After Fifty Years

4,014 words

The American Mercury, Fall 1969

For half a century, generation after generation, large numbers of Americans have worked hard and sometimes desperately to avert the subversion and capture of their nation. And they have failed — utterly.

Since 1920, they have formed at least ten thousand “Conservative” and “Anti-Communist” organizations, large and small, that, like the flowers of Spring, have bloomed for a season, faded away, and been forgotten. Even well-informed Americans today might find it difficult to identify precisely even the greatest of these: the once large and imposing American Defense Society, the International Legion Against Communism, which once had branches in London and Paris, or Colonel Hadley’s Paul Reveres, which once had many chapters in every state from Maine to California.

Each organization had its idiosyncrasies, and many spent much of their effort in squabbling with one another, but all of them, large and small, genuine and fraudulent, have used the same basic formula. Read R. M. Whitney’s Reds in America, published in 1924, and you will find it all there, from “atheistic Communism” to Bolshevik butcheries; from subversion in public schools and churches to treason in the armed forces and government; from the names and crimes of Communist agents to hints about the mysterious power of the International Conspiracy. And the solution? Awaken the American people; show them their danger! Defend Christianity! Defend the Constitution!

That was the appeal in 1920 (when the Lusk Committee released its famous hearings) and that is the appeal today. Of course, atrocities and treason have multiplied enormously during the past fifty years, but all that we now have is a vastly greater quantity of the kind of information that was available and should have been conclusive in 1920. The tactics that failed then and failed every year since then are the tactics that are being used today. The most desperate exertions of devoted men and women (some of whom, like the eloquent leader of the 1930?s, Major Pease, and his wife, spent their whole fortunes in the effort and died in poverty) never succeeded in halting even for a moment the enemy’s relentless advance. They did retard that advance, so that now in 1969 we are at the point at which we would otherwise have been in 1945 or 1950. But that point is the end of the road. The net result is total failure.

It would take several volumes to analyze that failure. It will suffice to note that, first, in war and in politics defensive tactics always fail against a determined and persistent enemy. (If you think there are exceptions, think them over.) Second, even honest and intelligent anti-Communist leaders rightly or wrongly thought it necessary to indulge their followers in the illusions of Nineteenth-Century sentimentality, and to affirm a belief in the very fictions by which the enemy deluded the ignorant and gullible.

The World Has Changed

The tactics of 1920 are now an anachronistic absurdity.

In 1920, the majority of adult Americans believed in Christianity, and so did almost all of the priests and ministers. Today, all but comparatively few “traditionalist” Catholic and “fundamentalist” Protestant churches are occupied by pulpit-pinks and pulpit-punks who deny the divinity of Christ, spout poisonous rant about “social justice,” and with increasing frequency have hysterical fits in which they rush out into the streets to incite rape and murder. And so few Christians remain in the Sunday-morning clubs that the little shysters almost never receive an effective rebuke. Today, Christianity has become the faith of a small minority, and it is simply dishonest to pretend otherwise.

In 1920, the American Constitution had already been undermined by the aliens who wheedled gullible Americans into such booby-traps as the White Slave Act (originally called the “Income Tax”) and the “Federal Reserve” swindle, and it had been even more seriously impaired by the hypocritical pretense that it was somehow compatible with “democracy” and with tyranny exercised by do-gooders. But it still retained considerable prestige, and, what was more important, the political system was still one under which the harm that had been done could possibly be undone and repaired. Today, although the word “Constitution” is regularly uttered with a sneer by the Warren Gang whenever it publishes an edict from our international masters, the American Constitution was effectively abolished years ago. Today, it is dead and gone, and no amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth will alter that fact. The proof of its death is that it is no longer possible to restore the Constitution by Constitutional means.

Most important of all, in 1920, Americans, although they had been seduced into drunken follies by fat-headed do-gooders and hired traitors, still had manhood and self-respect, and they had clearly before them the great monuments of our uniquely noble and uniquely powerful civilization, which had been created, and could be preserved, only by the race, called Indo-European or Aryan, that has always been numerically a tiny minority among the world’s teeming populations. Today, our culture has been so covered with alien slime that crude daubs, scarcely worthy of a schizophrenic child, pass for art; the raucous noises of savages pass for music; the filthy maunderings of an Oriental degenerate pass for “mental health”; and grown men and women, who presumably no longer believe in Santa Claus and Cinderella, listen seriously to fairy tales about “World Peace” and the “United Nations.” And our manhood and self-respect have been so completely leached away that, to name but one instance, the American people, like a herd of mindless sheep, watched stolidly while their enemies in Washington set up the Pueblo for capture; while a naval vessel flying the American flag was captured by a little band of mangy Oriental pirates; while American sailors and officers, who had been tricked into enlistment by the pretense that they were to fight for the United States, were kicked, starved, and tortured month after month for almost a year; while scabrous aliens and traitors representing the American people groveled before the pirates and begged them to deign to accept a cash reward and a lying confession of American guilt.

A people that can do that is not a nation of men. It is a herd that has lost even the instinct of self-preservation.

What is left? Only the biological fact of race, the yet discernible vestiges of our culture, and the yet fresh memories of what we were not long ago. Those are all that we have left from which to create, if we can, a new nation to replace what we lost.

It is, I know, sad and painful that we have lost so much that we cherished and loved. But we cannot undo the past by wishing or pretending. I loved my father, but I cannot call him back to life, and if I were to pretend that he is not dead, I should merely prove myself a coward and a fool, unworthy of his memory and his name.

What is left to us here under the vast and lonely skies of a continent that our forefathers wrested from the aborigines and, with blood and sweat, made into a mighty nation? We are not yet extinct. We can still reasonably hope that we will leave descendants worthy of our ancestors.

We hear much these days about “unrest on the campus” and “the revolt of youth.” Let us be sure that we understand what is happening.

One can scarcely visit the campus of a college or high school these days without seeing and smelling the bands of unkempt young derelicts that slouch about in the academic slums until they are graduated to the “hippie” colonies in San Francisco and other cities. They should excite no astonishment. They are precisely what our schools have been working to produce ever since John Dewey and his gang perfected their method of milking the taxpayers while sabotaging the minds and the moral instincts of children. What is remarkable is that there are still so many members of that generation who have not lost their self-respect.

Many of the “hippies,” of course, are merely degenerates or weaklings, part of the refuse that organized societies invariably produce and must sweep from their streets, if life is to go on. But, as our better journalists have reported, there are some who have, not without reason, despairingly rejected the society that has been produced by the rape of our culture and the imposition of an alien morality — a bustling society of hollow men, with only emptiness where their souls should be.

Consider, for example, the young derelict who says that he reached the breaking point when he took a good look at his father, a $50,000-a-year “executive,” who spent his days gulping tranquillizers and Martinis in his office, and his weekends in wife-swapping orgies with his fellow “executives,” trying desperately to convince himself that he was really alive. In another youngster, something snapped when he saw his apparently wealthy father, who postured as the “big man” of the town, cringing before local aliens. Consider the others who, after different experiences, rejected a society that offered them no faith, no dignity, no hope. There must have been an innate decency in those young men that made them say, “To Hell with it,” and, with a romantic gesture of self-destruction, head for the “hippie” colonies and the oblivion of consummated degradation. It is a pity that such young men were lost to themselves — and to us.

Where Brainwashing Failed

What we have left in our schools is a large number of innately decent and intelligent young Americans who could become the elite of a future that is yet possible. They make no melodramatic gestures; they have thus far watched in silence and uncertainty. But they are inwardly the most discontented of all.

They watch in scorn when bands of young rabble, pepped up with marijuana and “Liberal” jargon, rush out to screech about the “war in Vietnam” and the awful possibility that some sweet little Asiatics may be hurt —with never a word, of course, about the American soldiers who die in that trap. Those “demonstrations” are too obviously staged to create the impression that the Communists are not delighted with their operation in Vietnam.

But make no mistake. The real resentment and anger is not in the little mob of gesticulating ranters; it is in the hearts of the sober students who walk away in silent scorn. They have seen their friends drafted, and know they will themselves soon be drafted and shipped to the other side of the globe, not to fight for their country, but to die in infested jungles merely to provide a gang of thieves and internationalists with  a  flimsy  pretext  that they  are “fighting Communism” by making American taxpayers finance and equip the hordes that are killing their sons. That is an obscene spectacle that no clear-sighted young man can behold without bitterness in his soul.

That is one — but only one — of the causes of the deep resentment that lies almost unnoticed beneath the froth of what the press likes to call “ferment.” Among the herds that roam over every campus you will still find a fairly large number of students, intelligent young men and women, who, odd as it is coming to seem, came to college to learn, not to demonstrate and copulate. Many of them are puzzled, and some are bewildered; they are sure of only one thing; they are sick of the whole mess.

They, for example, find themselves trying to learn in college what any intelligent child can learn in the sixth grade, but which American children are prevented from learning by glib “educators” who are trying to create “equality.” In their home towns they have seen at work the do-gooders who snivel about the “underprivileged” and then gleefully grab young children by the nape of the neck and rub their faces in filth — to create “equality.” And here in college, in many a required course, they must hear and recite once more, as they have had to do every year since kindergarten, the dreary drivel about “democracy,” “social good,” “under-developed nations,” “one world,” and all the other myths of “Liberal” Make Believe, and they see that the purpose is to excite in them a feeling of guilt because they belong to the only race that could attain power over the forces of nature — guilt because their ancestors’ intelligence and courage raised them above the squalor of universal “equality.” They parrot, as they must, the professor’s gabble, but what they feel is not guilt, but anger. And they are sick of “equality.”

To enumerate all the causes that, in varying degrees for each individual, excite their disgust and resentment would be to compile an inventory of all the shibboleths and hypocrisies of contemporary society. Their resentment has been accumulating for a long time, but they repressed it until the “educators” exposed themselves by inciting riots and crime on the campus.

Not long ago, university presidents were still rather imposing figures as they recited with rotund unction the phrases about “challenging opportunities to serve mankind” and “meeting the needs of a changing world” that had been strung together by their speech-writers. But the spectacle of a little twerp cowering before a motley gang of punks or savages that he himself brought to the campus and subsidized with other people’s money, is one that cannot be forgotten.

Supposedly, of course, most of the “educators” were taken by surprise.

To be sure, the President of Brandeis University, Dr. Morris B. Abram, proudly assured the “Academy of Religion and Mental Health” that the rioters, presumably including the vermin that occupied his own building for ten days, are engaged in “a genuine revolution” to become “true citizens of the world without boundaries” because “they have absorbed well the ideals we taught them.” But, so far as the press has reported, Dr. Abram is the only “educator” to brag that he and his kind contrived the epidemic by subtly and skillfully injecting the “ideal” germs of anarchy and destruction.

The Twilight of the Wizards

The wizards that preside over other institutions recently disrupted by outbreaks of world citizenship and equality have thus far emitted only squeaks that seem to mean that they were surprised by the riots — that they had not planned it that way — that they never suspected that savages aren’t gentlemen— that they had not known what they were doing when they imported them. It is only courtesy to believe those excuses. But it follows, of course, that the pompous manikins are too ignorant and stupid to be entrusted with an academic responsibility greater than that of mopping the floors. Indeed, since in most institutions the janitors would never have done anything so silly, and in some the janitors even protested the Big Brain’s imposition of “brotherhood,” one wonders, on second thought, whether Prexy, Ph.D., LL.D., etc., could safely be entrusted with a broom.

What is significant is what was done in a few institutions by young Americans — and when I use that word, I mean young Americans, descendants and heirs of the creators of the Western world; I do not mean all featherless bipeds that, “regardless of race, color, or creed,” happen to be on our soil at the present time. In some universities, after Prexy, Ph.D., LL.D., etc. — excluded from his own building by creatures he had hired to come to the university as “students” — had groveled and “negotiated” for days, young Americans, losing patience with the deflated old windbag, simply went into the building and hauled out the animated garbage.

Those young Americans are our last hope of survival. They deserve what support we can give them. With luck and foresight, they may recover the country we lost.

We are told that “youth” is idealistic. That is true, if the statement means that our young men and women have inherited the quality, peculiar to our race, that finds expression in our great sagas of Beowulf, King Arthur, Roland, Parsifal, and Siegfried. It is false, if by “ideals” you mean the White Queen’s cultivated ability to believe at least six impossible things before breakfast, and the “Liberal” notion that you can make big magic by chanting lies about the real world.

Young Americans have the courage and the will to fight and, if need be, to sacrifice themselves for what they in­stinctively feel is great and noble. They are the last force to which we can ap­peal.

We cannot inspire them by rehash­ing for the ten-thousandth time Whit­ney’s Reds in America. They know, as our aging “anti-Communists” seem not to know, that the world of 1924 is gone with the wind — and, whether you like it or not, they feel no nostalgia for it. We cannot attract them with sermons about the beauties of a Constitution which, after all, was inadequate to pre­vent the present. They know that no document can make a nation out of a herd of equals; they sense that nations can exist only by the cohesion of a common will manifested in authority and discipline. We cannot charm them with platitudes about “mankind’s up­ward reach for a better world.” They know that “mankind” is an assortment of disparate peoples who must compete for space on an overcrowded planet; they sense that the world of nations to­day is what it always has been and al­ways will be: the real world in which the weak go under and the strong sur­vive.

That is why there was for so long no effort to foster an American youth movement. It was not what was wanted by the good-hearted and white-haired patriots who, in their ever diminishing conclaves, orated to one another in the hope that some miracle might yet waft them back to 1924 or, better yet, the Spring of 1914. It was dreaded by the master salesmen in the “anti-Commu­nist” business, who know what nice mixture of fact and shibboleth opens pocketbooks, and who naturally mean good business every step of the way — to the end.

At Last the Bugle Sounds

The first real effort, so far as I know, to bring together the scattered and si­lent elite of American youth is now being made by the National Youth Alliance, under the leadership of Mr. Louis T. Byers, a young man of undoubted integrity and true devotion, matured by extensive experience in “conservative” and “anti-Communist” circles. This could be the turning point for which we have so long hoped.

The principle of union and the textbook of the new organization is Francis Parker Yockey’s brilliant and long-suppressed book, Imperium ^[2], a philosophy of history that was virtually unknown until it was republished a few years ago. It has now been reprinted in a popular edition that sells for $2.50 (two copies for $4.00) — primarily for the instruction and use of members of the new Alliance.

I have twice before criticized Imperium as a philosophic synthesis of the lessons of history, pointing out, inter alia, that its major thesis was confirmed and corroborated by the entirely independent work of Lawrence R. Brown, The Might of the West ^[3], and by the antecedent work of the great Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision ^[4]. I need here only recommend careful study of Willis A. Carto’s discerning and very important introduction to the volume.

The essential point here is that Imperium, and through it the National Youth Alliance, for the first time tells the elite of young Americans what they have so long and doubtfully waited to hear. It does not tell them about the economic advantages of “free enterprise,” to be reaped by helping some corporation sell more Coca-Cola or hair oil or paint-remover, and it does not dilate on the blessings of freedom to buy a mortgage in the suburbs, run faster in the rat-race, and raise children to be taught that Paradise is a place where hominids with full bellies live in perpetual rut. It speaks to them of honor, loyalty, race, and Western man’s will to conquer or die. It summons them, not to meetings of a Ladies’ Missionary Society, but to a struggle against great odds. It warns them, not that lady-like conservatives must be careful to Love Everybody, but that the treason of the slimy Ganelon can be defeated only if the Men of the West are still willing to die in the pass at Roncesvalles.

This is a bugle call that cannot fail to rouse what Jung calls our “racial psyche,” and it would be sheer impertinence for you or me to try to add footnotes. But, in sober fact, this last effort of the West faces fearful odds.

Young America

The young, it is true, have a freedom of action that is denied to their parents, who, after all, must live to make the next payment on the mortgage and on the “income tax,” but the young in the schools will nevertheless face the subtle and devious hostility of the whole Establishment. The “educators” will try to trap them in an endless net of ambiguous rules and pettifogging regulations. Great idealists, who beam benignly when young Americans are beaten or knifed on the campus, will turn purple with rage at the slightest slight to the fauna of their academic jungles. And, of course, the pet curs of the press will bark “Fasheest,” “Nat-see,” and “Aunteye-Seemeetic,” the three sounds that should infallibly make well-conditioned Americans dive under the bed faster than frightened cats. And, equally of course, members of the National Youth Alliance will suddenly be surrounded by “responsible conservatives,” recently retired from the C.I.A. or A.D.L., eager to point out the virtues and profit of “moderation” and “democratic procedures,” with a bonus of whatever sexual bait seems most likely to hook the fish. Lastly, young Americans are uncertain what they should do to attain what they instinctively want; they are made hesitant by their own deficiencies. They have been passed through our public brain-washing machine, and they know that they have received, not a liberal education, but an “education” by “Liberals.” They have since the first grade been sloshed about in the standard detergent: one ounce of fact dissolved in a gallon of hogwash. They have so much to unlearn!

The Prospect

I do not venture to predict the future of the National Youth Alliance. It has great potentiality, but it will therefore be the target of open and stealthy assaults delivered with a fury and cunning surpassing all that we have seen thus far. And the time in which any action will still be possible is perilously short. I merely say that American youth is our last hope, and that at long last an effort is being made to rally it. The most that one can affirm is that the youth movement, with adequate support and guidance, has a chance of success.

If we choose to support it, let us not deceive ourselves. If this movement is not somehow frustrated at its very inception, if it ever gets under way, it will move forward with the gathering momentum of an avalanche. All that we can now foresee is the general direction in which the avalanche will move; that can be inferred from the pages of Imperium. That, as I pointed out years ago, may startle or even dismay conservatives of the older generations.

I wonder, however, whether the older generation has a right to tell young Americans how far they should go. The fight will be theirs. We may help them with our money and advise them; we may try to give them the advantage of what knowledge we have gleaned from history and our own experience. But let us remember that although you and I may personally have done all that we could — I hope we did — we nevertheless, belong to a generation that was too inept and too fatuous to keep what it had. Let us not try to impose the sentimentality and squeamishness that was fatal to us on our successors. The future, if there is one, is theirs.

Source: http://www.revilo-oliver.com/news/1969/09/after-fifty-years/ ^[5]