After the Hangover

The spirit of chivalry had in it this point of excellence, that, however overstrained and fantastic many of its doctrines may appear to us, they were all founded on generosity and self-denial, of which, if the earth were deprived, it would be difficult to conceive the existence of virtue among the human race. – Walter Scott

For a recent birthday my children gave me a complete set of the old TV comedy Car 54, Where Are You? I found the episodes to be just as funny now as when I was young. And it struck me while watching those old shows that a comedy like Car 54 could not be made today. At the time Car 54 was written, European Americans, like their European counterparts, were still in the “Christian Hangover” stage of their existence; they no longer took Christianity seriously as a faith, but the vast majority still took the ethics that stemmed from Christianity seriously. In consequence the humor in shows like Car 54 occurred within a world where the sanctity of marriage and the virtue of chastity were unquestioned, male friendships were not homosexual, and the good-hearted boob always triumphed over the sneering, heartless intellectual. But Car 54 was at the end of the Christian Hangover era. Modern man was about to emerge on the stage of history, devoid of even a Christian hangover. O brave new world!

The post-Christian era, in which Satan uses the forms of the Christian faith to subvert the Christian faith, is the era of the intellectual sneer. Everything noble is sneered at, and everything base is exalted. Our comedies are so filthy and degenerate that no citizen of the original Sodom or Gomorrah could sit through them without being disgusted. Our drama’s are devoid of sense, soul, and drama. And our churches have outstripped even the heathen in their worship of the heathen. And what or who is behind this plethora of filth? Is it the Jew? No, the Jew aids and abets the filth, but he is not its source. Satan, our ancient foe, is the architect of the brave new world. He was miserable in Christian Europe and uncomfortable in the Europe of the Christian Hangover. Now he is comfortable, to the extent that such a restless spirit can be comfortable.

Walter Scott, in his introduction to Quentin Durward, gives us an excellent portrait of the sneering intellect who presides over hell and over our modern day post-Christian Europe:

Among those who were the first to ridicule and abandon the self-denying principles in which the young knight was instructed, and to which he was so carefully trained up, Louis the XIth of France was the chief. That Sovereign was of a character so purely selfish—so guiltless of entertaining any purpose unconnected with his ambition, covetousness, and desire of selfish enjoyment, that he almost seems an incarnation of the devil himself, permitted to do his utmost to corrupt our ideas of honour in its very source. Nor is it to be forgotten, that Louis possessed to a great extent that caustic wit which can turn into ridicule all that a man does for any other person’s advantage but his own, and was, therefore, peculiarly qualified to play the part of a cold-hearted and sneering fiend.

In this point of view, Goethe’s conception of the character and reasoning of Mephistopheles, the tempting spirit in the singular play of “Faust,” appears to me more happy than that which has been formed by Byron, and even than the Satan of Milton. 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 tranquillity. 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.

Scott has shown us the way the Evil One undermines a Christian civilization. He does not attack in manly fashion, with a direct challenge. There are no devilish gauntlets thrown in the face of Christian warriors. Instead, the devil uses his “depreciating spirit and caustic wit” to undermine the Creator by destroying the image of God in man. The devil supports everything that dehumanizes man. By zigzags and parallels he attacks every aspect of man’s life on earth that makes him feel, “A personality stands here.”

The dehumanizing and depersonalizing program has proceeded at an accelerated pace since the European left Christendom for Satandom. Once the elite palace guards left their posts, there was no longer any reason why Satan and his minions had to refrain from attacking and destroying the European castle.

The demise of Christian civilization always begins with the satanic sneer. In Eden the sneering devil told Adam and Eve that they would not die. “That was just moralistic God talk.” Liberals today mimic their master; if you love your race and kin, you are sneeringly labeled a white racist; if you protest the torture-murder of your people, you are told, “to cry me a river”; if you protest the murder of the innocents in the womb, you are a sexist; if you protest democratic tyranny, you are a fascist. All the venom of the liberals is spewed out with a satanic sneer. The self-proclaimed lovers of humanity hate humanity. Their generic love for the rights of women, the black race, and democratic humanity is a subterfuge for their hatred of the human personality. Anytime there is any manifestation of the one culture that stressed the infinite value of the non-generic human personality, the liberals go berserk and seek to crush that manifestation. Because the slaughter of innocents, the worship of black people, and the implementation of a draconian, secular democracy, is so antithetical to the values of a Christian European, the liberals must be merciless in their suppression of any European opposition to their brave new world.

The hazy, lazy days of the Christian hangover, during which we shared some values if not the same faith with our fellow Europeans, are over. The conservatives, the mad-dog liberals, the halfway-house Christians, and the neo-pagans want us to fade away. And if we refuse to fade away, they will gladly, in the name of racial equality, democratic humanity, and the rights of women, have us exterminated.

When Solzhenitsyn came to the West in the 1970’s he stated that the most striking thing about the European people was their lack of courage. And of course Solzhenitsyn was not saying that there were not any Europeans left who would rush into a burning building to save a child or face a firing squad without flinching; he was talking about the courage to defend one’s people against an implacable enemy. In order to have the latter type of courage a people have to be a people. They must feel bound to their people by ties of faith and race. The problem with the Europeans is that they don’t believe they are a people and they do not have a faith.

The colored people of the world do have a faith. They believe in their race as a herd, and they worship the aggregate power of the herd. The European was never able to convert the non-European people to the faith that revered an individual’s race because it was part of a man’s personality, which was connected to a personal God. The halfway-house Christians who deny a man’s race is part of his personality have already said in their hearts there is no personal God, only an abstract God who rules an abstract utopia created by the mind of the liberal.

As Scott pointed out in his introduction to Quentin Durward, the devil destroys a man’s faith by making all the human bridges to Christ things of ridicule. When we hear halfway-house Christians such as Thomas Fleming mock white people for wanting to protect and defend their own, or when the clergy tell us to shun our blood ties to our kith and kin in the name of a universal religion, we are hearing Satan speak. There is no higher religion than the religion of the God-Man, who revealed Himself to mankind through the provincial, human things that all the modern, authoritative voices want us to abandon. The European’s answer is ‘no.’ He will not abandon the European hearth, because that is where his heart is, with his God. Outside of the European hearth there is nothing, no love, no virtue, and no charity. All is dark and deadly if we acquiesce to the liberals and consent to fade quietly away into the dark night. The heart revolts at such a surrender. And it is our hearts, filled with European prejudices that make us prefer our own to the stranger, honor to treachery, and Christ over Satan, which will take us through the dark night of Europe to a brighter day where we will see our Lord and kinsmen. +