What Makes a Man Say “Never Surrender” and Mean It?

With the cautionary tale of Haiti before their eyes, the Rhodesian whites still turned their country over to black barbarians. And with the example of Rhodesia before their eyes, the white South Africans still voted to place themselves at the mercy of a people who had no concept of mercy. Then in our own country, in the South of the 1950’s, the wall that separated the whites from the colored races was torn down. Why did they all cave in? Well, let us first look at the outside forces that turned civilized white African countries into voodoo blood orgies and the South into New Orleans.

The prime shakers and movers in the ‘Onward to Racial Babylon’ movement were the Utopian whites. These people had entered, in their minds, the La La Land of Rousseau. They saw themselves as the great white wizards who would give the noble black savages their freedom, and in return they expected to be worshipped by the people of color. They held the reins of power in the United States and throughout the Western world. Their techniques were childishly (that is, of an evil child) simple. They practiced exclusion and name-calling in order to bring racially recalcitrant nations to heel. “Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, you are a racist, and you can’t play with us!” was the war cry of the Utopians. And it worked. A friend, who had lived in South Africa during the period leading up to the fateful vote for extinction, said that the main reason the average white South African gave for voting to end apartheid was his desire to be included in the Olympics and other Western sporting events. And if we look at the Southern states in the 1950’s, we can see the same forces at work. The Southern colleges, prior to the 1950’s, used to refuse to play Northern colleges which had blacks on their teams. And until the 1950’s, the South refused to play in the national Little League tournament because they didn’t want to integrate their baseball teams. But they wanted to be included, so they capitulated.

What makes a people give in to name-calling and ostracization when they have a noble history of resisting much stronger measures in the past? Why did the people who had defended Rorke’s Drift and the people who had resisted Reconstruction allow themselves to be led to the slaughter by limp-wristed Utopians? The answer lies in the white man’s faith.

That the white man’s Christian faith produced men and women who were morally superior to the ancient pagans and the barbarian races cannot be proven in the same way that 2 + 2 = 4 can be proved. In fact one must still be connected to the older European civilization to be able to see the value of its people. The European Utopian and the barbarian cannot see the value of the older civilization and its people because the barbarian lives in the darkness and the utopian lives in a mind-forged lunatic asylum. But objective reality, which only the European who is still European can see, is that the European people were moral giants in a world of moral eunuchs and moral pygmies. What the Utopians promised to the last of the white holdouts in Africa and to the South was that they could have their faith and the fleshpots of Sodom and Gomorrah too. The Utopians assured them that they would not become pillars of salt when they looked back. They could be part of the racially harmonious Sodom and Gomorrah to which the rest of the white world had already succumbed.

The results were dramatic in white Africa. The white man could not go back to paganism because, though no longer fully Christian, he was still too Christian to be a good pagan. He became a useless pillar of salt. And in the South? It wasn’t quite as dramatic, but the results were the same: “He did not die, but nothing of life remained.”

It is painful to go back and read all of the “never surrender” assertions of the Southern segregationists and the white Africans. They seemed to be so determined not to give in, yet they did. In hindsight, it appears there were too many George Wallaces and Strom Thurmonds in their midst, men who supported the white cause when it seemed politically expedient and abandoned it when it became inexpedient. Such men lacked the Christian thing. If we look inside the souls of the defenders of Rorke’s Drift and the men of the Reconstruction Era, we can see what makes a man say “never surrender” and mean it.

The defenders of Rorke’s Drift and the Klansmen would not have been able to articulate the reasons for their refusal to surrender to black barbarism. They simply took it as a given – “never surrender, never say die.” But the unarticulated reasons for their refusal to surrender stemmed from the Christianity that was in their blood. The antique Christian knew the sinfulness of mixing with the heathen from his belief in the inerrancy of Scripture, which condemned race mixing. And he knew the foolhardiness of surrendering to the barbarian because of his historical consciousness, which stemmed from his belief in a God who had entered history.

When belief in revealed Truth lessens, so does the historical consciousness. “Why not mix with the heathen? It hasn’t been done in the past, but the past is not relevant.” In the absence of a deeply held religious conviction against race-mixing, the seemingly fierce resistance of the George Wallace, Strom Thurmond type of individual turns from a position of ‘never surrender’ to one of ‘You scratch my white back, and I’ll kiss your black a--.’ We’ve all seen how that works.

Robert Louis Stevenson is very underrated as a writer; he has great depth. And through his character Alexander Smollett, a Christian gentleman, he shows us why the Strom Thurmond type of white man caves in, and the Christian European does not. When faced with an ultimatum from the pirates, who seem to have the upper hand, Captain Smollett, replies:

“Now you’ll hear me. If you’ll come up one by one, unarmed, I’ll engage to clap you all in irons, and take you home to a fair trial in England. If you won’t, my name is Alexander Smollett, I’ve flown my sovereign’s colours, and I’ll see you all to Davy Jones.”

There are two reasons why Alexander Smollett refused to surrender. The first reason is that it simply isn’t done. A Christian gentleman, particularly an English one, doesn’t surrender to barbarians. And the second reason is that Captain Smollett knew, because he had an historical consciousness, that those individuals outside the sphere of Christianity have no concept of mercy or of a truce with dignity. Thus surrender is a metaphysical and a practical impossibility. When the George Wallace type of white South African and the Strom Thurmond type of Dixiecrat lost their Christian metaphysic, they were open to the idea that capitulation was practical. And thus they joined the barbarians and the Utopians.

The pathology of the white surrender to barbarism cannot be understood apart from Western man’s religious struggle. It was his faith that made him separate from the other races, and it was his lack of faith that caused him to seek extinction by blending with the other races. Because they are interdependent, Western man’s rush to extinction coincided with his complete rejection of Christianity in the second half of the 20th century. Certainly churches still exist, and some individual Europeans still hold His precious image in their hearts, but the European people, as an incorporate league, have rejected Christ. And it was not Darwin or Freud or Marx that severed European man from Christianity; they were merely additional links in a chain that was started by the medieval scholastics. All of nature, for the pagan, was animated by the gods. There were gods of the bush, gods of the sky, gods of the mountain, and so on. They were gods that could be propitiated in order to gain favor. Christianity dethroned those gods, but gave mankind something greater than nature to worship – a God who loved mankind, a God who desired not sacrifice but mercy. And He was one of us. We shared in His divine essence. God was still immanent, not in nature, but in man himself! How could any pagan lament the death of the nature gods when the alternative was so much better? Certainly not the Europeans. They embraced Christ with a passion. But the scholastic rebellion was the first satanic strike at the heart of the European’s faith. God was not immanent, the scholastics said, He was a derivative by-product of reason’s contemplation of the natural world. Christ’s words, “Behold the kingdom of God is within you,” were rejected as bad theology, and the anti-immanence police became the ruling authorities in the Church.

There were many resistance movements – the Franciscans were one prime example. But every time a St. Francis emerged, his movement was codified and emptied of its divine-human element. The Protestant Reformation was also an attempt to reclaim the original divine-human link. But the Protestant theologians re-imposed the prescriptions (God is not immanent) of scholasticism on the Protestant faithful, thus maintaining the dichotomy between a Christian’s loyalty to an abstract idea of God, preached by the hierarchy of his church, and his loyalty to the living God. And when the ‘Idea God’ of the various church hierarchies triumphs, the European’s loyalty to his own people perishes. How could it be otherwise? When God is an abstraction, so is man. One cannot be loyal to an abstraction.

European man’s battle is with himself. If he conquers the dragon of scholasticism, which is the progenitor of the scientific dragon, he will see his sacred heritage again. And then he will know that his heritage is intimately connected to his faith, which will give him the passion and fire to say, “We shall never surrender,” and truly mean it.

Galahad

'…I, Galahad, saw the Grail,
The Holy Grail, descend upon the shrine:
I saw the fiery face as of a child
That smote itself into the bread, and went;
And hither am I come; and never yet
Hath what thy sister taught me first to see,
This Holy Thing, fail’d from my side, nor come
Cover’d, but moving with me night and day,
Fainter by day, but always in the night
Blood-red, and sliding down the blacken’d marsh
Blood-red, and on the naked mountain top
Blood-red, and in the sleeping mere below
Blood-red. And in the strength of this I rode,
Shattering all evil customs everywhere,
And past thro’ Pagan realms, and made them mine,
And clash’d with Pagan hordes, and bore them down,
And broke thro’ all, and in the strength of this
Come victor. But my time is hard at hand,
And hence I go; and one will crown me king
Far in the spiritual city; and come thou, too,
For thou shalt see the vision when I go.'

--Tennyson

The 20th century intellectuals (it's too early to talk about 21st century intellectuals) were, and are, a pathetic bunch. They failed to come up with one single heresy of their own. Their entire repertoire consisted of 19th century heresies—Darwinism, capitalism, Marxism, and psychiatry. But what the 20th century heretics did do, which the 19th century heretics were unable to do, was to institutionalize the heresies of the 19th century. They were the Roman organizers, and the 19th century heretics were the Greek creators.

Things have become rather staid and quiet now that Satanic values have been institutionalized for so long in the Western world. But an epic battle took place in the 19th century. The works of such authors as LeFanu and Dostoyevsky bear witness to the battle.

And we should note that Satan has changed his tactics in order to adjust to the new order of things. Prior to the 20th century Satan was always trying to undermine European civilization. (He never needed to undermine non-European civilizations because they were always his.) But when Satanic -isms became the ruling -isms of the Western world -- such -isms as capitalism, communism, feminism, and militarism -- Satan became a conservative. He became the great preserver of Western civilization. It is no longer Christ's civilization, it is Satan's civilization. And Satan is vigilant in defense. But is he happy? Can he rest content? No, he cannot. There is one man whom he fears, and I don't mean Christ. Certainly he fears Him. But it is man we are talking about. Satan has confused and beguiled mankind just as he did in the Garden of Eden centuries and moments ago. The Lord is not his immediate concern, because he knows the Lord will not come to mankind unbidden. Satan fears the man who loves enough to once again unite Europe with Him. Which is why he tirelessly keeps the Satanic institutions of the West in working order. He lives in constant fear of the one man who can bring his whole empire crumbling down. And one day he will walk out of a Planned Parenthood abortuary or a Bushyite cabinet meeting and come face to face with his mortal enemy.

"Sir Galahad, you don't belong here. This is none of your business. This doesn’t concern you. Why don't you speak?"

"I give you fair warning. There is my gage. Now it begins. To the hilt."

What makes Galahad so dangerous to Satan is his ability to see through the material façade of this world to the spiritual reality behind the façade. Galahad never succumbed to the temptation of pitting his mind against Satan's mind. It was always Galahad's heart against Satan's mind. And that heart, because it was united to His heart, built Christendom.

All those pathetic heresies from the 19th century stem from one heresy, Darwinism. Darwinism is nothing more than the original sin. Man seeks to find a power in nature that is greater than God. Then, when the mind of man encompasses nature, the mind of man becomes God.

The idea of evolution was not invented by Darwin. The Greek philosopher, Empedocles, proceeded him by some two thousand years. And Satan preceded Empedocles by… how many years was it? What Darwin added to the equation, which made him widely popular, was the scientific proof of evolution. I'm not claiming he actually did provide scientific proof, but he was perceived to have provided it, and that made all the difference. But the initial joy in no longer being held accountable to a personal God was turned to despair when it gradually dawned on people that the other side of the "there-is-no-God-to-judge-us" coin was "there-is-no-God-to-love-us."



And that's where the creative evolutionists stepped in. The arch fiend, George Bernard Shaw, and that alien from the human race, Teilhard du Chardin, and a whole host of clergymen and academics told us that Darwin was right about the ape-to-man link but wrong about the prime mover of the evolutionary process. (1) There was, the creative evolutionists told us, a force behind the evolutionary process. It was not a personal force, it was not the old man with the white beard who Christians used to believe in; it was an impersonal intelligence. Wow! That sure sounds a lot more grownup and sophisticated than those old Christian fairy tales. But try as they might, the creative evolutionists cannot escape the biological determinism of Darwin. If a personal God did not create man with a divine essence, then there is only the natural world. Man is part of that world and no other. The Shavian creative mind theory, the Jungian 'oversoul', and every other ludicrous theory that man has conceived to supplant the Christian faith all boil down to the isolated intellect of man contemplating the natural world.

When I went to college, I had an English teacher who had his students read Shaw's Back to Methuselah. And I had a course in religion in which the professor assigned Teilhard du Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man. I'm sure those works are no longer read at universities as those old heretics are passé. Once the deification of the natural world has become institutionalized, the mundane daily work consists of more practical and less theoretical books. The 'Worship of Blacks I and II' and the 'Ethos of Feminism' are the type of courses the non-business majors take. One kind of misses the old heretics; they at least had some passion. But of course the old heretics were inconsistent. How can a disembodied brain have passion? Those old time heretics were living on the accumulated capital of one thousand plus years of Christianity. They were living off of that old guy with the white beard. The soul-dead zombies of today are their children, but not one of the old time heretics, if brought back from the grave to gaze on his soulless children, would acknowledge them as his own.



The professor who assigned du Chardin was a perfect example of the old guard heretics. He was a Swiss-German teaching at an American university, and like all those Germans of that era, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of just about everything. He spoke and wrote over eight languages, and although his specialty was religious studies he had published works in science as well. He was an ordained Lutheran minister, but he was not a believing Christian. He thought all religions were "fascinating," and he also loved the playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, who depicted the meaningless of existence so "wonderfully." Being of German descent, he quite naturally considered that modern students, particularly the American ones, were lazy. I vividly recall one lecture in which he went into raptures about the greatness of Samuel Beckett's depictions of the meaninglessness of existence and then diverged to talk about the laziness of the modern student.

After the class I had to ask him the question that had been festering inside of me for the entire semester. "Dr. ____, you are constantly making the point that the students are lazy and won't work, but why should they if they believe what you believe?"

"I don't understand your question."

"Well, if Christ be not risen, if he is just part of the meaningless fabric of mental images man has created to make his existence bearable, then why do anything? Why shouldn't we all just sit on top of the dung heap and weep?"

"Ah, fascinating – yes, the meaningless of existence. I saw a play in Paris once…"

It was hopeless. Centuries of Christianity had formed his habits, and he was incapable of seeing the dichotomy between his love of all things European and his doctrinaire assertion of the meaninglessness of existence.

And let me hasten to add that I was not a young hero from a Walter Scott novel. I was a character from a Dostoyevsky novel. I had an illogical attachment to the person of Jesus Christ, but I was unable to believe in his resurrection because it seemed so unscientific. But I did not find the meaningless world outside of Christ's Europe to be a "fascinating" world.

The universities and colleges present themselves as oases. But in reality one discovers they are deserts. Their glowing course descriptions promising enlightened knowledge are mirages. Their sterility is the result of institutionalized Satanism. And the universities are mirror images of our society. Every aspect of our culture has become part of the university – which is the way Satan wants it – the mind of man contemplating the natural world. Checkmate. But we come again to the one man Satan fears. Sir Galahad has not been checked. And he is fiercer in his love than Satan is in his hate. In His name he has breached the wall. To fight in his company is all a European can ask or hope for. "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more…"
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(1) There are those, like the late Rev. Falwell, who are not Darwinian evolutionists, but who are, nevertheless, creative evolutionists. They reject the "man is a monkey" theory of Darwin, but they hold to an evolutionary theory of the democratic man. He is the endpoint of their evolutionary process. This is why that group of people deified George Bush.

The Mind-Forged Wall

Lost in all the celebrations, eight years back, of the new century we were entering was the fact that the 21st century is the first of the post-Christian centuries. Christianity was certainly in trouble at the beginning of the 20th century, but by no stretch of the imagination could it be called dead. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, the old time religion can certainly be certified as dead.

And it is striking to me how easily the intellectuals of both the Catholic and the Protestant denominations have succumbed to Satanism. By isolating man’s intellect from his other faculties, they have left him at the mercy of the dialectic, and it is in the dialectic mode that Satan thrives.

Satan’s task, when he confronted Adam and Eve in the garden, was to get them to disobey God’s command not to eat from the forbidden tree. He needed to engage them in a dialogue if he was to succeed. Once he persuaded Eve, and through Eve, Adam, to look on God’s command as something abstract and debatable, he had them both hooked.

That original sin – the pride in our own isolated abstractions and the desire for the power we think our prideful cogitations will bring – is always with us; it is part of our sinful nature. And it must be fought tooth and nail lest it consume us. Yet the very guardians of the citadel of Christ have encouraged us to indulge our sinful appetites to abstract and depersonalize. We have depersonalized man and we have depersonalized the living God. ‘Our Father who art in heaven’ has become ‘Our abstracted, derivative By-Product who art everywhere and nowhere.’ When, following the lead of the clergy, we depersonalize God; we have created, to paraphrase Blake, a mind-forged wall between God and man.

The mind-forged wall was built over time by clerics, academics, and self-styled wise men who professed to be Christian but who still thought like Greeks. In the Greek culture the goddess of wisdom sprang from the head of Zeus; she bypassed the blood. In contrast, Christ, the font of all wisdom, came to us through the blood. Therefore, to the Christian, all true knowledge comes to us through the spirit-infused blood of Christ.

The modern Gnostic Christian views any mention of the blood as superstitious and barbaric. His God word is 'reason'; in fact, his God is the rational, autonomous man. Rational man will welcome Christ into his club, but only if Christ agrees to behave rationally. For reason, as Aquinas tells us, is the final arbiter. And if there is a power higher than God, is not that power God? But if we turn from the Greek mode of perception and look at the Hebraic mode of perceiving reality, we see something quite different from the men behind the wall. We see that the spirit of man can only be animated through the blood. Blood without the animating spirit is barbaric, mere voodoo superstition, but when the spirit and the blood are united the mind-forged wall between God and man disappears. And the unholy worship of our ratiocinations is stripped of its religious halo and seen for what it is: blasphemy.

So long as the mind-forged wall of bloodless Christianity exists, there will be a conflict between Christians of the blood and the Gnostic post-Christians in control of the churches. The post-Christians will continue to treat the black man as an object to be worshipped on the one hand (because he has the blood that they lack), and to be converted on the other hand (because he lacks the spirit, which the Gnostic has falsely linked to the intellect, that they possess).

The difficulty in converting the Gnostic post-Christian comes from the fact that the Gnostic has placed himself beyond the ken of humanity. By uniting his spiritual life to the mind rather than to the blood, he has thrown in his lot with the great enemy of mankind. The great poets have always seen Satan as the sneering intellectual, standing aloof from mankind.

And it does little good to hand a Gnostic the Gospel of Christ. He knows the story, but he has redefined it. He is no more open to the Gospel of Christ than he is to a tale from the Brothers Grimm. Both, to the modern Gnostic, are "fun" stories to play mind games with.

Miguel de Unamuno stated the problem clearly. It is first necessary to awaken a tragic sense of life in an individual before he can be convinced to turn to the Gospels and treat them as something other than a series of crossword puzzles. To put it simply – a man needs to believe he is sick before he will seek an antidote for his sickness.

If an individual only looks on death as tragic because it comes too early or because it causes pain and not because it extinguishes a personality, then that individual has no need of a loving, personal God. He needs modern science to prolong life and alleviate pain, but he does not need Christ. Only those who have not forsaken their blood and retreated behind the mind-forged wall can know Christ. Such individuals still feel pain at the loss of the "touch of a vanished hand" and still yearn for the "sound of a voice that is still." One has to feel that Cordelia’s death in King Lear was tragic before one can feel the joy of Thaisa’s resurrection in Pericles.

The tragic sense of life is intimately connected to a fairy tale appreciation of life. In the fairy tale, the hero conquers death and lives happily ever after. The modern man has no need for fairy tales, for castles in the sky; instead, he has self- help books and reads success stories. How petty his dreams are and how superficial his yearnings.

To feel abandoned and forsaken by God is a terrible thing. To feel estranged from God because of unresolved problems with some particular sin is also a terrible thing, but to feel no need for God, for the Man of Sorrows and the Risen Christ, is to be in the most unenviable state imaginable. And such is the state of modern man.

All of existence depends on one central issue: Can we feel, with Lear, the true tragic dimensions of Cordelia’s death? If the answer is yes, then all else will follow and we will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Evolution

I remember a very earnest 8th grade social studies teacher getting quite upset with me when I laughed at her slide presentation on the subject of evolution. I didn’t laugh because I had been brought up as a fundamentalist; my mother was a liberal humanist and my father was a middle –of–the–American-road Protestant, and both were pro-evolution. I laughed because the idea seemed preposterous. And the idea still seems preposterous. Now I know people inside the religious community as well as outside take evolution very seriously, but I don’t think they take it seriously because they have examined the theory and find it credible; they take it seriously because they like the notion of a force stronger than God. It is a way of hedging their bets. If God turns out to be too hung up on their personal lives, they can always appeal to a more impersonal and more powerful force above God who is not too particular about personal sin. But the downside of the evolutionary god is that, having no distinct personality, he is not concerned with particular persons. So in order to lose one’s sins in the great nature god’s indifferent center, one must also lose one’s personality. There is no personal resurrection with evolution; there is only an impersonal splattering of dust into the cosmos.

Evolution is not something discovered by Darwin. He gave it the ape-to-man formulation, but the idea that a natural impersonal force controls our destinies and not God is as old as Satan, who peddled that idea in the Garden of Eden. And it seems to be a litmus test for sanity. Accept evolution and you are with the sane, the rational, and the scientific. Reject it and you are with the insane, the irrational, and the nonscientific. Well, why not live dangerously? I reject it completely and without any attempt at some kind of Augustinian compromise. I simply reject it.