Gibbon on Julian – 4

The History of the Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire

Volume 2

Chapter XIX, Part 4


Under these melancholy circumstances, an unexperienced youth was appointed to save and to govern the provinces of Gaul, or rather, as he expressed it himself, to exhibit the vain image of Imperial greatness. The retired scholastic education of Julian, in which he had been more conversant with books than with arms, with the dead than with the living, left him in profound ignorance of the practical arts of war and government; and when he awkwardly repeated some military exercise which it was necessary for him to learn, he exclaimed with a sigh, “O Plato, Plato, what a task for a philosopher!”

Yet even this speculative philosophy, which men of business are too apt to despise, had filled the mind of Julian with the noblest precepts and the most shining examples; had animated him with the love of virtue, the desire of fame, and the contempt of death. The habits of temperance recommended in the schools, are still more essential in the severe discipline of a camp. The simple wants of nature regulated the measure of his food and sleep. Rejecting with disdain the delicacies provided for his table, he satisfied his appetite with the coarse and common fare which was allotted to the meanest soldiers. During the rigor of a Gallic winter, he never suffered a fire in his bed-chamber; and after a short and interrupted slumber, he frequently rose in the middle of the night from a carpet spread on the floor, to despatch any urgent business, to visit his rounds, or to steal a few moments for the prosecution of his favorite studies.

The precepts of eloquence, which he had hitherto practised on fancied topics of declamation, were more usefully applied to excite or to assuage the passions of an armed multitude: and although Julian, from his early habits of conversation and literature, was more familiarly acquainted with the beauties of the Greek language, he had attained a competent knowledge of the Latin tongue. Since Julian was not originally designed for the character of a legislator, or a judge, it is probable that the civil jurisprudence of the Romans had not engaged any considerable share of his attention: but he derived from his philosophic studies an inflexible regard for justice, tempered by a disposition to clemency; the knowledge of the general principles of equity and evidence, and the faculty of patiently investigating the most intricate and tedious questions which could be proposed for his discussion.

The measures of policy, and the operations of war, must submit to the various accidents of circumstance and character, and the unpractised student will often be perplexed in the application of the most perfect theory. But in the acquisition of this important science, Julian was assisted by the active vigor of his own genius, as well as by the wisdom and experience of Sallust, and officer of rank, who soon conceived a sincere attachment for a prince so worthy of his friendship; and whose incorruptible integrity was adorned by the talent of insinuating the harshest truths without wounding the delicacy of a royal ear.

Immediately after Julian had received the purple at Milan, he was sent into Gaul with a feeble retinue of three hundred and sixty soldiers. At Vienna, where he passed a painful and anxious winter in the hands of those ministers to whom Constantius had intrusted the direction of his conduct, the Cæsar was informed of the siege and deliverance of Autun. That large and ancient city, protected only by a ruined wall and pusillanimous garrison, was saved by the generous resolution of a few veterans, who resumed their arms for the defence of their country.

In his march from Autun, through the heart of the Gallic provinces, Julian embraced with ardor the earliest opportunity of signalizing his courage. At the head of a small body of archers and heavy cavalry, he preferred the shorter but the more dangerous of two roads; and sometimes eluding, and sometimes resisting, the attacks of the Barbarians, who were masters of the field, he arrived with honor and safety at the camp near Rheims, where the Roman troops had been ordered to assemble. The aspect of their young prince revived the drooping spirits of the soldiers, and they marched from Rheims in search of the enemy, with a confidence which had almost proved fatal to them. The Alemanni, familiarized to the knowledge of the country, secretly collected their scattered forces, and seizing the opportunity of a dark and rainy day, poured with unexpected fury on the rear-guard of the Romans.

Before the inevitable disorder could be remedied, two legions were destroyed; and Julian was taught by experience that caution and vigilance are the most important lessons of the art of war. In a second and more successful action, he recovered and established his military fame; but as the agility of the Barbarians saved them from the pursuit, his victory was neither bloody nor decisive.

He advanced, however, to the banks of the Rhine, surveyed the ruins of Cologne, convinced himself of the difficulties of the war, and retreated on the approach of winter, discontented with the court, with his army, and with his own success. The power of the enemy was yet unbroken; and the Cæsar had no sooner separated his troops, and fixed his own quarters at Sens, in the centre of Gaul, than he was surrounded and besieged, by a numerous host of Germans. Reduced, in this extremity, to the resources of his own mind, he displayed a prudent intrepidity, which compensated for all the deficiencies of the place and garrison; and the Barbarians, at the end of thirty days, were obliged to retire with disappointed rage.

The conscious pride of Julian, who was indebted only to his sword for this signal deliverance, was imbittered by the reflection, that he was abandoned, betrayed, and perhaps devoted to destruction, by those who were bound to assist him, by every tie of honor and fidelity. Marcellus, master-general of the cavalry in Gaul, interpreting too strictly the jealous orders of the court, beheld with supine indifference the distress of Julian, and had restrained the troops under his command from marching to the relief of Sens.

If the Cæsar had dissembled in silence so dangerous an insult, his person and authority would have been exposed to the contempt of the world; and if an action so criminal had been suffered to pass with impunity, the emperor would have confirmed the suspicions, which received a very specious color from his past conduct towards the princes of the Flavian family. Marcellus was recalled, and gently dismissed from his office.

In his room Severus was appointed general of the cavalry; an experienced soldier, of approved courage and fidelity, who could advise with respect, and execute with zeal; and who submitted, without reluctance to the supreme command which Julian, by the interest of his patroness Eusebia, at length obtained over the armies of Gaul.

A very judicious plan of operations was adopted for the approaching campaign. Julian himself, at the head of the remains of the veteran bands, and of some new levies which he had been permitted to form, boldly penetrated into the centre of the German cantonments, and carefully reestablished the fortifications of Saverne, in an advantageous post, which would either check the incursions, or intercept the retreat, of the enemy. At the same time, Barbatio, general of the infantry, advanced from Milan with an army of thirty thousand men, and passing the mountains, prepared to throw a bridge over the Rhine, in the neighborhood of Basil. It was reasonable to expect that the Alemanni, pressed on either side by the Roman arms, would soon be forced to evacuate the provinces of Gaul, and to hasten to the defence of their native country.

But the hopes of the campaign were defeated by the incapacity, or the envy, or the secret instructions, of Barbatio; who acted as if he had been the enemy of the Cæsar, and the secret ally of the Barbarians. The negligence with which he permitted a troop of pillagers freely to pass, and to return almost before the gates of his camp, may be imputed to his want of abilities; but the treasonable act of burning a number of boats, and a superfluous stock of provisions, which would have been of the most essential service to the army of Gaul, was an evidence of his hostile and criminal intentions. The Germans despised an enemy who appeared destitute either of power or of inclination to offend them; and the ignominious retreat of Barbatio deprived Julian of the expected support; and left him to extricate himself from a hazardous situation, where he could neither remain with safety, nor retire with honor.

As soon as they were delivered from the fears of invasion, the Alemanni prepared to chastise the Roman youth, who presumed to dispute the possession of that country, which they claimed as their own by the right of conquest and of treaties. They employed three days, and as many nights, in transporting over the Rhine their military powers. The fierce Chnodomar, shaking the ponderous javelin which he had victoriously wielded against the brother of Magnentius, led the van of the Barbarians, and moderated by his experience the martial ardor which his example inspired. He was followed by six other kings, by ten princes of regal extraction, by a long train of high-spirited nobles, and by thirty-five thousand of the bravest warriors of the tribes of Germany.

The confidence derived from the view of their own strength, was increased by the intelligence which they received from a deserter, that the Cæsar, with a feeble army of thirteen thousand men, occupied a post about one-and-twenty miles from their camp of Strasburgh. With this inadequate force, Julian resolved to seek and to encounter the Barbarian host; and the chance of a general action was preferred to the tedious and uncertain operation of separately engaging the dispersed parties of the Alemanni.

The Romans marched in close order, and in two columns; the cavalry on the right, the infantry on the left; and the day was so far spent when they appeared in sight of the enemy, that Julian was desirous of deferring the battle till the next morning, and of allowing his troops to recruit their exhausted strength by the necessary refreshments of sleep and food. Yielding, however, with some reluctance, to the clamors of the soldiers, and even to the opinion of his council, he exhorted them to justify by their valor the eager impatience, which, in case of a defeat, would be universally branded with the epithets of rashness and presumption.

The trumpets sounded, the military shout was heard through the field, and the two armies rushed with equal fury to the charge. The Cæsar, who conducted in person his right wing, depended on the dexterity of his archers, and the weight of his cuirassiers. But his ranks were instantly broken by an irregular mixture of light horse and of light infantry, and he had the mortification of beholding the flight of six hundred of his most renowned cuirassiers. The fugitives were stopped and rallied by the presence and authority of Julian, who, careless of his own safety, threw himself before them, and urging every motive of shame and honor, led them back against the victorious enemy.

The conflict between the two lines of infantry was obstinate and bloody. The Germans possessed the superiority of strength and stature, the Romans that of discipline and temper; and as the Barbarians, who served under the standard of the empire, united the respective advantages of both parties, their strenuous efforts, guided by a skilful leader, at length determined the event of the day. The Romans lost four tribunes, and two hundred and forty-three soldiers, in this memorable battle of Strasburgh, so glorious to the Cæsar, and so salutary to the afflicted provinces of Gaul.

Six thousand of the Alemanni were slain in the field, without including those who were drowned in the Rhine, or transfixed with darts while they attempted to swim across the river. Chnodomar himself was surrounded and taken prisoner, with three of his brave companions, who had devoted themselves to follow in life or death the fate of their chieftain. Julian received him with military pomp in the council of his officers; and expressing a generous pity for the fallen state, dissembled his inward contempt for the abject humiliation, of his captive. Instead of exhibiting the vanquished king of the Alemanni, as a grateful spectacle to the cities of Gaul, he respectfully laid at the feet of the emperor this splendid trophy of his victory. Chnodomar experienced an honorable treatment: but the impatient Barbarian could not long survive his defeat, his confinement, and his exile.

After Julian had repulsed the Alemanni from the provinces of the Upper Rhine, he turned his arms against the Franks, who were seated nearer to the ocean, on the confines of Gaul and Germany; and who, from their numbers, and still more from their intrepid valor, had ever been esteemed the most formidable of the Barbarians. Although they were strongly actuated by the allurements of rapine, they professed a disinterested love of war; which they considered as the supreme honor and felicity of human nature; and their minds and bodies were so completely hardened by perpetual action, that, according to the lively expression of an orator, the snows of winter were as pleasant to them as the flowers of spring. In the month of December, which followed the battle of Strasburgh, Julian attacked a body of six hundred Franks, who had thrown themselves into two castles on the Meuse.

In the midst of that severe season they sustained, with inflexible constancy, a siege of fifty-four days; till at length, exhausted by hunger, and satisfied that the vigilance of the enemy, in breaking the ice of the river, left them no hopes of escape, the Franks consented, for the first time, to dispense with the ancient law which commanded them to conquer or to die.

Gibbon on Julian – 3

The History of the Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire

Volume 2

Chapter XIX


Besides the reigning emperor, Julian alone survived, of all the numerous posterity of Constantius Chlorus. The misfortune of his royal birth involved him in the disgrace of Gallus. From his retirement in the happy country of Ionia, he was conveyed under a strong guard to the court of Milan; where he languished above seven months, in the continual apprehension of suffering the same ignominious death, which was daily inflicted almost before his eyes, on the friends and adherents of his persecuted family.

His looks, his gestures, his silence, were scrutinized with malignant curiosity, and he was perpetually assaulted by enemies whom he had never offended, and by arts to which he was a stranger. But in the school of adversity, Julian insensibly acquired the virtues of firmness and discretion. He defended his honor, as well as his life, against the insnaring subtleties of the eunuchs, who endeavored to extort some declaration of his sentiments; and whilst he cautiously suppressed his grief and resentment, he nobly disdained to flatter the tyrant, by any seeming approbation of his brother’s murder.

Julian most devoutly ascribes his miraculous deliverance to the protection of the gods, who had exempted his innocence from the sentence of destruction pronounced by their justice against the impious house of Constantine. As the most effectual instrument of their providence, he gratefully acknowledges the steady and generous friendship of the empress Eusebia, a woman of beauty and merit, who, by the ascendant which she had gained over the mind of her husband, counterbalanced, in some measure, the powerful conspiracy of the eunuchs.

By the intercession of his patroness, Julian was admitted into the Imperial presence: he pleaded his cause with a decent freedom, he was heard with favor; and, notwithstanding the efforts of his enemies, who urged the danger of sparing an avenger of the blood of Gallus, the milder sentiment of Eusebia prevailed in the council. But the effects of a second interview were dreaded by the eunuchs; and Julian was advised to withdraw for a while into the neighborhood of Milan, till the emperor thought proper to assign the city of Athens for the place of his honorable exile. As he had discovered, from his earliest youth, a propensity, or rather passion, for the language, the manners, the learning, and the religion of the Greeks, he obeyed with pleasure an order so agreeable to his wishes. Far from the tumult of arms, and the treachery of courts, he spent six months under the groves of the academy, in a free intercourse with the philosophers of the age, who studied to cultivate the genius, to encourage the vanity, and to inflame the devotion of their royal pupil.

Their labors were not unsuccessful; and Julian inviolably preserved for Athens that tender regard which seldom fails to arise in a liberal mind, from the recollection of the place where it has discovered and exercised its growing powers. The gentleness and affability of manners, which his temper suggested and his situation imposed, insensibly engaged the affections of the strangers, as well as citizens, with whom he conversed. Some of his fellow-students might perhaps examine his behavior with an eye of prejudice and aversion; but Julian established, in the schools of Athens, a general prepossession in favor of his virtues and talents, which was soon diffused over the Roman world.

Whilst his hours were passed in studious retirement, the empress, resolute to achieve the generous design which she had undertaken, was not unmindful of the care of his fortune. The death of the late Cæsar had left Constantius invested with the sole command, and oppressed by the accumulated weight, of a mighty empire. Before the wounds of civil discord could be healed, the provinces of Gaul were overwhelmed by a deluge of Barbarians.

The Sarmatians no longer respected the barrier of the Danube. The impunity of rapine had increased the boldness and numbers of the wild Isaurians: those robbers descended from their craggy mountains to ravage the adjacent country, and had even presumed, though without success, to besiege the important city of Seleucia, which was defended by a garrison of three Roman legions. Above all, the Persian monarch, elated by victory, again threatened the peace of Asia, and the presence of the emperor was indispensably required, both in the West and in the East. For the first time, Constantius sincerely acknowledged, that his single strength was unequal to such an extent of care and of dominion. Insensible to the voice of flattery, which assured him that this all-powerful virtue, and celestial fortune, would still continue to triumph over every obstacle, he listened with complacency to the advice of Eusebia, which gratified his indolence, without offending his suspicious pride.

As she perceived that the remembrance of Gallus dwelt on the emperor’s mind, she artfully turned his attention to the opposite characters of the two brothers, which from their infancy had been compared to those of Domitian and of Titus. She accustomed her husband to consider Julian as a youth of a mild, unambitious disposition, whose allegiance and gratitude might be secured by the gift of the purple, and who was qualified to fill with honor a subordinate station, without aspiring to dispute the commands, or to shade the glories, of his sovereign and benefactor. After an obstinate, though secret struggle, the opposition of the favorite eunuchs submitted to the ascendency of the empress; and it was resolved that Julian, after celebrating his nuptials with Helena, sister of Constantius, should be appointed, with the title of Cæsar, to reign over the countries beyond the Alps.

Although the order which recalled him to court was probably accompanied by some intimation of his approaching greatness, he appeals to the people of Athens to witness his tears of undissembled sorrow, when he was reluctantly torn away from his beloved retirement. He trembled for his life, for his fame, and even for his virtue; and his sole confidence was derived from the persuasion, that Minerva inspired all his actions, and that he was protected by an invisible guard of angels, whom for that purpose she had borrowed from the Sun and Moon.

He approached, with horror, the palace of Milan; nor could the ingenuous youth conceal his indignation, when he found himself accosted with false and servile respect by the assassins of his family. Eusebia, rejoicing in the success of her benevolent schemes, embraced him with the tenderness of a sister; and endeavored, by the most soothing caresses, to dispel his terrors, and reconcile him to his fortune. But the ceremony of shaving his beard, and his awkward demeanor, when he first exchanged the cloak of a Greek philosopher for the military habit of a Roman prince, amused, during a few days, the levity of the Imperial court.

The emperors of the age of Constantine no longer deigned to consult with the senate in the choice of a colleague; but they were anxious that their nomination should be ratified by the consent of the army. On this solemn occasion, the guards, with the other troops whose stations were in the neighborhood of Milan, appeared under arms; and Constantius ascended his lofty tribunal, holding by the hand his cousin Julian, who entered the same day into the twenty-fifth year of his age.

In a studied speech, conceived and delivered with dignity, the emperor represented the various dangers which threatened the prosperity of the republic, the necessity of naming a Cæsar for the administration of the West, and his own intention, if it was agreeable to their wishes, of rewarding with the honors of the purple the promising virtues of the nephew of Constantine. The approbation of the soldiers was testified by a respectful murmur; they gazed on the manly countenance of Julian, and observed with pleasure, that the fire which sparkled in his eyes was tempered by a modest blush, on being thus exposed, for the first time, to the public view of mankind.

As soon as the ceremony of his investiture had been performed, Constantius addressed him with the tone of authority which his superior age and station permitted him to assume; and exhorting the new Cæsar to deserve, by heroic deeds, that sacred and immortal name, the emperor gave his colleague the strongest assurances of a friendship which should never be impaired by time, nor interrupted by their separation into the most distant climes. As soon as the speech was ended, the troops, as a token of applause, clashed their shields against their knees; while the officers who surrounded the tribunal expressed, with decent reserve, their sense of the merits of the representative of Constantius.

The two princes returned to the palace in the same chariot; and during the slow procession, Julian repeated to himself a verse of his favorite Homer, which he might equally apply to his fortune and to his fears. The four-and-twenty days which the Cæsar spent at Milan after his investiture, and the first months of his Gallic reign, were devoted to a splendid but severe captivity; nor could the acquisition of honor compensate for the loss of freedom.

His steps were watched, his correspondence was intercepted; and he was obliged, by prudence, to decline the visits of his most intimate friends. Of his former domestics, four only were permitted to attend him; two pages, his physician, and his librarian; the last of whom was employed in the care of a valuable collection of books, the gift of the empress, who studied the inclinations as well as the interest of her friend. In the room of these faithful servants, a household was formed, such indeed as became the dignity of a Cæsar; but it was filled with a crowd of slaves, destitute, and perhaps incapable, of any attachment for their new master, to whom, for the most part, they were either unknown or suspected.

His want of experience might require the assistance of a wise council; but the minute instructions which regulated the service of his table, and the distribution of his hours, were adapted to a youth still under the discipline of his preceptors, rather than to the situation of a prince intrusted with the conduct of an important war. If he aspired to deserve the esteem of his subjects, he was checked by the fear of displeasing his sovereign; and even the fruits of his marriage-bed were blasted by the jealous artifices of Eusebia herself, who, on this occasion alone, seems to have been unmindful of the tenderness of her sex, and the generosity of her character.

The memory of his father and of his brothers reminded Julian of his own danger, and his apprehensions were increased by the recent and unworthy fate of Sylvanus. In the summer which preceded his own elevation, that general had been chosen to deliver Gaul from the tyranny of the Barbarians; but Sylvanus soon discovered that he had left his most dangerous enemies in the Imperial court. A dexterous informer, countenanced by several of the principal ministers, procured from him some recommendatory letters; and erasing the whole of the contents, except the signature, filled up the vacant parchment with matters of high and treasonable import.

By the industry and courage of his friends, the fraud was however detected, and in a great council of the civil and military officers, held in the presence of the emperor himself, the innocence of Sylvanus was publicly acknowledged.

But the discovery came too late; the report of the calumny, and the hasty seizure of his estate, had already provoked the indignant chief to the rebellion of which he was so unjustly accused.

He assumed the purple at his head-quarters of Cologne, and his active powers appeared to menace Italy with an invasion, and Milan with a siege. In this emergency, Ursicinus, a general of equal rank, regained, by an act of treachery, the favor which he had lost by his eminent services in the East. Exasperated, as he might speciously allege, by the injuries of a similar nature, he hastened with a few followers to join the standard, and to betray the confidence, of his too credulous friend. After a reign of only twenty-eight days, Sylvanus was assassinated: the soldiers who, without any criminal intention, had blindly followed the example of their leader, immediately returned to their allegiance; and the flatterers of Constantius celebrated the wisdom and felicity of the monarch who had extinguished a civil war without the hazard of a battle.

The protection of the Rhætian frontier, and the persecution of the Catholic church, detained Constantius in Italy above eighteen months after the departure of Julian.

Gibbon on Julian – 2

The History of the Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire

Volume 2

Chapter XIX


When the two nephews of Constantine, Gallus and Julian, were saved from the fury of the soldiers, the former was about twelve, and the latter about six, years of age; and, as the eldest was thought to be of a sickly constitution, they obtained with the less difficulty a precarious and dependent life, from the affected pity of Constantius, who was sensible that the execution of these helpless orphans would have been esteemed, by all mankind, an act of the most deliberate cruelty.

Different cities of Ionia and Bithynia were assigned for the places of their exile and education; but as soon as their growing years excited the jealousy of the emperor, he judged it more prudent to secure those unhappy youths in the strong castle of Macellum, near Cæsarea. The treatment which they experienced during a six years’ confinement, was partly such as they could hope from a careful guardian, and partly such as they might dread from a suspicious tyrant. Their prison was an ancient palace, the residence of the kings of Cappadocia; the situation was pleasant, the buildings of stately, the enclosure spacious. They pursued their studies, and practised their exercises, under the tuition of the most skilful masters; and the numerous household appointed to attend, or rather to guard, the nephews of Constantine, was not unworthy of the dignity of their birth. But they could not disguise to themselves that they were deprived of fortune, of freedom, and of safety; secluded from the society of all whom they could trust or esteem, and condemned to pass their melancholy hours in the company of slaves devoted to the commands of a tyrant who had already injured them beyond the hope of reconciliation.

At length, however, the emergencies of the state compelled the emperor, or rather his eunuchs, to invest Gallus, in the twenty-fifth year of his age, with the title of Cæsar, and to cement this political connection by his marriage with the princess Constantina. After a formal interview, in which the two princes mutually engaged their faith never to undertake any thing to the prejudice of each other, they repaired without delay to their respective stations. Constantius continued his march towards the West, and Gallus fixed his residence at Antioch; from whence, with a delegated authority, he administered the five great dioceses of the eastern præfecture. In this fortunate change, the new Cæsar was not unmindful of his brother Julian, who obtained the honors of his rank, the appearances of liberty, and the restitution o fan ample patrimony.

The writers the most indulgent to the memory of Gallus, and even Julian himself, though he wished to cast a veil over the frailties of his brother, are obliged to confess that the Cæsar was incapable of reigning. Transported from a prison to a throne, he possessed neither genius nor application, nor docility to compensate for the want of knowledge and experience. A temper naturally morose and violent, instead of being corrected, was soured by solitude and adversity; the remembrance of what he had endured disposed him to retaliation rather than to sympathy; and the ungoverned sallies of his rage were often fatal to those who approached his person, or were subject to his power. Constantina, his wife, is described, not as a woman, but as one of the infernal furies tormented with an insatiate thirst of human blood. Instead of employing her influence to insinuate the mild counsels of prudence and humanity, she exasperated the fierce passions of her husband; and as she retained the vanity, though she had renounced, the gentleness of her sex, a pearl necklace was esteemed an equivalent price for the murder of an innocent and virtuous nobleman.

The cruelty of Gallus was sometimes displayed in the undissembled violence of popular or military executions; and was sometimes disguised by the abuse of law, and the forms of judicial proceedings. The private houses of Antioch, and the places of public resort, were besieged by spies and informers; and the Cæsar himself, concealed in a plebeian habit, very frequently condescended to assume that odious character.

Every apartment of the palace was adorned with the instruments of death and torture, and a general consternation was diffused through the capital of Syria. The prince of the East, as if he had been conscious how much he had to fear, and how little he deserved to reign, selected for the objects of his resentment the provincials accused of some imaginary treason, and his own courtiers, whom with more reason he suspected of incensing, by their secret correspondence, the timid and suspicious mind of Constantius. But he forgot that he was depriving himself of his only support, the affection of the people; whilst he furnished the malice of his enemies with the arms of truth, and afforded the emperor the fairest pretence of exacting the forfeit of his purple, and of his life.

As long as the civil war suspended the fate of the Roman world, Constantius dissembled his knowledge of the weak and cruel administration to which his choice had subjected the East; and the discovery of some assassins, secretly despatched to Antioch by the tyrant of Gaul, was employed to convince the public, that the emperor and the Cæsar were united by the same interest, and pursued by the same enemies. But when the victory was decided in favor of Constantius, his dependent colleague became less useful and less formidable. Every circumstance of his conduct was severely and suspiciously examined, and it was privately resolved, either to deprive Gallus of the purple, or at least to remove him from the indolent luxury of Asia to the hardships and dangers of a German war.

The death of Theophilus, consular of the province of Syria, who in a time of scarcity had been massacred by the people of Antioch, with the connivance, and almost at the instigation, of Gallus, was justly resented, not only as an act of wanton cruelty, but as a dangerous insult on the supreme majesty of Constantius. Two ministers of illustrious rank, Domitian the Oriental præfect, and Montius, quæstor of the palace, were empowered by a special commission to visit and reform the state of the East. They were instructed to behave towards Gallus with moderation and respect, and, by the gentle starts of persuasion, to engage him to comply with the invitation of his brother and colleague. The rashness of the præfect disappointed these prudent measures, and hastened his own ruin, as well as that of his enemy.

On his arrival at Antioch, Domitian passed disdainfully before the gates of the palace, and alleging a slight pretence of indisposition, continued several days in sullen retirement, to prepare an inflammatory memorial, which he transmitted to the Imperial court. Yielding at length to the pressing solicitations of Gallus, the præfect condescended to take his seat in council; but his first step was to signify a concise and haughty mandate, importing that the Cæsar should immediately repair to Italy, and threatening that he himself would punish his delay or hesitation, by suspending the usual allowance of his household. The nephew and daughter of Constantine, who could ill brook the insolence of a subject, expressed their resentment by instantly delivering Domitian to the custody of a guard. The quarrel still admitted of some terms of accommodation. They were rendered impracticable by the imprudent behavior of Montius, a statesman whose arts and experience were frequently betrayed by the levity of his disposition.

The quæstor reproached Gallus in a haughty language, that a prince who was scarcely authorized to remove a municipal magistrate, should presume to imprison a Prætorian præfect; convoked a meeting of the civil and military officers; and required them, in the name of their sovereign, to defend the person and dignity of his representatives. By this rash declaration of war, the impatient temper of Gallus was provoked to embrace the most desperate counsels. He ordered his guards to stand to their arms, assembled the populace of Antioch, and recommended to their zeal the care of his safety and revenge. His commands were too fatally obeyed. They rudely seized the præfect and the quæstor, and tying their legs together with ropes, they dragged them through the streets of the city, inflicted a thousand insults and a thousand wounds on these unhappy victims, and at last precipitated their mangled and lifeless bodies into the stream of the Orontes.

After such a deed, whatever might have been the designs of Gallus, it was only in a field of battle that he could assert his innocence with any hope of success. But the mind of that prince was formed of an equal mixture of violence and weakness. Instead of assuming the title of Augustus, instead of employing in his defence the troops and treasures of the East, he suffered himself to be deceived by the affected tranquillity of Constantius, who, leaving him the vain pageantry of a court, imperceptibly recalled the veteran legions from the provinces of Asia.

But as it still appeared dangerous to arrest Gallus in his capital, the slow and safer arts of dissimulation were practised with success. The frequent and pressing epistles of Constantius were filled with professions of confidence and friendship; exhorting the Cæsar to discharge the duties of his high station, to relieve his colleague from a part of the public cares, and to assist the West by his presence, his counsels, and his arms. After so many reciprocal injuries, Gallus had reason to fear and to distrust. But he had neglected the opportunities of flight and of resistance; he was seduced by the flattering assurances of the tribune Scudilo, who, under the semblance of a rough soldier, disguised the most artful insinuation; and he depended on the credit of his wife Constantina, till the unseasonable death of that princess completed the ruin in which he had been involved by her impetuous passions.

Beyond evil and tyranny

The 2011 biography authored by R. H. S. Stolfi on Adolf Hitler mentions that Caesar perpetrated a genocide of whites in Gaul, something that I discussed in my previous post. Greg Johnson’s recent review of Stolfi’s biography merits reproduction below:

Russell Stolfi (1932–2012)


Adolf Hitler was clearly the man of the 20th century, whose shadow grows taller as the sun of the West sinks ever lower. Sadly, though, there is no biography worthy of Hitler.

If great men are those who leave their stamp on history, then Hitler was a great man. But great men present great problems for biographers. Great men are not necessarily good men, and even good men, when they hold political power, often find it necessary to kill innocent people. Evil men do not find this difficult, but good men do. Thus a good man, if he is to be a great man, must also be a hard man. But it is difficult for biographers, who are ordinary men, to sympathize with great men, especially men who are unusually bad or hard.

But biographers must at least try to enter imaginatively into the minds of their subjects. They must feel their feelings and think their thoughts. They must feel sympathy or empathy for their subjects. Such sympathy is not a violation of objectivity but a tool of it. It is a necessary counter-weight to the antipathy and ressentiment that hardness, cruelty, and greatness often inspire. Sympathy is necessary so a biographer can discover and articulate the virtues of intellect and character necessary to achieve anything great in this world, for good or ill.

Of course, one’s ability to sympathize with great men depends in large part on one’s moral principles. A Nietzschean or Social Darwinist would, for instance, find it easier to sympathize with a human beast of prey than would a Christian or a liberal democrat. Even so, it has been possible for Christians and liberals to write biographies of such great conquerors as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Mohammed, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon without whipping themselves into thousand-page paroxysms of self-righteous moralistic denigration.

Hitler, of course, provides even greater problems for biographers, because his demonization is a prop of contemporary Jewish hegemony, and there are consequences for any writer who challenges that consensus.

R. H. S. Stolfi’s Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny is one of my favorite books on Hitler. It is not a biography of Hitler, although it is organized chronologically. It is, rather, a kind of “meta-biography,” an essay on the interpretation of Hitler’s life. Stolfi’s project has both positive and negative aspects: Stolfi critiques the existing interpretations of Hitler’s life as a whole and of specific episodes in Hitler’s life, and Stolfi sets forth his own interpretations.

Stolfi’s criticism of Hitler biographies focuses on the work of those he calls the four “great biographers”: John Toland (Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography, Alan Bullock (Hitler: A Study in Tyranny), Joachim Fest (Hitler), and Ian Kershaw (Hitler: 1889-1936, Hubris and Hitler: 1936-1945, Nemesis). In Stolfi’s words, “the penchant of [Hitler's] biographers for gratuitous sarcasm, strained skepticism, and writing from preconceived heights of antipathy has left the world with a dangerously inaccurate portrait of Hitler” (p. 54). (Judging from the reception of David Irving’s Hitler’s War and The War Path, the existing establishment regards an accurate portrait of Hitler more dangerous than an inaccurate one.) Four examples of this bias will suffice:

(1) Ian Kershaw claims that outside of politics, Hitler was an “unperson,” a nullity, which completely ignores Hitler’s voracious reading, serious engagement with and understanding of philosophers like Schopenhauer, love of painting and fine art, remarkable architectural knowledge and skill, and love of classical music, including a connoisseur’s knowledge of the operas of Richard Wagner that impressed the Wagner family and other highly discerning individuals.

(2) Hitler’s biographers invariably denigrate his humble, common origins, coming off like parodies of the worst forms of social snobbery. But of course the same authors would wax sodden and treacly in describing any other man’s rise from poverty and obscurity to fame and fortune. Jesse Owens, for instance.

(3) Stolfi rebuts one of Joachim Fest’s most outrageous liberties as follows: “The great biographers all debunk Nazi theories of racial differences, which they characterize as pseudoscientific and based on unredeemed prejudice, yet one of them [Fest] could claim confidently, without hint of countervailing possibility, that the subject of his biography had ‘criminal features’ set in a ‘psychopathic face’” (p. 268).

(4) The great biographers regularly slight Hitler’s service as a soldier during the First World War, yet as Stolfi points out, Hitler won the Iron Cross First Class, the Iron Cross Second Class, and a regimental commendation for bravery. He was also seriously wounded twice. Hitler never spoke much about what he did to earn these commendations, partly out of his characteristic modesty and reserve, but also probably because he did not wish to relive painful experiences. But even this is twisted by his biographers to cast aspersions on Hitler’s bravery and character. Stolfi notes that with no other historical figure do biographers feel entitled to take such liberties.

Kershaw is the most tendentious of the great biographers, repeatedly characterizing Hitler as an “unperson,” a “nonentity,” a “mediocrity,” and a “failure.” These epithets must surely feel good to Kershaw and like-minded readers, but if they are true, then Hitler’s career is utterly incomprehensible. Stolfi is acerbic, witty, and tireless in skewering the great biographers—although some of his readers might find it tiresome as well.

In addition to offering fascinating interpretations of particular events, Stolfi argues for three overriding theses about Hitler: (1) Hitler cannot be understood as a politician but as a prophet, specifically a prophet forced to take on the role of a messiah; (2) Hitler cannot be understood as an evil man, but as a good man who was forced by circumstances and his own ruthless logic and unemotional “hardness” to do terrible things; and (3) Hitler must be understood as one of the great men of history, indeed as a world-historical figure, who cannot be grasped with conventional moral concepts.

Surely by now you are thinking that our author must be some sort of “discredited,” “marginal,” outsider historian like David Irving, or even a dreaded “revisionist.” So who was Russell Stolfi? Born in 1932, Stolfi is to all appearances an established, mainstream military historian. He was Professor at the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California and a Colonel in the US Marine Corps Reserve. He is the author of three other books: German Panzers on the Offensive: Russian Front–North Africa 1941-1942 (Schiffer Publishing, 2003), Hitler’s Panzers East: World War II Reinterpreted (University of Oklahoma, 1993), and NATO Under Attack: Why the Western Alliance Can Fight Outnumbered and Win in Central Europe Without Nuclear Weapons (with F. W. von Mellenthin, Duke University Press, 1983). I first read Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny in May of 2012, and I was so excited that I tried to contact Stolfi for an interview only to learn that he had just died in April.


Politician or Prophet?

Adolf Hitler was a formidable political organizer who took over a minuscule Bavarian debating club and turned it into the largest political party in Germany. After being imprisoned for an abortive Putsch, Hitler decided to attain power legally, through electoral politics. To that end, he virtually created the modern political campaign, traveling tirelessly by automobile and airplane and masterfully employing the mass media of his time. When he became Chancellor, Hitler proved a formidable statesman, transforming Germany with a virtually bloodless revolution and recovering German lands and pride through a series of deft foreign policy triumphs until the British and French started a World War to stop him.

Yet for all that, Stolfi argues that Hitler’s personality, goals, and grand strategy were more like those of a religious prophet, specifically an armed prophet like Mohammed.

Politicians presuppose a common political system and climate of opinion. They generally avoid contesting fundamental principles and instead deal with essentially quantitative differences within the same political and ideological continuum, hence their ability to compromise and their susceptibility to corruption. Stolfi points out again and again that Hitler refused to behave like a politician.

Hitler never compromised on basic principles. He took dangerously unpopular stands (p. 225). He refused to soften the party’s message to appeal to squeamish and lukewarm people. He was no demagogue: “A demagogue tells his audience what it wants to hear. A messiah tells his audience what he wants it to hear” (p. 248). Hitler never worried that his radical views would “discredit” him in the eyes of the public, whose minds were mostly in the grip of his enemies anyway. Instead, Hitler was supremely confident of his ability to lend credit to his ideas through reason and rhetoric. He wanted to elevate public opinion toward truth rather than condescend to pander to ignorance and folly.

Hitler also refused to enter common fronts with enemy parties, especially the Social Democrats, even when they took patriotic stands.

Hitler was, moreover, utterly incorruptible. He refused to make special promises to businessmen and other interest groups. He just handed them the party’s platform. In the end, he was offered the Chancellorship simply because his opponents knew he could not be bought off with anything less.

Revolutionaries deal with fundamental issues of principle, which is why they seek to overthrow existing systems and begin anew. Hitler was, of course, a political revolutionary. But he was something more. He saw himself as the exponent of a whole philosophy of life, not just a political philosophy. He placed politics in a larger biological and historical perspective: the struggle of Aryan man against Jewry and its extended phenotypes Communism and Anglo-Saxon capitalism. He believed the stakes were global: nothing less than the survival of all life on Earth was in peril. And having miraculously survived four years of slaughter and two serious wounds in the trenches of World War I—including an experience that can only be described as supernatural (p. 95)—Hitler believed that he enjoyed the special protection of Providence.

Hitler had a number of heroic role models. As a child, he was transported by Germanic myths and sagas. As a teenager, he identified with the hero of Wagner’s opera Rienzi, based on the story of Cola di Rienzi, the 14th century popular dictator who sought to restore Rome to its Imperial glory but who was undone by the treachery of the aristocracy and church and finally murdered. Hitler prophesied that he would become a tribune of the people who would rise and fall like Rienzi, and he did. Hitler also identified with Wagner’s Lohengrin and Siegfried. Although Hitler himself had little use for the Bible, his later career as armed prophet brings to mind the Hebrew prophets and lawgivers as well. Stolfi’s analogy between Hitler and Mohammed is quite apposite and revealing.

Savior of Germany – and Europe

Hitler, however, apparently did not think of himself as a messiah figure, but more as a John the Baptist, preparing the way for someone greater than him. But, as Stolfi documents, many of Hitler’s closest followers—all of them intelligent men, ranging from mystics like Hess to consummate cynics like Goebbels—as well as some of his more fair-minded enemies, did see him as a messiah figure, and in the end, he was forced to take on that role. Reading Stolfi makes Savitri Devi’s thesis in The Lightning and the Sun that Hitler was an avatar of the god Vishnu seem a little less eccentric. (Savitri did not originate that thesis. It was a view that she encountered widely among educated Hindus in the 1930s.) There was something messianic about Hitler’s aura and actions, and people around the world understood it in terms of their own cultural traditions.

Stolfi does not mention it, but there is a sense in which Hitler was the savior of Germany and all of Western Europe, although his accomplishments fell far short of his ambitions, consumed his life, and devastated his nation. When Hitler launched operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Soviets were poised to launch a massive invasion of all of Central and Western Europe. Hitler pre-empted that invasion, and although he failed to destroy the USSR, the Third Reich was destroyed instead, and Stalin conquered half of Europe, the outcome would have been much worse if Stalin had been able to launch his invasion. Stalin could have conquered all of Europe. At best he would have been repulsed after unimaginable devastation and bloodshed. Thus every Western European who has lived in freedom from want and terror since 1941 owes a debt of thanks to Adolf Hitler, the German people, and their Axis partners.

(See on this site [Counter Currents] Daniel Michaels, “Exposing Stalin’s Plan to Conquer Europe” and the National Vanguard review of Viktor Suvorov’s Icebreaker; for more recent literature on this subject, see Viktor Suvorov’s definitive statement of his research has been published as The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II [Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2008] and Joachim Hoffmann, Stalin’s War of Extermination, 1941-1945: Planning, Realization and Documentation [Capshaw, Al.: Theses and Dissertations Press, 2001].)

The Question of Evil

In today’s climate of moral relativism and rot, Adolf Hitler is probably the only human being that even liberals will denounce as evil. Hitler is the modern world’s paradigm and embodiment of evil. But of course other people can be evil if they are “like Hitler.” Thus the most radical thesis of Stolfi’s book is that Adolf Hitler was not evil.

There are many dimensions to this argument.

(1) Stolfi points out that there is no evidence that Hitler had psychopathic or sociopathic personality traits as a child. He did not torture animals or steal, for instance. He was polite, serious, and reserved.

(2) Stolfi also points out that Hitler was not primarily motivated by hate or ressentiment. He arrived at his two great enmities, namely against Jewry and Bolshevism, based on personal experience, current events, and extensive research. But when he was rationally convinced of their enormity, he naturally hated them with appropriate magnitude and intensity. As Stolfi writes, “It is difficult to imagine Hitler either as messiah or otherwise and not hating the enemy. Did Jesus the Christ or Mohammed the Prophet hate Satan or merely disapprove of him?” (p. 233).

(3) Calling Hitler evil, like calling him “crazy,” is mentally lazy, because it exempts us from trying to understand the reasons for Hitler’s actions: both his thought processes and objective events that prompted him to act. Hitler had his reasons.

(4) Stolfi argues that Hitler’s character, goals, and actions were not evil. Hitler did what he thought was right, and he was hard enough to spill oceans of blood if he thought it was necessary to advance the greater good. A Socratic, of course, would claim that it is an empty claim, as nobody does evil as such but only under the guise of a perceived good. The evil of an act is in its outcome, not its motive. We all “mean well.”

(5) Stolfi hints that Hitler may have, in a sense, been beyond good and evil, because his goal was nothing less than the creation of a new order, including a new moral order, and it begs the question to subject such men to the moral laws they seek to overthrow. This points us back to Stolfi’s thesis that Hitler has to be seen more as a religious than a political figure and forward to his third major thesis, that Hitler was a world-historical individual.

Russell Stolfi deals with a number of episodes in Hitler’s life that are adduced as evidence of evil. Stolfi argues that some of these acts are not evil at all. He others that others were necessary or mitigated evils. And he claims that still others were no more evil than the actions of other great men of history who nevertheless manage to receive respectful treatment from biographers. Finally, Stolfi argues that all of these acts, even the evil ones, do not necessarily make Hitler an evil man, for even good men can commit horrific acts if they believe they are necessary to promote a greater good.

(1) Stolfi argues that Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch and other violations of the laws of the Weimar Republic are somewhat softened by the fact that he believed that the Weimar Republic was an illegitimate and criminal regime. Hitler’s early attempts to defy it and replace it are not, therefore, “evil,” unless all acts of disobedience and revolution against governments as such are evil. In any case, after his release from prison, Hitler adopted a policy of strict legality: he pursued the Chancellorship through electoral politics, and he won.

(2) Stolfi argues that the creation of the Sturm Abteilungen (Storm Troops) was not motivated by a desire to violently intimidate political opponents and seize power. Instead, the SA was formed in self-defense against organized Communist efforts to violently intimidate political opponents and seize power, violence that had effectively suppressed the ability of all Right-wing parties to assemble. The SA did not merely assure the NSDAP’s freedom to assemble and organize, it broke the Red terror and restored political freedom to all parties.

(3) Stolfi argues that the Röhm purge was necessary because there was ample evidence that Röhm himself was plotting a coup, and, true or not, Hindenburg, the leaders of the military, and Hitler’s top lieutenants all believed it to be true. Hindenburg threatened to declare martial law and have the army deal with Röhm if Hitler would not. Hitler had to act, because if he didn’t, he would be effectively deposed: he would be abdicating the sovereign function to decide and act for the good of the people to Hindenburg and the army. Even so, Hitler temporized to the last possible moment.

Stolfi claims that Röhm’s death was a kind of apotheosis for Hitler: “By June 1934, Hitler stood poised to pass beyond friendship with any man into the realm of the lonely, distant Leader. But Hitler could never pass into that realm with Röhm alive and serving as a reminder of Hitler’s own historical mortality. Röhm had to die, and Hitler had to kill him” (p. 306). But this was not, of course, Hitler’s motive for killing him.

Ultimately, Stolfi judges Röhm’s death to be politically necessary and morally excusable. He describes it not as a cool, premeditated murder but as a “crime of passion” of a man faced with the infidelity of a sworn confidant (p. 309). Of course, the Röhm purge was the occasion for settling a number of other old scores, which complicates Stolfi’s moral picture considerably.

(4) Stolfi evidently thinks there was nothing evil at all about Hitler’s assumption of dictatorial powers—through a provision in the Weimar constitution—or his suppression of a political movement as destructive and implacable as Marxism. But he praises the relative bloodlessness of Hitler’s legal revolution.

(5) As for the concentration camps off to which Hitler packed the leaders of the Marxist parties and other subversive groups: in 1935, when the German population stood at 65 million, the concentration camp inmates numbered 3,500, most of them Communists and Social Democrats. The camp system and its mandate were expanded to house people in protective custody for being social nuisances, including beggars, drunks, homosexuals (homosexuality was criminalized under the Second Reich, remained criminalized under Weimar, and was criminalized in the liberal democracies too), gypsies, and habitual criminals—by 1939 there were 10 camps with 25,000 inmates in a country of 80 million people. That doesn’t seem quite as evil as it was cracked up to be. Furthermore, since Himmler and Heydrich certainly did not lack persecuting zeal and organizational skill, we can conclude that the camp system was exactly as big as they thought it should be.

To give some context, according to Wikipedia—where statistics about Soviet atrocities tend to be on the low end due to Marxist policing—in March of 1940, the Soviet Gulag comprised 53 separate camps and 423 labor colonies in which approximately 1.3 million people were interned out of a population of 170 million. Whatever the real size, it was exactly as big as Stalin wanted it to be.

Although I have not been able to find records of similar forms of internment in liberal democracies for political dissidents and social nuisances, these surely did take place. But even in the absence of these numbers, it seems clear that Hitler’s camps were far more similar to the prisons of liberal democracies than the Soviet Gulag to which they are always likened.

Of course, these were peacetime numbers. Under the exigencies of war, Hitler’s camp system expanded dramatically to house hostile populations, prisoners of war, and conscript laborers, which is another topic.

(6) Hitler’s anti-Semitism is often put forward as evidence of evil. Hitler himself thought that certain forms of anti-Semitism were repugnant if not outright evil: religious anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism based on ressentiment, gutter populist scapegoating, etc. His repugnance for such phenomena prejudiced him against anti-Semitism as such. But his personal experiences in Vienna, combined with serious reading eventually led him to a dispassionate, scientifically based, and historically informed anti-Semitism.

When Hitler took power, Germany had a relatively small Jewish population. His basic policy was to prevent any further German-Jewish genetic admixture, remove Jews from positions of power and influence, and encourage Jews to emigrate. By the outbreak of the Polish war, Germany’s Jewish population had been dramatically reduced. But due to Hitler’s war gains, millions of new Jews fell into his remit. More about this anon. Stolfi is somewhat circumspect in passing judgment about Hitler’s peacetime Jewish policy. But we can safely say that it was no more evil than, say, the British treatment of Boer non-combatants or the American treatment of the Plains Indians.

(7) Regarding Hitler’s foreign policy exploits as Chancellor—including rearmament, pulling out of the League of Nations, remilitarizing the Rhineland, the annexation of the Sudetenland and Austria, the annexation of Bohemia, and the war with Poland—Stolfi writes, “every international crisis that involved Hitler in the 1930s stemmed from an iniquity on the part of the Allies in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919” (p. 316). According to Stolfi, in all of these crises, morality was on Hitler’s side, and he lauds Hitler for conducting them with restraint and relative bloodlessness—at least up until the Polish war.

These were hardly the outrageous, unendurable moral provocations of Allied propaganda that justified Britain and France starting a World War because Hitler, having exhausted diplomatic negotiations, started a war with Poland to recover German lands and peoples subjected to horrific Polish oppression. The British and French simply could not grasp that, in Stolfi’s words, “a world-historical personality had marched, outraged, out of the desert of shattered Flanders fields, and the former Allies had not even superior morality to shield themselves from him” (p. 317).

(8) Stolfi interprets Operation Barbarossa against the USSR as a colonial war of conquest as well as a crusade to rid Europe of the scourge of Bolshevism. From an ethnonationalist perspective, of course, Hitler’s aim to reduce Slavs to colonized peoples was evil. Furthermore, it was more evil than British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgian, American, and Russian imperialism directed at non-European peoples, because it is always worse to mistreat one’s own blood than foreigners. But it was certainly not uniquely evil in the annals of human history. If Genghis Khan and Timur the Lame can be the subjects of objective historical assessments, then Barbarossa does not disqualify Hitler.

Stolfi does not treat Barbarossa as a necessary war to preempt Stalin’s planned invasion of Europe. I wanted to ask Stolfi his thoughts about the thesis defended by Viktor Suvorov and Joachim Hoffmann in an interview, but that was not to be. If they are right, of course, then there was no evil at all in launching Barbarossa, although one can justly criticize the excesses of its execution.

(9) According to Stolfi, Hitler’s darkest deeds are the massacre of 3.1 million Soviet POWs captured in the opening months of Barbarossa and the killing of 4.5 million Jews in what is known as the Holocaust. Stolfi is certainly a Hitler revisionist, but I do not know whether he is a Holocaust revisionist or not, since I am unsure if it is legal for him to think that “only” 4.5 million Jews were killed by the Third Reich. I had not even heard of the 3.1 million Soviet POWs, which Stolfi mentions only a couple of times in passing. But of course I have heard of the Holocaust, to which Stolfi dedicates the last two paragraphs of the book (pp. 461-62). Such a brief treatment may itself constitute revisionism, at least in France, where Jean-Marie Le Pen was fined for saying that the Holocaust was only a footnote to the Second World War. Given that some footnotes are longer than the paragraphs in question, Stolfi might have gotten in trouble in the land of liberté. Stolfi’s treatment, however, is a welcome corrective to the Jewish tendency to treat World War II as merely the backdrop of the Holocaust.

Of course, just as Hitler is our age’s paradigm of an evil man, the Holocaust is the paradigm of an evil event. Stolfi does not dispute that the massacre of 7.6 million people is evil. But he does not think it is uniquely evil in World War II or the annals of history in general. Winston Churchill, for example, was responsible for the starvation of millions of Indians whose food was seized for the war effort. He was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German non-combatants in strategically unnecessary terror bombings of German cities. He was responsible for the expulsion of 14 million Germans from their homes in Eastern and Central Europe, up to two million of whom died. Was Churchill evil? His apologists, of course, would argue that his actions were necessitated by the exigencies of war and the pursuit of the greater good. But Hitler’s apologists, if there were any, could argue the very same thing and be done with it. If Churchill, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Julius Caesar, and other members of the Million Murder club can receive fair treatment in a biography, then why not Hitler?

Stolfi compares the Holocaust to Julius Caesar’s ten year conquest of Gaul, in which he killed more than a million armed men and reduced another million to slavery. One million civilian non-combatants were also killed or reduced to slavery. Some particularly troublesome tribes were entirely exterminated because they were “irreconcilable, menacing, and useless either as allies or slaves” (p. 38). Stolfi points out, however, that Caesar’s acts “revealed harshness of almost incredible proportion,” but his acts were “based on realism and prudence in the face of perceived danger—scarcely sadism and cruelty” (p. 38). Likewise, Stolfi argues that “Hitler took the action of pitiless massacre as a last resort in the face of a perceived irreconcilable enemy” and his actions “showed virtually nothing that can be interpreted as sadism, cruelty, or ingrained hate as opposed to temporary fury in the carrying out of the action” (p. 39).

Hitler’s massacres, terrible though they may be, do not prove that he is an evil man, since even good men might resort to such measures in direst extremity. Moreover, even if they were expressions of evil, they were not unique expressions of unique evil but all too common in the annals of history. But, again, only in Hitler’s case are they treated as insuperable objections to serious historical treatment.

In sum, Stolfi argues that Hitler cannot be seen as evil if that means that he was motivated by sadism, psychopathy, hatred, or a neurotic need for power and attention. Instead, Hitler was motivated, first and foremost, by love of his people, beyond which were wider but less pressing concerns with the larger Aryan race, European civilization, and the welfare of the world as a whole. Because Hitler believed that the things he loved were imperiled by Jewry, Bolshevism, and Anglo-Saxon capitalism, he fought them. And when the fight became a world conflagration, he fought them with a remarkable hardness and severity. But his essentially decent character and positive ends remained unchanged. Thus for Stolfi, Hitler is a good man who did some bad things as well as good things—a good man who made many good decisions and some catastrophic mistakes.

A Dark World Historical Personality

But there is a sense in which Stolfi thinks that Hitler is beyond the very categories of good and evil, at least as far as historians should be concerned. Stolfi argues that Hitler was a great man, like such great conquerors as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Mohammed, and Napoleon. (Stolfi makes scant mention of unarmed prophets like the Buddha or Jesus.) According to Stolfi, if one were to freeze Hitler’s life at the end of 1942, he would have to be considered one of history’s greatest statesmen and conquerors. And even if one plays the film all the way to the end, Stolfi argues that the Allies did not win World War II so much as Hitler lost it, which itself underscores his greatness and the relative nullity of his opponents.

Indeed, Stolfi argues that Hitler was more than just a great man but one of Hegel’s “world-historical individuals,” who inaugurates a new stage in human history and cannot be judged or comprehended by the standards of the previous stage. Stolfi, it seems, detaches this concept from Hegel’s overall view that world-historical individuals advance history toward the Providential goal of universal freedom, a goal that Hitler, of course, rejected in favor of particularisms of race and nation. Sadly, though, Hitler may have advanced the universalist agenda in defeat, through no intention of his own.

But, as another prophetic figure once said of World War II, “the war’s not over as far as I’m concerned,” meaning that history is still unfolding, including the consequences of Hitler’s actions. So it remains to be seen whether Hitler will contribute to the victory or defeat of universalism. If racial nationalism—of which Hitler is an inexpugnable part—defeats the drive toward a homogeneous global society, then Hitler would be a world historical figure of an entirely new order: not an agent of “progress,” but of its termination; the man who ended the “end of history” and started the world anew; the man who took the ascending line of progress and inscribed it within a cyclical view of history, whether interpreted in the widely variant Traditionalist or Spenglerian senses.

♣

Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny is a remarkable book that I recommend to all my readers. Stolfi executes his audacious project with clarity and dry humor. Sometimes Stolfi seems to go a bit too far, perhaps just to test his dialectical skills. For instance, he even defends Hitler as a painter. He does a surprisingly good job, but I will still not budge from my conviction that Winston Churchill was Hitler’s superior in this—and only this—regard.

This book is even more remarkable because it is the work of a mainstream military historian, and it clears the way for other genuinely historical studies of Hitler and the Third Reich. This really is an inevitable development as the generations that lived through the war die off. Furthermore, we are now living in a multipolar world with new rising powers—Russia, China, India—that are free of Jewish cultural and political hegemony and hungry for a genuine understanding of Hitler and the Second World War.

White Nationalists should especially welcome Stolfi’s book because it works to dispel the cloud of moral hysteria and denigration that surrounds Hitler, taking some of the sting out of the inevitable accusation that we are “just like Hitler,” which turns out to be an undeserved compliment.

Original source: here and here

Holocaust debate

Below, “Creepy History” by Jeffrey L. Thurston, an Amazon book review of Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?, a 2002 book by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, and my abridgement of the long debate after Thurston’s review.

What caught my attention of the debate is that Michael Smith, one of the commenters who played devil’s advocate by questioning Holocaustianity, is not racialist but a typical liberal living in the Bay Area. Smith even endorses equality, feminism and, like many leftists, is extremely outraged by the treatment of the North American natives by the European colonizers.

Thurston wrote:

This book delves into a creepy subject but as usual with the subject of Holocaust Denial it does not seek to refute the Holocaust Deniers—rather it tries (again as usual) to make the Deniers the subject. There is little head on argument or discussion of the supposedly outlandish claims of Deniers. This book should have been all about the historiography of the Holocaust—this would have gone a long way to actually rebutting the points that Deniers always make (points about actual numbers and mechanics and historical sources). Instead it simply shows us how Official History is made and why it can’t be wrong.

In real life skeptics (of all people) should be skeptical of official politicized history. My research into Joe Stalin has shown me how the Official Version is often based on bizarre historiography. In making the book mostly about the Deniers nothing convincing is offered to counter the revisionist aspect of Holocaust “Denial”: those who say the Holocaust’s numbers have been exaggerated and those who question its mechanics.

Many people lumped in with Deniers have honest questions. The Official Version of Holocaust and the world’s reaction to Holocaust Denial have evolved into a very strange mix of fear and well—denial! It is illegal to deny the Holocaust in many supposedly “free” Western nations. If the subject were so open and shut then why do there have to be laws protecting free minds from it?

The rather simple arguments that Deniers (or revisionists) make are difficult to rebut—period. The Official Version must stand—period! On pain of the Law! And the Holocaust has morphed into the main casus belli of WWII and now of all world history—the sufferings of a tiny fraction of WWII’s victims are the subject of much of popular WWII history in the United States. I challenge people who are true skeptics to delve into this subject with an open mind. You might be surprised as I was.

Davros said…

I live in Britain, where there are no Holocaust Denial Laws and, in general, Holocaust Denial is not really a big issue. Indeed, you will find a lot of sympathy for the idea that Holocaust Denial Laws do indeed stifle freedom of speech and give Holocaust Deniers ammunition to say they are being repressed and their human rights denied.

Michael Smith said…

I have to agree that the book encourages readers to believe that official history is objective, self-correcting, and infallible. What a crock! The authors conflate skepticism about mass gassing chambers with outright denial of the Holocaust. That’s a sleight-of-hand job. So-called “deniers” are skeptical about mass gassing chambers, not about violent treatment of Jews per se.

David Irving is not a Holocaust “Denier.” He’s appeared at some of their gatherings but does not consider himself one of them, nor do they accept him as one of their own.

Flat earthers can be shown a picture of the round earth to demonstrate the error of their ways. Where can one get a picture of a mass gassing chamber that was used by the Nazis?

In the Irving-Lipstadt case defense attorneys specifically refused to present an affirmative case for homicidal gassing chambers. If one had existed, they’d have presented it. But there are no photographs to present, no material remains of a homicidal gas chamber, no documents that directly refer to mass extermination by gas. It’s all “proven” by inferential speculation, the same way 9/11 Truthers “prove” that the twin towers were brought down by controlled explosives.

DWD said…

“The sufferings of a tiny fraction of WWII’s victims are the subject of much of popular WWII history in the United States.” – Jeffrey L. Thurston

I’d hardly consider at least 10% of the total death toll of the war (50-70 million) coming from European Jews (5.1-5.9 million, more than 70% of all European Jews killed) to be a tiny fraction and something to be glossed over. These were not civilian deaths by battlefield accidents, friendly fire or even incidents of soldiers gone wild in a frenzy of killing. This was systematic, planned destruction, cold and methodical.

Michael Smith said…

Systematic planned destruction is what modern war is all about. And civilians routinely do most of the dying. The Nazis are far from the only ones guilty on this count.

There is a lot of ground between “glossing over” the killing of Jews in WWII, and elevating Jewish deaths to the prime concern. Why are Jewish deaths so often considered the prime concern? Because of the (alleged) homicidal gas chambers, the (alleged) assembly line of death, the (alleged) motive of total extermination. But all that has been called into question because of the lack of corroborating physical and documentary evidence, and Denying History fails to acknowledge that fact. Smearing the “Deniers” as racists is just a diversion.

Romeo said…

This is probably a dead thread, but I thought that I would ask. If the Holocaust never happened where did everyone go? How do you explain the disappearance of 6 million people? Some people say it was less that 6 million. Fine. How do you explain the disappearance of 4 million, 2 million, or even 500,000 people? Where did they all go? Or are all these people in on some grand conspiracy?

Michael Smith said…

Holocaust revisionism is basically related to two main questions: the gas chambers and the six million. So the question isn’t really “Did the Holocaust happen?,” but rather, “Were there homicidal gas chambers?” and “How many Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis?” No one denies outright that systematic and murderous brutality occurred, which is what is implied in the statement “the Holocaust didn’t happen.”

There is lots of dispute about the numbers. Many would not accept your assumption that millions are unaccounted for. Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial says it has the names of 3 million Jews who died in Europe (from all causes) during WWII. What about the other three million? In any case, how does it follow that if Jews are missing they must have been systematically exterminated in Nazi gas chambers? There are many ways to die, especially in a war zone.

Regarding the Holocaust as “the worst thing that ever happened” is directly related to the gas chamber question. If it were widely accepted that there were no homicidal gas chambers in WWII, there would be no credibility whatsoever to the idea that the Holocaust was the worst thing ever.

Davros said…

Ok, it’s quite clear that most of you haven’t actually read the book you are discussing. You keep making the same points all deniers make about the gas chambers but completely ignore many other aspects of the holocaust such as the activities of the Einsatzgruppen: mobile killing squads that killed over one million people. We know how many they killed because they documented it.

Oh, and about the numbers of people The Yad Vashem Archives (see here [link]). Say they currently have approximately 3.8 million people registered as murdered. I’m sure it was an innocent mistake but you accidentally left out 800,000 people. Furthermore, as I’m sure you know, the total number of dead is an estimate, not a certain number. There is a brief overview of the numbers here (link).

Finally about this “how does it follow that if Jews are missing they must have been systematically exterminated in Nazi gas chambers?” As already established, not all Jews were killed in camps. The evidence of atrocities at the camp liberations, the testimonies at Nuremberg, the reports coming out from Poland and Eastern Europe during and after the war, the information held in the German and Russian archives all point to a systematic destruction of Jews and others such as Roma, homosexuals, political activists, etc.

The main point that is made in the book that you clearly have not read is that there is a vast amount of evidence that converges on the inescapable conclusion that there was a widespread coordinated attempt to eradicate millions of people during the course of the Second World War.

Anybody attempting to deny this would have to have a similarly strong case that shows the evidence we have points inescapably to another conclusion. So far, none have been brought forward.

I confidently expect there never will be.

Michael Smith said…

I’ve read the book. I criticize it not out of ignorance but because it’s a bad book, based on the same “cumulative proof” reasoning as David Ray Griffin uses to establish that the Twin Towers were brought down by pre-planted explosives on 9/11. When you say that the evidence “converges” on the preferred conclusion, you are using Griffin-style reasoning. Evidence should logically require a conclusion, not merely “converge” on it.

Yad Vashem is still 2.2 million names short of the widely accepted 6 million figure, and this, only sixty-five years after the end of the war? The last time I checked they were 3 million names short, but the point remains that they haven’t got confirmation of six million Jews killed in WWII, much less in “the Holocaust,” however that clumsy term is interpreted. The Einsatzgruppen existed, but the “gas vans” thesis is disputed.

“Systematic destruction” is what war is all about. Nobody denies that systematic destruction occurred at the hands of the Nazis in WWII. The issue is whether poison gas was used to exterminate 6 million Jews in accordance with a deliberate Nazi intention to produce this result using an industrial assembly-line of death. The latter thesis is very much disputed.

“Widespread attempt to eradicate millions of people during the course of the Second World War” doesn’t mean very much. Obviously, the Allies and the Axis both engaged in widespread atrocities, killing tens of millions of people. But that obvious fact carries with it no implications about the existence or non-existence of homicidal gas chambers.

Romeo said…

So for the deniers: my first question was if there was no Holocaust what happened to all the people? Didn’t get any convincing answers on that one. The only response that I got was that it was only 3 million. As if that was okay. “Oh they only killed 3 million people.”

Why are deniers denying the gas chambers? There are pictures of these gas chambers. There are records for purchases of Zyklon B. What is there to deny about the gas chambers?

Michael Smith said…

You don’t read very carefully. I didn’t say “it was only 3 million.” I said Yad Vashem (last time I checked) only had three million names of Jews who died in Europe during WWII. Given that the commonly accepted figure for “the Holocaust” is six million, I asked, what about the other half? And I never said it was OK to kill even one person, let alone three million.

What happened to all the people is a question that can’t be answered unless we know to which actual people the question refers. Without claiming to know what the exact figures are, my own guess is that large numbers of Jews perished in the camps as a result of the collapse of German power on the Eastern front. This need not imply an extermination plot, much less one that employed homicidal gas chambers. Revisionists question the existence of homicidal gas chambers because their presumed existence is based on inferential speculation of the David Ray Griffin variety.

You are mistaken. There are no photographs of homicidal gas chambers said to have been employed by the Nazis to kill upwards of two thousand Jews at a time. Records for the purchase of Zyklon B don’t prove for what purpose the Zyklon B was used. Both sides in the Holocaust non-debate agree that Zyklon B was used for fumigation purposes.

There is nothing to deny in the homicidal gas chambers, but there is plenty to question. Organized Jewry clearly puts a higher value on Jewish life than that of any other group. And the gas chamber/mass extermination story has been a major form of moral capital for Israel for decades.

Flim Buff said…

No documents that refer to mass extermination by gas? No material remains of gas chambers? Well, so far you are 0 for 2 in the truth and accuracy department.

Michael Smith said…

You omitted a crucial word. This is what I wrote: “no documents that directly refer to mass extermination by gas.” The Nazis made no direct reference to extermination by gas. The theory is that they employed euphemisms to disguise the extermination program, which was not planned in advance nor organized by any central agency. The Nazis were telepathic improvisers guided by no blueprint and supported by no budget for a plan of extermination involving millions of victims.

There are material remains for small fumigation chambers, but not for the homicidal gas chambers allegedly used to gas 2000 Jews at a time. Show me a picture of one of those.

Davros said…

Michael,

A few points I want to raise about your arguments:

“There are material remains for small fumigation chambers, but not for the homicidal gas chambers allegedly used to gas 2000 Jews at a time. Show me a picture of one of those.”

Here you go:

Here are the material remains of one of the only 2 gas chambers that are known to have been able to hold up to 2000 people at a time. As you probably know, these chambers were blown up by the SS On January 20, 1945.

Here is a much better preserved chamber from the book you claim to have read. Alongside the pictures are reasons why we know it’s a killing gas chamber and not a delousing facility. One of those is also shown for comparison [Davros added a link to the reviewed book that presently only redirects to the main page of the book].

“When you say that the evidence ‘converges’ on the preferred conclusion, you are using Griffin-style reasoning. Evidence should logically require a conclusion, not merely ‘converge’ on it.”

Convergence was certainly good enough for Judge Charles Gray when dismissing the Irving v. Lipstadt libel case:

“Having considered the various arguments advanced by Irving to assail the effect of the convergent evidence relied on by the Defendants, it is my conclusion that no objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews” (from Section 13 of the Judgment of the case).

It’s interesting that you claim that the authors use the same method of “cumulative proof” that David Ray Griffin uses. Now, you may have an advantage over me here—I’ve only read one of his books, A New Pearl Harbor. In that he has no theory to converge the evidence on. He merely states that his book is an attempt to clarify the dire need for an in-depth investigation into the events of the 11th of September whilst relying on evidence based on books by other Truthers. He looks at competing theories but sides with none of them nor provides his own.

You stated that “Yad Vashem is still 2.2 million names short of the widely accepted 6 million figure.” As you should know from the book you claim to have read, the six million number is arrived at using a variety of means as described on pages 176-178. Briefly, the addition method— totaling up the numbers known to have been killed, subtraction, taking pre-war demographics and subtracting emigrations, the numbers liberated from camps and the numbers left in areas after the war. Finally, recapitulation cross-checking these numbers.

The methods documented vary between 4.5 million and 6.2. The lower figure is from Reitlinger 1953, the highest is Benz 1991. “Moreover, as we can see in the most recent figures—those from Benz—revisions, based on more accurate data, have increased, rather than decreased, the estimate”, p. 178.

The method employed by Yad Vashem is not a systematic review of demographic data, rather a collation of victims names and stories—many submitted by survivors on their behalf.

In fact they state very clearly on their website that not everyone will be accounted for. This from their FAQ:

When will there be 6,000,000 names in the database?

Never. Some Jews left no trace. They were murdered with their entire families, so there was no one left to submit pages of testimony for them; or they left no documentary traces; or the traces they left were destroyed, either during the war, or afterwards. In the 1960s and 1970s, archivists sometimes burned entire collections of what were perceived, unfortunately, as documents with no lasting value.

You then go on to state “The Einsatzgruppen existed, but the “gas vans” thesis is disputed.” This is not even an argument. What part of the Holocaust is not disputed by someone? It’s interesting you mention the gas vans when mass shootings were much more common. See pages 182-186 of the book you claim to have read.

You seem to be fixated on gassings. A quote from Gitta Sereny on page 182 puts this into context:

“[F]or most of the world, including most Jews, the term ‘Final Solution’ has mainly or entirely been identified with gas chambers in occupied Poland, or even more narrowly, those in Auschwitz. For almost half a century, the murder by shooting of between one and a half million and two million Jews in the occupied Soviet territories has somehow been treated differently. Grotesquely, more often than not, these murders by shooting have been neatly classified as ‘acts of war,’ an extraordinary misconstruction of history which plays straight into the hands of revisionists.”

Which I think neatly sums up what you’re trying to do here when you state:

“Obviously, the Allies and the Axis both engaged in widespread atrocities, killing tens of millions of people. But that obvious fact carries with it no implications about the existence or non-existence of homicidal gas chambers.”

You also make this statement:

“The issue is whether poison gas was used to exterminate 6 million Jews in accordance with a deliberate Nazi intention to produce this result using an industrial assembly-line of death.”

The book explicitly states (p. 128) that approximately 3,062,000 people died in gas chambers. You appear to ignore the approximately 50% of people killed by other means. I can only think you are trying to assert the “No gas chambers, no holocaust” argument.

You may well have read the book but you seem to have ignored most of the evidence presented in it and bring none to support any of your arguments when you attempt to refute it.

Michael Smith said…

Those photos would only persuade someone who already believes in the homicidal gas chamber thesis. The sleight-of-hand of interchangeably referring to cremation ovens and gas chambers is particularly unconvincing. Cremation ovens do not carry with them implications of murder.

Charles Gray did indeed fall for the convergence style of reasoning. That in itself proves nothing, except perhaps his gullibility. (But he also said there is little real evidence for the homicidal gas chambers, which is why speculative reasoning is said to be necessary.) I’ve reviewed the Irving-Lipstadt case in an article on my blog: “Must We Loathe David Irving?” At legalienate.blogspot.com I’ve also reviewed the book we are here discussing. See “Gas Chambers, 911, and the Perils of Orthodoxy” on the same blog.

In Griffin’s Pearl Harbor book he outlines the difference between a convergence theory and a deductive proof. I think it’s in the beginning of the book. An indirect proof is useful for Grand Juries to decide whether there is a preponderance of evidence against someone with which to bring them to trial. However, once at trial, a higher standard of proof is needed to convict someone. That higher standard of proof is lacking in the Holocaust story vis-à-vis homicidal gas chambers.

There’s plenty of room for doubt about the six million figure, which your wide variation in educated guesses confirms.

I’ve never denied the shootings on the Eastern front. I merely mentioned in passing that revisionists question the gas vans thesis, as they do. However, mass shootings are common in Euro American history, extermination by gas is not. It is the gassing claim that gives the Holocaust its alleged uniqueness.

It wasn’t revisionists who invented the homicidal gassing claim. If this claim has led to an unfair de-emphasis on mass shootings in the East, it’s the fault of the proponents of Holocaust orthodoxy. But again, mass shootings are common. Look at what happened to the indigenous nations of North America, for example, also often misdescribed as “acts of war”—far more thorough destruction than what happened to the Jews of Europe, but there are no Holocaust memorials to them. Quite the contrary. It’s buried history and most of it is probably irrecoverable.

You seem fixated on regarding mass murder by the Allies as inherently good because the Axis powers were inherently bad. But liquidating whole cities with firebombs and atomizing hundreds of thousands of Japanese are no more “acts of war” than wholesale shootings of civilians by the Nazis. Get rid of the double standard if you want to understand history. Michael Shermer can’t do this, unfortunately.

I’m not ignoring the Jews who were killed by various other means, merely pointing out that the argument with the revisionists centers on the homicidal gas chamber question and the six million figure.

I’ve read the Shermer book and commented on its faulty approach at some length. He’s a true-believer in the-Allies-are-inherently-good approach to history, and it shows. He’s a cheerleader.

Marius Rowell said…

The “You’re as bad as I am” defense wouldn’t keep you off death row in any US court, even though you are perfectly right in pointing out how the extermination of native North and South Americans by European invaders is equally unacceptable. White Europeans really deserve the bad rap they get from the rest of the world, and I’m speaking as one of those white Europeans.

Michael Smith said…

It’s the job of historians to determine the facts and account for them, not denounce atrocities. This is very difficult to do when relevant historical documents derive from an occupying army intent on convicting its defeated enemy, and criminal penalties attached to those who publicly challenge the military court’s findings. This is what happened in post-WWII Germany.

It’s unacceptable to kill civilians under any circumstances, but all sides violated this moral standard during WWII. Why pretend that only the Nazis did?

The mass gassing thesis has never been properly substantiated. There is no forensic evidence of mass homicidal gassing chambers, no open discussion of extermination by gas in the Nazi archives, and no extermination order. The theory is that a bunch of telepathic improvisers spontaneously annihilated millions of Jews in gas chambers (whose physical remains somehow vanished into thin air).

Obviously, many atrocities were committed against Jews during WWII. But that does not necessarily mean they were physically exterminated in gas chambers.

An excellent treatment of the whole subject, drawing on revisionist and establishment Holocaust scholars, is Samuel Crowell’s The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes, just published by Nine Banded Books.

Definitely there is a religious ideology at work here—questioning the official view of the Holocaust is quite literally blasphemous in quite a few European countries.

K. Grimm said…

I have followed this fascinating discussion all the way from the original book review and it is obvious that the subject generates heated emotion. One thing does stand out clearly though. While those in support of Mr. Thurston are posting detailed and reasoned arguments, his opponents, with the notable exception of Davros, are responding emotionally often with sneering comments that add nothing useful to the discussion and fail to address the points being raised.

That being said, I am not convinced by Mr. Thurston’s assertion that the Holocaust has been over emphasized in order to justify modern Israel’s actions in defense of itself. I have no sympathy with those anti-Zionists who wish to portray Israel as some sort of criminal nation. Also, I still believe, until I see substantial and convincing evidence to the contrary, that the Nazis did engage in industrial-scale extermination of despised peoples (mostly Jews), whether by poison gas or not.

The treatment of the Holocaust as “the most evil act in the history of the world” perpetrated by “the most evil regime in the history of the world” led by “the most evil man in the history of the world” is a narrative that suits many vested interests other than Israel. These include those on the Left who wish to divert attention from the appalling atrocities committed by communist revolutionaries the world over. By defining Nazism as “extreme right wing” we obscure the fact that the Nazi movement was in fact both anti-capitalist and socialist. Nazism in the popular mind has become the opposite of socialism rather than a particular variety of socialism bound up with German nationalism. This “extreme right wing” definition also has the useful function of placing a toxic warning on all right wing politics—i.e. don’t take the road to the right because it will ultimately lead to genocide.

Then, of course, there is the question of the murderous brutality of the Allies aerial bombing strategy. This is more easily justified when it is portrayed as a desperate but necessary method to help bring down “the most evil regime in the history of the world.” As for the civilians targeted for slaughter, well they did put into power “the most evil man in the history of the world” and supported “the most evil regime in the history of the world” so they had a price to pay.

Michael Smith said…

Israel is not acting in defense of itself. It is attacking. It always has.

The Holocaust obsession has certainly been important political capital for Israel, whether or not one thinks it is “overemphasized” to justify specific policies.

Israel is a criminal nation. Reserving rights and rewards for Jews and “redeeming” the land by robbing it from its indigenous owners and giving it to Jews “ingathering” from all over the world is not merely incredibly unjust, but frankly insane.

“I still believe, until I see substantial and convincing evidence to the contrary, that the Nazis did engage in industrial scale extermination of despised peoples (mostly Jews)”

This is backwards. A rational man does not believe until he sees evidence to substantiate what he is asked to believe. He doesn’t adopt a belief lacking in such evidence and then demand that others dissuade him from believing it. The important question is always the state of the evidence, not our subjective preferences.

The Nazis engaged in wholesale killing. All sides did in WWII. But whether these killings were acts determined more by the state of war than by Nazi ideology is a debatable question. I don’t see anything to be gained by insisting that debate be stifled in favor of a preferred conclusion.

Appalling atrocities of communists? There is as much shrieking hysteria on that topic as there is on the alleged Nazi gas chambers. We need to develop the capacity to see that all kinds of governments engage in atrocities, not just Nazis and Communists. And we need to debunk the hysterical treatments that insist that enemies of our favored states are composed exclusively of bloodthirsty killers that live only to skewer babies on swords and throw grandmothers to the sharks. Atrocities abound, but the scale and nature of the killing is often suspect, and the idea that “democratic” states don’t engage in the most hideous atrocities is sheer bunk.

Your justification for mass killing of German civilians is the standard one. But it’s unconvincing. From the standpoint of the indigenous peoples of North America, U.S. citizens are as guilty of unforgivable atrocities as the German people were under Hitler. So that means it would be OK to engage in saturation bombing of U.S. cities?

K. Grimm said…

If Michael Smith imagines that I am justifying the mass killing of German civilians then he has misunderstood my comment. In my last paragraph I had intended to say that the victorious Allies focused on the evils of Nazism to help justify the “murderous brutality of the area bombing strategy.” I did not say that I thought this strategy was justified. I had hoped that putting “the most evil regime in the history of the world” in quotes would avoid any ambiguity. I have read a great deal about the bombing of Germany and have been astonished at cold calculating way in which civilian populations were deliberately targeted, even when the Bomber Command had, towards the end of the war, achieved a high enough level of accuracy to focus on military targets.

An example may be useful here: if the bombing strategy used against Dresden were to be viewed as though it were a Luftwaffe plan to wipe out a British city it would be condemned as pure evil. The plan: destroy a major city, known to be a haven for refugees fleeing the advancing armies and thus create terror in an already desperate population.

The first wave of bombers would set the city ablaze by focusing on the old town centre with its highly flammable buildings. The fire would be so extensive as to overwhelm the fire fighting abilities of the city and lead to firefighters being summoned from neighboring towns. As these were arriving in the city the second raid would begin, thus catching and destroying the fire services and eliminating the ability of the population to fight the fires. The result would be an unstoppable fire storm. Next day, daylight bombers would be sent in to “pound the rubble.”

Then, to ensure maximum terror, low level fighters would be sent in to strafe the city, shooting anyone they could see—man, woman or child.

It may be assumed that the Dresden story is well known but in my experience this is just not the case. Most people I have discussed this with believe that Dresden was just a bombing raid that got out of control because the Bomber Command did not realize just how powerful their weapons had become.

I am not aware of “shrieking hysteria” on the topic of communist atrocities. On the contrary, the subject seems to get far less publicity than the evils of the Third Reich.

I will re-emphasize my original assertion: socialists / communists / the liberal left have propagated (very successfully) the idea that Fascism & Nazism are the opposite of socialism. We are routinely made aware of their evils and given the idea that they represent the political right in its purist form. Mr. Smith’s casual dismissal of communist atrocities is one commonly expressed by left-wingers. It can be paraphrased thus: “Everybody is already well aware of the evils of communism. Lets move on. There is nothing to discuss here.” The trouble is that, in fact, there is very much to discuss here and people generally are nowhere near as aware of the evils of communism as they are of the evils of Nazism. My impression is that Michael Smith is offended and embarrassed by discussion of Communist atrocities and would like to suppress debate on this issue by pretending that no debate is necessary and that those who try to raise the matter are guilty of “shrieking hysteria.”

It is strange to assume that there has been no discussion of the atrocities committed by democratic states. For most of my adult life I have been hearing about the evils of American actions in Vietnam with very little publicity given to the evils perpetrated by the communist north. In fact the popular image of that war is the one the media have chosen to take from the movie Apocalypse Now—i.e. the plucky Vietnamese, with minimum resources suffer the insane warmongering of the most technologically advanced nation on earth. I do hope Mr. Smith does not think that this is my view! For that matter, as I do not hold the childish opinion that our enemies are devils and we are fighting on the side of the angels I really don’t need to be “educated” out of this position by Mr. Smith.

Rather slyly, Mr. Smith states that Israel is a criminal nation. Surely, it would be more honest to say that he believes that Israel is a criminal nation. However, this would put his comment on a par with my own remark about Nazi extermination policies and would thus be open to equal criticism. Of course I have seen evidence of what I am asked to believe and have been (and still am) prepared to consider both sides of the argument. For the record, and I hope this is not so ambiguous as to be misunderstood, I am opposed to laws banning holocaust denial and loathe any attempts to “stifle debate in favor of a preferred conclusion.”

Michael Smith said…

Yes, I had assumed you were justifying the mass killing of Germans. My mistake. Sorry.

Two subjects

At last William Pierce’s last book, the very one which could not reach the printers because he died, has been published. It is available from Lulu.

Recently I added images to my own, online abridgement of Who We Are. If you don’t have time to read the printed book, or even my abridgement, skip the first eight prehistoric chapters if you wish—but don’t, don’t miss the history of the white race, at least in its abridged form starting from chapter 9.

Changing subjects, I have just added a Donate button [Note of April 2013: Presently at the bottom of the page]. Join the Knights of the Grail! Help Parsifal to heal Amfortas (the average German) from his overbearing sense of guilt:

Letter from Germany (2)

Or:

Self-harming Germans
cheering at Inglourious Basterds

Glad to have received a reply.

“Why should native Germans repudiate the memory of these atrocities is beyond me.”

It is of course a sad state of affairs, but I can see how it came to be this way. For the Allies after 1945 it was just the continuation of the war against Germany and the German people with other means.

After the first world war Germany was able to recover; thus to prevent another recovery and to turn Germany into a docile protectorate / occupied nation permanently, they went on to completely reengineer society by brainwashing and “reeducating” the populace.

I remember reading a quote somewhere saying that the war is only won once the occupied population has internalized the victors’ narrative. The Germans were made to feel guilty and to see their own ancestors / nation as evil and the Allies as saviors.

Our chancellor Merkel for example recently (in 2010 I think) visited the annual Russian victory parade in Moscow and thanked the Russians for “freeing” and “liberating” the German people. Her predecessors Schröder and Kohl did the same on D-day celebrations of the western Allies. Befreiung (liberation) is the word that is constantly being used to describe the beginning occupation of Germany in 1945. It’s the way they teach these events in the history lessons at schools and it’s the word used by the media. Thus mentioning the mass murder, torture, rape and expulsion of Germans that took place in that time would contradict the official narrative—the one-sided history which portrays our own ancestors only as criminals and the Allies as selfless benefactors on a crusade to “liberate” the German people from “Nazi tyranny.”

Our current leftist mass immigration and multiculturalism advocating establishment is also entirely based on this historical narrative. If you argue against mass immigration, it will ultimately always lead back to “evil Nazi Germany,” human rights and how we for this reason are obliged to accept immigration and have to repress nationalists. Then you have the Jewish lobbies, who think they have a monopoly on the victim status and who viciously oppose any Germans remembering their own victims. And when the Federation of German Expellees suggested a memorial for expelled people—including but not exclusive to the Germans who lost their native homeland in 1945—Polish politicians demanded measures from our politicians to prevent this (and our foreign minister Guido Westerwelle, back then during a visit in Poland, actually obeyed and condemned the Federation of German Expellees shortly after).

The European Union, Globalization, the historical self-image of the Allied nations… there are just so many different parties stacked against German interests in this case. In the end it’s all about power to this day; that’s why the knowledge about German victims is suppressed while atrocities in the other direction get exaggerated.

“Have you tried to communicate to them? Or translate to German these excerpts from Goodrich’s book?”

I haven’t translated any excerpts yet, there are other sources available in German. But you’re right, it’s probably a good idea to make parts of Goodrich’s book available in German as well if no one has done so yet. But I’m probably not the best suited for this task due to my limited language abilities.

And yes, I have talked about these topics with other Germans, but it’s a difficult topic to cover.

Nationalist Germans at least are already very aware of what took place, in that regard the situation might be different in other white nations, but they’re unfortunately only a small minority. But talking to them is like preaching to the choir. There’s no awareness problem in this case.

I would say average Germans on the other hand fall into two categories: there are those who have fully internalized the official narrative and those who are tired of the constant indoctrination and just want to be left alone and live a pleasant life.

Those who have fully internalized the official narrative will get agitated and attack you once you mention German victims, because they will see you as a revisionist who seeks to excuse German crimes by mentioning Allied crimes. They will not discuss facts but will discuss your motivation behind mentioning them and accuse you of having sinister intentions. The official historical narrative with the Jewish Holocaust has gotten quite a religious atmosphere, and if you stray from the German perpetrator & non-German victim narrative, it is seen as a sacrilege/blasphemy.

Some people have made the comparison that the Holocaust has turned into a secular version of Christianity, a new replacement religion. Emotions play a big role. How do you reach these people with mere facts? Of course reading a book like Goodrich’s, which describes in detail the suffering of the German people, is emotionally very disturbing and touching as well. But how do you get them to read these accounts in the first place when they already have all these mental protective barriers in place and judge you morally just for bringing it up?

Maybe part of the problem is also that we don’t have a Schindler’s List kind of movie showing the German suffering and retelling a book like Hellstorm. I’m not even sure how I would like that; it has an exploitative and tasteless element, but it’s a fact that people respond to emotional messages from audiovisual media quite strongly, and the German suffering is not present in that form. I’d go so far as to say that a large part of the population these days bases their historical knowledge on Hollywood movies they have seen, and we know whose narrative they only show.

Then there are those Germans who have grown tired of the daily anti-German indoctrination and the one-sided historical narrative that we’re constantly being force-fed with. They just don’t want to hear about past events. They say we should let bygones be bygones and focus on the future. They strive for a materialistic hedonism. They want to live a pleasant life, material wealth, entertainment, fun, happiness. In a way you can’t blame them, since we all strive for happiness.

But since they’ve just grown tired of the anti-German slandering based on the Second World War, they don’t want to hear anything about it. So they also block off once you mention the German victims. They might also get irritated or angry. I guess in part it’s because they fear that this controversial topic might endanger their material wealth and their status in society. Another reason might be that acknowledging it would lead to a cognitive dissonance. They would also have to acknowledge in turn that our society is ill and that the elites are anti-German and that we live under a repressive regime, which would conflict with their strife for happiness. It’s easier to look the other way and to conform with the crowd, and thus the messenger is shunned instead of acknowledging the message. As in the movie The Matrix, it’s a decision between the red pill and the blue pill—and it looks like in reality most people would prefer the blue pill to remain in a state of blissful ignorance.

I guess it’s also a form of mental escapism and suppression of uncomfortable truths and traumatic historic memories. Feeling victimized isn’t a good feeling. That might be another reason why the official narrative is so successful and why there’s a total disconnect with our past and people even identify with the Allied occupants, thus all this talk about “liberation” or Germans watching Tarantino’s movies like Inglorious Basterds and cheering while Germans get slaughtered on screen.

The point is that in both cases if you want to spread awareness, mentioning the mere facts helps little as it is an emotional and psychological problem and I don’t know how these mental barriers can be overcome.

Even in rare cases when you had long discussions with someone and think it left an impact… it gets quickly drowned out again by the constant barrage of propaganda through all the media channels.

Many people work hard throughout the day and once they come home they feel tired and just want to relax, they don’t want to think. What do they do? They lean back and turn on the television. And there they get the same message ad nauseam. It’s a seductive mix of propaganda and American Hollywood entertainment. It’s the same on the radio. They broadcast 24/7 American movies and series, advertising and a little system propaganda in-between. So whatever conversation you had, it’s just a little flicker on their attention span and quickly forgotten and drowned out. It reminds me of that one scene in Brave New World in which the character tries to get through to his mother, but she prefers the drug-induced feel-good state while consuming the systems media.

And then there’s the whole Jewish Holocaust propaganda and censorship we have to deal with. I would like to be able to separate the two topics and treat them independently, but often the first thing you hear when you mention German victims is “but they killed six million Jews! [and thus deserved it and wasn't so bad in comparison].”

You get it thrown into your face regularly. Not a day goes by without the holocaust being mentioned on television or in the newspapers. And it seems it wasn’t enough that we have selective memorials for them at every second street corner. In recent years they started to plaster the streets with golden stones with inscriptions which basically say “Here lived a Jew… and he was murdered by your ancestors!”

They call these things Stolpersteine (which means stones, on which one is supposed to stumble over). They often make children from elementary school place these stones or clean them. The protestant church also seems to support this project. Imagine if we would place such a commemoration stone for each German victim that was killed during the terror bombing campaign—we could plaster entire streets with them. I think that is another reason for this constant holocaust propaganda and exaggeration: it serves to hide and suppress the crimes against the Germans.

Some images to illustrate those Stolpersteine: here, here and here.

And once they throw the Jewish Holocaust in your face when you mention German victims, you can’t even argue with them as it is illegal. People have been imprisoned for merely translating books on the topic. And last year an NPD politician even got sentenced to jail for what they called “indirectly denying the Holocaust”: He didn’t want to participate in a Holocaust commemoration and called it a “one-sided guilt cult.” He got eight months of jail and a couple of thousands Euro fine.

And censorship in general is quite harsh. So you have to be very careful if you want to be a blogger in Germany.

Recently Gottfried Küssel, a blogger in Austria was sentenced to almost ten years for running his website, which was probably tamer than your own blog. Horst Mahler was sentenced to twelve years of imprisonment only for speaking out. Considering that he’s already seventy-six years old it’s more or less a life-long prison sentence for having the wrong opinion.

So spreading awareness online is always risky in Germany. Of course, you would think that simply mentioning the German victims should be safe, but if you draw a comparison to the official Jewish Holocaust, or they insinuate that you say certain things in order to show the Third Reich in a positive way, or that your speech could agitate the population, you go to prison.

Speaking of Horst Mahler, even the lawyer who defended him got imprisoned in turn, because the defense of his statements was seen as a repetition or a crime in itself. At least she only got imprisoned for something like three years I think, but on top of that she lost her lawyer license and has thus been barred from working in her profession. Her name is Sylvia Stolz and last month she participated in a free speech congress in Switzerland and spoke about the trial and the anti-free speech laws in Germany. I fear she will end up in prison again for giving that speech once she returns to Germany.

I will end my message with an article that was just released this Monday in the Junge Freiheit, one of the few conservative German newspapers. It also deals with German victims, the one-sided culture of remembrance and repressed memories. So I thought you might find it interesting. The article is in German, so I had to translate it. My English isn’t very good, but it should at least be better than the Google-translate version.

With Best Regards,

Friedrich

Why Rome fell

Excerpted from
March of the Titans:
A History of the White Race
by Arthur Kemp:


All civilizations fall only if the people who made those civilizations vanish. This is a truth, which applies to all races, nations, and people: as long as the people who created a particular civilization survive, and are present in significant numbers, the civilization that they created, will continue. Once those people vanish, then their civilization vanishes with them. There is no escaping this iron law of nature.

Classical Rome, one of the mightiest nations of the ancient world, was no exception to this rule. Although historians tend to focus on economic, moral, or military reasons for the fall of Rome, the real reason why this mighty civilization fell was because the very people who established the Roman civilization, ceased making up the majority population in and around Rome.

Although many historians have either ignored the racial factor in the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire—and some have never even thought about it—there have been many who have recognized race as the critical element. Amongst the more famous of these were professor Tenney Frank, from the Johns Hopkins University. Professor Frank, a recognized authority on the history of ancient Rome, is most famous for his work An Economic History of Rome (New York, Cooper Square Publishers, 1927, reprinted 1962) but his other works included the important “Race Mixture in the Roman Empire” published in the American Historical Review, volume 21 pages 689-708.

Along with Frank, many other well-known and respected historians dealt with the issue of how the Roman population changed. Amongst these were professor A.M. Duff; Charles Merivale; George La Piana; Theodor Mommsen; and the multiple authors of both the Cambridge Ancient History and the Encyclopedia Britannica’s Historians History of the World.

Frank’s first clue

Frank outlined how he first realized that race mixture was the cause of the change in Roman society. By studying the names of graves on the Appian Way in Rome, he found that huge numbers of late Roman Republic inhabitants had names which originated in the Levant, or Middle East, in strong contrast to the early inhabitants of Rome, who had Latin names. Frank then went on to make a determined study of the tombs and monuments in Rome and surrounds, drawing up a database of over 13,900 different names. His analysis of those names drew the conclusion that about 75 percent of those names were not Latin in origin. The “Greek” names were for the greatest part not Greeks at all, and were Middle Easterners who had adopted Greek names, particularly after the conquest of their region by Alexander the Great. The writer Juvenal, speaking of the Roman population, actually points out the Levantine origin of many of these people in his writings, referring to the Syrian River, the Orontes: “These dregs call themselves Greeks but how small a portion is from Greece; the River Orontes has long flowed into the Tiber” (Juvenal, III, 62).

Frank went on to explain the push and pull effect that led to the racial makeup change in Rome: of how native Romans were drawn away from Rome by colonization and military service, and of how their places were taken up by slaves, in serfdom and as freedmen, in Rome itself.

It is estimated that the slave population of Rome and its immediate surrounding area at the time of Augustus (circa 30 BC) was some 300,000-350,000 out of a population of about 900,000-950,000 (Hopkins, K. Conquerors and Slaves: Sociological Studies in Roman History, Volume 1. Cambridge, 1978). For all of Italy, the figure is approximately the same. A figure of around two million slaves out of a population of about six million at the time of Augustus is accurate—this means that at this early stage one in every three persons in Rome and Italy was a slave.

Charles Merivale points out how Julius Caesar himself saw the danger of slave labor flooding Rome, and actually passed a law forbidding certain types of labor-intensive work from using only slaves.

Roman fate sealed

Professor A.M. Duff pointed out that even by the time of Octavian Augustus, there were significant numbers of “Orientals” in Rome. Duff goes on to describe the social change process at work in Roman society. The desire of Romans to emigrate to other areas of the empire, is mentioned by the Roman writer Seneca, who stated that Romans looked for every opportunity to leave their native country. Freed slaves, mostly of Syrian or Eastern extraction, soon became numerically strong in Rome itself. The Emperor Philip was in fact born in Syria, and became known as “Philip the Arabian” as a result. Tacitus complains that in Nero’s day most of the senators and members of the aristocracy were now men of ex-slave status—and most of these were of Eastern origin.

By the Third Century AD, many of the emperors were actually descendants of the slaves of earlier centuries. George La Piana states it this way: “The denationalized capital of the great empire, came to be ruled by the offspring of races which originally had come to the city only to serve” (La Piana, Foreign Groups in Rome, p. 223).

Based on his research, Frank goes on to estimate that as much as 90 percent of the population of the city of Rome was of “servile extraction.” While this 90 percent would not all have been of foreign race, the majority most certainly were. “This Orientalization of Rome’s populace has a more important bearing than is usually accorded it upon the larger question of why the spirit and acts of imperial Rome are totally different from those of the republic. There was a complete change in the temperament!” (Frank, p. 705).

The Historians’ History of the World, edited by H.S. Williams, and published by the Encyclopedia Britannica underlines the importance of slavery in this change in Roman society: “Slavery was the most determined enemy of that spirit of conservatism and tradition which had been the strength of the Roman race.”

The replacement of the original Roman people by immigrants was marked first at the lowest levels or society, but then gradually made its way up through all levels. Septimus Severus was the first Roman Emperor who was not of Roman extraction, born as he was a Phoenician from North Africa. His wife was Julia Domna, a Syrian. Severus was succeeded by his two sons, who reigned for awhile together then successively. The throne later came to two grandsons. In all, the Syro-Phoenicians dominated the Roman Empire from 193 A.D. to 235 A.D.

A suppressed view of history

It is therefore clear that many famous historians who studied the classical Roman era in depth, saw clearly the change in race which took place as being the primary cause of the fall of that civilization. In summary:

1. The original Roman people were dissipated by war, foreign service in the military and emigration to their colonies;

2. Their place in Rome and surrounds was taken by the wholesale importation of slaves, the majority of whom had come from the mixed race southeastern reaches of the empire;

3. Eventually not even the emperors themselves were of Roman extraction; and

4. As a result, the remaining Roman population became increasingly of mixed racial origin as time progressed.

The importance of this racial change was not lost on many famous historians, but the modern era’s censorship of the issue of race as a determining factor, has led to the deliberate suppression of the work of Frank (and others). Nonetheless, the accuracy and validity of their observations remain as true as ever, and provide the real answer for the fall of the classical Roman civilization.

Note:

For excerpts of all chapters of Kemp’s book see: here.

Other darkest hours

Excerpted from
March of the Titans:
A History of the White Race
by Arthur Kemp:

The first great race war – Attila the Hun

The Goths and their racial cousins kept up a continuous localized war with the Romans for many years, and would have doubtless continued to do so for even longer had a new powerful racial foe not emerged which threatened to destroy the Goths, Germans, Romans and indeed all of Europe.


Alans – The first victims

Physically described by Romans as being “short, brown skinned and slant eyed” the Huns emerged from Central Asia and burst upon the easternmost Whites, a tribe called the Alans, in 372 AD. The Alans, a Nordic tribe still living in the ancestral homeland between the Black and Caspian Seas, were crushed by the Huns who had developed cavalry fighting to a fine skill. Remnants of the Alans fled south and west—to this day there are traces of this last Nordic tribe to be found amongst the present day inhabitants of the region.

The Alans who fled westwards sought refuge with the Ostrogoths, bringing with them the first news of the new Asiatic terror.


Ostrogoths fall before Hun invasion

If the Ostrogoths wondered what had befallen the Alans, they did not have to wait long to find out. Very soon the Huns swept even further west and invaded the Ostrogothic lands (in modern day western Russia) and defeated them as well.

The Ostrogothic king, Hermanric, committed suicide when the scale of the invasion became apparent, and his successor, Vitimer, was killed while trying to hold back the Huns. The Ostrogothic kingdom in western Russia disintegrated, and its survivors streamed further westwards, into the lands of the Visigoths and Slavs.

Above is a depiction of a scene which befell hundreds of thousands of Whites. A raiding non-White party attacks a Roman villa, killing the males and carrying off the White women for sexual slavery.

Athanaric, king of the Visigoths, engaged the Huns at the Dniester River in modern day Bulgaria, but the Huns defeated the Visigothic army as well. After this defeat, the Visigoths were forced to fall back and beg the Romans for permission to settle inside Roman territory.

This appeal was made all the more remarkable when it is borne in mind that the Romans and Visigoths had been at virtual constant war for near enough to two centuries. So when the Romans finally gave permission to the Visigoths to move into Roman territory, it was at a terrible price—the Visigoths had to surrender all their weapons and hand over large numbers of their women and children as hostages.

Crossing the Danube in 376 AD and settling in modern day Bulgaria, the Visigoths managed to gain a temporary reprieve from the ravages of the Huns. The conditions under which the Romans forced them to stay were such that it was not long before Visigothic resentment boiled over into open rebellion.

The Visigoths secretly re-armed themselves and launched a campaign against the Roman strongholds of Thrace and Macedonia in northern Greece. Finally, in the battle of Hadrianople (378 AD) in modern day Greece, a Visigothic army defeated a Roman army under the personal command of the Emperor Valens—who had been the one to impose the harsh conditions of refuge upon the Visigoths. Valens himself was killed in this battle.

The defeat was all the more ironic as a large number of the Roman army’s soldiers were in fact Gothic mercenaries. The Eastern Roman Empire then accepted the presence of the Visigoths in central Europe, and lifted many of the restrictions placed upon them by Valens.

While the Goths and the Romans were grappling with one another, the former Visigothic lands were being seized by the Huns.

By the time of the Battle of Hadrianople, the Huns had occupied most of Dacia, the land originally seized by the Visigoths from Romans (and which corresponds to the present day country of Rumania).

Europe almost entirely invaded

At this stage the racial balance of Europe could have swung decisively in favor of the Asiatic Mongolians—all the original White ancestral homelands had been either destroyed or occupied by the Huns.

In addition to this, the Huns also physically occupied large parts of western Russia and portions of central and eastern Europe, including entire portions of modern central Germany, Hungary and Rumania, turning them overnight into mini Asiatic states.

Not content with these conquests, the Asiatic Huns began pushing further westwards, causing entire nations to be moved and destroying virtually everything in their path.

In this way the remnants of the Alans, and many other minor Nordic tribes were forced westwards, in turn displacing other already settled tribes. It was this displacement which led to further migrations of assorted Germanic tribes into Spain and even as far as North Africa.

By 432 AD, during the reign of Roman Emperor Theodosius I, the Huns had increased their power base and stranglehold on eastern and parts of central Europe to the point where they actually collected a large annual tribute from Rome. (By this time Rome was totally dependent on “barbarian” or German and Gaulish mercenaries for its defense—the mostly mixed race population of Rome had long since lost any social cohesiveness and ability to provide recruits for the army).

Attila the Hun – brutal leader

In 433 AD, the Huns gained a new king, whose name would become a byword for the Asiatic terror—Attila.

The new Asiatic king established his headquarters at the village of Buda on the Danube River in 445 AD (Buda was later to combine with another village on the other side of the river, Pest, to become Budapest, the modern capital of Hungary).

By this time the Hunnish empire stretched from the Caspian Sea in the east right up to the North Sea. In all of the area the Huns carried out a vicious racial war of extermination against the Whites who militarily were too weak to resist. Countless White settlements were wiped out, with the women routinely being carried off into captivity.

In 452 AD, Attila began moving west again, with the intention of seizing France and finishing off all of Europe.

Hunnish blood enters eastern Europe

By this stage the Huns had started on a limited scale to physically integrate with sections of the peoples they had conquered. Traces of the Mongolian influence can still be seen amongst some peoples in eastern Europe (the so called “Slavic look” which in fact is not Slavic at all, but mixed Mongolian/Slavic.)

Possibly as a result of this limited integration process, the Huns managed to recruit some locals into their army, and units of various eastern European tribes found themselves in the Hunnish army which finally invaded France. They were dealt with extremely harshly by their distant racial cousins if captured. The vast majority of the Hunnish army were however Mongolian and under the ultimate leadership of the unquestionably militarily astute Attila.

The Huns stood poised to push through to the Atlantic Ocean—Europe stood on the very brink of extermination.

The Battle of Troyes – Whites unite to defeat the Asiatics

The threat of the Hunnish army finally forced the ever squabbling Romans and Visigoths into an united front. A Roman army, under the last of the Western Empire’s properly Roman generals, Aetius, joined up with a Visigoth army under their king, Theodoric I, and together they met the Hunnish army in central France near the present day city of Troyes in 451 AD.

In a day long battle, both sides inflicted heavy casualties on the other, with the Visigoth king, Theodoric, being killed in the fighting. By nightfall the combined White army had gained the upper hand over the Asians.

Attila was forced to retreat all the way across Europe as far as Hungary, exacting a terrible revenge in slaughter and looting from those White settlements unfortunate enough to be in his path of retreat.

Defeated in the west, Attila made one last attempt to destroy the Whites. In 452 the Asians invaded northern Italy and razed the city of Aqueila to the ground, massacring as many of the inhabitants as they could find (the survivors fled into the nearby marshes, there to later establish the city of Venice).

Suddenly in 453 AD, the sixty year-old Attila died—allegedly of a burst blood vessel incurred during his wedding night exertions following his marriage to a local German princess. (How much of that story is true is open to question: what is fact is that he took a blond German girl, named Hildico, as his wife, following an example set by many of his Mongolian warriors, whose genetic footprint can be seen on some faces in eastern Europe and Russia to this day.)

The Battle of Nedao – Germanics save the white race from extinction

Attila’s death was the signal for a revolt of the people subjugated by the Huns. In 454 AD, the Goths, Slavs and others in Europe who had managed to survive the nearly 70 years of cruel Asiatic rule, rose up and at the battle of Nedao in that year, defeated the Huns in a straight fight between a Mongolian and a Germanic army. The victory was total and the Huns were finally destroyed.

The battle of Nedao became one of the most significant battles in White history, for without it Europe would most likely have been completely overrun by Asiatics before 500 AD.

The Germans, as victors over the Huns, became famous amongst their Indo-European racial cousins, with the Icelandic word for German to this day translating literally as “peoples’ defender”.

Suffering total defeat at the hands of the Germans, the vast majority of the surviving Asiatic Huns then fled back into the Far East, to the Sea of Azov in Russia—fearing the retribution by the Whites that would follow (a fear which was fully justified, as the enraged and victorious Whites mercilessly put to death any bands of Hun stragglers they found).

The Hunnish legacy

However, the Huns left two significant things behind them—firstly they gave their name to the area which had functioned as their headquarters during their racial war, Hungary.

Secondly, some admixture of Mongolian genes occurred amongst the Slavic tribes which had been under the Asiatic Hunnish occupation for nearly 80 years. This was however by no means complete and only ultimately affected a small, but significant, number of the Indo-European Slavs.

The Slavs then expanded eastward into the regions of Russia which had been overrun by the Huns on their way west. There they also mixed with scattered remnants of the partly Hunnish, partly Slavic peoples the Huns had left behind.

All these mixes contributed towards creating the distinctive Russian “Slavic look” visible to this day in a small percentage of the eastern European population in Russia and elsewhere.

The greatest effect of the Hunnish invasion of Europe was however the extinction of the source of the Indo-European tribes from their ancestral homeland between the Black and Caspian Seas. Never again would this territory produce another Indo-European Nordic tribe—the fountain of new Nordic tribes was forever extinguished, one of the most significant acts of racial genocide ever seen.

The second great race war – the Crusades

• By 700 AD, Islamic armies had occupied North Africa and had destroyed what remained of the Gothic Vandal state.

• As the Crusaders approached Antioch [during the siege of that city], the Muslim defenders under Turcoman Yagji-Shah started killing all the remaining Whites in the city, along with any non-White Christians who had the misfortune to be present… By nightfall of 3 June 1099, the city was in White hands—and every non-White who had foolishly remained behind in the city was dead.

• By the time they [the Crusaders] got to Constantinople however, the wonder on the European faces must have been apparent—they appeared to have as little in common with the Byzantine Empire as with the Muslims, not only racially, but even in language. The Byzantine Christians did not recognize the Pope, spoke Greek instead of Latin and had distinctly Middle Eastern art and architectural forms.

Unlike the Hebrews’ ethnic cleansing policies recounted in the Old Testament, in the Crusades westerners committed the same mistake of all white conquests throughout history, even after capturing Jerusalem. Kemp writes:

However, the Crusader states did not try to change the population make-up of the region by enforced migration or expulsion—nor did they even try to convert the natives. So it was that the first European colonies were created: ironically in the areas where once their now very distant racial cousins had once walked… The Crusaders’ failure to majority populate the areas they conquered with their own racial kind led to their disappearance in a very short while—so that now only their vast empty buildings stand as monuments to the spirit and heroism of the times.

In the 2011, printed edition of his book Kemp adds this phrase about the Crusades:

Never a majority, the white Christian soldiers were overrun, and within three hundred years almost all trace was vanished.

The third great race war – the Moors invade Europe

The invasion of Western Europe by a non-White Muslim army after 711 AD, very nearly extinguished modern White Europe—certainly the threat was no less serious than the Hunnish invasion which had earlier created so much chaos. While the Huns were Asiatics, the Moors were a mixed race invasion—part Arabic, part Black and part mixed race, always easily distinguishable from the Visigothic Whites of Spain.

To give a flavor of the content of this chapter I will add some subtitles to the images that Kemp chose for this specific chapter—omitting the images:

• Above: A dramatic painting—based on actual events—showing Moors celebrating the fall of a White Spanish town, with White females captured alive. For several years the Moors demanded—and received—a yearly tribute of young White girls for use in their harems after the great Moorish victory of 711. This yearly tribute continued until 791 AD when the Whites had recovered their strength enough to break the terms of a treaty with the non-Whites.

• Above: Captured White prisoners about to be decapitated by Saracens: note how the Spaniards are depicted with blond hair.

• Above: The non-White Moorish advance into Europe seemed unstoppable when in 732 AD they launched a massive invasion of present day France. The king of the leading White tribe in that country, Charles Martel of the Franks (who had their headquarters in present day Paris) mobilized a counter attack. A great race battle took place between the towns of Tours and Poitiers in central France in October 732 AD. The battle was one of the most momentous in the history of the White race. Defeat would have meant that all of Western Europe might have fallen under the sway of Islam, and the mixed races from the East would have poured into continental Europe. Accounts have it that 375,000 Moors were killed—the White army was utterly victorious over the non-White army and the Moorish invasion of Europe was halted in its tracks. Charles Martel earned his name—Martel means “hammer”—at this battle—he personally bludgeoned to death a large number of non-Whites with his favorite weapon, a mighty hammer.

The fourth great race war – Bulgars, Avars, Magyars and Khazars

The lands making up western and southern Russia, Asia Minor (Turkey) and the southeastern Balkans were to be the scene of some of the most dramatic racial conflicts between various tribes of Europeans on the one hand, and various Asiatic, Mongol, and mixed race Muslim armies on the other.

These wars started around 550 AD, a century after the crushing of the Mongolian Hunnish invasion of Europe. They only finally stopped with the defeat of new Asian invaders some 400 years later, with the defeat of an Asiatic alliance known as the Magyars, in Bavaria in 954 AD.

This massive struggle against Asian and Mongolian hordes can rightly be grouped into one heading, even though different players acted in the drama.

If these combined Asian invaders had not been turned back, then it would most certainly have given the non-White Moorish invasion in Spain, which took place in the same time span, a far better chance of success. The White race might have been exterminated between the Asians and the Moors—but it was not.

The fifth great race war – Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan’s first raid was into Russia in 1221, when his army smashed their way through several southern Russian principalities who were taken completely unawares by the yellow-skinned Mongolians.

Soon a huge part of southern Russia was under the sway of Genghis Khan—and not even the efforts of the Russian tribes to the north could dislodge him.

The invasion of southern Russian was in fact the only invasion of White held lands in which Genghis himself took part. He died suddenly in 1227, and the Mongolian armies paused for several years in southern Russia while a successor to Genghis was chosen from amongst the leading Mongolian chieftains.

In the interim the Mongols instituted a grim reign of terror over the White tribes they had subjugated. Whole settlements were slaughtered en masse, with lucky survivors barely escaping to the north and west, bringing tales of terror from the new Asiatic invaders.

One tactic for which the Mongols became famous was to sack a town, leave and then a few days later send a rearguard party back to the sacked town to see if any survivors had made their way back—any such unfortunates were put to death on the spot. In this way entire regions were quite literally stripped of all living souls.

Finally in 1236, the Mongol armies moved again, striking westwards in such numbers and ferocity that they reached deep into the Balkans, Hungary, northern Russia, Poland and central Germany.

Under the leadership of one Batu, a grandson of Genghis Khan, the Asiatics resumed their westward invasions in 1237, sacking the Russian city of Kiev in 1240, continuing westward into Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, and the Danube River valley.


Whites defeated at battle of Leignitz

An alliance of Germans, Poles and Teutons under the command of Duke Henry II of Silesia formed a united White army and desperately tried to stem the Asiatic advance. They met the Mongols in battle at Leignitz in what was then Poland in April 1241, but were badly defeated. Henry was beheaded by the Mongolians and for several days afterwards his impaled head was carried around on a spear at the head of the Mongol army until it rotted away.

The southern Indo-European tribes, the Slavs, then put together a new White army and launched an attack on the main body of the Mongol army in southern Europe. The battle, fought just north of Budapest, at the Sajo River in April 1241, saw the White armies defeated once again. The combined defeats inflicted upon the Russians, Germans and Slavs meant that all of Europe lay open to the Mongols.

In 1242, the Mongol hordes penetrated into the suburbs of Vienna itself—at that critical moment the non-White invasion ceased of its own accord.

It was a quirk of destiny which saved Europe and its peoples from complete extermination at the hands of the Mongols. In December 1241, the Asiatic army had just started on their final drive westwards, marching across the frozen Danube River, when a messenger arrived from their homeland in Mongolia—the successor to Genghis Khan had died. Then and there, the Mongol army turned around and withdrew back to the east. Leaderless, they were never to penetrate into central Europe again.

Even though the Mongols withdrew from central Europe, all of eastern and southern Russia remained under Mongol occupation, where Batu created what became known as the Khanate of the Golden Horde—the name originating from an annual tribute of riches extracted from the northern Russians, who only escaped occupation by formally acknowledging themselves as vassals by paying a yearly tribute to the Mongol rulers in the south.

The only eastern European state which was not humiliated in this way was Baltic Lithuania. As Mongol strength slowly declined, the Lithuanians expanded, eventually occupying an area stretching from the Baltic right to the Black Sea in the south. Lithuania in fact became the most powerful state in eastern Europe.

By the early 1300s, the Mongol Empire in the south had been wracked by internal divisions, with rival claimants to the Mongol throne launching a series of fratricidal wars amongst themselves. Seizing advantage of the confusion in the Asiatic ranks, the Grand Duke Dimitry of Moscow led an army against a huge Mongol force at Kukikovo, on the banks of the Don River, in 1330. Although great casualties were suffered by both sides, the White Russians won: the first major reverse suffered by the Mongols since their occupation of southern Russia.


Ivan the Great

The Mongols were then further weakened by renewed internal dissension, with a new Mongol warlord, Tamerlane, conquering much of the original Mongol Empire in Russia in 1395. After Tamerlane’s death, his empire was broken into four independent khanates: Astrakhan, Kazan, Crimea, and Sibir.

So divided, the Mongols were at last weakened to the point where the Muscovite principality, under the leadership of Ivan III, took the opportunity in 1480, to refuse to pay the annual tribute to the Horde.

Ivan, called The Great, who ruled from 1440 to 1505, then followed up the refusal to pay the tribute with a series of localized wars which expanded the borders of his kingdom—some were against other White principalities while some were against local Mongol chieftains. In this way a succession of slow moves south, combined with a process of assimilation, saw the last of the Mongol states vanish another century later, although the names they gave to these regions still persist.

The first major White reconquest of the southern parts of Russia only began in the mid 1500s, when bands of Russian peasants, known as Cossacks, fleeing the autocratic fiefdoms of northern Russia, started settling along the banks of the Don River basin.

The Cossacks engaged in a large clearing operation lasting many decades against the Mongols. By the mid-1600s the majority of Mongols had been cleared from central southern Russia—the remaining minority were for the greatest part absorbed into the new population.


The Mongol legacy

In central Europe, the Mongols were not physically present long enough to have a lasting genetic impact upon the local population, although unquestionably a small amount of Mongolian genes did enter the bloodstream of a tiny part of the population. This took place mainly through the wholesale rape of White women for which the Mongols were also famous. The major impact of the Mongol invasion upon southern and central Europe was that they physically killed huge numbers of Whites in their path, numbers which were lost forever.

In southern Russia however, the after-effects of three hundred years of Mongol rule left a clear genetic imprint upon many of the peoples in that region. Many of the peoples of regions such as Kazakhstan are of clear mixed racial origin. It is these people who are today often mistakenly called Slavs. Even though they were originally the easternmost Indo-European peoples and as such part of the Slavic tribes, their racial identify was completely submerged by the Mongol invasion and it would be genetically incorrect to classify them as Slavic.

The sixth great race war – the Ottoman Holocaust

The Ottoman Empire was the longest lasting non-White invasion of European soil ever. Lasting from the beginning of the 13th Century right to the start of the 20th, this group of mixed race Middle Eastern Turks, driven by a fanaticism molded in their Muslim religion, occupied vast stretches of central and southern Europe, twice being turned back at the very gates of Vienna in their attempts to seize all of Europe.

The impact and legacy of the Ottomans upon central and southern Europe was therefore vast, and crucial to any understanding of the racial and cultural mix which has made south-eastern Europe the volatile place that it is.

After describing the rise of the Ottomans and their first landings and battles on European soil in the 14th and 15th centuries, including how white resistance failed in the battles of Nicopolis and Varna, Kemp writes about the Janissaries, or “stolen white children” who became the Ottoman elite:

One of the more remarkable ways in which the Ottomans kept their fighting strength up was through a unit of soldiers known as the Janissaries. The Janissaries were the Ottoman’s elite forces—and they were also White.

One of the Ottoman leaders, Emir Orkhan (1326-1359), who was the first to occupy European continental soil, issued an edict to the conquered Europeans in the Balkans that they must hand over to the Ottomans 1,000 White male babies “with faces white and shining” each and every year. The youths were brought before the Ottoman sultan, and the best of them—in terms of physique, intelligence, and other qualities—were selected for education in the palace school. There they converted to Islam, became versed in the Islamic religion and its culture, learned Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, and were compelled to serve the Ottomans, with their origins being concealed from them. They became the best and most trusted armed unit within the Ottoman Empire—a supreme act of irony.

This yearly tribute—reminiscent of the demand by the Moors for White virgins from the unfortunate Goths in Spain—was continued for an astonishing 300 years until 1648, during which time not only were 300,000 Whites absorbed into the Ottoman hierarchy (and for the greatest part also into the Turkish elite’s bloodstream) but the Janissaries became known as one of the most efficient army of soldiers in the world.

It is no exaggeration to say that they sustained the Ottoman Empire in Europe for much of its existence, playing a not inconsiderable role in many of the great victories of that Empire.

In 1574, the Janissaries had 20,000 men in their ranks—by 1826 the unit numbered some 135,000. The overtly racial make-up of the Janissaries always created problems of its own. Every now and then, the White soldiers would rebel against their Turkish masters—numerous rebellions are recorded, each being suppressed, until a famous rebellion in 1826 saw the unit finally disbanded, with a large number being killed and the rest dispersed into the broader Turkish population.

Kemp proceeds to explain how Jews were privileged under Turkish Rule; the fall of Constantinople; the war at sea when the Portuguese confronted the Turks; how Belgrade was captured in 1521 AD; the two sieges of Vienna; the Ottoman war with Russia, and finally the brutal destruction of Armenia in 1915-1923:

The region of Armenia, situated on the southeastern banks of the Black Sea, contains one of the most tragic and violent anti-White acts ever committed by the Ottoman Empire. Originally one of the earliest Indo-European homelands, Armenia has some of the oldest iron and bronze smelting and cereal grains sites in the world. Shaken by the flooding of the Black Sea basin around 5600 BC, Armenia was then occupied in quick succession by the early Indo-European Assyrians and Persians.

A period of independence followed, and under their great King Tigranes I (140-55 BC), Armenia established an empire which reached from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean and parts of modern-day Syria. This empire ended with the invasion of that country by the Romans in 69 BC. Armenia then became the first Christian state in the world in AD 301.

Racially speaking, the inhabitants of the region had suffered slight genetic damage in terms of Semitic infusions, but the country was devastated by the 11th Century invasion by the Seljuk Turks, the forerunners of the Ottomans. The Seljuk Turks’ oppressive rule saw a huge number—possibly even a majority—of White Armenians fleeing the country.

The Ottoman Empire, which took over from the Seljuks, instituted an even greater reign of terror against the remaining Armenians, causing further waves of emigration right until the late 19th Century, with many Armenians settling in America.

Those who stayed in Armenia were subject to the most horrendous massacres and persecution, with hundreds of thousands of Armenians being massacred by Turkish forces, culminating in efforts by the Turkish government to move Armenians to Mesopotamia. Between 1915 and 1923 more than one million Armenians died due to the Turkish attempted forced migration.

The remains of Armenians massacred at Erzinjan

By this stage, the vast majority of White Armenians had either emigrated, or had been absorbed into the overwhelming numbers of non-Whites in the Armenia itself, so that today very few original White Armenians remain in the country.

Armenia was therefore a entire country and people who were physically wiped out by the Ottomans, one of the greatest hidden genocides of the Turkish Empire.


The Ottoman legacy

The Ottoman Turks were the last of the Asian invaders of Europe to use violence as their passport of entry, but they were also significant for another reason: the sheer length of the time of their occupation of the Balkans left a large number of the inhabitants of the Balkan peoples with Turkish blood in their veins, as can be seen to this day, as many inhabitants of the region are not only Muslim in faith, but are also distinctly darker than other Balkan residents.

♣

All of these racial wars when whites faced extermination are a fascinating read.

Although the racial wars recounted by Kemp don’t end there, I won’t quote more to invite readers to purchase a hard copy of March of the Titans, an updated 2011 edition of the old online edition I’ve been quoting here (recently removed from the internet).

The fact is that unlike other races whites as a people have been an endangered species more than once, and this has paramount importance to understand our times. Personally, I find it outrageous that so few “white nationalists” are truly interested in the history of the white race; proof of it is that books like this are no bestsellers in the community.

Note:

For excerpts of all chapters of Kemp’s book see: here.

Lethal mixing of bloods

Most of present-day Greeks are mongrels, not peoples of pure “Indo-European” (whites for short) origin. According to William Pierce, the only way that the ancient Greeks could have survived as pure whites would have been to eliminate the entire indigenous population, either through expulsion or extermination:


Greece was invaded by Greek-speaking Northerners several times during prehistory. Those who arrived in the period 2,100-1,900 B.C. founded the great Mycenaean civilization, which flourished from the end of the l6th century until about 1,200 B.C.

Homer, whose Iliad and Odyssey describe Mycenaean Greece, refers to the Greeks, or Hellenes, inclusively as “Achaeans.” In fact, however, the Achaeans were only one of the Hellenic tribes which were in Greece in Mycenaean times.

In addition to the Achaeans, who occupied most of the Peloponnesus (the southern peninsula of Greece, in which Mycenae was located), there were the Aeolians and the Ionians, who occupied other portions of the mainland, many of the Aegean islands, and the west coast of Asia Minor. The Ionians, in particular, settled in Attica and were the founders of Athens.

These tribal divisions apparently predate the arrival of the first Hellenes in Greece, and it seems likely that the Achaeans, Aeolians, and Ionians invaded the Aegean region separately, over a period of several centuries.

And there were also the non-Greek Pelasgians, the Mediterranean aborigines, who occupied the lowest stratum of Greek society and substantially outnumbered the Hellenes in Mycenaean times. As pointed out in the last installment, the Mycenaean Greeks were influenced culturally by these Mediterraneans—and, as time passed, racially as well.

In the late 14th and early 13th centuries B.C. more Greek-speaking Indo-Europeans arrived, coming westward across the Aegean in ships. They were Homer’s “divine born” heroes, the fathers and grandfathers of the warriors who sacked Troy about 1,250 B.C.: golden-haired Achilles, the sons of Atreus, and the other princes and kings of the Iliad. They settled in Greece, founded dynasties, and lived in a manner remarkably like that of northern Europe’s feudal lords more than twenty centuries later.

A couple of generations after the fall of Troy—exactly eighty years afterward, according to Greek tradition—a new group of divine-born warriors swept down on Greece, this time from the north. They were the Heraclidae, the supposed descendants of the blond demigod Hercules, and with them came the Dorians, the last of the major Hellenic tribes to reach the Aegean region.

The Dorians, who had settled in central Greece a few years earlier, proceeded to conquer the Achaeans, occupy the Peloponnesus, and extinguish Mycenaean civilization. But, in so doing, they prepared the way for the rise of a new civilization which would greatly surpass the old one. Displaced Achaeans, Aeolians, and Ionians migrated to new areas, sometimes displacing those people already there and sometimes amalgamating with them.

The Dorians were blonder than the Achaeans they conquered, but that is only because the Achaeans had been mixing with the Mediterranean aborigines for several centuries before the Dorians arrived; originally the two tribes had been of the same racial composition.

But the Achaeans were certainly more civilized than the rude, new arrivals from the north, and it was 400 years before Greece recovered from the cultural shock of the Dorian invasion.


Historians’ bias

The four centuries between the Dorian invasion and the flowering of the literate Classical civilization are referred to by most historians as “the Dark Age,” for much the same reasons that the period between the fall of Rome, more than fifteen centuries later, and the flowering of Mediaeval civilization is also called “the Dark Ages.”

In both cases a people of an older civilization, who had begun to succumb to racial mixing and decadence, was overwhelmed by a more vigorous and racially healthier but culturally less advanced people from the north. And in both cases a period of gestation took place over a dozen generations or so, during which a synthesis of old and new elements, racial and cultural, occurred, before a new and different civilization arose from the ruins of the old.

Unfortunately, most historians tacitly assume that the records of political and cultural activity which have come down to us from periods of civilized literacy provide all the data needed to yield an understanding of the historical process. The state of development and degree of organization and complexity of city life are taken as a yardstick by which to evaluate the significance or historical importance of a particular period. And if one’s standards of value are geared to such things as the volume of commerce, the gross national product, or even the intensity of scientific, literary, and artistic activity, such a yardstick may seem, at first glance, to be proper.

But there are other standards of value, such as those of the National Alliance, which differ somewhat from the customary ones. For it is not in the external forms of organization and activity of a people that we see the most important criteria for making a judgment as to the significance of a particular period, but rather in the actual racial constitution of a people and in the dynamic processes which, for better or worse, are influencing that racial constitution.

Although the basic racial constitution of a people is always intimately related to that people’s achievements in commerce, science, industry, art, politics, and warfare, still the two sets of criteria can lead to fundamentally different evaluations of a given historical period. This is a consequence of the fact that race building and decay are usually strongly out of phase with civilization building and decay.

Thus, the long ages between the periods of maximum civil activity—ages which the historian customarily ignores as being of only slight importance—may very well be periods of the greatest interest from a standpoint of racial dynamics.

It is, of course, true that the periods of maximum civil activity are precisely those which yield a maximum of written records, artifacts, and the other raw materials from which the historian builds his tale. But relative abundance of evidence should not be interpreted as equivalent to relative historical significance, regardless of the historian’s value criteria.

The record of the rise and fall of pure races constitutes the primary history of mankind, and the rise and fall of civilizations occupy a place of secondary importance. This statement may seem self-evident to those already accustomed to looking at history from a racial viewpoint, but it is by no means generally accepted by historians today. Until it is, much historical writing will continue to be flawed in a fundamental way.

Sparta

The Dorians of Laconia organized the Peloponnesian population in a three-layered hierarchy. At the top were the citizens of Sparta, the Spartiates, all of pure Dorian blood, ruled by their kings.

At the bottom of the social structure were the Helots, or serfs, consisting of the aboriginal Mediterranean elements as well as many of the conquered Achaeans of mixed blood. No Spartiate could engage in trade or practice a craft. The Perioeci handled all their commerce, and the Helots provided all their other needs.

Sparta thus had the only full-time, professional army in the Aegean world, and this fact gave her an influence vastly disproportionate to her numbers. So thoroughly did Sparta dominate all her neighbors, and so thoroughly feared and respected by all other Greeks for their military prowess were the Spartiates, that for more than 800 years the city had no need of walls or an acropolis, in marked contrast to every other Greek city of those times.

For another thing, the Spartiates gave an emphasis to racial fitness which went far beyond the needs of a strong and efficient army. Their eugenics program placed a premium on physical beauty—on aesthetic qualities, not just on raw strength or robustness. Spartan women, for example, were a far cry from the muscle-bound behemoths one sees on Soviet women’s Olympic teams these days; instead, they were judged by other Greeks to be among the most beautiful and graceful, as well as the fairest, of Hellenic women, rivaled in beauty only by the women of Thebes.

Another Spartan practice which suggests that racial rather than imperialistic motives may have been uppermost in the minds of their leaders was the regular thinning out of the Helot population, in what was known as the crypteia. This admirable institution sent teams of young Spartiates out into the countryside with daggers to dispatch Helots by the hundreds—an undertaking hardly consonant with a desire for as many subjects as possible, which is the norm for imperialists.

It is easy to imagine the Spartiates, upon their arrival in Laconia, surveying the moral decadence and the racemixing which had made the Achaeans such an easy conquest for the Dorians, and then instituting a carefully designed program to safeguard themselves from a similar fate. For a time this program succeeded; the moral character and the racial quality of the Spartiates remained famously high. But ultimately it failed in both regards.

As with other ruling classes at other times, the Spartiates did not produce enough children to make up for their losses in war. Even heavy penalties for celibacy and late marriage, and exemption from taxes for those Spartan families with four or more children, did not solve the problem.

At the beginning of the fifth century B.C. the Spartiates were able to field an army of 8,000 men against the Persians, but after the costly Spartan victory over Athens and her allies in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) Spartan numbers declined rapidly. When the Spartiates marched against Thebes in 371 B.C., there were too few of them to prevail. After their decisive defeat by the Thebans at Leuctra, the Spartan army numbered only 2,000 warriors. A century and a half later there were only 700 of them, and they passed from the pages of history.

The Spartiates never succumbed to racemixing, but they did succumb to their own lifestyle. They would have been well advised to eliminate the Helots of the Peloponnesus and the Mediterranean population of Crete altogether and to establish a purely Dorian peasant class in those areas. Then they may well have been able to practice a successful eugenics program, maintain their moral health, and have a stable population too. But, of course, they did not have the advantage which hindsight gives us.

The other Hellenic tribes did succumb to racemixing. Their populations did not suffer the decline in numbers which the Spartiates did, but they suffered a decline in racial quality which resulted in their extermination, perhaps more slowly but just as surely—and less cleanly.

Athens

Athens was Sparta’s great political rival during much of the Classical Age. Athenian society came to be organized along quite different lines from Spartan society, but at the dawn of Greek history the similarities outweighed the differences.

The earliest Athenians were, like the other Hellenes, predominantly Nordic in blood and culture. Their social structure was aristocratic, and they were ruled originally by hereditary kings, just as in the case of the Spartiates.

In the seventh century there were two principal differences, from a racial viewpoint, between Sparta and Athens. The first difference, in favor of Sparta, was a culturally and racially more homogeneous class of citizens in Sparta than in Athens. The second was that Athens had a free citizen-peasantry—a decided plus for her.

By the beginning of the sixth century, however, the Athenian peasants were in danger of losing their freedom, many of them having already been sold into slavery and others being effectively chained by indebtedness.

The social unrest resulting from this situation led the Athenians to give absolute power to Solon, a nobleman, in the hope that he could improve things. Solon gave Athens a constitution which wrought a number of changes with long-lasting effects, some good and some bad. On the positive side, he outlawed the practice of enslavement for indebtedness. But he also took the decisive step of transferring the power of the Athenian state from the hands of the aristocracy into the hands of a plutocracy.

Although this latter change was only de jure at first, since the aristocrats were also the plutocrats, it shifted the ultimate criterion of fitness to rule from blood to gold. Henceforth, any sufficiently wealthy speculator who had acquired enough land to yield the specified amount of agricultural produce could theoretically qualify for the highest office in the state and for membership in the Council of the Areopagus: the highest judicial body in Athens, made up of nobles who had formerly held the office of archon, or ruler.

Race-Based Citizenry. Even after Solon, however, democracy did not devour the Athenians all at once. Solon and the tyrants who gained power shortly after his administration, the Peisistratids, governed an Athens in which citizenship was still a racial matter, being based on membership in one of the kinship groups, or clans, which made up the Hellenic tribes of Attica.

In 509 B.C., 85 years after the beginning of Solon’s administration, another “reformer,” Cleisthenes, took office, and he undertook a program of gerrymandering which laid the basis for changing citizenship from a racial to a geographic affair. From this point it was downhill all the way for Athens, racially speaking.

Half a century later the last remnants of power were transferred from the Areopagus to a popular council. All the abuses of mass party politics with which Americans are all too familiar were thenceforth the lot of the Athenians.

As the prosperity of Athens grew, more and more foreigners crowded into Attica, with intermarriage inevitably occurring. A temporary halt to the pollution of the Athenian citizenry by the offspring of aliens came in 451 B.C., when the great Pericles pushed through a law restricting citizenship to those born of an Athenian father and an Athenian mother. Only four decades later, however, in order to make up the enormous losses suffered in the Peloponnesian War, Athens bestowed citizenship on tens of thousands of foreigners.

And in the fourth century, although the citizenship law of Pericles remained on the books, every variety of Levantine mongrel was claiming Athenian citizenship. The banking industry of Athens, for example, was entirely in the hands of Semites, who had taken Greek names and were awarded citizenship for “service to the state,” much in the way Jews and Negroes have been elevated to the British “nobility” by the score in recent decades.

Darkening of Hellas. Intermarriage was rife, and the darkening of the Hellenes of Athens was well under way. Racial, moral, and cultural decline went hand in hand. The second-century historian Polybius described his countrymen as “degenerate, pleasure-seeking beggars, without loyalty or belief, and without hope for a better future.”

A century later, in the reign of Augustus, the Roman writer Manilius reckoned the Hellenes among the dark nations (coloratae genies). And so the Athenians, like the Spartiates, passed from the pages of history.


Extermination or expulsion

If it is difficult to believe that as great a state as Athens could pass from Nordic genius and glory to mongrelized squalor in a few centuries, just think for a moment of the racial transformation of America which has taken place in a single century. And imagine what America will be like two or three centuries hence (barring a White revolution), when Whites are a minority, outnumbered by both Blacks and Chicanos. America’s technology and industry may coast along for a century or two on the momentum acquired from earlier generations, as Athens’ culture did, but the American people—the real Americans—will have passed from the pages of history.

The passing of the Hellenes must be regarded as one of the greatest tragedies of our race. A great-hearted and noble people, filled with genius and energy, they seized upon the resources in labor, material, and land which their conquest of the conservative Mediterranean world offered, and they wrought one of the most progressive civilizations this earth has yet seen. Indeed, many of their creations remain unsurpassed to this day.

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 intraracial 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.