Classic EssaysRevilo P. Oliver

America after the Holy War, part 7

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by Revilo P. Oliver

IN 1955, I had at last to discard all the optimistic conclusions about what was historically necessary and inevitable that I had reached ten years before.

I had to re-examine the available data and reconsider the plight and potentialities of the American people, who had signally failed to do what I had once been certain they would naturally and instinctively do. And I was handicapped by the fact that for more than five lustra I had been — or had thought myself — too busy to establish much direct contact with the majority of average Americans, whom it was then fashionable to call “the man in the street.”

Not thoughtlessly, but perhaps with no more prescience than I had shown in 1945, I reached the conclusion that our race, including specifically the Americans, was a viable species, and that therefore, like all viable species of animal life, it had an innate instinct to survive and perpetuate itself. In 1955, as in Cicero’s time, our men still planted trees that would not mature in their lifetime and so could benefit only their posterity, and they made the other provisions for their children of which the trees were used by Cicero as a vivid symbol. Our women still bore children, and even if, as mere proletarians, they underwent the pains of travail thoughtlessly, they, whether consciously or unconsciously, expected their offspring to survive and, perhaps, be happier and more secure than they were.

In 1955, so far as I could learn, no American wittingly destined his children for degradation and servitude.

In 1955, perhaps because I was imperceptive, I saw no clear evidence of the subconscious death-wish, the degenerate yearning for annihilation as a Nirvana, a secure refuge from the stress of living and striving in an imperfect and disagreeable world, that Whittaker Chambers had identified as the Iethal soul-sickness of a self-doomed civilization. The possibility of such an explanation did not even occur to me. At that time, I had not met Chambers. Later, although I could not doubt either his intelligence or the sincerity of his bleak and integral pessimism, I optimistically found grounds for rejecting his conclusions.

There seemed to be no historical or biological precedent for suicidal mania in an entire species. It was true, for example, that the Romans had destroyed themselves, but their suicide, which had been a gradual process, extending over two centuries, could be satisfactorily explained by their ignorance of the relevant historical and biological knowledge that is available to us. Among the lesser mammals, the lemmings are the outstanding example of a suicidal urge, but although great hordes of the rodents, crazed by some strange biological impulsion, leap to their death in the sea, the species survives, and one hypothetical explanation of the mass suicides is that the species thus relieves the pressure of overpopulation and averts the otherwise disastrous consequences of a fecundity that produces individuals too numerous for the available food.

Neither analogy seemed applicable to Americans, and it was only a decade after my last contact with Chambers that I began seriously to ask myself whether he had not, after all, been right.

Since that time, I have seen nothing that would disprove or even logically impugn the validity of his fearsome analysis. And nothing, certainly, has occurred to support the alternative hypothesis, that the American mind was (and is) in a state of temporary irrationality, such as might be induced by hypnosis or opium, and subject to delusions that could be dispelled by confrontation with reality or a traumatic shock; during the past two decades, shock after shock has produced no perceptible reaction. Even so, however, I am inclined to believe that the hypothesis is still tenable.

To return to 1955: The very fact that Chambers could be so vilely traduced by our enemies’ hirelings and a chorus of pseudo-intellectual witlings was proof of alien control of the channels of quotidian commnication. And the fact that Senator McCarthy’s mild and almost tentative efforts to explore the periphery of treason had failed to evoke massive and irresistible support was proof that our national consciousness had been paralyzed by some malefic spell imposed by agencies of great power. In other words, the United States was no longer an independent country, having been clandestinely occupied by its enemies, whose control over it differed from the Soviets’ control over Poland and Eastern Germany only in that it was secret, and consequently the occupying power could not feasibly indulge in open reprisals against its critics and would have to budget strictly even surreptitious assassinations. To prevent its subjects from becoming inopportunely restive, it would have to silence its critics by obloquy and defamation in the press and radio, over which it had prudently established almost complete control.

The problem, therefore, was essentially a strategic one, the most effective use of such means of resistance as were still available. To use a metaphor then in common use, it was necessary to “awaken” the American people. But how?

In the Western world today, masses are set in motion and controlled by propaganda, an art which, as the name indicates, was first distinguished from rhetoric and theology in the Roman Catholic studies de propaganda fide and subsequently elaborated, on the basis of psychological research, into a virtually infallible technique for implanting any desired faith in the minds and consciousness of a large population. Although the power that has a virtual monopoly of the means of forming the consciousness of the masses, from public schools to newspapers and (in recent years) the boob-tubes, appears to have an insuperable advantage, propaganda directed against that power is possible on a limited scale, so long as it is not feasible for the masters openly to suppress, by pseudo-legal terrorism and naked violence, all dissent. In 1955, however, the need for counter-propaganda was not apparent to me, and if it had been, I should have had to recognize my irremediable incompetence in an art and technique for which I was by temperament unfitted. I thought, however, that there was one contribution I could make.

A first-rate propagandist, like a theologian, evangelist, or modem “educator,” is interested only in what he can make people believe and has no interest in the truth per se. If he is really a master of his technique, he will respect truth in the sense that he will carefully avoid, in propaganda intended to have a lasting effect, statements that are demonstrably false, and he will use even the old Jesuit device of suppressio veri with caution. The reason for this restraint is obvious: If an intricate web of propaganda can be shown to depend at important points on lies, the entire web collapses, and rational minds reject the whole. And when this happens, even powers of physical coercion such as the Inquisition once exercised will be inadequate, for the best minds will always murmur, as Galileo is said to have done, e pur si muove.

From this standpoint, the propaganda that is used to herd Americans is woefully inept and vulnerable at so many points that it should be easy to demolish the great festoons of cobwebs, and to sweep them from the minds of individuals whose thinking is cerebral rather than glandular. Factual and rational cricitism is therefore a potent weapon against our masters and can, when addressed to the literate part of our population, effectively demolish the gross and bungling impostures on which the control exercised over Americans so obviously depends. It was for this activity that I believed myself to have some capacity.

This was precisely the function of the new weekly periodical [National Review], as conceived by Professor Kendall, and since it seemed adequately financed to sustain heavy losses for three years, its success seemed assured. It obviously could not become a journal of mass circulation, for which the techniques of propaganda would be needed, but it could address a fairly large audience that had an influence far greater than its numbers: essentially all men of scientific and scholarly competence in the universities and learned professions plus the greater part of the American bourgeoisie, the class that had the most to lose from the subjugation of their country, most of whom had acquired in colleges (which in 1955 were yet far from reaching their present state of degradation) at least a certain familiarity with the standards of scientific and scholarly learning.

To these could be added readers who might, for various reasons, be attracted to opposition to the Establishment.

There was, indeed, one grave handicap that was not perceived at the time. The sudden influx of “professionals” from the moribund Freeman seemed to be only normal in the context of “literary” circles in New York City, where eyes are always fixed on the markets for written work, and it was only long after Professor Kendall had been shouldered out of the organization and I had severed my connections with it that I perceived that whenever a potentially influential journal is founded, it receives the assistance of talented “conservative” Jews, who are charged with the duty of supervising the Aryan children and making certain that they play only approved games.

The new journal, like all efforts to release Americans from the Old Man of the Sea, who has wrapped his puny legs around their necks in a stranglehold, faced an almost insoluble dilemma. From the time, immediately after the First World War, when Americans first became alarmed by the progressive Communist and “Liberal” subversion of their nation and culture, virtually the only organized opposition was offered by associations that were at least nominally Christian and claimed a religious basis for their efforts against their “godless” opponents.

These “anti-Communist” leagues and publications had unintentionally and inadvertently been the Communists’ most influential propagandists, for their endless yelping about “atheistic Communism” effectively procured for the Bolsheviks in Russia and here the toleration and even sympathy of the very large number of educated men who could not believe the Christian mythology and were repelled by the hypocrisy, obscurantism, and rabid ambitions of the clergy. It is a grim paradox, therefore, that it was the “anti-Communists” who, in the 1920s and 1930s, won for our enemies some measure of support from the influential men who would otherwise have been revolted by the vulgarity, fanaticism, and brutality of the votaries of the Marxist superstition. But the effects of this perhaps fatal blunder were a prime datum in 1955 and are, indeed, crucial even today.

(to be continued)

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Source: America’s Decline

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cas
cas
9 February, 2022 9:53 pm

Notice the water in america? The most medicated people on planet earth? Most of that does not get used up in the body and is washed out via urine and in most cases is NOT filtered out by water processing plants then you have fluoridation. Drink from plastic and be turned queer. God only knows what’s in the water.
Just a few years Obama said they were going to dial down the fluoridation in the water to city peoples.
Without clean water no white community can thrive, this is probably why the big drive for fracking, to further poison waters of mainly rural white folk

Lohengrin
Lohengrin
10 February, 2022 7:37 am

Regarding Revilo Oliver’s thoughts that suicidal endings for great civilisations like ancient Rome are rare – One should note Oxford scholar J D Unwin, who in his 1934 book ‘Sex and Culture’, showed, via exhaustive research across millennia, that in fact many societies have declined and fallen over 4000 years, with one common element – the introduction of ‘women’s rights’, easy divorce, and the destruction of monogamy as female impulses let loose.

Forms of ‘feminism’, alimony etc, existed thousands of years ago, going back to ancient Babylon & Sumeria, and ancient Rome fell under this spell too. Unwin showed that once this happens, men deprived of stable sexual and family life, lose their ability to maintain civilisation, and all crumbles. Once begun, the tide was never reversed, Unwin found.

J D Unwin Sex and Culture.jpg
Jim - National Alliance Staff
Jim - National Alliance Staff
Reply to  Lohengrin
10 February, 2022 11:18 pm

Those 3 generations have about passed, wouldn’t you say, Lohengrin? It appears our task, above all else, in these times is to save what White genes as we can. The Aryan mothers to do this are invited to come within our Cosmotheist community.