Great Failure

by Revilo P. Oliver

THE CRUSADES are, so to speak, the continental divide of European history. They have inspired thousands of novels and romances in all European languages, of which the best known in this country is probably Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman, a typical compound of 15% history and 85% exuberant fancy. They are subject of innumerable general and partial histories, and even a summarily select bibliography would cover several pages. For an orderly account of events, I shall recommend only A History of the Crusades, a composite work edited by Kenneth M. Sutton and others (2 vol., Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).

The avowed purpose of the Crusades was the conquest of Palestine, then called the “Holy Land”, because it was the scene of the tales assembled in the Christian’s holy book. When we consider the individuals who participated in that great outburst of military power, we can only rarely determine in what proportions a given man was actuated by superstition and by our racial desire for adventure, conquest, and glory.

In the Crusades, Europe attained the greatest measure of unity she has had since the fall of the Roman Empire. It is true that there was frequent and sometimes fatal dissention among the leaders, but they quarrelled as rival commanders, each jealous of his own prestige and confident of his own military judgement, not as Englishmen or Frenchmen or Germans. In feudal society (as so often in the Elizabethan theatre and grand opera) each territorial magnate, a count or duke, was the absolute monarch of his own domain, owing only a tenuous allegiance to a king or emperor, and nationality was, at most, only a vague perception of small ethnic and temperamental differences, not yet systematized politically into distinct nations.

The European unity manifested in the Crusades was, in part, made possible by a common religion, Christianity in the form of Roman Catholicism, still unperturbed by formidable heresy, and, in part, by a common culture and, among the literate, a common language, Latin. To what extent this basis of unity was preserved by Christianity is a question that depends on speculation about what would have happened, had the Germanic peoples been immune to the alien religion. The answer given by Charles Renouvier in his anonymously published Uchronie (Paris, 1876) is only one of scores that could be urged with equal plausibility.

In the Crusades, Europe, for the first time since the decadence of Rome, took the offensive and, in obedience to our racial urge to expand and conquer, the relatively small armies of European warriors vanquished the Moslems’ armed hordes, subdued Palestine, made an Aryan the King of Jerusalem, and partitioned the land into feudal domains.

In the Crusades, Europe also manifested, here and there, a sense of racial unity. One of the great leaders of the First Crusade, Godfrey de Bouillon, remarked on the folly of going to the Orient to fight the Saracens while leaving one’s wife and heirs exposed to the depredations of another Oriental race, the enemies of God and man, and he was only with difficulty persuaded to depart on the Crusade and leave urgent business unfinished at home. Other noblemen, notably Emicho de Leiningen, Guillaume de Melun et Gâtinais, Clarebold de Vendeuil, Thomas de La Fère, and Drogo de Nesle, attempted hurriedly to clean up some German cities, notably Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and Cologne, on their way to the holy war. Their patriotic efforts were largely frustrated by men of their own race. The Jews scurried to sanctuary in churches and monasteries, where they were protected by venal or superstitious ecclesiastics, including bishops and archbishops, and some went into hiding in the homes of venal or compassionate burghers. Of the Jews who fell into the hands of the Crusaders, many saved their lives by professing an eagerness to be doused in holy water, while an uncertain number of others were slain. Warriors on their way to Palestine could not tarry long in any one place, so their attempted épuration was more symbolic than real, and they had to be content with a relatively small number of executions and with carrying off booty that the usurers and swindlers quickly replaced by fresh depredations.

Yahweh’s darlings habitually and perpetually whine about persecution, and since the Crusaders did slay a number of them who failed to scuttle into sanctuary or hiding, they had some basis for fictions about a “holocaust.” They wrote narratives about the multitude of sweet innocents who heroically killed themselves and their families to avoid falling into the hands of the vile Christians. These accounts were recently translated, expounded and elaborated by Robert Chazan in European Jews and the First Crusade (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987), a work that I have not seen, although I have read a good part of the sources in an edition by Neubauer, Stern, and Baer (Berlin, 1892). Chazan evidently accepted the stories as historical chronicles.

Professor Ivan G. Marcus of the Jewish Theological Seminary, in his review of Chazan’s book in Speculum, LXIV (1989), pp. 685 ff., notes that the several sources represent revisions by various hands and fall into three families, distinguished by the use of “stench” or “filth” or both to designate Christians. He recognizes that the stories, improved by each reviser, “are highly edited, rhetorically colored, and liturgically motivated literary reworkings of circular letters and oral reports, written for definite purposes.”

It is likely that some Jews — how many we shall never know — did follow the example which, according to tradition, was set by the Jews in Masada when that fortress was retaken by the Romans in A.D. 73, and did kill themselves and their families rather than be temporarily polluted by drops of the hated Europeans’ holy water.

When the Crusaders reached Palestine, their prowess and valor crushed the Moslem armies and gave them possession of all the territory they coveted, on which they imposed a rule that has left monuments that still excite the awe of tourists, notably the vast ruins of the Krak des Chevaliers. But their conquest of Palestine, as their later conquest of the Byzantine Empire, was in the end ephemeral, and as the Europeans retreated, the land relapsed into the possession of the peoples from whom it had been taken.

The great effort, inspired by Christianity, ended in failure, because the minds of the conquerors had been muddled and perverted by Christianity. Thus was the blood of our race shed in vain, and its heroism aborted, as was often to happen in later centuries.

Another retelling of a part of the history of the Crusades is Edward Burnam’s The Templars, Knights of God (London, Crucible, 1988), which is the subject of an admirably perspicacious review by the editors of Mankind Quarterly, XXIX (1989), pp. 421 ff.

The Knights Templar fought valiantly and heroically in the Near East, but their order was an attempt to combine two incompatible things: knighthood and piety. They were warriors, but they were also ecclesiastics, and as such they were condemned to celibacy. They could not marry, and since Christianity had inherited and even exacerbated the morbid misogyny of its Jewish authors, they were even forbidden to have intercourse with those nasty and dangerous animals, women. The result, naturally, was that some became homosexuals, with a vice that does not necessarily exclude valor, (1) while others, evading an inhuman law, kept concubines, usually women from the native population, and engendered mongrel bastards.

(footnote 1. As witness the famous Heiros Lochos of Thebes, if their sexual habits are correctly reported. Philip of Macedon, who was by no means a sentimentalist but had an Aryan’s admiration of courage and loyalty, wept when he saw them dead in their ranks on the field of Chaeronea.)

The Knights Templar, therefore, were a part of the racial ruin wrought by an alien and poisonous religion. They, as the editors remark in the review, were part of the historical record that incites us to “wonder that Europe could for so long sustain the constant genetic loss resultant from centuries of warfare on the one hand, and centuries of monasticism on the other.”

The Jewish superstition, furthermore, was what aborted the first great European conquest and made it a war to save a part of the world for Christianity and thus, despite all the heroism of the Aryan warriors, made it in the end as futile and foolish as a war to “save the world for democracy.”

One could not improve on the concluding section of the review as a statement of a highly significant historical fact that is usually disregarded by writers who aspire to be popular pseudo-historians:

Although the Levant was potentially a source of wealth and riches for Europe, being central to trade with the Orient, it could have been held only if the Crusaders had abandoned the Christian ideal, which saw the local Christian population as their brethren, and had instead planned the permanent colonization of the Holy Land by European settlers, bringing European women, and thus ensure a permanent and plentiful garrison sufficient to resist the Moslem hordes brought against them for all directions. While the Crusaders never degenerated, in the Levant, to the levels of the Byzantines, nevertheless the only offspring they produced there were the offspring of local women who certainly did not share the gene pool of the European knights, and equally certainly were not reared in the tradition that enthused the chivalry of Europe. For the vast majority of European knights, participation in the Crusades, and settlement in the Levant, was genetic death. The indigenous Moslems could always raise fresh hosts with which to retake the cities won by the Crusaders at such heavy cost, while any Crusader reaction was possibly only when the internecine political and church squabbles in Europe would permit a new generation of young knights to be sent to the Levant.

Sent, one could add, to their genetic death and with further depletion of our race’s great and irreplaceable heritage.

So you can see that the hallucinatory drug to which our race was made addicted by its eternal enemies and by its own shysters and demented dervishes, was as deadly in 1096-1144 as it is today. One must wonder whether our faltering race, now so terribly depleted of its racial strength, can ever recover from the spiritual kuru or “AIDS” with which it was infected in the fourth and fifth centuries of the present era. Certainly not, so long as it idiotically suppresses the little that is left of the race’s ravaged immune system.

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Source: Liberty Bell magazine, December 1989