Sunday, June 1, 2008

'Pondering a skull, a glass half full'

In Japan, the Goddess of Creation, literally Mother Nature, is everywhere (5). The West has various derogatory words for it, from Animism to Vitalism, but one who has experienced what it means in everyday life will not dismiss it lightly.

Grand trees have sacred ropes tied around them, great rocks are the subject of veneration, and waterfalls serve for spiritual purification. The birth and rapid death of cherry blossoms are not only an occasion for drunken office parties alfresco, but also annual reminders that life is fleeting and this, unimproved, is the best and most beautiful of all possible worlds. Little shrines to Inari, the goddess of the soil and its life-giving crop, rice, are everywhere, guarded by two stone foxes. And these are Japanese trees and blossoms and rocks and waterfalls and soil and rice and foxes; not the spawns of global Gaia Inc., managed by Albert Gore, Jr through the local franchise of The Green Party. That's how one comes to love one's native land and to resist its adulteration by incompatible foreign peoples, cultures, ideologies and, not the least, interests.

Europe once had similar beliefs and observances. Their traces abound: hard and eternal as Stonehenge or evanescent as the flower wreaths on the heads of Slavonic or Scandinavian girls at their maypole dances. But the church, which inherited the Hebrew prophets' hatred of Astarte, co-opted a few ancient rites as Christmas trees or Easter eggs, or stamped them out with fire and sword a thousand years ago. And so, the umbilical cord that connects a people to its soil and its tribe was strictured in Europe and its diaspora, replaced first by the ecumenical church, and then by universalist intellectual constructs such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, and liberalism. But in Japan, the ancient link has survived, and that is one of the main reasons why Japan is surviving while the West is in the process of self-liquidation.

The prognosis for Europe's and its diaspora's return to their ancestors' spiritual connectedness with Nature is not good, given that the archdevil of modern times, Adolf Hitler, who saw the weakness that Christianity and Marxism had bequeathed to his people, was obsessed with the pagan Norse and Aryans, and transplanted their rituals and symbols to the Third Reich. But if the European civilization is to survive, it must get over Hitler, as it must over colonialism and slavery.

Not to mention Nietzsche, there are thoughtful contemporary voices, such as Alain de Benoist's On Being a Pagan, advocating Europe's return to the ways of Astarte-Europa as a way of shedding the psychoses of self-loathing, moralism and allophilia. But Christianity is by now woven into the European fabric. One hopes that the mainstream Christian churches will discover that the God of the Western peoples does not only dwell in dusty Nicean theology parchments or in a Scriptura written by unknown Hebrew scribes of 2600 years ago and significantly mistranslated ever since. They may rediscover that God dwells locally and tangibly: in the first flowers of spring pushing through the snow, and in the European birch and pine forests, among which the minarets pollinating with amplified Arabic incantations to the God of desert shepherds truly are out of place.

There is something the European peoples can learn from Japan about the meaning and place of religion. First, that the grand vision, based on the life of a foreign individual described in imported scrolls, does not have to displace the local Goddess but may live with her in a happy symbiosis. Thus, Buddhism cohabits with Shintoism, and Gautama with Amaterasu, and both are equally happy to get married in a Presbyterian church. The phenomenon of religious wars, of religious hatred, of a despotic, jealous God, is unknown in the history of Japan (6).

It follows that a God that is zealous, tyrannical and unforgiving is not healthy for the survival of an advanced civilization. The West has indeed abandoned such a vision of its God, and most of Europe has abandoned him altogether. The problem is that the irrational, self-sacrificial alternative creed that has filled the heart of the revamped Church and the heads of the West's elites – the creed of liberalism and allophilia – has resulted in the importation into the West of tens of millions of rapidly multiplying foreigners who brought with them their tyrannical, absolutist, dissent-hating God with implacable claims on universal fealty.

It's amazing that the Church – it matters not which denomination – was so quick in bowing to that foreign conception of God while having yielded, decades ago, the last few vestiges of its own old and superficially similar conception. It is perhaps not coincidental that the Church in Europe is strongest and liberalism is weakest in countries where they think locally and act locally. Poland, for instance, has a cult of the Black Madonna, and ostensibly Christian holidays have as much in common with the Amaterasu Shinto traditions of Japan as with the postmodern and shaky Christianity of Western Europe.

If the Japanese pleat ropes and rice straw into sacred symbols, the Slavs pleat wheat straw and ribbons into consecrated wreaths, and shrubs and pussywillows into fronds of Easter palms. If some spiritual Japanese purify themselves under cold waterfalls, some spiritual Poles take sunrise baths in running streams and rivers on Easter Thursday. On Holy Saturday, Catholic Slav priests have been consecrating fire and water for a thousand years in a ritual not essentially different from the one their pagan ancestors had performed, or that Shinto priests still perform. Other East European peoples have retained similar traditions, and it's in them where Europe's healthiest roots and some of its best leaders, such as Vaclav Havel or Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, may still be found.

It may be the misfortune of the European Union that it's a Franco-German creation. The one has the unfortunate habit of issuing a torrent of lofty words, such as Liberté, égalité, fraternité, that end up with la racaille either hacking women, priests and philosophers to pieces on the streets of Paris in the 1790s, or burning cities to the shouts of Allahu akbar in the present decade. And the other, mixing its repentance for the monstrosity of Nazism with current "isms" such as hedonism, nihilism and socialism, is hardly a model of a healthy take on life, nation or the transcendent.

For a European regeneration to take place, and an American one as well, the West must take its intellectuals to account. The political and cultural establishment of the European peoples, including the diaspora, works assiduously toward the decomposition of the West through open-ended Third-World immigration; surrender to Islam; abolition of ethnic identity – but only of the European ethnics; transfer of national sovereignty to supranational bodies some of which are controlled by votes of the Third World; and the enforcement of totalitarian anti-discrimination, anti-truth laws designed to nip in the bud any possibility of successful resistance by the Euro-ethnics subjected to this gradual wipeout.

As we have shown in the comparison with Japan, this current has no basis in universal justice or in irreversible patterns of historical dialectic. Its only basis is in a psychosis injected into the minds of the European peoples by their own elites.

~ From: Astarte and Amaterasu - The Diverging Destinies of Europe and Japan. -- Part 2 ~

 

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