Oliver on Which Way Western Man, part 3

American Dissident Voices broadcast of 29 March, 2025

by Kevin Alfred Strom

ON TODAY’S PROGRAM we present the final part — for the first time in audio form — of Dr. Revilo Pendleton Oliver’s brilliant overview and analysis of William Gayley Simpson’s great book Which Way Western Man? — and his review is a remarkable and significant work in itself. William Simpson’s book is, by the way, now in its third edition and is available from our bookstore at cosmotheistchurch.org.

Dr. Revilo Oliver was one of the greatest writers, and deepest thinkers, of the 20th century.

Dr. Oliver begins this week with a succinct look at the history of Christianity — and the tremendous perils which it poses for the future of our race. These are some of the most important ideas you will ever hear in your life.

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

Third and final part.

by Revilo P. Oliver

AS I HAVE said, [in Which Way Western Man?] Mr. Simpson has explored and elucidated every aspect of our plight. A comprehensive review of his book would run to an inordinate length and, for the most part, sound like an encomium. A reviewer, however, is expected to be a carping critic, and it is his duty particularly to call attention to passages that may be misleading in one way or another.

In an autobiographical section, Mr. Simpson describes what he calls his “mysticism.” I wish he had used another word, for he is dealing with operations of the subliminal, or subconscious, mind that are still unexplained. Psychology today, when it is a science as distinct from lucrative quackery, is in about the position of physical chemistry in the first century BC, when several Greek philosophers identified earth, water, air, and fire as the four constituent elements of all matter. The psychological problem, which seems to have been perceived only by the peculiar mentality of our race, is, of course, much older than the daimon of Socrates and there is a sense of it even in Homer. It is a matter of common experience that a mind, no matter how lucid, cannot explain some of its own operations. Some mathematicians, for example, say that if they think about a difficult problem as they fall asleep, the solution will appear in their consciousness when they awake. Despite Poe’s famous essay, artists, including poets and even some first-rate novelists, aver that their best ideas come from “inspiration,” emerging into their consciousness suddenly and not as a result of a sequence of logical deductions and inferences. When we meditate on a given problem, an idea that eludes us in strictly logical thinking obtrudes itself from some subconscious source and is found, on examination, to be logically sound. A similar process often governs personal choice: When reasoning fails to indicate a clear balance in favor of one or another alternative, we may choose in terms of a “hunch” or some similar prompting. It does not seem that such phenomena can be adequately explained as instinctive or as produced by the hereditary quality called phyletic memory, and until we understand the interaction between the three parts of the triune brain (the reptilian nucleus, the limbic substratum, and the neocortex, as identified by Dr. Paul MacLean) and between the prefrontal lobe of the neocortex and its other parts, we cannot explain the operations of the subconscious, but that does not in the least imply that the “spiritual” is not strictly physical. The subconscious, needless to say, is by no means infallible, and Mr. Simpson, who is anything but a “mystic,” properly insists that all its impulses be examined and approved by strictly rational thought before they are accepted.

I have heard Mr. Simpson accused of trying to unite Jesus and Nietzsche. It is true that he gives his interpretation of the character of the Christians’ Jesus, whom he evidently regards as an historical person and the author of doctrines that are clearly inapplicable to human life. His interpretation is based on the few Christian gospels that were hurriedly and ineptly thrown together by the particular Christian sect that shrewdly made a deal with the despots of the once-Roman Empire and thus acquired the legal and political power to persecute and exterminate the numerous Christian sects that were competing with it. Needless to say, the inconsistent and often self-contradictory picture presented by those gospels differs enormously from the pictures drawn in the many other gospels. It does contain, in the Apocalypse and some passages in the screed written under the name of Matthew, some of the gospels of the Ebionites, who were probably the first Christian sect that was not restricted to Jews, although the lowly goyim were promised no status higher than that of “whining dogs” and promised only the great privilege of lying on the floor and being given the table-scraps when the Jews banqueted after their Jesus came back from Heaven and inflicted on the nasty Aryans all the ingenious torments that are so exultantly described in the ghastly horror-story that closes the New Testament. The Ebionites’ Jesus must have differed greatly from the one described in the rest of the “orthodox” collection, as must the Jesus of the Naassenes (another Jewish sect), who descended from heaven in the form of a huge snake and crawled into Mary’s womb.

When the Christians started composing gospels around the middle of the second century, the various sects naturally adopted or devised tales to justify their own inclinations, and there is no reason whatsoever to believe that any one story is more likely to preserve elements of historical value than another. The sect that made the political deal with the despots was, for reasons that we may conjecture but cannot prove, one that carried with it the Jews’ Old Testament, which became so acute an embarrassment to Erasmus and many other sincere but thoughtful Christians at the time of the revival of learning. There were various sects, some of them large and numerous before they were exterminated, which quite logically identified the Yahweh of the Old Testament with Satan, and their Jesus obviously differed greatly from the “orthodox” version, as did the Jesus of the sects that knew him to have been a phantom or a corporeal form taken on by a god who wished to appear to mortals, as, for example, Venus took on the bodily shape of a Carthaginian maiden when she appeared to her son, Aeneas.

It is likely that all of the gospels were elaborated imaginatively from folk tales or oral traditions about one or another of the numerous Jewish agitators who, during the first century BC and the following century, tried to stir up the Jews in Egypt, Palestine, and probably Italy, most or all of whom bore the extremely common colloquial name Jesus (comparable to our ‘Bill’ for ‘William’), and all of whom naturally claimed to be christs (i.e., messiahs). Some of these agitators are known from other sources and are historical, though unimportant, figures, and one or another of these can be recognized as the probable prototype of one or another tale in the conflations, but it would be a waste of time to try to extract from confused narratives a consistent portrayal of any one individual. What Mr. Simpson has done — and this is valuable — is extract from the “orthodox” collection the elements that did strongly impress the minds of our race when our barbarous and ignorant ancestors accepted a religion that was presented to them as a documented and verified historical fact to which men had to accommodate themselves, even if it was unpalatable and repugnant to their moral sense.

It is the crucial fact of our time that the religion which was elaborated in the Middle Ages as an instrument of social stability has now been totally turned against us. Even so late as a decade ago it was still possible to entertain a lingering hope that the decision of conservatives since the French Revolution to base their position on the time-hallowed tradition had not been entirely a blunder, but the remaining votaries of the old faith were too few, too aged, and too bemused. Now the religion is being progressively restored to the primitive cult of the Ebionites and used as a mighty weapon against us. Its supposed “revival” by evangelical shysters is merely another proof of the deadly efficiency of our publicly-financed boob-hatcheries. Minds that have been so sabotaged that they can believe in the equality of races have been so debilitated that they can believe in anything, from “Bermuda Triangles” to Moon-faced drug-peddlers from Korea, from “one world” to poltergeists, from “psychics” who “foresee” the future or recognize reincarnated princesses from old Atlantis to the Yahweh described in Marc Dem’s Lost Tribes from Outer Space, who came hither in a flying saucer to install his Master Race among the lower anthropoids and who may come back any minute to clobber us nasty Aryans, if we annoy him by sending rockets too far beyond the Moon.

It is a grim fact that our people today is as hag-ridden with superstitions as were our ancestors in the Middle Ages. We have voluntarily shut our eyes to reality as though life were a child’s game to be played by capering blindfolded, until now we stand, as A.K. Chesterton says in his posthumous book, Facing the Abyss. Our recent history reminds one of the old Mexican myth of Toveyo, the cunning sorcerer who exterminated the Toltecs by beating faster and faster on a magic drum that made the hypnotized people dance ever more furiously until they, exhausted, made a final leap into the abyss of eternal night.

If we are not to follow the Toltecs, we must at last use the cognitive and objectively rational powers that are peculiar to our racial mentality. Whether our decaying race still has the will or even the capacity to make that effort is the only question and it must be answered soon.

Mr. Simpson is too honest to palliate our peril with illusory hopes or tranquillizing verbiage. His book, I warn you, is only for those who dare look upon the stark realities of a terrible universe. The Sun is but a lonely spark amid a billion suns that are themselves lost in endless night, and in all of infinity our planet may be the only lump of rock infected with sentient life, of which men are merely a peculiar and ephemeral variety. Among the mammalian bipeds, our race is a small and hated minority. For us there is no help from the infinite void that encompasses us, and no help beneath the clouds, except in ourselves. Like all living organisms, we must fight to survive in the unceasing struggle for life. But, as Mr. Simpson reminds us, survival is not enough: a race can survive only by aggression.

At their origin through some biological mutation or phenomenal hybridism, the Jews can have been no more than a band of squalid savages, less numerous and less important than the Mohicans or the Algonquins on this continent. Had their ambition been only to survive as a tribe, they would soon have disappeared, absorbed into the teeming populations of the Near East. But that minuscule race, inspired by implacable hatred, perfected through ruthlessly selective breeding a very high degree of predatory intelligence and a genius for dissimulation and deceit. Endowed with a loyalty to their own race that maintained their unity in dispersion, they infiltrated more civilized nations to exploit the superstitions and appetites, the gullibility and venality, of the masses. Thus, in only twenty-five centuries, they became the arbiters and virtually the masters of the world today.

If our race has been so debilitated by menticidal illusions that it no longer has the will to subjugate and dominate other races, then, by the irrevocable law of all life, it has become unfit to survive. If that is so, the superiority that we won by our courage and technological power and have now lost by our fatuity is lost forever, and despite what you and I may wish or hope, we are, in the grim balance of Nature, what the Jews believe us to be, an irredeemably inferior species,³ fit only for brutish servitude or, at best, extinction.

[Footnote 3. The Jews’ contempt for us is explicit or implicit in all their writings, except, of course, propaganda for the stupid goyim. As Dr. Nahum Goldman, founder of the World Jewish Congress, says in Das Jüdische Paradox (Cologne, 1978), p. 25, the Jewish mind, sublimely confident of its own superiority, has always regarded us “als eine minderwertige Rasse” — (“an inferior race”).]

(Finis.)

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