The weather has turned on us, like a girlfriend (I’ve read about such people) who suddenly won’t talk to you, and you ask her what’s wrong and she says, “If you don’t know, there’s no point in me saying anything.”

What I mean is, the weather turned to the winter side today. Oh, it’s not freezing (not quite). And it’s not snowing (although Lileks says a few flakes fell this morning). But the winter attitude is there. We’ve got a wind, sharpened with a carborundum stone. It wants to blow my hat away. It wants to give me a cold, or the flu if I let my guard down. And in combination with sunset coming an hour earlier now, we all know it’s time to stop lying to ourselves and to admit that summer was an aberration, a parole. This is the real world. This is Life, unpainted and raw.

Once again we have offended God with our ingratitude. That’s why we schedule a day at the end of the month for giving thanks, as a student gives the teacher an apple or a box of chocolates toward the end of term, in hopes that his previous slacking will be forgotten.



Iowahawk has posted scans of a book by Munro Leaf, most famous for the pacifist classic, Ferdinand the Bull. In 1942, Leaf sang a much more martial tune.

Dinesh D’Souza offers a spirited rebuttal today to the argument that “Hitler was a Christian,” noting quite properly that Hitler hated Christianity but adored Darwin.

In my novel Wolf Time, I noted that Nazism was compounded of Darwinism and Romanticism. I’m a big fan (as was C. S. Lewis) of much of the stuff that went on in the Romantic period in art and literature. That was the age when the Icelandic sagas gained thousands of readers, when the Grimms collected peasant fairy tales and Edvard Grieg worked Norwegian folk music into haunting orchestral works. Various European ethnic groups rediscovered their cultural histories, and—and this was very important—began to look at the common person, the peasant, as something more than a beast of burden. This helped to advance education and democracy.

But there was a downside. The celebration of the ethnic too easily overflowed into plain racism and xenophobia. The Norwegian, reading an Icelandic saga and saying, “We are as great as the Romans,” often went on to say, “…and we’re much better than the Poles.” The Darwinian idea of the survival of the fittest provided a scientific veneer for theories of racial superiority, and Nazism was born.

I’ve read that there are strong elements of neo-Nazism among some (not all) groups of Asatru (Thor and Odin worshippers) today. I’ve known several Asatru. We used to have them in our Viking Age Society, before our Great Schism. Some of them were people I liked, and some I didn’t like so much. I never heard any of them express racist views, but I never discussed the issue with any of them, either. So I can’t accuse them in this matter.

But I will say this. There is, within the Christian scriptures, ample authority for rejecting any view of human superiority on the basis of race. I see no such authority within the traditional documents of Norse mythology. I think that the Asatru (and all moderns who reject Christianity) are depending on the basic goodness of themselves and their friends to protect them from racism.

I don’t believe in the basic goodness of myself or my friends. I believe in the restraint provided by the authority of the Word of God.