Ivan is Alyosha’s older cynical brother, though still only in his early twenties, in The Brothers Karamazov. He is the one credited with dreaming up the “poem” about The Grand Inquisitor who says he is better than Christ because he actually wants happiness for people, whereas Jesus gives them perfection to aim for and standards so high that only the strong, a tiny minority, could ever hope to approach them. The Grand Inquisitor will, through the Catholic Church, offer the lie of eternal life and will distribute the bread that the many are too ill-prepared to share. The Church will also offer the confessional where sins are expiated so the weak can sin with the expectation of forgiveness and look forward to eternal salvation.

Ivan’s nihilism, however, has had an ill-effect on his half-brother Smerdyakov who has murdered their father as a result. When Ivan tries to get him punished for this, Smerdyakov is several steps ahead of him and threatens to frame him for the murder instead. Ivan desists, and devolves into madness. Once insane, he has a conversation with the Devil, who he is aware is a figment of his imagination. The Devil, perhaps not surprisingly, turns out to have an excellent sense of humor. From the book:

“There was, they say, here on earth a thinker and philosopher. He rejected everything, “laws, conscience, faith,” and, above all, the future life. He died: he expected nothing but darkness and death and he found a future life before him. He was astounded and indignant. “This is against my principles!” he said.” Continue reading →

“It may seem queer that we have lately seen a decrease of privacy and an increase of secrecy.  I mean that while private things are made public, public things are kept private.”

G. K. Chesterton, “The Real Case Against Revelations” (May 19, 1922).

When an entity tells you that “your privacy is important to us,” you know that entity is about to invade your privacy.  It is about to extract information that it insincerely promises not to share with, or rather sell to, someone else.  And there are, in addition, countless entities that constantly invade your privacy without so much as a “by your leave.”  By a term of use buried in the contract by which you accessed their free (or not so free) services, these entities can nosily read your mail, monitor your movements, catalogue your transactions, and link all of this to your biometric profile.

If you have been fool enough to babble in non-fatuous blog posts, they have the capacity to know the contents of your mind better than you know it yourself.  This of course means they have the capacity to push your buttons and yank your chain.  If they had reason to exercise this capacity, they could make you dance like the old organ-grinder’s monkey when the music began to play.

“’The religion which is able to bring peace at one stage of human development may be wholly ineffective at another.”

Brook Foss Wescott, “Christianity as the Absolute Religion” (1891)

I am sure we have all returned to a much-loved book and been bored, perhaps even disgusted.  Or have wearily pulled an old snoozer down from the shelf and been enchanted by the first sentence we re-read.  This shows that food and poison vary from time to time as well as from man to man.  Brook Foss Wescott was an Anglican bishop who in the line above says something well worthy of reflection.  There comes a time to put away childish things; perhaps a time to take childish things up again.

Commenters from time to time inform me that some favored branch of Christianity is bucking the secularization tide.  Where this growth is real, I have suggested that the influx very largely consists of refugees from moribund and defunct churches, and that, over the long term, these religious refugee camps may be swallowed by the rising tide.  My lugubrious suggestion appears to be supported by polling data collected by Gallup.

“Perhaps the word which most closely approximates race is people, either modified by a possessive (my, your) or as Oswald Spengler defined it when he wrote, ‘The Roman name in Hannibal’s day meant a people, in Trajan’s time nothing more than a population.”

Wilmot Robertson, The Dispossessed Majority (1973)*

The shooting at Old Dominion University is but the latest in a long line of scandals in which Americans are encouraged to identify nationality with citizenship, and in which those who decline this invitation see, in some cases with sadness, that the word “American” now denotes a mere population.  If the unbewitched dare to declare what they see, they are denounced as the victims of witchcraft (if not as witches), for while the powers that be do not believe that there should be shootings in classrooms, they believe even more strongly that a passport makes a fanaticized Muslim drifter from Sierra Leon as “American” as you and I.

“Few Marxists have read much of Das Kapital. The Marxist is very much the same sort of person in all modern communities, and I will confess that by my temperament and circumstances I have the very warmest sympathy for him. He adopts Marx as his prophet simply because he believes that Marx wrote of the class war, an implacable war of the employed against the employer, and that he prophesied a triumph for the employed person, a dictatorship of the world by the leaders of these liberated employed persons (dictatorship of the proletariat), and a Communist millennium arising out of that dictatorship.”  

H. G. Wells, Russia in the Shadows (1920)*

As I wrote the other day, Karl Heinrich Mordecai (alias Marx) stands in the long line of Jewish prophets, original in very little and certainly not in his wild beard.  Marx’s scribblings are a prolix apocalypse, departing from the ancient pattern only in their claim that History will undertake the Great Revolution, not the Ancient of Days.  Capitalism is “the Beast;” the Proletariat is “the Saints;” the Communist Revolution will be what the author of Daniel called the “dividing of time.”  Before the “dividing of time,” the Camp of the Saints is encompassed and persecuted by anthropomorphic brutes; after the Revolution, the Saints rule such brutes as are not slain in a New Creation Marxists call the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

“O, when the proles go marching in,
O, when the proles go marching in.
O, I want to be in that number
When the proles go marching in.”

It’s usually an error to be angry at particular actors when the same bad thing keeps happening. Usually this is a sign of something structural. Why does America keep getting forced to fight other peoples’ wars? Why didn’t electing the candidate who specifically promised not to do this not help, indeed made it even worse? The reason is actually pretty obvious.

As long as the USA has a trillion dollar military budget, it will always be more economical for other countries to buy US politicians than to buy their own weapons. The idea of building an enormous military to dwarf the rest of the world’s and then use it only for deterrence is utterly unrealistic. That level of power is an irresistible moral hazard.

Why does the USA behave like such a treacherous scoundrel with its enemies? Is it because, as a commenter here suggested, because we do not dare behave with honor? Very odd, is it not, that Americans were able to mostly maintain a code of honor for most of their history, certainly not boasting of assassinations and sneak attacks, but only now, when faced with a much weaker foe on the other side of the world who hasn’t attacked us, that honor has become an unaffordable luxury? Ridiculous. It is not fear but impunity that leads our leaders to act so. A weaker nation does not dare to behave treacherously with other nations for fear of reprisal and ruined reputation. Treachery, not honor, is the luxury of the strong.

The solution is obvious: the US military must be gutted. I would be in favor of eliminating everything but the national guard and coast guard, but cutting its budget by a factor of 3 or 4 would be an excellent start. Think of all the money we’d save and all the foreign hostility we’d be spared, with no loss of our ability to defend our own borders. I don’t believe the world needs the USA to be its policeman any more than I believe European nations need the EU to keep them from starting more world wars. These are rationalizations for domination rather than sober evaluations of probabilities. Whether taking on the military-industrial complex is politically possible is another matter, but if the coming electoral annihilation of US Likud in favor of US ANC which Pres. Trump has now completely guaranteed makes it more feasible, that would be some consolation for the coming anti-white hegemony we’re all going to have to live under.

Perhaps the following would also be an important consideration. Thinking about things this way, we never need to blame God’s favorites, our Elder Brothers, for influencing American politicians to fight their wars. Just say it was our fault for creating a situation where they’d have been crazy not to do it. Just saying that can’t be antisemitic, right? It’s even true.

“A Myth is indeed a mystery and remains a mystery.”

J. A. Steward, The Myths of Plato (1905)

(Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. This part concludes the series.)

The great question to be put to allegorical interpretation of an apocalypse is, why would God encrypt his Revelation?  We saw in the second part of this longwinded post that an allegory is a “description of one thing under the image of another” and that this means allegory is dogma expressed in cryptic or coded terms.  Men do this for one of two reasons.  They firstly convey their dogma “under the image” of a concrete illustration in the hope of making the dogma more comprehensible.  We see this when Aesop conveys a moral dogma “under the image” of an animal story, or when Jesus employs a parable to convey a dogma of conduct or creed.  

But an allegorical apocalypse makes historical dogmas more and not less obscure!

Men also encrypt a message by casting it “under the image” of something else because they hope to conceal the dogma from the uninitiated, from the censors, or from the police.  Thus, for instance, Andrew Marvell concealed his satire of English government “under the image” of “Last Instructions to a Painter” (1667).  Sebastian Brant likewise concealed his satire of the late Middle Ages “under the image” of a Ship of Fools (1494).  

Although one can argue that an allegorical apocalypse is a blueprint for God’s Cosmic Revolution, and that it must therefore be concealed from the eyes of “the Beast,” this argument founders on the fact that God will not be foiled and these cryptic blueprints have mostly served to baffle and divide the “Saints.”  This baffling and dividing invariably works to the advantage of the Beast.

But the great foaming reef on which this argument founders is that an allegorical reading of an apocalypse is so often used by cynical scoundrels to put good men on a string, very often to make these good men kill and die.   In the hands of a cynical scoundrel, an allegedly encrypted apocalypse will always be decrypted to show that God’s blueprint for the Cosmic Revolution is identical with the project of the cynical scoundrel who performed the decryption.

“Allegory is Dogma in picture-writing; but Myth is not Dogma, and does not convey Dogma.”

J. A. Steward, The Myths of Plato (1905)*

(Part 1 is here.)

I am sure many of you will agree that the essential Jewish apocalypse appears in the Book of Daniel, chapter 7, which is a report and partial interpretation of a dream that the eponymous prophet allegedly had when Belshazzar was newly seated on the throne of Babylon.  Almost all modern scholars agree that the book that we have was written much later, towards the middle of the second century B.C., and that “Belshazzar” is, or was inspired by, the Seleucid monarch Antiochus Epiphanes.

Daniel’s revelatory and apocalyptic dream is very simple but full of obscurities.  It relates that there are four autochthonous kingdoms, all ruling by what Toynbee calls “the way of Violence.”**  This is signified by the fact that they “arise out of the earth” and are represented as brutes: the first as a lion, the second as a bear, the third as a leopard, and the fourth as a Beast sui generis.  

This last Beast is uniquely abominable and armed with ten horns.  These “horns” are interpreted as viceroys, or satraps, or perhaps military commanders under the Beast, and they imply that the “kingdom” represented by the Beast is in fact a complex civilization or empire.  One of these horns is a uniquely bold braggart who overturns the ancient laws and conquers “the Saints” in a catastrophe that precipitates the great “dividing of time” known as Judgement Day (7:25).

The great “dividing of time” is the cosmic Revolution in which the the “Ancient of Days” appears and sets the world to right.  The victorious Brutes are suddenly vanquished; the vanquished Saints are suddenly victorious.  The Beast and his horns are destroyed; the Lion, Bear and Leopard toppled from power.  “Kingdom,” which is to say sovereignty or rule, is given by the “Ancient of Days” to “the Saints of the Most High.”

“O, when the saints go marching in,
O, when the saints go marching in.
Goy, you’re not gonna be in that number
when the saints go marching in.”

“The Saints,” (c. 165 B.C.)

Commenter C. A. Patterson sent me a link to an article from AllIsrael News in which Iranian leaders are described as “apocalyptic Islamists.”  An apocalypse uncovers otherwise hidden knowledge of the End of the World, Final Judgment, Hell. and Heaven.   A man is apocalyptic when he seeks by word and deed to hasten the End of the World.  An apocalyptic man is, as I recently said, a religious revolutionary, the events described in an apocalypse being nothing other than a cosmic revolution in which a long-suffering proletariat of “saints” comes out on top.

Mohammed learned the art apocalypse from the Christians, who themselves learned the art of apocalypse from the Jews.  Jews were almost certainly the inventors (or discoverers, if you prefer) of this dangerous art. Speaking of the sources that first put apocalyptic notions in Mohammed’s  head, an academic Arabist (and Christian minister) explains: