Revilo P. Oliver

For centuries we have labored under the illusion that Western Christianity was something that could be exported, and only recent events have at last made it obvious to us how vain and futile have been the labors and zeal of devoted missionaries for five centuries. When Cortez and his small but valiant band of iron men conquered the empire of the Aztecs, he was immediately followed by a train of earnest and devoted missionaries, chiefly Franciscans, who began to preach the Christian gospel to the natives. And they soon sent back home, with innocent enthusiasm, glowing accounts of the conversions they had effected. You can feel their sincerity, their piety, their ardor, and their joy in the pages of Father Sagun, Father Torquemada, and many others. And for their sake I am glad that the poor Franciscans never suspected how small a part they had really played in the religious conversions that gave them such joy. Far more effective than their words and their book had been the Spanish cannon that had breached the Aztec defenses and the ruthless Spanish soldiers who had slain the Aztec priests at their altars and toppled the Aztec idols from the sacrificial pyramids. The Aztecs accepted Christianity as a cult, not because their hearts were touched by doctrines of love and mercy, but because Christianity was the religion of the White men whose bronze cannon and mail-clad warriors made them invincible.

Now I admit that the notion of a warless world is a pleasant and attractive thought. But people who believe that there can be such a thing should ask it of Santa Claus, in whom they doubtless also believe.

It's not necessary here to rehearse the steps by which McCarthy was destroyed. He was of course sabotaged from within his own staff. The aliens who control our press and radio and the boob tubes spattered their slime over the country. Swarms of the ignorant and neurotic little shysters whom we call "intellectuals" issued from the doors of the colleges and universities, shrieking and spitting as is their wont. And all that had its effect. But the conspiracy was able to silence McCarthy only by a somewhat less routine operation. They found an Army officer who had been a military failure until Bernard Baruch promoted him to General, and who in 1945 should have been able to hope for nothing better than that he could escape a court martial and thus avoid being cashiered, if he could prove that all the atrocities and all the sabotage of American interests of which he had been guilty in Europe had been carried out over his protest and under categorical orders from the President. The conspiracy took that person, and with the aid of their press they did a quick masquerade job and dressed him up as a conservative. They wrote speeches that he was able to deliver without too much bumbling. They displayed his grin on all the boob tubes. And they elected him President. And, of course, "Ike" was elected with a mandate from his masters to stab Senator McCarthy in the back. And he did. And so the conspiracy plugged that small leak in the dike.

We now see that the gang of sleazy racketeers headed by John Dewey has attained its goal. We realize that the public schools have been for many years a vast brainwashing and brain-contaminating machine that has worked, on the whole, with great efficiency. It's a machine to which we send our children to have their minds filled with grotesque and debasing superstitions; to have their instincts of integrity and honor leached from their souls; to be incited to premature debauchery and perversion; to be imbued with thoughtless irresponsibility; and to be prepared for addiction to mind-destroying drugs and an existence below the animal level. The public schools have indeed been the most powerful single engine of subversion that our enemies have used upon us.

The first Christian who can write decent Latin is Minucius Felix, whose Octavius, written in the first half (possibly the first quarter) of the Third Century must have done much to make Christianity respectable. He concentrates on ridiculing pagan myths that no educated man believed anyway and on denying that Christians (he means his kind, of course!) practice incest (a favorite recreation of many sects that had been saved by Christ from the tyranny of human laws) or cut the throats of children to obtain blood for Holy Communion (as some groups undoubtedly did). He argues for a monotheism that is indistinguishable from the Stoic except that the One God is identified as the Christian deity, from whose worship the sinful Jews are apostates, and insists that Christians have nothing to do with the Jews, whom God is going to punish. What is interesting is that Minucius has nothing to say about any specifically Christian doctrine, and that the names of Jesus or Christ do not appear in his work. There is just one allusion: the pagans say that Christianity was founded by a felon (unnamed) who was crucified. That, says Minucius, is absurd: no criminal ever deserved, nor did a man of this world have the power, to be believed to be a god (erratis, qui putatis deum credi aut meruisse noxium aut potuisse terrenum). That ambiguous reference is all that he has to say about it; he turns at once to condemning the Egyptians for worshipping a mortal man, and then he argues that the sign of the cross represents (a) the mast and yard of a ship under sail, and (b) the position of man who is worshipping God properly, i.e. standing with outstretched arms. If Minucius is not merely trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the gullible pagans, it certainly sounds as though this Christian were denying the divinity of Christ, either regarding him, as did many of the early Christians, as man who was inspired but was not to be identified with God, or claiming, as did a number of later sects, that what appeared on earth and was crucified was merely a ghost, an insubstantial apparition sent by Christ, who himself prudently stayed in his heaven above the clouds and laughed at the fools who thought they could kill a phantom. Of course, our holy men are quite sure that he was "orthodox."

This capacity for imitation is possessed by savages, at least by the more intelligent ones, and it has deceived us time after time. The British are as gullible as we are. Hundreds and hundreds of times, at least, they gave scholarships to Blacks from Basutoland or Kenya or Nigeria or one of their other possessions, and the result was almost always the same. With the money given him, the savage bought himself a good wardrobe, attended an English school, learned to play soccer, attended Oxford, wrote a charming essay on Wordsworth or on ancient law, copulated with half-witted English women who thought him "romantic" and themselves "broad-minded," and when he got tired of living on English generosity, went home to his tribe where he had a well-roasted baby served up to him as a delicacy of which he had been long deprived by the stupid prejudices of the stupid British.

The link between Communism and traditional Christianity is so close that when Communists lose their faith, they usually and naturally flop over into Roman Catholicism. Whittaker Chambers was only the best known of the Marxists who, when disillusioned, reverted to an earlier form of his ruling superstition. Would-be atheists who do not become converted to the Marxist cult often retain in their minds the Christian residue that makes them susceptible to drivel about "all mankind," "One World," and the "humanitarian" sentimentality of do-gooders and similar pests--all of which find no confirmation in the facts of nature and the real world. There are even self-styled atheists who evidently think that the god in whom they do not believe stopped the biological evolution of anthropoids a hundred thousand years ago to make all talking species equal in some mysterious way that transcends the obvious and great difference between extant races in intelligence, character, and instincts, perhaps because the non-existing god equipped the several species with exactly equal souls.

With the exception of some early Christian sects that were exterminated when the Fathers of the Church wormed their way to power and could start killing their competitors, Christianity, during the greater part of its history, enforced celibacy and homosexuality on a fairly large part of our race, including some of its most intelligent members, through the priesthood and monasticism, and broke up families and family property by prohibiting marriages between even fairly distant relatives. Islam, on the other hand, ordained polygyny and encouraged Moslems to fill their harems, and engender children by women of all different races; that is why the Arabic stock was diluted and liquidated so much more quickly than our own.

If our squawking pacifists were rational, they would perceive that war can be ended only by abolishing the several species of mammals called human; our spacecraft have shown us that Mars and Venus are perfectly warless worlds.

In the sixth century B.C., Gautama, an Aryan princeling on the northern frontier of India, formulated a bleakly pessimistic philosophy that markedly resembles Schopenhauer's. This high doctrine of negation, for reasons that would require an extensive historical explanation, became extremely popular, but was variously interpreted by at least eighteen rival schools, each of which claimed alone to preserve the true teaching of Gautama the Buddha, and Gautama's austere atheism was gradually contaminated and obscured by the usual theological techniques, so that a philosophy that was intended to supplant religion was converted into just another elaborate and learned superstition.

A real atheist, needless to say, will disregard what the dervishes think it expedient to say about the "New Testament" when they make their pitch to the ignorant. He will read the myths for himself and objectively consider and appraise them as a whole, including the social gospel that is, indeed, the most important and operative part of them. And he will shudder at the Judaic malevolence that inspires them, the vicious hatred of culture and civilization. They were designed to create a foul and squalid world in which every instinctive value of our race is negated and aborted--a world in which the natural ties of family and property have been severed, leaving only rootless and helpless individuals, isolated and lost in the terrible loneliness of crowds--a world without history, without philosophy, without science, without reason--a world without beauty of any kind, without art, without literature, without culture--a world without real love, the love that unites men and women, and without even the Aryan's instinctive feeling for the beauty of women and physical health.

A really critical mind will not be content to remark the patent absurdity of the tales about supernatural beings and events in the "New Testament," but will go on to examine the purposes those tales were devised to serve. It requires no great critical acumen to perceive the appalling malice shown in Bolshevik promises that "the last shall be first"; the proletarian rancor of almost continual harping on the threat that rich men will be fried forever hereafter if they do not give all that they have to the poor and become paupers themselves; the frantic hatred of reason evinced by hostility to "the Greeks" who "seek after wisdom" and try to understand nature and the real world instead of drugging themselves with narcotic fantasies; the frightful malevolence of a god "who has made foolish the wisdom of this world" to profit a squalid and mindless rabble; and the hatred of all culture and civilization implicit in the election of illiterate boors as apostles and the insistence in the Drivel on the Mount on the need for bird-brains that "take no thought for the morrow" and, indeed, emulate the intellectual processes of vegetables.

There can be no question but that Christianity was originally a Jewish promotion, and it is noteworthy that the Christians who try to make their cult respectable in the Third Century claim that they repudiate the Jews. One of the earliest to do this was Tertullian, a Carthaginian shyster, whose Apologeticum, a defense of Christianity, was written at the very beginning of the Third Century. He asserts that Christianity is not a conspiracy of revolutionaries and degenerates, as was commonly believed, and claims that it is an association of loving brothers who have preserved the faith that the Jews forsook – which has been the common story ever since. Our holy men salvage Tertullian by claiming that he was "orthodox" in his early writings, but then, alas! became a Montanist heretic, poor fellow. Tertullian is the author of the famous dictum that he believes the impossible because it is absurd (credo quia absurdum), so he is naturally dear to the heart of the pious. How much Jerome and other saints have tampered with the facts to make Tertullian seem "orthodox" in his early works has been most fully shown by Timothy Barnes in his Tertullian (Oxford, 1971), but even he spends a hundred pages pawing over chronological difficulties that can be reconciled by what seems to me the simple and obvious solution: Tertullian, who was evidently a pettifogging lawyer before he got into the Gospel-business, had sense enough to eliminate from his brief for the Christians facts that would have displeased the pagans whom he was trying to convince that Christians represented no threat to civilized society; he accordingly concealed in his apologetic works the peculiar doctrines of the Christian sect to which he had been originally "converted," but he naturally expounded those doctrines in writings intended, not for the eyes of wicked pagans, but for other brands of Christians, whom he wished to convert to his own sect, which was that of Montanus, a very Holy Prophet (divinely inspired, of course) who was a Phrygian, not a Jew, and who had learned from chats with God that since the Jews had muffed their big opportunity at the time of the Crucifixion, Jesus, when he returned next year or the year after that, was going to set up his New Jerusalem in Phrygia after he had raised hell with the pagans and tormented and butchered them in all of the delightful ways so lovingly described in the Apocalypse, the Hymn of Hate that still soothes the souls of "fundamentalist" Christians today. If, in his Apologeticum and similar works, Tertullian had told the stupid pagans that they were going to be tortured and exterminated in a year or two, they might have doubted that Christians were the innocent little lambs that Tertullian claimed they were.

About three decades ago, when I needed to purchase some office equipment, chiefly steel filing cabinets, I was amused by a firm whose computer, having been informed that R.P. Oliver was the purchasing agent for R.P. Oliver, offered the former a secret "kick back" of 20% if he would buy their products at the expense of the latter. Another firm offered the purchasing agent a "complimentary" woman's mink jacket, which would be sent with his compliments to "any address," thus tactfully permitting him to choose between his wife and his doxy. That would have been good business, had the computers been operated by someone with intelligence enough to notice the odd coincidence between the name of the purchasing agent and the name of the owner to be exploited.

Our idealists must own that their velleity to abolish all suffering is most fully expressed in the Fifth Wisdom of Lamaism, the doctrine that teaches that "no durable happiness, nor yet security, for any sentient being can exist while others are a prey to suffering." That truth cannot be questioned and you may take it to heart: in practical terms it means we got ourselves born on the wrong planet -- in the wrong universe.

The struggle for existence in a universe we did not choose, and the burden of being a member of the only race which values objective, verifiable truth as an end in itself, makes us sometimes long for escape from reality -- in some cases through a literature of the fantastic, of marvelous dream worlds, of free-ranging fantasy. But we must not confuse that necessary escape with what is real. Permit me to suggest to the reader that it is a waste of his time and energy to play with fantasies that lack the literary and aesthetic charm of poetry and imaginative prose fiction.

A dream is by definition a series of sensations that occur in the brain when both our senses of perception and our powers of will and reason are in abeyance, so that we have no control over that flux of sensations. But it is, of course, a well-known phenomenon that when we dream that we are dreaming, the dream ends and we awaken. Then the conscious mind takes over and we are again responsible for our thoughts, and must face a day in which we must be responsible for our actions, which, by their wisdom or folly, may determine the rest of our lives. Our dreams may give expression, pleasant or painful, to our subconscious desires or fears. But in our waking hours we must, if we are rational, make our decisions on the basis of the most objective and cold-blooded estimates that we can make: estimates of the forces and tendencies in the world about us; estimates of the realities with which we must deal; remembering always that nothing is likely to happen just because we think it's good, or unlikely to happen just because we think it's evil.