Monday, October 3, 2011

Yet more on Pagans, Christians, and White Supremacists in the 21st Century

I'll do more analysis and opinionating later if I have time, and if I have the stomach for it. But for now, I've managed to put together a list of several articles from The Occidental Quarterly and Alternative Right that might help shed a little light on what certain white supremacist "intellectuals" have been saying recently about "Paganism" and Christianity.

For some background to all this see these two other posts:


Alex Kurtagic: Black Metal: Conservative Revolution in Popular Music, Part Two, Part Three ; from TOQ, April, 2010
"Anti-Christian views within the Black Metal scene usually fall into two categories: Nietzschean (often mediated through Anton Lavey’s 'Satanism') and neo-pagan. The Nietzscheans denigrate Christianity as an egalitarian religion of weakness, meekness, repentance, confession, and self-denial. The neo-pagans generally agree with the Nietzscheans, but emphasize the foreignness and deracinating influence of Christianity compared to the more authentic European pagan heritage. This outlook is explicitly völkisch, evoking the unity of blood and soil, of race and nation, and of spirituality and the Volk. The Black Metal scene also tends to be anti-Semitic for the same völkisch reasons they are anti-Christian. Some Black Metal musicians were so militantly anti-Christian that during the early-to-mid 1990s, they embarked on a campaign of church arsons."

Samuel T. Francis, review of The Real Right: New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe, Part Two ; from TOQ, Fall, 2004
"The French New Right has centered largely around an organization founded in 1968 called the Groupement de Recherche et d’Etudes pour la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE, or 'Group for Research and Study of European Civilization'), and its major exponent has been the journalist and author Alain de Benoist. Entirely unlike the American 'New Right' (or for that matter the Old Right), the French New Right is anti-Christian, anti-American, and anti-capitalist. Why then is it a 'right' at all?"

Robert S. Griffin (his website): The Religion of Ethnic Kinship (a review of Mattias Gardell's Gods of the Blood) ; from TOQ, Spring, 2007
"Gardell’s presentation in Gods of the Blood challenges the idea that Christianity is to be equated with the Western heritage, and that it is the most natural and uplifting religious expression for whites. I’m reminded of a chapter in The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds about William Gayley Simpson. Those of European heritage, Simpson asserted, need a religion of their own, one consonant with what is best in their past and the exigencies of their present. He called for a religion that is 'really our own,' one that will 'burst forth a new comprehension of life, a new faith, a new discipline for every side of our life, personal and social, for man and woman and child, from top to bottom, for the lowest to the highest.' .... Why, asks Simpson, cannot Aristotle be our Moses, Homer or some of the Icelandic sagas our Exodus and Judges? Why cannot Dante or Goethe take the place of Job? Why cannot Blake supplant the Revelation of St. John and Shakespeare replace Ecclesiastes? And why cannot the Psalms be superseded by the record of some ones of us, in the past or yet to come, whose lives are most inspiring to our collective soul? Why indeed."

Keith Preston (AttackTheSystem.Com): The Essentials of the European New Right ; from Alternative Right, August 2011
"It was my discovery of the European New Right that finally convinced me that one could be both a serious intellectual and a political rightist. My initiation came when I discovered Alain De Benoist’s and Charles Champetier’s manifesto for the French New Right eleven years ago. I had never seen rightist ideas presented in such a way before and I knew I had come upon something powerful. Previously, I had been more or less a left-wing Chomskyite. I had long found the left dissatisfying, particularly its victimological ressentiment and its PC bluenoses. Yet, when I looked at the bulk of the American right and saw the jingoist flag-wavers, Bible-bangers, Israel-firsters, plutocratic apologists, conspiracists, and knee-jerk militarists, I would wonder why would anyone could possibly want to be associated with that, for God’s sake? Murray Rothbard’s championing of the legacy of the 'Old Right' notwithstanding, I considered the right to be an intellectual wasteland. Fortunately, the European New Right rescued me from such a narrow perception. It was from the European New Right that I learned one could be a progressive without being an egalitarian, a conservative without succumbing to vulgar economism, and a traditionalist without being a yahoo."

"Recluse of the Hills": Paganism & Orthodoxy ; from Alternative Right, October, 2010
"When I hear Leftists rail against the 'reactionary' Catholic Church, I find myself wishing, praying that it were so! Unfortunately, with the exception of a very few traditionalist parishes, the Catholic Church, from the pope on down, has contracted the liberal bug and is dying from it. I know because I was a Catholic for many years and traveled across the entire spectrum of the church, from the liberal extreme in Berkeley (where I grew up) to a traditionalist, schismatic group in San Diego. There certainly were priests and laity at the right end of the spectrum who were aware of what was happening to the church (even Pope Paul VI, who himself was in large part responsible for the disaster, said the 'smoke of Satan' had entered the church), but these good right-wing folks had -- it became clear to me -- lost their church. They were like decent relatives in attendance at the Old Woman's funeral."

Matthew Roberts: The Rise of Anti-Western Christianity ; from Alternative Right, March, 2011 (originally published in The Brussels Journal, and reprinted/pimped widely on teh interwebs, including at RealClearPolitics, Conservative Heritage Times, Free Republic, The Southern Partisan Reader, Original Dissent, PoliticsForum.Org, Attack The System, The Center for Spiritual Capital at Loyola University, etc.)
"Christianity is fast becoming a non-Western religion. Although not the first to make the point, and certainly not the last, Philip Jenkin’s The Next Christendom popularized the notion that Christianity is undergoing a metamorphosis. Jenkins, an Englishman and the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of the Humanities at Penn State University, maintains that the heart of Christianity soon will be, if it is not already, Africa and Latin America. And the shift is not merely a demographic one, but an ideological one as well. Various African and Latin American expressions of Christianity are currently eclipsing the European version of Christianity. Eight years out from the first publication of The Next Christendom, now with a revised and expanded edition and two accompanying books in the trilogy, Jenkins’ observations in the first edition still hold true, a fact that he seems to celebrate in a pointedly anti-Western tone."

Andy Nowicki (his homepage): Christianity and Western Man (this is a response to Matthew Roberts' piece above) ; from Alternative Right, March, 2011
"Indeed, it is often said that Christianity’s universalist creed is somehow an inherent impediment to a Westerner’s healthy drive to embrace and take pride in his own heritage. In fact, if looked at properly, it is precisely the catholic (with a small 'c') orientation of the Church that lends moral legitimacy to the appropriate ethno-racial perspective. Absent the anchor of faith, and the accompanying notions of natural law and justice, one founders on nihilism, an outlook which in no time leads into the maelstrom of terror and chaos."