Oliver Reviews Which Way Western Man
[This review of Which Way, Western Man? was Dr. Oliver’s contribution to, and was published with the author’s permission in, Liberty Bell for September 1980. It was first written for, and published in, National Vanguard, October 1979.]
Western Man Must Assert Himself or Perish
To answer the question posed in the title of his book, William Gayley Simpson has condensed into 762 closely-printed pages the experience, the research, and the philosophical thought of a lifetime. He is now 87, and he began to write the present book 35 years ago. It is a veritable encyclopedia of everything that is directly pertinent to our race’s position in the world today and our problematic future.
The book is unique. What makes it so cogent is that it is both an intellectual autobiography and a synoptic treatise. The reader, even if he begins with conditioned reflexes that make him hostile to his own race, can follow, step by step, the process by which reason and intellectual honesty forced Mr. Simpson to his conclusions.
His work also may be taken symbolically as an epitome or re-capitulation of the course of Western civilization, which likewise began with the Christian faith of the Dark Ages and has now brought us to the point where we can no longer refuse to face the grim realities of the world in which we must either live or perish.
Born in 1892 in an educated but sternly Christian family, Mr. Simpson was graduated, magna cum laude, from a highly reputed theological seminary. He became a minister, and, unlike most clergymen, had a religious faith so ardent that, instead of regarding some of the most striking parts of Christian doctrine as convenient subjects for professional oratory, he, like St. Francis, tried to live in logical conformity with them.
Our race, like some others, has a strain of sentiment that can be excited by the idea of tapas, the mirific virtue and spiritual power produced by austerity, self-sacrifice, and self-mortification. The notion of tapas was a fundamental part of Aryan religions from India to Scandinavia, and it was not remarkable that our ancestors accustomed to venerate Odin, a god who, by an act of supreme self-sacrifice, handed himself om the great world-tree so that he might arise from the dead, should have accepted the cult of a god who had himself crucified and likewise rose from the dead; nor that, so long as they believed in their new religion, they held to the faith that spiritual excellence could be attained by inflicting degradation and pain on oneself. St. Francis was merely one of the many who had the fortitude to live up to that faith.
Mr. Simpson, too, tried to carry the religion to its practical consequences, but, unlike St. Francis, he did not lapse into a kind of amiable insanity. He learned from his dolorous experience that reality is not to be denied and that magic is either clever trickery or an hallucination. He realized that there was no way in which he “could be an honest man and remain a minister.”
Innumerable clerics, even in the darkest ages of Faith, found their creed unbelievable, but either took refuge in the Medæval aphorism, “populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur” [“the people want to be deceived, therefore let them be deceived”-Ed.], or, if not without honesty, accepted Cardinal Dubois’s celebrated dictum that God is a bogey that must be brandished in order to scare the masses into some semblance of civilized behavior. But since the forced unity of Christendom was effectively broken in the sixteenth century, not a few clergymen have publicly denounced the religion to which they gave assent in their youth.
One of them, the first great apostate of the nineteenth century, the Reverend Mr. Robert Taylor, disregarded the pleas of his ecclesiastical superiors and friends, who urged him not to ruin a promising career in the Church, in which his talents destined him for high office, by publishing facts that could only disturb the placid credulity or proletarian fanaticism of the lower classes. His Diegesis (1829), an historical investigation of Christianity and its relation to earlier religions, is a work of great learning and incisive scholarship, the more impressive today since many of the Christian gospels were still unknown when he wrote and he had at his disposal only a small fraction of the copious information about other early religions that subsequent discovery and research have now made available.
Taylor perceived that the early Jews, with the duplicity that is their outstanding racial characteristic, “plagiarized the religious legends of the nations among whom their characteristic idleness and inferiority of understanding caused them to be vagabonds; and pretended that the furtive patchwork was a system of theology intended by heaven for their exclusive benefit.” Under the cover of that brazen pretense, the Jews insinuated themselves into every nation whose prosperity they wished to exploit. Their migratory bands of “commercial, speculating thieves” were ever “ready to play into and keep up any religious farce that might serve to invest them with an imaginary sanctity of character and increase their influence over the minds of the majority, whose good nature and ignorance in all ages and countries is but ever too ready to subscribe the claims thus made upon it.”
Taylor was not really a precursor of Nietzsche, but he did identify the greatest of the innumerable hoaxes by which the Self-Chosen People have throughout history imposed on the gullible goyim and thus raised themselves from a miserable tribe of despicable barbarians, practicing primitive taboos and grotesque sexual mutilations, to the most formidable power in the world today.
Taylor differs from other prominent apostates and most of their contemporary deists and atheists, who inclined to esteem the Jews as enemies of Christianity. The others were taken in by another great hoax, the endless whining by the Jews that they were “persecuted” during the Middle Ages, when the Church gave them a virtual monopoly of usury, sorcery, and international trade; when they spun financial webs about kings and noblemen and most rulers were attended by skilled Jewish physicians, always spies and potentially executioners; when the Jews exercised such political, intellectual, and economic power that, as Bernard S. Bachrach has shown in his Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe (University of Minnesota, 1977), out of the 98 rulers whose policies he examines in detail, 88 (including Charlemagne) had to pursue pro-Jewish policies, while the ten who attempted to oppose the aliens in their domains went down to failure in one way or another; when the Jews could usually count on royal or ecclesiastical protection whenever their depredations excited local resentiment so strong that it became violent; when even the famous and belated expulsion of Jews from England and Spain overlooked those who thought it worthwhile to have themselves sprinkled with holy water; and when the Church itself was a great ladder by which marranos climbed to power and wealth, laughing among themselves at the stupidity of the goyim who imagined that a Jew could be transmuted by a few drops of magic fluid.
I therefore exempt Taylor from the generalizations about apostates I shall make below. His was a vigorous and incisive mind, and I am unwilling to guess how much of Christian doctrine he unwittingly retained.
Almost all of the apostates and anti-Christians of recent centuries exemplify the operation of what may be called the law of cultural residues. In all civilized societies, when a long-established and generally accepted belief is found to be incredible, good minds abandon it, but they commonly retain derivative beliefs that were originally deduced from the creed they have rejected and logically must depend on it. Thus it happened that modern enemies of Christianity rejected the mythology, but uncritically retained faith in the social superstitions derived from it—a faith which they oddly call rational but hold with a religious fervor.
They laugh at the silly story about Adam and his spare rib, but they continue to believe in a “human race” descended from a single pair of ancestors and hence in a “brotherhood of man.” They speak of “all mankind,” giving to the term an unctuous and mystic meaning with which they do not invest corresponding terms, such as “all marsupials” or “all ungulates.” They prate about the “rights of man,” although a moment’s thought should suffice to show that, in the absence of a decree from a supernatural monarch, there can be no rights other than those which the citizens of a stable and homogeneous society have, by covenant or established custom, bestowed on themselves; and that while the citizens may show kindness to aliens, slaves, and dogs, such beings obviously can have no rights.
They do not believe that one-third of a god became incarnate in the most squalid region on earth to associate with illiterate peasants, harangue the rabble of a barbarian race, and magically exalt the ignorant and uncouth to “make folly of the wisdom of this world,” so that “the last shall be first”—that they do not believe, but they cling to the morbid hatred of superiority that makes Christians dote on whatever is lowly, inferior, irrational, debased, deformed, and degenerate.
They gabble about the “sanctity of human life”—especially the vilest forms of it—without reflecting that it takes a god to make something sacred. And they frantically agitate for a universal “equality” that can be attained only by reducing all human beings to the level of the lowest, evidently unaware that they are merely echoing the Christians’ oft-expressed yearning to become sheep (the most stupid of all mammals) herded by a good shepherd, which is implicit in all the tales of the New Testament.
Although the “Liberal” and Marxist cults have doctrinal differences as great as those that separate Lutherans from Baptists, they are basically the same superstition, and whether or not we should call them religions depends on whether we restrict the word to belief in supernatural persons or extend it to include all forms of blind faith based on emotional excitement instead of observed facts and reason.
When those “atheistic” cults scream out their hatred of “Fascists” and “Nazis,” they obviously must believe that those wicked persons are possessed of the Devil and should therefore be exterminated to promote holiness and love. And when they see “racists,” who impiously substitute fact and reason for unthinking faith in approved fairy stories, their lust to extirpate evil is as great as that of the Christian mob that dragged the fair and too intelligent Hypatia from her carriage and lovingly used oyster shells to scrape the flesh from her bones while she was still alive. [Hypatia was a Neoplatonic philosopher, renowned for her beauty, who taught at Alexandria and was murdered by a Christian mob in the year 415 at the incitement of Cyril, archbishop of Alexandria—Ed.]
With very few exceptions, the anti-Christians, no doubt unwittingly, retained in their minds a large part of Christian doctrine, and they even revived the most poisonous elements of the primitive Bolshevism, which had been attenuated or held in abeyance by the established churches in the great days of Christendom. And today professed atheists do not think it odd that, on all social questions, they are in substantial agreement with the howling dervishes and evangelical shamans who, subsidized with lavish publicity by the Jews who control the boob-tubes and other means of communication, greedily participate in the current drive to reduce Americans to total imbecility with every kind of irrational hoax, from astrology to “pyramid power.”
It is to the great honor of Mr. Simpson that, as he says somewhere in his book, he is not a man “to do things by halves.” When he ascertained that the Biblical fictions were unbelievable, he logically perceived that the residue of derivative superstitions was equally mythical. He had the intellectual vigor and integrity to begin a search for truth, i.e., ascertained facts about the real world—a search that is an intellectual drama narrated in his candid pages. His studies of all subjects relating to the social realities of our time were thorough and almost exhaustive, and his citations from writers of recognized scientific and scholarly competence form a bibliography of almost encyclopedic scope.
Mr. Simpson resolutely examines the psychological and social consequences of our great industrial technology, which made us masters of the whole earth until Jewish superstitions paralyzed our vital instincts as well as our rationality, so that now our own technology is being used by our enemies “with deadly effectiveness to produce a herd of fellaheen, bemused, stupefied, tamed cattle, whom it will be easy for them to milk in the world-state corral they now have nearly ready to receive them.” That is a fact that no candid observer of the present will doubt, but Mr. Simpson goes on to consider the effects of industrial organization, which is necessarily inhuman, on the biological entity that is man.
Needless to say, there can be no question of abandoning the technological power on which alone depends our only chance to survive in the world we lost, but it is well that we understand the price that we must pay for power.
One chapter in this book ruthlessly demolishes a prejudice that has been inculcated into all of us by the dominant mythology. Sixty-five years ago, when the great American student of historical causality, Correa Moylan Walsh (who would be ranked with Spengler, had he been born in Europe), identified the causes of the catastrophic decline that was then already imminent, he noted the perverse “effeminization of men, for which the masculinization of women will be no compensation,” and he devoted the third volume of his Climax of Civilization to the systematic illusion called Feminism.
Limiting himself to essentials, Mr. Simpson has more concisely shown that, as should be obvious to anyone who looks about him, “men and women are fundamentally different creatures,” both physiologically and, what is even more important, psychologically. It is, of course, irrelevant that a dream of sexual equality may, like a dream of immortality, fascinate tender minds that need hallucinations to shield them from reality; and a calm consideration of the facts is particularly timely now, when screeching Jewesses are whipping the disinherited and bewildered females of our race into epidemic hysteria, thus applying the immemorial technique of their race, which, as some of its leading agitators have frankly stated, consists in creating dissension, antagonisms, and social disruption by finding groups of individuals who can be isolated on the basis of some supposed common interest and persuaded by artful sophistries that they are the victims of “social injustice” and “oppression.”
It is a grim fact that our people today is as hag-ridden with superstitions as were our ancestors in the Middle Ages. We have voluntarily shut our eyes to reality as though life were a child’s game to be played by capering blindfolded, until now we stand, as A. K Chesterton says in his posthumous book of that title, facing the abyss. Our recent history reminds one of the old Mexican myth of Toveyo, the cunning sorcerer, who exterminated the Toltecs by beating faster and faster on a magic drum that made the hypnotized people dance ever more furiously until they, exhausted, made a final leap into the abyss of eternal night.
If we are not to follow the Toltecs, we must at last use the cognitive and objectively rational powers that are peculiar to our racial mentality. Whether our decaying race still has the will or even the capacity to make that effort is the only question, and it must be answered soon.
Mr. Simpson is too honest to palliate our peril with illusory hopes or tranquilizing verbiage. His book, I warn you, is only for those who dare look upon the stark realities of a terrible universe. The sun is but a lonely spark amid billions of suns that are themselves lost in endless night, and in all of infinity our planet may be the only lump of rock infected with sentient life, of which men are merely a peculiar and ephemeral variety.
Among the mammalian bipeds, our race is a small and hated minority. For us there is no help from the infinite void that encompasses us, and no help beneath the clouds, except in ourselves. Like all living organisms, we must fight to survive in the unceasing struggle for life. But, as Mr. Simpson reminds us, seeking mere survival is not enough: a race can survive only by aggression.
At their origin through some biological mutation or phenomenal hybridism, the Jews can have been no more than a band of squalid savages, less numerous and less important than the Mohicans or the Algonquins on this continent. Had their ambition been only to survive as a tribe, they would soon have disappeared, absorbed into the teeming populations of the Near East. But that minuscule race, inspired by implacable hatred, perfected through ruthlessly selective breeding a very high degree of predatory intelligence and a genius for dissimulation and deceit. Endowed with a loyalty to their own race that maintained their unity in dispersion, they infiltrated more civilized nations to exploit the superstitions and appetites, the gullibility and venality, of the masses. Thus, in only 25 centuries, they became the arbiters and virtually the masters of the world today.
If our race has been so debilitated by menticidal illusions that it no longer has the will to subjugate and dominate other races, then, by the irrevocable law of all life, it has become unfit to survive. If that is so, the superiority that we won by our courage and technological power and have now lost by our fatuity is lost forever, and despite what you and I may wish or hope, we are, in the grim balance of nature, what the Jews believe us to be, an irredeemably inferior species, fit only for brutish servitude or, at best, extinction.
-excerpted from “Against the Grain: Volume 1” by Revilo P. Oliver (1995)