FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Fascist Gods

Rant Number 559     21 October 2013 Golden Dawn, the Greek far right party, evinces a penchant for polytheism. Yes, Zeus, Athena, Hera, Ares, Artemis, Dionysus, that droll bunch. It wanted Greek kids to revere the old deities – until it realised it offended the Orthodox Church and was a vote loser to boot. So, GD kicked the cheesy pantheon upstairs. Good riddance! Golden Dawn’s neo-paganism adumbrates that of a Gallic right-wing luminary, Alain de Benoist. Against a French and European milieu corrupted by Americanisation and rootless multiculturalism, Benoist invokes an imperial Europe. With a restored pagan culture going back to the Indo-Europeans. He too yearns for the return of the heathen gods. The far right’s fatal attraction to paganism harks back to minor fringes of reactionary thought. Julius Evola – the priest’s youthful mentor – wrote a book, Pagan Imperialism, advocating a ‘solar restoration’. Alfred Rosenberg’s nebulous Myth of the Twentieth Century raved of a spirit of the German race manifest in the Nordic god Wotan. During the Third Reich it sold like hot cakes, rivalling Mein Kampf. Hitler enviously observed how the book owed its success to the Catholic Church – to be placed on the notoriousIndex Librorum Prohibitorum as heretical was a great fillip to sales! Why should the discredited, clapped out gods turn on a few fascists? The answer is simple: dislike of Christianity. Her Jewish roots and heritage, particularly. Jesus Christ is the awaited Messiah of Judaism, as well as the founder of a universal, non-racial religion. Minds like Evola, Rosenberg and Benoist would find that intolerable. Rosenberg even tried to make Christ into an actual Aryan, traduced by a villainous, arch-semitic St Paul, the latter compared to the Jewish Karl Marx...you get the conspiracy drift. Curious how the old gods are regarded as the good guys, being an expression of Indo-European religion. Be that as it may, the far right brigade delude themselves. Zeus, Athena and their colleagues could be pretty ‘multicultural’. The Roman gods could easily mutate into the deities of conquered nations. Like you behold in Roman Aquae Sulis, the elegant English town of Bath. The invading legions discovered there a shrine of the Celtic goddess Sulis but they did not seek to destroy it. They simply assimilated Sulis to their deity Minerva – the Latin name for Athena – and hey, presto! Celtic acculturation into Roman rule and ways took place effortlessly. Of course, unlike modern multiculturalism Rome demanded adherence to a core set of values and norms, such as the Emperor’s worship. The unpleasant Druidical cult of severed heads was forbidden, yet Rome’s gods could adjust themselves to diverse peoples and races, just as Christianity can and should. Solar or Maya or Wicca paganism may look alluring to far right and New Age freaks but, frankly, polytheism is illogical, immoral and ridiculous. The trouble with many gods is that they will conflict. The deities of Olympus were always quarrelling. When Paris judged Aphrodite the most beautiful he angered Athena and Hera, so the Trojan War followed. Odysseus was loved by Athena but hated by Poseidon – it cost him twenty years of wandering. Of course, the gods had agreed not to cross each other but it could not work, hence contradiction lurks at the heart of a pantheon. As Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah of Hezbollah fame said to Julian Assange in a TV interview: ‘Having more than one god is like having a country run by two or more Presidents.’ Neat. As to morality – something the Right professes to care about – Saturn devours his children; shape-shifting Zeus seduces equally boys and girls; Hermes is the god of thieves; Hades kidnaps and ravishes Persephone; Priapus is famous for his tool...enough! Such figures replicate some of the worst human flaws. They have no right to any pure, spiritual or just moral worship. Ridiculous. Huh! Beauty contests among goddesses? Athena born out of her father’s head after it was split with a hammer by Hephaestus? Lucian of Samosat, the fine Greek satirist, had great fun in sending up the gods’ often laughable or disgusting lives. Go to him for more ludicrous details. Ironically, the far right has missed something else, similarly glaring: the return of the gods has already taken place, after a democratic fashion. That illogical, immoral and ridiculous gang are in your midst. There is perhaps no public shrine to Venus and Priapus but... no need. Eros and filth are an omnipresent pestilence. (Verily, European, Western civilisation has gone happily priapic.) Pecunia, the shabby money goddess, lords it supreme over East and West, from Wall Street to China. Its altars are banks and financial institutions – the City of London probably the biggest shrine. No temple of Ares, a.k.a. Mars, the god of war, stands but in actuality that litigious deity has innumerable, bloody votaries in statesmen and armies the world over. The Right would not relish my bringing in an Orthodox Rabbi but I will. Adin Steinsaltz in an Oxford lecture gives it you straight: ‘Contemporary culture is a pagan culture.’ That’s plain-speaking! Among the gods he shrewdly fingers ubiquitous Calliope, the shallow goddess of celebrities, those contemporary, idolised, all-too famous nonentities. Proudly, the Rabbi declares that Jewish culture is different. As with Prophet Elijah on Mount Carmel, the choice is stark: either you worship the gods, the Baals, or the One True God. Like the good Rabbi, I know which side I am on. ‘O Galilean, you have won!’ cried out Emperor Julian the Apostate as he fell, mortally wounded in battle. Julian was a brave, intelligent and pious ruler. His tragic mistake was trying to bring back the gods after the triumph of the Cross. He failed because his gods had failed. They were dead for good and cadavers cannot be resuscitated. The tawdry deities of our time – fascist or democratic, it doesn’t matter – are bound to fail too, insh’allah. Revd Frank Julian Gelli