Tag: history

The History of the Byzantine Empire

If you’re a Castalia History subscriber, you just might want to visit the Castalia Library substack today, as there is an announcement there concerning the fifth book in the Castalia History series, the April-May-June subscription book.

Also for Castalia History subscribers: there are about 20 Annual subscribers who still need to renew their subscriptions manually since we are not permitted to do so automatically in this particular situation. If your subscription has not been renewed, or if you need to make a catchup payment, you will receive an email shortly informing you of the need to do so.

And since we’re talking about Castalia History, I strongly recommend the daily excerpt from STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS, as the chapters on the tales of the secret services feature stories worthy of an action-adventure movie. The recently completed chapter on Brother James, who travelled through the enemy empire searching for a missing Spanish army that found itself surrounded by allies turned enemies in the aftermath of Napoleon’s decision to replace the Bourbon King of Spain with his brother Joseph, really has to be read to be believed.

In April La Romana had begun to be perturbed at the way in which the stream of dispatches and private letters from Spain, which had hitherto arrived regularly, had suddenly dried up. An officer who got through from Madrid with details of the accession of Ferdinand VII brought a complaint that the Home Government had got no dispatch from the expeditionary force for many weeks. Napoleon had stopped the post at both ends. This caused much alarm and evil surmises. They were more than fulfilled when on June 24th there was delivered to the Marquis a dispatch from Bayonne, announcing that the Bourbons had abdicated, that Joseph Bonaparte had been proclaimed King of Spain, that he had been acknowledged by the whole realm, and that he was to transmit the news to his army, and order the regiments to swear allegiance to their new sovereign.

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Why the Empire Always Falls

Philip K. Dick called it The Empire That Never Ended. Miles Mathis called them the Phoenecian Navy. I call them the Prometheans. Most people today call them globalists, but Jesus Christ called them the Synagogue of Satan. We don’t know what they call themselves, but they a) often appear to identify publicly as Jews and b) always criminalize expressions of Christianity and antisemitism.

And the latter points toward why they always fail, and why they have never, in more than 1,500 years, been able to successfully establish or maintain their own society or civilization despite occasionally possessing all the necessary instruments of power and influence in societies as powerful as pre-Imperial Spain, Tsarist Russia, post-Imperial Britain, or the post-Cold War USA. This cartoon sums up the essential cause of the failure.

For some inexplicable reason known only to themselves, the Prometheans always insist on a completely subjective law. And while that’s very useful for acquiring power, it is absolutely fatal to preserving it, because subjective law necessarily imposes the very sort of inequality that renders a society unstable. This is why every society that has successfully developed into a civilization has an elite that not only practices some form of noblesse oblige, but holds the members of the elite fully accountable to objective laws that are not substantially different than the laws the plebs must obey.

In short, to rule, one will be held responsible. To rule successfully, one must be capable of responsibly looking after the interests of the ruled.

Any elite that does not do so is viewed, correctly, as parasitical and illegitimate, and in Chinese terms, does not hold the Mandate of Heaven. And if there is one thing that is clear about the current Clown World super-regime, it is that it is illegitimate by its own self-proclaimed standard of democracy and its laws are entirely subjective. Which is why Clown World, like Babylon, is going to fall.

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Finland Played for Fools

The Finns are giving up their national sovereignty to Clown World because, despite decades of evidence, they actually believe that the US military is going to defend them against Russia:

The DCA gives the American military access to 15 bases in Finland and allows the deployment of military equipment and supplies on Finnish territory, as well as the free movement of US aircraft, ships, and vehicles. Members of the US military and the facilities they use would also get special legal protections.

When the DCA was signed, Finnish Defense Minister Antti Hakkanen said it was “a guarantee from the world’s largest military power that they will defend us.”

First, the USA is no longer the world’s largest military power except in two categories, sea power and space power, neither of which is sufficient to defend against Russia’s advantages with regards to infantry power, artillery power, air power, or nuclear power.

Second, the Finns should have probably asked the Poles what Britain’s guarantee was worth, or the Vietnamese, the Afghans, or the Iraqis what their US guarantees secured them in the end.

History strongly suggests that what best protects a small country is neutrality combined with a population willing to defend against any encroachments on its sovereignty. The single most dangerous position to assume is permitting a cowardly or corrupt elite inclined toward surrender that chooses a side in a battle between two major powers in the erroneous belief that this will either a) secure their own positions or b) protect the country.

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Archeology and the Sacred Name of God

There is a very important difference between the Greek and the Hebrew Old Testaments:

The Greek Septuagint Old Testament of 285 BC never used any sacred name for God, nor was such ever mentioned by other ancient writers such as the Israelite historians, Philo, and Josephus, or the later Eusebius, or even the Jewish Aristeas the Exegete who wrote his commentary on the Greek Septuagint. The YHWH word did not appear in any Old Testament text until the Masoretic Text of 1000AD! Nor was the existence of any Hebrew language Old Testament text ever mentioned by ancient theologians, whose work was exclusively with the Greek Septuagint text.

From the viewpoint of modern theologians, it must first be understood that they all still today accept the Masoretic Hebrew text of 1,000 AD as the true ancient language and Old Testament of our patriarchs. Anyone who dared question this assumption would end his career. Since that Masoretic Text includes the four letter tetragrammeton, YHWH, over 6,000 times, theologians are forced to speculate that Moses must have put it in his Pentateuch. The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 6, p. 1012, reads as follows: “In terms of the biblical narrative, some suggest that Moses derived the name of Yahweh from the Egyptians, while others think Yahweh was a Midianite deity worshipped by the Kenite clan. Moses would have been introduced to this new deity when he married the daughter of Jethro…”

Certainly, Moses would have been acquainted with the Pagan religion of the Egyptians. But, even if the Pentateuch was actually written by Moses in the 15th C. BC, he could not have written it in the Hebrew language which was not formed until the time of the Israelite captivities, from the 8th to 6th centuries BC, when the captive Israelites merged their native Phoenician language with the Aramaic of their captors. Now, I ask you, who wants to raise his hand to claim that Moses adopted the name of a foreign deity as a substitute for “God” or “Lord.”

If we set aside the closed-minded obduracy of modern scholarship, we can see that Moses did not write any text in the modern Hebrew language because it did not exist at that time, nor was there any Hebrew alphabet or script. The oldest Old Testament text known is the Greek Septuagint of 285 BC, and the word does not appear in it one single time, or in any other ancient Israelite writing, with one exception which I will mention now.

To place this information in proper context, recall that the northern kingdom of Israelites, who had turned to other gods, had been purged from the Holy Land during the 8th century BC, along with most of Judea. It would not be until 586 BC that the last three unconquered cities of Judea, namely Jerusalem, Azekah, and Lachish, were defeated. Archaeologists have found eighteen ostraca (clay sherds) in the city of Lachish from about 590 BC, most of them being letters from subordinates to a man named Yaosh, the military governor of Lachish. It is unknown if the writer was Israelite or Babylonian…

At the time of this letter in 590 BC, it would only be four more years before Lachish was conquered as a punishment from God because His Israelite children had gone chasing after Pagan gods.

Now, I’m not a theologian. This should be regarded as a starting point for investigation rather than an end. Even so, in this context, a lot of what is happening today begins to make sense, does it not? And it’s not as if we are not instructed, by the highest religious authorities, that their g-d is absolutely not God, the Father of Jesus Christ. I’ve certainly never witnessed anything positive come out of the Christian esotericism that dabbles in concepts like sacred names and languages.

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The Paper is Not Magic

And, as Liberia has proven, it doesn’t make the dirt magic either.

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. It is therefore futile and foolish to make appeals to Constitutional arguments in an immoral and atheistic society. Our enemies have disregarded what the Constitution says for half a century. It is a mistake continuing to play by a set of rules that our enemies no longer obey. Worse yet, turning a piece of paper into an idol and elevating it to some pseudo “holy” status in our minds.

Andrew Torba is correct. The power is not in the paper, the power is in the ideas and those ideas have been adulterated and perverted wherever they haven’t been abandoned. Neither the words nor the ideas have ever applied in any way to newcomers, immigrants, citizens, illegals, invaders, foreigners, or the children of those diverse peoples, they only ever applied to the Posterity of the Founders, the direct genetic blood descendants of the men who fought the American Revolution against their British brethren for independence from the King of England.

The Constitution was written to safeguard the liberties of the sons and daughters of the American Revolution and no one else. That’s what the Preamble to it says and that’s literally what Posterity meant. And that’s what it still means today, the legalistic fantasies of the would-be inclusive midwits who overrate the importance of their credentials and their own cognitive capabilities notwithstanding.

The words of the U.S. Constitution have never applied in any way to most of the “Americans” who are reading this now. So to fetishize it, to place any trust whatsoever in it, is to fundamentally fail to understand what it is, why it was written, and why it is no longer even remotely applicable to the United States of America in the Year of Our Lord 2024.

No damage therefore, that men in the state of nature suffer from one another, can give a conqueror power to dispossess the posterity of the vanquished, and turn them out of that inheritance, which ought to be the possession of them and their descendants to all generations. The conqueror indeed will be apt to think himself master: and it is the very condition of the subdued not to be able to dispute their right. But if that be all, it gives no other title than what bare force gives to the stronger over the weaker: and, by this reason, he that is strongest will have a right to whatever he pleases to seize on.
– John Locke, Of Conquest, Second Treatise on Civil Government, 1690

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The Trauma of Russian Independence

Clown World cannot abide Russia because Russia has escaped the satanic chains that bound her, while her European diplomats have lost the art of diplomacy for which they were once famous:

Dominic Lieven, a fine British scholar of the Russian Empire’s origins, wrote that the Russians were the only people Western Europeans had to deal with who were capable of fighting for their special, independent niche in the modern world with boundless courage, perseverance, and self-sacrifice.

Consider these words – we are the only civilization against which the West has attempted to act aggressively, and failed to achieve its goals. All the rest – the Great Empire of China, the ancient civilization of India, and many others – were unable to withstand the decisive thrust of the West, which for 500 years had been expanding the frontiers of its power by fire and sword. They were beaten, even if they were able to restore their statehood after some time.

Our country was never defeated. But let’s try to put ourselves in the Western Europeans’ shoes and understand their emotional state. For centuries, they have been living with a trauma called ‘an independent Russia’. However, we ourselves have never had the opportunity to understand what it is like to have a permanent enemy that can never be conquered.

So, when the USSR suddenly collapsed in 1991 and the unified state disintegrated, Western Europe found itself in a situation it had never experienced before. Overnight, the most unfulfilled wish of generations of European politicians and military leaders came true. All by itself, without a decisive military clash, and with the Russians’ full of desire to join the ‘European family’, even as pupils. Such a shock could not pass without serious consequences for the psyche of the statesmen and ordinary citizens of these Western European states.

Their entire foreign policy culture was based on the fact that Russia would never be pushed around or told what to do. Suddenly, the West felt it had won the Cold War without firing a single shot. In a state of fantastic emotional upheaval, the Western Europeans began to build relations with Russia as if it had finally been defeated. For several years, Moscow accepted the rules of the game that the West imposed. It took into account the wishes of the Western Europeans in the economic sphere and developed its foreign relations with an eye to how this would affect the main goal – which was gradual ‘integration’ with the EU.

In the new circumstances, the bloc found itself in the position of a demanding teacher, offering numerous ‘partnership’ programs with two simple objectives. First, to secure the interests of Western European business and make the Russian market even more open to it. Second, to ensure that Moscow was complying with its instructions.

European diplomats became equally demanding teachers. For several generations of EU ambassadors in Moscow, the main task was to monitor how well Russia was honoring its many commitments. As part of this ‘honorable’ mission, a tradition of communication with Russians at various levels has developed. And while there have been talks at the level of heads of state or foreign ministers, there has been no trace of normal diplomacy below that level.

EU ambassadors did not simply become the executors of the will of their masters back home (which is perfectly normal) – they gradually became technical workers entrusted with the task of observing Russia and pointing out errors in its behavior.

And the level of their intellectual ability was no longer measured by their competency in playing a subtle diplomatic game. The main measure was the degree of hysteria with which they pushed through a very simple agenda. All the more so as their individual will and intelligence were increasingly integrated into the system of rules and requirements common to all NATO and EU representatives abroad.

As a philosopher wrote in the last century, “in any collective, individual agency becomes the servant of the collective interest.” And gradually, we should add, it disappears in the sense that is a sign of agency in the first place – the ability to analyze a situation independently and to make decisions. This problem has become so total for Western European diplomacy and politics that it has gradually ceased to be noticed.

All the more so because European politics was also changing rapidly. Having found themselves, through no fault of their own, in the position of ‘winners of the Cold War’, Western Europeans felt a deep sense of moral superiority over the whole world around them. Except, of course, towards the Americans, who they are simply afraid of. We have repeatedly seen examples of the European Union interfering in the purely internal affairs of key partners such as China, or the still-very-friendly India. Not to mention states of lesser size and importance. Last year, for example, French President Emmanuel Macron made a scene with the Brazilians over their treatment of their forests.

The behavior of European leaders like Macron, Merkel, and Boris Johnson does often strike one as significantly out-of-touch with basic reality. When they talk about “defeating Russia” or “sanctioning China”, it makes one seriously wonder if they are even capable of basic math, let alone capable of understanding that the balance of power is no longer in their favor.

What the author gets wrong is that while Russia was never defeated by the West, it was defeated by a foreign power when the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, by the same power that rules over Ukraine and is at war with Russia today.

UPDATE: This recent demand by the European Parliament should serve to demonstrate the cartoonish extent to which the European leaders are overestimating their influence.

On Thursday, the European Parliament adopted a resolution calling on Moscow to send back 91.5 metric tons of gold and cultural artifacts that were exported to the Russian Empire in 1916-1917 by Romania.

I’m a little disappointed that the Russians merely rolled their eyes and told them, explicitly, “to fuck off”. I think it would have been much more amusing if they’d simply pointed out that the sanctions being applied by the European governments render any such transaction impossible.

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The Demonic Dirt

Haiti is descending into the depths of diversity.

Haiti has descended into cannibal gangs chasing people around and taking over police station.

Their Prime Minister has fled the country.

“The god who created the sun which gives us light, who rouses the waves and rules the storm, though hidden in the clouds, he watches us. He sees all that the white man does. The god of the white man inspires us with crime, but our god calls upon us to do good works. Our god who is good to us orders us to revenge our wrongs. He will direct our arms and aid us. Throw away the symbol of the god of the whites who has caused us to weep, and listen to the voices of liberty, which speaks in the hearts of us all.”
– Boukman, Bwa Kayiman Vodou Congress, Haiti, 14 August 1791

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Column and Line

Another intriguing excerpt from Castalia History’s forthcoming Studies On Napoleonic Warfare by Sir Charles Oman addresses the truth behind the history of the tactical conflict between the French column and the British line.

Every student who takes a serious interest in military history is aware that, in a general way, the victories of Wellington over his French adversaries were due to a skilful use of the two-deep British line against the massive column, which had become the regular formation for a French army acting on the offensive, during the later years of the great war that raged from 1792 till 1814. But I am not sure that the methods and limitations of Wellington’s system are fully appreciated. For it is not sufficient to lay down the general thesis that he found himself opposed by troops who invariably worked in columns, and that he beat those troops by the simple expedient of meeting them, front to front, with other troops who as invariably fought in the two-deep battle-line. The statement is true in a rough way, but needs explanation and modification.

The use of infantry in line was no invention of Wellington’s, nor is it a universal panacea for all the crises of war. Troops who are armed with missile weapons, and who hope to prevail in combat by the rapidity and accuracy of their shooting, must necessarily array themselves in an order of battle which permits as many men as possible to use their arms freely. This was as clear to Edward III at Crecy, or to Henry V at Agincourt, as to Wellington at Bussaco and Salamanca. A shooting-line must be made as thin as is consistent with solidity, since every soldier who is placed so far to the rear that he cannot see the object at which he is aiming represents a lost weapon, whether he be armed with bow, or with musket, or with rifle. Unaimed fire was even more fruitless in the days of short ranges than it is in the XXth century. And the general principles which guided an English general who wished to win by his archery in the Hundred Years War were much the same as those which prevail today.

The reason this topic is relevant today, more than 200 years later, is that rather like the period in the 17th century when the dispersed shooting line disappeared in favor of dense columns and the post-Civil War period when artillery and machine guns made it necessary to eliminate both line and column entirely, the battlefield is undergoing another period of tactical reconsideration, this time brought about by new drone and facial recognition technology.

These developments may, in fact, render the battlefield itself obsolete. The Kalishnikov Zala Product 55 quadcopter not only carries an explosive charge, but as can be seen in the embedded image, spools out 6.7 miles of fiber-optic cable to render it immune to electronic jamming, making it all but unstoppable by anything except elite skeet shooters and anti-air laser defense systems.

Which is just another reason to stay safely inside at home reading the Castalia Library substack, which being entirely free, is not only educational, but an unbeatable value, in addition to keeping Library, Libraria, and History subscribers even more up to date than the monthly newsletter. And if you’re a parent, you might want to consider subscribing to the Junior Classics substack, which is presently wrapping up the final section of the pre-Devil Mouse version of The Beauty and the Beast.

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The Fake Science of Sugar

How fat and cholesterol were substituted for sugar and turned Americans into an unhealthy herd of waddling land-whales.

A doctor explains how the groundwork for the Food Pyramid nonsense and the encouragement to reduce fat consumption and increase carbohyrdate consumption of the 1990s was laid by the corruption of scientistry in the 1960s.

In 1967, a single scientific study revealed the true culprit of the diabetes and heart disease epidemic was sugar. NOT saturated fat or cholesterol. So why wasn’t this information made common knowledge? They covered it all up. The sugar industry knew the results of these studies would tank sales and cost them billions. So the Sugar Research Foundation paid three Harvard Scientists $65,000 each to “prove” sugar was harmless. The scientists were some of the most respected nutrition experts in the world. Dr. Frederick Stare was the chairman of Harvard’s Department of Nutrition. Dr. Mark Hegsted was a scientific advisor for the USDA. Dr. Robert Gandy was a pioneer in dietary research.

The scientists dismissed multiple long-term studies. The first study proved sugar caused deadly arterial plaques. This was ignored. Another showed heart disease skyrocketed on a high-carb diet. The scientists dismissed it, claiming “these diets are rarely consumed.” The consequences of this scientific manipulation are horrifying. The truth about sugar and its effects on obesity, diabetes, and heart disease remained in the dark for years. Well-meaning doctors prescribed their patients low-fat, high-carb diets for decades. These dietary suggestions are to blame for the obesity crisis in America.

The USDA urged Americans to trade butter for margarine. Margarine is now accepted as an artery-clogging poison. And another massive shift was to “healthy” low-fat foods loaded with hidden sugars. As a result, U.S sugar consumption tripled. So did Big Sugar profits. And not surprisingly, so did type 2 diabetes and blood sugar issues. In 1980, only 1 in 50 Americans had a blood sugar problem. Today, that number is up to 1 in 3. High blood sugar kills roughly 3.2 million people per year.

In other words, as with immigration and third-world overpopulation, the seeds of the castastrophic crises we are experiencing across the West were planted in a very small period of time between 1960 and 1967.

During the mid-20th century, Borlaug led the introduction of these high-yielding varieties combined with modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India. As a result, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India, greatly improving the food security in those nations. These collective increases in yield have been labeled the Green Revolution, and Borlaug is often credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply.

Add the names of Frederick Stare, Mark Hegsted, and Robert Gandy to the infamous list that includes Norman Borlaug, Philip Hart, and Emmanuel Cellar of men whose objectives and actions contributed the most to the downfall of the West and its transformation into Clown World.

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