Counter-Currents
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Revilo Pendleton Oliver was born in Texas on this day in 1908. He received his undergraduate degree at Pomona College in California and his doctorate in classics at the University of Illinois under William Abbot Oldfather. He was Professor of Classics at the University of Illinois for many years.
Revilo Oliver was a man of remarkable erudition: he read eleven languages, including Sanskrit, and for more than half a century wrote scholarly articles in four languages for leading academic publications in the United States and Europe. His first book was The Little Clay Cart, an annotated translation of the Sanskrit Mrcchakatika, published by the University of Illinois in 1938.
During World War II, Oliver was Director of Research in a highly secret cryptographic agency of the War Department in Washington, DC, and was cited for outstanding service to his country. After his work for the War Department, Dr. Oliver was awarded a Guggenheim Post-Service Fellowship, and during the years 1953 and 1954 he traveled to Italy on a Fulbright Research Fellowship to study Italian Renaissance manuscripts.
In 1954, alarmed by the ongoing political subversion of the United States, Professor Oliver threw himself into conservative activism. He participated in the creation of National Review magazine; he was one of the founders of the John Birch Society; he made numerous speeches before patriotic groups; he wrote hundreds of articles and reviews. His disillusion with the conservative movement is chronicled in his book America’s Decline: The Education of a Conservative. Eventually, he abandoned conservatism and became an avowed racial nationalist.
Counter-Currents has republished the following essays and reviews by Revilo Oliver:
- History and Biology
- William Gayley Simpson’s Which Way Western Man?
- After Fifty Years
- Beyond Good and Evil: Bill Hopkins’ The Divine and the Decay
- Lawrence R. Brown’s The Might of the West
- The Shadow of Empire: Francis Parker Yockey after Twenty Years
- Spengler: Criticism and Tribute
For more work by and about Revilo Oliver, see the Revilo P. Oliver: The Life and Works of a Great American Writer and Thinker Website.
See also Margot Metroland’s commemorations, “The Professor and the Carnival Barker” and “Revilo Oliver in Winter.”
8 comments
A remarkable writer, even when tossing around opinions that were sometimes highly questionable. I always wished he had written a true Treatise on Race, something similar in scope but less tied to a single nation than The Dispossessed Majority, as he certainly possessed the intelligence and erudition for the vital task of constructing a comprehensive racial nationalist philosophy. But, like Sam Francis, he seemed to favor the shorter essay and monograph forms as his preferred mediums. It still disturbs and even amazes me that only the most ideologically extreme postwar thinkers on the Right could grasp the essential truth of our situation. How could it ever be that so many of our people were so blind for so long?
Hey Greg, love Oliver and all, but I have a query. They say the gladiator guy the Js are after, the intellectual anti semite guy, is another doctor—is that right? What kind? So they are after three doctors and at least one nurse? Any more? Why are they such hell on health care professionals?
Greg,
How did he get along with Buckley? He sounds like the type that Buckley would have purged.
I don’t know the complete story, but I’m pretty sure he was one of the first to get purged.
Other than that, for all who are interested, this is a great site for RPO writings: http://www.revilo-oliver.com/news/
Dear Greg Johnson,
Thank you for remembering Dr. Oliver and bringing back his birthday. He was one of the intellectual giants in this movement. Along with Dr. William Luther Pierce, Savitri Devi, Wilmot Robertson, Dr. Samuel Todd Francis and Julius Evola.
Here are some other people you should consider adding to the list: Dr. Roger Scruton, Dr. Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Dr. Christopher Lasch, Dr. George Santayana and Dr. Paul Fussell
Because Lasch had a soft spot for the white working class he is now seen as a white nationalist? I can imagine the wokeists making such an argument, but us? We need to keep our standards high. Lasch always saw himself as a man of the Left. I’m not sure about Fussell, either (though his memoirs of WW2 are worth reading).
Dr. Oliver was one of the first voices who awakened me. His prescient long-ago speech Conspiracy or Degeneracy? is current even today, and the question it poses is one we are still asking.
Dr. Oliver once said, “I favor the survival of Western Civilization“. Seven simple words which convey Our Cause powerfully. For years those words have been my response when confronted by the ideological bullies of the Left, and every time those words silence them.
Just noticed Revilo is Oliver spelled backwards.
(Yes, apparently I am in fact that slow.)
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