Historical Studies

Martin Luther in Life and Death, Part 13: Luther Remains Defiant

Frederick III of the House of Wettin, who also known as Frederick the Wise, was the Elector of Saxony and Landgrave of Thuringia and, upon the death of Maximilian I, he was also the preferred choice to become emperor by the de Medici Pope Leo X. However Frederick chose instead to support the efforts of Charles V in his bid to become emperor, and Frederick was instrumental in assuring his election. Martin Luther had long been a friend and correspondent of George Spalatin. Like Luther, Spalatin was a priest, and he was also one of the young humanists at the University of Erfurt who were under the tutelage and leadership of the Catholic prebendary and famous humanist, Conrad Mutianus, whom we had discussed at length in the earlier presentations of this subject. It was Mutianus, or Mutian, who had introduced Spalatin to Frederick, and in 1509 Spalatin became Frederick's librarian, but quickly rose to the position of court chaplain and secretary. Spalatin was with Frederick at the election of Charles V, during his coronation, and also at the Diets of Augsburg in 1518, and of Worms in 1521, where Luther faced trial. During the years from his time at Erfurt and up to this time approaching the Diet of Worms, Spalatin had always urged Luther to caution. But he nevertheless supported Luther even after Luther failed to heed his advice.

Martin Luther in Life and Death, Part 12: The Emperor Strikes Back

In our last presentation of Martin Luther in Life and Death, we saw some of the recorded responses from notable clergymen who were opposed to Luther, notably from Thomas Murner, who expressed the fear that Luther's direction would plunge Germany into a horrible war. This is in spite of the fact that Murner also agreed that the Roman Catholic Church was in need of reform. In one of his writings, Murner had also addressed the new emperor, Charles V, as those of Luther's party had also been doing, and said “The ruling powers... were sunk in indolence: discord and envy reigned among the clergy. But these evils could not be cured by a revolutionary upheaval and by the complete shattering of all existing institutions, which was what the new religious movement must lead to.” With these and other responses to Luther and Hutten and their followers, we see that the writings of the Reformers are not merely academic, but were actually having a great impact on much of the clergy and the common people of Germany, and for many men within the Catholic Church structure Luther truly was a cause of dread.

Martin Luther in Life and Death, Part 11: The Cause of Dread

Tonight's program is subtitled The Cause of Dread. As we near the end of our presentation, the reasons for that shall become more evident. As we progress through our study of the early stages of Martin Luther's Reformation, there are two subjects raised from our recent presentations of Luther's life which merit discussion. The first is his view on marriage, and the second his understanding of the consequences of international trade.

Throughout the history of the Medieval Roman Catholic Church, marriage was treated as a religious sacrament, as it remains with Catholics today, even though we should understand that it is often merely superficial. While the modern church marriage ceremonies are relatively new in history and the actual act of marriage did not occur in the church itself, the local churches nevertheless consecrated marriages, which ensured that the union was within certain church laws. A Catholic in good standing could not marry someone who was already known to have been married, unless they were widowed, and Catholics were also expected to marry other Catholics. They certainly were not permitted to marry Jews or Muslims if they themselves wanted to remain Catholics in good standing, and it was important for people to be in good standing with their local church if they desired to be in good standing with their community, as the two were very closely related. Of course, that did not stop people from converting their religion solely for the purposes of getting married, but we may observe in modern times that very frequently, religion and custom are far stronger barriers to the mixing of the races than race itself. However the point to understand here is that since the act of getting married was in accordance with local custom, and since the bounds of legitimate marriage were supervised by the local churches, the governments of the various states had very little to do with marriage, if anything at all.

Martin Luther In Life and Death, Part 10: Luther Declares War.

In our last segment of these presentations, we saw that with the promises of military support which were offered to him by Franz Sickingen and Sylvester von Schaumburg, Martin Luther was emboldened to the point of even declaring war against the papacy. With this we may feel the urge to jump ahead and get to the more exciting parts of this history, but then we would skip over the more important lessons which are found in the investigation of the motivations of individuals that lie behind the actual historical events. Taking the slow route, and examining the details, we shall indeed uncover at least many of the motives behind Martin Luther and the other men who led the Reformation and founded at least some varieties of the Protestant faith.

We left our author with his comments concerning Martin Luther's ‘Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation’ which he made in August of 1520, where he had concluded that “With unsparing energy Luther endeavoured to stir up German national feeling against Italy and in favour of his own cause. According to him the Italians were steeped in every kind of vice, and yet so proud and haughty that they looked upon the Germans as scarcely human. Luther’s address to the German nobility was a martial summons to the fiercest onslaught.”

Martin Luther in Life and Death, Part 9: The Point of No Return

In the last two segments of our series Martin Luther in Life and Death, we hope to have demonstrated that the Protestant Reformation was not only religious, but it was also political, and that regardless of the religious principals, it is absolutely naive to think that the princes of Germany joined the Reformation because of those principles alone. Rather, politics was much more responsible for the success of the Reformation than religion. If it were not for certain German princes and their enmity with the pope of Rome, Martin Luther would have been burned at the stake before his Lutheran church even became established. And while we may begin to understand a lot of the politics, the sinister forces behind some of the players will forever remain in the shadows.

A backdrop to Luther's Reformation were the Italian Wars which spanned over 60 years and most of Luther's life. Involved at diverse times were the French, Spanish, Austrians, Germans, Venetians, English, Scots, and, of course, the Popes. The papacy had been reduced to the role of just another political player in the struggles for the political control of the various parts of Europe. But the Papacy had an advantage because it was attributed with ecclesiastical authority. When its ecclesiastical authority was challenged by the religious Reformers, the objectives of the Reformers simply became a tool used by the political players to undermine the authority of the Popes. Some German princes put their lot with the Reformers, hoping to gain greater power or at least greater autonomy for themselves. Others chose to remain allied to the popes, as Roman Catholics, but their decisions were usually for relatively the same reasons.

In the background of the political struggle, we began to see how the humanists of Germany had rallied to Martin Luther's cause. We described how those humanists, once they realized the value of Luther's rebellion against the Papacy, had begun writing books and pamphlets propagandizing in favor of Luther. We saw how many of the pagan humanists who had opposed the scholarly theologians for so long were suddenly themselves transformed into Christian theologians virtually overnight, while humanists inside of the church itself had also rallied to Luther's cause.

Our purpose here this evening is to discuss a federal lawsuit against Henry Ford which was filed by a Jew lawyer named Aaron Sapiro in 1925, and lasted until it was settled in 1927. While the lawsuit and its outcome have no bearing on the legitimacy of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, it was nevertheless taken advantage of in a ploy by prominent Jews to discredit the Protocols, for which they use it to this very day, and, as we shall see, that ploy of the Jews was used in turn by Henry Ford to get out of the lawsuit. Because of the popularity of Ford's publication of The International Jew among those who realize the veracity of the material in the Protocols, and because of the way in which Jews have mischaracterized the Sapiro lawsuit as another proof against the Protocols, we feel that no discussion of the Protocols would be complete without a discussion of this lawsuit, and what really happened when Henry Ford allegedly apologized for his articles in The Dearborn Independent which were later compiled in the volumes titled The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem.

Firstly, one major misconception must be clarified. The Sapiro lawsuit against Ford really had nothing to do with The International Jew, with the Protocols of Zion, or with most of the material ever published in The Dearborn Independent. The lawsuit only involved what certain articles in The Dearborn Independent had said of the Jewish lawyer Aaron Sapiro, who was engaged in organizing farm coops. Ford smelled a rat, and believed that through agents such as Sapiro, Jews were trying to corner the agricultural industry. According to a paper found at Harvard University, Sapiro vs. Ford: The Mastermind of the Marshall Maneuver, in reference to what Ford's newspaper said about Sapiro, “the New York Times summarized the accusations: “Mr. Sapiro was accused in the articles of being a cheat, a faker and a fraud”. We would agree, even if we would not publish such accusations without some evidence. Although we do not perceive that Sapiro himself was an agent for Jews in general, that he was indeed acting out of greed and the desire for control of the production of others is a characteristic inherent among the typical members of his race.

Introductory notes:

Before Alfred the Great, there were few Anglo-Saxon Kings who had any degree of care for learning and refined culture. One of them who did was Alfred of Northumbria, who preceded Alfred the Great by nearly 150 Years. But Alfred of Northumbria only had an opportunity for learning when he himself was passed over for the throne by the Witena, or council, and his younger brother had received his father's kingdom. Rather than fight the decision, Alfred retired to Ireland and received an education in the Scriptures and other literature. He became king of Northumbria after 15 years of such an education, when his younger brother died. Soon following Alfred to the throne was Coelwulf, the patron of the English church historian Bede. In Book 3, Chapter 9 of his History of the Anglo-Saxons, Sharon Turner says:

“The effect of Alfred’s reign and habits in this province became visible in Ceolwulf, who soon succeeded to his throne. This prince, who acceded in 731, was the patron to whom Bede addressed his ecclesiastical history of the English nation. In the dedication, the venerable father of the Anglo-Saxon learning says, that it was this king’s delight not only to hear the Scriptures read, but to be well acquainted with the deeds and sayings of his illustrious predecessors. From this feeling he had desired Bede to compose his history. But the flame, which Alfred had kindled in his dominions, was soon afterwards quenched there by the sanguinary civil contests that succeeded. It burnt, however, with a cheering influence in the other provinces of the octarchy. Bede and Alcuin may be considered as two of the valuable minds which it had excited.”

Christogenea Saturdays, September 26th, 2015 - The Protocols of Satan, Part 6: The Protocols of Joly Refuted

In our last segment of The Protocols of Satan, we had presented three articles from The London Times which were presumably written by Philip Graves and had been published on consecutive dates in August of 1921. In Part 3 of this series, we had quoted the Russian historians Lev Aronov, Henryk Baran and Dmitry Zubarev, who in their 2009 article entitled Princess Catherine Radziwill and 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion': the hoax as a lifestyle had written the following in reference to the Philip Graves articles:

Appendix 2 of the book Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, by Nesta Webster, which was evidently first published in 1924. When we first read of the Joly book in relation to the Protocols, we concluded that both works must have come from the same source, rather than the Protocols having been taken from Joly. Nesta Webster helped us to vindicate that position. In all honesty, the opinions put forth by the Russian historians, Aronov, Baran and Zubarev, and the assertions of Philip Graves may be accepted, if it is taken for granted that the Protocols did not come into existence until after 1864, but only upon the basis that the Dialogue of Joly and the Protocols are the only literature of the 19th century which contain such ideas.

Nesta Webster had also shown that in a June 12, 1920 article in a publication called the Spectator, a certain Mr. Lucien Wolf had declared that the Protocols were a forgery based upon a few parallels found in another political work of the period, Hermann Goedsche's Biarritz which was published in 1868, and that upon that basis Wolf made the declaration that “Nilus followed this pamphlet very closely.” Evidently this claim did not stick in relation to Biarritz, but it is the same claim that Graves made a year later for the Protocols and Joly's Dialogue, after which the Goedsche book was also claimed to have been a plagiarism of the Dialogue.

Christogenea Saturdays, September 19th, 2015 - The Protocols of Satan, Part 5: Philip Graves and the Dialogue of Joly

Click here to read the Protocols themselves at the Mein Kampf Project at Christogenea.

In our last segment of The Protocols of Satan, we had presented those parts of Chapter 10 of Nesta Webster's book World Revolution which demonstrated that much of the underlying political philosophy found in the so-called Protocols of the “Learned Elders of Zion” was actually expressed before the Protocols were ever published, by many of the key figures in the European secret societies of the 18th and 19th centuries. To do this, Webster had compared some of the writings of Adam Weishaupt, Piccolo Tigre, Mikhail Bakunin, Vladimir Lenin and other revolutionaries to statements that had been made in the Protocols. Finding the same sentiments expressed in the Protocols in the works of so many of the secret societies and writings of the revolutionaries, one can only come to the conclusion that a conspiracy which is greater than any particular secret society or revolutionary was lurking in the background which gave fuel to them all. Webster acknowledged that such a conspiracy must have existed, but she did not readily accept the exclusively Jewish nature of that conspiracy. However she did admit later Jewish involvement in both the conspiracy and in the revolutionary movements which the underlying philosophies had generated.

We have already discussed at length the earliest attempts on the part of the Jews to discredit the Protocols as so-called “forgeries”. Nesta Webster had also aptly pointed out the obvious posturing and glaring deficiencies in these attempts which were centered around the testimonies of frauds and traitors such as Katherine Radziwill and du Chayla. Further investigation into the backgrounds and antics of both of these characters reveals that they are even far worse than what we have already presented here, although we are not so certain that we should continue to elaborate on them. As Webster had stated, there is no reason that the Jews should have continued to put them forth as witnesses against the Protocols, except to purposely distract attention from the real evidence of their most plausible source, which was buried in the secret societies themselves. So to Nesta Webster, the Jewish posturing in their attempts to discredit the protocols was the first indication that the Protocols must have been legitimate even if their original author may never be determined precisely.

Christogenea Saturdays, September 5th, 2015 - The Protocols of Satan, Part 4: Secret Societies and the Source of the Protocols

A few years ago I had participated in a series of programs with Sword Brethren that consisted of discussions based on Nesta Webster's book World Revolution. They could probably be greatly improved upon, as they were rather informal. We stopped with Syndicalism and chapter 9, I believe. Chapter 10 concerns primarily the Revolution of 1917, and instead we went on to present the British whitepaper on the Bolshevik Revolution known as Russia No. 1, never getting back to Nesta Webster.

Here we are not going to present the entire chapter, as our area of interest at the moment is confined to the Protocols of the so-called “Learned Elders of Zion”. Therefore it is our intention to present what Nesta Webster has to offer us in that regard. But we must also say a few things about the author herself. Nesta Webster, being very well read in the areas relevant to our study, had meticulously researched in several languages all of the primary sources that she could locate for her subject, and she offers copious citations. Often, and especially in this field of study, primary sources are impossible to obtain, so she resorted to what she believed were the most reliable and authentic secondary sources. However she was very altruistic, she was very reserved in her conclusions, and she seems not to have recognized the Jew as a truly alien character who is forever opposed to Christian society as a matter of his nature. However for us that is a benefit, because she cannot be accused of having motives which were merely based on hatred of any race or religion.

William Finck's program notes follow (other resources are linked below):

A HISTORY OF THE MONEY CHANGERS, by Andrew Hitchcock

1558 Queen Elizabeth I succeeds Queen Mary I, her half sister, to the throne in England. During her reign, Queen Elizabeth I decided that in order to wrest control of the money supply she would have to issue her own gold and silver coins. She did this through the public treasury and successfully took control of the money supply from the money changers.

1609 The money changers in the Netherlands establish the first central bank in history, in Amsterdam.

1642 Oliver Cromwell is financed by the money changers for the purposes of fomenting a revolution in England, and allowing them to take control of the money system again. After much bloodshed, Cromwell finally purges the parliament, overthrows King Charles I and puts him to death in 1649.

The money changers immediately consolidate their power and for the next few decades plunge Great Britain into a costly series of wars. They also take over a square mile of property in the center of London which becomes known as the City of London.

1688 The money changers in England following a series of squabbles with the Stuart Kings, Charles II (1660 - 1685) and James II (1685 - 1688), conspire with their far more successful money changing counterparts in the Netherlands, who had already set up a central bank there.

They decide to finance an invasion by William of Orange of Netherlands who they sound out and establish will be more favorable to them. The invasion is successful and William of Orange ascends to the throne in England as King William III in 1689.

Christogenea Saturdays, August 29th, 2015 - The Protocols of Satan, Part 3: Bergmeister and the Verdict at Berne 

Here we shall conclude our presentation of the booklet, The World Jewish Conspiracy, written by Dr. Karl Bergmeister and published in 1938, which defended the authenticity of the Protocols against some of the evidence presented at the Berne trial of 1934-1935, where a lawsuit had been tried against certain Swiss politicians because they had used the Protocols as propaganda in their campaigns. While it is accepted that Bergmeister could not prove the actual origin of the Protocols, and that the actual origin of the work in the form in which we know it may never be determined, he did indeed prove that the early attempts by Jews to discredit them as fabrications, or “forgeries”, were themselves based upon lies.

Before beginning, I am going to take a short digression to discuss the word forgery. I often hear the argument concerning the Protocols, that since a forgery is a copy of an original, the Jews prove that the Protocols are authentic by calling them a forgery. This might be funny, and it might even convince the simple-minded, but it should not be repeated because it is simply not true. If you examine not only the modern dictionaries, but also the original definitions for the word forgery in the first English dictionaries by Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster, you will see that the definition of the word is much broader. More precisely, a forgery is a document produced and ascribed to someone other than the person who produced it. So from a Jewish perspective, where the Protocols are disclaimed, the word forgery is appropriate. However we know better than to believe the Jews, and although certainly not all Jews are responsible for the Protocols, the Protocols do indeed represent the desires of world Jewry for the subversion of Christendom. And while all Jews are certainly not acting consciously to effect those desires, Jews do indeed act naturally towards their accomplishment. So many Jews may be able to plausibly deny the Protocols, but that does not mean that they are fraudulent.

Christogenea Saturdays, August 22nd, 2015 - The Protocols of Satan, Part 2: A Count, a Princess, and a Hoax as a Lifestyle

Here we will continue our presentation of The Protocols of Satan, which to a large extent will consist of the second part of our presentation of the booklet, The World Jewish Conspiracy, written by Dr. Karl Bergmeister and published in 1938.

While only history itself, and the actions of so many Jews throughout the last two hundred years of history, can certainly establish the credibility of the so-called “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” as representing the definite plans of World Jewry in the destruction of the Christian nations, we are presenting this booklet as the central part of our objective to demonstrate that the Jewish attempts to label the Protocols as a forgery were in fact fraudulent themselves.

Our source booklet is subtitled “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion before the Court in Berne”, and it was written to show the abuse and miscarriage of justice which resulted as certain nationalist-leaning politicians were using the Protocols against the Jews in elections in Switzerland, and then in 1933 the so-called “Federation of Jewish Communities of Switzerland” and the “Berne Jewish Community” had brought a lawsuit against those politicians in Berne. Obtaining favorable results in what was basically a mockery of a trial, Jews throughout the West, and especially in Britain, France and the United States, then began to even more fervently use the fraudulent evidence produced at Berne to discredit the Protocols as an “antisemitic” forgery. They continued to do this, and they do it to this day, in spite of the fact that the trial is discredited and that its results were overturned, although because the results were overturned for rather innocuous reasons, the treachery of the original trial proceedings was never fully elucidated in the public records.

William Finck's program notes follow:

When the Jews were banished by Edward I, usury was banished along with them. I found the following excellent summary in a book of the Parliamentary debates of New Zealand for the year 1901, where there was a debate over the permittance of pawn shops:

The Anglo-Saxon laws against usury were also very severe. Edward the Confessor outlawed usurers and confiscated their property; and [300 years later] Edward the First took such stringent steps to put an end to what was considered a great evil that he hanged 280 Jews and banished another fifteen thousand in one year - in fact, the opposition of the Catholic and also the Reformed Church with regard to this matter was so strong that it was considered un-Christian to take interest for money lent; and the consequence was that a liberal interpretation was put upon the Mosaic law to which I have referred, and the business fell principally into the hands of the Jews. It was held that, while a Jew might not take interest from another Jew, he was at liberty to get all he could from a stranger. Well, the fifteen thousand Jews were banished in one year, and no Jews were allowed to return to England until the time of Cromwell. That shows the view taken in England at that time in regard to the practice. It was left to Henry the Eighth to be the first to legalise usury in England, and he fixed the rate at 10 per cent. But his son, Edward the Sixth, a few years afterwards, repealed it: he did not believe in it; but when Elizabeth, the virgin Queen, came to the throne, she revived the statute of her father. James the First reduced the rate of interest to 8 per cent., Cromwell to 6, and Anne to 5; and since then usury has continued to exist and flourish.

Christogenea Saturdays, August 15th, 2015 - The Protocols of Satan, Part 1: Dr. Karl Bergmeister and The World Jewish Conspiracy

We are going to begin a long and multifaceted series which we are going to call the “Protocols of Satan”, and this is Part 1. The Protocols, so far as we know, have never been presented from our Christian Identity worldview, and we hope to make a thorough presentation in that manner here. However first we are going to have to establish the credibility of the Protocols, because they certainly were not some pro-Aryan conspiracy against Jews, as they are often claimed to be. Rather, they fully reflect the course of a long-running Jewish conspiracy against Aryans, against Christendom, which has with all certainty been carried out against our European races since the Emancipation of the Jews at the time of Napoleon, and even earlier than that. Henry Ford recognized this, and published The International Jew in book form and as a series in his paper, The Dearborn Independent, throughout the early 1920's.

However another book by Sergei Alexander Nilus, The Protocols and World Revolution, was translated into English and supposedly, as some sources refute the account, edited by Boris Brasol and published in Boston in 1920 by Maynard, Small & Co. The Nilus book, from its second Russian edition published in 1905, contained a copy of the Protocols, and they were apparently the first version available in English. Boris Brasol is a story in himself. He was a Russian lawyer who prosecuted a blood libel case against Jews in 1912. He was an officer in the Tsar's army during the first great war, and was fortunate to have been sent on a mission to the United States, where he was during the Jewish takeover of Russia in October 1917, and where remained thereafter, remaining a writer for several decades and writing several books against Soviet socialism.

This program is based on the article found at Heretical Press titled The Edict of Expulsion of 1290. Many of the original Medieval sources cited by Arnold Leese and Geoffrey Smith in that article are available freely online.

These include the Chancery Rolls and other documents of the English kings, which are available in facsimile format online and are indexed in several places, including the Medieval English Genealogy website and Medieval Genealogy Resources at Google.

No matter the invasion, the conquered or the conqueror, it has always been the treachery of the native kings, nobles or chieftains by which Britain was overrun by foreigners, whether they were Romans or Saxons or Normans. The same thing is true of the non-White hordes who are overrunning Britain today.

Martin Luther, in Life and Death, Part 8: Politics and Religion Must Mix

Studying Medieval European history is like untying a bundle of knots, and you have to untie one before you can get to the next. But then every so often you get one that can't be undone, so you are forced to cut the rope because there are some knots that can never be untied. The Protestant Reformation was not only religious, but it was also political. We can discuss all of the religious principals, but it is absolutely naive to think that the princes of Germany joined the Reformation because of those principles alone. Rather, politics is much more responsible for the success of the Reformation than religion. We can understand a lot of the politics, but because the sinister forces that had driven some of the players were successful at remaining in the shadows, there are always going to be some things which we cannot truly understand.

A backdrop to Luther's Reformation were the Italian Wars which spanned over 60 years and most of Luther's life. Involved at diverse times were the French, the Spanish, the Austrians, the Germans, the Popes, the Republic of Venice, and even the English and the Scots. These wars began as disputes over Naples and Milan, resulted in several invasions of Italy, and continued as struggles for control between the royal houses all over Europe. They were marked by alliances, counter-alliances, and betrayals no different than those which we have seen in the World Wars of the twentieth century. In the meantime the Austrians and the Venetians were fighting the Turks on other fronts. At one point in the wars, the French, who under Charles VIII had originally sought to use Naples as a base for the war against the Turks, had under Francis I been so treacherous as to ally themselves with the Turks, and allowed the Ottomans to use Toulon as a winter port for the alien fleets. As a result, over thirty thousand Muslims had occupied the city for about eight months, as Christians kidnapped from the coasts were being sold as slaves in its streets.

Martin Luther In Life and Death, Part 7: Luther and the Humanists.

Here we will continue our presentation of Martin Luther in Life and Death, and we are still in the portion of this endeavor which concerns Luther's life. This is the 7th installment of this series, and we hope to eventually present an understanding of the events relating to the Reformation up to the time of the Thirty Years' War. I do not know exactly why this took so long to get back to, because tonight is a culmination of what we presented over the first 6 segments, where the reason for presenting everything which we did in those segments should become manifest.

When we last discussed the life of Martin Luther, we talked at length about the indulgence dispute, and then about exchanges of letters which Luther had with certain of the Hussites, the followers of Jan Huss in Bohemia who had successfully broken away from the Roman Catholic Church. We saw that in 1519 Luther had been criticizing the Hussites for breaking from the Roman Catholic Church, but then in 1520 he began commending them. Luther's sudden admiration for the Hussites whom he had formerly criticized corresponds to his own change-of-heart and ambitions towards the Romish Church.

Here we conclude our presentation of Positive Christianity in the Third Reich by Professor D. Cajus Fabricius