Catholic Church

Jones vs. KMac: Spirit or Material? Toward a Synthesis

By now, healthy numbers of informed people are generally aware of the work of our editor Kevin MacDonald and traditional Catholic thinker E. Michael Jones. Much of their influence comes from the fact that both have devoted major portions of their careers to writing about what is absolutely the most pressing issue of our age: The Jewish Question.

What has long fascinated me is the fact that both writers have considered Jews and their collective behavior in quite contrasting ways — yet in my estimation, they are both right. How can that be? Thus, for a decade or so, I’ve attempted in my own mind to reconcile KM and EMJ. Better yet, I’d love to attempt a synthesis of the two approaches to understanding Jews. Given that the present essay marks my 100th contribution to The Occidental Observer, I’d say that a conversation about the attempt to reconcile KM and EMJ is worthy of the occasion.

In my estimation, the contrasting foundations of these two men’s analyses mirror the larger Western conflict we’ve all seen for five hundred-plus years with the struggle between our inherited Christian past, with belief in faith, souls, spirits, and—most of all—God, vs. rationalism, humanism, and materialism—in other words, a strongly scientific worldview. Obviously, Catholic traditionalist E. Michael Jones falls into the former group, while Kevin MacDonald, an academic evolutionary psychologist, falls into the latter. When views from these two competing and conflicting worldviews consider a wide range of topics, they barely ever share common ground, but with KM’s and EMJ’s approaches, they share so much that they are almost complementary in some respects. How can this be? What, then, is the nature of Jews? Why are they so unique among humans? What can they teach us about humanity in general — if not the greater meaning of existence itself?

My consideration of these questions is biographical in that I’ve grappled with these competing worldviews for most of my life and have actually wavered between them over the decades. To my own surprise, I’d now say that Jones’ Christian approach is the more conclusive narrative in that Christianity — as with religion in general — posits a beginning, a middle and an end, which even to many of us post-Christians is a familiar story encompassing “In the beginning,” Adam and Eve, the life of Christ, the struggles between Good and Evil, everlasting souls, heaven and hell, angels, and always an omnipotent, all-loving God.

In an exchange among KM, EMJ and their hostess, Jones explained some aspects of this religious view:

Man is a composite being made up of body and soul (if that word sounds tendentious to the sociobiologists, they can substitute “mind” in its place). He has both a brain and a mind. These two entities are related but distinct. Human beings, unlike angels, can’t have minds unless they have brains, which function according to the laws of chemistry, biology, electricity, etc. and are a direct product of our DNA. Our thoughts, however, are a function of our minds, and, although we can affect our minds by manipulating the chemistry of our brains through alcohol and drugs, the logic of our thoughts is independent of the functioning of our brains.

In contrast, MacDonald grounds his trilogy on Jews in a post-Christian world, one is which God is dead and therefore plays no role in the universe, where scientific laws impartially govern eternity, among which are those laws in evidence with respect to Darwinian evolution. Sadly (for me personally) this modern view of scientific materialism allows for no obvious purpose in existence beyond mere survival. And while survival is nice, it’s still does not provide a convincing reason to struggle and survive. In this sense, The West in general has been demoralized for the past few hundred years, depending on the pace and degree of an acceptance of the atheism — implicitly or explicitly — that has appeared alongside the rise of science.

In short, should you warm to either KM or EMJ, it will likely come down to the worldview you tend to accept already — the general Christian one of historical Europe or the modern scientific view. Personally, I can’t imagine many people changing their worldviews from one to the other simply based on a careful reading of Jones vs. KMac, but that has in fact been happening to me. I’m not back to a belief in God yet, but due to the facts surrounding the Jewish Question, I’m inching my way away from the Existential belief that our presence here on this Earth is meaningless, for it appears indisputable that Jewish existence has some sort of meaning, and, if their existence has meaning, so should ours.

Having just argued tentatively in favor of the religious or supernatural, I will allow that KM likely has the advantage in this debate in that the modern West and its institutions have largely abandoned a spiritual, Christian approach and accepted “science,” which can be as seemingly solid as physics and math or as malleable as the social sciences have been across time. As a rule of thumb, “educated” Westerners have shed Christianity and a belief in God, while “the unintelligent, hicks and charlatans” still embrace them. Witness today’s knee-jerk reaction to the Catholic Church’s repression of Galileo or the respective fates of Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan in the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial,” such that Darrow is still respected to this day while Bryan is knowingly mocked.

Without question, the largest institutions of The West such as academia and the media, but also the government that rules over us, are functionally anti-Christian and pro-science. Few would argue otherwise. (Let’s leave out the Covid debate for now.) So it is within these structures of support that MacDonald has advanced his career. His project on Jews in the 1990s admits as much in the opening words of the 1994 book that began the trilogy: “The project attempts to develop an understanding of Judaism based on modern social and biological sciences. … The fundamental paradigm derives from evolutionary biology, but there will also be a major role for the theory and data derived from several areas of psychology, including especially the social psychology of group behavior.” (vii)

Though it’s been many years since I read the trilogy, I still have a strong impression that A People That Shall Dwell Alone (1994) and Separation and Its Discontents (1998) hew more closely to what appears to be MacDonald’s mid-to-late career dedication to impartial scientific inquiry. In contrast, by the time of the more famous Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, (also 1998; hereafter usually CofC) there is the impression that this scientist-author, as a member of the group being “critiqued” and therefore harmed, has experienced a number of “Aha!” moments and realized that his earlier efforts at impartial research were insufficient when encountering a hostile group that undermines the very power of impartial science in the service of, well, a “group evolutionary strategy.” This does not imply that MacDonald did not think that the theory and data in CofC would not hold up to the same standards of scientific rigor as the other books in the trilogy. However, from 1998 onward, I would say, MacDonald has become a partisan—and for many good reasons. (In fact, here he writes as much: “As a result of reading about various Jewish intellectual and political movements, I came to see Jews as advocating policies that are opposed to the interests of European peoples. It was this cognitive awareness based on a great deal of reading and thinking that led me to my current beliefs.”)

Careful readers of the trilogy will spot this shift, I believe, with the first two books relying more heavily on evolutionary theory straining to be as evidence-based as possible, whereas CofC moves on to “the Boasian school of anthropology, psychoanalysis, leftist political ideology and behavior, the Frankfurt School of Social Research, and the New York intellectuals.” What is critical, KM points out, is that these venues and ideologies were promoted for their “scientific rigor” for decades, when in fact, as MacDonald discovered, they were perversions of real science employed in the course of anti-White ethnic warfare, with Freudian psychoanalysis being a prime case in point.

Perhaps more than any other thinker in the English-speaking world, MacDonald has exposed this form of ethnic warfare and really captured the critical conversations about race, Jews and Whites in the first two decades of the 21st century, despite robust efforts by Jewish-led interests to stifle this knowledge.

To be sure, KMac’s account could be right — and probably is. Over the millennia, Jews have evolved adaptive behavior that ensures their survival and puts them on top. But honestly, it’s really just too … “uncanny,” which is why EMJ’s Christian approach has, against my desire, it seems, pulled me toward belief in a spiritual battle rather than a merely biological and social one. Let’s consider Jones’ account.

I first ran across the writings of Dr. Jones through his journal Culture Wars, and I actually stopped buying it after a number of issues because the editing and format were often so atrocious that I could not take it seriously. I returned to it, however, because Jones’ writing on Jews was so blasphemous — meaning so good, touching always on our current culture in ways that were highly instructive. Only Kevin MacDonald, many of us TOQ/TOO writers and a tiny handful of others were doing something similar. And Lord knows the mainstream press and academia wouldn’t touch an approach like Jones’ (though any number of Jewish academics were in fact writing similar things in books that were rather obscure, in part because far fewer people read books this century).

I’m pretty good about keeping up with these topics and am happy to say that both MacDonald and Jones, despite opposition, have been getting great exposure for some twenty years. No doubt this is due in part to their successful use of non-written forms of discourse, such as YouTube, other podcasts, speeches, interviews, etc. And for some years, all their works were available on Amazon but of course those days are long gone as the regime methodically cracks down on White activists (and Jones).

Punishing Heretics

Not surprisingly, both of these modern heretics have paid a steep price for fearlessly addressing the JQ. For instance, beginning in 2006, this attack began against MacDonald:

The Southern Poverty Law Center has initiated a campaign against me. The controversy started in September, 2006 when someone not connected with CSULB emailed all the full-time people in the Psychology Department — except me — alerting them to a comment about me at the SPLC website.  Heidi Beirich of the SPLC came to Long Beach from November 12–15, 2006 to interview faculty and administrators about me. During the 2006–2007 and 2007–2008 academic years there was also a great deal of discussion and debate about my work and associations on faculty email lists. Eventually several departments issued statements dissociating themselves from my work and, in some cases, condemning my work.

The result was a hostile working environment for the next eight years (until he retired) where “[c]old shoulders, forced smiles and hostile stares became a reality. Going into my office to teach my classes and attend committee meetings became an ordeal.” Fortunately, MacDonald mounted a robust defense, arguing that “The SPLC is paying me attention because it wants to suppress my academic work.” Further, he argued that the two authors of the SPLC created a report that was “a compendium of ethical lapses.” Unlike others, he survived this attack on his career.

It’s been far from smooth sailing since, however. The ADL currently has 88 entries on MacDonald, and one way or another, MacDonald’s family and neighbors have heard nefarious stories about the retired professor, leading to discomfort and ostracism that most people never experience. And, of course, The Occidental Quarterly (an academic journal) and the online Occidental Observer, both of which MacDonald edits, have been de-platformed by PayPal and credit card processors.

E. Michael Jones has also endured his fair share of opprobrium as well, beginning with the almost surreal story of his first teaching appointment:

In the fall of 1980, E. Michael Jones was an assistant professor of American Literature at St. Mary’s College. After receiving his Ph.D. from Temple University in 1979, Jones had moved his wife and two children to South Bend, Indiana to begin what he thought was going to be a career in academic life. But God had other plans. One year into the six years of his tenure track position, Jones got fired because of his position on abortion. Getting fired for being against abortion at what called itself a Catholic college was something his professors at Temple found difficult to understand. Taking his cue from their incomprehension, Jones decided to abandon academe and start a magazine instead. Initially known as Fidelity and now as Culture Wars, that magazine set out to explore the disarray in the Catholic Church that led to his firing.

What Jones eventually found was that America’s kulturkampf, which long had a Protestant-Catholic dimension as well as a glaring racial one, found itself with a rapidly growing Catholic-Jewish battle as well. Increasingly after the year 2000, Jones wrote about this conflict in Culture Wars, culminating in collecting these essays into a truly magisterial book in 2008 titled The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (JRS). No reader of Jones’ writing in that tome can be surprised that Jones has been met with Jewish opposition. Jones, of course, seems entirely right about his arguments and observations, but many Jews don’t necessarily want the world to read such truths about them.

In particular, the SPLC has been aggressive in chasing Dr. Jones. And in 2008 they realized what initially appeared to be one of their greatest successes. As Jones relates:

I was in the middle of a tune when I got the call. On Monday nights I play Irish music at a pub in South Bend. On Monday, February 11, I was planning an early departure on Tuesday morning to speak at the Catholic University School of Architecture, as part of a lecture series on Building Catholic Communities….

Tim Ehlen was now on the phone explaining that the entire lecture series was cancelled by the Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.   The Architecture department was the host for this lecture series.  I was scheduled to speak in less than 48 hours. … Just as Dr. Carlson was beginning his presentation, an email was sent from the Southern Poverty Law Center to Ehlen …

“These are not the Latin Mass traditionalists,” Mr. Potok continued, referring to me and John Sharpe of IHS press. “These are the people who reject Vatican II reforms. They are out of [actor Mel Gibson’s father] Hutton Gibson’s world, in saying that the Jews are destroying the world.”

When confronted with the usual SPLC shtick, Dean Ott panicked and canceled the entire lecture series.  Six months of effort on the part of Ehlen to put this series together were all over.  I would be less than candid if I were to say that cancellations come as a surprise to me. The SPLC, the group which pressured CUA to cancel, employs people whose job it is to find out when I speak and get me canceled.

Another cancellation came some years later when Jones had bags packed for an appearance at a Traditionalist Catholic conference in Gardone, in northern Italy. As before, a telephone call relayed the information that yet another Jones speech would be canceled, “thus aborting an opportunity to discuss the thesis of The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit in the Traditionalist circles who had gone out of their way to avoid the issue.”

Of course, Jones understood all along what was happening because of his writing and speaking on Jews: “There were certain opinions which were left better unsaid.” Sage advice, no doubt, but based on literally thousands of instances, when that choice arises, Jones is sure to utter them anyway, which is why I titled a 2018 TOO essay on Jones: “Too Reflexively Ornery”:  E. Michael Jones and Culture Wars. In fact, a decade ago I labeled Jones as a “Catholic iconoclast” and noted how Culture Wars had run cover stories such as “Judaizing: Then and Now,” “Shylock Comes to Notre Dame,” and “Too Many Yarmulkes: Abortion and the Ethnic Double Standard.” This Philadelphia boy knows how to shock.

Reviews

Next, we come to the issue of how the works of MacDonald and Jones have been accepted, beginning appropriately in academia, since both men earned Ph.D.s and taught at universities. While there have been extensive scholarly reviews of MacDonald’s books, neither MacDonald nor I are aware of any instance of these highly relevant books being used in any classroom in American universities, which speaks volumes about the intellectual poverty of today’s humanities and social sciences, as well as the censorship applied to much dissident thought. (MacDonald keeps a superb website cataloging these reviews and so much more; one can follow the links for weeks on end.)

The same can be said for Jones’ books on Jews, particularly The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit. In my own field of American cultural history, Jones’ work far exceeds in explanatory power what has been happening in America for a century and a half over the depressing pablum that now dominates the humanities everywhere. Yet we know of no instance of The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit being used in the classroom.

Fear not, however, for both MacDonald and Jones are quite adept at using the Internet to propagate their knowledge and arguments, which is likely why MacDonald emerged as the de facto intellectual leader of the Dissident or Alt-Right and Jones has become increasingly popular among younger White males. I invite readers to consider writing (or creating videos) about the Internet presence of both men.

Fate of Their Books

Some of Jones’ books are still available on Amazon, such as Degenerate Moderns, Libido Dominandi and The Slaughter of the Cities, though not JRS (old or new edition) or Logos Rising. (Oddly, Barren Metal, which appeared between JRS and Logos Rising, is available.)

In MacDonald’s case, the first book in the Jewish trilogy, A People That Shall Dwell Alone, is available at Amazon, as well as an earlier book, but not the second book in the trilogy, Separation and Its Discontents. Of course, CofC and Cultural Insurrections, the two most important books in his oeuvre, are unavailable. In contrast, Barnes and Noble sells both A People That Shall Dwell Alone and Separation and Its Discontents, and most importantly CofC (but not Cultural Insurrections). We find another split in sales where Amazon does sell Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future (2019) (which, as you might expect, takes a social science perspective on the history of the Catholic Church and its influence), but Barnes and Noble does not. Go figure. In any case, searching for each book on both sites can take some extra steps, so, again, just buy them via links on KMAC’s site.

God and Spirit

As indicated above, I’ve found myself involuntarily drifting toward a suspicion that it’s actually Jones and his belief in traditional Catholicism who is setting us further along the track than Kevin MacDonald. I say this with full knowledge of the fact that Jones resolutely disavows a belief in race, the importance of DNA and related matters. Of course, Jones is dead wrong about this, but weighed against the mass of superb scholarship Jones has done over thirty years, I intellectually ding him only about 3% for his odd claims dismissing race. Perhaps this intellectual chasm between the two men is all the more reason to achieve a synthesis of MacDonald and Jones.

Another relevant point is that over the last two decades I’ve found myself accepting a belief in the existence of Satan and Evil, and undeniably, from the perspectives of Whites and other non-Jews, Jews are inextricably associated with Satan, though I’ll leave it to others to argue whether they are, in some sense, actually Satan or more along the lines of being under the spell of that malicious being.

MacDonald can never go that route because science rejects believe in God, spiritualism, the supernatural realm, etc. For his part, Jones accepts the linkage of Jews and Satan but does this properly through the most basic of Christian doctrines—one of the Gospels. St. John writes in the Book of the Revelation (2.9, 3.9) that “those who call themselves Jews” are really liars and members of the “synagogue of Satan” (JRS, 15).

On page 32 Jones again quotes St. John by writing “The Devil is your father, and you prefer to do what your father wants. He was a murderer from the start and was never grounded in the truth; there is no truth in him at all.” I will not begin to try to unpack all of that here, but in the Introduction to JRS and here in Chapter One, titled “The Synagogue of Satan,” Jones makes a case that St. John was revealing that at the foot of the cross, when many Jews rejected Christ as the Messiah, a transformation in the term “Jew” was introduced, and no longer has “a clear racial meaning.” Further, “When the Jews rejected Christ, they rejected Logos, and when they rejected Logos … they became revolutionaries” (p. 15). The following thousand-plus pages is a story of their revolutionary actions, which can be seen as “the history of the Jews and the attacks on the Universal Christian Church by heretics linked to Jews or heavily influenced by Jews” (p. 20). On that count, Jones succeeds hands down in making his case.

(It is interesting to note that on the following page Jones approvingly cites Kevin MacDonald’s observation that movements are led by the few — which Jones indeed shows in his discussion of The Enlightenment, the birth of modern England, the Russian Revolution, the Civil Rights movement and the rise of the American Empire. That neither Jones’s insights nor those of MacDonald are recognized at all in education in the entire Anglo-sphere is, then, an unspeakable crime and we can thank both scholars for doing their best to right this wrong.)

I know I have given far more attention to the writing of Jones than to MacDonald, but that is because I am de facto in MacDonald’s camp, writing as I do for The Occidental Quarterly and The Occidental Observer, where I explicitly support MacDonald’s work and implicitly follow it at all times as well. With Jones, however, it takes a bit more effort. MacDonald writes with unbroken clarity in a social science style, so his own prose speaks for itself. In contrast, Jones is more of a storyteller whose constant goal is to reveal “the unwritten grammar” of events both old and new. The only other scholar I’ve seen succeed in this so successfully in the cultural sphere is the late Jewish professor Stephen Whitfield (American Space, Jewish Time, 1988), though Whitfield covers only a fraction of the story Jones does. The style is fun but can take a little getting used to.

Jones uses other metaphors for exposing “the unwritten grammar” of reality. For instance, in Chapter 71 of Barren Metal, “Andrew Jackson and the Monster Bank,” Jones argues that “Jackson’s repeated use of the word ‘monster’ is the key which unlocks the door to understanding.” This passage highlights both the beauty and the utility of Jones’ writing, in this instance in a critique of usury:

What [author] Meyer failed to mention is that usury is, as Ezra Pound would have put it, contra naturam, and, by its very nature monstrous. Far from being a mysterious lapse into incoherence, Jackson’s repeated use of the word ‘monster’ is the key which unlocks the door to understanding his stake in this fight. A monster is something unnatural. Usury is monstrous because it is contra naturam. The bank war of the 1830s arose because neither Andrew Jackson nor his opponent Nicholas Biddle could articulate the real issue which had plagued the American System from its inception in the mind of Alexander Hamilton, namely, usury.

I suspect our editor Kevin MacDonald will not be overly persuaded by my foray into religion, but these unhappy, desperate times push me to desperate thoughts. By all rational, material measurements, the White race has been defeated by Jewry. Point to even one area in which Whites hold a credible counter to Jewish power. There are none. Except — and this is where desperation comes in — a turn to the possible existence of God, and the Christian God at that. Remember, if I can be convinced that Satan is alive and well, I can well consider that Satan’s opponent, God, also exists. It’s a start.

And I’m not the only one thinking this way. Much to my utter surprise, none other than enfant terrible Andrew Anglin has headed in much the same direction, to the extent that he, too, is turning to E. Michael Jones. In a blog on September 24, 2021, he posted this lecture by Jones:

Commenting on this video, Anglin wrote:

When I read about the way homosexuals have infiltrated the Catholic Church, my resolve in the belief that there is only one true faith is strengthened, as it makes perfect sense to me that in this time of ultimate, total, global satanic Jewish evil, that the Catholic Church would be under such aggressive assault by the Devil….

I will admit, however, that a big part of this is the fact that I really believe that E. Michael Jones is the only relevant living Christian intellectual. However, if that is the case, then why? Surely, God will offer us a guide in this time of darkness? I’m only seeing one guide, who actually seems like an adult.

I am personally cursed to see clearly what is happening in the material world. But I am not any clearer than you on what is happening in the spiritual world. So I am left in as much of a conundrum in trying to figure out what the true nature of religion is as anyone else.

Like Jones, Anglin believes that the Catholic Church “is a top target of Satan.” And any regular reader of The Daily Stormer knows that Anglin sees Jews at the center of all of this. Anglin and Jones are strange bedfellows indeed, but if Jesus could forgive a former prostitute and welcome her among his most intimate followers, Jones and the rest of us might also accept Anglin in a similar way.

Isn’t there an inescapable feeling that we are at a crossroads of history? MacDonald emphasizes that if Whites cannot adopt a counter strategy to the current Jewish group evolutionary one, our prospects are doubtful. Anglin, too, has admitted that The West has lost to the Jews and now is the time merely to survive. Jones, however, offers hope. In the closing of JRS, he writes:

The final collapse of Jewish resistance to Logos will take place when they have reached the pinnacle of worldly power. At no time in the past 2000 years have Jews had more power than now. …

The conversion of the Jews did not seem imminent. The Jews had never been more powerful; the Church, the antagonist of the synagogue of Satan for 2000 years, had never been weaker. But appearances can deceive. Benedict XVI, the author of Dominus Iesus, had said, even before becoming pope, that he looked forward to the conversion of the Jews. Reversal was in the air. (1073–77)

Perhaps we can only pray that this is so.

Conclusion

As stated above, both MacDonald and Jones, based  particularly on their books CofC and JRS, appear to be right with respect to the JQ. One cannot, for instance, read the writings of MacDonald and conclude, “No, he is wrong.” On scientific terms, he has nailed it. With Jones’ writing on Jews, it is not as easy to declare outright that “This is true” because it revolves around religion, and belief is a chief characteristic of religion. It is simply not susceptible to scientific proof. Still, when a reader gets to the end of JRS, the overwhelming response has to be, “Dr. Jones has made his case about the revolutionary (and destructive) nature of Jews.”

This is such an important point to grasp. Take, for instance, last year’s George Floyd incident, BLM violence, and what has since flowed from them. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s it was pretty much common knowledge that Jews were using Blacks as a battering ram against White society, yet by my estimation, about 90% of the writing on Blacks and American society since last year either states or implies that it is Black agency and power themselves that are responsible for this. Of course, that is preposterous. Blacks don’t have any power. Jews are responsible, and KM and EMJ have written brilliantly on this in an historical context. KM did so in his essay “Jews, Blacks, and Race,” which appeared in Cultural Insurrections, while Jones did so extensively in JRS (specifically chapters 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 26 and 29). This should be common knowledge still but is not.

Again, I must stress how critical it is to openly talk about Jews and the JQ, precisely as KM and EMJ have done. As Jones wrote in Culture Wars in the December 2020 issue, Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu told us, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” That is why Jones ceaselessly names the enemy: “If you want to succeed in the culture wars, you must identify the enemy.”

Elsewhere (Part 1 & Part 2; also here) I’ve cited TOO writer Andrew Joyce on both naming the Jew and describing their destructive (and often revolutionary) behavior. Just recently he contributed a new TOO essay in which he reviewed a new Arktos book by New Zealander Kerry Bolton, a book which gets to the heart of both MacDonald’s and Jones’s cases. Not mincing words, Joyce writes that “a very Jewish cast of characters were responsible for developing, spreading, and implementing many of the most destructive ideas of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At the heart of these ideas is the desire to fracture the host society/mass culture.” Joyce quotes Bolton for a specific argument:

The focus of this Neo-Freudianism is on the individual detached from society. It is therefore a means of deconstructing and fracturing the social organism, which is why the Marxian theorists who created the Frankfurt Institute in 1923 found Freudianism to be such a useful ingredient in creating a new revolutionary synthesis. The organic bonds of family, state, faith, and ethos, disparaged as ‘primary ties’ in need of cutting, were portrayed as injurious to the individual well-being and as repressing the individual’s path to self-actualisation.

Bolton, Joyce notes, shows that “The primary weapon employed by all factions is the Freudo-Marxism Synthesis, which touted social engineering as a ‘therapy’ but possessed social control as its aim. This synthesis and its early promotion were of course Jewish in origin, and Bolton makes sure to hammer this point home.” Fortunately for us, Bolton is as tenacious as Joyce and “repeatedly stresses that many of these figures are Jews, and that the Frankfurt School, its funders, and many other peripheral associations involved in early Cultural Marxism were ‘largely Jewish.’” This corresponds completely with the scope of the writing of MacDonald and Jones, both of whom are referenced in Joyce’s essay. I’m completely astonished at this late date that so many otherwise intelligent people either fail to see this or opt not to mention it.

In any case, for years, a tiny minority of us Whites have labored mightily to inform fellow Whites (and fellow Christians) of the threats posed by our enemy. We have done what we can but it appears not to suffice. Perhaps, then, E. Michael Jones has it right in the video above when he says to change the question from “What can we do?” to “What can God do?” Maybe so. In our desperate hour, maybe that’s all we can do. I’m running out of other ideas.

Review of David Skrbina’s The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul’s Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years

The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul’s Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Year
David Skrbina
Creative Fire Press, 2019

David Skrbina is a professional philosopher who was a senior lecturer at the University of Michigan from 2003–2018. In addition to the book under review, he has written and edited a number of books, including The Metaphysics of Technology (Routledge, 2014), Panpsychism in the West (MIT Press, 2017), and the anthology Confronting Technology (Creative Fire Press, 2020).

The Jesus Hoax attempts to convince the reader that there is no rational basis for Christianity and that the motivation for its main originator, St. Paul, was antagonism toward the Roman Empire. Within this framework, Paul was a Jewish nationalist whose goal was to recruit non-Jews to oppose the Roman imperium: “Since the biblical Jesus story is false, it was evidently constructed by Paul and his fellow Jews in order to sway the gullible Gentile masses to their side and away from Rome” (43). Indeed, Skrbina claims that Paul may have been a Zealot, i.e., a member of a Jewish sect dedicated to violent resistance against the Romans, concluding “it seems clear that he was an ardent Jewish nationalist opposed to Roman rule, as was the case with most elite Jews of the time” (37).

Skrbina argues that there is no convincing evidence for the truth of the Jesus story, either within the canonical New Testament or from non-Christian sources. The earliest reference from a non-Christian source is a paragraph from the Jewish writer Josephus dated to 93 recounting the basic story, that Jesus was crucified “upon the accusation of the principal men among us”—i.e., the elite Jews of the period. Here Skrbina raises a general issue: the earliest source for the passage from Josephus is from the Christian apologist Eusebius in the fourth century, and the oldest sources for the gospels themselves are dated much later than they were supposedly written (70–95), leaving open the possibility of redactions and interpolations. For example, the oldest copy of the complete Gospel of Matthew, which, as noted below, contains the most inflammatory anti-Jewish passage of all, dates from the mid-fourth century, well after Constantine had legalized Christianity in the Empire and anti-Jewish attitudes were rife among intellectuals like Eusebius and the Church fathers such as St. John Chrysostom.”[1] The extent of redaction and interpolation remains unknown and presents obvious problems of interpretation.

The first Romans to comment on Christianity were Tacitus and Pliny (~115), both of whom disliked Christianity. As Skrbina notes, “the Romans were generally tolerant of other religions, and thus we must conclude that there was something uniquely problematic about this group” (60).

And Skrbina is well aware that an analysis of the entire early Christian movement must be aware of Jewish issues, quoting Nietzsche: “The first thing to be remembered, if we do not wish to lose the scent here, is that we are among Jews” (34). He is quite accurate in his assessment of Jewish ethnocentrism: Jews “saw themselves as special, different, ‘select,’ and thus they put these ideas into the mouth of their God. Certainly, no one would deny a people pride in themselves. But these extreme statements go far beyond normal bounds. They indicate a kind of self-absorption, a self-glorification, perhaps a narcissism, perhaps a conceit. To be chosen by the creator of the universe, and to be granted the right to rule, ruthlessly, over all other nations, bespeaks a kind of megalomania that is unprecedented in history” (63).

Not surprisingly, such a people have often been hated by others, and Skrbina recounts the many examples of anti-Jewish attitudes and actions in the ancient world: “where the Jews settled amongst other peoples, they seem to have made enemies” (65), noting particularly the recurrent theme—a theme that continued long past the ancient world—of Jews allying themselves with ruling elites against the native population. I was particularly struck by a passage Skrbina quotes from recent scholarship referring to advice given in 134 BC to King Antiochus VII, the Greek ruler of the Seleucid Empire, to exterminate the Jews: “for they alone among all the peoples refused all relations with other races, and saw everyone as their enemy; their forebears, impious and cursed by the gods, had been driven out of Egypt. The counselors [cited] the Jews’ hatred of all mankind, sanctioned by their very laws, which forbade them to share their table with a Gentile or give any sign of benevolence.”[2]

Skrbina concludes that there is a “deeply-embedded misanthropic streak” in Jews that continues into the contemporary era, quoting the famous passage from Rabbi Yosef who, in 2010 stated, “Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world—only to serve the people of Israel. They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi [a man of high social standing] and eat” (Jerusalem Post, October 18, 2010). Skrbina: “There is something about Jewish culture that inspires disgust and hatred” (79).

Based on the extensive citations to the Old Testament, Skrbina concludes that the Gospels, commonly dated well after Paul’s writing, were also likely written by Jews. Skrbina notes that the latest-dated gospel, John, is addressed to “intra-Jewish squabbling” (41) over the issue of Jesus being the Messiah—obviously a view rejected by Orthodox Jews. In other words, John identifies as a Jew but as a Jew battling the Orthodox Jewish establishment. Importantly, John contains anti-Jewish passages that would echo down the centuries: Jews “sought to kill Jesus,” and the gospel represents Jesus as saying, “You [Jews] are of your father the devil… He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44) (41). Many contemporary scholars accept the view that anti-Jewish statements in the Gospels are intramural disputes about whether Jews or Christians were the chosen people of God.

Of course, there are many other anti-Jewish statements:

  • John 5:18: For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill [Jesus], because he was not only breaking the sabbath, but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God.
  • John 7:1: After these things Jesus walked in Galilee: for he would not walk in Jewry, because the Jews sought to kill him.
  • John 7:12–13: And there was considerable complaining about him among the crowds. While some were saying, “He is a good man,” others were saying, “No, he is deceiving the crowd.” Yet no one would speak openly about him for fear of the Jews.
  • John 8:37: I know that you are descendants of Abraham; yet you look for an opportunity to kill me, because there is no place in you for my word.

And the most influential of all:

  • Matthew 27:25–26: When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but thatrather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.

Such sentiments are not only found in the Gospels. St. Paul: 

  • 1Thess 2:14–15: For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which in Judaea are in Christ Jesus: for ye also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as they haveof the Jews: Who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men.

Skrbina, discussing the Gospel of Mark, notes that Paul et al. had two enemies, the Romans and non-believing Jews like the Pharisees who “wanted to kill Jesus” (95). Mark therefore blamed both, and Skrbina concludes that “Mark’s anger against his fellow Jews … got the better of him; for centuries afterward, Christians would blame the Jews for killing Christ, not realizing that the whole tale was a Jewish construction in the first place” (95).

Later in Matthew and Luke, “the anti-Jewish rhetoric heats up a bit; the Jews are called ‘a brood of vipers’ (Mat 3:7, 12:34, 23:33) and ‘lovers of money’ (Lu 16:14). And there are repetitions of the message of revolution, including armed confrontation (“I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” [Mat. 10:34]) and it depicts that the coming confrontation would split families.

Skrbina’s reconstruction of the trajectory of Christianity is presented as tentative (“I’ll not claim certainty here” [81]). For example, he imagines a soliloquy by Jewish patriot Paul asking, “What message could our ‘Jesus’ take to the masses,” answering “we need them to be pro-Jewish, not make them Jews–no, that would never work. We need something new, a ‘third way’ between Judaism and paganism. Maybe for a start, we could get them to worship our God Jehovah, and not that absurd Roman pantheon” (84; emphasis in text). And the whole point was to encourage revolt: “Throughout [Paul’s] letters we find numerous references to enslavement, revolution, insurrection, war, the importance of the disempowered masses, and so on. In the early Galatians we read of the need for Jesus to ‘deliver us from the present evil age’ ([Galatians] 1:4)” (90). Skrbina considers the following passage, from 1Corinthians 1:4 “decisive” (92): 

For consider your call, brethren, not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God chose what is foolish to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are. (Skrbina’s emphasis)

Militancy increases in Luke and Matthew, both dated to 85. Matthew (10:34): “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

If one agrees with Skrbina on all this, then he suggests that you “go to your local church leaders and confront them with the evidence (or lack thereof). Their response will confirm everything you need to know. Then, make it clear to them that you have been swindled” (112). And: “Christians need to own up the fact that they have been swindled, and then see if anything can be salvaged of their religion. Keep the social club, do charity work, help the poor—just dump the bogus metaphysics” (116). 

Discussion

Since I am not a believer and since I am quite cognizant of Jewish efforts to manipulate the beliefs and attitudes of non-Jews—the thesis, after all, of The Culture of Critique—I am quite open to Skrbina’s interpretation. However, there are a few things that bother me. 

Liars? In Skrbina’s view, the entire project was based on lies, lies made possible by Jewish contempt for non-Jews. In a section titled “Paul, Liar Supreme,” we find “The Gentiles were always treated by the Jews with contempt. … They could be manipulated, harassed, assaulted, beaten, even killed if it served Jewish interests” (99). The gospel writers were also likely liars: “Even in ancient times, people were not idiots. How could Mark accept without any apparent evidence or confirmation, such fantastic tales? And accept them so completely that he would write them down as factual truth, as real and actual events? And then how could the same thing happen three more times, to three different individuals?” (106). And Paul is even more unlikely to have actually believed what he was writing because he was so close to the events he wrote about, and because he was a “clever man. How could he possibly have fallen so completely for a bogus Jewish messiah that he would dedicate his life to spreading the story?” (106).

This is presented as an issue of cleverness, and it is certainly true that there is a small but consistent negative correlation between intelligence and religiosity.[3]  But the weakness of the association—explaining around four percent of the variance—indicates that there are plenty of intelligent people who are quite religious. This would have been even more likely in the ancient world—a context in which religion was taken very seriously, where miraculous events were taken for granted by many, and where there wasn’t already a long history of philosophical skepticism about religion, as there is in the contemporary West. Or consider the medieval period in the West that produced highly intelligent believers, such as St. Thomas Aquinas or William of Occam. Or the ultra-religious but very intelligent Puritans who settled New England and quickly founded Harvard University and the other elite Ivy League universities. We live in an age where science has become the height of respectability—hence the attempts to manipulate what can pass as scientific to serve other interests and have a dramatic impact on contemporary culture. However, the cultural context has been much different in the past, and I suspect that correlations between intelligence and religiosity would have been approximately zero in many historical periods.

Another issue related to lying is martyrdom. The proposal that Paul and the gospel writers were liars must deal with the issue of “Who would die for a lie? … as Jews, they were all, already, under persecution from the Romans. As extremist, fanatical Jews they were willing to do anything and suffer any punishment, in order to help ‘Israel’” (110). It’s certainly true that Jews died and were enslaved in droves when the Romans put down the Jewish uprisings, and this was presumably on the minds of the putative gospel writers (the first Roman-Jewish war was in 70), so the extreme altruism of martyrdom for the benefit of the group seems possible, particularly among Jews—there is a long tradition of Jewish martyrdom that continues to be an important aspect of Jewish identity. However, stories of martyrdom in both the Christian and Jewish traditions may well be at least exaggerated if not entirely apocryphal (e.g., here) because of their usefulness in creating a strong sense of ingroup identity.

Again, there are the questions of who wrote the New Testament and when was it written, including possible redactions and interpolations. I am not at all a scholar on the New Testament, but I note that a recent scholar, Robert Price, dates the first collection of St. Paul’s letters from Marcion in the second century, with the authorship of some letters highly contested, and a strong possibility of interpolations by later collectors:

The question of authorship would have little bearing here one way or the other. In this process, interpolations were made and then gradually permeated the text tradition of each letter until final canonization of the Pastoral edition (and concurrent burning of its rivals) put a stop to all that. … But the first collector of the Pauline Epistles had been Marcion. No one else we know of would be a good candidate, certainly not the essentially fictive Luke, Timothy, and Onesimus. And Marcion, as Burkitt and Bauer show, fills the bill perfectly. Of the epistles themselves, he is probably the original author of Laodiceans (the Vorlage [i.e., original version] of Ephesians) and perhaps of Galatians, too. Like Muhammad in the Koran, he would have read his own struggles back into the careers of his biblical predecessors.

But there are other scholars who continue to uphold the view that the New Testament is a reliable account, or at least reliable enough (see, e.g., Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the New Testament: Countering the Challenges to Evangelical Christian Beliefs). I am certainly not in any position to evaluate what continues to be a very contentious area which has been covered in minute deal for at least 200 years, often by highly motivated scholars. At this late stage of scholarship, it seems unlikely that a consensus will ever be reached, especially because a great deal of the scholarship may well be motivated by a desire to defend deeply held religious beliefs—or dispute them; e.g., Blomberg describes himself as “a Christian believer of an evangelical persuasion” (xxv), which doesn’t mean that he is incorrect, but indicates that he would be motivated to defend his beliefs.

Given all this complexity I take that path of humility in trying to assess these issues, resulting in my being an agnostic about the historicity of the New Testament, whether whoever wrote it were liars, and what their real agendas were. I am persuaded that there is no consensus on what was actually written in the first century, and I accept the possibility that the writings that survive as the canonical writings of Christianity may well include later redactions and interpolations that reflect very different perceptions and interests from those of the putative first-century writers.

The Anti-Jewish Statements in the New Testament. I noted above that there are quite a few anti-Jewish passages in the New Testament, including from St. Paul himself. Skrbina claims that “The scattered anti-Jewish statements in all the Gospels—especially John—more reflect an internal Jewish battle over ideology than an external, Gentile attack” (107–108). This is a common scholarly view, but if you are trying to recruit Gentiles to your movement to serve Jewish interests, would you really want to litter your writing with anti-Jewish statements? In fact, these statements, particularly the claim that Jews committed deicide, have been used by Christians against Jews throughout the succeeding centuries, most notably “His blood be on us, and on our children.” Although the major outbreaks of anti-Semitism have always involved far more than Christian religious beliefs—they have typically occurred during periods of resource competition of various sorts (MacDonald, 1998)—I have no doubt that Christian beliefs about Jews fed into and exacerbated anti-Jewish attitudes, especially in the past when vast sections of the European population were deeply religious—e.g., during the Middle Ages when religious beliefs motivated the Crusades and long, arduous pilgrimages to sites where miracles were said to have occurred. It was a period when, e.g., Notre Dame de Paris, the symbol of traditional France, was adorned with anti-Jewish imagery.

Ecclesia (right) and Synagoga, illustrating Jewish blindness in rejecting Christianity

Indeed, Jewish perceptions of the anti-Jewish nature of Christian theology have resulted in Jewish activism to essentially rewrite or reinterpret the New Testament in their interests. Antonius J. Patrick summarizes this strand of Jewish activism in his review of Vicomte Léon de Poncins’ Judaism and the Vatican: An Attempt at Spiritual Subversion:

The pronouncements on non-Christian religions and the declaration Nostra aetate passed in the Fourth Session of the Council (1965) accomplished almost all that the Modernists had hoped for. In effect, these pronouncements repudiated nearly two thousand years of Catholic teaching on the Jews. Ever since, the Church has continually bowed to Jewish pressure in regard to its liturgy, the naming of saints, and in the political realm—its most infamous decision in the latter being the recognition of the state of Israel in 1994.

Poncins, who closely covered the Vatican II proceedings, wrote of the declaration:

. . . a number of Jewish organizations and personalities are behind the reforms which were proposed at the Council with a view to modifying the Church’s attitude and time-honored teaching about Judaism: Jules Isaac, Label Katz, President of the B’nai B’rith, Nahum Goldman, President of the World Jewish Congress, etc. . . . These reforms are very important because they suggest that for two thousand years the Church had been mistaken and that she must make amends and completely reconsider her attitude to the Jews.

The leading figure in the years prior to the Council was the virulent anti-Catholic writer Jules Isaac, and he played an active role during the Counsel. “Isaac,” Poncins describes, “turned the Council to advantage, having found there considerable support among progressive bishops. In fact, he became the principal theorist and promoter of the campaign being waged against the traditional teaching of the Church.”

Isaac had long before begun his hostile campaign to overturn Catholic teaching on the Jews with his two most important books on the subject: Jésus et Israel (1946) and Genèse de l’Antisémitisme (1948). Poncins accurately summarizes the main thrust of these works:

In these books Jules Isaac fiercely censures Christian teaching, which he says has been the source of modern anti-Semitism, and preaches, though it would be more correct to say he demands, the ‘purification’ and ‘amendment’ of doctrines two thousand years old.

Moreover, whatever the beliefs and motives of St. Paul and the Gospel writers, the Church had essentially become an anti-Jewish movement by the fourth century when Catholicism became the official religion of the Roman Empire:

The proposal here is that in this period of enhanced group conflict, anti-Jewish leaders such as [St. John] Chrysostom [who retains a chapel named after him at St. Peter’s basilica in Rome] attempted to convey a very negative view of Jews. Jews were to be conceptualized not as harmless practitioners of exotic, entertaining religious practices, or as magicians, fortune tellers, or healers [as had been the case previously], but as the very embodiment of evil. The entire thrust of the legislation that emerged during this period was to erect walls of separation between Jews and gentiles, to solidify the gentile group, and to make all gentiles aware of who the “enemy” was. Whereas these walls had been established and maintained previously only by Jews, in this new period of intergroup conflict the gentiles were raising walls between themselves and Jews….

The interpretation proposed here is that group conflict between Jews and gentiles entered a new stage in the 4th century. It is of considerable interest that it was during this period that accusations of Jewish greed, wealth, love of luxury and of the pleasures of the table became common (Simon 1986, 213). Such accusations did not occur during earlier periods, when anti-Jewish writings concentrated instead on Jewish separatism. These new charges suggest that Jews had increasingly developed a reputation as wealthy, and they in turn suggest that anti-Semitism had entered a new phase in the ancient world, one centered around resource competition and concerns regarding Jewish economic success, domination of gentiles [especially enslaving gentiles], and relative reproductive success. …

Jews were increasingly entering the imperial and municipal service in the 4th century until being excluded from these occupations in the 5th century—an aspect of the wide range of economic, social, and legal prohibitions on Jews dating from this period [particularly prohibitions on Jews owning Christian slaves—itself an indication of the superior wealth of Jews]. These factors, in combination with traditional gentile hostility to Judaism (because of its separatist practices and perceptions of Jewish misanthropy and perhaps of Jewish wealth), set the stage for a major anti-Semitic movement. The proposal here is that this anti-Semitic movement crystallized in the Christian Church. (Separation and Its Discontents, Ch. 3, 96, 98, 99)

It is quite possible that the anti-Jewish statements in the New Testament are interpolations made much later by anti-Jewish writers motivated by resource competition and Jews enslaving Christians. If so, the liars were not Paul and the Gospel writers, but Christians concerned about Jews in the third and fourth centuries. J. G. Gager suggests that the extant literature from the early Church was deliberately selected to emphasize anti-Jewish themes and exclude other voices, much as the priestly redaction of the Pentateuch retained from earlier writings only what was compatible with Judaism as a diaspora ideology (J. G. Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity (Oxford, 1983), 7; N. deLange, “The origins of anti-Semitism: Ancient evidence and modern interpretation,” In Anti-Semitism in Times of Crisis, S. L. Gilman & S. T. Katz (NYU Press, 1991, 30–31). It’s quite conceivable that, rather than reflecting real intra-Jewish squabbles in the first century, as suggested by Skrbina, these early works were deliberately embellished in order to emphasize anti-Jewish themes in the originals—or they were completely fabricated—at a time when these writers had become strongly anti-Jewish for reasons that would not have been salient in the first century. In any case, this possibility is highly compatible with the view that there was a qualitative shift toward the conscious construction of a fundamentally anti-Jewish version of history during the formative period of the Catholic Church.

Consequences of the Lies. Skrbina ends by claiming that Paul’s lies were successful: “It took a few hundred years, but when enough people fell for the hoax, it helped to bring down the Roman Empire” (122). And he describes the lies as a “mortal threat”: “eventually drawing in 2 billion people, becoming an enemy of truth and reason, and causing deaths of millions of human beings via inquisitions, witch burnings, crusades, and other religious atrocities” (101).

I have never seen a scholarly argument that the institutionalization of the Catholic Church contributed importantly to the fall of the Empire. The Eastern Empire, although losing substantial territory to the Muslims, was only overthrown in 1453 after centuries of battling them. However, it’s certainly a reasonable idea given that Christian religious ideology was the polar opposite of thoroughly militarized Indo-European culture upon which Rome was built. Ancient Greco-Roman culture was fundamentally aristocratic and based on ideas of natural inequality and natural hierarchy. Thus, Plato’s “just society” as depicted in The Republic was to be ruled by philosophers because they were truly rational, and he assumes there are natural differences in the capacity for rationality—a modern would phrase it in terms of the behavior genetics of IQ and personality. Aristotle believed that some people were slaves “by nature” (Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 52), i.e., that the hierarchy between masters and slaves was natural. Reflecting themes common in Indo-European culture emphasized by Ricardo Duchesne (The Uniqueness of Western Civilization), the ancients prized fame and glory (positive esteem from others) resulting from genuine virtue and military and political accomplishments—but not labor, because laborers were often slaves and the rightful booty of conquest.

So the Christian ethic of prizing meekness, humility, and labor was quite a change. Within Christian ideology the individual replaced the ancient Indo-European family as the seat of moral legitimacy. Christian ideology was intended for all humans, resulting in a sense of moral egalitarianism, at least within the Christian community, rather than seeing society as based on natural hierarchy. Individual souls were seen as having moral agency and equal value in the eyes of God—a theology that has had very negative effects in the contemporary world.

However, universalism and the Christian virtues of meekness and humility are not the only story and indeed, as Skrbina notes, the sword also makes an appearance in the New Testament. In the Middle Ages Christianity was Germanized (James Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, Oxford, 1996), making it much more compatible with an aristocratic warrior ethnic. And in the medieval period and beyond, Christianity facilitated Western individualism and essentially ushered in the modern age of science, technological progress, and territorial expansion (Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World, 2020; MacDonald, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, 2019).

As a direct result, Christians who had a firm conviction about their beliefs eventually conquered the world and have been responsible for essentially all of the scientific and technological progress that created the modern world. Indeed, in his The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich argues that the medieval Church invented Western individualism by insisting on monogamous marriage and by “demolishing” extended kinship relations, presented by Henrich as an attempt to understand, as phrased in his subtitle, How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (Harvard, 2020). I have quite a few objections to his approach (see here), but he is certainly correct that the Church was influential in opposing the power of extended kinship groups and preventing concubinage and polygyny among elites, thereby facilitating a relatively egalitarian marriage regime. Essentially Henrich ignores the ethnic basis of Western individualism that reaches back into pre-historic Western Europe and is certainly reflected in the classical Western civilizations of Greece and Rome. Henrich also ignores genetic influences on IQ and personality. But I agree with a much weaker version—that the Church facilitated Western individualism and so helped give rise to the modern world (Chapter 5 of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, 2019).

So it’s not entirely a story of “causing deaths of millions of human beings via inquisitions, witch burnings, crusades, and other religious atrocities.” But the sad reality is that contemporary Christianity, or at least the vast majority of it, is utterly opposed to the interests of the people who have historically made it their religion. For example, Prof. Andrew Fraser has interpreted fundamental Christian texts in a manner consistent with an ethnic form of Christianity (e.g., “Global Jesus versus National Jesus”, and in The Sword of Christ (2020; this book seems to have been banned by Amazon), Giles Corey attempts to rescue an ethnically viable Christianity from the ruins of contemporary, leftist-dominated Christian theology. As I note in my preface:

Religious thinking is by its nature unbounded—it is infinitely malleable [so that, for example, redactions and interpolations on the New Testament could easily have been adapted to create a fundamentally new theology]. It is a dangerous sword that can be used to further legitimate interests of believers, or it can become a lethal weapon whereby believers adopt attitudes that are obviously maladaptive. One need only think of religiously based suicide cults, such as People’s Temple (Jonestown), Solar Temple and Heaven’s Gate. Mainstream Christianity from traditional Catholicism to mainstream Protestantism was fundamentally adaptive in terms of creating a healthy family life. It was compatible with a culture characterized by extraordinary scientific and technological creativity, [territorial expansion], and standards of living that have been much envied by the rest of the world. …

Corey is well aware that contemporary Christianity has been massively corrupted. Mainline Protestant and Catholic Churches have become little more than appendages for the various social justice movements of the left, avidly promoting the colonization of the West by other races and cultures, even as religious fervor and attendance dwindle and Christianity itself becomes ever more irrelevant to the national dialogue. [Guillaume Durocher notes that only 6–12 percent of the French population are practicing Catholics, indicating that Catholicism cannot be blamed for France’s current malaise.] On the other hand, [American] Evangelicals, a group that remains vigorously Christian, have been massively duped by the theology of Christian Zionism, their main focus being to promote Israel. [In general, they have rejected an explicit White identity or a sense of White interests.]

Until the twentieth century, Christianity served the West well. One need only think of the long history of Christians battling to prevent Muslims from establishing a caliphate throughout the West—Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours, the Spanish Reconquista, the defeat of the Turks at the gates of Vienna. The era of Western expansion was accomplished by Christian explorers and colonists. Until quite recently, the flourishing of science, technology, and art occurred entirely within a Christian context.

Corey advocates a revitalization of Medieval Germanic Christianity based on, in the words of Samuel Francis, “social hierarchy, loyalty to tribe and place (blood and soil), world-acceptance rather than world-rejection, and an ethic that values heroism and military sacrifice.”  This medieval Christianity preserved the aristocratic, fundamentally Indo-European culture of the Germanic tribes. This was an adaptive Christianity, a Christianity that was compatible with Western expansion, to the point that by the end of the nineteenth century, the West dominated the planet. Christianity per se is certainly not the problem.

The decline of adaptive Christianity coincides with the post-Enlightenment rise of the Jews throughout the West as an anti-Christian elite, and Corey has a great deal of very interesting material on traditional Christian views of Judaism. Traditional Christian theology viewed the Church as having superseded the Old Testament and that, by rejecting the Church, the Jews had not only rejected God, they were responsible for murdering Christ. …

In fact, intellectual movements of the left—disseminated throughout the educational system and by the elite media—have exploited the Western liberal tradition. The intellectuals who came to dominate American intellectual discourse and the media were quite aware of the need to appeal to Western proclivities toward individualism, egalitarianism, and moral universalism by essentially creating a moral community that appealed to these traits but also served their interests. A theme of The Culture of Critique is that moral indictments of their opponents have been prominent in the writings of the activist intellectuals reviewed there, including political radicals and those opposing biological perspectives on individual and group differences in IQ. A sense of moral superiority was also prevalent in the psychoanalytic movement, and the Frankfurt School developed the view that social science was to be judged by moral criteria.

The triumph of the cultural left to the point of substantial consensus in the West has created a moral community where people who do not subscribe to their beliefs are seen as not only intellectually deficient but as morally evil. Moral communities rather than kinship are the social glue of Western societies. Westerners, being individualists and relatively unconcerned about the prospects of their kin beyond their immediate family, willingly punish other Whites who oppose their moral community, even at cost to themselves (altruistic punishment). Their main concern is to have a good reputation in their moral community which is now defined by the media and the educational system—a moral community that was created by hostile elites out of fear and loathing of the traditional White American majority (see Culture of Critique, Ch. 7).

Finally, Skrbina asks, “Can it really be beneficial to accept a myth as truth? Can one really live a happy, successful, and meaningful life dedicated to a false story or a lie?” (16). I think that the answer is that yes it can. As an evolutionist, my working hypothesis is that when it comes to the realm of ideas, evolution does not aim for truth but rather for success in continuing one’s family and increasing the prospects of one’s tribe. Certainly the religious beliefs of other groups, say Muslims, Jews, or Mormons, may well be false and based on inventions. But the people believing in these lies have often done very well in evolutionary terms and are continuing to do so. Ashkenazi Jewish eugenics proceeded for centuries in a religious context, resulting in a highly intelligent elite able to wield vast influence throughout the West. Islam expanded over hundreds of years, controlling vast territories, with leaders rewarded by large harems and many descendants; Islam is now rapidly expanding in Europe and has higher fertility than native Europeans. It’s well known that seriously religious, fundamentalist Christians in the West have more children on average than non-Christian Europeans, which is certainly adaptive. But they are also more likely to swear fealty to the interests of Israel and in general they are entirely resistant to being informed about the negative effects of multiculturalism or about Jewish cultural influence (whose effects they despise) or even Jewish traditional hostility toward Christianity.

And it can scarcely be doubted that Catholicism and mainline Protestantism have been completely corrupted and actively subverted so that millions of White Americans have been swept up by the multiculturalism and replacement-level immigration as moral imperatives. Jewish activism has certainly been part of this, but traditional Christian universalism and moral egalitarianism are also part of the equation. One might say that Christianity, despite periods when it was highly adaptive, carried the seeds of its own destruction—a chink in its armor that made it relatively easy to subvert once the culture of the West had been subverted by our new hostile elite.

So, in my view, it’s a complex story, and one that is far from finished.


[1] Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (AuthorHouse, 2003; originally published: Praeger, 1998), Ch. 3.

[2] Quoted in Emilio Gabba, “The Growth of Anti-Judaism or the Greek Attitude toward the Jews.” In W. D. Davies & Louis Finkelstein (Eds.), The Cambridge History of Judaism. Vol. 2: The Hellenistic Age (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 614–656, 645).

[3] Miron Zuckerman, et al., “The Negative Intelligence–Religiosity Relation: New and Confirming Evidence,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 46, no. 6(2020): 856–868.

 

Julien Langella’s Catholic and Identitarian


Catholic & Identitarian: From Protest to Reconquest
Julien Langella
Arktos, 2020.

“The absence of anger is a sign of the absence of reason.”
Saint Thomas Aquinas

For better or worse, I’m fairly certain there hasn’t been a Catholic in my family tree since the Reformation, and I remain unsure about a strict definition of “Identitarianism.” It was with an ambivalent but open mind, then, that I recently read Julien Langella’s Catholic & Identitarian, a furious lament on the present condition of France and a firm apologetic for ethnic activism among Christians. Such a text is surely needed. In May 2016 I wrote a scathing essay on Christian attitudes to, and activism on behalf of, mass migration, prompted by the foot-kissing antics of Pope Francis, described in the essay as “the personification of a sick glorification of humility and weakness.” Although I focused for the most part on the Catholic Church, I took aim at all denominations with the demand that “Those who describe themselves as Christian White advocates need to become more vocal in articulating a more ethnocentric or culture-based theology that their co-religionists will find convincing. It is simply not enough to hope that Nationalists can achieve something politically and then come to the rescue of the churches.” Julien Langella, one of the co-founders of Génération Identitaire and whose text first appeared in French in 2017, has provided an admirable response to this problem that will appeal to, and educate, readers of all religious backgrounds and none.

Is this a Catholic book? Yes and no. Religious elements of the text are, thankfully in my opinion, framed as a backdrop to the primary concern: the French are facing the gradual but imminent replacement of their ethnic group in their own homeland. Langella’s central ambition in the book is therefore to explain and condemn this Great Replacement while stressing how Catholicism (and other important facets of the traditional and ancestral life of the French) could and should be used as an underpinning for a resurgent French “Identitarianism.” Langella helpfully avoids some of the clichés of the “TradCath” social media scene by demonstrating an impressive grasp of historical Catholic literature as well as a mature and wide-ranging understanding of many of the contemporary political, ideological, and economic currents that have combined against the European peoples. Most important of all, he is honest in his criticisms of the prevailing attitudes of the Catholic Church on mass migration and ethnicity, devoting one section of the book to a dissection of Pope Francis himself. Unashamedly local in concern, yet avoiding a parochialism that ignores the need for Europeans to unite on some level, Catholic & Identitarian is the most impassioned warning and call to action that I’ve read since Guillaume Faye’s blistering Ethnic Apocalypse (2019).

The book is divided into five chapters, each of which is subdivided into lesser sections. Some of the latter are just a few paragraphs long, which gives the book a sense of fast pacing despite the heavy subject matter often under discussion. The writing style is punchy and straightforward, and mercifully devoid of jargon. The text opens with an interesting Preface from Abbot Guillaume de Tanoüarn, who has previously made headlines in France for resisting the police-enforced demolition of churches. Abbot Guillaume uses his Preface to make the moral and spiritual case for ethnocentrism among Europeans, commenting that “the crisis we face is a moral crisis, and because of its rootedness, because what is at stake is the identity of each of us, one can even say that, deep down, it is also a spiritual crisis.” Individualism is regarded as a cancer, because the common good, or communicatio, of a nation is “not founded on individuals who are magically stuck together, but on families who, in the Christian model of society which prevailed in the West, represent a union of two sexes in “one flesh,” according to the law of love.” Against the organic community, “it has become fashionable in the media to question identity, to stigmatise attachment to soil and traditions. It is almost as if any prior spiritual wealth, anything greater than the Individual, has become suspicious, or has transformed into some new bizarre metaphysical paradigm.” Abbot Guillaume laments the arrival of a perception that individual “freedom encounters no other limit, no other boundary than the liberty of others in a world where neither good nor evil has the slightest meaning.”

Abbot Guillaume dragged from St Rita church, Paris by riot police in 2016

For Abbot Guillaume, “identity is inherited,” and “among the facts that condition individuals, ethnic origin has its place. … There obviously exist different ethnic origins.” He pours scorn on “the ideology of mandatory miscegenation, which includes an infatuation with quotas and the compulsive glorification of diversity on the “American model,” for which one carefully fails to set limits and ignores in particular the violence it often entails,” and endorses the message of Langella that “miscegenation does not enrich; it impoverishes.” The Abbot closes his Preface with the wish that “the ideology of globalism, as all ideologies, will one day explode like a bubble in response to the urgency of natural politics.”

Julien Langella’s brief introductory chapter sets the scene. Catholicism is on the decline in France, and rather than being incremental, “the collapse is brutal.” More than just a lack of faith and adherence, French society has turned radically to open effronteries to the historical faith: “working on Sundays, homosexual parody of marriage, legalisation of euthanasia, consecration of abortion as a fundamental right, trafficking of women’s bodies through surrogate mothers etc.” The religious decline has occurred alongside massive demographic change, with 20% of the French population now of foreign origin. Langella makes the argument that “De-Christianisation and the Great Replacement go hand in hand,” with Western spirituality, if it exists at all, now being replaced by “an obsession with ‘well-being,’ a kind of Westernized Buddhism” (which I have demonstrated elsewhere is heavily Jewish) and “the cult of the god Consumerism.” Against this spiritual and moral decline, Langella proposes a militant Catholicism typified by the statements of Dom Gérard Calvet, founder of the Sainte Madeleine du Barroux abbey in Le Barroux, who declared his violent antipathy to “the globalist heresy” that wants to “simultaneously eradicate the faith and dissolve the people into a consumerist blob.” Langella asserts that “multicultural societies, sinking ever more each into violence, are doomed to perish,” and celebrates the fact that Catholic voters in France are increasingly turning to ethnocentrism, voting for the Front National in higher percentages than the national average. Langella argues that these voters and activists should gather under the banner of “Identitarianism.”

Why Identitarianism? Langella explains that “nationalist” is a tainted word in France that has “never won general support.” While there is “no academic definition” of Identitarianism because “it does not correspond to any specific school of thought or specific doctrine,” it amounts to an “awareness”: “multicultural societies are multi-conflictual societies, and the homogeneity of a nation determines its survival.” He adds, “to be Identitarian is to reject the commercial standardisation of way of life at the global level, immigration through non-European settlement, and the increasing Islamisation of our streets.” All of which can be summed up in Langella’s stark statement: “If the French disappear, then France dies. … Globalism is a culture of death, and the Identitarian struggle is a march for life.” The introduction closes by making the claim that Christian charity and the struggle for identity are not contradictory:

To claim to accommodate all the misery of the world is not charity. At best, it is weakness and laxity. At worst, it is a calculation in favour of the interest of those who profit from servile labour and a cheap market. The foreigner also has a homeland and a right to live well there, a right to rootedness. Therefore, to accept an uncontrolled flow of immigrants into our country is not the solution to the miseries of Africa and the Middle East. On the contrary, it gives a moral guarantee to those who would transform these unfortunate people into urban slaves. Between the false generosity of pro-immigration lobbies and the cynical “compassion” of certain shady employers, there lies a world of hypocrisy.

The book’s first, and most Catholic, chapter, “Catholic and Indentitarian, Universal and Rooted,” is a prolonged argument against those who have asserted that “total open borders is the only possible Christian position on the subject.” Langella describes the “twisting” of scriptures to defend such an agenda as an act of “moral terrorism,” “perverse ideological manipulation,” and “an idolatry of humanity, a new golden calf, rather than faith in the incarnate God.” For Langella, and the many Catholic thinkers he cites, unity in the Church is not equivalent to the “absurd relativism which prides itself in loving everyone, while it despises everything by placing them on the same level under the pretext of equality.” For Dom Gérard Calvet, such an idea is an example of “ancient Christian virtues twisted into foolishness,” while Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, once wrote that “Man absolutely cannot by himself bring about world unity, for division is imposed upon him by the sovereign will of God.” Both were echoing the sentiments of Pope Pius XII, who declared that it was not the position of the Church “to attack or underestimate the particular characteristics that each people, with a jealous piety and an understandable pride, retains and considers as a precious heritage. Her purpose is the supernatural unity in universal love felt and practiced, and not in an exclusively exterior, superficial, and thus debilitating, uniformity.”

Identitarian activist and father-of-three: Julien Langella

While Langella proves himself very capable of selecting some choice Traditionalist quotes, he is equally at pains to admit that “certain clergy — priests, bishops, and even cardinals — are among the first to uphold an unnatural Manicheism that opposes the Gospel to patriotism.” These clerics, spouting “nonsense” and endlessly agitating against the Front National, empty France “of much of her substance, reducing her to a collection of principles, at best “Christian values,” which is to say welcoming migrants, while “remaining more indulgent with the politics supportive of the legalisation of divorce, contraception, and abortion.” Citing Pius XII, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, Langella makes the argument that Christian charity must always begin at home, in “an order established by God.” In fact, Langella posits that “National preference is a fundamental Christian virtue.” What follows is a brief but interesting historical tour of Catholic mystics and clergy who undertook war against Islamic incursions, with Langella concluding that “defense of the homeland and defense of the Faith are a single entity in the face of the invading Muslim.”

The chapter closes with a survey of the facts demonstrating the reality of race, and the assertion that Catholicism cannot, and should not, deny it. Incorporating everything from Edmund Burke to Pope Pius XI and the findings of modern genetic studies, it’s a powerful apologetic for prejudice, with Langella asserting that “refusing prejudice is a moral blackmail, a weapon of intimidation against Europeans who are disgusted with invasion-migration. … In forbidding us from exercising the virtue of prejudice, the globalists want to force us to consent to our own disappearance under the wave of the Great Replacement.” He closes with a statement from Benedict XVI: “Nations should never accept to witness the disappearance of what made their own identity.”

The text’s second chapter, “The Religion of Miscegenation,” largely departs from spiritual discussion and context, and provides a very interesting exploration of multiculturalism that will provide food for thought for Whites of all religious persuasions —or none. For Langella, “Gender theory and multiculturalism have the same philosophical origin: liberal narcissism. … To fight gender theory and to ignore multiculturalism is totally contradictory.” The chapter moves on to a lengthy exploration of the nature and extent of miscegenation propaganda in France, which includes a national campaign poster promoting breastfeeding featuring blonde women with Black infants pressed to their chests. Langella describes this phenomenon as a “cult of miscegenation” embraced at all levels of society but promoted especially by hostile elites who have ensured that “what was formerly a purely private choice has become a virtue in and of itself.” Langella cites as one example the Jew Bernard-Henri Levy who once wrote: “Everything that’s local, berets, butter, bagpipes, in short anything French, is foreign to us, even repugnant. … I like race-mixing and I hate nationalism.” Langella is blunt in his response: “Miscegenation is a war. By its obsessive nature, it’s even a jihad.” He then describes the links between globalism and the military-industrial complex, arguing that “military imperialism is the enforcement arm for the globalist project, that of a world where the United States and its lackeys can behave like ghetto rats on an international level.” These elites comprise a “nomadic oligarchy” that treats Europeans like sub-humans “and the rest of the world like replacement livestock.”

One of the book’s great strengths is its focus on the role of international finance in advancing globalism and multiculturalism. International money power demands that the peoples of the earth become “an inexhaustible reserve of servile workers and compulsive buyers.” Multiculturalism, “a weapon of mass subversion,” is “indispensable to the good order of a consumer society: without identity, without fixed landmarks, men are empty inside, so they try to fill this void with material goods.” Nations composed of interlinked and rooted families are inferior, in marketing logic, to nations of transient homosexual couples with two incomes and no children. Against the rise of consumerism, Langella calls for a resurgence in activism in areas that are now seen as old-fashioned — like protest against work on Sundays. Pointing to the number of days off work during the Middle Ages (around 190 a year) due to feast days and religious events, Langella argues that reclaiming even one day of the week from consumerism would be a foothold in the struggle that would at least make Catholic activists appear “more credible.” As things stand, Western youth are in chaotic rebellion against all forms of Tradition since “Capitalism encourages young people to rebel against all authority except one: money.” He closes the chapter by remarking:

The arrival of this liquid society, composed of human beings with barely any willpower, is the anthropological sine qua non for the development of the liberal economy. … This is why, everywhere they can, with the complicity of their Left-wing proxies in education and culture, the hyper-nomads propagate the ideology of multiculturalism. And when people like the Serbs try to resist, “humanitarian” bombs rain down upon them. For as a last resort, there always remains armed force to impose through fire and tears what they could not achieve with advertising and moral lessons.

The book’s powerful third chapter, “The Migration Hurricane and the Church,” offers an unflinching look at the Catholic response to the waves of mass migration into Europe that has accelerated since 2015. Langella stresses that we are witnessing an ongoing colonisation of Europe, “for this is indeed an immigration of settlement.” The author posits three main causes of the migration wave: “globalist ideology as a consequence of the Enlightenment and Jacobin Republicanism; the need for a servile labour force, encouraged by the liberal desire to abolish borders; and the dependency promoted by the welfare state.” Faced with this trifecta, and in a pattern witnessed throughout the West, the French “Right” “has always been the first to betray the French people. Large corporate interest in cheap labour and international Marxism go hand in hand to promote a world without borders where the rule of money can extend without limit.” This combined power has been catastrophic, with one ancient village in the Loire region consisting of 188 inhabitants subjected to a dumping of 100 immigrants (in effect, a total destruction of the life of the village) in the name of “population distribution” to areas “without housing shortages.” In “disgusting displays of cynicism,” Big Capital has been propagandizing such new values while crushing native employment, with Uber running campaigns to collect clothing and toys for illegal immigrants while ruining local cab drivers, and Starbucks announcing their intention to employ 10,000 refugees. For Langella,

This is the typical liberal double-game: on one hand, fracture the workers by exacerbating competition among them, and on the other, acquire a brand image in supporting the current humanitarian cause. It’s a win-win for them in terms of profitability and moral reputation.

Following this discussion is a very disturbing exploration of anti-White activity in France, culminating in an exploration of the rape of French women by migrants. Some of the stories are among the most horrific that I’ve encountered, and there’s no benefit in my repeating them here. The predictable result of this endless ethnic crime has been a form of White flight, and the rise of ethnic segregation in France. As Langella puts it, “You can eliminate land borders all you want; ethnic borders will remain. … We are witnessing genuine ethnic division on French territory.” Langella, to his great credit, always retains a grander vision, and is always at pains to avoid degenerating into a Counter-Jihad caricature, which to be honest is something that I, in my ignorance of Langella and his activism, expected prior to actually reading his text. This broader vision is exemplified when the author finally reaches the subject of Islamic terrorism toward the middle of the chapter, where he concludes: “Islamism is the tree that hides the forest: the true cause of the attack in Paris was immigration.” I couldn’t agree more.

From here Langella moves to a discussion of Church attitudes to mass migration. Setting out his case, Langella argues that the Church “does not have a political program, but she offers a moral framework.” The Church’s record in activism on behalf of refugees and migrants is, however, very mixed. In 1914, Pope Benedict XV instituted the World Day of Migrants and Refugees, but this was primarily in response to the Armenian genocide, and was not “a justification of immigration in itself.” A “migrant” in the ecclesiastical language of the time, was always assumed to be fleeing genuine persecution, rather than being an immigrant in a general sense. Over time, argues Abbot Guillaume, the Church has passed from a teaching of duty of charity to the oppressed to the “ideological value of immigration as an absolute.” For Abbot Guillaume and Langella, this is a heresy that essentially posits immigration as “a trampoline for the Second Coming,” and is “profoundly anti-Christian.” Both point to the “universal destination of goods” as “the foundation of the Catholic critique of capitalism.” This idea always posits that social actions must always take place within the context of uplifting the common good. This “Common Good,” argues Langella, should be the compass of political action and is infinitely more important than “diversity.” He cites Pope John Paul II as saying the right to emigrate “should be regulated because applying this right in an uncontrolled way can be dangerous and harmful to the common good of the communities welcoming the migrants.” Pope Benedict XVI, meanwhile, asserted that “States have the right to regulate migratory flows and to defend their borders.”

Langella then moves to a discussion of “the elusive Pope Francis.” Langella is probably correct in stressing that due to media distortions, especially the media’s desire to portray Francis as a Leftist Pope with relaxed attitudes on gays and open arms for migrants, a full picture of the current Pope’s ideological positions is more difficult than usual to discern. That being said, Langella critiques Francis for being intentionally ambiguous, and for “offering to journalists on a platter” an ambiguity that has led to him becoming “the darling of the intellectual Left.” Langella further criticizes the Pope for “improperly appealing to emotion, and more often in favour of illegal immigrants rather than those who pay the price of accepting the migrants, though no one ever asked if the latter wanted to do so.” The author also sees validity in claims that Francis has shown “indifference towards the victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants” and “a certain disdain for Europeans as well as a kind of preference for the migrant.” Langella is clear:

Pope Francis is more than ever a pope of images and gestures. He knows the media impact of a good phrase, a good word. The Pope likes to disarm his interlocutors. Not to detract from his refreshing spontaneity, but we have to recognise that he is a “good customer,” as they say in the trade.

Faced with such a situation, Langella offers common sense to his fellow Catholics: “The Pope is not infallible when he discusses social questions. … We can — with prudence — criticise the political speech of the Pope if it hurts the common good.” Closing the chapter, Langella appeals to the writings of a host of cardinals that support the right to strong borders and oppose the globalist project of mass migration. In the meantime, Langella suggests waiting for a shift in leadership rather than encouraging division in the Church, opining that “the best way to save the position of the Pope is to refrain from commenting on it.” I don’t agree, but then I’m not Catholic and I will concede that Langella may have a better appreciation of the situation.

The fourth, and in my view most interesting, chapter of the book is titled “What To Do?” As you might expect, it’s a program of action. The first step is to attempt to change terminology, or the interpretation of it. Langella stresses that “migrant/refugee” is a piece of terminology designed to inculcate sympathy where it is not deserved. What most of these foreigners want is not safety but “comfort and modernity. What they wanted was superfluous shiny objects.” Europeans must strip themselves of sentimentalism, of a love devoid of truth. For Langella, most Black and Middle Eastern migrants are mere cowards seeking luxury, and this is the vision of these foreigners that he believes must become endemic among Europeans if a genuine sea-change in attitudes is to take place.

The next step is the return to fundamental notions of homeland as “a bridge between God and men, a gateway between Heaven and earth.” This ecological outlook locates Man firmly inside his habitat, in opposition to liberal anthropocentrism which places Man above all, and in opposition also to “Deep Ecology” (see the work of Pentti Linkola) that posits Man as an animal no higher than any other. In Langella’s view of a Christian ecology, Man’s culture and traditions and his age-old links to the soil are as worthy of preservation as the habitat itself, reversing the trend of deranged leftists to campaign on behalf of endangered squirrels while entire villages are handed over to foreign peoples.

The third step is the fostering of genuine European unity based on common ethnic and cultural feeling rather than on strictly economic and military interests. What Langella proposes is a “European policy of rootedness” resembling the Visigrad Group (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary) which together has been described as “the most secure region on the continent.”

The fourth step is a reversal of the endless quest for increased GDP which has contributed to an “evident form of moral underdevelopment.” Langella is opposed to international finance and posits a return to forms of corporate social financial order resembling the medieval guilds based on local self-sufficiency and accountability. Explaining this turn to Localism, Langella explains:

It is not the extreme Left-wing globalists who are inciting migratory flows, it’s not even the No Border types who help illegal immigrants to cross the borders. It’s global industrial capitalism. The sole alternative to global uprooting is localism. We don’t need to make everyone in the world a farmer, but we do need to allow people to have food sovereignty, which is also economic and political sovereignty. In other words, we must give them back their dignity. This is the best antidote to uprooting.

Finally, Langella moves to the ethnically foreign population residing in France. He asserts that assimilation is an unachievable myth, and that France is not merely an “idea” but a biological reality that is under threat. The only real response, he argues, is forceful repatriation. Here there is no room for sentimentality: “Mass immigration is a cancer. … It is a profound injustice. … It’s a collective kidnapping. It’s murder. They’re killing us.” Repatriation should begin with a return to the law of blood and the end of birthright citizenship, along with a moratorium on labor migration and a ban on family reunification. This would be swiftly followed by the non-renewal of residence permits with automatic deportation at the end of their period of validity. All construction of non-Christian places of worship would cease. All Islamists would then be targeted for systematic expulsion “to the country of their family history.” After this, specialist units of the police and army should be employed in the rapid and massive forceful removal of foreign populations: “Without a show of force on our part, a general explosion will be imposed on us at any rate, because multiculturalism carries within it the seeds for war like clouds carry the storm.”

Prior to this sequence of events, Langella advocates the building of networks of the ethnically aware in rural France, where localism can be seeded and where defense zones can be efficiently constructed. This will be necessary because “France has learned well that from now on, the state is its enemy and that, despite our calls for unity, the police will never side with us.” He therefore advocates the attitude of the partisan, described by Carl Schmitt as someone who “defends a piece of land for which he has a native attachment,” and whose primary strength is “his bond with the land, with the native population, and with the geographic configuration of the country, mountains, forests, jungle, or desert.” Langella expects no sudden collapse of the System, and is prepared to play the long game.

I have to admit that the book’s fifth chapter, “Fall and Reconquest,” struck a bum note with me, and it would have been my preference, had I been editor, to have omitted it entirely. The entire chapter is a re-run of the Book of Maccabees, which Langella offers as a blueprint of reconquest for us to follow. It didn’t resonate with me at all, or indeed with the approach of the rest of the book, and its inclusion continues to baffle me. The book closes with a somewhat poetic two-page conclusion, the central message of which is that we must “kill the bourgeois inside us” and engage in a “crusade of an integral and permanent love. An eternal fire in our heart, a feast of every moment and of every day.”

Julien Langella is to be commended for producing an impassioned, and often furious, message from a dying France. Some bum notes and petty criticisms aside, there is much here to enthuse and enrage the committed Catholic, and to educate and inspire the non-Catholic. Of course, I could critique the lack of engagement with Jewish matters, but I think it’s already a minor miracle, given France’s array of harsh speech laws, that he ever managed to publish this remarkable work. I think Julien Langella is a very intelligent and capable activist who needs no reminding of the influence of certain elements in the tragedy unfolding for his nation. My demand for total honesty, in this instance, therefore wavers somewhat at the prison gates that inevitably loom in France for anyone daring to question that which lies behind so many of the labels (globalists, nomadic oligarchs, etc.) employed in this very mature text.

I’d be dishonest if I didn’t mention that the total collapse of Catholic Church credibility, much of it mired in seemingly endless sex abuse scandals, hasn’t contributed in some part to the massive swing to the Left in nations like Ireland. I don’t think it’s the sole cause, of course, and I believe at least some of these scandals have become a kind of media meme for a reason, but I do believe that the Catholic Church has a credibility issue to address before it can in any way become a focal point for the ethnic revival of its faithful. But, to Langella’s credit, he appears to be planning for a Catholic revival somewhat outside the Church. This strikes me as eminently sensible. For the record, my own experiences in France are limited to a couple of trips to Paris, some seven years apart. The first was disappointing, the second utterly heartbreaking, as I witnessed some of the world’s most beautiful sites and streets sunk in the degradation and filth of mass migration. I sincerely wish Julien Langella the very best of luck in his quest to redeem his homeland for his people and indeed his God.

Kevin MacDonald’s Preface to Giles Corey’s The Sword of Christ

 

 

Note: Giles Corey’s new book, The Sword of Christ, may be purchased here. Get it before it’s banned!

Giles Corey has written a book that should be read by all Christians as well as White advocates of all theoretical perspectives, including especially those who are seeking a spiritual foundation that is deeply embedded in the history and culture of Europeans. This is excellent scholarship combined with a very fluid writing style. He has thought deeply about all the issues confronting the peoples and cultures of the West.

Corey is well aware that contemporary Christianity has been massively corrupted. Mainline Protestant and Catholic Churches have become little more than appendages for the various social justice movements of the left, avidly promoting the colonization of the West by other races and cultures, even as religious fervor and attendance dwindle and Christianity itself becomes ever more irrelevant to the national dialogue. On the other hand, Evangelicals, a group that remains vigorously Christian, have been massively duped by the theology of Christian Zionism, their main focus being to promote Israel.

Until the twentieth century, Christianity served the West well. One need only think of the long history of Christians battling to prevent Muslims from establishing a caliphate throughout the West—Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours, the Spanish Reconquista, the defeat of the Turks at the gates of Vienna. The era of Western expansion was accomplished by Christian explorers and colonists. Until quite recently, the flourishing of science, technology, and art occurred entirely within a Christian context.

Much of my scholarly interest has been to attempt to understand the people and culture of the West, resulting in my book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future. As I argue there, individualism lends itself to moral and ethical universalism which led to the religiously based eradication of slavery long before the rise of an elite hostile to Christianity itself. And White intellectuals in the nineteenth century attempting to understand their own moral universalism often attributed it to their racial origins.

Such individualism was not disastrously self-destructive. As Corey notes, “Christian universalism historically posed little to no danger to White survival because it was preached by Whites living in a world ruled by Whites; it was only in the multicultural Egalitarian Regime inseminated in the mid-twentieth century that Christian sacrifice was transformed into a call for racial suicide.” The individualist, Christian West was thus highly adaptive—until the rise of a hostile, Jewish-dominated elite bent on corrupting adaptive forms of Christian individualism in favor of a completely deracinated individualism, now accompanied by powerful religious, media, and academic voices preaching White guilt, often from a Christian perspective.

Instead, Corey advocates a revitalization of Medieval Germanic Christianity based on, in the words of Samuel Francis, “social hierarchy, loyalty to tribe and place (blood and soil), world-acceptance rather than world-rejection, and an ethic that values heroism and military sacrifice.” This medieval Christianity preserved the aristocratic, fundamentally Indo-European culture of the Germanic tribes. This was an adaptive Christianity, a Christianity that was compatible with Western expansion, to the point that by the end of the nineteenth century, the West dominated the planet. Christianity per se is certainly not the problem.

The decline of adaptive Christianity coincides with the post-Enlightenment rise of the Jews throughout the West as an anti-Christian elite, and Corey has a great deal of very interesting material on traditional Christian views of Judaism. Traditional Christian theology viewed the Church as having superseded the Old Testament and that, by rejecting the Church, the Jews had not only rejected God, they were responsible for murdering Christ. My view, developed in Chapter 3 of Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism is that traditional Christian theology was fundamentally anti-Jewish and was developed as a weapon which was used to lessen Jewish economic and political power in the Roman Empire. Here Corey describes the writings of the fourth-century figure, St. John Chrysostom, who has a chapel dedicated to him inside St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome as well as a statue outside the building. His writings on Jews are nothing less than scathing and reflect long-term tensions between Jews and Greeks in Antioch. And Chrysostom was far from alone in his hatred. For example, St. Gregory of Nyssa, also writing in the fourth century: “ [Jews are] murderers of the Lord, assassins of the prophets, rebels against God, God haters, . . . advocates of the devil, race of vipers, slanderers, calumniators, dark-minded people, leaven of the Pharisees, sanhedrin of demons, sinners, wicked men, stoners, and haters of righteousness.” The traditional Church was certainly far from friendly toward Jews.

And although Protestantism was generally far more amenable to Jewish interests even before its current malaise, there certainly are exceptions. Here Corey emphasizes Martin Luther’s writings on Jews. Luther emphasizes Jewish hatred toward Christianity and their sense of superiority vis-à-vis Christians, seeing the latter as “not human; in fact, we hardly deserve to be considered poor worms by them.” But he is also concerned about Jewish economic exploitation and domination of Germans via usury—certainly the biggest complaint about Jews in traditional Europe. And he is repulsed by Talmudic ethics which promote very different moral codes for Jews and non-Jews.

However, much has changed since the origins of Christianity. In the contemporary United States, Christian Zionism has had a very large influence on Evangelical Protestantism whose theology departs radically from traditional Christianity, particularly with respect to the Jews. Corey has an excellent section on how Jews helped shape this new theology; it should be required reading for Christian Zionists because it would open their eyes to the sordid history of the movement. The result of such thinking is that Zionism has often become a vehicle of moral idealism in the minds of a great many gentiles, from Lloyd George to the present, who believe that the restoration of Israel is far more important than the fate of their own people.

Jews have not stood by idly on this but have actively supported the Christian Zionism movement. I noted in a 2010 article on the delusional Pastor John Hagee:

Beginning in 1978, the Likud Party in Israel has taken the lead in organizing this force for Israel, and they have been joined by the neocons. For example, in 2002 the Israeli embassy organized a prayer breakfast with the major Christian Zionists. The main organizations are the Unity Coalition for Israel which is run by Esther Levens and Christians United for Israel, run by David Brog. The Unity Coalition for Israel consists of ~200 Christian and Jewish organizations and has strong connections to neocon think tanks such as the Center for Security Policy, headed by Frank Gaffney, pro-Israel activist organizations the Zionist Organization of America, the Likud Party and the Israeli government. This organization claims to provide material for 1,700 religious radio stations, 245 Christian TV stations, and 120 Christian newspapers.[1]

Corey notes that Hagee’s organization, A Night to Honor Israel, has donated over $100 million to right-wing causes in Israel over the years. He has been well rewarded financially for his efforts and is the recipient of numerous awards from Zionist organizations.

Christian Zionism is a fitting reminder of how humans, unlike animals, can be motivated by ideas, including ideas that are completely unrelated to believers’ real interests. These ideas may be disseminated by people who are only doing so for selfish reasons, such as the dishonorable Cyrus Scofield, whose annotated Bible has become central to Christian Zionism. Maladaptive ideas may also be disseminated by people who are utterly opposed to the legitimate interests of believers or even hate Christianity and the West in general. Here Corey discusses the role of Felix Untermeyer, a wealthy Jew, in promoting Scofield and his Bible. It was a religious ideology “with a new worship icon—the modern state of Israel,” and Corey does an excellent job showing how Christian Zionism is a radical departure from traditional Christian theology. I found the following passage quite stunning:

The heresy of Christian Zionism, using an arbitrary and self-contradictory literalist and futurist hermeneutic, contends that the Jews remain God’s chosen people, separate from and superior to the Church; indeed, they believe that earthly Jewish Israel will replace the Church, and that as such, “Christians, and indeed whole nations, will be blessed through their association with, and support of, Israel.”

Although Christian Zionism is far less influential than the Israel Lobby in furthering Jewish interests in the United States, it has certainly had some influence and creates a ready-made cheering section for wars in the Middle East on behalf of Israel. After all, other attitudes typical of Christian Zionists, such as opposition to abortion or pornography, have had much less traction with the current left-oriented establishment despite their powerful commitment to the state of Israel.

Religious thinking is by its nature unbounded—it is infinitely malleable. It is a dangerous sword that can be used to further legitimate interests of believers, or it can become a lethal weapon whereby believers adopt attitudes that are obviously maladaptive. One need only think of religiously based suicide cults, such as People’s Temple (Jonestown), Solar Temple and Heaven’s Gate. Mainstream Christianity from traditional Catholicism to mainstream Protestantism was fundamentally adaptive in terms of creating a healthy family life. It was compatible with a culture characterized by extraordinary scientific and technological creativity and standards of living that have been much envied by the rest of the world.

Corey has great material on Jewish perceptions of Christianity in the Talmud and on negative Jewish influences on culture in the present West, including pornography and the sexual revolution generally. As is so often the case with Jewish activism, the pornography movement has been motivated not solely by money but by hatred toward Christian morality and Christian family functioning. The results have been devastating: huge increases since the 1960s—the breakthrough decade of Jewish power—in all the markers of family dysfunction and poor child outcomes: lower marriage rates, higher births out of wedlock, higher rates of teenage pregnancy, precocious sexuality, high divorce rates, and unstable pair bonds. In other words, the Western family pattern of monogamous nuclear families based on strong husband-wife pair bonds has been under attack from Jewish dominated movements, the most noteworthy of which was psychoanalysis promising an idyllic future if only people would jettison traditional Christian constraints on sexuality. These negative trends in family functioning have been most pronounced among the lower social classes and thus have much less effect on high-IQ middle- and upper-income groups, including Jews as a relatively high-IQ group. The disaster in family patterns has fallen far more severely on the White working class.

Corey’s has an extended treatment of the corrosive effects of pornography, now extended to child pornography and legalized pedophilia as the “final frontier” in the sexual revolution. As in other areas, this starts out by advocating language that makes the activity more or less acceptable depending on the interests of advocates. In the case of pedophilia, the first step is to label them “minor attracted persons,” whereas in the area of free speech, we find labels like “hate speech”—even for speech that is reasonable and fact-based. If issues related to free speech are any guide, there will soon be articles in law journals arguing that pedophilia is normal and should not be punished, and eventually courts will begin to adopt this logic in particular cases. Already Supreme Court justices like Elena Kagan have signaled a willingness to curtail speech on diversity issues,[2] and this would be joined by the other liberals, which would mean that curtailing free speech on race is at most one Supreme Court appointment away. And when that happens, it won’t be long before it is embraced by conservatives. As Corey notes in the case of pedophilia, “We are presumably one Supreme Court ruling away from the National Review cocktail ‘conservative’ crowd celebrating pederasty as the next great achievement of individual liberty.”

Given the exhaustive summary of the negative effects of pornography—including neurological impairments related to impulsivity and lessened interest in familial relationships of love and nurturance—it is horrifying indeed that “sixty percent of boys and thirty percent of girls were exposed to pornography in early adolescence, including ‘bondage, rape, and child pornography’, and another which concludes that children under ten years old now account for over twenty percent of online pornographic consumption.” This definitely was not happening when I was growing up in the 1950s, prior to the deluge. I agree with Corey’s conclusion, “We have conclusively established that Jewish leadership and participation was instrumental in and a necessary condition of the pornographic war that has struck at the most sacred foundation of the West, the family.” As Freud famously said, “we are bringing them the plague.”

Corey has an excellent and exhaustive section on Jewish ritual murder—an absolutely convincing presentation on a topic that, like so much of Jewish history, is a minefield for serious scholars. As he notes, “There are … hundreds of accusations and cases of Jewish ritual murder, each just as sadistically depraved as the last, involving barrels of nails, crucifixion, decapitation, spit-roasting, stoning, and a litany of other barbaric evils; we could fill entire volumes with the accounts of each of these innocent lives so cruelly taken from this world.”

 

This is a topic that I have never written about, although I was somewhat familiar with Blood Passover, Ariel Toaff’s book on the topic. As to be expected, Toaff’s book was condemned by the activist Jewish community and he was pressured into publishing an apology, promising to prevent distribution of his book, etc. However, we should not be surprised to find that such practices occurred. Ritual murder is an extreme manifestation of normative Jewish hostility toward the surrounding society which is an important facet of the entire subject. The eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon was struck by the fanatical hatred of Jews in the ancient world:

From the reign of Nero to that of Antoninus Pius, the Jews discovered a fierce impatience of the dominion of Rome, which repeatedly broke out in the most furious massacres and insurrections. Humanity is shocked at the recital of the horrid cruelties which they committed in the cities of Egypt, of Cyprus, and of Cyrene, where they dwelt in treacherous friendship with the unsuspecting natives; and we are tempted to applaud the severe retaliation which was exercised by the arms of the legions against a race of fanatics, whose dire and credulous superstition seemed to render them the implacable enemies not only of the Roman government, but of human kind.[3]

The nineteenth-century Spanish historian José Amador de los Rios wrote of the Spanish Jews who assisted the Muslim conquest of Spain that “without any love for the soil where they lived, without any of those affections that ennoble a people, and finally without sentiments of generosity, they aspired only to feed their avarice and to accomplish the ruin of the Goths; taking the opportunity to manifest their rancor, and boasting of the hatreds that they had hoarded up so many centuries.”[4]

As I noted in an article titled “Stalin’s Willing Executioners: Jews as a Hostile Elite in the Soviet Union,” “Hatred toward the peoples and cultures of non-Jews and the image of enslaved ancestors as victims of anti-Semitism have been the Jewish norm throughout history—much commented on, from Tacitus (“they regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies”[5]) to the present.”[6] Toaff brings out the revenge motive: “In their collective mentality, the Passover Seder had long since transformed itself into a celebration in which the wish for the forthcoming redemption of the people of Israel moved from aspiration to revenge, and then to cursing their Christian persecutors, the current heirs to the wicked Pharaoh of Egypt.”

Hatred and revenge were clearly on display in the early decades of the Soviet Union, a period in which around 20 million people were murdered. From “Stalin’s Willing Executioners,” a review of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century:

There can be little doubt that Lenin’s contempt for “the thick-skulled, boorish, inert, and bearishly savage Russian or Ukrainian peasant” was shared by the vast majority of shtetl Jews prior to the Revolution and after it. Those Jews who defiled the holy places of traditional Russian culture and published anti-Christian periodicals doubtless reveled in their tasks for entirely Jewish reasons, and, as Gorky worried, their activities not unreasonably stoked the anti-Semitism of the period. Given the anti-Christian attitudes of traditional shtetl Jews, it is very difficult to believe that the Jews engaged in campaigns against Christianity did not have a sense of revenge against the old culture that they held in such contempt. …

Slezkine seems comfortable with revenge as a Jewish motive, but he does not consider traditional Jewish culture itself to be a contributor to Jewish attitudes toward traditional Russia, even though he notes that a very traditional part of Jewish culture was to despise the Russians and their culture. (Even the Jewish literati despised all of traditional Russian culture, apart from Pushkin and a few literary icons.) Indeed, one wonders what would motivate the Jewish commissars to revenge apart from motives related to their Jewish identity. …

Slezkine’s argument that Jews were critically involved in destroying traditional Russian institutions, liquidating Russian nationalists, murdering the tsar and his family, dispossessing and murdering the kulaks, and destroying the Orthodox Church has been made by many other writers over the years. …

The situation prompts reflection on what might have happened in the United States had American Communists and their sympathizers assumed power. The “red diaper babies” came from Jewish families which “around the breakfast table, day after day, in Scarsdale, Newton, Great Neck, and Beverly Hills have discussed what an awful, corrupt, immoral, undemocratic, racist society the United States is.”[7] … It is easy to imagine which sectors of American society would have been deemed overly backward and religious and therefore worthy of mass murder by the American counterparts of the Jewish elite in the Soviet Union—the ones who journeyed to Ellis Island instead of Moscow. The descendants of these overly backward and religious people now loom large among the “red state” voters who have been so important in recent national elections. Jewish animosity toward the Christian culture that is so deeply ingrained in much of America is legendary. As Joel Kotkin points out, “for generations, [American] Jews have viewed religious conservatives with a combination of fear and disdain.” And as Elliott Abrams notes, the American Jewish community “clings to what is at bottom a dark vision of America, as a land permeated with anti-Semitism and always on the verge of anti-Semitic outbursts.”

As the quote from neocon Elliott Abrams—and much else—indicate, this fear and loathing continues into the present. Consistent with what we know of the psychology of ethnocentrism, a fundamental motivation of Jewish intellectuals and activists involved in social criticism has simply been hatred of the non-Jewish power structure perceived as anti-Jewish and deeply immoral—Susan Sontag’s “the white race is the cancer of human history,” which was published in Partisan Review, a prominent literary journal associated with the New York Intellectuals (a Jewish intellectual movement), is emblematic.

As I write this in the summer of 2020, we are experiencing what feels like the end game in the Jewish conquest of White America. Because Jews have become a hostile elite with a powerful position in the media and educational system, Jewish attitudes in the 1950s that the U.S. is an “awful, corrupt, immoral, undemocratic, racist society” are now entirely mainstream and the cancel culture that we see now is indeed directed most of all toward White red state voters, particularly in the South. Cancel culture started with toppling Confederate monuments, but of course it didn’t stop there, so now statues of the Founding Fathers are being destroyed and there are demands that statues dedicated to Christian religious figures be removed. Jews in particular have demanded the removal of a statue of King Louis IX of France because of his attempt to curb Jewish moneylending in the interests of his people and for burning 12000 copies of the Talmud.

The Cathedral of Notre Dame burning, April 15, 2019. Much of the cathedral was built during the reign of St. Louis.  

This hatred won’t end if and when Whites become a minority. Jews were responsible for the 1965 immigration law that opened up the United States to immigration from all over the world, and they have energetically worked to make alliances with these immigrant groups who are encouraged to hate White America and often adopt anti-White rhetoric almost as soon as they arrive because they can see the political advantages of doing so.

This won’t end well. As I concluded in my recent book, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition:

I agree with Enoch Powell: “as I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’”[8] All the utopias dreamed up by the Left inevitably lead to bloodshed—because they conflict with human nature. The classical Marxist Utopian vision of a classless society in the USSR self-destructed, but only after murdering millions of its own people. Now the multicultural utopian version that has become dominant throughout the West is showing signs of producing intense opposition and irreconcilable polarization. 

Given the very large Jewish involvement in these projects consequent to the Jewish rise to elite status throughout the West, the big picture is that the thrust of Jewish power has been to create societies envisioned as being good for Jews, inevitably advertised in idealistic, morally uplifting, humanitarian terms [to appeal to the evolutionary psychology of individualism where social ties are based on belong to moral communities rather than communities based on kinship ties]. Historically, such projects have typically not ended well and have resulted in massive social upheavals. It would thus not be surprising if current social divisions result in a movement characterized by anti-Jewish overtones. …

All of the measures of White representation in the forces of social control will continue to decline in the coming years given the continued deterioration of the demographic situation. At this point, even stopping immigration completely and deporting illegals would not be enough to preserve a White America long term.

The left and its big business allies have created a monster. Whites have to realize that if they do nothing, they will be increasingly victimized and vilified in the coming decades as the monster continues to gain power. Better that any blood be shed sooner rather than later. 

What happened in the early decades of the Soviet Union is a chilling reminder of what can happen when an alien hostile elite seizes control of a country.

I agree entirely with Corey’s conclusions and recommendations for a revival centered around the adaptive aspects of Christianity—the aspects that produced Western expansion, innovation, discovery, individual freedom, economic prosperity, and strong family bonds. A Christianity that is adaptive in the evolutionary sense of survival and reproduction and fundamentally cognizant of the mistakes of the past.

We must not tolerate subversion. Liberalism must go; we cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the Enlightenment. We cannot afford to countenance any further anti-American, anti-family, anti-White speech, and this should be reflected in a new Constitution. Just as conservatism was not enough, the United States Constitution was not enough, with gaps that left it gaping wide for judicial “interpretation.” For another thing, we must circle the wagons and inculcate the männerbund, restraining our individualism at least for the time being. For another, we must return to our Lord and Savior. A nation without faith can have no guiding light, no purpose, no drive, no Mission. Izaak Walton, writing of his friend John Donne’s last days, described the body “which was once a temple of the Holy Ghost and is now become a small quantity of Christian dust.” His last line: “But I shall see it reanimated.”

Kevin MacDonald, August 9, 2020


[1] Kevin MacDonald, “Christian Zionism,” The Occidental Observer (March 12, 2010).

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2010/03/12/kevin-macdonald-christian-zionism/

[2] Kevin MacDonald, “Elena Kagan: Jewish Ethnic Networking Eases the Path of a Liberal/Leftist to the Supreme Court, The Occidental Observer (May 20, 2009).

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2009/05/20/elena-kagan/

[3] Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol.1, ed. J. B. Bury (London: Methuen, 1909), 78.

[4] Quoted in W. T. Walsh, Isabella of Spain: The Last Crusader (New York: Robert M. McBride, 1930), 196.

[5] Tacitus, The History 5, 4, 659.

[6] Kevin MacDonald, “Stalin’s Willing Executioners: Jews as a Hostile Elite in the USSR.” Review of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. The Occidental Quarterly, 5(3), 65–100, 93–94.

[7] This quote comes from Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, Chapter 3.

[8] “Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ Speech,” The Telegraph (November 6, 2007).

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html

Review of Judaism and the Vatican: An Attempt at Spiritual Subversion. Vicomte Léon de Poncins.

Review of Judaism and the Vatican: An Attempt at Spiritual Subversion
Vicomte Léon de Poncins, trans. Timothy Tindal-Robertson
Palmdale, CA.: Christian Book Club of America, reprinted 1999. Originally printed 1967.

Editor’s note: TOO has posted several articles over the years on Jewish influence on the Catholic Church: George F. Held’s translations of Léon de Poncins: The Problem with the Jews at the Council in four parts, Jimmy Moglia’s “Quo Vadis Vatican? Jewish involvement in the radical changes of the Second Vatican Council,” my “The role of Jewish converts to Catholicism in changing traditional Catholic teachings on Jews.” Andrew Joyce’s “Jews, White Guilt, and the Death of the Church of England” shows how some of these same figures (e.g., Jules Isaac) have influenced the Church of England.

After a little over a half century, it has become quite clear that the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) and the changes which took place in its wake—especially the promulgation of the New Mass by Pope Paul VI/Montini (1963–78)—has created a new religion that while it may still be called “Catholic” is in reality something quite different than what had existed for some two thousand years beforehand. The Council had been called by Pope John XXIII/Roncalli (1958–1963) to be “pastoral” and not to define doctrine or settle theological disputes; however, it was quickly taken over by Modernist forces who, despite being a minority (albeit a very determined minority), were able to force through a progressive agenda.

The Modernist takeover at Vatican II was not by happenstance, but, as with a great many important historical events, was well planned in advance. John XXIII’s predecessor, Pope Pius XII/Pacelli (1939–1958), had contemplated calling a council, but had been warned against it. Although Pius XII prevailed in not convoking a general assembly and is thought by many as the last “traditional” pope, an objective look at his appointments and actions during his pontificate paint a different picture. Many of the Vatican II revolutionaries operated freely during Pius XII’s reign and some had gained influential positions inside the Roman Curia. One of the most prominent Modernist was the future Pope, Paul VI.

It has been argued that had the Council never been convoked and had the Church retained its traditional stance on morals and doctrine, the cultural revolution which took place in the 1960s and beyond may have never taken place or would have been mitigated. The Vatican II documents, in many instances, were not explicitly heretical, but they were worded in such a way that they could (and were) interpreted in a liberal fashion. Modernists boasted that the Council inaugurated a “New Springtime” in the Church which would add converts and invigorate the faithful to greater devotion. Just the opposite occurred, as millions left and joined other denominations or simply lost interest .

Vatican II would have profound societal effects, especially in regard to marriage, child rearing, and the role of women. Very soon after the Council had ended, “Catholic divorce” in the form of Church annulments became popular. Where marriage in the time before Vatican II was held as indissoluble, married couples by the thousands were afterwards granted annulments by Church authorities and could and did remarry. Traditionally, Catholic women were seen and acted as homemakers and child-bearers or, if called, sought a religious vocation; after Vatican II women were encouraged to pursue careers and were granted positions in the Church and even allowed liturgical roles. Under the papacy of John Paul II/Wojtyla (1978–2005) for the first time, younger women and girls were permitted to become altar servers.

The New Springtime proved to be an unmitigated disaster on all fronts, as not only vocations, Church attendance, and membership plummeted to historic lows, but also widespread divorce and the new role of women led to a catastrophic drop in birthrates especially among the Catholic populations of Western Europe.

One of the most significant changes which took place at the Council was on the relationship between the Church and the Jews. The Modernists had hoped, with considerable Jewish backing, to push through language which would absolve the Jews from their crime of Deicide, condemn “anti-Semitism,” and play down Christian efforts to convert the Jews. Evangelization was to be replaced with the idea that Jews were “elder brothers” of Christians, as opposed to the traditional doctrine of “supercession”—that the covenant between God and the Church superceded the covenant between God and the Jews. This new construct appeared with the notion of Western civilization’s “Judeo-Christian” heritage which became a popular phrase in conservative and neoconservative literature.

There were few Churchmen or those among the laity who opposed Vatican II and almost none who objected to the new policy toward the Jews or did any investigation on how such a radical change came about. Among the few who did was Vicomte Léon de Poncins, a distinguished French author who had written numerous books and articles dealing with Freemasonry, the Jews, and subversive political movements. Poncins was the founder of the famous review, Contre-Révolution, which was published in Switzerland. He came from a distinguished French family. His great-grand-fathers were defenders of the Ancien Régime, one losing his life fighting the revolutionaries in 1789, while the other was imprisoned by Napoleon for his support of the monarchy.

Poncins wrote two books shortly after the close of the Council: Judaism and the Vatican (1967) and Freemasonry and the Vatican (1968). The former chronicled the events, personalities, and literature which led to the changes which took place in the decades prior to Vatican II in regards to the Jews. It also gave a first-hand commentary on the machinations which went on behind the scenes at the Council, including the actions of Paul VI and progressive bishops which many Catholic conservatives at the time, and even now, did not hold accountable or looked the other way, especially about the Pope’s involvement.

While there have been studies of Vatican II in the turbulent years which followed and while most have included analysis of the changes in Church policy toward the Jews, the later literature (mostly from traditional Catholic sources) has steered clear of the notion that the Jews had malicious intentions in their efforts. More traditional authors argued that they were doing so for self-preservation and in reaction to Christian persecution. Poncins was not of this mode of thought, believing in more sinister aspects of Jewish behavior which was why he was smeared and called an “anti-Semite.”

The Jewish onslaught on the Church began in earnest after the conclusion of World War II. The justification that Jewish intellectuals used was that the persecution of the Jews under National Socialism was the culmination of Gentile oppression and hatred which stemmed back to the time of Constantine’s emancipation of the Church and his patronage of it. Once given power, both Church and state persecuted the Jews over the next two millennia.

The reason for the Church’s animus toward the Jews was Christianity itself which at its root was “anti-Semitic.” In the minds of Christians, the Jews were directly responsible for Christ’s death. Therefore, the Gospel accounts which placed the blame on the Jews during Christ’s “trial” and Crucifixion, along with the early Church Fathers’ commentary on these events, had to be discredited. Later, the great Church doctors also had to be undermined for their upholding of Jewish responsibility in the death of Christ.

The pronouncements on non-Christian religions and the declaration Nostra aetate passed in the Fourth Session of the Council (1965) accomplished almost all that the Modernists had hoped for. In effect, these pronouncements repudiated nearly two thousand years of Catholic teaching on the Jews. Ever since, the Church has continually bowed to Jewish pressure in regard to its liturgy, the naming of saints, and in the political realm—its most infamous decision in the latter being the recognition of the state of Israel in 1994.

Poncins, who closely covered the Vatican II proceedings, wrote of the declaration:

. . . a number of Jewish organizations and personalities are behind the reforms which were proposed at the Council with a view to modifying the Church’s attitude and time-honored teaching about Judaism: Jules Isaac, Label Katz, President of the B’nai B’rith, Nahum Goldman, President of the World Jewish Congress, etc. . . . These reforms are very important because they suggest that for two thousand years the Church had been mistaken and that she must make amends and completely reconsider her attitude to the Jews. [10]

The leading figure in the years prior to the Council was the virulent anti-Catholic writer Jules Isaac, and he played an active role during the Counsel. “Isaac,” Poncins describes, “turned the Council to advantage, having found there considerable support among progressive bishops. In fact he became the principal theorist and promoter of the campaign being waged against the traditional teaching of the Church.” [11]

Isaac had long before begun his hostile campaign to overturn Catholic teaching on the Jews with his two most important books on the subject: Jésus et Israel (1946) and Genése de l’Antisémitisme (1948). Poncins accurately summarizes the main thrust of these works:

 In these books Jules Isaac fiercely censures Christian teaching, which he says has been the source of modern anti-Semitism, and preaches, though it would be more correct to say he demands, the ‘purification’ and ‘amendment’ of doctrines two thousand years old. [11]

The two fonts of Revelation are: Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture. To be successful, Isaac had to challenge the veracity of the Gospels, a seemingly monumental undertaking, but Jewish hubris apparently knows no bounds. The passages which Poncins quotes from show a number of inconsistencies, errors, and omissions which makes one wonder how books so flawed and biased could attain such notoriety. Poncins points out the shabby scholarship and vitriol that Isaac has for his subject:

In short, in their account of the Passion, now revised and corrected  by Jules Isaac, the writers of the Gospels appear as arrant liars of whom Matthew is unquestionably the most venomous. [19]

 

While the Romans cannot be completely exonerated for Christ’s death, Isaac focuses solely on the actions of Pilate during the Passion. He ignores the number of occasions during His three-year ministry where the Jews sought to kill Him. The most important omission was when Caiphas, shortly after the raising of Lazarus, condemned Christ to die: “Neither do you consider that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.” [S. John ch. xi, vs. 50] There is no evidence, even at that late date, that any of the high Roman officials, including Pilate, knew of Christ until his Crucifixion.

In addition to his written works, Isaac organized “both national and international gatherings attended by sympathetic Catholics who were favorably disposed towards his arguments.” [12] Instead of falling on deaf ears inside the Vatican, in the post-war Catholic world, Isaac attracted a significant following. In fact, he was able to obtain a private audience with Pius XII where “he pleaded on behalf of Judaism.” [12] In 1960, after discussions with high ranking officials of the Roman Curia, Isaac met with John XXIII and asked the pope to “condemn the ‘teaching of contempt’ [in the Gospel narratives], suggesting that a sub-commission should be set up specifically to study the problem.” [12–13] Isaac’s activities proved to be quite fruitful, as Poncins reports:

Some time afterwards Jules Isaac ‘learned with joy that his suggestions had been considered by the Pope and handed on to Cardinal Bea for examination.’ The latter set up a special working [party to study relations between the Church and Israel, which finally resulted in the Council vote on the 20th of November 1964. [13] 

That a vicious critic of Sacred Scripture, the Church Fathers, and saints was received by the Catholic hierarchy says a lot about the power and influence that the Jews had attained. And that their ideas were eventually accepted by Rome, shows how it had become increasingly Judaized. Judaization would only accelerate especially after the promulgation of the New Mass as popes would visit and pray with Jews at synagogues.

While Judaism and the Vatican appeared over a half century ago, it is still relevant for it was one of the first works which showed that the modern Catholic Church is a different institution than had previously existed for some two thousand years. Furthermore, Poncins addresses the touchy subject of the Jewish infiltration of the Church which even many traditional Catholic authors have typically avoided.

Poncins’ tome is important, for the changes in the Church’s attitude toward the Jews played a large part in its downfall as the Western world’s preeminent moral authority which used to defend the family, taught what the proper role of women in society should be, while it condemned societal-wrecking evils as sodomy, divorce, abortion, contraception, and concubinage. Without the Church’s guidance, Western societies were easy prey for the cultural Marxists’ (often Jewish) assault on traditional values and morals.

A revitalization of Western civilization can only come about if the nightmarish demographic trends of the Occidental peoples are reversed. It is doubtful that such a turnaround can come about unless the Catholic Church repudiates the Second Vatican Council, especially in its policy toward the Jews, and becomes once again a defender of traditional Christian morality. To begin such an arduous task, there is no better place to start than a thorough reading of Vicomte Léon de Poncins’ Judaism and the Vatican.

Ethnos Needs Logos (and Genos)

Dr. E. Michael Jones is a prolific and pugnacious Catholic author. He is a great crusader for Truth and I admire his work tremendously. A man who can spin off a thousand pages on the “Jewish Revolutionary Spirit” is clearly a man with important things to say. He makes unexpected and illuminating connections like few others and has a way of reducing complex cultural or social phenomena down into a single blast furnace of a sentence. Oftentimes the result is breathtaking, as in, “modernity is rationalized sexual misbehavior.” Jones began his career by getting fired from St. Mary’s College in South Bend for being against abortion. (Listen to him tell the story.) A bit nonplussed at being considered too Catholic for a Catholic college, he launched his own magazine, now entitled Culture Wars, and almost forty years and a dozen incisive volumes later, shows no sign of slowing down. Anyone who wishes to understand the hidden forces that shape the modern world will find a trove of insights in his large body of work.

In this short essay, however, I venture to take issue with the great Dr. Jones. The “issue” arises from the fact that he insists that race is not an important focus of identity. Being a militant Catholic (in the best sense), Jones maintains that if everyone just converted to Catholicism most modern ills would take care of themselves. In this, I happen to agree with him. Imagine if the Catholic hierarchy actually converted to Catholicism! Not to mention the Jews and Muslims and the LGBT crowd! A lot of problems would vanish instantly. But alas, that’s not happening anytime soon, and meanwhile, we—the men of the West—have a fight on our hands. In short, I believe that race is much more important than Jones is willing to concede, both as a component of individual humans and as a factor in history and culture.

Aware of his stance on race, I recently bought his two booklets Ethnos Needs Logos and Benedict’s Rule. Idly flipping through the first one, I came across the sentence, “Without the Catholic Church, Europe would resemble Somalia.” Now, I like to think I’m a good son of Holy Mother Church, but that statement made me slightly sick to my stomach (see also Kevin MacDonald’s recent comment on the role of the Church in European history). I decided to read the books carefully and work out exactly where I stand in relation to Jones’ ideas.

The genesis of Ethnos Needs Logos was a conference on national identity conducted in Guadalajara, Mexico, during which Jones privately debated David Duke and Mark Weber (of the Institute for Historical Review) over whether race or religion is more responsible for the creation of nations. Jones vigorously expounds the idea that “Logos,” the rational and divine order of the universe as personified in Christ and now embodied in the Catholic Church, is the only force that can raise ethnic groups to the highest level of human culture. Drawing on Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Jones describes how this process culminates in nationhood and the Christian state. The end of human progress, which involves the progressive understanding and social implementation of the true idea of “freedom,” is thus the Catholic West. In making his point, Jones ridicules the idea that race, mere matter as he calls it, plays a role in the moral development of mankind.

In Benedict’s Rule, published in 2017, a year before Ethnos Needs Logos, Jones discusses how imperial overreach emptied Roman identity of its meaning. (It also emptied Rome of its founding people: Appendix to Chapter 2 of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition—a good example of how changing the people also changes the culture.)

Jones goes on to claim that the void after the fall of the Empire was filled by religion and the growth of ethnic groups (“ethnogenesis”). He describes how the ensuing reign of chaotic tribalism was eventually tamed and civilized by the monastic Order of St. Benedict and the Catholic Church. He then switches to modern times to describe how the Church in America “controlled” ethnogenesis by creating cohesive ethnic parishes in northern cities. Jones holds that the Church constituted a powerful “ethnic group” defined by religion. Jones is an adherent of the “triple melting pot” theory, which claims that, in America, religion replaced national origin as the main bond of unity, in consequence of which there were three “ethnic groups” in America: Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Unfortunately, the Church fell into the trap of joining the “civil rights” movement (and defining justice in racial terms) instead of defending the integrity of its ethnic parishes, and, coincidentally, its own power. Interestingly, Jones says the Catholic parishes in the northern cities should have resisted being broken up by the influx of Blacks into their neighborhoods, although elsewhere he states that “any race-based defense was either illicit or ineffectual.” (Ethnos, 40) The collapse of Catholic power in the 1960s and 1970s permitted the conservative movement to organize disaffected White Catholics, who resented the liberal turn of their Church, into a new “ethnic group.” Jones ends by predicting that globalism will soon usher in a new era of rampant tribalism, and that Islam will be the big winner if the Catholic Church does not return to its traditions.

Jones does not define “ethnic group,” but he uses the term to denote any effective social group, including tribes, religious groups, nations, and even political parties.

All in all, two very interesting booklets that support each other’s arguments with a wealth of trenchant analysis. I found myself agreeing with practically all of it, and was pleasantly intrigued half a dozen times. There is much I would like to discuss—perhaps at a later time—but at present I will confine myself to just two of Dr. Jones’ ideas.

The first statement that caught my attention is that Whites in America embrace White identity only because they are deracinated; they have lost the more important communal bonds of ethnicity and religion and have seized upon an ersatz identity:

The term “white” or “European,” . . . is the infallible sign that we are dealing with advanced deracination. White people are people who lack an identity, and so the only identity they can come up with is a negative one, namely, the opposite of black. (Ethnos, 40)

In fact, White identity in America is as old as the nation itself, especially in the South, given that the racial division between Blacks and Whites has existed since before the founding. Moreover, during the period of ethnic defense culminating in the 1924 immigration law, it was common for White Americans to have a sense racial identity and to feel threatened by immigration, especially immigration of Eastern European Jews. Such ideas, often influenced by Darwinism, were published in prominent media and by publishing houses with excellent establishment reputations. (See Chapter 6 of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition.)

I agree that many White Americans are deracinated in the current situation, but this is after the rise of a new (fundamentally Jewish) elite and decades of propaganda from the mainstream media, activist organizations, and academia fostering White guilt and the idea that White racial identity (and only White racial identity) is a psychopathology and has no scientific basis—the latter an idea that Jones evidently approves.

The same is true of other identities. Christianity has gone by the wayside; so has identity based on national origins, and even old-style patriotism has been ridiculed and outlawed. Whites are desperately looking for community. (I firmly believe that this loss of identity is the real cause of the high White suicide rate.) Some are looking back to the White heritage of “the West” and trying to develop a focus of attachment and action based on that. If these people can mobilize others to defend White people and Western Culture, then I support their efforts. Along with Dr. Jones, I hope that the West returns to the old Faith, but the question of bare survival is now looming, and I prefer the survival of pagan White culture to the death of all White culture.

Jones denigrates racial identity as materialist and artificial—not simply a lesser choice among various possibilities, but one completely in error. However, the enemies of Western Man and Christianity have grouped heritage Americans into the category of “White,” and are waging war on them—us—on that basis. If we are not interested in seeing ourselves as White, our enemies are. Even more urgently, the demographic situation in America is grinding inexorably onward, precisely against Whites as Whites. Therefore, it seems we will have little choice but to fight under that flag. The longer the enemy wages war against “Whites,” the more defenders will take up the banner thrust into their hands.

I certainly do not regard White identity as negative or artificial. However, if one takes it as a catch-all term, then, yes, it is a very thin concept, because it encompasses so many groups across the world that differ on all points except race. What unites all those Whites in the various nations? Precious little. On what basis could they be united for common action? It is White identity within the various nations that could provide some traction, for there it could draw upon common history and traditions. That is the key: race by itself probably cannot provide a basis for unity and action, but fused with religion, national feeling, and anything else that helps bond society together, it could give rise to a powerful ethnos. Therefore, Whites should seek to reactivate their traditional identities based on religion, nation, or region, as well as on race.

The next fifty years is going to be a riveting lesson in the dynamics of imperial disintegration and ethnogenesis. Seeking solidarity in Whiteness, if it does nothing more than facilitate strong bonds between groups of Whites caught in a civil war fought along racial lines, will have served a vital purpose.

The second point that demands explication is Jones’ denial that race is anything more than mere matter, without importance in relation to the faculties of the soul, human behavior, or society at large. He cuts the ground away completely from any attempt to invest race with meaning for individuals or society:

Race . . . is a creation of the biological materialism which found its most prominent spokesman in Charles Darwin. Materialism is based on the primacy of matter, and matter, as everyone trained in Thomistic philosophy knows, is the principle of differentiation. Matter, therefore, cannot lead to unity.” (Ethnos, 12)

He insists that men are inclined to race pride “because we are all by fallen nature carnal and are always ready to choose material goods over spiritual goods.” (Ethnos, 22)

But why should unity be an overriding goal? This pre-judges the question of whether race exists and whether race a primary dividing line in the contemporary world, resulting in a situation where anti-White hatred is increasingly prominent in the mainstream media and on social media. This utopian ideal of a harmonious humanity united by spiritual ideals ignores the reality of what is happening all around us.

Moreover, the good doctor, it seems to me, is denying heredity and race any role in the mental and moral make-up of men. First, heredity influences human behavior. Genes or other biological factors don’t determine human behavior, because every normal human possesses free will in his actions. However, there is a cascade of modern research that shows how genetic factors predispose people to this behavior or that. Ignoring these data results in a philosophical idealism dedicated to the spiritual unity of mankind in which the mind is completely separate from the body. Jones is quite aware of Jewish influence on the culture of West, but does anyone seriously believe that a philosophical idealism based on the unity of mankind will ever appeal to Jews? Will it ever appeal to the (now virtually hegemonic) cultural left and its addiction to the racial and gender identity politics of division?

Genes can make some people more inclined to alcoholism and violence, among other behaviors. I should stress that no gene or complex of genes can make a person an alcoholic. That would represent the destruction of free will and reduce men to genetic robots. A person repeatedly chooses to drink—that makes an alcoholic. The genes nudge a person in that direction, or incline a person to that behavior, but only the will, seated in the soul, directly pulls the trigger on the action. Thus, genetic factors may sway the will, but do not impel it.

In addition to genetic influence on behavior, there appears in Catholic teaching the idea that heredity contributes to the moral make-up of man.

First, some background. In Catholic teaching, the human is a perfect union of two distinct elements, the body and the soul. The human soul is both the animating principle of the body, and an immortal spirit. (The souls of animals are not spirits and go out of existence with the death of the animal.) The souls of men have spiritual faculties or powers called the intellect and the will. The intellect has its seat in the soul, but it is dependent upon the senses to provide it with material for its operations. How and to what extent the intellect is dependent upon the physical brain is a problem that has long fascinated not only me but also centuries of Catholic theologians and psychologists. As to why intelligence is so variable in humans, there are two possibilities. The first is the idea that the physical quality of the brain, if excellent, permits greater reach and power to the operations of the intellect; however, if it is inferior, it can limit mental performance. The second possibility is that God fashions the soul and its intellect according to the constitution of the body and the brain. Both of these cases permit the conclusion that the material body has an impact on the soul and its capabilities.

The idea of heredity is surprisingly prominent in Catholic teaching. It was with intense interest that I recently read the following passages from the pen of the great German-born Thomist, Abbot Vonier, in his classic 1913 work The Human Soul:

There seems to be no contradiction in supposing that spiritual souls may differ widely in qualities, God forming them according to the differences of hereditary dispositions. . . . Saint Thomas Aquinas distinctly inclines towards the view that Almighty God fashions the soul He creates according to the body into which He infuses it. As long as the soul’s spirituality is safeguarded, there is no reason why the body, with its qualities, should not be to God the occasion for creating a soul with corresponding qualities. (Vonier, 45-46)

[Man’s physical make-up] has its qualities and its defects, which the soul cannot change

. . . the soul’s office is . . . to tune all the strings of nature to the highest pitch; but all the tuning in the world will never change the make of the instrument. (Vonier, 47)

These are explosive ideas. They support the proposition that humans have varying capacities (including moral capacities) that follow the dispositions of heredity. Similar statements appear in the work of other theologians. The Jesuit Ernest R. Hull, in The Formation of Character, says

The bodily gifts of nature are . . . unequally distributed; and hence a huge difference of quality in the composition of the brain, nerves, sensitive organs and the rest. And since all our functionings in life have to be carried on through this conjoint instrument called the body, it follows that men come into existence with an immense initial difference of mental and even moral capacity, according to the qualities of these different organs. … Hence there is no difficulty in acknowledging the fact that some people are born stupid, others clever, some weak and others strong, some sluggish . . . others vivacious and active. . . . Even in the moral order there are some who are almost literally born angels in the flesh, while others are painfully prone to anger, sloth, gluttony. (Hull, 113; emphasis added)

Further support comes from the 1908 Catholic Encyclopedia:

Character is the expression of the personality of a human being. . . . A man’s character is the resultant of two distinct classes of factors: the original or inherited elements of his being, and those which he has acquired. On the one hand, every human being starts with a certain nature or disposition—a native endowment of capacities for knowledge, and feelings, and tendencies towards volitions and action—which varies with each individual. This disposition is dependent in part on the structure of the bodily organism and especially of the nervous system which he has inherited; in part, perhaps, also on his soul which has been created. . . . The transmission from parent to offspring of hereditary dispositions, therefore, involves no conflict with the doctrine of the creation of each human soul. (Catholic Encyclopedia, “Character”)

There is nothing more central to man than his character. Character is the truest manifestation of who a man is, a direct expression of his moral temper. And, character is partly derived from heredity. It is based on temperament and formed by the habitual action of the will, which decides between courses of action. (Temperament can be thought of as the natural inclinations of a person, manifested especially in his personality, with a strong hereditary component.) Character is the “group of internal dispositions, issuing from heredity, environment, education, or deliberately formed habits, which preside over one’s habitual conduct.” (Attwater, A Catholic Dictionary, 96; emphasis added)

Within mainstream Catholic theology, the body becomes more than dumb “matter” when it is united to a soul. The soul does not spiritualize or divinize the body, but it does raise it to full partnership with an immortal spirit, all of whose functions are performed through and with the body and its natural endowment. The passages above show us that the physical, hereditary qualities of the body impart to the human being a not-inconsiderable part of his moral constitution.

To make the obvious connection, if heredity is important and if the races differ significantly in their genetic endowment, then race is real.

Thus, the body—heredity—race—contributes to the formation of the psychological and moral human being. Man is a union of the physical and the spiritual worlds, each with a sphere of influence over the other. Yes, the soul is much more important, but the body is more than a cipher, much more than “mere matter.”

Lastly, I would like to address the preposterous claim that “Without the Catholic Church, Europe would resemble Somalia.” Without in any way downplaying the tremendous civilizing work of the Catholic Church, I present for your meditation two numbers:

Average IQ of Europe: 100.
Average IQ of Somalia: 68.

From Human Rights Watch:

If a person scores below 70 on a properly administered and scored I.Q. test, he or she is in the bottom 2 percent of the American population and meets the first condition necessary to be defined as having mental retardation. . . . An I.Q. in the 60 to 70 range is approximately the scholastic equivalent to the third grade.

I know that Dr. Jones often resorts to hyperbole, but no White society would ever resemble Somalia.

As important as it is, the spiritual cannot provide a complete explanation for society and history, because man has a physical body and lives in a physical world. True Catholic teaching does not despise matter, but rather exalts it because it was made by God. Indeed, the highest form of matter in the universe is the human body, animated by a soul. Catholics should not despise the concept of race either, because it too was created by God. Catholic teaching is (or was) very comfortable with the idea of individual human inequality in talent and character, as well as with the idea of talent-based hierarchies in society and state. There is likewise no reason to deny the obvious differences between races, other than a misguided concern to give false charity greater importance than truth. There is no profit in that.

Whether race will ever become a powerful and effective focus of identity in the beleaguered West is an open question, but it is painfully clear that the war against “Whites” is intensifying dramatically. I say we should mobilize all the forces we can lay hold of, whether spiritual or racial, and bring them to the fight.


Sources

Attwater, Donald. A Catholic Dictionary. New York: MacMillan Company, 1943.

Hull, Ernest R., S.J. The Formation of Character. St. Louis: Herder Books, no date.

Jones, E. Michael. Benedict’s Rule: The Rise of Ethnicity and the Fall of Rome. South Bend, Indiana: Fidelity Press, 2017.

Jones, E. Michael. Ethnos Needs Logos: Why I Spent Three Days in Guadalajara Trying to Persuade David Duke to Become a Catholic. South Bend, Indiana: Fidelity Press, 2018.

Maher, Michael. “Character.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 3. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908. 26 Nov. 2019 <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03584b.htm>.

Vonier, Abbot. The Human Soul. Bethesda, Maryland: Zacheus Press, 2010.

 

 

“The Mightier Our Blows, the Greater Our Emperor’s Love”: The Crusader Ideology of Germanized Christianity in the Song of Roland

There is a mysterious quality to the first literature of any ancient nation. The earliest recorded poems are those produced right at the edge between the forceful spontaneity of barbarism and the dead letter of civilization. They almost invariably reflect a primordial and manly mindset very different from that of our own time. They express the psychology and values of conquering peoples, heeding closely to the law of life, by which nations prosper or die. So it is with the Iliad of ancient Greece,the Beowulf of the Anglo-Saxons, and the Song of Roland of the French.

The Song of Roland is the French national epic and the first great piece of French literature, emerging in the eleventh century, on the back of the First Crusade to retake the Holy Land from the Muslims. The poem’s author is even more mysterious than Homer, for we do not even know his name. The Song is a vivid and powerful expression of the values of medieval European chivalry and indeed of the centuries-long clash of civilizations between Christianity and Islam, dating back to the Muslim conquests of Roman Christian Levant and North Africa.

In contrast with later criticisms of Christianity as embodying a universalist “slave-morality,” in the Song we find Christian values perfectly fused, and perhaps subordinated to, the essentially Germanic warrior ethos of the French knightly aristocracy in the form of a novel crusader ideology. The Song presents a perfect case-study of what James C. Russell called the “Germanization of early medieval Christianity” or what William Pierce called “Aryanized” Christianity.[1] The heroes of the poem are obsessed with honor, family, nation, religion, and service to the emperor. I shall present the historical Charlemagne and the values of the Song of Roland. These can help us understand both the emergence and defense of European identity in past centuries. Read more