The blame for this unwelcome book falls squarely on the shoulders of Mescaline Franklin, who is a young man practicing boxing according to my advice, who mentioned that Julius Evola cited boxing as a symptom of the Africanizing of American culture. This claim has also been made by another 20th Century Italian aristocrat, Aldo Nadi, who participated in one of Europe’s last sword duels. How two men who I greatly respect as scholars of the masculine traditions could be so wrong on such a simple point is a more important question than proving these false assertions wrong. I made no attempt to answer the question, but rather dismissed it and immediately began connecting the dots that would lead intelligent observers to the conclusion that the quintessential Indo-European art of boxing, which was the unique expression of “Aryan” martial culture for almost 4,000 years, and was tied intricately to pastoral conditions in the temperate zone of the northern hemisphere, could be construed as an example of the martial culture of Equatorial West Africa—where there is no historic or prehistoric evidence for boxing—imported as a slave art to the North American colonies, and degrading European culture in America to the abysmal hell of sweaty combat, is beyond ridiculous, and ironically makes sense on a few subjective levels, which will be discussed chronologically.

I was immediately moved to put this martial baby to rest once and for all, while at the same time exonerating these observers for seeing modern boxing through an ascetic prism that, from their perspective, could not be seen for what it was, an imported Asiatic ethos against which modern boxing, in the form it originated circa 1700 in England, was a rebellion. Modern boxing was, firstly; a rejection of the protestant values of the English merchant class along with the denial of honor to the common fighting man that was the cornerstone of the Catholic and Anglican aristocracies of Europe, who clung to old martial pedigrees despite the pallid rot of their own masculine traditions. Secondly, modern boxing was a resurrection of the ancient Indo-European tradition of ritual fist-fighting that had thrived for 2500 years before it was finally extinguished by Christian edicts at the dawn of the Dark Ages.

For ages boxing has been the unique heritage of the Western World—so much so that it has been aggressively exported by proud practitioners for thousands of years—where men without social pedigrees, but possessed with the heroic spark could lay a claim to martial virtue. The fact that for two generations men of European descent trained and competed with men of African descent in this quintessentially Western tradition, in roughly equal numbers, and that today American men of African descent are training Eastern Europeans to be the best boxers yet, preserving the very same tradition taught to their forefathers by English, Irish and Nativist American trainers, only strengthens the case that there has always been something special about the Western way of combat that has crossed all social boundaries in modern times.

Only a fatally sick society fears the compliment of imitation, or the adoption of its arts by its poorer classes and subject peoples. During the course of this narrative it will be shown that this wax and wane cycle from ferocious warrior to fat wimp, from cleaving hero to clinging hierarch, has been a cyclic aspect of Western masculine culture. So, as the West sinks into effeminate oblivion for a third time in its long and tumultuous history, it may be observed that we have reason to believe that there will be another resurrection of the hero from his guilt-gilded tomb.