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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 used 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.