Might Is Right Read online

  Might Is Right

  Ragnar Redbeard

  Ragnar Redbeard

  Might is Right

  This ebook is based on the 1927 edition, originally published by Dil Pickle Press, Chicago. Some minor editorial changes have been made to correct obvious misprints but many of the inconsistencies in spelling, grammar and punctuation have been left unchanged.

  OPPORTUNITIES

  A man’s opportunities are never exhausted so long as other men (who are not his friends) possess millions of acres and thousands of tons of gold.

  The guarded treasure halls and iron-clad temples of modern kings and presidents, high priests and millionaires, are positively the richest the world has ever known.

  Bulging are they with the vast hoards of silver and diamonds and gold.

  Here, then, is opportunity on a colossal scale. Here is the goal of the Cæsars, Nebuchadnezzars and Napoleons in the days that are coming.

  All is ready and prepared for them, even as in olden times.

  Cæsar carried off the treasures of Egypt, Greece, Gaul and Rome. Napoleon looted the money vaults of Venice, Vienna, Madrid, Berlin and Moscow. London only escaped him.

  Nebuchadnezzar plundered the Temple of Zion, where the Jews kept all their deposits and drank his beer and wine out of Jehovah’s pots of gold.

  Napoleon, Cæsar, Nebuchadnezzar! They were three great men, were they not? And in this their greatness consisted — they seized their opportunities.

  ALL ELSE IS ERROR

  The natural world is a world of war; the natural man is a warrior; the natural law is tooth and claw. All else is error. A condition of combat everywhere exists. We are born into a perpetual conflict. It is our inheritance even as it was the heritage of previous generations. This “condition of combat” may be disguised with the holy phrases of St. Francis, or the soft deceitful doctrines of a Kropotkin or Tolstoi, but it cannot be eventually evaded by any human being or any tribe of human beings. It is there and it stays there, and each man (whether he will or not) has to reckon with it. It rules all things; it governs all things; it reigns over all things and it decides all who imagine policemanized populations, internationally regulated tranquility, and State organized industrialism so joyful, blessed and divine.

  THE VICTOR GETS THE GOLD

  Virtue is rewarded in this world, remember. Natural law makes no false judgments. Its decisions are true and just, even when dreadful. The victor gets the gold and the land every time. He also gets the fairest maidens, the glory tributes. And — why should it be otherwise? Why should the delights of life go to failures and cowards? Why should the spoils of battle belong to the unwarlike? That would be insanity, utterly unnatural and immoral.

  Behold the crucifix, what does it symbolize?

  Pallid incompetence hanging on a tree.

  Lo, I hear the fighters coming

  Over hill and dale and plain.

  With the battle cry of ages

  In a Rebel world again.

  Who’d forge their swords to plow-shares,

  Shall sweat in bitter yokes,

  The free-born race and fearless

  Must deal out battle strokes.

  In the wars of the Great Cæsar, and Grim Hannibal, in the times of Belzchazzar, the Pharaohs and all; the days of Rienzi and Roland the Bold; all banners are waving for women and gold.

  It is might against might, remember, by land and sea, man against man, money against money, brains against brains, and — everything to the winner.

  CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTORY

  In this arid wilderness of steel and stone I raise up my voice that you may hear.

  To the East and to the West I beckon. To the North and to the South I show a sign —

  Proclaiming “Death to the weakling, wealth to the strong.”

  Open your eyes that you may hear, O! men of mildewed minds and listen to me, ye laborious millions!

  For I stand forth to challenge the wisdom of the world; to interrogate the “laws” of man and of “God.”

  I request reasons for your Golden Rule and ask the why and wherefore of your Ten Commands.

  Before none of your printed idols do I bend in acquiescence and he who saith “thou shalt” to me is my mortal foe.

  I demand proof over all things, and accept (with reservations) even that which is true.

  I dip my forefinger in the watery blood of your impotent mad-redeemer (your Divine Democrat — your Hebrew Madman) and write over his thorn-torn brow, “The true prince of Evil — the king of the Slaves!”

  No hoary falsehood shall be a truth to me — no cult or dogma shall encramp my pen.

  I break away from all conventions. Alone, untrammeled. I raise up in stern invasion the standard of Strong.

  I gaze into the glassy eye of your fearsome Jehovah, and pluck him by the beard — I uplift a broad-axe and split open his worm-eaten skull.

  I blast out the ghastly contents of philosophic whited sepulchres and laugh with sardonic wrath.

  Then reaching up the festering and varnished facades of your haughtiest moral dogmas, I write thereon in letters of blazing scorn: — “Lo and behold, all this is fraud!”

  I deny all things! I question all things!

  And yet! And yet! —

  — Gather around me O! ye death-defiant, and the earth itself shall be thine, to have and to hold.

  What is your “civilization and progress” if its only outcome is hysteria and downgoing?

  What is “government and law” if their ripened harvests are men without sap?

  What are “religions and literatures” if their grandest productions are hordes of faithful slaves?

  What is “evolution and culture” if their noxious blossoms are sterilized women?

  What is “education and enlightenment” if their dead-sea-fruit is a caitiff race, with rottenness in its bones?

  2

  How is it that “men of light and leading” hardly ever call in question the manufactured “moral codes,” under which our once vigorous Northern race is slowly and surely eating out its heart in peaceful inaction and laborious dry-rot?

  Standard “moral principles” are arbitrarily assumed by their orthodox apologist to be a fixed and unalterable quantity, and that to doubt the divine-rightness of these “principles” is treason and sacrilege. When the greatest thinkers of a race are incapable, or afraid to perform their manifest and logical function, it is scarcely to be wondered that average citizens are also somewhat unwilling to “risk life, fortune and sacred honor” for the overthrow of popularized “right and wrong” concepts, that they know from bitter personal experience, are unworkable falsities. Although the average man feels in his heart that nearly all political and religious conventionalisms are dynamic deceits, yet how cautiously he avoids any open display of antagonism thereto? He has not the courage of his opinions. He is afraid to say openly what he thinks secretly. In other words he is living in a state of subjectiveness; of vassalage. He allows his brain to be dominated and held in bondage by the brain of another. From his infancy he has been deliberately subjected to a continuous external pressure, especially designed to coerce his understanding into strict accord with pre-arranged views of moral, political or religious “duty.” He has not been permitted one moment of real mental liberty. He imbibed fraudulent conventionalisms with his mother’s milk. He listens to the most hideous lies being glorified in his presence as sublime truths. He hears falsehoods sung in swelling chorus. He hears them sounded on bugles of silver and brass. He hears them intoned by congregations of the faithful amid peals of sacred music, and the solemn roll of chanted prayer. Thus his mind is sterilized by authority before it has had a chance to mature. Thus youth is mentally castrated, that its natural vitality may be afterwards u
sed up in the yoke of custom — which is the yoke of slavery. In the nursery, at school, and at college, plastic brain-pulp is deliberately forced into the pre-arranged mould. Everything that a corrupt civilization can do, is done to compress the growing intellect into unnatural channels. Thus the great mass of men who inhabit the world of to-day have no initiative, no originality or independence of thought, but are mere subjective individualities, who have never had the slightest voice in fashioning the ideals that they formally revere.

  Although the average man has taken no part in manufacturing moral codes and statute laws, yet how he obeys them with dog-like submissiveness? He is trained to obedience, like oxen are broken to the yoke of their masters. He is a born thrall habituated from childhood to be governed by others.

  Chinese civilization deliberately distorts its children’s feet, by swathing them in bandages of silk and hoop-iron. Christian civilization crushes and cramps the minds of its youth by means of false philosophies, artificial moral codes and ironclad political creeds. Deleterious sub-theories of good and evil are systematically injected into our natural literatures, and gradually (without serious obstruction) they crystallize themselves into cast-iron formulas, infallible constitutions, will-o-the-wisp evangels, and other deadly epidemics.

  Modern “leaders of thought” are almost wholly wanting in originality and courage. Their wisdom is foolishness, their remedies poison. They idiotically claim that they guide the destinies of nations, whereas, in reality, they are but the flotsam and scum-froth that glides smoothly down the dark stream of decadence.

  “Thus all the people of the earth are helpless,

  Seeing those that lead are blind.”

  Mankind is aweary, aweary of its sham prophets, its demagogues and its statesmen. It crieth out for kings and heroes. It demands a nobility — a nobility that cannot be hired with money, like slaves or beasts of burden. The world awaits the coming of mighty men of valor, great destroyers; destroyers of all that is vile, angels of death. We are sick unto nausea of the “good Lord Jesus,” terror-stricken under the executive of priest, mob and proconsul. We are tired to death of “Equality.” Gods are at a discount, devils are in demand. He who would rule the coming age must be hard, cruel, and deliberately intrepid, for softness assails not successfully the idols of the multitude. Those idols must be smashed into fragments, burnt into ashes, and that cannot be done by the gospel of love.

  The living forces of evil are to be found in the living ideals of to-day.

  The Commandments and laws and moral codes that we are called upon to reverence and obey are themselves the insidious enginery of decadence. It is moral principles that manufacture beggars. It is golden rules that glorify meekness. It is statute laws that make spaniels of men.

  A man may keep every one of the Ten Commandments and yet remain a fool all the days of his life. He may obey every written law of the land, and yet be a caitiff and a slave. He may “love Jesus,” delight in the golden rule and yet continue to the hour of his death, a failure and dependent. Truly the way to hell is by fulfilling the commandments of God. If the all-conquering race to which we belong, is not to irretrievably dwindle into multitudinous nothingness, (like the inferior herds it has outdistanced or enslaved) then it is essential that the Semitic spider webs (so astutely woven for ages into the brains of our chiefs) be remorselessly torn out by the very roots, even though the tearing out process be both painful and bloody.

  If we would retain and defend our inherited manhood, we must not permit ourselves to be forever rocked to repose, with the sweet lullabies of eastern idealisms. Too long we have been hypnotized by the occult charm of Hebrew Utopianism. If we continue to obey the insidious spell that has been laid upon us, we will wake up some dread morning with the gates of hell — “of hell upon earth” yawning wide open, to close again upon us forever.

  The idea of hell is in some respects a truthful conception, suggestive of actual fact. If we terrestrialize the location, there is nothing inharmonious about it. Many a race, many a tribe, and many a mighty empire has gone down into a grimly realistic sheol. Is it not right and just, that the vile, the base and the degenerate (that is to say the slave nations of the earth) should be punished pitilessly for their creeping cowardice? Is it not right that they should be, as it were, fried and toasted — should swim in pools of boiling blood, or dance sweltering satanic glees, with blistered feet and straining eye-balls on red-hot Saharas of gravel and sand?

  In actual operation Nature is cruel and merciless to men, as to all other beings. Let a tribe of human animals live a rational life, Nature will smile upon them and their posterity; but let them attempt to organize an unnatural mode of existence an equality elysium, and they will be punished even to the point of extermination.

  3

  All ethics, politics and philosophies are pure assumptions, built upon assumptions. They rest on no sure basis. They are but shadowy castles-in-the-air erected by day-dreamers, or by rogues, upon nursery fables. It is time they were firmly planted upon an enduring foundation. This can never be accomplished until the racial mind has first been thoroughly cleansed and drastically disinfected of its depraved, alien, and demoralizing concepts of right and wrong. In no human brain can sufficient space be found, for the relentless logic of hard fact, until all pre-existent delusions have been finally annihilated. Half measures are of no avail, we must go down to the very roots and tear them out, even to the last fiber. We must be, like nature, hard, cruel, relentless.

  Too long the dead hand has been permitted to sterilize living thought — too long, right and wrong, good and evil, have been inverted by false prophets. In the days that are at hand, neither creed nor code must be accepted upon authority, human, superhuman or ‘divine.’ (Morality and conventionalism are for subordinates.) Religions and constitutions and all arbitrary principles, every mortal theorem, must be deliberately put to the question. No moral dogma must be taken for granted — no standard of measurement deified. There is nothing inherently sacred about moral codes. Like the wooden idols of long ago, they are all the work of human hands, and what man has made, man can destroy.

  He that is slow to believe anything and everything is of great understanding, for belief in one false principle, is the beginning of all unwisdom. The chief duty of every new age is to up-raise new men to determine its liberties, to lead it towards material success — to rend (as it were) the rusty padlocks and chains of dead custom that always prevent healthy expansion. Theories and ideals and constitutions, that may have meant life and hope, and freedom, for our ancestors, may now mean destruction, slavery and dishonor to us. As environments change no human ideal standeth sure.

  Wherever, therefore, a lie has built unto itself a throne, let it be assailed without pity and without regret, for under the domination of a falsehood, no nation can permanently prosper. Let established sophisms be dethroned, rooted out, burnt and destroyed, for they are a standing menace to all true nobility of thought and action. Whatever alleged “truth” is proven by results, to be but an empty fiction, let it be unceremoniously flung into the outer darkness, among the dead gods, dead empires, dead philosophies, and other useless lumber and wreckage.

  The most dangerous of all enthroned lies is the holy, the sanctified, the privileged lie — the lie that “everybody” believes to be a model truth. It is the fruitful mother of all other popular errors and delusions. It is hydra-headed. It has a thousand roots. It is a social cancer. The lie that is known to be a lie is half eradicated, but the lie that even intelligent persons regard as a sacred fact — the lie that has been inculcated around a mother’s knee — is more dangerous to contend against than a creeping pestilence. Popular lies have ever been the most potent enemies of personal liberty. There is only one way to deal with them. Cut them out, to the very core, just as cancers are. Exterminate them root and branch, or they will surely eat us all up. We must annihilate them, or they will us. Half and half remedies are of no avail.

  However, when a lie has gone
too far — when it has taken up its abode in the very tissues, bones and brains of a people, then all remedies are useless. Even the lancet is of no avail. Repentance of past misdeeds cannot “save” decadents from extermination. The fatal bolt is shot; and into the fiery furnace of wholesale slavery, and oblivion, they must go, to be there righteously consumed. From their ashes something new, something nobler, may possibly evolve, but even that is the merest optimistic supposition.

  In nature the wages of sin is always death. Nature does not love the wrong-doer, but endeavors in every possible way to destroy him. Her curse is on the brow of the “meek and lowly.” Her blessing is on the very hearts’ blood of the strong and the brave. Only Jews and Christs and other degenerates, think that rejuvenation can ever come through law and prayer. “All the tears of all the martyrs” might just as well have never been shed.

  4

  Whatsoever a people believeth shall make it free, enslave it, or corrode its very marrow in strict accordance with natural order. Consequently if a people place implicit faith in what philosophers teach them, they are liable to be duped. If many nations are so duped, their deception is a menace to the liberty of the world.

  Freemen should never regulate their conduct by the suggestions or dicta of others, for when they do so, they are no longer free. No man ought to obey any contract, written or implied, except he himself has given his personal and formal adherence thereto, when in a state of mental maturity and unrestrained liberty. It is only slaves that are born into contracts, signed and sealed by their progenitors. The freeman is born free, lives free, and dies free. He is (even though living in an artificial civilization) above all laws, all constitutions, all theories of right and wrong. He supports and defends them of course, as long as they suit his own end, but if they don’t, then he annihilates them by the easiest and most direct method.