The Faith is Europe, and Europe is the Faith!

by Edward Waverley

"The faith is Europe, and Europe is the faith!" ~ Hilaire Belloc

I have a friend who for several years has been living abroad in Europe. He went there to study theology, and in theory this was an excellent plan. After all, where else but in Europe can one discover all the great eternal truths of the Christian faith as handed down to us by the church fathers? And all of the church fathers were European, so it's logical to assume, as my friend has done, that one's best chance to grasp the faith is to live and work in Europe.

Alas, Europe is no longer herself. It is no longer possible to join Hilaire Belloc in declaring that the historic Christian faith is identical with the historic nations of Europe. The relentless onslaught of wars, both physical and spiritual, which have been waged against Christendom over the last century have reduced the Old World to a propositional shell of her formerly vibrant self. The elimination of blood-and-soil consciousness in Europe and her satellites has been a deliberate goal of anti-Christs throughout the existence of the church. But it wasn't until the Church succumbed to the propositional view of nations, as propounded by JJ Rousseau and his entourage, that the faith began to recede.

But to return to my friend abroad. He is now making a living teaching in Europe, and I get an occasional letter from him. I was surprised recently to find that far from sharing my antique vision of Christian nations and their vital importance to the life of the church, he has fully embraced the vision of Rousseau. My friend has declared that racial consciousness, rather than being birthed and nourished in Christianity, is on the contrary vanquished by the faith. I was deeply saddened by his report, and could only feel that it was probably a very accurate reflection of the dominant opinion of European youth today. Nevertheless, I decided to respond to his letter. I wanted to remind him how much nations have meant to Christians throughout history, and to urge him to begin thinking like the many great fathers who have been granted to the church throughout her history. My reply is here:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My dear friend,

I must beg to differ with your analysis quite emphatically. As you are surely aware, the English word nation in Acts 17, translated from the Greek ethnos (ethne plural), is taken from the Latin “nationem.” The New Oxford Dictionary (2nd ed, 1989) states that nationem means “breed, stock, race, nation.” This, in turn, derives from the Latin “nasci,” which means “to be born.” So there is a substantial genetic component to the historic idea of nations, including when the Biblical writers use the word. Otherwise, how do we explain the painstaking effort to give such long and detailed genealogies all through the biblical text?

We can see this concept of the meaning of birth, and its connection to national status, at work vividly in the so-called Anchor Baby laws in the USA, through which legislators have managed to foist more and more foreign subjects onto the federal dole by claiming that by simply being born within the geographic boundaries of America, a newborn is (Abracadabra!) a full American citizen, with full rights and entitlements to all sorts of benefits. Never mind the fact that the same legislators deny that there is any such thing as an historic American nation defined according to the above definitions. The point is that, when it suits their agenda, the concept of birth suddenly becomes of enormous importance. But the double standard is set up always to strongly benefit non-Whites, and to punish Whites. And this is about as anti-Christian of a policy as I can imagine, for it is based entirely in a politics of envy and greed, and it is a mockery of the Tenth Commandment, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's possessions." How in the world do the concepts of neighborhood, and coveting make any sense in that verse without a firm category of private property? And private property is simply a microcosm of the broader idea of national institutions and identity.

It's easier to see how destructive and counter-intuitive this is if we narrow the focus of the argument. Imagine if pregnant Mrs. Johnson happened to go into labor at the home of her friends the Robinsons, and for some medical reason could not leave that home until the baby was born. Would anyone try to argue that, because the baby had been born at the Robinson residence, that it was now a legal heir to the Robinson estate? The idea is ludicrous. No one can become a Robinson unless he is either born from Mrs. Robinson, or in the special case of the Robinsons voluntarily adopting. Yet the claim of borderless ideology is that America does not belong to any one race (and race is simply a very large extended family, easily established with DNA testing), but that America belongs to everyone, and that everyone must be absolutely free to live and work and enjoy the blessings of whatever nation they happen to be in at the moment.

Notice that this is never the case with third-world countries. There is no immigration problem with people streaming into Africa. On the contrary, people are leaving Africa in droves, doing everything that they can to exit. The claim of pseudo-Christian anti-borders ideology is that Christians, especially Western Christians, should be under a gospel obligation to distribute their wealth, open their nations, their local communities, and even their homes to as many foreign strangers as possible, because this supposedly breaks down primitive, anti-Christian barriers which have been supposedly abrogated by the Advent of Jesus Christ. When I encounter such thinking I always wonder, "Why did Jesus, then, feel the need to go and preach almost exclusively to the people of his own nation and race? Why did he carefully list the concentric steps in which the Great Commission was to be unfolded, in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth? Why did Paul, in Titus 1:12, approvingly quote a Cretan author who had declared that 'All Cretans are liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons'? Why did Paul go on to command his readers to rebuke Cretans accordingly?" Those are my thoughts when I hear about this new gospel command to forget about the mythology of nations. Evidently Paul and Jesus do not agree with this philosophy, nor did the Holy Spirit appear to subscribe to it when, inspiring John on Patmos, He stated that in the Eternal Consummation, all of the kings of the nations of the earth will bring their splendor into the city.

Peter Brimelow has defined the concept of nation to mean, "the interlacing of ethnicity and culture" usually speaking a single language. There are countless examples of such nations throughout history, many of which are indexed in the Bible. And when Paul refers to the settled times and boundaries of nations, he is making the point that such boundaries and times are set by God for the purpose of diffusing political power in such a way as to facilitate the gospel. The implication is that an unhealthy concentration of central authority is deleterious to the Bible. This is precisely the opposite of the popular idea that borders obstruct the gospel. According to the Bible, borders and boundaries are healthy outlines, laid down by God so that families can exercise dominion over the whole face of the earth in a milieu of familiarity and kinship. This has always been the predominant doctrine of nations in Christendom.

You say that multicultural empires are historically normal, and you are quite correct. Whether it's the Roman Empire, or the present American Empire, or any other you wish to name, the common denominator is the reckless attempt to meld together diverse people groups in the hope that they will be more loyal to The Imperial Proposition than they are to their own race or ethnicity. The question is, is there any difference between a nation and an empire? The term multiculturalism itself gives us the answer. Empires are never monocultural, but always multicultural. But the drift of empire is monocultural, in that the elite who rule in empires demand rigorous cultural conformity in their subjects. While claiming to embrace "diversity", our imperial rulers actually want people to become rootlessly similar, until all feelings of loyalty have been steadily transferred away from families and over to the all-powerful central state. To see the truth of this, witness the slavish outlook of all Americans, who expect to be told what to think and what to do in every area of life by the State that they gladly worship.

I can do no better than to quote RJ Rushdoony, as he comments upon sociologist Carle Zimmerman's theory of families. Zimmerman's analysis shows, to my mind at any rate, that the correct biblical view of nations is that they are God-ordained extensions of many related tribes, all hierarchically arranged so as to reflect the glory of God's majesty:

Carle C. Zimmerman has pointed out that there are three types of families in history: the trustee, the domestic, and the atomistic families. The trustee family has central authority in a society: it is the basic power and institution, and most government is in its hands. The trustee family sees its possessions and its work as an inheritance from the past to be transmitted to the future. The family wealth is thus not for private use but for the family's on-going life.

The domestic family is a weakening of the family's powers, with the state as gainer. It is a transition stage to the atomistic family, when the totalitarian state is the on-going life and power, the main heir and the controller of inheritance, and the source of direction for a society.

The family in Scripture is a trustee type of family, and Biblical law is geared to the family as trustee. This means that authority in the family, i.e., the authority of the husband and wife, is not personal but theological. This appears very clearly in Ephesians 5:21-33. The matter of family authority is theological. The husband's headship is established by God as a ministry through the family. His authority, while resting in his person, is not personal; it is religious and theological. His authority is valid thus only insofar as he is faithful to the word of God; when he departs from it, God will confound his authority. Women and children will then rule over men and be their oppressors (Isa. 3:4, 12).

All authority on the human scene, in the family, church, state, and school, as well as the vocations, is ministerial (Eph. 6:5-9) and theological rather than personal. The personal exercise of authority for the sake of power is the mark of the Gentiles, i.e., of unbelief (Matt. 20:25-29; Mark 10:35-45).

Since Biblical authority is a trusteeship from the Lord, it is basic to that authority that it must be exercised in the name of the Lord for His Kingdom. What we are and have belongs neither to us, to the family, the church, or the state, but to the Lord and His Kingdom. We must thus protect ourselves and our possessions from the attempts by an ungodly heir, or by the state, to gain possession over them as if the right of inheritance were a personal fact. Inheritance, however, is a theological principle, with an eschatological framework. It must serve the purposes of God and His Kingdom, and its goal is the new creation, and all the glory of the earth made an inheritance of God's Kingdom.

Nations are, by definition monocultural. A pastor friend of mine has put it quite beautifully: "Culture is religion poured over ethnicity." The 20th-century theologian Henry Van Til had an equally apt phrase: "Culture is nothing but the unfolding of a nation's religious convictions." And this is a perfectly biblical notion. Notice that this formula does not fail to obtain in the case of empires, but it doesn't obtain in a healthy way. Whereas in a historically Christian nation, such as France, the French people were allowed to discover their own national way of expressing their faith through the flourishing of the uniquely French culture, an empire disturbs such natural developments by insisting upon unswerving allegiance to the State. In 1789, when revolutionaries seized power in France and declared all of the old regime to be discarded, they explicitly claimed ownership over the children of France, as being the properly entitled authorities for recruiting and shaping them for the ends of the State. Again, this is a systematic expression of godless humanism, wherein a group of men claim God-like control over the destinies of the majority of men, for the supposed purpose of establishing a better world system.

The relentless push from the imperial leadership is for all the subjects to amalgamate their beliefs, their languages, their races, etc. The reason for this strategy is at once obvious and brilliant: if Rome, or America, is everywhere, and if everyone on earth is potentially an American (which is the explicit claim of our entire political leadership) then the very idea of nationalistic or racial loyalty is entirely emptied of its power. The only power left in which to take refuge is the empire. Whereas the Bible teaches that it is in God that we live, and move, and have our being, Imperial Statism teaches that it is in the State that we live, and move, and have our being. Statist thinking is simply the normal Christian formula for worship, with the State replacing God as the object of worship.

In One-World international ideology, or on a smaller scale in American-style imperial hegemony, the State does not fail to usurp as many of God's sovereign roles as it can. God is omnipotent, and so the federal government of the USA acts and speaks as if it is omnicompetent, able to address every human problem from a vantage point of perfect objectivity. God is omniscient, and so the government demands unfettered access to all information, however private, about its subjects. God is omnibenevolent, and of course our government frames all of its activities in pseudo-religious language about "The Great Society", "No Child Left Behind", "The Race to the Top", "The Patriot Act", "The Department of Homeland Security" etc. Such usurpations are plainly prophesied in Scripture, where the Psalmist queries: Why do the nations rage? And try to overthrow the Lord and his anointed one? They conspire together and claim that they can shed the bounds that God has placed upon them as nations.

You stated, "Most emperors seemed to be indifferent to the language, ethnicity, and cultural practices of a people with the singular exception of religion." First, Emperors are not typically indifferent to language, ethnicity, and cultural practices. On the contrary, emperors are mightily opposed to any religion other than Full-Orbed Statism. Secondly, are we supposed to admire emperors for being hostile or neutral toward the historic character of the peoples which they conquer or with whom they form slavish alliances? Far from admiring such hatred for God's distinctions, I despise such attitudes. The reason that Rome tolerated, for example, the Jewish religion in Palestine up to the time of Jesus' life wasn't that Rome was indifferent to the Jews' religious and political beliefs. No, they tolerated the Jews only to the extent that the Jews were cooperative taxpayers, and obedient subjects to Roman authority. If and when there were uprisings in Palestine, or elsewhere, those insurrections against the Empire were quickly and violently put down. As we know from the history of the First Century church, Rome quickly scented that the Christians did not and would not acknowledge Caesar as a god, for the Christians steadfastly refused to serve or worship any god but God Almighty. Hence the feverish persecution of the Roman Christians, their martyrdoms, and tribulations, and scatterings. Wherever the Crown Rights of King Christ are fully pressed, there you shall see swift and bloody retribution from the Powers that Be in Government. This helps us to understand why there is, in America, a shallow feeling of Ease in Zion. Many false professors of the faith have decided that going with the flow of international technocracy and statism is more pleasant than the task of the Christian life.

"That is to say living in the Islamic empire you can be of any nation, and even to a certain degree of any religion, but you can not openly criticize the Islamic faith." Two points here. 1) The Koran commands all good Muslims either to slay or convert all infidels. There is no quarter to be given to unbelievers from the Koran. Meanwhile the Koran also permits its adherents to engage, whenever necessary for preserving life, in the practice of taqqiya, or strategic lying. If necessary, Muslims are permitted to deny their faith verbally, if only to get along with infidels for a time. No such doctrine is permitted in the Bible, other than a time when the truth is being demanded of a Christian by an explicit enemy bent on murder, as was the case in the story of the Hebrew midwives lying to protect the infant boys in Egypt. 2) Even if Islamic rulers were indifferent to the religious convictions of their conquered subjects, which I doubt, it would not follow that this is a healthy tendency. If anything, permitting any form of religion which contradicts the dominant faith in a nation will badly undermine the faith of the people, which is obvious both in the ostensibly Christian empire of America, and in the pagan empire of Rome. In each case, the original dominant religion was eventually subsumed in a flood of interreligious chaos. In the case of Rome, it was a very good thing, contrary to what Augustine wrote in "The City of God." The death of that empire was good for Christianity, just as the death of the American empire will be very good for a return to real, biblical Christianity.

"but is it not more accurate to say that it is the Church (the body of Christ) struggling against the invisible powers?" I don't agree that the Church is only ever struggling against invisible powers. This was the position of the Gnostics, who denied the goodness and validity of the material world, while badly over-spiritualizing the nature of the Kingdom. When Jesus said that his kingdom was not of this world, he was not saying that his kingdom is immaterial. Indeed, how could he say that in light of the central importance of the Incarnation, the putting on of flesh so as to identify fully with mankind? No, what Jesus meant was that his power was not derived from, nor in any way contingent upon, the world system of power as it is devised by anti-Christ men. Now it's very true that we struggle not against flesh and blood, but in context Paul is saying that the nature of the Christian struggle is not limited merely to a contest of physical strength, but that it encompasses angelic spheres, that demons and spirits are also at work, on behalf of Satan. This does nothing to remove the importance of working, physically, to resist evil in the world.

"It may just be semantics, but nations rise and fall, and the modern nations (at least in their modern nation-state identity) were almost all formed within the last 100 yrs." I agree that the central state government identities are very new, but this is only to reinforce my own point that one-world/no-borders ideology is contrary to most of human history, and that the dominant model has been one of diffused power, through many smaller political entities. Wherever you encounter a violent attempt to expand an empire, such as occurred in Ancient Rome, or with the British Empire during the 18th and 19th centuries, or in America throughout her history, you will inevitably find that the efforts to build were very bloody, and that historic people groups were usually striving to secede back into their own historic spheres of geography and sovereignty. Witness the dissolution of the USSR, the attempted withdrawal of the American South in 1860-1865, the attempt of Quebec to secede from Canada, and on and on. In each case, a group of people far smaller than the size of the empire saw themselves as having more in common, and a better shot at liberty, with each other than with the melange of peoples who were held together only by flimsy documents or political slogans. Blood and soil consciousness is ineradicable in such people, and no amount of bullets will ever destroy what God has ordained.

You wrote: "Their were era's in which temporal authority, and more or less absolute dominion, was given to kings and emperor's who were Christians, true Christians (Stephen Milutin of Serbia for example)." It's interesting to note that the etymology of the word "king" is "kinning", as in, "Being kin, or related to in blood." God plainly excoriated the people of Israel when they demanded a human king, but God granted their evil request, even as he imposed many conditions for who could occupy the throne. He must be a blood relation, for it is an abomination to be ruled by foreigners. He must have his own hand-written copy of God's word that he has written out himself. And many similar demands. To the extent that European nations followed these outlines, they enjoyed some modest success politically through monarchy. There was an old phrase of the Europeans, "I serve the King, and the King serves Christ!" Oh for such a slogan to be true! But what if the king is anti-Christ? Then a Christian is no longer permitted to say, "I serve the king!" He must declare that he opposes the king who opposes God.

" If there is a hierarchy found here on earth that mirrors, let us say the celestial hierarchy, it will not be found in the rulers of this world, but in the Church itself." Rulers are appointed by God, and are under just as much obligation to obey and seek God as the Church is. Today the Church has abrogated her duty disastrously, and has failed to discipline the increasingly ungodly civil government. The Church has been seduced by an insane idea that she has no authority to instruct or counsel the State, an argument invented by JJ Rousseau, JS Mill, John Locke, and other anti-Christ humanists. The Church's assignment is to disciple nations, teaching those nations everything she has learned from Christ, and baptizing those nations in His name.

"What forms one's personhood in the likeness of God has much more to do with love, mercy, compassion, and humility than language, ethnicity, state, or cultural practices. " As you can guess, I reject this formulation. I don't think love, mercy, or compassion are possible outside the context of culture and ethnicity. My obligations in Christ are concentric, and begin with my immediate family, followed by my extended family, my local community, etc. According to the politics of guilt and pity, we are expected to feel more compassion for our fellow Christians in Africa than we do for our unbelieving mother of father. Such teaching is not found in the Bible, but rather is found in Marx and Trotsky. Why else does Paul say that he who fails to provide for his own has forsaken the faith and is worse than an unbeliever?

A Dialogue in Hell

by Edward Waverley

With apologies to Goethe

The following interview was recorded by the author at the brink of hell, a domain guarded not by Cerberus, but by one of its harridans-in-chief, Susanna Margaretha Brandt. The woman who was the model for Goethe’s Gretchen in Faust granted the interview on the condition that we publish it unexpurgated, without the usual tricks of editors everywhere, who she described as, “incorrigible traffickers in sensation and controversy.” In the spirit of that agreement, we present to you here our uncensored exchange with that odious creature who even now shows no remorse for her infanticide of 1771, for which she was executed the following year.

Interviewer: It says here that you support a woman’s right to kill babies, is that right?

Susanna: Yes, I think that a woman must be free to move on from an unwanted pregnancy, whether it resulted like mine did from a rape, or whether it arose from consensual sex.

Interviewer: But if a woman isn’t willing to give birth to a child, wouldn’t it make more sense for her to refrain from sex altogether?

Susanna: Well in my case, your objection is irrelevant. I was drugged and raped by a drifter, so I don’t accept any responsibility for what happened.

Interviewer: You mean when you killed your baby it was simply inevitable?

Susanna: No, what I mean is that I reject your suggestion that what I did involved a baby. A natural biological process was unfolding that promised to bring me some very unpleasant consequences and so I intervened to stop that process in its tracks.

Interviewer: Well it would be ludicrous for me to argue with a demon about the imago dei, so I’ll concede the point in order to return to something you said a minute ago, about consensual sex. Is it your contention, then, that people should be free to divide their sexuality from its God-given ends?

Susanna: What are these ends of which you speak?

Interviewer: God has revealed that the chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. Within that framework, the utmost joy of matrimonial felicity is the mutual pleasure that arises when a man and a woman are united in their desire to bear and rear children, whose appearance serves as a literal and blessed reminder to the family of its eternal bond with Heaven.

Susanna: But you seem to be forgetting all that we know about family life. Having kids doesn’t heighten sexual pleasure. On the contrary, kids damage sex irreparably in several ways. Pregnancy fattens women, a process that only worsens as she cranks out more ruffians, and if the babies are allowed out of the womb, they intrude more and more upon the leisure time of their parents, canceling out most sexual opportunities for years.

Interviewer: Aha! So we have discovered where Hollywood gets all of its ideas about love, marriage, and heterosexual monogamy! Evidently you are the direct pipeline to hell, and have been instructing the liberals about exactly which myths to concoct and spread for the maximum impact on a wicked and perverse generation. Allow me to congratulate you: the Satanic plan is working to a tee. What you have described is precisely what is preached and believed by all modern liberals and increasingly by deluded Christians. Everyone watches these movies, accepts their presentation of sex as unshakable truth, and steadfastly refuse to get married, let alone have children. Even those who marry insist that they must be free to delay having children interminably, or to put it off until it is financially prudent. Evidently, your master’s theory that man must live by bread alone has really made inroads on earth.

Susanna: Thanks, we try very hard down here. The boss says that abortion is more popular than ever in your world, and it’s easy to believe. But you make a good, and related point; sometimes what’s even better than encouraging and inspiring abortion is to kill the dreams of heaven right when they’re hatching in young minds, long before young people are even thinking consciously about marriage and family. The hellish picture of families that we broadcast, and that are of course taken directly out of our own existence here in hell, are usually more than enough to frighten even the pluckiest kids out of wanting to get married. The results are very pleasing: the vast majority of people enter adulthood with a very cynical view of marriage; both men and women expect to have plenty of casual sex before getting hitched, either with or without any serious thought about marrying their partners; even weirdo outliers who refuse to put out before marrying will usually delay marriage until they have established a career; and then, even when people do get married, there are usually so many exciting memories of the glory days of youth (I believe you people call it sin?), that the husbands and wives resent each other. As a result there are many, many barriers to your picture of heavenly matrimonial childrearing. And we like it that way. A lot.

Interviewer: But haven’t falling fertility rates worldwide lessened the abortion rates?

Susanna: As a matter of fact, you’re right, they have, and for us that is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, watching a woman self-destruct in the wake of an abortion is one of the most glorious sights in hell. We revel in the daily pain a woman must walk with when she begins to experience doubt about whether her blob was really a blob. Now of course we demons know that it was always a blob, because the blobs never arrive here. But the fact that blobs are blobs does not in any way prevent us, as demons, from tormenting the post-abortion women. Because so many of them experience doubts, we can often talk with them and tell them that they are guilty as hell, and that they belong with us and to us. One of my favorite delights is how often such visitations result in suicide in addition to blobicide. I’ve met some of these gals in person.

Interviewer: retches violently

Susanna: You okay?

Interviewer: I think so, yes…let me go back to something you said about the dead babies.

Susanna: You mean the blobs.

Interviewer: No, I mean the slain children. You say they never come here. And you claim that proves their blobhood. I’m happy to inform you that they are all with their Father in Heaven. And you also admitted that you don’t always meet the mothers. That’s because many of them have been rescued by the grace of God from your demonic clutches. When you whisper to them about their bloody guilt, you tell a bloody and diabolical half-truth. You are right to mention their guilt, but you have neither the right nor the power to convict them of the sin you mock. You prey upon spurious guilt, even among the redeemed who have already repented of their sin, but there are already many murderers in Abraham’s bosom today, and there shall be many more in eternity.

Susanna: Your lectures are as tedious as your religion is sad. You seem to think that our enemy can actually help you, and for that I am beginning to hate every inch of your being. Is this interview nearly through?

Interviewer: No, not quite. I have another question for you. Why did you say earlier that the falling rates of abortion are a mixed blessing for hell?

Susanna: Well, as I said, the drawback to fewer abortions is that we miss out on one of the most exquisite forms of torture known to humankind, the undying nightmare of a woman who has slain her blob. But there is an advantage for us as well. The less people conceive babies at all, the less people there are who exist to join the enemy. As long as humanity continues on earth, the enemy has wide-open access to the human world, and he continues to claim more of their souls as time goes by. Seeing even one soul leave our orbit and enter his is, for us, the equivalent of a miscarriage. And we would never, ever, willingly yield one of our own to that sickening man who never stops talking of…AARARGHGH!! (She spits out some blood and gore, vomits hugely.) You smote me!! You stupid Christer, what have you to do with Mephisto?? How did you injure me?!

Interviewer: I smote you with the True Cross. I will not listen idly to your blasphemies, hellish minx! Dare you to insult my Lord, and my God? No power of hell, and no scheme of man can ever pluck me from his hand. Get behind me, and go your way. As for me, I march to Zion!

Siding With the Past

 by Edward Waverley 

Racist is a very curious and troublesome word. We know what liberals mean when they call someone racist. Liberals use 'racist' to mean that the person they are debating believes that there are deep, obvious, and unchangeable differences between the races; liberals also mean that such beliefs are demonstrably false; and liberals also mean that to think such things is absolutely evil.

The first part of this accusation applies to me with complete accuracy; if assenting to the idea that there are deep, obvious, and unchangeable differences between the races makes a person a racist, then I am a racist. But if 'racist' is defined, a priori, to include the judgment that all such beliefs are evil and primitive, then I am absolutely not a racist, because I reject the idea that such beliefs are immoral. On the contrary, I think such beliefs are wise, true, and realistic. The liberal tries to shut down debate on many topics by smuggling in an absolute moral condemnation of all reference to the idea that the races are different, and he also imputes to his opponent the idea that simply by noticing such differences, his opponent is also implying that there is a moral hierarchy of races. But I need not believe that whites are morally superior to other races in order to believe that whites are very different from other races. I do believe that whites are very different from blacks; I deny that whites are in any important sense morally superior to blacks. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, but not all of the races have built an enduring Christian civilization where charity reigneth. In fact, only one race has done as much, and that is the European race.

Recognizing the obvious and undeniable historical and spiritual differences between the European race and all other races has nothing to do with pride. The differences are obvious to anyone who has eyes, ears, heart, and brain. It is a difference of burden. All of the heavy lifting of building and elevating Christian civilization has been done (yes, by God) through the European people. And what was it that enabled the European race to turn away from paganism and toward the light? What allowed the Europeans to produce unparalleled achievements in art, music, science, medicine, architecture, literature, and poetry? Obviously it was made possible because the Europeans had hearts on fire for Jesus Christ. Why haven't there been any similar achievements among Africans? Among Mexicans? Among Asians? Is it because the gospel has gone unpreached to those people? Obviously not, because the church has been reaching out to those groups for centuries. Then why do black people commit an inordinately disproportionate number of violent crimes in America compared to all other races? And why do white people commit almost none of them, in spite of having so much larger a share of the population? How does that work? Is it because black Americans have not been told about Jesus Christ? That's absurd. Africans have inhabited North America for as long as Europeans have; both races arrived at the same time, and have been coexisting in this nation throughout its history. Blacks have always had, at best, a very tenuous grasp of Christian truth; the more that blacks are worshiped and given everything that they demand from white society, the worse and worse grows their behavior. Please don't try to tell me that black behavior has been improving over time since the civil rights revolution. We know that the opposite is true.

I can hear the objection already: but haven't the morals of the whites in America gone just as much into the sewer as those of the blacks? To an extent I grant that, but that's because a small number of anti-Christian liberals co-opted the true gospel and turned it into the hyper-liberal social gospel of social justice, race-mixing, and related multicultural utopian nonsense, and the American churches swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker. So in a country where only 100 years ago perfectly decent American Christians would never have blushed to tell you that they considered blacks to be a more primitive and backward race, and that they had no desire to share space or business with them, now we live in a country where even to mention such an idea is an invitation to have your head cut off.

Let me ask a question: if wanting to live in a majority white country, and being opposed to integration and interracial marriage, and wishing to live separately with people who are a natural and spiritual extension of my own blood is such an evil, anti-Christian attitude, then why is it that this was exactly what was believed by the vast majority of Christians for 1300 years prior to the 20th century? How do you explain that? Is it that all those older Christians, like Rudyard Kipling, and Walter Scott, and Shakespeare, and RL Dabney, and John Taylor of Caroline, and Thomas Hughes, and Charles Dickens, and Andrew Jackson, and John Calhoun and millions more, were they not really Christians? According to the new racial gospel, those old jerks were confused racists, who misunderstood the Bible and didn't understand reality. Well I am choosing to side with the old jerks.

But I will never accept the new and postmodern idea that such beliefs are evil. Such beliefs are neither evil nor especially virtuous; they simply reflect reality. All Europeans prior to the 20th century believed that firm barriers existed between the races, and that such barriers were necessary for the maintenance of civilization. This definitely includes Christians. It's not as if I believe that black people are unable to enjoy the blessings of salvation; I don't believe that at all. Race is no barrier to God, but there is no other civilization besides the European one that has actually followed through with the biblical mandate to center itself upon the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Abide With Us

by Edward Waverley

And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?

Today our spotlight falls upon one of the forgotten knights of Christian chivalry and the immortal hero he created. The novelist’s name is Jack Schaefer (1907-1991) and in his debut novel, he introduced the man who rode, “out of the heart of the great glowing West and when his work was done rode back whence he had come and he was Shane.”

As the blogger CWNY has said, “The best works of Western civilization are the ones in which the author tells a simple story well.” I believe that Shane belongs on the same shelf of great European folklore with Don Quixote, the Grimms’ fairy tales, and the novels of Scott and Dickens, for it is a simple story told very well. The novel is narrated by young Bob, a boy basking in his family’s affections, and struck with love at first sight for the magnificent stranger he spies from afar.

“He rode into our valley in the summer of ’89. I was a kid then, barely topping the backboard of father’s old chuck-wagon. I was on the upper rail of our small corral, soaking in the late afternoon sun, when I saw him far down the road where it swung into the valley from the open plain beyond…He was clean-shaven and his face was lean and hard and burned from high forehead to firm, tapering chin. His eyes seemed hooded in the shadow of the hat’s brim. He came closer, and I could see that this was because the brows were drawn in a frown of fixed and habitual alertness. Beneath them the eyes were endlessly searching from side to side and forward, checking off every item in view, missing nothing. As I noticed this, a sudden chill, I could not have told why, struck through me there in the warm and open sun. He rode easily, relaxed in the saddle, leaning his weight lazily into the stirrups. Yet even in this easiness was a suggestion of tension. It was the easiness of a coiled spring, of a trap set.” (Shane, 1949)

Like all of the princes and squires who sit at the round table of European literature, Shane is in many ways a type of Christ. And like the Man of Sorrows, Shane is also an easy rider whose supernatural personality encompasses many moods, from the tenderest exchanges of friendship to the dispensing of rough justice.

Shane rides abruptly and irresistibly into the lives of the youngster Bob Starrett and his parents, homesteaders in the old Wyoming Territory who are deeply committed to living out their simple faith while working their family farm. When Shane stops to ask for a drink of water for himself and his horse, Joe Starrett does what the good peasant always does in a fairy tale: he insists that Shane stay the night.

“He stopped the horse and looked down at us. He was refreshed and I would have sworn the tiny wrinkles around his eyes were what with him would be a smile… ‘Thank you,’ he said in his gentle voice and was turning into the road, back to us, before father spoke in his slow, deliberate way. ‘Don’t be in such a hurry, stranger.’”

This is a representation of the encounter between the risen Christ and two of his disciples on the road to Emmaus. The Gospel of Luke says that after they had spoken for a while with Jesus without recognizing Him, “he made as though he would have gone further. But they constrained him, saying, Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent. And he went in to tarry with them.”

Once Shane has complied with Starrett’s entreaty of hospitality, bad weather necessitates a longer stay, and by the third day under Starrett’s roof, there is an unspoken bond between the stranger and the family. In the same way that Christ entered human history on a quest to make peace between God and man, Shane quickly begins to clear the ground of Starrett’s homestead in order to plant the family deeply and firmly into their promised land.

Shane does not come to give the Starretts peace as the world gives peace. The peace that he offers is the kind that can come only from manly adherence to His heart. His pistol is an object of fascination and awe for Bob, who has a natural curiosity about this man who never wears a gun but who has an otherworldly mastery of his weapon.

“His right hand closed around the grip and you knew at once it was doing what it had been created for. He hefted the old gun, letting it lie loosely in the hand. Then the fingers tightened and the thumb toyed with the hammer, testing the play of it. While I gaped at him, he tossed it swiftly in the air and caught it in his left hand and in the instant of catching, it nestled snugly into his hand too. He tossed it again, high this time and spinning end over end, and as it came down, his right hand flicked forward and took it. The forefinger slipped through the trigger guard and the gun spun, coming up into firing position in the one unbroken motion.”

The best part of the story is of course Shane’s confrontation with incarnate evil in the person of the meddling rancher Luke Fletcher and his hired gun, Stark Wilson. Wilson and Fletcher have declared that the whole valley belongs to them and their gang, and they have the government contract to back up that claim. They are trying to cut in on the homesteaders, and they naturally sneer at any consideration of the aspiring farmers or their families. But Shane is neither a farmer, in spite of his adoption into the Starrett family, nor is he a hired gun. He is a man of the old code, an antique European clinging to the permanent things, who sees what must be done and does it very well. Here is the prelude to the showdown at Grafton’s saloon:

“Shane stopped about three quarters of the way forward, about five yards from Wilson. He cocked his head for one quick sidewise glance again at the balcony and then he was looking only at Wilson. He did not like the setup. Wilson had the front wall and he was left in the open of the room. He understood the fact, assessed it, accepted it.”

Those of us who are still fighting the good fight under the old code are in the same position that Shane faced in the saloon. We do not like the setup of open combat with one enemy before us, and his legion behind us. But we need to acknowledge the reality of the situation, assess it with courage, and press on into the fray. It is either Shane’s code or the weary way of the world; it is either Christ or the abyss.

The Courage of Charles Lindbergh

by Edward Waverley

Today is the seventieth anniversary of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. This is not the sort of anniversary that Google commemorates on its front page, like Pederasty Day or Martin Luther King Month. Why not? Well to tell you the truth, I have no idea why there is so little fanfare in modern times about the day that FDR stated would live in infamy. Maybe that hackneyed quotation is itself the point. The fact is that when it comes to Pearl Harbor, the homeless modern liberal has no idea what he’s supposed to think. On the one hand, the cowardly Japanese attack of December 7, 1941 has been decidedly condemned by one of the icons of liberaldom, Mr. New Deal himself. On the other hand, what’s not to like about a day on which hordes of lovable Asians transgressed all codes of honor by slaughtering thousands of unsuspecting Whites? And so the denizens of journalism do not know which of their idols to appease: should they kowtow to ethnic feelings by screening the public from the facts about the Pearl Harbor atrocity? Or should they exploit December Seventh as an opportunity to lionize Roosevelt, and through him their god Obama? The resulting silence is deafening, and highly amusing in its illumination of the convulsions of liberal logic.

I am not going to bore you with another recitation of the facts about FDR deliberately ignoring reliable intelligence that plainly showed that the attack was coming. Those who know the true score about our foolish and disastrous entry into the Second World War cannot fail to see that Roosevelt had been openly clamoring for a war, any war, since long before his inauguration in 1933. As John T. Flynn demonstrates so deftly in his Country Squire in the White House (1940), young Roosevelt, while still serving as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Wilson during the First Great Unjust war, had been giving speeches all over the country proclaiming that, “We want the country to feel, too, that in maintaining a fighting force of the highest efficiency we are at the same time educating thousands of young men to be better citizens [Flynn’s italics].” Flynn then spells out a bit of what this ought to have shown Americans when Roosevelt was being vetted for the presidency about twenty years later.

“[W]e find him here [in 1913] playing with an idea that he would nurse through the years—that military training educates young Americans to be better citizens [Flynn’s italics]. There are many who believe that some military training in schools or colleges adds to education a useful element. But that a stretch in the army or navy by itself, with its discipline, its stratification of classes, its living by orders, is precisely the kind of education for American citizens—that is an opinion shared by few American educators.”

However accurate Flynn may have been in that last pronouncement about the philosophy of education in 1940, he was totally wrong if he thought that future educators would share his doubts about giving education a militant form. As it turned out during the rest of the 20th century, Roosevelt’s militant view of education sank in completely with American educators, who fully absorbed FDR’s idea that pedagogy ought to emulate the ideas of total war that inform our military. And just as it is the mission of the American military to make the world safe for democracy, it is the mission of the American schools to produce cooperative taxpayers who are as enthralled by the apparatus of the central government as they are by its military.

What does all of this have to do with White History Month? Our spotlight today falls upon one of the most heroic Americans, Charles Lindbergh. The fury with which the Lone Eagle is today denounced by neoconservatives ought to clue us in quickly that this is a man we need to study.

Lindbergh was an amazing and fascinating man in several different walks of life. His accomplishments as an aviator are very well known, not the least of which is his famed nonstop flight from New York City to Paris, completed on May 21, 1927 when he was a mere 25 years old. Despite the fact that he was already a US Army Air veteran who had shown vast physical courage as a pilot, Lindbergh was not drawn in by the warmongering of either Woodrow Wilson (whose activities Lindbergh’s father had staunchly opposed as a Congressman), nor of Roosevelt throughout the New Deal era. It would be one thing if Lindbergh’s critics could point out, as they can with someone like Cindy Sheehan, that he was a deranged pacifist. But such a dismissal is impossible in Lindbergh’s case, not only because of his Medal of Honor, but also because of his ultimate role in WWII. But more on that later.



Of all that Lindbergh accomplished in his career, nothing can compare to his defiant leadership of the America First campaign. The group was established in 1940 and eventually boasted a membership of 800,000, giving the lie to the crazy myth that Americans were solidly united about the need for American intervention prior to Pearl Harbor. Lindbergh threw all of his weight behind the campaign, even though the pain of his son’s murder and the resulting media circus had by 1940 driven him overseas to live with his family in England. It was during his time abroad in Europe that Lindbergh was afforded an ideal opportunity to inspect the German military, to acquaint himself with the political situation in England and France, and to conclude firmly that America had nothing to gain, and much to lose from intruding into the European theater. On that basis, Lindbergh traveled several times to America First events in New York City, Chicago and elsewhere during 1940 and 1941. It was Lindbergh’s opinion that,

“The potentially gigantic power of America, guided by uninformed and impractical idealism, might crusade into Europe to destroy Hitler without realizing that Hitler’s destruction would lay Europe open to the rape, loot and barbarism of Soviet Russia’s forces, causing possibly the fatal wounding of western civilization.” [Quoted from David Gordon, America First: The Anti-War Movement, Charles Lindbergh and the Second World War 1940-1941. CUNY Graduate Center, 2003.]

Doesn’t he sound like a maniac? Yes, he sounds just like several other maniacs from American history, such as the Copperhead Congressman Clement Vallandigham who was imprisoned by Abraham Lincoln for questioning the president’s crusade in the South. And he also sounds like that loony Ron Paul, who cautioned that George Bush’s excursions in the Middle East might not turn out to be all that he was cracking them up to be. All three men were vindicated in their prophecies, and all three men faced the venom of the powers that were above them. How Paul has avoided prison so far is anyone’s guess, but Lindbergh struck hard and fast in his devastating anti-war speeches.

On September 11, 1941, Lindbergh gave an address at a Des Moines “America First” rally that he titled, Who Are the War Agitators? It was in that speech that much of the vitriol poured out upon Lindbergh by the neoconservatives finds its source. That is the speech where Lindbergh minces no words about who it was pushing America into the European fray: a confluence of Roosevelt (of course), the British imperialists (he was very right about that), and Jewish Americans. Well what can we say about Lindbergh’s assessment? Wasn’t his speech anti-Semitic? Not at all. In fact, he was not saying anything at all about the Jewish race in general, he was only noticing that the desire among American Jews to send American troops into Germany was irrelevant to the national interests of the American nation, and was in fact a selfish and sentimental impulse. Lindbergh summarized the downright stupidity of pretending that stopping Hitler in Europe would be tantamount to establishing tolerance worldwide:

Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation.

Ah there’s the rub. The pro-war Jews back then were, and their offspring neocons now are, dyed-in-the-wool liberals. Do liberals really consider tolerance to be a virtue? Of course not. Tolerance is not a liberal virtue, it is a Christian virtue. And when Lindbergh spoke of how war threatens the existence of tolerance, peace, and strength in a nation, he was not speaking as a rootless imperialists; he was speaking as a European Christian who had studied enough history to know of what he spoke.

You may be thinking that Lindbergh’s opposition to our entry into WWII disqualifies him from the White Hall of Fame on the grounds of cowardice. But if his derring-do as a pilot prior to the war is not enough to convince you, then consider the fact that he abruptly left the America First campaign the moment he learned about Pearl Harbor. Unlike the sissy FDR who conveniently avoided any danger from either of the wars that he clamored for as a wealthy sinecure, Lindbergh moved to have his Army commission reinstated for combat in Europe. Conforming perfectly to every other base act of his career, FDR refused to permit Lindbergh back into the American military, evidently feeling that Manifest Destiny was more than enough to guarantee martial success without the Lone Eagle. But Lindbergh was not to be excluded from action forever. By 1942 he had obtained a civilian position through United Aircraft that placed him in the thick of fighting in the Pacific Theater. He eventually flew 50 combat missions, all as a civilian, including one in which he gunned down a Japanese observation plane.

For liberals, Lindbergh is a contemptible figure whose career confuses them. Some leftists are prepared to admire his anti-war stance before Pearl Harbor, but absolutely condemn his participation in military life that on their view contradicts his time with America First. Other leftists, like the National Review crowd, don’t know what to make of his frank remarks about Jewish selfishness, or his very mild compliments toward the German military spirit that he observed under Hitler. So they smear him every chance they get. But for those who see life through the eyes of European civilization, it is obvious that Lindbergh was nothing less than a very late, nearly anachronistic, example of the old knights of White Hall.

The White Hall of Fame

by Edward Waverley

When President Obama appointed Eric “My People” Holder as US Attorney General in 2009, one of Holder’s very first policy initiatives was to abolish the White Hall of Fame (WHOF). Flexing many of the same revolutionary muscles he had built during his internship with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Holder moved quickly to seize WHOF property during those heady First Hundred Days. But those of us entrusted with the upkeep of White Hall had already long anticipated any such outrage. Providentially the Justice Department’s plans for a SWAT raid leaked to our operatives, and we swiftly removed our property from our longstanding grounds in Pulaski, Tennessee where, in the immediate aftermath of the War to Prevent Southern Independence, many of our ancestors had taken a courageous stand against colored intrusions so similar to those now faced by the present generation. It was through a cold and drizzly midnight fog that we vacated the sleepy town of Pulaski, setting our faces like flint for the north as we began a necessarily anonymous, subterranean existence.

Heeding the Lord’s enjoinder to remember Lot’s wife, none of us that night even looked back upon the birthplace of our parent institution, that Klan which was launched by Bedford Forrest to defend the White man and his culture after all economic and political liberty had been ripped from free Whites in the South, and replaced with an experiment in radical egalitarianism. As the bloggerCWNY has said about that earlier era, “Forrest's wisdom was in his blood, and his wise blood told him that the white man and his culture was inherently unequal to all other men and to every other culture.”

We faced a new underground existence. Though our new digs are much more down-at-heel than formerly, we have foiled the barbarian Holder in his main purpose by rescuing the invaluable materials that, until 2009, had enjoyed nearly fifty years of uninterrupted public visibility near the birthplace of our predecessor institution.

The White Hall of Fame was founded in Pulaski in the summer of 1960 as a response to the relentless calumny and vitriol being poured out upon White people in nearby Nashville during that city’s notorious Nashville Sit-ins. Colored rabble-rousers like the Antiguan lawyer Z. Alexander Looby, community instigator the Rev’rund Kelly Miller Smith, and everyone’s favorite adulterer-plagiarist Martin Luther King, coordinated what would eventually become the first broadly successful campaign to foist integration upon a peaceful and biracial Southern city. In the spring of 1960, the communist minister Kelly Miller Smith of the First Baptist Church on Capitol Hill began his efforts to thrust integration illegally upon White business owners within Nashville. When the businesses and property of many White Nashvillians were being occupied and damaged by an obstinate, multicultural horde of thugs and race hustlers, many valiant Whites vowed to protect their property and to defend their liberty as businessmen to run their shops and diners however they chose. If it had not been for the imminent danger these thugs posed to lawful White proprietors, it might have been amusing to witness the antics of black men who claimed to abhor violence but who were eager to trespass where retaliation was inevitable. The Sainted MLK appeared at the colored Fisk University in April to lecture Nashvillians on the moral superiority of the ‘peaceful’ intruders and to assure the occupiers that he found their actions “inspiring.” By May, the black and white descendants of Robespierre and Marx had forced their will into law in Nashville, and with the help of the police, blacks were permitted to go in and out of White businesses. Although liberal Nashville Mayor Ben West collaborated joyfully with the barbarians who demanded admission into private businesses, and although the outcome of the sit-ins was a resounding blow against the social and legal traditions of Dixie, several of the White victims organized a rapid response.

The White response to the sit-ins was a singular instance of how violence can clarify blood wisdom. Because racial bonds are both social and biological, the truths of racial bonds often go unspoken, for they are truths that are lived and breathed rather than being spoken about or written. That is why so few of the great Europeans of the past like Sir Walter Scott or Charles Dickens had an explicit racial code. For them, it simply went without saying that European culture was superior to all other cultures, because no other culture had succeeded in enshrining Christian charity in its institutions and communities. The fact that those older writers recognized the unique role of Europeans in world history is inescapable when you simply read their books. The assumptions of the Christian faith and of the racial ties that bind undergird every word that they wrote, and for this reason it is hardly surprising that all of the greatest European writers are today the objects of the relentless derision of multicultural liberals and academic Gnostics.

But in certain epochs, like the 1860’s in America, or in a more confused and less salient form in the 1960’s, the trends and accidents of human action sometimes coalesce in ways that force latent ideas up to the surface of history. During the radical, federal reshaping of all aspects of the South after 1865, there was not time for Forrest and the other survivors to write novels and books defending the Southern cause. Just as the rapine and pillaging by radical Yankees against the fiercely independent Southern Whites inspired the men of the South to form a Klan to defend its homes and its women, the Washington City meddlers who foisted Phase Two of Reconstruction upon the South in the 1960s inspired the foundation of the White Hall of Fame in the summer of 1960.

We are a less martial group than either the Confederacy or the Klan, though we are the spiritual and filial descendants of both of those proud bodies. Once integration had been set in stone in Nashville, there were even at that late date plenty of Cavaliers remaining who would not go quietly along with the program of race-mixing. I was only a young boy when my father gathered a few likeminded men to make his proposal for White Hall. He didn’t realize it at the time, but as he gave his talk to the group of about five patriots one night around our kitchen table, I was perched within earshot atop our hallway stairs. I heard him tell them:

Men, none of us knows what God has ordained of the future. And we aren’t like those who have no faith in His goodness, and who in the face of struggles or even death, abandon all hope and refuse to struggle against the powers and principalities arrayed against His Kingdom. For the moment we still have our swords to defend our kin and our homes, and regardless of that, we have for eternity our union with His sacred heart. Just as our ancestors refused to fear the government, no matter how cruel or ruthless the men who ruled, we also must refuse to bow slavishly to their every whim. God knows that we are not violent men, nor were the Klansmen bloodthirsty savages. But God also knows, and let us never forget, that whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Him to stumble, it is better for that man never to have been born. We shall never be among those who cause or permit our little ones to have their lives or their link to Him severed by barbarians.

That was all. Everyone seemed to understand and to be stirred into feelings that were both ancient and new, all agreeing that they would by all means regard each other as brothers and extended families, knights of a new round table. White Hall began that night in our little house, and within the year, the men were making monthly excursions to nearby Pulaski for times of retreat, research, and mutual encouragement. As depressing and devastating as the ensuing decades were to all that was normal in American life, the establishment of White Hall was one defiant outpost of European civilization. And now, even the publicly visible grounds and facilities of our institute have been forced out of sight. But never, we trust, out of mind.

December Is White History Month

by Edward Waverley

Here in the remnants of what was America, some happy few of us today are looking forward to Christmas as the birthday of our Lord and Savior. By a rather sly piece of public relations, the fourth-century Western church fathers designated December 25, near the Roman winter solstice, as the date of the Incarnation, in hopes of wresting the affections of pagans away from Saturn and toward the Christ. Well if the energies of a one-day pagan orgy can be usefully channeled into a celebration of Christ’s birth, why can’t we, by a parallel strategy, divert attention away from African Month (or Hispanic Month, or Moslem Month) and direct it toward a European Month? My proposal is that we take a page from those old church fathers and denominate the whole month of December as White History Month.

And just as the European church found a way to confront rampant paganism in the fourth century, the 21st-century church in America faces a dire threat in the form of other tempting gods from Africa, Mexico, and parts elsewhere. So by an extension of the old Christmas strategy, all this month, we will be taking time to commemorate the heroic deeds of White people everywhere.
I realize that you are probably already killing yourself to get ready for Black History Month (formerly known as February). But remember, you still have two whole months left to get ready for Negro Worship Month, so even liberals are without any excuse to ignore White History Month. Or perhaps, over the last few weeks, you were too busy participating in the Reconquista of the USA while honoring Hispanic Heritage month, and so you find that you simply lack the requisite energy or mental power to spend an additional month studying White achievements. Never fear my post-racial friend. I have taken it upon myself to bring you daily dashes of history, thought, poetry, and imagery culled out from the White Hall of Fame.


This blog will be the first of what I, Edward Waverley, hope will be many efforts to reach out to other dwindling but stubborn corners of civilization. In my first installment, I will explore the secret history of the White Hall of Fame. The WHOF is a proud, and until recently a thriving institution. But the trustees and I have recently been driven underground, and (we must confess) nearly out of existence. In our refurbished digs, we have sought the wisdom of many of our ancestors, and in these humble pages I have been given the assignment of cobbling as much of that wisdom together as possible for White posterity.