Revilo P. Oliver

Afterthoughts on Afterlife

Kevin Alfred Strom — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 15:07:38 +0000

by Revilo P. Oliver

WE DO NOT KNOW when or how or by whom the notion of a life after death was invented. All mammals instinctively fear death, but if they escape their natural enemies and survive to senility, they seem to acquiesce in a quiet extinction of their enfeebled consciousness. We cannot suppose that the Australopithecus or any species of Homo erectus imagined a possible prolongation of life, and, despite some very recent claims, it is highly improbable that the Neanderthals did. The remote ancestors of our own race, the Cro-Magnons, must have had the capacity for such imagination, but we have no means of knowing what they believed.

We are often told that burials are evidence of some belief in an afterlife, but they may be no more than a manifestation of an instinctive respect or affection for the dead man and an unwillingness to see his corpse devoured by beasts. When a man’s possessions are buried with him, there may have been some notion (as is attested in Egypt, for example) that the equipment would be useful to him in a post-mortem existence, but it is equally possible that some or many instances of this custom may indicate the emergence of a strong sense of private property: the spear or the beads or the golden drinking-horn were the dead man’s, and no one should steal from him when he dies.

* * *

However men came to imagine a survival after death, it is probable that the very oldest form of the notion was a belief that the corpse in the grave retains a certain sentience. Numerous inscriptions attest the survival even to Roman times of a belief that wine poured through the opening of the tomb would rejoice the spirit of the dead and even induce drunkenness. And this most primitive belief survives poetically today, as in Tennyson’s

My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed;
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead.

When men imagined ghosts, shadowy and tenuous, but not absolutely immaterial, simulacra of the dead in which their consciousness persisted, at least for a time, the phantoms, now detached from the grave, were given a realm of their own in an underworld, far beneath the ground, or, more poetically, in a misty land beyond the sunset. There the dead man, whether hero or peasant, was automatically and inexorably doomed to a miserable life-in-death, a helpless and almost voiceless shade, whose umbratile consciousness is embittered (as in the Homeric Nekyia) by the knowledge that it is better to be a dog among the living than a monarch of all the dead.

It is hard to account for the origin of the really revolutionary idea of a divine discrimination between ghosts, so that the afterlife of the ghosts will correspond in some way to the degree of moral excellence attained during life or, what is only slightly different, the special favor of some god. In his play, Critias (Plato’s uncle) explained it as a device to enforce the doctrine that the gods sustain human society by rewarding right conduct and/or punishing the reverse: when experience had made it only too obvious that Hesiod’s Zeus does not act on the reports of the invisible spirits he sends to observe even the most secret acts of men, i.e., that just men do suffer unjustly while scoundrels flourish throughout long lives, it became necessary for lawgivers to invent the notion of a life after death in which Zeus will at last give effect to his judgement of men’s morality.

What is certain is that if a large populace really believes in the inevitability of justice after death, fear of condign punishment will to some extent inhibit crimes against society, and that the social utility of the myth commended it to many thoughtful men who did not themselves believe it.

* * *

A meaningful concept of immortality always includes more than existence after death. No one wants the immortality of Tithonus.

If there is a divine justice, it must do more than discriminate among ghosts and allocate post-mortem residence according to moral criteria. Although the dead in Hades are usually in the form they had at the time of their death (e.g., Deiphobus and others in Vergil), the favored dwellers in Elysium or the Beatae Insulae seem always to have the bodily form that was theirs at the time of their greatest excellence: the warrior is in the prime of his physical prowess, regardless of when or how he died; the sage has the maturity of his wisdom, but is exempt from the effects of old age; and a woman who has earned such immortality reverts to the age at which she was most beautiful.

One of the Christian apocalypses composed under the name of John has Jesus promise that, come the resurrection, all the Christians, whether they died as infants or of old age, will pop out of their graves exactly thirty years old. I think there was a comparable doctrine in the gospel of Zoroaster, although it is hard to elicit anything specific from the gathas or to be sure of their respective dates. Immortality must be at the prime of life.

* * *

“Immortality” generally means only survival after death, with an indefinite perdurance thereafter. The concept of eternity is rarely thought out to its logical conclusion, for merely an assurance of continued life in some comfort after death suffices to content most minds.

The concept of a perpetual deathlessness created difficulties even when applied to gods. In some mythologies, diuturnal life suffices even for them: the Norse gods themselves die, at least in the Ragnarök, some (Balder) earlier. When Cronus was overthrown by Zeus, he really perished from this world, but since the di immortales were, by definition, immortal, it was necessary to suppose that he was either imprisoned in the darkest depths of the underworld or transported to the Isles of the Blest. One of the quirks of the inconsistent religion of the Egyptians was the provision of a heaven for dead gods, Duat. And in the mystery religions, chiefly Oriental, some gods (Tammuz, Osiris, Mithras, Christ) are slain but are resurrected, being thus both mortal and immortal! And in every religion, all gods (except a first one, for whom it is impossible to suggest a parentage without embarking on an endless regression) are born, so they are not really eternal, and their existence is assumed for only a few thousand years at most, leaving their future indefinite.

No one really believes in an eternal existence after death. The mind staggers before the concept of infinity in either time or space. Even the Hindus, who have calculated that the present age will end precisely, in terms of our calendar, on 17 February 428,898, when the universe (with all its gods except the Trinity) will perish in a cosmic conflagration, believe that the senior member of the Trinity, Brahman, will create another universe and yet another in a process that will continue for another 311,035,680,000,000 years, after which, they modestly admit, they do not know exactly what will happen, except that the creative force itself cannot perish with the total destruction of all things, including the supreme gods. Even they draw back before the horror of infinity!

* * *

The eternal, like the infinite, is really a mathematical concept and involves, of course, the well-known Kantian antinomy. Has anyone tried to determine whether the notion of immortality takes a special form in the Aryan mind, corresponding to the characteristic drive of what Spengler terms the “Faustian soul,” with is passion for what is unlimited and infinite? And is it true that only the Aryan mind (which, I take it, is what Haas calls the philosophical mentality) really perceives the difference between eternal and diuturnal life?

* * *

A belief in life after death is by no means an Aryan characteristic. In all ages of history, many Aryans of reflective minds have been convinced by observation of the processes of organic life that perdurance of the individual after death is impossible, and have accepted that conclusion as fully as did Lucretius, for example. Although the Stoics were primarily concerned to establish a rational basis for morality, some of them, notably Panaetius, who did the most to make Stoicism acceptable to the Romans, categorically denied the possibility of survival after death. Even for rational Christians, when not in a mood of emotional exaltation, life after death has been le grand peut-être, a possibility, a hope, rather than a certainty. And although the exceptions may be numerically negligible, even a desire for immortality is not universal:

We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never . . .

* * *

When an hypothesis of life after death is entertained by a rational mind, its grim consequences become at once apparent. Generations of men have for millennia come and gone, like the leaves of the trees, and each dead man, if his ghost survives, goes “to join the greater majority” in some realm of which the population must be increasing at a fearful rate. “O Earth! art thou not weary of thy graves?” And to the Aryan mind, there is something repellent and horrible about the prospect of becoming a mere unit in some vast proletarian mass, packed together in some afterlife, like bees in a hive or Jews in a vast ghetto. To endure after death only to become lost among billions and billions of swarming rabble would be a Hell in itself.

The Aryan mind is natively aristocratic: if life after death is a reward, it must be won by some kind of personal excellence, some achievement, not by the merely passive virtues of a timorous slave. The Classical mind could not conceive of Elysium or the Isles of the Blest as a refuge for a multitude of merely harmless wights: they were reserved for the few who had risen above the herd to make themselves illustrious for courage or wisdom. The Norse Valhalla admitted warriors who had proven themselves in battle under the eyes of the gods, with whom they would dwell until all went forth, foredoomed, to fight the good fight in the last battle and perish in the Götterdämmerung. What happened after death to the villains and knaves, no one cared.

This racial sentiment led naturally to a concept of a selective and limited immortality, most familiar to us from its statement by many of the Stoics (Chrysippus et al., but not Panaetius): the souls of ordinary men evaporate at death, but the souls of men who have attained distinction as heroes or sages endure in some celestial region (most clearly portrayed in the Somnium Scipionis) until the ecpyrosis, the universal conflagration. Thus, in a sense, a man who is highly endowed genetically may create his own limited immortality, i.e., a diuturnal but not eternal existence. One need not remark on the social advantages of a belief that inspires great men to serve their nation and race.

* * *

The most reasonable theory that offers immortality to all is metempsychosis [reincarnation -- Ed.]. It avoids all the absurdities and the repulsive immorality of such cults as Christianity, and, by a doctrine of karman, yields the only rational theodicy. It assumes no childish miracles or divine meddling with the immutable laws of nature, but instead presents itself as natural law that operates uniformly throughout the universe as precisely as do the forces that determine gravity, chemical combinations, or optical phenomena. So plausible and reasonable a doctrine, which cannot be shown to be inconsistent with ascertained facts, naturally appeals to our racial mentality. There is the difficulty, of course, that the reincarnated individual does not remember his previous lives, but it is assumed that his subconscious being persists through all his lives, and it is usually provided that he will at some time remember all his previous lives, at least those in human form, when “the veil of ignorance” drops from his eyes. In many forms of belief in transmigration, one also avoids the embarrassing question why an afterlife is the perquisite of a limited number of species of anthropoids, to the exclusion of mammals, e.g., dogs and horses, that are often morally superior. And, most persuasive of all, one can construct for each individual a neat evolutionary sequence from the lowest forms of organic life to the human, from the lower races to the higher, from the morally mediocre to the morally superior, and then onward to superhuman beings who reside, perhaps, on other planets in the vast universe in which our earth is but an atom. Metempsychosis could be called a psychic Darwinism, the evolution of spiritual species.

* * *

It is possible, of course, to combine the two doctrines, metempsychosis and an Elysium. The most beautiful conception of immortality of which I know, and certainly one that by contrast shows the utter vulgarity of Christian ideas, is set forth in Pindar’s second Olympian: after three or six lives in which a man has lived with strict justice and perfect integrity, he passes beyond the tower of Cronus to the fair realm that cannot be reached by land or sea, where gentle breezes from a placid ocean blow forever on the fields of asphodel. For a description, see Pindar. If the beauty of great poetry can commend a religion, here you have it.

* * *

A radically different and, to us, very strange conception of immortality has been evolved by the Jews. Originally, as is obvious from almost all of the tales in the collection Christians call an “Old Testament,” their racial god, Yahweh, who fought other gods to help them prey on the more civilized nations of the Near East, could do nothing for them at death, and a Jew’s ghost went to a ghastly life-in-death in Sheol, which, of course, is simply the Irkalla of the Babylonians, from whom the Jews took all their cosmogonic myths. This conception, however, attained a fine literary expression in the older parts of the diatribe called Ecclesiastes. When the Jews thought of appropriating the monotheism of the Greek Stoics and thus promoting their Yahweh from a tribal deity to the sole god of the entire world, some Jewish sects took from Egyptian and Zoroastrian cults the notion of a Last Judgement, at which the dead, reassembled and repaired, would pop out of their graves, and pious Jews, thus resurrected and reanimated, would be rewarded with a new life on an earth that had been vastly improved by the butchery of most of the goyim and the enslavement of the rest to their divinely-appointed masters. All this, however, was secondary to the real sense of immortality, which transcends the mythology and is thus felt with equal intensity by the many Jews who are privately or admittedly atheists. As candid Jewish writers explain to us, a Jew feels himself a part of a superorganism, his race, of which the god is merely a personification. His criterion, therefore, is what “is good for the Jewish people,” and his immortality is that of the superorganism of which he is but a small and ephemeral digit. There can be no doubt but that this conception of immortality is innate in the racial mentality, although it escapes the comprehension of our race, for whom an immortality in which the individual, with all of his personal character, thoughts, and memories, does not survive seems a contradiction in terms.

* * *

I need not remark that Christianity is merely a Judaized rifacimento of Zoroastrianism, as is, indeed, symbolized in the well-known myth that the nativity of the avatar of one-third of its god was attended by Zoroastrian priests (Magi). The Zoroastrian-Christian notion of an afterlife is based on the radical religious innovation that imagines a conflict between a good god and an evil god who is the master of all the other gods in the world. A prudent individual will enlist on the side of the good god, since he is certain to be victorious in the end. When a person has professed faith in the good god, his first duty is to weaken the forces of that god’s competitor by seducing (“converting”) the votaries of all gods but his own or slaughtering them in holy wars. He is also obliged to respect most of the rules of conduct that are common to all organized societies and a few peculiar ones in addition. He thus acquires credits in heaven, but contracts debts when he indulges himself in forbidden pleasures. When he dies, his discarnate soul comes to a bridge or gate, where the celestial bookkeeper consults the entries in his ledger and admits the man with a credit balance to heaven, throws debtors into hell, and, according to some accounts, provides a limbo for souls that have just broken even on his books. One of the joys of heaven will be that of delightedly watching the torments that will be inflicted on the luckless debtors and the persons who did not even open an account in the right god’s bank. The other joys are endless idleness, a great attraction for born loafers, who, presumably, will not have their immortality terminated by being bored to death.

* * *

Christianity as we know it must have originally been a cult confined to members of Yahweh’s race, but in the Second Century they began to peddle it to the multi-racial proletariat of the Empire that had been Roman. Although a veneer of talk about Love was added for sentimental women and timid men, the underlying sadism and malice that makes the religion so repugnant is evident in its conception of an afterlife. Admission to heaven is won by an unquestioning and mindless Faith in inherently improbable tales, and the seething proletarian masses that will throng the celestial streets will principally enjoy the bliss of watching for all eternity the sufferings of their betters — the rich, the cultivated, the wise, the learned, the well-born, the aristocrats of birth or intellect, the rulers of nations — who, not having had the unthinking faith of mustard seeds or sparrows, will have inflicted on them, forever and forever, every agony that can be devised by diabolic ingenuity.

Christianity was basically a religion for the proletariat, standing in sharp contrast, for example, to the Norse religion, which was frankly aristocratic: Valhalla was reserved for heroes, and it was only an afterthought that provided for women, even if well-born, the rarely-mentioned Freyja’s Bower. And we must never underestimate the influence of women. In the last days of the decaying Empire, Christianity’s principal competitor was the Mithraic cult, another derivative of Zoroastrianism. That cult, which was no more plausible but was more virile, simply excluded women; and although females could have a cult of their own, that of the Magna Mater Idaea (whose shrine was sometimes conveniently located just across the street), they probably felt themselves the victims of “discrimination” and worked zealously for the cult that, as Anatole France remarked, exalted women by making them a sin.

After the collapse of the Empire in the west, Christianity became useful to ambitious kings in the northern nations. Very few Norse kings were as honorable as Hakon the Good (note the appreciative epithet) of Norway, who, although a Christian in his youth, renounced the alien cult rather than impose it on his subjects. During the critical period, few Norse kings overlooked the advantages of a religion that provided a specious pretext for extending their own power by destroying the independence of the aristocracy. It is also noteworthy that the Christianizing kings introduced the practice of torture, which was and is so repugnant to our racial instincts. There is a long and bloody record of men who were forced by physical torture to become “converted” or who obstinately refused that humiliation and honorably perished amid abominable torments inflicted on them by the monarch’s real or assumed piety: even more moving are the records of men who became Christians to save their sons from being blinded, mutilated, or killed. When one remembers that the pagan hero kills, but never tortures, one has a certain measure of the corruption of morality wrought by the Oriental superstition.

* * *

It is noteworthy that in all meaningful conceptions of immortality, the soul, though perhaps composed of more tenuous matter, is corporeal: it feels bodily pains and pleasures. In every hell that the various religions have invented, the dead suffer physically: darkness, hunger, thirst, wounds, fetters; in some cults, they are roasted in flames or congealed in ice. In every heaven, the fortunate enjoy sensuous pleasures: sight, hearing, balmy climate, beautiful landscapes, choice viands, good conversation, and the like; urban cults provide golden streets and jewelled edifices. The sensuous pleasures may become sensual. There is extant a sepulchral inscription on which the dead man depicted the rewards that he is confident he will enjoy for his righteousness: the sexual organs of, as I remember, thirty-two women. For that matter, if the author of one of the tales in the “New Testament” knew enough Greek to write it correctly, his Christians expected to enjoy the bliss of unlimited promiscuity in their heaven, although our salvation-hucksters naturally think it expedient to claim, as usual, that the words do not mean what they say. (Current tendencies in the churches, however, may make them revert to the literal meaning.)

* * *

Various religions, of which we have mentioned a few, offer conceptions of a life after death that are either more or less plausible than others and more or less attractive. If we abstract from them the fundamental question of the possibility of some kind of afterlife, we can draw no conclusions from the prevalence of a desire to live beyond the natural span of human life. Whenever men hear of anything that pleasures their fancy, they naturally desire it. And they may long for what is in fact unattainable, as in the famous example of Alexander’s pothos. Indeed, they usually do, and, significantly, they commonly long for what is not only physically, but also psychologically, impossible, given their own nature. The common ending of fairy tales, “and they lived happily ever after,” not only implies that the protagonists will never grow old, but also that they, like Christians in their heaven, will be content with an unchanging and static existence.

* * *

No weight can be given to claims by individuals that they sense or feel they are immortal. If we except the Jews, in whom the feeling is probably biological and refers, as we have noticed, to something that is not a personal survival, we cannot dodge the epistemological problem. If there is life after death, the ghost can say to himself, cogito, ergo sum, and thus he will know than an afterlife is possible. But only the dead can know that. The living can never know they will exist after they die. They may try to convince themselves of immortality by reasoning from some reported phenomena, much as some persons now convince themselves that there is life on the hypothetical planets of other stars, and they may attain an emotional state called faith, in which they gratify themselves by assuming the reality of what they like to imagine. Their only “proof” of immortality is Unamuno’s dictum, “Si el alma humana es inmortal, el mundo es bueno; y si no lo es, es malo.” But good and evil do not exist in the physical universe, which is unaffected by human predilections. Reality cannot be deduced from desire: Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit is certainly true, but proves only that a man who despairs of other possibilities of survival will excogitate (as did some of the ancient Stoics, long before Nietzsche) a theory of die ewige Wiederkehr (which, by the way, is quite sound philosophically, if one postulates that time, like light, is composed of quanta). There can be no knowledge of immortality; only a belief, held with greater or less emotional conviction.

* * *

Since immortality is, by its very nature, unknowable, a belief in it is not irrational per se, as is, for example, belief in racial or other human equality, which is made patently false by everyone’s quotidian observation of reality. To maintain a belief in spite of indubitable evidence to the contrary is a symptom of irrationality; to accept a belief on the basis of fallacious evidence and in the absence of proof that it is false is to err, but not to be irrational. Some persons, for example, believe in an afterlife because numerous individuals claim to have seen or heard ghosts; they are deficient in critical judgement, since they allow neither for the prevalence of fraud, mendacity, and hallucinations, nor for the perturbing influence of their own mammalian fear of death, but they are not irrational in their reasoning from the data they have credulously and imprudently accepted as genuine.

We regard immortality as a superstition because there is no cogent evidence of life after death, and what we know of organic processes and of the power of the human imagination makes any hypothesis that the individual can survive the disintegration of his body extremely improbable. But, at the limit, we cannot conclusively refute the sophistic analogy that just as there are invisible and normally impalpable forces, such as radio waves and subatomic radiation, perceptible only by their effects, so consciousness may be produced by an invisible force that is separable from the biological organism on which it impinges under certain conditions. We may think that highly improbable, but we cannot prove that it is flatly impossible. Like Aristotle, we cannot prove that the psyche or some part of it, such as the power of ratiocination, cannot be more than the functioning of organic life. We can never disprove an hypothesis that is, by its very terms, not subject to empirical verification. But we can be prudent enough not to mistake an unverifiable conjecture for a fact.

* * *

A recent article in Instauration offers an acute and cogent explanation of one of the most drastic and puzzling effects of Christianity on our race and civilization.

The Nordic peoples accepted Christianity for several reasons, of which the most important, in my estimation, was the Bible, which, unlike other mythologies, so simulates an historical record that it seems to be an account of events that actually happened; and if its tales are historical truth, they prove the existence and power of a capricious and ferocious god whom mortals must dread and strive to placate. This god, furthermore, offered to his votaries, under conditions that it was painful but not impossible to meet, an assured and comfortable life after death. Our ancestors naturally desired an afterlife, if it was to be had: who (except a world-weary and over-civilized décadent) would not long to extend his existence far into the future? And the new religion, distasteful as it was in many ways, offered what seemed to be a certain way of attaining what all men desire.

A theory of metempsychosis was not unknown to the Nordics, but it was unsystematic and seems to have provided that a man would be reborn as his own grandson or great-grandson, as obviously did not happen in some observable instances. For this or some other reason, there is no trace of a real faith in reincarnation in our earliest sources. Valhalla was accessible only to heroes who died in battle, and it was no paradise: it was a military encampment of an army that intends to die honorably, fighting for a lost cause. And, for that matter, no man, however valorous, can be certain that he will die in battle. If Norse ladies heard the faint rumor that their souls would dwell in the halls of the Vannic goddess, Freyja, the prospect cannot have pleased them. Everyone knew, furthermore, that the myths were myths, based on no authentic information and subject to alteration, within very wide limits, by the fancy of the skalds, whose songs were poetry, not revelations. Some of the Norse quite frankly admitted they were atheists; the majority believed or thought it likely that Odin, Thor, and the other gods existed, but no one could claim to have any certain and definite knowledge of them, let alone of what might happen to their worshippers after death. There is no evidence of a confidence in any kind of afterlife among the Nordic peoples when the Christian salesmen arrived with what they claimed to be an historical record and a guarantee of immortality — to be had at a price, to be sure, but what would not a man pay not only to survive death but to enter on a life free of the striving, the toil, the sorrow, and the eventual failure of a life on earth? For many, the temptation must have been irresistible.

So much, we may take for granted. The price to be paid for this immortality, however, was conduct that was in many ways unnatural, even inhuman. As the writer in Instauration perspicaciously observes, the alien cult’s doctrine of “original sin” had a certain plausibility in that men are always tempted to violate the code of their society, whatever that may be, and not infrequently do so. But it was enforced by the Aryans’ subconscious sense that, for the sake of obtaining the immortality promised by a god whose existence seemed to be an historical fact, they were betraying and violating their own inner nature by imposing on themselves conduct that their instincts rejected. They thus had a sense of guilt without understanding why. By not sinning in the eyes of the god, they were sinning against themselves. They were biologically guilty.

From this inner discord, the author of the article concludes, — from the subconscious mind’s reaction to the perpetual conflict between the innate nature of a healthy Aryan and the conduct that his superstition requires of him, — comes the maddening sense of guilt that has been for fifteen centuries, and is today, a black and monstrous incubus on the minds of our race.

This explanation seems to me psychologically sound and cogent. The feeling of guilt would have increased proportionally as the new religion began to affect the conduct, as distinct from the superstitions, of the Norse, as it did only gradually. The holy men who sold immortality to the Norse shrewdly concealed from their customers the price that would eventually be demanded. They not only did not try to change the established norms of social conduct, but they even invented miracles to sanction those Nordic standards, e.g., Jesus restored the sight of a blind man so that he could split the skull of the enemy who had insulted him. It was only when Christianity had been firmly established, by fire and sword where necessary, that the religion began gradually and progressively to tighten its noose about our throats, as its dervishes discovered that more and more of the natural conduct of healthy men had been forbidden us by the Jewish god. The Christian concessions to the Aryan ethos were gradually eliminated — some only quite recently — and the subconscious perception of biological guilt was proportionately exacerbated. And the menticidal poison was the more deadly in that its virulence lay below the level of cognition.

This explains much that was puzzling in the history of Europe — and much that is puzzling today. It explains, for example, the frenzy of “Liberals” and “Democrats” as they try, ever more furiously, to impose on their race the Christian myths about “all mankind,” the equality of races, and “one world,” — as they impose on themselves the Christians’ maudlin or malicious doting on whatever is lowly, inferior, debased, deformed, and degenerate. The modern “Liberal” cannot even promise himself that Jesus has reserved for him a spacious condominium in a heavenly metropolis, but as he phrenetically tries to impose Christian superstitions on the world, he knows, at least subconsciously, that he is a member of a superior race that he is betraying in violation of his racial instincts. Hence his frantic sense of guilt; hence the subconscious death-wish of our Christian-dominated people today.

Vicisti, Galilaee?

– August 1980

What Is ‘Liberalism’?

Kevin Alfred Strom — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 02:02:31 +0000

by Revilo P. Oliver (pictured)
An excerpt from Dr. Oliver’s book America’s Decline: The Education of a Conservative (Londinium Press, London, 1981)

EDITOR’S NOTE: Readers who consider themselves conservatives should be careful not to read too much into this critique of what they may see as their main social, political, and philosophical opponent. Oliver, by the time of this writing, had long abandoned conservatism as a cause both lost and unworthy, so this essay is no justification for “rightism” in any sense. It is, instead, a call for clear vision and an acceptance of the world as it is and human life as it is: material, biological, evolutionary, and governed by absolute natural laws which we must accept no matter how “unfair” they may seem or how difficult and daunting the tasks they ordain for us. — Kevin Alfred Strom.

“LIBERALISM” IS A succedaneous religion that was devised late in the Eighteenth Century and it originally included a vague deism. Like the Christianity from which it sprang, it split into various sects and heresies, such as Jacobinism, Fourierism, Owenism, Fabian Socialism, Marxism, and the like. The doctrine of the “Liberal” cults is essentially Christianity divested of its belief in supernatural beings, but retaining its social superstitions, which were originally derived from, and necessarily depend on, the supposed wishes of a god. This “Liberalism,” the residue of Christianity, is, despite the fervor with which its votaries hold their faith, merely a logical absurdity, a series of deductions from a premise that has been denied.

The dependence of the “Liberal” cults on a blind and irrational faith was long obscured or concealed by their professed esteem for objective science, which they used as a polemic weapon against orthodox Christianity, much as the Protestants took up the Copernican restoration of heliocentric astronomy as a weapon against the Catholics, who had imprudently decided that the earth could be stopped from revolving about the sun in defiance of Holy Writ by burning intelligent men at the stake or torturing them until they recanted. Pious Protestants would naturally have preferred a cozy little earth, such as their god described in their holy book, but they saw the advantage of appealing to our racial respect for observed reality to enlist support, while simultaneously stigmatizing their rivals as ignorant obscurantists and ridiculous ranters.

The votaries of “Liberalism” would have much preferred to have the various human species specially created to form one race endowed with the fictitious qualities dear to “Liberal” fancy, but the cultists saw the advantage of endorsing the findings of geology and biology, including the evolution of species, in their polemics against orthodox Christianity to show the absurdity of the Jewish version of the Sumerian creation-myth. The hypocrisy of the professed devotion to scientific knowledge was made unmistakable when the “Liberals” began their frantic and often hysterical efforts to suppress scientific knowledge about genetics and the obviously innate differences between the different human species and between the individuals of any given species. At present, the “Liberals” are limited to shrieking and spitting when they are confronted with inconvenient facts, but no one who has heard them in action can have failed to notice how exasperated they are by the limitations that have thus far prevented them from burning wicked biologists and other rational men at the stake.

It is unnecessary to dilate on the superstitions of “Liberalism.” They are obvious in the cult’s holy words. “Liberals” are forever chattering about “all mankind,” a term which does have a specific meaning, as do parallel terms in biology, such as “all marsupials” or “all species of the genus Canis,” but the fanatics give to the term a mystic and special meaning, derived from the Zoroastrian myth of “all mankind” and its counterpart in Stoic speculation, but absurd when used by persons who deny the existence of Ahuru Mazda or a comparable deity who could be supposed to have imposed a transcendental unity on the manifest diversity of the various human species. “Liberals” rant about “human rights” with the fervor of an evangelist who appeals to what Moses purportedly said, but a moment’s thought suffices to show that, in the absence of a god who might be presumed to have decreed such rights, the only rights are those which the citizens of a stable society, by agreement or by a long usage that has acquired the force of law, bestow on themselves; and while the citizens may show kindness to aliens, slaves, and horses, these beings can have no rights. Furthermore, in societies that have been so subjugated by conquest or the artful manipulation of masses that individuals no longer have constitutional rights that are not subject to revocation by violence or in the name of “social welfare,” there are no rights, strictly speaking, and therefore no citizens — only masses existing in the state of indiscriminate equality of which “Liberals” dream and, of course, a state of de facto slavery, which their masters may deem it expedient, as in the United States at present, to make relatively light until the animals are broken to the yoke.

“Liberals” babble bout “One World,” which is to be a “universal democracy” and is “inevitable,” and they thus describe it in the very terms in which the notion was formulated, two thousand years ago, by Philo Judaeus, when he cleverly gave a Stoic coloring to the old Jewish dream of a globe in which all the lower races would obey the masters whom Yahweh, by covenant, appointed to rule over them. And the “Liberal” cults, having rejected the Christian doctrine of “original sin,” which, although based on a silly myth about Adam and Eve, corresponded fairly well to the facts of human nature, have even reverted to the most pernicious aspect of Christianity, which common sense had held in check in Europe until the Eighteenth Century; and they openly exhibit the morbid Christian fascination with whatever is lowly, proletarian, inferior, irrational, debased, deformed, and degenerate. This maudlin preoccupation with biological refuse, usually sicklied over with such nonsense words as ‘underprivileged [!],’ would make sense, if it had been decreed by a god who perversely chose to become incarnate among the most pestiferous of human races and to select his disciples from among the illiterate dregs of even that peuplade, but since the “Liberals” claim to have rejected belief in such a divinity, their superstition is exposed as having no basis other than their own resentment of their betters and their professional interest in exploiting the gullibility of their compatriots.

In the Eighteenth Century, Christians whose thinking was cerebral rather than glandular, perceived that their faith was incompatible with observed reality and reluctantly abandoned it. A comparable development is taking place in the waning faith of “Liberalism,” and we may be sure that, despite the cult’s appeal to masses that yearn for an effortless and mindless existence on the animal level, and despite the prolonged use of public schools to deform the minds of all children with “Liberal” myths, the cult would have disappeared, but for the massive support given it today, as to the Christian cults in the ancient world, by the Jews, who have, for more than two thousand years, battened on the venality, credulity, and vices of the races they despise.

There is one crucial fact that we must not overlook, if we are to see the political situation as it is, rather than in the anamorphosis of some ‘ideology,’ i.e., propaganda-line, whether “Liberal” or “conservative.” The real fulcrum of power in our society is neither the votaries of an ideological sect nor the Jews, clear-sighted and shrewd as they are, but the intelligent members of our own race whose one principle is an unmitigated and ruthless egotism, an implacable determination to satisfy their own ambitions and lusts at whatever cost to their race, their nation, and even their own progeny. And with them we must reckon the bureaucrats, men who, however much or little they may think about the predictable consequences of the policies they carry out, are governed by a corporate determination to sink their probosces ever deeper into the body politic from which they draw their nourishment. Neither of these groups can be regarded as being “Liberal” or as having any other political attitude from conviction. The first are guarded by the lucidity of their minds, and the second by their collective interests, from adhesion to any ideology or other superstition.

Bureaucracies contain, of course, ambitious men who are climbing upward. One thinks of the bureaucrats who, shortly before the “Battle of the Bulge” in the last days of 1944, were openly distressed “lest a premature victory in Europe compromise our social gains at home,” meaning, of course, that they were afraid that peace might break out before they had climbed another rung on their way to real power. After the defeat of Japan, one of them, a major in the ever-growing battalions of chair-borne troops, too precious to be distressed by such nasty things as fighting battles, frankly lamented his hard luck: if only the war had lasted another three months, and a suitable number of Americans been killed, he would have been promoted to colonel and would also have a “command” that would have qualified him as the foremost expert in his field and thus assured his prosperity after the evil day on which he would have to face the hardships of peace. This attitude may not be admirable, but it is quite common and a political force of the first magnitude, which it would be childish to ignore. It is not, of course, peculiar to the United States. When the National Socialists came to power in Germany, they had many enthusiastic adherents of the same type, who, after the defeat of their nation, did not have to be tortured to become witnesses to the “evils of Nazism” and endorse any lie desired by the brutal conquerors. The attitude, furthermore, though especially prevalent in our demoralized age, is not peculiar to it. One thinks of the Popes who are reported to have told their intimates, “How much profit this fable of Christ has brought us!” And the same realistic appraisal of the main chance was doubtless present in many ecclesiastics who did not reach the top or did not have so much confidence in the discretion of their immediate associates.

Unmitigated egotism, which is necessarily a prime factor on all the higher levels of society in a “democracy,” is a political force with which one cannot cope directly; one can only attack the masks that are worn in public. It is, however, an obstacle that can be circumvented and one which could become an asset. The only strategic consideration here is represented by the truism, “nothing succeeds like success” — a crude statement, which you may find elaborated with elegance and sagacity in the Or culo manual of the great Jesuit, Baltasar Gracián. Our formidable enemies today will become our enthusiastic allies tomorrow, if it appears that we are likely to succeed. I speak, of course, only of members of our race, but the most competent and acute “Liberals,” who today declaim most eloquently about the “underprivileged” and “world peace,” could become tomorrow the most eloquent champions of the hierarchical principle (with which they secretly agree) and a guerre l’outrance against our enemies, if their calculations of the probable future were changed. And, as the Jews well know, the great humanitarian, whose soul shudders today at the very thought of insufficient veneration of the Jews, could become tomorrow grateful to the Jews only for the wonderful idea about gas chambers that was incorporated in the hoax about the “six million,” and he would probably find a real personal satisfaction in putting the idea into practice at last. As Gracián says, the prudent man will ascertain where power really lies, in order to use those who have it and to spurn those who have it not.

If one wishes to talk about principles or even long-range objectives to the representatives of this extremely powerful political force, one should wear motley and cap with bells; the only arguments that will be cogent to them are of the kind that always taught the Reverend Bishop Talleyrand precisely when it would be profitable to kick his less nimble associates in the teeth. Some historians claim, and it may be true, that Talleyrand had principles. If so, he never let them interfere with his conduct. He was a man of great talent and perspicacity, and he always found the right moment and right way to join the winning side in time for it to boost him yet higher. When age at last forced his retirement, he was equally adroit in conciliating impressionable historians by simulating regret for the methods by which he had attained eminence. He is one of the comparatively few perfect models for brilliant and pragmatic young men today.

Many of my conservative readers will find this fact disagreeable or even depressing, but I trust they will not dream of resuscitating an etiolated religion, and will not count too heavily on the spiritual effects of a possible restoration of racial self-respect and sanity. If the fact is unpleasant per se, it is also the basis for some cautious optimism, since it leaves open the possibility that movement on behalf of our race, if it ever seems likely to succeed, could quickly become an avalanche. In certain circumstances — not likely, perhaps, but possible — the despised “racist” of today could be astounded by the discovery that an overwhelming majority of the bureaucracy and of the White men in power above it had always been with him in heart. The sudden conversions will not necessarily be hypocritical, for it is quite likely that there is now such a majority which, ceteris paribus, would prefer to belong to a virile race rather than a dying one. But remember the proviso, ceteris paribus: no personal sacrifices, no risks.

The Three American Eras

Kevin Alfred Strom — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 21:12:01 +0000

by Revilo P. Oliver

THE JEWS ARE a unique race, parasitic and predatory, evidently formed from hybrid stock (including, according to Mourant’s haematological analysis, c. 10% of Congoid blood) in the way described in Sir Arthur Keith’s theory of human evolution.

The parasites find, seemingly by instinct, and attack every inherent weakness in our racial stock and exploit our vices, so that it is often difficult to fix a boundary between our innate deficiencies and the parasites’ exacerbation of them. Our current religion is one of their many weapons: The superstition infects our race through its appeal to our racial proclivity toward romantic sentimentality, transcendental mysteries, and even a certain heroism: the willingness of men to sacrifice themselves for their people, which is perverted into asceticism and an itch to serve “all mankind.” That has been a deadly infection, encouraging both the survival of the unfit of our own race by preventing the natural process by which viable species eliminate their degenerates, and by encouraging a fatuous toleration of racial enemies.

Whittaker Chambers seems to have been right when he decided (for some of the wrong reasons) that our people are driven by a subconscious, but irresistible, death-wish. At least, the racial mind of most of our contemporaries, rotted by fifteen centuries of a superstition designed by the Jews to paralyse goyim, seems no longer capable of perceiving reality, let alone of coping with it.

For those Americans who do wish to perceive reality, it is useful to divide our country’s history into three eras, viz.:

I. The First Republic, established as result of the Civil War (the only one in our history) in the British colonies, 1775-1783, which made the several colonies independent states. This republic, based on the Constitution, lasted from 1789 until 1860, when it was forever destroyed by the war of aggression launched by a league of Northern states and their invasion of the South.

II. The Second Republic, established by the Northern conquest, 1865 to 1932. Some parts of the original Constitution were salvaged and adapted to a regime of “democracy” and political corruption that was fundamentally incompatible with that Constitution, although the boobs were made to believe that that document had been preserved by being destroyed.

III. The Ochlocracy, sometimes called the Dictatorship of (the thugs who own) the Proletariat, 1932-present. Established by the Jews’ capture of the government of the Second Republic in 1932 and the gradual assimilation of the United States to the governmental system used in the Soviet Union, including the establishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal in Washington (still called the Supreme Court), which has repeatedly made it clear that ‘Constitution’ has become merely a word that is used in bad jokes. No one should be misled by the fact that the management still stages elections to amuse the boobs, some of whom find them almost as exciting as football games.

The future of our stultified and brutalized race depends on so many imponderables that it would be rash to venture any forecast. The only hope, as I see it, is that the present owners will make the blunder of precipitating or permitting a total collapse so drastic and sudden that its physical effects will penetrate to the consciousness of the boobs and induce something like thought, and that if and when that happens, there will be a nucleus of men who understand the situation and have the courage and intelligence to organize and lead the boobs to regain independence from the world-conquerors.

I continue to write, at constant sacrifice of my own convenience and peace; to write, in the hope that I may possibly contribute a little to the formation of such a nucleus that will be able to act intelligently when the time comes — if it ever does.

– January, 1983

The Descent of Islam

Kevin Alfred Strom — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 02:47:16 +0000

by Revilo P. Oliver (pictured)
first published by Kevin Alfred Strom in National Vanguard magazine, January-February 2003 / first online publication at NationalVanguard.org

ISLAM, LIKE CHRISTIANITY, is essentially a Jewish cult for goyim. The Koran, however, is not derived from the Babylonian Talmud. Most of the Koran (Qur’án, “the statements” (i.e., of God to Mahomet)) probably was composed by Mahomet after his Hegira, which took place in 622. The Babylonian Talmud was probably first collected in the Sixth Century and much of that heap of ordure is of a much later date, although naturally with forged pretension to great antiquity. It sprang, of course, out of the festering mentality of the Jews, and while it is most unlikely that any part of the Talmud as such could have been known to the Jews in Arabia who influenced Mahomet, they naturally had the mentality of their race, so it is not remarkable that there are two or three passages in the Koran that correspond more or less closely to passages in the Talmud.

It would be more proper to classify Islam as a Christian sect or group of sects, since the word ‘Christian’ properly designates all of the innumerable sects that attribute divinity to the Jesus who is the protagonist of the “New Testament,” although, of course, there is naturally great hostility between competing sects, each of which claims to represent the “true religion” and even tries to deny the term ‘Christian’ to all of its competitors in the salvation-business. It is true that Mahomet claimed to be the successor of the Jewish Jesus, whom he, like the Christians, regarded as not having been a christ in the strict sense of that word (i.e., a divinely appointed king to lead the Jews to dominion over the whole world), but as a Saviour who, like Zarathustra, could bestow a pleasant immortality on anyone, regardless of race, who believed the right dogmas while keeping his reason in abeyance.

Direct influence of the Talmud on the Koran is excluded because the Talmud throughout shows a hostility to the Jesus of the “New Testament” and to his successors, including Bar-Kokhba, because those christs didn’t get any effective butchering of Aryans under way. Had there been effective influence of the Talmud on Mahomet, he would certainly have refrained from recognizing the divinity of the Jesus in question and presenting himself as his successor. Islam is strictly comparable to the many Christian sects, e.g., the Huggletonians, the Shakers, the Mormons, the Anabaptists of Leyden, the Elect of Shiloh (followers of Joanna Southcott), et al., which gave their Jesus a divinely appointed successor or coadjutor. The story of Mahomet was modelled on the Christian legend: a virgin birth is, of course, de rigeur for all Saviours, but much less common is a claim that the Saviour’s mother remained a virgin after parturition, as is claimed for Mary in the Gospel of James and other Christian gospels and is claimed for Fatimah (Mahomet’s mother) in the Moslem tradition.

It is highly probable (see, e.g., H. W. F. Saggs, Babylonian Civilisation, London, 1962; reprinted as The Greatness that was Babylon, New York, 1968) that in the first part of the sixth century B.C. the Jews were established in possession of the strategic oases that controlled the trade-routes in the Arabian Peninsula by the last king of Babylon, Nabonidus, whom, in keeping with their racial instincts, they repaid by stabbing him in the back, exciting subversion in his kingdom and finally betraying Babylon to the armies of Cyrus the Great. Cyrus was the only goy whom they tried to cozen by saluting him as their christ, and it was probably through such flattery as much as from the bargain they doubtless struck with Cyrus before betraying the Babylonians to him that they were given privileged status in the Persian Empire. The Bible and Josephus tell us how a caravan of rich Jews, their chariots laden with gold and silver while their hundreds of goy slaves trudged along behind, set out from Babylon to take possession of Jerusalem and start exploiting the natives and kicking them around, while the majority of the ‘chosen’ stayed in Babylon to continue eating on the Babylonians whom they had betrayed. When the Persians took Egypt, their protection was extended to the hordes of Jews who were parasites on the Egyptian natives.

The Arabian Peninsula was lousy with Jews in the time of Mahomet; they fostered his new religion at first, just as they promoted Christianity in the decaying Roman Empire, and they doubtless made suggestions that Mahomet adopted, but they conspired against him when they found that he was less than docile. There is a succinct account in Sir Richard Burton’s Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah & Meccah, which is now available in a Dover reprint. The Moslems, like some Christian sects, were more or less hostile to Jews in theory, though not in practice, and there were almost no professed Jews left in the Holy Cities when Burton visited them (although there doubtless were Jews who had taken Arabic names and professed Islam to disguise themselves, just as among us they take Aryan names and simulate our culture in public), but in general, Islam, like Christianity, guaranteed the Jews immunity in return for small contributions as tax.

The doctrines of Islam are essentially Christian in the sense that there is no important dogma that is not paralleled in one or more of the innumerable Christian sects of the past and present, and Islam itself, of course, split into many divergent sects that quarrelled about theological fantasies. Most Christian sects, however, are overtly proletarian and “peace-loving,” deprecating violence except when they run amok in a holy war and enjoy butchering “heretics” for the profit of the Jews. Islam, however, was less hypocritical and a holy war (jihád) is one of the cardinal articles of its faith (except in a few minor and “heretical” sects that arose long after the time of Mahomet). That was the secret of its success. The new religion was a means of uniting the reciprocally hostile tribes of Arabia and launching them on a programme of world conquest that was phenomenally successful so long as the Arabs retained their racial vitality. For example, they virtually owned almost all of India after 1000 A.D. and until the British conquest, and they conquered Spain and the southern part of France, although they were gradually driven out of Europe, since at that time our race was less degenerate and had not lost its will to live.

Islam, like Christianity, served the Jews’ purposes by inculcating superstitions about the equality of races, teaching that all anthropoids that believed in a religious rigmarole as an article of faith and avoided rational thought were equal and vastly superior to persons, whatever their race, who held other superstitions or, what was much worse, did not have delusions about the real world. The poor Arabs took that nonsense seriously (God had said it, hadn’t he, in a confab with Mahomet?), and were so thoroughly mongrelized that today the only real Arabs, indeed, the only real Semites, are to be found in Saudi Arabia, where some of the tribes stayed home and thus escaped much of the hybridization that destroyed the Arabs in the lands they conquered. It is possible, of course, that an Arab could be found here and there in the Islamic countries that the press calls “Arab” because one or another dialect of Arabic is spoken there (Egypt, Iraq, Syria, etc.), but the population of those countries is a mass of mongrels.

There is one conspicuous difference between Islam and Christianity in their dysgenic effects, equally pleasing to Jews. With the exception of some early Christian sects that were exterminated when the Fathers of the Church wormed their way to power and could start killing their competitors, Christianity, during the greater part of its history, enforced celibacy and homosexuality on a fairly large part of our race, including some of its most intelligent members, through the priesthood and monasticism, and broke up families and family property by prohibiting marriages between even fairly distant relatives. Islam, on the other hand, ordained polygyny and encouraged Moslems to fill their harems, and engender children by women of all different races; that is why the Arabic stock was diluted and liquidated so much more quickly than our own.

Many Christian sects have been more or less theoretically anti-Jewish in the past, and some still profess to be, but holy men cannot resist the most indubitable revelation of God’s will, cash, and now that the Jews have virtual control of the finances of the countries that once belonged to our race, the various Christian sects are behaving as Rabbi Schindler predicted a century ago: they are erring daughters trooping home to their nice Yiddish mama.

— November, 1981

I’m Looking for Work

Kevin Alfred Strom — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:32:07 +0000

Kevin Alfred Strom

by Kevin Alfred Strom

LIKE THIS SITE? Let me build one that’s just as nice for you or your organization. I’m Kevin Alfred Strom, the Webmaster and editor of this Revilo Oliver site since its inception. Since the government made me a fourth class citizen, it has become very difficult for me to support myself and my three children.

I am skilled in writing, editing, graphics, and publishing (both the print and Web varieties), and I have become quite expert at customizing WordPress to create online magazines, newspapers, and organizational Web sites. If you have any kind of paying work in these fields, no matter how small, please let me know. I’m eager to get started. Just click on the ‘contact’ link on this page.

If you don’t have any work for me now, but appreciate my past efforts, please consider making a donation.

Oliver’s Works on Yockey Republished

Kevin Alfred Strom — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:44:59 +0000

by Kevin Alfred Strom

TWO IMPORTANT essays by Dr. Oliver have just been added to this site, but they don’t show up at the top of the main page because I have been tagging all articles with their original publication dates, so the archives show the correct year. Thus these pieces are filed under 1966 and 1969 respectively.

They are The Shadow of Empire: Francis Parker Yockey After Twenty Years, from the June 1966 number of The American Mercury; and, also from the Mercury, the Fall 1969 issue, After Fifty Years.

These essays, up until today, had only been available in libraries or online in poor transcripts of error-filled scans.

The Shadow of Empire, in addition to being a valuable analysis and critique of Yockey’s Imperium, is a call to sanity and realism among those who were then fighting to preserve America and the West via conservatism.

After Fifty Years, which was also made into a short film, is Revilo P. Oliver’s inspiring call to young Americans to follow the revolutionary path foreshadowed in Imperium, issued at the formation of the National Youth Alliance, led by Louis T. Byers. The NYA would eventually be the vehicle for the philosophy, writing, and social activism of William L. Pierce.

Charles Scott Hamel, Distinguished Student of Revilo P. Oliver, Dies at 72

Kevin Alfred Strom — Thu, 06 May 2010 13:04:14 +0000

by Kevin Alfred Strom

A NOTED STUDENT and biographer of Revilo P. Oliver, Charles Scott Hamel, has died in South Carolina at the age of 72. From the Southern Partisan Web site, we read:

The esteemed publisher and benefactor of Southern Partisan magazine, Charles Scott Hamel, died Monday, 1 March 2010, after an extended illness at Providence Hospital in Columbia, South Carolina. He was 72. At the time of his death he lived in Chapin, South Carolina on the banks of Lake Murray.

Born in Arlington, Virginia, 9 April 1937, Mr. Hamel was the son of the late Charles D. Hamel and Ethel Scott Hamel of Washington City, District of Columbia. As a boy, Mr. Hamel matriculated at the prestigious Virginia Episcopal School in Lynchburg, class of 1956; and thence to the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee where he earned a bachelor of arts degree.

Mr. Hamel devoted much of his life to the study of the classics and the history and culture ancient Greece and Rome. After college Mr. Hamel was invited to study at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana under the tutelage of the preeminent philologist and renowned Classicist Revilo P. Oliver. Mr. Hamel was later asked by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute to write the biographical entry about Dr. Oliver in the work American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia. After graduating from Illinois with a Masters Degree in Classics, Mr. Hamel studied for a time at the University of Chicago. Mr. Hamel was also an active member of long-standing with the Philadelphia Society.

In his post-graduate life, Mr. Hamel was a teacher of Latin at various colleges, academies, and college preparatory schools including the Archibald Rutledge Academy in McClellanville.

In the 1970s Mr. Hamel sought to expand his influence on the world of letters and launched the Foundation for American Education, which he helmed until his death. The Foundation is an eleemosynary organization dedicated to preserving and promoting the classical traditions in the American scholarship and specifically to the publication of books and monographs which otherwise might not be publicly available. The Foundation has produced such notable works as the re-publication of Lincoln the Man by noted American poet and scholar Edgar Lee Masters. Lincoln the Man is an unflinching biography of President Abraham Lincoln which was actually banned by the United States Congress at the time of its original publication in the 1930s. The Foundation most recently published two volumes of the collected works of professor Clyde N. Wilson, Ph.D.: From Union to Empire: Essays in the Jeffersonian Tradition and Defending Dixie: Essays in Southern History and Culture.

Mr. Hamel was also keenly aware of the loss and cheapening of American history and culture as well as that of the ancients. For nearly a quarter-century, he served as publisher of the outspoken Southern Partisan magazine: a unique journal of opinion dedicated to introducing the intellectual traditions of the old South to a new generation….

Revilo Pendleton Oliver forever altered the course of many lives, through his writing, through his teaching, and through the great force of his personality. Charles Scott Hamel was one of those whose life was changed by his association with Dr. Oliver.

Mr. Hamel also did not stint in sharing his knowledge with others. It’s inspiring to read of his efforts, which continue through those he motivated and taught. The tasks he took on — spreading the ideals of classicism, scholarship, and Western civilization in an age of trash culture, raising the banner of intellect in the crippled and downtrodden South, and standing for historical truth and the ideals of freedom — were difficult ones, and put him directly at odds with the regime in Washington. Let us, in noting his passing, vow to emulate his dedication, courage, and energy.

Read the full article at The Southern Partisan

New Revilo Oliver Pages

Kevin Alfred Strom — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:20:37 +0000

This site's publisher and Webmaster Kevin Alfred Strom

by Kevin Alfred Strom

I AM gradually converting all of the existing Revilo P. Oliver documents on this site to a database-driven format so that new features, functionality, and content can easily be added in the future. So far, I have added all of the existing articles and recordings through 1968 and will be adding much more in the near future. (By the way, the cursive ‘R’ in the site’s new icon is a scan of Dr. Oliver’s own signature initial.)

All of the newly-posted articles can be searched for keywords or text strings using the search box on the new main page. Eventually, every article will be searchable there. If you need to access the old html site, it’s still available and will remain so.

One of the most exciting — and totally new — additions is the new Papers of Revilo P. Oliver section.

If my work has benefited you, please consider making a donation. Since the inception of the government’s efforts to destroy and imprison me, my ability to support myself and my family has been greatly reduced.

List of Oliver Correspondents, pre-1976

Kevin Alfred Strom — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 06:05:45 +0000

by Kevin Alfred Strom

N.B.: I’ve added this post so that all the names in the Oliver correspondence files will be indexed properly, but this is not the main means by which you should access the archive. Browse the archive by visiting http://revilo-oliver.com/papers .

The Revilo P. Oliver Papers
The Alphabetical Files

Due to a tragic theft aided and abetted by the FBI’s “Joint Terrorism Task Force,” only about half of Dr. Oliver’s alphabetical files are available. This file constitutes the initial release of Dr. Oliver’s alphabetical archive, comprising the folders which held only pre-1976 correspondence. The full surviving alphabetical archive will be released publicly in the year 2020.

Download this entire archive as a zip file (218 MB)

LIST OF FILES [easiest access (uses frames) is at http://revilo-oliver.com/papers ]

end of file

Our Vanishing Cousins

Kevin Alfred Strom — Sun, 01 Dec 1985 14:10:35 +0000

by Revilo P. Oliver
(Liberty Bell, December 1985)

SINCE THE PUBLICATION of the late Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis in 1971, the mountain gorilla has been a species of particular interest to us, if we take an intelligent interest in our own species and its problematical future. The gorillas, our cousins and a branch of the evolutionary line of which the several human species are at present the most conspicuous and numerous product, are a biological failure and their species is dwindling rapidly and inexorably to final extinction. Ardrey made the suggestion, which was startling at first sight, that the racial psyche of the gorillas was biologically aware of their hopeless plight and impending doom. That genetic despair was manifest in the etiolation of their vital instincts and progressive loss of the racial will-to-live.

When we Aryans ponder the plight of our own species, the only one for which we must feel a personal and necessary concern, we observe a phenomenal etiolation of our racial instincts and a progressive effacement of our racial will to live and to subdue other species for the benefit and enhancement of our own. There are, furthermore, obvious analogies. The gorillas, although they are physically by far the more powerful of the primates, have become peace-lovers in their degeneracy and they avoid combat, slinking away from adversaries they cannot frighten by idle blustering. They have lost the territorial imperative and no longer have homes or territories they defend from the intrusion of aliens. The mammalian imperative to perpetuate and multiply the species has become so feeble that males have become permissive toward their females and offspring, tolerating profligacy in the former and insubordination in the latter, and showing little concern for the welfare of either.

Gorillas unconsciously, and Aryans consciously, seem to acquiesce in the decline and eventual extinction of their species, and if we would apologize for them by explaining that they are retreating before enemies with whom they do not have the intelligence to cope or the courage to contend, is not that apology an admission that the species have become biologically obsolete and unfit to survive in the conditions in which they now find themselves? And may not our contemporaries’ endless gabble about “one world,” “brotherhood,” and similar frantic denials of reality emanate from a racial psyche which, far below the level of consciousness and implicit in the primordial force that makes an organism live, has somehow sensed that Aryans no longer have the vitality to strive and conquer and so must ineluctably go under in a world in which only the fit survive?

It is therefore with more than an academic interest that we take up a new study of a species that shows such disturbing analogies to our own, Gorillas in the Mist, by Dian Fossey (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1983; $21.50).(1) Miss Fossey, with a dedication of which only women are capable, devoted thirteen years of her life to close and intimate observation of mountain gorillas and to personal association with many of them, who accepted her companionship as though she were one of their group. She learned to recognize individuals by their features and distinctive nose-prints. (Portraits of a dozen of her best friends are assembled for comparison on the end-papers of the book.) She carried the young on her shoulders and became such a pal of adults that one photograph shows her playfully tickling a monster that could have literally torn her limb from limb. She gave fanciful names to the gorillas she knew best and followed their individual fortunes for years, often from birth to death. (Four pages of genealogical tables show the descendants of as many prominent males, usually with dates of birth and decease and a notation of the cause of death.)

(Footnote 1: The book is well printed with apt photographs. Miss Fossey writes a generally acceptable prose, but although the publishers are one of the most respected still in the business, their editorial staff was given to somnolence. One reads, for example, on p. xviii, “Dr. Leakey’s planning was indeed fortuitous [sic!]. In the six and a half years [since the last study of the gorillas] … the ratio of adult gorilla males to females … had dropped … accompanied by a halving of the population.” Miss Fossey did not intend nonsense, so she must have written, or intended to write, ‘fortunate.’ But even that will not do, although readers accustomed to the catachrestic and soloecistic prose of our contemporaries may guess the meaning that is not expressed. What the author meant is, ‘It was fortunate that Dr. Leakey decided to have a new study made so soon after the preceding one,’ i.e., before the population of gorillas dwindled to less than half.)

Miss Fossey, being a woman, even found spiritual values in the anthropoids with whom she associated for so many years. She became especially fond of a female gorilla whom she named Macho. (The name is a Swahili word that means ‘eyes,’ and has, of course, nothing to do with the Spanish adjective that means ‘male’ and is commonly misused by ‘hippies’ and journalists who try to be cute.) Of one encounter, she writes: “Suddenly I heard a noise in the foliage by my side and looked directly into the beautifully trusting face of Macho, who stood gazing at me. She had left her group to come to me. On perceiving the softness, tranquillity, and trust conveyed by Macho’s eyes, I was overwhelmed by the extraordinary depth of our rapport. The poignancy of her gift will never diminish.” Macho belonged to the harem of a gorilla whom Miss Fossey named Uncle Bert, and she was especially grieved when both were killed, evidently while trying to protect their infant son from either poachers or officials of the nigger government, who wanted to impress visiting journalists.

Poachers shoot gorillas to obtain their heads, for sale to tourists, and their ears, tongues, testicles, and small fingers, for use in manufacturing a potent tonic that is prepared and sold by native holy men, who practice sumu, the local variety of the ju-ju that is the common faith of the Blacks, who are, by nature, even more religious than “born again” Americans (2). Both religions, incidentally, venerate the cross as a sacred symbol.

(Footnote 2: Miss Fossey conclusively confirms the observations of Dr. Harry B. Wright (Witness to Witchcraft, New York, 1957), which I have so often cited in my remarks about religion. Nature has equipped Congoids for a Faith so intense that the mumbo-jumbo of their witch-doctors can excite a psychosomatic reaction that is lethal. Miss Fossey knew one Black male who died because a sorcerer condemned him to death by cutting the throat of a dedicated chicken, and she saw some of her own employees, who believed that a hex had been put on them, convinced they would die if the spell was not removed by a well-paid holy man; she saw them actually waste away before her very eyes until she provided the money for the magical cure, which soon restored them to health. It appears that the niggers’ belief in the supernatural can also be used to subject a victim to the will of the wizard. One of Miss Fossey’s employees surreptitiously took hair from her hairbrush and used it for an invultuation essentially similar to the invultuations practiced by Christians during the Middle Ages. The hair was affixed to a bit of wood carved to resemble her head (not, note, her entire body, as would have been necessary had her death been intended); as soon as the scalp of the little image had been entirely covered with her hair, it was to be pulverized and the powder was to be introduced into her food and drink by her servant, a little at a time, so that the contamination would not be noticed. It was believed that this technique would render her totally subservient to the will of the magician, and such doubtless would have been the effect, had it been practiced on an African native. Miss Fossey, however, belonged to a race that nature has equipped with organs of rational thought and scepticism about supernatural hocus-pocus, although in many members of our race the organs atrophy for want of exercise.)

The gorillas have retreated to the slopes of several extinct volcanoes that lie in a narrow band across the boundaries of three territories in Africa that were once under civilized rule, but were restored to savagery by American taxpayers: the Belgian Congo (now called Zaïre), Belgian Ruanda (now called Rwanda for no good reason), and Uganda, which will retain its old name so long as British boobs finance its savages as “members of the Commonwealth.” The natives of the region are Congoids, chiefly of the Bantu tribe of Hutu (Bahutu), except that in Ruanda some Matusi (Tutsi) survived the massacres that the Americans incited and financed. The Matusi are an Hamitic people, who speak a language that is related to Ancient Egyptian and Coptic, and some anthropological theorists like to imagine that they are descended from the mongrelized Egyptians of the later Empire, who could have tried to colonize the interior of Africa. (The theory dates from Victorian times and doubtless suggested to Sir Henry Rider Haggard the background of his famous romance, She, and its sequels.) The Watusi have a considerable admixture of Black blood and most of them have features and complexions that are somewhat Negroid; they are noted for their physique and stature, since many of the men are seven feet tall, and they have supplied many of the basketball players who engross the mental capacities of some Americans. Although they had no real culture, the Watusi were more intelligent than the Bantu and naturally dominated the lower race in Ruanda until American do-gooders, with their morbid hatred of civilization, promoted “anti-colonialism” and supplied the numerically preponderant Hutu with modern rifles and ammunition to help them exterminate the “aristocratic” Watusi, who were not given modern arms and were overwhelmed by the vast mass of their inferiors. The resulting massacres were horrendous, but excited no qualms in the United States, where “intellectuals,” depraved by Jewish superstitions, are always pleased when a superior population, even if not Aryan, is destroyed by a lower species, thus producing progress toward a “democracy” of universal barbarity.

If your interest in gorillas is sociobiological and philosophical, you will be disappointed by Miss Fossey’s book. She seems never to have heard of Ardrey’s thesis or have thought of the biological implications of what she observed. The gorillas are indeed making rapid progress toward extinction. There were 500 of them in 1960 and only 242 in 1981. In one area, a population of 169 dwindled to 52 in seven years. Miss Fossey attributes the decline to the depredations of more human anthropoids, which became an important factor only in quite recent times and, as she may not have perceived, directly as a result of “anti-colonialism.” The savages were not only turned loose, but are heavily subsidized by Aryan idiots, who supply them with foodstuffs and medical services to accelerate their prodigious multiplication, and fawningly provide them with some trappings of civilization to encourage them to strut about as “emerging nations” in what would be a black-face farce, if the boobs still had wit enough to laugh at absurdity. Miss Fossey hopes that the gorillas can be preserved as an “endangered species” with funds supplied by civilized nations, but with the rapid breeding of Congoids, there will be constant encroachment on the tiny territory that has been theoretically reserved for the big apes and a continual diminution of their food. Gorillas are not carnivorous and subsist entirely on wild vegetation, spiced with insects. It takes an enormous amount of such food to nourish four hundred pounds of muscle, and an adult gorilla has to spend all his waking hours in eating.

If ability to survive environmental change is a test of intelligence, all apes are less intelligent than baboons, who are classified as monkeys, and Congoids, who are classified as human, two species that instinctively form tribal organizations under the rule of chiefs, whereas apes, like “liberated” Americans, reject the hierarchical principle and individuals think only of their own comfort and whims. Apes do that instinctively, while Americans have profited from the “back-to-the-ape” movement in their public schools.

Miss Fossey has compiled scientifically a vast amount of data about gorillas. They are less intelligent than chimpanzees. They do not think of using twigs or sticks to obtain desired food, and the cries by which they communicate among themselves are less numerous and significant (3). (It would be interesting to see a comparison between gorillas and their nearest congeners, the orang-utans of the East Indies.)

(Footnote 3: Miss Fossey does not mention the experiment conducted at an American zoo — in Atlanta, as I recall — a few years ago. A gorilla was provided with a television receiver, and it was found that his favorite programs were the ones that were most popular with American addicts of the boob-tube.)

Miss Fossey and her White assistants made a detailed study of the pathology of gorillas, and set forth the results with scientific precision in several appendices to her book. Endemic diseases are a chronic dysentery and hepatitis. (The latter will be recognized as the most popular disease of American homosexuals, since the epidemic of “AIDS” is still in its early stages. Apes are not practicing homosexuals, and I judge from Miss Fossey’s silence that male gorillas do not handle the sexual organs of other males as an assertion of social superiority, as do chimpanzees.) Gorillas often contract pneumonia, which is usually fatal. They are commonly infested with parasites, ranging from body lice to hookworms and tapeworms.

Although male gorillas seem indifferent to adultery by their females, it is noteworthy that when a male has taken a female with her child from another group, he kills the child before engendering offspring of his own. Gorillas, like all mammals except humans, copulate only when the female is in oestrus, but Miss Fossey observed some young males who tried to subigate sexually immature females, perhaps for practice (4). According to her observations, females become puberate at the age of ten or sometimes nine, but it is possible that some may be as precocious as the negress who was in an advanced stage of pregnancy when she was nine and attracted some attention because physicians announced they would abort her and the hospital was picketed by a crowd of nitwits, who believed that Jesus had injected a soul into the fetus, presumably intending to afflict Americans with another nuisance.

(Footnote 4: Persons who are much interested in such matters may wish to speculate about the significance of an odd incident reported on p. 81.)

The gorillas have an ardent champion in Miss Fossey and, no doubt, some of her colleagues, but it is unlikely that their biologically obsolete species can long be preserved from extinction. Whether our race will follow them into oblivion is still uncertain.

Revilo P. Oliver

Afterthoughts on Afterlife

What Is ‘Liberalism’?

The Three American Eras

The Descent of Islam

I’m Looking for Work

Oliver’s Works on Yockey Republished

Charles Scott Hamel, Distinguished Student of Revilo P. Oliver, Dies at 72

New Revilo Oliver Pages

List of Oliver Correspondents, pre-1976

Ackerman, Adolph J:

Alabama, State of:

Allego, Donna M:

Allen, Prof Ward:

Allerton, Walter W:

Altieri, Mrs Sean:

American Mercury:

Americans for National Security:

Anderson, Mrs Mildred:

Anderson, Thomas:

Anderson,Vincent M:

Andrews, D Frank, III:

Arnold, Mary:

Arutunoff, Armais:

Ashton, David:

Babcock, Mary:

Baird, Rand:

Barbush, Raymond F:

Barlow, Prof Claude W:

Barnes, Eric:

Barrett, David P:

Bartholomew, Fletcher:

Beezley, PC:

Bender, Grace:

Blount, Alice:

Bosl, Prof Dr Karl:

Boyd, Estelle D:

Bozell, Brent:

Braden, Spruille:

Brady, Kevin:

Brandt, Dr and Mrs JW:

Brehm, Mrs WF:

Brophy, Frank Cullen:

Brown, Lawrence R:

Brownlee, George:

Bruere, R T:

Bump, George Christian:

Butler, Eric:

Cain, Mrs Mary Margaret:

Caldwell, Taylor:

California Justice Foundation:

Cambridge, Kathryn:

Camille, Milton J:

Campbell, Gen William Peyton:

Canfield, Joseph M:

Canwell, Al F:

Carto, Willis:

Caum, Suzanne:

Cecere, Dr Geremia:

Chakford, W C:

Chalfant, John W:

Champaign County Historical Museum:

Chapman, Conrad (National Economic Council):

Clavelle, Richard:

Clement, Michel:

Cochran, Louis (FBI):

Collins, John H:

Common Sense:

Congress of Freedom:

Conseil Canadien Humanites:

Coon, Carleton:

Corbin, Mrs Lottie S:

Corvin, Helen:

Counterattack:

Cowger, John:

Craig, James E:

Crawford, Mrs Virginia:

Crow, Mrs Martha V:

Cryer, John C:

Cunningham, Maurice P: