Reading from the translation by Robert Kivennsland, 2017, Westholme, Yardley Pennsylvania, 198 pages
Originally published in German in 1910
Hermann Lons wrote a romantic novel of triumph set in the thirty year period that determined that his people would suffer through two industrial wars before it was raped and dismembered. Fittingly, in middle age, he volunteered to fight for the Kaiser and died in the front lines in the first year of the Great War that ended the western nation state-based civilization that the Thirty Years War initiated, with the modern ideal of the nation state being born at The Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
“…when they had to ride forth with the red billy saps hanging from their wrists.”
Harm Wulf, the scion of a long line of semi-isolated peasants, is called by cruel events, and the death of his family to lead the fight against the mercenary armies of both Christian Faiths lurching across and pillaging the lands. This was the fight of the peasant against the mercenary. Modern people think of the peasant as a semi-slave serf, mistaking him for that miserable creature bound to the land who occupied most of Europe’s bottom rung. The peasant was the bulk of the middle class, with the artisans occupying the urban middle class. Peasants owned slaves, servants, maids and for-legged chattel. Peasants were rural business owners—farmers—and represent the modern suburban and rural middle class.
Lons skips over the many gruesome details of the war and it seems his book was used as the basis for the James Clavel book, the Last Valley, made onto the movie starring Michael Caine.
What stands as central to War Wulf is that the people upon whom the majority of the tax burden fell in Medieval Germany, being the middle class farmer, received no protection from the holders of the social contract he paid into and had to become a vagabond, criminal, mercenary or resistance fighter to survive. Many parallels to our own postmodern, “defund the police” [which means end the social contract funded by the middle class by which the government protects them and their property] rings horribly true.
One aspect of the plight of the German peasant and his large scale eradication and replacement by a kore collectivist nation state order, was the fact that his prince, his lord, his ruler, who he paid ever increasing taxes to, permitted, or was unable to prevent, the immigration of foreigners with zero stake in the social contract, who came to pillage the system. As one of my friends, from Hungary said, “There is a reason why Gypsies are hated across Europe—they earned it.”
Gypsies are depicted often as impoverished folk who wander about, locate charitable farmers and especially their heartache wives feeling sorry for starving nursing mothers. Then it is soon discovered, that the gypsies were working as scouts for the mercenaries who would come to rob, rape, pillage, murder and burn. This is similar to the way that criminals of minority type are placed—often as war refugees from overseas, sometimes as refugees from terrible American ghettos—in middle class suburbs and cities, given charity and even free residency, and are then used as an excuse to clear out middle class majority folk on the false pretext that the social contract protecting the middle class person’s life and property discriminate against the criminal—and then the mercenaries come, bussed in from across state lines to rape, rob, terrorize and burn.
Reading Hermon Lons’ War Wolf has instilled the thought in this mind that perhaps we are entering our own Thirty Years War, typified by income redistribution favoring people who have not paid into the dying system over those who have.
Thanks to Bob Johnson for lending me this book.
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Hey James,
Been reading your blog and find it interesting. I'd like to make a suggestion. I've recently started watching a show called 'The shield'. It's about a Cop who works in LA and deals with the different gangs and how he deals with his own dept. I feel as though this is an accurate depiction of what goes on. I'd like to know what you think and feel about that show. I believe it will be worth your time.
Thanks.
Thanks for the suggestion, Maxwell. However, I don't have a TV in my backpack and get very little online time on the laptop. I usually don't have any viewing time. I see a handful of movies and documentaries when I'm in Utah in September and that's about it for the year. Next year I'll ask Bob about watching The Shield.
... mercenary armies of both Christian Faiths lurching across and pillaging the lands."
I would be careful here. Many writers of that era were hostile to the Christian faith and were reading their own prejudices back into that era. There definitely were abuses by Christians, but true Christians work rather than pillage.
I agree with the rest. The nation-state was a solution to the problem of the 30 Years' War, but the solutions of the past are the problems of the future. What good is any government if it fails to protect its people? That's the question we will increasingly ask in our day.
Re: Gypsies and medieval farmers, the same seems true of South African farmers and the Bantus they employ. Farmers work in a high-trust rural economy where your reputation is your currency. They project this onto everyone else, whether or not it's warranted. Often, the people they employ are also scouts for criminals. The farm murders in South Africa are always inside jobs according to reports I've seen. Recall also that girl that got murdered in Iowa by the illegal immigrant: he was employed by a big-wig Republican agribusiness owner.
I think a new 30 Years' War has already begun in Mexico and the gates of our country may be thrown open to barbarian hordes in January.
So The Thirty Years War did not feature Protestant versus Catholic armies?
I suppose I'll have to forget all the history I read about catholic and protestant witch burnings, Swede protestant soldiers making Catholic Germans drink sewage, etc...
Thanks for clarifying that no Christians participated in the war on either side...
Certainly spicy times ahead.
No police means vigilance commitees, gangs and all manner of tribalism.
"Get fit, get hard, get ready."
I truly hope that all police are defunded.