What is often deemed as “Western civilization” or simply “the west”, whether consciously or subconsciously, carries a whole host of ontological implications that distinguish it phenomenologically from the character of all other types of civilizations in the world throughout history. It is important to note that this expression has perhaps only a very loose relationship to geography, and that the term has far more to do with specific modes of thought that were birthed out of a specific kind of consciousness that arose around a specific time and place in human history.
Before we speak of “Western civilization”, we should attempt to properly understand what “civilization” itself is. Civilization is a phenomenon that occurs when differing minds harmonize in a common consciousness to produce a “way of life” that is maintained through a social order. Social constructs, alternatively known as “natural constructs”, organically develop in order to maintain the social order in accordance with the harmonized consciousness that maintains a people who partake in the phenomenon of civilization. The social constructs that are generated in any given civilization are developed through interpretations and reinterpretations of stories, teachings, customs and traditions that are passed down from what we can describe as the “mythological originators”.
Whether we look to Jesus Christ and the Apostles as the mythological originators of Christian European Civilization or to George Washington and the so-called “Founding Fathers” as the mythological originators of American Civilization, we can observe ontological characteristics that are outgrowths of the thoughts and ideas taught and passed down by their respective originators. These thoughts and ideas are either explicitly stated as sacred or at the very least treated as sacred. As stated before, members of a given civilization will appeal to their respective mythological origins and originators in order to contribute to further civilizational development. This is to say that a member of a civilization will typically only interpret and reinterpret the sacred teachings of his mythological originators thereby revealing some type of respect for what he or she, at least in function, deems “sacred”.
While there have been many civilizations throughout human history all over the world, the two examples given above were chosen on purpose. To understand the ontological difference between Medieval Europe and the Atlanticist West, one must understand how American civilization was a total and utter rejection of Christian European civilization. This is to say that, despite all superficial claims of civilizational continuity, the liberalism of Humanism is antithetical to the orthodoxy of Christianity in virtually every category of importance. One should make no mistake, Humanism is a distinct religion with a theology that contradicts not only Christianity, but also the vast majority of the cultures and traditions of the ancient past. While Christianity is clear in distinguishing man as a fallen creation in need of God’s mercy, Humanism proclaims the superiority of man as the highest being, either explicitly or implicitly. It replaces the divine with the natural, God with man and mysticism with scholasticism. Divine revelation is discredited as “superstition” while human reason is elevated as the vehicle of enlightenment.
One can write lengthy books about the intricate theological, ontological and cosmological differences and contradictions between the doctrines of Humanism and the doctrines of Christianity, however, what has been given thus far will suffice for the purposes of this article. The modes of thought that have been propagated by liberal Humanist doctrines since the so-called “Enlightenment era” can be traced back to ancient Greece and even earlier civilizations in the east. What is important to note, however, is that such views were always held among a small minority in any given civilization in the ancient past. The vast majority of social orders were very traditionalist and adhered to some kind of platonist idealism. Most civilizations of the ancient past can thus be considered “anti-Humanist” and most certainly illiberal. Christianity was a religion that did not in the slightest differ in this aspect. St. Augustine once stated that:
“The identical thing that we now call the Christian religion existed among the ancients and has not been lacking from the beginnings of the human race until the coming of Christ in the flesh, from which moment on the true religion, which already existed, began to be called ‘Christian.’”
— St. Augustine, Retract I, xiii, 3
St. Augustine’s words here reveal the Christian religion to be a continuation of long established ancient traditions and concepts from the east. In fact, St. Augustine holds Christianity to be the ultimate fulfillment of all these ancient traditions so deeply rooted in platonist schools of thought. The usage of the term “platonist” as a descriptor here should in no way imply that Plato was the originator of these modes of thought (Confucius is another example). The term is strictly used as a reference to these specific modes of thought that actually are far older than Plato and that Plato himself was inspired by and was simply propagating further in his own time and place.
The gradual spread of the Christian religion on the continent of Europe, after the fall of the Roman Empire, gave way to what is often called the “Christian medieval ages”. Liberals today demonize this period as the “dark ages”, to contrast it against the renaissance and the enlightenment period which they hold in high esteem. Nevertheless, one should acknowledge that the medieval ages were in fact the height of Christian civilization in so far as a “Christian civilizational phenomenon” can be understood in Europe. If we define “western civilization” as a product of the enlightenment and associate its essential values and presuppositions with the religion of Humanism, then it is ontologically incoherent to call Medieval Europe “Western.“ One should either consider it a separate category altogether, or one should recognize St. Augustine’s claims as an admission that Medieval Europe was the fulfillment of eastern thought, thereby qualifying it as an Eastern civilization rather than a Western civilization.
During the European Medieval ages, one could find suppressed voices who attempted to undermine the Christian social order in Europe. These thinkers were often persecuted, not because of their own personal beliefs, but rather because they proclaimed doctrines which were recognized as existentially destructive. These “natural philosophers” would often go out of their way to lead the masses towards sacrilegious modes of thinking and living. These voices were the spiritual ancestors of today’s liberal humanists. Their challenges were largely of a rationalist nature and these were often accompanied by naturalistic arguments based on theological presuppositions contrary to those of the Christian religion. They were also more prominent in the geographically western churches than they were in the geographically eastern churches. In fact, their impact was becoming so great that the western church began to waiver and suffer a crisis.
In the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas is said to have helped rescue the church from this crisis with his philosophical writings that attempted to marry the mysticism of divine revelation with that of humanistic reason. It was his work that began to transition medieval christian civilization from a mystical christianity towards a more scholastic christianity. Towards the end of his life, St. Aquinas actually retracted his work after, what I believe, was a revelation to him to abandon it because he was making a mistake. On the feast of St. Nicholas [in 1273, Aquinas] was celebrating Mass when he received a revelation that so affected him that he wrote and dictated no more, leaving his great work the Summa Theologiae unfinished. To Brother Reginald’s (his secretary and friend) expostulations he replied:
“The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.” When later asked by Reginald to return to writing, Aquinas said, “I can write no more. I have seen things that make my writings like straw.”
— Herbert J. Thurston and Donald Attwater Revision of Alban Butler’s, Lives of The Saints
Aquinas passed away three months later while on his way to the ecumenical council of Lyons. Of course, most Catholics who are of a scholastic persuasion do not interpret this event in the manner that I do, for they hold Christian scholasticism as a positive achievement rather than a symptom of declining Christian spirituality. Before I speak further on this matter, I must make it clear that I do not personally view St. Aquinas in a bad light, but rather that I believe many scholastic oriented Catholics are making a mistake when they elevate his labors for the reasons that they do. I see great value in St. Thomas Aquinas's writings from the perspective of human philosophy, but for me, this value is completely divorced from my Christian faith. What I mean to say is that I value his works as a student of philosophy but not as a disciple of Christ. As a philosophical work, I hold St. Aquinas’s labors in high regard, but as a theological work, I consider his writings just as he himself did in the end, “writings like straw”.
It is my view that St. Aquinas and the western church in general gave too much credit to the arguments of these natural philosophers and that rather than attempting to marry divine revelation and human reason, the correct approach would have been to refute the theological presuppositions behind the elevation of human reason all together. If this had been done, the corruption of Christian spirituality from religious mysticism to religious scholasticism could have been avoided. What one may today call “Scientism” was thus allowed to further undermine Christianity as the western church was now put on the theological defensive against the steadily growing strength of Anti-Christian “liberal science”. The seeds for future liberal revolutions were now sown and all that was necessary to transition these forces from the theological realm to the political realm was an excuse to revolt. This excuse came in the 16th century with the Protestant Reformation.
Some Roman Catholics like to scapegoat Martin Luther as the principle cause of this great evil, however, this is simply overt reductionism. Martin Luther was certainly no natural philosopher. In this area of theology, he was still an ardent Catholic Christian. The natural philosophers actually rode the coattails of the Protestant Reformation and used Luther’s reformation as a springboard for their own liberal revolutions. They themselves were of course just as hostile to Luther as they were to the pope and it is inappropriate to exaggerate their association with Luther himself. It is therefore folly to equate liberal Humanist political revolutionaries and catholic Christian ecclesiastical reformers as a singular movement.
Using the controversies during the time of the protestant reformation as a pretext, the natural philosophers, now matured as “liberal Humanists” consisting of unitarians, deists, agnostics and even atheists, began to spread their revolutionary spirit into the political theater all in the deceptive name of “religious freedom”. The fruits of these labors yielded the English Revolution in 1642, the American Revolution in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789. The attitude known as “the white man’s burden” was a major characteristic of these new liberal humanist orders. Some claim that “the white man’s burden” is nothing else than the great commission that Christ gave to the Apostles; the order to go out into the world, spread the gospel message and make disciples of all nations. This, however, could not be further from the truth. While it is true that an often heretical Christianity was used as a means, the gospel message was never actually the true end of “the white man’s burden”. For the white man was not a Christian, but a Humanist. His burden was to spread the enlightened values of bourgeois liberty that were suddenly realized through Jewish and Anglo-Masonic revolutions. In this time, we can observe the slowly manifesting essence of what we can today understand as “Western civilization.”
The American Revolution of 1776 essentially established a new world order that was explicitly stated by the founding fathers to be distinct and contradictory to the “medieval barbarism” of Europe. These were the sentiments of many liberal humanist thinkers such as Thomas Paine who made his true feelings about Christianity clear in his 47 page pamphlet titled Common Sense. Mentioned earlier was the ever growing strength of Anti-Christian “liberal science” which was in fact nothing more than a manifestation of the cult of reason. On January 22, 1825, John Adams wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson making his sentiments perfectly clear. Adams wrote:
“The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudices, both ecclesiastical and temporal, which they can never get rid of. They are all infected with ... creeds, and confessions of faith. They all believe that the great Principle (God) which has produced this boundless universe ... came down to this little ball (the earth), to be spat upon by Jews. And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.”
— The Adams-Jefferson Letters
From here we can begin to understand why many traditionalists even fascists, all understood that the Masonic Anglo-American civilization of whiteness was the most Jewish.
“The British imperialists understand the old Jewish saying: "Only Jews are human beings, the rest are mere humanoid creatures" somewhat differently: "Only whites are human beings, the rest are mere humanoid creatures," narrowing the concept of the "white race" for some as applicable only to Europeans, and for some others only to themselves, the English: "Only Englishmen are human beings, the rest must serve the gentlemen!" In addition to the merchant navy and the English island war fleet. The age of the Great Jewish Preparation turns out to be at the same time the most English age of world history - the age of world trade, colonial conquest, imperialism and the development of maritime travel, the age of the navy. England becomes the mistress of the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, dreaming of dominating the Pacific, or Great Ocean, so that all the waters of our land, as well as the land and the air, eventually become part of her fiefdom - the fiefdom of world Jewry."
— Konstantin Rodzaevsky, Contemporary Judaisation of The World
Those who describe such classical liberals as “christian men” do so in great error. Humanism is a separate and adversarial religion against Christianity. The Americanism that was born out of liberal Humanism is an ontological foundation for a civilization that is antithetical to Medieval European civilization. The cosmology of Humanism is the basis of the “liberal science” that Adams spoke of in his letter to Jefferson. It is an outright rejection of Christian cosmology and in fact most other traditional cosmological views as well. The famous traditionalist thinker Julius Evola once stated:
“The Japanese are among the most traditional of cultures that still exist. If a lack of understanding exists between some Western cultures and the Japanese, the cause does not proceed so much from a difference of taxonomy but rather more so from the fact that the latter — the Western cultures — find themselves outside of Tradition, that is, they are the product of a ‘profane’ and anti-traditional spirit, a situation which puts them in opposition not only to Asian cultures, but also to every normal and higher culture in Europe’s own past.”
— Julius Evola, The Spiritual Bases of The Japanese Imperial Idea
The Japanese traditionalist Okakura Kakuzo, had similar beliefs to Evola regarding this phenomenon:
“The picture of Western glory is unfortunately false. Size alone does not constitute true greatness, and the enjoyment of luxury does not always result in refinement. The individuals who adhere to the fiction of the great machine that creates the so-called ‘modern civilization’ become the slaves of mechanical habit and are ruthlessly dominated by the monster they have created. In spite of the vaunted freedom of the West, true individuality is destroyed in the competition for wealth, happiness and contentment all of which are then sacrificed to an incessant craving for even more.”
— Okakura Kakuzo, The Awakening of Japan
“The unique blessing of unbroken sovereignty, the proud self-reliance of an unconquered race, and the insular isolation which protected ancestral ideas and instincts at the cost of expansion, made Japan the real repository of the trust of Asiatic thought and culture. Thus, Japan is a museum of Asiatic civilization; and yet more than a museum, because the singular Genii of the race leads it to dwell on all phases of the ideals of the past, in that spirit of living Adventism which welcomes the new form without losing the old essence.”
— Okakura Kakuzo, The Ideas of The East
Terms like “the west”, “western civilization”, “white supremacy” and “liberal values” are ontologically rooted in a Humanist essence. Medieval European civilization was not ontologically western. The ethnic peoples of Europe were not “white”, but Christian. Their values were not derived from liberal science, but from creeds and confessions of faith just as John Adams correctly pointed out. If we understand this in its fullness, we can conclude that the 21st century liberal hegemony known as the “Atlanticist West” is not the faithful successor of Medieval European civilization, but rather its adversarial usurper! We can rest assured that if we were to speak to a medieval European about what he thought of “western civilization” and the “white man’s burden”, he would describe it as nothing short of satanic. The following comparative list reveals to us why this is the case.
Understanding this difference is key to starting the journey of “revolting against the modern world”. One can not claim to be a traditionalist nor a true conservative until one has carefully assessed these ontological truths of civilizational being. Once this is done, one quickly learns how the pretentious promises of liberal Humanism fade away, and how quickly the great values of “tolerance” and “acceptance” are exposed as an absolute farce. Once modernism is properly defined and critiqued, such as this article hopes to do, one can only stand in awe as the diverse members of liberal Humanists put their differences aside and unite against you for daring to defy the great spirit of modernity. Austrian traditionalist thinker and philosopher Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddin put it like this:
"In the Middle Ages, people were born and baptized into the Church. But the Church was the corpus mysticum and it depended upon one's own free will whether one wanted to be a living or a dead member of the Mystical Body of Christ. The cry "traitor" was only raised against those who broke the solemn oath of allegiance, not those who chose to go ways different from their status of birth. The Connêtable Charles de Bourbon who served with Charles V, or Marshal Moritz of Saxony, the great general under Louis XV were hardly considered to be traitors. Soldiers picked out the countries they wanted to serve. Prospective monks chose their orders. There were no "traitors to the proletariat" or "traitors to democracy." Today we live in an age of increased predestination and decreased free will, where Calvin, Freud, Marx, Luther, Darwin, Dewey, and the host of racial biologists have laid down the inexorable laws of anthropological, religious, psychological, environmental, and sociological determinism with no hope for escape. We are merely exhorted to make a virtue out of necessity and to be loyal to our prison and prisoners. Every attempt from our side to escape the artificial shell or to use our dormant remainders of free will to destroy the chains is branded as treason and punished accordingly by State or Society or even by both."
— Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddin, The Menace of The Herd
The core pillar of the liberal hegemony of the Atlanticist West is how Liberalism leads to Legalism which later down the line leads to further Liberalism. In other words, classical liberalism leads to the evaporation of culture (which serves as a soft gentle glue that organically produces, maintains and spreads ethnic harmony). When culture is weakened and undermined enough, legalism is required to make up for the unnatural shift in the organic balance of the normal ontological state. This leads to the concept of “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” becoming a totally alien concept in the minds of the populace because their liberal concept of “rights” causes them to adopt an attitude of “I shall do it because I can.” This is what leads to a puritanical legalism in liberal society which may seem still attractive compared to what comes after that.
Within a few generations of liberals living under a puritanical liberal order, progressive liberalism rises to counter the puritanical legalism of the classical liberal and immediately all the former social norms that were enforced by hard law instead of soft culture, are now deemed “oppressive” and in need of elimination. Once this stage is reached, the classical liberal’s puritanical chains of restraint are broken and every classical liberal is revealed to be a progressive liberal all along! This rose up as the antithesis of Medieval European Christian Civilization, while the West has revealed itself to be a civilization of the anti-Christ since the very beginning.
“The West is not a continuation of European culture, but its replacement. European identity was hijacked, and the spirit which haunts modern Europe is an anti-European one. I love real Europe - Christian, Greco-Roman, Gothic Europe with its traditional spirit and heroic values. But I despised and rejected this liberal, bourgeois, degenerative, and politically correct pseudo-Europe which is losing its culture and identity before our very eyes.”
— Alexander Dugin, Europe vs The West
Brilliant. I have been waiting for someone to say exactly this. I am in fact anti-white, whiteness being understood in the correct light of the Faustian spirit, which had its seed in the classical world but only sprouted in the 1500s. The humanists revived the philosophies of Epicureanism and democracy, but drained all that remained good in these philosophies into a radical, distilled form of utilitarian materialism that is far more soulless than anything the Greeks could have conceived of.
I am sometimes afraid that I am the only person who sees the nature of the monster that we are fighting against, that we have only demoralized and deracinated liberal Christians and enlightenment-influenced neopagans, both compromised in key ways by the Faustian spirit that is severing Earth's connection to heaven, transforming the former into hell.
You have restored faith in me that Christendom is not dead yet.