“America”—the propositional “nation,” i.e., the egalitarian capitalist system—is the most evil enterprise in human history if it can take a person one generation removed from a proud and healthy people with a strong identity and turn him into a deracinated nihilist like this.
Excerpted from the 13th article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:
Wealth inexorably undermined the old virtues. Decadence rotted the souls of the noble Romans. While the mongrel mobs were entertained by the debased spectacles in the Colosseum (not unlike the distraction of today’s rabble by non-stop television), the patricians indulged themselves with every new vice and luxury that money and a resourceful merchant class could provide. Pampered, perfumed, manicured, and attended by numerous slaves, the effete aristocracy of the first century A.D. was a far cry from the hard and disciplined ruling class of a few centuries earlier.
Just as there are Americans today who understand where the weakness and lack of discipline of their people are leading them and who speak out against these things, so were there Romans who tried to stem the tide of decadence engulfing the Republic. One of these was M. Porcius Cato, “the Censor” (234–149 bc), whose public career spanned the first half of the second century B.C.
Cato was born and raised on his father’s farm and then spent 26 years fighting in Rome’s legions before entering politics. Early in his career, having been appointed governor (praetor) of Sardinia, Cato set the pattern he would follow the rest of his life: he expelled all the moneylenders from the island, earning the undying hatred of the Jews and a reputation as a fierce anti-Semite.
Archreactionary
Later Cato was elected censor in Rome. The duties of a censor were to safeguard public morality and virtue and to conduct a periodic census of people and property for military and tax purposes. Cato took these duties very seriously. He assessed jewelry and other luxury items at ten times their actual value, and he dealt promptly and severely with disorder and degeneracy.
In the Senate Cato spoke out repeatedly against the foreign influences in philosophy, religion, and lifestyle which were encroaching on the traditional Roman attitudes and manners. As a result, Rome’s “smart set” condemned him (privately, for he was too powerful to attack openly) as an archreactionary and an enemy of “progress.”
In the field of foreign policy, Cato was adamantly opposed to the integration of the Semitic East into the Roman world. He wanted Rome to concentrate on the western Mediterranean and to deal with the Levant only at sword point. Unfortunately, there were few men of Cato’s fiber left among the Romans by the second century.
Declining Birthrate
One of the most fateful effects of decadence was the drastic decline in the birthrate of the Roman nobility. Decadence is always accompanied by an increase in egoism, a shifting of focus from race and nation to the individual. Instead of looking on bearing and raising children as a duty to the state and a necessity for the perpetuation of their gens and tribe, upper-class Romans came to regard children as a hindrance, a limitation on their freedom and pleasure. The “liberation” of women also contributed heavily to this change in outlook.
The failure of the patrician class to reproduce itself alarmed those Roman leaders with a sense of responsibility to the future. Emperor Augustus tried strenuously to reverse the trend by issuing several decrees regarding family life. Heavy penalties were set for celibacy or for marriage with the descendants of slaves. Eventually, Augustus ordered that every noble Roman between the ages of 25 and 60 must be married or, at least, betrothed.
Suicide of the Nobility
In 9 A.D. tax advantages and other preferences were granted to the parents of three or more children; unmarried persons were barred from the public games and could not receive inheritances, while the childless married person could receive only half of any inheritance left to him.
All these measures failed. Augustus’ own daughter, Julia, was a thoroughly liberated member of the “jet set” of her time, who considered herself far too sophisticated to be burdened with motherhood. In embarrassment, Augustus banished her to an island.
From the dictatorship of Julius Caesar to the reign of Emperor Hadrian, a century and a half, one can trace the destinies of 45 leading patrician families: all but one died out during that period. Of 400 senatorial families on the public records in 65 A.D., during the reign of Nero, all trace of half of them had vanished by the reign of Nerva, a single generation later.
Rise of Capitalism
As the patricians declined in numbers, the Roman peasantry also suffered, but for a different reason. The later years of the Republic saw the rise of agricultural capitalism, with wealthy entrepreneurs buying up vast estates, working them with slaves and driving the freeborn small farmers out of the marketplace.
By the tens of thousands the Latin and Sabine yeomen were bankrupted and forced to abandon their farms. They fled to the city, where most of them were swallowed up in the urban mob.
“New Romans”
The capitalist nouveaux riches who came to wield much of the power and influence in Rome lost by the dwindling patricians were an altogether new type of Roman. Petronius’ fictional character Trimalchio is their archetype. Tenney Frank wrote of these “new Romans”:
It is apparent that at least the political and moral qualities which counted most in the building of the Italian federation, the army organization, the provincial administrative system of the Republic, were the qualities most needed in holding the Empire together. And however brilliant the endowment of the new citizens, these qualities they lacked. The Trimalchios of the Empire were often shrewd and daring businessmen, but their first and obvious task, apparently was to climb by the ladder of quick profits to a social position in which their children, with Romanized names, could comfortably proceed to forget their forebears. The possession of wealth did not, as in the Republic, suggest certain duties toward the commonwealth.
Different Spirit
Many historians have remarked on the fact that the entire spirit of the Roman Empire was radically different from that of the Roman Republic. The energy, foresight, common sense, and discipline which characterized the Republic were absent from the Empire. But that was because the race which built the Republic was largely absent from the Empire; it had been replaced by the dregs of the Orient.
The change in attitudes, values, and behavior was due to a change in blood. The changing racial composition of Rome during the Republic paved the way for the unchecked influx of Levantine blood, manners, and religion during the Empire.
But it also set the stage for a new ascendancy of the same Northern blood which had first given birth to the Roman people. We will look at the conquest of Rome by the Germans. First, however, we must backtrack and see what had been happening in the North during the rise and fall of Rome.
Excerpted from the 13th article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:
Today, when we speak of “Latins,” we reflexively think of short, swarthy, excitable people who are inordinately fond of loud rhythms, wine, spicy food, and seduction, and who aren’t to be taken very seriously. That is not an accurate image of all speakers of Romance languages, of course. Many individuals of French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian nationality are as racially sound as the average Swede or German. Yet, the image persists, and for good reason.
The Latini, the Northern tribesmen who settled Latium in the ninth century B.C. and founded Rome a century later, were something altogether different. Most of today’s Latins share nothing with those of 28 centuries ago except the name. Not only are the two strikingly different in appearance and temperament, but every element of the culture the original Latins created as an expression of their race-soul has been fundamentally transformed by those who claim that name today.
Even the character and tone of the modern languages derived from that of the Latini are profoundly different. The Romance languages, overburdened with vowels, have a soft, effeminate air that was never present in the language of the early Romans, which was as hard and manly as the people themselves. (The Romans did not say See-sar or Sis-ero; they said Kai-sar and Kick-ero.)
Virtuous Race
Above all, the Latini were a people to be taken seriously. They brought with them to Italy the spirit of the northern forests whence they had come. They took themselves and life very seriously indeed.
Duty, honor, responsibility: to the early Romans these were the elements which circumscribed a man’s life. Their virtues (the Latin root of the word means “manliness”) were strength of body and will, perseverance, sobriety, courage, hardiness, steadiness of purpose, attentiveness to detail, intelligence, and the characteristically Nordic will to order. Through these virtues they brought the world under their sway and created a civic edifice of such magnificence that it has ever since provided the standard against which all others are measured.
The Romans shaped the world around them—its institution, its politics, its attitudes, and its lifestyles—more extensively and more profoundly than anyone else has, and then they perished. That fact has fascinated and occupied the energies of historical scholars as no other topic. What were the reasons that the Romans rose so high and then fell so far?
Typically Indo-European
When they arrived in the Italian peninsula in the ninth century the Latins, like their Italic neighbors before them, brought with them institutions and customs which were typically Indo-European. In a great many ways they remind us of the Mycenaean Greeks described by Homer. In the social and political institutions of the early Romans, in particular, we can see elements which were as familiar to the Dorians three centuries earlier as they were to the Celts and Germans ten centuries later. Just as the languages of all these kindred Northern peoples were derived from a common source, so were their modes of organizing and governing themselves.
The earliest history of the Romans is partly shrouded in the mists of antiquity. The Latins were not as fond of writing books as were the Greeks, and only a few inscriptions in stone have come down to us from the time prior to the fifth century B.C.—and not a great deal after that, until the second century B.C. The oral traditions of the Roman people from the eighth century B.C. are a blend of myth and history and must be taken cum grano salis, as they would have said.
Latins, Sabines, Etruscans
Very early in its history, Romulus’ hilltop village of Latins joined forces with a neighboring village of Sabines, the Titienses. The Sabines and the Latins were of very closely related Indo-European stocks, and the amalgamation did little to change social institutions, other than doubling the number of senators.
A few years later, however, the Etruscan Luceres—of non-Indo-European stock—were absorbed by the growing Rome. Although the Etruscans remained a tribe apart from the Latin and Sabine inhabitants of the city, without patrician status, this condition was destined not to last.
Kings of Rome
Tradition gives the date 716 B.C. for the death of the Latin founder of Rome, Romulus. He had long before carried out the amalgamation of his tribe with the Titienses, and a year after he died the combined Latin-Sabine populus chose a Sabine, Numa Pompilius, as the second king of Rome.
For a century the kingship alternated between Latin and Sabine, but about the year 616 B.C. it passed to a man who was neither. He was Tarquinius Priscus (Tarquin the Elder) and was said to be the son of a Greek father and an Etruscan mother. How a half-Etruscan came to be king of the Romans is not clear; the traditional account is not convincing.
Probably what happened is that Rome suffered a military defeat at the hands of one of the powerful Etruscan communities on the other side of the Tiber. In any event, Tarquin forced the Romans to accept 100 new patrician families from among the Etruscan inhabitants of the city. Although the Etruscan patricians were accorded a status subordinate to that of the elders of the Latin and Sabine clans (the former were designated patres minorum gentium, or “fathers of the lesser clans”), time eventually blurred this distinction; the Etruscans entered the Senate, bringing the number of senators to 300, where it remained for more than five centuries, until the dictatorship of Julius Caesar.
Servian “Reforms”
It was Tarquin’s successor, Servius Tullius, however, who wrought changes which were to have much more profound racial consequences: in essence, Servius made the plebs a part of the populus Romanus. He accomplished this by overshadowing the patrician assembly, the Comitia Curiata, with two new popular assemblies, one civil and one military.
Gold over Blood
Servius certainly cannot be accused of being a democrat. Yet he clearly initiated the process which eventually led to the ascendancy of gold over blood in Roman society, just as Solon had done in Athens a few years earlier.
Four Factors
The following centuries saw the political power of the plebs increase greatly relative to that of the patricians, while wealth continued to gain weight relative to race and family.
The Romans survived the founding of the Republic by roughly a millennium, but we are not concerned in this series with the political and cultural details of their history, except as these details have a salient racial significance. Therefore, the emphasis in the following historical summary is rather different than that found in most textbooks on Roman history.
Let us focus on four factors: first, the growing racial diversity of the Roman state; second, the eventual decadence of Rome’s patricians; third, the differential in birthrates between Rome’s patrician and plebeian classes; and fourth, the effects on the Roman peasantry of large-scale slavery as a capitalist institution.
Excerpted from the 10th article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:
And what a contrast between the Hellenes and their achievements, on the one hand, and what existed before—and has existed since—in Greece! That is not to say that every Greek of today is unimaginative or insensitive or ugly, but it is clear that something essential has been lost between the time of Aristotle and the time of his late namesake, Mr. Onassis. And the loss was at least as great between the time of Achilles and Aristotle, although the culture-lag phenomenon tends to mask this earlier decline in racial quality.
The Hellenic genes are still there, the genes of the race which gloried in single combat between equals facing one another on the field of battle and pitting skill, courage, and strength in a contest to the death, but they are now submerged in the genes of a race which always preferred to sling its stones from afar, to lie in stealthy ambush, to give a surprise knife-thrust from the rear. The race-soul which first envisioned the symmetry of the Doric temple and pondered the mysteries of existence as none before it has become inextricably mingled with one concerned, first and last, with personal advantage and disadvantage, profit and loss.
Extermination or Expulsion
This catastrophic mixing of bloods has occurred over and over again in the history and prehistory of our race, and each time it has been lethal. The knowledge of this has been with us a long time, but it has always failed us in the end. The Hellenes of Sparta and Athens both strove to keep their blood pure, but both ultimately perished. The only way they could have survived would have been to eliminate the entire indigenous population, either through expulsion or extermination, from the areas of the Mediterranean world in which they settled.
The Hellenes always possessed a certain feeling of racial unity, distinguishing themselves sharply from all those not of their blood, but this racial feeling was, unfortunately, usually overshadowed by intrarracial conflicts. The rivalries between Hellenic city-states were so fierce and so pervasive, that the Mediterranean natives were more often looked upon as a resource to be used against other Hellenes than as a biological menace to be eliminated.
Economics over Race
The ultimate downfall of the Nordic conquerors in Asia, just as in the Mediterranean world, can be traced to an economic consideration and to an error in human judgment. The economic consideration was that a conquered population, just like the land itself or the gold and other booty seized by the conquerors, had real value. Whether the people were enslaved or merely taxed as subjects, they were an economic resource which could be exploited by the conquerors. To drive them off the land or wipe them out completely would, from a strictly economic viewpoint, be akin to dumping captured gold into the ocean.
Such an action could be justified to a conquering tribe of Indo-Europeans only if they were willing to subordinate all economic considerations to the goal of maintaining their racial integrity into the indefinite future—and if they also had a sufficiently deep understanding of history to foresee the inevitability of racial mixing wherever two races are in close proximity. Unfortunately, even where the will for racial survival was very strong, the foresight was insufficient. Measures which were quite adequate to prevent racemixing for a few generations, or even for a few centuries, broke down over the course of a thousand years or more.
Inspired in the 1956 classic film Forbidden Planet, by “Monsters from the Id” I mean the not immediately manifest, invisible forces that are driving the white race into self-extinction. In his latest article, Sebastian Ernst Ronin wrote:
It is now two generations of White European non-birthers who ultimately have flung wide open the floodgates of mass, non-White immigration into our Occidental homes; a healthy host cannot be susceptible to a blood-sucking parasite; we are the Niggers of our own demise. This scribbler is included in this number; I am responsible.
Cultural Marxism, for all of its value as a propaganda meme to tackle the soft edges of Jewish political correctness, feminism, and popular culture, as a stand-alone discipline to shed light on racial suicide is a convenient and lazy philosophical afterthought. It is a probe of symptom rather than cause, an argument that it was a few snowflakes that blew off the iceberg onto the decks that was responsible for the sinking of the Titanic. It is an a priori juggling of first principles of most shallow dimensions. Worst of all, it is a mistake because it deflects and cloaks the necessity of having to assume responsibility for the soul sickness of self-induced racial suicide.
Recently I have leaned toward the “suicide” interpretation of what is happening to us, in contrast to the “homicide” hypothesis so popular in white nationalist circles.
International capital does not give a rat’s ass for nor recognize in the least race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc., etc. What it does care for and recognize, via the economic and political decision-makers who stand behind it, is an ever-expanding consumer market and tax base to finance the Lib-Mod social programs that have been instituted in Western countries. For this reason have the doors of the Occident been thrown wide open. From the perspective of capital that has overseen and recognized a non-reproducing “market”, i.e. an historically predominant White population, it was a matter of necessity, as understood by capitalists/Globalists, to fling open the doors. There is the betrayal!
And this reminds me what we have been saying about capitalism.
The betrayal of the White European race stems from deep, deep within, so deep that it is not visible or obvious for most.
My emphasis; that’s why I call it a “monster from the Id.”
There is little return to be had from a racial death wish, ergo little investment. Given such, why would our economic, cultural, and political elites not abandon us in droves, as they have? The first step of the revolution does not begin with the expedient and safe blurting of Jew, Jew, Jew; that is after the fact. The first step of the revolution begins upon the surface of a mirror to identify the source of weakness that has allowed the penetration of an alien and poisonous spirit. Why is it not understood by the finger-waggers that a strong and united front renders the Jew a harmless pooch? Manipulation can only occur with the full consent, be it conscious or not, of the manipulated.
From where does this existential strain of fear and self-loathing stem? The Jew, via the media and popular culture—some would claim via Christianity, may very well have implanted an extraordinary amount of shit into the White Euro psyche—, but the root of fear and self-loathing he did not. It is what makes the Jew’s work so easy; it is the root of the racial death wish, and until such time as the root is dug up and discarded all else is for naught; it is pretend enlightenment. There can be no “awakening.”
Ditto! And we better start acknowledging the presence of these monsters from the Id.
Much of White European nationalist discourse consists of grandiose projections about how political power will be taken back, seldom including the realization that this power has been biologically and willingly surrendered. And now, in the present? In the present, simply put, White Europeans do not have the numbers nor the requisite courage, wisdom, and commitment to counter a realistic challenge. Our racial and spiritual lifeblood bleeds in torrents from the wrist slashes that we ourselves have opened. We require a jolt of unimaginable scope and pain to possibly begin to reverse towards a gasp and grasp for life. Such a systemic jolt arrives, via the combination of Globalist cull and Gaian purge, but it is yet 20 years or so removed.
Fortunately Sebastian is wrong here. Very few nationalists have realized that Armageddon is around the corner. The dollar will crash sooner than expected, opening a window of opportunity for us.
Kenneth Clark may have been clueless about the fact that race matters. Yet, that our rot goes much deeper than what white nationalists realize is all too obvious once we leave, for a while, the ghetto of nationalism and take a look at the classics, just as Clark showed us through his 1969 TV series Civilisation.
Compared to the other famous series, Clark’s was unsurpassed in the sense that, as I have implied elsewhere, only genuine art—not science—has a chance to fulfill David Lane’s fourteen words.
By “art” I mean an evolved sense of beauty which is almost completely absent in today’s nationalists. Most of them are quite a product of Jewish modernity whether with their music, lifestyles or Hollywood tastes, to a much greater degree than what they think. For nationalism to succeed an evolved sense of female beauty has to be the starting point to see the divine nature of the white race. In Clark’s own words, “For all these reasons I think it is permissible to associate the cult of ideal love with the ravishing beauty and delicacy that one finds in the madonnas of the thirteenth century. Were there ever more delicate creatures than the ladies on Gothic ivories? How gross, compared to them, are the great beauties of other woman-worshiping epochs.”
Below, links to excerpts of most of the chapters of the 1969 series, where Clark followed the ups and downs of our civilisation historically:
For an introduction to these series, see here.
Below, some excerpts of “Heroic Materialism,” the thirteenth chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark.
Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages (also, the headings don’t appear in the original text):
The westerners’ new god: Mammon
Imagine an immensely speeded up movie of Manhattan Island during the last hundred years. It would look less like a work of man than like some tremendous natural upheaval. It’s godless, it’s brutal, it’s violent—but one can’t laugh it off, because in the energy, strength of will and mental grasp that have gone to make New York, materialism has transcended itself. It took almost the same time to reach its present conditions as it did to complete the Gothic cathedrals. At which point a very obvious reflection crosses one’s mind: that the cathedrals were built to the glory of God, New York was built to the glory of mammon—money, gain, the new god of the nineteenth century. So many of the same human ingredients have gone into its construction that at a distance it does look rather like a celestial city. At a distance. Come closer and it’s not so good. Lots of squalor, and, in the luxury, something parasitical.
Blake’s Satan
One sees why heroic materialism is still linked with an uneasy conscience. The first large iron foundries like the Carron Works or Coalbrookdale, date from about 1780. The only people who saw through industrialism in those early days were the poets. Blake, as everybody knows, thought that mills were the work of Satan. ‘Oh Satan, my youngest born… thy work is Eternal death with Mills and Ovens and Cauldrons.’
The [slave] trade was prohibited in 1807, and as Wilberforce lay dying in 1835, slavery itself was abolished. One must regard this as a step forward for the human race, and be proud, I think, that it happened in England. But not too proud. The Victorians were very smug about it, and chose to avert their eyes from something almost equally horrible that was happening to their own countrymen.
In its early stages the Industrial Revolution was also a part of the Romantic movement. And here I may digress to say that painters had for long used iron foundries to heighten the imaginative impact of their work with what we call a romantic effect; and that they had introduced them into pictures as symbolising the mouth of hell. However, the influence of the Industrial Revolution on Romantic painters is a side issue, almost an impertinence, when compared to its influence on human life. I needn’t remind you of how cruelly it degraded and exploited a mass of people for sixty or seventy years.
What was destructive was size. After about 1790 to 1800 there appeared the large foundries and mills which dehumanised life. Long before Carlyle and Karl Marx, Wordsworth had described the arrival of a night shift ‘that turns the multitude of dizzy wheels, Men, maidens, youths, Mothers and little children, boys and girls, Perpetual sacrifice.’
The terrible truth is that the rise in population did nearly ruin us. It struck a blow at civilisation such as it hadn’t received since the barbarian invasions. First it produced the horrors of urban poverty. It must have seemed—may still seem—insoluble; yet this doesn’t excuse the callousness with which prosperous people ignored the conditions of life among the poor on which to a large extent their prosperity depended, and this in spite of the many detailed and eloquent descriptions that were available to them. I need mention only two—Engels’s Conditions of the Working Classes in England, written in 1844, and the novels written by Dickens between 1840 and 1855. Everybody read Dickens. But his terrible descriptions of poverty had very little practical effect: partly because the problem was too big; partly because politicians were held in the intellectual prison of classical economics.
The images that fit Dickens are by the French illustrator Gustave Doré. He was originally a humorist; but the sight of London sobered him. His drawings were done in the 1870s, after Dickens’s death. But one can see that things hadn’t changed much. Perhaps it took an outsider to see London as it really was.
Degenerate architecture
At the beginning of this series I said that I thought one could tell more about a civilisation from its architecture that from anything else it leaves behind. Painting and literature depend largely on unpredictable individuals. But architecture is to some extent a communal art. However, I must admit that the public buildings on the nineteenth century are often lacking in style and conviction; and I believe that this is because the strongest creative impulse of the time didn’t go into the town halls or country houses, but into what was then thought of as engineering. In fact, all modern New York started with the Brooklyn Bridge.
In this series I have followed the ups and downs of civilisation historically, trying to discover results as well as causes; well, obviously I can’t do that any longer. We have no idea where we are going, and sweeping, confident articles of the future seem to me, intellectually, the most disreputable of all forms of utterance. The scientists who are best qualified to talk have kept their moths shut.
The incomprehensibility of our new cosmos seems to me, ultimately, to be the reason for the chaos of modern art. I know next to nothing about science, but I’ve spent my life trying to learn about art, and I am completely baffled by what is taking place today. I sometimes like what I see, but when I read modern critics I realise that my preferences are merely accidental.
Western civilisation has been a series of rebirths. Surely this should give us confidence in ourselves. I said at the beginning that it is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs. Fifty years ago W.B. Yeats, who was more like a man of genius than anyone I have ever known, wrote a famous poem.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
For an introduction to these series, see here.
Below, some excerpts of “The Light of Experience,” the eight chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark.
Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:
I am in Holland not only because Dutch painting is a visible expression of this change of mind [the revolution that replaced divine authority by experience, experiment and observation], but because Holland—economically and intellectually—was the first country to profit from the change. When one begins to ask the question, ‘does it work?’ instead of ‘is it God’s will?’ one gets a new set of answers, and one of the first of them is this: that to try to suppress opinions which one doesn’t share is much less profitable than to tolerate them.
Nearly all the great books which revolutionised thought were first printed in Holland. What sort of society was it that allowed these intellectual time-bombs to be set off in its midst? Inside the old almshouse of Haarlem, which is now a picture gallery, there is plenty of evidence. We know more about what the seventeenth-century Dutch looked like than we do about any other society, except perhaps the first-century Romans. Each individual wanted posterity to know exactly what he was like.
One can’t imagine groups like this [Rembrandt’s Syndics] being produced in Spain or seventeenth-century Italy, even in Venice. They are the first visual evidence of bourgeois democracy. Dreadful words—so debased by propaganda that I hesitate to use them. Yet in the context of civilisation they really have a meaning. They mean that a group of individuals can come together and take corporate responsibility; that they can afford to do so because they have some leisure; and that they have some leisure because they have money in the bank.
Amsterdam was the first centre of bourgeois capitalism, the chief banking centre of Europe. I don’t say much about economics in this book chiefly because I don’t understand them—and perhaps for that reason believe that their importance has been overrated by post-Marxist historians. But, of course, there is no doubt that at a certain stage in social development fluid capital is one of the chief causes of civilisation because it ensures three essential ingredients: leisure, movement and independence.
♣
In studying the history of civilisation one must try to keep a balance between individual genius and the moral or spiritual condition of a society. However irrational it may seem, I believe in genius. I believe that almost everything of value which has happened in the world has been due to individuals.
Nevertheless, one can’t help feeling that the supremely great figures in history—Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Newton, Goethe—must be to some extent a kind of summation of their times. They are too large, too all-embracing, to have developed in isolation.
Rembrandt is a crucial instance of this conundrum. It is very easy—indeed rather more convenient for the historian—to imagine Dutch art without him; and there was no one else in Holland remotely comparable to him—nothing like the group of poets and dramatists who preceded and accompanied Shakespeare. Yet the very fact that Rembrandt was so immediately and overwhelmingly successful, and went on being successful—his etchings and drawings never went out of fashion—and that for twenty years almost every Dutch painter was his pupil, shows that the spiritual life of Holland needed him and so had, to some extent, created him.
However, any attempt to relate art to society gets one into a false position. The greatest of all pictures based on the facts of vision wasn’t painted in the scientific atmosphere of Holland, but in the superstitious, convention-ridden court of Philip IV of Spain: Las Meninas, ‘The Ladies in Waiting’, which was painted by Velasquez about five years before Vermeer’s finest interiors.
The enlightened tidiness of Hooch and Vermeer and the rich imaginative experience of Rembrandt reached their zenith about 1660. During that decade the leadership of intellectual life passed from Holland to England. Towering above all these remarkable scientists [Boyle, Hooke, Halley, Wren] was Newton, one of the three or four Englishmen whose fame has transcended all national boundaries. I can’t pretend that I have read the Principia, and if I did I wouldn’t understand it any more that Samuel Pepys did when, as President of The Royal Society, it was handed to him for his approval. One must take on trust that it gave a mathematical account of the structure of the universe which for three hundred years seemed irrefutable. It was both the climax of the age of observation and the sacred book of the next century.
♣
What is civilisation? A state of mind where it is thought desirable for a naval hospital to look like this and for the inmates to dine in a splendid decorated hall.
Painted Hall
Royal Hospital
Greenwich, London
The strange thing is that none of the nineteenth-century writers (except Carlyle and Ruskin) seemed to notice that the triumph of rational philosophy had resulted in a new form of barbarism. If, from the balcony of the Greenwich Observatory, I look beyond the order of Wren’s hospital I see, stretching as far as the eye can reach, the squalid disorder of industrial society. It has grown up as a result of the same conditions that allowed the Dutch to build their beautiful towns and support their painters and print their works of philosophers: fluid capital, a free economy, a flow of exports and imports, a dislike of interference.
Every civilisation seems to have its nemesis, not only because the first bright impulses become tarnished by greed and laziness, but because of unpredictables—and in this case the unpredictable was the growth of population.
For an introduction to these series, see here.
Below, some indented excerpts of “Man—the Measure of all Things,” the fourth chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark, after which I offer my comments.
Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:
The Pazzi Chapel, built by the great Florentine Brunellesco in about 1430, is in a style that has been called the architecture of humanism. His friend and fellow-architect, Leon Battista Alberti, addressed man in these words: ‘To you is given a body more graceful than other animals.’
There is no better instance of how a burst of civilisation depends on confidence than the Florentine state of mind in the early fifteenth century. For fifty years the fortunes of the republic, which in a material sense had declined, were directed by a group of the most intelligent individuals who have ever been elected to power by a democratic government. From Salutati onwards the Florentine chancellors were scholars, believers in the studia humanitatis, in which learning could be used to achieve a happy life.
In Florence the first thirty years of the fifteenth century were the heroic age of scholarship when new texts were discovered and old texts edited. It was to house these precious texts, any one of which might contain some new revelation that might alter the course of human thought, that Cosimo de Medici built the library of San Marco. It looks to us peaceful and remote—but the first studies that took place there were not remote from life at all. It was the humanist equivalent of the Cavendish Laboratory. The manuscripts unpacked and studied under these harmonious vaults could alter the course of history with an explosion, not of matter, but of mind.
The discipline of trade and banking, in its most austere form, was beginning to be relaxed, and life—a full use of the human faculties—became more important than making money.
The dignity of man. Today these words die on our lips. But in the fifteenth century Florence their meaning was still a fresh and invigorating belief. Gianozzo Manetti, a humanist man of affection, who had seen the seamy side of politics, nevertheless wrote a book entitled On the Dignity and Excellence of Man. And this is the concept that Brunellesco’s friends were making visible.
Gravitas, the heavy tread of moral earnestness, becomes a bore if it is not accompanied by the light step of intelligence. Next to the Pazzi Chapel are the cloisters of Santa Croce, also built by Brunellesco. I said that the Gothic cathedrals were hymns to the divine light. These cloisters happily celebrate the light of human intelligence, and sitting in them I find it quite easy to believe in man. They have the qualities that give distinction to a mathematical theorem: clarity, economy, elegance.
Alberti, in his great book on building, describes the necessity of a public square ‘where young men may be diverted from the mischievousness and folly natural to their age.’ The early Florentine Renaissance was an urban culture, bourgeois properly so-called. Men spent their time in the streets and squares, and in the shops.
Elsewhere I’ve talked about how the modern world of money is inimical to racial interests. As to date, no white nationalist that I know has criticized the barbarous architecture, symptomatic in the worshiping of the new god of capitalism, so well epitomized in both London and New York: the subject of the last episode of Civilisation.
Together with the degenerate music, TV and Hollywood tastes and sexual lifestyles of some nationalists, architecture is another facet where the uncorrupted individual can read the signs of a decadent society; and why he cannot blame non-gentiles for all our problems when even the nationalists themselves are part of this problem.
Remember Clark’s words in the first episode? “If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a Minister of Housing or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the buildings.” One only has to contrast the completely soulless edifices we see everyday going to work with Raphael’s town square and see how extremely degraded, Mammonesque in fact our large cities have become.
In the popular imagination, the extreme examples of this degeneracy are the Foundation novels of Asimov and the latest Star Wars films, where a whole planet has become metropolis: the exact opposite of the most humane sci-fi novels by Arthur C. Clarke where, like the Florentines, the white people lived in small Elysian towns. Architecture today is so degenerate that even Roger Scruton in Why Beauty Matters—a 2009 BBC documentary that, unlike Clark’s Civilisation, is marred by the constant presence of non-whites—pays special attention to the sterile architectural forms of today’s world.
I wish young nationalists became believers in the studia humanitatis and familiarise themselves with those intellectuals in the movement that (like Clark) have a much broader sense of European culture than the common white nationalist blogger. I refer to people like Tom Sunic in Europe and Michael O’Meara in America. Both could help us to leave behind the provincial scene so common in the nationalist sphere as well as the simplistic single-cause hypothesis.
It is true that, unlike the Athenians, fifteenth century Florentines were chiefly interested, like contemporary western man, in making money. But like the Athenians the Florentines… loved beauty. Of the landscapes whose beauty mostly caught my attention during a trip through Europe by train, I still remember the Italian, about which Clark said:
Looking at the Tuscan landscape with its terraces of vines and olives and the dark vertical accents of the cypresses, one has the impression of timeless order. There must have been a time when it was all forest and swamp—shapeless, formless; and to bring order out of chaos is a process of civilisation.
Then, in the first years of the sixteenth century, the Venetian painter Giorgione transformed this happy contact with nature into something openly sensual. The ladies who, in the Gothic gardens, had been protected by voluminous draperies, are now naked; and, as a result, his Fête Champêtre opens a new chapter in European art. Giorgione was, indeed, one of the inspired, unpredictable innovators who disturb the course of history; and in this picture he has illustrated one of the comforting illusions of civilised man, the myth of Arcadia, which had been popularised some twenty years earlier by the poet Sannazaro. Of course, it is only a myth. Country life isn’t at all like this, and even on a picnic ants attack the sandwiches and wasps buzz round the wine glasses. But the pastoral fallacy had inspired Theocritus and Virgil, and had not been unknown in the Middle Ages. Giorgione has seen how fundamentally pagan it is.
True, but I don’t believe that the pastoral fallacy is childish. Pace Arthur Clarke, achieving Arcadia is an essentially psychogenic endeavour rather than a technological one. And I sincerely believe that utopia is feasible: only human primitivism, and especially the “monsters from the Id” currently affecting the white peoples, prevent it.
It has long seemed to me wise thinking about an ideal to direct our efforts toward it. It doesn’t matter if the ideal encounters numerous pitfalls: our will should incessantly be directional toward the worlds of the Florentine Fête. If the will of a sufficiently massive amount of white people is noble, the outside world can and will only represent the nobility of that will. Clark said:
With Giorgione’s picnic the balance and enjoyment of our human faculties seems to achieve perfection. But in history all points of supposed perfection have a hint of menace; and Giorgione himself discovers it in that mysterious picture known as the Tempesta.
What on earth is going on? What is the meaning of this half-naked woman suckling a baby, this flash of lightening, this broken column? Nobody knows; nobody has ever known.
To me the meaning is obvious. Even since the Renaissance artists started to see that the cities, more inclined to Mammon than to Raphael’s square, were places of tribulation in contrast to the madonna and her child with the man standing in contrapposto. Broken pillars often symbolize death (that bucolic world was about to die), and the painting’s storm in the background could be interpreted to symbolize urban turmoil.
In the last entry both Clark and I discussed Francis of Assisi: a saint who in Spanish language we call San Francisco. Colonists from Spain, who established a fort at the Golden Gate, named the Californian city after St Francis in 1776. Like London and New York, the modern city of San Francisco is a good paradigm to illustrate my interpretation of the Tempesta.
It should be a no brainer—and I am astounded that recently my frankness caused much offence in a well-known nationalist who lives in the Sin City—that white people of sound mind find it rather awkward to reproduce in such a town. I will repeat here my diatribes already written in the threads even if, by doing it, I completely part ways from the candid gentleness of the hero of this series, Kenneth Clark.
In the 1980s I lived in the Bay Area and noticed the cultural gulf between the inhabitants of the city of San Francisco and the family-oriented town of Novato in Marin County at the other side of the Golden Gate, where I lived. I felt the difference between the Sin City and Novato as conspicuous as the two sides of the border with my native Mexico. No hyperbole: that’s what I felt.
How could millions of healthy white families possibly thrive in Sodom, or in Gomorrah? The mere sight of the pink and blue sodomites inhibits altogether our wish to have lots of kids. The visual experience of constantly watching on the streets such rape—that is the exact word—of the beautiful San Francisco of yore inhibits the Aryan soul from founding large families. This is exactly the same psychological phenomenon of watching swarms of Mexican browns and even yellows throughout California.
A few months ago I rewatched Hitchcock’s Vertigo after decades of not seeing it. The movie made me feel extremely dismayed, and therefore my hatred skyrocketed toward the cultural rapists that turned such a beautiful city into Gomorrah. It doesn’t matter that, as an ultraliberal German blogger told me, “these gay demonstrations are neither frequent nor ubiquitous.” The general rape, not only by homos, of the old city is so ubiquitous that, if I had real political power, I’d send the cultural rapists straight to my trains with a one-way ticket you know where.
One of the reasons why I believe that American-style “white nationalism” is phony is precisely because the whole movement is, at least partially, dissociated. With the exception of Harold Covington the movement smells to ink, not gunpowder. Shouldn’t it be more than obvious that, for a nationalist of truly sound mind, the Gomorrahites that brought toddlers to a Sadomasochist Fair in San Fran would have to wear Rosa Winkel camp badges, and subsequently sent to Auschwitz II?
The only way that my passion would be misallocated is that the aggressiveness of the “gay movement” in San Francisco be perfectly compatible with Norman Rockwell’s America. But truly honest nation-builder nationalists know all too well in their hearts that pink and blue wild men (see link above) are inconceivable in the Rockwell world, don’t you?
by Greg Johnson
After the destruction of the Ring and the downfall of the Dark Lord, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin return to the Shire only to find that it has been seized by aliens who have enslaved and robbed the hobbits and ravaged the land.
The returning veterans rouse their people to rebellion, killing many of the usurpers and driving the rest away. Then they discover who was behind it: the fallen wizard Saruman, who is banished from the Shire. Before he can leave, however, he is killed by his servant in crime, the treacherous Wormtongue, who is then felled by three hobbit arrows.
This chapter was omitted from Peter Jackson’s film trilogy (as well as Ralph Bakshi’s animated version), although Jackson does allude to it in two places. In The Fellowship of the Ring, when Frodo peers into Galadriel’s mirror, he has a vision of the hobbits enslaved and the shire blighted by dark satanic mills. In the extended version of The Return of the King, after the fall of Isengard, Merry and Pippin discover that Saruman’s storehouses contain products from the Shire, indicating some sort of contact.
But Jackson moved the deaths of Saruman and Wormtongue to the fall of Isengard. Wormtongue still kills Saruman, but he is dispatched by an arrow from Legolas. [see YouTube clip here] Thus when Frodo and company return to the Shire, they find it unchanged. Thus in Jackson’s telling, Frodo’s vision was just one possible future foreclosed by the death of Saruman at Isengard.
Still, I think it a shame that “The Scouring of the Shire” was not filmed, for it is a potent political allegory that remains relevant today. Most commentators simply note that the Scouring is based on Tolkien’s personal experience of returning from the trenches of World War I to find England a changed place. But the Scouring goes far beyond anything in Tolkien’s experiences. It is a work of imagination, a political allegory that far more closely resembles the experiences of German soldiers returning from the Great War to find a radically new, alien-dominated regime.
The Shire was subjugated as follows. After the fall of Isengard, Saruman was reduced to a wandering “beggar in the wilderness,” a refugee. But when he enjoyed power, the wandering wizard developed a far-flung network reaching all the way to the Shire, where he cultivated the friendship of Lotho Pimple.
The Shire was an agrarian, autarkic society of independent small farmers and merchants. Pimple, however, was sufficiently alienated and ambitious that he wished to change this social order. He wanted more land than he could work himself, and he wanted hirelings to work it, so he could grow rich by growing cash crops for export. In short, he wanted to be a big shot with a plantation.
By means of mysterious infusions of capital from outside the Shire (obviously from Saruman) Pimple managed to target economically troubled small holders for takeover (perhaps by loaning them money at usurious rates and then foreclosing when they could not pay), reducing them to employees on what was once their own land. Thus Pimple became a big man, styling himself Chief Shirrif and then just Chief. When Saruman and Wormtongue arrived as refugees, naturally Pimple took them in.
Having elevated the rootless and greedy Pimple to power, Saruman cozied up with the Chief and began to institute a new order. He brought in racially indeterminate aliens to intimidate and terrorize the hobbits. He also recruited hobbits of defective character — people who wanted to act big and meddle in other people’s business (in the internet age, we call them trolls) — to vastly expand the police force. This was necessary, because Saruman also vastly expanded rules and regulations in order to yoke and mulct the hobbits. Naturally there was discontent, so a vast network of spies and informants was created, as well as a courier service to swiftly convey reports and orders. Dissidents were thus easily ferreted out and imprisoned.
Society was collectivized. Private homes were replaced by ugly, cramped, ramshackle housing developments. Rationing was introduced to crush the hobbits’ spirits and lower their standard of living, freeing resources to be consumed by their new overlords or to be exported for cash. Leisure was restricted and work expanded. Handcrafts, which were fine for an aesthetically refined and ecologically sustainable subsistence economy, were replaced by heavy industry to produce exports for cash.
This industry was fueled by wholesale deforestation and fouled the water and the air. But the desecration of nature went far beyond the bounds of even economic necessity, betraying a hatred of nature and beauty as such. Saruman’s real goal was less to create a new world than to destroy the old.
Finally, to cement his rule, Saruman had his collaborator Pimple secretly killed once he had outlived his usefulness.
It is simply an error to reduce this all to an allegory of the endogenous rise of capitalism in England. For the role of Saruman indicates that this process was far from endogenous in the Shire. Nor was it in England, for that matter. Saruman represents an alien influence, specifically the Jewish spirit — rootless, alienated, materialistic, and ultimately nihilistic — which is incarnated both in Jewry and its extended phenotype, Calvinism and low-church Protestantism. (It was the Puritan Revolution that brought the Jews back to England.)
Yet Saruman’s takeover and elimination of Pimple does not resemble anything that happened in England. But it does resemble the revolution that deposed the Kaiser, followed by various Judeo-Bolshevik Putsches and ultimately the Jewish-dominated Weimar Republic. Furthermore, Saruman’s totalitarian system of spies and informants and his expropriation of small farms and seizure of their produce did not take place in England or Germany, but it did happen in Soviet Russia, leading to some of history’s greatest crimes against European man.
Thus “The Scouring of the Shire” is a political allegory applicable not just to England but to all forms of Jewish subversion of traditional society.
But it is also an allegory of how a people might regain control of its destiny. The hobbits have lost their freedom through salami tactics. Each day a little more of their freedom was sliced off, but not enough to cause a general rebellion, just a lot of passive grumbling, until finally, when the meaning of what was happening dawned on them, it was too late. Frodo and company, however, returned home after a long absence, and the change hit them all at once. It did not slowly demoralize and enervate them. It made them fighting mad.
And as war veterans, they knew something about fighting. The Shire was also lost because the hobbits were disunited and fearful, ultimately because they had enjoyed a soft and easy-going lifestyle. Frodo and his comrades, however, had been tested and hardened in the crucible of war. They were not cowed by alien bullies, no matter what their stature. They immediately resolved to rally their people and scour the Shire of the usurpers. The hobbits had been long groaning under the new regime. The veterans were the spark to the tinder.
A few opening skirmishes led to a climactic battle at Bywater, which left nearly 70 of the alien interlopers dead and the rest in chains or flight. Nineteen hobbits also lay dead. The hobbits then marched to Bag End to depose Saruman and send him packing without penalty. The prisoners were also sent on their way unharmed. These foolishly gentle policies toward murderers were justified by Frodo with effusions of moral and metaphysical clap-trap that remind us that, after all, this is children’s literature. Best we ignore him when our own enemies are at our mercy.
The closest historical analogy to “The Scouring of the Shire” comes from Germany, where various Freikorps groups — militias of demobilized veterans — put down Judeo-Bolshevik Putsches in Prussia and Bavaria. Furthermore, the successor of the Freikorps was the NSDAP, also led and staffed by veterans, which finally put an end to the Weimar Republic. It is a model worth contemplating today as thousands of white veterans return from a Jewish-instigated war in Iraq to face 30 percent unemployment in a homeland overrun and despoiled by non-white immigrants. They are a constituency just waiting for a leader.
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