solve the riddle of the Sphinx, but whose intelligence is insufficient to ward off fate. It is only the old blind Oedipus who sees, at Colonus, what the rationalists could not and cannot see. Like the blinded Gloster in King Lear, he sees the world feelingly. He sees a God beyond the gods, a God connected to the human heart. It has always been Satan’s mission to obscure the divine intimations in the human heart and beckon man to look at God and the world with his mind. That was the original temptation that the first man and woman succumbed to.

Observe, too, what is very important: man had it in his power to destroy the harmony of his being in two ways, either by wanting to love too much, or to know too much. He transgressed in the second way; for we are, in fact, far more deeply tinctured with the pride of science than with the pride of love; the latter would have deserved pity rather than punishment, and if Adam had been guilty of desiring to feel rather than to know too much, man himself might, perhaps, have been able to expiate his transgression, and the Son of God would not have been obliged to undertake so painful a sacrifice. But the case was different. Adam sought to embrace the universe, not with the sentiments of his heart, but with the power of thought, and, advancing to the tree of knowledge, he admitted into his mind a ray of light that overpowered it. The equilibrium was instantaneously destroyed, and confusion took possession of man. Instead of that illumination which he had promised himself, a thick darkness overcast his sight, and his guilt, like a veil, spread out between him and the universe. His whole soul was agitated and in commotion; the passions rose up against the judgment, the judgment strove to annihilate the passions, and in this terrible storm the rock of death witnessed with joy the first of shipwrecks.

- from The Genius of Christianity by François R. de Chateaubriand

This has ever been the conflict. Christ restores the harmony of man’s being by turning him back to the sentiments of his heart, and Satan seeks to tempt man away from his heart back to his ‘illuminated mind.’ Christ vs. the Pharisees, St. Paul vs. the Greeks, the Europeans vs. the Scholastics, the poet vs. the scientist, the Kinist vs. the universalist. The rationalistic façade is always different but always rational. The devil is the great mocker, the supreme sophist. He sneers at everything human:

These last great authors have given to the Evil Principle something which elevates and dignifies his wickedness; a sustained and unconquerable resistance against Omnipotence itself—a lofty scorn of suffering compared with submission, and all those points of attraction in the Author of Evil, which have induced Burns and others to consider him as the Hero of the “Paradise Lost.” The great German poet has, on the contrary, rendered his seducing spirit a being who, otherwise totally unimpassioned, seems only to have existed for the purpose of increasing, by his persuasions and temptations, the mass of moral evil, and who calls forth by his seductions those slumbering passions which otherwise might have allowed the human being who was the object of the Evil Spirit’s operations to pass the tenor of his life in tranquility. For this purpose Mephistopheles is, like Louis XI, endowed with an acute and depreciating spirit of caustic wit, which is employed incessantly in undervaluing and vilifying all actions, the consequences of which do not lead certainly and directly to self-gratification.

--Introduction to Quentin Durward by Walter Scott

I once read a book, written for children (like a number of those books written for children, I think it moved me more than it did my children) that told the story of a country boy in Elizabethan England who somehow ended up working at the royal court. When he refused, despite the scorn and ridicule of the city-bred boys and girls, to give up his country songs, one of the nobles of the court applauds him and says, “Quite right, my lad; you should never be ashamed of your home and the things you love.”

Thomas Fleming is almost right; it is not infantile, but it is childlike for a white man to care about the survival of the white race. But didn’t someone once enjoin us to become like little children? All the things we love – home, kith, and kin – are interwoven into the fabric of the white man’s culture. Only a man who has severed his mind from his heart and turned to the worship of his own mind could suggest that we give those things up for lost.

But therein lies the conflict. The children of darkness have given up their religion of the heart for the religion of the mind. This goes against the wisdom of the race. The white man has always preferred the leaden casket over the one of gold and the one of silver; the cottage in the woods to the sumptuous palace; and the blood of the Lamb to the magic talisman. Let the sons and daughters of this ‘new age of enlightenment’ keep all their magic talismans: rationalism, science, and multiculturalism. The European will stay with the European cottage in the woods that contains the things he loves. And his childlike attachment to the things he loves will keep him bound to the Sacred Heart Who speaks to men through the little things that the clever men and women have discarded. The old fairy tales are correct: the faithful heart always triumphs over the satanic mind.