2,198 words
German translation here
Tacitus’ Germania, a short monograph on German ethnography written c. 98 AD, is of great historical significance. The transmission of the text to the present day, and certain adventures and tensions surrounding it, make for an interesting story.
Roman historian and aristocrat Cornelius Tacitus (c. 55–c. 117 AD) was the author of several works, more than half of which have been lost. What remains of his writings are divided into the so-called “major [long] works,” the Histories
The Germania is a short work, not really a “book.” My copy, “Germany and Its Tribes,” is a mere 23 pages long—albeit in moderately small wartime print on thin paper containing no notes, annotations, maps, illustrations, or other editorial aids. It was translated from the Latin by Alfred Church and William Brodribb in 1876 and published in The Complete Work of Tacitus by Random House’s Modern Library in 1942.
The Agricola, about Roman Britain, is roughly the same length. Agricola, the general primarily responsible for the Roman conquest of Britain and governor of Britannia from 77–85 AD, was Tacitus’ father-in-law.
The Germania has been the most influential source for the early Germanic peoples since the Renaissance. Its reliable account of their ethnography, culture, institutions, and geography is the most thorough that has survived from ancient times, and to this day remains the preeminent classical text on the subject. The book signifies the emergence of the northern Europeans from the obscurity of archaeology, philology, and prehistory into the light of history half a millennium after the emergence of the southern Europeans in Homer and Herodotus.
Though Tacitus at times writes critically of the Germans, he also stresses their simplicity, bravery, honor, fidelity, and other virtues in contrast to corrupt Roman imperial society, fallen from the vigor of the Republic. (It has been said that no one in Tacitus is good except Agricola and the Germans.)
Tacitus’ book is based upon contemporaneous oral and written accounts. During the period knowledge of northern Europe increased rapidly. Roman commanders produced unpublished memoirs of their campaigns along the lines of Caesar’s Commentaries, which circulated in Roman literary circles. Diplomatic exchanges between Rome and Germanic tribes brought German leaders to Rome and Roman emissaries to barbarian courts. And Roman traders expanded traffic with the barbarians, generating, perhaps, more knowledge than the military men.
According to Jewish classicist Moses Hadas, Tacitus “never consciously sacrifices historical truth. He consulted good sources, memoirs, biographies, and official records, and he frequently implies that he had more than one source before him. He requested information of those in a position to know” and “exercises critical judgment.”
Other Ancient Accounts of the Germans
Prior to Tacitus’ narrative, a Syrian-born Hellenistic Greek polymath of the first century BC, Poseidonius, may have been the first to distinguish clearly between the Germans and the Celts, but only fragments of his writings survive.
Julius Caesar did not penetrate very far east of the Rhine, so his knowledge of the Germans, expressed in De Bello Gallico (On the Gallic War, c. 50 BC), was limited.
The Roman Pliny the Elder’s Bella Germaniae (German Wars, c. 60s–70s AD) probably contained the fullest account of the people up to Tacitus’ time, but it has been lost.
Pliny, the foremost authority on science in ancient Europe, had served in the army in Germany. When Mount Vesuvius destroyed Herculaneum and Pompeii, he was stationed near present-day Naples, in command of the western Roman fleet. Eager to study the volcano’s destructive effects firsthand, he sailed across the bay, where he was suffocated by vapors caused by the eruption.
Following the Germania, the most important ancient work discussing northern Europe was Ptolemy’s Geography, written in the 2nd century AD. Ptolemy is the Alexandrian astronomer best-known for positing the Ptolemaic System. The Geography named 69 tribes and 95 places, many mentioned by no other source, as well as major rivers and other natural features.
From late antiquity, no extensive study of the Germanic peoples has survived, if one was ever written, and no single writer treated the migrations in a coherent way.
Loss and Rediscovery
At some point during the collapse of classical civilization and the migrations of late antiquity the text of the Germania was lost for more than a thousand years. It resurfaced only briefly, in Fulda, Germany in the 860s, where it and the other short works were probably copied. A monk at Fulda quoted from it verbatim at the time. Subsequently it was lost again.
In 1425 rumors reached Italy that manuscripts of Tacitus survived in the library of Hersfeld Abbey near Fulda. One of these contained the shorter works. In 1451 or 1455 (sources differ) an emissary of Pope Nicholas V obtained the manuscript containing the lesser works and brought it to Rome. It is known as the Codex Hersfeldensis.
In Rome, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, examined and analyzed the Germania, sparking interest in the work among German humanists, including Conrad Celtes, Johannes Aventinus, and Ulrich von Hutten.
Its first publication in central Europe occurred at Nuremberg in 1473–74; the first commentary on the text was written by Renaissance humanist Beatus Rhenanus in 1519.
The first page of Germania, the Codex Aesinas
The Codex Hersfeldensis was then lost again for half a millennium. (This time, of course, the content survived in published form.) Then, in 1902, a portion of the Codex Hersfeldensis was rediscovered by priest-philologist Cesare Annibaldi in the possession of Italian Count Aurelio Balleani of Iesi (Italian: Jesi), a town located in the Marches of central Italy. The manuscript had been in the family’s possession since 1457. This single text, the oldest extant version, became known as the Codex Aesinas. (I.e., the Aesinas is believed to consist of portions of the lost manuscript from Hersfeld.
One scholar has summarized the tremendous impact the text’s rediscovery in 1455 has had on European history:
The rediscovery of the Germania in the late fifteenth century was a decisive event in the study of the ancient Germanic peoples. Renaissance scholarship endowed Roman literary texts with outstanding authority, as well as making them more widely available. At the same time, a rise in German national feeling led to heightened interest in ancient texts which illuminated the Germanic past. . . . The Germania . . . was used to cement a link between the Germans of Tacitus and the Germans of the early modern period. From about 1500 onward the Germania was rarely far from serious discussion of German national identity, German history and even German religion. Fresh impetus was given to it in the nineteenth century and, of course, the racial purity, valour and integrity of the Germans as portrayed by Tacitus had immense appeal to the National Socialist hierarchy in the 1920s and 1930s. (Malcolm Todd, The Early Germans, 2d ed., Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, p. 7)
Among others, the Germania influenced Frederick the Great, Johann Fichte, Johann Gottfried von Herder, and Jakob Grimm.
Key to the rediscovery, preservation, transmission, and social and racial influence of the Germania over the past 500 years have been Renaissance humanism, modern (pre-21st century) scholarship, the invention of printing, liberalism, nationalism, and racial science.
A Dangerous Book
Since the Renaissance, the Germania has provided the most significant historical evidence of the early Germanic peoples.
The inevitable identification of the ancient Germans with their descendants commenced soon after the book’s discovery. Historians, philologists, and archaeologists all added pieces to the mosaic, so that by the time unification occurred in 1871 the early history of the Germans was firmly grounded.
The Germania influenced at least one 20th century leader decisively. Young Heinrich Himmler in September 1924 read Tacitus during a train ride and was captivated. At the time he was personal assistant to Gregor Strasser, leader of the National Socialist Freedom Movement (Nationalsozialistische Freiheitsbewegung).
In contemporaneous notes, Himmler wrote that Tacitus captured “the glorious image of the loftiness, purity, and nobleness of our ancestors,” adding, “Thus shall we be again, or at least some among us.”
In 1936, the year of the Berlin Olympics, Hitler personally requested of Mussolini that possession of the Codex Aesinas be transferred to Germany. Mussolini agreed, but changed his mind when the proposition turned out to be unpopular among his people.
A facsimile copy was made for the Germans and Rudolph Till, chairman of the Department of Classical Philology and Historical Studies at the University of Munich, and a member of the Ahnenerbe (a racial think tank co-founded by Heinrich Himmler in 1935), studied the manuscript in Rome in the months prior to the war. The Ahnenerbe published Till’s findings as Palaeographical Studies of Tacitus’s Agricola and Germania Along with a Photocopy of the Codex Aesinas in 1943.
German ideologist Alfred Rosenberg and SS chief Heinrich Himmler both retained intense interest in the Codex. Mussolini’s government fell in 1943. In July 1944 Himmler dispatched an SS commando team to rescue the manuscript. The unit searched three Balleani family residences in Italy without success.
The Codex was in fact stored in a wooden trunk bound with tin in the kitchen cellar of one of the residences, the Palazzo on the Piazza in Jesi. (There is a 1998 online newspaper account in German about this affair that relies upon Jewish writer Simon Schama’s 1996 Landscape and Memory for its authority.)
Palazzo Balleani in Jesi
The upshot was that possession of the manuscript remained in the hands of the Baldeschi-Balleani family. After the war the family stored the Codex Aesinas in a safe deposit box in the basement of the Banco di Sicilia in Florence, Italy. In November 1966, the River Arno experienced its worst flooding since the 1550s, causing damage to the Codex. Monks at a monastery near Rome skilled in preserving manuscripts succeeded in saving it, though permanent water damage could not be eliminated.
The Codex was sold by the family to the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome in 1994, where it is currently cataloged as the Codex Vittorio Emanuele 1631.
Suppress That Classic!
Since WWII, as ideological imperatives took precedence over dispassionate scholarship, the Germania‘s capacity to instill self-awareness and collective identity has deeply disturbed proponents of anti-white policies and ideologies. The historical record is problematic, too, in not depicting the Germans as irredeemably evil, possibly scheming, say, to vaporize the extensive Jewish populations of Rome and Persia in clay kilns.
One feint such ideologues employ is to insinuate that ancient Germans and modern northern Europeans possess no biological or historical kinship. Though nonsensical, it is as easy to argue as is the assertion that biological race does not exist, or dozens of other counter-factual dogmas.
But many would no doubt prefer to ban the book Communist-style, removing all copies from circulation and restricting access to unpulped copies to a handful of approved “scholars” on a carefully monitored basis.
As long ago as 1954 Jewish historian Arnaldo Momigliano declared before “an important international classical conference” that the Germania was one of the most dangerous books ever written. (In 1938 Momigliano lost his job as professor of Roman history at the University of Turin after passage of the Fascist racial law. He moved to England, where he taught for the rest of his life.)
Today, Harvard University’s Christopher Krebs, author of A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania From the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (2011), trumpets Momigliano’s view of the ancient text’s “insidious” nature to the applause of academic peers, literary critics, and journalists.
Krebs’ insincere declaration—gambit, really—that “Tacitus did not write a most dangerous book, his readers made it so,” doesn’t fool anyone. In societies committed to the proposition that speech and ideas constitute “hate,” there is unanimous, or at least undissenting, agreement on how to treat “dangerous” books and ideas.
In an interview, Krebs says that he is half German and half Swedish. But “Krebs” can be a Jewish name—e.g., biochemist Hans Krebs, formulator of the Krebs cycle. Scanning random passages from the book, it is hard to think that the author is not Jewish or part Jewish. If white, he has mastered their psychology to great profit.
Adam Kirsch, a Jewish book reviewer for Slate, the Washington Post-owned online magazine, quotes Krebs approvingly: “‘Ideas are viruses. They depend on minds as their hosts . . . The Germania virus . . . after 350 years of incubation . . . progressed to a systemic infection culminating in the major crisis of the twentieth century.'” (Yes, he means the “Holocaust.”) The title of Kirsch’s article is “Ideas Are Viruses.”
This is a characteristically Jewish, and totalitarian, way of thinking.
Kirsch, a child of privilege, is the son of author, attorney, and newspaper columnist Jonathan Kirsch. A 1997 graduate of Harvard, Adam Kirsch writes regularly for Slate, The New Yorker, The Times Literary Supplement, and other magazines.
Wishing that the Germania had been lost during the Middle Ages, Kirsch concludes, “If the last surviving manuscript had been eaten by rats in a monk’s library a thousand years ago, the world might have been better off.”
Ah, liberal enlightenment! The world can never get enough of it.
19 comments
I am stunned again and again about the never-tiring hate some Jews are capable of. It really seems they will not have enough until we of German ancestry are biologically wiped from this planet and all our historical records eradicated.
Ascribing the conquest of Britain principally to the agency of Agricola in the late 70’s is too late and too much praise. Agricola was responsible for the subjection of (using modern geography’s names) northern England, the central and northern districts of Wales, including the Isle of Anglesey, and lastly the Scottish lowlands. That’s a considerable portion of Great Britain but not quite half of the Roman province even exlcuding Caledonia – the Scottish Highlands essentially – which were occupied briefly and repeatedly but not reduced to the form of a province (the future profit was so meagre as not to be worth the effort). Claudius, at the head of almost 45,000 legionaries and auxiliary contingents, with war elephants, landed in AD 43. By his successor Nero’s death, the inaugural governors and commanders such as Suetonius Paulinus (prominent also in the annexation of Mauretania) had subjugated the bulk of modern England and its tribes. Roman Britain was conquered 43-68 (hell, by Claudius’ death in 53 it was all over, notwitstanding Boadicea’s foredoomed revolt), the Flavian emperors’ generals such as Agricola conducted expansion and Romanisation (meritorious work to be sure).
You may have intended irony by terming the huts and camps of the Germanic village elder a ‘court’ but if not meant facetiously it’s strange to hear so poor and commonplace a dwelling dignified as something equal to even the most undistinguished Roman senator’s freedman’s country villa, which it wasn’t.
Has anyone seen the public broadcasting TV show about how Germans have apologized somewhat for the Holocaust, but they have much more apologizing to do? It sounded like it was written by Episcopalians who were about to pass their next multimillion dollar civil rights memorial budget that “calls us into a deeper atoning for the sins of segregation by holding us accountable to the beloved and enriching community of color for our unearned White privileges”.
Any time you hear an Episcopalian say “deep” or “deeper,” reach for your guns and religion.
Richard Weaver analyzed “god terms,” which were those you could not oppose without declaring yourself an extremist. See “Ultimate Terms in Contemporary Rhetoric”.
Today, “diversity” is the prime god term. Greg Johnson is most apt to follow Weaver and give us a full list of today’s god terms and how they are used to push the transformative agenda forward and to keep the racists in check.
I’m often surprised that GJ hasn’t availed himself of the Nashville Agrarians and their descendents, Richard Weaver and Mel Bradford. The structure of their critique of modernity and progress is all a WN could wish for. Just start with Lyle Lanier’s “A Critique of the Philosophy of Progress” in the great I’ll Take My Stand.
The Agrarians and other paleo-conservatives are implicit WNs. They look back to America before the Freedmen made us so miserable and the illegals and Muslims were taking over everything.
If the Kali Yuga ever comes, a WN articulation and forceful reclamation of the original States Rights argument will be a part of it. Now would be a good time to refresh on the Va. and Ky. Resolutions, and South Carolina’s nullification crusade in 1830.
Southern history could offer GJ and the New American Right much valuable stock, and his unique background and rare talent will always distance him from the scholars at Chronicles and the Abbeville Institute.
THEIR GOAL IS GENOCIDE. OURS. WHAT’S YOURS?
In reply to bitterly bitter:
I’ll try to tie your comments back to Tacitus’ “Germania,” and will note they provide proof of the need for an Open Thread – intelligently and astutely moderated – on counter-currents.
bitterly bitter in blockquote:
The Germans will never be allowed to stop “apologizing for the Holocaust,” because they must be kept forever on the back foot, seeking the approval of people who have no reason whatsoever to grant that approval. They MUST be trapped in the Idea that they owe, and will owe forever, because if the first crack in the myth of the Holocaust is allowed to develop, the moral and legal legitimacy of this extortion plan will fail.
After all, if they are allowed repeat allowed to realize the depth of their Racial Heritage, it might well, new flames might well come from the kindling, and these may destroy illusions, bringing opportunities to see outside the Cave, and see where the ideas come from.
Today, “diversity” is the prime god term. Greg Johnson is most apt to follow Weaver and give us a full list of today’s god terms and how they are used to push the transformative agenda forward and to keep the racists in check.
Linder has discussed the functional equivalent of this. Cultural Marxism – the political form of Judaism – limits us to THEIR words, using THEIR definitions, to define the world in THEIR terms. In turn, these are organized to form memes – idea virii – that tell you what you must think, and why you must act, their way.
Their goal is not just “to keep the racists in check.” THEIR Goal is the genocide of the White Race, and the destruction of Western Civilization.
I can not speak for Greg. Johnson.
Bluntly, the Southern Agrarians had their chance. Apparently, they still wait for General Lee to return and lead them to victory. The problem is, he’ll have to speak Spanish to do it.
Leave the dead to bury the dead. The Stars and Bars are only good for getting you pulled over for “license and registration, please.” They stopped moving forward, and modern technology – Hell, the Transcontinental Railroad – left them behind. The borders of the Treaty of Guadulope-Hidalgo are being held, by the Reconquista.
Southern history as a positive force in national organization came to an end in 1865, when Lee tendered his sword. We look back to them, and see, with rare exceptions, what did not work, to move forward with.
The German people were inspired by Germanicus, and rightly so. It showed how their Ancestors were viewed by men who controlled the commanding heights of Western Civilization at that time. They saw the organic natural continuity, and could easily envision how they have extended that foundation forward, and could build upon it yet further.
The South? All I see is Tara, the ancestral home of the wonderful O’Hara Family, being used to sell trinkets to tourists (“Look! Real cotton balls!”), with the lovely grounds being maintained by our hard-working, diligent Latino companions, saying only “Gracias, Senorita!” and “Por favor, Senor?” to the touristas.
One day they’ll tell the Anglo tourists what they really think.
What’s In YOUR Future? Focus Northwest!
Cont’d from the above.
Posidonius was likely a Greek himself not merely one ‘Hellenised’. Posidonius was from Apamea-on-the-Orontes, one of the Tetrapolis – that is the Four Cities – in northern Syria founded and settled by Greeks (real Greeks by blood) at the instance of Alexander’s general Seleucus, in the twenty-five or so year period of his itinerant colonising and conquering. Syria was, and so too lower Mesopotamia (i.e. Babylonia) to an extent, the Greek (not merely Hellenised!) core of his immense Asiatic possessions. Apamea’s name derives from Apame, an Iranian appellative borne by a Persian princess married to Seleucus, but this Apamea (for there were many holding this name, as there were dozens of Alexandrias, Seleucias, and Antiochs, and Apollonias, Artemitas, etc) was the military headquarters of the empire expressly founded for that purpose and colonised accordingly. Greek and Macedonian soldiers of the king were billeted here with their families, and retired veterans given parcels of land with servants and slaves, in the vicinity.
There subsisted about 43,450 Greco-Macedonian military-colonists, i.e. soldiers given land with the obligation of serving the army, throughout the empire of Seleucus at the beginning of his half-Persian son’s reign in 281 BC – this number excludes civil and unauthorised Greek colonists, as well as excluding women and children of both sexes, and old men incapable of bearing arms, it also does not count Greek soldiers directly tied to the king and his court as the 10,000 strong King’s Companions bodyguard regiment, Silver-shield Bearers heavy infantry regiments, and Greek mercenary brigades hired by temporary contracts, etc which did not serve, or live (they followed the king on his tours and campaigns, with barracks in the great metropolises, both Greek-built like the Syrian Antioch and Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, near Bagdad, or indigenous metropolises like Sardis or Susa) under a feudal arrangment – , the vast majority of these soldier-colonists with their households dwelt west of the Tigris and mainly in Syria and especially the sea-coasts of Asia Minor but Mesopotamia was thickly settled by Greeks. A siege engine works and manufactures of arms and machines of war (missile projectors and the like) stood at Apamea. The Greek kingdom of Syria’s war elephants were bred there too; this was extended and sustained by the Romans, greatly augmented by that wily blond Augustus (I’m not one of those who fancy every single Ancient was a blond, which is a curious belief, but Augustus was certainly so).
“But”, you say, “Posidonius’ life was in the second century BC some one hundred years after Seleucus and the migration of the Greeks as the conqueror’s race, surely by this time the city’s Greek inhabitants were such only in language and culture, etc, etc”. Posidonius’ contemporary Polybius gives a minute description of the Tetrapolis, being parts of Greece outside of Greece one might say. For example, another of the Four Cities, Seleucia Pieria (Antioch’s port) had 6,000 Greek male citizens in the time of his historical composition (it had somewhat declined in that age, following the bloody fraternal wars in Syria between the House of Seleucus and that of Ptolemy, the Greek Pharaohs). Archaeology corroborates that the city’s character was continuous with that of its foundation (settlers’ descendants don’t disappear, or intermix into extinction, a mere century after the fact – usually). Was the Apamea of Posidonius’ birth still Greek at the time of Strabo’s Geography being written? Were the 117,000 citizens (this number would surely have included all free-born natives within the city and its circumjacent rural jurisdiction, their womenfolk and children whereas the 6,000 of Seleucia Pieria in Polybius’ account numbered just the hereditary Greek non-banished native male citizens of unimpaired bodily or mental capacity above 18 years) Apamea-on-the-Orontes had in the census of Augustus still Greek? Probably not.
Cf. Plutarch of Chæronea and Lucian of Samosata, the second century AD’s greatest Greek writers (and two of the greatest ever). Chæronea was situated in Bœotia, by that time and for several earlier centuries, a poor and obscure region of Greece. The slave trade never inundated this part of the country, and, conjoined to evidence from Plutarch’s thought and literary works, he was almost certainly racially Greek. Lucian was from the interior of Asia Minor where it abuts Syria by the Euphrates. Greeks did not settle in considerable numbers at all in these parts, and by Lucian’s birth any Greek families would be intermingled thoroughly with the natives, as naturally happens absent extreme dissimilarity or hostility. Was Lucian Greek by race? Unlikely, certainly not purely. Still his thought and literary works are nothing but Greek, and Europe has always claimed him as her own as he clearly does not belong to any tradition of Asia. Indeed Asia, owing to the fanaticism and deliberate casting of history pre-Mohammed into oblivion, destroys and hates what the Classical West once performed or erected on Oriental soil as it’s foreign to their ways and spirit. Fair enough.
The Bedouin and town Arabs in the modern Syria’s Beka’a Valley roamed the wondrous ruins of Heliopolis in Cœle Syria (Greek for the ‘Hollow’ Syria referring to the valley’s expansive and undulating topography), or Palmyra in the desert, or even the Hellenistic Petra in Jordan, with stupid indifference. It’s not theirs, they don’t care. (Now they ‘care’ because of the Western and Mongol-Oriental tourist dollars). Why did I clutter this website with such a long digression? Mr Hamilton saying Posidonius was a ‘Syrian-born’ Greek is geographically true, but the implication that the first scholar to distinguish the Germanic peoples as a separate race from the Celts was an Asiatic is not probable.
It will never be “enough”. The Germans will always “have more work to do”.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/germans/memorial/cron.html
Parasites believe that their hosts can never do enough for them. Trying to please the Jews is, to use a Sanskrit metaphor mentioned by Revilo P. Oliver, like trying to extinguish a fire by feeding it enough wood to glut its appetite.
He is right, ideas are viruses. So what is our virus?
Revilo P. Oliver made a few interesting comments on Jewish malevolence and mendacity in his review of Nicholas Carter’s The Late, Great Book (Liberty Bell, April 1986). In a footnote Oliver wrote:
“That the Vikings reached North America can no longer be denied, but whether they reached Minnesota is still hotly debated, and earlier visits by White men are even more doubtful. Richard Deacon’s Madoc and the Discovery of America (New York, Braziller, 1966) presents a plausible hypothesis, but one that has not been, and cannot be, confirmed. As for ‘expert’ opinion, we must remember that the questions involved excite very strong emotions and that in academic circles today circumspect professionals dare not countenance opinions that might give rise to a damning suspicion that they are so wicked that they can perceive a difference between a nigger and a white man. Race has been converted from a biological fact to a test of religious orthodoxy.”
I’ll remember that line — “Race has been converted from a biological fact to a test of religious orthodoxy” — when I see the titles of books that place quotation marks around the word race. Academic libraries seem to have shelves full of such rubbish.
Oliver continued:
“It is noteworthy that while Aryans naturally welcome evidence of the accomplishments of their race and often press ambiguous data too far or accept factitious evidence, the violent emotions are all on the other side. I do not know whether or not the famous Kensington Stone is genuine, but the question of its authenticity, it seems to me, should be dispassionately considered. It was in the 1940s, as I recall, that a distinguished Jewish scholar, an authority on Mozarabic literature and culture, evidently chanced upon a copy of Hjalmar Holand’s Norse Discoveries (1940), and screamed with rage. He wrote a passionate diatribe to prove that the Kensington Stone was a forgery perpetrated by vile Nordics; he printed it as a booklet at his own expense and sent copies to members of several learned societies. I was startled by the intensity of the racial hatred that he indiscreetly failed to dissemble.”
Oliver concluded:
“So long as the academic world cowers before the Self-Chosen People and their ‘Liberal’ stooges, we must consider with great caution and even suspicion all ‘expert’ pronouncements that are derogatory to our endangered race, but we should also refrain from credulously accepting unsubstantiated theories that flatter us.”
Indeed, we should never underestimate the malevolence and mendacity of the Jews, nor the careerism and cowardice of many nominally White men in academia. The extent to which academia has been politicized is appalling. It seems that nothing is considered neutral and that nothing is considered too small. It reminds one of Václav Havel’s remark that the communist system left its mark on everything.
Perhaps Counter-Currents should address the controversy relating to Indo-European studies and Georges Dumézil’s theories concerning tripartition.
I’ll remember that line — “Race has been converted from a biological fact to a test of religious orthodoxy”
(Wiki) German socialism is accompanied by the Volksgeist (national spirit) which is not racial in the biological sense but metaphysical: “the German spirit in a Negro is quite as much within the realm of possibility as the Negro spirit in a German” (Werner Sombart)
Every time I think I have a handle on Jewish shamelessness to the point that I start believing nothing Jews do will surprise me, I end up surprised. It no doubt enrages Jews they can’t censor the classics with the whole world watching.
Re White Republican’s post above:
Most of us associate Revilo Oliver with his racialist writings. But in the course of researching and writing this article I came across several citations to his academic work. It seems that he had a professional interest in Tacitus and his manuscripts, though the articles were not specifically about the Germania.
They were:
Revilo P. Oliver, “The First Medicean MS of Tacitus and the Titulature of Ancient Books,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 82 (1951): 232-61. http://www.jstor.org/pss/283436
Revilo P. Oliver, “The Praenomen of Tacitus,” The American Journal of Philology 98 (Spring 1977): 64-70 http://www.jstor.org/pss/294003
Revilo P. Oliver, “Tacitus—Librarian?” The Classical Quarterly (New Series) 29 (1979): 223-24 http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=3653868
Each of the links above displays the first page of the article. There is, however, one full Tacitus PDF available online:
Revilo P. Oliver, “Did Tacitus Finish the Annales?” Illinois Classical Studies, 2 (1977): 289-314 https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/11675/illinoisclassica21977OLIVER.pdf?sequence=2 In this article Oliver’s trademark acid-tongued humor and satire are plainly in evidence.
The Kensington Runestone is interesting to me. The weight of opinion is that it is a “hoax.”
Decades ago I read Theodore C. Blegen’s The Kensington Rune Stone: New Light on an Old Riddle (1960). Blegen was a Norwegian-American history professor at the University of Minnesota, where Blegen Hall is named in his honor. I attended many classes there.
Blegen did not believe in the authenticity of the stone, but after reading his book I was surprised at the complexity of the subject. I went away from it uncertain as to whether the stone might not in fact be authentic. My recollection is that I was at least convinced that the farmer who discovered it was innocent, and not a forger, as many academics alleged.
I know there have been further developments since, but I have not kept up with them.
Andrew Hamilton,
Thank you for this information. I have been aware that Revilo P. Oliver was a distinguished classical scholar, but I’m not familiar with his work in this area.
I can’t verify this now, but I believe that the Penguin and the Oxford University Press editions of the Histories include introductions that are apologetic concerning Tacitus’ comments on the Jews.
The Jews seem to enjoy pseudo-historical fantasies in which real or perceived enemies of the Jews are defeated. The festivals of Passover and Purim are cases in point.
I remember watching a documentary on the battle of Teutoberg Forest. Toward the conclusion, it effectively lamented that the Germans won the battle, with the result that the Germans weren’t absorbed by the Roman empire. I think the documentary might have been produced in German.
You might like to know that in “Revised Historiography,” an article written around 1980, Oliver wrote:
“The famous Kensington Rune Stone, which purportedly attests the presence of Norse explorers in what is now Minnesota in 1362, has long been regarded as a forgery perpetrated by a local resident for the glory of Scandinavia, but a recent linguistic analysis makes it seem unlikely that the supposed forger could have introduced subtle dialectical variations of Old Norse unrecorded in his time; so doubt remains.”
The Kensington Rune Stone seems to be one of those things of which it is difficult to determine whether it is genuine or a clever hoax. As Oliver indicated, its authenticity should be considered objectively, and not according to partisan agendas.
Interesting review, as shown by the number and range of comments!
I saw a proof copy of this book last year but decided not to get it, as it seemed just an excuse for more anti-German propaganda. More recently, I found a discarded set of photocopies of NYT articles [why were they put together?] which included a review of Kirsch, which confirmed my opinion: “Oy! Those crazy Germans!”
I was interested to learn his father is Jonathan Kirsch, as I do in fact have one of his books, God Against The Gods, but I confess I haven’t read it. It’s a rather pedestrian account of “The War Between Monotheism and Polytheism” as the subtitle says, I thought, but inspired by this review I glanced through it, and I must say there’s no sign of any Judaic bias; YHVH-1 is definitely the bad guy, pagans wise and tolerant. Of course, plenty of Jews claim to be “secular” [growing up, I thought “jew” was a euphenism for ‘atheist’] but usually there’s still the anti-goyim animus [“Sure, we invented God, but only an idiot like Palin would believe in him”] which I don’t see. So perhaps in this case the family tie doesn’t explain things; perhaps one of those “rebellious kids”?
I recently published a couple of reviews on my blog that point out the Judaic Bias of even the most “objective” writers on history or even technology:
Magida on “Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant:
http://jamesjomeara.blogspot.com/2011/10/welcome-to-club-nazi-little-artie.html
Douglas Rushkoff’s Program or Be Programed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age
http://jamesjomeara.blogspot.com/2011/09/day-without-judaism-its-easy-if-you-try.html
La Vie d’Agricola. Full text in a Bilingual edition. Accompanied by critical essays from Ernest Hello, Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve, Maurras, Edmond Lareau, Louis-Gabriel Marchand, Marel Durry. Les Editions de La Reconquête.
I have Tacitus’Germania in the excellent edition of the Loeb Classical Library (Latin text+English translation).I do not see what is so “dangerous” with this little book, except in arousing some interest in the past and perhaps some ethnic pride,which is after all encouraged to all peoples of the world,so why not to Germans?Jewish hyper-paranoia and pathological revengefulness must be the source of so much hatred for this little book.If there is however any book that is really dangerous in arousing the WRONG ethnic pride it is the Old Testament.Personally I am in favour of totally obliterating this monstruous scripture from the face of the earth.Its destructive influence is palpable to this very day (ask the Palestinians!).Its immoral genocidal teachings are an affront to all moral sensibilities.All Germanic peoples have since long become utterly civilized,but Jahweh’s Chosen Bandits are as barbaric as described on every page of the Old Testament.
Shouldn’t “Holocaust” be lowercased? Even Commentary, the organ of the American Jewish Congress, lowercased the word in the 1960s.
The Jews have good reasons to hate Tacitus, not alone because of the “Germania”. In Tacitus “Historia”, V, 3-5, there is a description of the Jewish people which is simply devastating. The Jews were expelled from Egypt because they were thought responsible for an abhorrent plague; Moses then established a religion where all the values of other religions were converted into their contrary, etc. Tacitus mentions also the tendency of Jews to help each other in contempt of the laws of their host people. The text could have been written by a modern antisemite.
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