Or the Survival of the Fittest
by Ragnar Redbeard
“Must we then speak of this subject also; and shall we write
concerning things that are not to be told, and shall we publish
things not to be divulged, and secrets not to be spoken aloud?”
…….Julian the Emperor
“The law immutable, indestructible, eternal; not like those of
to-day and yesterday, but made ere time began.”
…………………Sophocles
The natural world is a world of war; the natural man is a
warrior; the natural law is tooth and claw.
All else is error.
A condition of combat everywhere exists. We are
born into a perpetual conflict. It is our inheritance, even
as it was the heritage of previous generations. This
“condition of combat” may be disguised with the holy
phrases of St. Francis, or the soft deceitful doctrines of a
Kropotkin or Tolstoi, but it cannot be eventually evaded
by any human being or any tribe of human beings. It is
there and it stays there, and each man (whether he will or
not) has to reckon with it. It rules all things; it governs
all things; it reigns over all things and it decides all who
imagine policemanized populations, internationally
regulated transquillity, and State organized industrialism
so joyful, blessed and divine.
Virtue is rewarded in this world, remember. Natural law
makes no false judgments. Its decisions are true and just,
even when dreadful. The victor gets the gold and the land
every time. He, also, gets the fairest maidens, the glory
tributes. And – why should it be otherwise?
Why should the delights of life go to failures and cowards?
Why should the spoils of battle belong to the unwarlike?
That would be insanity, utterly unnatural and immoral.
How is it that “men of light and leading” hardly ever
call in question the manufactured “moral codes”, under which
our once vigorous Northern race is slowly and surely eating out
its heart in peaceful inaction and laborious dry-rot?
Standard “moral principles” are arbitrarily assumed
by their orthodox apologist to be a fixed and unalterable
quantity, and that to doubt the divine-rightness of these
“principles” is treason and sacrilege. When the greatest
thinkers of a race are incapable, or afraid to perform their
manifest and logical function, it is scarcely to be wondered that
average citizens are, also, somewhat unwilling to “risk life,
fortune and sacred honor” for the overthrow of popularized
“right and wrong” concepts, that they know from bitter
personal experience, are unworkable falsities. Although the
average man feels in his heart that nearly all political and
religious conventionalisms are dynamic deceits, yet how
cautiously he avoids any open display of antagonism thereto?
He has not the courage of his opinions. He is afraid to say
openly what he thinks secretly. In other words he is living in a
state of subjectiveness; of vassalage. He allows his brain to be
dominated and held in bondage by the brain of another. From
his infancy he has been deliberately subjected to a continuous
external pressure, especially designed to coerce his
understanding into strict accord with pre-arranged views of
moral, political or religious “duty”. He has not been permitted
one moment of real mental liberty. He imbibed fraudulent conventionalisms
with his mother’s milk. He listens to the most
hideous lies being glorified in his presence as sublime truths.
He hears falsehoods sung in swelling chorus. He hears them
sounded on bugles of silver and brass. He hears them intoned
by congregations of the faithful amid peals of sacred music,
and the solemn roll of chanted prayer. Thus his mind is
sterilized by authority before it has had a chance to mature.
Thus youth is mentally castrated, that its natural vitality may be
afterwards used up in the yoke of custom–which is the yoke of
slavery. In the nursery, at school and at college, plastic brain –
pulp is deliberately forced into the pre-arranged mold.
Everything that a corrupt civilization can do, is done to
compress the growing intellect into unnatural channels. Thus
the great mass of men who inhabit the world of to-day have no
initiative, no originality or independence of thought, but are
mere subjective individualities, who have never had the
slightest voice in fashioning the ideals that they formally
revere.
Although the average man has taken no part in
manufacturing moral codes and statute laws, yet how he obeys
them with dog-like submissiveness. He is trained to obedience,
like oxen are broken to the yoke of their masters. He is a born
thrall habituated from childhood to be governed by others.
Chinese civilization deliberately distorts its children’s
feet, by swathing them in bandages of silk and hoop-iron.
Christian civilization crushes and cramps the minds of its youth
by means of false philosophies, artificial moral codes and
ironclad political creeds. Deleterious sub-theories of good and
evil are systematically injected into our natural literatures, and
gradually (without serious obstruction) they crystallize
themselves into cast iron formulas, infallible constitutions,
will-o-the-wisp evangels and other deadly epidemics.
Modern “leaders of thought” are almost wholly
wanting in originality and courage. Their wisdom is
foolishness, their remedies poison. They idiotically claim that
they guide the destinies of nations, whereas, in reality, they are
but the flotsam and scum-froth that glides smoothly down the
dark stream of decadence.
“Thus all the people of the earth are helpless, seeing
those that lead are blind.”
Mankind is aweary, aweary of its sham prophets, its
demagogues and its statesmen. It crieth out for kings and
heroes. It demands a nobility – a nobility that cannot be hired
with money, like slaves or beasts of burden. The world awaits
the coming of mighty men of valor, great destroyers; destroyers
of all that is vile, angels of death. We are sick unto nausea of
the “good Lord Jesus”, terror-stricken under the executive of
priest, mob and proconsul. We are tired to death of “Equality”.
Gods are at a discount, devils are in demand. He who would
rule the coming age must be hard, cruel and deliberately
intrepid, for softness assails not successfully the idols of the
multitude. Those idols must be smashed into fragments, burnt
into ashes, and that cannot be done by the gospel of love.
The living forces of evil are to be found in the living
ideals of to-day.
The commandments and laws and moral codes that we
are called upon to reverence and obey are themselves the
insidious enginery of decadence. It is moral principles that
manufacture beggars. It is golden rules that glorify meekness.
It is statute laws that make spaniels of men.
A man may keep every one of the Ten Commandments and yet remain a fool all the days of his life.
He may obey every written law of the land, and yet be a caitiff
and a slave. He may “love Jesus”, delight in the golden rule
and yet continue to the hour of his death, a failure and
dependent. Truly the way to hell is by fulfilling the
commandments of God. If the all-conquering race to which we
belong, is not to irretrievably dwindle into multitudinous
nothingness (like the inferior herds it has outdistanced or
enslaved), then it is essential that the Semitic spider webs (so
astutely woven for ages into the brains of our chiefs) be
remorselessly torn out by the very roots, even though the
tearing out process be both painful and bloody.
If we would retain and defend our inherited manhood,
we must not permit ourselves to be forever rocked to repose
with the sweet lullabies of eastern idealisms. Too long we have
been hypnotized by the occult charm of Hebrew Utopianism. If
we continue to obey the insidious spell that has been laid upon
us, we will wake up some dread morning with the gates of hell
– “of hell upon earth” yawning wide open, to close again upon
us forever.
The idea of hell is in some respects a truthful
conception, suggestive of actual fact. If we terrestialize the
location, there is nothing inharmonious about it. Many a race,
many a tribe and many a mighty empire has gone down into a
grimly realistic Sheol. Is it not right and just that the vile, the
base and the degenerate (that is to say, the slave nations of the
earth) should be punished pitilessly for their creeping
cowardice? Is it not right that they should be, as it were, fried
and toasted – should swim in pools of boiling blood, or dance
sweltering satanic glees, with blistered feet and straining eyeballs
on red-hot Saharas of grave and sand?
In actual operation Nature is cruel and merciless to
men, as to all other beings. Let a tribe of human animals live a
rational life, Nature will smile upon them and their posterity;
but let them attempt to organize an unnatural mode of existence
an equality elysium, and they will be punished even to the point
of extermination.
All ethics, politics and philosophies are pure
assumptions, built upon assumptions. They rest on no sure
basis. They are but shadowy castles-in-the-air erected by daydreamers
or by rogues, upon nursery fables. It is time they
were firmly planted upon an enduring foundation. This can
never be accomplished until the racial mind has first been
thoroughly cleansed and drastically disinfected of its depraved,
alien and demoralizing concepts of right and wrong. In no
human brain can sufficient space be found for the relentless
logic of hard fact, until all pre-existent delusions have been
finally annihilated. Half measures are of no avail, we must go
down to the very roots and tear them out, even to the last fiber.
We must be, like Nature, hard, cruel, relentless.
Too long the dead hand has been permitted to sterilize
living thought – too long, right and wrong, good and evil have
been inverted by false prophets. In the days that are at hand,
neither creed nor code must be accepted upon authority,
human, superhuman or ‘divine’. (Morality and
conventionalism are for subordinates.) Religions and
constitutions and all arbitrary principles, every mortal theorem,
must be deliberately put to the question. No moral dogma must
be taken for granted – no standard of measurement deified.
There is nothing inherently sacred about moral codes. Like the
wooden idols of long ago, they are all the work of human
hands, and what man has made man can destroy.
He who is slow to believe anything and everything is
of great understanding, for belief in one false principle is the
beginning of all unwisdom. The chief duty of every new age is
to up-raise new men to determine its liberties, to lead it towards
material success – to rend (as it were) the rusty padlocks and
chains of dead custom that always prevent healthy expansion.
Theories and ideals and constitutions, that may have meant life
and hope and freedom for our ancestors, may now mean
destruction, slavery and dishonor to us. As environments
change no human ideal standeth sure.
Wherever, therefore, a lie has built unto itself a throne,
let it be assailed without pity and without regret, for under the
domination of a falsehood no nation can permanently prosper.
Let established sophisms be dethroned, rooted out, burnt and
destroyed, for they are a standing menace to all true nobility of
thought and action. Whatever alleged “truth” is proven by
results, to be but an empty fiction, let it be unceremoniously
flung into the outer darkness among the dead gods, dead
empires, dead philosophies and other useless lumber and
wreckage.
The most dangerous of all enthroned lies is the holy,
the sanctified, the privileged lie – the lie that “everybody”
believes to be a model truth. It is the fruitful mother of all other
popular errors and delusions. It is hydra-headed. It has a
thousand roots. It is a social cancer. The lie that is known to
be a lie is half eradicated, but the lie that even intelligent
persons regard as a sacred fact – the lie that has been inculcated
around a mother’s knee – is more dangerous to contend against
than a creeping pestilence. Popular lies have ever been the
most potent enemies of personal liberty. There is only one way
to deal with them. Cut them out, to the very core, just as
cancers are. Exterminate them root and branch, or they will
surely eat us all up. We must annihilate them, or they will us.
Half and half remedies are of no avail.
However, when a lie has gone too far – when it has
taken up its abode in the very tissues, bones and brains of a
people, then all remedies are useless. Even the lancet is of no
avail. Repentance of past misdeeds cannot “save” decadence
from extermination. The fatal bolt is shot; and into the fiery
furnace of wholesale slavery and oblivion they must go, to be
there righteously consumed. From their ashes something new,
something nobler may possibly evolve, but even that is the
merest optimistic supposition.
In Nature the wages of sin is always death. Nature
does not love the wrong-doer, but endeavors in every possible
way to destroy him. Her curse is on the brow of the “meek and
lowly”. Her blessing is on the very hearts’ blood of the strong
and the brave. Only Jews and Christs and other degenerates
think that rejuvenation can ever come through law and prayer.
“All the tears of all the martyrs” might just as well have never
been shed.
4
Whatsoever a people believeth shall make it free,
enslave it or corrode its very marrow in strict accordance with
natural order. Consequently, if a people place implicit faith in
what philosophers teach them, they are liable to be duped. If
many nations are so duped, their deception is a menace to the
liberty of the world.
Freemen should never regulate their conduct by the
suggestions or dicta of others, for when they do so, they are no
longer free. No man ought to obey any contract, written or
implied, except he himself has given his personal and formal
adherence thereto, when in a state of mental maturity and
unrestrained liberty. It is only slaves that are born into
contracts, signed and sealed by their progenitors. The freeman
is born free, lives free and dies free. He is (even though living
in an artificial civilization) above all laws, all constitutions, all
theories of right and wrong. He supports and defends them of
course, as long as they suit his own end, but if they don’t, then
he annihilates them by the easiest and most direct method.
There is no obligation upon any man to passive
obedience, when his life, his liberty and his property are
threatened by footpad, assassin or statesman.
One of Columbus’s lieutenants in the West Indies,
captured a Carib chief by means of a subtle stratagem. The
chief was invited to a feast and when there, persuaded with
honeyed words to don (on horseback) a set of brightly polished
steel manacles; it being cunningly represented to him, that the
irons were the regalia of sovereignty. He foolishly believed his
astute flatterer, and when the chains were firmly clasped
around his limbs, he was led away, to die of vermin, turning a
mill in a Spanish dungeon. What those glittering manacles
were to the Indian chieftain, constitutions, laws, moral codes
and Hebrew dominated civilizations are to the nations of the
earth. Indeed, under the name of Progress and Social
Evolution, mankind has been lured into fetid dungeons, where
it labors unceasingly and for naught, in darkness, despair and
shame. Like that Spanish lieutenant the masters of the earth
first flatter their dupes in order to more easily enchain them.
Who talks nowadays of the “sovereign people” without a laugh
of derision? And yet it was once thought to be a term full of
significance. Their ‘sovereignty’ is now acknowledged sham,
and their freedom a dream. The sovereign people be. –
It is clear, therefore, that the man or nation that would
retain liberty or be really safe must accept no formula as final
– must trust in nothing written or unwritten, living or dead –
must believe neither in special Jehovahs, nor weeping Saviors
– neither in raging devils, nor in devilish philosophies – neither
in ghosts, nor in idols, nor in laws – nor in woman, nor in man.
“O threats of hell, and hopes of paradise,
One thing at least is certain – this life flies;
One thing is certain and all the rest is – lies,
The flower that once has bloomed forever dies.”
He who saith unto himself, “I must believe, I must not
question” is not a man but a mere pusillanimous mental
gelding. He who believes “because it has been handed down”
is a menial in his heart; and he who believes “because it has
been written” is a fool in his folly. Sagacious spirits doubt all
things, and hold fast only to that which is demonstrably true.
The rules of life are not to be found in Korans, Bibles,
Decalogues and Constitutions, but rather the rules of decadence
and death. The “law of laws” is not written in Hebrew
consonants or upon tables of brass and stone, but in every
man’s own heart. He who obeys any standard of right and
wrong, but the one set up by his own conscience, betrays
himself into the hands of his enemies, who are ever laying in
wait to bind him to their millstones. And generally a man’s
most dangerous enemies are his neighbors.
Masterful men laugh with contempt at spiritual
thunders, and have no occasion to dread the decisions of any
human tribunal. They are above and beyond all that. Laws and
regulations are only for conquered vassals. The free man does
not require them. He may manufacture and post up Decalogue
regulations, to bind and control dependents with, but he does
not himself bow down before those inventions of his own
hands, except as a lure.
Statute books and golden rules were made to fetter
slaves and fools. Very useful are they for controlling the herds
of sentenced convicts who fill the factories and cultivate the
fields. All moral principles, therefore, are the servitors, not the
masters of the strong. Power made moral codes, and Power
abrogates them.
A man is under no obligation to obey anything or
anybody. It is only serving-men: – must obey, because they are
caitiffs by birth, breeding and condition. Morals are only
required in an immoral community, that is to say, a community
held in a state of conquest.
Fear God, bridle the spirit and obey the law is advice
most excellent, as from a philosopher to a yokel, but when
directed in all earnestness at a man of inherent might, he smiles
to himself in silent scorn. Full well he knows that in actual life
the path to victory and renown does not lie through
Gethsemanies, but over fallen enemies, the ruins of rival
combines, through Aceldamas. “Meekness of spirit” is
regarded by him as a convenient superstition, very useful for
regulating the lives of his servants, his women and his children,
but otherwise inoperative.
“I rest my hopes on nothing.” proclaimed Goethe, and
masterful minds in all ages have never done otherwise. This
unspoken thought gives to all truly great men their manifest
superiority over the brainless, vociferating herd. The “common
people” have always had to be befooled with some written or
wooden or golden Idol – some constitution, declaration or
gospel. Consequently, the majority of them have ever been
mental thralls, living and dying in an atmosphere of strong
illusion. They are befooled and hypnotized even to this hour,
and a large proportion of them must remain so, until time is no
more. Indeed the masses of mankind are but the sediment from
which all the more valuable elements have been long ago
distilled. They are totally incapable of real freedom, and if it
were granted to them, they would straightaway vote themselves
a master, or a thousand masters within twenty-four hours.
Mastership is right – Mastership is natural – Mastership is
eternal, but only for those who cannot overthrow it and trample
it beneath their hoofs. Is it not a fact that in actual life the
ballot-box votes of ten million subjective personalities are as
thistle down in the balance, when weighed against the far
seeing thought and material prowess of, say, ten strong silent
men?
6
It is notorious, universally so, that the blackest
falsehoods are ever decked out in the most brilliant and
gorgeous regalia. Clearly, therefore it is the brave man’s duty
to regard all sacred things, all legal things, all constitutional
things, all holy things with more than usual suspicion. “I deny
and I affirm,” is the countersign of material freedom. “I believe
and I obey” is the shibboleth of serfage. Belief is a flunky , a
feminine – Doubt is a creator, a master. He who denies
fundamentals is in triple armor clad. Indeed, he is invulnerable.
On the other hand, it has been said that every belief, every
philosophy has some truth in it, but so, we might add, has every
insanity.
Strong men are not deterred from pursuing their aim
by anything. They go straight to the goal, and that goal is
Beauty, Wealth and Material Power. The mission of Power is
to control and exploit the powerless, for to be powerless is to
be criminal. The world would indeed be a house of horrors, if
all men were “good” and all women padlocked.
As far as human searchlights have yet penetrated into
the darkness that enshrouds the origin of nations, we see the
subduers and the subdued, the plebeians and the patricians, the
chiefs who governed, and the vassals who obeyed. And there
is nothing in the most modern social developments (of these
deedless days) to warrant any belief that this ancient and
natural division of human animals, into castes of superiors and
inferiors, sovereigns and serfs, can ever be dispensed with. The
slave-owner’s whip cracked from the beginning, and it will
crack till the day of doom. In every kingdom, republic and
empire on earth we have (in one disguise or another) the master
and the slave – the ruler and the ruled. In the course of
centuries names alone have changed, essentials have remained
the same. Forms of royalty may alter, but kings can never die.
There was mastership at the beginning, and there will be
mastership to the end. We build, but as our fathers built.
Change is not progress, nor numbers advance.
Every one who would be free must show his power.
Unalterable remains the basis of all earthly greatness. He who
exalteth himself shall be exalted, and he who humbleth himself
shall be righteously trodden beneath the hoofs of the herd.
“The humble” are only fit for dog’s meat. Bravery includes
every virtue, humility, every crime. He who is afraid to risk his
life must never be permitted to win anything.
Human rights and wrongs are not determined by
Justice, but by Might. Disguise it as you may, the naked sword
is still king-maker and king-breaker, as of yore. All other
theories are lies and lures.
Therefore! If you would conquer wealth and honor,
power and fame you must be practical, grim, cool and
merciless. You must ride to success (by preference) over the
necks of your foemen. Their defeat is your strength. Their
downfall is your uplifting. Only the powerful can be free, and
Power is non-moral. Life is real, life is earnest, and neither
heaven nor hell its final goal. And love, and joy, and birth, and
death, and fate, and strife shall be forever.
This earth is a vast whirl of warring atoms – a
veritable revolving cock-pit. Each molecule, each animal
fights for its life. You must fight for yours, or surrender. Look
well to it, therefore, that your beaks and spurs, your fangs and
claws are as sharp as steel, and as effective as science can make
them.
Though, the survival of the strongest is the logic of
events, yet personal cowardice is the great vice of our
demoralized age. Cowardice is corroding the brain and blood
of our race, but men have learnt to disguise this terrible
infirmity behind the canting whine of “humanity” and
“goodness”. Words flow instead of blood, and terrible insults
are exchanged instead of terrible blows.
How rich this degenerate world is in small, pettysouled,
good-for-nothings, who are forever excusing their
infantile ineptitude behind some plausible phrase – some
conventional make-believe?
Courage, I say! Courage, not goodness, is the great
desideratum–courage, that requires neither tin horns, nor
calcium lights, nor brass bands, nor shouting multitudes to call
it into effective action.
But courage that goes its way alone, as undauntedly as
when it marches to ‘victory or death’ amid the menacing stride
of armed and bannered legions.
Courage, that delights in danger – Courage, that
knows not despair! Courage, that proudly, defiantly, smiles on
death!
Courage, that regards with equal loathing the
multitudes mad howls of hate, its stupid hee-haws and its
stridulating ‘tremendous applause’.
Courage, that asks no quarter, even with the knife at
its throat – courage that is stiff-necked, unyielding, sullen,
pitiless!
Courage, that never falters – never retreats!
Courage, that looks down with supreme disdain upon
all slave regulations, upon all rights and wrongs, upon all good
and evil!
Courage, that has made up its mind to conquer or –
perish!
That is the kind of courage this world lacks. That is
the kind of courage that aids by active co-operation the survival
of the Fittest – the survival of the Best.
That is the kind of courage that has never turned a
master’s mill.
That is the kind of courage that never will turn it.
That is the kind of courage that will die, rather than
turn it.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
“When Svipdag came to the enclosure, the gate of the burg was
shut, (for it was customary to ask leave to come in and see, or
take part in the war games). Svipdag did not take that trouble,
but broke open the gate and rode into the yard.” *
Queen Yisa said – “This man will be welcome here.”
*Ancient norse saga
I C O N O C L A S T I C
CHAPTER II
As far as Sociology is concerned, we must either
abandon our reason or abandon Christ.
He is pre-eminently, the prophet of unreason – the
preacher of rabble-rabies. All that is enervating and destructive
of manhood, he glorifies – all that is self-reliant and heroic, he
denounces. Lazarus, the filthy and diseased vagrant, is his hero
of heroes; and Dives the sane, energetic citizen and his ‘awful’
example of baseness and criminality. He praises “the humble”
and he curses the proud. He blesses the failures and damns the
successful. All that is noble he perverts – all that is atrocious
he upholds. He inverts all the natural instincts of mankind and
u rges us to live artificial lives. He commands the
DEMONIZATION of virtues that aggrandize a people, and
advises his admirers to submit in quietness to every insult,
contumely, indignity; to be slaves, de-facto. Indeed, there is
scarce one thought in the whole of his Dicta that is practically
true.
O, Christ! O, Christ! Thou artful fiend! Thou Great
Subverter! – What an amazing Eblis glamour thou has cast over
the world? Thou mean, insignificant-minded Jew!
Why is it that our modern philosophers are so mortally
afraid to boldly challenge the ‘inspired’ utopianism of this
poor, self-deluded, Gallilean mountaineer – this preacher of all
eunuch-virtues – of self-abasement, of passive suffering?
The sickly humanitarian ethics, so eloquently rayed
forth by Jesus Christ and his superstitious successors in ancient
Judea and throughout the moribund Roman empire, are
generally accepted in Anglo-Saxondom as the very elixir of
immortal wisdom, the purest, wisest, grandest, most incontrovertible
of all ‘divine revelations’, or occult thaumauturgies.
And yet when closely examined, they are found to be neither
divine, occult, reasonable, nor even honest; but
composed, almost exclusively of the stuff that nightmares are
made of, together with a strong dash of oriental legerdemain.
Through a thousand different channels current
politico-economic belief is dominated by the base communistic
caballa of the ‘man of many sorrows’; yet as a practical
theorem, it is hardly ever critically examined. Why is it that the
suggested social solutions promulgated by Jesus, Peter, Paul,
James and other Asiatic cataleptics are accepted so meekly by
us, upon trust? If these men were anything, they were crude
socialist reformers with mis-shapen souls, preachers of ‘a new
heaven and a new earth’, that is to say, demagogues –
politician-of-the-slums; and out of the slums, nothing that is
noble can ever be born.
As agitators, Jesus and his modern continuators shall
be exclusively considered in these pages. However, it must be
distinctly understood, that the spiritual and temporal in all
cosmogonies are so intricately interwoven that it is almost
impossible to completely divorce them. Like the Siamese
twins, Gods and Governments are inextricably bound together;
so much so indeed, that if you kill one, the other cannot live,
Hence the open or secret alliance that has always existed
between the politician and the priest.
Whatever their primitive purity (or impurity), all
operative creedal philosophies are essentially civil and military
codes, police regulations. ‘Religion is a power, a political
engine, and if there was no God, I would have to invent one’,
said the great Napoleon. In letter and in spirit, Christianity is
above all things a political theory, and a theory that often takes
the form of raging hysterics.
Religions are the matrix in which public institutions
are generally molded. This has ever been well understood by
the dominant leaders of mankind, from Numa to Brigham
Young, from Solon to Loyola, from Constantine to the lowest
Levite hireling, who gets paid in dimes and cents for his
unctuous mock – ditthyrambs.
‘All ye are brethren.’
Are all men really brethren? – Negro and Indian,
Blackfellow, Kalmuck and Coolie – the well-born and the basebred,*
– beer-soaked loafer and hero-hearted, patriot-belted
chieftain and ignoble mechanic-slave, – pot of iron and pot of
clay?
What proof is there that the brotherhood-of-man
hypothesis is in accordance with nature? On what trustworthy
biologic, historic or other evidence does it rest? If it is natural,
then rivalry, competition and strife are unnatural. (And it is
proposed to prove in this book, that strife, competition, rivalry
and the wholesale destruction of feeble types of men is not only
natural, but highly necessary.) Has ‘brotherhood’ ever been
tried upon earth? Where, when and with what final result? Is
not self-assertion nobler, grander, and more truly heroic than
self-denial? Is not self-abasement but another term for
voluntary vassalage, voluntary burden-bearing?
Christ might well and truthfully have said unto his
followers, ‘Come unto me all ye that are weary and heavy laden
and I will bind you in unbreakable bonds, and load you down
like an ass between two burdens.’
The ‘poor and ignorant’ were his first followers – the
vagrants, the disinherited shiftless classes; and to this very day,
the poorer and more ignorant men and women are, the more
eager are they to follow his religious ideals, or the political
millenialisms that are distilled out of his delusions.
‘If we only lived as Christ lived, what a beautiful
world this would be,’ saith all thoughtless ones. If we lived as
Christ lived, there would be none of us left to live. He begat no
children; he labored not for his bread; he possessed neither
house nor home; he merely talked. Consequently he must have
existed on charity or have stolen bread.
* These terms are used in the strictest Darwinian sense.
‘If we all lived like Christ’, would there have been anyone left
to labor, to be begged from, to be stolen from? ‘If we all lived
like Christ’ is, thus, a self-evident absurdity.
No wonder that it is recorded: ‘Not many wise after
the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called; but God
chose the foolish things of the world, and God chose the weak
things of the world, and the things that are despised.’ Nothing
else would have anything to do with him. Christ was indeed,
the prophet of the credulous rabble during three years of active
agitation, and it abandoned him in his hour of need (what
always happens under similar circumstances,) for the rabble is
ever cowardly, ungenerous, suspicious, unfathomable base. It
has never yet had a leader of commanding ability (either in
peace or in war), that it did not ultimately desert or betray, i.e.
if he did not take the precaution to make himself its master.
After permitting Christ to be butchered, the mob
thereupon set him up as their Divinity and erected altars to his
renown. Slaves, women, madmen, lepers, magdalenes were the
earliest Christians, and to this hour, women, children, slaves
and lunatics are the raw material of the Christian Church.
Primitive Christianity cunningly appealed to the
imagination of a world of superstitious slaves (eager for some
mode of escape that meant not the giving and receiving of
battle-strokes). It organized them for the overthrow of Heroic
Principles; and substituted for a genuine nobility based on
battle-selection, a crafty theocracy founded upon priest-craft,
hell-craft, alms-giving, politicalisms and all that is impure and
subterranean. It is a doctrine at the disgraceful in its
antecedents, its teachers and in itself. Truly has it been called
‘the fatal dower of Constantine’, for it has suffocated or is
suffocating the seeds of Heroism.
Both ancient and modern Christianism and all that has
its root therein is the negation of everything grand, noble,
generous, heroic, and the glorification of everything feeble,
atrocious, dishonorable, dastardly. The cross is now, and ever
has been, an escutcheon of shame. It represent a gallows and a
Semite slave swinging thereon. For two thousand years it has
absolutely overturned human reason, overthrown common
sense, infected the world with madness, submissiveness,
degeneracy.
Truly, there is a way which seemeth right unto a
people, but the ends thereof are the ways of death.
Sound the loud timbrel,
O’er lands and o’er waves;
The Israelite triumphs!
The nations are – graves
Is the Golden Rule a rational rule? – Is it not rather a
menial rule – a coward rule – a best-policy rule? Why is it
‘right’ for one man to do unto others as he would have others
do to him and, what is right? If ‘others’ are unable to injure him
or ‘do good’ to him, why should he consider them at all? Why
should he take any more notice of them than of so many
worms? If they are endeavoring to injure him and able to do it,
why should he refrain from returning the compliment? Should
he not combat them, does not that give them carte-blanche to
injure and destroy him? May it not be ‘doing good’ to others,
to war against them, to annihilate them? May it not, also, be
‘good’ for them to war against others? (Again, what is ‘good’?)
Is it reasonable to ask preying animals to do unto
others as they would be done by? If they acted accordingly,
would they, could they survive? If some only accepted the
Golden Rule as their guiding moral maxim, would they not
become a prey to those who refused to abide thereby?
Upon what reasonable and abiding sanction does this
‘Rule’ rest? – Has it ever been in actual operation among men?
– Can it ever be successfully practiced on earth – or anywhere
else? – Did Jesus Christ practice it himself upon all occasions?
– Did his apostles, his ‘sons of thunder’ practice it? – Did Peter
the boaster do so when he ‘denied Him’ for fear of arrest at the
camp-fire? Did Judas the financier when he sold him for net
cash? Also, how many of his modern lip servants actually
practice it in their daily business intercourse with each other.
How many?
These questions require no formal answering.
They answer themselves in the asking. And here it must be
remembered that the best test of a witness is cross-examination.
‘Do unto others as you would have others do to you.’ No baser
precept ever fell from the lips of a feeble Jew.
It is from alleged moralisms of this sort and fabulous
‘principles’ that our mob orators, our communards, revivalists,
anarchists, red republicans, democrats and other mobworshippers
in general derive the infernal inspiration that they
are perpetually hissing forth. Even the subversive pyrotechnic
watchword of their mephisto-millennium are to be found in the
‘holy gospels’. Is it not written, ‘and God sendeth angels to
destroy the people’? – Behold! These men are the ‘angels’ that
He sends: politicians and reformers!
‘Love one another’ you say is the supreme law, but
what power made it so? Upon what rational authority does the
Gospel of Love rest? Is it even possible of practice, and what
would result from its universal application to active affairs?
Why should I not hate mine enemies, and hunt them down like
the wild beasts that they are? Again I ask, why? If I ‘love’
them does that not place me at their mercy? Is it natural for
enemies to ‘do good’ unto each other, and what is ‘good’? Can
the torn and bloody victim ‘love’ the blood-splashed jaws that
rend it limb from limb? Are we not all predatory animals by
instinct? If humans ceased wholly from preying upon each
other, could they continue to exist?
‘Love your enemies and do good to them that hate you
and despitefully use you’ is the despicable philosophy of the
spaniel that rolls upon its back when kicked. Obey it, O!
Reader and you and all your posterity to the tenth generation
shall be irretrievably and literally damned. They shall be
hewers of wood and carriers of water, degenerates, Gibeonites.
But hate your enemies with a whole heart, and if a man smite
you on one cheek, smash him down; smite him hip and thigh,
for self-preservation is the highest law.
He who turns the ‘other cheek’ is a cowardly dog–a Christian dog.
Give blow for blow, scorn for scorn, doom for doom,
with compound interest liberally added thereunto. Eye for eye,
tooth for tooth, aye four-fold, a hundred-fold. Make yourself a
Terror to. your adversary, and when he goeth his way, he will
possess much additional wisdom to ruminate over. Thus shall
you make yourself respected in all the walks of life, and your
spirit – your immortal spirit – shall live, not in an intangible
paradise, but in the brains and thews of your aggressive and
unconquerable sons. After all, the true proof of manhood is a
splendid progeny; and it is a scientific axiom that the timid
animal transmits timidity to its descendants.
If men lived ‘like brothers’ and had no powerful
enemies (neighbors) to contend with and surpass, they would
rapidly lose all their best qualities; like certain oceanic birds
that lose the use of their wings, because they do not have to fly
from pursuing beasts of prey.
If all men had treated each other with brotherly love
since the beginning, what would have been the result now? If
there had been no wars, no rivalry, no competition, no kingship,
no slavery, no survival of the Toughest, no racial
extermination, truly what a festering ‘hell fenced in’ this old
globe would be?
Reverend Ferdinand M. Sprague of Chicago, (who
may be taken as a common specimen of the priest-politician),
in a little pamphlet lately published, entitled ‘The Laws of
Social Evolution’, writes thus: –
“The sheet anchor of Socialism according to its ablest exponents, is the Holy Christian religion. Its motto founded on the precept ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ is –‘each for all, and all for each.’
Its working principle for the present is altruism.” *
Nearly all the canonized ‘Fathers’ of the early Roman
propaganda (most of whom, by the way, were slaves, freedmen
or – eunuchs) advocated similar Ideals. Even now, the anointed
and sanctified head of the Catholic Church resurrects the same
hoary old utopianism, in a Jesuitic encyclical addressed to his
flock. (How suggestive of being shorn and skinned, is that
word ‘flock’.)
Again, the Epistle of James who is known to have
been Christ’s full brother killed by a special policeman’s club
in a street riot, has been reprinted and widely circulated by
Socialists in order to so broadcast their illogical theories of a
universal brotherhood, founded upon enforced labor,
regimentation of the herd and majority votes.
Many modern cities are, also, infested with plausible
epileptoid priestlings of unreason, like Dr. McGlynn, Professor
Bemis, Hugh Price Hughes, W. T. Stead, Myron Reed and
Professor Herron of California. All these men are unrivalled
masters in the art of persuasive declamation. They accept the
New Testament as their text book and preach therefrom to
morbid multitudes the actrocious and shallow gospel of equal
rights, equal liberty, equal brotherhood, as the veritable omnific
word, the newly discovered emancipating protocol of the
Crucified (yet all-mighty) Don Quixote, the Saviour, God of
Asia Minor, he who was born in a cattle-shed and died on a
gallows.
A God begging his bread from door to door! – A God
without a place to lay his head! – A God spiked to two pieces
of crossed scantling! – A God stabbed to death by a hired
officer! – A God executed by order of a stipendary magistrate!
* The ethics of socialism are identical with teachings of Christianity. -Encyclopedia
Brittanica
What an insane idea. Is it an idea or rather a wasting cranial
disease? Talk about ‘the heathen in his blindness’ and
superstitious madness in past ages! Why it is as childplay to
the hysteric Idolatry of today, the deification of a Jew. The
‘Divine Democrat’ was executed upon a government gibbet,
because the Rulers of Imperial Rome were more powerful men
than he was. His strength and that of his followers was not
equal to theirs.
He died an abysmal failure, – a Redeemer who did not
redeem, – a Saviour who did not save, – a Messiah whipped
like a calf, – a slave agitator deservedly destroyed for preaching
a Falsehood, the monstrous gospel of Love, Brotherhood,
Equality.
Even from the spiritual point of view, there is nothing
whatever in his life or its after effects to show that ‘The pale
man upon the cross,’ when he moaned and wept so bitterly,
‘beheld any further down the Void than those who gathered
round to see him die.’
Of what use was that ‘pale dreamer’ to the iron
conditions that existed in the conquered and garrisoned
Fortress of Jerusalem? For once the city mob were on the right
trail, when they petitioned for the release of Bar Abbas, rather
than the supple singer of a ‘Sweet bye and bye.’ Bar Abbas is
described in the ‘Scriptures’ as a petty thief. He was really an
armed insurgent leader, the slayer of Roman tax-gatherers, a
guerrilla chief (like Rob Roy, Robin Hood, William Wallace,
William Tell) who levied toll upon opulent Hebrews for
patriotic purposes.
Had I been there that day, I, also, would have joined in
the demand: – ‘Release Bar Abbas unto us.’ – Better one Bar
Abbas than a thousand Christs.
Alas! Alas! O Gallilean! Thou art neither the Way,
the Truth nor the Light!
Reverting, however, to Chicago’s reverend Utopia
constructor, thus waileth he with cajoling crudity: “The laws
of social evolution, far from being the blind, barbarous and
brutal struggle for organic existence, consists in the physical,
intellectual and moral well-being of ALL the members of
society, so constituted that the politico-ethical principles of
Liberty, Equality and Fraternity shall have the largest possible
realization throughout the social organism. The main features
of the condition of progress are christian churches, christian
schools, christian governments, christian ethics and
economics.”
Another secuctive but most malignant State Socialist
(Henry George) roundly proclaims that “The salvation of
society, the hope of the free and full development of Humanity
is in the gospel of brotherhood, the gospel of Christ!” and there
upon he proposes to make politicians the national rent-tax
collectors, Administrators of everything in general and allround
Distributors of State Pensions to ‘the poor and needy’.
Has not mankind had sufficient experience of what politicians
are? Those black-hearted, creeping thieves and frauds. Their
sting is deadlier than the bite of a cobra, and in the breath of
their mouth there is – Death. Curses be upon ye, O ye
Politicians! And upon all who advocate increasing your
prerogatives!
Presidential candidates, from Jefferson, to Lincoln,
(also, their apish imitators) have generally indulged in equally
shallow rhodomontade, because it means votes, and for votes,
office-seekers would dress up in glowing language and ray
forth any devilish deception.
For two thousand years these effeminate superlatives
have been trumpeted to the remotest corner of every Christian
land, and yet (while enervating the morale of people), they
have dismally failed to inaugurate the much foretold Earthly
Paradise. They were preached by bare-foot monks at the
inauguration of the Dark Ages, in order that those saintly lovers
of the common people might creep into the administration of
cooperative wealth and power. Now, the same general ideas
are revived and dressed up (this time in politico-economic
garb) by the eloquent agitator, in order that he may rule and
plunder in the future, through the agency of the State; just as
the priest once ruled and plundered through the equally
rapacious agency of the Church.
When the Church triumphed the Dark Ages began,
and when it is finally rooted out (together with all its social
antennae) the Heroic Age dawns once more. True heroes shall
be born again as of old, for our women may yet be something
more than rickety perambulating dolls and drug-stores in
spectacles.
The ‘Church’ is the idol of the priestly parasite. The
‘State’ is the idol of the political parasite. Beware, O, America!
that in escaping from the holy trickery of the monk, you fall not
an easy prey to ‘the loving kindness’ of the politician. Even if
the ‘reformer’ succeeds in re-establishing upon majority-votes,
the dark tyranny of the ‘greatest number’, we have this
consolation to fall back upon, such organization must
ultimately tumble down of its own weight, and then re-divide
up into warring fragments. Nothing that is unnatural can last for
long.
The Universal Church is no more; all we see of it now
is jealous remnants. And the Universal State, the Social
Democracy, the Economic Republic, the Brotherhood of Man,
should they take practical form, are pre-ordained to similar
failure. All they could do, would be to postpone the operation
of the survival of the fittest – drugging nations in temporary
sedatives.
No matter how eagerly madmen may try to do it, there
is no known process whereby they can jump out of their own
skins. Christian or socialist churches, paternlisms, schools,
governments, administrations, ethics and moralisms (even if
genuinely Christian and Fraternal) would be wholly impotent
to change the natural course of things and, therefore, powerless
to command the survival of mental and physical cripples, even
although those cripples were as canonized saints for
‘goodness’, and as the sands of the seashore for number.
Shrieking sentimentalism is indeed a feeble lever wherewith to
overturn the immutable order of the Universe. It cannot do it.
No! Not if it were whooped till the crack of doom! Not even
if it had a Lamb of God in every city, ready to be butchered
each Friday afternoon in order to make a Christian Holiday.
‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’, those three great lights
of Modern Democracies are three colossal Falsehoods, –
ignoble slave-shibboleths; impossible of actualization, even if
proclaimed by some superhuman Satan, followed by armed
hosts of un-killable demons, all armed to the teeth with flaming
swords, Greek-fire and dynamite cannon.
You may trace Equality in letters of silver on tablets of
burnished gold, but without engineering a perpetual miracle,
you can not make it – true.
You may write Fraternity in blazing diamonds on
walls of enduring granite, but without reversing the mechanism
of the Universe, you cannot make it a fact.
And, though you enscroll Freedom on countless
sheepskins and rivet Statues of Liberty on every harbor-rock,
yet with ‘all the king’s horses and all the king’s men’ one being
born to be a hireling and a subordinate, No Power can free.
Can you build up a marble palace with mud and slime,
O! Ye drivelling bedlamites? Can you raise up a conqueror
from the dunghill, or make the stupid great? Can you
manufacture heros out of hogs, O! Ye snuffling ‘Educated’
swine?
“We can! We can! We Can!” shrieketh the raging
rhetoricians of the market place and the editorial mill. “We can!
We can!” bellows the herd, as it stupidly pours through the sliprails
to the pithing pen. “Yes, O! Yes! With the love of Jesus
and our collection plate,” whines the soft-skinned preacher as
he turns over the sybiline leaves of his Black-Art. “Of a
certainty, we can,” hisseth the plastic politician, the rattlesnake!
The hungry basilisk! Whose lawmaking is more blighting than
the breath of a simoom.
Thereupon, toward you, O! America! They, one and
38
all, point the finger of pride! Towards you!
America! Where the politicians rage and the people
imagine vain things! And the dogs in the alleys are baying at
the moon!
Then, turn I away! Sadly! Sadly! Sadly! And I brush
against a slave in copper-rivetted overalls, hurrying to his mill,
and against another in gold chain and silken hat, hasting to his
money-changing– and a lean woman in sordid rags, with a pile
o lumber balanced upon her crown; and a splendid harlot in
diamonds and brilliant plumage, rideth slowly by.
And the cattle in the slaughter yard are lowing for
their hay; and a draught mare, with a galled shoulder, lieth
swollen and dead on the frozen paving blocks. How nauseous
it all is?
Loathsome! Loathsome! O, how loathsome?
Man is part and parcel of the animal kingdom and
(notwithstanding Jefferson, Franklin and Lincoln – Karl Marx,
LaSalle, and Liebknecht – Christ, Robespierre and Rousseau –
Hyndman, Tennyson and Mazzini – Dr. Adler, Bebel, George
and Isaiah – Bellamy, Gronlund and W. T. Stead) he cannot
escape from the draconic ordinances that despotically govern
that kingdom and environ his being like an atmosphere on
every side.
Altruism, meek and lowly self-abnegation, upon any
extended scale is among predatory organisms (and all
organisms are predatory) impossible of practice on pain of
wholesale felo-de-se.
Every man is under an obligation to fight and bear his
own burden. If he cannot do so, others cannot do his fighting
or his burden-bearing and their own at the same time with
reasonable safety to themselves. He, therefore, who finds it
impossible to carry his own burden, had better sink down and
die in his tracks than impose an additional load upon the
shoulders of his kind-hearted fellow strugglers. For then, they
would be overloaded and consequently unable to fight
successfully; so ALL might perish together.
Practical fraternal sympathy (upon any universal
scale) has always had in the end a most destructive effect upon
the internal structure of communities. Men will always love
and cherish those that are near and dear to them; but when it is
proposed to extend the circle of their ‘near and dear ones’ to all
mankind, that is going rather too far. Indeed, all must perish
ignominiously if that foolish idea prevails. ‘ALL’ are, even
now, enervating themselves, undermining their strength, by
futile overexertion in that very direction. They are straining
themselves to death by endeavoring to carry an impossible
load. The majority of men are born far too weak constitutionally
for their conditions; and the few who do possess the
necessary stamina and grit will have quite enough to do in
proving by deeds their fitness to survive, propagate and
possess. Many are projected – few are selected.
Yet altruism, wholesale self-renunciation – wholesale
burden-bearing, for the sake of ‘Outraged and Suffering
Humanity, is the maddening basis upon which ‘our good Lord
Jesus’, and his demented imitators have erected their sporadic
sociology – their Magnificent Satanism.
Does not simple business acumen whisper to us that
every man’s chief occupation upon earth is to sustain himself.
‘I mean subsist at any cost; you shall want ere I shall, business
is business.’ If men had sufficient personal initiative to think
along these stern lines, there would be little use on earth for the
theologian and ‘the reformer’; whose twin Mephistos who find
their renown and grandeur in the abasement of mankind. The
battle of life would then be so grim, terrible and realistic; (so
Trojan in fact) that those holy dissimulators and crafty
deceivers would rapidly die off or be eaten off; for in the clash
of naked interests, the Best and Bravest only cold possibly
survive; and no one would ever dream of including them
among the Best or Bravest.
Count Leo Tolstoi, undoubtably the ablest modern
expounder of primitive Christliness, in a much translated
volume, entitled: “Work While Ye Have Light”, writes this;
“Our Faith tells us hat bliss is to be found, not in resistance, but
in submission; not in riches, but in giving everything away;…
we have not quite succeeded in casting off every habit of
violence and property.”
To the most inept understanding, could any
proposition be placed in a clearer light? Is it not as simple as
‘rolling off a log’, that the individual who even attempts to
become a true and honest Christian must become like unto a
tame sheep? What a sublime ideal? How heroic?
The bliss of a sheep! How superlatively delightful?
How divinely glorious? And a Jew as the Good Shepherd, who
leadeth his lambs “to green pastures, and quiet resting places,
the pleasant waters by”. For two thousand years or so, his
fleecy flocks have been fattening themselves up with
commendable diligence for the shearing-shed and the butchersblock.
Let any nation throw away all ‘habits of violence’, and
before long it must cease to exist as a nation. It will be laid
under tribute; it will become a province, a satrapy. It will be
taxed and looted in a thousand different ways.
Let any man abandon all property, also, all overt
resistance to aggression and behold, the first sun will scarcely
have sunk down in the west before he is a bondservant, a
tributary, a beggar – or a corpse.
Property is necessary to the complete and free
development of personality and, therefore, human animals
should somehow obtain a full and fair proportion thereof at any
cost – or perish in the attempt; for he who cannot possess
himself of property is much better buried out of sight. Our
cities are literally honeycombed with treasure caverns, heaped
up with gold, title-deeds, silver and instruments of credit; our
valleys and our mountains are actually bubbly with wealth
untold; and yet, poor miserable ‘servants of Christ’ pass idly
by. Men, they call themselves! I call them castrates.
If Tolstoi’s obsequious principles are derived from the
Sermon on the Mount, then who can deny but that the sermon
on the Mount is a sermon unto decay and slavery? If they are
derived from the Golden Rule and if the Golden Rule is the
word of God, then can it be doubted that the word of God is the
word of Fraud? There is far too much of this ghastly ‘goodness’
in the nation, far and away too much. It is time men who can
think began to emancipate themselves and consider the fact
that: –Morals, laws and decalogues were made by liars, thieves
and rogues.
All good citizens, however, are hereby warned and
solemnly advised, not to smash-up the Ten Commandments –
not to burn up the Golden Rule – not to break up the Moral Law
– for that would be terribly wicked! Terribly! On the other
hand they must obey all Law implicitly (no matter how it
originated) and be sure (above everything) to order themselves
lowly and reverently before executive officers of the Law even
if in doing so, they are deprived of their Property and their
Liberty forever. Obedience, you see, is of God ‘who so loveth
the world’, but Disobedience is horrible and of the Devil, and
the Devil is a frightful rascal, who has not the slightest respect
for anybody or anything; not event the American Constitution.
Let us curse the Devil then and obey – the Law.
Liberty is honestly definable, as a state of complete
bodily and mental self-mastership (which includeth the
possession of property; also defensive weapons) and thoroughgoing
Independence from all official coercion or restraint.
Liberty in the conventional sense is a miserable Lie.
To be independent is synonymous with proprietorship.
To be property-less and unarmed is the condition of actual
dependence and servitude. Unarmed citizens are always
enslaved citizens, always. Liberty without Property is a myth,
a nursery tale, believable only by babbling babies and ‘foolsof-
the-forest’ – fools the city, also. “Liberty Regulated by
Law” is, in practice, tyranny of the darkest and foulest
description, because, so impersonal. There are numerous
worthy, reasonable and practical methods whereby individual
tyrants may be removed; but a tyranny ‘regulated by Law’ is
only removable by one method – the sword in the hands of men
who are not afraid to use it, or to have it used against them.
That is to say – the Sword in the hands of the Strongest.
During the whole course of human history, there is not
upon record, one authentic instance wherein a subjugated
people has ever regained property-holding Liberty, without first
butchering its tyrants (or its tyrants armed slaves in battle),
thereafter confiscating to its own use the lands and realized
property that previously had been in the possession of its
defeated foes and masters. This statement is made with cool
deliberation and aforethought. Let it be disproved by any one
creditable example to the contrary, and the Author is prepared
to forfeit 50,000 ounces of pure gold and enough ‘dimes and
dollars’ to erect in Chicago a bronze statue of ‘Our Blessed
Redeemer’ (crown of thorns and all) 100 cubits higher than the
Masonic Temple. This offer is strictly bona-fide and shall
remain open till 1906, so that philosophers, editors, statesmen,
divines (and other accomplished liars) may have enough time to
blind themselves, wading through National Archives and the
putrid rubbish heaps that men call Public Libraries. Should
some or all of said Mutual Admiration Society maniac-geniuses
go blind, also deaf, dumb and silly: this wicked old world may
probably whoop with delight – should it happen to hear of the
fact.
During the three years of Christ Jesus’ peripatetic
trappings, he never said anything that had not been better said
a thousand times before, by Dervishes, Spellbinders and
Mahatmas. Neither did he do anything that had not previously
been better done, by the jugglers and wonder-workers of Egypt,
India and Assyria. Not a few of his ‘miracles’ are to this day,
part of the ordinary stock-in-trade of fortune telling gypsies,
third-class strolling players, and charlatans in general.
The very phrase that ‘He’ uses to sum-up and
memorize ‘His’ patent Cure-all, was undoubtedly stolen
(directly or indirectly) from Plato, the Rig Veda or Confucius.
The Golden Rule is not only a snare and a tangle, but it, also,
is a literary piracy.
‘He raised the dead,’ you indignantly protest. And
even supposing that he did, wherein is the positive advantage?
What is gained by restoring vitality to the decomposing corpse
of an animal that may be so easily duplicated – an animal that
is a positive nuisance, numerically. What is the ‘good’ of
breathing the ‘breath of life’ into an odorous winding-sheet-full
of maggots and mouldy bones? Are there not plenty of
animalculae on earth, without dragging them out of tombs?
(Especially are there not plenty of leprous Asiatics?) Death and
destruction are necessary to the health of this world and,
therefore, as natural and lovable as birth and life. Only priests
and born cowards moan and weep over dying. Brave men face
it with approving nonchalance.
“Come lovely and soothing Death, undulate around
the world. Serenely Arriving! Arriving! In the day, in the
night; to all, to each. Sooner or later, delicate Death.” *
He fed the hungry – but to what end, I say? Why
should a famishing multitude be fed by a god? And that too, in
a land said to be flowing with milk and honey! Would not such
a mob be far better dead? Would not Napoleon with his cosmic
‘whiff of grape-shot’ be just the right man for such an
occasion? From the harmonious nature of things, it is clear that
men were intended to feed themselves by their own personal
exertions or perish like dogs. He therefore, who ‘feeds the
hungry’, is really encouraging poltroonry (which includeth all
other crimes) for men who quietly starve within reach of
abounding plenty are – all poltroons.
‘He clothed the naked,’ you shriek; and why, it may be
asked, should ‘the naked’ be clothed – they being able bodied?
What right have they to broadcloth and fine linen? If men
possess not enough sense to clothe themselves -
(in a literal Weaving Mill of inexhaustible looms),
* Walt Whitman’s “ Ode to Death”
why should a ‘God’ – the son of a ghost, come down from
Cloudland (via a Jewess maiden’s womb) to robe such
groveling, miserable hounds in swaddling clothes made of
cotton or wool? ‘Clothing the naked’ is purely a business
affair.
Here, it may be suggested en-passant – is the wearing
of garments, in itself, a natural and necessary condition of adult
existence? It certainly does not render the ‘human form
divine’, more healthy or more beautiful to gaze upon (although,
it may prevent Tenderlings from perishing of cold). Was it
really intended that the man-animal ONLY, should wrap itself
up from birth to death in layer over layer of disease-breeding
rags? Was there not a secret vital strength in the wind and rain
and storms that whirled round our forefathers giant limbs and
shaggy brows? All ethnic legends tell us that our first parents
were most elegantly attired in glorious sunshine and gaudy
fresh air. Who ever saw a Cherub painted in pointed shoes,
pantaloons, cuffs, collars and overcoat; or a smirking angel in
bloomers, steel-ribbed corsets and a delicate little ‘O! Dear me!
How awfully awful!’ style? Clothing serves most effectively to
hide the abominable physical deformity of modern men and
women, just as superficial educationalisms serve to hide their
dwarfed minds. If they were so perambulate around in the
nude, even the street cars would bark at them out of sheer
terror. Indeed, they would be more hideous to the eye than the
stuffed scarecrow that adorns a relative’s harrowed field and at
which our old dog, “Danger”, generally barks himself into
hysterics over, whenever he gets off the chain.
What a horrible sight a crowd of free and independent
electors would be, all sitting in solemn conclave, sucking their
thumbs, absorbing political opiates and divine euthanasia? Just
think of it! (Even Carlyle the dyspeptic would faint at the
sight.) The very conception of such a saddening horror makes
one ill. It would be as if they all had just emerged from a tomb,
a tomb of wool and cotton and leather.
Physical distortion and mental malformation are the
direct result of two thousand years of bad-breeding; that is to
say, of Mongrelize, of Democracy, of Equality, of Moody and
Sankeyism. Christians, originating in the despairful and
fallacious philosophy of a Crucified Wanderer (suffering from
acute Morbus Sacer), is now developed into an organized and
world-wide conspiracy of Clerical, Political and Decedents
directed en-masse, with Jesuitic cunning against all the
primitive and Heroic Virtues.
Our clean-skinned ‘heathenish’ ancestors with all their
vital forces unimpaired were really the nobler type of animal.
We on the other hand, with our corrupt, irresolute, civilized
hearts, our trembling nerves, our fragile anemic constitutions
are actually the lower, the viler type –notwithstanding the
baseless optimism that courtly rhymers drivel into their “Heirs
of all the ages”, etc., etc.
No people can long retain hardihood and
independence, whose minds become submissive to a False
Ideal.
Blessed are the Strong for they shall possess the earth
Cursed are the Weak for they shall inherit the yoke. Blessed are
the Powerful for they shall be reverenced among men – Cursed
are the feeble for they shall be blotted out.
Blessed are the Bold for they shall be masters of the
world – Cursed are the Humble for they shall be trodden under
hoofs. Blessed are the Victorious for victory is the basis of
Right – Cursed are the Vanquished for they shall be vassals for
ever.
Blessed are the battle-blooded, Beauty shall smile
upon them – Cursed are the Poor-in-Spirit, they shall be spat
upon. Blessed are the Audacious for they have imbibed true
wisdom – Cursed are the Obedient for they shall breed
Creeplings.
Blessed are the iron handed, the unfit shall flee before
them – Cursed are the haters of battle, subjugation is their
portion. Blessed are the Death defiant, their days shall be long
in the land – Cursed are the feeble brained, for they shall perish
amidst plenty.
Blessed are destroyers of false hope, they are true
Messiahs – Cursed are the God-adorers, they shall be as shorn
sheep. Blessed are the Valiant, for they shall obtain great
treasure – Cursed are the believers in Good and Evil, for they
are frightened by shadows.
Blessed are they who believe in Nothing – never shall
it terrorize their minds – Cursed are the ‘lambs of God’, they
shall be bled ‘whiter than snow’. Blessed is the man who hath
powerful enemies, they shall make him a hero – Cursed is he
who “doeth good” unto others, he shall be despised.
Blessed the man whose foot is swift to serve a friend,
he is a friend indeed – Cursed are the organizers of Charities,
they are propagators of plagues. Blessed are the Wise and
Brave, for in the Struggle they shall win – Cursed are the unfit
for they shall be righteously exterminated.
Blessed are the sires of Noble Maidens, they are the
salt of the earth – Cursed the mothers of strumous Tenderlings,
for they shall be shamed. Blessed are the mighty-minded for
they shall ride the whirl-winds – Cursed are they who teach
Lies for Truth, and Truth for Lies, for they are abomination.
Blessed are the unmerciful, their posterity shall own
the world – Cursed are the pitiful for they shall receive no pity.
Blessed are the destroyers of idols, for they shall be feared by
tyrants – Cursed are the famous Wiselings, their seed shall
perish off the earth. Thrice cursed are the Vile for they shall
serve and suffer.
Contrast this with an orthodox Sermonette, one that is
repeated every seventh day in thousands of sacred sanctuaries
by consecrated black-robed clericals, who have been specially
trained from boyhood to weepfully, unctiously rehearse the
same with upturned eyes and skillful snuffle or in classic
diction, sounding, sonorous, nay! Sublime – as suits the
occasion.
Dearly Beloved Brethren!!!
Gawd answers all who kneel and pray, is a Trewth
accepted day by day. Behold! their bright and joyful lot,
who’ve faith in what Christ Jesus taught!
If you’ve empty pockets and tables bare, demand ye
not your natural share; that would be wrong; but, creep and sigh
and ‘you’ll go to heaven when you die’.
For the meek and humble who obey, there’s a happy
and far, far away; but a fearsome, fiery, brimstone pit, shall
melt their marrow, who won’t – submit.
If foemen smite you on one cheek, turn round the
other, tearful, meek; if perjured knaves your votes betray:
come ‘wicked sinners’, kneel and –pray.
If Hebrews fleece and flay your hide, heaven’s gates
for you, shall open wide; Christ your Shepherd, won’t lead
astray, O! Lambs of God! come bleat and pray.
If bruised and beaten, shorn and sold, you’re sure of
stalls in your Father’s fold; but – robbers rob, or rulers slay!
Hell roast your souls for ever and aye.
If elected persons invade your wealth, with bribes and
lies or deadly stealth, and threat your bones with a bannered
host: Christ is your refuge and the Holy Ghost.
You’ll triumph thus ‘in the dawning years’ hope on!
Toil on! In this vale of tears sing, “Rock of Ages cleft for me,
O! let me hide myself in thee.”
Jewish books are for the Jews,
And Jew Messiahs too.
But if you’re not of Jewish blood,
How can they be for you?
To make an Idol of a book,
Is poison for the brain;
A dying God upon a cross
Is reason gone insane.
Beware of all the Holy books
And all the creeds and schools,
And every law that man has made
And all the golden rules.
“Laws” and “Rules” imposed on you
From days of old renown,
Are not intended for your “good”
But for your crushing down.
Then dare to rend the chains that bind
And to yourself be true.
Dare to liberate your mind,
From all things, old and new.
Always think your own thought,
All other thoughts reject;
Learn to use your own brain
And boldly stand erect.
