Oliver on Which Way Western Man, part 2
American Dissident Voices broadcast of 22 March, 2025
by Kevin Alfred Strom
TODAY we continue — for the first time in audio form, using Artificial Intelligence to bring us this work in the voice of the author himself — Dr. Revilo Pendleton Oliver’s overview and analysis of William Gayley Simpson’s important book Which Way Western Man, which is now in its third edition and available from our bookstore at cosmotheistchurch.org.
Dr. Oliver was a professor of the Classics, Spanish, and Italian at the University of Illinois at Urbana. He was fluent in eleven languages and was one of the greatest American philologists. He was one of the founders of the John Birch Society, a writer for National Review, Liberty Bell, Nation’s Business, The American Mercury, and National Vanguard, among other periodicals; and was instrumental in the founding of the National Youth Alliance, predecessor organization to the National Alliance.
Dr. Oliver left off last week with a discussion of five noteworthy Christians who left the church, and continues today with an examination of the persistence of the cultural residue of Christianity among those who falsely believe they have liberated themselves from it.
These are the words of Dr. Revilo P. Oliver — listen.
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Which Way Western Man? by William Gayley Simpson
a review; first published in National Vanguard and The American Mercury, 1979
Second part.
by Revilo P. Oliver
IT IS, first of all, noteworthy that four of the five [men that we discussed who left the church] did not even think through to a logical conclusion their rejection of Christianity. They were content to denounce it as the cause of woes unnumbered to modern man, but they did not see what that implied. Only Taylor perceived that Christianity was based on a cult invented by a “misanthropic horde of exclusively superstitious barbarians,” by “barbarians who resented the consciousness of their inferiority in the scale of rational being by an invincible hatred of the whole human race.” The Jews, with the duplicity that is their outstanding racial characteristic, “plagiarized the religious legends of the nations among whom their characteristic idleness and inferiority of understanding caused them to be vagabonds; and pretended that the furtive patchwork was a system of theology intended by heaven for their exclusive benefit.” Under the cover of that brazen pretense, the Jews insinuated themselves into every nation whose prosperity they wished to exploit. Their migratory bands of “commercial, speculating thieves” were ever “ready to play into and keep up any religious farce that might serve to invest them with an imaginary sanctity of character and increase their influence over the minds of the majority, whose good nature and ignorance in all ages and countries is but ever too ready to subscribe the claims thus made upon it.” Taylor was not really a precursor of Nietzsche, but he did identify the greatest of the innumerable hoaxes by which the Self-Chosen People have throughout history imposed on the gullible goyim and thus raised themselves from a miserable tribe of despicable barbarians, practicing primitive taboos and grotesque sexual mutilations, to the most formidable power in the world today.
Taylor obviously differs from the other apostates and most of their contemporary deists and atheists, who inclined to esteem the Jews as enemies of Christianity, having been taken in by another great hoax, the endless whining that they were “persecuted” during the Middle Ages when the Church gave them a virtual monopoly of usury, sorcery, and international trade — when they spun financial webs about kings and noblemen and most rulers were attended by skilled Jewish physicians, always spies and potentially executioners — when the Jews exercised such political, intellectual, and economic power that, as Bernard S. Bachrach has shown in his Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe (University of Minnesota, 1977), out of the ninety-eight rulers whose policies he examines in detail, eighty-eight (including Charlemagne) had to pursue pro-Jewish policies, while the ten who attempted to oppose the aliens in their domains went down to failure in one way or another — when the Jews could usually count on royal or ecclesiastical protection whenever their depredations excited local resentment so strong that it became violent — when even the famous and belated expulsion of Jews from England and Spain overlooked those who thought it worth while to have themselves sprinkled with holy water — and when the Church itself was a great ladder by which Marranos climbed to power and wealth, laughing among themselves at the stupidity of the goyim who imagined that a Jew could be transmuted by a few drops of magic fluid.
I therefore exempt Taylor from the generalizations about apostates I shall make below. His was a vigorous and incisive mind and I am unwilling to guess how much of Christian doctrine he unwittingly retained. I do not know his opinions on many subjects; I have not seen the files of the obscure periodicals, Carlile’s The Lion and his own short-lived Philalethean, that contain his last published writings. After having twice served long prison sentences at the instigation of vulgar holy men who resorted to their favorite means of proving the “divine truth” of their lucrative trade, Taylor was convinced of the futility of trying to enlighten a multitude resolved to remain invincibly ignorant: He retired to practice as a physician in France, leaving unpublished works, perhaps of great value, among the manuscripts that were destroyed or dispersed at his death in 1844.
The other apostates I have mentioned and many that are now forgotten, together with almost all of the anti-Christians of recent centuries, exemplify the operation of what may be called the law of cultural residues. In all civilized societies, when a long-established and generally accepted belief is found to be incredible, good minds abandon it, but they commonly retain derivative beliefs that were originally deduced from the creed they have rejected and logically must depend on it. Thus it happened that modern enemies of Christianity rejected the mythology, but uncritically retained faith in the social superstitions derived from it — a faith which they oddly call “rational” but hold with a religious fervor.
They laugh at the silly story about Adam and his spare rib, but they continue to believe in a “human race” descended from a single pair of ancestors and hence in a “brotherhood of man.” They speak of “all mankind,” giving to the term an unctuous and mystic meaning with which they do not invest corresponding terms, such as “all marsupials” or “all ungulates.” They prate about the “rights of man,” although a moment’s thought should suffice to show that, in the absence of a decree from a supernatural monarch, there can be no rights other than those which the citizens of a stable and homogeneous society have, by covenant or established custom, bestowed on themselves; and that while the citizens may show kindness to aliens, slaves, and dogs, such beings obviously can have no rights.
They do not believe that one-third of a god became incarnate in the most squalid region on Earth to associate with illiterate peasants, harangue the rabble of a barbarian race, and magically exalt the ignorant and uncouth to “make folly of the wisdom of this world,” so that “the last shall be first” — that they do not believe, but they cling to the morbid hatred of superiority that makes Christians dote on whatever is lowly, inferior, irrational, debased, deformed, and degenerate.
They gabble about the “sanctity of human life” — especially the vilest forms of it — without reflecting that it takes a god to make something sacred. And they frantically agitate for a universal “equality” that can be attained only by reducing all human beings to the level of the lowest, evidently unaware that they are merely echoing the Christians’ oft-expressed yearning to become sheep (the most stupid of all mammals) herded by a good shepherd, which is implicit in all the tales of the New Testament, although most bluntly expressed in another gospel, which reports Jesus as promising that after he has tortured and butchered the more civilized populations of the earth, there will be a Resurrection and his ovine pets will pop out of their graves, all of the same age, all of the same sex, all of the same stature, and all having indistinguishable features, so that they will be as identical as the bees in a swarm.2
[Footnote 2. The Greek text of the gospel in question was published by Konstantin von Tischendorf in his Apocalypses apocryphae (1866; reprinted by Olms, 1966); see p. 78. I know of no translation.]
Although the “Liberal” and Marxist cults have doctrinal differences as great as those that separate Lutherans from Baptists, they are basically the same superstition, and whether or not we should call them religions depends on whether we restrict the word to belief in supernatural persons or extend it to include all forms of blind faith based on emotional excitement instead of observed facts and reason. When those “atheistic” cults scream out their hatred of “Fascists” and “Nazis,” they obviously must believe that those wicked persons are possessed of the Devil and should therefore be exterminated to promote holiness and love. And when they see “racists,” who impiously substitute fact and reason for unthinking faith in approved fairy stories, their lust to extirpate evil is as great as that of the Christian mob that dragged the fair and too intelligent Hypatia from her carriage and lovingly used oyster shells to scrape the flesh from her bones while she was still alive.
With very few exceptions, the anti-Christians, no doubt unwittingly, retained in their minds a large part of Christian doctrine, and they even revived the most poisonous elements of the primitive Bolshevism, which had been attenuated or held in abeyance by the established churches in the great days of Christendom. And today, professed atheists do not think it odd that, on all social questions, they are in substantial agreement with the howling dervishes and evangelical shamans who, subsidized with lavish publicity by the Jews who control the boob-tubes and other means of communication, greedily participate in the current drive to reduce Americans to total imbecility with every kind of irrational hoax, from astrology to “pyramid power.”
It is to the great honor of Mr. Simpson that, as he says somewhere in his book, he is not a man “to do things by halves.” When he ascertained that the Biblical fictions were unbelievable, he logically perceived that the residue of derivative superstitions was equally mythical. He had the intellectual vigor and integrity to begin a search for truth, i.e., ascertained facts about the real world — a search that is an intellectual drama as narrated in his candid pages. His studies of all subjects relating to the social realities of our time were thorough and almost exhaustive, and his citations from writers of recognized scientific and scholarly competence form a bibliography of almost encyclopaedic scope.
In the journalists’ idiom, Mr. Simpson has “covered the waterfront.” He has neglected no relevant subject from economics to biology. He examines the economic system that is based on financial fraud, which has now reached the point that, as was shown recently by the Farmers’ Union’s statistical analysis, the average American pays much less for all the food that he and his family eat than he pays for “credit,” i.e., as interest on fictitious loans of the counterfeit currency manufactured by the Federal Reserve. He knows that all men and women are created unequal by the unalterable laws of genetics that govern all forms of organic life. He even considers the possibility that a religion may be an indispensable symbol and bond of a people’s unity, and he speculates about the likelihood that our race, if it does not become extinct, may in a distant future develop some believable and wholesome faith of which the form cannot now be foreseen.
Mr. Simpson discusses demonstrable facts with relentless objectivity. We live in a Universe in which life itself is but a trivial and transitory phenomenon, and the awesome contrast between its brutal realities and the glowing figments of our imaginations is always painful, even to men who have the fortitude to contemplate it. Some of Mr. Simpson’s perceptions may distress even the rare individuals who try to emancipate themselves from the endemic illusions of the masses.
He resolutely examines the psychological and social consequences of our great industrial technology, which made us masters of the whole Earth until Jewish superstitions paralyzed our vital instincts as well as our rationality, so that now our own technology is being used by our enemies “with deadly effectiveness to produce a herd of fellaheen, bemused, stupefied, tamed cattle, whom it will be easy for them to milk in the world-state corral they now have nearly ready to receive them.” That is a fact that no candid observer of the present will doubt, but Mr. Simpson goes on to consider the effects of industrial organization, which is necessarily inhuman, on the biological entity that is man. Needless to say, there can be no question of abandoning the technological power on which alone depends our only chance to survive in the world we lost, but it is well that we understand the price that we must pay for power. I commend Mr. Simpson’s discussion to all thoughtful men, and I remark only that Lord Acton, a Liberal whom even the “Liberal” cultists of our own day profess to admire, perceived, more than a century ago, that a real democracy (as distinct from the ochlocracy that is euphemistically called “democracy” today) must be based on some form of slavery.
One chapter in this book ruthlessly demolishes a prejudice that has been inculcated into all of us by the dominant mythology. Sixty-five years ago, when the great American student of historical causality, Correa Moylan Walsh (who would be ranked with Spengler, had he been born in Europe), identified the causes of the catastrophic decline that was then already imminent, he noted the perverse “effeminization of men, for which the masculinization of women will be no compensation,” and he devoted the third volume of his Climax of Civilization to the systematic illusion called Feminism. Limiting himself to essentials, Mr. Simpson has more concisely shown that, as should be obvious to anyone who looks about him, “men and women are fundamentally different creatures,” both physiologically and, what is even more important, psychologically. It is, of course, irrelevant that a dream of sexual equality (as in the gospel I mentioned above) may, like a dream of immortality, fascinate tender minds that need hallucinations to shield them from reality; and a calm consideration of the facts is particularly timely now, when screeching Jewesses are whipping the disinherited and bewildered females of our race into epidemic hysteria, thus applying the immemorial technique of their race, which, as some of its leading agitators have frankly stated, consists in creating dissension, antagonisms, and social disruption by finding groups of individuals who can be isolated on the basis of some supposed common interest and persuaded by artful sophistries that they are the victims of “social injustice” and “oppression.”
(to be continued)
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We will continue this series, “Oliver on Which Way Western Man,” next week, right here on American Dissident Voices.
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