The following is the unedited version of an exposé currently featured
in the 20th revised edition of Malleus
Maleficus' [title withheld] *** (see
below): If you wish to report intrusiveness, racism or inaccuracies, please email
MalleusMaleficus@aol.com To make a formal complaint under IPSO rules
please contact IPSO directly at ipso.co.uk .
O’Brien thought about
it for a moment longer, then shook his head and continued with a cold and
sustained deliberation. “Once favoured with nine lives and the persistent
powers of the luck of the devil, it is an undeniable historical fact that western Enlightenment is of Hellenistic origin and of Caucasian heritage.” Nor did the
supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon rest upon political causes. “The genius of
his megalopolitan intellect was denied to either the Asian or the African, albeit an assertion that contemporary society finds significant enough to explicitly reject in modern revisionary history. Of
course, they averred that he was an infliction from hell, God’s own curse and a
visitation of the devil. But the Soul
of the West was an idea of which no other
race or culture gave even the
merest hint, the idea of the tribute that power pays to reason. As indeed, Thucydides’ statement, that “the strong do
what they can and the weak suffer what they must,”[1] is no longer corroborated by the principles of an enlightened and megalopolitan world. In fact, it is impossible to do justice to this declining human genus without reaching the conclusion that it has brought into existence laws and rules of behaviour we now recognize as universal; liberties, not so much of Greeks, Romans or Englishmen as of all men; rights that are constituent elements of any other nation, race, or people, to whom the term 'civilized' can with justice be applied. Indeed, if it was his peculiar distinction to have
formulated an ethos which, today, covers almost the entire globe, Western man
has managed to impart to modern history not only his skill as a builder of
nations, but also his constitutional
flair for institutionalising that which is representative of a people’s liberty.”
But even without
invoking the much maligned sense of entitlement of the “white supremacists capitalist patriarchy” - and
their past history, O’Brien said, was part of the indictment against them - it
was nevertheless the case that they were the true upholders of the surpassing
human values, the purveyors of a finely-tuned hereditary sense of inquiry and
method, to say nothing of the pursuit of knowledge, ripping their fingers raw
clinging to razor-sharp holds halfway up the precipice. For at the heart of the
matter was their ever ceaseless and impatient sense of enquiry.
O’Brien turned himself fully towards me: “Curious but
austere, virtuous rather than religious, the soul of this race is heretical by
temperament and founded, like the original sin, upon a tendency towards the
forbidden. Entering deeply into the womb of the cosmos, the white man’s
intellectual drive is the truly Faustian legacy of this frail humanity - to say
nothing of his great, unconscious surge towards the infinite, the last creation
of Promethean religiousness. It is the price he pays for being a participator
rather than a mere observer.”
There was no trace of prejudice or chauvinism in his
manner. To the extent I was able to understand and detect, he possessed none of the misanthropy, cynicism, and hatred that
distinguishes the rise of the neo-fascist movements in one country after
another. Rather he delivered himself, in a flat, monochrome voice, as though
everything was self-evident, a sort of predetermined mechanism whose outcome
was long since known to him. Indeed,
I can’t remember a more dignified or inspired and rich tribute to something
that has gone, that is no longer and is essentially irretrievable, or
irreparable, like a shattered mirror.
“But these are irrelevant phenomena of no ultimate
significance,” he said, and I could feel myself dying inside, “it makes no
difference either way to the fact that the indigenous soul of the West is
fading and its slide into decline irreversible. Zero velocity, an object at
rest, Western man has lost the
initiative - which is his highest intellectual possession.” Far from having
given leave to Africa and the East, the West, today, was sleepwalking
into another dark age, standing, as it did, at the receiving end of the
intercontinental Vőlkerwanderung from
poor to rich countries that was
comparable in scale only to the great
resettlements of the classical past.
Nothing would turn the barbarian tide. As the Romans themselves found out, massive citizenship grants became an
inescapable cause of their own demise. Roman identity had always been plagued
by a sense of her own adulteration, and if the Babel of foreign tongues in her
public places, was bound to cause demographic apprehension as well as
considerable cosmopolitan pride – “then, Europe today, must assume the same swagger at her peril. It’s hard not to sympathise, Malleus, but what you are experiencing,
quite simply, is counter-colonisation. Your
people are about to become a subject race, absorbed into the bloodstream of the
world’s manifold rivers, a riven remnant, celebrating the only passion which
the highest form of civilization has been left to express: Remorse.”
“Thus the oppressor of the world became the most abject
servant of the most infamous slaves,” I said, quoting a Weimar classicist. There
was a sense of familiarity about Western
humble pie acts and an abject policy of kowtowing to revisionists.
Subjects, I knew, included the shame of third-world exploitation, racial
paranoia, the familiar sins of white discrimination, and post-colonial
stress-syndromes. The
aptitude for detached historical judgment had given way to government
apologies, lawsuits and compensation settlements. I was profoundly taken aback by the thought of
it
all. For abject contrition seemed to
me to have had the opposite effect. What it denoted in historical terms might
well be the rapid fading of a major anthropological tradition and its
veneration for evolutionary fitness. And the facts that underlie that line of
reasoning are well transparent. Clearly, the West has lost its nerve. The
psychological foundations of Western history have shifted from hubris to humility. A depressing combination
of deference and disingenuousness
is the ultimate linctus for
post-colonial guilt. But I had not the
capacity, then, to consider that without
reference to the hindsight that I have now. Nor did I disagree with O’Brien. It
just occurred to me that there was no future to anything that the descendants
of Athens and Rome might be allowed to remember with pride, but that instead we
had become the ultimate historical personification of the feeling of
shame.
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[1] Melian Dialogue
*** is available on Amazon. Malleus Maleficus is the anonymous author of an historiographic apology of the British Empire.
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