Classic EssaysKevin Alfred Strom

A Tribute to Richard Cotten

Richard Cotten was a pioneer pro-White broadcaster, an inspiration to hundreds of thousands, and originator of the credo “Freedom is not free; free men are not equal; and equal men are not free.”

by Kevin Alfred Strom

ON A SUMMER in my youth, in the turbulent terminal years of the 1960s, I happened to tune in to radio station WFAX in Falls Church, Virginia. The program I heard for the first time that day had an influence on me that still reverberates in my life. The program was called Conservative Viewpoint and the speaker was the man who, years later, would introduce and close each American Dissident Voices broadcast, Mr. Richard Berkeley Cotten (pictured). Mr. Cotten had then and has now what a friend of mine calls an “audiogenic” voice, with a deep, authoritative resonance and an easy grace of expression that denotes the gentleman of the “old school” which he in fact is. It was not only his manner of speaking and his voice which drew me to him, however; it was what he was saying.

Those were, in many ways, terrible times to be growing up, and I was just a child, really. I couldn’t have been over 14 years old, and the Jew-inspired “youth revolution” was in full flower, with its poisonous petals of promiscuity, miscegenation, nihilism, and drug use blooming all around me. I knew that what was going on was wrong, and I was deeply troubled by the fact that the media and government establishments seemed to be approving of and fostering these destructive developments. I was lucky to have one fine teacher at my junior high school who stood firm against these trends and who pointed me in the right direction; and I was also lucky to have found a voice for sanity and reason on the radio in Mr. Richard Cotten.

As American society entered its planned disintegration in that terrible decade that sounded the death knell for the Old America, the airwaves were full of ostensibly patriotic broadcasters. There was a great demand for the truth, truth which the mainstream media would not provide. There were Christian patriot programs, constitutionally-oriented programs, conservative programs, John Birch Society programs, and many more, some of them quite successful and with large audiences.

One of those I remember very clearly was H. L. Hunt’s Lifeline from Dallas, Texas, with the superb announcer Melvin Munn. All of these shows had value, and they did, like the many patriot programs of today, tell the truth — part of the truth, that is. But Mr. Cotten’s program was different from any of these, in that the truth to him was not something that you could divide and parcel out. Other broadcasters observed the taboos that they thought (perhaps rightly) kept them on the air, that kept America’s enemies from worrying about them too much. But, like American Dissident Voices, Mr. Cotten’s Conservative Viewpoint told its listeners the full truth as he saw it; it named America’s enemies by name; and it identified race as the most crucial issue facing our people worldwide.

This naturally brought down the same Jewish pressures upon Mr. Cotten and the stations which carried his program that have been brought to bear against our free speech in later years. He won a landmark freedom-of-speech case at the U.S. Court of Appeals when the notorious anti-American Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL), one of the main Jewish pressure and espionage agencies in the United States, tried to prevent the license renewal of a station which carried his program. The court ruled in Mr. Cotten’s favor, stating that “whatever we may think of his opinions, Mr. Cotten has a right to be heard from.”

Richard Cotten stated early in his radio career, “You haven’t really lived until you’ve been called an anti-Semite.” And he has been fighting for the truth for some 37 years now. He began on a local station in Bakersfield, California in the late 1950s, and by the late 1960s was broadcasting on over 30 stations across the United States and the world, some of them super-power international giants like XERB and XEG. For about twenty years he endured a grueling schedule of scripting and producing not one but six Conservative Viewpoint programs per week, and for an even longer period produced his newsletter of the same name.

Ian Smith, left, Prime Minister of White Rhodesia meeting with Richard Cotten for a broadcast interview in Salisbury.

He traveled the world gathering material and interviews for his show, making trips to embattled Rhodesia and South Africa and attempting to rally White people to the defense of their brothers and sisters in those lands. He made an historic series of broadcasts from the Middle East, and was perhaps the first American broadcaster to bring evidence of Israeli atrocities against civilians to light. He gathered together thousands of rare and valuable documents under the umbrella of his National Documentation Institute and made them available without charge to patriots and scholars around the world, many of which I have drawn on for the production of my program over the last four years.

One of many documents published and popularized by Mr. Cotten (Rep. Rarick was his personal friend).

I didn’t have the pleasure of meeting Richard Cotten until one day in 1983 while I was working on a project at the National Alliance’s then-headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. A tall, distinguished-looking fellow with white hair and mustache came in to have a talk with Dr. Pierce, and as he was saying good-bye I recognized his voice. It was the same voice I had heard so many years before, a voice which had inspired and informed me half my young lifetime ago. That was one of those moments you can never forget, when two parts of your life come together in a flash.

In the 1990s, Mr. Cotten has been a guest commentator on American Dissident Voices; a spokesman for White solidarity on nationwide television; and he has been my friendly critic and staunch supporter. I am proud to call him my friend. In 1993 I was delighted when he agreed to be the voice which introduces this program. [His introduction and closing was used until 1997. — K.A.S.]

Let’s explore some of Mr. Cotten’s writings.

His Conservative Viewpoint of 15th July, 1965, contains an illustration of the sculpture which decorates the headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in New York City, a smooth, featureless, generic human form. Mr. Cotten explains:

Here is the UNESCO “Brown Man” from an official UNESCO photograph. It is pure Communist art, supposed to represent our great-great-great-grandchildren, after the Marxist world revolution succeeds in destroying all national, racial, and other distinctions. Notice the complete absence of features hinting of race or any other individuality. Just a raceless, nationless, classless, characterless, faceless, homeless slob — your “integrated” great-great-grandson.

Unesco statue

I would add that we see this kind of art everywhere these days — on public buildings, on government or ad-council posters or advertisements, on postage stamps. It is art in which the facial features of human beings are obscured or blurred, and the coloration is an obscure brown or sepia tone; art in which even with the closest inspection the observer cannot detect the race, or for that matter the expression or character, of those depicted.

It is the art of a dying society, a society afraid of its own identity. It is the art of an occupation regime engaging in psychological warfare upon us, purposely denying us the spiritual necessity of seeing idealized images of men and women of our race in our art. The disgusting and frightening statue of the “headless olympian” at the recent Olympic Games is perhaps the most startling example of this psywar which Mr. Cotten had the perception to recognize three decades ago.

In July 1978 he published an article entitled “The High Cost of Remaining Uninvolved.” It contains a striking illustration which I will try to describe to you. Across the entire first page, and filling nearly half of it, is a large rectangle covered with 286 capital letters, equally spaced. 285 of the 286 are the letter G, for Gentile. In the center of the arrangement is one lonely letter J, for Jew. The purpose of the illustration is to bring home forcefully the true numerical relationship between the population of Gentiles and Jews in the world.

The legend by Mr. Cotten reads as follows:

This illustration has been developed by me, Richard B. Cotten, and I accept responsibility for the accuracy of the presentation. It is based upon a world population of four billion, eighty-three million (1978 World Almanac) and a world Jewish population of fourteen million, two hundred fifty nine thousand, five hundred and twenty five as stated in the 1978 American Jewish Yearbook. By simple division we arrive at the figure of one Jew to every two hundred and eighty-six gentiles. To maintain symmetry this illustration depicts only two hundred eighty-five gentiles.

Mr. Cotten continues:

An extraordinarily high price is being extracted from those who have deliberately chosen to remain uninvolved. Our nation is being destroyed — from within — and no educated citizen of the Republic can pretend to be unaware. Yet for reasons which at first may appear to be reasonable and prudent, these self-same citizens are withholding their help. …I have met a lot of very good people. These are people who most sincerely believe they follow the correct path in avoiding any possible tinge of “racism,” yet at the same time they admit the basic correctness of my position…. The oft-repeated truism, “all that is necessary for evil to conquer is for good men to do nothing,” stands like the Rock of Gibraltar.

It is now almost fifteen years since I came out with my original dissertation on what the fear of being branded an anti-Semite was doing to us. I tried to treat it with an element of humor, and as I recall I opened the paper with the quip “Until you’ve been called an anti-Semite you haven’t lived!” …If and when we can overcome this “fear of the smear” the elaborate defense mechanism erected by our unelected rulers will crumble like a house of cards. And they know it!

As I examine my conscience and look at what has now become my life’s work, I am led to conclude that I am one of the luckiest men alive — because I do not have to bend to the dictates of those who control our lives.

I sincerely believe that I have been given some very special insights and I have developed some concepts that could free us from this involuntary servitude. …That is exactly what it amounts to. We neither follow our true destiny nor honor our forebears …when we permit an unassimilable minority to determine our future. At this late hour I can’t imagine that any would deny the incredible power of the Zionist Lobby and the effect this has on our nation’s attitude with respect to Israel. But most of these same citizens remain oblivious to the complex apparatus that exercises control over virtually every facet of our lives….

[So many people tell me:] “I agree with you, but….”

Now that “but” is going to be our undoing unless we’re careful. No one is going to remain uninvolved in the end, but then it is going to be too late to do any good. I can’t help but think of the nurses in Chicago a few years ago who kept hoping their murderer would murder the other nurses first. But there were no winners as I recall. And that was followed rather closely by an affair in Mesa, Arizona, where a gunman invaded a beauty parlor. Do you remember? He made everyone lie down on the floor in a perfect circle — arms outstretched, fingertips touching…. And then he killed them, one by one. And even then I guess each one was hoping he’d kill the other ones sooner and him (or her) later. As I recall the killer was one hundred per cent. successful.

And so will the killers of this nation be successful if we continue to succumb to a:

…completely unreasoning fear… of the accusation of anti-Semitism. So many know I am right on these issues yet keep silent.

Of course this same person might (in confidence) let me know that he or she was aware. But then comes an apologetic, “…you know how it is, Richard, I have to live here; I do business in this town.” Most people want me to know that they are secretly “with me” (with some possible reservations), and I have had that kind of support all through the years. …If I have learned nothing more, it is that, as I have often quipped, “…The best-kept secret that everybody knows is the nature of the hidden hand that rules.”

A few are even willing to say in private:

The Black man has the NAACP, the Jew has the ADL, so why shouldn’t the White man have some sort of united front through which to express himself?

But so many still add:

“Isn’t there some way we can kinda soft-pedal?” My answer is an unequivocal “No!” Why in the name of all that is sacred should we be so fearful? …It is high time that the majority got organized….

And if that is too strong for my fellow citizens to swallow, then it is possible that Dr. Oliver’s question, “have we, the Men of the West, lost the will to live?” will have been answered. But as these good people withhold their support, and as they remain carefully insulated behind closed (and locked) doors, I would remind them that we are the minority, speaking in global terms. And in the eyes of our unelected rulers, we are the one threat to their age-old dream of becoming the Rulers of the World.

The price extracted is best understood in terms of honor and self-respect. To know that a situation exists but to avoid any commitment is terribly degrading to the individual. I recall an illustration that we circulated in the early days of the anti-Communist movement and it showed a father looking down at a very small son and saying, “I am sorry you are going to have to live under Communism, my son; it all came so quickly.” Friend, it does not come quickly at all. It comes because good people decide that they are going to remain uninvolved.

I have developed the illustration which I have placed on the first page of this article [which shows that for every Jew in the world there are 286 gentiles] in an attempt to help our people see just how ridiculous it is to permit such an incredibly small minority to control our destiny.

Ladies and gentlemen, you have been listening to just a few excerpts from the work of patriotic writer and broadcaster Richard Cotten, a man who for almost 40 years has labored to free America from Jewish tyranny. He influenced my life and thousands of other lives for the better during these dark years of America’s decline. He will be remembered in our future renaissance.

Mr. Richard Berkeley Cotten celebrated his 76th birthday on September 8, 1995 and has just come home from an extended bout with illness in the hospital. He has every hope of a full recovery, but the illness has left him out of touch with his friends and supporters from over the years.

(September, 1995)

* * *

Editor’s note: Richard Cotten was moved by the many cards and letters sent to him by American Dissident Voices listeners after the 1995 broadcast on which this article is based. His work for ADV and his appearance the previous year on the Geraldo television program (in which he capably argued against Jewish censorship) were to be his last hurrah, however. His illness worsened and he died in 1998, leaving a record of White courage seldom matched in postwar America. His published obituary stated:

Richard Berkeley Cotten, age 78, of Capon Bridge, West Virginia, died Thursday, June 18, 1998. Mr. Cotten was born September 8, 1919, in Phoenix, Arizona, the son of the late Sheppard M. and Ruth Wilson Cotten. He was a political writer and broadcaster with Conservative Viewpoint, for many years headquartered in Washington, DC. He was a United States Navy veteran of World War II. Surviving with his wife Estelle are three sons, two daughters, twenty-eight grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. Graveside services will be private.

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Carol Ranney
Carol Ranney
21 February, 2015 7:30 pm

I remember Richard Cotten’s broadcast from when I was in college. I got some of his literature as well. It wad my first real contact with racism, and I have never forgotten it. My life has been dedicated to fighting racism, in part thanks to Mr. Cotten.

Chris Rossetti
Chris Rossetti
Reply to  Carol Ranney
22 February, 2015 8:42 am

Mr. Cotten was a consummate gentleman of the old school, without any characteristic that could lead to the reaction you claim, Carol. Like Mr. Strom, I knew him personally.

I think you’re a liar.

If not a liar, then, if you’re White, you’re a fool working for the destruction of your own people.

If there is some racial stain in your background, your behavior is understandable perhaps — but it is YOU, not Richard Cotten, who is motivated by hate. “Anti-racism” is by definition a kind of hate, since it works for the destruction of every race.

Carol A Ranney
Carol A Ranney
25 February, 2015 2:07 am

I’m curious. Do you believe that all human beings (as defined in the dictionary) have eternal souls? I ask because I used to listen to Cotten on a Christian radio station.

Michael Olanich
Michael Olanich
2 March, 2015 9:58 pm

A very heart-warming tribute to Richard Cotten. I did not know much about his history before reading this article years ago, but I always enjoyed his Intro/Outro to American Dissident Voices. Even from that little introduction, I was inspired by the authority of his voice, and his credo “Freedom is not free; Free men are not equal; And equal men are not free” near the end of the broadcast became thoroughly imprinted in my memory. The saying not only rang true, but in only about 15 words he encapsulated the spirit and mentality of White European Man. Kevin describes how he was inspired to broadcast because of Cotten; I too have always held a similar inspiration to do broadcasting because of Strom and Pierce. I believe, however, that now is… Read more »

Jim
Jim
11 July, 2019 7:56 pm

I still remember Richard Cotten’s CV and often quote his closing “Freedom is not free, free men are equal and equal men are not free” to counter those who want to use government to enforce equality which is tyranny! As a teenage I listened to CV with my Dad who was a financial supporter. My deceased Dad gave me some of CV literature which I still possess. I especially value CV’s foresight in article which proclaimed the modern so-called “Jews” are not descendants of the Biblical Hebrews but Khazar impostures! I am also a doubter of the six million legend and don’t use the term ‘the Holocaust’ (with a capital ‘H’) which is copyrighted by the Jewish controlled media falsely implying so-called ‘Jews’ had a monopoly on WW2 suffering! Those… Read more »

rick
rick
11 August, 2019 11:22 am

this broadcast somehow eluded me all these years…a real treat to discover it!

Michael Brown
Michael Brown
12 March, 2021 5:13 pm

I was in 8th grade, circa 1965, when I heard him talking about China taking over Taiwan, in some plan he mentioned. One of my classmates got mad when I told him that.

Ronald Dunne
Ronald Dunne
10 January, 2023 11:51 pm

I remember Mr Cotten’s broadcasts in the 1960’s on a local radio station. My Dad was a serious listener and I a jr hi-high school student at the time. He was self-employed and I often worked for him in his landscaping business. Every noon, everything came to a halt to listen to Conservative viewpoint. We went to some of his local presentations and he was very interesting and a patient teacher. He, and men like him, are sorely missed- he had a knack for calling a spade a spade and didnt blink in the face of controversey.