A great American scholar and patriot speaks again
after a long silence. Controversial but thoughtful as always, he
discusses a profound subject of major importance with which sturdy
spirits must come to grips.
"These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, Go NOT
unto the way of the heathen...but go rather to the lost sheep of the
house of Israel." Matt. 10:5-6
YOU, WHO ARE now reading these lines, and I are strangers. I have no
means of knowing whether you are a Christian or an atheist. That,
however, will not matter, so long as we talk about facts and not wishes.
The observed and verifiable facts of the world about us are not
affected by religious faith or the lack of faith. Christians and
atheists must find themselves in perfect agreement when they affirm that
lead is more malleable than steel, that the earth is an oblate spheroid
rotating on its axis, that whales are mammals, that Germany was defeated
and devastated by the many nations allied against her in 1945, and that
the Chinese are Mongolians.
About such matters there can be no dispute among Western men, who
instinctively accept the reality of the world about us and CANNOT
believe, as do many Orientals, that it is merely an illusion in the mind
of a dreamer.
If we would salvage and restore our civilization -- the Occidental
culture that is peculiarly our own and that now seems to be
disintegrating and rotting before our very eyes -- we must do so as
Western men, by observing reality objectively and by reasoning from it
dispassionately. And when we try to compute what resources remain to us,
we need first of all to determine the actual strength of the Christian
tradition at the present time.
The West and Christianity Synonymous
It is a fact, which Christians will regard with satisfaction and some
atheists may deplore, that Western civilization in the sense that the
great majority of the people belonging to it (though never, at any time,
ALL of them) believed implicitly in the truth of the Christian
revelation. That religious unanimity was for a long time so nearly
complete that, after the fall of the Roman Empire and the evanescence of
hopes for its restoration, we of the West regarded our religion as the
bond that united us and distinguished us from the rest of the human
species.
During the Middle Ages, our ancestors occupied the greater part of
Europe, and, until they discovered the American continents, they lived
only in Europe, but despite that geographical unity, they did not
generally refer to themselves as the Europeans. For all practical
purposes, furthermore, our ancestors belonged to the same division of
the White race: they, like the true Greeks and the true Romans before
them, were all members of the great race that we now call Indo-European
or Aryan, but they had in their languages no word to designate their
blood relationship and biological unity. Thus, when they referred to the
unity of which they were always conscious as something transcending the
constantly shifting territorial and political divisions of Europe, they
called themselves Christendom. And for many centuries that word was
adequate and misled no one.
For many centuries the West was Christendom and its civilization was
indubitably Christian: that, whether you like it or not, is an
historical fact. There is a complementary historical fact that was less
obvious at the time and that even thoughtful men overlooked or tried to
ignore until the events of the past two decades made it indubitable:
Christianity is a religion of the West, and, for all practical purposes,
ONLY of the west. It is not, as its polemical adversaries so often
charge, a Semitic cult, for it has never commanded the adhesion of any
considerable number of [Semites], and it is not, as Christians once
generally believed, a universal religion, for experience has now proved
that it cannot be successfully exported to populations that are not
Indo-European.
Ascertained Facts Undeniable
Experience has also proved that it does not do the slightest good to
deny ascertained facts. The men of Classical antiquity knew, of course,
that the earth is spherical, and Eratosthenes in the third century B.C.
calculated its circumference as 24,663 miles.
But the early Fathers of the Church, living in the age of growing
ignorance that shrouded the last century of the Roman Empire, decided,
on the basis of some statements in the Old Testament, that the earth
ought to be flat or, at least, no more curved than a shield. Lactantius
was the most eloquent and probably, therefore, the most influential of
the many who assiduously demanded that the earth be flat and so imposed
on their contemporaries the conviction that it was. In the Middle Ages,
to be sure, there were some learned men, such as Buridan, who knew that
the globe is a globe, but they, like learned men today, who all know
very well that talk about the equality of races is utter nonsense,
usually refrained from publicly denouncing fashionable delusions. It was
not until the Fifteenth Century that the truth became again inescapable,
but when it did, the Christians, being men of the West, who do not deny
the lessons of experience, surrendered the comfortable error in which
they had once generally believed; and since that time, no rational
Christian has doubted that the earth is spherical.
Western Civilization Unexportable
Today, as in the Fifteenth Century, Western men have had to discard a
congenial assumption to bring their conception of the world into
conformity with observed reality. So long as we of the West held
unquestioned dominion over the whole earth, we permitted ourselves to
assume that our civilization in general, and our religion in particular,
could be exported and made universal. We did not sufficiently observe
that talent for mimicry is common to all human beings and indeed to all
anthropoids; that all human beings stand in awe of those who have power
over them; and that a genius for dissimulation and hypocrisy is
hereditary in the most intelligent Orientals.
Even with these oversights, the evidence against our assumption was
fairly clear, but in the pride of our power we felt that we could
indulge an assumption that was so congenial to the romantic generosity
that is a peculiarity of our race. But the events of half a century, and
especially of the past two decades, have shown us, beyond peradventure
of doubt, the shape of the world in which we live. We now know what our
prolonged missionary effort, cultural as well as religious, accomplished
-- and how its visible effects were produced.
Conversion by Cannon
When Cortes and his small but valiant band of iron men conquered the
teeming empire of the Aztecs, he was immediately followed by a train of
earnest missionaries, chiefly Franciscans, who began to preach the
Gospel to the native and soon sent home, with naive enthusiasm, glowing
accounts of the conversions they had effected. Their pious sincerity and
innocent joy still lives in the pages of Father Shagun, Father
Torquemada, and many others. For their sake I am glad that the poor
Franciscans never suspected how small a part they played in the
religious conversions that gave them such happiness. Far, far more
persuasive than their sermons and their book had been the Spanish cannon
that breached and shattered the Aztec defenses, and the ruthless Spanish
soldiers who slew the Aztec priests at their own altars and toppled the
Aztec idols from the sacrificial pyramids.
The Aztecs, Tepanecs, and other natives accepted Christianity, not
because their hearts were touched by alien and incomprehensible
doctrines of love and mercy, but because it was the religion of the
White men whose bronze cannon and mailclad warriors were invincible.
Military force -- Not Love
That was early in the Sixteenth Century and even then there were not
wanting indications that should have given pause to a critical mind, but
we of the West went on repeating that found mistake for four centuries,
as the missionaries whom we sent to all parts of the world wrote home
glowing reports of the number of "hearts" they had "won for Christ." It
was only after our enemies' campaign of "anti-colonialism" really got
under way that most of us realized that what had won all those hearts
was primarily the discipline of British regiments and the manifest power
of the White man.
We now know what happened. On many a shore of Africa, for example,
missionaries eager to "win souls for Christ" ventured to land alone, and
the aborigines, after mutilating and torturing them for a good communal
laugh, ate them, cooked or raw according to the custom of the local
cuisine. Usually, a few weeks or a few months later, a British cruiser
hove to off shore and lobbed half a dozen 4.5 shells into the native
village, and, if not pressed for time, landed half a company of marines
to beat the bushes and drag out a dozen or so savages to hang on
convenient trees.
Consequently the tribe, if not very obtuse, took the hint and
respected the next bevy of missionaries as some how representing the god
of thunder and lightning. And if the men of God distributed enough free
rice and medical care with their sermons, they were able to make
"converts," as the natives learned to utter the words that Christians
like to hear.
White Missionaries Murdered
That is, in essence, the whole history of "winning souls" among the
savages. There were, of course, many local variations. If the first
missionaries were preceded by troops or White settlers, the Blacks had
already been convinced of the virtues of Christian rifles and had
learned that White men should not be regarded as esculent comestibles.
If often happened, however, that the natives, ever after many years of
preaching and conversion, rejected the white man's odd rites very
emphatically, and a fresh supply of missionaries was needed. In 1905,
for example, the Maji-Maji conspiracy in Tanganyika murdered all the
missionaries and almost all the White men and women in the entire
territory, and it required a German regiment and several companies of
marines to restore the teaching of the Gospel. That was done by giving
some forty or fifty thousand demonstrations that a Mauser bullet could
penetrate even a Black hide that had been most carefully anointed with
the grease of a boiled baby.
The Christian missionaries did teach a ritual and often inculcated a
superstition that had some superficial substance of Christianity, but
they might as well have followed the example of St. Francis and preached
sermons to the birds. That is why the many, many thousands of devoted
Christians who expended their whole lives to "save souls" built only an
edifice of cardboard and tinsel that is now gone in the wind.
Christianity Incomprehensible to Natives
What the vanishing of that flimsy facade has made obvious was
predictable from the first. The religion of the West has NEVER been
comprehensible to the rudimentary minds of Congoids, Capoids, and
Australoids; races so primitive that they were congenitally incapable of
inventing a wheel and even of using one without supervision -- races
that could not develop for themselves even the first and simplest
preliminaries of a civilization.
When the missionaries invented systems of writing the crude languages
of the primitives, they had also to invent words to express such
concepts as 'God', 'soul,' 'justice,' 'morality,' and 'religion' --
invent them by either creating new words or by perverting to such
meanings sounds that in the native jargons conveyed impressions that
were faintly and remotely analogous. That fact alone should have made us
think.
It was clear, furthermore, that the "converts," even those who had
been most thoroughly imbued with an awe of the god of repeating rifles
and locomotives, would conform to the White man's morality only under
coercion, and that whenever they escaped from the White man's
supervision they spontaneously reverted not only to their own mores but
also to whatever form of voodoo they had practiced before.
Even if earlier experience had not been conclusive, what happened in
Haiti at the very beginning of the Nineteenth Century should have
removed the last lingering doubt. But the missionaries did not learn,
and the "Ladies' Missionary Society" went on contributing their mites,
plying their needles, and glowing with tender emotion for the sweet
little savages depicted by their romantic imaginations.
Although it is true that in some places in the former colonial
possessions missionaries are still tolerated, if they are obsequious to
the natives and pay very well, we have at least learned that the Gospel
follows the British regiments in the White man's ignominious and insane
retreat from the world that was his. (end of article)
If you want to read up more on this subject get the Book:
America: Free, White, and
Christian by Charles Weisman -- A record of the many historical
documents, Constitutions, Charters, and history that established America
as a Free, White, and Christian nation in it's early beginnings. $8.00
postpaid (Weisman Publications, 11751 W. Riverhills Dr. #107D,
Burnsville, MN 55337, USA) |