Counter-Currents
Johann Peter Krafft, The Siege of Szigetvár, 1825.
5,125 words
The bad news is the bad news — the stories we’ve seen and heard in the past few months, years, decades that all keep warning us of more to come. The good news is that these times of transition provide us with opportunities for clarity and fresh perspectives on historical and social phenomena that inspire mental diversions and theory-making. Some of the more compelling central questions that have lately emerged in dissident circles are: “what is a civil war?” and, “are we headed for one (or in one already)?” What follows are my contributions to the discussion, and I mean them to be a starting point, or an opening salvo in a seminar, rather than an ultimate “theory of everything.” My contention is that we can understand current crises through interpretive historical frameworks, even if those frameworks force us to conclude that current crises are, in some ways, major breaks from the past. Still, few things are without their precedents.
In his book Churchill, Hitler, and the “Unnecessary War,” author Patrick Buchanan began by conjuring that quintessential modern warlord:
Every European war is a civil war, said Napoleon. Historians will look back on 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 as two phases of the great Civil War of the West, [when] the once Christian nations of Europe fell upon one another with such savage abandon they brought down all their empires, brought an end to centuries of Western rule, and advanced the death of their civilization. [1]
Francis Parker Yockey said much the same thing in his earlier Imperium, when he emphasized that a political-civilizational power transfer from Europe had occurred and fled to its extreme peripheries: to the east (Asiatic, anti-European Russia) and to the west (essentially anti-European America). [2]
What painting is there that better shows off tradition and its antithesis within the same European ritual?
Designating every European war as a “civil war” is facile; its broadness robs “civil war” of a meaningful definition and history of its clarity. Napoleon’s synthesis of 3,000 years of conflict served to legitimize his own intercontinental campaign of conquest. According to this assertion, Napoleon was simply following a venerable tradition of warfare, even as he engaged in an anti-traditional agenda that involved toppling centuries-old monarchies across Europe and spreading French Revolutionary dogma — a premise made by an opportunist and snatcher of destiny. If we are nationalists, we should distinguish between polities and nation-states (as well as propaganda from reality) and take them seriously as fundamental entities.
At the same time, neither Mr. Buchanan nor Yockey was wrong to view history and its shifts broadly and from a civilizational lens. The twentieth-century World Wars were about nation-states and nationalism — but they were clearly about much more than any one, two, or three individual nations, or even empires. The West entirely (and much beyond it) was at stake.
This dilemma, if it is one, neatly encapsulates what the Dissident Right tries to address. We are nationalists who wish to save peoples and cultures in Europe from homogenization and globalist destruction. We do not want Sicilians to become Swedes, nor do we wish to see either as undifferentiated “Europeans” by eliding them in our historical analyses. At the same time, our mission is to protect all of Europe and its offshoots that Europeans have populated, or the sum of those parts we call “Western Civilization.”
With these considerations in mind, I have attempted a rough classificatory system into which historians could theoretically sort most European conflicts. The primary division between European wars here is the entity of the state or nation-state. Conflicts within two or more fully-fledged states are “Intra-Civitas wars,” conflicts between fully-fledged states I have classed as “Inter-Civitas wars” and finally, conflicts beyond state boundaries are “Extra-Civitas” wars. Sometimes, the one led to the others, and European land empires like Austria-Hungary and the Holy Roman Empire posed difficult questions about statehood and autonomy, but this is a beginning. Let’s explore the long and interesting history of wars between whites. [3]
Intra-Civitas Wars
The first broad category of European wars were “Intra-Civitas wars.” In other words, opponents fought their battles within a given polity or nation-state. Intra-Civitas conflicts were either: A) civil wars, or B) wars of secession. In turn, these exhibited one or more subtypes: i) localized unrest, ii) issues of leadership/dynasty, and iii) ideological struggles. [4]
Civil Wars
Such wars met two qualifications. A civil war must firstly have been a dispute between parties within the same state/country; and secondly, its antagonists’ ends must have aimed to take over the entire polity and/or enforce sweeping reforms on the central government. Civil wars had three basic varieties:
Localized or civil rebellions: Revolts, or uprisings that were more “mobbish” than any type of organized armed resistance, but ones that nevertheless were serious and meant to overthrow or enact significant reforms on the established government (the Whiskey Rebellion (1791-1794), the Paris Commune (1871); Jack Cade’s 1450 uprising in England). This variant almost always failed to achieve adherents’ goals, which were often only quasi-coherent. The civil unrest instigated by Antifa and BLM seems to be succeeding due to the weakness of the US state and its officials’ willing participation in their own disgrace and abdication of basic civic duties.
Dynastic civil wars: This is self-explanatory and involved conflicts over kingdoms, in which winning the throne was the goal, rather than doing away with the throne altogether (the Wars of the Roses (1455-1485); Stephen and Maude’s War (1135-1153), the 1845 Jacobite Rising). Though most dynastic civil wars of the past involved hereditary monarchies, today’s dynastic civil wars should include presidencies and dictatorships that other, would-be dictators have fought to overthrow, but who have had no plans to significantly alter, apart from the installation of cutthroats friendly to the new regime. It’s shabbier, sure, without the jewels and anointing oils, but for the purposes of this essay, they are essentially the same concepts.
Ideological civil wars/revolutions: These civil wars involved a wholesale restructuring of polities and were generally the most brutal, total, and wrenching type, and ones in which many soldiers and civilians tended to die (the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the French Revolution, including the War in the Vendée (1789-1799), the Russian Revolution and Civil War (1917-1923), the English Civil War (1642-1651)).
Wars of Secession: the rebelling province or sub-federal territory did not want to alter the central polity, but desired to form its own polity by breaking away (the War of Southern Secession (1861-1865), the Second Balkan War (1913), various Scottish and Irish uprisings against the English/British).
A note: this means that the American “Civil War” was not a civil war, once and for all. At no time did the South consider marching on Washington in order to overthrow the government of the United States and/or to install Jefferson Davis in the White House via military junta. Martin Luther King’s March on Washington one hundred years later intended more of a governmental coup than a Southern march on Washington ever would have. Had Southerners somehow seized the US capital, they would have sued for peace terms . . . in order to leave. Neither did the South intend to radically alter the Constitution and innovate a new system. Southerners’ constitution was a virtual copy of the original with only a few specific changes and clarifications.
This is an old hill over which others have fought and refought since 1865, and it may not be the most important one to die on now, but we should not allow this nineteenth-century war, one that our educational system has taught us was a “civil war,” blind us in our evaluation and recognition of the genuine article. The war between the northern and southern factions of American states in the mid-nineteenth century was a classic war of secession. Indeed, I would be more inclined to categorize it with wars of the next section, than into the category of “civil wars,” since the Confederacy had all the trappings and performed all the duties of statehood for almost the entirety of the conflict.
You can buy The World in Flames: The Shorter Writings of Francis Parker Yockey here.
Inter-Civitas Wars
As for conflicts fought between separate polities, those fell under the broad scope of “Inter-Civitas” wars and thence into one or more of three main conflict types: A) localized wars/revolts; B) dynastic disputes; and C) wars of ideology that had civilizational consequences.
Localized wars: Combatants fought over disputed territory or boundaries (Russo-Swedish Wars (fought on-and-off during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), the Crimean War (1853-1856)).
Dynastic disputes: Two or more states conflicted over who would control one or both of their states, or an entirely different state (The War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714), The War of Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and its reignited and wider conflict, the Seven Years War (1756-1763), the Hundred Years War (1337-1453), Spain’s attempted 1588 Armada invasion of England).
Tota-Europa wars / Ideological wars: Widespread conflicts that had civilizational, often continent-wide consequences; these tended to rip apart the European social fabric and destroy older orders/ancien régimes, resulting in the beginning and ending of eras. They usually exacted hideous body counts (the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815), the World Wars (1914-1945)).
Inter-Civitas wars often sparked smaller, Intra-Civitas wars within battling states that manifested as civil wars, secessionist wars, or other wars of independence. The Peloponnesian War provided us the example of the Greek city-state of Corcyra and its collapse into civil war, as all around it, the larger battles in the Aegean raged. Rival democratic and oligarchic factions inside Corcyra’s walls made the disastrous decision to ask the principal antagonists, Athens and Sparta, respectively, to kill their own neighbors.
Continental rivalries did have some benefits for Europeans. They encouraged and maintained true diversity in Europe, while containing diversity’s more negative aspects by giving rise to the nation-state. These developments made it the most richly differentiated continent per square mile of territory, as well as the most ordered and intellectually creative. [5] It spurred the tireless European spirit and its sense of competition, leading to glorious feats in technology and conquest. Men vied for the honor of presenting their innovations to their kings and countries before counterparts in neighboring states could do so. For a time, this made Europeans fiercely proud of both their nations and their race.
But we should also acknowledge inter-European warfare’s negative consequences.
Some of the most damaging Inter-Civitas wars were those of the third type. They were comprehensive and often ideological, and we should call them “Tota-Europa wars,” because antagonists of those conflicts sought to profoundly shift European religious, social, political, or economic fundamentals. The Peloponnesian War once again gave us a model with which to use in comparison. It engulfed much of the Mediterranean and pitted the rising, democratic Athenians and their sea empire against an older, oligarchic Sparta and its land empire. It ended the Greek golden age and devastated a large portion of the civilized European world.
Historians believe that the Thirty Years War — an Inter-Civitas religious and dynastic conflict with smaller but savage civil wars — may have wiped out one-third of Central Europe’s population. Of course, the two World Wars, from under whose shadows we have never emerged, outdid even that war in their horror and scope, and ended the Christian era of Europe. These came the closest to being “the great Civil War[s] of the West” that Buchanan and Yockey described, but using the term “Tota-Europa war” is more appropriate and emphasizes their civilizational impact while still preserving the definition of “civil war” as one fought solely within a defined “civil” state or nation. I admire Mr. Buchanan and mean him no disrespect, but perhaps he meant to say that whites from 1914-1945 collectively signed an intra-racial suicide pact that looked like a sound decision to irresponsible war-mongers like Winston Churchill, who still operated as if nineteenth-century “balance of power” politics was a sound foreign policy. We need to quit being afraid of words like “white” and “race,” if our arguments require them.
By far the most devastating consequence of Inter-Civitas conflict was an unquenchable thirst for non-white empires among Europe’s powerful nations that created, but never fully satisfied, a European addiction to non-white labor. Unchecked competition compelled European countries to gobble up more and more territory in the scramble for the non-white world, all for the purpose of gaining an advantage in a geopolitical chess match played against their neighbors. The desire for extracting wealth and luxury through colonial slavery left a burdensome legacy from which the white world seems destined to carry on into perpetuity. Worse, constant Inter- and Intra-Civitas wars fought between whites before the age of imperialism primed European powers to use nearly any method to gain an advantage — even if that meant using non-whites from their developing empires to undermine other white imperial powers. Sometimes, they even unleashed this havoc on their own colonists — racial manipulation that became tragically common. The French sicced Amerindian groups on the British and their colonists throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The British mustered Africans and Indians from their empire to fight the Germans during the World Wars. And after those latter wars, sagging and spent, imperial European countries felt obliged to dissolve the empires that pride and vainglory had once compelled them to build, and then to accept the inundation of the non-white people they once called “subjects” and “slaves” into their diminished lands as “citizens.” These were the terrible effects of Europe’s unending Inter-Civitas clashes. Let’s turn now to look more closely at the wars European empires wrought.
Extra-Civitas Wars
The third type of conflicts fought on European-controlled territory and between Europeans were colonial/imperial wars, and they deserve their own section for two reasons: 1) these conflicts took place outside Europe-proper, or beyond the “metropole,” though colonies were technically considered on soil belonging to the British, French, Spanish, Dutch, etc; and 2) Almost every war fought by Europeans over their colonial possessions involved a racial component that altered the character of such wars, making colonial conflicts either “wars with race” and others fully “race wars.” At times, colonial battles began as the former and ended as the latter. “Race wars” tended to be nastier, but both forms were bitter feuds.
Colonial wars with race: These wars were fought primarily between white peripheries and white metropoles (the Boer Wars (1880-1881, 1899-1902), the American Revolution (1776-1783), Chilean (1808-1817) and Argentine (1810-1826) wars of independence). Despite being primarily intra-racial, colonial struggles for independence almost always had some racial element that involved metropolitan use of non-whites against white colonists and settlers.
Colonial race wars: conflicts that were primarily racial struggles between European colonists/colonialists and non-white “natives” in which white settlers and white officials from the mother country often opposed one another in their aims (Bacon’s Rebellion (1676), the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), Rhodesian (1964-1979) and South African Border Wars (1966-1984), Angolan-Congo Wars (1961-1974)).
Colonies Versus Metropoles: Past Betrayals
As readers may have gathered, the above analysis has assumed a primarily white West, even if Western empires were not so. What does it all mean for today’s discord, since the troubles are occurring in Western countries that now suffer from unprecedented levels of multiracialism? Labeling what we are seeing as simply one, huge “race war” seems incomplete. As commentators have pointed out, much of the animus is intra-racial. Jewish and white (along with a smattering of non-white) elites lead a hodge-podge, but still mostly white, brigade against European populations wherever they reside.
Taken together, this suggests that we are seeing a low-grade type of Intra-Civitas civil war in America and in many other Western nations, paired with an approaching Tota-Europa civilizational struggle that touches on profound issues of history and identity. The peculiar combination of the two has created what looks most like Extra-Civitas wars as they appeared in the former colonies. Wars of this kind might be a novelty to most white-majority nations, but they were familiar to whites who lived on the outskirts of Western civilization and in colonial outposts. Those vulnerable settlers had to contend not only with non-white violence but also subversion from within their own ranks. Anyone who believes that white anti-whiteness was a twentieth-century phenomenon that appeared in force only after that “unnecessary war” in 1945 needs to consult the history and conduct of Western imperialists. Long before the misadventures in Rhodesia and South Africa, Westerners had both suffered from and perpetrated racial betrayals.
The British, for example, infamously promised in Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation of 1775 that black slaves in the colonial South could earn their freedom if they served the British army and helped put down their rebellious (and even Loyalist) white masters. It was a craven and transparent stunt designed to cow Southerners and instill fear in what was a largely loyal region. British officials also contracted and armed Amerindian “allies” to raid their colonists’ frontiers and towns during and after the American Revolution. The most notorious example of this backdoor intrigue was the British support and outfitting of war chief Tecumseh and his various tribes in the Ohio Valley up to the War of 1812.
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, etc, etc.
The French Revolution and Europe’s subsequent plunge into the first modern Tota-Europa war of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was just as damaging and “unnecessary” as were the World Wars one hundred and more years later. One of the most egregious examples of this damage and its ripple-effect was the catastrophe that took place in France’s wealthiest Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue from 1791-1804. Decades before the French Revolution, free blacks and mulattoes who ventured to the Parisian metropole from its colonies “were greeted with sympathy and consideration by an increasingly large section of [French] society.” Anti-slavery clubs became fashionable with the salon set, who welcomed their kind and fueled black resentment (radical chic had its precedents, too). A governor of Saint-Domingue admitted that once, he also was “filled with all the European prejudices against harsh treatment of the negroes. But [he] quickly [became] convinced that there must be a discipline, not only severe, but severe in the extreme” in order to maintain control of the island. [6]
His remark perfectly illustrated the unhealthy dynamic between Frenchmen living in the metropole (and who depended on Caribbean sugar plantations to sweeten their morning cafés) and Frenchmen living cheek-by-jowl with hundreds of thousands of black slaves on the periphery of French civilization. When the metropole in Paris descended into revolutionary chaos in 1789, “the conquerors of the Old Regime laid hands upon [the] social fabric” of Saint-Domingue, and all hell broke loose. By 1804, every white person who had lived on the island of now-Haiti had either absconded themselves from its shores or died gruesomely at the hands of black killers. Many French revolutionaries cheered the massacres as comeuppance against their class enemies and hailed it as a sign that equality was on the ascent. [7]
John Brown didn’t emerge from a vacuum to go on to murder whites with broadswords in “Bleeding Kansas” and then to attempt Haiti 2.0 in Virginia. An entire generation of Northern radicalism had nursed his anti-white hatred (note: I do not mean the free-soilers and whites of the farming and laboring sorts who opposed slavery out of their racial and economic interests). True, Brown had few Northern supporters at the time of his hanging in 1859 (though notable Yankee transcendentalists compared him to Christ, the Martyr), but they completed his mission well and willingly enough within a decade, and they did so while using tens of thousands of black troops against their white counterparts. Unsatisfied even with total victory and the millions of freed slaves roaming the ravaged Southern countryside in 1865, Northern radicals took out their vengeance on the white South and humiliated its people by instituting black-run Reconstruction governments. At that point, the South was essentially a Northern colony.
Indeed, much of the South had, in some ways, always seemed like a colony to the North. They considered the region strange, backward, and indolent. To most Northerners, the South existed in books, and they cried over imaginary black characters and shook their fingers at fictional white villains (Kirk Herbstreit and white liberal tears, anyone?). Then, they attended their Christian reform societies to “discuss” it all in antebellum book clubs. They happily sewed anti-white discord in lands remote enough for comfort and in places they used like milch cows to finance projects with tariff monies. Only when their own cities began to fill with a new kind of Southern export — black men, instead of white cotton — did some begin to feel uneasy. The problems and perils of the Southern periphery had invaded their Northern centers. Southern addiction to black slave labor and Northern WASP, and later, Jewish, indulgence of anti-whiteness and black misbehavior throughout this nation’s history has resulted in countless farces and tragedies, both.
Peripheries Versus Centers: Future Battles
In an opposite reactionary force to the phenomenon described by Yockey, in which Western civilizational power bled away from its beating European heartland to its oppositional peripheries, the problems of peripheries — of those colonial outskirts, and their reliance on non-white labor, their fraying law and order, and searing anti-white resentment — have migrated now to the centers, mirroring what occurred in nineteenth and twentieth-century America during the Great Migration. Once, the outgoing flow of civilizational fortitude broadcasted a confident Britishness, Frenchness, Teutonism to all corners of the world; once, Europe sent the literal representatives of her surety in the form of her nations’ sons and daughters. These children of empire embraced a mission to enrich Europe, to populate the globe, and to lighten its darkest thickets.
But this is the crucial point: it is clear through historical examples that in the midst of this optimistic purpose, there was also, running through it like a malicious virus, a streak of anti-Western and anti-white feeling that first gestated in the metropolitan centers of European nations and that malcontents directed this sickness toward their imperial peripheries. Few whites had a greater pro-white racial consciousness than those living on the edges of white civilization and among large populations of racial aliens. The fact that most of these places (Saint-Domingue, the American South, southern African colonies), peoples, and attitudes no longer exist is due to the fact that those peripheral whites were either killed, pushed out, or vanquished in war, while metropolitan whites either actively or passively engaged in their dispossession. The conspiracy against whites in Rhodesia and South Africa, in which one of the chief agents was their own mother country of Great Britain, demonstrated a recent and especially rotten example of this process.
Indeed, there always existed among whites of central metropoles the sniffing and self-righteous disdain for their colonial or backwoods brethren (observe our slick, coastal elites and their superior attitude toward Middle America for a modern manifestation). This innate tendency assumed an especially noxious and charged form when the colored races — that alien element — was involved. War among Europeans changed during the age of empires. Non-white outsiders became useful bludgeons with which metropole authorities beat their own countrymen and ruined fellow-Europeans when fighting their wasteful wars. Unlike sabers and pistols, however, conscripted non-whites were not content to collect dust on the walls and languish away in war-chests, waiting to be taken up again at their masters’ need. They demanded a share in the prizes of white lands, wealth, and political power. Black soldiers of the Union Army, for example, expected full American citizenship as the price for their service, and the ongoing project and propaganda campaign that has tried since then to convince both blacks and whites that Africans are Americans continues to be as ineffective as it is expensive.
Now Western nations hide themselves behind the thinning walls of their delusions, while their sons and daughters abandon the posts that guard the borders of their countries. Civilizational power has indeed shifted to the anti-Western and non-white world, and the world has begun projecting its own visions onto Europe. It sends its black and brown masses to populate and darken every corner of the white West. Once, whites were confident that Westerners would inherit the earth. The new migrants are confident, too, that they will inherit the West. They want what all conquering invaders have wanted throughout history: land, horses, and women. The Alps, those stirring peaks and hills in the heart of Europa that have thrilled the blood of Europeans for hundreds of generations, have become a haven for black African “refugees.” It may be less dramatic than Hannibal and his thundering herd of elephants storming the mountainous gates of the Ancient Boot, but it’s no less alarming.
Occupied Italy. [8]
It is also clear that today’s struggles in the white West have more in common with colonial Extra-Civitas conflicts than any other internal European wars of the past. Now that Europe, Australia, and North America have all but become colonies of the Third World, the peripheries have shifted, as well. They have moved from Calcutta and Kenya, Ceylon and Guinea, and are now located in nation-states of the West, while the managerial centers that dictate their fates are the globalist metropolises of capital, trade, and politics. Native whites find themselves existing on the economic and social fringes of their own countries. They are the often-unnoticed and always-necessary working and middle classes who live in small towns, rural areas, and suburbs. They resent the new “white codes” levied by the chattering elites and the miseducated urbanites in their efforts to convince legacy whites that they and their histories are disposable. They instinctively cling to nationalism as a bulwark against the cosmopolitan sewage oozing from Washington, New York, London, and Brussels. They are often the ones who must live close to areas darkening with the torrents of new immigrants flooding their schools and turning their hometowns into barrios and bazaars.
Metropoles and metropolitans are what they have always been, but rampant multiracialism so near to Western civilization’s historic centers has made their campaign against their own countrymen especially charged and intense. They are breaking white civilization on the wheel of race. The worrying situation about all of this is that those on the peripheries, if they remain there, always seem to lose their battles and find themselves dispossessed and despised, for the multicultural centers depend for their survival on keeping the white peripheries out and stigmatized, slowly starving them of their political and, eventually, physical will. To maintain this hegemony, there is no vile act that they will not commit and call a “necessary war” against hate; no limit to their machinations that they will explain as praise-worthy action in the service of bending history toward the arc of “justice.”
National battles between peripheries and centers may be the next great civil wars of our time. The only way now to correct several centuries of white mistakes is to commit to the very necessary crusade to save ourselves. There are only two options from which native whites and their nations can now choose: 1) a risky civil war of redemption fought by whites in their respective nations, and for which they will need both a dynastic takeover and an ideological campaign that reverses the anti-white rot. In short, they must collapse the centers of bureaucratic power, or take it over from within. Or, 2) a less total war of secession in which whites may do more lobbying and community-building than fighting in order to carve out separate states from their original nations, thus cutting off the power of cosmopolitan centers to affect them. Above all, race must no longer be a factor in Western states, something that by definition will require the kind of racial homogeneity present in Europe before imperial wars polluted it.
I’ll be honest: neither scenario seems likely in the foreseeable future. . . and yet, events are moving at great speed. I remind myself that history is not merely the record of catastrophes, but of great men and great peoples, who challenged both the gods and history, slaying unbeatable beasts and snatching away crowns from old regimes that once seemed invincible, just to spite them all. After Greece, there was an Alexander. After Alexander, there was an Augustus. After Augustus, there was a Corsican, who took on the old metropoles and kings of Europe and changed the continent irrevocably. For good or ill, I cannot decide, but I can certainly admire. Intra-racial in-fighting and “pathological altruism” may be uniquely strong white traits.
But so, too is defiance.
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Notes
[1] Patrick Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and the “Unnecessary War”: How the British Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World (New York: Random House, 2008), xvii.
[2] Francis Parker Yockey, Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics, Paul Bondarovski, ed. (Creative Commons Attribution License, 2017).
[3] I am inclined, for instance, to view nineteenth-century Hungary as a fully-fledged state within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while I am less inclined to view Croatia-Slovenia as one.
[4] See Stanley G. Payne’s Civil War in Europe, 1905-1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011) for his first chapter on “Revolutions and Civil Wars as Forms of Conflict” and subsequent analysis of the, here, criminally-understudied Spanish Civil War. Based on his sympathetic portrayals of the Spanish nationalists and Francisco Franco (as well as his enthusiasm for fascist symbolism and regalia), I suspect that Professor Payne might be a fellow-traveler.
[5] Historians have classically dated the era of nation-states as beginning in 1648, after the Treaty of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War. Negotiators aimed at their creation in order to avoid the kind of disorganized melee of statelessness in central Europe, exacerbated by diversity and incompatible religious groups living within the same territories.
[6] Lothrop Stoddard, The French Revolution in San Domingo (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 48.
[7] Stoddard, 39, 59.
[8] This appetite-killing image is brought to you by Taylor Lindsay, “Michele Amaglio Photographed the African Refugees Living in the Alps,” Vice, March 16, 2017.
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36 comments
“I remind myself that history is not merely the record of catastrophes, but of great men and great peoples, who challenged both the gods and history, slaying unbeatable beasts and snatching away crowns from old regimes that once seemed invincible, just to spite them all. After Greece, there was an Alexander. After Alexander, there was an Augustus. After Augustus, there was a Corsican, who took on the old metropoles and kings of Europe and changed the continent irrevocably. For good or ill, I cannot decide, but I can certainly admire. Intra-racial in-fighting and “pathological altruism” may be uniquely strong white traits.
But so, too, is defiance.”
How beautifully stated!
Another interesting text, thank you.
A few points.
Napoleon’s wars were in fact the prolongation of the Révolution’s wars, he inherited them.
The Western culture or civilization could also be described as that of christianity, the true unifying factor of that world.
The recent “gilets jaunes mouvement” in France (in its beginning) was a perfect example of the periphery knocking at the door and trying to take over the centre of decisions.
No tense but I thing that you’re WRONG.
Time is running out increasingly and some places are probably not going to “survive” in the near future. France, Britain, Germany may have already passed beyond the demographic point of no return, with projected majority minorities by 2060.
What happens then? I’ll tell you what: YOU WONT BE ABLE TO CLING TO THE NATION-STATE ANY LONGER. Tens of thousands of Germans and French are already fleeing to Lake Balaton, Hungary, following Orban’s cabinet’s decision to accept “European refugees”.
And that’s the correct response. While I’m certain that there are certain Nordicists around who absolutely hate Sicilians and other Meds, we need to remember what Nietzsche said:
“No, we do not love humanity; but on the other hand we are not nearly “German” enough, in the sense in which the word “German” is constantly being used nowadays, to advocate nationalism and race hatred and to be able to take pleasure in the national scabies of the heart and blood poisoning that now leads the nations of Europe to delimit and barricade themselves against each other as if it were a matter of quarantine”.
Europe will become whole, because of necessity. You guys are just delaying the inevitable unification of Europe and are clinging to an idealized and irretrievable past.
We tried it your way, with the nation state and all. And all we got was more wars, greed, and jealousy.
It will take only one socially left-leaning government, installed by voters ashamed at the exclusion of baby-touting migrants, angry at the ‘patriarchy’ stunting their white-collar careers, or just embittered by the corruption and rapacity of global capitalism, to undo Poland and Hungary.
As we in Britain know too well, once a certain critical mass for demographic change is attained, the momentum for dispossession becomes irreversible. It starts with the welcome of ‘nice’ hard-working first generation immigrants and proceeds to a fair-to-all colourblind muticulturalism for their descendants, but the endpoint will always be the degradation of the indigenous European ethnos by admixture and cultural regression to a lowered mean.
Some people can never understand that the vast majority of Africans, no matter how many generations resident in Italy or France, can never contribute to and extend the high culture of those nations. Whether by nature or inclination they will always be opposed to it, maybe chipping away and critiquing as outsiders — or more likely just spitting on and vandalising it.
To make ‘diverse’ is in fact to make everywhere the same — to replace the truly vivid kaleidoscope of European nations and peoples with the sullen blacks, arrogant Muslims and cowed whites of London, Paris and Malmö.
If Budapest and Warsaw can avoid this fate it will only be by hardening their hearts. Already the EU and liberal media such as the Guardian are mounting campaigns in those nations to promote ‘change’ — how long before they are emboldened to foment so-called ‘colour-revolutions’ there?
“Time is running out increasingly and some places are probably not going to “survive” in the near future. France, Britain, Germany may have already passed beyond the demographic point of no return, with projected majority minorities by 2060.
What happens then? I’ll tell you what: YOU WONT BE ABLE TO CLING TO THE NATION-STATE ANY LONGER.”
This alarming forecast may well be correct. So what is the solution if the peoples of France, Britain, Germany, etc., want to continue to survive ? In a word, the construction of Fortress Europa along the lines that Francis Parker Yockey advocated in his book, “Imperium”.
The question: What are the means available to construct Fortress Europa ? Where is the energy to come from ?, how to generate the courage necessary to oppose and to combat the mighty opposing forces of Globalism, Internationalism, mass-Third World Immigration, the deliberate de-industrialisation of Europa, the declining birth-rate – all of which have contemporary Europe (Britain included) firmly in their grip ?
The solution: If one understands that it was the two world wars and particularly the Second which brought Europe to its knees and to the present impasse, then the solution is to generate and to apply the same energy in the reverse direction, this time constructively to rebuild Europe not destructively to destroy it.
I mean here: one has to expose and morally destroy the ruling regime and its founders: the war-mongers Churchill and Roosevelt are to be exposed as insane genocidal maniacs; their Second World War to be exposed as the most destructive war in the history of Europe (Thank Pat Buchanan for your book, “Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War”); the Allies ‘Nuremberg Trial of the defeated German leaders which today still supplies the moral-legal basis of the current ruling regime, to be exposed as a “lynch-mob” – as per the Harlan F. Stone, Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, and as a Perversion of Justice, as condemned by US Senator Robert Taft; the propaganda-lie of the Six Million (the “Holocaust”) to be revealed as the Hoax of the Twentieth Century (Thank you, Prof. Arthur Butz of Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA); the closing down of NATO, the America military presence in Europe which serves the same purpose as did the Soviet Red army in eastern Europe, that is in propping up the ruling regimes in Europe. De-legitimize Churchill and Roosevelt and their Second World War and the whole rotten pack of cards will come tumbling down..
Damn straight my good man!
The Right has been trying this “exposure” for generations. Has not worked and won’t work until the average Westerner is pushing wheelbarrows of worthless money to the store for a loaf of bread.
Westerners still have not incurred enough pain. They need to incurr much more. Even the German masses were not ready to act until 1932 when the Depression wiped out what little money they had.
White Westerners will need to feel what REAL socio-economic pain is all about, before they will act.
Dear SRP,
if you think that “The Right has been trying this “exposure” for generations. “, then you don’t know the Right, not the Right in Western Europe , Britain included. The Right over here has spent the last sixty years snivelling on, “Please, Sir, There are too many darkies in our town”, to which complaint our lords and masters in Parliament and the Courts always respond, “Quiet fellow. I’ll set the dogs onto you, or transfer you to one of our stinking jails.” Which they are not slow to do.
Come on, let’s say it in the words of Dr. Goebbels, “Churchill is Britain’s grave digger”…and ditto Roosevelt for the USA. Pat Buchanan recognised as much in his book, “Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War.”, published 2008; subtitle: How Britain lost its Empire and the West lost the World…..lost the world, we are in danger of losing everything.
Let’s push this message down the throats of hundreds of millions of dispirited White folks and then we’ll start getting somewhere.
As a german looking at this history “white betrayal” seems to be mainly a an eternal Anglo Problem…
Touche! There’s this wonderful quote about Germany I ran into a while ago. It’s a bit long, but stRiki-Eiking:
“This, then, is how the idea of Europe and European balance was born. It is crystallized, of course, with the Treaty of Westphalia, the first complete, conscious, explicit expression of a politics of European balance, the main function of which, as you know, is to reorganize the Empire, to define its status and its rights in relation to the German principalities, and the zones of influence of Austria, Sweden, and France on German territory, all according to the laws of equilibrium, which actually explains why Germany could become, and actually became, the center for the elaboration of the European republic. We should never forget that Europe as a juridical-political entity, as a system of diplomatic and political security, is the yoke that the most powerful countries (of this Europe) imposed on Germany every time they tried to make it forget the dream of the sleeping emperor, whether Charlemagne, Barbarossa, or the little man who was burnt between his dog and his mistress one May evening on the chancellery premises. Europe is the way of making Germany forget the Empire. So, if the emperor never really wakes up, we should not be surprised that Germany sometimes gets up and says: “I AM EUROPE. I am Europe since you wished it that I be Europe.” And it says this precisely to those who wanted it to be Europe and nothing but Europe, namely French imperialism, English domination, or Russian expansionism. In Germany they wanted to substitute the obligation of Europe for the desire for Empire. “Fine,” Germany replies therefore, “that’s no problem, since Europe will be my empire. It is just that Europe be my empire,” says Germany, “since you only created Europe in order to impose the domination of England, France, and Russia on Germany.” We should not forget this little anecdote from 1871, when Thiers was arguing with the German plenipotentiary, who was called Ranke, I think, and said to him: “But who are you fighting against? We no longer have an army, no one can resist you, France is exhausted, the Commune was the final blow against any possibility of resistance, so against whom are you waging war?” Ranke answered: “But, let’s see, against, Louis XIV.”’
Germany occupies this weird space where it is either managed by the greatest power of the age—either Spain in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (with the Ottomans attempting to break in), replaced by the French in the seventeenth and eighteenth, directed by the Concert of Europe in the early nineteenth when Austria and England struck a bargain, only to see Germany emerge in the late nineteenth century, controlled by the Americans and the Soviets during the Cold War. All this is to say, I can imagine how Germans must feel about their European “friends.” I would like to see a German Europe over an Anglicized Europe, certainly. But Europeans have always been a quarrelsome bunch, whether the continent was composed of small kingdoms, empires, or nation-states. Perhaps Anglos were especially perfidious, and I think it was partly due to the sheer amount of non-white territory they controlled before the World Wars.
I was under the impression that Germany, as we understand it today, came into being in the 19th century.
Modern Germany, you’re right, was a product of Bismarck. It was still referred to as “Germany,” the “German principalities,” and the people were called “Germans” long before. The Thirty Years War began with a local rebellion in one of Germany’s principalities and eventually plunged much of the continent into war. After Westphalia, the Hapsburg Holy Roman Empire, which had united much of Germany before, was greatly diminished. Much of Alscace-Lorraine went to France. Switzerland and the Netherlands broke off, part of German territory was given to Sweden, etc. This drastic weakening and humiliations of the German states and the Empire drove men like Bismarck and Ranke to unify Germany and its wayward territories into a new German Empire in 1871. The idea of redeeming “Germany” began in the seventeenth century. They had a particular beef with the Bourbons in France, hence Ranke’s quip.
Germany (as an idea in the first place) can’t be humiliated enough for its imposition of violent and primitive desert cult of Christianity onto much more advanced and spiritually enlightened Slovenian people. German land grabbing is nothing more than predecessor to British globe grabbing that I call primary expansion/colonialism.
The real problem is the consequence of this mentality; European people are subjugated by the age of barbarity for the last two thousand years. And reading this and similar “AR” sites doesn’t fill me with optimism regarding the prospects of White race.
All Europeans countries have historically looked to their own interests and this has sometimes, inadvertantly, had negative consequences for our civilisation as a whole. Just like neither Athens or Sparta intended to destroy the pre-Alexandrian political order in Greece but their actions were mututally self-destructive. There is no Anglo problem and you should stop looking for a scapegoat to make you feel better.
A great piece, penned by one of the strongest writers on Counter Currents. Thanks so much for the work you do, Kathryn S. You are actually female, correct?
Yes, I am, Mr. Rogerson, and thank you for the kind words.
I left Europe 15 years ago. Invasion was bad enough, but one had to contend with the enemy within: politicians, magistrates, teachers, journalists,… the vast majority of these giving the keys to the invaders. As for the police and others, they are used to repress the local people and not the invaders.
Already chunks of Europe are under the control of the invaders. If and when trouble erupts, the UN is likely to organise the partition of old nations. Kosovo is a good example of this process.
Not an historian, but I believe that the West has bled itself out in attempting, without success, to resolve two issues: first, finding a viable replacement for Monarchial government, and second, deciding which Western nation shall “lead” the West. Cromwell, Napoleon and Hitler are all explained under this thesis.
The huge virtue of Monarchy is that it (in most cases) delivers orderly succession. The huge flaw of Monarchy is that the King’s successor may not be competent. By 1914, the pent-up need to resolve the numerous tensions throughout Europe created by the twin-issues of Monarchy and Western Succession, led to the war.
As for the issue of Western Succession – long story short, from 1815 to 1914, Britain had been the “leading” nation of the West, but Germany was eclipsing Britain in many areas. By 1914, Western leadership needed to change.
Had the Schliefen Plan worked, the war would have been quickly decided for Germany, monarchies throughout Europe, including Britain, would have been swept away, AND we today would now be looking back on the 20th century as the “German Century”. But Germany stumbled at the Marne, the moth-eaten British monarchy prevailed, and the West was denied the leadership of a young and vigorous Germany.
Hitler was the second bite at the apple. But he also stumbled, at Stalingrad. Thus, the West beat itself to death trying, and failing, to resolve these internal twin-issues.
Now look where we all are today. And the corpse of the British monarchy is still hanging out there.
It is the West’s failure to resolve these twin-issues which has, I believe, led to the all the debacles of the last hundred years.
This is just a comment, and I know it can be derided as pie in the sky, but…
I think there’s a third solution: OUR OWN “ISRAEL” OVERSEAS.
1. We have to think LONG term: centuries, not decades. It took the Moors 77 years to conquer Hispania and 700 for the Iberians to take it back, for example. When the Muslims conquered Constantinople, however, it was GAME OVER for that civilisation. Why were the outcomes so different, though? In admittedly crude terms, I believe it’s this…
2. When the Moors invaded the Iberian peninsula, many Iberians collectively retreated into a sliver of the north, west of the Pyrenees, called the Kingdom of Asturias. Without that bulwark – without that cordon sanitaire between themselves are their enemy – their would be no Spain today, and perhaps no West at all. Conversely, the Byzantines surrendered, converted or fled all over the place. In short, they were DISPERSED, they became enfeebled, and consequently they lost everything.
3. We, too, must build an independent, defensible nation of our own, from which – one day in the far future – our descendants will be able to go out and re-conquer the West. Our task, today, in this war of the ages, is to physically COALESCE into an organised defense – to create A NEW ASTURIAS. So how do we get one?
4. Trapped as we are BEHIND enemy lines, we are ISOLATED and thus POWERLESS. As the author says, there will be no secession and no Civil war 2.0, because the populace aren’t up to it. They’re nothing but latter-day Byzantines, cowering behind the walls, listening wide-eyed to the marauding hordes, and awaiting their downfall, both personal and civilizational.
5. Asturias must hence be created OUTSIDE the West. Now, I can hear all the arguments already: impossible, the difficulties are too many to even enumerate, it’s defeatist, we must stand and fight to the last man, etc., but hear me out. Imagine, if you will, “PROJECT ASTURIAS”.
6. We form a JOINT STOCK COMPANY to build a JOINT STOCK COUNTRY. Some 10,000 would-be Asturians give $10,000 each to become the shareholders. That’s $100 million of capital. The group meets, nominates leaders, and agrees a constitution and a strategy. It is united as one.
7. With its war chest, the group’s leaders approach an existing nation, perhaps a poorer African one, and negotiate to buy 1,000 square miles of coastal land with an option to buy several thousand more over time. As in the words of the U.S. Revolution, “We ask but for peace, liberty and safety.” The group makes the necessary arrangements, a pioneer corps moves in first and builds the fundamentals, with the rest of the Asturians coming piecemeal until everyone is safe.
Are there holes in this idea? Of course.
Could it be mocked to death in its cradle? Yes.
But if not PROJECT ASTURIAS, please give me a better concrete idea of how we’re going to end up as Asturians and NOT Byzantines.
I can’t keep reading and talking about how there’s no hope. We have to create our own hope through actions, not words.
Interesting idea. I’ve always admired how the Spanish endured 700 years of Moorish aggression and settlement without the invaders leaving much of an Islamic imprint on Spanish culture, or miscegenation altering the Spanish people — an extraordinary feat by the Iberian people, and one for which Spanish Catholicism deserves much credit. My vote would not be Africa, though. I think we need to at least go somewhere that would feel familiar to most Europeans, so Patagonia gets my vote.
Hi KatS,
Thanks for replying.
Patagonia would do me fine, but the price per hectare/acre would presumably be higher, and as Argentines are richer anyway, and possibly more jingoistic, they might well be less inclined to sell their land.
I feel that getting well away from the West would be advisable no matter what. Being surrounded by “the other” would strengthen communal bonds within the group. The thought of building a new nation, and saving our culture in the process, lifts my spirits even as a daydream.
Population density maps are here btw: http://www.luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#3/12.00/10.00
I have also emailed Mr Johnson to ask him to pose the question in his next podcast: “Fight or flight: What realistic solutions are people on the dissident right proposing and/or actively working on?”
Kind regards
Cassandro, I think that’s the most vital question in the movement, and I support airtime given to it. Thank you for stressing it.
Mr. Régniez, I’m sure you have some wonderful stories to share about Le Royaume de Patagonie and about Mr. Raspail. I would love to read any. I plan on doing some traveling in South America when this all blows over, maybe next summer, and Patagonia is one of my top priorities in terms of destination.
I am one of the Vice-consuls for Le Royaume de Patagonie, we only have Vice-consuls, our Consul général, the writer Jean Raspail, died not long ago. Tricky place Argentina, very much on the extreme left of the political spectrum, not easy to settle there these days.
A successful Project Asturias needs a strong enough military to protect whatever land it decides to settle. After purchasing said land, $100 million will not go far towards defense.
***||| I’ve always admired how the Spanish endured 700 years of Moorish aggression and settlement without the invaders leaving much of an Islamic imprint on Spanish culture, or miscegenation altering the Spanish people — an extraordinary feat by the Iberian people, and one for which Spanish Catholicism deserves much credit. |||***
Firstly, those fluent in both Spanish and Arabic can tell you the imprint the latter has had on the former. Spanish vocabulary is littered with Arabic terminologies. Moreover, the names of principalities, rivers, cities, regions etc. still remind a serious observer of those 7 centuries. Algarve, River Almanzora, Andalusia, Gibraltar, Guadalquivir, Javalambre etc.
Secondly, miscegenation by definition means an intermingling of distinct racial types. The invading troops contained a heavy contingent of North African Berber tribes, who are a Mediterranean race and whose ancestors had earlier accompanied Carthaginian expeditions into European heartland. Just Google the famous French football icon Zidane who is paternally and maternally Berber. Most, not all, of the troops that crossed into Spain looked like him. It would be a hard task to differentiate between the Chaoui and Kabyle people and Spaniards. And, therefore, if there were intermarriages, which definitely there were, the progeny then would’ve retained their Mediterranean features.
One of the reasons behind the Catholic authorities’ uncompromisingly harsh inquisition after the reconquest was that, racially, it was extremely difficult to distinguish between a Christian and a Muslim. In most cases, they both almost looked the same. And, hence, any remaining Muslims had to embrace the Christian faith or face expulsion from the peninsula. The task could’ve been easier had there been some kind of a neat distinction between the two like there is among Blacks, Whites, Han, Mongol etc.
Lastly, I fully agree that if not for the dynamism and sheer mobilizing effect of the Catholic Christian faith, Iberian peninsula would’ve been very different today. I apologize for barging in but here is a lesson for my White Nationalists friends. Racial awakening must adhere to a formidable spiritual order.
Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand were tough and noble leaders of a tough people who took their faith seriously and wanted their soil back for their future generations so that it remains under the shadow of the Cross.
**I accidentally posted my comment as a separate thread.
It is, however, addressed to a comment by KatS in thread #8.
Hello, again, Muhammad Aryan.
I must disagree with the influence of Islam on Spanish culture; after 700 years of living somewhere, leaving behind a few phrases and buildings (maybe a liking of certain spices) just isn’t much to speak of, and speaks instead to co-existence, rather than real integration. I take my information from Stanley Payne, a noted Spanish historian on the subject. According to him:
Unlike, say, the Mongols, Arabs constructed a major new civilization, which would impose itself permanently on each of the many lands conquered, Islamized and in most cases Arabized — with the exception of Spain. Only in the Iberian Peninsula was a large territory both conquered and for the most part culturally and religiously Islamized, only to be reconquered and de-Islamized by a portion of its pre-Muslim inhabitants.
Al-Andalus was not a “Western” or “European” variant of Islamic society in anything other than a geographic sense, but it simply became the westernmost projection of Arabic-speaking Middle Eastern society and culture.
In theory all Muslims form part of the umma , or general Islamic community (as you know). In practice, however, Muslim society has been riven by ethnic tensions (as most diverse places are), which in Al-Andalus were profound, as much or more than in any other Islamic land. Prior to the eleventh century, and even to some extent afterward, the elite remained Arab and looked down on the Berbers (the other principal group of Muslims of foreign origins) and the native converts, as well as on Christians. In theory, Islam rejects racial discrimination, but reality revealed otherwise. The Arabs exhibited a powerful sense of caste and racial superiority, demeaning racially inferior “sons of white women.”
Morisco and Christian culture clashed in nearly every respect. Their two styles of life were diametrically opposed. The inner organization of Morisco homes and the way houses were grouped in neighborhoods in no way resembled the way in which Christians did such things. Christians were offended by the sounds of Muslim music and ceremonies, the scent of the perfume Muslims used, and the bright color of their clothing, whose style and tone were so different from the more austere Spanish manner. The music often cited as being “Moorish” or “Arabic,” in southern Spain, like the Flamenco, owes itself to the Gypsy-Indian influence of later centuries.
However, I’ll grant this: the long confrontation with Islam was in some ways the major formative factor, as well as the major de-formative factor, in Spanish history. The Muslim conquest of the eastern and southern Mediterranean removed much of the ancient Greco-Roman world from its course of civilization, largely destroying the original languages and culture of these regions, and thus consigning them to an oriental civilization that after five centuries became stagnant.
Spanish society formed itself around a new militant culture. The real change that the Islamic invasion and reconquest made was to the Spanish attitude toward religion and statecraft. It gave Spain a new historical role of frontier and periphery, which was different from what the peninsula had experienced prior to the eighth century. Under Rome and its Visigothic successors, the peninsula had been part of the core of late Roman civilization. In the new Western civilization of Latin Christendom, the Spanish principalities would at first be more marginal and would require centuries before it was a full participation in the core.
As for miscegenation: after 700 years, of course “blood-mixing” occurred in some measure, but the original Spaniards who converted to Islam after the invasion either re-converted or were expelled. The Arabs/”Moors” WERE a different people from the Spanish-Visigoths, and as stated before, no one recognized that more than they, themselves.
For a time, F & I planned on engaging in a long and rather drawn-out re-conversion process that involved “testing” suspected Jews and Muslims by way of their dietary habits (e.g. forcing them to eat forbidden meats and shellfish), but that was discarded in favor of “pureza de sangre,” or purity of the blood, especially after Moriscos led a rebellion in the sixteenth century and appealed to the Ottomans for aid. They had remained in large groups in southern Spain due mainly to Spanish Christian landowners wanting cheap labor to work their farms — something I could have included in the essay, as a matter of fact. Mass expulsions occurred in which much of the cryto-Jewish conversos or Muslim “converts” were found and expelled by the Inquisition.
To make a long reply short: the Spanish resistance to Islam’s 700 year threat and settlement was unprecedented and deserves to be recognized as a singular European achievement of Western Christendom.
Greetings Kathryn,
|||***||| I must disagree with the influence of Islam on Spanish culture; after 700 years of living somewhere, leaving behind a few phrases and buildings (maybe a liking of certain spices) just isn’t much to speak of, and speaks instead to co-existence, rather than real integration. I take my information from Stanley Payne, a noted Spanish historian on the subject. |||***|||
I can assure you it is way more than ‘a few phrases’. I rely on the 19th century scholar of Arabic and Spanish Reinhart Dozy whose ‘Glossaire Des Mots Espagnols et Portugais Derives De L’Arabe’ gives a good account of the deep linguistic bond between the two languages which germinated during those seven centuries. Also, Stephen Weston’s ‘Remains of Arabic in the Spanish and Portuguese Languages (1810)’ too is a useful source on this subject.
Familiarity with the Spanish and Arabic script is required to appreciate these works.
|||***||| The Arabs/”Moors” WERE a different people from the Spanish-Visigoths, and as stated before, no one recognized that more than they, themselves. |||***|||
Mr. Stanley Payne writes the following in his ‘A History of Spain and Portugal’ (Volume I, Chapter Two: Al Andalus)
“…there was little sense of racial antipathy; the majority of the first wave of invaders were not even Arabs but Berbers who differed little in appearance from the Hispanic people. Some of these Berbers were themselves not yet fully assimilated into Islam.”
Although he is correct on the Berber account, however, his comprehension of the ‘Arabs’ appears somewhat problematic. As I have mentioned in my previous threads here on CC, several of the top commanders certainly belonged to Nejd and Hijaz, yet, not every Arab-speaking back then looked like a desert Bedouin. There were converted Aramaic-speaking Syrian tribes in this invading expedition who had begun to adopt the Arabic language after their entry into Islam. And these folks also ‘differed little in appearance from the Hispanic people.’
|||***||| For a time, F & I planned on engaging in a long and rather drawn-out re-conversion process that involved “testing” suspected Jews and Muslims by way of their dietary habits… |||***|||
What could be the reason behind this measure?
Why would the authorities need this ‘long and drawn out re-conversion process’ if there already had been a neat distinction between the natives and the progeny of the invading colonizers? They would’ve easily separated the two and expelled the undesirables.
|||***||| To make a long reply short: the Spanish resistance to Islam’s 700 year threat and settlement was unprecedented and deserves to be recognized as a singular European achievement of Western Christendom. |||***|||
I agree. The last two paragraphs of previous comment say as much.
As for whether it ‘deserves to be recognized as a singular European achievement of Western Christendom’, well, ‘Western Christendom’ systematically weakened the Byzantines and left them at the mercy of the Ottomans. As a result, today, the grandest Christian city ever arose on the European soil, Constantinople, rests with the Islamised Turks.
Therefore, taking everything into consideration, the West did regain Hispania but destiny exacted an extremely heavy price.
Regards,
Good morning, or good whatever part of the day it is for you. It’s early where I am.
I still must disagree that Al-Andalus left many meaningful things behind considering that for the better part of a millennium, they and a foreign population systematically restructured the peninsula. The Berbers may have been close relatives to native Spaniards and intermarried with some of them, but Arab/Levantine overlords kept themselves at a distance from both them and the Spanish natives and converts (except, one must point out, in their harems). The reason for testing dietary habits was the fact that most Muslims by 1492 were descendants of the original Spaniards of central and southern Spain, with some admixture of North African, but the Spanish ethnicity did not radically change; few families from the Levant or other Arabized lands remained behind. For a time the Spanish wanted to keep these people, but eventually decided that the idea was unworkable and chose to base exile on ancestry or blood history. Mediterranean peoples are similar, but they are in no way one ethnicity, and as I said, no one recognized that more than the Islamic conquerors themselves. The men who felled the Aztecs were white European men, not Berbers or Arabs or Syrians.
I wonder at your bringing up Eastern Christendom, when I specifically mentioned Western Christendom and the reconquest as being of particular notability in the Latin West without bringing up the Byzantines at all, nor did I claim that West and East never quarrelled. The loss of Constantinople was grievous, but the reason was due more to the Ottoman strength of arms and invasion rather than anything else. I must assume that it was an attempt at scoring a point for Islam. No serious person denies that the systematic Islamic takeover of much of the Mediterranean and of near/central Asia was impressive. I also rather admire Erdogan and his populist streak, even as I lament the turning of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque once again. But history is long, and structures live many lives, and barring some catastrophe, the former cathedral will outlive this one as well. And I will also not deny that the ridding of Al-Andalus from Spain satisfies me greatly, as is probably apparent.
I do enjoy our little sparring sessions.
Good Morning, it’s evening in our part of the world.
I brought up ‘Eastern Christendom’ because it’s all ‘West’ from where we see it. European boundaries, or rather the boundaries of the West, were quite extended until Arab-Berber-Turk assaults pushed it beyond Ionia and Thrace and out of the whole traditionally European north African coast. And, besides, when it comes to the heritage of the Western Civilization, the domains of Constantine and his successors were grander than the ones that were now in control of the still relatively unrefined Franks and Visigoths.
Perhaps, it was this resentment against the Visigoths that the erstwhile Roman citizens of Hispania decided that it was time to settle the scores and they aided the Arab-Berber expeditions pushing their Germanic ruling elite northwards.
Anyhow, it has been a nice cognitive exercise. Thanks for writing these thought provoking essays.
Well, this was about short-sighted inter-European struggles and betrayals in order to settle what now seem like petty scores. Europeans have been guilty of that throughout their history, east, west, in-between, or far abroad. If Western civilization collapses, it will be by its own hand.
You’re welcome, and thank you for commenting, as usual. Have a good evening, Muhammad Aryan.
“I am inclined, for instance, to view nineteenth-century Hungary as a fully-fledged state within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while I am less inclined to view Croatia-Slovenia as one.”
Firstly, the imaginary entity of “Croatia-Slovenia” lives only within your head.
Secondly, Austrian-Hungarian empire — at least for the “Austrian” part — is nothing more than the stolen Carantanian (i. e. Slovenian) state, along with population, statehood itself and legal tradition. Carantania, before being absorbed by the Habsburgs, was democratic (in true meaning of the word, not in perverted sense of modern age) state in which Thomas Jefferson has found an inspiration for his Contractual Theory.
Even more, it can be justly said that Austrians are germanized Slovenians, which is no wonder given the extent of Slovenian population and the geographical extent of state of Carantania.
It’s particularly amusing how you drag Croats into your opinion, that has nothing to do with well established, verifiable historical facts. Croats are very distinct ethnic group having little cultural and linguistical (apart Croatian being part of larger Slavic language group) commonalities with Slovenians. They are part Sebs and part serbianized Slovenians, especially in Istria, Kvarner Bay islands and Slavonia, which are occupied Slovenian territories. Croats were not a constituent part of Austria-Hungary in the same way as Slovenians.
Thank you for reading.
It was a typo; I meant to write the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia. I appreciate you bringing it to my attention.
You’re welcome. I also apologize for being rude, but I can say in my defense that rudness is comming from being fed up with never ending Germanic-Serbian fabrications of history to justify the land grab. I care only about the truth, even when it’s not flattering to Slovenian peoples. I say peoples, not folk, because folk (German Volk) is a word denoting mercenaries within Roman army — Volk meaning literally regiment, a military formation of drunken villains running around, stealing, burning and raping, while imposing the hypocritical and imbecile Middle Eastern cult of Christianity upon originally pagan European peoples, of which prototype are Slovenians. I don’t care about the Volk/folk, I care about ljudje/Leute (or in old English lēode).
This is not an egotrip of a Slovenian, this is the very core of the tragedy of European demise. And while I have to agree with Hitler saying that people, tied to their land, can’t follow globalist businessmen, I can’t help noticing a hipocrisy, for among the first who brought the international egalitarian cult of Christianity by sword and by fire, were Germans. Furthermore, I can observe that forced Christianization must have appeared quite similar to contemporary Slovenians as Jihad, conducted through numerous terrorist attacks across the West, is experienced by European people; as revolting, backward and utterly primitive. In fact, there are three “Jihads”, that have broken the spine of Europe: Christianity, Communism and Islam, three Semitic religions, with Germany playing the major part in “popularizing” them.
Not to worry, Slovenec. I can appreciate the frustration you have. I’m here to learn about and read different perspectives, too. It’s why I fell in love with Counter-Currents in the first place.
That’s what Germanity (I don’t know the correct phrase for “being of German quality”) is historically all about:
— insatiable land grab (the Habsburg gang perfected this traditional German criminal activity, beginning with Rudolph I. and taken to sophisticated heights of ethnocide of Slovenian people by whore Maria Theresa)
— introduction of state sponsored primitivism in a form of violent Germanization and Christianization
— systematic and relentless (although amateurish) fabrication of history to justify the German crimes
Every time one praises the “great German spirit”, he spits in the face of truth, righteousness and beauty — he spits in the very face of Europeanness.
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