March of the Titans

The following sentences of March of the Titans: The Complete History of the White Race by Arthur Kemp caught my attention:


The collapse of the Roman Empire had left an overwhelmingly mixed race population in Italy, incapable of maintaining the original Roman civilization because they were no longer the same people as the original Romans.

So weakened, the inhabitants of Italy were no match for the ferocious Goths and other Indo-European tribes who, for over a century, marched up and down the Italian peninsula, plundering and sacking the remains of the great Roman centers at will.

Successive Gothic invaders—including an invasion from across the Mediterranean by Gothic Vandals from present day Algeria—slowly but surely decimated the mixed race population, which went into dramatic decline when supplies from the former empire’s territories dried up.

The Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantium, paid Germanic mercenaries to re-occupy Italy from time to time, but all these attempts to re-establish the Western Empire in Italy fell on stony ground for the simple reason that the Romans themselves no longer existed.

[The above sentence is so important that instead of summarizing Kemp’s description of the history of Italy in the next pages I’ll omit it so that the reader may ponder in this racial principle to understand Western history under the new paradigm. (Only Hitler and the Nazis seemed to grasp the new paradigm before the Anglo-Saxons destroyed the only enlightened nation that broke away from the previous worldview.) In the final pages of the same chapter, Kemp writes:]

Although Mussolini and Adolf Hitler were allies during World War II, and they are both often called Fascists, this term strictly only applies to Mussolini’s followers, and not to Hitler or his movement.

Essentially the reason for this are that the policies for which National Socialism, or Nazism, espoused, were completely different to that which Mussolini espoused: Fascism essentially had to do with the economic organization of the state according to nationalistic and authoritarian lines, whereas National Socialism had to do with reorganizing the state along racial lines. Anti-Semitism was also a key dividing issue: Mussolini was originally pro-Jewish, and for a long time the head of the Fascist Party in Rome was the Grand Rabbi of that city—while Hitler’s movement had anti-Semitism as one of their central policy positions. Under the influence of Hitler, Mussolini only introduced racial laws and anti-Semitic policies in 1938, but they were nothing like the measures introduced by the Nazis.

The difference between Nazism and Fascism has been obscured after decades of propaganda, yet it is important in the historical context to realize Hitler was not a Fascist, whereas Mussolini was.


Postwar Italy – menace of the south

Apart from losing all of its colonial possessions, a large number of Italians died in the war. This, combined with the natural population increase of the southern Italians, which soon outstripped that of the northern Italians, meant that slowly but surely, Italy started growing darker and darker.

This process, which is by no means complete or total, was significant enough to create a virtually constant state of political anarchy in Italy. Since the end of the Second World War very few Italian governments have been able to last for more than a year in office, and a strong northern separatist emotion has emerged during the last part of the 20th Century, working hard for total separation from the obviously darker and impoverished south of that country.

Violence and lawlessness, which had long since been the trademark of the dark mixed race south of the country (the Mafia), is spreading its tentacles ever further into central and northern Italy as the racial balance shifts—this is a process which is visible to any contemporary observer.

Today Italy is a bi-racial nation—most of the White population is concentrated in the north, while in the south and in Sicily, most of the population are of mixed race. The north/south division in Italy is an active point of political debate in that country, particularly on the economic level. Northern Italy is mostly urban and considerably wealthier than southern Italy, with its businesses accounting for two-thirds of the entire country’s Gross National Product (GNP).

Italy has also served as a major entry point for many illegal Third World immigrants entering western Europe—these developments are reviewed in a later chapter.

March of the Titans

The following sentences of March of the Titans: The Complete History of the White Race by Arthur Kemp caught my attention:

Byzantium – The Eastern Roman Empire

The city’s status as residence of the Eastern Roman Emperor made it into the premier city in all of the Eastern Roman colonies in the Balkans, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Cyprus, Egypt, and part of present day Libya. A good indication of the degree to which the Eastern Empire was not made up for the greatest part of original Romans, can be seen in the official languages of the Byzantines: Greek, Coptic, Syriac and Armenian, with only a very few mainly Christian priests actually speaking Latin.

Due to the immense symbolism of Rome, Eastern Roman emperors made two attempts to recapture the west, once ironically using Romanized Germans. This use of Germanic tribes such as the Goths and eventually even Vikings (in the Varangian Guard in Constantinople) was the major reason why the Eastern Empire lasted as long as it did.

Surrounded by huge walls, defenses erected by the Romans at the height of their power, and defended by armies of Germanic mercenaries, Constantinople ended up surviving as a city virtually besieged for the greater part of its life, its territories eventually restricted to the direct area of the city.

In the west, Germanic tribes were once again on the offensive, and soon after Justinian’s death, had recaptured most of the territory which had been retaken under the Eastern Roman emperor. What must have seemed like an endless wave of warlike Germans swept down from the north, sweeping masses of mixed race Roman remnants into the south of the country, helping to create the distinctive “olive” south of Italy visible to this day.


Islam threatens Constantinople

The first waves of non-White Islamic armies came sweeping up out of the Saudi Arabian peninsula, fired up by a new powerful religion which urged its supporters to convert the “kafirs”—or non-Muslim infidels—by force if necessary, through the “Jihad” or Holy War. The Eastern Empire soon began losing its eastern most territories before the Islamic armies, most being impossible to defend with the limited resources available to Constantinople. This non-White racial invasion would be the spark for the Second Great Race War—the Crusades…

♣

Despite this victory, the writing was on the wall for the Eastern Empire—a rapidly growing mixed race population, a small White minority, threatened from the west by the Slavs, and from the east by the Turks and Persians—there seemed to be no way out. Between 634 AD and 642 AD, the Islamic armies invaded Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, finally besieging the city of Constantinople itself three times, in 670 AD, 717 and in 718. After this year, the Islamic armies launched new invasions virtually every year.

The result was the start of one of the longest running race wars in history, between the Whites in Western Europe on the one hand and the mixed race Arabic/Black armies of Islam on the other hand. The battlefield raged around Constantinople—that city’s Christian status in the face of Islam led generations of White Christians in Europe to physically prop up the city, artificially prolonging its life-span by centuries.

This race war was fought under the guise of a religious battle to be known as the Crusades, and would last 275 years, from 1095 to 1270 AD. (The full story and impact of the Crusades is reviewed in a following chapter.)

The city finally fell to the Muslim armies in 1453 AD—the date which formally marks the end of the Eastern Roman Empire. Once again, like the Western Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire was, by the time of its fall, Roman in name only.

Parrott’s article: a clarification

I don’t claim to have studied carefully Matt Parrott’s, “The Causes of Causes, a Subterranean Perspective,” published yesterday at Youth Network. But after posting this reply here at WDH, which only deals with a few paragraphs where Matt mentions me, I’ll do it. Parrott said:

I believe that Chechar’s mistaken in identifying Christianity as the root cause, and I believe the examples from Byzantium and Medieval Europe, examples where the church’s true interests and influences could actually be observed, confirm that Nietzschean models of suicidal ressentiment and exegeses of multicultural humanist globalism are fundamentally flawed.

Two different places: Constantinople and Europe.

Byzantium cannot be fairly compared to Medieval Europe insofar as, by the time it fell in the 15th century, the city had already suffered a great deal of mongrelization—a mongrelization that undoubtedly contributed to its decline and eventual fall. (That Parrott puts the two together corroborates my view that white nationalists should read the two histories, by William Pierce and Arthur Kemp, that have been written about the white race.)

Medieval Europe is a more complex subject because, unlike Constantinople, it was not a mongrel empire. But even here Kevin MacDonald’s Separation and Its Discontents shows that the broadly positive role that the Church played by elaborating a collectivist defense mechanism to counter Jewish influence was not exactly the best way to do it. In that book MacDonald also says that National Socialism (a movement which left Christianity behind) was the most dangerous enemy that Judaism has confronted in its entire existence. In other words, from the point of view of ethno-preservation the German movement was an improvement over the defense mechanism elaborated by the Roman Catholic Church against Jewry. (See my review of MacDonald’s book here.)

I mention MacDonald’s second book of his trilogy because, even though I agree with him that Christendom more or less protected Europe from alien influence, the protection was not enough, not nearly enough, as shown in the fate of post-Christendom Europe and precisely because of the universalist ideals proclaimed by the Church.

Chechar’s also unconvinced by the Jews as Primary Cause model. Being a White Mexican, he perceives the problem from the vantage point of a White civilization which choked and died on introgression and decadence, largely devoid of Jewish influence. He’s settled on a Christianity as Primary Cause model, answering the question of suicide affirmatively.

I don’t say “Christianity as Primary Cause,” and my analysis goes beyond Mexico. Let’s talk about Europe and remind my readers that, during my previous debates with Pat Hannagan, he conceded that while the Iberian whites committed suicidal mestization in the Americas they remained genetically pure in the Iberian Peninsula itself. But my friend Pat was misinformed. The peninsular Portuguese violated the “One-drop Rule” to the point that contemporary genetic studies reveal a Negro gene in their blood absent in other Europeans (see e.g., the first comment after this post). In other words, even leaving Mexico and Latin America aside, many Iberian whites committed racial suicide within their homelands, and both Christianity and the “One Ring” (see below) are the culprits.

The Catholic Church that Chechar envisions destroying Latin America and the Protestant Yankees Hunter Wallace envisions destroying Dixie are merely the zombie carcasses of Christianity, spearheads of the capitalist impulse to expand into their respective societies and steamroll over all the institutional and ideological obstacles to the profit which feeds the power structure.

I agree with Parrot that the “economics over race policies” are a gigantic factor of white decline, perhaps as big as the axiological meme that’s killing both Mediterraneans and Nordics. Therefore, I am not an anti-Christian reductionist so to speak. Yes: I blame the egalitarian software that we may call the Christian / Secular Christian problem (liberalism run amok after the French Revolution) and, as I just said, the One Ring of greed and power (economics over race—again, see both Pierce’s and Kemp’s magnificent histories of the white race for an explanation of the “Ring”). These factors constitute part of the ingredients of the formula that’s killing us—plus the Jewish ingredient.

From this point of view the Jewish problem would be a very strong catalyst that has accelerated the process in the last centuries since the emancipation of Jewry, but certainly not the “active ingredient” of the brew (what monocausalists believe).

So you can see that my position goes far beyond both Christian reductionism and Jewish reductionism. I believe that individualism, universalism, weak ethnocentrism (“hardwired” characteristics in the White psyche since prehistoric times) + egalitarianism, liberalism, capitalism (cultural “software” after the Revolution which ironically strengthened Christian axiology) + the Jewish culture of critique in the 20th century = a truly lethal brew for the White peoples.

By the way, Hunter Wallace has also responded to Parrott’s article, but he naturally focuses on other issues.

After Anno Domini

This piece has been chosen for my collection Day of Wrath. It has been slightly modified and presently can only be read as a PDF within the book, ready for printing in your home for a comfortable reading.

Germanic People and the Romans (3)

Excerpted from the 17th article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:

The Gothic nation, as was mentioned in the previous installment, had established itself on the southern shore of the Baltic, around the mouth of the Vistula, before 300 B.C. Prior to that the Goths had lived in southern Sweden.

Conquest of the Steppe

The Goths west of the Dniester—the Visigoths—moved down into the Danubian lands west of the Black Sea, where they inevitably came into conflict with the Romans. They conquered the Roman province of Dacia for themselves, after defeating a Roman army and killing a Roman emperor (Decius) in the year 251.

For the next century and a quarter both the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths prospered, while the fortunes of the Roman Empire continued to decline. The Goths, who were excellent seamen, raided the Black Sea coastal cities of Asia Minor at will, and Rome was also hard pressed to defend other portions of her long border with the Germans.

Peaceful Coexistence

Toward the end of the third century, during the reign of Diocletian, the Empire was divided into eastern and western halves, for administrative and military purposes. The progressive breakdown of communications led eventually to separate de facto powers, one centered in Rome and the other in Byzantium (later renamed Constantinople).

During the first three-quarters of the fourth century, despite occasional raids, a state of relatively peaceful coexistence between Goths and Romans pervaded. Especially in the eastern half of the Empire, diplomacy and bribery were used to hold the Goths at bay. During the reign of Constantine (306-337) 40,000 Goths were recruited into the Roman army, and they thenceforth were the bulwark of the Eastern Empire.

It was in the reign of Emperor Valens, in the year 372, that the greatest menace to the White race, both Germans and Romans, since the beginning of recorded history suddenly appeared on the eastern horizon. From the depths of Central Asia a vast horde of brown- skinned, flat-nosed, slant-eyed little horsemen—fast, fierce, hardy, bloodthirsty, and apparently inexhaustible in numbers—came swarming across the steppe around the north end of the Caspian Sea. They were the Huns.

The first to feel their impact were the Alans, living south of the Don between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. The Hunnic horde utterly crushed the Alans, some of whose remnants retreated southward into the Caucasus Mountains, while others fled westward in confusion, seeking refuge among the Goths. In the Caucasus today traces of the Nordic Alans are found in the Ossetes, whose language is Indo-European and who are taller and lighter than the Caucasic-speaking peoples around them.

End of the Ostrogoths

Next the Huns fell upon the Ostrogoths and routed them. The aged Ostrogothic king, Hermanric, slew himself in despair, and his successor, Vitimer, was killed in a vain effort to hold back the Brown flood. The Ostrogothic kingdom disintegrated, and its people streamed westward in terror, with the Huns at their heels. Athanaric, king of the Visigoths, posted himself at the Dniester with a large army, but the Huns crossed the river and defeated him, inflicting great slaughter on his army.

Thus, the Visigoths too were forced to retreat westward. Athanaric petitioned Valens for permission for his people to cross the Danube and settle in Roman lands to the south. Valens consented, but he attached very hard conditions, which the Goths, in their desperation, were forced to accept: they were required to surrender all their weapons and to give up their women and children as hostages to the Romans.

Oppression and Rebellion

The Goths crossed the Danube in 376 and settled in the Roman province of Lower Moesia, which corresponds roughly to modern Bulgaria. There the Romans took shameful advantage of them. Roman-Jewish merchants, in return for grain and other staples, took the hostage children of the Goths as slaves.

The Goths secretly rearmed themselves and rose up. For two years they waged a war of revenge, ravaging Thrace, Macedonia, and Thessaly. Finally, on August 9, 378, in the great battle of Hadrianople, the Gothic cavalry, commanded now by Fritigern, annihilated Valens’ infantry (most of whom were also Goths), and the emperor himself was killed. This was the worst defeat Rome had suffered since the Goths defeated and killed Decius 127 years earlier, and the battle decisively changed the conduct of future wars. Heretofore, Roman infantry tactics had been considered unbeatable, but Fritigern’s Goths had shown what heavy cavalry could do to infantry unprotected by its own cavalry.

The emperor of the eastern half of the Empire who succeeded Valens took a much more conciliatory stance toward the Goths, and they were confirmed in their possession of much of the territory south of the Danube which they had seized between 376 and 378. The Huns, meanwhile, had occupied Gothic Dacia (present-day Romania), as well as all the lands to the east.

Loss of a Homeland

The ancient homeland of the Nordic race was now in the hands of non-Whites. For more than four millennia wave after wave of White warriors had come out of the eastern steppe to conquer and colonize Europe: Achaeans, Dorians, Latins, Celts, Germans, Balts, Slavs, Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, and uncounted and unnamed peoples before all these. But the Sarmatians were the last; after the Huns drove them and the Goths out, no other White barbarians were to come riding out of the east.

For the next thousand years the eastern steppe which had been the breeding ground of the Nordic race became the invasion route into Europe for periodic waves of non-White hordes from Asia: Huns, Avars, Turks, Magyars, Mongols.


German vs. German

The Huns contented themselves, for the time being, with that portion of Europe between the Carpathians and the Danube, leaving the Romans and the Germans elsewhere to their own devices. Rome, a hollow shelf peopled largely by Levantines and ruled in effect by a gaggle of filthy-rich Middle Eastern moneylenders, speculators, and merchants, depended for her continued existence upon cleverness and money rather than real strength. Germans menaced her and Germans defended her, and the Romans concentrated their energies on playing German off against German.

The game succeeded in the Eastern Empire, more or less, but not in the Western Empire. A Frank, Arbogast, was the chief adviser—and effective master—of Western Emperor Eugenius in the year 394, having assassinated Eugenius’ predecessor. The emperor of the East, Theodosius, sent his Gothic army against Arbogast, and Arbogast called on his fellow Franks for support. The two German armies fought at Aquileia, near modern Venice, and the Goths defeated the Franks.

Alaric the Bold

Two of the leaders of Theodosius’ army were Alaric the Bold, a Gothic prince, and Stilicho, a Vandal. After the battle of Aquileia Stilicho, nominally subordinate to Theodosius, became the effective master of the Western Empire. Alaric was chosen king of the Visigoths by his tribe and decided to challenge Stilicho, but as long as Stilicho lived he was able to hold Alaric at bay.

The emasculated and Levantinized Romans, unable to face the Germans man to man, bitterly resented their German allies as much as they did their German enemies. This resentment, born of weakness and cowardice, finally got the better of the Romans in 408, and they conspired to have their protector, Stilicho, murdered. Then the Romans in all the Italian cities butchered the wives and children of their German allies—60,000 of them.

(Alaric the bold)

This foolish and brutal move sent Stilicho’s German soldiers into Alaric’s arms, and Italy was then at the Goth’s mercy. Alaric’s army ravaged large areas of the peninsula for two years in revenge for the massacre of the German families. Alaric demanded a large ransom from the Romans and forced them to release some 40,000 German slaves.

Fall of Rome

Then, on the night of August 24, 410, Alaric’s Goths took Rome and sacked the city. This date marked, for all practical purposes, the end of the capital of the world. Rome had endured for 1,163 years and had ruled for a large portion of that time, but it would never again be a seat of power. For a few more decades the moribund Empire of the West issued its commands from the fortress city of Ravenna, 200 miles north of Rome, until the whole charade was finally ended in 476. The Empire of the East, on the other hand, would last another thousand years.

Byzantine discussions at Majority Rights

Monocausalism again!

Now that I’ve been called Jew for the third time, this occasion for rejecting conspiracy theories such as those imagined about John F. Kennedy’s assassination (in an Occidental Observer thread where I also dared to mention 9/11 in the context of Holocaust denialism/revisionism), a comment at Majority Rights on the single Jewish-cause hypothesis caught my attention.

Precisely the Majority Rights writer who last year labeled me “Jew” in a featured article for my skepticism about 9/11 conspiracy theories (search “J Richards” in this entry) has been given admin powers at Majority Rights. A couple of days ago he abused such powers and deleted a comment of someone who hilariously scoffed at Richards’ monocausalism.

Admin powers to a single Jewish causer, at a major nationalist site? What a shame…

Since I think in Spanish, my dominion of the English language is but a fraction of the mastery of the English language that you can read at Majority Rights. Yet I would never, ever exchange my simple, straightforward honesty for the pointless sophistication that in Spain we label as discusiones bizantinas (in reference to the pointless, ultra-sophisticated theological discussions in ancient Constantinople).

What’s the point of authoring in-depth articles on Heidegger’s ontology while at the same time you believe in conspiratorial nonsense that any High Scholl kid can debunk by merely reading Skeptical Inquirer? Take a look at the Occidental Observer thread on the Holocaust I referred to above and search for my recent aggregations to see what I mean.

Christmas Eve

I have a lot to say about Christianity. Believe me. Decades of my life were destroyed as a result of a focalized abuse perpetrated by my father—a fanatic Catholic—when I was a minor. His verbal abuse and slapping on my face, together with his eschatological doctrine of eternal damnation, broke my adolescent heart. Since as a young person nobody helped me, I was completely unable to process the trauma.

At seventeen I constantly had themes from Mozart’s Requiem stuck in my head in the Catholic school Zumárraga, an ear worm synchronized with the religious metamorphosis that was taking place in my mind: the change from the stage of perceiving God as the loving father of my St. Francis to the terrible God of the Requiem—my introjected Father.

Confutatis maledictis
Flammis acribus addictis
Sed tu bonus fac benigne
Ne perenni cremer igne.

My fear of eternal damnation, what Alice Miller calls “the fighting with the parental introjects,” i.e., the fighting against our inner daddy, reached truly paranoid, medieval levels of obsessive fear, as I recount in my book Hojas Susurrantes (Whispering Leaves). It’s a miracle that, unlike millions of adolescents who have been abused in this infernal way at home, I didn’t lose my mind…

Nevertheless, since the Jews have been targeting Christmas, I won’t criticize my parents’ religion in Christmas Eve. I better copy and paste part of a non-autobiographical chapter of Whispering Leaves that I used to source a couple of online encyclopedias. Pay special attention to the paragraph that starts with the words: “Something completely lost to the modern mind is that…” which, in a nutshell, summarizes my views on why Christianity conquered the souls of the ancient Romans.

The following excerpts relate to the positive side of the religion of my family: how the Church vehemently combated abortion and infanticide among the white people. Let’s remember that infanticidal practices run amok in the Classical World accelerated the fall of the Roman Empire, just as today’s millions of abortions represent a pivotal role in the demographic winter for the white people and the consequent demise of Western civilization.

Relying heavily on Larry S. Milner’s treatise on infanticide, in 2008 I wrote:

That so many researchers have produced astronomical figures on the extent of infanticide moves me to think that Larry Milner’s initiative to devote ten years of his life researching the topic should be undertaken by others. Only then can we be sure if such large numbers are accurate. Here I cannot substantiate the figures of Milner and others, but shall weight the case under the most diverse of collected sources.

Joseph Birdsell believes in infanticide rates of 15-50% of the total number of births in prehistoric times.[1] Laila Williamson estimated a lower rate ranging from 15-20%.[2] Both believe that high rates of infanticide persisted until the development of agriculture.[3] Some comparative anthropologists have estimated that 50% of female newborn babies were killed by their parents in the Paleolithic.[4] These figures appear over and over in the research of other scholars.


Paleolithic and Neolithic

Decapitated skeletons of hominid children have been found with evidence of cannibalism. Neanderthal man performed ritual sacrifices of children. As shown in the bas-reliefs of a Laussel cave, a menstruating goddess is appeased only by the sacrifice of infants.[5]

Marvin Harris, the creator of the anthropological movement called cultural materialism, estimated that in the Stone Age up to 23-50% of newborns were put to death. However, Harris drew up a rational explanation. In his book Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures, published in 1977, he tells us that the goal was to preserve the population growth to 0.001%. This explanation of more “civilized” cavemen than us has not been taken seriously among other scholars. But the renowned geneticist James Neel is not left behind. Through a retroactive model to study the customs of contemporary Yanomami Indians he estimated that in prehistoric times the infanticidal rate was 15-20%. However, Neel wrote: “I find it increasingly difficult to see in the recent reproductive history of the civilized world a greater respect for the quality of human existence than was manifested by our remote ‘primitive’ ancestors.” Ark would have scoffed at this claim. The fact that Neel published such praise for the infanticidal cavemen in Science, one of the most prestigious scientific journals, shows the levels of antediluvian regression that we suffer in our times.[6]


Ancient World

As we have seen, the sacrifice of children was much more common in the Ancient World than in present times.

Three thousand bones of young children, with evidence of sacrificial rituals, have been found in Sardinia. Infants were offered to the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. Pelasgians offered a sacrifice of every tenth child during difficult times. Syrians sacrificed children to Jupiter and Juno. Many remains of children have been found in Gezer excavations with signs of sacrifice. Child skeletons with the marks of sacrifice have been found also in Egypt dating 950-720 B.C. In Carthage “[child] sacrifice in the ancient world reached its infamous zenith.” [7] Besides the Carthaginians, other Phoenicians, and the Canaanites, Moabites and Sepharvites offered their first-born as a sacrifice to their gods.

Carthage. Charred bones of thousands of infants have been found in Carthaginian archaeological sites in modern times. One such area harbored as many as 20,000 burial urns. It is estimated that child sacrifice was practiced for centuries in the region. Plutarch (ca. 46–120 AD) mentions the practice, as do Tertullian, Orosius, Diodorus Siculus and Philo. The Hebrew Bible also mentions what appears to be child sacrifice practiced at a place called the Tophet (from the Hebrew taph or toph, to burn) by the Canaanites, ancestors of the Carthaginians, and by some Israelites. Writing in the 3rd century B.C., Kleitarchos, one of the historians of Alexander the Great, described that the infants rolled into the flaming pit. Diodorus Siculus wrote that babies were roasted to death inside the burning pit of the god Baal Hamon, a bronze statue.[8] (I will approach the subject of the recent studies on the Israelites and child sacrifice in the Epilogue.)

Greece and Rome. Interestingly, in Persian mythology of Zoroastrianism, at birth some children are devoured by their parents: a fable reminiscent of Cronus. Rhea hid Zeus and presented a stone wrapped in strips, which Cronus took as a swaddled baby and ate it. Cronus represents the archaic Hellas.

The historical Greeks considered barbarous the practice of adult and child sacrifice.[9] It is interesting to note how conquerors like Alexander are diminished under the new psycohistorical perspective. If we give credence to the assertion that Thebes, the largest city in the region of Boeotia, had lower rates of exposure than other Greek cities, its destruction by Alexander was a fatal blow to the advanced psychoclass in Greece. A few centuries later, between 150 and 50 B.C. an Alexandrian Jew wrote Wisdom of Solomon, which contains a diatribe against the Canaanites whom he calls perpetrators of “ruthless murders of their children.” (Take note how the classics, the 16th century chroniclers, and the 19th century anthropologists wield value judgments, something forbidden in present-day academia.) In The Histories Polybius was already complaining in the 2nd century B.C. that parents severely inhibited reproduction, and by the 1st century there were several thinkers who spoke out against the exposure of babies. Epictetus wondered “A sheep does not abandon its own offspring, nor a wolf; and yet does a man abandon his?” In the Preface we had seen that in the same century Philo was the first philosopher to speak out against exposure.[10]

“The greatest respect is owed to a child”, wrote Juvenal, born in 55 AD. His contemporary Josephus, a Romanized Jew, also condemned exposure. And in Heroides, an elegiac poem that he wrote before his exile, Ovid asked, “What did the child commit, in so few hours of life?” However, two centuries after Augustus, in times of Constantine Rome struggled with a decreased population due to exposure. The legend of Romulus and Remus is also revealing: two brothers had been exposed to die but a she-wolf saved them. Romulus forced the Romans to bring up all male and the first female, and forbade killing them after certain age. As Rhea saving his son Zeus, this legend portrays the psychogenic landmark of classical culture compared with other cultures of the Ancient World. But even so exposure was practiced. A letter from a Roman citizen to his wife, dating from 1 B.C., demonstrates the casual nature with which infanticide was often viewed:

Know that I am still in Alexandria. […] I ask and beg you to take good care of our baby son, and as soon as I received payment I shall send it up to you. If you are delivered, if it is a boy, keep it, if a girl, discard it. [11]

In some periods of Roman history it was traditional for a newborn to be brought to the pater familias, the family patriarch, who would then decide whether the child was to be kept and raised, or left to death by exposure. The Twelve Tables of Roman law obliged him to put to death a child that was visibly deformed. Infanticide became a capital offense in Roman law in 374 AD but offenders were rarely if ever prosecuted.[12]


Christianity

Something completely lost to the modern mind is that, in a world full of sacrifices as the Ancient World, the innocent child has to die, ordered by his father: an all too well known practice. It is impossible to understand the psychoclass that gave rise to Christianity ignoring this reality turned into a powerful symbol.

However, my working hypothesis is that the forms of parenting had to suffer, in general terms, a regression during the Middle Ages. As I said before, I was tempted to include a graph different from Lloyd deMause’s: one that showed the great slump since the best times of Ionia, Athens and Rome. I didn’t do it because that would mean starting from a dogmatic position: that Middle Ages childrearing was necessarily worse because history waned in the centuries of darkness. As a working hypothesis it is respectable; as an axiom it would be dogmatic. We must always keep in mind that in Scandal in Bohemia, Sherlock Holmes said to Watson: “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

It will thus be the future task of historians to find out if childrearing modes were, in fact, more abusive in the Middle Ages than during the highlights of the Greco-Roman world. In the archived Wikipedia talk page of Psychohistory, Loren Cobb said:

In my view, the psychohistory of Lloyd deMause is indeed a notable approach to history, in the sense in which Wikipedia uses the term “notability.” I am not personally involved in psychohistory—I am a mathematical sociologist—but here are some thoughts for your consideration.

Psychohistory as put forth by deMause and his many followers attempts to explain the pattern of changes in the incidence of child abuse in history. This is a perfectly respectable and non-fringe domain of scientific research. They argue that the incidence was much higher in the past, and that there has been an irregular history of improvement. This is a hypothesis that could just as easily have been framed by an epidemiologist as a psychologist. DeMause proposes a theory that society has gone through a series of stages in its treatment and discipline of children. Again, this is well within the bounds of social science. None of these questions are pseudoscientific. Even the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, a bastion of scientific epidemiology, is interested in these kinds of hypotheses.[13]

I exchanged a few e-mails with Cobb, who like me is very critical of the psychoanalytic tail in deMausean legacy, and his position piqued my interest. So let this prolegomena with academic references continue which, if developed, could become such an epidemiological approach in the future.

The Teachings of the Apostles or Didache said “You shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born.”[14] The Epistle of Barnabas stated an identical command.[15] So widely accepted was this teaching in Christendom that apologists Tertullian, Athenagoras, Minucius Felix, Justin Martyr and Lactantius also maintained that exposing a baby to death was a wicked act. In 318 AD Constantine I considered infanticide a crime. The West took its time to consider criminal the late forms of infanticide. The author of the Codex Theodosianus in 322 AD complained:

We have learned that in provinces where there are shortages of food and lack of livelihood parents are selling or pledging their children. Such ignominious act is repugnant to our customs.

Around 340 AD Lactantius argued that strangling infants was sinful. Although infanticide was not officially banned in Roman criminal law until 374 AD when Valentinian I mandated to rear all children (exposing babies, especially girls, was still common), both exposure and child abandonment continued in Europe.

Middle Ages. The practice was so entrenched, as well as the sale of children, that it had been futile to decree the abolition of such customs. Until the year 500 AD it could not be said that a baby’s life was secure. The Council of Constantinople declared that infanticide was homicide, and in 589 AD the Third Council of Toledo took measures against the Spanish custom of killing their own children.[16] Whereas theologians and clerics preached to spare their lives, newborn abandonment continued as registered in both the literature record and in legal documents.[17]


Christmas postscript

While the wicked are confounded,
doomed to flames of woe unbounded
yet, good Lord, in grace complying,
rescue me from fires undying!

The above is the English translation of the Latin lines.

However disgusting I find to quote a kike, I believe that psychologist Robert Godwin hit a nail. The unconscious message of Christianity is that, when through sacrificial offerings we murder or even torture our innocent son—as was done throughout the Ancient World—, we murder God; and that the crucifixion of Jesus was meant to be the last human sacrifice, with Jesus acting on behalf of our own murdered innocence.

This is the key to understand why a Judaic-inspired cult conquered the Roman Empire. Therefore, and even when I consider myself a spiritual martyr of such religion, I cannot share the views of those nationalists who repudiate every single legacy of such faith. However abominable the doctrine of hell is, what I said above is crucial for a radical—denoting or relating to the roots—understanding of the origins of the religion of our parents.

♣

P.S. of 15 April 2012

See references & comments below.