“Conservative” Historians Refuted

With every bit of resistance which we mount against this new world order, we know that the strong man is being bound (Matt. 12:29).  Resistance itself, then, is victory. But inasmuch as Hollywood may have propagandized Christian civilization into a morose state of self-loathing, the revisionist narratives which they have promulgated were not strictly of their own making, but the offspring of a Marxist-infiltrated academia, to which Digby Baltzell attests in his book, The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America (1964). Baltzell therein outlines how the American university system, along with all WASP country clubs and every other cloistered outpost of their power, was outright bought by wealthy, international bankers. These bankers then reformulated the agendas, staffing, and curricula of the institutions, with an aim to unseat the WASP establishment as the patricians of American society and to overthrow Christendom as a whole.

But, worthy as these matters are of our consideration, they are relatively divergent from this article. We focus on the section of our social structure upon which Hollywood, the press, and myriad lesser institutions largely rest – the academic realm. If Hollywood is the spear, academia is the trickster himself.

As much as historians are given the last word on the past (theirs is the craft of retrospect, after all), they also set the parameters of discussion in the present and thereby shape the future. In this sense, they are more than men of retrospect; they must eminently contextualize all parts of the human experience and enjoin all men to heed the lessons of the past, as interpreted through their perspectival lenses. But having foregone a biblical worldview, which is the only objective framework and underlying basis of coherence itself, these secular oracles are forever separated from the verifiability of their own subjects by Lessing’s ugly, broad ditch.¹  Though originally conceived as a critique of Christianity, Lessing’s ditch actually undercuts all views but Christianity. For it is indeed Christ alone who has crossed that ditch; aside from His finished work, none can truly confirm the reality of what lies beyond its far bank – or even if a far bank itself exists.

As our modern academicians distance themselves from the incarnate Christ as the essential underpinning of reality, they find themselves at ever greater variance with historians past, and just as significantly, even from their contemporaries – which is to say that the rejection of Christian orthodoxy has not cleared the path for any new consensus, only chaos. If that is confusing, not to worry: you will understand what I mean before the article’s end.

In what is clearly an exhibition match between renowned “conservative” historians Victor Davis Hanson and Jared Diamond, NPR tackles the subject of “Why the White Man Rules the World.”² Therein they rehash the theses of their respective books: Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Hanson’s Carnage and Culture. While Hanson argues that whites’ success has nothing to do with heritage, religion, or even ethics, but only with the culture that came out of ancient Greece, Diamond insists to the contrary that it is purely the accident of environment, and that without any influence by heritage, religion, or ethics. The two most conspicuous lessons to be taken away from this exchange are that both Hanson and Diamond agree that the white man’s dominion cannot in any way be attributed to his heritage, religion, or morality; and, second, that they agree on nothing else.

But another hailed “conservative” historian must also be mentioned here: Nial Ferguson, author of Empire: The Rise and Decline of the British World Order, has also weighed in on this subject, claiming that it is neither environment nor culture, as surmised by Hanson and Diamond, but the institutions of ancient Greece which established the white man’s dominion. And, like some forlorn youth pastor attempting to make “relevant” his message, he refers to the Occident’s impactful institutions as “killer apps.” These he outlines as competition, the scientific revolution, property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society (really?), and the work ethic. Though he borrows from the man’s work, he makes no apologies to the late Max Weber for dissociating the West’s work ethic from Protestantism, nor does he offer him any attribution. Oh, and he too states parenthetically, but most emphatically, that these “apps” have nothing whatsoever to do with heredity, religion, or ethics. Again, we see that the modern historians speak univocally in their denunciation of the traditional explanations of Western civilization. But they are at a loss to arrive at any consensus on any alternative to these dirty, antiquated ideas of folk and faith.

But Ferguson states in this interview, “A hundred years ago if you had asked the question, everyone would have said it was race.” In saying this, he is knowingly confessing to the pedestrian nature of his view in the context of the prevailing zeitgeist, as well as its heterodoxy in the scope of broader historical consensus. Liberals attest to this freely, so long as it suits their needs:

A new Social Science and a new common sense, grounded in the assumption of environmental causation, gradually came into their own in the course of the twentieth century: slowly at first, but with increasing momentum in each decade after 1880, a naturalistic, urban, environmental, egalitarian, collectivist, and eventually Democratic ethic finally undermined the Protestant, rural, hereditarian, opportunitarian, individualistic, and Republican ethic which rationalized the Natural Right of the old-stock business-gentleman’s rule in America between 1860 and 1929. What a rural Republican quite naturally blamed on heredity in the 1870’s was confidently blamed on environment by his urban and Democratic grandson in the 1930’s.³

Of course, as an urban Democrat himself, Baltzell is playing an apples-and-oranges sleight of hand here, contrasting the growing propositionalism of 1930s urban Democrats with the racial conservatism of 1870s rural Republicans. This is deceptive, because both parties in the 1870s, urban and rural, were generally of one mind on the matter of race. More than that, even rural Democrats in the time of Baltzell’s own writing tended to agree more with their Republican neighbors than with metropolitan Democrats (hence the segregationist Dixiecrats). They believed race was highly determinative of culture and civilization. Heredity, religion, and ethics were the essential pillars upon which Western civilization uncontestedly stood. In reality, the bipartisan consensus held Christianity and its resultant ethics, solidified and expressed in white Christendom, to be the very definition of civilization.

As a modern liberal, Baltzell carefully crafted that lopsided comparison to indict the paleoconservative wing of the Republican party in his own day, and to obscure the fact that even the urban Democrats once agreed with them. But none of this diminishes his acknowledgement that the paradigm of faith and folk is the monolithic orthodoxy throughout time, especially in the Christian era. Men of letters, and the general populace with them, affirmed the white race, the Christian religion, and the ethics which resulted from the union of these things, without reservation.

Hanson’s view that, divorced from blood and faith, Greek culture endowed European man with individualism, democracy, capitalism, and efficient infantry is laughable on the face of it. It leaves the crucial question unanswered — if not race, religion, or ethics, what inclined the ancient Greeks to these cultural apparatuses in the first place?  This is a bit like saying that the key to winning friends is a beautiful smile, but that it has no correlation to mouths or faces. Absurd, too, is his assertion that any people, no matter their background or makeup, can absorb our occidental features in exactly the same measure and to exactly the same effect. History emphatically and precisely proves the antithesis: I ask, have American blacks absorbed occidental culture? Have the Arabs in England assimilated into our civilization? If not, what impedes them? Have even the southeastern Asians (who do quite well academically and financially) in America taken up the mantle of Western culture? The answer in every case is no. They will not because they cannot. They have their own heroes, traditions, and customs.

Even the word “culture” itself belies the point, as its root, cult, means “religion” by definition. This necessary connection of culture to a certain cult underpinning it led Henry Van Til to famously state, “Culture is religion externalized.” And the term culture itself is the word used to refer to all areas of organic growth, such as agriculture, permaculture, bacterial culture, and others. Applied to humanity, culture is a sort of social ecology (in this case, Christianity) shared by related organic members. More than a string of glaring omissions, Hanson’s position is a willful distortion throughout. And, of course, none of that is to say that I think Hanson’s list of distinctive attributes are in fact the true bulwarks of Western culture. Democracy, for instance, is a complete aberration within the context of greater Western history.

And, though a step removed, Ferguson’s position buckles at all the same stress points as Hanson’s, because institutions cannot truly and fully be divorced from culture any more than culture is separate from the cultus or the people of the cultus.  This leaves Ferguson with the exact same eternal regression, definition, and common-sense problems as Hanson.  Both fall under the umbrella of a completely arbitrary Grecophile propositionalism which neither feel compelled to justify – because neither can.

But we of the Christian perspective can and always have accounted for the institutional and cultural hallmarks of Western civilization as being the result of a divinely orchestrated suffusion of true religion into the providentially prepared soil of a particular race: the philosopher-race of Japhethites were long since prophesied by father Noah to one day inherit the tents of Shem (Gen. 9:27), and when they were brought into the ambassadorial orbits of Israel, Jerusalem and Athens engaged in cross-pollination of law, ethics, and religion. Though Israel carried the holy Seed of the Messiah, God brought them under the sway of the Hellenes in equal parts, as punishment for Israel’s disobedience, and as preparation to pass the covenant from Shem to Japheth in the inauguration of the Anno Domini (A.D., the year of His dominion), upon which even the secular calendar pivots. Two centuries before Christ, during the period of God’s divorce of the Israelite nation (otherwise known as “the period of silence”), seventy Israelite elders, under the commission of Ptolemy II, translated the Hebrew Scripture into what became known as the Greek Septuagint. According to a prominent Christian view, this was the last act of divine inspiration under the old covenant until the coming of John the Baptist, and this text was given a divine certification by Christ Himself as He, His apostles, and the early Church used this text rather exclusively, preferring it even over the remaining Hebrew copies of their day.

The European emphasis of Christian missions, having been prophesied by Noah, Isaiah, and others, was thus born by the submersion of the narrative of salvation itself into a European context. Revelation had been translated into European terms and put on the European mind like a robe, which itself was prepared long beforehand for just this metaphysical assimilation. And upon this basis, the New Testament furthered the process by even weaving European philosophical terms throughout the gospels themselves; most notable, of course, is John’s employment of the term Logos as a title for the Christ, the implications of which are themselves staggering. Think on it: aside from the titles found in the old Hebrew texts, every term of reference Christendom has recognized as legitimate in speaking of the God of Scripture has been distinctly European in origin. Our most basic and common word “God” comes from the old German Gott. Our word “Lord” is carried down from the old English loverd, meaning “master of the house.” Almighty is of Norse origin, along with the related term alfather. When the hymn invokes the glory of the High King of Heaven, this is a title translated from the old Gaelic, which, by the nature of the title itself, declares God to be the king of all the Celtic clans. The Latin equivalent is deus (dios in Spanish) and the Greek equivalent is theos, from which we derive the word “theology”; but prior still, deus is believed to stem from tiu, which is taken to be the first word for God in the entirety of the Indo-European family of languages, and that dating from the Patriarchal age.

But whenever we have taken the histories and cultural contexts of other races into consideration, Christians have remained reticent to accept such appropriations from non-European sources. Allah is the common word by which the Arab peoples speak of deity. But we have always denied its applicability to the true God for obvious reasons, and to a lesser extent, likewise even with the abbreviated al. Baal simply means, “the lord,” but we reject it as well for its history. And when surveying the Africans’ varied terms for deity – so steeped in cannibalism, ritual sex, voodoo, and all of the most wicked associations – Christians rejected them as germane references to the true God also. Even the Hebrew invocation of hashem is deemed non-viable.

Far from arbitrary preference, the question of vernacular propriety concerning titles of the true God goes beyond the words themselves to the predestined affinities of the people back of them. As every good Calvinist knows, regeneration precedes faith in the order of salvation, which is to say that irresistible grace imperceptibly transforms our substance and our being prior to belief, assent, or any inkling of knowledge on the part of the one receiving it. So it is that we retrospectively perceive this regenerative process underway from the most remote times.

[T]he worship of the heroes took refuge with the fugitive Norwegians in Iceland, where were preserved the sacred books of the Edda, in which the purer natural religion, and even the first doctrine of the existence of one invisible God, are again recognizable, among the ingenious fables of the heroes. According to these books the most ancient god is Allfadur (Allfater, Father of all), the indivisible, and eternal Creator and Preserver, the Father of the universe and of the inferior gods, whom He will survive, and who will one day destroy both them and the present world, and create a new one in its stead. . . . [F]ate, the past, the present, and the future . . . are regarded as continually proceeding from Him; while the whole of nature’s creations, both gods and men, are regarded as merely temporary effluences from one great and supreme being.⁴

Therefore, we see great significance in the words of the viking poet on the brink of conversion:

All hail ye generations yet unborn
Than us far happier; ye shall one day drink
That cup of consolation, and behold
The torch of Truth illuminate the world,
Yet, do not us despise; for we have sought
With earnest zeal and unaverted eye,
To catch one ray of that ethereal light,
Alfader still is one, and still the same;
But many are His messengers divine.⁵

Menzel, along with the saga-men who preceded him, are important, if meager, contributors to the great company of writers past who have highlighted the elements of Patriarchal religion underlying Greco-Roman, Germanic, and Celtic myth.

In the Christian era St. Patrick used the shamrock to instruct people in the doctrine of the Trinity, and in earlier days the Druids used the oak for the same purpose. They sought a tree having two principle arms springing laterally from the upright stem, roughly in the form of a cross. Upon the right branch they cut the name Jesus, upon the middle or upright stem, Taranis; upon the left, Belenis; over this they cut the name of God — Thau [of the same previously mentioned Indo-European root whence we derive words such as “deus”(Latin), “dios” (Spanish) and “theos” (Greek)]. The Hebrew prophets, it will be noted, referred to their expected Messiah as ‘The Branch’. . . . The unity of the Godhead was the very soul and centre of Druidism, and this unity was a Trinity. . . . When Christianity preached Jesus as God Druidism had the most familiar name of its own Deity presented to it. . . . It is singular that the ancient Briton never changed the name of the God he and his forefathers worshipped, nor has he ever worshipped but one God . . . a perfect preparation for the reception of Christianity.⁶

Though Druidism was contrary to all other religions, the Druids embraced Christianity as the long-awaited culmination of their native religion. Druidism, as well as the Alfather-worship of the Germanics, taught a need of atonement for sin, expectation of the coming Messiah, and a literal resurrection of the body, all symbolized by the sign of the sunwheel, otherwise known as the Celtic cross. (And may it not be forgotten that it was the appearance of the cross on the face of the sun  – a sunwheel – which inspired Constantine’s dramatic conversion and made the phrase in hoc signo vinces the battle-cry of Christendom!) European paganism is found to have retained more true religion by the time of Christ’s coming than was even found in Judaism, as many Jews had cast off belief in an afterlife and blurred the distinction between themselves and God to the point where they imagined God to be a Jew and themselves gods.

I will not here delve into the types and shadows contained in the European pantheons, as such an endeavor would likely fill a book all on its own, but shall conclude this line of thought with an offer of one uncanny proof for the thesis:

The oldest records of the Germanic folk tell us that as far back as the people can account, since the times of Peleg, in whose day the earth was divided amongst the sons of men (Gen. 10:25), the doctrine of atonement was observed. Passed down from their titan fathers, the annual gathering of the Suevic confederation was called “the Day of Atonement.” Thereon they congregated in an edenic grove, selecting a large tree set apart from the rest to represent at once Ydrassil, the “the Life Tree,” and Oberichtsbaum, “the Tree of Judgement.” Under the boughs of this great tree, the council of the twelve reiks, an ancient order of both judges and priests, would adjudicate all matters of contention among the people, and between the people and Alfather God. Once all litigious matters among the people were concluded, the reiks offered sacrifice for the sins of the nation by the slaughter of a horse (representing a proxy sacrifice of God Himself), the body of which was nailed to the Oberichtsbaum, and the blood sprinkled upon the people with young boughs taken from the same tree. And after having been sprinkled by the blood of the sin offering, they were washed clean by water taken from a running stream. Some of the animal was burned as a fat offering, and some cooked for eating by the people.

Just as with the Celts, the similarities to biblical themes in Alfather-worship are beyond coincidence. Europeans were uniquely prepared for reception and ownership of the Christian Covenant in ways in which other races were not. Christians so thoroughly accepted this to be the case that use of the old terms for deity were retained and redeemed unto overtly Christian use. The apostles thus understood the dominion of Christ to “flash like lightning from the East and shine even unto the West” (Matt. 24:27), or, as medieval Christian cartography denoted, Ultima Thule: the furthest bounds of the West.

As Hillaire Belloc famously stated it, “The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith.”

But Jared Diamond must be examined somewhat apart from his fellows. Though all three men take what are essentially environmentally-based positions, Diamond’s is the most thoroughly materialist in orientation. And his book Guns, Germs, and Steel has been the most influential, due no doubt to the fact that it seems to most thoroughly exonerate failed societies of their shortcomings and portray the white man’s civilizational successes as serendipity, or a mere bumbling luck, by which good fortune the white race is effectively indebted to all others.

In his book, Professor Diamond relays a moving account of epiphany: while he is touring New Guinea, a native asks him why white men have so much “cargo” (possessions) while the New Guineans have so little.  It was this inquiry by a genuinely confused and simple native that set the cogs of Jared’s Western imagination spinning. After some period of consideration, he settled upon a conclusion. The ultimate reason, he says, for the discrepancy in “cargo” between New Guinean and white men is wheat.

Yes, you read that right.

He says that because the regions inhabited by the black race had no storable cereal grasses, such as wheat, indigenous to their lands, then blacks could never progress beyond the stone age. And, affirming the inverse corollary, he attributes the white man’s textiles, computers, aircraft, and all of his technological, legal, and social advancement to the presence of cereal grasses in old Europe.

But it becomes apparent that he only framed the above explanation in such a simplistic way as a means of abbreviating his more comprehensive theory for transmission to the primitive intellect of the New Guinean. Wheat is but a representation of a wider range of environmental supports which he says have uniquely, though quite accidentally, positioned the white race for advancement: he says that, unlike Europe, Africa had no domesticable animals. And when someone points out water buffalo, zebras, and elephants, he says those animals are far too surly for domestication; comparing an African water buffalo to a European bred ox or cow, the buffalo is a far meaner beast. But this ignores the fact that we Europeans actually bred our animals for temper to achieve their current dispositions. Our animals seem more domesticable because we domesticated them. (And never mind the fact that even our domestic bulls remain insufferably aggressive beasts!) The people of Pamplona, Spain, will attest to that. The same can be said for horses and many other such domestic breeds of the northerly climes.

None of this, however, stops Diamond from leveling exactly the same argument regarding the elephant — insisting that African elephants are not at all like the mild elephants of Asia, which have been domesticated and used as beasts of burden in agriculture and construction for millennia. No, he says, they have, like the cape buffalo, been programmed by their environment into irascible and untamable killing machines. He blithely omits any consideration of the fact that as soon as white men arrived in Africa, they did the impossible – domesticating elephants, using them as pack animals, and shipping them to Europe and America to be trained in circuses. Non-domesticable, indeed.

Take pause for a moment to reflect on just how absurd his central assumption is: he insists that natural evolution created intricately interlocking and varied ecosystems around the globe – temperature, animal life, plant life, seasons, and everything else, except people themselves, are unequal designer components. People, unlike the cape buffalo or the elephant, he says, are the only egalitarian set in the world, identical in aptitude, intelligence, and talents the world over. And the vastly different cultures, customs, languages, technology, law, and even appearance of the people are the result of the infinitely variegated environmental stimuli bearing upon a naturally non-differentiable and distinctionless humanity. That’s his theory. Really. “Nonsense” is too kind a word.

All of this aside, critique of these men’s respective shot-in-the-dark theses is not the primary focus of this piece. My central concern is not what they positively propose so much as what they have collectively rejected: since they have settled on no particular consensus between them to explain the white man’s dynamism and ascendance, only a consensus on what they reject — the traditional faith-and-folk conception of Western civilization — they have settled on no dogma of their own other than negation. Their orthodoxy is, then, nothing less than anti-Christianity.

More than heterodox, this new anti-orthodox orthodoxy condemns the entire catalogue of historians past, not only as incorrect, but as incorrect on a magnitude which demands we regard them all as evil. Oswald Spengler, Thomas Cahill, Arthur Kemp, G.A. Henty, Madison Grant, Hilaire Belloc, Leopold von Ranke, Sir James Ware, Heinrich Gotthard von Treitschke, Geoffrey Brunn, Thomas Macaulay, Thomas Carlyle, William Bradford, James Ussher, Raphael Holinshed, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Nennius, Gregory of Tours, Saxo Grammaticus, Adamnan, the Venerable Bede, Snorri Sturluson, Flavius Josephus, Eusebius, Plutarch, Herodotus, Suetonius,  Homer, and many, many others, all the way back to the prophet Moses, stand condemned by the new anti-orthodox orthodoxy.

This new anti-orthodoxy coincides with Fukayama’s work, The End of History, wherein he gloats that the globalism resulting from the cataclysms of World Wars I and II has universalized mankind, abolished the nations, and obliterated the factionalism of Christendom with it – all of which, the futurists allege, ushers in an eternal state of peace wherein everyone is right, all are equal, all are brothers without distinction, white Christians having no place. Talmudists, Jacobins, communists, New Agers, theosophists, monists, satanists, and Babelists of every denomination have have all long awaited just such a utopian age.

The age of boundaries is closing, and we are approaching a nobler era when nations shall be no more; when the lines of race and caste shall be wiped out; when the whole earth shall be under one order, one government, one administrative body.⁷

Dystopian as Fukayama’s vision of a New World Order is, he is proven correct in the sense that they who are regarded even as the preeminent “conservative” historians of our day are ostensibly proclaiming the abolition of history by their unanimous rejection of traditional historiography.

There is then no modern historical view, only an anathematized past. Historians in  their priestly functions represent mass man, whose only concord with his fellows is in the denunciation of the past, because history bears witness by the pillars of Western civilization – heredity, religion, and ethics – to the dominion of the Triune God. But there are those who yet remember that breed, creed, and deed are handmaids of Providence. All considerations of relative progress and regression presuppose a linear destination for history, a moral framework undergirding it, and an absolute Lawgiver over it all. The Christian doctrine of providence is the only true repository of meaning in the study of history.