Revilo Oliver on America’s Decline

2,065 words

Revilo P. Oliver
America’s Decline: The Education of a Conservative 
Sussex, England: Historical Review Press, 2006

If there is anything that shows the state of the Dispossessed Majority and the Great Replacement as it existed in the early twentieth century it is Woodrow Wilson’s boyhood home in Staunton, Virginia. The home, which is a museum open to the public for tours, is adjacent to the Presbyterian Church where Wilson’s father served as pastor. Between the home and the church is a Jewish synagogue.

The political circumstances in America between the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt is one where the native white Americans lost out to globalist Jews and other minorities. This displacement continues today. One of the far-seeing white advocates who pointed out these problems was Revilo Pendleton Oliver, Jr. (1908-1994).

Oliver was a Classicist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His family had lived in America since the 1600s and mostly originated in the colonies of the mid-Atlantic. For a time, he was a member of the anti-Communist John Birch Society but was forced out due to his wisdom regarding the Jewish Question. Oliver was frustrated with the Birch Society’s leader suppressing information about the remarkably close connections between the organized Jewish community and the Communists.

During the Second World War, Oliver worked in military intelligence in Washington, DC. He was not engaged in metapolitics at this time. In 1945, as he left Washington with his wife, figuring that the American public would come to understand the true disaster of the war very shortly. He believed that the public would realize that the war had saved the Soviet Union while destroying the better half of Western Civilization, and took heart in the fact that “[a]ll the putrid propaganda [about Germany] sprayed in [American] faces from 1939 to 1942 did not suffice to induce the delirium of 1917 and stampede cattle into Europe ‘to make the world safe for democracy.” (p. 52).

In 1949, Oliver took hope in the fact that a brave white advocate in Congress, John Rankin, attempted to get the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) designated a subversive group. It was a hopeful, budding American Majority reaction to the hostile Jewish elite, but this action went nowhere.

Oliver was one of the many Americans on the Right who became politically active during the Korean War. He observed the fall of Senator Joseph McCarthy and decided that he needed to act. He wrote many books thereafter.

You can buy K. M. Breakey’s Shout: The Battle Cry of Freedom here.

One of Oliver’s books, America’s Decline, lays out the history of white American displacement. As mentioned above, the problem starts with Wilson. Oliver saw Wilson as a “crackbrained idealist” and a “pseudo-intellectual rabble-rouser.” Wilson had many Jewish supporters and he acted upon their advice. Furthermore, Wilson used the sinking of the Lusitania to maneuver America into the First World War. Other Wilson-era problems described by Oliver were the Federal Reserve, the federal income tax, and the Seventeenth Amendment, which allowed for the direct election of senators. Wilson also whipped Americans into a “delirium” to fight Germany.

Oliver argues that Wilson set the stage for the Prohibitionist ban on alcoholic beverages. This made a drink which had been enjoyed by humanity since the dawn of civilization illegal, thereby creating a vast black market which allowed many of the ethnonationalist Jews involved in bootlegging very wealthy. They then used that wealth to warp American politics to serve their ends. Prohibition, and its scoff-law imbibers, became

the paramount political issue for more than a decade, virtually eclipsing every real issue of national importance. Except in a few communities in which foreigners were dominant, election to public office was limited to hypocrites, who would publicly promise to tighten the control of a police state over Americans, and privately tell themselves that the “Noble Experiment” was sure to provide them with untaxable income and good liquor. (pp. 46-47)

Oliver shows that when the Second World War broke out, Franklin Delano Roosevelt maneuvered the United States into war with Japan. American cryptologists had broken the Japanese diplomatic code. They also knew that the Japanese had broken the diplomatic code of the Portuguese. Roosevelt summoned the Portuguese ambassador and informed him that they would strike Japan when the Japanese were overextended in attempting to capture European colonies in Asia, such as Portuguese East Timor. The Japanese discovered this and it changed their strategy, opting to attack Pearl Harbor as well as other European outposts simultaneously.

Oliver doesn’t directly say that the British made a terrible decision when they gave an unsolicited guarantee to Poland to declare war in their defense. However, he does believe that Roosevelt and Churchill were bent on provoking war. Roosevelt, for example, used the US Navy to provoke hostilities with Germany between 1939 and 1941, long before Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States.

Roosevelt and Churchill waged war against the Germans with savage ferocity, and in doing so they also built up the Soviet Union. Thus, when the conflict was over, America had a new enemy that was made powerful as a result of wartime lend-lease aid. The newly-empowered Soviets were only held in check by the United States, which had decisively defeated an Asiatic power and emerged as the largest economy with the largest military.

Oliver was critical of the Bretton Woods order which America set up to isolate the Soviets during the Cold War: “. . . [T]he so-called ‘cold war’ begun by Truman seemed an obvious prelude to armed combat, even though it was used by traitors and looters as a pretext for exporting our resources to our eventual enemies on the idiotic theory that we could so overload them with gifts that they would become our friends” (p. 57).

Throughout the Cold War, the American Empire of Nothing gave away American industry, access to markets, and secured the shipping lanes for every nation regardless of ongoing frictions. The Eisenhower administration carried out an “Atoms for Peace” policy which likewise gave away America’s nuclear technology. Iran’s nuclear program initially grew out of Ike’s policies. Today, America is totally reliant upon Taiwan for semiconductors. Oliver didn’t recognize that trade relationships would eventually help the US to defeat the Soviet Union without a thermonuclear war, but he did realize that America was giving away much of its economy though its Cold War policies. Once the Cold War ended, globalist free trade became a problem.

Oliver also points out that much of “civil rights” ideology is a perversion of Christianity:

The doctrine of the “Liberal” cults is essentially Christianity divested of its belief in supernatural beings, but retaining its social superstitions, which were originally derived from, and necessarily depend on, the supposed wishes of a god. Thus “Liberalism,” the residue of Christianity, is, despite the fervor with which its votaries hold their faith, merely a logical absurdity, a series of deductions from a premise that has been denied. (p. 78)

He doesn’t use the term Negro Worship, but that is exactly what this is. Negro Worship has existed since at least the 1830s, and its most deadly armed prophet was the mattoid John Brown.

Oliver is critical of Jewish control of the United States. His perspective is that of a Classicist, so he compares Jewish hostile actions in twentieth-century America to Jewish hostility in the ancient world. He writes:

When Jews first appear in history, they are an international race with colonies in many lands. (The tale about a Diaspora after the siege of Jerusalem in AD 69 is, of course, just another hoax.) They always maintained a very large colony in Babylon, which they betrayed to Cyrus and the Persians in 538 BC, just as, much later, they habitually betrayed the Greco-Roman cities of Asia Minor to the Parthians. During the Greco-Roman period, in fact, Babylon was their real capital, the seat of their Nasi, the Chief Executive of their international nation. In oracles that they forged near the beginning of the second century BC under the name of an early Greek prophetess, the Jews boast that all the lands and seas of the earth are full of them. In the first century BC, Strabo, one of the foremost geographers of antiquity, stated that it was almost impossible to find an inhabited place on earth into which the Jewish race had not penetrated and acquired an effective control over the natives. And at that time, although Strabo probably did not know it, they were already in China, where they have today an “influential but unnumbered colony.” In the first century of the present era, Josephus repeatedly boasts that there is no people anywhere on the globe who do not have a segment of the Jewish race lodged among them. (p. 95)

Oliver also recognizes that the so-called flagship publication of the “conservative movement” was flawed from the outset. He writes:

In the spring of 1960, I was still uncertain how to explain the fact that the National Review . . . had become a basically “Liberal” periodical, witty and entertaining, but, under the cover of a devotion to Catholicism, subject to strict Jewish censorship, so that it purveyed a kosher “conservatism,” distinguishable only at certain points from the orthodox “Liberal” line, and having the effect of exciting bright young men to play innocuous games with words and ideas on a constantly supervised playground. (p. 100)

Oliver was also critical of attempts by conservatives to give the United States a state religion. In one conference, he witnessed a serious proposal to make America Christian along Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian lines. This idea is obviously a non-starter and impractical. Not only do the three denominations have theological quarrels among themselves, but America’s founders include Unitarians, Congregationalists, and Quakers, so leaving them out was obviously a bad idea. The entire concept might have ended up as a ruse to distract conservatives.

Oliver goes on to comment that

[i]f conservative thought is to be politically effective, it must rely on human experience, logic, and common sense; it needs Edmund Burkes and Irving Babbitts, not young Shelleys possessed by a Demon of the Absolute. A proposition, whatever its justification in faith or theory, is for political purposes excluded if it does not fall within the range of present possibility. (p. 175)

The overwhelming bulk of the book consists of essays by Oliver that were published in various papers and magazines. All of the essays have considerable insights and many are applicable to the present day. A large number of Oliver’s ideas have entered mainstream discourse. He may also have been the first person to say that universities have too many administrators. This fluff and puff increases the costs of an education and provides jobs for bored Leftists who then make trouble and subvert the youth. The recent Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE) push is the product of non-white mediocrities angling for an intellectual job without needing to do any real thinking.

Oliver also has a lengthy essay about the dynamics of Hispaniola, both racial and political. He wrote this when the Dominican Republic nearly fell to a Communist conspiracy that was thwarted by a major deployment of American troops.

Oliver’s books retain considerable value for those on the Right. If there is any flaw in his writing, it is that he has a pessimistic tone. We know today that his pessimism was unfounded. He made an impact. I even remember watching an episode of the 1980s sitcom Our House in which a Pearl Harbor veteran and Roosevelt supporter had to come to terms with the fact that Roosevelt had conspired to allow the Japanese attack to occur. Admittedly, Our House was only a TV sitcom, but middle-of-the-road TV shows can reflect a shift in social attitudes.

Additionally, while Congressman Rankin’s attempt to take down the Anti-Defamation League failed to succeed, FOX News commentator Tucker Carlson successfully pushed back against them when they called for him to be fired after talking about the Great Replacement. Carlson was so successful in countering ADL claims that they backed down. It was a considerable blow to an organization that usually wins.

Americans also successfully resisted the anti-Russian propaganda that started in 1999. While Americans overwhelmingly support Ukraine in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, public opinion is such that it is not possible for the Biden regime to conduct direct action against Russia, such as was the case with Roosevelt’s actions in the Atlantic before December 1941.

If anything, Oliver’s career shows that despair is beneath us. The extreme Right of the 1960s has made an impact on the national consciousness of today.

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