The Last Verbal Crusader

by Revilo P. Oliver

THROUGH THE pietas of his beautiful wife, the late Gerald L.K. Smith has been commemorated by a well-printed and hard-bound volume of 363 pages entitled Besieged Patriot, published by the Elna M. Smith Foundation, of which the name on the title page has, for some obscure reason, been blotted out with stickers that give the name of the Christian Nationalist Crusade (P. O. Box 202, Eureka Springs, Arkansas). It is a series of 142 “autobiographical episodes exposing Communism, Traitorism, and Zionism,” augmented with a series of brief notices of well-known men whom Smith knew and with whom he was, for a time, associated in one way or another. This form avoids the inconveniences of an autobiography, which, calling for a continuous chronological narrative, might have forced the author to decide whether he should try to explain away some incidents or ignore them in the hope that no one would notice the omission.

The names of Francis Parker Yockey and Opal Tanner White might have caused some embarrassment, and many would have expected to learn why Smith published in his The Cross and the Flag as sucker-bait such notorious hoaxes as one of the Reverend William Dennis Mahan’s pious forgeries, introduced by a flagrantly disingenuous “authentication,” or a silly memoir, purportedly by an English noblewoman, attesting that Darwin came yammering back to Jesus on his deathbed, a fraud that was particularly offensive because the Man of God who contrived it did not take the trouble to learn the form of British titles of nobility or even to look at a map of England to make his holy drivel superficially plausible. Such impostures on the credulity of his readers were not even expedient: They cost Smith the subventions he was receiving from at least one regular contributor of large sums.

Used with discretion, Besieged Patriot will be an indispensable source for the history of the ill-fated “anti-Communist” movement in the United States. It will also convince every attentive reader of the vanity, the utter futility, of trying to use Christianity to defeat the Jews who invented it.

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Source: Liberty Bell magazine, April 1985