Counter-Currents
Remembering William Gayley Simpson
(July 23, 1892–December 31, 1990)
A Pleasant Afternoon with Harriet & Bill Simpson
Margot Metroland
3,063 words
Back in 1986, my friend Fritz Berg[1] was suddenly inspired to drive 100 miles north into Upstate New York — Fritz lived in Fort Lee, New Jersey, across the George Washington Bridge — and drop in on William Gayley Simpson.
This was more than a joyride, and I suppose it wasn’t all that sudden; Fritz had some kind of agenda in the works. Bill was getting old — about 94 at the time — and there was talk about him and his wife moving north to Cooperstown, New York, mainly for health reasons. Cooperstown (population 1,820), founded by James Fenimore Cooper’s father, had everything — or at least it had doctors, as well as arts festivals and, of course, baseball. It was a major metropolis compared with where the Simpsons were living then, which was basically the middle of nowhere, in a rambling old house in the woods.
The place didn’t even have a name, so far as I knew. A year ago I finally researched it and found that there was a tiny hamlet down the road calling itself Prattsville (population 700). But Prattsville is in fact a “town”; i.e., a subdivision of Greene County, New York — not a village at all, but rather what in other states might be called a township. Thus, it was a town with 700 people over 20 square miles, an area about the size of Manhattan. And that’s where Harriet and Bill Simpson lived, at the edge of a forest in the northern Catskills. It’s also where Bill ended up being buried in 1990, after dying in hospital in Cooperstown.
Digging a little deeper, I learned that Bill had been given this house, with attached farm and woodlands, way back in 1932. Yes, he was given it, the way you might give away your spare copy of Which Way Western Man? (about which, more later). Bill had once been a Presbyterian minister, but he became disenchanted with Christianity after reading Friedrich Nietzsche, so he defrocked himself and became instead a professional lecturer and Seeker After Truth. He did the whole Razor’s Edge trip, traveling to India and the Far East, meeting gurus and mystics, ever searching after the meaning of existence. Having never had any interest in gurus and mystics, I found these accounts more otherworldly than intriguing.[2]
As another churchman wrote of Bill in 1934:
He longed to live close to the earth, away from the madness of cities, and to grow his own food with his own hands. And it was at this time that a friend, knowing of his need, gave him a farm near Prattsville, New York, high up in the Catskill Mountains.[3]
I love this story. Anybody got a spare farm you don’t need? A newspaper clipping from 1935 says that Bill “bought” the house and acreage from one Gordon E. Becker, but this may reflect a simple formality of deed transfer.
Regardless, here we were 54 years later, and Bill had to figure out what to do about the property. His wife was much younger, but she wasn’t about to remain in that house by herself, an elderly widow alone in the woods, high up in the Catskills. So now Bill was thinking along eleemosynary lines: He ought to give the house and land to a charity, or a foundation, or something like that. Bill had had at least one child from his earlier marriages (I count at least two wives before Harriet, whom he married in 1965), but the child or children never seemed to be in the picture, and there was no talk about leaving the Prattsville farm to the whelps.
All of which brings us back to the subject of Fritz Berg. Fritz was floating some scheme about turning Bill’s house into a writer’s retreat. The idea is that we’d set up some not-for-profit, choose some candidates willing to live at our little mountain Yaddo, and Bill would make the property over to the foundation’s board. We had a mutual friend who’d lived for a couple of years on a private buffalo preserve in the middle of Nebraska, where he was ostensibly working on a big book that would prove definitively that the Holocaust Was a Hoax. But long-form writing eluded this fellow during the period when he was out where the buffalo roamed. Thus, instead he ended up writing sprightly little articles for The Spotlight and a church newspaper.
Fritz figured Prattsville might be a better alternative to the buffalo preserve, with the extra advantage that it wasn’t way the hell out in Nebraska. And if you needed some fellowship and entertainment — well, the fleshpots of Fort Lee and Manhattan were just a couple of hours away! Alas, however; the buffalo guy took a job with one of the Carto enterprises and moved out to California. But there were other writers . . . maybe we could find some.
And so late one Saturday morning Fritz and I, and a couple of curiosity-seeking friends, made the long drive up to this place in the woods. Fritz brought along a ham steak he’d had in the refrigerator, because the Simpsons were vegetarians, mayhaps even vegans, and it was suggested that we might wish to bring along some normal-people food. So that was the ham steak. Bill’s wife Harriet said she had no idea how to cook it, so I grilled it in a skillet, and it ended up with the consistency of shoe leather. Bill and Harriet’s luncheon food was good, as I recall, but the ham experience has blotted out all recollection of anything else we ate.
You can buy The World in Flames: The Shorter Writings of Francis Parker Yockey here.
“That ham really was pretty terrible, wasn’t it?” said Fritz later on. I let him think maybe it had lain in his refrigerator too long, rather than me overcooking it in the skillet. “Fritz is tight as a drum,” commented Matt Balic, one of our fellow travelers.
Harriet — Mrs. Simpson — was 70 years old, but looked much younger.[4] She was the sort of person who’d proudly proclaim her age because she knew she looked attractive and fit, and laughed at the Grim Reaper. She seemed a healthy, athletic 52, maybe, with freckles and strawberry-blonde hair. I vaguely recall that the Simpsons had one room of the house given over to exercise equipment. (Willis and Elisabeth Carto did, too, in their hilltop Escondido home which, once you drove up there, seemed almost as isolated as Prattsville.) Harriet was one of the most upbeat and cheerful people I ever met, the sort of person who enters a room and it’s like you’ve opened the Venetian blinds and let the sunlight in. Bill looked good for his years, too, though of course the 24-year age gap was noticeable, and Bill’s personality was ineradicably dour. Regardless, their Life-Extension Institute program, or whatever it was, was wearing very well on them.
Harriet and Bill also had a dog, a very noble rough-collie bitch, probably a pedigreed descendant of Albert Payson Terhune’s Sunnybank Kennels broods. (Would they have known each other? Bert Terhune’s father was a Presbyterian pastor in Newark, New Jersey in the late 1800s; Bill came from nearby Elizabeth, and pastored a Presbyterian church in Morris County, not too far from Sunnybank Kennels in Pompton Lakes. Surely, Terhunes and Simpsons crossed paths somewhere.) Now, the collie needed to be taken for a walk, and I offered. We went down the road and then around the house a couple of times, with Matt Balic following and badgering me to let the dog off the leash. I could not do that. I had strict instructions from Harriet.
Finally Matt grabbed the leash from me and tossed it on the ground. The collie bounded off into the woods, while Matt laughed. I managed to retrieve the dog, but Harriet had seen it all through the kitchen window. I was in a sulk against Matt for the rest of the day.
* * *
Bill and I were pen-pals for a month or two after this visit. Our epistolary colloquies went sort of like:
Me: Well, Bill, HOW CAN WE SAVE THE WESTERN WORLD?
Bill: Margot! Don’t you know we’ve already LOST?! We LOST a long time ago!
Conversation had been a bit cheerier during our lunch. I didn’t say much, letting Fritz lead the way, prompting Bill to talk about the fallacies of Christian altruism, and how it has ruined our race and our country. Bill was curious about ethnic backgrounds. Since Fritz was German, he asked if the rest of us were. Not quite; we were Irish and Scots and Croat. Bill had changed his own ethnicity description through the years. On his 1917 draft card he listed his race as “Anglo Saxon.” By 1934 (per the foreword to Toward the Rising Sun), he was claiming his ancestry was “pure Gaelic.” Maybe something about the English had gotten his nose out of joint in the meantime, so he changed affinities, like Spike Milligan.
Bill had taken the wrong path at times, but I often felt he drew the wrong conclusions about it. He had once been enamored of the example of St. Francis of Assisi, particularly the bit about how Francis was a rich kid who gave all his goods to the poor. Bill did something like that, too, when young. And then there was the time he graduated from Union Theological Seminary and was offered a plum billet as pastor of a wealthy church in Philadelphia. He refused that and chose instead a poor church in an industrial town in New Jersey.[5] Christianity for Bill eventually became the Light that Failed, a snare and a delusion. He started out by thinking Christianity was all about self-abnegation and sacrifice and hardship, and this led him very easily to Nietzsche’s belief that it was a destructive “slave mentality.” Nietzsche grew up in a parsonage, and this may be one reason why ex-parson Bill took a liking to him.
Bill tells about this St. Francis obsession in both Toward the Rising Sun (1934) and Which Way Western Man? (1978, revised ed. 2003). And it appears in newspaper stories about him in the 1930s. I found it baffling. If you really want to be like St. Francis, why not join the Franciscans? Or perhaps become an ornithologist?
1930s college lecture tours in Charleston, West Virginia and Canton, New York
Those two books, the bijou 1934 one and the vast 1978 tome, are not only separated by 44 years, they show two subtly different mentalities: the first is about a theologian, or ex-theologian, seeking the meaning of life and preparing sermons or philosophical lectures. He warns us of dangers, or “sirens,” that tempt us as we struggle along our path. One of them is basically a platitude out of Shakespeare’s Polonius: “To thine own self be true” — or don’t destroy your own well-being with futile struggle and sacrifice to hold onto a dysfunctional marriage or unworkable belief system (I think Bill knew both dilemmas). But then we come to a bigger concern:
The next siren against which I feel it important to warn you is — Christian morality. Perhaps I had better call it Christian pity.
This he illustrates with a tale of a lighthouse keeper to whom is entrusted a quantity of oil to keep the light burning. But then some local villagers are perishing of famine and beg him to share the oil, which they evidently intend to consume. (Really? Whale oil? Kerosene?) Anyway, he gives them oil and the light goes out, and ships at sea are caught in a storm and perish on the rocks.
The bigger, later volume avoids these clumsy circumlocutions. Having struggled through most of his personal journey, and enumerated his many mistakes, Simpson is now ready to say what he means. If Christianity has been a force for evil, it’s because it’s been a Trojan Horse of false science and inverted ethics. (The same can of course be said of atheistic materialism; evil uses whatever tool is convenient.) Race and eugenics are now on the table and must be openly discussed. Like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Bill Simpson is revolted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) preachments on race in the 1950s.
To recap, UNESCO originally published a “Declaration of World’s Scientists” claiming that human races did not exist. (FALLACIES OF RACISM EXPOSED, Unesco Courier, 1950.)
Writes Bill Simpson:
[This manifesto] was so flimsily thrown together and so promptly repudiated by outstanding biologists, physical anthropologists, and geneticists from all over the world, that it had to be replaced the very next year with a modified, but still unsatisfactory, substitute statement, whose departures from the previous version plainly served to acknowledge and “emphasize not only the undocumented nature of the original assertions, but their actual fallacy.”
You can buy Savitri Devi’s book, Gold in the Furnace, here.
Despite that retraction, UNESCO continued to propagate the original statement, even augmenting it as the years went by. Not surprisingly, they often leaned on the expertise of race-denier extraordinaire Ashley Montagu (alias Israel Ehrenberg), author of Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (1942). Simpson continues:
UNESCO followed up with its pronouncement of 1964 that “no biological justification exists” for opposing racial intermarriage, [and] the general public has been led to think that racial differences, if they exist, are of no consequence and can be ignored, and more and more often we see a fair young maiden walking down Main Street hand in hand with a jet black Negro.
Thus, the inspirational lecturer who did college speaking tours in the 1930s, and was fawned over in the press for his quest for social justice and human betterment, was now revealing himself as a full-on race-realist, a White Nationalist, and a believer in eugenics, selling a doorstop of a book published by Dr. William Pierce’s National Vanguard.
Revilo Oliver wrote an incisive and respectful analysis of Which Way Western Man? (reprinted at Counter-Currents here), using his review mainly as a pretext to expand upon the preposterousness of: Christianity and religious delusion in general; the mendacity of Jews; and his own curious theories about rivalries among early Christian sects. I’ve always believed, however, that Prof. Oliver really must have thought of Bill Simpson’s career much as he once described Whittaker Chambers’: painful and inspirational, but the story of a man who clearly was cursed with poor judgment at the outset. If he was so terribly wrong about his enthusiasms when young . . . his insights were also likely to be awry when he got old.
* * *
Along with disposing of his Prattsville house and property, Bill wanted to cull some of the thousands of books he’d collected over the years. These included several boxes of the first edition of Which Way Western Man? (WWWM). So here was the other bit of Fritz’s agenda in visiting the Simpsons. Fritz offered to pay Bill for a half-dozen copies, which he then might sell or give to friends. Fritz also took various other books from the Simpson library into his care, gratis. He already had a great collection of 1920s and ‘30s volumes he’d inherited from old Bundists, a few of which he passed on to me.
The others in our traveling party got in on the act, and I myself ended up buying about four copies of WWWM. I’d bought one a year before, so I now ended up with five copies of it sitting on my wireframe bookshelves in Hoboken. They were perched high, up top, because I knew the guinea pigs would want to chew on those nice rag-paper dustjackets if they could reach them. (I would let the piggies out to run around my overpriced floor-through cold-water flat, in their single-file guinea-pig crocodile line, for an hour or so a day. They really made a mess of Gore Vidal’s Lincoln, down on the bottom shelf, and so I learned my lesson.)
Visitors would see all those copies of Which Way Western Man? and say, “Oh this must be a really, really good book, huh?”
And I’d say, “Well, I don’t know, I’ve skimmed it a few times. But I do know the author!”
* * *
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Notes
[1] Friedrich Paul Berg (1943-2019) was a trained engineer and graduate of the Columbia College School of Mines, now called Columbia School of Engineering and Applied Science. He had a brief career in environmental engineering, primarily at New York City-area airports, before devoting himself to dismantling the Second World War-era “gas chambers” and “gas-mobile” stories, which he analyzed from an engineering perspective. (End-of-life website here.) Fritz spent most of his life till his 50s in Fort Lee, New Jersey and environs, after which he moved to Arizona. His parents were both from Germany, his mother being Catholic and his father Evangelische (Lutheran). Fritz was raised unchurched, but was perhaps nominally Lutheran, and attended public schools until university at Columbia. Fritz told me he would have preferred Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, where some of his high school friends were going, but his parents and teachers urged him to pick Columbia, which was probably easier to get to, anyway, if you were going to be a commuter student. I think because Fritz went to public schools he absorbed a type of demotic accent that strangers perceived as “Jewish”; this and his name Berg frequently caused misapprehension that he was Jewish.
[2] Many years ago, in Ojai, California, I was taken to see and hear Jiddu Krishnamurti. It was an open-air address, with at least a couple hundred people in attendance, and as I recall Krishnamurti spoke without a microphone. The Theosophists’ boy-prophet of the early 1900s was now in his 90s, and he began by telling us he had no eternal truths to tell us; we must search for the Meaning of Life ourselves. I thought this pleasant and amusing at the time, and was vaguely reminded of it when I met William Gayley Simpson a few years later.
[3] Jerome Davis, Yale Divinity School, Foreword to Simpson’s Toward the Rising Sun (New York: Vanguard Press, 1934).
[4] Harriet Storrs Nichols Whitcher Simpson died in 2000 at 84, and is buried next to Bill.
[5] The “industrial town” seems to be Mendham, New Jersey, which today is one of the most affluent areas of the very comfortable and leafy Morris County, New Jersey. According to Wikipedia, “The Mendham Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and the state register in 1985.” Of course, Mendham may well have still had its obsolescent factories 110 years ago, and it would hardly have been a rival for a Presbyterian Church in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia — unless you were determined, like the Rev. Mr. Simpson, to choose the neediest congregation.
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15 comments
WWWM has laid on my bookshelf unread for around the past ten years. Still not sure I want to read it. The reason being that, as much as I support it, I actually don’t enjoy reading most WN or DR literature beyond articles or essays. So much of it (especially from the 1960s on) is just a lengthy recitation of “Here’s What We’ve Lost” without any silver lining that it just leaves any pro-white advocate completely demoralized by the time the book is finished. Pat Buchanan’s Death of the West is a prime example of that.
Gayley’s tome is well over 1,000 pages. It looks academic and cerebral, which I like, but I just don’t know. This article was interesting, I had no idea Simpson lived that long, or that he was a vegetarian. I’m sure he’s rolling in his grave as we speak.
I’d have no clue about him at all, if I hadn’t visited him and Harriet, and thereafter maintained a short correspondence. I should have thought him merely an angry, defeated prophet without a congregation, if I knew him only from WWWM. But George Dietz and Dr. Pierce clearly thought highly of him. Too many years passed between his days of lecturing fame (basically, 1930s) and the publication of WWWM, and he had not taken in new insights and practicalities, hadn’t recharged his batteries. He did however know how to keep himself healthy and long-lived. But to what end, is the question.
Good one there. Thanks!
Simpson forces us to see the real issues, but he cannot resolve the core paradox of any form of atheism, including prowhite varieties: why be moral in a godless cosmos? Applied to our case, why make the sacrifice of embracing a persecuted dissident politics, when this is done mostly for the benefit of future generations? It is always more in the personal interest of any individual white man simply to go along with the dispossessionary trend than to oppose it.
I doubt that either a majority of humanity, or even just of our race, will ever be atheists. As such, I reiterate one of my main recommendations: to save our race – across the plant, but especially within America – it is much better to work to demonstrate the ethical compatibility (or as I prefer, necessity – though this latter is a tougher claim) between white preservationism and (essential, ecumenical) Christian moral theology, than to work to discredit Christianity, and then seek to develop a prowhite alternative morality. Attacking Christianity in its essence as opposed to critiquing its (contemporary) antiwhite racial heresies is more likely to lead to nihilism and hedonism than committed white nationalism.
I’m an atheist who was raised LDS, which is a pretty demanding Christian sect. You are either very committed or you aren’t. I’m not so, and in fact, I had them officially remove my name from their records about when I turned thirty. This did not make my parents too happy, of course.
I don’t see how non-belief or not knowing the Cosmos has anything to do with nihilism or hedonism. As a historian interested in technical and sometimes military matters, I do understand what the limits of Science and Progress are ─ not something that I would say for most Leftists who now think that “Science is Real.”
What is Nihilist to me is automatically accepting every conspiracy-theory that comes down the pike as the Truth because it involves doubting the Gubbamint or the you-know-whos.
And usually this notion about the Father of Lies is paired with the idea that the Gospels are the only literal word of God and the complete moral compass of life. Sad.
This is how we get “Creationists” like the late “Revisionist” Charles D. Provan, who was willing to doubt the Jews und ihren Lügen for theological reasons, but since Waffen-SS Kurt Gerstein (the spy of God) was an Evangelical Lutheran, Provan was willing to try to force Gerstein’s crackpot Statement to make sense (given in French captivity while he was being accused of War Crimes prior to his apparent suicide).
Provan argued the way that Creationists do, which is to say that the Holy Words don’t mean what they say but what true believers think they do in “translation.” Fritz Berg really clued me in as to how people like Chuck Provan conceptualized debate and the Truth.
I could go on about Michael A. Hoffman II as well, another Born Again (actually he converted to Catholicism) and was another theological anti-Semite who went off the reservation. His book on Hitler (enemy of the German people, whatever that means) wasn’t even worth writing a review for.
Not that most people have any critical thinking skills or any significant epistemological philosophies at all, but I am strongly concerned that White Nationalists improve in this area.
That is one reason why I have a great interest in things like the Moon Landing (real) and the JFK assassination (yes, lone gunman anti-social, with a cheap but accurate military surplus rifle and a .38 pistol, who was captured in a panic shortly after fatally gunning down a suspicious cop in Dallas less than an hour after killing the President and shooting the Governor). I could include Flat Earth Theory in this as well, but I don’t have the patience for debating complete idiots.
As far as Christianity, I graduated from BYU-Idaho and Idaho State U. I studied History and Electronics Engineering Technology. Plus, I graduated from High School LDS Seminary. I have done more parsing of scripture than I ever care to ─ certainly no expert ─ and I just don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. Christianity, yeah, I think it is as dead as its own superstitions. All or most superstitions are just Evil in my opinion.
However, I am not anti-Christian. Unlike Islam, I will support it if that is what my people want. Coming from the other side of the family, it helped my Dad and my Uncle when they had a tough childhood in rural Colorado. My Grandad was never a mean drunk but it led to a broken marriage. A Christian upbringing might have given him more maturity at a crucial time in Grandpa’s life when he started his family. As for the kids’ also non-LDS Stepdad, he was not as good a catch. Grandpa did try to be a good part-time Father, but never got over his wife leaving him.
Mormonism at least puts great emphasis on family, and even if their critical thinking is hampered somewhat ─ as is true with all Faiths. However, the LDS do ask comprehensive cosmological questions and are open to interesting answers. I thought it was funny that the TV Series Expanse included LDS space colonists. It might have been even more interesting if it weren’t always Jews and homosexuals writing the screenplays for stuff like this.
Anyway, my view is that Jews are a “race” (as Hitler said in Mein Kampf) and that theological anti-Semitism and “fighting the Joos,” rather than building civilizations, is a dead-end.
I also agree with Atheist/Agnostic George Lincoln Rockwell in that White people have the right to worship as they choose (and for as long as they choose). I am willing to give Christianity a special pass here (to a point). I don’t have all the cosmological answers and I don’t think anybody else does either ─ but I don’t find any superstitions to be particularly enlightening or even pragmatic. Furthermore, nearly all Churches now are heartily embracing radical egalitarianism if not outright Wokeness.
Yesterday, July 24th was Pioneer Day. I have fond memories as a kid dressing up in my Mom’s homemade 19th century costumes to celebrate ─ but it was not as fun for me as the pyrotechnics of Independence Day (grin).Today the Mormons are strongly resisting LGBTQ but they caved on miscegenation by allowing African Negroes into the lay priesthood in 1978, so it is just a matter of time probably.
In Rexburg, the home of what is now called BYU-Idaho, which today is still about 95 percent White and 95 percent LDS, I went with my old roommate and toured the dorms and old haunts from forty years ago. Fun fact: we each had dozens of firearms in our dorm rooms, and they kind of shook their heads but let us be. You would never find that allowed in a College dorm today. At BYU-I, unless you were an African (Negro) ballplayer, you could be expelled for watching an R-Rated movie or getting caught drinking, but the totalitarianism is not like it used to be, LOL. Today Woke Big Brother is likely watching and there are narcs everywhere.
Anyway, I was appalled at the extent of the June Pride stuff in Rexburg and Idaho Falls. The LDS just avert their gaze, as Christians are wont. It isn’t the LDS pushing this crap but the ubiquitous corporate chains. You rarely see any old Mom & Pop businesses anymore, not even in a small LDS college town like Rexburg. I worked in one of these shops as a radio technician for a long time. My biggest gripe was no health insurance. For that, I had to move to the big city.
This is not intended as a rant. I made peace with Christians long ago. I am very proud of the accomplishments of my family (Dad and now-deceased Uncle were aerospace and nuclear engineers that among many things tested reactors and nuclear bombs and re-designed the Space Shuttle engines when it blew up). And I am also proud of my Pioneer ancestors.
The bottom line is that I do not have all the answers, but with respect to Christianity for White Nationalism, I will paraphrase Stalin who once compared “German Communism” to saddling a milk cow.
🙂
So much content, so little useful information. For the umpteenth time you tell us unbidden that Oswald was a lone gunman and the moon landings happened, all fifty-one years of temporal evidence to the contrary. Don’t question it. Then you suggest not to ‘fight the Joos’ as you put it but build a civilization. That’s like the proverbial bucket and the elephant in the room. White people have been building civilization for millennia but in the last century or two the Jewish capacity for destroying it has just kept growing.
You can question it. The more of that the better.
But I am not seeing a whole lot of questioning here. Just nihilistic, dead-end doubting ─ because reasons.
I am happy to debate or discuss it myself.
The Bill Kaysing “Moon Landing was faked” objections have been refuted a hundred fold and at this point are just dumb.
Interestingly, I can take either side of those debates without fearing legal repercussions ─ unlike with those who would doubt the nonsensical homicidal gas-chamber story.
I think you misunderstood my point about “fighting the Joos.” I consider at least discussing the JQ or the “Jewish Question” to be a litmus test for White Nationalism since this alien minority practically runs everything and comparatively holds every leadership position in Europe and the Anglosphere. Perhaps we can learn much from a certain avuncular Austrian corporal.
However, I see no point in doing this from a theological perspective, unless one truly believes in the Volcano Demon stuff. But you do you.
Historical Revisionism is part of the historiographical method. And this is essentially how the Scientific Method works too, which is not something that many “Science is Real” types would ever understand. For them it is true because the New York Times or the World Economic Forum told them so.
Almost no one who has complained about the Warren Commission Report has ever actually read it. Unlike the Bible, there is no superstition needed there. “Magic Bullet” and slogans like that are simply crass lies from liars like (((Oliver Stone))).
Plus there is the report of the House Sub-Committee on Assassinations in the 1970s. And pretty much every other ballistic experiment done by competent experts. Hint: the Dealey Plaza shots were not rocket science. The oft-told claim on scripted TV shows that the Warren Commission sharpshooters could not duplicate Oswald’s hitting the target in two out of three tries is simply a lie.
I have already considerably discussed the Moon Landings and the misinformation peddled around them from the doubters quite a bit on this very board, and to a lesser extent with Saint JFK. I’ve also touched on “the nukes are fake” nonsense.
I’ll probably write my own review of the Oppenheimer film, which I plan to see in true IMAX a few days.
I don’t really like Christopher Nolan films. I thought Inception and Interstellar were dumb and made no sense ─ and I never see Capeshït under any circumstances.
I did like Dunkirk visually, but I was disappointed in that it contained no political or military context ─ just another aspect of the Greatest Generation and their big slog through the Good War, and then at the end of the movie, a little “we shall fight them on the beaches, and in the air, and on the land, and in the pubs,” yadda yadda from Churchill (or his BBC voice double).
Since the teasers for Oppenheimer are big on how they are going to ignite the atmosphere with the Trinity test ─ oh the hubris ─ I am not expecting much from the technical aspects that might get covered from an action-movie director. The bar is set pretty low.
Many of the reviews have complained that the endless dialog is underneath a pounding score for three hours. Most critics do not complain of the historical aspects, but we shall see. I am expecting that the movie is really big on Jewish eschatology without much treatment one way or another on “Jewish Physics.”
The thing with the JFK assassination is that from the outset, Leftist attorney and journalist (((Mark Lane))) successfully obfuscated every relevant fact and magnified every irrelevant “connection” that could possibly be made with a straight face, and by a few orders of magnitude ─ as though the dead Lee Harvey Oswald were his client in court without a judge who could keep counsel under control. And due to the beatification of Jack in the Libtard corporate media, it actually caught the popular imagination.
Along with Saint Doctor King, of course, Saint Kennedy was a righteous Gentile. And I find it amazing how both the Right and Left revere him almost uncritically.
🙂
I’ve observed that atheists, since they’re not concerned with getting into a good neighborhood in the afterlife, will focus more of their attention on trying to make the world a better place. That can lead into loony leftist utopianism, but not inevitably. In some cases, it can lead to better things.
I take the position that I don’t know if there is a better place beyond. Nobody has ever returned from the inevitable mortal coil shedding ─ at least not provably so.
Unless you can check all of the corner pockets ─ without missing any ─ looking for a higher being in the infinite universe, which is by definition unknowable, then I don’t see how anyone can know.
So either you don’t let it bother you ─ which is my stance ─ or you count on some level of superstition and make-believe. I don’t see the point in guessing.
I have always been a hard-Right nationalist. But before the Left completely hijacked the term Progressive, I used to consider myself one. This means that it is our obligation as inteligent human beings, dutiful citizens, and stewards of our homelands, to make Civilization work and to make it a better place. That is beyond the ken for most other races in my view. Earthly accomplishments were palpably important to people in the past, as they are now, and as they certainly will be in the future.
This is in contrast to many religionist views. They often think that the works of Man are inherently corrupt and that the world is just made that way by God for whatever reason. No need whatsoever for something like Progress.
Man’s Works, therefore, are in fact so flawed that you cannot bother with banal things like politics, and maybe should just jump off a cliff to get to the Afterworld so much quicker. Always Trust the Plan in other words. And every sect has a different Master Plan.
Contra Marx, Progress is never linear; it’s spotty at best. I agree that Utopianism is meant to be eschewed, but this kind of Nihilism is just as bad.
🙂
When Fritz and his wife came to Arizona circa 2001 he was trying hard to shake the Jersey accent, and before that he corresponded with me often about how he loved the Southwestern Desert and wanted to paint it. My Grandmother did the same after she retired from teaching in the Phoenix urban jungle. I like the desert and can certainly appreciate art, but I’m not all that big on themes with Cowpokes and Noble Savages.
I don’t think anybody ever seriously believed that Fritz was Jewish, although there were a few Jews who tried to push Fritz’s buttons by saying so. I was with him on a Sunday evening, the day before he died, and helping his wife during his short stint in the hospice. Fritz joked that once he was gone, I could bear witness that he had never been visited by the mohel. Yes, his guy-schnozzle was intact, which is not something that can easily be said for my generation.
A lot of Jews came down the Route 66 pipeline from Chicago, getting sidelined in Arizona at places like Scottsdale and Paradise Valley. Fritz was very outspoken about his beliefs, and at least once a Jewish neighbor tried to run him down in the driveway while out walking his dog. The poor Hebrew ended up crashing his car into his own garage and getting arrested, beating a more serious rap. Fritz kept a .38 under his pillow but he was an urbanite at heart and did not know a lot about guns.
Fritz used to call me up at work constantly, hoping that I could find a reference document about some kind of obscure engineering anachronism. Frequently it really paid off. But making it understandable for the masses was easier said than done.
Fritz and I used to stroll along the art walk in downtown Scottsdale, special days when the galleries had open houses and put out some of their better wares for sale along the sidewalk with cheap complimentary champagne. Fritz never drank nor smoked, which I thought was unusual for his generation. Along the art walk or in a local café he seldom held back his opinions as a Revisionist and critic. At least one old Jewess came over to his dining table and dumped her glass of water onto his head. Fritz had two voices: Outdoor Voice and Very Outdoor Voice. I miss those chatty walks.
🙂
Wonderful memories, Scott. I didn’t communicate much with Fritz between 1990 and 2010. There would have been no meeting with William Gayley Simpson and Harriet had it not been for his initiative and curiosity. So I had to give him primacy of place in this up-close-and-personal commemoration.
Thanks, Margot.
I miss him and it’s quite a drive to visit his wife for me now, but I do visit if I can avoid hitting a coyote or getting into some other mishap on the highway. She is doing “fine” in the 118 degree heat, but a bit lonely since their dog has died. Her son moved to the area and visits often now between music gigs.
Here is one of the last pictures I have of Fritz, the year before when he was starting to lose his health:
2018 Fritz at Pet Smart with Lucky and Santa
🙂
the JFK assassination (yes, lone gunman anti-social, with a cheap but accurate military surplus rifle and a .38 pistol, who was captured in a panic shortly after fatally gunning down a suspicious cop in Dallas less than an hour after killing the President and shooting the Governor).
Yep, that pretty much definitively proves he acted alone.
“Yep, that pretty much definitively proves he acted alone.”
The Warren Commission ballistics has been proved many times over.
LHO was a dyslexic anti-social who didn’t make friends and couldn’t hold down a job for longer than a few weeks. He had to work at it to get kicked out of the Marine Corps.
The only job that Lee didn’t get fired from was entry-level radio board assembly in Minsk, and they gave him substandard performance reviews and asked that he start paying Red Union dues and quit missing mandatory political meetings. They don’t fire him, but they cut his salary in half so he is now making what normal (non-defector) Soviet assemblers do ─ and pretty soon Oswald gets disillusioned with the Worker’s Paradise. The USSR is happy to see him go.
Back in Dallas, LHO broke up with his Russian wife on the fateful Friday in November sixty years ago, and brought his rifle in to work wrapped in big brown packing paper for the parade. A few months earlier Oswald had tried to kill General Walker, but the shot missed his head by an inch and Lee sucessfully scampered away.
LHO was on a path of self-destruction and took an almost impulsive opportunity that presented itself; he was probably mildly surprised that he was able to calmly walk away through the crowds from the TSBD building.
But in less than an hour LHO had taken a cab a couple miles to his boarding house flat to change and put on a jacket and fetch his handgun.
Btw, Oswald’s boarding house flat is just around the corner from his old home on W. Neely St. where the self-styled Castroite had once posed in the back yard for what became the infamous Life Magazine cropped and retouched cover photo with copies of the rival Daily Worker and the Militant in one hand and his Carcano rifle in the other ─ and on his hip he sports his S&W Model 10 K-frame modified .38 Special snubbie revolver. When they lived there together, wife Marina snapped two poses of Lee with his cheap camera, which made identifying marks on the negatives, and Lee sent copies to impress Castro sympathizers and activists (probably not too successfully).
After leaving his boarding house, and briskly walking to find a circuitous bus stop, LHO then pumps four .38 slugs into suspicious cop J.D. Tippit, who got out of his car to talk to him ─ a shooting seen or heard by many in the neighborhood ─ only to be captured by police a few minutes later from the hue-and-cry generated despite Oswald stashing his light-colored jacket under a parked car and furtively dashing (without paying) into a nearby theater that he often frequented on busy Jefferson Blvd.
Really, there is no reason to overthink it.
But for some reason everybody thinks that Saint Jack could not have been killed by anything other than an infinite conspiracy. (John Connally is collateral damage but not a bad bonus, although the Governor gets lucky and survives.)
Yeah, it had to have been the Moossaadd, the CIA, little green Googly men…
Just not possible that it could have been as simple as a misfit nut like John Hinckley, Jr. standing there with a .22 revolver in 1981 when President Reagan’s entourage marches past to get into the Limo. (Ronnie is shot but gets lucky. James Brady not so much.)
I’m game to talk about it further. Bugliosi’s expert book on the subject weighs six pounds and has tiny typeface that is barely broken up by paragraphs let alone chapters. It almost requires a magnifying glass to read.
🙂
Having only skimmed his book, which I could easily conclude from reading your article, would indicate you actually don’t ‘know’ him. This, and the above comments, would lead me to conclude that no one has read this ‘tome’. Revilo’s critique would indicate he has read it. The breadth of this work is truly astounding. The endless references to books, quotes, supporting evidence are a wealth of information. The depth and detail of his thinking is hard to measure. The criticisms appear as trite jokes by those who have yet to think about even the simplest problems of humanity. Even though I’m an evidenced based Christian, I can see past his disillusionment with the same. The insight and breath of his work does not permit me to categorize and simply dismiss him in anyway. I believe him to be one of the great minds in all of history.
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