*
Some self-declared Christian from America told me I should have enlisted with “the Christian fascists” like some hero in a Drieu La Rochelle novel, joined up with the Francoists—better than the astral light, the light of a candle (except I actually read the Bible, the faithful are the stars in the heavens—there’s the Candlemas and the astral faithful in the sky, so perhaps I know Christianity better than this self-declared “Christian fascist”).
Well, anyone can declare themselves a Christian—anyone can declare themselves a Muslim or a Buddhist or a socialist. There’s no trick in that. So did Jim Jones—very enthusiastic in his Christian pretensions. So what?
Did you ever hear the expression “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”—or, to turn it round, a rotten apple is as rancid by any other name (all brown, folded in on itself—it wrinkles your nose like vinegar)? So you can call yourself what you like—you can call yourself a “traditionalist Christian”, “a follower of the Mahdi”, “a post-Marxist”, “a post-liberal”, “a Nietzschean”, “a classical liberal”. Call yourself what you like—call yourself a woman if you’re a man and vice versa, if you’re in the “calling yourself something” business.
All it means is “join my gang”—my gang is filled with “good” people, whereas other gangs are “bad” people (nose-pickers, abortionists, twerps—whatever the “evil” is this week). Come into my gang and we’ll be against all the “bad people”—I mean, we do things ourselves but that *doesn’t count* because we’re “good”.
And no, the answer isn’t Peterson’s “I’m just an individual, I only identify as an individual”—that is also a form of identity politics, one where you only identify with other individualists (mostly Jews, as it turns out—who would prefer that their racial enemies call themselves individuals).
Peterson doesn’t speak the truth as he sees it, if he did he’d never be a celebrity—he’s careful to cut it off so he can negotiate and form a gang with other people, for status and money.
I’m just a truthful person who aims not to be hypocritical. That is not an identity or a belief—there’s no club to join, there’s no doctrine, there’s no belief. I’m not here to go into fake ecstasies about “Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ” or “Muhammad, the superlative prophet of the ages” or “father Odin, wise seer of the sky”. Not because I don’t think gods and prophets are real—but because I’m in the truthfulness business, not the believer racket.
That’s why I am also not in the “I trust the scientific method” racket—which is another belief, which just says, in dogmatic terms, “you can only know things through scientific positivism”. This is also a belief—it isn’t true, science relies on non-scientific attributes, like intuition, to function. It can’t support the stilts it balances on with its own method.
We find you say some acute things—but it’s a bit alienating and we’d prefer you to…
You’d prefer me to lie a bit more—or to put out some bland generalities about how “white people will overcome our current situation—it’s inevitable given our natural talents” or how “Franco was the most magisterial Christian statesman of our era, what we need is a new Francoist movement”.
Franco…well, have you ever considered, if Francoism is so great, why Spain is among the most progressive countries in Europe, with a cratered birthrate (and a fractured political structure with a vibrant leftist separatist movement)? How did that happen so quickly, in about 20 years after Franco died?
Clearly, Franco made no substantial impact on the Spanish population—his movement did nothing to change the fundamentals of Spain. In fact, if anything, Spain is worse off than some non-fascist countries in regard to social matters (the same goes for Salazar and Portugal—the country now tolerates heroin as official state doctrine).
“But we must form a Christo-fascist movement and say Christ is King”. Yes—we must follow Jim Jones into the jungle because he’s a charismatic man (and a total liar).
A truthful assessment of Spain—in the spirit of Christ, who was a truthful man—would say that Spain’s problems are very deep and she collapsed back in the 1600s and never recovered. Francoism was a minor freeze in a wider history of Spanish decline.
For non-Catholic countries, like Britain and America, “a Christo-fascist movement” is not conceivable because the whole history, culture, and institutions of these countries are the opposite to that. As Thomas Howard says to More in A Man For All Seasons, “This isn’t Spain you know.”
What he means is that the English don’t throw donkeys off churches for entertainment or torture people who don’t say exactly what the Inquisition tells them—so that Henry VIII, even if he disagrees with More, isn’t going to torture him (even if he executes him in the end). That’s a racial difference between Spaniards and Anglo-Saxons—another reason you can’t just have “Francoism” in, say, contemporary America (a country formed in its very institutions to negate the idea of “absolute papal authority”—and with a totally different racial constitution to boot).
There are other problem with Franco—his links to Freemasonry, for example; and, to be more precise, to the Jesuits (who now control the papacy—and look how quickly we’re blessing same-sex unions these days).
**
This all originates from an attempt to be “political”—to find some “agreeable” point of unity to a situation, which is then retailed under a respectable name “The Evangelical Union”, “The Followers of the Mahdi”, “The True Brothers of Joseph Smith”. What this amounts to is lies or de facto lies that distort reality—and that’s what the left is in essence, departure from reality with lies.
I’ll give an example where I made a mistake and was “political”. I said that the Catholic Church is the closest you can get to paganism today—because it folded all the pagan rites into it, preserved a kind of polytheism with the saints, and carried on Roman imperial authority.
Yes—all true. But the problem with this rational truth is that behind it I thought, “Clever way to get pagans and Christians on the same page, also Catholicism is more hierarchical than Protestantism, and it preserves lots of cultural elements of Europe too”.
It’s true in its own way, and I’d still say that if you want to see what the rites of Mithras were like the closest you can get is a traditional Latin Mass—because that’s an actual tradition, not some attempt by modernists who read a journal article to reconstruct a religion.
You either work from an extant tradition, or you get direct inspiration from the gods to start again—because there’s something in the tradition, in the initiation, that can’t be recovered from a book (that is itself a rightist idea—there’s some experiential thing that is lost in pure rules-based abstraction); and that’s why most neo-pagan movements fail, because they’re from a book—they’re not linked to actual contact with the gods or with a tradition, they’re actually modernist to the core in the way they approach the matter.
However, as regards the Latin Mass, it’s only like if I said if you really like dinosaurs that you can go and look at a Komodo Dragon and you’ll have an impression as to what a dinosaur was like. It is still very definitely not a dinosaur—just as close as you can get.
Further, the Mass is actually an inversion and corruption of the rites of Mithras—and if you take it seriously, you can’t endorse an inversion of a religious ceremony. It’s only if you think “politically” that you think “that doesn’t matter”, because “it’s for the good of the team” (powerful organisation, unity of all Europeans).
In a similar vein, the right is not actually just for “hierarchy”, it’s for reality—which is usually hierarchical, but hierarchy can easily depart from reality (e.g. the KGB was very hierarchical, it doesn’t make it a right-wing organisation).
So the problem was I had this political intent behind the true statements I made—and that distorted it. And it comes from this idea “unity above all, got to get the team—in this case the Europeans—on the same page” (also, “strength in numbers”—which is fallacious and democratic, “strength in truthfulness” actually).
Today, I’d say, in realistic terms, it’s more like the Catholic Church is part of the AntiChrist system, although it is true that if you want an idea of what paganism and the Roman Empire were like the closest you can get is some traditionalist Catholic organisation (right down to the Latin). But it’s not a solution.
People who talk about Franco are engaged in the same type of “political” project where you don’t look at the reality and instead daydream about some powerful entity that will save you—the Catholic Church, Franco. The latter doesn’t even exist—it’s the lure of the foreign and the exotic (especially for an American), and what is foreign and exotic is high-status in decadent societies.
It’s the same as “political tourists” who go to Hungary and Poland and extol life under “actually existing Christian conservatism”—lured away by the foreign and exotic, just as the left goes on about the “excellent range of restaurants” multiculturalism brings. Decadent people love the exotic and foreign—the Indian restaurants, the Polish priests, the Hungarian folk dances. It’s all part and parcel of a general decadence in the West, even on the self-proclaimed right.
The craze for Russian Orthodoxy is blatantly the same thing—it’s no different to Californians with their hatha yoga, except in a conservative register. Indeed, Seraphim Rose, a notable Western convert to Russian Orthodoxy, was from California (and a homosexual)—it’s just another boutique religion for bored Westerners, except for those with more conservative tastes (there is less enthusiasm for conversion to Islam—that’s because it can’t be accommodated to modernity as easily as Russian Orthodoxy, which, like Buddhism, is exotic but doesn’t mean you have to change your Western lifestyle; it makes no real demands).
There are other reasons to talk about Franco; for example, he’s almost respectable, barely, like Pinochet. He led an American ally for a time—if you say I’m for “Christo-fascism like Franco” you can avoid the dreaded “H” word. “No, no—nothing like Hitler, this is an entirely Christian movement. Franco was actually on America’s side, Eisenhower made a treaty with him—we’re not Satanic neo-pagans or Nietzscheans.” So it’s to do with cowardice and respectability, at heart—not realism, not in Protestant Anglo-Saxon countries like Britain and America. It’s divorced from reality.
Ultimately, Franco was “a nice guy”—a Christian who didn’t actually fight for Hitler (technically) and was just against the Communists. He wasn’t “total evil”, just a respectable guy—but with a “dangerous” and “naughty” edge, “nice fascism” (like people who insist Mussolini was fine until he fell in with that naughty young master Hitler down the road—“Italian Fascism was totally different.”).
A more realistic view is that Franco played both sides like an opportunist. He let the Hitlerites set up shop to spy in Spain, turned a blind eye to their U-Boats—but, on the other hand, Spain was where Admiral Canaris met his opposite number in British intelligence during the war. That’s right, the head of the German intelligence service was in dialogue with the head of the British intelligence service—because Hitler was actually surrounded by all sorts of traitors, it’s amazing he got as far as he did.
And Franco helped facilitate that for “reasons” (Masonic reasons); he stayed out of the war, in part, because it was judged Spain would be more a liability than an advantage for the Germans—because her coast would have to be defended, which would be hard. Yet he did accommodate both sides to a degree, with an accent on the Axis. It’s that ambiguity that attracts today, because he’s borderline “safe” in respectable company, just like it’s “safe” to drape yourself in Catholicism to put forward reactionary views (because the Catholic Church is a powerful and respectable organisation, child rape aside).
This is not realism, though—it’s politics.
***
So all these ideas are detached from reality—just like there was an Internet craze to call yourself “a tankie” a few years ago, like you were some member of a conservative faction of a Communist party in the 1960s that supported the invasion of Czechoslovakia (dubbed “tankies”, i.e. “send in the Red Army tanks to quell the populace”).
The fact people say stuff like that, somewhat seriously, just reflects how far people in the West treat life as an extended role-playing video game—it’s on the same continuum as people who “change gender”.
This level of “game-playing” and cost-free fantasy is part of the problem—bijou beliefs, from “Orthobros” to “Tankies”, that make me feel special and give me something to daydream about.
“Tankies”. Who cares what stance you take towards the foreign policy of a state that hasn’t existed for 30 years? Well, it’s a way to say “I’m a hardcore guy”, to show off; but it’s still detached from reality—it’s like these people who continued to be “Jacobites” centuries after the cause failed, as if “the restoration” will occur any day now (in the end it turns into a drinking club and eccentric joke “the South will rise”).
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. Muhammad, Buddha, and Jesus were men who were truthful, spoke from the heart, and were not hypocrites. I know a man like that when I see it—and they are rare. It doesn’t matter what you call a man who speaks from the heart and is not a hypocrite—people who follow these men, or think they follow them, are a whole other matter (as most people always say “it’s not about religion, it’s about power”).
I know the sweet smell of a rose when I come across it, no matter what name it uses—and I also know the smell of a rotten apple, whatever the label says.