by Professor Revilo P. Oliver
(Liberty Bell, February 1985)
Architects of Fear, Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics, by George Johnson, published by a Jeremy Tharcher in Los Angeles, but peddled by Houghton Mifflin, a once respected firm in Boston, is the wad of piffle that the title would lead you to suspect. The author is a young journalist, born in 1952, but he evidently took his title from a phrase that was used about two decades before he was born, when the great War Criminal of all time used to coo over the radio to simple-minded females and tell them “We have nothing to feeah except feeah itself.”
A large part of the book consists of expansions of items Johnson wrote, when even younger, for the Minneapolis Star under the patronage of its immigrant editor-in-chief, Stephen D. Isaacs. It would not merit mention here, if I had not noticed in it a conveniently concise illustration of the technique of manufacturing such books.
Dr. Thomas H. Landess, an editor of the Southern Partisan, commented on contemporary journalism in a recent address at Hillsdale College in Michigan. He was principally concerned with the sabotage and prostitution of the English language in the writing that he compared to “punk rock” (i.e., the cacophonous din that has replaced music in degenerate circles). He gave a good estimate of contemporary journalists:
“With almost no exception… the men and women whose work appears in the editorial pages of the great Eastern opinion mills or on the screens of your television set are badly educated and ill-trained… These people are mostly too ordinary and unimportant to be responsible for the tremendous changes that have taken place in our time. None of them is Genghis Khan. They’re not even privates in the barbarian army. They’re merely camp followers, tagging along behind, hoping to turn a trick and make a buck.”
True enough, but Fagan’s lads do learn from their master a few simple kinds of low cunning, and the more talented ones can produce books that seem instructive to persons who read without reflecting on what they see in print. Johnson lumps together in his screed the widest variety of persons who are so paranoid that they do not realize how blessed it is to be American serfs and labor for the international parasites who now own them. He appears at first sight to be a naif young man, inadequately educated, who is striving to be fair and accurate in his reports and appraisals, even when he mentions such nonsense as claims that the world is dominated by the British Empire and its decadent aristocracy or by the Vatican and its horde of miracle-workers (many of whom are now also working on sales-jobs for the Soviet, perhaps as insurance against unemployment, if the old firm goes bust).(1)
(1. The book is a hack job, of course, and the author’s preparation was naturally superficial. For example, in his chapter on claims that there is a Catholic conspiracy (pp. 85-102), the author misses some real gems. Emmet McLoughlin’s An Inquiry into the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Secaucus, New Jersey, Citadel Press, 1977) revives the old tale that the Pope hired Booth and Surratt to expunge a champion of “democracy.” And there is the Christian holy man who calls himself Tony Alamo and has grown wealthy from a chain of salvation-shops managed from his headquarters, the Holiness Tabernacle in Arkansas. He not only proclaims that the Catholics assassinated Lincoln (with Jackanapes Kennedy thrown in for good measure), but spreads the alarm that the “serpent-like Vatican” now completely controls the Federal Government and all its branches and also controls all the media of communication, from the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and the rest of the press to all of the large broadcasting and television systems, which are being used to destroy the United States, with the approval of all Catholic laymen, who are “haters of God” like their priests. The exemplary Christian rabble-rouser is really a sweet Jew boy, Bernie Lazar Hoffman, and you can guess why he attributes to the diabolic Catholics what his own divine race is really doing. Johnson has heard of the model for such agitation, “the Wandering Jew, an international best-seller published in 1844,” but Johnson seems not to know that it was written by Joseph Sue, the son of a Jewish or half-Jewish physician who grew wealthy during the French Revolution. Joseph, to make himself seem more French, called himself Eugene Sue (or, as the name was frequently written with the tréma, Suë). Le Juif errant, published as a serial in 1844-1845, describes the wickedness of an international network of Jesuits who are trying to strangle and enslave mankind, but are defeated, naturally, by a noble Jew, who is atoning for his failure to recognize Jesus as the messiah. The bulk of the novel is tripe, but the prologue and epilogue are devoted to a brilliantly romantic conception that proves that Sue had a touch of poetic genius. (Sue produced approximately two hundred small volumes of fiction and drama, but his masterpiece was Les mysteres de Paris, a form of novel that he invented, which artfully combines as much pornography as could then be tolerated in print with graphically realistic descriptions of the sordid Parisian underworld and detailed explanations of the devices used by its criminals, the whole spiced with a sentimentality worthy of Dickens and constant propaganda for a socialist revolution that will make everyone happy and honest.)
But Mr. Johnson is more than a bright boy dealing with topics beyond his powers of logical analysis and discrimination. He has learned the tricks of his trade, taught perhaps by some member of the great race that Yahweh specially created to rule the world he deeded to them by the famous b’rith. Here is a capsule illustration.
He believes that Robert Welch was sincere in his desire to “purify” his Birch business by purging it of persons suspected of such consummate wickedness as lack of veneration for Yahweh’s Masterpieces, and he refers to a speech I gave in Boston in 1966, when I was about to carry out my intention to sever my connection with Welch’s promotions, as I have fully described in America’s Decline. Here is what journalist Johnson says on his pages 136f.:
“Welch blamed ‘agents provocateurs’ hired by the Insiders for infiltrating his society and sowing anti-Semitism to convince the public that the Birchers hated Jews. Welch tried to keep the interlopers out. In the mid-1960s, Robert DePugh, leader of a paramilitary right-wing organization called the Minutemen, and journalist Westbrook Pegler were dropped from the society because they were considered by the public to be anti-Semites. Revilo P. Oliver was eased out in 1966 after he said, in a speech at the society’s New England Rally for God, Family, and Country: ‘If only by some miracle all the Bolsheviks or all the Illuminati or all the Jews were vaporized at dawn tomorrow, we should have nothing to worry about.'”
Now Johnson is obviously quoting from my address, Conspiracy or Degeneracy?, of which the verbatim text was published, together with documentary notes, by Power Products shortly after I spoke, and which is now available from Liberty Bell Publications in a reprint made by photo-offset. And it will be noticed that the clever boy does quote accurately, but gives the unwary reader the impression I said the precise opposite of what I did in fact say. So here is the corresponding passage from Conspiracy or Degeneracy?:
“The conspiracy that is destroying us, we are told, is a conspiracy of Communists or of Illuminati or of Jews. Now most of the authors who offer us one or another of those three identifications expound their view in a manner that is less than cogent. Most of them either overstate or oversimplify their case, and some of them, I am sorry to say, give the impression that they are no more intelligent than ‘Liberal intellectuals.’ Most of the writers on this subject are either so fascinated by their own discoveries or so anxious to convince a maximum number of readers that they imply that the conspiracy they identify is the root of all evil — that is if it were abolished, mankind — all mankind, mind you — would enter, instanter, on a Golden Age of peace and domestic tranquility and happiness. If only by some miracle all the Bolsheviks or all of the Illuminati or all the Jews were vaporized at dawn tomorrow, we should have nothing more to worry about. The trouble with that beatific vision, of course, is that every educated man knows that it just can’t be so.”
Now I do not in the least object to Johnson’s implication that I am sadly deficient in veneration for the world-conquering Sheenies who have occupied and rule what was once a White man’s country, but I do resent the libellous imputation that I adopted one of the simple-minded simplifications to which I specifically objected.
Journalists will, of course, be journalists, and it is only charitable to hope that they enjoy the bones that are thrown them from time to time by their appreciative trainers. And I thought this concise and neat example of how the more talented ones earn their rewards would be of some general interest.