Counter-Currents
1,945 words
The Catholic writer E. Michael Jones is currently one of the most popular thinkers on the Dissident Right, owing to disaffected nationalists turning to Catholicism in the wake of Charlottesville. In their desperate search for a based Catholic thinker, these young right-wingers settled upon Jones. Jones’s many tirades against Jews and willingness to associate with the Dissident Right make him an appealing figure to aspiring Catholic reactionaries.
But many of his ideas are silly and wrong. Identitarians should stop seeing him as a serious thinker. Jones himself makes this case better than anyone in a December essay on Sam Francis and the “Triple Melting Pot.” Jones infamously delivered the keynote address at a 2005 memorial event for Francis. Instead of honoring the late paleoconservative, Jones decided to criticize Francis and rant about the Jews. The December essay is intended to defend the speech and reaffirm one of Jones’ many silly ideas. The self-appointed Church doctor argues Americans are not divided by race. We are instead divided by religion, and faith defines our ethnic differences. He criticizes Francis — who he refers to as “Sam” to convey the impression they were friends — for failing to grasp this dynamic.
The essay on Francis exposes many of Jones’s unserious arguments and claims. He insists religious identity defends you from leftist attacks and elaborates on his odd Triple Melting Pot claim.
Jones expresses how amazing it was for him to participate in a Shi’a march in Dearborn, Michigan. Jones contrasts this march with Charlottesville and says it proves “religious identity is the only bulwark against the identity politics of the Great Satan”:
The Arbaeen March in Dearborn in which thousands of Shi’a Muslims marched unhindered to Henry Ford Park shouting “Long Live Hussein” is one example of what I’m talking about. If Antifa had showed up at this rally, they would have had to field thousands of demonstrators to contest the Muslims’ right to assemble. We’re dealing with hypotheticals here, but judging from the size and composition of the crowd, Antifa would not have come out unscathed from this encounter.
Why on Earth would Antifa protest a Muslim gathering? Antifa wants more Muslims and encourages them to defiantly express their culture. If anything, Antifa would cheer on the march. You might as well say the Right should don pink pussy hats because no Antifa tried to stop the Women’s March. There are no similarities between a minority religious festival and a political demonstration in support of white identity.
Jones points to Antifa not disrupting SSPX processions in Post Falls, Idaho as further proof the Left cowers when faced with religious identity. He also touts how the Bishop of South Bend ignored a request to condemn him. Jones cites this as proof the Catholic Church will defend intellectual heretics and implies God will protect him from Antifa:
[U]nlike “conservatism” or “whiteness” or any other confected identity, Catholicism confers an identity through baptism which cannot be taken away from its members by the self-appointed popes who, as recipients of oligarchic money, police the precincts of identity politics. Sam Francis was excommunicated from the synagogue known as conservatism by William F. Buckley, who with the help of Jewish money, had had himself named pope of that sect. The fact that the same thing didn’t happen to me at the hands of [left-wing reporter] Dexter van Zile is proof of my contention that the Catholic faith is a category which exists in the mind of God. As such, it cannot be contradicted by men. It guarantees protection from the predations of Satan and his synagogue on earth that no other identity can provide.
Humble is the man who thinks God stands between him and cancel culture.
In reality, the Catholic Church has a long history of condemning Catholic nationalists. Pope Pius XI formally condemned the Catholic nationalist Action Francaise in the 1920s and excommunicated its leading members. Many church leaders today denounce Matteo Salvini and other European nationalists who dare say no to more immigration.
This reasoning also ignores that Jones is a fringe figure on the Catholic intellectual right. First Things isn’t going to publish or defend Jones. Many writers condemn his anti-Semitism as un-Christian. Most reactionary Catholic writers stress their philo-Semitism to a comical degree. Leading integralist Sohrab Ahmari wrote a whole article about how much he loves Jews.
Jones is not representative of the broader Catholic Right. One bishop ignoring a random journalist’s request does not indicate much.
Leftists react more violently to white identity than to religious identity because they see the former as a serious threat. They do not feel threatened by Catholic traditionalists living in far-away rural America. There would be violent demonstrations against religious processions if the Left felt religious identity threatened the power structure. But Religious identity does not challenge the powers that be. Elites certainly don’t like conservative Christians, yet they realize that people embrace such faiths in response to a loss of power. Smart leftists realize religious identity can at times be a safety valve, the original opiate of the masses before the Sackler family came along.
Evangelical Christianity became more popular after the Civil War and had a revival after the civil rights revolution. White Southerners turned to God to cope with their subjugation. Similarly, young nationalists disenchanted with the failures of the alt-right turn to traditional Catholicism as a coping mechanism. Many of them, but not all, feel it’s better to retreat to religion than to try to change the world.
Jones supports this development. He does not care about demographics or preserving European identity; it’s all a distraction from furthering the Catholic faith. Jones argues white identity is a trap and identitarians “play into the hands of their largely Jewish oppressors.” The real solution is to hope the Church turns everything around.
Jones’s contention that America is divided between three ethnic groups makes no sense in contemporary America. The Triple Melting Pot theory comes from Will Herberg’s 1954 book, Protestant, Catholic, Jew. Herberg asserted these three categories separate Americans and define who they are: “Unless one is either a Protestant, or a Catholic, or a Jew, one is a ‘nothing’; to be a ‘something,’ to have a name, one must identify oneself to oneself, and be identified by others, as belonging to one or another of the three great religious communities in which the American people are divided.”
This is nonsense and no longer applicable to modern America. Even in Herberg’s day, it was silly. It assumes white Protestant segregationists and black Protestants were in the same ethnic group. Jones counters this by saying blacks were mere tools of Jews during integration. The civil rights revolution was actually an ethnic battle!
You can buy Greg Hood’s Waking Up From the American Dream here.
The gist of my talk at the Sam Francis memorial was that the culture wars are simply not understandable in racial terms. The different sides in the culture wars may have used race as a pretext, but the identity of the antagonists was ethnic, not racial in the sense commonly portrayed in the media. In applying the ethnic calculus to this period of history, we discover that the blacks, even if they were the most visible player in the civil rights phase of the culture wars of the ‘60s, were ultimately the pawn of other groups, which were just as white as the groups they attacked.
Jones, by the way, believes integration was anti-Catholic ethnic cleansing engineered by Protestants and Jews. According to this thesis, blacks were also victims of this scheme.
Jones dismisses a more reasonable ethnic paradigm of black, Jew, and white Gentile because Jews are the only group who proudly celebrate their identity. The others don’t see themselves as white or black, apparently.
The Triple Melting Pot is anachronistic in modern America. Ethnic enclaves are, for the most part, a thing of the past. Most whites grow up in mixed religious communities and interfaith marriage is at an all-time high. Jones claims that people stay with their faith most of their life. In reality, most American Christians change denominations throughout their lives. The only people who insist on the fundamental differences between Catholics and Protestants are LARPy Catholic intellectuals and hardcore evangelicals. Most whites today don’t see any real differences in the faiths, and they don’t base their identity around religion. Many whites are secular and rarely attend. The parish is no longer at the center of American life.
Ever since the first settlers encountered the Indians, race has shaped American life. Whites were always likely to take the side of their fellow whites against non-whites. The chief differences in early America were white, red, and black. America was founded by Protestants who saw their faith as a foundational component to America, but white Catholics were always included within the body politic. One of the signers of the Declaration of Independence was the Catholic Charles Carroll.
The animosity between Catholics and Protestants primarily erupted with mass Catholic immigration in the mid-19th century and was a major factor in American life for the next 100 years. However, the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 and the disappearance of ethnic enclaves has largely put this animosity to pasture. White Catholics and Protestants are not divided by separate communities or cultures. Religious differences don’t matter to the vast majority of Americans.
America also has a plethora of other religions now thanks to mass immigration. Jones notes this, but insists we have to stick to the Triple Melting Pot for unknown reasons. Trust the random Herberg book!
The essay veers awkwardly from one argument to the next, but the overall purpose is to insult Francis. He castigates the paleocon as a materialist who failed to understand logos. Jones also hilariously claims that Francis conjured up “revolutionary fantasies based on phantasms of the mind which had only a tenuous connection to reality.” This comes from a man who believes the sun revolves around the Earth.
If the cheap shots weren’t enough, Jones makes sure to celebrate his insulting speech at Francis’s memorial as a heroic fusillade against philo-Semitic racists. At the 2005 memorial in Francis’s honor, Jones decided to ignore remembering the deceased writer. Instead, he ranted about the stupidity of race realism and how bad Jews are. Francis’s family and friends were rightfully appalled by this lack of decorum.
In Jones’s telling, he was a brave Cassandra warning the evil racists of the perils in their thinking. The evil racists — who are also cowards! — couldn’t face his bold truth-telling at an event to honor a dead friend, not Jones’s narcissism. Jones self-righteously says his warnings went unheard and this led to Charlottesville:
Sam Francis, with the help of Paul Gottfried, inspired Richard Spencer to hand out spears to the white boys and point them in the direction of the legal machine gun nest in Charlottesville, where they all got mowed down.
Jones builds his essay around appealing to identitarians. He says the war on whites is real and mass immigration hurts America. But his goal is to tell you these things don’t matter; all that matters is that you join the Catholic Church. It’s clear that Jones wants to subvert the Dissident Right and direct it into his own niche project. His aims have nothing to do with preserving our civilization. Then again, Jones believes race isn’t a real concept. Maybe that should be expected of a thinker who doesn’t even believe in heliocentrism.
There are many great Catholic writers for young nationalists to turn to. De Maistre, Chateaubriand, Bonald, etc. All of these thinkers offer valuable insight into life and faith.
E. Michael Jones only offers insight into his own ego.
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31 comments
Thank you, Monsieur Hampton!
Groypers are cringe, and must lose.
There is a quick retort to this stuff: God does not exist. There is no good reason to believe that God exists and powerful reasons for thinking he does not. In fact, the lack of positive evidence itself points toward nonexistence, since it would explain why no evidence exists. Why is there no evidence of unicorns? Because they don’t exist.
Race, however, is real.
I know the theistic arguments; all of them are unsound. How stupid to base one’s world view on an unsupported belief.
Damn man, you are so rebellious that it feels almost dangerous to even be in the same comments section as you! You are reaching levels of groundbreaking with your comment that were never thought possible. It’s like….duh! I actually just took one more look around the house to make sure there isn’t a God hiding somewhere, and sure enough….no God. Joke’s on you, religious people!
Evangelical Christianity became more popular after the Civil War and had a revival after the civil rights revolution. White Southerners turned to God to cope with their subjugation. Similarly, young nationalists disenchanted with the failures of the alt-right turn to traditional Catholicism as a coping mechanism. Many of them, but not all, feel it’s better to retreat to religion than to try to change the world.
What often interests me about Jones’ Catholicism is the degree that he deviates from it into a religious philosophy of ‘logos’. His core implication is that Catholicism — the advent of Jesus Christ — is a manifestation of metaphysical logos. That is to say of timeless ideas & values that in our corrupt present have been pushed down. Logos Rising is a call to get with a proper and a sane metaphysical program. When convenient for him, and it is always convenient! he transposes Jesus and Logos and vice versa.
But it is precisely here that this particular Catholic — or perhaps Neo-Catholic? –emphasis is useful. But not only useful: sound. In order to recover our European culture we need to recover and strengthen European conceptual categories, and these are certainly logos-based. It seems to me completely possible to define very strict social restrictions and support the tenets of a European nationalism by defining and strengthening a logos-based religious worldview. This is what interests me: restoring a metaphysical outlook that depends on a metaphysical foundation.
It seems to me that when we speak of Catholicism and Christianity we are in fact speaking of Greco-Christianity. And this means that Christian understanding was refracted through Greek rational lens. And the notions and ideas that support European protectionism (White identity) are completely rational. Indeed one must have rational clarity to see and understand why preservation, in its fullest senses, is necessary.
Although I think that E. Michael Jones’ position in respect to issues of white identity are weak and flawed, I do not see the fix as being that hard at all. And Christian universalism — in the sense of the universalism of logos — is not in any sense an enemy of a European identitarian project if it is taken to its logical ends. “Take your body and your mind, with all its ‘logos’ capacities, back to your own lands and build great things there.”
The more that a Christian/Catholic position becomes acutely metaphysical and defined (hard & demanding) the more it can serve protectionism projects as I see ours as being. And it is that, in its essence. But the degree that it is seduced by Christian sentimentalism, the more it loses any edge at all.
I propose that it is a mistake, and likely a severe one, to become unfriendly and non-helpful to the non-European peoples. A universal helping spirit is a universal human thing and is quite in accord with metaphysical logos. So, in fact, a rigorous and exclusive metaphysical Christianity can be, and must be, the route to be taken.
Finally, those who are Christian are — in the best cases — convinced at metaphysical levels of the soundness of their perception-system. It becomes *necessary* in this sense. You either live it authentically, or you don’t (that is, you live it as a *shadow* of what it was: a simulacrum). It surprises me to notice pagans and non-Christians describe Christian belief as something as malleable and idea-based as their own beliefs, whatever they are.
Consider the Argument from the Hiddenness of God. It proceeds by asking several questions:
1. Would God’s existence be an important truth?
There are reasons for thinking it would be. If God did exist then death would not be final, life would not be ultimately tragic, and good would triumph in the end.
So, God’s existence would be an important truth.
2. Is God’s existence obvious?
By ‘obvious’ I mean obvious to casual inspection. One couldn’t overlook it, like a table in one’s house.
The answer is: No, it is not obvious. It is certainly not as obvious as it could be.
So, God’s existence is not obvious.
3. Could God’s existence be obvious?
The theist could reply that God’s existence couldn’t be obvious, since God is a purely spiritual being without a material body. But that reply is irrelevant because of the properties theists claim that God possesses, including unlimited power. So, even if God were immaterial he could still make his existence known to us. How could he do this?
He could perform miracles, grand cosmic demonstrations. He could make the solar system disappear and reappear on the other side of the galaxy; he could solve the greatest problems in mathematics by skywriting; he could address everyone, in a booming voice from the sky, in every natural language. Those feats would make it rational to believe, at the very least, that an all-powerful being exists.
So, God’s existence could be obvious.
4. Since God’s existence would constitute an important truth, and since his existence isn’t obvious but could be, why isn’t it obvious? If God exists, he is keeping this important truth from us. Why is he hiding?
The atheist answers: Because God doesn’t exist, like unicorns.
The theist, in reply, can appeal to faith and free will.
Faith: If God’s existence were obvious one would not be free to believe in his nonexistence: free will would be destroyed. But is faith a good thing? Faith is belief without regard to evidence, which is irrational. Faith is not a virtue. As David Hume stated, a wise man proportions his beliefs to the available evidence. So that’s not a good reason.
Free will: First, we would not be free not to believe. But so what? I’m not free not to believe that the desk in my office exists. But is my life diminished by this fact?
Second, we would not be free to accept or reject God. But this is false according to Christian scriptures. After all, Lucifer believed in God’s existence and still chose to defy him. The fallen angels believed that God existed but they chose to rebel. So, people might choose to turn away. Furthermore, God might wish for people to accept and worship him out of love instead of self-interest, just to save their own skins. One would still have the cosmic choice.
The atheist’s explanation is clearly better than the theist’s.
Hence, God’s nonexistence should be accepted as the best explanation for his hiddenness.
Christianity in its current forms cannot survive because its current political inclination paves the way for rival faiths to supplant it.
Ultimately, Christianity is just like the rest of humanity: it will follow the victor. Come a European Populist victory, the Christian faith will reinvent itself and new blood will flow into the Church, because the Church is nothing if not people, people with opinions who are subjected to political trends just like anyone else.
A conflict between the theist and atheist right is pointless because the victory of one means the victory of the other.
There is a quick retort to the claim that ‘God does not exist’ it’s that ‘God exists and you’re using the wrong measuring instruments to detect its existence’.
I try not to hold Jones’ Catholic chauvinism against him because he is on our side on some things. Maybe he’s right about the value of Catholicism maybe he’s not. The grand experiment of Catholicism in Africa will tell us whether its Catholicism that made Whites what they are (Jones’ proposition) or whether it was Whites who made Catholicism what it is (the position of those who think culture is downstream from race). What’s clear is that the ‘Triple Melting Pot’ theory should be renamed to ‘Triple Melting Crock’ theory because it’s a crock.
Reading around the cracked pottery of crackpots for the gems of insight is something of an acquired taste and skill that I acquired long ago.
Jones is right and you know it!!!
Why, just a few weeks ago I overheard some blacks in DC talking abut robbing the next white person who comes along. When the subject came into view they readied their attack. Then, when he got closer, the head black spoke up: “Wait a minute! He’s not white! He is an Irish Catholic. Let’s leave him alone!”
On a more serious note, Jones gets just about everything about Sam wrong in his essay. For example, he said Sam got upset when he couldnt defeat the neocons with paleoconservatism, so he turned to race in the 1990s (as if one guy who lost his main media outlet expected to single-handedly defeat the neocon establishment).
That would be news to Sam who was a reader of Instauration and The Dispossessed Majority in the 1970s. He was writing about race in Chronicles in the 1980s.
Sam was privately critical of Christianity but never wrote anything negative about the faith under his own name. He knew our people were mostly Christian (even if in name only) and that our ancestors were Christian.
This mirrors my view. If I thought Catholicism could save our race I would go to mass every day and to confession every week. I am skeptical that it can and the current church seems as anti-white as any institution.
Mr. Bright
You must learn to separate the muddied schemes of Catholic apologia and other associated speculators, from the actual doctrines of the Church. To begin with, one cannot be a “Catholic philosopher”, since Catholicism precludes the possibility of assuming a position that defies Catholicism, and the freedom to assume whatever position is the prerequisite of capacity to philosophise.
There is no definition of a “legislating logos”, that is the whole point of it. “Legislating logos”, “metanoia”, “free will” — all these serve one purpose only, which is to stir the waters where clarity threatens to establish eminence.
What would be the purpose of a priest, and of a vain dispenser of mystifications, if one could establish the definition of a “legislating logos”? A thing like that must always be a subject of discourses. Of course, people who fall for that kind of stuff are themselves victims of vanity, which is only eclipsed by the vanity of the dispensers. Here, every kind of illusion of grandeur, and grandiose, vain, all-or-nothing statements about most banal and simple things flourish. Here is a sample of that by one of the most eminent dispensers of such nonsense:
“Conversations about matters other than religion or art are always trivial and vain”
“Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.”
“How inferior the human machine is, compared to man-made machines. They can be decoked, unscrewed, oiled and parts replaced. Decidedly, nature is not a very wonderful thing.” (an example of believing that linguistic artifacts accurately reflect reality)
“Daydream is the only good thing in life. Everything else is vulgar and empty.”
There is that clever kid in school who is very anxious about anyone else saying something clever, since his whole self-esteem is based on his self-perceived status. Infernal hatred of dissenters becomes his weapon of choice. Youtube is their contemporary place of assembly. They usually solve this tension by adhering to an absolutist, all-or-nothing ideology, which says that everyone who disagrees with them will be destroyed in the upcoming apocalypse in a cosmic fit of vengeance, and are quite energized by this prospect: Neo-Pagan Anarchists, Doomsday Christians, Learn-to-Codists and Bitcoinists, and what have you. Sure enough, a broken clock is correct twice a day.
Isn’t Jones a geocentrist?
When I heard Jones dismissing natural selection with arguments like:
‘it can’t explain the eye’
and
‘what good is half a wing’,
it really disinclined me from pursuing his ideas and writings much further.
I don’t know Jones’ work, but from what I’ve read about it, his views seem internally inconsistent. How can he a) deny the importance of race and ethnicity in favor of religion, while b) affirming the JQ?
I wouldn’t think he’d base his opposition to Jewish influence in the West entirely on religion. If he does, that’s just silly. Does he recognize they are a hostile ethnic group, independent of their religion?
The problem with this argument is that you have established your own personal criteria for what God ought to be and how God or gods ought to prove their existence, and since YOUR arbitrary criteria is not met, you conclude that gods simply cannot exist. I notice most atheists I talk to or listen to will do this, and it strikes me as vacuous. We are talking about something metaphysical, beyond the confines of current physical sciences. It may be possible that one day, physical science can come up with answers regarding the metaphysical, but for now they do not. This is for the realm of philosophy and religion, perhaps even art, for now.
I am not arguing this in favor of one particular religion, btw. I am essentially agnostic, but recognize that a healthy society is one that has some form of religion animating it. The only “atheist” society I can think of in all of history has been the Soviet Union. Every other human culture and certainly High Civilization has recognized the existence of the Divine. It drives people to accomplish far more than mere rationalism can. “Well, akshually” has never been the rallying cry of any society of any merit. Nobody has ever raised a magnificent statue or hoisted a banner of a giant fedora.
NB4 “well where’s your evidence?” I’m convinced by the simple fact that Nothing cannot create Something, and the universe has a lot of incredible Somethings to behold.
I’ve been aware of racial issues for about a decade now, and the conclusion I’ve reached after countless discussions and debates is that one of the grimmest imaginable futures for ethnic Europeans is that we survive as a group, but spend the rest of history splitting hairs over whether the countless Christian teachings and Bible verses which are problematic from a nationalist perspective *are actually not completely bad if you apply them in extremely narrow, specific situations*. I’ve had these kinds of debates so many times and wish we could just move on from it.
(To be fair, we should avoid mixing our rhetoric with any “edgy atheism” as well. That stuff turns most people off.)
As for E. Michael Jones, I’ve always found him a bit ridiculous, albeit sometimes interesting. I had no idea how he behaved in relation to Sam Francis’s memory. Very poor taste.
Jones says Jews are bad because they killed Christ, who was logos incarnate. This made them perpetual enemies of God, truth, the natural order, civilization, and the entire human race. The demonic “revolutionary spirit” affects even secular Jews. Not every person who rejects Christ is an enemy of logos. But since Jews base their identity on killing Jesus and hating his followers, they are especially prone to “evil.”
Catholics can be forgiven for thinking Mr Jones is onto saying. When you consider the amount of damage Jews have been able to inflict over the centuries in so many ways in so many places, you gotta wonder if it’s more than an evolutionary strategy. There is something supernatural-demonic aiding these people.
Arthur Konrad wrote: “ You must learn to separate the muddied schemes of Catholic apologia and other associated speculators, from the actual doctrines of the Church. To begin with, one cannot be a “Catholic philosopher”, since Catholicism precludes the possibility of assuming a position that defies Catholicism, and the freedom to assume whatever position is the prerequisite of capacity to philosophise.”
I come at this with a different general premise. First, one certainly can engage philosophically through a Christian attitude or view-of-life. I do not think that one becomes a Christian, or decides to remain one, because of an abundance of argumentation. I think one makes a religious choice when in a very different mood or mode.
What *interests* me, to employ that over-used term, is European renovation: the recovery of paideia but also the recovery of the individual who would, from this, reground himself within proper categories of concern. In my own case I find a great deal of nourishment within Catholic and Christian traditionalism. I am absolutely certain that these categories will not be eradicated simply because they are part-and-parcel of European being.
Therefore, even if I were a Catholic-oriented philosopher — and I define philosophy more along the lines of *existential choice* (se Pierre Hadot) — there is no one that I cannot or won’t talk to and no one I will not try to work with. I am also of the understanding that within Greco-Christianity there is, indeed, a living spirit and a living water, though I am aware that some people, of rational bent, could not accept nor understand what I am referring to. But there you see we notice the *metaphysical* separation. Most of those who have written in this comment section are trying hard to *work out their agreements* within atheistic terms, and within those terms and categories they make sense of course.
But you might be able to understand that my categories transcend those expressed here. You see, I can easily understand their existential and mental categories, but they cannot (by definition) understand mine. Mine are incomprehensible because they are seen as being *unreal*.
It is a curious problem.
God is self evident in nature’s design, natural geometry, harmonies, that all things are purposeful and clearly defined, by the self-evident existence of beauty, etc. I’m a fool for replying to an amateur theologician with amateur theology, but it strikes me that only someone who is bitterly depressed or a complete cynic would say that benevolent omniscience is “hidden”. I don’t think the materialistic idea that our world is just bits of stuff haphazardly smashing into bits of other stuff is a serious proposition, only redditors, fatalists and academic liberals think this.
I’ve never been a fan of EMJ but I’d rather be allied with Catholics like him than the awful people in Conservative Inc.. Christianity still has the ability to galvanize people (white and black) for collective action in many parts of this country.
Also, I would disagree with your assertion that blacks aren’t victims, to some extent, of the social engineering of the 60’s, which included ghettoizing them in northern cities. Many of the social problems that crushed black communities in the 60’s and 70’s are now doing the same to white communities all over the country. Just drive through rural parts of Oregon, Washington or California – it’s not good. The data used by Charles Murray in Coming Apart has only been getting worse.
I’m not a Christian, but a resurgence of Catholicism would be preferable to the nihilistic death spiral of white America.
I too am shocked by Jones’ asinine views when it comes to race. I really can’t explain it except possibly as some sort of a misguided defensive strategy. However, I would advise not to dismiss him altogether. His books on culture, history and the jews are well written, meticulously researched and first rate.
“Crackpot”, huh? .
I can’t defend Jone’s on race and evolution, and I don’t know anything about this Sam Francis thing. But I don’t need to. Jones has written a lot and I can read him with discernment. And when I did, I encountered history that told me about the Catholic religion I was born into and that religion’s historic relationship to the people who have more than anyone else undermined the nations of the west. Turns out that the religion I inherited wasn’t simply the corrupt and superstitious “antisemetic” hierarchy that my Jewish and protestant professors suggested it was but actually, at least some of the time, operated as a check on the money changing parasitism that now dominates our country and the West. On the other hand Protestantism, usually portrayed as relatively progressive by the professoriate, too often just relapsed into the Hebrew bible and sanctified capitalism or usury with Protestant ethicalism,
I learned all that particularly from Jones, not KMac. And Jones may rant against Jews but I prefer that to Jared Taylor’s quietism. Sometimes I wonder if the neo Wasp Taylors aren’t waiting to make a new deal with the Chosen People – one that will leave ordinary whites of lower IQ’s including Anglos at the bottom of the some High Anglo – Jewish libertarian matrix.
But now I think I may be ranting myself. That is because lately I have begun to wonder if the WASP isn’t undercover in WN and articles like this that dismiss Jones as crank and ranter increase this suspicion So I just need to say = and even the Germanophile Jones won’t say this -the WASP’s contribution to white civilization in the last century was to team up with the Jew to bring down fascism – the fascism which was the white’s chance to save our civilization. That is not a good recommendation for a neo WASP resurgence in WN. WASP’s give it up to the Jew Whatever is wrong with E Michael Jones, he is not giving it up to the Jew.
But anyway, at least all you Catholics and should read Jones’s histories of Jews, Capitalism and Catholic Power. Despite his HUGE warts on evolution, race and Cathophilism, Jones is still refreshingly and informatively outside the WASP=Jewish cultural paradigm that dominates most thinking in America.
@Lyle Bright
With that, I can certainly sympathize. The Catholic Church is without doubt the greatest and the most grand religious institution that mankind has ever erected. This aspect of it sadly, is the least discussed one. In this I see more than in something else the so called “Catholic Tradition”, and in this sense, every other institution of its kind pales in comparison. And of course, precisely in cheap apologia and hopeless dashes against science, the kind of enterprise which was always destined to fail, has the Church debased itself to the level of being forced to mobilize disinformation and fanaticism to its side.
From this positive aspect comes also that air of solemnity and refinement which one usually encounters in a good old, traditional Catholic religious edifice, compared to which everything else which is flaunted as more “authentically European” appears rather third-grade and hopelessly deliberate.
But if this is understood as a positive contribution of the Catholic Tradition, then what is left is disappointment over its irreversible failure to utilize such capacity in order to reform itself. It is almost mind-boggling that an institution built on such a scale had failed throughout the centuries to assimilate anything — that is to say, until reaching this age, the most decadent age of all, when it finally started to “open up” to all the abominable things.
Why had Catholicism failed to assimilate the apocrypha, and why had it failed to assimilate any reformation movement? Is it too much to ask that it had at least 20% of the capacity for assimilation of what Hindus had? To give one example, wouldn’t assimilating the doctrine of predestination from the Calvinists have improved its theological and philosophical standing, and at the same time, nipped one heresy in the bud?
Forget about the intellectuals — the Church had made it easy even for mediocrities to have it discredited. How is it to entertain any hope of prevailing then? For this reason I say that Catholicism survives in spite of its doctrines and positions. Most eminent Catholic apologists have to avoid discussing the doctrine as far as they can when defending the Church, and talk as much as possible about Dante.
If one doubts the existence of the divine, then why accept the existence of the self? Materialism leads to nihilism, worldliness and the pursuit of external satisfactions as the highest virtues in life. If all principles are nothing but the products of the human imagination, then why adhere to any principles at all, beyond those needed for the fulfillment of desires? Why is it that we perceive one race as being endowed with superior qualities to another? Because there are differences in the cultural achievements of a people that do not simply amount to who built the highest termite mound. If we are to believe that there’s nothing that transcends material or practical categories in the historical existence of a people, then everything becomes reduced to relative perspective, that is to say, us vs. them. But then, for example how would you account for time preference and how different races value it?
Furthermore I find that materialist culture breeds weak men, mediocre men incapable of action, so called “Last Men”. Why sacrifice yourself for a cause when there’s no rational reason to believe in anything higher than your own wellbeing? You can talk on the internet to be sure, but when it comes to action, why do anything at all? What is the motive for laying aside your material wellbeing and comfort provided to you amply by modern society for the sake of some higher goal? After all, if there is no God, there is no justice, no “right”, no good, no dignity, no personhood, no race, no qualities of any sort whatsoever, in the world, for all of these ideas are just as ephemeral and the same anti-theistic arguments can be used against them. The leftist rationalist attacks on racial science are simply an extension of the empirical materialist world view to social matters. Indeed their entire argument boils down to that race differences do not exist, because such differences can not be explained in material terms, regardless of the volume of facts demonstrating that genetics influences behavior.
It goes without saying that such an outlook would lead to disgusting consequences. One could remark that the Jews simply realized this to be the “truth” a long time ago. They believed themselves to be the Master race chosen by God to rule mankind. The Romans brutally shattered that fantasy. What was left to them to believe in? If mastery of the world bequeathed to them by its Creator was denied by the events of said Providence in which He manifests, then was it not pertinent for them to seize it by cunning and artifice instead? In a world without God, power and whim then become the sole ruling authority. Is this what we strive for?
I’m not arguing for Christianity or any other religion. I’m arguing against faithlessness. Atheism is a weapon, not a doctrine. A weapon designed to weaken the racial constitution of a nation, to make them pliable, by means of suggestion, to adopt the principles of self destruction. Everyone’s personal belief choices are their own private matter and should not be a cause for division. But when Atheism assumes the mantle of the ruling ideology that permeates the ethos of a nation, it will lead to the self destruction of said social organism, as evidenced in history time after time again. Faith is necessary for society. It is necessary for life. Furthermore, it is necessary for science, because without belief in the wondrous unknown, the horizons of scientific knowledge can’t expand.
Getting back on track, I consider EMJ to certainly be an interesting figure to listen to at times, but it’s a long stretch to consider him a man of the right, at least in the sense that this term is understood here. The recent debate he had with J. Taylor just made me want to cry. I personally consider Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson to be a much better candidate for catechizing the right than EMJ.
Just to clarify, both of my comments were intended as responses to D.M. For some reason, they did not come up as direct responses to him and instead just popped up in random spots in the comments.
Very good Article. We have to ask ourselfs seriously: Are we going to side with everyone who is naming the jew? Do we side with anyone who is against migration or islam? No we dont.
The alt-lite for example is disdained for a good reason.
@11, Justaguy78: You think EMJ has his crazy moments? An acquaintance of mine believes in the Annunaki/Ancient Astronaut theory, whence she derives the idea that the Jews were created last of all by the Annunaki to be the straw-bosses and pusher-foremen of the rest of us.
To me Jones is primary a Roman Catholic apologist rather than one who is fighting for white well being. Yes, he can be interesting at times, but at the end of the day – at least for him – all will be right if everyone just converts to Roman Catholicism – preferably the Traditional variety. There is some truth in what he says in regards to religious identity overriding ethnic/national identity. Yes, there was great pressure on immigrants to assimilate, but at the same time European immigrants of 100 ago wanted to assimilate into American society. Ethnic identity largely lost its grip but religion held sway. In those days you couldn’t be strongly Polish or Italian or Irish without appearing somewhat less American, but on the contrary you could be as Catholic or Jewish or even Protestant (in the case of Scandinavians & some Germans) as could be and your loyalty to America would never be in question. The loss of ethnic neighborhoods in the inner cities was due to the was due to better economic conditions after the war, the affordability of the human being, and the development of the suburbs. Even though there probably was orchestrated efforts by left-wing elements (largely Jewish) to bust up ethnic Catholic neighborhoods in the 1960s, Jones makes the whole process sound like the equivalent of the Cherokee Trail of Tears. White consciousness, even today is quite a murky thing. Christianity, because of its universality, has never been a benefit to white well being. Judaism, we know, is basically a tribal religion but it’s Islam that I find more amusing. Like Christianity, Muslims are not concerned what race one is, but unlike Christianity (in modern society) it operates like Orthodox Judaism, that the religion functions in an all encompassing tribal fashion. This could be said of Christianity in Europe AD 1200, but definitely not today. I will continue to read Jones for the amusement of it all, but I realize where he is coming from. BTW, if you couldn’t tell, I am a renegade Catholic.
Francis supposedly had a death bed conversion to Catholicism, funnily enough. A religion he adored from what I’ve been told.
He seemed like genuinely nice fellow compared to the fools sensible people on the Right entertain now for some reason. Paedos (a certain Englishman), racists (in the actual sense, not racialist), domanitrix loving deviants, disingenuous moral aribarters. Does politics just attract failed actors who don’t have the looks but who still wish for a little limelight?
As for belief in God (a topic that shall remain for the remainder of our existence since we are belief seeking animals as John Gray wisely pointed out). My grandfather believed in one. Francis Bacon also. Seeing as I am not as smart as either of those unique people, I can choose to believe in God. Arthur Balfour’s arguments for existence weren’t that bad either. If I am wrong, meh, I like mass, the Sermon on the Mount, and St. Bede. I’d say the same even if I didn’t believe in God, which I might even do. I’m content to live a hidden life with prayer. It was the same for my ancestors, why should I try and change it? Progress? That heathen myth that gobbles a family’s blood in the name of the enlightened few? Pff, I’ll pass on half formed modernity.
I don’t care for E. Michael Jones but that goes the same for all noiseless thinkers.
Just look at Civitas in France and then tell me again how Catholicism is bad for white nationalism.
I’m waiting.
This is a much needed article. Jones is a Catholic Calvinist, which means he’s also an Augustinian neoplatonic Manichaen. This is why he denies the existence of race and other empirically verifiable phenomena. His own version of Catholic theology is the only thing he uses to interpret reality. As usual, when Americans try to be theologians, philosophers, or scientists, they fail miserably because their collective vision has been permanently narrowed by the Protestant ethos.
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