THE ENEMY OF OUR ENEMIES:
A Critique of Francis Parker Yockey's The Enemy
of Europe (section 2)
go to first section
by Professor Revilo P. Oliver
(Published in one volume with Francis Parker Yockey's The Enemy of
Europe, Liberty Bell Publications, November 1981)
THE GREAT PSEUDO-MORPHOSIS
It is odd that Spengler, and even odder that Yockey, has so little to say about the prime example of what they call "pseudo-morphosis," the acceptance of an alien element by a young culture, which accordingly strives to make its Weltanschauung conform to a pattern that is repugnant to its inner nature. As we noticed above, Spengler's dichotomy between the "Apollonian" and the "Faustian" cultures makes him consider our Renaissance an example of such a cultural delusion, but although he recognizes the "Magian" culture as totally alien to our own, he never investigates a far more startling pseudo-morphosis, the imposition of a Magian religion on a Faustian people. And of all the writers who follow the Spenglerian conception, only Lawrence Brown had the very great merit of having perceived the tragic consequences of the fact that the culture of modern Europe was, at its very beginning, infected by a Levantine religion, so that it became "a society whose inward convictions have been at hopeless variance with the outward professions the events of history have forced it to make," thus producing a spiritual tension that "has destroyed the peace of mind of every able man in the West for a thousand years."
It is true that the Christianity of the West differed drastically from
all the early Christian cults, including, of course, the one that in the
Fourth Century made a deal with the despotic government of the decaying
Empire that was still called Roman, although the Romans, for all practical
purposes, had long been extinct. What Spengler calls the Faustian soul
surcharged that squalid religion with its own vision of the world, incorporating
in the cult its own concepts of heroism, personal honor, chivalry, esteem
of womanhood, delight in visual beauty (whether in women, in architecture,
or in the mimetic arts), and love of magnificent poetry, together with
the racial will-to-power--all elements which were unknown to, or expressly
negated by, the holy books that Europe inherited from the mongrel proletariat
of the rotting ancient world. The real scriptures of Western Christianity
are not the alien Bible but the Chanson de Roland, Tristan and
Isolde, the Christias, Gersusalemme liberata, Paradise
Lost, and the many other epics and romances of a great and surpassingly
beautiful tradition that ends with Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur and
Idylls of the King--any one of which would have induced apoplexy
in Tertullian, Jerome, Augustine, and the other ranting or gabbling "Fathers
of the Church." (31) And the religion, thus made at some points consonant
with the Aryan ethos, was permitted to absorb and claim a monopoly of the
antecedent and in some respects higher morality of our race, and for a
millennium the cult so dominated our culture that the West was Christendom.
But like the proverbial house built on sand, the lofty and ponderous structure
could not survive the collapse of its foundations. (32)
(31. To anyone who has the patience and equanimity to
read judiciously a fair sampling of the verbose screeds collected in the
three hundred and eighty volumes of Migne's Patrologia, the veneration
long accorded to that motley rout of shysters, crackpots, and hallucins
will seem unbelievable. For a concise conspectus of the character and activity
of the "Fathers," see Joseph Wheless's excellent Forgery in Christianity
(New York, 1930). Lying for the Lord is a normal exercise of piety.)
(32. The disintegration of a long-established tradition
is always perilous to a civilized society and may be disastrous. I expressed
a last hope that something could be salvaged from the ruin of the religion
in a booklet, Christianity and the Survival of the West, written
in 1969; it is now available in a second edition (with a new postscript,
but with no change in the text) published in 1978 by Howard Allen Enterprises,
Cape Canaveral, Florida.)
Western Christianity, unfortunately, was saddled with its Bible, which
could not be discarded or ignored because it was believed to be an historical
record of actual events. Indeed, it is probable that the principal reason
why our ignorant ancestors accepted the religion of the dying empire they
invaded and dismembered was that the religion differed from all others
known to them by its simulation of historicity in its holy book, which
purported to describe events that had taken place in known parts of the
world at specific times and had been witnessed by many persons, including
the supposed narrators. (33) And the belief the book was a record of historical
events cannot but have greatly--and tragically--affected the course of
our civilization.
(33. A complementary cause was the impression produced
on the invaders by the sumptuous architecture, superb engineering, beautiful
literature, polished art, and elaborate social organization that had survived
from earlier times in the decadent empire. There were minor causes, especially
the verbal dexterity of Christian missionaries, to which some added a maual
dexterity, as did St. Poppo, who used a well-known vaudeville trick to
perform a miracle for Harald Blastand ("Bluetooth"), King of Denmark, and
thus bring the heathen to Christ. Charlemagne's ruthless conquest of the
Saxons seemed to credulous persons evidence of the superiority of his religion
rather than of the military resources of his large kingdom.)
The Bible was an incubus of which Western Christianity could not rid
itself. The collection of tales that had been thrown together at the end
of the Third Century by feckless evangelists, who had been too negligent
to edit out even the most glaring contradictions between or even within
the pieces they selected with an eye on immediate marketing of salvation,
had been made canonical by imperial decrees and pitiless persecution of
the numerous Christian sects that had other gospels. (34) By the time that
the cult had been accepted by most of the Nordic peoples, copies of the
Latin text of "God's word" had been disseminated throughout Europe, and
it was much too late to expurgate and amend the tales, let alone to assemble
or compose a holy book more consonant with our racial psyche. And there
were limits to the ability of even the cleverest theologian to twist the
texts into a more acceptable form, unless he went so far as to pretend
that the texts do not mean what they say, but are instead a kind of cryptogram
with a hidden meaning, and that God's revelation was really a kind of puzzle-contest
with eternal life as the grand prize for solving his conundrums and eternal
torment the penalty for submitting an incorrect answer--and that would
have permitted anyone to read into the text whatever allegorical meaning
or mystical soprasenso was suggested by his imagination or ambition.
The best that could be done was to make the doctrine and practices of the
religion depend, not on the embarrassing and irreconcilable texts, but
on the decisions of a Vicar of God who had ecclesiastic authority over
all Christendom, although even his power was straitly limited by vested
interests and prevailing superstitions. This device had many shortcomings,
but it made possible the development of Western Christianity.
(34. The Christian sect that shrewdly made a political
deal with the despots of the decaying empire was one that brought with
it the Jewish Old Testament, and it used the military power it thus acquired
to extirpate all the competing Christian sects, including the many that
rejected the Jewish compilation or logically identified Yahweh with Satan.
To what extent the wily Jews actively contributed to the triumph of a sect
that ensured them a privileged position in society and endless profit (plus
a chance to continue their habitual wailing about "persecution") is unknown.
We need not regret the suppression of the Christian sects that practiced
homosexuality, promiscuity, incest, and sacred anthropophagy, but it was
a disaster that the "orthodox" were able to exterminate the Marcionists,
who, though less fanatical and aggressive, may have been the largest of
the various sects before piety was augmented by fire and sword. Marcion,
although superstitious, was sufficiently clear-headed to perceive the utter
incompatibility between the Jewish book and the doctrines of even the gospels
that have been included by the "orthodox" in the New Testament part of
their holy book; he was also revolted by the barbarous notion that a supposedly
good god would have his own son killed. There were many other sects that
rejected the Jewish pretensions. The Marcionists survived underground until
at least the Fifth Century, when an "orthodox" poetaster, Prudentius, laments
that the government had not yet been able to butcher all of them. Had Christianity
reached us in the form of Marcionism or of one of the similar sects, it
would be unnecessary for some of our contemporaries to devise ingenious
sophistries to argue that the protagonist of the New Testament was not
a Jew. Scores of gospels that the victorious faction did not succeed in
entirely destroying have come to light in the papyri, and while they give
us no high opinion of the intelligence of their superstitious authors,
many of them would have served our people better then the ones that were
included in the "orthodox" compilation.)
So long as the Papacy had the political power to exterminate dissenters,
(35) the religion gave Europe a needed cultural unity, but by the Sixteenth
Century the Protestants became bold enough to challenge the Vicar's authority
by alleging the meanings they found in selected passages of the supposed
Word of God, and numerous enough to enlist the support of ambitious princes
who had armies of their own. That was the beginning of the end. A century
of intensive butchery produced only a conclusive demonstration that the
Christians' fierce God had become senile or cynical. He had been Johnny-on-the-spot
when the Jews wanted to grab the country of the Canaanites, and he had
even stopped the sun in its quotidian course above the flat earth at an
elevation of about thirty thousand feet--stopped it to help his Chosen
Bandits slaughter all the men, slaughter all the women, slaughter all the
children, slaughter all the oxen, slaughter all the sheep, and slaughter
all the asses: "all these they slew with the edge of the sword." But when
the Antichrist appeared in person in Rome--or in Germany--and gobbled up
souls by the thousand, Yahweh didn't lift a finger or even despatch a single
archangel, let alone tamper with the solar system, to help his True Believers
exterminate the Catholic or Protestant Children of the Devil. At the same
time, increasing knowledge of the real world made the Christian myths incredible
and ridiculous. The religion slowly reverted to the proletarian squalor
of its origins, despite the efforts of "conservatives" to shore-up a time-honored
tradition that seemed indispensable to the preservation of a civilized
society. (36)
(35. Heretics appeared constantly throughout the Middle
Ages, but in groups small enough to be disposed of conveniently in holy
bonfires, and only the Albigenses were numerous and rich enough to call
for a full-scale Crusade. An interesting attempt to patch up the religion
is provided by the only surviving copy of the De duobus principiis,
which was discovered and published too recently to be mentioned in the
usual handbooks. The anonymous author was repelled by the gross immorality
of the Old Testament and he also saw the absurdity of the conventional
Christian claim that a god who lacked either the power or the will to squelch
the Devil was both omnipotent and just; in the second half of his tractate,
however, he tries to salvage the portions of the New Testament that were
emotionally satisfying to him. Better minds were also found during the
Middle Ages, as is proved by the fame of the treatise De tribus impostoribus,
which was attributed to Frederick II. Hohenstaufen and others who might
have written it, but they were content to smile at the passionate votaries
of the three impostors (Moses, Jesus, Mahomet) with equal disdain or compassion,
and they prudently refrained from denouncing what Mellin de Saint-Gelays
called "la crance et estude/de l'ingorante et sotte multitude.")
(36. Vulgus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur, is a
Mediaeval aphorism that was doubtless repeated by many enlightened ecclesiastics
before Cardinal Caraffa and by some for reasons that transcended professional
interests, but only after the seismic shock of the French Revolution did
concern for the maintenance of the social order become a major consideration
in persuading educated men to give outward adhesion to a cult in which
they could not believe. It seems impossible to determine whether, as a
general rule, "revealed" religions inhibit by fear more crimes than they
incite by fanaticism, but, given the state of our society in the Seventeenth
Century, the celebrated Cardinal Dubois may have been right when he asserted
that a god is an indispensable bogeyman that must be flourished to scare
the masses into a semblance of civilized behavior. That question, however,
cannot concern us here, where it is irrelevant. We are men of the West,
who cannot believe, while rational, that facts can be ascertained by deciding
what is more useful socially or most strongly tickles our fancy.)
Even at its best, however, Christianity powerfully and, indeed, immeasurably distorted our culture.
As all educated men know, Christianity is essentially a Judaized version of Zoroastrianism, as is, in fact, implied in one of the accepted legends about the nativity of its Saviour God, at which Zoroastrian priests (Magi) are said to have been in attendance. The Zoroastrian cult, reputedly founded by a Zarathustra, who, as is de rigeur for all Saviours, was born of a divinely fecundated virgin (or, what is slightly more miraculous, from several virgins simultaneously), was the archetype of all the "universal religions," of which only Toynbee seems to have perceived the importance as a force that constricts and deforms a people's native culture. It introduced some very peculiar and epochal notions that have been profoundly deleterious to all races influenced by them. We need mention only two cardinal points.
Zoroastrianism (and, of course, the Christian rifacimento of it) is a dualism that posits the existence of two extremely powerful gods, each of whom would be omnipotent but for the power of the other: a good god (Ahuramazda, Jehovah), who is engaged in a continuous war for supreme power with an evil god (Ahriman, Satan), with the odd consequence that although the good god is backed up by his presumably mighty son (Mithras, Jesus) and commands legions of doughty archangels, and the evil god can marshal legions of valiant devils, including all the gods previously worshipped by men, both antagonists need to recruit renforcements from the puny race of mortals and accordingly struggle for the possession of individual souls. The cosmic conflict between the two gods is a desperate one, a holy war waged with all their resources and causing infinite devastation and suffering on earth, although, strangely enough, the result is a foregone conclusion and everyone knows that the good god will triumph in the end and spend the rest of eternity in joyously tormenting his captive adversary and all of that monarch's wickedly loyal and luckless followers.
This paradoxical and amazing dualism has infected all the thinking of
our Western civilization, both religious and secular. (37) It has inspired
an endless series of holy wars, not only to exterminate Protestants, Catholics,
or other religious agents of Satan, but also, with equally frantic religiosity,
to annihilate or enslave Satanically evil nations (in the United States,
successively Southerners, Spaniards, (38) and Germans). I need not remark
that the dualism has survived the superstitions about the supernatural
from which it came and inspires ostensibly non-religious cults, as in the
Marxists' holy war against the diabolically evil Capitalists or Fascists;
and it goes without saying that when the zombies swarm out of the cesspools
of Harvard or Yale to howl at Professor Jensen or Professor Shockley and
prevent him from talking sense to such sane men as may remain in the academic
ruins, the ignorant creatures feel that they are fighting the Devil and
only their native cowardice prevents them from rending the learned men
limb from limb in the faith that the facts of nature can thus be altered.
(39) And, on the other hand, everyone can see that the missionaries who
were once sent abroad to annoy the natives of Asia and Africa and "save
souls" have been replaced by the far more pernicious gangs of "do-gooders,"
who plunder us for the benefit of "underdeveloped nations" and, in so far
as they are not mere racketeers, must be buoyed up by a belief that they
are commending themselves to a Jehovah in whom they no longer believe.
(37. It is true that today many Christians, who either
do not read their holy book or read it in an emotional fog, sincerely believe
that their religion is a monotheism, having been so persuaded by adroit
theologians who exploit the prevalent notion that a monotheism is, for
some reason, a "higher" or "purer" cult than a polytheism, thus catering
to the interests of the Jews, who have claimed to be monotheists ever since
they perceived, in the second and first centuries B.C., the enormous advantages
of impudently claiming that their tribal deity, Yahweh, was the Providence,
or animus mundi, of Graeco-Roman Stoicism. When the Christians began
to deny the existence of Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Isis, Tanit, and all the
innumerable other gods of the past, and to regard them as mere myths or
illusions, they rejected the explicit testimony of the "Fathers of the
Church," and of their holy book, which they thus denounced as unreliable.
The religion could probably have survived that amputation, but when the
Christians killed off Satan to make their religion really monotheistic,
they made it intrinsically incredible. The resulting bankruptcy of the
cult was wittily adumbrated by a French theologian (J. Turmel), whose urbane
treatise was translated into English under the title, The Life of the
Devil (New York, 1930), and published under a pseudonym, "Louis Coulange.")
(38. Some of the promoters of the Spanish-American War
doubtless had the rational purpose of seizing Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other
Spanish possessions for American expansion and colonization, but enthusiasm
for the war was whipped up by proclaiming a jihad, as had been done
in the unconscionable war of aggression against the Southern sates. Spaniards
were described as diabolic monsters of cruelty, and at least one military
man attained great popularity when the press reported that he had promised
to slaughter so many of the human devils that only Spanish would be spoken
in Hell for the next fifty years. The prompt defeat of our hopelessly weaker
opponent averted satisfaction of the Christian fanaticism and blood-lust
that had been excited by the propaganda, but professions of a high moral
purpose led the United States foolishly to throw away part of the spoils
of the war it had won by "liberating" Cuba to make the aggression seem
altruistic.)
(39. In England, Professor Eysenck, while lecturing on
a strictly scientific topic that displeases Jews, was assaulted and severely
injured by a swarm of vermin hatched out in the University of London.)
The Zoroastrian dualism makes weak minds susceptible to hallucinations
by which they identify their interests or wishes with the cause of the
Good God and excite themselves with a blind and deadly hatred of their
opponents or rivals (who may have the same hallucination about them) as
the innately evil agents of the Bad God, to be driven by any means, fair
or foul, to the perdition to which they are damned. And nothing basic is
changed by replacing Ahuramazda/Jehovah with an abstraction, such as "democracy,"
and replacing Ahriman/Satan with an another, such as "aristocracy." (40)
Ironically enough, this poisonous dualism, which came to us through the
Jews, now dominates the reaction against Jewish overlordship, for most
of the Jews' antagonists identify them as "the Synagogue of Satan" etc.
ad nauseam, while those who do not, usually regard the Jews as an
inherently and almost praeternaturally evil people, instead of regarding
them rationally as a specialized race which, being a minority among all
the peoples on whom it is parasitic, has learned that its will-to-power
must be advanced by cunning rather than undisguised force of its own--a
race, furthermore, which quite naturally regards its own interests and
purposes as just and justified by either a covenant with a deity or its
own intellectual superiority, much as our ancestors felt no compunction
as they took a continent away from the aborigines, confident in their own
manifest superiority, although some of them were foolish enough to think
that the Indians must have been inspired by the Devil to try to retain
possession of their own hunting grounds. So long as our minds are clouded
by the Zoroastrian myth, we shall be incapable of rational thought for
our own survival.
(40. This particular form of the superstition is implicit
in innumerable writings that distort history to fit some pattern of "social
progress," but the reader will find both amusing and instructive an especially
clear specimen, Frederic Huidekoper, Judaism at Rome, New York,
5th ed., 1883. That account of a struggle between the evil "aristocrats"
and the pure-hearted "improvement party" (which, of course, was inspired
and led by God's Race) represents, so to speak, the virus in its pure state.)
A second epochal innovation of Zoroastrianism was the bizarre notion
of religious "conversion," of which the import is clearly seen in the tradition
that Zarathustra's first convert was a Turanian, i.e., a Turko-Mongolian
was transformed by psychic magic into an Aryan and more than an Aryan.
By the simple act of believing the stories Zoroaster told him, that alien
joined the Army of God and attained an exalted position to which Aryans
could attain only by believing the same stories, while Aryans who were
less easily captivated by evangelical rant remained servants of Satan,
the deadly foes of God, and should be exterminated as soon as possible
by the Aryans, Turanians, Mongols, Semites, and others whose minds had
been opened to the Gospel. The obvious effect of this superstition was
to destroy awareness of the biological fact of race and replace it with
a delusion that could only hasten the Aryans' racial suicide. (41)
(41. Hastened, not initiated, because the men of our race,
wherever in the world they have established themselves, cannot keep their
hands off women of the native races. This lascivious fatuity, to be sure,
is as universal as masculine lust, and a superior race may even regard
indulgence in it as evidence of their own superiority. The great Egyptian
king of the Twelfth Dynasty, Sesostris III. (Khakaure), who established
border patrols to prevent the infiltration into Egypt of Nubians from conquered
territory, in the very inscriptions in which he points out the racial inferiority
of Blacks, boasts that he "captured their women" and "carried them off,"
doubtless into Egypt as slaves, not foreseeing the terrible consequences
of the inevitable miscegenation.)
The nonsensical notion that any anthropoid can be miraculously "converted"
to "righteousness" by being made to believe the dualistic myth logically
engenders a mystic yearning for "One World," in which massive slaughter
of the wicked Unbelievers will force the survivors of all races to unite
in worship of Jesus or Democracy and thus live in a Heaven on Earth. The
fatuous dream of a potential spiritual unification accounts for the current
use of the term "all mankind," which is intelligible only as parallel to
such classifications as "all marsupials" or "all carnivores," with a mystical
connotation that inspires unthinking awe in many of our contemporaries,
and since the fantasy is, of course, biologically impossible, (42) some
childish minds, perturbed by a glimpse of reality, fester until they reach
the state of the famous expert on "Mental Health," Brock Chisholm, whose
diseased mind lusted for the extermination of white men so that the whole
globe could be inhabited only by coffee-colored and mindless mongrels made
righteous by their equality in squalor.
(42. No one should ever have been so credulous as to believe
the claims of missionaries that they "saved souls" by transforming savages
or Orientals into Christians. All that the holy men accomplished by harangues
and bribery (supplemented by the incontestable superiority of our hated
race which was made manifest in such things as repeating rifles and the
disciplined courage of British regiments) was to induce an outward assent
to statements that the native mind was innately incapable of comprehending
and translated into ideas acceptable to brains of quite different formation
from ours. It was natural and inevitable that when the savages saw our
race become so lunatic as to surrender its colonial possessions, the "Christianity"
of those who did not at once revert to their native cults became what they
had always understood it to be, a special kind of mumbo-jumbo. For a convenient
survey of those developments, see Postchristianity in Africa, by
G.C. Oosthuizen, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1968. This "anthropological" study
is the more instructive because it is written by a Christian, who naturally
cannot understand the real causes of the events he describes.)
Belief in the psychic magic of "conversion, furthermore, opened the
way for the Bolshevism that attained its fullest development in Christianity,
the devastating notion that Faith--a faith that is as thoughtless and preferably
as unconscious as the "faith" of a vegetable or a mustard seed--was what
counted, so that an ignorant peasant, an illiterate fisherman, or the most
scurvy proletarian could make himself the superior of the noblest, the
bravest, and the wisest of men--and, secure in the favor or a god who so
hates learning and reason that he will "make folly the wisdom of this world,"
the simpletons and morons, having become True Believers, can look forward
to the delights of seeing, when the last have been made first, their betters
suffer the most atrocious torments forever and forever. No idea, no menticidal
poison, could be more effective in destroying the culture and even the
sanity of the people in whom it has been injected. (43) And the poison,
destructive of all social stability and hence of civilization itself, survived
the mythology from which it sprang and persists today in the atheistic
"Liberals" who bleat about the "underprivileged," fawn on savages, and
demand an "open society" that is perpetually stirred up so that the dregs
on the bottom may become the scum on the top.
(43. How alien this nonsense was to the mentality of our
race is shown by the fact that, professing to believe it, they promptly
began to reason about Faith and erected the vast intellectual structure
of Scholasticism, "comme si raison et foi pouvaient trottiner de concert,"
as Maurice Garon sardonically comments. The final result, of course, was
Nominalism and the labefaction of the Mediaeval Weltanschauung and
eventually of the alien religion that had been incorporated in it.)
Having noticed these two cardinal elements of Zoroastrianism and the
religions derived from it, we need not mention others, for the vital historical
question is whether this pernicious cult was Aryan in its origins or a
device of aliens. To be sure, it became the religion of the Persians. It
was the religion of Darius the Great, who boasted that he was an "Aryan
of the Aryans" and modestly attributed his victories to the help of Ahuramazda.
It was the religion of his son, Xerxes, whose mind was so blighted by fanaticism
that he boasted that he had destroyed the temples on the acropolis at Athens,
where the Greeks worshipped nasty devils, and had commanded the benighted
Greeks to worship his One True God. (44) It is also true that all the early
legends about Zarathustra state or imply that he was an Aryan, although
it may be significant that his miraculous nativity is said to have occurred
in many different places, and that he is always described as an itinerant
prophet who was not a native of the region in which he began to proclaim
his gospel and salvage men's souls. What is even more remarkable, the only
name that the Zoroastrian cultists gave themselves in the time of the Persian
Empire, so far as we know, was Airyavo danghavo, words which literally
mean "the Aryan peoples." That presumptuous appellation is obviously false
in an ethnic sense, for it excludes the Aryan peoples of India, who were
specifically damned as the worshippers of devils, and includes the many
non-Aryans who elected to be Saved and join the Elect by believing or pretending
to believe Zarathustra's evangels. If the term the Magi chose for their
cult was not just an impudent falsehood, it must have originated in a calculated
use of arya (45) in its non-racial sense, "noble, excellent": since
worshippers of the good god must be good people morally superior, they
could be called "the excellent people." That would make the name comparable
to the famous verbal trick by which the "Fathers of the Church," in a time
of military supremacy, called their motley followers "soldiers of Christ,"
so that non-Christians could contemptuously be called "pagans" (pagani,
"peasants, yokels"). (46)
(44. Xerxes does not specifically mention Athens, perhaps
because the name might carry an impious suggestion that God must have been
taking a nap when the Greeks, though hopelessly inferior in numbers and
resources, destroyed his navy and sent him scuttling back across the Hellespont,
but the allusion is unmistakable. The text of his inscription (transliterated
from the cuneiform into Roman characters) may conveniently be found in
Professor Roland G. Kent's Old Persian, New Haven, 1953.)
(45. I give the well-known Sanskrit form, whence comes
our 'Aryan'; in Avestan, the dialect of the Zoroastrian holy book, the
word becomes airya, as in the phrase I quoted above.)
(46. Originally a paganus was an inhabitant of
a rural district (pagus) as distinct from a townsman at a time when all
prosperous landowners in the countryside were citizens of a town, so that
it had about the connotation of our 'rustic.' In the later part of the
First Century it acquired the meaning of 'civilian, common man' (exclusive
of persons of any social distinction) and was often contrasted with miles
('soldier'); in the later Empire, agents of the secret police, who disguised
themselves as individuals of the lower classes, went about pagano ritu,
i.e., as 'plainclothesmen.' But under the Dominate, the status of the countryfolk
(pagani in the first sense of the word) progressively declined to serfdom,
hence the particular force of the "Fathers' " propagandistic word. The
trick is disguised by the Christian explanation that "pagan" beliefs lingered
longest in the countryside, which does have a certain basis in fact (countryfolk,
perforce, remain close to nature), but should not blind us to the origin
of the religious meaning in clever propaganda.)
The Zoroastrian dualism was accepted by the Aryans of Persia, (47) who
vehemently repudiated their own, presumably Vedic, gods, much as Christianity
was accepted by the Nordic peoples of Europe, who repudiated Odin, Thor,
and their other gods as evil agents of Satan. Christianity was, of course,
an Oriental cult, and the analogy makes it difficult to believe that its
Zoroastrian antecedent was natively Aryan.
(47. It would be interesting but futile to speculate about
the use of hallucinatory drugs to spread the Gospel. The Zoroastrian haoma
has been identified by R. Gordon Wasson (Soma, Divine Mushroom of Immortality,
The Hague, 1968) as a drink made from the Amanita muscaria, one
of the mushrooms that are used throughout the world to produce religious
experiences and visions of God. On its use when the early Christians symbolically
ate the flesh of their god, see John Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom and
the Cross, New York, 1970--a most informative study, although etymologies
from the Sumerian and later languages are probably overworked. In our own
time, as it well known, drugs are used by the more enterprising evangelists
to induce piety in the victims they collect in colonies of fanatical bands.)
There are many indications that it was not. Much of the evidence is
too intricate to be discussed here, and it will suffice to mention a few
essentials. The name of the Saviour, however it should be spelled (Zarathustra,
Zaratost, Zaratast, etc.), is not readily explicable as Indo-European
and may come from another language. There is reason to believe that the
cult's holy book, the Avesta (a title which may not be Indo-European),
was not composed in Persian, but was translated into a late Persian dialect
from another, probably Semitic, language. (48) It is even possible that
in the time of Darius the sacred language of the Zoroastrian scriptures
and the liturgies recited by the Magi was Semitic, for the Persian Empire
had three official languages, Old Persian, the native language of the rulers,
Elamite, respected for its antiquity and still spoken at Susa, and Aramaic,
the Semitic language which was most widely known throughout Persian territory
and outside it, and which, accordingly, was the language commonly used
by the Persians in the administration of their empire and in diplomatic
correspondence with other nations. Before the extant text of the Avesta
was written down, (49) the Greeks of the Hellenistic Age who interested
themselves in the "Persian" religion found only texts in Aramaic, the language
spoken by the Zoroastrian priests of their time, (50) and it is obviously
possible that some of those texts were the originals, dating from the time
of the Persian Empire, and not translations, as is generally supposed.
(48. This was known to Spengler (Vol. II, p. 168), who
relies on scholars in the field who are cited in the article to which he
refers in a footnote. The linguistic evidence is tangled, but Avestan,
the dialect of the Avesta, is related to Old Persian, the language
of the Persian emperors, much as the various Prakrits are related to Sanskrit,
and the natural inference is that Avestan is a broken-down and late form
of Old Persian, rather than an early dialect of some region (Bactria?)
or an hypothetical brogue of the Medes. It does resemble the decadent Persian
of the last days of the Empire, which, however, is centuries earlier than
the date to which most scholars (e.g. Darmesteter in the concluding part
of the introduction to the third volume of his version of the Zend-Avesta)
assign the extant text of the Avesta. To my mind, that is conclusive.
Granting that some of the gathas in the Avesta probably represent
statements actually made by the prophet known as Zarathustra, it does not
follow that the statements were made in Avestan. It is likely that many
of the statements in the New Testament were actually made by one or another
of the various Jesuses of whom the protagonist is a composite figure, but
no one would believe that those agitators spoke in Greek to the Jewish
rabble.)
(49. In the First Century, according to Darmesteter, whom
I cited above. Other scholars would place it in the first century B.C.,
i.e. at the end of the Hellenistic Age and, of course, later than
the Greek authors in question.)
(50. See J. Bidez & F. Cumont, Les Mages helleniss,
Paris, 1973 (=1938), especially pp. 35, 88-91; cf. pp. 34, 44. The English
translation of Cumont's Oriental Religions now in print dates from
1911, and is naturally less complete than his fourth edition (Paris, 1929);
in the translation, he notes that the Zoroastrian texts were in Aramaic,
but by an odd slip he speaks in one passage as though the Aramaic-speaking
evangelists were Persians, although he must know better. This is corrected
in his fourth edition.)
There is one significant datum which seems not to have been given the
emphasis it deserves. As everyone knows, Zoroastrian priest were always
called Magi, but Magi was not originally a word of religious meaning:
it was an ethnic term that designated a certain peculiar people who lived
in Media but were in some way distinct from the ordinary Medes, and during
the early centuries of Zoroastrianism only men of that peculiar
tribe could be priests and their sacred office could be transmitted only
by hereditary descent through females. (51) That fact is as startling as
though in the Roman Catholic Church the only word for a priest was
'Irishman,' and during the Middle Ages only pure-blooded Irish (i.e.,
having an Irish mother as well as father) could perform sacraments. The
word Magi, I believe, creates a very strong presumption that the
propagators of the religion were not Aryans. (52) It may be only a coincidence
that according to a tradition in the Jews' holy book (53) which seems to
have an historical basis in events that took place before the time of Zarathustra,
colonies of Jews had been planted "in the cities of Media." But since forgery
and imposture have always been normal Jewish devices, no weight can be
given to their claim that Zarathustra was a Jew and wrote in Hebrew. (54)
(51. Hence their famous custom of engendering offspring
by sexual intercourse with their mothers or, if that was not possible,
with sisters.)
(52. This must be distinguished, of course, from the custom,
common among the Greeks, by which the priest of a local temple or shrine
was a descendant of the family on whose land the sanctuary was built, and
also from the formation of a caste of professional holy men, such as the
Brahmanas of India.)
(53. 4 Reg. (= 2 Kings), 17.6 & 18.11.)
(54. See the texts translated from the Syriac by Bidez
& Cumont, op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 103-104, 129, 131, and the
texts cited in their Vol. I, p. 50, nn. 3,4. At the date it was made, the
Jews' claim that Zarathustra was a Jew was doubtless just a normal part
of what the authors, apropos of an impudent attempt to appropriate the
Etruscans, call "la propagande juive pour imposer aux paiens se croyances"
(Vol. I, p. 238), although the purpose more commonly may have been to bamboozle
ignorant goyim by making them believe in the vast superiority of
Yahweh's Master Race. The Christians naturally forged ahead in much the
same way and concocted "proof" that Zarathustra had been a prophet of the
advent of their Jesus; see, op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 118, 127, 130,
135.)
The really fundamental and cogent consideration is the enormous difference
between the "universal" religion and the spirit of all the certainly Aryan
religions of which we know, especially the Vedic, the Greek, and Norse,
which we know in detail. The discrepancy is so great that even Toynbee
felt obliged to conjecture that Zarathustra (whom he accepts as an Aryan)
must have been instigated by a Jew. (55)
(55. A Study of History, Vol. I, p. 81, n. 1.)
The very idea of evil gods is alien and repugnant to the spirit of all authentically Aryan religions, which are never so irrational as to inject good and evil deities into a universe in which the very concepts of moral 'good' and moral 'evil' are indubitably created by human societies for their own purposes and correspond to nothing whatsoever in the world of nature. Wickedness can exist only within a given society of human beings and can be defined only in terms of the standards of morality that the society more or less instinctively applies to relationships among its own members. Only infantile minds can attribute moral iniquity to hurricanes, volcanoes, dynamite, and other natural phenomena that may be baneful to us; primitive peoples, ignorant of the causes, may superstitiously attribute such phenomena to supernatural forces and may imagine gods that are indifferent to human welfare or have been angered by some supposed offense, but so long as they have a vestige of rationality they will not imagine gods who are inherently evil and seeking to promote wickedness. A notion that species of animals (e.g. snakes, sharks, tigers) that defend themselves against us or prey on us, or that species of human beings that pursue their own advantage to our detriment (e.g. Japanese, Jews) are wicked because they obey the universal law of life is simply irrational. And when a pack of fanatics claims that all persons who do not share their superstitions are diabolically evil, they are insane, prevalent as that form of insanity may be. The Zoroastrian dualism may fairly be called the most devastating mental disease that ever became epidemic on this planet.
The Aryan religions are not infected by that black delusion. (56) Their
gods, like the forces of nature, are multiple and, as is only reasonable,
are sometimes opposed to one another in their relations with mortals. Venus
and Juno may each work against the other, just as every day the force of
sexual attraction enters into conflict with the requirement of sexual fidelity
that makes marriage an indispensable social institution. In the great epic
of our race, the Iliad, which deals with a war to the death between
the Achaeans and the Trojans, some of the Greek gods favor one nation while
other Greek gods favor the enemies of the Greeks. No Greek was so irrational
as to believe there was only one god and then say "Gott mit uns!" as Christians
do when they embark on holy wars against one another. In the Norse religion,
the Aesir and Vanir are united in Asgard, but often at odds with one another,
as are the forces of nature to which mortals are subject. The Aryan mind
could never, of its own accord, have conceived of so monstrous an inversion
of religion as appears in the mad fanaticism of the Zoroastrians, who converted
the Aryan gods of the Vedas into fiends, and of the Christians, who converted
the gracious gods of the Graeco-Roman pantheon into malevolent devils.
(56. A conspectus of the basic concepts of Aryan religions
may be found in the admirably concise work of Professor Hans Gnther, available
in an English version by Vivian Bird and Roger Pearson, The Religious
Attitudes of the Indo-Europeans, London, 1967. I am aware of the danger
that we may identify as characteristically Aryan the qualities that we,
as Aryans, admire, but a certain objectivity may be attained by considering
what is admired in the great literatures of our race.)
The Aryan were not so foolish as to imagine that their gods were omnipotent; their gods are far more powerful than we, but they too are subject to Destiny, the impersonal force that is inherent in the structure of the physical world. They were not so credulous as to mistake the ravings of an hallucin or the sophistries of a theologian for revelations of truth: they had no gospels, and every one knew that poets and skalds were free to invent or modify stories about the gods that might be no more or less truthful than folktales. The Aryans did not have the hatred of civilized life that inspires the dualists' notion of Faith, a blind belief in certain tales by which ignorance and credulity are exalted above learning and reason. The Aryans respected the gods they imagined, but with a manly self-respect also; they did not cringe and cower before celestial despots, as do races with the slave-mentality and Sklavenmoral of the Near East.
The Aryan spirit is innately aristocratic and heroic. Aryan man, when
he is most fully Aryan, is driven by a spiritual passion to excel,
(57)--to realize, at whatever cost to himself, whatever capacity for greatness
he may have within him. And while he rationally expects to find perfection
in gods and men no more than in the world of physical reality, he has innately
certain ideals of personal honor, fairness, and manly compassion
that are incomprehensible to other races. (58) Both of these characteristics,
however, although they are the source of all the greatness our race has
attained, make Aryans vulnerable. The very superiority of men who approach
our racial ideal makes it easy for a parasitic race or our own criminal
elements to rouse against us the inferior's resentment of superiority and
to excite envy and malice in proletarian herds, thus disrupting our society
in what Ortega y Gasset calls, "the revolt of the underman." And artful
appeals to our sense of fairness and compassion can excite, especially
in females, the irrational sentimentality that ignores the fact that a
cohesive society is an organism and, like all organisms, can live only
by excreting its waste products--the grim fact that, by the unalterable
laws of biology, we, like all mammals, bring to birth biological tares
and misfits, which must be eliminated, if the species is not to degenerate
to eventual extinction. And what the struggle for life does automatically
for other mammals, our species, being capable of reason and purposeful
social organization, must do deliberately--or perish.
(57. As in Iliad, VI. 208, perhaps the most memorable
line of our great epic, which is repeated at XI. 784.)
(58. An excellent work, which will enable us to see ourselves
as others see us, is Maurice Samuel's You Gentiles (New York, 1924;
recently reprinted). Jews feel only contempt for a race so mentally inferior
that its men prefer to meet their enemies in a fair fight instead of stabbing
them in the back when off their guard or giving them a poisoned cup under
the guise of friendship. And if we consider the matter objectively, they
may be right: "c'est la supriorit de ma race sur la v"tre: la v"tre mourra,
la mienne durera." Farrre formulated the only biologically valid criterion
of superiority. I remember an erudite Jewish professor who could
not perceive that a chivalrous respect for valiant and honorable opponents
differed from the pawkish notions about forgiveness set forth in some parts
of the New Testament medley. Apropos of the hoax about the "six million"
that the Jews are using to bleed the Germans whom we conquered for them,
he said, with arrogant candor, "The stupid Christians forgive enemies,
by WE exact vengeance to the last drop of their blood." Whether he is correct
in his confidence in his race's superiority, the future will determine--probably
the near future. The other races, needless to say, also despise us for
our indulgence toward them, each in terms of their own standards, and eagerly
look forward to the ruin we seem determined to bring upon ourselves.)
The Christian version of the Zoroastrian dualism was Judaized, and Ahuramazda was replaced by the Jews' tribal god, Yahweh. As a result, our race lived for centuries in terror of the capricious and ferocious deity of the Old Testament, and no phrase is more common in the harangues of our holy men than "fear of God." Christians had to believe they were at the mercy of the supernatural monster who, for example, deliberately alienated the mind of an unnamed Egyptian king so that he would have an opportunity to afflict the whole of the obviously innocent population of Egypt with every imaginable disease, plague, and disaster, even murdering the Egyptians' children, so that his pet Jews could gloat over the torments of the goyim, who were evidently made so imbecile by their suffering that they permitted the Jews to "borrow" all their valuable property, gold, silver, jewels, and even wearing apparel, and then run away with the loot. Yahweh, naturally, repealed the law of gravity long enough to permit the swindlers to escape with the stolen property and to set a trap to destroy more goyim. And the terrible deity is credited with many similar exploits, all as vicious and immoral from every point of view, except, of course, that of the Jews who created him in their own image. And thoughtful Christians could derive little reassurance from their theologians' story that the savage god had finally repented of his blunder in picking the Jews as his pets, for a thoughtful man must quail before the appalling malevolence of the Jewish hymn of hate that closes the New Testament and is the Christians' favorite horror-story.
Thinking men were equally depressed to learn from that New Testament that Yahweh, having repented of one blunder and decided to let his erstwhile pets kill his son, bestowed his divine favors on the very dregs of a squalid, ignorant, and dirty population in Palestine to emphasize his new commands, which, quite logically, make Believing Christians dote on everything that is lowly, inferior, debased, diseased, deformed, and degenerate.
For Aryans, including, of course, the Germanic peoples who invaded the
moribund Empire that had once been Roman, Christianity has been a deadly
and perhaps fatal poison, a delusion that forced our people to act against
the dictates of their own biological nature. (59) If ever in recorded history
there was a cultural pseudo-morphosis, that was it.
(59. Christianity was also deleterious to our race biologically, but we cannot measure or even estimate its dysgenic effect. It certainly encouraged the preservation and reproduction of the unfit, and, through both monasticism and the distribution of social rewards, it inhibited the reproduction of superior men and women. Having given the Jews a privileged position and enriched them, it facilitated Jewish penetration of our society by a common ruse: Aryan males were hooked by offering them smiling Jewesses with generous or lavish dowries; the Jewesses, although perfunctorily sprinkled with holy water, had naturally been taught by the inspiring examples of Esther and Judith that their loyalty was to their race, not to the goy whose bed they shared and whom the would manipulate in the interests of their kind. A Jewish strain, conceivably as potent as Dr. Nossig claimed (see note 30 above), was thus planted in many gentle, noble, and even royal families and may, as some believe, account for their decadence, both mental and physical, as frequently occurs when incompatible genetic strains are combined. But statistics on all these points are lacking, and if we had them, we should only face the impossible task of measuring what happened against what would have happened, if Europe under the Germanic peoples had adopted some other (what other?) religion or religions. Charles Renouvier's Uchronie (Paris, 1876) will sufficiently entertain and discourage those who must speculate about the incalculable.
An anonymous writer in Instauration (Aug. 1980) sought to explain
psychologically one of the most drastic and puzzling effects of Christianity
on our race and civilization. When our ancestors accepted the Magian cult,
they believed themselves at the mercy of a capricious and ferocious god
whom they had to appease and placate by observing absurd taboos and imposing
on themselves unnatural conduct their racial instincts rejected. Thus they
had a sense of guilt without consciously knowing why. By not sinning in
the eyes of Yahweh, they were sinning against themselves. They were biologically
guilty. From this inner conflict,--from the subconscious mind's reaction
to the perpetual conflict between the innate nature of a healthy Aryan
and the conduct his Christian or "Liberal" superstitions require of him,--comes
the maddening sense of personal and racial guilt that has been for centuries
and is today a black and monstrous incubus on the minds of our race. This
explanation may well be right.)
SPENGLER VS. YOCKEY
I have tried above to exhibit briefly the magnitude of the cultural distortion that is overlooked by both Spengler and Yockey, although, according to their own doctrines, it was the imposition on the Faustian soul of a Magian ideology, the product of a totally alien civilization. Spengler, however, who goes almost as far as Toynbee in regarding the Jews as a "fossil people," can be defended on the grounds that he regards the Faustian culture of the West as one that arose, around the year 900, among the dominant peoples who then lived in Europe, regardless of ethnic diversities or innate racial characteristics, and that Christianity was simply an element that entered into that culture. From that standpoint, our culture, whether for better or worse, was as naturally and inevitably Christian as Napoleon was a Corsican. To ask what our civilization would have been like without Christianity is like asking what George Washington would have become, had he been born of different parents. Our estimate of Spengler's historionomy will therefore depend on our acceptance or rejection of (a) his conception of a culture as largely independent of biological race, and (b) his assumption that the Jews as such, have had no great influence over our history.
For Yockey, no such apology will serve. He follows Spengler, it is true, in his general doctrine of race, but he attributes to the Jews, whom he frequently designates as the "culture-distorters," a vast and decisive influence over our recent history, and since he does not claim that their baneful power is a recent phenomenon, he must logically believe that it has been exercised against us in earlier centuries. If he is to give us a philosophical comprehension of the historical process, he must explain the nature, origin, and development of that power--and obviously such an explanation must include consideration of the effects of Christianity on both our people and the Jews who, for purposes that Yockey recognizes as hostile, lived among them.
As I have said before, I come neither to praise not to bury Yockey,
but merely to evaluate his work. It is clear, I believe, that as an exegesis
of historical causality, Imperium and, of course, its sequel are
radically defective, even in terms of their own premises. They have other
values. I have always believed that Imperium was enlightening and
even inspiring reading for young men and women whose minds have not been
irremediably blighted by the denaturing superstitions inculcated in the
public schools. And both books are studies of politics, in the original
and proper sense of that word, not as it is used in our great ochlocracy
in reference to the periodic popularity-contests between Tweedledum and
Tweedledee which many Americans find as exciting as baseball games.
Cont'd in Section 3
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Copyright ©1999 Kevin Alfred Strom. Back to Revilo P. Oliver Index