by Professor Revilo P. Oliver

April 1985

In the Eighteenth Century, some French naturalists, notably Corneille de Pauw and the celebrated Comte de Buffon, noting the differences between mammals of cognate species in the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, elaborated a theory that there was in the Western Hemisphere some geological influence that produced biological degeneration. Assuming that the various mammalian species had been carried from the Eastern half of the globe to the Western, it appeared that some of them had become weaker and smaller, while others had shown the morbid growth of giantism. Anthropoid mammals were not exempt from the deleterious influence, and human beings from Europe and Asia had degenerated in the New World to savages, the Indians of North and South America. Presumably, civilized men more recently transported to the two continents would likewise degenerate from generation to generation, and the future of the Europeans who established their colonies in North America was dark indeed.

These theories were once widely accepted, and it will be remembered that Thomas Jefferson, inspired by his hopes for the new nation he had helped to found, was particularly active in efforts to refute them, and spent a great deal of his own money in collecting and shipping to Europe specimens of species that were not inferior to the corresponding species of the Old World. The theories of De Pauw, Buffon, and others were eventually abandoned when it was seen that they arose from ignorance of the laws of biological evolution that were eventually formulated by Darwin, and represented the kind of thinking that is now prevalent only in the sacrosanct nonsense about the equality of the races.

In the Nineteenth Century, cultivated Europeans were disturbed by the growing power of the United States, derived from exploitation of the vast natural resources that Great Britain had shortsightedly abandoned to her revolted colonists, and by the contrast between that power and the crudity and vulgarity that was shamelessly exhibited by the majority of Americans. Good examples of this dismay at the low level of culture in the United States are the mordant "Domestic Manners of the Americans" (1832), by Frances Milton Trollope (mother of the Victorian novelist and herself a writer of distinction), and the milder and less discerning "American Notes" (1842) of Charles Dickens. A minority of Americans of superior education tried to refute such censures by showing that they were themselves cultured individuals and claiming that progress would eventually raise the American populace to their level. Most of the champions of our cultural potentiality are well-known, but I shall mention the unfortunate Francis Glass, who deserves to be remembered for his eulogistic biography of George Washington in a Latin which was astonishingly good in his circumstances and almost Classical, about which I have written elsewhere, and for his valiant but hopeless struggle against the poverty to which he was born.

At the same time, sagacious Europeans, not only conservatives but real liberals (as sharply distinct from the chatterboxes who usurp that title today), notably Lord Acton, and Macaulay, were deeply worried by the constant deterioration of American government in a fatuous democracy which, they foresaw, could only end in catastrophe. And all Europeans of humane spirit were appalled by the bloody ferocity with which the Northern States, crazed by the ranting of the poisonous vermin called Abolitionists, invaded the Southern States to slaughter white men and subject them to an innately savage and primitive race. The enormity of the losses on both sides in that fratricidal madness and the disregard of the conventions that mitigated war between civilized nations profoundly shocked thoughtful Europeans, who correctly saw in them the beginning of that Advance to Barbarism that became so patent in the so-called World Wars, in which the United States was the decisive force.

The suspicion and, in some cases, apprehension with which Europeans watched the United States were partly allayed by the hope that the "grande barbarie eclairee au gaz" would eventually acquire the cultural stability of European civilization, partly mitigated by the disdain that enabled Carlyle to dismiss the horrors of the war of 1861-1865 as "a dirty chimney on fire," and partly repressed by an awareness that the United States did have a military potential that was useful to European powers, as, for example, it was shortsightedly used by a clever British politician, George Canning, as a cat's-paw in an economic offensive against Spain for which Britain was unwilling to accept responsibility, with the result that the simple-minded Americans took a childish pride in their Monroe Doctrine, imagining that it was their own bright idea, sprung from a noble itch to meddle in the affairs of South America.

In the Twentieth Century, the power that the United States, with its vast resources and manpower, could exert when drunk with idealistic hallucinations became the central fact of European history, and the decisive participation of the American simpletons in the two European Catastrophes gave to the United States a factitious prestige and encouraged the less cultivated classes of European nations to emulate the worst and most vulgar aspects of American life, including the fatuous "democracy," which placed political power in the hands of the most unscrupulous manipulators of "hoi polloi." The result was the 'Americanization' of Europe, which was essentially a barbarization of which the better European minds were painfully aware.

So long as the United States seemed a dominant world power with, perhaps, a great future, and some Europeans for a time drew a specious analogy between American power over Europe and the Roman Empire's power over Greece, resentment of the United States was checked by respect for our nation's accomplishments and supposed potential. But when it became increasingly obvious that the Americans were mad and had embarked on a policy of national suicide -- a suicide by which the United States would also consummate the ruin of Europe and the destruction of Western civilization. Respect for power became contempt for the world's village idiots. Europeans became even more afraid of the insane giant in his self-destructive fury, and criticism of our hapless country became more incisive and deeply perceptive.

The admirable French quarterly, "Nouvelle Ecole," edited by the distinguished Alain de Benoist, devoted its combined Fall and Winter issues in 1975 to a searching study of American life and culture. I may say in passing that I was invited to contribute a long article in French to that issue, but I declined, partly because I was not sure that I could attain the necessary objectivity, but primarily because I knew I could not write an honest analysis of our plight without stressing the effects of the Jewish invasion and eventual subjugation of the United States. The subtle conquerors of the world by deceit so systematically exacerbated and cynically exploited the very worst deficiencies of our population, which had been largely recruited from the lowest classes of European Aryans, that, great as our race's folly had been, it would have been unjust to place upon it the whole gravamen of guilt for what alien invaders had cunningly encouraged or incited it to do. My article would thus have been one which it would have been imprudent for the editor of the journal to print. "Nouvelle Ecole," a journal of high intellectual content and largely written by men of eminence in the true sciences and in historical studies, was a courageous publication, but it had nevertheless to be circumspect and avoid overt offense to Yahweh's Master Race. Even so, despite all that caution, a few years later a private meeting of its editors, contributors, and supporters was invaded by a mob of howling Jews, who wielded iron clubs to split the skulls of Aryans who dared think thoughts not approved by their God-given masters.

"Nouvelle Ecole," I may add, represents the best thinking of Europe today, with the necessary and limiting discretion I have mentioned. Its policy is to marshal in each quarterly issue the essential conclusions of contemporary research in history and the sciences that are directly concerned with human civilization and culture, and I regret the failure of an ambitious project undertaken a few years ago by some leading American "conservatives," who hoped to publish an English translation of the periodical or, at least, of an anthology of articles from it. The project failed in the end for lack of sufficient funds, although the amount needed was absurdly small by the standards of a nation in which excited dunderheads are reported to have given of their own free will $74,000,000 two years ago, and probably more in later years, to finance the oleaginous gabble of Jerry Falwell, who is only one of the many rabble-rousers who promote Jesus and the Jews on the Jews' boob-tubes.

In the periodical's special issue, entitled "L'Amerique," the leading article, by Robert de Herte and Hans-Jurgen Nigra, is entitled "Il etait une fois l'Amerique" ('Once upon a time there was an America'). The title will have informed you that it reaches the conclusions of Professor Anthony Hacker of Cornell in his "End of the American Era" (1970): the United States has ceased to be a nation, that is, a body of persons united by a common race and culture, and has become merely a geographical expression, a name for a territory inhabited by incompatible races and temporarily held together by the efforts of each to exploit the others in a competitive fermentation that will inevitably end someday in an explosion.

The article is keenly perceptive and implacably objective. No American can read it without wincing at every paragraph and bitterly conceding that facts cannot be refuted by the habitual American technique of shouting, usually with what Oscar Wilde termed "the rage of Caliban at seeing his face in a mirror." The authors touch unerringly with their stylus each spot of gangrenous oedema on an apparently doomed land, and they marshal their facts ruthlessly, but if there is any exaggeration at all, it is in their quotation from one of the most eminent of modern French literary men, the late Henri de Montherlant. I translate it: A single nation which has succeeded in debasing intelligence, morality, and the quality of humanity on practically the whole surface of the globe: that is something that was never seen before since the earth existed. I indict the United States for perpetrating a continuous crime against mankind. There is a certain unfair hyperbole in that statement, as there would be in a denunciation of Othello without reference to Iago. It is true that the Americans, with their depraved itch to inflict democracy and degeneracy on the whole world, have wrought unequalled devastation and slaughter on a global scale in their fits of righteousness and sadism, but it is disingenuous not to add that they have made themselves the fellahin of the Chosen People who have swarmed into their new Promised Land, and if the Americans have served Yahweh's Folk in especially conspicuous ways, so have Europeans, who eagerly served the same masters and as vilely, and who have, after all, wrought their own destruction and cannot reasonably complain that the Americans helped them destroy themselves. Prostitutes, even if they are better educated, should not denounce the brothel next door for immorality.

The leading article that I have cited, with the complementary article by Alain de Benoist, make of the "American" number of Nouvelle Ecole an objectively analytical and dispassionate study of the United States today that is at once complete (with the exception I have mentioned) and concise. I cannot summarize here more than a hundred closely-printed quarro pages, but I commend that magazine to you, if you are willing to think about facts and are not a typical American, such as those I have heard a hundred times exclaim, in soprano or falsetto, "I can't bear to hear anything unpleasant."

The recently begun British quarterly, "Scorpion," which carried the notice of Evola that I mentioned in February, contains in its belated number for Summer, 1984, a series of short articles on the United States. There is one on Jack London, "the last American hero," another on Ayn Rand, a demographic survey with a map that attempts to predict the coming partition of the territory now called the United States, and some minor items, but there are three principal articles, all of them comparatively short.

Robin Davies writes a modest estimate of what, if words are to be used properly, we must call the only Civil War thus far fought in our territory, which began in 1777 and ended in the independence of the American colonies and the expulsion of the losers in that Civil War who had not been murdered by their fellow colonists. It presents a segment of history of which many Americans first learned from Kenneth Roberts' famous novel, "Oliver Wiswell" (New York, Doubleday, 1940), which set off an epidemic of hysteria among the Daughters of the American Revolution. I note, incidentally, that Davies' list of sources indicates that he missed the judicious work by Henry Belcher, "The First American Civil War" (London, Macmillan, 1911), which is an excellent summary.

An American, Robert Hoy, best known for his songs, contributes an article, "Lid on a Boiling Pot," reprinted from the collection entitled "New Right Papers," edited by Robert W. Whitaker (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1982). Mr. Hoy surveys the "Populist" movement that tries to unite the various and diverse protests of Americans (I mean Americans, not resident aliens), almost always of the least educated and least brain-washed classes, who tried to oppose, often with violence, one or another aspect of the totalitarian tyranny that now covertly rules their occupied country. He hopefully believes that we have reached an "historic moment" that offers an opportunity to the New Right to overthrow the small-time gangsters of the major political parties. "As happens so seldom in history, destiny holds out the hand of a tremendous opportunity. Woe to us, if we do not accept it!" But it may be doubted whether Destiny has obtained the Jews' permission for such hand-holding.

The lead article is by the editor of "Scorpion," Michael Walker: "Our America: Lost and Found." He tries to continue, on a reduced scale, the articles in "Nouvelle Ecole," and he does so with the same implacable realism. The title is explained by his observation that "Our America is the British America, which, like all the other nations of America, can survive only if the United States is destroyed... The United States is now beyond question the "enemy of Europe," politically, militarily, and above all, culturally."(1) The menace to civilization that he sees lies in the contagion of the barbarism that has become the way of life in the United States. "The America of the United States, which is not our America, defines itself in terms of its world mission, not to "conquer" but to "convert" in the name of a way of life which is inimical to the human community. "We are all potential Americans." He means of course that Europe can sink into the "democratic" degradation that the government of the United States is trying to impose on the whole world by enslaving the American populace and gradually pauperizing it. But here, as in "Nouvelle Ecole," we miss an important element: we are trying to stage Othello without Iago.

Mr. Walker quotes the disgusting inscription on the Statue of Liberty which, in effect, advertises the United States as the world's garbage dump for human refuse, but he does not note that the silly verses were written by an enemy alien, Emma Lazarus. That is a symbol of what is missing throughout his analytical discussion, even in his references to the prevalent superstitions that provide an enormously lucrative business for the innumerable "Bible thumpers" who "ply their trade in an anxiety-ridden land." It is no coincidence that, as is stated in the title of the booklet by Ralph Perier, published by "Liberty Bell", "The Jews Love Christianity." And as Mr. Walker himself remarks, the ruin of civilization wrought by America was a consequence of the prevalent mania that "the United States has a Judaeo-Christian mission to make the world 'safe for democracy.'" And I particularly note that the Europeans, who so relentlessly judge us, did not themselves recognize that self-preservation imposed on them the more modest and rational mission of making Europe safe from 'democracy.' And although we are bitterly and justly condemned for importing hordes of enemy races into this country, all of Europe, including the Britain that made itself no longer Great, has been smitten by the same suicidal mania. In Sweden, for example, cancer of the cerebrum has become so epidemic that the 7,000,000 Swedes and aliens long established in Sweden have, of their own free will, irremediably polluted their country by importing 1,000,000 pieces of anthropoid garbage from Africa and the biological cesspools of Asia.(2)

Michael Walker's prognosis is grim: "The United States is doomed and no amount of corn-beer patriotism can save it. ... When the United States does disintegrate, it will do so quickly and with little fuss. It is, after all, a "gimmick" made to sell, and like all gimmicks, it wasn't made to last. The United States may disappear faster and sooner than anyone would think possible."

That is his opinion. I doubt it. I especially doubt the prediction about "little fuss." It is true that I spent decades hoping with a blithe optimism for the survival of the American people and the country "they" created, and I remember I once based a calculation on the assumption that White men in the United States retained at least so much of the basic instinct of all higher mammals to protect their progeny that they would never permit their children, for whom they claim to have some affection, to be hauled to "integrated" boob-hatcheries and forced into association with niggers. What wild optimism that was!

I no longer expect manhood of rabbits. But my guess is that the dismemberment of the United States will be a long and bloody process, and that a large part of the Aryans of this country will have (before their death) a practical experience of the "democracy" they so joyously imposed on the Sudeten Germans and many other members of their own race in Europe.

=============================NOTES=========================

(1) The phrase that Walker emphasized may be intended to be an allusion to Francis Parker Yockey's "The Enemy of Europe," which (together with my long essay on Yockey) has been published by Liberty Bell Publications. Yockey, however, has the merit of facing frankly the fact of the Jews' dominion over a country that is only nominally independent.

(2) There is little merit in the argument "tu quogue," and I have noted only a few examples of the rotting of European nations. An American who is vexed by the article in "Scorpion" could write an answering polemic, claiming that all the infections of the American body politic were imported from Europe, beginning, of course, with the Puritans, who came straight from England. I remember an encapsulated bit of history that was current when I was in college: "The "Mayflower" set sail from Plymouth on the sixth of September, 1620. It encountered severe storms on the Atlantic, but did not sink. That was one of the great tragedies of the sea."