Not Quite Alone

“What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!” – Burke

About fifteen years ago a man named Charles Sykes wrote a book, called Dumbing Down Our Kids, which was considered a classic in conservative circles. I read the book a few years after its publication. The book was terrible. Sykes criticized the liberals for teaching values instead of facts. We had to get back to facts and nothing but facts was Sykes’ mantra. If you think you hear the echo of Thomas Gradgrind in Sykes’ plea for facts, you are right; he does sound like Thomas Gradgrind:

Now, what I want is, facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!

Sykes’ response to an educational establishment that taught liberal values was to resurrect a “factoid” method of education that leaves the human soul out of the picture. Sykes’ book revealed the moral bankruptcy of contemporary conservatism. A conservative, Godless, value-free Sykes’ education or an atheistic, value-laden, liberal education is a Hobson’s choice.

A book that was much better than Sykes’ ‘classic’ work was the book, The Public Orphanage: How Public Schools Are Making Parents Irrelevant by Eric Buehrer. In his book, Buehrer made the case for values in education. The liberals were not wrong to teach values, Buehrer maintained, they were wrong to teach liberal values. I couldn’t agree more. Virtue does not consist of avoiding the bad, it consists of loving and actively pursuing the good. Herman Melville’s reading of Shakespeare sheds some light on this issue. The evil bastard son of Gloucester in Shakespeare’s King Lear has this to say about bastards:

Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moon-shines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?
Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops,
Got 'tween asleep and wake? Well, then,
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land:
Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund
As to the legitimate: fine word,--legitimate!
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top the legitimate. I grow; I prosper:
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

In the margin beside that passage in his copy of Shakespeare, Herman Melville wrote, “There is often an energy to demonism that mere virtue often lacks.” Melville is correct. The spiritual void in the conservatives’ pragmatic, value-free education cannot compete with the liberals’ utopian, value-laden education. The liberals get the cream of the white crop of the current generation because they have a faith. Nor do those who reject utopian liberalism embrace pragmatic conservatism; they embrace despair. It was not always thus. In the early to mid-20th century, there were still men of European ancestry, such as Russell Kirk, Andrew Lytle, and Whittaker Chambers, who saw and espoused a conservatism grounded in the traditional Christianity of the European people. And so long as virtue and faith were connected, there was still a Promethean fire in the virtuous European to counter the demonism of the liberals. However, when the conservatives became positivists the fire died and the liberals held the field unopposed by any force capable of halting their advance toward what they see as Utopia, but which is in reality Hell on Earth.

The internecine wars of Christian Europeans – Catholic vs. Protestant, Cavalier vs. Roundhead, Royalist vs. Covenanter, and so on – were terrible. But those conflicts, waged by the worst on each side, were always settled by the grace of God working in the best on both sides. The greater tragedy is the tragedy of modern Europe. There is no Christian army in the field; there is only the army of liberals. The pragmatic, utilitarian conservatives do not even constitute an opposition, because they are not interested in fighting liberalism. They only want to make it more conformable to their pragmatism.

The greatest of all tragedies has befallen the European people. They have descended to the level of swine; they are content to merely feed and wallow in garbage. The superficiality of our modern swinish culture indicates that the European has arrived at the last stop on the road to oblivion. One is reminded of the Greek soldiers in Homer’s Odyssey. The evil sorceress, Kirke, gives the men what they seek, swinish oblivion. But the pagan hero, Odysseus, rescues them with a magic herb and his sword. It will take a Christian hero, with faith instead of a magic herb, to wield the sword that frees his people from swinish oblivion.

God is to be found in the depths so if God is to be avoided it is necessary to create a superficial world where there is no depth. We need look no further than academia to see such a world. In academia, the abstraction rules; something is considered sacred to the extent it contradicts the essential truths of the European heritage. Old Europe was patriarchal; academia is matriarchal. Old Europe was Christian; academia is anti-Christian. Old Europe kept the black savage at bay; academia worships the black savage. And our entire society has become part of academia. What started out as little pockets of superficiality confined within the halls of academia has spread to every nook and cranny of the European nations. Now, wherever there are Europeans gathered together we no longer see human beings we see swine. This is a heartbreaking sight if you once knew, through a sympathetic connection to the Europeans of the past, the Europeans when they were human.

The colored barbarians, who never quite reached the fully human level of existence, have always had more in common with the large, predatory animals than with the antique European. They are delighted with the new swinish Europeans because swine are easy to slaughter.

We few, the remnant Europeans, are not pagans like Odysseus. We do not believe in magic talismans. Our God has told us, and shown us, that divine charity is above and superior to magic talismans. But we can, like Odysseus, attack the evil sorceress who has consigned our kith and kin to swinish oblivion. The scientistic, egoistic spirit of the modern age, which is spewed out like garbage in our schools, our churches, and every major educational outlet of the modern world by conservatives and liberals alike, must be resisted and defeated so that the swine can see His world.

“But can swine see and believe?”

“They were not always swine. If one swinish European reclaims his humanity, will not more follow in his train? That is a consummation devoutly to be wished.”

Solzhenitsyn stated in his great work, The Gulag Archipelago, that he felt like the Gulag was a nation unto itself. The prisoners were physically isolated from Russian society but they were a truer, better society than the Russia outside the Gulag, because in the Gulag there was a true communion of souls.

In post-Christian, swinish Europe, the Christian European does not even have the comfort of knowing there are others in the Gulag that think and feel like him. His isolation is greater. He needs communion with other hearts like his, but he cannot find any in the herds of European swine. The only strengthening comfort left for the Christian European, and it is no small comfort, is communion with the dead. And of course, I’m not referring to some kind of spiritualist séance; I’m talking about that silken tie of sympathy that links one human soul to another. The communion of saints is more than just a phrase; the dead are alive, and they speak to us from His world because He sustains all true communion with His love. We only see through a glass darkly, but we must hold to that dark vision or the white European world will become a permanent feeding trough for swine who were once human beings. +

One Cure for Racial Anemia

“They are like sheep penned up in the shambles, that the butcher may take his choice among them... so general is the depression, so universal the despair.”

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It is obvious to anyone who wants to see the obvious that the white European is suffering from racial anemia. He has no desire to defend his race or to see his race perpetuated. The liberal thinks that racial anemia is merely intellectual maturity, but of course the liberal is diseased and incapable of making a judgment on important matters. And racial suicide is an important matter.

The white, neo-pagan, nationalist cartel holds it as an article of faith that the Christian faith is the cause of racial anemia. The reasoning from that quarter, to the extent that one can find any reasoning in their anti-Christian diatribes, seems to go as follows: “The non-European races which do not have a Christian tradition do not have racial anemia, and the vast majority of the Mass-going and church-going, white Christians do have racial anemia. Therefore, the Christian faith and those who adhere to it are the cause of white, racial anemia. If we eliminate Christianity and all white Christians, there will be no more racial anemia; there will be a small, elite band of superior white intellects that will have dominion over the face of the earth.”

The problem with the white neo-pagan is that he drinks from the same stream as the liberal, the stream of abstracted unreality. The waters do not have the same effect on each individual, but every individual that drinks from them becomes unable to see through the eye, past the material world, to the spiritual world behind the arras. In the case of the liberal, the waters make him deny the concrete spirit and blood Christianity for an abstracted religion of his own invention. With some variations, the liberal has chosen to worship the idea of the black man.

Like the liberal, the neo-pagan has rejected spirit and blood Christianity for an abstract religion of his own, but in the neo-pagan’s case (remember that the stream of unreality, like an LSD trip, inspires different visions of unreality) his drink from the stream of unreality causes him to worship the white Übermensch, the man with the superior intellect. However, divorced from God, the white Übermensch is a pathetic, hopeless creature, because the white man cannot, like the other races, make his race into his God. The white man needs depth. He must seek his beginning and his end.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides ; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, --
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

“Is Christ risen?” must be the first question a European asks. If He is risen, then Christianity cannot be repudiated because it is “bad for white people.” The second question that needs to be asked is, “Must the white European commit racial suicide in order to be a Christian?” The liberal says yes, but the liberal’s answer is disingenuous because he no longer believes Christ is risen. He simply wants to use the old Christian faith to support his new, black-worshipping faith. And the neo-pagan accepts the liberal’s distortion of Christianity because he hates the white, Christian European just as much as his liberal counterpart does. He only loves the new European, the man of the future, who is devoid of faith, honor, and humanity.

What the neo-pagan and the liberal will not do, because both drink from the stream of unreality, is to honestly confront the white man’s past. Did the Christian men at Rorke’s Drift feel that surrender to the Zulus was the Christian thing to do? Did Alfred, on his deathbed, tell his sons to give England back to the pagans because he, Alfred, had done a terrible thing when he wrested England from the pagans? The only way you can claim that faith in Christ results in racial anemia is to claim that our European ancestors were not Christian. And that is what the liberals claim and that is what the neo-pagans claim. The liberals say that their abstracted Christ-less Christianity is the real thing, and the neo-pagans deny that the Europeans really believed in or took seriously the Christian faith. “It was their white genes that motivated them, not their professed faith.”

Let us leave the liberals and the neo-pagans at the stream of unreality and look at the reality. The white man’s racial anemia has one source, his lack of faith in Jesus Christ. Any white Christian who thinks that he can cure white racial anemia through alliances with pragmatic, “Let’s leave religion out of the picture” conservatives, or openly ‘hostile to Christianity’ neo-pagans is deluded. The only cure for a disease that stems from a lack of faith is faith. But of course neither I nor any other Christian European can make the modern European believe, as his ancestors once believed, in the God-Man, Jesus Christ. The Christian faith is not a suit of armor that can be used for the utilitarian purpose of fending off the barbarians and then discarded when the barbarian threat is gone. It is all or nothing. Either we believe in the white Christ and fight for His Europe, or we perish.

It is customary, when writing about the demise of the European people, to suggest some kind of five-point plan for a restoration. But I can’t even think of a one-point plan that will restore Christian Europe. I can only observe that the antique Europeans did not look on Christianity as a practical “guide to success” religion. They acted as they thought Christian men and women should act and left the rest to God. If we call that absence of a plan a plan and follow it, we will be more in line with the third dumb brother of fairy tale fame. And that brother, the brother with a heart united to His heart, always ends up inheriting a Kingdom.

If you want to have a really depressing experience, go get some of the old Protestant and Catholic works of apologetics. They never convinced anyone that Christ was the Son of God, but they did provide millions of men and women with an excuse for atheism or religious indifference. But while the rather childish turf wars went on between the Protestant and Catholic clerics, the Christian Everyman of Europe was doing the real missionary work. He was forging an apologetic work called European civilization which was built out of the European’s love for Christ.

I don’t hold out any hope for European man in the ‘catastrophe theory’, which claims that when the barbarian hordes complete their conquest, or when the European economies fail, Europeans will come to their senses and unite. Suffering does change some noble souls for the better, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but more often than not it hardens the sufferer against all humanity. I take more hope from the fact that Walter Scott’s Europe once existed. We have before our eyes, if we will just look into the past, the embodiment of the Christian faith in the lives of those ancient Europeans. Our fidelity to Scott’s Europe will, in the long run, bring other Europeans back to the Europe that was built by the Christian Everyman. In the long run, we are not dead; in the long run there is life if the Last Europeans are steadfast.

The greatest dangers to the European who wants to remain steadfast against the liberals and the barbarians often are those dangers that need to be resisted by denial. Against the seductive democratic temptation – “don’t go outside the democratic process” – and the clerical temptation – “Father Riley says don’t worry, the Pope knows what he is doing, just don’t use the word ‘nigger’ and pray for Obama and all will be well,” we have our eternal ‘no!’ We can refuse to serve the liberals and those who would have us compromise with liberals. Such denials are part of the hero’s quest. If he lets himself become ensnared by the dark ladies of democracy and clergy-worship, he will never have a chance to wield his sword against the dragon guarding the gates of liberaldom.

There has never been a time in the European’s history when the battle lines were so clearly delineated between good and evil. On the liberal’s side is legalized abortion, the worship of black barbarism, homosexuality, feminism, and every satanic perversion of the good that Satan could stuff into the minds of his liberal minions. On our side is the Man of Sorrows, who looks at us as He looked at Peter after the third denial. It is a look of infinite mercy and compassion. If it had been a look of anger or rebuke, Peter would have been able to bear it. But to know that he had failed the God who could forgive and love those who denied Him thrice put fire into Peter’s heart. And that same fire that kindled St. Peter’s heart stirs our hearts. +

Reflections on the Old Testament

In many of the old westerns there is a hillbilly father with a gun-toting clan of sons and nephews behind him. This hillbilly father usually kills his hillbilly neighbors and anybody else whom he takes a dislike to without restraint or remorse, justifying his actions by quoting one of the saltier passages of the Old Testament. And indeed the Old Testament would have great appeal to a homicidal maniac. But if it is read by someone with a genuine desire to come closer to God, there is much that can be gleaned by a perusal of the Old Testament. I was somewhat surprised recently (which I know I should not have been) when I read through the Old Testament and found it to be fascinating and completely relevant. A number of issues interested me.

1) Lord, what Fools…
The story of the Israelite people seems to be just one long story of faithlessness. In my childhood, I thought the Israelites had to be the stupidest people who ever lived. How, having seen God intervene so convincingly in their behalf so many times, could they persist in returning to the idols again and again? Now I can see that it was as easy as sin. God spoke to the Israelites through His prophets. The average Israelite had to first trust that Moses or Joshua or Gideon or Samuel was a true prophet, and then he had to believe that God’s will was something that was good for him. In other words, he had to believe something far more difficult to believe in than God’s power; he had to believe God loved him. One can imagine the thought process: “Sure, He parted the Red Sea for us and saved us from the Egyptians but now He plans to let us starve out here in the desert.” And it is not every generation that gets to see a miracle as dramatic as the parting of the Red Sea. Is it that hard then to see how the traditional idols of all the Israelites’ neighbors were more appealing to them than the true God? And in many cases the Israelites did not totally reject God; they simply hedged their bets, worshipping the pagan idols and the God of Israel, much like we do today, attending some nominally Christian service on Sunday and worshipping Baal during the rest of the week. It is embarrassing to read the adventures of the ever-faithless Israelites because one gets the distinct impression that one is reading about oneself.

2) Segregation and Slavery
It isn’t hard to see why the liberals deny that the Bible is true history and declare it to be mostly tribal legends. If they took it seriously, they would have to abandon some of their most cherished beliefs. For instance, if one takes the Old Testament seriously, God does not appear to be a One-Worlder. He is less than delighted with the Tower of Babel, and throughout the Old Testament He insists that the Israelites segregate themselves from those with different views of God. And while not providing a divine sanction for every type of slavery, the Old Testament does indeed sanction the type of domestic slavery that protects the Israelites from contamination and checks the baser instincts of the servant race. It is a domestic slavery much like that of the old South of our country.

3) Prophets and Prophecies
Despite the fact that the age of prophecy was supposed to have ended with the coming of Christ, we constantly are told about new prophets and prophecies, most of which, in the Catholic Church at least, are linked to the Virgin Mary. The Old Testament prophecies are related by God to one individual, such as Moses or Elijah, but are generally meant for the entire Israelite tribe. In the Christian era, the alleged prophecies are generally related to an individual or a small group of individuals. Are they meant for the entire Christian tribe? I think one is better off disregarding them unless the revelations come to him personally.

Unlike the Kings of Israel (Samuel had warned the Israelites not to give up the old prophet / judge system) who were generally stinkers, the prophets (with a few exceptions) were the cream of the crop. My favorite prophets are Gideon, Elijah, and Jeremiah.

Gideon, a prophet judge before the Israelites had kings, I admire for his steadfast fidelity to the Lord and his Agincourt-type victory over the Midianites.

Elijah I admire for the sheer dramatic virtuosity of his entrances and exits. He pops up without warning to the wicked King Ahab and tells him that “There shall not fall upon the ground any dew or rain until I call for it.” Then he disappears as suddenly as he came. And when he departs the earth, he leaves in a chariot of fire. What an exit!

When I was growing up, the only Jeremiah we heard about was the bullfrog. But Jeremiah the prophet was one hell of a man. He is often called the “weeping prophet” because it was his unpleasant task to tell the people of Judah of the evils that were coming. One is never popular when bearing bad news, but Jeremiah spoke what the Lord told him to speak despite imprisonment, rack and rope.

4) God’s Providence
The average Israelite does not seem to have been granted extra years to his life or special individual blessings. But the kings and prophets who adhered to God’s word were. And the Israelite people were granted victory in battle when they collectively obeyed God’s word. When they returned to the idols of Baal, God allowed their enemies such as the Assyrians or the Philistines to defeat them. But does God’s providence work that way now? Was not the Israelites’ situation unique? God had a particular reason for wanting the tribe of Israel to survive and a particular reason for making sure that they did not succumb to a permanent state of idolatry. He intended to bring forth the Christ from their tribe. I know that one could make a case that the sons of Japheth (the Europeans), once the Christ was born, became, when they converted to Christianity, the new Israelites. But I don’t think that case should be made. I think the European miracle was a miracle of grace and free will while the Israelite miracle was one of God’s grace. Nor do I think, as such Christian warriors as Lee and Stonewall Jackson thought prior to the South’s defeat, that God awards victory in battle to those who are in the right. The historical record shows us too many instances of the triumph of evil over the good to believe that the Christian side will always prevail. Every nation always invokes its gods before going to war, but a Christian should, even without having read Shakespeare or Doystovesky, be able to understand that no nation, since the Christ Child was born, will ever have the same divine sanction as Israel did when going into battle.

5) Evil Women
Ahab was probably the worst King of Judea, and yet his wife Jezebel was ten times as evil. Haman was as evil as they come, and yet his wife was worse. The Bible is full of virtuous and pure women such as Ruth, but it also tells us something about women, something that coincides with what the Greek tragedians like Aeschylus and the Christian poets such as Tennyson and Shakespeare have told us: “The difference between a man and a man is the difference between heaven and earth, but the difference between a woman and a woman is the difference between heaven and hell.” The feminine principle, when separated from God, has the demonic power to engulf the earth in the flames of hell. There must be Christian patriarchal restraints placed on women lest we have an entire society based on the hellish instincts of Jezebel. And it doesn’t take a great prophet to see that Jezebelian instincts dominate our own anti-society.

6) Fairy Tale Mode
The Old Testament (and the New as well because there is no dichotomy between the two) strongly resembles the Grimm’s Fairy Tales. There are giants, evil stepmothers, good and evil wizards, talking animals and dramatic divine interventions. To many people, in fact to most, this means that the Old Testament (and the New) is false. But I think it proves the contrary. In the depths of our souls we think in the fairy tale mode, because we have a racial memory of a time when we were closer to God. We don’t go back and forth between Narnia and earth anymore because we are too degenerate. But our great poets who articulate what we have hidden in our souls give us a glimpse of a time when we used to see wonders and hear an echo of God’s voice. When we abandon the fairy tale mode of thought and replace it with theology or philosophy, we place even more layers of atheistic crust over our already over-laden souls.