In his Soirées de St. Petersburg, Josesph de Maistre famously wrote, that, for the three hundred years up to that point, history “had been a constant conspiracy against the truth.” These lines, which first appeared in print in 1821, are an obvious reference to Martin Luther’s theses of Wittenberg and the bloviations of the partisans of the Reformation, Enlightenment, and the French and associated revolutions. Sadly, in 2024, we must add two centuries to that tally.
The right understanding of history is absolutely essential to the right understanding of the present; without it, we do not know where we are. Orwell wrote that “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” These famous and once-familiar lines are more than an apt bon mot from 1984. They are—consciously or otherwise—standard operating procedure for government, media, and the education industry today. It is why so much of what those institutions present as history is, to be plain, a tissue of lies.
The best way to answer a lie is to refute it. This may be done in one of two ways: by lengthy, reasoned discourse, with sufficient annotations and footnotes to prove one’s point, when presented with an error by one seeking the truth; or by forceful, sharp retort, when the other’s object is to silence or destroy the truth itself. It is vital to tailor the response to the questioner: the sincere seeker will be repulsed by a snide or caustic answer, while the mere antagonist will ridicule erudition itself. In this article, it is the latter type of questioner with whom we shall deal—after all, it takes whole libraries to help the former! So let us explode a few widespread lies.
The first is that European civilisation or the white race is responsible for all the evil that now exists. When one is asked if one feels guilt for being white, my response has always been, “Do you feel guilt for asking such a stupid question?” The first thing to realise is that European superiority over the planet was not the result of DNA (and here, the woke and the neo-Nazis are unconscious brethren) but of culture driven by religion. Referencing the fall of Peking in the Second Opium War, Dom Gueranger put it very well in his Liturgical Year:
In our own times, the mere sight of a Christian army, though composed of but a few thousand men, struck terror into the heart of an immense Empire of the East: its Ruler who counts four hundred million subjects, and calls himself the ‘Son of the Celestial Empire,’ was so overcome by fear, that, without offering the slightest resistance, he fled from his palaces and Capital. Yes, this is the superiority given by Baptism to Christian Nations; for it would be absurd to attribute this superiority to our civilization, seeing that civilization itself is but a consequence of Baptism.
This might seem absurd or bizarre to modern, Western eyes, having had a century and a half of further secularisation since the good Benedictine wrote those words. But a godson of mine, who is an Indian convert from Hinduism, wrote to me, offering his comments about the civilisations of India and China, which are far older than ours, but which have made far less impact upon the world at large:
India as I have known it has been at its core dark. The darkness is not so much physical as spiritual—the Great Mogul had jewels aplenty. The impression has come to me of an ancient civilisation—glorious, powerful, and dark—that was utterly exhausted. Again, the exhaustion was spiritual; never was it physical. India, China, the great empires of the Orient never lacked in labour or in industry—but I wonder: was their labour ever work? Was their industry ever industrious? How does one understand the busy, hive-like activity and their blind sub-dermal despair? I have searched and searched but have failed to locate that bright spark that lights the soul of the Christian man.
Lest the European feel too cocky about this spiritual superiority, Hilaire Belloc chimes in:
We have reached at last, as the final result of that catastrophe three hundred years ago [the Protestant revolt], a state of society which cannot endure and a dissolution of standards, a melting of the spiritual framework, such that the body politic fails. Men everywhere feel that an attempt to continue down this endless and ever darkening road is like the piling up of debt. We go further and further from a settlement. Our various forms of knowledge diverge more and more. Authority, the very principle of life, loses its meaning, and this awful edifice of civilization which we have inherited, and which is still our trust, trembles and threatens to crash down. It is clearly insecure. It may fall in any moment. We who still live may see the ruin. But ruin when it comes is not only a sudden, it is also a final thing. In such a crux there remains the historical truth: that this our European structure, built upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity, was formed through, exists by, is consonant to, and will stand only in the mold of, the Catholic Church. Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish. The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.
Dom Gueranger makes the same point:
And we, the western nations, if we return not to the Lord our God, shall we be spared? Shall the flood-gates of heaven’s vengeance, the torrent of fresh Vandals, ever be menacing to burst upon us, yet never come? Where is the country of our own Europe, that has not corrupted its way, as in the days of Noah? that has not made conventions against the Lord and against His Christ? That has not clamored out that old cry of revolt: Let us break their bonds asunder, let us cast away their yoke from us? Well may we fear lest the time is at hand, when, despite our haughty confidence in our means of defense, Christ our Lord, to whom all nations have been given by the Father, shall rule us with a rod of iron, and break us in ‘pieces like a potter’s vessel.’
These last two quotes seem horribly bleak, when read against the current scene. But Dom Gueranger does have some comfort:
If, later on again, our Europe be misled by false theories and break with the Church; if this beloved Spouse of Jesus be betrayed and pillaged, calumniated and deprived of her rights by those very Nations which she had protected for so many ages, as the most loving of Mothers;—fear not; the Holy Ghost will add to her glories in some other way. Look at his present workings in the Church. Whence, if not from him, are those ever increasing vocations to the apostolic ministry? Moreover, while conversions from heresy are more numerous than at any previous period, there is not an infidel country where the Gospel is not being preached. Our century has had its Martyrs for the Faith; it has heard the authorities of China and Cochin China, like the Proconsuls of old, putting the Christians through an examination; it has heard the sublime answers, suggested by the Holy Ghost to these brave Confessors, as Christ had promised. The farthest East produces its elect; the negroes of Africa are evangelized; and if a fifth part of the World has been made known, it already counts its Faithful by thousands, flourishing under a hierarchy of lawfully appointed Pastors.
If Europe dies, the Faith shall not die with her.
From the great, anti-European lie flow so many other lies that want refuting. Slavery, to be sure, was a terrible thing; but although the Europeans bought, the Africans sold. The African diaspora has been, for the larger part of its history since emancipation, a blessing to itself and the lands where it is established—including my own. But pride in the achievements of Europe overseas is not racism; neither, in my own country, is ancestral pride on the part of descendants of those who fought in the ‘Lost Cause’ of the Confederacy—which not to say that racism cannot be found among some who have it. But theirs is not the serious and pervasive racism which plagues society today.
America today struggles with the racism rampant among the ruling circles who consider people of colour incapable of achieving anything on their own; it is the racism found among people who do not know or do not care about the collapse of the black middle class—and, most importantly, the black family—over the past six decades. It is the complacency of the governmental, educational, and media establishment toward the terrible reality that the largest single cause of death among young black males is other young black males. This does not bother our elites in the slightest, because in their hearts of hearts, they believe that blacks are incapable of anything else. Yet it is not a question of DNA, but of culture—specifically the paternally-deprived culture of dependency that our establishment has superintended since the death of Jim Crow.
Europe, of course, is different. Although racism, in imitation of the United States, has recently become a whip for the elite to flagellate their subjects, it is fascism that has been their weapon of choice for decades. Anything they dislike is automatically dubbed with the F-word. In Austria, this usage is particularly annoying (and also amusing), given the history of the establishment’s father, Karl Renner. A collaborator with both Hitler and Stalin, Renner welcomed the Anschluss with open arms, exclaiming “You are National Socialists, we are International Socialists; we are brothers!” He was right; but the moronic talk today of a ‘black-brown dictatorship’ under the Nazis is an utter lie—it was a ‘red-brown dictatorship,’ if it was anything. The word Leftist historians use to describe Dollfuss’ regime—‘Austrofascism’—is a masterpiece of well-poisoning propaganda.
Dollfuss died at the hands of the Nazis, and Renner collaborated—there is a difference. Today, groups of individuals in Europe who express pride in either the Continent as a whole or their country in particular are called fascist, ‘extreme right,’ or some other such term of intended abuse.
The problem is that, while the Church shall last to the end of time, nothing else must likewise endure—not even corrupt and dictatorial ruling elites. Lies must be refuted; but if they are the policy of a rulership—pace Orwell—it cannot last forever. The lies told by such a group inspire the formation of a deep resentment. If not relieved by truth-telling, that resentment shall one day bring everything down.
