Alfred, fourth and last son of his father King Athelwulf by his wife Osburh, was never supposed to be king and in fact may have originally been intended for the clergy. Beyond even these hurdles Alfred was sickly and struggled with some sort of gastrointestinal disease that caused him severe discomfort throughout his life. Despite this assortment of personal setbacks, England very well may have ceased to be England without his toil, tenacity, and sacrifice. Alfred’s two eldest brothers died after brief reigns, and in 865 his third eldest brother, Athelred, ascended the throne at the age of 18. Alfred was now suddenly second in line to the throne at the young age of 16. The very same year a joint invasion force of Vikings led by Ivar the Boneless, called the “Great Heathen Army”, invaded England.
England at this time was not in fact England, but a collection of minor kingdoms whose fortunes waxed and waned through the centuries. Wessex was Alfred’s kingdom found in the south of England, where the West Saxons settled. Athelred died in April of 871 after another defeat at the Battle of Merton in March, making Alfred king at the age of 22 and leader of the resistance against the Vikings. Alfred sued for peace and paid the Vikings to leave Wessex, which they did for a time, simply moving on to other Christian Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. By 876, under Guthrum, a new group of Vikings invaded Wessex. In 878, these Danish Vikings made a surprise assault on Chipenham, with Alfred and a small group of his associates escaping to the forest and marshlands of Somerset. One by one, each of the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had fallen, until Wessex stood alone as the only English-speaking and Christian kingdom left. This last kingdom was now a small ember burning on the island of Athelney. From this marshy island fortress Alfred planned and organized his resistance, gathering faithful Christian men of the surrounding shires to his banner.
One of the stories that emerged around Alfred at this time was that he dressed himself as a bard and made his way to the Danish camp to observe their forces and meet their leaders, for whom he played his harp and sang. G.K. Chesterton, a prominent English writer during the twentieth century, penned the epic poem Ballad of the White Horse to commemorate the life and deeds of Alfred, and to serve as an allegory of the conflict between Christianity and nihilism that had grown in the West, and is with us today. In Book III, Alfred is making his way across the White Horse Vale, the magnificent pre-Anglo-Saxon carving of a horse cut into the white chalk hill. He observes that it has grown over in the years since the Danish occupation, thick with weeds. Alfred is brought before the Danish leaders, including King Guthrum and his nephew Harold, where he is bade to sing and tells Anglo-Saxon war tales while playing his harp. Harold is the youngest and first Viking to take the harp and respond:
Well have you sung, O stranger,
Of death on the dyke in Wales,
Your chief was a bracelet-giver;
But the red unbroken river
Of a race runs not for ever,
But suddenly it fails.Doubtless your sires were sword-swingers
When they waded fresh from foam,
Before they were turned to women
By the god of the nails from Rome;But since you bent to the shaven men,
Who neither lust nor smite,
Thunder of Thor, we hunt you
A hare on the mountain height.
These few verses sung by Harold sum up a mind-numbingly common refrain that is heard in the Alt-Right/New Right, at least in American circles. Christianity has apparently made us weak, and somehow Christ cannot compare to a particular political philosophy, scientific discovery, or in some cases even a pre-Christian deity, whose memory in fact has only been preserved by Christianity. Each of the Viking lords take a turn at the harp, which presently returns to Alfred:
I will even answer the mighty earl
That asked of Wessex men
Why they be meek and monkish folk,
And bow to the White Lord’s broken yoke;
What sign have we save blood and smoke?
Here is my answer then.That on you is fallen the shadow,
And not upon the Name;
That though we scatter and though we fly,
And you hang over us like the sky,
You are more tired of victory,
Than we are tired of shame.That though you hunt the Christian man
Like a hare on the hill-side,
The hare has still more heart to run
Than you have heart to ride.That though all lances split on you,
All swords be heaved in vain,
We have more lust again to lose
Than you to win again.Your lord sits high in the saddle,
A broken-hearted king,
But our king Alfred, lost from fame,
Fallen among foes or bonds of shame,
In I know not what mean trade or name,
Has still some song to sing;Our monks go robed in rain and snow,
But the heart of flame therein,
But you go clothed in feasts and flames,
When all is ice within;
Alfred also notes the overgrown pagan carving of the White Horse vale, as the Christians have no longer been able to maintain it:
Nor monkish order only
Slides down, as field to fen,
All things achieved and chosen pass,
As the White Horse fades in the grass,
No work of Christian men.Ere the sad gods that made your gods
Saw their sad sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale,
That you have left to darken and fail,
Was cut out of the grass.Therefore your end is on you,
Is on you and your kings,
Not for a fire in Ely fen,
Not that your gods are nine or ten,
But because it is only Christian men
Guard even heathen things.For our God hath blessed creation,
Calling it good. I know
What spirit with whom you blindly band
Hath blessed destruction with his hand;
Yet by God’s death the stars shall stand
And the small apples grow.”And the King, with harp on shoulder,
Stood up and ceased his song;
And the owls moaned from the mighty trees,
And the Danes laughed loud and long.1
The goal posts of the nihilistic mind are always changing. As pointed by Alfred, the great pagan work of the White Horse vale is preserved by the Christian Anglo-Saxons, while allowed to disappear into oblivion by the pagan Vikings. Just as the Vikings abandoned the works of pagan predecessors, so too we see the liberal let rot the values once deemed progressive by their forerunners. They may hold to a principle or two, and quite vehemently, but over the generations it will have no holding power. The proverbial White Horse values held by the forces of progress in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are now often the “conservative values” of our modern era, and are seen as irrelevant or bigoted by the forces of progress today. An especially rapid change of this kind can be seen by observing the value of being “colorblind.” Cherished from the 1960s to the 2000s, this liberal stock value has quickly been replaced by the need in our modern decade for color-awareness paired with subservience to higher melanin counts.
While there is always a spiritual war raging about for the souls of individual men, nations, and races, a conflict has been waged in earnest for the soul of the West that is all too historically visible for the past 300 to 500 years, depending on who is counting. There are the forces of Christ and Christendom, and arrayed against them are those of the antichrist ideology who usually prefer the title “progress.” The forces for Christ have been soundly beaten in these preceding centuries, as many of us have taken note, much like Alfred and his people against the seemingly unstoppable Vikings. To briefly list a few important milestones, the forces of progress decapitated the forces of Christ in the French Revolution, even if only to be conquered by a different, more imperial, progress in the form of Napoleon shortly thereafter. The American Civil War crushed the explicitly Christian and traditional South, sacrificing them and many good Christian men from Appalachia, the North, and European immigrants in order to continue progress, and no doubt to maintain control of Southern resources and revenue. Within a half century, the British Empire led by cosmopolitans and (dare I say) globalists, decided that the Boers were to be crushed and integrated into the empire. The Boers, like the South, were an explicitly Christian people, unlike those of the empire at that point, and they fought a guerrilla war until their women and children were starved in concentration camps. The World Wars then saw millions of Christians killed under the newest guise of these antichristian forces, communism.
We are told that if we Christians would just let go of our Savior and King, we could make our way unencumbered toward the New Right utopia of a race-conscious, agnostic white superman. This is a difference only in degree from the Christless, traditionless, monochromatic, mocha-skinned utopia promised to us by the globalists and liberals. If we would just let go of any meaningful attachment to our people and religion, we would have world peace. Both of these utopias are based on wholesome, but warped, values and flattery of different sorts of pride. Loving one’s people, or patriotism, is a moral virtue. But most people, especially decent folk, aren’t going to kill and be killed for their 23andMe genetic test results. Loving your neighbor as thyself, even if he comes from a rival tribe or nation, is wholesome and honorable in the context of individuals, similar to the “turning of the cheek.” What it most certainly does not mean is inviting the rival nation in to take the jobs of your men, live off your taxes, or even outright pillage your streets and molest your women.
A recent article from AltRight.com observed that traditional Catholicism is burning as an ember in the hearts of Frenchmen and growing. This same ember is burning in the South, amongst the Boer, and even more dimly, but still present, throughout the West. Its reception was for the most part a hail of insults, since religion is to be of secondary importance to “the cause.” There are very few, if any, historical examples of one people resisting another without an intact culture, which always includes religion. The fork in the road appearing in America and the rest of the West is between an organic cultural revival for our various peoples, and an artificial utopian vision touted as a cure by cosmopolitans quite understandably disaffected with what our civilization has become.
Jef Costello, a writer for Counter Currents, recently gave a speech for the Northwest Forum called “Does Hope Lie in the Proles?” He demonstrates how out-of-touch the liberal establishment has become with the vast majority of the white American population. They’ve gotten to the point where they truly don’t understand how they lost the 2016 presidential election, or why so many working-class whites voted for Trump. He eventually turns his analysis onto the Alt-Right and their aspirations to lead the “proles,” or average working-class Americans:
In sum, the proles will see us as a lot of disaffected, spoiled, bratty, out-of-touch sacks of venom, who have created a little ghetto for ourselves replete with forums in which we may vent and posture without tangible results, and any real consequences. They will see that most of us have nothing in common with them, cannot understand their daily woes, and are entirely irrelevant to their lives.
And they are also perceptive enough to pick up on the dirty little secret of the Alt Right: namely, that many of us do not really love our race. That in fact we walk around most of the time consumed by hate for other white people, and that many of us have about as much contempt for the working class as your average liberal.
This “dirty little secret” is a highly important fact. It is a common sentiment on the Alt-Right that the movement is not to “save” all whites,; in fact, some whites being not worth saving is the general idea. This is where the rub comes in: defining an in-group as based only on race, IQ, or appropriate amounts of the “Faustian spirit,” or some combination of these three, is not only a bad idea, but an unrealistic one. There are plenty of high-IQ, 100% white people, possibly even Faustian, who are the very liberals or traitorous collaborators highly active in our dispossession. So a successful resistance in the form of a counter-culture will be based on something besides these criteria, and in the Alt-Right this extra criterion is often agreement with their abstract principles. Abstract principles are important, but they don’t save a people. A love for a people based on their admirable qualities, such as their good looks, intelligence, adventurous spirit, or historical achievements, is not love at all. Chesterton notes this idea in his book Heretics, in reviewing the insightful poet Rudyard Kipling:
The great gap in his mind is what may be roughly called the lack of patriotism – that is to say, he lacks altogether the faculty of attaching himself to any cause or community finally and tragically; for all finality must be tragic. He admires England, but he does not love her; for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reasons. He admires England because she is strong, not because she is English. There is no harshness in saying this, for, to do him justice, he avows it with his usual picturesque candour. In a very interesting poem he says that-
“‘If England was what England seems’”
—that is, weak and inefficient; if England were not what (as he believes) she is—that is powerful and practical—
“‘How quick we’d chuck’er! But she ain’t!’”
He admits, that is, that his devotion is the result of a criticism, and that is quite enough to put it in another category altogether from the patriotism of the Boers, whom he hounded down in South Africa.2
So it is with many on the utopian side of the Alt-Right. They admire what they’ve constructed as embodying the “white race,” but are not in many cases connected with this race in any organic way. This leads ironically to a disdain of many of the healthiest portions of the white race, especially our piety. Certainly many Christians in the West have need of restored institutions, fighting spirit, and willingness to take their own sides, but desiring this restoration is completely different from outright despising them. Like many other thinkers in the West influenced by Nietzsche, the utopian arm of the Alt-Right has become what Chesterton observes of Bernard Shaw. In another chapter of Heretics, he states:
Having come to doubt whether humanity can be combined with progress, most people easily pleased, would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby. Mr. Shaw cannot understand that the thing which is valuable and lovable in our eyes is man – the old beer-drinking, creed-making, fighting, failing, sensual, respectable man. And the things that have been founded on the fancy of the Superman have died with the dying civilizations which alone have given them birth. When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for its corner-stone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward – in a word, a man. And upon this rock He built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it. All the empires and the kingdoms have failed because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.3
The networking amongst Western peoples and the rapid expansion of our ideas across the internet, and in some cases even real life, is fantastic. But an artificial Alt-Right utopia is not the way forward for any of our peoples, who each have organic Christian cultures lying just one or two generations under the historical surface. Better to be a Southern Nationalist, an Amerika secessionist, a Charles Martel Frenchman, or a Boer living in Orania, rooted in a living community of your people no matter how small, than a cosmopolitan living alone while railing against “normies” and awaiting the “White Imperium.” The forces of liberalism are growing weary in the west. Their own prophets worriedly warn them that all of their work will be undone if they can’t manage to reproduce themselves. But it falls on deaf nihilistic ears.[6] After all, managing micro-aggressions becomes tedious even to the most controlling and unhappy of people. We and our traditionalist Christian communities are the future of our various nations in the West if only we Christian folk “have more lust to lose again” than the forces of progress have to win.
Footnotes
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