A National Benefit:
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol

1,932 words

Who can listen to objections regarding such a book as [A Christmas Carol]? It seems to me a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it, a personal kindness. — William Makepeace Thackeray, Fraser’s Magazine, 1844

Christmas is the most blessed festival of the year because it doesn’t concern us alone . . . — Friedrich Nietzsche, youthful diaries

It is a sad and sorry state of affairs that one of the remaining joys of Christmas is that its continued existence angers my enemies. The so-called “War on Christmas” is just one offensive in the wider war on white people, but it is a key battle, as it allows the Left to attack two of the things it most despises: the family and the child. That the Left adopts the Soviet attitude towards the family as a unit to be expunged in order to leave people more time and inclination to worship the centralized state in loco parentis is only to be expected. The war against the child is more complex because it is actually a war on childhood itself as a natural expression of innocence.

The Left hate childhood because it is part of the natural cycle they seek so feverishly to subvert. Because they are weak-minded, the Left strike out against and seek to pervert and subvert those they most resemble: children. Children, their very existence, are the rawest expression of nature’s purpose, and the Left despise nature because it happened without centralized state control (unless that happens to be the way you think about God) and because it was attended by a millennia-long meritocratic game which white men won. This opposition to nature also dovetails neatly with globalist plans for the West, hating and fearing nature as the globohomo crowd do, and partly explains the global Left being in estrus about transhumanism, a comic-book philosophy for immature men.

One of the ways in which hatred can be meted out is despoliation, and the Left have paid an eroticized level of attention to the ruination of childhood, from the fear and timidity engendered by the manufacture of a pandemic, through the false devils of racism and the phobias, to the malevolent instillation of perverted sexual norms into malleable and therefore vulnerable minds. The sexualization of children is not the same thing as the recognition of sexuality in children, however. The following diaristic excerpt from an essay on infantile amnesia shows an awareness of sexual phenomena in infancy dating from over a century and a quarter ago:

As early as 1896 I had already emphasized the significance of childhood for the origin of certain important phenomena connected with the sexual life, and since then I have not ceased to put into the foreground the importance of the infantile factor for sexuality.

Even those on the Right who pace the floors of their rooms long into the night fulminating about Jews will recognize that Freud makes a valid contribution (to ontogeny as well as phylogeny), and is investigating cultural areas which are of necessity sensitive. This is the very sensitivity on which the modern pedophile vampires prey, those classroom perverts who want innocence destroyed as their (post-) modern version of épater les bourgeois. For all their manifestoes and martial singalongs, the Left only ever had one motto: Let’s spoil the whole holiday as long as it annoys Daddy.

And, of course, Christmas is a holiday which is under attack, the whole institution paying for its essential whiteness by being intentionally deflated in the United Kingdom and America just as the “minority” religions are receiving a cultural boost. The only problem there was that blacks were not even sophisticated enough to have a festival celebrating life, and so one had to be invented. Happy Kwanzaa, everyone. Here’s another excuse to shoot and stab one another, O black people, in case you were running short.

So as the provisional wing of the elites hack their way through all that remains of joyfulness and the celebration of life and its cycles, as their work of destruction proceeds through the form with epic dispatch, all we can do is remember the childhood wonders of Christmas, like sadder, wiser adults going through old toys in a dusty attic. One of these is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Every year I surprise myself by the fact that I have never read this most famous of English novels, and I have read all of Dickens’ novels with the exception of Martin Chuzzlewit. This year, I elected to give myself an early Christmas present.

I am sure that outlining Carol’s plot can’t count as a spoiler, particularly if you are from the old country, imprinted as it is in the English-speaking psyche. Ebenezer Scrooge is a miserly old curmudgeon we first discover at the funeral of Jacob Marley, his lately deceased business partner. Marley’s burial, however, is not the last Scrooge will see of his colleague (as the delightful opening line states, “Marley was dead, to begin with”), who visits him in spectral form to warn that he will be visited by three further spirits: those of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. A terrified Scrooge buckles up for the ride, and we are treated to one of literature’s most famous stories of the supernatural.

An old man, tired of life and made to rue his default personality — one of miserliness, unhappiness, and the worship of money — comes to the realization that there is more to life than his bitter, avaricious solipsism. Dickens has created the greatest arc of development of them all: the translation of a husk of a human being into the genuine article through the compassionate recognition of his fellow man. How moving in today’s theater of Mammon in which we find ourselves, dictated to by Untermensch who should be as dead as Marley.

Stylistically, Dickens was the master of two prose devices difficult to perfect but unforgettable on the page. The first is the power of the metaphor or analogical image. Thus, Scrooge pronounces that “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on their lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.”

You can buy Mark Gullick’s Vanikin in the Underworld here.

He is obsessed with money, or rather that portion which is not yet under his control. “What’s Christmas to you,” he demands, “but a time for paying bills without money?”

Given today’s personal debt crisis, Scrooge undoubtedly underestimated the problem, but his essential meanness is encapsulated in the brilliantly evocative, seven-word policy which led the old miser to light no candles or lanterns in his abode: “Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.”

This is Dickens, of course, and so we are in the genre of the moral homily. In Scrooge’s case, his moral lesson involves scenes from his own life, past, present, and future. This narrative within a narrative is one of several aspects of A Christmas Carol which allies it with its transatlantic cousin It’s a Wonderful Life, and Dickens’ central message is that what a person does in life is the imprimatur of their moral being, not their relationship with the material and fiscal. It is pointed out more than once by other characters that Scrooge may be rich, but he does not seem to enjoy his life except at the expense of others. Scrooge points out that Marley’s ghost is chained:

“You are fettered,” said Scrooge, trembling. “Tell me why?”

“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link”, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?”

Anyone who has seen particularly early cinematic versions of Carol will be familiar with celluloid ghosts, translucent as though dusted with flower, but Dickens’ first spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Past, has more than a hint of the Lovecraftian about it:

[T]he figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness: being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body: of which dissolving parts no outline would be visible in the dense gloom wherein they melted away.

What the ghost has to show Scrooge, however, could not be clearer or more distinct. The old miser is transported back to his childhood and youth and shown the scenes of his innocence, of the sheer enjoyment children have for Christmas before the cynicism and materialism of adult life sets in – chronically, in Scrooge’s case. His ex-fiancée diagnoses a young man changing for the worse:

“You fear the world too much”, she answered gently. “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?”

And so, like another iconic figure from English literature, Hamlet, Scrooge loses all his mirth, and the panorama with which the second spirit, or Ghost of Christmas Present, shows him is the life of ordinary people that very day. We visit the Cratchit family, and the famous little cripple, Tiny Tim, to see the humility of Christmas expressed as joy even in penury. For descriptive ability, technique welded to inspiration such that you can’t see the join, Dickens’ description of London streets at Christmas in this chapter is a gift all by itself. Dickens is, of course, the greatest of London novelists.

Finally, Scrooge knows all too well what the arrival of the last spirit portends:

“You are about to show me shadows of the things that have not happened but will happen in the time before us,” Scrooge pursued. “Is that so, Spirit?”

Suitably ethically softened up, Scrooge foresees both future and his own mortality. His paranormal odyssey over, Scrooge rejoins mankind a changed man, and we have changed with him, such is the genius of Charles Dickens.

There are many filmed versions of A Christmas Carol, the most famous to those of my generation being Alastair Sim and Alec Guinness in the 1951 version. There are also, for those of you who really do want a childlike Christmas, a Muppet Christmas Carol, starring Michael Caine, and an amusing take in Blackadder’s Christmas Carol in which Ebenezer Blackadder starts out as the soul of generosity and Christmas spirit until the ghost shows him that, if he continues his niceness, the future belongs to Baldrick (you have to understand the franchise to get that).

Christmas unites the white West — or it used to, which is why it is such a target for the spoilers and wreckers of the Left, those anti-nature, anti-joy Morlocks who don’t see why any white people, even and especially children, should enjoy any time of year, even Christmas. Blacks have been instructed to take no part in Christmas except in children’s books about black Santa and most current Christmas advertising. Christmas is or should be an expression of reverence for the state of childhood. The material-consumer complex has ensured over the decades that Christmas is devalued spiritually, and now the globalists have arrived at the battlefield to bayonet the corpses: the World Economic Forum, the burghers of Davos, the open-borders hysterics, the freaks and frauds of transgenderism, the ethnomasochists and mea culpists and oikophobes who hate you and your children because you are white. These grave-stalkers are all Scrooge, and Marley’s Ghost is nowhere to be seen.

And, on that cheery note, Merry Christmas. And, as Tiny Tim Cratchit says at Christmas dinner, “God bless us, every one.”

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