Losing “Home”

The modern world is a world of ephemerality in every way.  Accordingly, the concept of a home has been lost to the meat-robots who are rapidly replacing humans.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, “a person in the United States can expect to move 11.7 times in their [sic] lifetime”; the propensity of Americans to wander about is a perennial topic of discussion.  In Europe, many of the War stories I find most tragic are not of individuals who died, but of the destruction and dispossession of family homes that had been established for centuries before the United States even existed.  And in my own life experience, I have too oft found myself surrounded by chic cosmopolites, who deem excessive attachment to living in one place to be a sign of emotional immaturity—perhaps even of mental illness.

The following article, which was nestled alongside a heart-rending review of Silesian Inferno (Schlesisches Inferno) at pp. 15–18, is a peculiar favorite of mine.  I have tried showing it to people, but never yet found anyone who understands it.

To Professor Oliver’s observations about “abolishing humanity”, I can add only that humans are indeed being replaced by fungible wetware computing assets, programmed and managed by more reliable, more intelligent machines. ®

Coming Home

By Revilo P. Oliver
Liberty Bell, November 1992, pp. 11–15.

[*11] The Manchester Guardian may have been a liberal publication when it was founded in 1821.  When I first began to glance occasionally at copies of it, a hundred and thirty years later, it had already become an evangel for “Liberal intellectuals,” telling them what to think—or to recite without troubling their consciousness with thought.  I am, by the way, becoming very tired of putting quotation marks about a phrase that designates a horde of chatterboxes who are neither liberal[1] nor intellectual.  “Liberal intellectuals,” as Joseph Sobran once dared to say publicly, to the displeasure of his editor-in-chief,[2] are only slightly disguised Communists, i.e., votaries of the Marxian religion, although some may be too ignorant to know it.

As one would expect, recent issues of the Guardian’s weekly supplement, which is widely distributed in this country, are filled with passionate yelps that the “rich nations” (that means you, sucker) [*12] must reduce their own standard of living so that they can give trillions of dollars to the “poor nations” (and that means billions of niggers, wogs, and other biological détritus) to help them “save the planet” (by breeding faster).  (That is the hogwash purveyed by the Gore who is now, incredible as it seems, a candidate for the office of Vice President.)[3]  There is naturally no mention of the only pollution from which the planet needs to be saved, the horrible overpopulation by billions of vocal anthropoids that are multiplying like guinea pigs, thanks to the fatuity and subconscious death-wish of our own ill-starred race.

Occasionally, however, the Guardian Weekly prints something worth reading.  In the issue for 21 June 1992 there is an item by Ralph Whitlock, which, I hope, may have reminded the paper’s habitual readers that there is much that neither they nor we can understand about our fellow creatures, who have as much right to this planet as we do, although our race, long bemused by a pernicious superstition, thought that they were made for our swollen-headed species to use and abuse.  It is worth quoting.

Mr. Whitlock says that last May he and a neighbor were commenting on the late return of swallows and house martins when

Over the meadows before his house, dipping and diving toward us as they hawked insects on the wing, were four or five martins.  Suddenly they were with us, and, losing their interest in flies, they made straight for the sites of their fast year’s nests.  Without hesitation and with no exploratory reconnoitering, they flew directly to the vestiges of the nests that had survived the winter’s gales, and clung to them twittering.  It was as if they were saying, “Well, here we are Home again! and so glad to be here!”

And I fell to marvelling at the unerring instinct that had brought them all those 7,000 miles from their winter quarters in South Africa, 14,000 miles if you reckon the autumn journey.  When the time came to begin the journey the birds must have had a clear picture of their destination, and a detailed programming of their route. … And there was no mistaking the impulse which guided them, for, the next day, they were busy laying the foundation of a new nest under the house eaves, using what remained of their nest of the previous year.

In the martins and many other species of birds, as I remarked when commenting on Dr. Rhine’s imposition on the credulity of the [*13] public,[4] we have a genuine instance of “extra-sensory perception.”  Their astonishing journeys are certainly not explicable in terms of the five senses that we possess.  The most plausible theory is that they somehow perceive the lines of force in the earth’s magnetic field and, perhaps, the angle of the sun’s rays.  But whatever the explanation, we have here a phenomenon of what can be called a “spiritual force” and is much more worthy of our attention than absurd religions about supernatural beings, whether old and outworn superstitions or newly invented by the hucksters of marvels for the gullible.

The same inexplicable power of perception is present in various species of mammals.  If you ride a horse over winding trails in the foothills, which he has never visited before, the instant his head is turned homeward he will know it, although you may not, if you have not consulted a map.  There are apparently unquestionable reports that if a baboon is carried, in a vehicle from which he cannot look out, a hundred miles along the two legs of a right-angle triangle, he will, when released, start homeward across the hypotenuse.

L-R:  Knut Hamsun, a Nobel Prize medal, and Reichsminister Dr. Joseph Goebbels.  (Representative images.  Montage by Raches.)

Knut Hamsun is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest Norwegian authors—perhaps even the greatest of all time.[1]  He visited the United States in the 1880s; he found, “In the [eighteen-] fifties there were signs of an intellectual elite in two of the oldest Southern states, but the war came and uprooted it before it was established….  Instead of founding an intellectual elite, America has established a mulatto studfarm.”[2]  Soon thereafter, he wrote the novel that first established his fame, which established the genre of the psychological novel.  I am particularly sympathetic thereto, for I understand, as he did, that it is sometimes the destiny of artists to starve.  Hamsun’s career as a novelist grew, and he was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In 1943, after the two men met, Hamsun sent his own Nobel Prize medal, the symbol of his achievements, to Reichsmininster Dr. Goebbels with the words:[3]

Knut Hamsun meets Dr. Goebbels in 1943.

Nobel established his prize as an award for last year’s “idealistic” poetry.  I know of no one who, so tirelessly year after year, has written and spoken the cause of Europe and humanity as idealistically as you, Mr. Reichsminister.  I apologize for sending you my medal.  It’s a completely useless thing for you, but I have nothing to send.

There is scurrilous speculation about why Hamsun did this.  I think that it is unwarranted.  Hamsun had expressed pro-German attitudes in both world wars.  He was consistently pro-German, anti-British, and anti-American.  The 1917 book that won him the medal he gave to Dr. Goebbels, Growth of the Soil, had strong National Socialist undertones before National Socialism even existed.[4]  This list of arguments could be much extended; but it is unnecessary:  Most tellingly, Hamsun eloquently eulogized Hitler at a time when many former sympathizers were already trying to distance themselves from the National Socialists—when praise for the recently deceased German leader could bring no advantage, and only personal detriment.

On May 7, 1945, Hamsun wrote[5] on the front page of Afterposten:

In its hostile and derogatory article about this noble tribute, Wikipedia’s current version gives the translation:

Adolf Hitler

I’m not worthy to speak up for Adolf Hitler, and to any sentimental rousing his life and deeds do not invite.

Hitler was a warrior, a warrior for humankind and a preacher of the gospel of justice for all nations.  He was a reforming character of the highest order, and his historical fate was that he functioned in a time of unequaled brutality, which in the end failed him.

Thus may the ordinary Western European look at Adolf Hitler.  And we, his close followers, bow our heads at his death.

Knut Hamsun

And thus, regardless of whatever convolutions and illogical contortions may be indulged by those who wish to distance Hamsun from the German National-Socialists, the record is clear:  The same brilliant mind whose stories inspired millions of readers truly and sincerely admired Adolf Hitler—and he awarded the symbol of his own highest achievements to Reichsminister Dr. Goebbels.

For my part, I have drawn some important lessons from the perpetual controversies about Hamsun.

The attempts to “rehabilitate” Hamsun are abhorrent:  Creatures who covet Hamsun’s work attempt to split the man down the middle, override his will, dissociate him from those whom he respected, and repudiate on his behalf that which he endorsed.  It is a cowardly theft of the spirit.  And I never want for that to happen to me.

If, perchance, I may exercise whatever talents I have to create value for others, then those others must accept me as I am—or else my value is not theirs to take.  Although I am not a National Socialist, I stand on Hitler’s side of history:  On his side, and on the side of every German who fought for him; and for reasons that I may elaborate in future Proems, I especially admire Dr. Goebbels.  You may agree or disagree—but if you find it unacceptable, then you do not deserve me, and you do not deserve anything that I ever make.  Be that so, the loss is yours and not mine.

Let those with creative talents pass such judgment, and have the moral courage to stand by it.  For creativity is power:  It is the power to move the world. ®

Notes

[1] And the way that Norway is destroying its genetic stock, it will never produce such an author again.

[2] Knut Hamsun, The Cultural Life of Modern America (1889), translation by Barbara Gordon Morgridge, pp. 143–144.  I have previously quoted this here.

[3] Letter from Knut Hamsun to Dr. Goebbels, June 17, 1943, as quoted by the Hamsun Center (archive).  The Hamsun Center’s English-language version seems to lack a corresponding page.

Note to Proems readers:  I request assistance obtaining archival scans of Hamsun’s letter to Dr. Goebbels of June 17, 1943, and of Dr. Goebbels’ reply of June 23, 1943.

Carle Vernet, An equestrian portrait of Emperor Napoleon with a battle beyond.  Cropped by Raches; see full painting.

As I search history for inspiration on how to overcome the New Dark Age, I have not infrequently focused on three great leaders:  Caesar, Napoleon, and the last and greatest leader of Western Civilization, Adolf Hitler.  For except insofar as the Jews were concerned, the Suicide of the West was not a race war:  “It was a war between aristocracy and degenerate democracy…”

Today is the 217th anniversary of coronation of Emperor Napoleon, and the 216th anniversary of Napoleon’s brilliant victory against much larger forces at Austerlitz.  In homage to the great man, I mark this day with a remarkable insight from Dr. Oscar Levy’s preface to Ludovici’s Nietzsche: His Life and Works (London, 1910), pp. viii–ix, xii–xiii, here excerpted with my addition of some illustrations:

[*viii] Nietzsche may have been right, therefore he may be unsuccessful.  I myself regard Nietzsche’s views on art, religion, psychology, morality, as extremely sound; I think they are proved both by history and by common experience; I even suspect that they could be confirmed by science, if only science would give up looking at the world through the coloured spectacles of democratic prejudice . . . but then, it is so difficult to give up this democratic prejudice; for it is by no means simply a political opinion.  Democracy, as a political creed, need terrify no one; for political creeds succeed each other like waves of the sea, whose thunder is loud and whose end is froth; but the driving power behind democracy is not a political one, it is religious—it is Christianity.  A mighty religion still, a religion [*ix] which has governed the world for two thousand years, which has influenced all philosophies, all literatures, all laws, all customs up to our own day, till it has finally filtered into our hearts, our blood, our system, and become part and parcel of ourselves without our being aware of it.  At the present moment we are all instinctive Christians.  […]

[*xii] I was on a visit to Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche, in her villa high up amongst the hills of Weimar, waiting in the drawing-room for my hostess to enter.  It was the first time that I had stood upon the holy ground where Friedrich Nietzsche gave up his heroic soul, and I was naturally impressed; my eyes wandered reverently around the scene, and I suddenly noticed some handwriting on the wall.  The handwriting consisted of a powerful letter N which the ingenious builder had engraved profusely upon the oak panels of the room.  The N, of course, reminded me of another big N, connected with another big name,—the N which used to be engraved together with the imperial crown and eagle upon the plate and regalia of Napoleon Bonaparte.  There was another victim of democracy: the man who, elevated by its revolutionary wave, tried to stifle and subdue the anarchical flood, was swallowed up as ignominiously as its other implacable opponent, the plucky parson’s son of the vicarage of Röcken.

Andrea Appiani, Napoleon I of France.

The mighty sword in the beginning and the mighty pen at the end of the last century were alike impotent against—Fate.  No doubt, I saw in that moment, as though lit up by a flashlight, the fate of Europe clearly before my eyes.  A [*xiii] fate—an iron fate.  A fate unavoidable for a continent that will have no more guides, no more great men.  A fate unavoidable for an age that spills its best blood with the carelessness of ignorance.  A fate unavoidable for a people that is driven by its very religion to disobedience and anarchy.  And I thought of my own race, which has seen so many fates, so many ages, so many empires decline—and there was I, the eternal Jew, witnessing another catastrophe.  And I shuddered, and when my hostess entered I had not yet recovered my breath.

Dr. Levy wrote amidst a civilization that was rotted to its core, beneath a veneer of superficial modern glitz and glamor.  Decayed for so long by the spiritual poison of Christianity, it had then spent more than a century repudiating all aristocratic and hierarchical principles for “liberty, equality, brotherhood”—for democracy.

It is an historic irony that this Jewish author should point to his own Jewishness in this context; for in his analysis of that nation which decided “to be at any price”, Nietzsche incisively identified why the Jews usually promote decadence as their source of power.[1]  But the Jews are neither the source of the decay, nor unanimous in the satisfaction that they usually take from it.  For his part, Dr. Levy declared what few in the modern age will dare to say, or even dare to think, when he pointed to the fate of they who “will have no more guides, no more great men.”  His only mistake in this passage was that he could not foresee one who was to be greater than Napoleon—who was commensurately struck down with greater viciousness.

Thanksgiving or Christmas, pick one:  The Puritans are the root of American degeneracy, the forebears of the Abolitionists and of modern liberals, and the origin of the War on Christmas.  (Image:  Frontispiece to The Vindication of Christmas, by John Taylor (1652).)

For the subtitle, and for the general inspiration, I give thanks to the magnificent Revilo P. Oliver.[1]

On September 16, 1620, a small group of degenerate religious fanatics left noble Old Europe, where, despite the limited tolerance they had found in the Netherlands, they were generally unwelcome as agitators and antisocial renegades deadset on destabilizing and destroying traditional society.  Similar splinter-sects who stayed behind would soon roil England with proletarian revolution, regicide, and the full opening of England to Yahweh’s Chosen Parasites, who for three and a half centuries had been banned unless they suffered the indignity of having magic water sprinkled on their heads.

The Pilgrims were Separatist Puritans; and together with other Puritans who soon infested Massachusetts, they soon started the original War on Christmas.  For they correctly identified traditional European Christmas celebrations as un-Biblical and “pagan”.  The singing of Christmas carols, Christmas feasting, and the playing of sports (as was then traditional at Christmas) had snuck something Aryan into the schizophrenic cultural amalgam that is European Christianity.  According to the Puritans, Christmas was an ordinary workday, and the only proper way to celebrate the putative birth of Jesus was quietly to read the Bible and pray, without merriment or festivities.

The Puritans wanted to be purely Christian—Christian all the way, Christians par excellence.  They were wannabe-Jews, who oft gave their children ridiculous Hebraical names due to their obsession with the Old Testament; and behavior and worldview were Jewier than some actual Jews’.  Given their attitude, no wonder their clothing was eerily similar to that of the Chassidim.  They were hateful, and in full rebellion against the traditions of their European forefathers.

The Puritans banned Christmas as “Satanic”.  Public notice from Massachusetts, 1659.  The text, for those who have trouble with medial-s:  “Publick Notice: The Observation of Christmas having been deemed a Sacrilege, the exchanging of Gifts and Greetings, dressing in Fine Clothing, Feasting and similar Satanical Practices are hereby FORBIDDEN with the Offender liable to a Fine of FIVE SHILLINGS.”

On Christmas Day, 1621, Mayflower passenger William Bradford (who, as governor, referred to himself in the third person as “Gov”) cracked down with Biblical wrath on recent arrivals who tried to hold traditional Christmas festivities.  In 1659, the Massachusetts Bay Colony specifically banned people from taking off work for Christmas Day, and from Christmas feasts:

For preventing disorders arising in several places within this Jurisdiction, by reason of some still observing such Festivals,*as were Superstitiously kept in other Countries, to the great dishonour of God and offence of others;

It is therefore Ordered by this Court and the Authority thereof, that [*58] whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like,* either by forbearing labour, feasting, or any other way upon any such account as aforesaid, every such person so offending, shall pay for every such offence five shillings as a fine to the County.

Although most people miss the deeper cultural implications that I raise, the Puritans’ War on Christmas is sometimes mentioned in the mainstream media.  It is well-known to historians of the Christmas holiday, and to Massachusetts historians:

Although Christmas was widely celebrated in Europe as a Christian holiday marking the birth of Jesus Christ, puritans saw it as a false holiday with stronger ties to paganism than Christianity, and they were correct, according to the book The Battle for Christmas:

It was only in the fourth century that the Church officially decided to observe Christmas on December 25.  And this date was chosen not for religious reasons but simply because it happened to mark the approximate arrival of the winter solstice, an event that was celebrated long before the advent of Christianity.  The puritans were correct when they pointed out—and they pointed it out often—that Christmas was nothing but a pagan festival covered with a Christian veneer.  The Reverend Increase Mather of Boston, for example, accurately observed in 1687 that the early Christians who first observed the Nativity on December 25 did not do so “thinking that Christ was born in that month, but because the Heathens Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan holidays metamorphosed into Christian ones.”

[…]

After the puritans left Europe, they decided to leave these holiday traditions behind. Instead of feasting and giving gifts, puritans commemorated Christmas by praying, reflecting on sin and working instead of resting.

The puritans even forced non-puritan colonists, such as the Anglicans, to work on Christmas day.

Whereupon I look philosophically and culturally to those deeper implications that most others miss.

Crackpots and insane fanatics tend to swing wildly between superficially opposite extremes.  Redouble this for their descendants, who rebel with equal unnaturalness against the unnatural strictures of their ancestors.  They form an unhealthy culture, which spreads the same essential crackpot fanaticism to others.  And by the law of cultural residues, the fanaticism and its basic obsessions remain long after the initial doctrines have been discarded, or have mutated beyond recognition.  I have oft remarked on the general connection between Christianity and liberalism; and I have specifically associated the Puritans with liberalism.

In the following, I quote an excerpt from William S. Haas, Destiny of the Mind: East and West, MacMillan, New York, 1956.  (I will someday try to find a better link than Archive.org.)

I found this remarkable book via R. P. Oliver, America’s Decline: The Education of a Conservative, pp. 271–274 of the Historical Review Press edition, in a review titled, “Never the Twain Shall Meet”.  This is in Part III of “History for Conservatives” at pp. 227–313, originally printed in various issues of American Opinion in 1963–64.  I highly recommend this whole series of essays—and indeed, the whole book.  Part II at pp. 254–267 is about Toynbee, a subject to which I will return.

As Professor Oliver observes in America’s Decline, p. 272:

Professor Haas attacks—and I believe, demolishes—an assumption that underlies almost all modern theories of history: that the minds of all human beings, if not defective or disordered, work in essentially the same way.

In the subsequent summary, Professor Oliver notes that there is between Eastern and Western minds “a barrier that [one] can never cross”; and he remarks on evidence that the difference “may not be racial”.  For the greater implications of this theory, he concludes that Professor Haas has “done for the study of comparative history what Böhr did for atomic physics.”

Yet in demonstrating the difference of minds, Professor Haas has highlighted some remarkable parallels across cultures.  Turning to Haas, op. cit., pp. 72ff.:

[*72 cont’d] Still more revealing with regard to the spirit of the Roman family are its religious and political aspects.  The Romans too worshipped ancestral spirits—the lares.  In conjunction with the penates—the spirits of the household—the lares protected the life and continuity of the family, thus holding a place dear to the Roman heart.  These spirits, however, were never given ascendancy over the deities of the national cult.  The Roman family never had nor claimed the kind of omnipotence which fell to the Chinese family.  In sharp contrast to the latter, the Roman family, from its first appearance in history, aimed at something more general and greater than itself, something whose superiority it never questioned.  Hence it was that the virtues cultivated within the Roman family were easily transformed into civic and political virtues, while those of the Chinese family remained distinctly social.

The historical and sociological cause of the difference in behaviour between the Chinese and the Roman families lies in this contrast.  While the Roman family took its place as the essential constituent of city life, the Chinese remained what it was from its origin, the dominant product of an agricultural society.

Wherever it appears, the patriarchal family is a natural phenomenon.  But in the West, as is clearly illustrated in the Roman paragon, it pointed at something beyond itself, namely, the state.  In the East on the other hand it maintained its natural form and developed into a creative centre of human values.  The state rose and unfolded beside it, even against it.  Indeed, the Chinese family always constituted more an obstacle to political life and thought than a source of political strength and good will.

Here, then, we face a highly important example of the opposed ways in which the two structures work and express themselves.  The East tends to move within a given frame, creating, shaping, and improving existing conditions.  It remains refractory to any revolutionary act which would end in the overthrow of that established frame.  In contrast, the Western institution points beyond itself to something new or to what is considered new.

[*73] Neither the Chinese nor the Roman state grew out of the patriarchal family.  The Chinese state was a phenomenon in its own right with its own implementation.  A psychological and ideological rivalry resulted between it and the family.  It is perfectly compatible with these conditions that the state in China should have been regarded as a kind of national family, a view which did not contribute to the state’s strength.  On the other hand, the Roman family went a long way toward meeting the prerequisites of the state.  The rising state had only to take and shape what was offered it by the family to strengthen its own political virtues.  This of course did not make of the Roman family a state, any more than the reverse conditions made of the Chinese state a family.  Yet the fundamental difference remains that the Roman family was oriented to something beyond itself of a higher order.

Hence we arrive at this seemingly paradoxical fact.  The Roman state attained the power of its inner organization and outward force because of its deep psychological relation with the family.  This relation, however, in no way obliterated the boundary line between the two institutions.  In China, the state and the family faced each other as strangers.  But this separation, far from shaping the idea of state in the Chinese mind and strengthening its factual position, tended to make it difficult for the state to assert its full authority.  In Rome, despite the difference between family and state, a certain organic link between the two was achieved.  These two widely different relations between state and family apply not only to China and Rome, but with few exceptions and in varying degrees to the East and to the West in general.

In all higher civilizations the upper levels in the social hierarchy were monopolized by the clergy and the military nobility, both groups competing for the leading position in state and society.  Chinese civilization was the only one to reverse this order.  To the social stratification it applied a unique standard.  Here too China remained faithful to the natural order.  Nowhere else did the farmer enjoy on the social ladder the place of distinction awarded to him in China.  True, he had to compete in the general evaluation with the scholar but the fact that precedence was given to the latter, far from impairing the esteem in which the farmer was held, threw it on the contrary, into clearer relief.  These two groups, [*74] seemingly so distant or even opposed to each other, were linked by the idea that they alone, each in its respective field, constituted the productive classes.