MARXMANSHIP IN DALLAS, Part II

by Professor Revilo P. Oliver

(An edited version of this article was published in American Opinion, March 1964. Except for the correction of minor typographical errors, this is an exact transcription from Dr. Oliver's original typescript, which was finished on 11th January, 1964. — KAS)

 
OSWALD's memorable demonstration of Marxmanship in Dallas may have saved the United States. And of Kennedy it may someday be said that the good he did not do lived after him.

Henceforth, no American has an excuse for illusion. He has had an ocular demonstration of who and what his enemies are. And that lesson is repeated every day as his enemies, recklessly exposing themselves, try to carry out their original plan in spite of Comrade Oswald's bungling.

The assassination and its aftermath must have given to many Americans the shock that each of us must somehow feel in his own being before he can understand what Communists really are and why they are seeking to kill or enslave him. That understanding does noy automatically come from mere information. We all carry in our minds a great accumulation of items of information, such as that a continent lies under the ice of Antarctica or that the natives of the Andaman Islands are pygmies, which have no effect on our thinking because such facts seem irrelevant to our own lives. By this time, every literate American has in his own mind a good deal of information about Communists, although often as detached and unrelated items that seem remote from his quotidian concerns. Even copious and systematic information may remain, so to speak, inert in the mind until illumined by a perception that carries conviction.

The Moment of Truth

The perception usually comes from some personal experience or observation. It may be some minor shock, such as the falling apple is said to have given Newton, but at that shock a thousand bits of scattered knowledge latent in the mind arrange themselves into a coherent whole and exhibit a basic truth.

When I was a youngster, I knew of a man of substance who told me that he had almost been enlisted in a Communist-front operation to release from prison a creature named Mooney, who had murdered nine persons in California to show how much he loved Humanity. Although moved by the plausible and pathetic story told him by the editor of a "literary" periodical, the gentleman was canny enough to check a few facts and then visit the headquarters of the organization soliciting his support. His unannaounced visit gave him his moment of perception. he returned with the conviction that he had seen specimens of a criminal gang that was burrowing its way beneath the foundations of society, bent on undermining the whole nation. I thought his alarm preposterous, and, I am afraid, smiled at it.

In college, I could not overlook the young Communists. It required no great acumen to see that their idealistic squeakings about "social justice" and the "downtrodden" were mere pretense to cover the malice and phrenetic rancors seething within them. But I did not really understand them until I met, during the great Crusade to Save the Soviet, a young lawyer who had been provided with a direct commission and a "vital" job in Washington to preserve him from the kind of military service that may be bad for the skin. He explained to me the wickedness of making a profit, and he told me how "social justice" would come to businessmen. "We'll shoot them in the belly," he said rapturously; "they die longer that way." And the greasy-faced creature licked its dry lips.

A professional man tells me that his moment came at the time that Irreproachable Ike, violating the Constitution he had sworn to uphold, used the Army to help the Warren Gang get the race war under way. He was talking to a clergyman of the "social gospel" variety whose emotional perturbation he did not understand until some indiscreet exclamations let him see that the holy man was inwardly trembling with eagerness for news that Americans had been bayonetted or machine-gunned on the streets of Little Rock.

The moment came to another man when he was one of a party of four in the bar of a private club. One of the four, an evidently urbane and cultivated gentleman, who had come to the United States as a refugee and had been given a salary and security that he could never have attained in the land whence he came, took a Scotch or two too many and began to make it painfully clear that he regarded Americans as detestable swine who need to be taught, with the toe of a boot, their place in One World.

A university professor tells me that his moment came two years ago when a senior colleague, who for many years had pontificated about the "marketplace of ideas," and, serene as a seated Buddha, had beamed benignly when Gus Hall and Gordon Hall spoke on the campus, "because we need to hear all sides," began to yell like a Comanche at a scalp-dance. What had shattered academic serenity was the discovery that there was a horrible "hate-sheet" read by "Fascist war-mongers" who must be "stamped out" or, at least, have their teeth kicked in. As for contributors to the hate-sheet, said the Sakya Muni of Academic Freedom, whom I quote verbatim, "they must be exterminated. Shooting is too good for them." The hate-sheet in question was that mild and self-consciously "moderate" fortnightly, National Review, and my informant believes that the Double Dome would have run amok with a kris, had he even suspected the existence of American Opinion. As it was, however, the yells sufficed to make my informant suddenly realize what makes "Liberals" tick — and he compared them to certain well wrapped and disguised packages that are occasionally discovered by a postal inspector or the baggage master of an airline because they also tick.

A New Yorker says that his moment came in early December when he read a column by Walter Lippmann, whom he had long supposed to be suffering from nothing more serious than a cerebrum bloated with ideals. In that column the punctate pundit, wrapping his feet about his neck in one of his customary verbal twists, claimed that "in a free [sic] country" criticism of "Civil Rights and Russia" is "inherently subversive." Not content with having thus exposed himself, Big-Brained Walt went on tactlessly to yowl that because Oswald scored a bull's-eye on Jack, "the only solace for the nation's [sic] shame and grief can come from a Purge" — a purge, of course, of the awful Americans who think they still have a country. Thus, said my correspondent, was long covert hatred of Americans and dissembled blood-lust made manifest for all to see. It is possible, to be sure, that the quoted phrase was just lipography, and that Lippmann meant something else, such as forced feeding of castor oil to Americans, but the phrase served to give at least one of his readers an impulse to put together and comprehend many data that his mind was holding in suspension.

Ex uno disce omnes

Oswald was a young Communist punk, but, aside from his fortuitous notoriety, there was nothing unusual about him. You have seen thousands like him, and you are paying taxes to breed or nourish swarms of them.

You saw a representative selection of them in that excellent film, "Operation Abolition," which is now more timely than ever. You saw the veteran criminals, who should have been deported or imprisoned long ago, riot and yell at the House Committee, an official delegation of the highest governmental authority in our nation. You will not have failed to recognize in them rabid beasts grown insolent with long impunity. You saw also the rioting swarms of young vermin that had crawled out from the woodwork of the University of California and other tax-supported institutions of "higher learning." You had an opportunity to study their degenerate and hate-contorted faces.

You can see fledgling Oswalds in the flesh whenever, as occasionally happens, a loyal American is permitted to speak on or near a college campus. The young "progressives" will be there to jeer and quibble. It will be instructive to observe how many are deformed in body or feature as well as mind, and, if you approach near enough, you can see the hatred glistening in beady eyes. (For a close approach, a handkerchief sprinkled with ammonia will minimize the discomfort.) And you should reflect that you are financing, directly through taxes or contributions or indirectly through the institution's tax-exemption, the hatching and "education" of young murderers.

You can see the species wherever you look, and with just a little patience and dexterity, you can make all but the most hardened and experienced disclose their inner emotions — perhaps in a spate of verbiage, but at least for a moment in an unguarded word or glare in the eyes; and you will feel like a swimmer who has glimpsed, six fathoms down, the flatm greenish flicker of a turning shark.

You can see them on television, on the floor of Congress, and in their pulpits; you can read them in the press. And you need have no doubts. Whether they are trying crudely or subtly to use the Communists' assassination of Kennedy to incite hatred against "right-wing extremists," you can no longer fancy that they are just ignorant "intellectuals" with mixed-up ganglia. They are lying. They are lying with conscious calculation. They are lying with murderous intent.

You cannot mistake them when, in your very presence and with breath-taking effrontery, they discharge the diseased hatreds and homicidal lusts that fester in their gangrenous little minds.

From direct observation, you, as an American, can now recognize your enemy and know what he is. And if ever you are tempted to doubt the evidence of your own eyes and ears, remember that such monsters are no novelty — that in the brief span of man's sad and dolorous history one can find almost innumerable recorded instances of recrudescent savagery and of the frenzied and exacerbated rage of anthropoid beasts that cannot bear to be dragged toward civilization and humanity. The best illustration in a book that I have seen is Louis Zoul's Thugs and Communists (Public Opinion, Long Island City 4; cf. American Opinion, January, 1962, pp. 29-36).

The vital thing is that you, as an American, realize that you are being hunted by a feral and stealthy pack. And that this is no nightmare, from which you will automatically awaken in a moment, nor yet is it a vision excited by the writers who strove to be more outré than Poe. That is a reality which you must face, if you are to survive at all.

The Time is Now

With the nature of our enemies thus made manifest, and with such unmistakable indications of their numbers and power, an American who does not wilfully close his eyes and drug his mind can scarcely escape a perception of the magnitude and immediacy of our peril. This is the year of decision. We cannot hope for a complete victory this year, but we must end thirty years of unvaried retreat and, for a change, advance a little to recover some of the ground we have lost and to turn the tide of battle. A mere stalemate is scarcely possible, and another defeat will be our last. With another defeat, you and I may not be alive in 1965 — or, if we are, we may regret it.

Now that Providence has given us a last chance, we must use it wisely and well. We must act with courage and determination, and, above all, with a rational and realistic understanding of our situation. We are fighting against enormous, though not insuperable odds, and we shall need the utmost effort of every American who will work with us. Our greatest handicap is that we, unlike our enemies, do not have a unified and secret command which plans the total strategy without need to disclose or explain it to anyone, and which carries out that strategy by issuing orders that are obeyed without question. Against a conspiracy that makes its decisions in secret and coördinates with the efficiency of a single organism the movements of its

s running out.
 

Copyright ©2000 Kevin Alfred Strom.  Back to Revilo P. Oliver Index