Against the Flood

Enter Pericles, wet.

[stage direction from Shakespeare’s Pericles.]

After 1965 a good movie in line with the values held dear by antique Europeans was as statistically rare as white on black crime. The statistical rarities were usually adaptations of European literary works written before the demise of the white man. Branagh’s Henry V (his only good adaptation of a Shakespeare play), John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King, based on Kipling’s story, and Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew were a few of the statistical exceptions. Before 1965, the movies were 90% supportive of the essential Europe and 10% against. After 1965, they were 100% against, with the occasional exception, which did not occur with sufficient frequency to constitute a percentage point.

When I say that the pre-1965 movies were supportive of the essential Europe, I do not mean to say that there were not signs of a weakening of the European walls. On the racial issue, for instance, there was a growing tendency in the 1950’s to depict the Indian as simply a pigmented white man with the same values as a white man. The horrific aspects of the Indians’ culture were often down-played. In the Western titled Yellow Tomahawk, for example, Rory Calhoun, the scout for a cavalry unit, moralistically informs a settler that, “Indians love their people just as much as you love yours.” Oh really? Then why did they kill the sickly infants and let the elderly members of their tribes starve or freeze to death? (1) But even in that Western, the hero ultimately declares that “I’ll stand by my race.” With the exception of one movie, Arrowhead, starring Charlton Heston, which actually focused on the bestial savagery of the Indians, the pre-1965 Westerns were weak on the racial issue. They were not anti-European though. The heroes in the movies were the white men who lived up to the code of chivalry that was nurtured in Europe and born in a manger in Bethlehem.

The black man was also, like the Indian, regarded as a pigmented white man in the pre-1965 movies. And such a view was false, but the white man in the older movies was still depicted in a heroic light and his civilization was presented as the only civilization. In Zulu (1960), the black savages are invested with a nobility they did not possess, but it is the white British soldiers who are the heroes. And in the movie Safari (1956), the Mau Maus are depicted as the villains and the whites as the heroes. After 1965, the reverse was true.

So in the main the popular movies from the 1930’s to 1965 were supportive of white European civilization, but they presented the erroneous view that the colored peoples could be brought into the white fold. The naive, “they are just like us under the skin” view of the colored people was the leak in the European dike.

In the mid-1960’s the leak in the dike became a flood, and the notion that there had ever been anything good or noble in white people or their civilization was washed away in an anti-European flood.

At first there was only a tiny minority of Europeans who welcomed the flood, while the vast majority denied it was a flood. “It’s just a little cleansing, necessary at times; Europe is still Europe.” Then when the flood reached epic proportions, the Europeans who had called the flood a cleansing moved to the safe, high ground (but not the morally high ground) with the anti-Europeans and claimed that Europe had to be flooded; it was evil.

A few Europeans, statistical non-entities, refused to leave the flooded Europe. They are still trying to salvage something from the flood waters that will help them maintain a link to old Europe. And then, when a patch of dry land is found, the European will emerge from the waters, wet, but determined to rebuild Europe.

To date, after forty-five years of flooding, I’ve seen no European salvage operation that has brought up, from the depths of the flood waters, anything that was part of essential Europe. The salvagers all seem to be formalists who are only concerned with those aspects of the older European culture that can be studied, catalogued, and used to help the formalist in his particular discipline. Thus the theologian wants to preserve the Greek philosophical tradition, the conservative wants to preserve 19th century capitalism, and the Christian layman is only concerned with salvaging the church buildings in which to sing the praises of the new black gods.
Something more than outward dross needs to be preserved if the European is to come into his own again. The bards of ancient Europe, who are the true historians, all bear witness to something unique about the European. (2) He was not satisfied with the perfectly formed but spiritually shallow culture of the Greeks, nor did he remain content with the Egyptian night of the savage cultures. The European had that within which passeth show; he needed to climb glass mountains and slay dragons in the name of a God above the gods.

It is utter madness to seek refuge from the anti-European flood waters on the dry shores of multi-racial universalism or in the mind-forged prisons of neo-pagan utopia. Go to the past, ride with Forrest, stand with the men at Rourke’s Drift, walk the mountain path with Tell and make the ascent of the glass mountain. We begin the ascent in Europe’s green and sacred land, thinking the land beyond the glass mountain will be something strange and wonderful. Well, it is wonderful but it is not strange. Having made the ascent in the attempt to find His land, we discover that His land is our land; it is Europe before the anti-European tidal wave.

“We who are about to die demand a miracle.” The same God who delivered the Israelites from bondage will deliver us from the anti-European flood waters if we invoke that God by staying faithful to the European essentials, those virtues that come from the European hearth: faith, and loyalty to one’s kith and kin.

Because the Europeans took Christ as their King and kinsman, Christianity is in the blood of the European. Even when he is a blaspheming Marxist, evolutionist, or race-mixer, the European couches his heresies in Christian terms. And infinitely better, when the European ceases to blaspheme and actually remembers things past, he sees in his mind’s eye a small remnant band of believers who survived a flood and rebuilt a civilization.

The Christian bards often use a near fatal drowning to symbolize the rebirth of a civilization. In Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Pericles and his wife Thaisa survive separate shipwrecks and are eventually reunited with the sure and certain hope of reestablishing their kingdom.

This, this. No more, you gods!
Your present kindness
makes my past miseries sports.
You shall do well
That on the touching of her
lips I may
Melt and no more be seen. O,
come, be buried
A second time within these arms.

To once again embrace Christian Europe? She lives in the depths. All that is needful to bring her to the surface again is Europeans who still love eternal Europe and hate liberaldom in all of its many guises. +

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(1) Paganism comes in different guises, but it always ends with the same result: the slaughter of the innocents. Now that the liberals have rejected Christianity and returned to paganism in a technological and secular humanitarian guise, they are killing the old and the very young just like the red Indian and the black barbarian.

(2) The original purpose of poetry is either religious or historical, or, as must frequently happen, a mixture of both. To modern readers, the poems of Homer have many of the features of pure romance; but in the estimation of his contemporaries, they probably derived their chief value from their supposed historical authenticity. The same may be generally said of the poetry of all early ages. The marvels and miracles which the poet blends with his songs, do not exceed in number or extravagance the figments of the historians of the same period of society; and, indeed, the difference betwixt poetry and prose, as the vehicles of historical truth, is always of late introduction. Poets, under various denominations of Bards, Scalds, Chroniclers, and so forth, are the first historians of all nations. The intention is to relate the events they have witnessed, or the traditions that have reached them; and they clothe the relation in rhyme, merely as the means of rendering it more solemn in the narrative or more easily committed to memory.