Europe Regained

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.

-King Lear

About ten years ago, when my mother was still alive, she sent me the obituary of the man who had been my Little League manager. He was the type of man who would make a good subject for the old Reader’s Digest feature called “My Most Unforgettable Character.” Mr. Gulf was the only manager who didn’t have children on a team. His kids were all grown, but he stayed on as a volunteer umpire and a manager. When he died at 88, he had only been retired from Little League baseball for six years. Mr. Gulf was a tall, barrel-chested man with a gravel voice, but he was very patient with his charges and seemed to have grasped the fact, unlike some of the other adults involved with the Little League, that Little League baseball was supposed to help boys become men, in the ‘Battle of Waterloo and the playing fields of Eton’ sense. The Little League was not designed, in Mr. Gulf’s eyes, to help grown men become little boys again. To many of the parents and other managers Mr. Gulf was a figure of ridicule because he regularly sat on the edge of the dugout and spouted sport clichés. But he wasn’t comical to us, because Mr. Gulf actually believed in the clichés and his belief made us believe.

One of Mr. Gulf’s favorite axioms, which he delivered to every boy before he stepped up to the plate, was, “Son, you’ve got to believe that you can hit that ball. If you don’t believe in yourself, you’ll never get a hit.” A cliché? Not to Mr. Gulf and not to us. More often than not, we did hit the ball because Mr. Gulf made us believe we could hit. And it seems to me that the problem with the modern European man is that he no longer believes in himself. I don’t mean this in the blasphemous sense, in that a man should believe only in himself and in nothing outside himself; I mean it as an extension of Mr. Gulf’s ‘Battle of Waterloo and the playing fields of Eton’ metaphysic. The European used to believe that his culture was superior to every other culture, and that superiority, which came to him by the grace of God, entailed certain responsibilities, chiefly the responsibility of defending his race and his people against the onslaught of lesser breeds who were outside the law and did not know or respect the God of charity and mercy. Strength, vigilance, and unflinching loyalty to white culture was thought to be necessary because the European considered his race as the Christ-bearing race.

The modern European, to the extent that he has any strength, vigilance, or loyalty, expends it all in attacking the white race and the religion that was championed by the white race. There is no escaping that fact. Halfway house Christians will claim that they are just removing the bad European cultural baggage from Christianity and restoring the Christian faith to its original purity, but it is not difficult to see the disingenuousness of their claim. Every single “improvement” on the European-centered Christianity is in line with liberalism; not the gospel of Jesus Christ, the God of the antique Europeans. The new spirit of inclusion is not an improvement; it is a dethronement of Christ. The new cult of Negro worship is not an advance; it is a blasphemous capitulation to the lowest form of paganism. And where in Scripture did Christ say that it was permissible to make Him subordinate to the democratic process?

The new Christianity is not Christianity. Those who equate Christianity with an organized, philosophical system or a social club will follow the new anti-Christian Christianity to its logical conclusion, which is hell. But the Europeans who yearn for a God of charity and mercy above the nature gods will still seek the Son of God. The problem facing the drug-soaked, sex-crazed, nihilistic European, who still feels a void in his soul, is that the Christ he sees before his eyes is a liberal Christ. He needs to seek out the same hovel that Lear took refuge in. And there, in the hovel of spiritual desolation, he will see the Christ, not the Christ of the liberals, but The Christ, The Son of the Living God.

In one post I wrote, titled “The Gingerbread House,” I mentioned that the United States and the western European countries used the seductive form of the egalitarian heresy. They covered the books about the European past with monkey-vomit and told the lost souls of modernity that they were welcome to read that filth if they could stand the stench. By and large the confused modern turned from a past covered with monkey vomit. But some pilgrims were so desperate or possibly so cynical that they had to see the monkey vomit books for themselves. I was such an individual. And in those books whose covers were sprayed with the liberal monkey vomit of scorn, derision, and accusations of racism and infantilism, there was a compelling image of a God whom the European people used to worship. He was not the God of the modern, organized churches; He was not the God of the philosophers or the Negro-worshippers; He was Jesus of Nazareth, the Man of Sorrows, who took flesh and dwelt among us. This the antique European believed.

The antique European also believed in his eternal moment. He believed that what he did on this earth made a difference, because his blood was connected to a loving Savior who had forged a connection to His people more mystical and mysterious than the most devout devotee of the ancient mystery religions could conceive, and more intrinsically humane than any philosopher or moral theologian could possibly imagine. The liberal has convinced the European that he has no eternal moment, that there is no link between mortal man and a loving God. We are all, we Europeans of the old stock, in Hamlet’s position. We are born to set it right. We will not be played upon by liberals who are determined to pluck out our mystery by denying our blood connection to the living God:

Ham. I do not well understand that. Will you play upon this pipe?

Guil. My lord, I cannot.

Ham. I pray you.

Guil. Believe me, I cannot.

Ham. I do beseech you.

Guil. I know no touch of it, my lord.

Ham. ‘Tis as easy as lying. Govern these ventages with your finger and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most excellent music. Look you, these are the stops.

Guil. But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony. I have not the skill.

Ham. Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. ‘Sblood, do you think that I am easier to be play’d on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.

There is a world in those words, “Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.”

Just as Claudius sought to impose his world, based on adultery and fratricide, on Hamlet, so do the liberals seek to impose their world of Negro worship, infanticide, and Christ-less Christianity on the European. The grazers have accepted the legitimacy of the liberals’ world, but we few, we Europeans, will not accept their world. In our blood, which we have not forsaken, we have seen another and better world than Liberaldom.

The majority of the French people at the time of the French Revolution did not support the radicals who murdered the King, but the majority of French people had become grazers. They were indifferent to the ancient ideal of “I serve the King and the King serves Christ.” And no doubt the indifference of Louis XIV and Louis XV, not Louis XVI, to that ideal did much to breed the indifference. A small minority with conviction will always triumph over a majority of indolent grazers. This is why the polls constantly fool the conservatives. They take a poll among the grazers and find out that a majority favor older traditional values. “Behold!” the conservative exclaims, “We are turning the corner.” But the grazer is indifferent traditional. He would prefer his neighbor to be white, but he isn’t going to get upset if he is a Somalian; he doesn’t like the idea of homosexual marriage, but he isn’t going to lose any sleep over it so long as the network keeps showing football games. And on and on it goes. Has the white man really become such a creature of indolence that he can be played upon so easily by the liberals? Yes, he has become such a creature.

Virtually all white Europeans are liberals by what they acquiesce to. But liberalism still has only a minority of adherents who have given their hearts and souls to liberalism. If a European Hamlet emerges, he who has that within which passeth show, who is willing to attack liberalism, he will find that the walls of Liberaldom are not as impregnable as the liberals want us to believe. They are vulnerable to a passion for His Europe that is greater than their passion for Satan’s mind-forged walls of Liberaldom.

One of the many admirable aspects of Hamlet’s counter revolution was his complete unconcern as to whether the people, the grazers, were for or against him. He knew what his duty was and he did what his high calling demanded of him. We don’t know if any of the grazers will follow in our train if we attack Liberaldom, but by the same token we will never know if we don’t attack Liberaldom without any expectation of help from the grazers. There might be genuine heroes among the ranks of the grazers who are just in need of a heroic example. If the last Europeans do not act as Europeans they will truly be the last Europeans.

Last week I took my youngest children to an amusement park to enjoy the last rose of summer. While they were enjoying themselves on the rides, I ordered our hamburgers at the food stand. Ordering food at the same time were some liberal ‘care providers’ (liberals can always be identified) for a large group of retarded young adults and older adults. As the retarded people sat waiting for their food, they started yelling the f-word at each other. The care providers didn’t ask them to stop; in fact they seemed quite amused. I went up to the care providers and told them I wanted them to tell their charges to stop screaming the f-word as my children would soon be coming to eat their lunch at a nearby table. The care providers told me what was obvious, that their charges were retarded. Then they went on to explain that we all had to understand that retarded people had to be treated differently than other people; “we must make allowances” etc. But who teaches retarded people to yell the f-word across a crowded room? The liberal care providers do, by their smiling acquiescence. It is just as uncompassionate to allow retarded adults to wallow in moral filth as it is to allow them to sit in soiled diapers. I never remember retarded people screaming obscenities when I was growing up. They take their cue from their leaders.

The white grazers that I see every day remind me of those retarded people. They take their cue from the liberals and say and do horrendous things. But what if some Europeans would emerge and present a different example for the grazers to follow? Would miracles occur? We don’t know. But we do know that truth needs to be embodied in a person. He taught us that. The hero, not the solecism or the platitude, is the European bridge to His Kingdom come. +

The Heroism of White Men

Andries Wilhelmus Jacobus Pretorius (b. November 27, 1798 – d. July 23, 1853)

The story of South Africa is that of two fine European peoples, as alike as two races can be, who have established their civilisation at great cost and with courage upon the tip of Africa. In spite of their unhappy schism they have managed to exert their sway over, and to accept responsibility for, a greater number of servants than any nation has been blessed or cursed with since the slave empires of antiquity. – In Search of South Africa by H. V. Morton

A new movie about Nelson Mandela, the murdering black thug who became a liberal saint, is coming out just in time for Christmas. All good white people will see the movie with their two quality children, or, if unmarried, with their significant other. Such movies are the life blood of the white liberal. Nothing delights them more than to further defile the corpse of Christian Europe. The movie will emphasize the goodness of the black South Africans and the evil of the white South Africans, thus completely distorting the reality of South Africa’s history.

The white South Africans can justly claim that no race of people, with the possible exception of the pre-Civil War southern whites of North America, has ever done more for another race of people than the white South African has done for the black South African. What took place in South Africa prior to black rule was a miracle of God’s grace, and the white Europeans were the conduits. It would be an unconscionable oversight if the story of South Africa was told without properly applauding the achievements of the white South Africans. But of course the story is told without lauding the white South Africans. They are not just ignored – that would be bad enough – they are made out to be the villains in the story. And this is what we should expect since Satan is the guiding light of white liberals. The South African story is now told from Satan’s perspective.

As late as the 1960’s, writers such as Anthony Jacob were praising South Africa for holding the line against American democratic egalitarianism and Russian Communism. But by 1994 the white South Africans had succumbed. Why? It was not because they were defeated in battle, and it was not because of any trade embargo by the democracies of the West. They were simply tired of being excluded from Western sporting events and being told they were the ‘bad guys.’ But they had been the bad guys for many years prior to 1994, and they didn’t capitulate. Then what was different in 1994? The difference was Faith. The white South Africans suffered from the same malaise as their fellow Europeans: they no longer believed, with sufficient fervor, in the Christian faith. Having lost their faith, they lost two essential qualities that are necessary to maintain a minority government against a hostile majority.

1) The fortitude to stand against the world and be unpopular. The Christian expects, because His God told him it would always be so, to be hated by the world. But his faith in Christ sustains him when the jackals of the world attack him for his fidelity to the cross. When the South Africans felt themselves to be fighting for a Christian civilization in the darkest region of the earth, they were strong, and no force or earth could defeat them. When they lost that faith they crumbled.

2) The ability to see reality. A Christian can see reality, but a liberal cannot. When the white South Africans were Christian, they could see that they were the only force that could prevent South Africa from descending into a hellish black nation dedicated to murder, torture, and demonism. But when they ceased to look at existence with the eyes of Christians, they saw reality as the Western liberals do. “Why can’t we have a Babylonian, mixed race paradise right here in South Africa? All that stands in our way is apartheid.”

If a European is not a Christian, he will be susceptible to utopian thinking – Communism, racial egalitarianism, neo-paganism, whatever ideology that looks to a future without God and without real human beings of flesh and blood.

The weakness of a white man without faith was brought home to me recently when I saw the neo-pagan Nick Griffith try to debate a group of anti-white British liberals. He tried to conciliate them and use the democratic jargon with which they were familiar, but it was to no avail. They believed in their godless faith more than Nick Griffith believed in his ‘equal rights for whites’ advocacy, and they had no interest in conciliating Nick Griffith.

We can’t ignore the one great similarity between the neo-pagan, the democratic egalitarian, and the communist-socialist. All three look to a Godless future where the traditional faith of the European is held in contempt. And we should not ignore the striking contrast between the successes of white Christian South Africans, in dealing with barbarians, and the lack of success of the Nick Griffiths and the post 1994 white South Africans. What is missing? The real Christianity.

H. V. Morton, in his book In Search of South Africa, tells of a typical Zulu massacre of whites.

Before the Boers realised what was happening, the Zulus had flung themselves upon them. Thomas Halstead cried, “We are finished!” “Treason!” “Help, O lord!” were other cries, as the seized men fought savagely with knives. Several Zulus were killed and others, maddened by knife-wounds, broke the command that no blood must be shed in the kraal as they clubbed some of the Boers to death on the spot. The rest, fighting and stabbing were over-powered and dragged away to the Hill of Execution. Above the screams, the howls, the chanting, and the rattle of spears against shields, was heard the great voice of Dingaan ordering the murder.

Just before this happened a Zulu knocked at the door of Owen’s mission station with a message from Dingaan. He bade Owen not to be frightened, but he was going to kill the Boers. Owen, who had been afraid for days, was wondering how he might risk death by warning the Boers, when someone in the room shouted, “They are killing the Boers now!”

“I turned my eyes and behold! an immense multitude on the hill,” he wrote in his Diary that evening. “About 9 or 10 Zulus to each Boer were dragging their helpless unarmed victim to the fatal spot, where those eyes which awaked this morning was to see the cheerful light of day for the last time, are now closed in death. I lay myself down on the ground. Mrs. and Miss Owen were not more thunderstruck than myself. We each comforted the other. Presently the deed of blood being accomplished the whole multitude returned to the town to meet their sovereign, and as they drew near to him set up a shout which reached the station and continued for some some time... At this crisis I called all my family in and read the 91st Psalm, so singularly and literally applicable to our present situation, that I could with difficulty proceed with it!”

The Boers died fighting hopelessly to the last. Retief was made to witness the death of his son and his followers. The young boys were killed with the others. The bodies were piled upon the hill of death, and over them were the bodies of the grooms and
attendants. The heart and liver of Retief were removed and taken to Dingaan so that he might look upon them. Over sixty Boers, one Englishman, and numerous attendants lay dead in the sunlight of that morning in February, and the vultures of Hlomo Amabuta came down from the sky.

And then he writes about the European response:

Under the leadership of a great Afrikaner, Andries Pretorious, who subsequently gave his name to the Transvaal capital, they formed a Commando of four hundred and sixty four men and set off to face an enemy who was numbered by tens of thousands. They took with them sixty-four ox-wagons. On the way they begged God to help them and vowed that if they were granted victory they would build a church and for ever keep the day of their triumph as a Holy Sabbath. Professor Uys tells me that while this vow was made, the laager was guarded by Englishmen.

The commando made contact with the enemy near the Zulu capital and formed a laager with a river at their back. In the morning the Zulus attacked and the Boers held their fire until the enemy was ten yards off, then a hail of elephant ball and buck-shot poured from the wagons. The battle lasted three hours and the Boer guns were smoking hot.

Then came the moment in the plan of a Boer battle which above all others rouses admiration. Bart Pretorious, the brother of the General, put himself at the head of a small body of horsemen and galloped out, the men levelling their hot gun-barrels and firing from the saddle. In the last of three charges the Boers managed to split the Zulu army. Seeing this, Andries Pretorious took command of three hundred horsemen and came galloping out of the laager. He rode straight into the gap between the Zulus, and then one section wheeled left, and the other right, and each began to press back and drive the now demoralised enemy in front of them. The rout became a headlong flight.

When the Boers rallied and assembled, and came back to the laager with their hot guns and their spent ponies, they saw that the river was red with Zulu blood; and its name on the map to-day is Blood River. If one sometimes suspects upon reading of these Homeric contests, that the casualties must have been estimated on a classical basis, there is at least firm authority for the statement that the Zulu dead at Blood River, which were carefully counted, numbered some three thousand.

H. V. Morton describes the battles as Homeric. But Homer in his wildest imagination could not have conceived of the heroism displayed by the Afrikaners, and the South South African English. And they kept their vow:

At Pietermaritzburg, which became the capital of the republic in Natal, they built a church; and to this day December 16, Dingaan’s Day, is a solem day of remembrance throughout the Union.

The reason the neo-pagans keep attempting to win whites over to neo-paganism is because they think they must have the strength of numbers in order to win battles. Since they don’t believe in the Christian God, they are unable to see that numbers do not ultimately determine the victor in battle. The great victories of Christian Europeans always came against a multitudinous majority. It is the singleness of purpose that comes from a common faith, and not numbers, that the Europeans need. They do not need “one man more” to fight their modern battle of Agincourt.

I know in my own life the only times I’ve ever approached the heroic mode was when I invoked my God. And if we look at the incredible history of the European people, we see that it was their God, the Christ, who inspired them to a level of heroism that the post-Christian man has never and will never come close to reaching.

The liberals have buried the cross of Christ fathoms deep in the ocean. They now sleep quite content in the knowledge that no European is capable of, or willing to, resurrect that cross. But the God who made the deaf hear and the blind see can also make heroes of ordinary men who still seek Him in their hearts. The faithful European will plunge the depths and bring His Cross to the surface again. And then? The European Phoenix will rise from the ashes of neo-pagan despair and suicidal liberalism and bear witness to the world that it is only through His Cross that a people can overcome the world. +

The European Rose

In a recent phone conversation with my father, he made the remark that he was sick of blacks screaming about discrimination. Now, this might seem like a rather mild protest to those of us on the Kinist right-wing, but it came as quite a shock to me because my father has been a good American liberal for his entire 80+ years on this earth. He never used the 'N' word in his life, he honors Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and he regularly worships black athletes. In fact it was the accusations of racism behind the shooting death of some black football player, by blacks, that finally elicited a protest from my father.

My father is not going to become a Kinist; he has not seen the light, but if my father is expressing mild indignation about the never-ending scolding of white people, then there must be a significant number of white people, not as liberal as my father, who are feeling something akin to rage. It would be a wonderful thing to see that rage turned into a counterrevolution, but that is not going to happen because 1) most of the enraged white people are disenfranchised, and 2) those who are not disenfranchised are afraid to reveal their anger lest they become disenfranchised.

Twice in the last week I have seen the words "wake up" used in reference to the colored invasion. The first instance was in a back issue (1979) of what the liberals would call a 'racist' publication. The magazine asserted in one article that white people were beginning to "wake up." And the second instance was when I heard Pat Buchanan call his new book on the immigration problem a "wake up call." Now, I have nothing against "wake-up call" books or magazine articles; they are helpful and necessary. But I think all the whites who can be awakened have already been awakened. And those whites include the fearful enfranchised whites who are afraid of being "outed" and the disenfranchised whites. What those whites need more than information about the colored invasion is empowerment. They need some means to fight back against the five citadels of power.

What is implicit in the "give them more information" books and articles is that white Europeans must look to some political candidate who supports the white Europeans' interests. But this is not an option for the white European. Let's look at the current presidential candidates. Only two candidates, Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo, are seriously against illegal immigration. And they are not even talking about stopping all non-white legal immigration and rebuilding a segregated nation. So a victory for Tancredo or Ron Paul would only be a tactical, delaying-type of victory; it would not even be a major first step in a successful counterrevolution. And this is the very best we can hope for if we follow the implicit advice of the "get out the information" publications. So we come back to the issue of empowerment. There are enough white people aware of and angry about the colored invasion to stop it if they had power, but they do not have any power. And until that fact changes, information books and articles will not help.

I think white people are doomed to the same fate as Sisyphus if they continue to look on politics as the key to empowerment rather than seeing it as the final denouement of a far greater power struggle. Regarding politics as a thing in and of itself is tantamount to seeing with and not through the proverbial eye.

Although it often seems that politicians are not born of mortal women but instead come straight from the bowels of hell, they are indeed mortal. Their beliefs are formed in the society in which they live. And once those beliefs are formed, they seek to impose those beliefs on others through political means. So the real source of power in a society is the institution or institutions that determine belief.

I would argue that there is only one institution in our society that determines belief, and that is the Academy. And what about the Church? There is no longer any Church; she has been absorbed by the Academy. Throughout Western man's history there has been a conflict between Athens and Jerusalem. Churchmen differed through the centuries over the compatibility of the two. They killed each other in disputes over the matter. But all is peaceful now because Athens has triumphed. Yes, we still have churches, but they only echo and rubber-stamp what the Academy says. Belief is determined by the Academy. And the Academy has determined that the older, Christian, European culture is evil.

A sizeable minority of disenfranchised working class whites and unemployed whites have not been completely converted by the Academy. They could become part of a white counterrevolution, but they are leaderless. The tiny minority of enfranchised white collar whites who do not share the beliefs of the Academy are the people who should lead the counterrevolution, but they remain in silent disagreement with the Academy lest they become disenfranchised themselves. And the ones who do speak out only recommend actions that are acceptable to the Academy, which places white people in the position of merely voting for a political candidate, such as Ron Paul, whose candidacy constitutes a rear-guard, delaying tactic to cover up a retreat, and not a full-scale counter attack.

A rear-guard, delaying action is noble; a retreating army needs men willing to be the rear guard. But it is suicidal to regard a rear-guard action as an offensive attack, and that is what we do when we place all our hopes in rear-guard political candidates. The political arena is a very narrowly focused arena. The Academy has triumphed, and it is not going to let anyone enter the arena who suggests policies that diverge too sharply from the political views of the Academy. There has been a successful revolution; it will take more than electoral victories to defeat the institutionalized forces of the revolution.

European civilization was built on the concept of church and hearth. Non-European societies had sacrificial altars and tribal dwellings; they did not have churches and hearths. But Satan made a covenant with the Uncle Silas's of the West and created an Academia Satania that has absorbed church and hearth. And the enraged, confused, disenfranchised, white man looks for a hero willing to strike back against the seemingly invincible dragon of Academia Satania.

The European Hero will be an intelligent man, but he will not be an intellectual. He will be a Christian, but he will not equate Christianity with one particular sect or one particular rite. He will be a man of blood and spirit. He will be spiritually in line with William Wallace and William Tell, but his people will not be just the Scottish people or just the Swiss people. His people will be white Europeans who do not worship the gods of the Academy.(1) The anti-white movement is an international movement, so the resistance will be an international movement as well.

The true European everyman's task is to remain loyal while waiting for the Hero. We must not become blasphemers and worshippers of the Golden Calf. It is not the U. S. Constitution, international law, or some economic system that sets the European apart from all other races. It is the hearth and church, sanctified by His blood, which sets the European apart. And that is what the Hero will fight for. And one hero will beget other heroes, and then we will once again see His blood upon the European rose.
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(1) It seems to me that if our souls are in the proper state to recognize a true European hero, we will also be in a proper state to recognize The Hero.

A Cross Can Be a Beautiful Thing

Ever since my third oldest son was knee-high to that old grasshopper, he has always wanted to know, whenever I showed a movie to the family, "Who is the hero?" It did my heart good when he asked that question, because I knew that a child with a thirst for heroes was heading in the right direction. And my son did not disappoint me. He has stayed with Walter Scott and P. C. Wren as he entered his teens.

Unfortunately the modern world is very much against heroes in general and against the particular heroes of my son. Why? Because my son's heroes are all knights of Christendom. Some might wear cowboy boots and a white hat instead of armor, but they are all heirs of King Arthur.

When conservatives talk about how we are turning the corner and winning the battle for the hearts of our young, I usually have to fight back the urge to vomit. American popular theater is the movies, and the type of movie hero that our young people pay money to see is not a Christian hero. This does not bode well for our already sick-beyond-belief nation, because only a hero can save us. But if we have lost our appetite for, and our belief in, genuine heroes, then it is quite probable if a true hero did emerge he would be rejected like the one who stands as the ultimate hero of Western culture. As Andrew Lytle tells us, "The hero's most perfect image is, of course, Christ, the man-God."

There are two types of heroes who appear in the modern movie, and neither is a Christian hero. The first type is the sensitive, politically correct man that emerged in the 1960s. He saves whales, fights racism and sexism, goes to sensitivity seminars, and has had a vasectomy. But the new liberal hero is a very dull bird. For the sake of the box office, he has been modified.

The second type of hero is the pagan-liberal. Liberals will allow Joe Sixpack to watch white men do some heroic punching, shooting, and derring-do under one or all of the following conditions:
1) The white hero must be fighting against politically incorrect bad guys such as Nazis (always popular), Klansmen, Southern sheriffs, sexists, Indian fighters, or fundamentalist Christians. Harrison Ford's character in Raiders of the Lost Ark is an example of a hero from that genre.
2) The white hero must have a black best friend who accompanies him and shares in the heroic deed-doing. Chuck Norris' Texas Ranger T.V. series and the older Magnum P.I. series are examples.
3) The white hero must have a female partner who is not feminine and who equals if not surpasses the male hero in every aspect of heroism. Fill in whatever movie you want in this category for they are legion.

The movies with white male heroes are few enough. And when the few ones that do have white male heroes depict them as defenders of liberaldom, the result is not good for the individual viewer or for society as a whole. Contrary to what the "We-are-turning-the-corner" conservatives say, you cannot have a public theater that glorifies only liberal heroes and expect conservative Christian principles to prevail.

I hold to the view that Christendom officially ended after the reign of Charles of Austria of the House of Hapsburg; Christendom had been declining for some time, but it officially ended then. However, remnants of a Christian worldview still survived in Europe and in this country until the 1960s.

Our own popular theater offers proof of the survival of some Christian instincts after the demise of Christendom and before 1965. Looking specifically at the Christian hero, one can see that Hollywood was not so dominated by liberal themes back then as it is now. Consider some of the movies that were once mainstream, popular movies: Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), Shane (1953), High Noon (1952), Ivanhoe (1952), The Quiet Man (1952), Stagecoach (1939), The Garden of Evil (1954), Gunga Din (1939), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Beau Geste (1939), The Fighting O'Flynn (1949), and the list goes on and on. What is distinctive in all of the movies listed, and hundreds of others from 1930 through 1965, is that the hero either implicitly or explicitly supports a Christian world view. True, Shane doesn't sermonize, but it is clear when he is advising Bob to grow up clean and straight, he is not advising him to grow up and become a Tibetan monk or a psychologist.

And in some of the movies, the hero makes it explicit. I must call your attention to a remarkable movie that features the actor who most often played a Christian knight – Gary Cooper. The movie I refer to is The Garden of Evil. Gary Cooper plays a former sheriff who finds himself in a bar in a no-where town in Central America. Enter a damsel in distress. Her husband is trapped in a mine shaft somewhere, surrounded by hostile Indians. She will pay a lot of money (it's a gold mine) to any man willing to help her rescue her husband. An assortment of no-goods and half-goods accompany her. We gradually find out that one, Gary Cooper, has not gone along for the money. We find out his real reasons for going, when late in the picture the wife, now a widow, looks for some reason why her husband was placed on a cross to be tortured to death by the Indians. I'm skipping much of the plot, but suffice it to say that Gary Cooper, without growing a halo and without excessive sentimentality, tells her, "A cross isn't always an ugly thing; it can be a beautiful thing. We all have one."

A simple 1950s pot-boiler? I don't think so. In the movie, Gary Cooper's character rose to heroic heights to which no modern movie hero could every come close. The heroes that inspire us, the stories we tell, are the real test of how our society stands. And our society doesn't stand; it wallows. Until we have heroes that once again see beauty on a cross, we will continue to wallow.

The Hero

Eugene O’Neill is one of American’s greatest playwrights. Although a professed enemy of all organized religion, his plays are permeated by Christianity. His characters are, like O’Neill himself, Christ-haunted and looking for redemption. Three of his later plays, “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” “Hughie,” and “A Touch of the Poet,” are especially well-written plays with great spiritual depths.

It is the play, “A Touch of the Poet” that I would like to use to begin a discussion of the hero. In the play there is one central character (Cornelius Melody) and two major supporting characters (Nora Melody, his wife, and Sara Melody, his daughter). Cornelius Melody had been a military hero in the old country. He now, at age forty-five, runs a tavern in Boston. The year is 1820. Talk of Andrew Jackson and the ‘common man’ is always in the air. Melody, however, will have none of that. He drinks alone and rides alone on a special charger. When he rises in the morning and feels depressed after a night of heavy drinking, he puts on his old military uniform and recites from Lord Byron in front of the mirror:

I have not loved the World, nor the World me;
I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed
To its idolatries a patient knee,
Nor coined my cheek to smiles, nor cried aloud
In worship of an echo; in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such – I stood
Among them, but not of them.

Cornelius Melody needs a vision of himself as a hero. No matter how low he sinks he can always face the world as long as he believes he is still the hero that he was at the battle of Talavera.

Through a long series of events, Con Melody ceases to see himself in a heroic light and is shattered by the experience. His daughter, who had always sneered at her father’s attempt to maintain his heroic image, is surprised to find that her view of existence is altered for the worse when her father ceases to believe in his own heroic image. And of course this was because she had always, despite her outward contempt, believed, in the deepest regions of her soul, that her father was a hero.

It is easy to deprecate Con Melody’s rather pathetic attempts at maintaining a heroic self-image. And O’Neill certainly doesn’t try to give us a happy ending to the play by showing us Con Melody making a successful ‘comeback’ attempt. But what O’Neill does is to lay bare an essential truth of existence: our religious vision, our raison d’etre so to speak, is tied up to our belief in, and our vision of, the Hero. If we lose that vision and belief, we have lost our faith.

I’ve commented on the demise of the Christian hero before, but I’m returning to the subject again because I believe it is of paramount importance. Our belief in heroes is linked to our belief in Christ himself. And I would submit to you that we do not believe in Christian heroes anymore. We have the straight liberal type like Gandhi (so admired by the late John Paul II) and the liberal-pagan type like Eastwood and Stallone, who use their male chromosomes in defense of liberal causes. But the Christian hero? He no longer walks down the ‘mean streets,’ which is why the back alley-type of mean streets have become the main streets, traveled by pagan punks, liberal leeches, and capitalistic carnivores.

The Christian hero springs from a culture that is either essentially Christian or from a culture that at least still has a positive image of a Christian society that used to exist. The Zorro figure in Johnston McCulley’s The Mark of Zorro (1919) springs from an imagination that remembers what a Christian hero should be. Only Walt Disney Studios (the real Disney) managed to recreate Zorro with his Christianity intact. What distinguishes the Christian hero from the modern, liberal and pagan heroes? Well, let’s look at McCulley’s Zorro.

First, Christianity is in his blood. Zorro doesn’t have to consult a moral theology book before he acts, because according to the code of chivalry or (to use the exact term which McCulley uses) the code of the cavalier, right and wrong are self-evident. Years of adhering to a tradition that is bred in the bone and in the blood have made an honorable man’s course of action clear.

For instance, when Captain Ramon insults Zorro’s swordsmanship, he is content, in contrast to the pagan hero who would kill for such an insult, to merely wound Ramon as punishment. But when Ramon dares to press his attentions on a Spanish lady, Zorro kills the disreputable captain, in contrast to the modern liberal Christian who knows nothing of chivalry and who thinks Christianity and pacifism are synonymous.

Zorro spares Ramon when only a personal insult is involved, and he kills him when the code of the cavalier has been breached. And he does all this without consulting an expert in moral theology or biblical exegesis. Wise blood is always superior to the syllogism. It is also more practical because when you carry your faith in your blood, your hands, unencumbered by heavy tomes of philosophy and theology, are free to carry a sword and dagger.

The second element of a Christian hero like Zorro that is not present in the modern liberal hero is a deep respect for the special mission of women. They are the life-bearers and the nurturers, as well as the inspiration for the hero. The female counterpart to the hero inspires by her fidelity to virtues of the hearth. The hero is the good woman’s support and comfort because he defends her rights as wife and mother. But he is seen as the hated oppressor by evil women because he denies them access to the world outside the hearth.

Try to find an image of the hero in any realm of the church or in the world today that excludes the female from the male realm; because not excluding her hurts the female as well as the male. “What about the priesthood?” you say. “Is the female not excluded from that role?” Yes, she is. But only for legal reasons. Christ was a male, so the church authorities have reluctantly kept the priesthood a male domain. But they have given away all the rest of the Pauline teaching. They have supported the role of women in secular society and in the church. They have not defended the women of the hearth nor have they attacked the dragon ladies who have abandoned the hearth.

And we also must distinguish between the Christian and Gnostic view of women. The Gnostic sects, such as the Society of St. Pius X, are spiritually akin to the Muslims, who hate femininity itself. Both deny the spiritual nature of women. They believe women must be kept out of the male sphere of action, not because they have an exalted calling in another sphere, but because their femininity is evil in itself. In their eyes, there is no legitimate Eros, there is only the evil, fleshly act. The act must be tolerated because male warriors and male priests are needed, but the sex that is most intimately connected to the fruits of intercourse must be denied their spiritual role as nurturers and fair ladies who inspire heroic deeds. There is an excess of sex in the Gnostic sects but there is no Eros, and the soul that goes to Gnostic heaven is a masculine one, but one devoid of true masculinity because it is without chivalry.

The third trait of the hero is that he has the ability to properly direct his efforts. He does not worship action in and of itself. His actions must support the reign of charity or else he will not act. The capitalist thinks the Christian hero is lazy because he will not compete in the free market arena. And the pagan considers him cowardly for refusing to enter the lists in order to prove his manhood. Like Don Diego Vega, the Christian hero fights only when issues that directly affect the reign of charity are involved. And then, Zorro rides.

It is important to note that the Christian man of action is not necessarily a military man. In times when the state is Christian, the hero fights for king and country, but when the state is at war with Christ, the Christian hero is an outlaw, such as Zorro, Rob Roy, and William Tell. No matter how bravely a man fights, he is not a hero if he places his sword at the service of an unholy cause.

And finally, whether the hero is Zorro, Shane, Forrest, or von Stauffenberg, he turns our face towards Him. By self-sacrifice, by putting the spiritual above the temporal, the hero, at the last trump, in the twinkling of the eye, when all hope seems gone, rescues us from a purely material vision of life which is death to the soul. The plight of Señorita Lolita Pulido illustrates this point. But to appreciate her dilemma we must try to imagine what it is like to be a Spanish maiden who actually believes death is preferable to the forced attentions of a man without honor, a man who is not a cavalier.

The señorita must be forgiven for lacking the modern enlightened notion that sex is mere friction and of little consequence one way or the other. She finds herself trapped and alone with the evil Captain Ramon.

She fought him, striking and scratching at his breast, for she could not reach his face. But he only laughed at her, and held her tighter until she was almost spent and breathless, and finally he threw back her head and looked down into her eyes.

“A kiss in payment, señorita!” he said. “It will be a pleasure to tame such a wild one.”

She tried to fight again, but could not. She called upon the saints to aid her. And Captain Ramon laughed more, and bent his head, and his lips came close to hers.

But he never claimed the kiss. She started to wrench away from him again, and he was forced to strengthen his arm and pull her forward. And from a corner of the room there came a voice that was at once deep and stern.

“One moment, Señor!” it said.

Captain Ramon released the girl and whirled on one heel. He blinked his eyes to pierce the gloom of the corner; he heard Señorita Lolita give a glad cry.

Then Captain Ramon, disregarding the presence of the lady, cursed, once and loudly, for Señor Zorro stood before
him.

When we get our last fatal illness we will all hope for a cure, a last minute reprieve from the clutches of death. But in our last illness, the reprieve will not come. Señor Zorro will not be there. Or will he? An embrace is not a kiss. When Señor Death tries to claim his kiss, will we hear the greatest cavalier of all say, “One moment, señor!”?

Without the hero, we would be forever doomed, like Sisyphus, to push the materialist rock up the very material hill. The hero enables us to see beyond the rock and beyond the hill, to a glass mountain of fair ladies and grand endeavors, presided over by the Hero.

The 19th Century Counter-Attack, Continued

Since Oswald Spengler wrote his epic book, The Decline of the West, there has been enough 'decline-of-the-West' books written to fill up the rooms in which the miller's daughter was required to turn straw into gold. Books by Thomas Molnar, Plinio Correa de Oliveira, James Burnham, Richard Weaver, Romano Guardini, Max Picard, and Hilaire Bello come to mind, but there are countless more. Although none of the death-of-the-West authors cockeyed optimists -- after all, they are writing about a death -- they are still more optimistic about the prospects for a revival of the West than subsequent events warrant. Why -- despite no lack of men willing and able to delineate the causes and the cures for the West's decline -- has the West continued to decline? Is it simply that the prophetic voices have gone unheeded? Yes, to a certain extent. But there is also something missing in the analyses of the death-of-the-West authors. What is missing is a sufficient comprehension of the limits of rational analysis. Dostoyevsky wisely depicts Stavrogin in The Devils as "rational to the end" as he hangs himself. And the 20th century death-of-the-West authors with their overly analytic and rational examinations of the West's decline simply tighten the noose around the gasping-for-breath throat of the West.

The Christians of the last Christian century -- the 19th -- knew something that eluded the 20th century death-of-the-West authors; they knew that we are created and sustained by God's love. Outside that love, we cease to exist in a form that is even remotely human. We become ugly caricatures of human beings. The culture that Western man created in response to Christ's love was sustained because we loved it, as a parent loves a child created from a marriage of love. But when the marriage became a marriage of convenience, we ceased to care about the child of that marriage. The child didn’t die, but it became, deprived of love, an ugly, depraved monster.

The decline of the West then is at once a simpler issue than the death-of-the-West authors perceived and a more complex issue. It is simpler in that the West’s decline can be easily summed up: We ceased to love it. But the problem is also more complex because it is much easier to analyze the death of a culture than it is to rekindle a love for that culture, which is why I once suggested that we look at the 19th century Christians. They faced the same cold, scientistic, Godless void that we now face, but they reacted to it differently. They responded to modernity by going deeper, by living the Pauline Christianity of “if I have not charity.” Our century, on the other hand, went cosmic, caving in to the old Greek notion which Christians of every century have had to fight, namely, that the more non-human and cosmic our concept of God is, the more religious we are.

It seems to me, when I read an author such as Walter Scott or George MacDonald, that the 19th century Christians were the last Christians to believe unashamedly in Christ’s humanity. And I say this because they were not ashamed of the ideals, such as chivalry and the cult of the Christian hero, which sprang from a belief in Christ’s sacred humanity. Therein, I think is the reason for the gulf between us and the 19th century Christians. We are ashamed of Christ’s humanity and therefore embarrassed by the older European culture which reflected that sacred humanity. It is more than just a slight fault, this turning away from the human Christ toward a more cosmic Christ. It is a sickness that leads to the death of the soul. Christ warns us about it in Mark 8:38:

Whosever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words, in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.

And again in Luke 9:26:

For whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words, of him shall the son of man be ashamed, when he shall come in his own glory, and in his Father’s and of the holy angels.

In both passages Christ refers to himself as the Son of Man. Why the emphasis on His humanity? And why the Incarnation if not to emphasize that it was through humanity that one touched the living God.

The 21st century Christian responds to criticism of modern Christianity by saying nothing has changed. “It all goes on as before. People regularly watch the Christmas Carol and read the old fairy tales to their children.” But things are not the same. The 19th century Christians read Grimm and Dickens because they loved the stories; they didn’t study them for psychological insights. They believed in the One who inspired the stories. We study the stories along with the stories of the non-European countries just as we study the other religions along with His religion, but we have no personal connection to the stories of the European culture or to the divine Person who inspired the stories. Our approach is more cosmic and cosmopolitan than the old provincial approach of the 19th century Christians, but is it more Christian? Well, if to be more inhumane and devoid of passion is to be more Christian, then it is more Christian.

And it is the Catholic old guard, those great defenders of the Faith in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who remain the greatest obstacle to a full-blooded Christianity and, hence, a restoration of the West. The great defenders were all, so they claimed, great despisers of modernity and great advocates for the ‘Thing,” which was, of course, Catholicism. But the great defenders were also modernists. Their jeremiads against modernism were merely against the results of modernism. They were like liberal parents who draw back, appalled, when their children put into practice the principles they had been espousing but not practicing.

What is the essence of modernism? The poets and the folk, before the folk became intellectualized, have always known what the essence of modernity is. It is the disembodied brain, the angelic, satanic presence standing aloof from humanity and sneering at humanity. The old guard modernists didn’t sneer as openly as their children, but the sneer was there. They were infected with the notion that the reasoning power of the mind was pure, and the heart was defiled. They believed this despite the fact that the reality of life and the Old Testament prophets as well as Christ Himself all testified to the fact that it was the wisdom of the blood and of the heart that counted.

Most of the old guard are dead now; why not let them rest in peace? After all, they meant well. Whether they meant well or ill is more than I know. What I do know is that their heirs in the Platonic Novus Ordo and the Aristotleian traditionalist ranks still live and still perpetuate the lie that Christianity is merely a transmutation of Greek philosophy. Christianity didn’t die out because people no longer yearned for a personal savior; it died out because people yearned for a personal savior whom they could not find in the Church. When the 20th century Church ceased to resist the Greek separatist heresy, their church became a Christ-less church. And the old guard was so intent on defending the Greco-Roman walls of the Church that they neglected to check if Christ was still within those walls. It would sound nicer, but it would be a lie, if I said I harbored no resentment against the Catholic old guard. I resent them because I and countless others followed the path that they had laid out and yet never followed themselves, ending up in a dark dungeon with no light, no air, no anything.

Permanently etched in my mind is a conversation I once had with one of the Catholic old guard. I had asked the great man why he quoted St. Thomas so much and what he actually thought of St. Thomas. “Personally,” I told him, “he leaves me cold.”

The gist of his reply was that the great thinker did not think very much of St. Thomas, and he would not read him if he was trying to learn about the Christian Faith, but he quoted from St. Thomas all the time because St. Thomas was the reigning king in conservative and traditionalist Catholic intellectual circles, the main audience for the great man’s books and articles. So much for the old guard.

At the end of the day there is only one, absurd, archaic hope left for the West, and that hope is the Christian hero. He is a man so blinded by love for the old European culture and the One who inspired it that he doesn’t pay any heed to the new, false, Christless versions of Christianity and the new, emerging cultures of darkness. He is not a Nietzscheian Übermensch, a man of the future; he is a man of the past, the European past. And he endureth all things and hopeth all things because he has that burning flame in his heart that the 19th century Christians and St. Paul called charity.