Children of Satan II: The Beast-Men

Donoso Cortes's 'Immense Sea of Blood'

Lust for the spilling of human blood is a touchstone of the Synarchist mindset. Take the case of the 19th-century Spanish Catholic counter-revolutionary ideologue, Juan Donoso Cortes (1809-53), who argued that human sacrifice is the most universal of all human institutions.

Whatever his importance in the leadership of the post-1848 reaction in Europe in his lifetime, Donoso Cortes posthumously played a central role in the creation of fascism in Europe in the first half of the 20th century through the work of his admirer Carl Schmitt, the Crown Jurist of the Nazi regime. As early as 1922, at least, Schmitt set out to revive the work of Donoso Cortes as one of three thinkers necessary “For A Political Philosophy of the Counter-Revolution,” as Schmitt titled an essay published that year. Schmitt credited Donoso with reaching conclusions more profound than his philosophical predecessor, Synarchist ideologue Joseph de Maistre, the other “thinker,” along with the purported father of traditionalism, Louis de Bonald, whom Schmitt identified as key for the counter-revolution.

Schmitt held up Donoso Cortes as the principal “theoretician of dictatorship and decisionism.” Spanish fascist legal authorities, who collaborated with Schmitt, used Schmitt's reworking of Donoso Cortes to give legitimacy to Francisco Franco's regime. Indeed, speaking in Franco's Madrid in May 1944, Hitler's Schmitt hailed Donoso Cortes as the Cassandra who had forecast that the whole planet would be submerged in just such a “universal civil war” as was then occurring, if “the discussing class” were left in power. Victory in this civil war requires that Donoso's importance be understood, Schmitt argued.

Man, the Most Despicable of Creatures

Donoso Cortes is most famous for his Jan. 4, 1849 speech before the Spanish parliament in which he cried: “Let us have dictatorship!”

“I say, Gentlemen, that dictatorship, in certain circumstances, in given circumstances, such as those in which we find ourselves, for example, is a legitimate form of government, as good and as profitable as any other, a rational system of government which can be defended in theory as well as in practice,” proclaimed Donoso. “So wise are the English” that in England, “dictatorship is not an exception in law, but is part of common law.” Dictatorship, indeed, is part of the divine order--God reserves the right to arbitrarily break his own laws, he asserted. Thus, folly awaits “the party which imagines that it can govern with less means of doing so than God, and refuses to use the means of dictatorship, which is sometimes necessary.”

Donoso hated humanity. “The meanest reptile which I trample under my feet would seem less despicable to me than Man,” Donoso wrote in his philosophical piece, {Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism}. “The point of faith which most oppresses and weighs upon my reason is that of the nobility and dignity of the human species; a dignity and nobility which I wish to grasp and understand, and cannot.... Before I can believe in the nobleness of this stupid multitude, I must receive the fact as a revelation from God.”

A typical fundamentalist, Donoso argued that revealed religion (in his case, the Roman Catholic Church), must impose dictatorship, as human beings are incapable of independent reason. “The doctrinal intolerance of the Church has saved the world from chaos,” he wrote, because the moment discussion of the sacred political, domestic, social and religious truths is permitted, “that moment the mind becomes unsettled, being lost between truth and error, and the clear mirror of human reason is obscured.”

“Reason has not been given to man to enable him to discover the truth, but only that he might comprehend it when it is explained, and perceive it when it is pointed out to him,” he wrote. “The misery of man is so great, and his intellectual indigence so lamentable, that he could not understand the first thing with certainty which he ought to comprehend, if the divine plan permitted that he should discover anything by himself. I would ask, if there exist any man who can exactly define what reason is; or who can tell why he is endowed with it; or in what way it is useful to him, and what are its limits.”

'God Told Me To Kill!'

Donoso's view is, in fact, strictly Satanic, for he argues that God granted Man the faculty of free will only to do evil. His liberty is only “to draw evil out of good, disorder out of order, and to disturb, even though it be accidentally, the perfect adjustment with which God has arranged all things.... Evil exists, because without it we cannot imagine human liberty.... Evil comes from man, and is in man, and, coming from and dwelling in him, there is in it a great agreement, and no contradiction whatever,” Donoso argued.

The culmination of Donoso's philosophical treatise, is that “the institution of bloody sacrifices” is “the most universal” of all human dogmas and institutions. The most civilized nations and the most savage tribes believe in “a pure victim offered as a perfect holocaust,” he wrote. Without the death penalty, without “the purifying efficacy of blood,” all societal bonds would collapse. He even asserted that “the dogma of solidarity” between men is embodied in “the institution of bloody sacrifices”!

Donoso Cortes virtually bathes in blood:

“Since the day of the first effusion of blood, it has never ceased to flow, and it has never been shed in vain.... Mankind ... has always believed these three things with an unconquerable faith: that the effusion of blood is necessary, that there is a manner of shedding blood which is purifying, and another mode which is condemnatory. History clearly attests these truths. It presents to us the narrative of cruel acts, of bloody conquests, of the overthrow and destruction of famous cities, of atrocious murders committed, of pure victims offered on blood-stained altars, of brothers warring against brothers, of the rich oppressing the poor, and of fathers tyrannizing over their children, until the Earth appears to us like an immense sea of blood, which neither the piercing breath of the winds can dry up, nor the scorching rays of the sun can absorb.”

--Gretchen Small