Fuentes, Dreher, and the Jews

Major W. E. Gordon, M.P: “What I want to get from you distinctly is that these people who come here, and of whom we are talking now, at all events, are your own people and in need, as you say, of an asylum somewhere, which is the chief thing, the principal consideration?”

Theodore Hetzl: “Yes.”

W.E.G.: “All other considerations are secondary to that in your eyes?”

T.H.: “Yes.”

 W.E.G.: “Having those feelings for your own people, do you deny us the right to consider our own people, too?”

T.H.: “You do not want me to answer that question.”

The Chairman: “Whatever the witness says, I do not think the right will be denied to us.”

T.H.: “It is a rhetorical question.”

W.E.G.: “There has been a great deal said about anti-Jewish feeling, a thing I have personally resented in the strongest way, but what I want to get from you as a great Jewish authority is, if the Jewish people are paramount to you and your ways of thinking, may not our own people be paramount to us without our being charged with anti-Jewish feeling?”

T.H.: “It is the same question.”

Theodore Herzl, ed., The Tragedy of Jewish Immigration: Evidence Given Before the British Royal Commission in 1902 (1920)*

Major Gordon’s question was not, in fact, rhetorical.  And we may suppose that the Father of Zionism more than once dodged Gordon’s question because his answer would have been, No!  Or perhaps that it was not the business of a Jew to assure Britons that Britons should put Britons first.

The Father of Zionism had his own tribal fish to fry.

One View of the Question

“If this people be purged and bled out by battle, their sickness may go and their eyes be cleared to the necessities of things. But they are now far gone in rottenness.”

Rudyard Kipling, “One View of the Question” (1893)

In 1893, the great “White City” of the World’s Columbian Exposition opened on the south shore of Lake Michigan and a newly graduated Indian lawyer named Mahatma Gandhi, just arrived in South Africa, made his first protest against White rule.  Today the Obama Presidential Library is being built in Jackson Park, former site of the long-gone “White City,” and the colonial power that Ghandi protested has collapsed and been colonized.

In that same year of 1893, Rudyard Kipling published a prophetic epistolary short story called “One View of the Question,” the question being whither the White world. The view he offered was of course his own, but he put it in the pen of Shafiz Ullah Khan, military adjutant to an Indian prince named Rao Sahib.  Khan had been sent to London to purchase luxuries for the Prince and his court, but also to take the measure of their British overlords.

The Barque of St Peter Follows Close in the Wake of the World

Tomorrow is the sixth mensiversary of the papacy of Leo XIV, so I asked AI what the new Pope has been up to.   Primarily advocating the Great Replacement, denouncing Climate Change, patting the hands of sad homosexuals, raising Girlbosses to positions of authority, and breaking down the last barriers between the Church and International Bankers.  Or so, at least, says AI.   It was perhaps to  demonstrate evenhandedness that Pope Leo has also permitted traditionalists to celebrate the Latin mass in St. Peter’s Basilica (although not at the High Altar that stands atop St. Peter’s tomb).

Here is what the Robot Savant has to say:

Geography Sacred and Profane

“Benavides met a tribe which no missionary had as yet reached, and found them, to his amazement, instructed in the doctrines of Christianity. On inquiring, he learned that they had been taught by a lady, . . .”

John Gilmary Shea, History of the Catholic Missions Among the Indian Tribes of the United State (1854).

In 1519, two Spanish fleets entered the Gulf of Mexico.  The first was under the command of Hérnan Cortéz and went on to overthrow the Aztec empire and found the syncretic civilization we call Mexico.  The second was under the command of Alonso Álvarez de Pineda and surveyed what is now the south coast of the United States, from Apalache Bay to the Rio Panuco, but failed to discover the passage to the Western Ocean it had hoped to find.

The success of Cortéz and failure of Pineda is one reason the Gulf is today named for Mexico and not for the landmass to its north.

Apart from completing the map of the unbroken coastline from the Florida Strait to the Passage of Yucatan, and thereby proving that the Gulf of Mexico has no back door, Alvarez made one other contribution to geography. Coasting off today’s Louisiana on the Feast of Pentecost (which that year fell on June 2), Alvarez saw from the abundance of driftwood and the turbidity of the water that a great river debouched into the sea near at hand.

The Most Holy Trinity

We were discussing the doctrine of the Trinity in the comments last week.  It so happens that I will be canoeing on the Trinity next Saturday, this being the treat I have requested from my three children for my sixty-eighth birthday.  For persons unfamiliar with the geography of Texas, the Trinity River is formed by the combination of several forks near Dallas and runs south by southeast to Galveston Bay.  The river was named La Santissima Trinidad (The Most Holy Trinity) in 1690, by Alonso De León, governor of  Coahuila, on the first Spanish expedition to establish missions among the Tejas Indians in what would become Texas.  The De León expedition arrived on the banks of the river we now call the Trinity on May 19, 1690, very near the point (Alabama Ferry) where I took these photographs 334 years later.

A Pilgrim’s Progress for the Impatient

“It came from mine own heart, so to my head,
And thence into my fingers trickled;
Then to my pen, from whence immediately
On paper I did dribble it daintily.”

John Bunyan, The Holy War (1682)

So John Bunyan said in answer to those who called his Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) a derivative work.  But he had not copied models or mouthed platitudes.  The substance of the story came from his own heart; its form was devised in his own head; its text was dribbled onto paper by his own hand.  The keynotes of Bunyan and his Pilgrim are therefore individualism and authenticity, and this is why The Pilgrim’s Progress is a masterwork of Protestant prose.

I should mention that my grandfather was named for the hero of Bunyan’s great work, a pilgrim named Christian who took the journey of faith alone.  He had assistance, to be sure, but he (Bunyan’s hero) personified the view later expressed by the lyrics,

You got to walk that lonesome valley
Well, you got to walk it by yourself
Ain’t nobody else can walk it for you
You got to walk that valley for yourself*

George Cruikshank (1792-1878) was an English caricaturist who is today best remembered for his illustrations in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1838).  At some point Cruikshank made a series of illustrations for Pilgrim’s Progress, although these were not published until 1903.  I have copied his illustrations below, and have written brief glosses for reader’s unfamiliar with Bunyan’s tale.

The Servant Abideth Not in the House Forever

“I had a feeling, as I went about, that I should find some very ancient and curious opinions still comfortably domiciled in the fine old houses whose clustered gables and chimneys appeared here and there, at a distance, above their ornamental woods.”

Henry James, Portraits of Places (1884)*

“Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!”

Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism (1866)**

Henry James was speaking of Warwickshire, a rural county near the center of England.  The “very ancient and curious opinions” intimated by those bosky gables and chimneys were, he believed, the opinions of “self-complacent British Toryism,” a creed that reduced to a “stubborn unwillingness to see the harmonious edifice of Church and State the least bit shaken.”  This stubbornness was at bottom a resolve to persist.

Ballad of the Goodly Fere

Simon Zelotes speaketh it somewhile after the Crucifixion.

Ha’ we lost the goodliest fere o’ all
For the priests and the gallows tree?
Aye lover he was of brawny men,
O’ ships and the open sea.

When they came wi’ a host to take Our Man
His smile was good to see,
“First let these go!” quo’ our Goodly Fere,
“Or I’ll see ye damned,” says he.

Aye he sent us out through the crossed high spears
And the scorn of his laugh rang free,
“Why took ye not me when I walked about
Alone in the town?” says he.

Oh we drank his “Hale” in the good red wine
When we last made company,
No capon priest was the Goodly Fere
But a man o’ men was he.

I ha’ seen him drive a hundred men
Wi’ a bundle o’ cords swung free,
That they took the high and holy house
For their pawn and treasury.

They’ll no’ get him a’ in a book I think
Though they write it cunningly;
No mouse of the scrolls was the Goodly Fere
But aye loved the open sea.

If they think they ha’ snared our Goodly Fere
They are fools to the last degree.
“I’ll go to the feast,” quo’ our Goodly Fere,
“Though I go to the gallows tree.”

“Ye ha’ seen me heal the lame and blind,
And wake the dead,” says he,
“Ye shall see one thing to master all:
‘Tis how a brave man dies on the tree.”

A son of God was the Goodly Fere
That bade us his brothers be.
I ha’ seen him cow a thousand men.
I have seen him upon the tree.

He cried no cry when they drave the nails
And the blood gushed hot and free,
The hounds of the crimson sky gave tongue
But never a cry cried he.

I ha’ seen him cow a thousand men
On the hills o’ Galilee,
They whined as he walked out calm between,
Wi’ his eyes like the grey o’ the sea,

Like the sea that brooks no voyaging
With the winds unleashed and free,
Like the sea that he cowed at Genseret
Wi’ twey words spoke’ suddently.

A master of men was the Goodly Fere,
A mate of the wind and sea,
If they think they ha’ slain our Goodly Fere
They are fools eternally.

I ha’ seen him eat o’ the honey-comb
Sin’ they nailed him to the tree.

Ezra Pound – 1885-1972

With a tip of the hat to Frank Wright.

The Reductio ad Absurdum of Idolatry of Personal Intuitive Discernment

Like sex and food, personal intuitive discernment is a sine qua non of biological life (even amoebae and mushrooms, flocks and forests can learn – and indeed, must learn (watersheds, too, maybe)). But, as with sex and food, or any other creaturely good, it can be idolized: can be given more weight than is its proper due. It has its limits. These must be observed, and not transgressed, or else some vicious madness great or small must eventually ensue – even if only the quirkiness of the mild idiosyncrat, harmless and nattering to himself alone in a corner.

As a lifelong natterer of eremitic inclinations, I am well acquainted with such corners. Indeed, I’m nattering this very moment, alone (with all of you, of course), in the little corner of my office. Among the many other things it does for me, regular commensal liturgy involves me with my fellows, and so with our intersubjection; with reality, which is after all a net of relations. Liturgy calls us back to each other, and so to social health; which is to say, to charity, and to love; which again is to say, to sanctity: to blessedness.

In the limit, personal intuitive discernment of metaphysical and religious truth, to the exclusion of any exogenous authorities on such matters, cannot but end, fairly quickly, in immursion within a cult of one. And that’s a lonely, sad place – when all is said and done, an ineffectual place – to end up.

Cult is the font of culture. If everyone were immured in his own cult of one, there could be no culture; indeed, not even any society (for, society cannot proceed except on the basis of a general consensus on the meanings and importances of terms; and no such consensus can be possible, when nobody shares the same metaphysics or religion, the same cult).

To be human is among other things to be social; to share in some common culture with some fellows, in commensal communion; in, i.e., some basic common cult. Rejection of all exogenous authority makes that impossible.

We should not therefore be surprised to find that, in practice, such a rejection simply can’t be done. In practice, everyone relies upon exogenous authorities of all sorts. There’s no way to get through a day without doing so.

Lao Tse Speaks

When foresters, farmers, and fishermen, are put in ownership of the land and the seas, and left in freedom to do what seems best (which includes all-round profitability), the world mysteriously gets better and beauty proliferates. When, instead, bureaucrats are put in charge (“public” or “private,” it hardly matters), the world grows vile, ugly, and tyrannical.

David Warren