America after the Holy War, part 3
by Revilo P. Oliver
THIS WILL SEEM ODD, perhaps even improbable, to younger readers today, but, as my elder teachers assured me when they spoke of Tango Time, those halcyon days of Western civilization before the First World War, it is impossible to convey in words the spirit and atmosphere of an era to one who has not lived in it. Perhaps I can most concisely illustrate what I mean by quoting from a journal that I kept for some years while I was in school, primarily to exercise myself in treating contemporary topics in passable Greek and Latin prose, but in which I entered some reflections on politico-historical tendencies. In June 1934, a time at which our supposedly literary and intellectual periodicals were filled with endless chatter about disarmament, world peace, and similar hallucinations, which I then thought the product of unassisted fatuity, I made the following entry:
The coming war in Europe will necessarily be fought to determine continental hegemony… TIle war, although it will probably involve participation of all or almost all of the nations of Europe, must assume one of three forms. viz.:
1. Great Britain and Germany vs. France.
2. Great Britain and France vs. Germany.
3. Great Britain and Germany vs. Russia.
The probable results of each of these three combinations can be calculated with some nicety.
1. This type of war… should most please the average pacifist: It would be brief, involve comparatively little destruction, and probably be followed by a comparatively permanent peace (ie, twenty to forty years). If France should be in the hands of radicals, the Soviets, despite their malevolent cowardice, would probably join France; Italy would join Great Britain and Germany: thus the results would be even more desirable.
2. This type of war, I pessimistically fear, is the most probable. It will be the most insanely stupid and disastrous… Germany cannot be ready before 1940 at the very earliest, and probably not before 1942 or 1944. England’s democracy makes it impossible for her to fight the war earlier, when her chances of success would be so much greater… The longer the delay, the greater the destruction and suffering the war will cause.… The results of such a war are conjectural in the highest degree, although only three conclusions are possible.
a. A British victory. This must result in a complete regeneration and revitalization of the Empire, with a return to the healthy and normal imperialism of the Victorian era. Ireland and India will be reminded of their necessary subordination, the Labourites and other termites will be suppressed, and the world may expect once again of England a moral and cultural hegemony.
b. A German victory, although its results will be analogous to the triumph of Rome over Greece in the ancient world, is far preferable to the third alternative.
c. No victory. This possibility is nightmarish but not merely a dream. If Germany and England carry the war to the point of mutual exhaustion, there will no longer be the possibility of an hegemony in Europe for anyone to fight for in the war that will inevitably follow the next peace. This would offer to the Soviet bandits a great opportunity and they would seize it (for predatory creatures are informed of such opportunities by instinct). The spread of Communism (= Nihilism, not Socialism) in Europe would be an epochal catastrophe and make it imperative for the United States to fight a long and bitter war to save our civilization or rather some of it, for the ineluctable deterioration of culture would be so great that the mind instinctively refuses to envisage it. This is precisely the result I most fear.
3. A war by the major powers of Europe against barbarism is the obvious and best solution of the present difficulties in Europe… Here is a common cause in which it is possible for all nations of the continent to unite: they will all profit greatly and simultaneously remove the Damoclean menace that will otherwise hang over them for an indefinitely long time. Russia, that pack of slavish barbarians that stares with greedy eyes at the wealth of Europe and with savagely malevolent eyes at the culture of Europe, is always, whether militarily weak or strong, a constant focal point of infection from which the Bolshevik plague may, at any time of economic strain in the civilized world, emanate with anaeretic effect. Of all the many and grave blunders made by the victorious nations in 1918, the most foolish and lamentable was their decision to abandon the invasion of Russia. That blunder will, in any future conjunction of circumstances, cost them dearly, but the cheapest and most efficacious way of repairing their mistake is a concerted war now. But such a war holds promise of other and greater advantages. Healthy nations are always imperialistic, and the collapse of the will to expand and colonize in post-bellum Europe is the sign of a profound malady, a social neurasthenia, that must speedily be remedied if the whole continent is not to become culturally gerontic and sterile. A war against the enemies of Europe is a means not only of submerging the dissension between European powers, but also of finding by conquest a new vigor and youth. Such a war would, of course, be directed to (1) systematic and permanent destruction of all factories and heavy industries in Russia, (2) capture and occupation of the remaining ports in Soviet territory, and (3) capture and colonization of the Ukraine and other border districts of high economic value.
This third alternative is so obviously the one that Europe should choose that it is heartbreaking to watch the hopelessly purblind leaders of England and France continue their ancient, half-hereditary attempts to secure a balance of power on the continent. There are, of course, difficulties, but… it would surely be possible for sagacious statesmen to create within three or four years an excellent casus betli which even their liberals and cowards would eventually be forced to support.
This was written at a time when European “statesmen” were performing in Geneva a dreary farce called a Disarmament Conference; when the press and even serious periodicals everywhere were filled with jabbering about world peace and similar fairy tales fit only for minds that had not yet doubted the existence of Santa Claus; when boys at Oxford were taking oaths never, never to fight for King and country — oaths which, by the way, they never broke, for they said nothing about not fighting for the Jews.
My analysis, written in a time of almost universal fatuity, is one of which I am not ashamed — it was certainly realistic in the sense that, as is now obvious, a mere fraction of the military power that was wasted in the war that began in 1939 would have sufficed to abolish the world’s plague-house — but it is noteworthy that I did not even think of a possibility of American involvement in the European war, and that I took no account of the Jews, except insofar as they are implied in references to Bolshevism. How naif I was — and long remained — on this subject is amusingly evident from an entry in October 1934:
I cannot understand why intelligent Liberals condemn Hitler: he is the expression of the will of the majority; he is the triumph of democracy… I suspect that soi-disant democrats who object to Hitler are fundamentally and, for the most part, unconsciously opposed to democracy in both theory and practice.
That was, of course, the pons asinorum in both. In political theory, which deals with abstractions and is therefore inherently Utopian, rational men either approved the Hitlerian regime or repudiated the whole concept of majority rule. In practical terms, rational men perceived that Germany was not the United States, so that what was feasible or desirable in one was not even likely to be feasible or desirable in the other — whence it followed necessarily that all the yelling about “Fascism” was merely a new version of the mental aberration that three centuries before had identified either Luther or the Pope as the Anti-Christ, ie, a kind of epidemic insanity.
Stated in those terms, the problem appeared to be intellectual and psychological, and I think that is why I, in common with almost all Americans who thought about such matters, so signally failed to perceive the extent of Jewish power, even in the most striking exhibitions of it. One good example will suffice.
In his fundamental work on German politics, Adolf Hitler, commenting on the Jews’ concerted and frantic defamation of General Ludendorff after the defeat of Germany in 1918, said:
It remained for the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood, and their fighting comrades, the Marxists, to impute responsibility for the downfall precisely to the man who alone had shown a superhuman will and energy in his effort to prevent the catastrophe.… All this was inspired by the principle — which is quite true in itself — that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily, and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would never believe that others could have the impudence to distort truth so infamously.… From time immemorial, however, the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited. Is not their very existence founded on one great lie, namely, that they are a religious community, whereas in reality they are a race? …One of the greatest thinkers that mankind has produced (Schopenhauer)… called the Jew “The Great Master of Lies.” Those who do not realize the truth of that statement, or do not wish to believe it, will never be able to lend a hand in helping Truth prevail.
The statement, including the sound psychological observation, is unexeceptionable, and the Jews immediately proved its veracity.
With the contempt they feel for Aryans, whom they regard — not without justification — as a vastly inferior race, stupid and easily manipulated by appeals to their venality and superstitions, the Jews at once instructed their hirelings to spread the audacious lie that Hitler had advocated the use of the Big Lie as a valid “Fascist” technique. And from almost every journalistic nozzle, that stinking hogwash was sprayed in the faces of the gullible and despised Americans. That the Jews’ Big Lie was believed by the simple-minded was not remarkable, for the reasons that Hitler so clearly stated. What was significant was that it was believed — and irrationally believed — by persons who had an obligation to know better. Some of the journalists who repeated it were Americans and claimed to believe it, and it is a grim fact that a few university professors repeated it, although the German text of Mein Kampf was available in the library of any respectable college or university and could have been obtained in a few days from importers in New York and Boston, while indolent or very busy men, who might begrudge the few extra minutes to read the German, could have purchased an acceptable English translation in any good bookstore in any large city or university town. When one observed the success of the Jews’ propaganda on both levels, however, one thought in terms of two social problems that were crucial in contemporary thought, both, as it happens, formulated by French authors: la psychologie des foules and la trahison des clercs.
There was another factor that was exploited by Jewish propaganda and added to popular confusion. Reasonable men, even if they did not believe that the Hitlerian regime represented the Germans’ only means of emancipating themselves from the covert domination of the Jews, naturally saw that it was the legitimate government of Germany and that only our light-headed busybodies, chiefly sexually frustrated women, publicity-seeking dervishes, and utterly unscrupulous politicians, could have the impudence to denounce it as a German institution: What the German people deemed fitting and proper in their situation was obviously their business. It was equally obvious, however, that a German institution could not well be adapted to the United States, but if it could, there were very few Americans who did not feel as I did, that it would be deplorable. I doubt that the many business men, attorneys, and others who were wont to say “We need a Hitler here,” were thinking of more than a counterpart of the “Dutch Cleanser” who would as efficiently deal with the malodorous and ever-spreading corruption of our society. They doubtless did not desire the economic and other governmental controls that were necessary in Germany but unnecessary here and to which they vehemently objected when the schemer in the White House contrived ways to impose them. And in all probability they did not even consider, let alone want, the unmitigated democracy of the Hitlerian government, which was, of course, based on the principle of unlimited majority rule.
It must be remembered that my generation had seen something of the consequences of democracy — enough, at least, to teach one to hope ardently for the restoration of the American Republic and its Constitution. Furthermore, even in 1930-32 Americans enjoyed a degree of personal freedom, almost inconceivable today, that no rational man wished to lose, while one could reasonably hope that our traditional liberty could soon be recovered.
One of the most effective denunciations of European Fascist regimes originated, it seems, with R. Aron and A. Dandieu, who, in their Décadence de la nation francaise, identified Fascism as “Ia démonstration de I’esprit américain.” That neat identification, though grossly unfair to the Fascisti, became commonplace in political polemics, for it was plausible and contained an element of truth, if one considered only the worst aspects of Mussolini’s reform of Italian government. To prove their point, the authors pointed to the insanely authoritarian government of the United States, where Americans acquiesced in a tyranny that the most despotic government in Europe’s history would not have dared to impose on its subjects.
The Eighteenth Amendment, which made the United States ridiculous, and its government contemptible, in the eyes of the civilized world and of its own rational citizens, formally repudiated all the principles of the American Constitution and, indeed, the very concept of personal dignity and freedom that is instinctive in our race. And we must sadly remember that while the Jews naturally lurked in the background, snickering and profiting, the persons responsible were exclusively White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, all of them above the age of puberty and literate. It will be no irrelevant digression to remind ourselves summarily of the essentials of a political fatuity that must be taken into consideration in any estimate of the prospects of our people and race.
Woodrow Wilson appears to have been primarily a crack-brained idealist and only secondarily a shyster. Unfortunately, instead of following his father and grandfathers into a pulpit, where he could have ranted about his fantasies harmlessly, he became a professor of “political science,” which he had the ingenuity to make a kind of secular theology. As President of Princeton University he manifested such priggish arrogance and self-righteous dishonesty that he became intolerable to the faculty and would have been dismissed in disgrace, had not a kindly alumnus of the university (William F. McCombs) found a way to avoid public scandal by procuring for him a nomination for the governorship of New Jersey.
Wilson showed such dexterity in betraying his sponsors, and such skill as a pseudo-intellectual rabble-rouser, that the Jews residing in the United States saw in him a potentially useful shabbat-goy, and decided to train him. As one of them later boasted to Colonel Dall, Barney Baruch, the Jewish satrap, led Wilson around “like a poodle on a string” and taught him to sit up and bark ideals for political bon-bons. Fido, having been taught to do the proper tricks to promote (a) the Federal Reserve System, (b) the Income Tax, and (c) the Seventeenth Amendment (to avert the danger that legislatures might send honest men to the Senate) and (d) having pledged himself to obey his masters’ voice when the war started in Europe, was saved from the consequences of his governorship in New Jersey by purchasing for him the Democratic nomination for the Presidency and ensuring his election by inciting Theodore Roosevelt to form a third party and thus split the Republican vote in 1912. Donkeys, it should be noted, are not the only animals that trot docilely when a carrot is dangled before their nose.
Wilson’s success as a politician seemed incredible to contemporary politicians who were not in the know. They, noting his record in New Jersey, knew better than to trust him, and throughout his life, as his principal bodyguard, Colonel Sperling of the Secret Service, had ample opportunity to observe, he was always uncomfortable in the company of men, who might guffaw when his prating became too absurd, and he avoided them (except his supervisor, ‘Colonel’ House) as much as possible, preferring to flounce about before an audience of sentimental women, who would listen raptly while he orated about the beauties of democracy (which the American Constitution had been designed to avert), the “New Freedom”, “World Peace,” and similar niaiseries, and they would then, round-eyed with admiration, exclaim, “Oh, Mr Wilson, what big ideals you got!” (There was the further advantage that the more attractive and impressionable young matrons might consent to hear more about his ideals in bed; there was the slight disadvantage that some of them might believe and preserve the promises he rashly made in writing, but that was no great risk. When a disappointed lady demanded $250,000 for his letters, he had only to appoint a Jew to the Supreme Court and her attorney, Mr. Untermeyer, found that his compatriots in the United States were glad to apply golden balm to the lady’s broken heart and assure the future of her inconvenient son. If his owners had other expenses to keep Fido in trim, there is no record of them, so far as I know.)
Although Wilson, inspired by his high ideals, had not hesitated to stab in the back the men who made him Governor of New Jersey, he knew better than to fail in obedience to the aliens who made him President of the United States. With the aid of the venal press and thoughtless intellectuals entranced with humanitarian verbiage, the Federal Reserve swindle, the White Slave Act (euphemistically called the “Income Tax”), and the Seventeenth Amendment were speedily put over on the starry-eyed victims in 1912 and 1913. The war in Europe came on schedule in 1914, but some time was needed to condition the American cattle for a stampede thither, and the Jews preferred to wait until the desperate British bought American troops with the Balfour Declaration, promising Palestine as the future capital of the International Empire.
The conditioning of the Americans was, of course, not neglected. Expert professional liars cudgeled their brains to invent tales about German “atrocities.” The famous lie-factory operated by Lord Bryce, with the assistance of Arnold Toynbee, developed such expertise with a razor-blade and paste that a photograph of a German iron foundry with loaded coal-cars in the foreground was converted into a picture of a soap factory with gondolas loaded with the bodies of soldiers in the foreground. And British ingenuity could do better than that.
In February 1913 Winston Churchill (who had divined that the great war was scheduled to occur, to everyone’s astonishment and dismay, in September 1914) had the British liner, Lusitania, converted to an auxiliary cruiser, armed with twelve six-inch naval cannon — a fact that was known to the publishers of the authoritative naval handbook, Jane’s Fighting Ships, in which the Lusitania was so listed in the volume for 1914. But while copies of the British publication were on the desks of the commanders of every warship and of the larger merchant ships in the entire world, and in the reference libraries of our major newspapers (it was the source of pictures of warships in the news), the average American did not even know that such a publication existed.
The Lusitania was accordingly advertised as a passenger liner, loaded with munitions (in violation of both American and international law) and with stupid Americans who elected to take a passage on the ship and ignore the formal warning published conspicuously by the German Embassy in the newspapers of New York. Thus what Churchill had earlier described as “45,000 tons of livebait” was dangled before the German submarines, care being taken to make sure that the Lusitania had no naval escort when it entered the zone of the blockade that the Germans had officially announced in keeping with the recognized rules of warfare. A German submarine took the bait, and the British Admiralty took the action necessary to ensure the maximum loss of life. In this country there was an epidemic of frenzied shrieking about the “barbarity” of submarine warfare and especially the “frightful” and “savage” conduct of the German commander of the submarine, who had torpedoed the ship without first corning to the surface to be destroyed by the concealed naval guns with which, his copy of Jane’s informed him, the Lusitania was equipped. But that minor detail was discreetly omitted when whipping up the passions of the suckers.
Wilson, doubtless after conferring with higher authority, dispatched a stern note of protest to Germany, although, as he may or may not have known, the staff of his own State Department had officially reported that, even assuming that the Lusitania was an unarmed passenger ship, “the British had obliterated the distinction between merchantmen and men of war; therefore Germany had every right to sink the Lusitania.” When Germany returned a mild and conciliatory reply to the impertinent American note, Wilson officially accused the Germans of lying, and the Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, resigned rather than be a party to such a fraud. An inconvenient witness, who had somehow glimpsed the armament of the Lusitania, was kidnapped by the Secret Service and eventually deported to Switzerland. The efficiency of organized crime, when directed from the White House, is noteworthy. The one incident I have mentioned is merely typical of the conduct of Wilson and his masters during the two years that were needed after the sinking of the Lusitania to get the Balfour Declaration signed and the Americans ready for a Declaration of War.
The significant fact is that the Americans did not enter that war as a civilized nation that fights to protect or extend its own power. They entered the war in the manner of a tribe of Apaches who had whipped themselves into a frenzy with war dances and anticipation of the fun of taking scalps. Wilson yammered about “making the world safe for democracy” and a “war to end wars” and the Americans, instead of confining the lunatic in a padded cell, imagined that he was talking sense. They collectively raved about “saving civilization” from one of the most civilized nations on Earth. From almost every pulpit, the holy men howled for blood. Newspapers not already under control felt a patriotic duty to print every kind of preposterous drivel that would augment the frenzy. The Creel Commission found college professors who were glad to lie for a fast buck or — what was worse — for just a pat on the head. Attorneys and business men did “their bit” by rushing into cinema houses, theatres, ball parks, and music halls to interrupt programmes and recite for four minutes canned speeches on the glory of butchering “the Huns”! A whole nation went mad, while squads of great financiers, delighted that their time had come, systematically looted the crazed Crusaders,
The facts of the Holy War — in comparison with which the wildest Moslem jihad seems a sober and reasonable foray — which the Americans fought in an access of religious delirium are too well known to require allusion here. And I need not mention two of its most important by-products, the Jewish capture of the former Russian Empire, and the shocking sadism by which millions of Germans were deliberately starved to death after the Armistice in preparation for the great inflation of their currency that enabled the Jews, who naturally received money that was still valuable from their colonies in the victorious nations, to buy for a few dollars almost any valuable piece of property they thought worth owning (e.g., one of the best apartment houses in Berlin for $50.00).
Since I have spoken harshly of Wilson, I shall in fairness digress a moment to note that he may not have been entirely devoid of a moral sense. He eventually broke with his supervisor, ‘Colonel’ House, and soon thereafter came that memorable day on which, in the faint light of dawn, he was rushed from a special train to the White House in an open car, lifting his hat and bowing to the cheering throngs with which his mind had filled the deserted streets. The precise cause of his breakdown is uncertain, but there is a report — I wish that it were more securely attested — that in his intervals of lucidity he moaned, “God help me! I have ruined my country.”
(to be continued)
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Source: America’s Decline
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