Odinism is Horseshit
Posted by alex in Asatru & Odinism, Reader Mail at 3:01 pm | 
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Alex,
In the FTL broadcast of 8-13, you spoke of Allvater Odhinn’s sacrifice on Yggdrasil. You mocked his sacrifice, and compared him with the Jewish Christ. I am writing to alleviate these misconceptions.
The old Norse Rune poem phrase stating that yew is “the guardian of the flames†also conjures the image of an internal flame: a spiritual fire within. This internal spirit is symbolized by Odhinn, who hung from Yggdrasil for nine nights wounded by a spear (hence his kinship with the hanged). He made this sacrifice himself, and in doing so faced death, descending to the realm of Helja. In the twilight (unification) between life and death he was mystically initiated into the mysteries of Runic hieroglyphs, after which he cut himself down from the tree and took his new knowledge back into the worlds of Æsir and men. Odhinn`s character has always been that of the man of both deeds and spiritual knowledge. Thus the concept of mysticism linked directly with action is an integral one. It is embodied in the hanged man, who has not physically died, and will return to the world of action with newfound insight. Here is the â€dark prison†which will be escaped from with a “rebirth in light and clarityâ€. This is plainly represented in the picture of the twelfth tarot card (the hanged man), which immediately precedes the “death†card. It is the antithesis of the weak and thoroughly dead Christ, who has been symbolized submissively nailed to the cross for all eternity; thereby embodying a negation of the physical realm (the earth and the world of deeds) entirely. A permanent sacrifice along these lines can only be symbolic of a mystical utopia (Id Est: salvation), utterly unattainable, divorced from reality and impotent. Alfred Rosenberg clearly understood these equations when he stated; “Mind” signifies the stripping of the cares of the world, the extension of the soul passing into infinity, and, “deed†directed at a creation in this world”. “Mind and dead are rhythmically alternating, self conditioning and mutually enhancing essences of man; the one alludes to the other, allowing it to be recognized and become creativeâ€. “The Nordic man is the antipode of both directions, grasping for both poles of our existence combining mysticism and a life of action being born up by a dynamic vital feeling, being uplifted by the belief in the free creative will and the noble soul.”
It is obvious that you have not undertaken a thorough examination of the myths even on the surface, let alone began to peal away at the hermetic truths undergirding them. You should stick to what you know, comrade, and that’s politics. I appreciate your work, and I am a frequent visitor to your site; however, you do yourself and VNN a disservice by making such dilettante comments about an authentic Aryan religion.
Wotan mit uns!
R.
“MOCKED HIS SACRIFICE” – ODIN DOES NOT EXIST. YOU CAN’T MOCK THE SACRIFICE OF A FICTIONAL CHARACTER. WHAT I MOCK IS BUHLIEVERS IN MYTHICAL CREATURES. THAT WAY MADNESS LIES. AS HISTORY SHOWS, ODINISM TURNED INTO JEBOOISM REAL EASILY. WHY? BECAUSE ODINISM IS BASED IN, STEEPED IN LIES, EXACTLY LIKE JEBOOISM. ODINIST PREACHERS AREN’T INTERESTED IN TRUTH ANY MORE THAN THE LOWEST LOAM-LICKER. THEY TELL THEIR SUCKERS THAT ODINISM IS TRUE AND REAL, LIKE ANY CHRISTIAN LIAR. FUCK THEM. SCIENCE IS THE WHITE MAN’S TRUE ‘RELIGION.’ FACTS AND THE WILL TO USE THEM ARE ALL WE NEED, NOT LIES.
SO GO AHEAD, TAKE PRIDE IN YOUR “EXPERTISE” IN THE DETAILS OF BIG LIES. JEBOO-WHITE WON’T GET YOU, OR OUR RACE, ANY FARTHER THAN THE JEBOO-CHRISTIANITY IT SUCCUMBED TO.
I’VE HEARD MY WHOLE LIFE THAN MAN NEEDS LIES AND MYTHS. IT ISN’T TRUE. THE LESS INTELLIGENT NEED SIMPLER VERSIONS OF THE TRUTH – NOT LIES. ODIN? HE DOESN’T EXIST. ODINISM? JUST ANOTHER BIG LIE.
11 September, 2006 at 12:26 pm
A final word on Yockey, for anyone who insists on his important:
Plagiarism of a valid theorist (Schmitt) is unacceptable. It is not “vatic”, it is plagiaristic. The Book of Isaiah is prophetic. Leonardo’s notebooks are prophetic. Two “world wars” proved Nietzsche prophetic — and ultimately wrong. Yockey is wannabe prophetic, imitation prophecy, a false prophet as the scriptures say, so are all who repeat his rhetorical wishful-thinking aloud about Evropa, Evropa. As Wagner in art, so Yockey in philosophy. Patchwork, myth-mongering, post-War hackery.
It is well to point out that Hitler himself had trouble with this type in struggling for mastery of the German political scene. He repeatedly lambasts the “fatherland clubs” (vaterländischen Verbände) for their silly “teutonic” hats – which always reminds me of the moose club hats worn by Fred and Barney in the Flintstones cartoon – and patriotic disdain of action and realpolitik. In fine, the “folkish” set has long been a hindrance to action, or in our case, a mere forthright approach to the Jewish problem. Linder didn’t make VNN after he read the “Integral Tradition” website or any of the silly cryptoleftist occultniks in the Third Reich (Moeller van den Bruck, e.g.). He grew up in America, read good old American authors, went to school, pursued a career, and ran up against the wall of Judentum. By contrast, what the occultniks do is circle about with the same set of ideas and fads which have congealed into their own little “cultural studies” program. That’s what “folkish” is — a bit of vanity to tide one over. Instead of doing some hard research in a university library or maybe just having an ounce of curiosity about the long bibliographies often included in books of a topical nature, they sit around the little HTML campfire of “folkways” and affect attitudes of superiority and erudition. Like this New America character — dude cannot hold a fucking votive candle to my learning, and I could literally write a book on the Gita, nay on misconceptions about the Gita, and this fellow wouldn’t budge an inch from his own purview. To take an example at random, which I let slide before: he artfully dodges the fact that he can’t prove his original assertion that Krishna exhorts Arjuna to fight for his race (his own words), so he twists it to mean that Arjuna should fight to destroy a degenerate branch of the family tree. Again, very artful — and again unprovable. Not one line of Krishna’s can be adduced to support either assertion. Moreover, Arjuna himself is the son of Pandu and Kunti; Pandu’s name (meaning “pale”) has suggested to some scholars, Professor van Buitenen among them, that he was leprous. Dritarashtra (who later elopes with Kunti) is blind, and is the brother Pandu; both are descendants of Kuru (hence Pandava and Kaurava). So, where is this physical degeneracy that needs to be cut away by the son of a possibly leprous chieftain? how will New America endeavor to prove his assertion? Answer: he wont’. He can’t. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about, but he, like just about everyone else, loads the Gita with his own needs. This happens, again, because people have been trained to have so much needless veneration for religious texts – which are a few parts history and a great deal of florid nonsense – that they can’t see the little kernels of plain storytelling beneath. That’s what philologists and comparative historians do, anyway: getting to the bottom of a religious text, not “interpreting” or gushing over it.
Once again, folkish vanity is a hindrance. Be it Odinism, neofolk, or ultra-sophisticated isms like “archeofuturism” and “eurasianism”, it’s all just loads of bullshit misleading those with gregarious & feminine instincts, from New America to good old Constantine von Boffmeister.
11 September, 2006 at 12:30 pm
Excuse me! “[I]nsists on his importance”.
“i don’t care, except that you are turning off your mind to one of those rare human phenomena who is up there with shakespeare and beethoven.”
There it is again: the leveling instinct. You not only drag Beethoven down to Wagner, you drag Shakespeare into the mix — and thereby, once again, prove my point re White Nationalism’s lack of taste.
It’s all one in WN’s back of cultural goodies. All Aryans created equal, all “White art” of precisely the same value.
11 September, 2006 at 12:43 pm
“whether wagner’s father was really one named wagner or geyer is irrevelant:”
So irrelevant, neither of us mentioned it. I don’t give a fuck what his name was or whether his Opa fucked a jewess. Never said so.
What you’ve tried to do with this comment is bring in a typical red-herring to dodge some criticism you can’t stomach or oppose. By mentioning it, and proceeding to denounce us for it, you give the illusion that we are guilty of a popular misconception. The only person guilty of that, however, is you, who can’t handle someone criticizing your idol, and moreover you are now guilty (in addition to what came before) of severely dishonest debating.
11 September, 2006 at 2:18 pm
Ride of the Valkies is slow, bombastic crap. Just my opinion. I wouldn’t listen to it if I could turn it off. I do like the Beethoven I’ve heard. Bach is praised by people of a mental cast, but it’s uninspiring and uninterestig to me. It sounds like a math proof, or something a programmed computer came up with. That’s not what I want in music.
I don’t know how you remove emotion from music – what’s left? – or how you do it wrong. Speaking only for me, music has helped me make associations I could not have made in an ordinary mental state. It can help you see the connections between things you can’t otherwise. Mencken felt that he was actually a musician – not a writer, but he never had the proper training. I feel the same way in one sense. Prose of the type I admire and try to produce is aimed to get at the thing you’re trying to get by whatever catches it. Mencken’s writing is the supplest ever – he’s the best at English. Only Shakespeare is as supple, but he’s less interesting, and very seldom funny. Mencken’s English is as close to music as words can be got because you don’t know what he’s going to do next. It is the perfect opposite of words as used by Fox (read: middle class). Music expresses exactly how one feels, even if one can’t explain it precisely in words, because words are both more and less precise than notes. It’s like talking to a woman, versus touching her. You could translate the touch into words, but it would require lots of thought to pick the right words and order them correctly. VNN is about, as our slogan shows, getting the thing. Getting the hidden gold in our hand and holding it up to the light, so everyone can see it. That requires disturbing minds by any means necessary – using cliches, tweaking cliches, switching out words, abandoning grammar – whatever gets to the point. Mencken’s writing is musical, and VNN is musical too.
11 September, 2006 at 2:32 pm
alex, do you despise ALL german opera like outis? ‘twould be a pity indeed, and silly.
I don’t despise opera, I’m simply not interested in it. I’m interested in country. In fact, if I weren’t doing VNN, I would probably try to write country songs because I think I could do it better than the failed alt-rockers & marketers who are successful today. Gigantic half-assed soap operas in foreign languages don’t interest me. That’s not an anti-intellectual position, that’s a cold description of opera: bad music, bad acting, bad staging = negative synergy = opera. I only like stuff that’s funny or inspiring, and opera is neither.
oh, and alex, you can be assured that your musical training and talent are but a drop in the bucket compared with mine. not bragging. just stating what is most likely fact.
I’m sure that’s true. Now work on your taste.
not that that means you have to think wagner’s music is “good stuffâ€. i don’t care, except that you are turning off your mind to one of those rare human phenomena who is up there with shakespeare and beethoven. your loss.
I mine my vein, and Wagner is not in it – as a musician. Ride of the Valkyries is his best, according to the world, and it stinks.
11 September, 2006 at 3:03 pm
For those who’d like to judge for themselves, Ride of the Valks.
http://www.carolinaclassical.com/articles/wagnervalkyries.html
Wagner was the John Williams of the 19th century. His music makes a nice backdrop for Will Smith getting jiggy with space aliens.
11 September, 2006 at 3:25 pm
“Gigantic half-assed soap operas in foreign languages don’t interest me.”
LOL. Why can’t I think of shit like that.
“I don’t know how you remove emotion from music – what’s left? – or how you do it wrong. Speaking only for me, music has helped me make associations I could not have made in an ordinary mental state.”
What’s left is what you hear in most Bach pieces, meandering tonal sermons and accompaniments. Come to think of it, the worst choral piece I’ve ever heard is Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, a herald of bad things to come in the German operatic vein. That is how emotion is done wrong. Imagine a movie with a horribly schmaltzy romantic scene: emotion played wrong. This is completely on the shoulders of the composer — if he’s a church lad like Bach, he’ll make schmaltz about Christ; if he’s a Romantic he’ll make something soppy or circuslike (Berlioz); but with Beethoven there is a perfect moment in history, a personality in music, a harmony of composer and epoch, which takes the result outside of the realm of music as profession. That music survived Beethoven does not prove that Beethoven has been, or can be, surpassed; it only means no one would think of quitting music, except Schindler, his secretary. When I was younger I read little and listened to classical music daily, but only Beethoven had an inspirational effect; it was as much to the credit of listening to him, as to reading Nietzsche, that I came to understand the nature – and needs – of genius.
What you said about country is essentially how I feel about music now – I haven’t listened to Bach in years – regarding German nationalist folk. Some of the stuff is just leagues beyond anything popular, anywhere, and completely unknown outside of Germany and national circles in Europe. That is real “folk” music – arising from the folk, in folkish style, and with folkish interests – as opposed to internationalist, kosher-stamped “neofolk” and the like; the latter even has the gall to claim it as emanating from their own “scene”, which is completely absurd. Neofolk sucks up all valid symbolism and folkishness to increase itself as a scene.
Anyway, the German sort of folk music is impossible in America. The tradition of the volkslied is very strong. You never see an American nationalist making up folk songs, at least nothing modern, as it simply doesn’t exist as a tradition here. And you’d certainly never see a group of American skinheads or nationalists sitting around a campfire singing to each other, as can still be seen in Germany. That sort of “Kameradschaft” is unique to Germany and the acoustic song is in itself a form of protest by affirming the simple and the “deutsch” ( deutisch = “of the people”). Most guys here would say it’s “gay”. In that way we’re a lot colder and self-contained than the Germans are known to be. When I hear a young German strumming on a guitar, calling for Jews to be shot in his own tongue — then I am as inspired as when I read your best writing. Not the same thing as Beethoven, but funny and inspiring, certainly.
In general, I have always been wary of relying too much on music. It tends to become a fetish, or something you put on when you’re bored or have a whim to induce a certain emotion, which spoils it.
11 September, 2006 at 3:26 pm
this discussion is tiring me, but i’ll make one more go at it:
1. to outis: wagner is not my god, and not my idol. he is one of a handful of great geniuses in the ralm of art, that is all. and when i lump beethoven in with wagner, believe me, i’m not levelling. perhaps i am even dragging beethoven up a bit to the level of wagner. that is my humble opinion
as for the rest of your uninformed ravings, i have to take my leave. i am beginning to feel like the proverbial white man who tries to reason with a nigger.
2. to alex: if all you know of wagner’s music is ride of the valkeries, then i’m afraid you have indeed heard a bombastic piece of music. it is one of my least favorite inspirations of wagner. and if anyone told you that ride of the valkeries is wagner’s best musical inspiration, that person was, to put if mildly, full of nigger shit.
thus, for you to tell me to “improve my taste” based on you thinking ride of the valkeries is wagner’s best, i would suggest you:
1. lisen to the music drama (or opera, whatever you care to call it) it comes from: die walkure (the second of the ring of the nibelung music dramas) in its entirety.
2. if not in its entirety, listen to all of act i. you won’t hear any “ride of the valkeries” in that one. but you will hear some of the most passionate love music ever dreamt of, especially in the last third of act i. and heroic too. in the best sense of the word.
3. listen to the last scene of act ii, at brunnhilde’s entrance till the end where siegmund is killed by his own father, wotan. heroism, love, defiance, and tragedy par excellence.
4. skip the beginning of act iii (where “ride of the valkeries” occurs; i often skip this part myself)
5. go right to the last 30 minutes of act iii. there, wotan punishes his daughter brunnhilde, though he loves her best of all. heart-wrenching music, and a gorgeous, soothing aria by wotan as he kisses her to sleep and leaves on the fire-surrounded rock. there is no more beautiful ending in all of opera than the end of die walkure, in my opinion.
3. if you like country music, well, what can i say…
i guess i can take a little of it, depending on my mood. but for the most part, and like you say, all the stuff that comes out of nashville is utter unadulterated crap of the first order.
(i can stomach don williams and a handful of past artists who sing with real feeling and distinction)
11 September, 2006 at 3:30 pm
“Above all, German youths understand him. The two words ‘infinite’ and ‘meaning’ were really sufficient: they induced a state of incomparable well-being in them. It was not with his music that Wagner conquered young men, it was with the “idea”:—it is the enigmatic character of his art, its playing hide-and-seek behind a hundred symbols, its polychromy of the ideal that leads and lures these youths to Wagner; it is Wagner’s genius for shaping clouds, his whirling, hurling, and twirling through the air, his everywhere and nowhere, the very same means by which Hegel formerly seduced and lured them!— In the midst of Wagner’s multiplicity, abundance, and arbitrariness they feel as if justified in their own eyes—’redeemed’—. Trembling, they hear how the great symbols approach from foggy distances to resound in his art with muted thunder; they are not impatient when at times things are gray, gruesome, and cold. After all, they are, without exception, like Wagner himself, related to such bad weather, German weather! Wotan is their god: but Wotan is the god of bad weather … They are quite right, these German youths, considering what they are like: how could they miss what we others, we halcyons, miss in Wagner—la gaya scienza; light feet; wit, fire, grace; the great logic; the dance of the stars; the exuberant spirituality; the southern shivers of light; the smooth sea—perfection …”
“I have explained where Wagner belongs—not in the history of music. What does he signify nevertheless in that history? The emergence of the actor in music: a capital event that invites thought, perhaps also fear.”
11 September, 2006 at 3:36 pm
I defy anyone to claim Wagner’s 3-inch-thick-fluffy-frosting “Ride of the Valkyries” is higher, tighter, finer, truer than Bill Bailey’s “Welcome to the Jungle.”
Listen/watch here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zuIQkjm78o
Now you tell me Dick Wagner knows more about life force, will and determination and reality and truth than Bill Baily. No he doesn’t.
To understand Outis’ and my criticism of the Head Cases, I suggest an alternative approach. Get where money changes hands and try to take some of it. Then you understand what’s so ridiculous about the excogitators. They’re bullshitters who don’t even realize. Money clears shit up real quick. Academia and “art” are where bs thrives.
Genuine intellection is a working back and forth between observing and thinking and reading. You can’t go by experience and facts alone, but you can’t go by patterns alone. There must be interplay and careful observation, and the field of money, say the stock market, or any form of speculation, is where theory and practice come into painful relief. Remember the big-shot college economics profs who managed a billion-dollars straight into the ground when attempting real-world money management. Well, mutatis mutandis for these philosophers. You start with facts from observations, and you try to find the patterns, using reason and reading. There’s nothing more or less to it. But if you go to far in the direction of theory or “one exception invalidates a million ordinaries,” you fall into error. And, if you’re a philosopher, you become ridiculous.
Bill Bailey, Axl Rose, can shit better music than “Ride of the Valkyries.”
11 September, 2006 at 3:40 pm
” . . .slow, bombastic crap. . .”
Just like this thread.
11 September, 2006 at 3:44 pm
If it doesn’t hurt when you’re wrong, then you’re unlikely to get it right. There’s no cost to being wrong for professors. That’s why college isn’t the real world. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real and valuable scholars, it means they are well spaced because there’s no PAIN no PENALTY for being wrong, often there’s PROMOTION. In the real world, you get PUNISHED for PICKING the wrong PUSSY or STOCK. You get punched in the stomach/groin/wallet.
Bill Bailey is an artist. Wagner scrumbles around with imaginary gods and whips up hours and hours of fartmusik. There is no human experience that can’t be compressed and expressed, fully, in a three-minute song or epigram. It doesn’t take 10,000-page reports to “prove” that the right terrorists caused 9/11.
11 September, 2006 at 3:52 pm
Your description of Mencken/music/VNN made me think that what I have been attacking can also be described musically. While you and Mencken use virtuosity of speech to get at something, WNs and ‘traditionalists’ will pick up only the *tone* of a text. Young men who read Nietzsche often come away armed with the annoying habit of imitating his tone. Same with Yockey and a handful of other writers. It ends up as sheer sermonizing and putting on airs. This can be related back to music itself: Romantics imitate tones and become stylized in what was the originality of a predecessor. Some throw in scraps from non-musical sources, like Cellini threw spoons and other detritus into the pot to make his statues. Then comes the backlash against Romanticism, and rococo Romanticism, where Jews and drunken Russians divide music into the senseless and the entertaining. Same in painting. Same in literature. What sifts down into the brains of young men is always a ghost of something, a tone, or the echo of a tone, which infects or rather possesses them. The real trouble begins when they try to extract something from this pretence — contributing to unnecessary profusion of hollow artefacts and ideas (romanticism/decadence).
11 September, 2006 at 3:53 pm
hey alex, are you gonna have the guts to put up the message i just submitted about 5 or so minutes ago?
it looks likes the anwer is you don’t have the guts, because i see several more messages from you deriding wagner’s admittedly bombabstic and least inspired piece of music ride of the valkeries and not posting my last message. think you’re skewering the debate a bit by not publishing my post, eh? yes, you are. it’s your site. but you’ve lost my respect just a wee bit, which until now was pretty high.
now i’ll have to be very careful to trust anything you say, because i know on this one you are WAY OFF, BROTHER. you are massively misinformed if you tell your readers that ride of the valkeries represents wagner at his finest. it is wagner at his most bombastic, and anyone who knows anything about opera will say the same thing.
11 September, 2006 at 3:58 pm
by censoring the information (leaving out my most important post on the wagner subject),
you are displaying perfect hebe characteristics; you know, what they do with the news on a daily basis:
only show you what they WANT to show you, and ommiting crucial information so you’ll remain IGNORANT.
or are you just afraid of being wrong?
i am ashamed of you, alex.
and until i see the post in question published, i will not trust you one wit.
11 September, 2006 at 4:00 pm
alex says: “ill Bailey is an artist. Wagner scrumbles around with imaginary gods and whips up hours and hours of fartmusik. There
is no human experience that can’t be compressed and expressed, fully, in a three-minute song or epigram.”
i say: well, that leaves out every symphony i can think of. every opera. every musical. every movie. and a whole lot of songs. and goyfire too. better all the remaining goyfires 3 minute shows, alex. you dumbass. you’re dumber than i thought.
11 September, 2006 at 4:02 pm
come one, alex, you fucking coward:
put up my post about ride of the valkeries and what parts of die walkure you should listen to. (ride of the valkeries ain’t one of ’em).
chicken shit alex…
you’re a fucking piece of unmanly chicken waste.
11 September, 2006 at 4:04 pm
see name above.
and trust me.
11 September, 2006 at 4:24 pm
While I enjoy some Classical music now and then. It seems many of the music of that style and era where the “pop music” of the day. People cranking out the same stuff to make money off the rich of the day. I honestly prefer the fiddle playing to the slow violin style for most of the time and the general folk style music over Classical. But I’am a peasent.
On the point of religion I believe our major aim should be unlocking the mystery of the DNA code. The Eugenic potental is for our race upon that is awesome. With a Nation of average I.Q 160 Aryan people the need for the outer fairy tale story to explain things to the masses which then gets taken as literal will be the past.
11 September, 2006 at 4:33 pm
IF YOU GOT DA MONEY, HONEY, WE GOTCHO DISEASE.
“There is no human experience that can’t be compressed and expressed, fully, in a three-minute song or epigram.”
Amen.
11 September, 2006 at 4:40 pm
hey alex, are you gonna have the guts to put up the message i just submitted about 5 or so minutes ago?
try to understand before you insult. the comments here are moderated because if we approved every message, we’d post lots of spam. we approve comments as often as we can, but if there’s a gap it’s because we are out.
trust us, we’re not afraid of you outarguing us on wagner, of whom we know little nor care little. note that we’re willing to put it directly to the test, and with music, the test is in the ‘earing. axl rose is a better artist than richard wagner.
11 September, 2006 at 4:57 pm
Anyone who gets this far down, read and reread Merovius’ comment. He’s got it in a nutshell. Peasantry, fiddles and eugenics = ich wachse ohnmächtig!
11 September, 2006 at 4:59 pm
Bach’s music sounds like a fly buzzing around trying to escape a cathedral, blocked by the stained glass. There is no comparison between Bach’s boring, wafer-thin annoyances and Handel’s Messiah, in which you feel the inspiration and what it must feel like to Believe, even if you don’t.
11 September, 2006 at 5:11 pm
No argument there.
I like Handel’s Messiah, easily get that feeling, but I was already spoiled by Allegri’s Miserere. It appeals to my morose Italian side. If you don’t know it, seek it out. Try to get a few versions as well, some are weak on the chorus, which ruins the effect. — I hasten to say that it isn’t jubilant like Handel or Beethoven’s 9th chorus. It is just lovely Italian “stile antico”. The second chorus should, if it is not underdone, give one an “ascending” impression as the voices are go up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_%28Allegri%29
11 September, 2006 at 5:47 pm
A final word for Outis, the gnats he strains for, and an idea for Alex.
Mr. Outis wrote:
A final word on Yockey, for anyone who insists on his important:
Plagiarism of a valid theorist (Schmitt) is unacceptable. It is not “vaticâ€, it is plagiaristic. The Book of Isaiah is prophetic. Leonardo’s notebooks are prophetic. Two “world wars†proved Nietzsche prophetic — and ultimately wrong. Yockey is wannabe prophetic, imitation prophecy, a false prophet as the scriptures say, so are all who repeat his rhetorical wishful-thinking aloud about Evropa, Evropa. As Wagner in art, so Yockey in philosophy. Patchwork, myth-mongering, post-War hackery.
in reply:
Well, throwing out all Yockey had to said because of an alleged (minor) plagiarism of Schmitt is standard Jewish policy; the same policy the Jews are using to attack Mearshimer and Walt.
I suspect your critique is not so much rational, as a rationalization, and that’s fine.
you wrote:
It is well to point out that Hitler himself had trouble with this type in struggling for mastery of the German political scene. He repeatedly lambasts the “fatherland clubs†(vaterländischen Verbände) for their silly “teutonic†hats – which always reminds me of the moose club hats worn by Fred and Barney in the Flintstones cartoon – and patriotic disdain of action and realpolitik. In fine, the “folkish†set has long been a hindrance to action, or in our case, a mere forthright approach to the Jewish problem.
in reply:
It is better to point out that Hitler, himself, had trouble with many in struggling for mastery of the German political scene; that having been said, his integration of those who supported the intellectual and moral foundation of his National Socialist state with those who needed their working out of their ideals is masterful.
As to who has a “‘more,’ as distinct from a ‘mere’ forthright approach to the Jewish problem,” the foundations of our betters – men like Rosenberg, Yockey, Oliver, Rockwell and Pierce have defined and maintained the intellectual, and spiritual foundations that make “forthright approach(es) approach to the Jewish problem.”
you wrote:
Linder didn’t make VNN after he read the “Integral Tradition†website or any of the silly cryptoleftist occultniks in the Third Reich (Moeller van den Bruck, e.g.). He grew up in America, read good old American authors, went to school, pursued a career, and ran up against the wall of Judentum. By contrast, what the occultniks do is circle about with the same set of ideas and fads which have congealed into their own little “cultural studies†program. That’s what “folkish†is — a bit of vanity to tide one over.
in reply:
You hit on Linder as an exemplar from the straw men of the so-called “occultniks,” and criticized the “occultniks” for “circl(ing) about with the same set of ideas and fads…”
“Circling” is seen in the example of Arjuna – “What To Do? What to Do?” – in the East, and Hamlet – “What to Do? What To Do?” – in the West.
It is the path of those who, through ignorance, choose impotence, by circling around an issue, rather than demonstrating the wisdom of Alexander the Great, and cutting through the Gordian knots of Jew-imposed lies, which extend throughout the Culture. In effect, it was the imposition of the Western plane over the Eastern circle, and, as usual, the West – the RIGHT idea, with FORCE – won.
you wrote:
Instead of doing some hard research in a university library or maybe just having an ounce of curiosity about the long bibliographies often included in books of a topical nature, they sit around the little HTML campfire of “folkways†and affect attitudes of superiority and erudition. Like this New America character — dude cannot hold a fucking votive candle to my learning, and I could literally write a book on the Gita, nay on misconceptions about the Gita, and this fellow wouldn’t budge an inch from his own purview. To take an example at random, which I let slide before: he artfully dodges the fact that he can’t prove his original assertion that Krishna exhorts Arjuna to fight for his race (his own words), so he twists it to mean that Arjuna should fight to destroy a degenerate branch of the family tree. Again, very artful — and again unprovable. Not one line of Krishna’s can be adduced to support either assertion. Moreover, Arjuna himself is the son of Pandu and Kunti; Pandu’s name (meaning “paleâ€) has suggested to some scholars, Professor van Buitenen among them, that he was leprous. Dritarashtra (who later elopes with Kunti) is blind, and is the brother Pandu; both are descendants of Kuru (hence Pandava and Kaurava). So, where is this physical degeneracy that needs to be cut away by the son of a possibly leprous chieftain? how will New America endeavor to prove his assertion? Answer: he wont’. He can’t. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about, but he, like just about everyone else, loads the Gita with his own needs. This happens, again, because people have been trained to have so much needless veneration for religious texts – which are a few parts history and a great deal of florid nonsense – that they can’t see the little kernels of plain storytelling beneath. That’s what philologists and comparative historians do, anyway: getting to the bottom of a religious text, not “interpreting†or gushing over it.
in reply:
People from Pramahansa Yogananda to Sathya Sai Baba, and others, have written their own commentaries and “interpretations” of the Gita, and more power to them.
I like to think “this New America character” is using the Creative power of the Western Mind to resolve the issue of Arjuna in the Gita in light of RACE; by RACE, you can not merely look to the presence or absence of melanin, but must look to something greater, something transcendent, and that is the Culture.
There is no “needless veneration for religious texts”; rather, there is a respect for the creation of a religion, a tool for binding the soul back to God, for each Culture; that the same issues are addressed in different religious texts, from different Cultures, means there are more than “little kernels of plain storytelling beneath.”
What lies “beneath” the story is an opening to what stands above; the Soul, the Creative source of Culture, above the Mind. Remember, the Mind was created by the Soul to experience four-dimensional reality, but wants to remove any interest in the Soul, so that it will rule.
you wrote:
Once again, folkish vanity is a hindrance. Be it Odinism, neofolk, or ultra-sophisticated isms like “archeofuturism†and “eurasianismâ€, it’s all just loads of bullshit misleading those with gregarious & feminine instincts, from New America to good old Constantine von Boffmeister.
in reply:
(1) Notice that my proposal was to actually DO something positive, for all of us, by sending money to Alex Linder, and your reply was critical:
Mr. Outis Says:
The 10th 2006f September, 2006 at 5:13 pm
“Well, that was all rather smarmy. Reminiscent of Glenn “gimme all yo’ DOLLAZ†Miller, with all the usual “holier than thou†attitude of the myth-mongering Yockeyites.”
And, again, I reply that sending money to Alex Linder is damn near a duty for those of us who take the RACIAL Struggle seriously, and “Doc” Schneider was right – “Boots, or bullion. Send money to the people who are at the tip of the spear for us, until you can stand besides them in the street.”
Nothing “smarmy” about that, at all.
(2) Alex makes an excellent point about country music; I think he should take basic tunes that he likes, and write *ahem* appropriate lyrics for them. Something useful may well come out of this.
I like Dresden’s song, “White America,” and have often thought how very impressive it would be to have Travis Tritt come out on stage as the musical intro ends, as has the crowd sings with him:
I…WANT TO LIVE…IN A WHITE…A..ME..RI..CA!
I…WANT TO LIVE…IN A WHITE…IM..PE..RI..UM!
Yockey would support such sentiments; especially about the money, and the White America.
And Mencken would support the writing of country music lyrics; remember, his goal, to reach people with his ideas, is the same as Alex Linder’s. I can imagine Mencken sitting down with Travis Tritt and writing the music of a…
New America
An Idea Whose Time Is HERE!
11 September, 2006 at 6:50 pm
This guy is as dense as Apollonian. I give up.
11 September, 2006 at 8:50 pm
alex, you’re not listenting:
you’re giving links to one of the weakest of wagner’s musical moments: ride of the valkeries. you are not being fair to wagner’s music, and you are being dishonest by representing that as an example of a typical wagnerian musical moment. it is not. it has been cliched as such, but it not typical of wagner.
now stop passing off disinformation as truth. isn’t that what vnn is all about, trying to stop the disinsformation?
go listen to those parts of die walkure i told you to, then get back to us. if you honestly listen to those parts, and still hate wagner, then fine. until then, stop acting like you KNOW axl rose is greater than wagner (i can barely type that with a straight face…).
i’m not an authority on guns n roses, so i’ll not pass judgment. but the little i have heard of them, well, i’ll keep judgment to myself (it didn’t make me want to hear more, let’s put it that way; but if you have any recommendations, such as i gave you, i will go forthwith and listen to every piece you suggest, and get back to you.)
oh, and sorry i got impatient
13 September, 2006 at 10:11 am
Nor will you find, in any part of Krishna’s monologue, exhortation to fight for the race; fighting his own blood is what paralyzes Arjuna, not whatever “Faustianâ€-psychogobbledygook Carpenter said.
It is clear Outis is absolutely obsessed with me. How funny it is to read about his obsession, again and again. He must have a seriously perverted mental state, to be sure.
“Faustian”, Outis? Where do I write about a “Faustian” spirit here? Go on, show us. Oh, that’s right, nowhere. You made it up. Ah, Outis is a liar. Which everybody knew, of course. A boring and obsessed liar, as well.
13 September, 2006 at 1:43 pm
You’re like one of those kids in school who gets off by pointing and snickering about something they made up to slander some other kid.
I did, however, make a mistake attributing that to you. That’s a called a typo; if you are, however, flattered to think it obsession, lying, perversion, or whatever else, fine with me.
By the way, you’re a fucking idiot.
13 September, 2006 at 4:29 pm
I found another interesting article about religion. Perhaps a better strategy for Linder would be to harness the awesome power of religious belief rather than to let it go to waste by criticising the stupidity of how it is expressed in modern christinsanity and not offering something better- something racial-religious in its stead.
Escaping Illusion?
Kim Sterelny
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Daniel C. Dennett. xvi + 448 pp. Viking, 2006. $25.95.
In recent years, Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust), Pascal Boyer (And Man Creates God) and David Sloan Wilson (Darwin’s Cathedral) have all set forth evolutionary theories of religion. This focus is unsurprising: Like language, moral cognition, elaborate tool use and the extensive division of labor, religious belief seems to be both a typical and a distinctive feature of human intelligence—one of remarkable persistence.
Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking The Spell adds to the growing list of books on religion as a natural phenomenon but is strikingly different in tone and content from its predecessors. It is written for Americans, whose world is not secular: In the United States, it is impossible for an open skeptic to be a serious political figure, and even the skeptical take religion to be of profound moral and social significance. Dennett devotes much of his energy to trying to convince his nonsecular readers that it is legitimate to inquire scientifically into the roots of religious belief and to assess its moral consequences, good and bad. Reading this, I felt like a member of an alien species; it was a strange experience for a secular boy from a secular world.
Before I discuss Dennett’s take on religion, let me explain why I think his cultural project is doomed. He wants the religious reader to take his assessment of religion’s causes and effects seriously, and he labors mightily to present himself as fair-minded, if not neutral, about the truth of the central claims of such faiths as Christianity. The smart money is not on him. His intended audience will rightly regard any evolutionary model, indeed any secular model, of religion as essentially corrosive. For the so-called “genetic fallacy” (the erroneous supposition that a defect in the genesis of something is evidence that discredits the thing itself) need be no fallacy. A causal account of the origins and maintenance of belief can undermine that belief’s rational warrant.
Suppose, for example, that someone were able to explain my political views about discrimination in university hiring by making the case that I held them because I am male and Caucasian. That explanation would not show that my beliefs were false, but it could show that they were not rationally based, because they depended not on the flow of information from the world to me but on my selfish interests. Given those interests, I would have those beliefs whether or not university hiring practices were fair. If, in fact, my beliefs were true, they would be so by luck. Rationally formed beliefs are counterfactually sensitive: Had the world been different, the agent’s views would be different. For that reason, economic and other institutional theories of attitude are undermining. If true, they show that there is no mechanism through which an agent’s beliefs about the world track states of the world.
Likewise, secular theories of religion are corrosive. Religious commitment cannot both be the result of natural selection for (for example) enhanced social cohesion and be a response to something that is actually divine. A cohesion-and-cooperation model of religion just says that believers would believe, whether or not there was a divine world to which to respond. If a secular theory of the origin of religious belief is true, such belief is not contingent on the existence of traces of the divine in our world. So although a secular and evolutionary model of religion might be (in a strict sense) neutral on the existence of divine agency, it cannot be neutral on the rationality of religious conviction.
I think this is true of all secular models of religious conviction, even the “economic model,” the one that most aspires to neutrality. According to this model, which Dennett discusses in a chapter titled “The Invention of Team Spirit,” religious belief is an instance of ordinary economic behavior. People join religious communities and sacrifice time, money and freedom to secure concrete rewards: immortality-despite-death, guaranteed bliss, supernatural intervention on their behalf and the like. These things are not available elsewhere; you can’t just purchase them online. No wonder that the suppliers of such services stay in business. The trouble, of course, is ensuring delivery.
We have a noncorrosive explanation of religion, but not a secular one, if we think that people are rational to expect to get what they pay for. We have a secular but corrosive theory if we think that such expectations are irrational and reflect the projection of economic decision-making beyond its proper domain. The economic model looks neutral only so long as we refuse to ask ourselves whether the expectation of return is rational. Once that question is posed, neutrality collapses. So Dennett is too optimistic if he imagines that religious readers will regard his research project as anything other than poisonous: They could be vindicated only by the project’s failure.
Still, Dennett has a lot of interesting things to say about why religion might have evolved. His account is more multifaceted than those of Atran, Boyer and Wilson. In contrast with Wilson, for example, Dennett does not take religion to be a unitary phenomenon with a single evolutionary cause. Also, he does not present an integrated, systematic theory of religion; rather, he assembles the materials from which such a theory can be given for particular cases. I shall spend the rest of this review surveying some of these materials and Dennett’s use of them.
Dennett has based his case in part on work of cognitive anthropologists Atran and Boyer, who in effect have argued that religion is a spandrel—a side effect of certain other cognitive adaptations. The simplest hypothesis is Atran’s idea that religion is a consequence of our tendency to anthropomorphize, to project intentionality onto the world. We treat people as intentional agents—creatures that act as they do because of their thoughts and preferences. That regarding people this way is an adaptation is almost uncontroversial. As Dennett himself has persuasively argued in many of his works, it is often adaptive to treat other systems as intentional agents, especially when they are well-designed, well-functioning systems. But we habitually overuse this productive heuristic. It is harmless to talk to your cat, and it may well be productive for a hunter to conceive of his prey as actively planning to avoid or escape his attentions. But it is not adaptive to shout at and kick the step for being in the way after you have stubbed your toe on it. Likewise, we get no capacity to intervene in or predict the weather by thinking of storms as produced by divine agents. To the contrary, we get a false sense of control, which imposes a double tax: the price of the sacrifices we make, and the risks we expose ourselves to by embracing the illusion.
I agree with Dennett that this idea of Atran’s partly explains the prevalence of religion. Dennett also accepts the central argument of Boyer, who thinks religious ideas spread so well because they strike a balance between strangeness (which gets them noticed and remembered) and ordinariness (which gives them intelligibility and appeal). That’s why, according to Boyer, supernatural agents are transformed but familiar: They are people, animals or plants, natural objects like mountains, or artifacts like statues or knives. But they are not ordinary ordinary objects. Run-of-the-mill mountains do not eat, but this special, supernatural one does. Nevertheless, sacred mountains are mostly like other peaks; hence we can think intelligibly about them. That combination gives religious ideas both salience and transmittability. Dennett thinks that there is something importantly right about this observation and the ideas Boyer develops from it.
I am unconvinced. It is one thing for a supernatural entity to be memorable. It is another for it to be credible. Some stories get deeply etched in people’s minds, perhaps because they transform the ordinary just enough to be gripping without becoming unintelligible. Famous examples—The Iliad, say—have lasted thousands of years. But people do not understand The Iliad as being literally true; still less do they organize their lives around it. And how would belief in one of the memorable fantasies humans imaginatively generate when puzzled or frightened—say, a tree that can walk (to use one of Dennett’s examples)—ever be adaptive for an organism?
The best-known adaptationist ideas about religion link it to the striking fact that people must cooperate to survive. Generating resources jointly is an ancient feature of human lifeways, and we are adapted to and for cooperative social worlds. Wilson, Joseph Bulbulia and others have argued that religious belief is one of those adaptations. A community that believes in an immensely powerful and knowledgeable enforcer gets the benefits of its norms being followed without paying the costs of policing them. Dennett does not discount this hypothesis completely, but he is more inclined to endorse less obvious proposals that link religious belief to psychic benefits.
One such argument is that religion facilitates placebo effects: Perhaps the belief that you are the object of divine concern has real and crucial health benefits, particularly in a premodern world. Another is Boyer’s hypothesis that religious belief simplifies choice-making in an informationally complex world.
In addition, philosophy has spawned a plethora of “ideal agent” theories: One idea from ethics, for example, is that what you ought to do is what you would want to do if you were ideally rational. Boyer points out that divine agents are often ideal agents; moreover, often they are ideal agents who are supposed to have our best interests at heart (our ancestors, for example). So in a complex and difficult world, it would be good to get their advice and follow it rather than succumb to decision paralysis. A nifty idea, although I remain skeptical: This strategy seems too costly and exploitable to me.
Dennett has long been involved in synergistic interaction with Richard Dawkins, so it is no surprise that Dawkins’s memetic view of religion plays a role in Dennett’s theory. Religion thrives, according to Dawkins, because its tenets and customs—its “memes”—like so many DNA or RNA-based genes, are structured to ensure that they are passed from one generation to the next (the Shaker practice of celibacy not withstanding).
Here Dennett’s theory is nuanced. He points out that today’s organized religions are reflective, self-conscious systems, which include not just beliefs about the supernatural but also rather strict ideas about how these beliefs are to be interpreted, warranted and fit together. Early religions may have a more or less direct biological explanation of the kind we have been discussing. But modern religions depend on massive investment in the mechanisms of cultural transmission. They cannot exist without the apparatus of holy books, seminaries, catechisms, theologians. So here a theory of cultural inheritance and cultural evolution comes into its own. Biases in preservation and transmission will be central to the explanation of the success and failure of modern religions. In contrast to Dawkins, though, Dennett does not assume that the dynamics of religious memes are virulently pathological. For him, this is an open empirical question.
I have never formed a settled view of the memetic explanation for the persistence of religion. Dawkins’s image is wonderfully vivid, but the memetic view does not include an account of our cognitive biases that explains why we find supernatural explanations believable. Perhaps Atran’s hypothesis (or one like it) explains this. But I have come to think that there is a plausible division of labor between meme-based views of religion and those that emphasize internal biases of the mind.
All selection processes depend on variation, and so a theory of our mental biases helps account for the cultural variations that are available. A meme-based theory is primarily external, emphasizing networks of the exchange of ideas and information. These networks and their organization help explain the transmission potential of human ideas. In small-scale social environments, people transmit many of their ideas to their kin in the next generation. Moreover, there is a reciprocal dependence on one’s neighbors. In such networks, ideas and genes will be filtered in somewhat similar ways. In addition, there is limited investment in books, memory aids and other tools that help us remember and understand what we see and hear, so intrinsic biases on what we can understand and repeat play a leading role. In larger-scale societies, intrinsic memorability matters less, because cultural mechanisms are available to ease the memory burdens. So the amount of variation expands. Also, the networks are more open. Thus the transmission potential of ideas will be very different from that of genes, and ideas will be filtered very differently. In today’s world, religions are not transmitted mostly to kin and to others who live in circumstances of mutual dependence. Such religions are therefore potentially more dangerous to us.
Despite my worry that Dennett is too hopeful that religious readers will be open to his arguments, I found Breaking the Spell thoughtful, informed and probing. It is surprisingly cautious: Dennett is sensitive to the limits on what we currently know and is mainly concerned to develop a research agenda. In discussing specific hypotheses about specific religions, he is not at all dogmatic. I doubt, though, that the book will reach the audience he wants. It will mostly be read by people like me, not by his decent, civil, morally serious Christian neighbors.
Reviewer Information
Kim Sterelny divides his time between Victoria University in Wellington, where he holds a Personal Chair in Philosophy, and the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University in Canberra, where he is a professor of philosophy. He is the author of Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition (Blackwell, 2003), The Evolution of Agency and Other Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and The Representational Theory of Mind (Blackwell, 1991).
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/53121
14 September, 2006 at 1:40 am
fuck all religion.
instead, listen to die walkure, act i. last scene of act ii. last 30 minutes of act iii. skip the infamous ride of the valkeries.
4 January, 2007 at 11:17 pm
You will never gain the popular vote without some sort of belief system buyin unfortunately. That is why it matters Alex. I’m staying out of the music debate. ;)
31 October, 2007 at 7:13 pm
Having just been referred back to this thread, I have a question for Outis:
Dismissing all intellectualism and all ideology, how do you propose to explain white nationalism to those intelligent enough to ask, on a more profound level, why one must conflict the Jews?
Your argument that no coherent world view is necessary to advance the white race is more typical of the beer drinking white trash segment of the movement than any portion of the movement worth discussing.
7 January, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Alex: “Odinism couldn’t even defeat a religion that advocated turning the other cheek.
NEXT.”
And neither could Chistianity and for that sake your precious
Atheism. All belief systems are succumbing. We wodanists just want us to never forget our original heritage. Much like a Japanese wanting to never forget Shinto. Despite what you think, our heritage, our roots are important. So you can “Next” all you want. It just makes you sound like trite little cunt.