Revamped Liberty
by Revilo P. Oliver
IN THE 1920s, the Chicago Tribune, then an American newspaper, decided to found a magazine that would compete with Collier’s, The American, and similar popular journals. A contest to name the new publication was won by a man who suggested ‘Liberty.’ The periodical attained great popularity, enjoyed a large circulation, and flourished for many years. I do not know when it disappeared, but I have the impression that the Tribune‘s magazine ceased publication quite some time before Americans were stampeded into Europe to fight for the Communists and Jews.
A decade ago I saw one or two issues of a periodical that had taken the name Liberty, but I was so little impressed by it that I remember nothing of its contents. I have just been sent the issue for May-June 1990, which is labeled Volume 85, No. 3, so the journal evidently pretends to be a continuation of the Tribune’s old magazine.
Published bimonthly at 55 West Oak Ridge Drive, Hagerstown, Maryland, it is well printed, with a somewhat garish use of color and oversize type for titles. It describes itself as “the magazine of religious freedom,” but I cannot imagine what impels a presumably large number of persons to pay $6.95 per annum for it.
The leading article is by Clifford Goldstein, “On the Withering Away of Marxism.” We are assured, without even a shadow of evidence, that dear Karl once had “a vibrant life-changing relationship with Jesus Christ,” but alas! he stopped vibrating and therefore “missed the prime root of all man’s problems, sin and separation of God.” So he scribbled Das Kapital to cozen Christian suckers with his reformation of their old cult of uncontrolled imagination and pious denial of Nature, reverting to the communism of early Christianity, which festered with the hatred of civilization that has always inspired Jews and the dregs of a mongrel proletariat.
Another soothsayer proclaims that “Real freedom must be found in bondage to God.” That childish paradox is consonant with the avowed purposes of the hero of another article, Rousas Rushdoony, a learned and ingenious Calvinist (whose Chalcedon Chronicle I have cited more than once in these pages), who proposes to make of the United States the Godly Hell that Calvin made of Geneva.
The prize must go, however, to an Ella Mae Rudzewski, who tells us to develop a “tolerant theology” — that should be as easy as producing dry water. (Dry Martinis are something else again.) “The solution to intolerance, then, begins when we respond to God’s invitation to listen to him. By beholding, we are changed.” (My emphasis.)
“Hark, hark, the lark!” You can indeed hear him if you live in the right part of the country and get up in time; and you can behold him, if you have a good pair of binoculars. But I do not know how one can hear and see spooks. A lady whose hearing is so acute that she perceives the sonar signals of bats assures me she has never heard even a squeak from Jesus, indoors or out. Good Christians probably can attain the requisite auditory and optical illusions by overheating their imaginations and working themselves into fits, but lysergic acid diethylamide is easier and quicker.
It is depressing to learn that there are evidently many adult Americans who not only lap up such drivel, but pay $6.95 a year for it, and many others, prosperous or even wealthy, who heavily subsidize the magazine so that it can be distributed at that price.
There is, however, one point at which we can agree with Liberty. It quotes two of Rushdoony’s disciples who want to abolish the public schools. One of these, Gary North, who, we are told, is also Rushdoony’s son-in-law and has not spoken to him for more than a year (there is room for only one Calvin in Geneva), neatly summarizes the question: “There is a fundamental difference between whorehouses and public schools: whorehouses aren’t tax supported.” (His emphasis.) He and we are in total agreement on that point, but alack! I fear you and I cannot march into the future arm in arm with North and the other Calvinists.
They complain, of course, because the boob-hatcheries do not inject enough Jesus-juice and Calvinistic righteousness (with a death penalty for atheism, i.e., rationality). I have often been struck by the ingratitude of Christians toward the public moron-mills, which, as several recent surveys substantially agree, so sabotage the minds of their victims that 80% or more of them are infected with a belief in the supernatural with all its trappings, including angels, gods, witches, ‘psychics,’ and, no doubt, leprechauns and Martians on ‘flying saucers.’ This incidence of superstition is not surprising: as we all know, minds that have been so maimed that they believe in the equality of races can believe anything, especially if it is false.
That, of course, is precisely the point of our criticism of the publicly financed centers of child-abuse, which inject into their helpless pupils the ‘One World’ pus of Judaeo-Communism, rendering them incapable of rational thought about the real world, and force them into degrading and demoralizing association with the lowest forms of human life. The grounds for abolishing the public schools are not that they “teach humanism,” as North and his pals so loudly wail, but that they do not.
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Source: Liberty Bell magazine, August 1990
