THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

As I said before, only when evolution reached the Aryan stage did a people begin to question the value of life itself. Suicide is common in the Orient, but it is always a sacrifice or an apology. Buddhism came from a blue-eyed Aryan named Gautama Buddha, and Buddha offered guidance on how one could avoid life completely. His goal, like the goal of the religion Buddhism came from, the Judaism to Buddha's Christianity.

There is a similar historical relationship between Christianity and Judaism, but what makes me suspicious of the insistence that Christianity was ENTIRELY a product of the Old Testament is the fact that the GOALS of Judaism and Christianity are entirely different. Even in Jesus' time, many of the Temple priests denied any kind of rebirth, and the concept of Heaven and Hell is vague at best in Judaism.

By contrast Buddha and Hinduism had the same goal: an escape from the eternal curse of the Wheel of Life, the misery of living forever as one animal after another, with respites when one's karma got one TEMPORARILY into Nirvana.

A lot of people laugh at the Islamic idea of a bevy of renewable virgins, but in the Deep Wisdom of Hinduism and Buddhism, the first sign that one's time in Nirvana was ending was that one began to have and smell bad breath.

Now let's get back to basics. Aryans questioned the value of life ITSELF. They did not see life as a good thing, and the agonies of old age in those times were something Buddhism emphasized. This relates to those who think that hunting is bad. They assume that, if the hunter didn't kill them, animals would die in a hospital loaded with painkillers and their family weeping around them.

An animal that dies from a hunter's or is suffocated for five minutes by a lion is relatively lucky. A kudu killed by wild dogs on the African veldt is slowly eaten alive for an hour or two. Other kinds of death take longer.

So Aryans noticed that whoever ran THIS world was not kind. The Hindus and Buddhists wanted to escape the whole process. They did not want to die that way a million times and counting. Up in Persia, Zoroaster hit on a different formula. He declared that the god of THIS world was indeed evil. But the god of the NEXT world, Ahura-Mazda, was good:

"My kingdom is not of THIS world."

But as ideas get discussed and people get paid to "interpret" them, Aryans tend to carry them to their logical extreme. Thus Zoroastrianism, which was the religion of the land Mani came from, Iraq, had by his time degenerated into a belief that this world was altogether evil, and everything about it was evil. Mani was a Christian, but he openly synthesized the two great religions of his time, the Christianity based in Constantinople that ruled Rome and the equally vast Persian Empire of Zoroastrianism.

Mani developed a Christian heresy called Manichaeism, which called for universal human sterility. But Mani was a latecomer. The same idea had been propounded in a modified form by St. Paul. Paul said it was better to remain sterile, but one could still attain heaven if he had sex AND a Christian marriage:

"It is better to marry than to burn."

Some heretics wanted to get rid of the Old Testament completely, and each of them called for Manichaeism: "Sterility NOW!"

For two thousand years, the Church has struggled to separate Paul's Zoroastrian hatred of this world from Mani's doctrine. The problem is that they both come from the same source, and no one in any church can admit what that source WAS. They must maintain the hypnotic fiction that early Christianity developed entirely and solely from the Old Testament. Protestants have a harder time, because they must shoehorn every Christian doctrine into the Old Testament that most Jews in Christ's time couldn't even READ.

The Old Testament for the majority of Roman Jews was in Greek, not Hebrew, and Luther decided these must be false texts since everything had to develop from Hebrew and this was in Greek.

But, again, back to basics. Aryans have been trying to deal with the simple fact that, in those times, life was seldom worth living with a CONCEPT they realized: Something HAPPENS to you when you die. The concept of an afterlife was a major basis of Egyptian civilization, so that concept was certainly around a long, long time. But Egyptians simply provided for the next life the way they would for an extension of this one.

Aryans, Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian and Christian, decided that THIS life was, on balance, NOT something they wanted to extend indefinitely. There must be a Higher State in the next world, because they could not bear to face endless repetitions of THIS life.

To repeat the old Spanish proverb, "If life were worth living, we would not need so many philosophers."

But in white countries today, we are becoming less and less tolerant of misery. That is the reason Western Civilization has roared around the world the way the Mediterranean roared over our ancestors when their homeland became the Black Sea. Every other civilization is built on a stoic survival of misery. Western civilization has an endless list of valid criticisms, but it is not based on the idea that one must find a Deep Reason to lie down and let the world roll over you. That idea only returned with the World War II Generation.

Contrary to popular stereotypes, even the Victorian Morality was not based on a worship of misery. They saw the superiority of a self-disciplined white society over others and they insisted on it. In Victorian times if you ate a lot of sugar your teeth rotted. If you drank a lot you could pay a huge price. A girl who had a bastard child suffered tremendously.

In Victoria's day, infant mortality was huge, and huge families were needed in Europe just to keep the population constant. There simply was not time for a young woman to have and raise the children needed and have an occupation as well.

In America this habit of huge families ran into the fact that, in America, children survived. We had all the population we needed, with a little more natural growth, when the cheap-labor mania set in in the middle 1800s. We could pick and choose a few more good immigrants, but immigration did NOT populate America. In 1850 some 90% of our white population probably descended from pre-1700 immigration.

So Victorian morality largely reflected the realities of its time, not a male chauvinist plot to "keep women down." Compared to women in most other societies in Victoria's time, women were wildly free in the West. Most Women's Lib spokespersons are Jewish, but have you ever heard them discuss all those wonderful rights Jewish women used to have in the ghettoes and in the Middle East?

Back to America after 1850. The Civil War destroyed a major segment of the population that would have been born to the old maids who proliferated after it, but our population was growing nicely anyway. In 1921 and 1923 America passed the Immigration and Nationalities Act. These acts were aimed at keeping our population as it was ethnically, and the fact that more immigration for its own sake was no longer necessary.

These Immigration and Naturalization Acts provided for a MAXIMUM of 300,000 immigrants a year into a population of over 110 million. It formalized the fact that America was NOT "a nation of immigrants."

In 1965, the World War II Generation got rid of this 1921 and 1923 rejection of the idea that we somehow owe it to the world to destroy ourselves.

The Misery Philosophy did not come from the Victorians. Only with the World War II Generation did we return to self-destruction as an ideal.