Beyond the Cruel Thorns

The Briar Wood by Edward Burne-Jones

After many, many years a brave young prince came into that land. An old man told him the story of the thicket of thorns, and how a beautiful palace stood behind it in which a very beautiful princess, named Rosebud, lay sleeping along with all her court. He told, too, how he had heard from his grandfather that many, many princes had come and had tried to break through the thicket, but had become entangled in the cruel thorns and perished.

But the young prince said, “I am not afraid. I will go and see this lovely sleeping beauty.”

Writing in 1944 Herbert Butterfield made the point in The Englishman and His History that whenever the English had a revolution it was to restore their “ancient Saxon liberties.” Butterfield goes on to say that no two Englishmen could agree on the exact starting date of the ancient Saxon liberties, nor could any two Englishmen agree on exactly what the ancient liberties were. Nevertheless, the English people always rebelled in the name of the ancient liberties. Butterfield thought that this uniquely English way of rebelling had been very beneficial to the English people, because by citing the ancient liberties when they revolted they always kept a bridge to the past. Dickens described the very conservative English style of change in Nicholas Nickleby:

The first act of Nicholas, when he became a rich and prosperous merchant, was to buy his father’s old house. As time crept on, and there came gradually about him a group of lovely children, it was altered and enlarged; but none of the old rooms were ever pulled down, no old tree was ever rooted up, nothing with which there was any association of bygone times was ever removed or changed.

In contrast to the English, the French, in 1789, burnt all their bridges to the past. And in every subsequent revolution they revolted in the name of the future, not the past. The French revolutionists were the forerunners of the modern liberal who asks, “Why should we maintain bridges to the past?” We should not, if we believe as the liberals do that in the past is racism, sexism, puritanism, etc. But if we believe that the past contains the social customs and codes of behavior that stemmed from Christianity, then we as Christians should want to maintain the bridges to the past.

Unfortunately what Butterfield admired in the English people, an innate conservatism that kept them connected to the past, no longer exists in the English people. They have joined the French, the Americans, and the rest of the European people who have jettisoned their pasts in the name of an utopian future. The principles of the French revolution are now the principles of every European country.

The essence of the French Revolution was its godlessness. Reason, who, as Unamuno tells us, is always a whore, was made into a goddess, and abstract humanity was triumphant over the individual men of flesh, blood, and bone.(1) Speaking for the opposition was Edmund Burke: “I hate abstractions,” and Sir Walter Scott:

An established system is not to be tried by those tests which may with perfect correctness be applied to a new theory. A civilized nation, long in possession of a code of law, under which, with all its inconveniences, they have found means to flourish, is not to be regarded as an infant colony, on which experiments in legislation may, without much danger of presumption, be hazarded. A philosopher is not entitled to investigate such a system by those ideas which he has fixed in his own mind as the standard of possible excellence. The only unerring test of every old establishment is the effect it has actually produced, for that must be held to be good, from whence good is derived. The people have, by degrees, moulded their habits to the law they are compelled to obey; for some of its imperfections, remedies have been found, to others they have reconciled themselves; till, at last, they have, from various causes, attained the object which the most sanguine visionary could promise to himself from his own perfect unembodied system. (cited in The Conservative Mind as: Lockhart, Scott, III, 305-6)

Whenever the satanic principles of the French Revolution predominate, there is race-mixing and atheism. They are inseparable, because Satan hates the incarnate, Christian culture of the European people. Faith can not exist in the abstract. It must have a local habitation. It must take root in a people. If there is no such thing as a distinct people, then there can be no distinct God. Genuine, concrete, non-abstract human beings are the conduits for God’s grace; generic humanity is without grace. The Europeans no longer see Christ as the one true God because they no longer see anything in the particular. Abstracted, desiccated liberals do not see Europeans as a unique people with a special heritage. And they do not see the Christian God as a unique God separate from all other gods. There are no distinctions! Everything and everybody has been blended into a universal melting pot. But of course “some are a little more equal.” In the absence of Christianity, the unbrave rationalists rule without mercy or pity:

The Législatif had not been long in session when tidings of the great negro rising in San Domingo began to arrive in France; tidings coupled with frantic appeals for aid which grew in intensity and volume. Blanchelande’s initial report on the situation estimated six thousand regular troops, fifteen thousand stand of arms, and an immense matériel of war as the absolute minimum required to save San Domingo from destruction. And these colonial appeals were vigorously endorsed by the Civil Commissioners recently sent from France. Their very first letter emphasized the need of large and speedy succors, and their recommendations grew more insistent with every despatch sent home. When on February 20, 1792, the Colonial Assembly drew up an appeal for twenty thousand troops, the Commissioners appended their earnest endorsement. “Twenty thousand men,” it reads, -- “this figure, we certify, is but the absolute necessity.”

But against these appeals the Jacobins and the “Amis des Noirs” set themselves like flint, and in fact succeeded in preventing the despatch of any real aid to San Domingo. They first denied the existence of the insurrection, declaring it a ruse to assure a Royalist asylum over-seas; then, when forced to admit the fact, they branded it as the work of émigrés. “The massacres,” cried Brissot triumphantly, “began on the 21st of August; -- just at the moment when the news had arrived of the King’s flight to Varennes. Evidently they were organized by the Counter-Revolutionists.” Month after month frantic letters and petitions poured by hundreds into the Hall of Assembly, and these not only from over-seas, but also from thousands of Frenchmen reduced to ruin and trembling for the lives of kindred in San Domingo. These appeals, coupled with the horrors contained in every report from the island, might well have moved hearts of stone; --but not the hearts of the Jacobin opposition. Time after time a grim tragi-comedy was enacted on the floor of the Assembly. Some fresh batch of reports and petitions on San Domingo would move moderate members to propose the sending of aid. Instantly the Jacobins would be upon their feet with a wealth of fine phrases, patriotic suspicions, and a whole armory of nullifying amendments and motions to adjourn; -- the whole backed by gallery threats to the moderate proponents. And in the end, nothing would be done.

-- The French Revolution in San Domingo by T. Lothrop Stoddard

The white liberals in America and Europe look at Obama’s ascendancy to the Presidency and say, “See, nothing bad happens when blacks rule; in fact, that good darkie is doing everything we tell him to do.” What the liberals (and I need not say ‘white liberals’ because liberalism is alien to every other race) fail to comprehend is that black people respect only power. They will go with whoever has power. And Obama realizes that white liberals are still the ruling power in the United States. So long as he goes along with what his white masters want, he will be petted and stroked, loved and worshipped by his indulgent white masters. But if you were to place the Obama in South Africa or Rhodesia, you would see exactly what the French witnessed in San Domingo and exactly what the white South Africans and white Rhodesians are witnessing now: the wholesale extermination of whites. The American and European liberals who are now over 60 years of age will probably never live to see the night of sorrows when their “good” darkies take off their masks, but their “quality” children and grandchildren will. And then, those children and grandchildren will call upon white men to save them. Will there be any left by that time? There will be if we, the white Christian remnant, have left behind sons who believe in the non-abstracted Europe of Walter Scott and Edmund Burke, and not the abstract, dystopian Europe of Liberalism.

Of course there may never be a dramatic apocalyptic extermination of the whites. There is already an incremental extermination going on now which might be sufficient. We are seeing, in this monster called the modern world, cruelty beyond anything the world has ever witnessed before. On the one hand the barbarians are loose again, after centuries of being restrained by Christian Europeans. And on the other hand, in addition to the barbarian cruelty, is the cruelty of the new white techno-barbarian. He doesn’t kill with the blood lust of the barbarian. He kills with cold, bloodless detachment. His new religion of reason is beyond love and mercy. He can consign a whole race, his own race, to death and oblivion. He can consign millions upon millions of babies to die in abortuaries. And he can calmly watch millions of ‘collateral damage’ human beings be executed in saturation bombing raids. All this the modern techo-barbarian can do because he is no longer a European; he is an inhuman man of the future. He is the Übermensch of Nietzsche’s demented dream.

Against the nightmare world of modernity stands the last European, the Christian hero. He is now a rogue male. His hand is against every man and every man’s hand is against him. Since he has not burnt his bridges to the past, he is in possession of a secret that the barbarian and the liberal and even Satan himself can never possess. The Christian hero knows that the hopeless causes are not hopeless. They only appear hopeless to those who see Christianity from the outside. The prince in the fairy tale story of "Sleeping Beauty" is undeterred by the thicket of thorns because he possesses the knowledge of all Christian heroes: his King and kinsman will never abandon him; ‘Lo, I am with you alway even unto the end of the world.”
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(1) “Whatever Reason may tell us—that great liar who has invented, for the consolation of failures, the doctrine of the golden mean, the aurea mediocritas, the ‘neither envied nor envying’ and other such nonsense—whatever Reason may tell us—and she is not only a liar but a great whore—in our innermost soul, which we now call the Unconscious, with a capital U, in the depths of our spirit, we know that in order to avoid becoming, sooner or later, nothing, the best course to follow is to attempt to become all."

-- Abel Sanchez by Miguel de Unamuno