The Whiteman at Bay

I do not subscribe to the traditionalist Catholic viewpoint of history which claims that the 13th century was the apogee of Christian civilization, followed by a steady decline in every subsequent century. Nor do I agree with the Protestants who view all of European history prior to the Reformation as the age of darkness, in contrast to the post-Reformation age of light. I have a personal preference (for reasons I have stated in an earlier article) for the 19th century, but I see all of European man’s history, prior to the 20th century, as a successful effort, the only successful effort in the history of mankind, to keep Satan at bay. And by saying that, I do not mean to suggest that Satan has not had his individual successes within European civilization. What I am affirming is that Europeans, despite the onslaughts of Satan, had maintained a civilization that acknowledged the light of the world and were aware of their obligations to stay focused on that light.

All dates on a matter such as the decline of the West are arbitrary, but I think 1914 is a fairly accurate date to use when we are talking about the point in history when Satan was no longer being kept at bay. He was loose. And by the mid-1960’s he had institutionalized his values throughout all of Christian Europe. So now the white Christian male is being kept at bay by Satan.

As one who is opposed to the reign of Satan, I am concerned about the failure in the last fifty years of every European counterattack. It would seem, judging by the recent European failures to uproot him, that Satan is very difficult to uproot once he has taken up residence in a civilization. But is he invincible? Our ancestors’ success against him indicates that he is not.

What then do we lack that our ancestors had? We lack the heroic, integral way of responding to adversity. We no longer see an evil and say, “this must not go on,” (1) and strike out at the evil. Instead, we form “think tanks” and study groups. We spend years of fruitless effort in trying to get someone elected who will address the particular evil we are trying to combat. In short, we are Hamlet prior to his conversion from confused graduate student to the lawful King of Denmark. We are “crawling around between heaven and earth.”

Satan wants European man to see life as an intelligence test in which the person with the highest score wins. But when we perceive life as Satan does, we always lose. We lose because we are not angelic beings. When we abstract our minds from our blood, we become like unto Satan, because when we abstract, we “believe a lie.”

To abstracted reason, evil appears good because it seems pleasurable, while virtue appears evil because it seems painful. In order to discover that the reverse is true, mankind must resist the pleasures in which their abstracted minds encourage them to indulge and perform the virtuous deeds that their blood, animated by His spirit, calls on them to perform. I have known women who rejected motherhood because they could not stand the idea of pain. And yet what mother does not rejoice when she gives birth? In Shakespeare’s poem, “The Rape of Lucrece,” Sextus Tarquinius cannot resist his idée fixe; he must have the fair Lucrece. With what result?

Even in this thought through the dark night he stealeth,
A captive victor that hath lost in gain;
Bearing away the wound that nothing healeth,
The scar that will, despite of cure, remain;
Leaving his spoil perplex'd in greater pain.
She bears the load of lust he left behind,
And he the burden of a guilty mind.
He like a thievish dog creeps sadly thence;
She like a wearied lamb lies panting there;
He scowls and hates himself for his offence;
She, desperate, with her nails her flesh doth tear;
He faintly flies, sneaking with guilty fear;
She stays, exclaiming on the direful night;
He runs, and chides his vanish'd, loath’d delight.

Our ancestors who built Christian Europe lived life in the heroic mode. They did not feel called upon to match wits with the devil. They felt called upon to defend their souls and their civilization from the onslaughts of the devil. The Christian hero cares only about one thing: Is his cause God’s cause? And if it is, he sallies forth and leaves the rest to God.

There's a special Providence in the fall of a sparrow.
If it be now, 'tis not to come: if it be not to
come, it will be now: if it be not now,
yet it will come; the readiness is all.
Since no man has ought of what he
leaves. What is't to leave betimes?

Every society has men of courage. But it takes more than courage to maintain a Christian civilization or to mount a counterattack against a satanic civilization. It takes courage and vision. And the “vision thing” of which George Bush senior was so dismissive is what has been lacking and is still lacking in the ranks of the far right.

Twenty-five years ago I would have called the abortion issue the central issue of our times. But now I see that legalized abortion is the result of the anti-European ethos of the modern world. Anti-European whites legalized it and anti-European whites and barbarians of color constitute the unholy alliance that maintains legalized infanticide. Thus, the central issue is the restoration of Christian Europe. From that restoration will come the restoration of laws protecting babies in their mother’s wombs and other laws necessary for the welfare of a Christian people. But first there must be a restoration. And that is why the Sons of Martha should never and can never lead a counterrevolutionary movement. The Sons of Martha always get lost in the household details of the movement and lose sight of the real issue of the war. The restoration of white civilization, for instance, cannot be divorced from the issue of the restoration of Christian civilization. But the Sons of Martha divorce the two. They see that there are professed white Christians maniacally opposed to white Europeans and that there are professed white Christians who are in favor of segregation and white sovereignty in white countries. So instead of trying to ascertain who are the true Christians, they treat Christianity as a washout and look for a more practical way to bring people to the banner of White Europe. But in doing so, they leave their movement without a metaphysic.

This fact was made abundantly clear to me a few years back when I read an article by an American Son of Martha in a right-wing British magazine called The Spearhead. The author maintained that white people needed a religion of their own to replace Christianity if they were going to combat the anti-European forces arrayed against them. In his Son of Martha logic, religion was something one could simply pick up for pragmatic purposes. “We need a religion to beat the barbarians – let’s buy one at the religion store.” It doesn’t work that way, of course. European man has a religion, he has the religion, and it has always been his religion. When the barbarian truly converts to the white man’s religion, he supports the white hierarchy. In Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s encyclopedic work on Europe, he tells in the chapter on Britain of an old Indian (the real India) who wistfully yearns for the return of the British Rajah. That old man is the British equivalent of Uncle Remus.

The good news for white folk is that the Sons of Mary have not yet begun to fight. The liberals and the barbarians have only beaten the Sons of Martha. But the bad news is that the Sons of Martha show no signs of stepping down and recognizing that the “impractical” Sons of Mary are the only men who have the vision to lead a successful counterrevolution. The Sons of Martha do not believe that “without vision the people perish.” They believe that what rationalism has destroyed, namely Western civilization, rationalism can restore. ‘Tis not so, it never has been, and it never will be. Only a faith that holds the purely rational, the purely empirical, and the purely scientific in contempt can hope to breach the walls and eventually capture and destroy Castle Babylon. +
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(1) Squeers caught the boy firmly in his grip; one desperate cut had fallen on his body--he was wincing from the lash and uttering a scream of pain--it was raised again, and again about to fall--when Nicholas Nickleby, suddenly starting up, cried 'Stop!' in a voice that made the rafters ring.

'Who cried stop?' said Squeers, turning savagely round.

'I,' said Nicholas, stepping forward. 'This must not go on.'

'Must not go on!' cried Squeers, almost in a shriek.

'No!' thundered Nicholas.

Aghast and stupefied by the boldness of the interference, Squeers released his hold of Smike, and, falling back a pace or two, gazed upon Nicholas with looks that were positively frightful.

'I say must not,' repeated Nicholas, nothing daunted; 'shall not. I will prevent it.'

Squeers continued to gaze upon him, with his eyes starting out of his head; but astonishment had actually, for the moment, bereft him of speech.

'You have disregarded all my quiet interference in the miserable lad's behalf,' said Nicholas; 'you have returned no answer to the letter in which I begged forgiveness for him, and offered to be responsible that he would remain quietly here. Don't blame me for this public interference. You have brought it upon yourself; not I.'

'Sit down, beggar!' screamed Squeers, almost beside himself with rage, and seizing Smike as he spoke.

'Wretch,' rejoined Nicholas, fiercely, 'touch him at your peril! I will not stand by, and see it done. My blood is up, and I have the strength of ten such men as you. Look to yourself, for by Heaven I will not spare you, if you drive me on!'

'Stand back,' cried Squeers, brandishing his weapon.

'I have a long series of insults to avenge,' said Nicholas, flushed with passion; 'and my indignation is aggravated by the dastardly cruelties practised on helpless infancy in this foul den. Have a care; for if you do raise the devil within me, the consequences shall fall heavily upon your own head!'

He had scarcely spoken, when Squeers, in a violent outbreak of wrath, and with a cry like the howl of a wild beast, spat upon him, and struck him a blow across the face with his instrument of torture, which raised up a bar of livid flesh as it was inflicted. Smarting with the agony of the blow, and concentrating into that one moment all his feelings of rage, scorn, and indignation, Nicholas sprang upon him, wrested the weapon from his hand, and pinning him by the throat, beat the ruffian till he roared for mercy.

--Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

Whatever Happened to Personality?

“Modern critics say that Charles Dickens exaggerated. He did not. He happened to live in a world that had not heard of standardization in men or material. What we now call eccentricity was in his day the normal expression of a man’s personality; it was an unself-conscious world; a world in which a man was not afraid of being himself. To-day, even in remote villages, outside influences react on a man and tend to whittle down personality to a common denominator. Here and there, however, tucked away in unlikely places, you may find the last outposts of the Dickens world…”

-- H. V. Morton in The Call of England

Hatred of the Past

As a general rule I do not like the science fiction genre in film or literature, but there is a powerful image that has stayed with me for many years from the movie Fahrenheit 451. The hero of the film, having lived in a society that banned all books, comes to the realization that he has been robbed of the past. And without the past, he is present-bound -- bound to the mindset of the present, the mores of the present, and the vision of the present. He sets out to correct his Prometheus-bound condition by reading old books, declaring that he must reconstruct the past. It is a wonderful moment when the hero sits down at a table and starts to read David Copperfield.

Now in the movie, the present and future are made triumphant over the past by the actual banning of books written in and about the past. But I would maintain that our current present-and-future-oriented society has succeeded in destroying man’s consciousness of the past more thoroughly, because it has been done more subtly than any futuristic totalitarian society ever spawned from the mind of a science fiction writer.

And it is not a question of right-wing or left-wing. Both wings have burned the past from modern man’s mind and heart. But they have not done it in the way the sci-fi books generally depict it. They have not suppressed all knowledge of the past and all access to the past as the futuristic sci-fi societies do. Instead they have killed the past by demonizing it, in the case of the left-wing, and de-Christianizing it, in the case of the right-wing.

Let’s start with the left-wing. The most deplorable anti-Christian way to treat history is the modern way. Our “historians” treat all those individuals who have lived before us as convenient stepping stones that lead to us, the most advanced and superior of creatures. Of course, those who come after us will be more advanced and superior than we are. And on it goes, with the last generation on earth being the supreme generation everybody else has worked and labored to bring forth. This process, supported by professed Christians, is the most un-Christian of concepts because it denies the individual personality. No human being, in the Christian scheme of things, is a stepping stone for another human being’s progress. He is a personality, supreme in his own right, and of infinite value and worth to the personal God who created him. Dickens, one of the great giants of world literature, expressed the Christian view of personality so well in The Tale of Two Cities:

“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?”

In the modern leftist view of history, the past is evil. Individuals from the past are only good to the extent that they were forerunners for the future. Thus in literary circles one hears this: “Mr. Old Fogey wrote in silly times but there was a suggestion of bisexuality in his works that helped pave the way for our modern writers.” In politics: “Women were mostly repressed in those days but the actress Susie Q. Slut was very promiscuous thus paving the way for the sexual liberation of women today.” In the Church: “Christians in those days were generally racists but Father O’Shea performed biracial marriages and supported integration thus paving the way…” And so on and so on...

So the past is used as a morality play for the present. You will be condemned if you are not progressive and forward-looking. Hence, the thing to be is future-oriented. One must always be looking forward to the latest perversion in religion, in politics and in science, in order that one can embrace it and not appear to be backward and unprogressive and therefore damned.

The right-wing, like the left-wing, condemns the past. But where the left-wing condemns the past as evil and the individuals from the past as sinful, the right-wing condemns the past as disordered and the individuals from it as weak. They also look to the future, but unlike the left, they look to a future that has been ordered by the mind of Aristotle and the discipline of the Romans. They, like the leftists, only praise individuals from the past whom they see as forerunners of their vision of the future. Thus right-wingers look to writers who were Christian with a small c and pagan with a capital P as their heroic forerunners.

But to live in either the left-wing’s or the right-wing’s past-hating world is to live in oblivion. St. Paul stated the Christian case for all of us when he declared, “For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself. For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord;” Hence to be cut off from the past as a living, breathing thing is to be cut off from Christ; the future-worshipping societies of the right and left are Christless. If one does not read Walter Scott or LeFanu in order to receive a breath of the wholesome Christianity of the 19th century but only to see if, on any issue, Scott or LeFanu were forerunners of the modern era, then one has entered the future world where there is no future. Christ and only Christ transcends the past, present, and future. To live outside his reign of charity is to have no past, no present, and no future. That’s where Star Wars and Aristotle put us – outside His reign of charity, without a home in this universe or any other.