The Battle Lines Are Drawn

“We are in God’s hands, brother, not in theirs.”

Seldom does a day pass that I do not think of Alan Breck Stewart. Surely you know the man – he is Robert Louis Stevenson’s fictional hero, who, as he never tires of telling us, “bears a king’s name.” You see, he is a descendant of that ill-fated line of Scottish kings defeated once and for all, in terms of any earthly standing, at the Battle of Culloden. But Alan refuses to acknowledge defeat. He lives the life of an outlaw, swearing allegiance only to the old Scottish clans and refusing to recognize King George as a legitimate king. He completely steals the book from the rather priggish and much too Whiggish David Balfour. And at the book’s end, David, now a wealthy laird, yearns for the days when he lived the outlaw life with Alan Breck Stewart.

Why should anyone care about a mere figment of Robert Louis Stevenson’s imagination? Because Stevenson, quite probably without realizing it, gives us an excellent portrayal of the glory and difficulties that await all those who would take up a counter-revolutionary cause.

The glory springs from the fact that one is fighting for the old ways – for the hearth over the school, the peasant over the merchant, the warrior-bard over the banker, the act of charity over the syllogism, and the wise man from the village over the academic in the big city.

The difficulty stems from the fact that a counter-revolutionary’s life is a lonely one. Can one realistically expect his countrymen to keep the image of the old ways before their eyes and in their memory, when a man must live and it is the new ways that rule the roost? And what about one’s children? Suppose Alan Breck Stewart meets a bonnie lass behind the heather, and then suppose he marries that lass and their union bears fruit? Can he expect his wife and children to live the outlaw’s life? Will not the very natural desire to see his children successful and prosperous cause the counter-revolutionary to make his accommodation with the ruling Whigs of the world?

Most of us with counter-revolutionary sentiments make our accommodation with the world. Those with intellectual integrity continue to affirm the correctness of the old ways while admitting that they do not have the stomach to fight for them, while those with less integrity manage to convince themselves that the new order isn’t really so revolutionary and that it can be changed from within. Those who seek to change the new order from within always fail. They fail to understand the true dynamic of the revolution, and consequently over-estimate their own abilities to make any kind of dent in the new order. But they make a living, while the Alan Brecks of the movement die in poverty and exile.

The compromisers and the accommodators do cause a problem though. As the revolution marches onward, it becomes more and more difficult to compromise and remain a human being with a soul. For example, a Christian living in the newly formed United States of the 1790’s could clearly see that the U. S. Constitution was a devil’s document, designed to foster a new godless leviathan and to destroy the older incorporate league which Western man had formed with Christ. Lacking the will to fight, the 1790’s Christian unfortunately decided to make his peace and to remain thankful that the revolutionary forces permitted him a breathing and living space in the new order. But what about the 21st century descendant of that first compromiser? The descendant now has no room to maneuver. It is not a case, as it was with the 1790’s Christian, of conceding a few points to the secularists and then sneaking off to church. The secularists have taken over the Christian churches and have imposed their new religion on the formerly Christian world. Continual compromise by his ancestors has left the 21st century Christian with no options: It is fight or join the secularists. It is not possible to cooperate with race mixers or murderers of babies. When Satan’s end game is the only game permitted, the Christian must fight or cease to be Christian.

I make the assertion that the present times are intelligible. Any knight of the old stock can clearly see that there is nothing left us but counter-revolution. This should not be a subject for debate; the only debate should involve the tactics to be used.

The revolution has been with us for centuries. It has come against us in the form of Scholasticism, capitalism, communism, neo-paganism, Freemasonry, and numerous other Satanisms, but the key to the revolutionaries’ success has been their ability to sever nature from grace. Primitive man was connected to nature; his natural world was filled with spiritual meaning. There were gods of the field, gods of the forest, and ghosts of the dead. The gods could be malevolent or benevolent, depending on what was done to appease or to anger them. Most works by Christopher Dawson and all of Mircea Eliade’s works describe this connection primitive man had to nature.

However, there is, as every Christian knows, and as every tree-hugging liberal does not know, a downside to primitive religious belief. There is no ethical dimension to be found in the nature gods; they are capricious and unloving. The natural world is pregnant with meaning under their rule, but it is not a pregnancy that will give birth to a God that loves man enough to rescue him from the endless cycle of birth and decay.

The more ethical religious traditions that supplanted the more primitive ones, like Platonism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, added an ethical dimension to religion, but denuded the natural religion that gave primitive man a link to the gods. Man needs more than an intellectual or mystical comprehension of the Logos; he needs to be connected to God in every fiber of his being.

Enter Christ, the God-Man. Christianity correctly practiced and preached combines the primitive religions’ sacred cosmos with the more ethical religious traditions. Nature is not destroyed, it is transformed. God’s grace has entered the world in the form of the Christ, the living God. Natural man now understands that all those gods of the field and the hunt were precursors of the one true God, and ethical contemplative man now knows that the source of his contemplation has a local habitation and a name, thus adding a personal, human element to his religion that was not there before.

In primitive societies the hero is the man who can climb the cosmic tree and be connected to the earth and to the heavens. The counter-revolutionary hero also is connected to earth and heaven; he has not lost his sacramental view of the world, nor has he ceased to experience in the deepest recesses of his soul a connection to a spiritual realm rooted in heaven but also firmly planted on earth. There is no false dichotomy in the counter-revolutionary’s vision. “Heaven has visited earth.”

All revolutionary societies and movements in some form deny the spiritual link between heaven and earth. The scholastics and the Protestant theologians who followed in their train insisted that the God of sorrows was not to be found in the human heart, but in the human mind. This over-rationalization of God narrowed the focus of European man, who kept staring into the golden bowl of his intellect and worshipping the God he placed there.

Of course, the necessity of counter-revolution now is much greater than in the days of Alan Breck Stewart. The Scottish Highlander’s fight was still a fight within Christendom. The modern European knight errant fights from within the bowels of satanic liberaldom. He can be inspired by the spirit of his ancestors, but his situation is much more desperate than that of his ancestors for the simple reason that his ancestors had Christendom and he does not. I think we are all still in a state of shock, hardly realizing all of the horrific implications from the death of Christendom. G. K. Chesterton, for instance, could not even conceive of a time when Christendom would not exist:

“What Mahomet and Calvin and all those breaking away from the dying civilization did not realize, is the curious fact that it is a dying civilization that never dies. It does decline, and has done so any number of times; it does decay; it is always at it. But it does not disappear; and, at the end of more or less debased periods, has a way of managing to reappear, when its enemies have in their turn decayed. The moral is, I will venture to think, that it is unwise to desert this perpetually sinking ship, or betray this everlastingly dying creed and culture. It has had another period of final extinction at the end of the Middle Ages. It has suffered eclipse in the enlightenment of the Age of Reason and Revolution; which in their turn begin to look as if they had seen better days...

“The moral is that no man should desert that civilization. It can cure itself; but those who leave it cannot cure it. Not Nestorious nor Mahomet nor Calvin nor Lenin have cured, nor will cure, the real evils of Christendom; for the severed hand does not heal the whole body.” (1)

We are motivated by the same love for Christendom that motivated our ancestors, but we are proceeding from an entirely different point. Polite debates and agreements to agree to disagree are things that take place between people with a common faith and a common cultural heritage. We share neither of these with the liberals of the neo-pagan variety or the mad-dog variety. When Satan’s clergymen talk about the evils of “familism” and the neo-pagans talk about the creation of a new neo-pagan god, we know that Satan is truly present at the heart of what was once Christendom.

I received a letter recently from a former student who had grasped, organically, that Christendom had given way to the new Satandom. His question was, 'What am I to do?' My first reaction was to tell him what Charles Peguy said about Christian fathers. He said that a Christian father was the true counter-revolutionary. But of course my young friend could not go out and make some woman become a Jeanie Deans or a Maud Ruthyn so that she would be fit to wed a Christian knight. But a young man, or an old man for that matter, can cling to what he loves. If he loves the old Europe, he can cling to it. The one true God, whom the neo-pagans mock and scorn and the liberals deny, reigns in that Europe. And if one is faithful to old Europe and its people, the right bride and the right sword to fight for that bride and His Europe will come to the faithful knight, or, to use my favorite image, to the faithful woodcutter.

I once, in my mid-twenties, got to visit with one of the major writers in the European Christian conservative camp. In the middle of my compliments on a book he had written about the dangers posed to the faith by false science, he said, “If I were writing that book today I would not make a distinction between false science and science. All science is false.” I have had many years to reflect on that comment, and I believe it to be true. The old sage wasn’t claiming that there weren’t such things as biology, physics, and chemistry; what he was asserting was that science, as practiced by Western man, had always been used to destroy Christian Europe.

So long as the European remains a prisoner of any part of the scientific world, he will be incapable of launching an effective attack on liberaldom. The triumph of the scientific view of man means the triumph of dumb nature. The neo-pagan, forsaking his pagan and his Christian ancestors, sits at his computer and dreams of a new, scientific, faithless faith that he will create for the white man. But when the neo-pagan talks about “creating” a new faith, he has already told us what he worships: his own mind.

The mad-dog liberal looks at the world scientifically as well. He has made an a priori decision that he sees all that there is to see and that ‘all’ is the natural world and only the natural world. So he fantasizes about the natural black savage and makes him the Crown King of the natural world.

Richard Weaver called science a false messiah, and Melville said that science was incapable of providing man with any answer to the riddle of existence. Yet modern man still believes that the men in the white lab coats hold the secrets of life and death. Modern scientific man is not a non-believer, he believes in everything except reality. He believes in the natural goodness of the black man, the perfectibility of mankind after the elimination of recalcitrant whites, and the life everlasting on this earth after the men in the white lab coats have completed their research.

The European of the ancient stock seems, to the liberals of the mad-dog and neo-pagan variety, to be an obstacle blocking the creation of the new world order. But the ancient European must remain undaunted in the face of every liberal attempt to destroy him, because the antique European and only the antique European knows there is only one world order and that is His world order, which He, because of a love that passeth all understanding, invites us to share with Him.

The debates are now over. The battle lines have been drawn. The liberals are standing on the left bank of the river Science, and they are led by our ancient foe. We, the last Europeans, stand on the far shore with the dismal swamp behind us. One step back and we perish in despair. Surrounding us, unseen, are a legion of archangels ready to assist us in battle, or so our blood tells us. Yet we hesitate – after all we live in Liberaldom, and is not fear, doubt, and hesitation the mark of an ancient European living in Liberaldom? – But then there is Galahad and the legions of Europeans who followed him. They believed in the unseen God who spoke through the blood. Our blood calls us then. And soon we are amongst the enemy. They fall like wheat before the scythe. Faith was all. Once the internal battle was won, victory on the actual battlefield was assured. Let there be sung “Non nobis” and “Te Deum.”

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(1) What writers such as Chesterton could not envision was a Europe where Europeans would be a tiny minority. In the past, European renewals occurred because Christendom was still European. In the 21st century, Europeans need to do more than renew; they must rebuild Christendom.