Who We Are #19 — Spaniards and Iberians

JUST AS THE southeastern-most region of Europe — the lands bordering the Black Sea on the west and north — has been a borderland contested between Whites and non-Whites over the course of most of our recorded history, so also has Europe’s southwestern-most projection, the Iberian peninsula, been a racial battlefield throughout the centuries. Serving as a natural gateway into Europe from Africa, Iberia has repeatedly been used by invaders from the south, and the racial consequences may be seen in Spain and Portugal today, where an exceptionally wide range of racial types is to be found.

Despite today’s diversity, Iberia seems to have shared a common racial heritage with the lands north of the Pyrenees during the Ice Ages, when men and women of the Cro-Magnon race hunted there and left in Spanish caves some of the most magnificent specimens of their art (see the third installment in this series). With the retreat of the glaciers and the thawing of the tundra, however, a short (and, presumably, dark) Mediterranean type entered the peninsula from northen Africa and became established there, about the same time as in Italy and Greece, around 8,000 years ago.

Bell Beaker Folk

During the Neolithic, as the climate north of the Pyrenees became suitable for agriculture, these Mediterranean Iberians began expanding into other areas of Europe, eventually reaching Britain and southern Germany. Archaeologists refer to one of the later waves of these people as the Bell Beaker folk. Remnants of these Iberian invaders were found in Britain as late as the first century A.D., and they are described by the Roman writer Tacitus in the portion of his Agricola dealing with British geography and ethnology: “The dark complexion of the Silures, their usually curly hair, and the fact that Spain is the opposite shore to them (not exactly; they were in southeastern Wales, quite far from Spain –Ed.), are evidence that Iberians of a former date crossed over and occupied these parts.” The Silures of Wales evidently resembled the Spaniards with whom Tacitus was familiar.

By Tacitus’ day Spain had seen much more than Cro-Magnons and Iberians, however. The Phoenicians, a Semitic people from the eastern Mediterranean, established colonies in Iberia in prehistoric times, prior to 1,000 B.C. They were drawn there by the considerable mineral wealth of the peninsula, which had active mines producing silver, gold, copper, lead, and iron well before the dawn of history. Cadiz, Malaga, and Cordoba were all established originally by the Phoenicians, and the name Spain itself is of Phoenician origin.

Greeks and Celts

As early as 600 B.C. the Greeks had also established colonies in Iberia, mainly on the coast of northern Catalonia (the northeastern part of the peninsula), for the same reason as the Phoenicians. The Greeks later expanded southward along the Catalonian coast and down into Valencia.

Around 500 B.C. the first Celts arrived. Moving southward and westward, they crossed the Pyrenees and settled primarily in the west and northwest of the peninsula. Later groups of Celts pushed on into the other parts of the peninsula, overcame the Iberian natives, and intermarried with them, yielding the Celtiberian race.

Subsequently many Celtiberians migrated northward and occupied that portion of Gaul south of the Garonne River (ancient Acuitania, modern Gascony), where new Celtic bands pushed through them on their way south. Only in the northwestern part of Iberia, in Galicia and Asturias, did the Celts remain relatively unmixed.

Restless Basques

Iberia’s varied topography has always helped to maintain the diversity of her population. In particular, the mountains of the peninsula have served as refuges for the more independent-minded of her peoples — and there has always been an extraordinary abundance of the latter in Iberia. Even today, several separatist movements keep Spain in a state of political unrest. The most notable of these is that of the Basques, a remnant of the original Iberian race. The Basques have undoubtedly undergone a certain amount of racial admixture with Indo-Europeans over the last 2,500 years, but their speech remains as the sole example of a Mediterranean language still extant on western European soil.

In 480 B.C. the Carthaginians, a Semitic people of Phoenician origin, in response to a plea for help from their Phoenician cousins in Cadiz who were attempting to put down an Iberian insurrection, invaded the peninsula. Once in, the Carthaginians decided to stay and they settled down to a long period of expansion and economic exploitation.

Semitic Beachhead

In 237 B.C., after the First Punic War, in which Rome took Sicily away from Carthage, the Carthaginians made the fateful decision to strengthen their beachhead on European soil. They began a general conquest and colonization of those parts of Iberia not already under their control. During this process the Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca founded the cities of Cartagena and Barcelona, the latter named for his own family.

Rome regarded the Carthaginian moves in Iberia — in particular, the siege of the Greek colony of Saguntum (modern Sagunto, on the Valencian coast) — as a casus belli; thus commenced the Second Punic War. After a long and difficult struggle against the redoubtable Hannibal, Rome crushed Carthage and found herself in possession of a new province: Iberia. Although it then took the Romans 75 years to pacify all the Iberians, Celts, and Celtiberians of the peninsula, it remained Roman for more than five centuries. The Roman imprint on Spanish culture and politics, as well as on the racial destiny of the peninsula was very strong.

The Roman conquest ended the power of the Semitic Carthaginians in Iberia, but on the heels of Rome’s legions came another plague of Semites to batten on the rich province: the Jews. In their inimitable fashion they wormed their way into every aspect of the Iberian economy, and it was not long before there was hardly a commercial transaction anywhere in the peninsula in which money did not rub off on some Jew’s palm.

So many Jews flocked to Roman Spain, and they multiplied so prodigiously there, that today the Jews of the world still divide themselves into two categories: those descended from the Jews of the Iberian peninsula, who are called Sephardim, and those descended from the Jews who battened on central and eastern Europe instead, who are called Ashkenazim. Spain was for the Jews like New York and Miami Beach rolled into one: a commercial center with great natural resources where they could become filthy rich, and a place in the sun where they could then sit on their accumulated shekels in leisure and comfort.

Germans and Alans

Roman authority and Jewish wealth coexisted more or less amicably in Spain for 500 years. By the beginning of the fifth century A.D., however, the Romans were as decadent in Spain as in Italy, and German and Sarmatian invaders from the north found the rich province easy picking. As described in the 17th installment in this series, the Alans, Vandals, and Suebians crossed the Pyrenees into Spain in 409 and divided the peninsula among themselves, after first laying waste to it.

They were followed shortly by the Visigoths, under Adolf, brother-in-law and successor of the mighty Alaric, following the latter’s sack of Rome. The Visigoths subjected their predecessors, nearly annihilating the Alans in the process, and established their ownership not only of the peninsula but also of a substantial portion of southwestern Gaul as well. After the Suebians and Vandals had been pacified, they were allowed to remain in the northwestern corner of the peninsula (Galicia), while the Visigoths settled north of the Pyrenees, making Toulouse their capital.

Andalusia

The Vandals did not long remain pacified, however; war soon broke out between them and the Suebians, and the former left Galicia and reestablished themselves in the southern part of the peninsula, to which they gave their name: (V)andalusia. Then, in March 429, the entire nation, 80,000 strong, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and seized new territory in northern Africa (see the 17th installment).

The Suebians seized the land vacated by the Vandals, but the Goths eventually reasserted their own dominion and pushed the former back into Galicia and adjacent territory in the northwest. The leader of the Goths at this time was Euric, a son of the mighty Theodoric, vanquisher of Attila.

Euric may be considered the founder of the Gothic Kingdom of Spain. He died in 484. His successors, Visigoths and Ostrogoths, ruled the peninsula for the next 227 years.

Jews vs. Goths

By the time of Recared I, who reigned from 585 to 601, Gothic Spain was again renowned for its wealth — and again the Jews found that wealth irresistible. The Goths, however, were not so willing as the Romans had been to allow the Jews to eat up the whole country, and in consequence there was almost continual strife between Goths and Jews, with the latter incessantly scheming, agitating, and whining of “persecution.”

Much to their later regret, the Goths did not deal decisively with their Jewish problem. Instead, they allowed themselves to be convinced by their bishops that a sprinkling of holy water would cure the Jews of their ancestral ways. King Sisibert, around the year 620, forced 80,000 Jews to be baptized, and an even larger number were driven from the kingdom.

Half a century later one of his successors, Wamba, was obliged to take similar measures against the Jews, so troublesome had they again become. In 673 he expelled from the Gothic realm all who would not submit to baptism, while the citizens of several Spanish communities acted on their own initiative and dealt with local Jewish merchants and moneylenders in a more forceful and effective way.

Decadence and Racemixing

Although King Wamba was a strong ruler, who successfully put down a Basque rebellion and maintained his frontiers against his Frankish neighbors to the north and Arab pirates raiding by sea from the south, prosperity had already begun taking its toll on Gothic vigor. It was Wamba’s immediate predecessor, Recesuinto, who, at the insistence of the Church, took the first direct step toward Gothic racial suicide (if we do not count as such Sisibert’s allowing baptized Jews to pass as Gentiles a few years earlier) when he abolished the longstanding ban against intermarriage.

Prior to Recesuinto’s reign, the racial pride of the Goths had remained intact. None but Goths might rule, and Goths might marry none but Goths. The penalty for violation of this ban was quite severe: both partners were burned at the stake. Thus, the blood of the Goths had remained unmixed with that of their Roman, Iberian, and Jewish subjects. Recesuinto allowed Goths to marry baptized Jews and anyone else who claimed Christian beliefs, and the nobility of Spain has since been tainted heavily with the Semitic blood of department-store heiresses, or the equivalent thereof in that pre-department-store era.

The Jews conspired all the more against the Goths, and the successors of Recesuinto and Wamba were obliged to take measures against them on a number of occasions. They failed, however, to rid their kingdom of the pestilence, because they did not apply the same measures against baptized Jews as against their unbaptized brethren. This shortsightedness finally led to the undoing of the Goths during the reign of Roderic, who took the throne in 709.

While the men of Roderic’s race had grown soft and indecisive over the course of the dozen generations which had passed since the time of Adolf, unable finally even to cope with a gaggle of money-hungry Semites in their midst, a new Semitic danger had begun to rise to the south of them.

Rise of Islam

About the month of August of the year 570, five years after the death of Emperor Justinian and certainly within a few years of the birth of Pepin of Landen — also known as Pepin the Old, Count of Austrasia, Mayor of the Palace, and great-grandfather of Charles Martel — there was born in the Arabian city of Mecca a son to the merchant Abdallah, son of Abdul-Muttalib, son of Hashim. He was named Muhammad.

At about the age of 25 Muhammad wooed and won a wealthy widow, 15 years his senior. Her fortune enabled him to spend less time buying and selling camels and more time reflecting on the sad state of morals among his fellow Arabs.

God of the Black Stone

When he reached the age of 40 Muhammad decided to leave the family business altogether and put himself forth as a prophet. He began preaching a creed which was an amalgam of several of the Semitic religions of his day: a bit of Judaism, a bit of Christianity, and a bit of the traditional Arab religion then holding sway in Mecca. Muhammad emphasized two things: that Allah, the local Arab god of the Black Stone of the Kaaba, was the only god; and that charity, in the form of almsgiving, was necessary to virtue. (At the time the Arabs had a number of deities, although Allah was generally considered supreme. The Black Stone associated with this particular god, perhaps a meteorite, had been worshipped by Arabs since prehistoric times. It is now built into one of the walls of the Kaaba, a small temple in Mecca which, in Muhammad’s day, also housed the embodiments of a number of other gods.)

The prophet business went no better for Muhammad than the camel business at first, but he was nothing if not persistent. When his fellow Meccans threatened his life, he fled with some 70 followers to Medina, 200 miles to the north. That was in 622, the year from which Muslims date their subsequent history.

Needless to say, Muhammad’s following increased after 622, and by the time of his death ten years later he had united most of Arabia behind him and convinced his countrymen of their sacred obligation to spread his new creed among the infidels, using fire and sword. Incited by his teachings, the Arabs began a campaign of foreign conquest and forced conversion in the Middle East and northern Africa. By the time Roderic had ascended to the throne of the Goths in 709, Muslim hordes had conquered Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, the easternmost regions of Asia Minor, Egypt, and all the rest of northern Africa except the Gothic fortress of Ceuta, on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar.

Fall of Spain

Treason delivered Ceuta into the hands of the Arabs and their allies in 711, and an Arab-Moorish invasion force sailed across the strait and seized a beachhead in Andalusia. Roderic’s army fought the invaders in a fierce, three-day battle at Xeres (now Jerez de la Frontera), about 13 miles inland from Cadiz, under a blazing July sun. The Moors under their Berber general Tariq, won, and the Goths retreated to their cities.

The Gothic cities were well fortified and had withstood Arab raiding parties more than once, but as soon as Tariq’s dusky horde appeared outside the walls of each city in 711, the Jews inside, by prearrangement, threw open the gates.

Although Muhammad had experienced especially strong opposition from the Jews of Medina, who had controlled the business of that city during his stay there, and he had singled them out for special opprobrium in his writings (“Satan has gained possession of them and caused them to forget Allah’s warning. They are the confederates of Satan….” — Koran, chapter 58, verse 17), his followers had not hesitated to make a deal with their fellow Semites in order to vanquish the infidel Goths.

Jewish Hatred

For their part, the Jews were more than ready to trade masters. They had hopes, which were soon realized, that under Arab rule they would be able to regain the wealth, power, and privileged position they had held under the Romans. They bitterly hated the Goths for attempting to assimilate them into the Spanish population and make them work for their daily bread alongside Christian Spaniards.

Before word of the Jews’ treachery could be spread and the Goths could separate them — baptized and otherwise — from the general population and neutralize them, the invaders held virtually all the strong-points. Within a few months the greater part of Gothic Spain was in Muslim hands, and only scattered survivors made their way northward across the Pyrenees or into one of two remaining Gothic enclaves. One of these, in the southeast, fell to the Arabs a few years later. Only in the mountains of the north, in Asturias, were the Goths able to hold back the Semitic tide permanently.

Still Gloating

Even today, 12 centuries after the fact, Jews still gather in their synagogues on holidays to gloat over their destruction of the Goths, and Jewish writers openly boast of their treachery. The popular Jewish author and lecturer, Max I. Dimont, has taken particular satisfaction in the fate of the Gothic women, both in Spain and in those areas of Gaul subject to Moorish raiding parties from the south. In his best-selling book, The Indestructible Jews, Dimont writes:

As blond Christian maidens fetched fancy prices in the slave markets, raids in Christian lands by Muslim private entrepreneurs became big business. Female captives were pedigreed like dogs. Their Christian antecedents, their genuine blondness, their virginity, and their ability to bear children were all ascertained and notarized before they were marketed.

Dimont discreetly avoids mentioning that the slave merchants doing the pedigreeing and marketing of these White girls were, in most cases, Jews. What he does say is:

From the inception of Islam’s conquest, Spanish Jews had soared to the highest government posts. A series of brilliant Jewish viziers — viceroys — enriched the caliphate’s coffers and helped usher in an age of splendor and learning.

Battle of Tours

The victorious Semites and their mixed-race allies from north Africa did not long remain content with their conquests south of the Pyrenees. In 722 they invaded Gothic Gaul and seized Narbonne, Carcassonne, and several other towns. Ten years later, with an enormous army of Arabs and Moors behind him, the Arab governor of Spain, Abd ar-Rahman (whose name is spelled in various ways by different authors), began a new drive to the north, laying waste Gothic and Frankish areas of Gaul alike. His aim was to add all of Europe to the Muslim realm.

Eudes (also known as Odo), the Gothic count of Aquitaine, tried to hold back the invaders at the Garonne but failed. He then combined his remaining forces with an army of Franks and German volunteers from across the Rhine, under the leadership of Charles (Karl), count of the Austrasian Franks. The armies of Charles and Abd ar-Rahman met in the rolling champagne country of east-central France, between the towns of Tours and Poitiers, in October 732. The ensuing battle was one of the most momentous in the history of our race.

Indo-European over Semite

The English historian Edward Creasy speaks of “the great victory won by Charles Martel over the Saracens, A.D. 732, which gave a decisive check to the career of Arab conquest in Western Europe, rescued Christendom from Islam, preserved the relics of ancient and the germs of modern civilization, and reestablished the old superiority of the Indo-European over the Semitic family of mankind.”

The medieval chroniclers have described the conflict in picturesque terms:

Then Abd ar-Rahman, seeing the land filled with the multitude of his army, pierces through the mountains, tramples over rough and level ground, plunders far into the country of the Franks, and smites all with the sword, insomuch that when Odo came to battle with him at the River Garonne, and fled before him, God alone knows the number of the slain. Then Abd ar-Rahman pursued after Count Odo, and, while he strives to spoil and burn the holy shrine at Tours, he encounters the chief of the Austrasian Franks, Charles, a man of war from his youth up, to whom Odo had sent warning. There for nearly seven days they strive intensely, and at last they set themselves in battle array, and the nations of the North standing firm as a wall and impenetrable as a zone of ice utterly slay the Arabs with the edge of the sword.

Stout Hearts and Iron Hands

One medieval account reckons the Arab dead at 375,000, but this is probably an exaggeration. The great historian Edward Gibbon also draws on medieval sources in his description of the battle:

No sooner had (Charles) collected his forces than he sought and found the enemy in the center of France, between Tours and Poitiers. His well-conducted march was covered by a range of hills, and Abderame appears to have been surprised by his unexpected presence. The nations of Asia, Africa, and Europe advanced with equal ardor to an encounter which would change the history of the world. In the six first days of desultory combat, the horsemen and archers of the East maintained their advantage: but in the closer onset of the seventh day the Orientals were oppressed by the strength and stature of the Germans, who, with stout hearts and iron hands, asserted the civil and religious freedom of their posterity. The epithet of Martel, the Hammer, which has been added to the name of Charles, is expressive of his weighty and irresistible strokes…. After a bloody field, in which Abderame was slain, the Saracens, in the close of the evening, retired to their camp. In the disorder and despair of the night, the various tribes of Yemen and Damascus, of Africa and Spain, were provoked to turn their arms against each other: the remains of their host were suddenly dissolved, and each emir consulted his safety by a hasty and separate retreat….

The victory of the Franks was complete and final; Aquitaine was recovered by the arms of Eudes; the Arabs never resumed the conquest of Gaul, and they were soon driven beyond the Pyrenees by Charles Martel and his valiant race.

Gibbon adds to his account the information that the Christian priests and bishops of France, instead of being grateful to Charles for saving them, cursed his memory because he had found it necessary to seize a portion of the Church’s ill-gotten wealth in order to pay his army:

His merits were forgotten, his sacrilege alone was remembered, and, in an epistle to a Carlovingian prince; a Gallic synod presumes to declare that his ancestor was damned; that on the opening of his tomb the spectators were affrighted by a smell of fire and the aspect of a horrid dragon; and that a saint of the times was indulged with a pleasant vision of the soul and body of Charles Martel, burning, to all eternity, in the abyss of hell.

One can only suspect that the clerics involved in this condemnation may have had among them a few of those baptized Jews who had been slipping into the Spanish church for decades, and who were the first to make their way to the safety of the north when their brethren threw open the gates of the Gothic cities to the invaders.

Though forced to retreat south of the Pyrenees, the Arabs and the other Muslim invaders of Spain remained in the peninsula for nearly 800 years, and the genetic damage they wrought there was great. Islam, like Christianity, makes no distinction of race; all that counts is religion, not blood. Thus, the interbreeding begun under Recesuinto to satisfy the demands of his bishops continued at an accelerated pace under Muslim rule, and, as mentioned by the Jewish writer Dimont, the Arabs and Moors were especially fond of mingling their genes with those of Spain’s blond Gothic nobility.

One indication of this lust is revealed by the terms imposed on the Goths who remained in the unconquered enclave in the northwest, which later grew into the Kingdom of Galicia: In order to keep the Semites at bay they were required to pay a tribute of 100 blond virgins each year. It was not until the reign of Alfonso 11, which began in 791, that the Goths were again strong enough to put an end to this humiliating imposition.

Song of Roland

The painfully slow reconquest of Spain began soon after Charles Martel’s great victory. In 755 the Franks retook Narbonne, after a siege of six years, and drove the last of the Arabs out of Gaul’s coastal strip of Septimania. Thereafter the Franks undertook repeated campaigns south of the Pyrenees.

In 778 Charlemagne (Karl the Great), Charles Martel’s grandson, retook most of the territory north of the Ebro. It was during the withdrawal of the Franks back across the Pyrenees after this successful campaign that the rearguard of Charlemagne’s army, commanded by his nephew Roland, was ambushed in a mountain pass near Roncesvalles by Basque tribesmen (who, it should be noted, opposed their Mediterranean cousins, the Arabs, with the same vigor with which they opposed Goths and Franks). This episode provided material for a number of heroic medieval romances, including the immortal Chanson de Roland of the 11th century.

After this the Arabs and Moors were gradually pushed back toward Africa in a series of bloody wars with their neighbors to the north. Not until 1492 was the reconquest of the peninsula finally completed. In that year the unbaptized Jews were expelled en masse from the country they had betrayed eight centuries earlier, and the remaining pockets of Moors followed them ten years later. The Inquisition, which had been established in 1478, dealt to a limited extent with the baptized Jews.

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Source: National Alliance