Christianity

Operation Excalibur: Back to Church, Bucko! Part 1

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Then, He said to them, “But now…he who has no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one.” (Luke 22:36)

“Talk is for lovers.  I need a sword to be king!” Excalibur Opening Scene (Battle of the Knights) 1981

Setting the Scene

Images of Excalibur, King Arthur’s legendary sword, typically mirror the mythic iconography of the Christian Cross.  Note the cosmic aura surrounding the gleaming hilt of the sword in the stone on the cover of my book, Dissident Dispatches.  Its mysterious magnetism beckons the man of destiny.  Only a true hero, uniquely possessed of the strength to pull the fearsome blade from the rock of ages, will be endowed with the sacred majesty of kingship.  Excalibur was a fearsome weapon, striking down the king’s enemies in a spiritual struggle between good and evil.  Of course, as a figment of literary imagination, Excalibur is more useful as an instrument of psychological or cultural rather than physical warfare. Accordingly, like any other popular meme, it can be deployed in cyberspace by any number of combatants, for fun or in deadly earnest.

On the Alt Right, the most famous, politically effective meme has been the seemingly innocuous cartoon image of Pepe the Frog.  Amidst the tumult and confusion of the Trump campaign, Pepe helped the Alt Right movement sort out amused friends from outraged enemies. The sorting process was a two-way street, however.  As part of the wider push by corporate and political wire-pullers to de-platform the Alt Right, the powerful Jewish activist organization, the Anti-Defamation League conducted a concerted, well-funded campaign of its own to brand Pepe memes as anti-Semitic and racist “hate speech”.  The goal was to outlaw reproduction of the Pepe meme by Alt Right publishers, broadcasters, and bloggers.  The tool chosen to achieve that outcome was copyright law.  Simply for featuring Bishop Pepe on the cover of a book, Arktos Media, already well-known as a dissident right publisher, found itself the target of legal action organized by the ADL.

The response was both unexpected and disproportionate.  Bishop Pepe triggered determined, well-resourced, and crafty enemies.  The frog cartoon cover art was quickly leveraged into a credible threat to the survival of Arktos Media.  In its campaign against Alt Right Pepe , the ADL had enlisted Matt Furie, a cartoonist who had drawn a primitive Pepe in a comic book, more than ten years ago.  In the meantime, thousands of green frog images had appeared on the internet and IRL during the meme wars of 2015–2016.  The ADL supported Furie in his claim to copyright ownership and hence all profits derived from the commercial use of Pepe the Frog memes.  A major corporate law firm was engaged (putatively pro bono publico) to enforce Furie’s putative proprietary interest in Pepe against all the world.  In practice, only parties associated in some way with the Alt Right or the Trump campaign received notices to cease and desist their use of Pepe memes and to hand over to Matt Furie any profits they may have earned therefrom.  In their letter to Arktos, Furie’s lawyers threatened substantial legal and commercial penalties should the publisher not capitulate to this demand.  Read more

Renewing Christendom

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Dissident Dispatches: An Alt-Right Guide to Christian Theology
Andrew Fraser
London: Arktos, 2017

Andrew Fraser was for most of his career a professor of law at Macquarie University in Sydney. He was catapulted to prominence in July, 2005, by a letter to a local newspaper warning against the importation of Sudanese refugees into Australia: “Experience everywhere in the world shows us that an expanding black population is a sure-fire recipe for increases in crime, violence and other social problems.” The controversy surrounding the letter resulted in his departure from Macquarie.

In 2011, he published The WASP Question, a book which examines the failure of Anglo-Saxons around the world—the “invisible race”—to maintain a conscious ethnic identity and defend their collective interests:

The defining characteristic of WASPs [he wrote] is that they are much less ethnocentric than other peoples; indeed, for all practical purposes Anglo-Saxon Protestants appear to be all but completely bereft of in-group solidarity. They are therefore open to exploitation by free-riders from other, more ethnocentric, groups.

In the course of studying Anglo-Saxon origins, he came to appreciate the role played by the Christian Church in transforming a bunch of squabbling Germanic tribes into the English nation. It would be impossible to guess from looking at contemporary Christianity that the church could ever have served such a function. The privatization of worship since the Enlightenment has been so successful a revolution that many Christians are unaware of it, imagining it simply the nature of their faith to be a private affair.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Medieval Christianity “was a way of life, a communion, and a faith practiced in public and private by all manner of men and women,” as Fraser points out. The Bible did not merely “serve individual believers as witness to the word and work of God,” but also “provided the sacred charter” of the church. But if the Christian Church presided over the formation of the English nation, might the retreat of Christianity into the private realm have contributed to the downfall of proud Anglo-Saxon nationhood within the last several decades?

With such questions in mind, Fraser, already of an age to retire, made the unusual decision to enroll as an undergraduate at a nearby divinity school. The school turned out to be a “hotbed of multiculturalist ideology,” and at one point he was suspended for an entire year due to complaints of his “intolerance” from students and faculty members. But he persisted, and in 2015 was awarded a Bachelor of Theology degree.

Dissident Dispatches is the record of his experiences as a student. The book includes papers written for course credit (with his lecturer’s comments), accounts of his skirmishes with the politically correct, and subsequent personal reflections on both. It is arranged chronologically rather than thematically, giving it the feel of a miscellany, but a consistent theological and political perspective underlies the whole. Weighing in at over 500 pages, the volume is best digested in short installments. What follows is merely a summary of a few of the main themes. Read more

On Europe and “the Faith”

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PopeFrancis

“Too often you have not been welcomed…Forgive the closed-mindedness and indifference of our societies, which fear the change of lifestyle and mentality that your presence requires.”
Pope Francis, 2016.

“Europe is the faith, and the faith is Europe…I say again, renewing the terms, The Church is Europe: and Europe is The Church.”
Hillaire Belloc, 1920. 

Over the years my attitudes towards race and religion have unfortunately brought me into conflict with many Christians, some of whom have been very close to me. Closest to home, my wife is an evangelical Christian. Like many of her co-religionists, she believes much of what she is told in church, not only in terms of what is written in the Bible, but also in the social instructions her church issues in order to steer its flock towards a “good” and “moral” Christian life.

My wife and I are opposites in many respects. She is fully aware of my own agnosticism, and is equally aware of my positions on racial, religious and political matters. Possessing an abundance of good qualities as a wife and mother, I don’t think I am doing her a terrible injustice by stating that she doesn’t completely understand the complexities of the subject matter I routinely explore. To her, the thing that matters most is that my attitudes are “good.” It is the “moral” merit of my positions that she is most interested in, and because she is a Christian the question of how “moral” my opinions are is entirely dependent on how closely they fit with the Christian moral worldview  —  as taught to her by her church. Thus, when we discuss this or that aspect of the news she will often ask of my opinions: “Yes, but is that a good attitude to have? Is that displaying forgiveness? Isn’t your heart too hard?” If the discussion continues, it frequently evolves into a debate between (my) facts and (her) moral feelings. Read more

My Journey

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Back in the 40s and 50s, a minority group thought that they had an excellent way to make society better — they would make people better. In their midst was a man who was educated, charismatic, determined, and very religious; he was a rising star in their movement. They put their plan into action in the areas in which they lived, and had some success, but they also faced serious opposition, even persecution; they were forced out of some places, they were targeted for assassination, and their leader was beaten nearly to death.

They returned to their base of operations to regroup and revise their plan. The leader had a notion to effect their desired changes in another place, but he was prevented from going. But this man had a message, and he was on a mission, and he had a vision. He pulled his team out of the place to which he was prevented from going, and they set out to do their work somewhere else. When they began having success in this new place, they again became targets of the entrenched, corrupt political system. They were arrested and jailed. But they were not without support from the ruler with ultimate authority, and after a groundbreaking event, they were freed.

The city officials asked them to leave the city, which they did. But the ultimate success of their efforts was truly epic. Their message had found fertile ground among all classes of people there, and in time an entire continent had been radically changed because of the commitment of this tiny group that endured and risked so much on the notion that they could make the world a better place by changing the way people think.

Yes, that was back in the 40s and 50s. Not the 1940s and 1950s, but the actual 40s and 50s. The place was the Middle East and Greece; the tiny group was a new religious sect that came to be known as Christians, and their leader was Saul of Tarsus, known to us today as Paul, the Apostle of Jesus Christ.

Paul and his compatriots made three missionary journeys to spread the Gospel, the second of which is of particular interest to us. As I described it above, Paul wanted to go to Asia to preach, but Acts 16 tells us that the Holy Spirit prevented him. In a vision, Paul saw a man standing across the sea, shouting to him, “Come to Macedonia and help us!” Paul immediately assembled his team and went. (By the way, the “groundbreaking event” to which I referred was an earthquake which caused enough damage to the jail that Paul and Silas were able to escape, but not before converting the jailer to Christianity.)

Why is this of particular interest to us? Because it was the introduction of Christianity to Europe, that is, to White people. Rather than send the Gospel to Asians, God first sent it to White people, our people. And we embraced it. Unlike other races and religions, the White race was not conquered into Christianity; we were convinced into Christianity. We saw its virtues, we accepted it. It changed the lives of our ancient ancestors, and continued on through the ages and generations of Europe. Christianity inspired our people to the greatest discoveries and accomplishments in the history of the world. If you are a White Christian, that is your heritage and birthright.

Read more at the Faith and Heritage website.

Columbus lands in the New World

Columbus lands in the New World

 

Is Universalism So Bad for Whites?

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Our current disastrous situation is that the White race is rapidly declining in absolute numbers and the countries it built are being taken over by the Third World.

There are, clearly, two elements to this. The first is that Whites are disappearing of their own volition because they don’t reproduce.

The second element is unrestricted immigration and multiculturalism.

It’s my argument that universalism in general and Christianity in particular didn’t produce either (for simplicity I’m assuming that Christianity is universalist although there are exceptions). The distortions of the Left did.

The elephant in the room which nobody is too happy to mention is that the evident reason for the demographic suicide of White, Western peoples is that they have dissociated sex from reproduction, which Christianity teaches not to do. Here, far from Christianity being the cause of this White birth decrease, there is its opposite, the erosion and abandonment of Christianity, at the root of this trend.

There is a Jamie Kelso video in which he confronts young Whites about such an issue as well. Read more

Monotheism vs. Polytheism

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This piece below was first published in Chronicles (A Magazine of American Culture), April 1996.

Can we still conceive of the revival of pagan sensibility in an age so profoundly saturated by Judeo-Christian monotheism and so ardently adhering to the tenets of liberal democracy? In popular parlance the very word “paganism” may incite some to derision and laughter. Who, after all, wants to be associated with witches and witchcraft, with sorcery and black magic? Worshiping animals or plants, or chanting hymns to Wotan or Zeus, in an epoch of cable television and “smart weapons,” does not augur well for serious intellectual and academic inquiry.

Yet, before we begin to heap scorn on paganism, we should pause for a moment. Paganism is not just witches and witches’ brew; paganism also means a mix of highly speculative theories and philosophies. Paganism is Seneca and Tacitus; it is an artistic and cultural movement that swept over Italy under the banner of the Renaissance. Paganism also means Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Charles Darwin, and a host of other thinkers associated with the Western cultural heritage. Two thousand years of Judeo-Christianity have not obscured the fact that pagan thought has not yet disappeared, even though it has often been blurred, stifled, or persecuted by monotheistic religions and their secular offshoots.

Undoubtedly, many would admit that in the realm of ethics all men and women of the world are the children of Abraham. Indeed, even the bolder ones who somewhat self-righteously claim to have rejected the Christian or Jewish theologies, and who claim to have replaced them with “secular humanism,” frequently ignore that their self-styled secular beliefs are firmly grounded in Judeo-Christian ethics. Abraham and Moses may be dethroned today, but their moral edicts and spiritual ordinances are much alive. The global and disenchanted world, accompanied by the litany of human rights, ecumenical society, and the rule of law—are these not principles that can be traced directly to the Judeo-Christian messianism that resurfaces today in its secular version under the elegant garb of modern “progressive” ideologies? Read more

Christianity and the Ethnic Suicide of the West

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Several comments on my post “What’s wrong with the Swedes?” mention Christianity as a problem in the dispossession of Whites. I agree that Christianity is part of the problem, but I think there are several difficulties with supposing that it is a root cause of the problem.

  • First and foremost, Christianity was the religion of the West during its expansion around the world. A century ago, with the exception of China, Japan, Siam, Korea, Ethiopia, and Liberia, the rest of the planet was dominated by Christian Europeans. Christianity was at least consistent with this incredible expansion and with the very large increase in the European population that occurred during this period of expansion. If anything, the decline of the West has co-occurred with the decline of religion among Western elites. If the world had stayed the way it was in 1960, no one would be talking about the suicide of the West.
  • Christianity has been many things throughout the centuries—an ideology of ethnic defense during the Iberian Reconquista, a pillar of exploitative monarchies and aristocracies in Europe and Latin America, a force for ethnic defense against usurious exploitation of peasants by ethnic outsiders at times during the Middle Ages, supporting slavery and segregation in the American South and apartheid in South Africa. Christianity has not had a consistent message of ethnic suicide or moral universalism. People on both sides of the slave trade in 17th–18th-century Britain were Christian. Both sides of the American Civil War were Christian.
  • Throughout history, Christianity has been quite adept at rendering unto Caesar—accommodating to the powers that be. In the U.S. and I suppose elsewhere in the West, Christians had much more influence on culture prior to the 1960s and the rise of the secular left — e.g., spearheading the successful drive to rein in Hollywood depictions of sex and Christianity beginning in the 1920s. But all that ended with the cultural revolution of the 1960s which was certainly not Christian in inspiration. Right now, the powers that be are the secular, multi-cultural, pro-non-White-immigration left, and one of their main goals is the eradication of public displays of Christianity and traditional Christian views on marriage and the family. Christianity itself has been corrupted by the secular left, most obviously in the case of the Second Vatican Council but also including the mainline Protestant sects. The Church had stood for cultural conservatism and had been a bulwark against Jewish influence for centuries.

Read more