Reading from pages 431-60 of Myth of the 20th Century, the 1982 Black Kite Edition

Alfred Rosenberg conducted a heroic examination of his People’s condition, tracing their triumphs, tragedies and traditions. His effort was flawed, but surely so is this effort at both summarizing, buttressing in some places and critiquing in other places, his effort. Rosenberg paid the ultimate mortal price for heresy, for fighting against the worship of material accumulation, currency, money, economy of scale, human exploitation, cultural negation and spiritual castration. As proof of his heroic efforts he was killed for his attempt to stave off oblivion with the expression of ideals. He was killed in the age of ideals, when men usually killed men as a pretext to better their enemy’s condition. And so Rosenberg became a casualty in a 100 million person industrial slaughter house dedicated on all side to the betterment of the human condition.

Ironically, the man who called for a Greater Isrаel in the Middle East, who wrote over and over again that every people should have a homeland, is now nearly erased, and generally vilified when not, supposedly because he advocated worldwide genocide, when his ideological crusade, at least so far as I have been able to determine in this book of his, written in 1930, was dedicated to saving first his people, and by extension all others, from the great cultural and spiritual erasures of Capitalism, Communism, Socialism and Democracy.

Did he end up getting in over his head and getting involved in the doomed war efforts of his master, who had declared his book all but unreadable?

I do not know.

My task was to examine this book, a task I would have completed in 500 words if its subject was predominantly 20th century politics and ideology. Outside of war gaming military methods for recreational purposes, I do not regard the study of the industrial wars of the 20th century or the political power structures waging these wars, to be worthy of my time. Before the Guns of August roared in 1914, the Arуan soul had already been twisted and corrupted beyond all decency. The Indo-European races had long since been seduced by their own conquered enemies and servants into an industrial level pursuit of paradise on earth, of a garden of the gods created by man that would serve as is stairway to the heavens where he would people the stars and supplant any earlier notion of divinity in his crazed quest to fence in infinity.

I tolerated Rosenberg’s work because he casts numerous useful lights on the Arуan past, on the journey of the sons of the Almighty Sky into the wicked arms of the blue eyed daughters of Zeus and like Enkidu, Achilles, Heracles, Jason, Samson and legions of forgotten heroes before and among them, embracing oblivion rather than treading the imperishable path. For the European, his rise and his fall, his genius and his folly, are naturally vested in his unequaled Will, the burden of Atlas taken on crippling his promethean vision. Alfred charts the decline of the Titans in sometimes brilliant sometimes tedious style, but always with soul.

I would leave the reader with a few quotes from Rosenberg’s final chapter. The author should have the last word, rather than his reviewer:

“Out of liberal cowardice our leader refused to recognize this before 1914…”

“…Kalergi, is part European and part Japanese. He is thus a suitable man to announce the old demand for an epoch of decline and for a faceless united state.”

“It is inevitable that both missionaries and opium dealers and other dubious adventurers will have to leave China.”

“The honourless rule of money must, by necessity, strive for world rule by creating world debt.”

The old boy nailed quite a few predictions, largely because what is so surprising to us in our gaslit hive was clear to the reasonable mind before the curtain came down.

And here we are, 90 years later, sinking in a sea of debt.

-James LaFond, Friday, January 8, 2021, Cascadia