The Code of the European

“But I have all my life long been prejudiced against that form of underhand violence which I have heard old men contend came into fashion in our country in modern times, and which certainly seems to be alien from the French character. Without judging others too harshly, or saying that the poniard is never excusable—for then might some wrongs done to women and the helpless go without remedy—I have set my face against its use as unworthy of a Christian soldier.” -- Stanley J. Weyman in A Gentleman of France

In the wake of the Norwegian massacre which is reportedly the act of a self-styled “Christian fundamentalist,” the Christian fundamentalists are rushing to renounce the shooter and violence in general. Christians should renounce the shooter for the reason that no Christian kills children, no matter what their color or party affiliation; killing children is what liberals are so fond of doing. But the second renunciation, the renunciation of all violence, is wrong. Christians must defend their own people, using violence when the enemy uses violence. When I hear self-anointed white nationalist leaders urging white people to renounce all violence, while the violence against white people is reaching unheard of levels, I know that the nationalist leaders are more concerned about their own careers than they are about the plight of white people.

I know Anders Behring Breivik, like Timothy McVeigh, was against many things antique Europeans are against – multiculturalism and Islamic encroachment on the West – but he was also a Zionist Christian and he made no attempt, like the IRA makes no attempt, to distinguish non-combatants from combatants. It is true that the murdered young people were liberals in the making, but that type of killing, destroying the enemy’s offspring, is pagan, not Christian. Christian warriors have often failed to live up to the code of chivalry, but that doesn’t make the code invalid or any less binding. Europeans of the past have successfully fought Muslims without becoming like unto the Muslims.

The liberals have quite predictably labeled Anders Behring Breivik a right-wing Christian and an immoral monster. But he is not a Christian as our European ancestors were Christian, nor is he an immoral monster. Anders Behring Breivik is a child of liberalism. He is the product of the new, theoretical Christianity first championed by Thomas Aquinas. If we cannot know the living God via the European people, who made Him the incarnate center of their civilization, how can we know Him? The Christian intelligentsia on the Roman Catholic side said that we could know God through the intercession of an infallible expert’s opinion of Church documents. And the Protestant experts told us we could know God through their interpretations of the Holy Scriptures. Both theoretical versions of Christianity left out the heart of Christianity, man’s personal encounter with the living God, as exemplified in the incarnational culture of the European people. By demonizing the Europeans’ past and denying the validity of their culture of “mere feelings” the European religious theorists cut the European off from his intuitive, instinctual life, which is a man’s only touchstone of reality, and allowed him only a second-hand life in which he was totally dependent on his own mind. He became a reed for any liberal wind that promised him some release from the void in his soul. The post-Christian European, the European who sees only a mind-forged reality, might become a mad-dog liberal and support the mass slaughter of babies and the extermination of the white race; he might become a halfway-house Christian and support the extermination of the white race and acquiesce to the slaughter of babies; or he might become a pro-Zionist white nationalist who believes in the extermination of the children of the mad-dog liberals. It is internecine warfare we are witnessing. We have yet to hear from the men of Christian Europe who do not fight as the pagan liberals or the pagan Muslims fight in order to combat the pagan liberals and the pagan Muslims.

Did our hearts soar when we heard the news of Anders Behring Breivik stalking and killing the Norwegian young people? No, but our hearts were stirred to the depths when Paul Hill stepped out and killed the abortion doctor and his assistant. That was life imitating art. When Paul Hill said, “You won’t kill any more babies,” it reminded us of Nicholas Nickleby’s response to Wackford Squeer’s brutal beating of Smike: “Stop! This must not go on.” It’s in the European’s blood, the instinct to stop brutality at any cost. But if the European has divorced himself from his blood, he will be a dead man from the neck down; he will be all head, a head brimming with the semi-Pelagian, mind-forged theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. In that theological schema, ensoulment occurs when the human mind says it takes place, and not when God ordains it. From a purely logical standpoint, Anders Behring Breivik was completely right to do what he did. He was following the dictates of his own mind-forged faith. The Labor Party was destroying his country, the party members and their children would never have souls – ensoulment takes place when the human intellect says it takes place – so the soulless liberals and their children were fair game for Anders Behring Breivik. All quite logical if the human heart is left out of the equation, as it is in all philosophical and theological systems.

We must fall back on Christianity, which embraces man’s whole nature, and though not a code of philosophy, is something better; for it proposes to lead us through the trials and intricacies of life, not by the mere cool calculations of the head, but by the unerring instincts of a pure and regenerate heart. The problem of the Moral World is too vast and complex for the human mind to comprehend; yet the pure heart will, safely and quietly, feel its way through the mazes that confound the head.”

Without the unerring instincts of his European heart, Anders Behring Breivik became one with the liberals who view the world and all those who inhabit it as grist for the satanic mills of their minds.

A friend who shares my loathing for Liberaldom told me that it was disingenuous to talk about fighting for the destruction of Liberaldom while denouncing the first man who had the courage to strike back at Liberaldom. I don’t see it that way. Liberaldom is the incarnation of Satan where Christ was once incarnate. Are we striking a blow for Christian Europe when we fight as a liberal would fight, with no regard for Christian chivalry? It seems to me that we fall into a satanic trap when we use the tactics of the devil in order to fight the devil. The lodestar of Europe has always been and always shall be Jesus Christ. I don’t believe that we have to abandon Him in order to fight, and win, against Satan and his liberal minions. As with Timothy McVeigh there will be no attempt to understand Anders Behring Breivik’s rage. “He is a monster,” the liberals tell us. But the rage is justified; all Christian Europeans should feel a rage against the liberals and their barbarian allies. It is still possible to channel that rage against the liberals and their barbarian allies without breaking the code of chivalry. In his book, Anders Behring Breivik linked the cause of Christian Europe with the cause of Israel. No man who fuses Judaism and Christianity can be trusted to act as an integral Christian. The Jews regularly attack the Palestinians, making no distinction between combatants and non-combatants, and quite possibly that was a significant influence on Anders Behring Breivik.

No doubt it is easier to never use violence for any reason or to use violence on all occasions and for any reason, than it is to make distinctions and use violence when necessary within limits and to refrain from violence when restraint seems necessary, but such is the cross the Christian must bear. In Caroline Gordon’s novel None Shall Look Back, she tells us of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s actions after he liberated a group of Confederates from a Union prison camp. He took one liberated Southern soldier aside and asked him if any of the Yankee soldiers had abused the Confederate prisoners. There was one who had, and he was shot. The rest of the Yankee prisoners were treated humanely. And again, when Forrest became the Grand Wizard of the K. K. K., he didn’t ride against every Negro; he rode against those who raped and murdered.

True Christian charity often demands that we kill, always in defense of, and always with men like Tell, Havelock, and Forrest before us as exemplars. They knew when to kill and when to refrain from killing, because they had faith that was bred in the bone, a surer and more certain faith than the mind-forged faith of the modern, wayward Europeans. +

Westerns

The Western has been called America’s finest, most original contribution to the world. I would concur. The American West has fascinated such diverse poetic talents as G. K. Chesterton and Dylan Thomas.

Living under a demonic government of the Deists and for the capitalists, Americans had to go West if they wanted to get a whiff of free air that was not already owned by the robber barons. Father Luigi Ligutti describes in his book Rural Roads to Security how this Western escape valve was lost:

The entrance of women into the industrial field tended to reduce the wages of men, since men were no longer the sole support of a family; the idea of a family wage for the head of the family was slipping to that of a mere individual wage in competition with women and children. Still labor was not at once shackled by this condition. There was still a possibility of escape, and when escape is possible, liberty is not dead.

Harold Faulkner gives the alternative when he writes: As long as public land could be had at nominal cost, “wage slavery, in the sense that there was no escape, did not exist. If times were hard and wages low, the worker could always go West.” (Faulkner, Harold, American Economic History, 3rd Ed. New York: Harper, 1935.)

After 1850, transportation underwent marked improvements. Steam railroads increased 300 per cent between 1850 and 1860.

With steam transportation established, the factory system began that forward leap which continued, with but brief lulls during the great panics, through the remainder of the century.

This twofold development, growth of factories and improvement in transportation, was directly instrumental in changing from bad to worse the conditions of labor. Wages tended to become standardized at a minimum, since goods from one city were brought into competition with the same type of goods from another city. Price plus quality capture the market. By established custom the necessary curtailment was taken from wages. Transportation and growth of factories also made profitable the subdivision of labor, thereby creating vast numbers of detail jobs, simple enough to be classed with unskilled labor and each paid the correspondingly lower wage.

The specialized capitalist, alert to the possibilities of saving by division of production, concentrated industry in fewer and larger plants. Labor, long below the ability of housing itself in health and decency, huddled more densely in the industrial tenements. This urbanization of population paralleled the concentration of industry and was, in greater part, due directly to it.

Labor declined rapidly, losing not only ownership of tools, productive property, and control of conditions of labor, but also home ownership as well. Company tenements, company stores, company commodities were being provided, but in a very inadequate manner, and under circumstances that left only a shadow of liberty or recognition of rights on the side of the working people.

Another factor that greatly stimulated urbanization of population was the rapid disappearance, since 1880, of desirable western land obtainable on easy terms. During the first half of the nineteenth century public land of rare quality was limitless and given on terms that were meant to be an invitation and reward for settlement. Little or no capital was required to secure and work a claim. The disappearance of such public land closed a safety valve of escape from the city and dammed the floods of immigrants in the already close confines of industrial cities. [Emphasis added]

Urbanization, so rapid and so concentrated, created a host of social and economic problems. Of these the most tragic to human freedom was the increasing depth of helpless surrender to which an ever greater and greater portion of the nation's citizens was reduced, succumbing to the unscrupulous and liberalistically sanctioned avarice of the "robber barons." Labor had become depersonalized as regards the relations of employer and employee. Corporate ownership and control lodged in the hands of a relatively few. These few, interested primarily in greater profits, better business, and more production, neither saw nor cared to see the laborers, nor still less the slums in which they existed. Public opinion protested, and government took action again and again, but the philosophy of wealth continued unconquered and almost unquestioned except in subconscious thought, and the conditions of labor, even though improved, lagged behind that of the favorites of fortune as far as ever.

When one couldn’t escape to the West anymore, to live a life uncontaminated by capitalism, one could at least dream of a different world in the movie theaters of America. The code of chivalry might be dead in the land of the robber barons, but it still existed on the silver screen when Roy Rogers, Gary Cooper, and Wild Bill Elliott rode the range.

Walker Percy, in his novel The Moviegoer, describes the feeling many of us have felt when viewing one of the clean and pure Westerns of the pre-1960s:

Fort Dobbs is good. The Moonlite Drive-In is itself very fine. It does not seem too successful and has the look of the lonesome pine country behind the Coast. Gnats swim in the projection light and the screen shimmers in the sweet heavy air. But in the movie we are in the desert. There under the black sky rides Clint Walker alone. He is a solitary sort and a wanderer. Lonnie is very happy. Therese and Mathilde, who rode the tops of the seats, move to the bench under the projector and eat snowballs. Lonnie likes to sit on the hood and lean back against the windshield and look around at me when a part comes he knows we both like…

Clint Walker rides over the badlands, up a butte, and stops. He dismounts, squats, sucks a piece of mesquite and studies the terrain. A few decrepit buildings huddle down there in the canyon. We know nothing of him, where he comes from or where he goes.

A good night: Lonnie happy (he looks around at me with the liveliest sense of the secret between us; the secret is that Sharon is not and never will be onto the little touches we see in the movie and, in the seeing, know that the other sees—as when Clint Walker tells the saddle tramp in the softiest easiest old Virginian voice, “Mister, I don’t believe I’d do that if I was you”)…

The cinematic Western thrived in the 1930s and 1940s in the form of the B-Western. B-Westerns vary in quality. I favor the ones that feature a hero with a moral code written in his heart over the preachy sheriff ones, but the worst B-Western is better than the most critically acclaimed modern movie about a lesbo-policewoman or a sensitive young student who fights a one-man campaign to end hatred and bigotry in the South.

The essential thing in the B-Western and in the good A-Westerns is that the hero supports the code. And by ‘code’ I do not mean the motion picture code; I mean the code of chivalry. The weak, the poor, the mothers, the fair maidens, and the farmers are defended against the barbarians and the chestless, villainous, capitalist masterminds who live to plunder, rape, and murder.

John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), starring John Wayne, was the first A-Western made. (By A-Western, of course, I mean that the movie was a main feature and not just a second feature or Saturday matinee.) The A-Westerns of the 1940s and 1950s that followed generally reinforced the code, but the A-Western heroes of those pictures were more rough-hewn and more flawed than the B-Western heroes and often had to grapple with personal demons as well as with bad guys.

Take the movie Naked Spur, starring Jimmie Stewart, for example. In that movie the male protagonist, played by Stewart, tracks and captures a wanted killer. Stewart’s character had been cheated out of his ranch by a faithless finance while he was away fighting the war. He is determined to get the money to buy another ranch even if it means buying a ranch with blood money. But by the end of the movie in the final showdown with the forces of evil, Steward relents and renounces the blood money, thus maintaining the code.

With very few exceptions, the A-Western hero of the 1940s and 1950s maintains the code. But in the 1960s the code has broken down. Instead of watching Randolph Scott standing tall and declaring, “There are some things a man can’t ride around,” we are treated to a new type of Western. In this Western there is no Christian knight, which is what the cowboy hero was, a “knight without armor in a savage land.” There are now only social commentary movies which demonize the white man and deify the Indian (Soldier Blue, Little Big Man, etc.) and existentialist clap-trap from Italy with anti-heroes such as Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef.

There was, of course, one who took exception to the anti-hero Westerns of the 1960s, and that was John Wayne. He took the code into the 1960s and the 1970s with him. There is an interesting story that illustrates this point. When Don Siegel was directing the final showdown scene in The Shootist (1976), John Wayne’s last movie, the script called for Wayne’s character to shoot one of his antagonists in the back. John Wayne refused to do it. Siegel told him that Clint Eastwood had done it when he, Siegel, had directed Eastwood. John Wayne replied, “Well, I don’t do it.” The script was rewritten to accommodate John Wayne. A minor difference? No, ‘it’ makes all the difference in the world.

John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott, Roy Rogers, Joel McCrea, and countless other Western heroes represented a proud, long line of men who supported the code, the code of great knights, swashbucklers, and saints. That code is gone now. Not even our Christian leaders would recognize it, and if they did they would condemn it. But the code existed, and the American Western is one of our reminders that it did once exist.

I have many favorite Westerns. There is The Searchers, Big Jake, and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, all starring John Wayne. And there is The Garden of Evil and The Hanging Tree, starring Gary Cooper. And the list goes on: Night of the Grizzly with Clint Walker; Fort Dobbs, also with Clint Walker; The Tall T with Randolph Scott; and South of St. Louis with Joel McCrea.

But the finest and purest of all the Westerns is Shane. In almost every other Western the hero gets to ride off into the sunset with the heroine as his reward for virtue and valor. And there is nothing wrong with that. But the character Shane rises to an even higher level. He rides off alone, having faced and killed the villains, to save a family whose joys he cannot share and a way of life for farmers whom he cannot join.

I used to tell my students that we all, as we are growing up, have a Shane in our mind’s eye. The pity is that most of us replace Shane with the image of Mr. Wall Street or Mr. Go-With-the-Flow. “Such heroes as Shane are only for storybooks; they are not for real life,” the ‘mature’ adult says. Ah, but they are for real life, at least the only real life that matters.