Above and below Aeropagitica, centuries lagging.
To sons of Thrace, Illyria, and Dalmatia, Dacia,
From Moesia, may we be eternally condemned
To freedom of our own suffering!

To sons of Anglia, Caledonia, Cambria,
And their mother Britannia,
Bloodless is the liberty you chose
And therefore a slave’s mark!

Eisegesis of the new and endless laws popping up here and there, eager to reduce mankind to domesticated fowlry, against which I battle to save my land of foreign rot.

  1. The endless hate speech laws, the endless, insufferable laws on bigotry, on intolerance, now rising up like a tide, which I will not name (mark of the Devil who comes down bringing good) not to encourage idolatry of mankind.
  2. And of cowardice, and of domestication I will speak, from a culture of monks, of incense, of prelates and droning Liturgies, to those lands of separation of church and state, attempting to form a false Nomocanon (Church Law), without the bishops and priests—for the bishops are the philosophers and the priests are those with the courage to be free AGAINST the “Goodness” of the world.
  3. And of lust, of petty prides, of shameful weaknesses of modern man, who is a woman even the women mock, conducting his anathemas in the name of justice, equality, tolerance, etc. without the involvement of the Autocephaly—which are the universities, faculties, cathedras, symposiums, etc. May the young acolyte too weak to endure life be called weak!

And now of the eisegesis itself which shall brook no arguments, call upon no discussions, be intolerant to the point of malice. To discuss foolish arguments is the mark of a fool. To tolerate weakness is to strengthen it. There shall be no citations but quotes, no footnotes, none of the filioque (heresies) now conquering lands which we used to chase for liberties and wealth, now fleeing, and taking their wealth and bringing it here. A PAMPHLET FOR THE ENGLISH WORLD, WHO ARE BECOMING COWARDS WHILE CALLING US BARBARIANS, THEY, who once had Mill and Moore, and Russell and Milton—your blood is curdled into cowardice, cowardice you regard as the future of the world.

Dear Englishmen, my literary friends and philosophical teachers whom I occasionally converse with, I hear your incessant shouting and grumbling, echoing around the world as the wailing of a hysterical midwife about to drop the infant called humanity onto the floor of barbarism. Suffice it to say I find your fear arrogant, your hysteria infantile, and your mental fortitude laughable. The world doesn’t turn around such mere liberty as not to be insulted, as not to be despised, whether on the account of blood or creed—but blood even now barbaric will one day become noble, and creed once heretical will have its time—so have the Times proclaimed. Yet it appears you are stilting the very progression of era, reducing mankind, with your love, your care, your sick motherly affection, into infants, into imbeciles, into godless, sinless angels, who like angels must be idiotic if they are of Earth, and terrible in their judgment, if their heavenly qualities descend in our secular society. You wish to write Church Laws—yet your Anglican Church has nearly forgot what submission to organs of religious authority looks like—that is how far your freedoms have gotten you. Yet now, you have an entire flock of prelates without a bishop’s writ, monks of no monastic orders (yet who claim to speak for us all), which extol equality as the most wonderful, most sublime of human achievements, in fact, that all of our life we are meant just to be equal—therefore, happy, therefore—sinless. And is it not from these lands—lands you find still barbaric—that humanity’s soul was formed the highest in moments of great burden? And the burdens we can endure, would they not crush nine tenths of you, and uplift the last piece or crash them into the very Earth?

For this is not the liberty I have fought for whenever I took to writing to win for my people, but of an even sinister mark than the past secular Church Laws, of the Paris Commune, of Hegelians, of Leninists, Marxists, Fascists, etc. But when time is ripe, even a barbarian must rise upwards, as I am attempting to do right now, and my biggest opponents are those seeking to aid me, while my adversaries are in fact my most stalwart allies.

To whom I manifest these words is your very ancestor Milton, who proclaimed:

For this is not the liberty which we can hope, that no grievance ever should arise  in the Commonwealth – that let no man in this world expect.

Yet do you not strive to do what your ancestor himself so wisely warned you against? And I hope men will see, my foes and allies alike, a difference of look I proclaim, as Milton did, “between the magnanimity of triennial Parliament” which today is but free association of free men, and in this even women must be manly that is to say, not cowardly, and on the other side, “that  jealous  haughtiness  of  prelates  and  Cabin Counselors  that  usurped  of  late”, which are all the infatuated idolaters of  various new sects arising such as diversity, equality, tolerance, etc., which on their own might not be terrible, but under their stewardship become insufferably infantile and petty.

If I should thus far presume upon the mental fortitude of your will and spirit, Readers and Editors and Activists, I might defend myself without judgment, if any should accuse me of being bigoted or intolerant, that the will of the reader is an adult will and not a child’s and furthermore how much more I long for this discussion than the tiresome droning of my own land about the turbid past. And just as Milton plucked out of “the old and elegant humanity of Greece,” so I must pluck his feathers, and of Britannia and England, on which I was partially raised, emulating the greats but never reaching them. And even if you have democracy, even if you have liberty, you have not the fiery spirit of rebellion, nor the barbaric desire to be great anymore, so far you have dishonored your own republic calling its conquests shameful, while I uplifted even my own tyrants the Turks, calling them great—for only great men can conquer us. Weaklings—like the Germans—we shall crush and bury in the steppe.

Such honor was done in the old days that men relegated to their enemies dignity, even while mocking them, so that when the Cossacks mock the Sultan greatness and history must follow. As so, the Sultan exclaims himself arrogantly master of the earth thusly:

“Sultan Mehmed IV to the Zaporozhian Cossacks: As the Sultan; son of Muhammad; brother of the sun and moon; grandson and viceroy of God; ruler of the kingdoms of Macedonia, Babylon, Jerusalem, Upper and Lower Egypt; emperor of emperors; sovereign of sovereigns; extraordinary knight, never defeated; steadfast guardian of the tomb of Jesus Christ; trustee chosen by God Himself; the hope and comfort of Muslims; confounder and great defender of Christians – I command you, the Zaporogian Cossacks, to submit to me voluntarily and without any resistance, and to desist from troubling me with your attacks.” — Turkish Sultan Mehmed IV

And the Cossacks reply in equally vicious grandeur:

“Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Turkish Sultan!

“O sultan, Turkish devil and damned devil’s kith and kin, secretary to Lucifer himself. What the devil kind of knight are thou, that canst not slay a hedgehog with your naked arse? The devil shits, and your army eats. Thou shalt not, thou son of a whore, make subjects of Christian sons. We have no fear of your army; by land and by sea we will battle with thee. Fuck thy mother.

“Thou Babylonian scullion, Macedonian wheelwright, brewer of Jerusalem, goat-fucker of Alexandria, , swineherd of Greater and Lesser Egypt, pig of Armenia, Podolian thief, catamite of Tartary, hangman of Kamyanets, and fool of all the world and underworld, an idiot before God, grandson of the Serpent, and the crick in our dick. Pig’s snout, mare’s arse, slaughterhouse cur, unchristened brow. Screw thine own mother!

“So the Zaporozhians declare, you lowlife. You won’t even be herding pigs for the Christians. Now we’ll conclude, for we don’t know the date and don’t own a calendar; the moon’s in the sky, the year with the Lord. The day’s the same over here as it is over there; for this kiss our arse! — Koshovyi otaman Ivan Sirko, with the whole Zaporozhian Host

And certainly, tales and poems followed such displays of vulgarity—but where they enriched both Russia and Turkey back then without knowing it would most certainly shame you, you sophisticated prelates, and certainly the whole of Zaporozhian Host would be rotting in jail for prejudices, bigotry, ethnic hatreds and wars won would have been lost, and culture be strangled precisely by being defended in the name of decency, in the name of their dignity. As such, our enemies are greater than yours—for we can hate them openly—and we are theirs—for we expect no quarters. And today, we walk openly in the streets of Istanbul and Turks, my former masters come to my land, afforded full respect of a man who has done it all, been a master and a nomad, a warlord and a deposed king and we call not on the Turks to destroy the imagery of our former masters, nor do we call upon their humiliation even if we could, for it would mean we were conquered by fools and not mighty men, which would reduce us to fools in kind. Yet you so “kindly” now proclaim all your heritage as sin and rot, without even knowing what disastrous effect it will have on the former subject—for suddenly, they were conquered by men not ahead in culture, and therefore the same, so their ancestors become weaklings even while claimed otherwise, while your ancestors become monsters, even when great deeds follow in their steps.

If you are therefore resolved, and it would be shameful to think otherwise, I wish to accuse all of England, all of the West, of its filioque which you have now ordained (under no one’s desire) that we are to be made good and decent by being reduced into precisely cowards or toddlers: that no book, essay, critique, pamphlet, or any human endeavor be made, unless the same be first approved and licensed by these imbecilic prelates of equality and stupidity. For certainly you have regressed where we have once stood and there is scarcely a difference between an Imperial Censor of Russia and a sensitivity reader, or your safe spaces or even your higher standards of decorum as compared to my own. For that part of the soul which reserves even men’s bigotries to himself we must place under the mark of Spirit, not Reason, and it is therefore unreasonable to dabble in spiritual affairs by ways of sanctions which claim to be Rational but are in fact fillioque that is, heresies, which now persecute honest and even witty men who offend less than any era before, certainly not to the level we tolerate effortlessly and you so hysterically ban. And so, Milton’s thought, which I shall quote, I shall reason differently than you:

“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”

And certainly to an Easterner, who is mentally still more primitive, a younger breed, a more tougher hound, words can never produce such abject horror as in the minds of other races who we all therefore term womanly, effeminate, cowardly, slave-like, like the blacks (except the Ethiopians enduring still) who break under mere words or smallest pressure, or you, the English, for you seem to break when they break, as if you still think you are responsible for them as master is for his slave—but slaves these are not, and like grown men they must learn to take hits and you must learn not to intervene. But should I be accused of encouraging bigotry let it be told that bigotry is a lesser insult than pampering and I would rather my country be like Russia dreaded and feared than like England, wealthy and respected but not self-assured even of its right to exist. I refuse not the accusations of liberals but seek to prove my own fortitude in all matters pertaining strength and to help young souls rise up over their petty insecurities so that one day, they might understand what a greatness it is to even be insulted by a Zaporozhian and how devastating to personal growth is to always have an inspector you can call to shield you from the world.

In Russia, where books and wits were ever deeper and more profound than in any other part of the Slavic East, I find but two dark sources of greatness which have always produced wonder: those of man’s unlimited evil and of his subjugation not by laws of secular libel but inner might. And so Dostoevsky, who many regard as a saint, openly wrote of the desire for Russia to conquer Istanbul and crush the Turks and Mohammed, extolling the true faith, the only faith—his faith. No tolerance, no calls for brotherhood. Yet—great he was, but also not afraid to die for what he believed in. For he understood—and I hope you will too—how despicable forced loves are. And Osip Mandelstam, who wrote the Stalin Epigram writing about “the Kremlin Caucasian”, and his “Ossetian torso.” And if this poem is in the East satire, in the West it is certainly racism—so in the West his fate would today just be the same as it was, only instead of a gulag and a commissar he would respond to some nonsensical Court of Salem, one of your courts of equality and against bigotry. Because his ethnicity was insulted, even a dictator can feel hurt, and so never read a single poem of Mandelstam again if you so favor your principles on race, for Mandelstam is then not a victim of communist oppression, but a vicious racist and hater of Georgians. But since the Georgians are greater than you in Spirit insults wash off them that lead you into fines and jails because your minorities are cowards and traitors, while ours are mighty and ferocious. And if you don’t believe me put the torso of one of your minorities in a poem and see how fast your prelates, your infantile children, your angels of goodness come knocking on the door.

Thus the books of Dostoevsky were always under the threat of censorship that was vicious but uplifting, since they tested the Spirit, while yours is petty and infantile, since it crushes the Spirit by forcing a man to love even those he would love to despise.

***

For all installments of “Nomocanon of Mephistopheles,” click here.