The political/social views of “The Luciferian Sword”

There is a type of “Luciferianism” that basically consists of LaVeyan Satanism, replacing “Satan” with “Lucifer,” plus a few minor twists, in some cases accepting Lucifer as an actual deity, but retaining LaVey’s entire quirky set of social, political, and economic views.

This is very different from the older favorable references to “Lucifer” that one can find in the writings of various Western occultists of the 1800’s and 1900’s. I personally would be more interested in a “Luciferianism” that was derived from the latter.

But a LaVeyan-based Luciferian website has recently been brought to my attention, on a message board run by me, so I’ll comment on it now.

The website is Order of the Luciferian Sword. This website emphasizes LaVey-derived social and political views — plus a somewhat greater-than-average flirtation with Nazism than is common among LaVeyans (although plenty of LaVeyans have flirted with Nazism too). Just underneath the menu at the top, the front page announces, “I am intellectually sophisticated enough to admire the third Reich, and not necessarily be a racist or a cookie cutter Nazi.”

The About page claims to espouse a “non-political revolutionary view,” but the vast majority of pages on the website are about the author’s social and political views. Maybe he and I have a different understanding of the meaning of the word “political”?

The website also has several pages on other topics, including Lucifer, theism, chakra-related meditation exercises, and “Indigo children.”

For now, I’ll comment on just two aspects of Lionel’s worldview:

• Lionel Legion’s Nazi sympathies
• Lionel’s rant against “egalitarianism”

Lionel Legion’s Nazi sympathies

I’ll discuss the author’s Nazi sympathies first, because the Nazi sympathies of various people in the Satanist scene are a longstanding pet peeve of mine. (See my collection of pages Against neo-Nazism Among Satanists.)

On Lionel’s page about National Socialism, he says:

Now as the name implies, National Socialism is indeed a form of Socialism. However what separates National Socialism from hard-line Socialism is that the later upholds an extreme egalitarian distribution of wealth and monetary gain. What this means is that in a Socialist utopia a toilet cleaner gets paid the same as a surgeon who practices life threatening cardiac operations ….

What??? Where does he get the idea that socialists say a toilet cleaner should get paid the same as a surgeon? I’ve never heard any socialist advocate any such thing — at least not as a policy for the immediate future.

Marxists traditionally do believe in an eventual future ultra-high-tech world where economic scarcity of any kind will no longer be an issue — sort of like the “resource-based economy” advocated by Jacque Fresco, who is one of Lionel’s heroes. In such a world, Marxists and Fresco both believe, the very concept of “payment” would no longer exist in its present form.

Of course, Marx’s vision has never been enacted in real life. In the opinion of most Marxists, that’s because all successful revolutions in the name of “Communism” have occurred in countries that were not technologically advanced enough for true Communism to be feasible.

In my opinion, Lionel needs to learn a little bit about what Marx, Engel, and other socialists have actually said, as distinct from the caricatures of socialism he has evidently heard from right wing sources.

Anyhow, Lionel says that National Socialism

Stresses that a country should be self-sufficient. Industry must be nationalized and people are encouraged to only consume national products. No “Made in China” just “Made in Our Country”.

…

Stresses that a countries industry should remain within it’s borders.

This is called economic nationalism. One does not need to be a Nazi to be an economic nationalist. Economic nationalism has the advantage of shielding a country from international economic crises. However, most economists believe that economic nationalism is not in a country’s longterm best interests, and that it has the longterm effect of stifling a country’s economic development. In any case, the concept of economic nationalism is older than Nazism, and its pros and cons can be debated without reference to Nazism.

It demands a strong central authority and glorifies the rule of the individual, and of one leader of which must be of a strong character and healthy wit.

Lionel, do you really want to live in a dictatorship?

It is not inherently racist, as all other political movements.

There actually was quite a bit of racism in Mein Kampf, e.g. in Hitler’s talk about “Aryans” vs. Jews — who were seen primarily in racial terms, not religious terms. (See Mein Kampf, Volume One, Chapter XI, “Nation and Race,” quoted here, for example.)

Anyhow, in today’s world, Lionel claims that:

never once has a parent dared to tell their kids that perhaps it is ok to believe in Odin instead of Jesus

“Never once” is an exaggeration. There does exist a Norse Pagan movement, although admittedly it is small. Most Norse Pagans are NOT neo-Nazis or Nazi sympatizers. Anyhow, the above is in the context of:

European children and white people in general are raised up and hammered with the notion that being proud of who or what they are is “hateful”, their spirit is suppressed and never once has a parent dared to tell their kids that perhaps it is ok to believe in Odin instead of Jesus, that perhaps it’s ok to be proud of being white, or Germanic, or who they are; that perhaps it’s ok to look back to Europe and gaze in wonder at their ancestors accomplishments.

Being proud of one’s ancestors’ accomplishments is one thing, but drawing racist or white nationalist conclusions is quite another thing. The great accomplishments of Europeans have all occurred at times when Europe was opening itself up to cultural influences from other parts of the world. Cultural isolation leads to stagnation.

Anyhow, Lionel does make the following point that I partly agree with:

Numerous National Socialist rallies have been intercepted and interrupted by a mob of screaming liberals and politically correct automatons. By doing this they are merely fueling the Nazi’s desire to demonstrate and become even more active (and violent). This can also lead to people doing disasterous things since they are essentially giving them the impression that they are under attack and in danger. Thus the best way to combat it if you really feel National Socialism is obsolete in the political realm, is to simply ignore them and go on your merry way (if you can’t debate their ideas without screaming obscenities at them).

Hmmm, I wouldn’t say we should just ignore them, but I do think we need more people willing and able to debate against the ideas of neo-Nazis and other extreme right wingers without screaming obscenities. Like it or not, extreme right wing movements are growing in today’s world, and it won’t be possible to stop them without a multi-pronged response including (among many other things, of course) a rational response to their claims.

When in Doubt;

Put Yourself in their Shoes.

How would one feel if it was brought to ones attention the fact that there are less and less of your kind (intellectually, culturally and racially), if you were looked down upon as a venomous hater for simply stating your proud of being white, or if every 3 months a videogame or movie was released in where your ancestors are depicted as evil men which you must eliminate without mercy, movies where your racial brethren are violently shot and killed like flies. If you were constantly slapped with white guilt like a dog is slapped across the face by people pulling out the race card whenever you chose to defend your right to be proud of who you are. I’m sure all people who share my views would agree with me;

Putting oneself in one’s opponents’ shoes can certainly be an enlightening exercise. There are some situations in today’s world where white people do get ganged up on. Primarily, these situations affect (1) white children in poor, predominantly non-white school districts, and (2) white people in some prisons. A racist skinhead gang sprouting up in such a situation would be quite understandable.

However, such situations are far from the norm in American society as a whole. In most parts of American society as a whole, white people still have a lot of informal social privilege — even in cities like New York City, where white people are now a minority.

The larger reality is that white people are not in any imminent danger of extinction. White people are still a majority here in the U.S.A. Even if/when white people become a minority, as is projected to happen by mid-century, it is highly unlikely — at least on a large scale — that everyone else would gang up on us. There are plenty of ethnic tensions amongst the other groups too — and plenty of tensions between groups on bases other than ethnicity, e.g. religion.

Furthermore, white people are far from uniformly depicted as villains in the movies. In American movies at the present time, the majority of characters of all kinds — including heroes as well as villains — are white.

And a culture is not harmed by a little self-criticism. Even Lionel himself engages in his own criticism of modern Western culture, pointing out, for example, that “the perpetrators of the Spanish inquisition or the massacre of the American indians were never punished but rather rewarded and lived wealthy, luxurious lives like royal, pink, bloated pigs.” (He brings this up in the context of pointing out American hypocrisy in going to war to punish other countries for their alleged atrocities.)

Lionel also disbelieves in the Holocaust. He does not get into a discussion of the historical evidence, but merely tries to sow doubt by pointing to some examples of obviously-faked war propaganda from World War II. But it is acknowledged, even my mainstream historians, that some specific atrocity stories about the Nazis (such as the “human soap and lamp shades” stories) were indeed fake, and were manufactured as war propaganda. (This is acknowledged even on the Nizkor website, which is devoted to refuting Holocaust revisionism.)

However, since World War II, historians have had plenty of time to sort out the reality from the propaganda. And the following are still considered, by nearly all WWII historians, to be well-established historical facts: (1) that the number of Jews killed during WWII was between five and six million (not less than one million, as is alleged by Holocaust revisionists); (2) that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz; and (3) that various high-ranking Nazis had a deliberate policy of killing as many Jews as possible (as distinct from just happening to let a lot of Jews starve in work camps due to food shortages, as is alleged by the Holocaust revisionists).

These are the points at issue between mainstream historians and Holocaust revisionists. I’m inclined to believe the mainstream historians on these matters, given that the World War II era has been extensively studied.

Oddly enough, one of Lionel’s listed heroes is Albert Einstein. Lionel neglects to mention that Einstein (1) was Jewish and (2) fled to the U.S.A. to get away from the Nazis.

On his page about National Socialism, Lionel does make the following good point: “The good/evil narrative of WWII is a blur with the good/evil narrative of so many bad movies, t.v. shows, and reportage. … In reality people aren’t really ‘evil’ — there’s just the challenge of understanding why people do what they do.”

Indeed, one of the pillars of my own concept of Satanism is that we should question demonization. We should think for ourselves and not blindly accept the larger society’s ideas on what is “Evil.” Sometimes, the larger society’s ideas of “Evil” are based on silly prejudices. But not always. Some things really are seriously bad for us. It is up to us to educate ourselves and make our own decisions.

Lionel’s rant against “egalitarianism”

Like many LaVeyan Satanists, Lionel rants against what he calls “Egalitarianism.” Like most such ranters, he comes across as exceedingly ignorant of what he is talking about. For example:

The line in our constitution that states “All men are created equal under god” must be erased…

There’s no such line in the Constitution. The line “All men are created equal” appears in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. And “under God” is not a part of that sentence in the Declaration of Independence. Nor, by the way, is God mentioned at all in any part of the Constitution.

The concept of equal rights became part of the U.S. Constitution via the Fourteenth Amendment, whose Section 1 says:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Does Lionel really want to eliminate “the equal protection of the laws”? I would hope not.

Many of Lionel’s objections to “egalitarianism” make no sense whatsoever. For example:

Under the notion of equality, humanity has expanded like poured cement, covering the globe. Only a handful of places remain where you cannot see constant signs of human habitation. In particular, we have covered the globe in fences and roads that divide up natural ecosystems and interrupt the life cycles of their species. We cannot stop ourselves because we are politically all equal, which means that any person with the money and desire should be able to purchase and develop any land they encounter.

What on Earth does this have to do with “the notion of equality”? Here in the U.S.A., we do have large national parks, with restrictions on development. These days, Republicans typically want to loosen restrictions on development in the national parks, whereas Democrats typically want to tighten them. But the Democrats are the more egalitarian of the two parties, contradicting Lionel’s claim that egalitarianism inherently leads to unlimited exploitation and destruction of natural ecosystems.

Equality creates our greatest failures. Governments, corporations and mass religions do not arise on their own. They arise to service an audience that, brainwashed by political “reality” and dumbed-down by an insistence on reality, wants to purchase and vote for things that resemble its wishful thinking.

It is true that governments, corporations, and religions often cater to “wishful thinking,” but that’s not the reason why they exist in the first place. Corporations exist because of economies of scale, i.e. because there are many things that can be done more efficiently by groups of people working together than by individuals working alone. Governments exist primarily as a way of settling disputes, and there are also many other services that governments can provide more effectively than individuals too.

Anyhow, corporations are not particularly “egalitarian.” Most corporations are run as top-down hierarchical dictatorships.

As for religion, Christianity historically has not been very egalitarian either. Christianity coexisted with slavery and with a hereditary caste system (the privileges of European nobility) for many centuries. Ideals of equality did not become commonplace in the West until the Enlightenment, when many intellectuals were moving away from Christianity.

Perhaps Lionel thinks “equality” means a janitor gets paid the same as a surgeon? He writes:

People must be allowed to have the opportunity to rise above each other with their talents, for without this freedom human life is worthless and devoid of joy, glory and color. People must be allowed to say “I am stronger, smarter, faster than HE!” without having a ruthless communist commissar telling you otherwise or sending you to a gulag for your “counter-revolutionary” thoughts!

There is no taboo on individual excellence, or on people rising above others on the basis of their talents. Nor, at least here in the U.S.A., is there any taboo on calling attention to one’s own accomplishments; people do that on their resumes all the time.

I should qualify this by saying that there is no such taboo in the adult world. It’s true that studious children are often treated badly by other children, which is why I do favor special schools for the more academically-inclined children, contrary to some ultra-egalitarian educational philosophies which hold that all children of the same age group should be kept together no matter what. Here in New York City, we do have plenty of specialized high schools, fortunately.

Notice I said “ultra-egalitarian” in the above paragraph — not just “egalitarian.” Any idea can be carried to counterproductive extremes. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the original idea was a bad idea. Nor are the counterproductive extremes are an inevitable consequence of the original idea.

Lionel reduces the entire concept of “egalitarianism” to its most absurd extreme. And he misunderstands even the ultra-egalitarians. For example:

Everything that has ever been invented, every new idea, every new thought or invention has been the product of special people receiving divine intellectual inspiration and thus, bringing into being their particular thought. Every thing which we are to call the glory of mankind has been the product of natural human inequality. Let us for instance, pretend that the lie of human equality were to be true, then in this case the caveman would never have invented the wheel and thus humanity would have never benefited from this shape, nor would have other cavemen evolved from this in order to create cars, bikes and hula hoops which require this strange and mysteriously seductive shape that is the wheel.

What the ultra-egalitarians believe is not that no one can be technologically inventive, but that everyone can be technologically inventive, given the right circumstances and the right education. The mere existence of technological progress does NOT disprove the ultra-egalitarian view, although one can reject ultra-egalitarianism for other reasons. (See the Wikipedia article on Nature vs. nurture.)

Anyhow, Lionel rants:

Any one ideology which stresses or enforces equality of any kind must be destroyed, it must be cast out, purged from the whole of human thought! Destroy, destroy, destroy! This lie that has seen fit to creep into the minds of idealists and empty headed dreamers must be crushed under an iron fist! Any ideology which promotes this has historically led to disaster, this is quite simply because egalitarianism goes against the nature of man, which will always be unequal! Luciferian providence has proclaimed thus; we must wage brutal intellectual war with this horrible idea that all men are created equal and are thus of the one and the same! Every single ideology that proclaims egalitarianism, wether it be religious (Christianity, Islam, Judaism and all other egalitarian faiths), political (Communism and all other egalitarian political ideologies), and intellectual (extreme forms of humanitarianism) must be sent away and purged from the whole of human consciousness! Everything we call the glory and beauty of man kind is born from natural human indifference and inequality, everything which has lowered us and sought to destroy us has been born out of a desire to equalize everybody or make people out to be “more sheep in the flock”. This can be seen in how all ideologies espousing egalitarianism have historically seeded intellectual prisons for the human experience while priests, commissars or incompetent leaders solidify their own human inequality based on human ignorance and gullibility! Every single fall of man has been because of some smart or down right foolish individual and his unnatural desire to equalize everyone in a religious, political or social context.

If indeed “Any ideology which promotes this has historically led to disaster,” then how does Lionel think that the U.S.A. has managed not only to survive and thrive, but to become the world’s sole superpower?

Historically, the point of egalitarianism in the United States has been to promote equal rights — to oppose things like racism, sexism, hereditary privilege (such as the privileges of European noble families), and slavery.

There is no conflict between egalitarianism (in the sense of equal rights and equal opportunities) and meritocracy. Only when people have equal rights and equal opportunities do the truly talented, of all backgrounds, have an opportunity to prove themselves. The opposite of egalitarianism is not meritocracy but a hereditary caste system. Does Lionel want us to return to a hereditary caste system? I don’t think so…..