The Great Passion

“We have a goal for which one does not hesitate to offer human sacrifices, to risk every danger, and to take upon oneself whatever is bad and worst: the great passion.”

—F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §26 (edited excerpt).

EXCITER - First time in Finland...

...with Violence & Force!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KifMAfE2aZ8

Hallowe'en in a Suburb (1926)

The steeples are white in the wild moonlight,
And the trees have a silver glare;
Past the chimneys high see the vampires fly,
And the harpies of upper air,
That flutter and laugh and stare.

For the village dead to the moon outspread
Never shone in the sunset’s gleam,
But grew out of the deep that the dead years keep
Where the rivers of madness stream
Down the gulfs to a pit of dream.

A chill wind weaves thro’ the rows of sheaves
In the meadows that shimmer pale,
And comes to twine where the headstones shine
And the ghouls of the churchyard wail
For harvests that fly and fail.

Not a breath of the strange grey gods of change
That tore from the past its own
Can quicken this hour, when a spectral pow’r
Spreads sleep o’er the cosmic throne
And looses the vast unknown.

So here again stretch the vale and plain
That moons long-forgotten saw,
And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,
Sprung out of the tomb’s black maw
To shake all the world with awe.

And all that the morn shall greet forlorn,
The ugliness and the pest
Of rows where thick rise the stones & brick,
Shall some day be with the rest,
And brood with the shades unblest.

Then wild in the dark let the lemurs bark,
And the leprous spires ascend;
For new and old alike in the fold
Of horror and death are penn’d,
For the hounds of Time to rend.

Ingrid Rimland Zundel Has Passed Away

[caption id="attachment_5001" align="aligncenter" width="750"] Ingrid Rimland Zundel and her husband, Ernst Zundel[/caption]

by Michael Hoffman

INGRID RIMLAND ZUNDEL, an accomplished and successful professional author and the loyal wife of the late World War II revisionist publisher and activist Ernst Zundel, has died. We have no other details at the present time, though it appears to have been from natural causes.

Ingrid was born into the historic community of German Mennonites resident in Russia since the time of Catherine the Great. After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Stalin began deporting these German-Russians to Siberia. The German Army arrived in time to halt the extrusion and escort Ingrid’s family and thousands like them safely out of the USSR. After the war, many German Mennonite refugees were sent to South America, where Ingrid’s family took up residence under harsh conditions. She eventually left her faith community to pursue a higher education and the career of a writer. She met Ernst in the 1990s. She survived her husband by less than three months. She leaves behind an extensive headquarters complex in Tennessee, complete with lodging facilities, a library and archives, the disposition of which is unknown. She was her husband’s sole heir, according to his son Pierre.

Another courageous World War II revisionist, the Leftist scholar Serge Thion, died October 15 in France. There were no suspicious circumstances.

2017 also saw the passing of Barbara Kulaszka in June, after a long illness. She was a tireless Canadian civil liberties attorney who for decades assisted Doug Christie in defending dissidents who otherwise would have been deprived of adequate legal representation.

Requiescat in pace.

Read more: here

The disastrous results of intermixing

"The totally disastrous results that can be produced by a superior race
intermixing with inferior races had been fully perceived by the most ancient
civilized peoples. This was undoubtedly the origin of the caste system which
prevents any union between peoples of different races, and which we find still
in place in many old societies. Without mankind would perhaps have never
gone beyond the dawn of civilization. Thanks to this system powerfully
sanctioned by religious law, the ancient Aryans, when they penetrated into
India, at the time inhabited by savage hordes with dark skin, guarded
themselves against any crossbreeding and, consequently, degradation and the
final absorption that menaced them. Without the caste system, the brilliant
civilization that they founded on the banks of the Ganges would never have
taken root, and history would not have occupied itself with them. This system
therefore played, in fact, an immense role in the history of the early
civilizations; if, with our modern ideas, we find it unjust, the fact is that,
fortified by long-time traditions, it has outlived in many peoples the necessities
that called it into existence."

The Influence of Race in History by Doctor Gustave Le Bon

The Battle That Created Germany

Archaeologists have made a fascinating discovery that could rewrite the history of a legendary battle between Germanic tribes and the Romans in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD.

[caption id="attachment_4983" align="alignnone" width="1800"] A scene to remember. Source: The Battle of Teutoburg Forest, Paja Jovanović, 1899[/caption]

For four days the battle raged, stretching along lines up to 100 kilometers long through the dark and foggy Teutoburg Forest in northwestern Germany. It was the year 9 AD, and the Roman general Publius Quinctilius Varus, governor of Germania, was following the advice of a Germanic chieftain he knew and trusted, because the German had long fought in the service of the Romans. His name was Arminius – Hermann, in German. But Arminius was using his knowledge of the Romans to lure Varus into a trap, vanquishing three legions so completely that only handfuls of the 20,000 Roman troops escaped.

Those captured were enslaved or sacrificed to gods, their severed heads nailed to trees. Varus himself fell on his sword on the fourth and final day of the battle. Arminius, of the Cheruscan tribe, sent Varus’ head to Maroboduus, king of the Suebi, another Germanic tribe. The message was simple: the Romans can be beaten, join me. But the king declined the offer and sent the head to Emperor Augustus in Rome.

The battle of Teutoburg Forest changed history, its impact visible to this day. It stopped the Romans from colonizing the wild lands east of the Rhine – Germany even now is divided between a wine-loving south and west and a beer-swilling north and east. But the war cries and clang of swords also echoed through the ages in other ways: as a creation myth – glorious and catastrophic at once — that later forged the German nation.

The battle’s tale was spun into myth and retold in poems, plays, operas, books and paintings that hailed Hermann as Germany’s first hero. Many experts think that Siegfried, a hero in German mythology like Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon, is based on Arminius. The cult around Hermann the German peaked in 1875, when a gigantic monument of him was completed near the town of Detmold. This copper hero holds aloft a sword seven meters long and faces France, Germany’s old foe, beaten four years earlier in a war that had finally ushered in German unification.

Read more: here

The March on Rome

On the afternoon of October 28th. 1922, the Fascist ruling committee the Quadrumvirate, sent a ultimatum to the Liberal Premier, Luigi Facta to leave his post and declare Mussolini the National Leader. But the Premier declared a state of siege instead.

This was the crucial moment. There seems little doubt that the army, had they the desire, could have routed the Fascists in a showdown. Fascist squads had taken over all the key postions throughout the country and now the capital lay before them. The King refused to sign a decree that would have stopped the Fascists as he had been reassured in September by Mussolini that his throne was not in jeopardy by the Fascists. King Victor Emmanuel's failure to act served as an open invitation to Fascism.

On October 29th. , according to Mussolini's own account, the Kings aide-de-camp phoned him in Milan asking him to come to Rome to form a government. Mussolini insisted on a telegram . When the wire came, he boarded a train for Rome.

In the morning when he arrived, he was greeted by bands of rain soaked Fascists, who had camped out on the outskirts of the capital. From the train he was driven to meet with the King at the Palazzo Quirinale. The Fascist Revolution was over. Mussolini and his cabinet were sworn in the following day.

Meanwhile, the Fascist forces had entered the city from other parts of the nation but Mussolini had ordered them back to their homes and jobs. During the afternoon he put on his black shirt and led them in a triumphant parade in honor of the Unknown Soldier. The parade ended at the depot where on Benito's personal orders trains had been assembled to take the Fascist Legions out of Rome. This was the beginning of the age of Fascism.

Hitler on the Greeks and Romans

"One of his favourite themes was that Western civilization had reached its finest flowering in the Mediterranean basin, in the civilizations of Egypt, Greece and Rome. His admiration of the Greeks, in particular, knew no bounds and in many respects his views bore an uncanny resemblance to those of the great Johann Joachim Winckelmann. There is no way of knowing whether Hitler, a notorious pickpocket in the market of ideas, actually took these notion from the pioneer art historian. But Winckelmann's dictum that 'the only way for us to become great. . . lies in the imitation of the Greeks' is one that Hitler repeated virtually word for word on various occasions. What he say in their culture was a peerless aesthetic ideal. 'What makes the Greek concept of beauty a model iw the wonderful combination of the most magnificent physical beauty with a brilliant mind and the noblest soul'. As a result the Greeks had achieved perfection in every field. He considered the Parthenon to be supreme and the architectural style he himself later endorsed was initially a pastiche of neo-Dorian. Greek sculpture had never been surpassed in his view and one of his most prized possessions was the best surviving copy of Myron's Discobolus, Discus Thrower. He had acquired it in 1938 and on placing it on exhibition praised it as an aesthetic model for all time. 'May you all then realize how glorious man already was back then in his physical beauty,' he told his audience. 'We can speak of progress only if we have attained like perfection or if we manage to surpass it.' He also admired the Greeks for 'the excellence of their world thought.' 'Our technology alone is all they lacked,' he maintained. Despite his own nonbelief, he even admired Greek religion and his entourage must have found it hard to trust their ears when they heard him say, 'We would not be in any danger today to pray to Zeus.' The strength and serenity of pagan icongraphy he contrasted to Christian imagery of suffering and pain - 'You need only look at the head of Zeus or Athena and compare it to that of a medieval crucifixion scene or of some saint.' The distinction was visible in architecture as well. 'What a difference,' he said, 'between a dark cathedral and a bright, open temple.' All in all, Greek civilization represented 'a beauty that exceeds anything that is evident today'.

It was an enthusiasm he never lost. In 1941, after the Wehrmacht had devastated Yugoslavia in its march through the Balkans and crossed the Greek border, Hitler commented to Goebbels how much he admired the bravery of the Greek army. 'Perhaps there is still some of the old Hellenic in them.' The Fuhrer, Goebbels further recorded, 'forbids any bombing of Athens. . . Rome and Athens are Meccas for him. He deeply regrets having to fight the Greeks. Had the British not intervened, he would never have hastened to help the Italians.' A few weeks later, he returned to find Hitler 'sad that he considered it at all necessary to fight in Greece. The Greeks certainly did not deserve it. He intends to treat them as humanely as he possibly can. We watch a newsreel of our entry into Athens. The Fuhrer can take absolutely no pleasure in it, so deeply saddened is he by Greece's fate.'

His esteem for the Romans was of a different order. He admired their 'grandeur,' their 'world empire,' their 'imperial might'. The age of Augustus marked the zenith of Western civilization. 'Ancient Rome was a colossally serious state. Great ideas inspired the Romans'. Above all, it was their architecture and its enduring influence on Italy that he venerated. Years after his state visit to Italy he was still in raptures: 'Rome moved me. And in Naples, the courtyard of the royal palace, how splendid are its proportions, one element balanced by another.' In Rome he was left in awe by the magnitude of the great ruins, in particular the Colosseum and the Baths of Caracalla. But the Pantheon and Hadrian's tomb impressed him still more. As time passed it was less to the Greeks and more to the Romans, with their domes, vaults, arches and arcades, that he turned to for architectural inspiration.

Hitler deplored the fall of the Roman Empire and, having often pondered the reasons for it, eventually came to the conclusion that 'Rome was broken by Christianity not by the Teutons and Huns'. He even appeared to justify the crucifixion of Jesus, commenting on the Oberammergau passion play, which he atteneded in 1930 and 1934, 'Rarely has the Jewish threat to the ancient Roman world been so graphically illustrated as in the person of Pontius Pilate in this play; he emerges as a Roman so racially and intellectually superior that he stands out like a rock amid the Jewish dung and rabble.' Had it not been for the Christians, he said on another occasion, Rome would have retained control of all of Europe and its legions would have demolished the Hunic tribes. European history would have taken an entirely different course. 'It would be better,' he said, 'to speak of Constantine the Traitor' and 'Julian the Steadfast' instead of calling the one 'the Great' and the other 'the Apostate.'"

Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, pp.21-22

Note: this blog doesn't necessarily agree with everything written in this article.

Marble by Nikolai Endegor

This series has been inspired by beautiful marble statues from Paris museums. I think, association and contrast of the cold stone and the living body can give a new sense of beauty and become something bigger than just the sum of two single components. Each work of the series is assembled from two photographs: one being shot in the museum and the other - in the studio.

Source: Here

[gallery ids="4929,4931,4933,4935,4937,4939,4941,4943,4945,4947,4949,4951" type="slideshow"]

Who is White?

Those of you who have over the years or decades either observed or participated in the resistance to the murder of the White race know that provocateurs have attacked the racial purity of professed leaders to impugn their motives. In my opinion part of the reason this has successfully worked for the enemy is a mind set grown from an alien religion. A basic tenet of Judeo-Christianity and part of its fatal allure is that it allows inferior men to claim superior status without corresponding effort. A Judeo-Christian with an IQ of 90 and a dismal life history can get baptized, repeat a few ritualistic words and presto, suddenly proclaim divine status superior to that of a man a million times his superior in intellect and character. The "blue-eyed blond" syndrome is typical of this mentality. And I say this advisedly since I appear Nordic, tall, slender, blue-eyed blond. Yet I can only guess at the purity of my ancestry. My father of record sold my mother to his buddies and to strangers for booze money, so the Gods alone know all. What I do know is this. I look White. I fight for White. I recognize the achievements of the White race. I want to preserve our kind. I am horrified that the beauty of the White Aryan woman may soon perish from the earth forever. I suffer for each White child tormented in America's inter-racial nightmare. I see beauty in a Celtic princess with brown or red hair and green eyes. I see beauty in the statuesque Nordic Goddess with blue eyes and golden hair. I see beauty in the freckle-faced Irish lass. I see heroism in Robert Jay Mathews and Richard Scutari with their dark hair and eyes of green or brown as well as in Frank DeSilva, a fair skinned Bruders with a French Portuguese name. Theirs is far greater nobility than 99% of those "Nordic Ideals," I might add.

For those who boast of their "purity," you have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents and so on. Go back 500 years or so and you have a million ancestors. A few more generations and everyone who ever trod the lands of Europe is your ancestor, including Huns, Mongols and Moors. There are no 100% pure Aryans as per 10,000 years ago. But we still do exist as a distinct and unique biological entity. The cultures and civilizations we create are beyond comparison. The beauty of our women, blondes, brunettes, redheads, green-eyed, blue-eyed, brown-eyed, is the desire of all men and the envy of all women. So, we do not want to be derailed by gossip or speculation on who may be 1/16th Indian or have some Italian, Spanish or Portuguese blood. We are not going to debate over whether the collective remaining White gene pool is 95% or 97% pure Aryan.

Surely it would be a tragedy if the various divisions of our race lose their distinctive traits and beauty. And after we have secured the existence of our people and a future for ALL our children, hopefully we can take steps to preserve this diversity. But for now, we are going to accept the facts and circumstances as they exist. We are going to work together for the holy cause and we will not tolerate provocateurs, divisions or dissension. If someone looks White, acts White, fights White, then until their actions prove otherwise, they are our Folk. On the other hand, regardless of pedigree or appearance, those who oppose, criticize, hinder or fail to support our cause are no friends of ours.

David Lane

BLASPHAMAGOATACHRIST - Tyrannic Empire (demo)

https://www.facebook.com/100010458310878/videos/508222269536379/

Black Winds - Vocals

Sabbaoth - Bass

Virrugus Apocalli - Guitar

T. Antichrist - Drums

2017 - full album avalibe from NWN prod. next year all formats

The Hellenic Thunder: Der Stürmer mugs

The politics of "niceness"

Nobility of Blood

"There is only nobility of birth, only nobility of blood. (I am not speaking here of that little word "von" or of the Almanach de Gotha: parenthesis for asses). When one speaks of "aristocrats of the spirit", reasons are usually not lacking for concealing something; as is well known, it is a favorite term among ambitious Jews. For spirit alone does not make noble; rather, there must be something to enable to spirit. - What then is required? Blood."

Friedrich Nietzsche

The wisdom of experience

"The wisdom, the understanding, that arises from one’s own personal experience, from formative experiences that involve some hardship, some grief, some personal suffering, is often or could be more valuable to us (more alive, more meaningful) than any doctrine, than any religious faith, than any words one might hear from someone else or read in some book."

— David Myatt, The Numinous Way of Pathei-Mathos (2012)

Martin Eric Ain: 1967 - 2017

Only Death is Real!

I've entreated death, he answered me 
You entreated death, the answer will come... 

WOTANSBLUT RECORDS Upcoming releases

Death and Mercy

“Up above, we will defend the life of the trees and the mountains from further devastation. Down below [in the towns], we will spread death and mercy.”

- Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

Yukio Mishima by Kerry Bolton

Yukio Mishima, 1925–1970, was born Kimitake Hiraoka into an upper middle class family. Author of a hundred books, playwright, and actor, he has been described as the “Leonardo da Vinci of contemporary Japan,”[1] and is one of the few Japanese writers to have become widely known and translated in the West.

The Dark Side of the Sun



Since World War II, the West has forgotten what Jung would have termed the “Shadow” soul of Japan, the collective impulses that have been repressed by “Occupation Law” and the imposition of democracy. The Japanese are seen stereotypically as being overly polite and smiling business executives and camera snapping tourists. The emphasis has been on the soft counterpart of the Japanese psyche, on the “chrysanthemum” (the arts), and the repression of the “sword” (the martial tradition).[2]

The American cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote of the duality of the Japanese character using this symbolism in her study, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,[3] to which Mishima referred approvingly.[4] Benedict had been commissioned by the US government in 1944 to write a study of Japanese culture. Portraying the Japanese as savages was fine for the purpose of war propaganda, but a more nuanced understanding was thought necessary for post-war dealings.

What Benedict described was the ethos of probably every Traditional society, regardless of time, space, and ethnicity. This “perennial tradition” was described by Julis Evola, who showed that traditional cultures have analogous outlooks. They perceive the earthly as a reflection of the cosmos, the mortal as a reflection of the divine. They regard the King or Emperor as a link between the earth and the cosmos, the human and the divine. This was the Traditionalist ethos Yeats desired to revive in Western Civilization, for example, in a manner similar to Mishima’s demand for the revival of the Samurai ethic in Japan. In such traditional societies, the King is also a priest who serves as the direct link to the Divine,[5] the warrior is honored rather than the merchant, and society is strictly hierarchical and regarded as an earthly reflection of divine order. Fulfilling one’s divinely-ordained duty as a king, soldier, priest, peasant, or merchant is the purpose of each individual’s life, and is sanctioned by law and religion.

Hence, in traditional societies the role of the merchant is subordinate, and the rule of money—plutocracy—as in the West today, is regarded as an inversion of the traditional ethos, a symptom of cultural decay. In traditional Japan, as Inazo Nitobe explains:

Of all the great occupations in life, none was further removed from the profession of arms than commerce. The merchant was placed lowest in the category of vocations—the knight, the tiller of the soil, the mechanic, the merchant. The samurai derived his income from the land and could even indulge, if he had a mind to, in amateur farming; but the counter and abacus were abhorred.[6]

Nitobe states that when Japan opened up to foreign commerce, feudalism was abolished, the Samurai’s fiefs were taken, and he was compensated with bonds, with the right to invest in commerce. Hence the Samurai was degraded to the status of a merchant in order to survive.[7]

According to Benedict, during the war, the Japanese regarded themselves as the only nation left in the world that had maintained the divine order. They believed it their duty to re-impose this order upon the rest of the world.

Japan’s Bushido, the “Way of the Knight,” is therefore analogous to that of other traditionalist societies, such as the chivalry of Medieval Europe and the warrior code explained by Krishna to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. To the Japanese warrior aristocracy the sword (katana) was a sacred object, forged with ceremony, its use subject to precise rules. [8]

Mishima insisted that Japan return to a balance of the arts and the martial spirit. Using the terminology of Jung, Mishima was calling Japan to “individuation” by allowing the repressed “Shadow” archetype, “The Sword,” to reassert itself. Mishima was himself a synthesis of scholar and warrior who rejected pure intellectualism and theory in favor of action.

Nitobe, in explaining Bushido, wrote that intellectualism was looked down upon by the Samurai. Learning was valued not as an intellectual exercise but as a matter of character formation. Intellect was considered subordinate to ethos. Man and the universe were both spiritual and ethical. The cosmos had a moral imperative.[9] This was discussed by Mishima in his commentary of Hagakure.

The American occupation was such an inversion of the Japanese spirit that Ian Buruma, writing in the “Foreword” to the 2005 edition of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, states:

Young Japanese today might have a hard time recognizing some aspects of the “national character” described in Benedict’s book. Loyalty to the Emperor, duty to one’s parents, terror of not repaying one’s moral debts, these have faded in an age of technology-driven self-absorption.[10]

The Way of the Samurai

Mishima’s aesthetic ideal was the beauty of a violent death in one’s prime, an ideal common in classical Japanese literature. As a sickly youngster, Mishima’s ideal of the heroic death had already taken hold: “A sensuous craving for such things as the destiny of soldiers, the tragic nature of their calling . . . the ways they would die.”[11]

He was determined to overcome his physical weaknesses. There is much of the Nietzschean “Higher Man” about him, of overcoming personal and social restraints to express his own heroic individuality.[12] His motto was: “Be Strong.”[13]

World War II had a formative influence on Mishima. Along with his fellow students, he felt that conscription and certain death waited.[14] He became chairman of the college literary club, and his patriotic poems were published in the student magazine.[15] He also co-founded his own journal and began to read the Japanese classics, becoming associated with the nationalistic literary group Bungei Bu, that believed war to be holy.

However, Mishima barely passed the medical examination for military training. He was drafted into an aircraft factory where kamikaze planes were manufactured.[16]

In 1944, he had his first book, Hanazakan no Mori (The Forest in Full Bloom) published,[17] a considerable feat in the final year of the war, which brought him instant recognition.

While Mishima’s role in the war effort was obviously not as he would have wished, he spent the rest of his life in the post-war world attempting to fulfill his ideals of Tradition and the Samurai ethic, seeking to return Japan to what he regarded as its true character amidst the democratic era in which the ideal of “peace” is an unquestioned absolute (even though it has to be continually enforced with much military spending and localized wars).

The Will to Health

In 1952, Mishima, then an established literary figure, traveled to the USA. Sitting in the sun aboard ship, something he had been unable to do in his youth because of his weak lungs, Mishima resolved to match the development of his physique with that of his intellect.

His interest in the Hellenic classics took him to Greece. He wrote that, “In Greece there had been however an equilibrium between the physical body and intelligence, soma and sophia . . .” He discovered a “Will towards Health,” an adaptation of Nietzsche’s “Will to Power,” and he was to become almost as noted as a body builder as he was a writer. [18]

Literary Assault

[caption id="attachment_4857" align="alignnone" width="564"] Yūkoku (Patriotism) (1966)[/caption]

In 1966, Mishima wrote: “The goal of my life was to acquire all the various attributes of the warrior.”[19] His ethos was that of the Samurai Bunburyodo-ryodo: the way of literature (Bun) and the Sword (Bu), which he sought to cultivate in equal measure, a blend of “art and action.”[20] “But my heart’s yearning towards Death and Night and Blood would not be denied.” His ill-health as a youth had robbed him of what he clearly viewed as his true destiny: to have died during the War in the service of the Emperor, like so many other young Japanese. He expressed the Samurai ethos: “To keep death in mind from day to day, to focus each moment upon, inevitable death . . . the beautiful death that had earlier eluded me[21] had also become possible. I was beginning to dream of my capabilities as a fighting man.”[22]

In 1966, Mishima applied for permission to train at army camps, and the following year wrote Runaway Horses, the plot of which involves Isao, a radical Rightist student and martial arts practitioner, who commits hara-kiri after fatally stabbing a businessman Isao had been inspired by the book Shinpuren Shiwa (“The History of Shinpuren”) which recounts the Shinpuren Incident of 1877, the last stand of the Samurai when, armed only with spears and swords, they attacked an army barracks in defiance of Government decrees prohibiting the carrying of swords in public and ordering the cutting off of the Samurai topknots. All but one of the Samurai survivors committed hara-kiri. Again Mishima was using literature to plot out how he envisaged his own life unfolding and ending, against the backdrop of tradition and history.

In 1960 Mishima wrote the short story Patriotism, in honor of the 1936 Ni ni Roku rebellion of army officers of the Kodo-ha faction who wished to strike at the Soviet Union in opposition to the rival Tosei-ha, who aimed to strike at Britain and other colonial powers.

The 1936 rebellion impressed itself on Mishima, as had the suicidal but symbolic defiance of the last Samurai in the Shinpuren Incident of 1877. In Patriotism the hero, a young officer, commits Hara-kiri, of which Mishima states: “It would be difficult to imagine a more heroic sight than that of the lieutenant at this moment.”[23]

Mishima again wrote of the incident in his play Toka no Kiku[24] Here he criticizes the Emperor for betraying the Kodo-ha officers and for renouncing his divinity after the war, which Mishima viewed as a betrayal of the war dead. Mishima combined these three works on the rebellion into a single volume called the Ni ni Roku trilogy.

Mishima comments on the Trilogy and the rebellion:

Surely some God died when the Ni ni Roku Incident failed. I was only eleven at the time and felt little of it. But when the war ended, when I was twenty, a most sensitive age, I felt something of the terrible cruelty of the death of that God . . . the positive picture was my boyhood impression of the heroism of the rebel officers. Their purity, bravery, youth and death qualified them as mythical heroes; and their failures and deaths made them true heroes in this world . . . .[25]

It is the frequent expression of Mishima’s feeling that “failure and death,” such as that which ended both the 1877 and 1936 rebellions, made the traditionalist rebels “true heroes in this world,” that indicates a metaphysic at work underlying his outlook and especially his actions, in regarding not the result of an action as of significance but the purity of the action per se. This is beyond politics, which aims to achieve results, or “the art of the possible,” and enters what the Hindu would call dharma.

In early 1966, Mishima systemized his thoughts in an 80-page essay entitled Eirei no Koe,[26] again based on the Ni ni Roku rebellion. In this work he asks, “why did the Emperor have to become a human being?”[27] While the work remained obscure, it provided the basis for the founding of his paramilitary Shield Society several years later.

In an interview with a Japanese magazine that year, Mishima upheld the imperial system as the only type suitable for Japan. All the moral confusion of the post-war era, he states, stems from the Emperor’s renunciation of his divine status. The move away from feudalism to capitalism and the consequent industrialization disrupts the relationships between individuals. Real love between a couple requires a third term, the apex of a triangle embodied in the divinity of the Emperor.[28]

The Tatenokai

[caption id="attachment_4846" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Mishima with members of the Tatenokai[/caption]

The following year Mishima created his own militia, the Tatenokai (Shield Society) writing shortly before of reviving the “soul of the Samurai within myself.” Permission was granted by the army for Mishima to use their training camps for the student followers he recruited from several right-wing university societies.

At the office of a right-wing student journal, a dozen youths gathered. Mishima wrote on a piece of paper: “We hereby swear to be the foundation of Kokoku Nippon.”[29] He cut a finger, and everyone else followed, letting the blood fill a cup. Each signed the paper with their blood and drank from the cup. The Tatenokai was born.[30]

The principles of the society were:

(1) Communism is incompatible with Japanese tradition, culture, and history and runs counter to the Emperor system;

(2) The Emperor is the sole symbol of our historical and cultural community and racial identity; and

(3) The use of violence is justifiable in view of the threat posed by communism.[31]

The militia was designed to have no more than 100 members, and to be a “stand-by” army concentrating only on training, without any political agitation. The metaphysical basis of Mishima’s thinking for the militia was expressed by his description of the Tatenokai as “the world’s least armed, most spiritual army.”[32] They were following the path of tradition, which had sustained the Japanese during World War II against overwhelming material forces, as described by Ruth Benedict.[33] Mishima referred to Benedict’s book when explaining that his reason for creating the Tatenokai was to restore to Japan the balance of the “chrysanthemum and the sword” which had been lost after the war.[34]

The emblem that Mishima designed for the society comprised two ancient Japanese helmets in red against a white silk background.

By this time, Mishima felt that his calling as a novelist was completed. It must have seemed the right time to die. He had been awarded the Shinchosha Literary Prize in 1954 for The Sound of Waves and the Yomiuri Literary Prize in 1957 for The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. His novels Spring Snow and Runaway Horses had sold well, but he was aggravating the literati, amongst whom his sole defender at this time was Yasunari Kawabata, who had received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, Mishima missing out because the Nobel Prize committee assumed he could wait awhile longer in favor of his mentor. Kawabata considered Mishima’s literary talent to be exceptional.

Mishima characterized the intelligentsia as:

The strongest enemy within the nation. It is astonishing how little the character of modern intellectuals in Japan has changed, i.e., their cowardice, sneering, “objectivity,” rootlessness, dishonesty, flunkeyism, mock gestures of resistance, self-importance, inactivity, talkativeness, and readiness to eat their words.

The Hagakure



Mishima’s destiny was shaped by the Samurai code expounded in a book that he had kept with him since the war. This was the Hagakure, the best-known line of which is: “I have discovered that the way of the Samurai is death.”

The Hagakure was the work of the seventeenth-century Samurai Jocho Yamamoto, who dictated his teachings to his student Tashiro. The Hagakure became the moral code taught to the Samurai, but did not become available to the general public until the latter half of the nineteenth century. During World War II it was widely read, and its slogan on the way of death was used to inspire the Kamikaze pilots. Following the Occupation it went underground, and many copies were destroyed lest they fall into American hands.[35]

Mishima wrote his own commentary on the Hagakure in 1967.[36] He stated in his introduction that it was the one book he referred to continually in the 20 years since the war and that during the war he had always kept it close to him.[37]

Mishima relates that immediately following the war, he felt isolated from the rest of literary society, which had accepted ideas that were alien to him. He asked himself what his guiding principle would be now that Japan was defeated. The Hagakure was the answer, providing him with “constant spiritual guidance” and “the basis of my morality.” Like all other Japanese books of the war period, the Hagakure had become loathsome in the democratic era, to be purged from memory, but in the darkness of the times it now radiated its “true light.”[38]

It is now that what I had recognized during the war in Hagakure began to manifest its true meaning. Here was a book that preached freedom, that taught passion. Those who have read carefully only the most famous line from Hagakure still retain an image of it as a book of odious fanaticism. In that one line, “I found that the Way of the Samurai is death,” may be seen the paradox that symbolizes the book as a whole. It was this sentence, however, that gave me the strength to live.[39]

The Feminization of Society

One of the primary themes of interest for the present-day Western reader of Mishima’s commentary on Hagakure is Mishima’s use of Jocho’s observations on his own epoch to analyze the modern era. Both seventeenth century Japan and twentieth century Japan manifest analogous symptoms of decadence, the latter due to the imposition of alien values that are products of the West’s cycle of decay, while those of Jocho’s day indicate that Japanese civilization in his time was in a phase of decay. Therefore, those interested in cultural morphology, Spengler’s in particular, will see analogues to the present decline of Western civilization in Jocho’s analysis of his time and Mishima’s analysis of post-war Japan.

The first symptom considered by Mishima is the obsession of youth with fashion. Jocho observed that even among the Samurai, the young talked only of money, clothes, and sex, an obsession that Mishima observed in his time as well.[40]

Mishima also pointed out that the post-war feminization of the Japanese male was noted by Jocho during the peaceful years of the Tokugawa era. Eighteenth-century prints of couples hardly distinguish between male and female, with similar hairstyles, clothes, and facial expressions, which make it impossible to tell who is the male and who the female. Jocho records in Hagakure that during his time, the pulse rates of men and women, which usually differ, had become the same, and this was noted when treating medical ailments. He called this “the female pulse.”[41] Jocho observed: “The world is indeed entering a degenerate stage; men are losing their virility and are becoming just like women . . .”

Celebrities Replace Heroes

Jocho condemns the idolization of certain individuals achieving what we’d today call celebrity status. Mishima comments:

Today, baseball players and television stars are lionized. Those who specialize in skills that will fascinate an audience tend to abandon their existence as total human personalities and be reduced to a kind of skilled puppet. This tendency reflects the ideals of our time. On this point there is no difference between performers and technicians.

The present is the age of technocracy (under the leadership of technicians); differently expressed, it is the age of performing artists. . . . They forget the ideals for a total human being; to degenerate into a single cog, a single function becomes their greatest ambition . . .[42]

The spectacle of Hollywood and everything that the words “star” and “celebrity” suggest epitomize the cultural banality of the world today.

The Boredom of Pacifism

Under pacifism and democracy, the individual is literally dying of boredom, rather than living and dying heroically.

Ours is an age in which everything is based on the premise that it is best to live as long as possible. The average life span has become the longest in history, and a monotonous plan for humanity unrolls before us.[43]

Once a young man finds his place in society, his struggle is over, and there is nothing left for youth apart from retirement, “and the peaceful, boring life of impotent old age.” The comfort of the welfare state ensures against the need to struggle, and one is simply ordered to “rest.” Mishima comments on the extraordinary number of elderly who commit suicide.[44] Now we might add the even more extraordinary number of youth who commit suicide.

Mishima equates socialism and the welfare state, and finds that at the end of the first, there is “the fatigue of boredom” while at the end of the second there is suppression of freedom. People desire something to die for, rather than the endless peace that is upheld as a Utopia. Struggle is the essence of life. To the Samurai, death is the focus of his life, even in times of peace. “The premise of the democratic age is that it is best to live as long as possible.”[45]

The Repression of Death

The modern world seeks to avoid the thought of death. Yet the repression of such a vital element of life, like all such repressions, will lead to an ever-increasing explosive tension. Mishima states:

We are ignoring the fact that bringing death to the level of consciousness is an important element of mental health . . . Hagakure insists that to ponder death daily is to concentrate daily on life. When we do our work thinking that we may die today, we cannot help feeling that our job suddenly becomes radiant with life and meaning.[46]

Extremism

Mishima states that Hagakure is a “philosophy of extremism.” Hence, it is inherently out of character in a democratic society. Jocho stated that while the Golden Mean is greatly valued, for the Samurai one’s daily life must be of a heroic, vigorous nature, to excel and to surpass. Mishima comments that “going to excess is an important spiritual springboard.”[47]

Intellectualism

Mishima held intellectuals in the same contempt as Westerners who were also in revolt against the modern world, such as D. H. Lawrence, who believed that the life force or élan vital is repressed by rationalism and intellectualism and replaced by the counting house mentality of the merchant, not just in business but in all aspects of life. Jocho stated that:

The calculating man is a coward. I say this because calculations have to do with profit and loss, and such a person is therefore preoccupied with profit and loss. To die is a loss, to live is a gain, and so one decides not to die. Therefore one is a coward. Similarly a man of education camouflages with his intellect and eloquence the cowardice or greed that is his true nature. Many people do not realize this.[48]

Mishima comments that in Jocho’s time there was probably nothing corresponding to the modem intelligentsia. However, there were scholars, and even the Samurai themselves had begun to form themselves into a similar class “in an age of extended peace.” Mishima identifies this intellectualism with “humanism,” as did Spengler. This intellectualism means, contrary to the Samurai ethic, that “one does not offer oneself up bravely in the face of danger.”[49]

No Words of Weakness

The Samurai in times of peace still talks with a martial spirit. Jocho taught that, “the first thing a Samurai says on any occasion is extremely important. He displays with this one remark all the valor of the Samurai.”[50] Jocho stated: “Even in casual conversation, a Samurai must never complain. He must constantly be on his guard lest he should let slip a word of weakness.” “One must not lose heart in misfortune.”

The Flow of Time

Jocho reference to “the flow of time” indicates that he recognized the cyclic nature of the life of a cultural organism 400 years before as Spengler explained it to the West.[51] Mishima points out that while Jocho laments “the decadence of his era and the degeneration of the young Samurai,” he observes “the flow of time,” realistically stating that it is no use resisting that flow.[52] As Jocho stated: “The climate of an age is unalterable. That conditions are worsening steadily is proof that we have entered the last stage of the Law.”[53]

Jocho employs the analogy of seasons just as Spengler did in describing the cycles of a civilization: “However, the season cannot always be spring or summer, nor can we have daylight forever. What is important is to make each era as good as it can be according to its nature.”[54] Jocho does not recommend either nostalgia for the return of the past, or the “superficial” attitude of those who only value what is modern, or “progressive” as we call it today.

A Samurai’s Destiny



Mishima’s literary output was like a blueprint for his own personal military plan of attack upon the modern era, in keeping with the Way of the Samurai. Mishima would not have expected a final act of defiance against the modern world to end in “victory” in any conventional sense. Having been imbued with the traditional ethos of Japan during the war, it was the spiritual dimension that mattered. Against vastly superior material forces, this spiritual dimension had sustained Japan’s “mission” to bring hierarchy to the East and to the Pacific, as the only nation that had maintained this traditionalist outlook. Benedict records that this belief was retained in the immediate post-war era and that this was still motivated by a spiritual outlook:

Japan likewise put her hopes of victory on a different basis from that prevalent in the United States. She would win, she cried, a victory of spirit over matter. America was big, her armaments were superior, but what did that matter? All this, they said, had been foreseen and discounted. . . .

Even when she was winning, her civilian statesmen, her High Command, and her soldiers, repeated that this was no contest between armaments; it was a pitting of our faith in things against their faith in spirit.[55]

November 25, 1970 was chosen as the day that Mishima would fulfill his destiny as a Samurai, pitting his faith in spirit against the modern era. Four others from the Tatenokai joined him. All donned headbands bearing a Hagakure slogan. The aim was to take General Mishita hostage to enable Mishima to address the soldiers stationed at the Ichigaya army base in Tokyo. Mishima and his lieutenant, Morita, would then commit Hara-kiri. Only daggers and swords would be used in the assault, in accordance with Samurai tradition.[56]

The General was bound and gagged. Close fighting ensued as officers several times entered the general’s office. Mishima and his small band each time forced the officers to retreat. Finally, they were herded out with broad strokes of Mishima’s sword against their buttocks. A thousand soldiers assembled on the parade ground. Two of Mishima’s men dropped leaflets from the balcony above, calling for a rebellion to “restore Nippon.”

Precisely at mid-day, Mishima appeared on the balcony to address the crowd. Shouting above the noise of helicopters he declared: “Japanese people today think of money, just money: Where is our national spirit today? The Jieitai[57] must be the soul of Japan.”

The soldiers jeered. Mishima continued: “The nation has no spiritual foundation. That is why you don’t agree with me. You will just be American mercenaries. There you are in your tiny world. You do nothing for Japan.” His last words were: “I salute the Emperor. Long live the emperor!”

Morita joined him on the balcony in salute. Both returned to Mishita’s office. Mishima knelt, shouting a final salute, and plunged a dagger into his stomach, forcing it clockwise. Morita bungled the decapitation leaving it for another to finish. Morita was then handed Mishima’s dagger but called upon the swordsman who had finished off Mishima to do the job, and Morita’s head was knocked off in one swoop. The remaining followers stood the heads of Mishima and Morita together and prayed over them.

Ten thousand mourners attended Mishima’s funeral, the largest of its kind ever held in Japan.[58] “I want to make a poem of my life,” Mishima had written at 24 years of age. He had fulfilled his destiny according to the Samurai way: “To choose the place where one dies is also the greatest joy in life.” Mishima wrote in his commentary on Hagakure: “The positive form of suicide called hara-kiri is not a sign of defeat, as it is in the West, but the ultimate expression of free will, in order to protect one’s honor.”[59]

After his death, his commentary on the Hagakure became an immediate best seller.[60]

Notes

1. Henry Scott Stokes, The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 15.


2. Stokes, p. 18.


3. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 1946,(New York: Mariner Books, 2005).


4. Stokes, p. 18.


5. Evola states of this: “Every traditional civilization is characterized by the presence of beings who, by virtue of their innate or acquired superiority over the human condition, embody within the temporal order the living and efficacious presence of a power that comes from above.” Hence, the Roman Pontifex for example, means “a builder of bridges” between the natural and the supernatural. Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World (Vermont: Inner Traditions International, 1995), p. 7.


6. Inazo Nitobe, Bushido: The Code of the Samurai, 1899 (Sweetwater Press, USA, 2006), p. 104.


7. Nitobe, p. 105.


8. Evola, p. 84.


9. Nitobe, p. 59.


10. Ian Buruma, “Foreword,” The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, p. xii.


11. Mishima, Confessions of a Mask (London: Peter Owen, 1960), p. 14.


12. Mishima was “well versed in Nietzsche” (Stokes, p. 152).


13. Stokes, p. 72.


14. Stokes, p. 80.


15. Stokes, p. 81.


16. Stokes, p. 89.


17. Stokes, p. 89.


18. Stokes, p. 119.


19. Stokes, p. 152.


20. Mishima, Sun and Steel (London: Kodansha International, 1970), p. 49.


21. During World War II.


22. Mishima, Sun and Steel, p. 59.


23. Mishima, “Patriotism,” Death in Midsummer and Other Stories (New Directions, 1966), p. 115.


24. Stokes comments that Mishima “was a brilliant playwright, perhaps the best playwright of the post-war era in Japan. His dialogue was superb and the structure of his plays excellent.” (p. 170).


25. Mishima, cited by Stokes, p. 200.


26. Mishima, The Voices of the Heroic Dead, 1966.


27. Stokes, p. 200.


28. Sunday Mainichi, March 8, 1966.


29. “Imperial Japan.”


30. Stokes, p. 203.


31. Stokes, p. 205.


32. Queen Magazine, England, January 1970.


33. Benedict, p. 21. See below.


34. Comments to Stokes, p. 227.


35. Kathryn Sparling, “Translator’s Note,” Yukio Mishima on Hagakure: The Samurai Ethic and Modern Japan, 1967 (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. viii.


36. Yukio Mishima on Hagakure: The Samurai Ethic and Modern Japan, 1967 (New York: Basic Books, 1977).


37. Mishima on Hagakure, p. 4.


38. Mishima on Hagakure, pp. 5–6.


39. Mishima on Hagakure, p. 6.


40. Mishima on Hagakure, p. 17. Jocho, Hagakure, Book One.


41. Mishima on Hagakure, pp. 18–19. Jocho, Hagakure, Book One.


42. Mishima on Hagakure, pp. 20–21.


43. Mishima on Hagakure, p. 24.


44. Mishima on Hagakure, pp. 24–25.


45. Mishima on Hagakure, p. 27.


46. Mishima on Hagakure, p. 29.


47. Mishima on Hagakure, p. 61.


48. Mishima on Hagakure, p. 67. Jocho (Book One).


49. Mishima on Hagakure, p. 69.


50. Mishima on Hagakure, p. 74. Jocho (Book One).


51. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of The West (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1971).


52. Mishima on Hagakure, p. 82.


53. This refers to the entering of three progressively degenerate stages according to the Buddhist cycles of history. Mishima on Hagakure, p. 95, note 11.


54. Mishima on Hagakure, p. 83.


55. Benedict, p. 21.


56. Stokes, pp. 29–51.


57. Army.


58. Stokes, p. 241.


59. Mishima on Hagakure, p. 46.


60. Kathryn Sparling, “Translator’s Note,” Yukio Mishima on Hagakure, p. vii.

 

Unworthy of Them

Interview with an old Dutch Waffen SS veteran (English subtitles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-iIsPWiOGY

Gabriele D’Annunzio on high finance and banking

“In all of Europe, in the whole world, political power is at the service of high finance and banking, it submits to the abject impositions of thieves and fraudsters working together in legal consortium. Not even in the worst times of barbarism and slave trade were human beings trafficked with such cold cruelty. Nations are put on the market. Public life exists only as a filthy commerce practiced within the confines of sterile institutions and hollow laws.”

— Gabriele D’Annunzio in an address to his Arditi, Fiume d’Italia, 1920

Outside of their society

"All my life I’ve been searching, wondering, talking without meaning or context. It has been nothing. Yes, I say this without bitterness or self-reproach, as I know that almost all of people’s lives are made this way. My heart is empty. And emptiness is a mirror turned to my own face. I see myself and am seized with disgust and fear. Through my indifference for people, I’ve been placed outside of their society. Now I live in a ghost world, enclosed in my dreams and imaginings."

The Seventh Seal, dir. by Ingmar Bergman, 1957

So True!

Von Thronstahl ~ Brechen Muss Der Schwarze Bann

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT_Pbef2FpA

Russian WWII Vets say “Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS Were the Best Soldiers in the World”

Old incorrigible Natonal Socialists, telling it to curious journalists somewhere in Bolivia, or skinheads said these words in а Berlin suburb? Wrong! Three outstanding Russian writers, unanimously admiring the worst enemies of Communism! (Very serious intellectual crime all over ‘the civilized world’ today) Speaks Daniil Granin (born in 1919), who spent 3 years in the blockading (by German and Finnish troops) Leningrad: “The Germans fought better, much better than our soldiers. Moreover - we`ve managed to win that war only by human flesh!”

Boris Vasiljev was the Red Army battle officer during WW2:

“The Nazi Germans waged war perfectly. Even when they were encircled, they fought excellently! I know it. I saw it by myself!”

The author of several military and patriotic novels, Vasiljev tells:

“We`ve managed to win the war by chance, absolutely. Evald von Kleist simply decided to stop his tanks for several days just near Moscow. Therefore, the Soviets received some free time in order to transfer the fresh troops, which attacked the Germans very successfully”

While General Andrej Andreevitch Vlasov is reputed officially in modern “free capitalist” Russia as a “vicious pro-Nazi collaborator and traitor”, Vasiljev considers absolutely differently:

“Vlasov was magnificent, properly Russian national military Commander! He decided to revenge himself upon Stalin, who committed terrible crimes against all peoples of Russia. Vlasov had high ideal of the Free Russia, as well as the real sense of responsibility towards his soldiers.”

The Red Army generals en masse were the direct opposite as compared with Vlasov, thinks Vasiljev:

“There were killed 1.300.000. Russian soldiers near Rzhev — through Soviet commanders’  faults only, and nobody speaks about the terrible tragedy so far in my country!”

The late Viktor Astafjev was on the Soviet-German front all the war long, 1941-1945:

“The Germans fought much, much better — in all respects! The Communists chose to shed rivers of the Russian blood literally in order to win the War. The Soviets won over Germany only by their extreme brutality and inhumanity!”

The best WW2 Commander? “Field-Marshall Erich von Manstein, of course!”, tells the great Russian national writer:

“He managed to push three Bolshevik armies into the Azov and Black Seas with the help of two German corpses only! He was the great military genius — yes, really!”

And Zhukov?

“Honest Russian patriot? Ha! This bastard covered half-Europe by the millions of the Russian guys` corpses by his extremely sadistic personal kind of war waging! He deserves neither honor, nor respect, never!”

(Story by  Alexander Mezentsev)

In Solitude

Age of Barbarism

"For we live in a mighty age. It is the greatest that the Western Civilization has ever known or will know. It corresponds to the Classical Age from Cannae to Actium, to the age illumined by the names of Hannibal, Scipio, and Gracchus, Marius, Sulla, and Caesar.  The World War was but the first flash and crash from the fateful thundercloud which is passing over this century. As then, at the commencement of the Imperium Romanum, so today, the form of the world is being remoulded from its foundations, regardless of the desires and intentions of “the majority” or of the number of victims demanded by every such decision. But who understand this? Who is facing it? Does one of us consider himself lucky to be there to see it? The age is mighty, but all the more diminutive are the people in it. They can no longer bear tragedy, either on the stage or in real life. They crave happy endings of insipid novels, so miserable and weary are they. But the destiny which pitched them into these decades now takes them by the collar and does with them what has to be done, whether they will or no. The coward’s security of 1900 is at an end. Life in danger, the real life of history, comes once more into its own. Everything has begun to slide, and now only that man counts who can take risks, who has the courage to see and accept things as they are. The age is approaching - nay, is already here - which has no more room for soft hearts and weakly ideals. The primeval barbarism which has lain hidden and bound for centuries under the form-rigour of a ripe Culture, is awake again now that the Culture is finished and the Civilization has set in: that warlike, healthy joy in one’s own strength which scorns the literature-ridden age of Rationalist thought, that unbroken race-instinct, which desires a different life from one spent under the weight of books and bookish ideals. "

~Oswald Spengler THE HOUR OF DECISION1934

The Shadow Kingdom

[caption id="attachment_4777" align="aligncenter" width="400"] Kull of Atlantis[/caption]

The blare of the trumpets grew louder, like a deep golden tide surge, like the soft booming of the evening tides against the silver beaches of Valusia. The throng shouted, women flung roses from the roofs as the rhythmic chiming of silver hosts came clearer and the first of the mighty array swung into view in the broad white street that curved round the golden-spired Tower of Splendor.

First came the trumpeters, slim youths, clad in scarlet, riding with a flourish of long, slender golden trumpets; next the bowmen, tall men from the mountains; and behind these the heavily armed footmen, their broad shields clashing in unison, their long spears swaying in perfect rhythm to their stride. Behind them came the mightiest soldiery in all the world, the Red Slayers, horsemen, splendidly mounted, armed in red from helmet to spur. Proudly they sat their steeds, looking neither to right nor to left, but aware of the shouting for all that. Like bronze statues they were, and there was never a waver in the forest of spears that reared above them.

Behind those proud and terrible ranks came the motley files of the mercenaries, fierce, wild-looking warriors, men of Mu and of Kaa-u and of the hills of the east and the isles of the west. They bore spears and heavy swords, and a compact group that marched somewhat apart were the bowmen of Lemuria. Then came the light foot of the nation, and more trumpeters brought up the rear.

A brave sight, and a sight which aroused a fierce thrill in the soul of Kull, king of Valusia. Not on the Topaz Throne at the front of the regal Tower of Splendor sat Kull, but in the saddle, mounted on a great stallion, a true warrior king. His mighty arm swung up in reply to the salutes as the hosts passed. His fierce eyes passed the gorgeous trumpeters with a casual glance, rested longer on the following soldiery; they blazed with a ferocious light as the Red Slayers halted in front of him with a clang of arms and a rearing of steeds, and tendered him the crown salute. They narrowed slightly as the mercenaries strode by. They saluted no one, the mercenaries. They walked with shoulders flung back, eyeing Kull boldly and straightly, albeit with a certain appreciation; fierce eyes, unblinking; savage eyes, staring from beneath shaggy manes and heavy brows.

And Kull gave back a like stare. He granted much to brave men, and there were no braver in all the world, not even among the wild tribesmen who now disowned him. But Kull was too much the savage to have any great love for these. There were too many feuds. Many were age-old enemies of Kull’s nation, and though the name of Kull was now a word accursed among the mountains and valleys of his people, and though Kull had put them from his mind, yet the old hates, the ancient passions still lingered. For Kull was no Valusian but an Atlantean.

Read more: here

[caption id="attachment_4785" align="alignnone" width="640"] A very nice illustration by Marie and John Severin for "The Shadow Kingdom"[/caption]

A story of Kull, first published in Weird Tales, August 1929.

Hitler, Christianity And The Third Reich by Kerry Bolton

THE PLACE OF CHRISTIANITY under National Socialism has been a matter of contention, as with all else connected with that philosophy. Hitler has been damned as the devil incarnate by his Christian opponents, and heralded as a Jesus-like messiah by his Christian proponents. The 24th point of the NSDAP’s political programme even describes National Socialism as standing for “positive Christianity.” In order to access the real relationship of Christianity to National Socialism it is necessary to go beyond the propaganda of both pro- and anti-National Socialist Christians.

To do this the private pronouncements of the National Socialist leaders must receive greater attention than their public statements. An additional consideration is the actual practice of the National Socialist regime towards the churches. Hitler’s private conversations with his inner circle between 1941 and 1944, as recorded by Reichleiter Bormann, himself one of the National Socialist Party’s most avid anti-Christians as we shall see, provide the most insightful of sources in determining the real attitude of Hitler towards Christianity.

Hitler commented on Minister of Religion Kerrl’s effort to identify National Socialism with “positive Christianity,” that it was “the noblest of intentions, but I don’t believe the thing’s possible, and I see the obstacle in Christianity itself.” “As for the men close to me,” he stated, “who, like me, have escaped from the clutches of dogma, I’ve no reason to fear that the church will get its hands on them. We’ll see to it that the church cannot spread abroad teachings that conflict with the interests of the State. We shall continue to preach the doctrine of National Socialism, and the young will no longer be taught anything but the truth. In the long run National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together. The ideal solution would be to leave the religions to devour themselves, without persecutions. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion has to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble.”

Early View



During the first years of the regime, and just prior to it, Hermann Rauschning recorded Hitler’s conversations with his inner circle. According to Rauschning, a conservative in the ranks of the National Socialist party who became the president of Danzig, Hitler said of Christianity, “Leave the hair-splitting to others. Whether it’s the Old Testament or the New, or simply the sayings of Jesus, it’s all the same old Jewish swindle. It will not make us free. A German church, a German Christianity, is a distortion. One is either a German or a Christian. You cannot be both…. We don’t want people to keep one eye on the hereafter. We need free men who know that God is in themselves.”

Hitler made it clear that he was not interested in an “Aryanized Christianity” or the “Aryan Jesus” myth promoted by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Von Liebenfels, and certain party members. “You cannot make an Aryan out of Jesus, that’s nonsense,” he stated. Rather, the festivals of the church, hijacked by Christianity from the heathens in the first place, would be re-heathenized. “Easter is no longer resurrection, but the eternal renewal of our people. Christmas is the birth of our saviour: the spirit of heroism and the freedom of our people.” If the priests put up resistance the regime would expose them before the people. “We shall brand them as ordinary criminals. I shall tear the mask of honesty off their faces. And if that is not enough, I shall make them appear ridiculous and contemptible. I shall order films to be made about them. We shall show the history of the monks on the cinema.”

Indeed, in 1937 a trial was held of 337 monks, “for abusing pupils or patients” committed to their care. A few monks escaped with millions of marks of German money, while the vast majority were imprisoned. The English ex-monk Joseph McCabe commented that they went to court “on the vilest of charges.” Of a chaplain named Father Leogivill, he said: “Once when he was on night duty he raped a sick youth of 17 who was asleep in the ward, and could not defend himself because his right arm was in a sling.” This situation was not unique, nor is it today uncommon. What is unique are the effective measures the Third Reich took.

Folk Religion



A folk religion would arise that would replace Christianity. “The peasant will be told what the church has destroyed for him: the whole of the secret knowledge of nature, of the divine, the shapeless, the daemonic. The peasant shall learn to hate the church on that basis. Gradually he shall be taught by what wiles the soul of the German people has been raped. We shall wash off the Christian veneer and bring out a religion peculiar to our race. And this is where we must begin, not in the big cities……”

Rauschning remarks in his Hitler Speaks that the old folks customs were being used by the regime to de-Christianize the peasantry. Agriculture Minister Walter Darre, the original proponent of the famous Blood and Soil doctrine and the real father of the “Green Movement,” was one of the regime’s most avid anti-Christians. Agricultural exhibitions had themes of the old peasant revolts against the church. Peasant calendars were produced which replaced Christian festivals with Germanic heathen ones.

Communism And Christianity: Revolts Against Nature

The very doctrines of National Socialism and Christianity are antithetical. Christianity was held to be the forerunner of Bolshevism, and both were revolts against Nature herself, with the Jews to be behind each. Bormann records Hitler as stating: “Christianity is a religion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.” “Pure Christianity — the Christianity of the catacombs — is concerned with translating the Christian doctrine into fact. It leads quite simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely wholehearted Bolshevism under a tinsel of metaphysics.”

“The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child…. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. Bolshevism practices a lie of the same nature when it claims to bring liberation to mankind. In the ancient world the relations between men and Gods were founded on an instinctive respect. It was a world enlightened by the idea of tolerance. Christianity was the first creed in the world to exterminate its adversaries in the name of love. Its keynote is intolerance.”

The Pox Of Christianity

Hitler’s analysis of Christianity is Nietzschean: “The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity.” “Christianity is a prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilization by the Jews of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society. Thus one understands that the healthy elements of the Roman world were proof against the doctrine. Yet Rome (i.e. Fascist Italy) allows itself today to reproach Bolshevism with having destroyed the churches. As if Christianity itself hadn’t behaved in the same way towards the pagan temples.”

The Deplorable Bible

"It is deplorable that the Bible should have been translated into German, and the whole of the German people should have thus become exposed to the whole of this Jewish mumbo-jumbo. As a sane German, one is flabbergasted to think that the German folk could have led themselves to such a pass by Jewish filth and priestly twaddle."

Priests

“What a happy inspiration to have kept the clergy out of the party. On 21 March 1933 at Potsdam, the question was raised: with the Church or without the Church? I conquered the State despite the malediction pronounced on us by both creeds [i.e. Catholic and Protestant]. On that day, we went to the tomb of the kings, whilst the others were attending religious services. Suppose that at that period I’d made a pact with the churches, I’d today be sharing the lot of the Duce [Mussolini]. By nature the Duce is a free thinker, but he decided to choose the path of concessions. For my part, in his place I’d have decided to choose the path of revolution. I’d have entered the Vatican and thrown everybody out.”

As with many other matters, Hitler intended postponing a final reckoning with the priests until after the war. “The evil that’s gnawing at our vitals is our priests, of both creeds. After the war, I’ll take the necessary steps to make the recruiting of priests extraordinarily difficult. In particular, I’ll no longer allow children from the age of 10 upward, to devote their lives to the church when they’ve absolutely no notion what they’re undertaking — in accepting celibacy for example.”

Church & State

Political interference from the clergy was not tolerated. Hitler stated: “If one once allows the church to exercise the slightest influence on the governing of the people and the upbringing of the younger generation, it will strive to become omnipotent, and one makes a great mistake if one thinks that one can make a collaborator of the church by accepting compromise.” From the earliest days of the regime, the National Socialists had come into conflict with the churches. The 1933 sterilization law of the congenitally retarded was particularly offensive to the Catholic Church, with its doctrine of the sanctity of all human life, in contradistinction to the eugenic outlook of the National Socialists. In 1937 Pius XI accused the regime of “secret and open fundamental hostility to Christ and his church.” Towards the end, in 1945, Pope Pius XII described National Socialism as, “the arrogant apostasy from Jesus Christ, the denial of his doctrine and of his work of redemption, the cult of violence, the idolatry of race and blood, the overthrow of human liberty and dignity.”

One point of irritation to Hitler was that while the churches had declared themselves enemies of the German State, the people were expected to subsidize them. Subsidies were actually extracted from the wage packet much like union levies, and to contract out meant to endure considerable antagonism. This paradox was never resolved. Hitler commented that, “Once we cease handing out millions of marks a year to the church, the damn parsons will very quickly change their tune and, instead of having the impudence to revile us and to attack us in the most shameful manner, will very soon be eating out of our hands. Once the war is over I will put a swift end to the Concodat [diplomatic agreement between the State and the Vatican]. It will give me the greatest personal pleasure to point out to the Church all those occasions on which it has broken the terms of it. One need only recall the close co-operation between the Church and the murderers of Heydrich [Security Chief].” “Catholic priests not only allowed them to hide in a church, but even allowed them to entrench themselves in the sanctuary of the altar.”

“I don’t interfere with matters of belief, therefore I can’t allow churchmen to interfere with temporal affairs. The organized lie must be smashed.The State must remain the absolute master.”

“When I was younger, I thought it was necessary to set about matters with dynamite. I’ve since recognized there’s room for a little subtlety. The rotten branch falls of itself. The final state must be: in St. Peter’s chair, a senile officiate; facing him, a few old women, as gaga and as poor in spirit as anyone could be. The young and healthy are on our side. Against a church that identifies itself with the State, as in England, I have nothing to say. But even so, it’s impossible to hold humanity eternally in bondage to lies. After all, it was only between the 6th and 8th centuries that Christianity was imposed on our people by princes who had an alliance of interest with the shavelings. Our people had previously succeeded in living all right without this religion. I have six divisions of the SS composed of men absolutely indifferent in matters of religion. It doesn’t prevent them going to their deaths with serenity in their souls.”

“That the Fascists were spared a second civil war is due to the fact that the movement succeeded in uniting the Italian nation in spite of the opposition from the church. Further, Fascism clearly defined the position as regards what things fell within the sphere of the church and what things fell within the sphere of the State. When the church refused to recognize the law for the formation of the Fascist Youth Organization, the Fascists retaliated by ruthlessly breaking up every religious procession from Rome to the south of Italy. The result was that within three days the church had come to heel.”

Joy Of Life

[caption id="attachment_4764" align="alignnone" width="540"] German soldier and Dutch woman in the dunes, Netherlands, between 1941 and 1944[/caption]

The heathen character of National Socialism was contrasted to the otherworldly preoccupation of the church. Hitler states: “To deserve its place in history our people must be above all a people of warriors. This implies both privileges and obligations, the obligation of submitting to a most vigorous upbringing and the privilege of the healthy enjoyment of life. If a German soldier is expected to be ready to sacrifice his life with demur, then he is entitled to love freely and without restriction. In life, love and battle go hand in hand, and the inhibited little bourgeois must be content with the crumbs which remain. But if the warrior is to be kept in fighting trim, he must not be pestered with religious precepts which ordain abstinence of the flesh. A healthy-minded man simply smiles when a Saint of the Church like St. Anthony bids him eschew the greatest joy that life has to give, and offers him the solace of self-mortification and castigation in its place.”

Himmler and the SS



The SS epitomizes the contradistinction between Christianity and the philosophy of the Third Reich. It was a Black Order in its own right, and Himmler envisaged the creation of an autonomous SS State which would be an example to the world of National Socialism. In 1937 Himmler instructed his chiefs to plan a counter-culture to replace Christianity, and it was declared, “the age of the final showdown with Christianity” had dawned, and one of the objectives of the SS was to provide Germans with “the proper ideological foundation” to replace it.

An SS porcelain factory manufactured pagan cult objects to replace Christian symbols. The Summer and Winter Solstices were revived to replace Christian festivals. There were SS birth and marriage ceremonies of heathen character. The underlying conception behind such ceremonies was the SS perspective of birth and marriage as aspects of an eternal cycle of life and death. Himmler’s right-hand man, Heydrich, Reich Security chief, declared of Christianity and heathenism: “Who is there among us who does not, deep in his heart, provided he can still think with his blood, have a profound, strangely haunting sense of shame, when, walking through the countryside, before the panorama perhaps of snow-covered Alpine mountain tops or in the midst of a somber Westphalian heath, comes across an image of the crucified Jesus? The Gods of our ancestors looked different; they were men, and each had a weapon in his hand, symbolizing the attitude to life that is inherent in our race: that of action, that of a man’s responsibility to himself. How different the pale crucified one, expressing — by his decided look of suffering, humility and extreme surrender — qualities which contradict the fundamental heroic attitude of our race.”

Himmler’s idea of God was a major influence on SS philosophy. This Got was spelled with only one ‘t’ in archaic German, to distinguish it from the Christian “Gott.” At an SS birth ceremony it was declared: “From Got your knowledge, your tasks, your life-purpose, all life’s perceptions flow. Each who drink from this tankard be witness to the fact that you are Got-united.” SS newlyweds were betrothed before the SS Wedding Altar and presented with a wooden bread dish by Himmler. This bore the carved legend: “Be worthy of the bread of your soil, then your kin will live forever.” Himmler, in his 1935 publication The SS as an Anti-Bolshevik Battle Organization, rejected atheism and propounded a belief in a god or first principle responsible for cosmic ordering of “this whole earth, the entire plant and animal world.” Amongst his trusted aides he referred to this god as Uralten — “the original or ancient one,” an old Germanic conception. Christianity had placed women in a position of subjection to enforce their destruction. The priesthood was seen as a homoerotic and even homosexual institution, anti-woman by its nature.

“The whole tenor of the priesthood and the whole of Christianity [was that of] an erotic male fraternity for the formation and maintenance of this Bolshevism.” “I have the conviction that the Roman emperors, who exterminated the first Christians, did precisely what we are doing with the communists. These Christians were at the time the vilest scum, which the city accommodated, the vilest Jewish people, the vilest Bolsheviks there were. The Bolshevism at that time had the power to grow large on the dying body of Rome. The priesthood of this Christian church, which later in unending battle subjugated the Aryan Church, was engaged from the fourth to the fifth century in demanding the celibacy of the priesthood. They based themselves on St. Paul and the original apostles who presented the woman as something sinful and tolerated or recommended marriage as a legal way out of whoredom — that is in the Bible — and represented the procreation of children as a ‘necessary evil’. This priesthood pursued this path consistently through those centuries until in the year 1139 the celibacy of priests was put into effect. Further, I have the conviction that merely for the few who do not wish to reconcile themselves to this homosexuality — especially for the parish priests who in my estimation are to an overwhelming extent over 50% not homosexual, while I assume that in the monasteries homosexuality amounts to 90-95-100% — there is a way out created for them to procure the necessary women and females in the oral confession box.”

Himmler hoped that within a few years judicial proceedings would show the church leadership up as a homosexual fraternity which “has been terrorizing people for 1800 years, claiming from them the greatest blood sacrifices, sadistically perverse in its manifestations.” As we have seen, several years later, the judicial system did begin to address this matter with the trial of monks for molestation. Himmler emphasized the anti-woman nature of the Medieval witch and heresy trials. It is an interesting sidelight that he expected particular attention to be paid to interaction between his SS men and young women socially, to combat the “exaggerated masculinizing” of society.

Addressing SS at Posen in 1942 on their numerous tasks, Himmler zeroed in on Christianity, saying that it would have to be dealt with more vigorously than hitherto. “This Christendom, this greatest pestilence which could have befallen us in history, which has weakened us for every conflict, we must finish with.” Himmler attacked the Christian idea of Man as above or apart from Nature, and explained his cyclic conception of Eternity, that Man must be anchored in his ancestors and in his grandchildren.

Martin Bormann On Christianity

Martin Bormann, who became Hitler’s secretary and deputy after Hess’ abortive peace mission to England, like Himmler, Rosenberg, Heydrich, Hitler and most of the others at the top of the Reich hierarchy, also had a clear perspective on Christianity. The following is taken from Kirchliches Jahrbuch fur die evangelische Kirche in Deutschland: “National Socialist and Christian concepts are incompatible. The Christian churches build upon the ignorance of the men and strive to keep large portions of the people in ignorance because only in this way can the Christian churches maintain their power. On the other hand, National Socialism is based on scientific foundations. Christianity’s immutable principles, which were laid down almost two thousand years ago by Jews, have increasingly stiffened into life-alien dogmas. National Socialism however, if it wants to fulfill its task further, must always guide itself according to the newest data of scientific researchers.”

“When in the future our youth no longer hear anything about this Christianity, whose doctrine is far below our own, Christianity will automatically disappear.” “When we National Socialists speak of God, by God we do not understand, as do naive Christians and their clerical beneficiaries, a manlike being who is sitting around in some corner of the spheres. Rather, we must open the eyes of mankind to the fact that in addition to our unimportant earth there exist countless other bodies in the universe, many of them surrounded, like the sun, by smaller bodies, the moons. The force which moves all those bodies in the universe, in accordance with Natural Law, is what we call the Eternal, the Allfather or God. The assertion that this world- force can worry about the fate of every individual, every bacillus on earth, and that it can be influenced by so-called prayer or other astonishing things, is based either on a suitable dose of naiveté or on outright commercial effrontery.”

“In contrast, we National Socialists call upon ourselves to live as naturally as possible — that is, in keeping with the Laws of Life. The more thoroughly we know and attend to the Laws of Nature and Life, the more we adhere to them, the more do we correspond to the will of the Eternal; the deeper our insight into the will of the Eternal, the greater will be our success.” “It follows from the incompatibility of National Socialist and Christian concepts that we must oppose any strengthening of existing Christian denominations and must refuse to give them any assistance. We can make no differentiation between the various Christian confessions. Any strengthening of the Christian concepts would merely work against us.”

“To an ever-increasing degree the Folk must be wrested from Christianity and their agents, the pastors. Obviously, the Christians, from their standpoint, will and must defend themselves against this loss of power. But never again must Christianity regain an influence in the leadership of our folk. This must absolutely and finally be broken.”

Christianity In The Third Reich



Despite the pragmatic and relatively cautious approach the times required, the regime did begin preliminary measures against Christianity. One means was to heathenize the churches from within. A National-Socialist-oriented German Christian Faith Movement was formed in opposition to the mainline Protestant churches. Hundreds of pastors of the Confessional Church were arrested in 1937. Catholics were removed from the Civil Service. In 1937 over 100,000 Germans formally left the Catholic Church. According to the reliable British historian David Irving (The War Path), “The Nazis discouraged Catholic education in schools, the convents and monasteries were dissolved and their property confiscated, and the Jesuits were driven out of influence everywhere.” The Hitler Youth sung such verses as, “I am neither Christian nor Catholic, I am for the SA through thin and thick.”

Something of what the regime had in mind for eventually replacing Christianity with after the war can be deduced from the proposals drawn up in 1942 for the creation of a National Reich Church by leading National Socialist philosopher Alfred Rosenberg. Indeed his own magnum opus The Myth of the Twentieth Century had met such condemnation by the churches since its first publication in 1930. Among the points for a Reich Church were:

“13. The National Church demands immediate cessation of the publishing and dissemination of the Bible in Germany.”

“14. The Führer’s Mein Kampf is the greatest of all documents……embodies the purest and truest ethics for the present and future life of our nation.”

“18. The National Church will clear away from its altars all crucifixes, Bibles and pictures of the saints.”

“19. On the altars there must be nothing but Mein Kampf and to the left on the altar a sword.”

“30. On the day of its foundation the Christian cross must be removed from all churches, cathedrals and chapels, and it must be superseded by the Swastika.”

The priesthoods were to be replaced by orators. Also see The German Religion — Deutsche Glaubensbewegung — (German Faith Movement): Three years after Adolf Hitler assumed the seat of power in Germany, in 1936 the National Reich Church was established, and in it only national orators of the Reich were allowed to speak. Reich Church Bishop Ludwig Müeller: “The National Reich Church demands an immediate stop to the printing and sale of the Bible in Germany. The National Reich Church will remove from the altars of all churches the Bible, the cross, and religious objects. Mercy is an un-German conception. The word mercy is one of the numerous terms of the Bible with which we can have nothing to do. On the altars there must be nothing but My Struggle (Mein Kampf), and to the left of this a sword.”

 

Sources:

David Irving The War Path NY 1978
William Shirer Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich
Hitler’s Secret Conversations 1941-1944
Herman Rauschning Hitler Speaks
Peter Padfield Himmler: Reichsfuhrer SS Macmillan London 1991

Zazen Sounds Magazine coming soon

The Cover and Contents of the first Issue of Zazen Sounds Magazine.More info regarding this and two other Releases coming at next weeks.

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The Strong Man is Mightiest Alone

[caption id="attachment_4713" align="aligncenter" width="1000"] 1941[/caption]

“The Strong Man is Mightiest Alone.”

― Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

 

Vampyric Blood - "Ordo Dracul" LP

Finally after all these years, I am proud to announce the vinyl version of Vampyric Bloods debut album "Ordo Dracul" will be out this week!

"Through the gloom of the eternal night comes the debut album of this rotten vampyric Finnish entity.
Raw, melancholic and haunting ancient soundscapes of sorcery and blood lust from beyond the grave through the medium of mystical vampyric Black Metal in the vein of the immortal cults from the 90s!"

The vinyl version has a bonus track, is on transparent red vinyl and is limited to 200 copies!

OUT NOW! Purchase here: http://www.black-metal.shop/

These will not be available through the DAP webstore (to save you all the postage), and there will be no reservations & so on.
First in first serve.

The album can be heard in full here: https://youtu.be/_k1Dw7xW8dI