by Professor Revilo P. Oliver

October 1985

Among the pests that afflict us in summer, and more annoying than flies and mosquitos, are swarms of addle-pated little zombies, hatched out in the public schools, who squawk as they "demonstrate" against nuclear weapons. It is unlikely the little creatures know what they are saying. They merely make a noise, and they can repeat any simple phrase their trainers teach them before sending out a swarm to distract attention. The zombies are squawking about nuclear weapons today; yesterday, they were making the same sounds about "apartheid" in South Africa; tomorrow, they may be screeching about "Nazis" or "abortions." I remember having seen a swarm of them scuttling and scrambling around a high school in southern California; they were "demonstrating," as I recall , against the Birch Society, but were noteworthy because their "Liberal" teachers had managed to scrub them and dress them in clean clothes before opening the doors of their zoo.

What is remarkable about these demonstrations of "Schwaermerei" is that so many Americans, instead of calling the fire department to hose off the street, seem to think that the squawking means something more than, say, the racket that comes from a frog pond in the evening.

Equally odd is the strange disposition of some Americans to pay attention to what are called "SALT talks" that have been going on for years in Geneva. The purpose of those talks is unknown. Some persons think the purpose is to reduce the risk of unemployment among the call girls of Geneva. Others think that it may be an elaborate psychological experiment to determine how long human beings can utter meaningless jabber without becoming certifiably mad. If one read the pontifications of the scribblers in newspapers or watched a song-and-dance act that is used to fill in idle moments on the White House show, one would suppose that the Americans and Russians who draw salaries to stay in Geneva were "negotiating" about an agreement on the part of the Soviet to limit its manufacture of certain kinds of weapons. And while I try not to seem overly pessimistic in my estimates of my contemporaries, I must admit that there are indications that a considerable number of Americans believe such a thing to be possible. If that seems unlikely, remember there are Americans who believe in virgin births, ghosts that haunt houses, and the equality of races. If they can believe things like that, they can also believe in magic spells that would so enchant and stupefy the Soviets that they would not equip themselves with every kind of weapon they deem effective.

Now any intelligent man would know that the masters of the Soviet, not being nincompoops with skulls filled with drivel about "world peace" and "peaceful coexistence," are equipping themselves with every military weapon they deem effective and endeavoring to develop new and better ones.(*) It is also obvious that in devising new weapons they must make experiments which, given modern methods of detection, must be known to properly equipped observers in civilized nations. It therefore follows irrefragably that the Soviets' collaborators in Washington and the Jews' newspapers for "goyim" are simply lying when they pretend to know nothing of the ever increasing superiority of the Soviets in weapons. This may, however, be of little practical importance, since no matter what weapons the United StateS might have, the alien government of this country would never permit them to be used against the Soviets anyway. (* A publication called the WASHINGTON REPORT in its issue for August 1985 gives some details, partly from secret American documents recently declassified, of the enormous superiority of the Soviet over the United States in weapons now ready for use and the overwhelming superiority that will be attained by the proximate production of a large number of new and even more effective weapons devised by Soviets' scientific research (much of which, no doubt, has been done in the United State) for which there is no American counterpart. The WASHINGTON REPORT is the house-organ of the National Security Council, which, if you send them enough money, will try to talk the Congress into taxing you some more for weapons, since so much of the present Budget must go to finance the Jews' massacre of Semites in Asia Minor. The Council hopes to influence a Congress which has complacently watched while every administration in Washington, from Eisenhower to Reagan, has worked for the Soviets and carried out for them their encirclement of the United States, beginning with the establishment of a base in Cuba and continuing step-by-step to the recent transfer to the Soviets of strategically located islands off the coast of Alaska in preparation for the eventual occupation of Alaska. The Congress not only watched the Communist encirclement but took an active part in it by stripping the American boobs of their Panama Canal. The Council does not estimate how many tons of gold would be needed to buy a few ounces of patriotism from the Congress of the United States.

On the subject of our weapons, there is a book by Daniel Ford, THE BUTTON, published this month, which raises the question, "If the Soviets should attack the United States with intercontinental missiles, could the United States mount a counter attack?" Mr. Ford's answer: "Probably not." (What that suggests to him, naturally, is more gabble about world peace-posh.) It would be interesting to know how many of our enormously expensive missiles would really work. Some years ago, there was a test of the "Minuteman" missiles that were then touted as a sure-fire deterrent of the Soviet. It took the experts more than half an hour to get one of the things out of its underground silo in North Dakota. And before the "Minuteman," there was the appallingly expensive "Titan," which was never intended to work at all, since, as one of the subcontractors disclosed before he was silenced, it was so designed that its fuel lines would almost certainly clog, if it were fired.)

About twenty years ago, seemingly reliable information from within the Soviet Union indicated that a place named Plesetsk, in sparsely inhabited territory about 125 miles due south of Archangel (the port on the White Sea), and perhaps at others, the Soviets were conducting intensive experiments to develop more effective nuclear weapons, although they cheerfully signed scraps of paper that purported to "outlaw" such research, since they were willing to humor nitwits when they could conveniently do so. There were efforts to give this information to the few Americans who are interested in the possible survival of their kind, but the reaction of "Liberal intellectuals" is as automatic as the reaction of chickens when a hawk flies above their pen, and it was authoritatively proclaimed that only "neo-Nazi alarmists" would spread such damnable falsehoods.

I now learn from the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER (Summer 1985) that as long ago as 1983 the official Soviet newspaper, PRAVDA, admittEd the existence of the missile center at Plesetsk, and that late in 1984 two Russian scientists publicly admitted that such experimentation was in progress. Furthermore, in its issue for Spring 1983, the INQUIRER reported (pp. 7 f.) the finding by James E. Oberg that many reported sightings of "flying saucers" (now called "unidentified flying objects," UFOs in the strange jargon of journalists, who imitate the Communists' use of acronyms) were really the reentry into the atmosphere of Soviet missiles designed to carry nuclear warheads in a coming war. Characteristically, the Soviets, who had signed a treaty that established an "international law" that "outlawed" such tests, had published in the hunk of well-printed propaganda that is distributed to Americans at the expense of American taxpayers, SOVIET LIFE, articles with "scientific" reports on "authentic" observations of "UFOs," and the Soviet Academy of Sciences published an elaborate report on such "authentic" but "unexplained" sightings of flying saucers, which excited and vastly elated Americans who want to believe in wizards from distant planets or want to make money out of suckers.

I was a little amused some years ago when I supplied a statement to a group of earnest people who were trying to discourage the wave of almost hysterical nonsense about "UFOs" at that time. I said that it was indubitable now that all reports of "flying saucers" are either hoaxes, optical illusions, hallucinations, or the lies that are told by inferior people who want to attract notice, EXCEPT that certain sightings could well be of secret weapons produced experimentally by research technicians in Israel or the Soviet Union. My statement was used EXCEPT my exception. The group evidently felt that it would be simply wicked to suggest that the saintly Jews or the high-minded Communists might be doing anything secretly. And they felt that, although I had merely named the two countries, and had left to intelligent readers to recognize them as enemies of the American people, although not of the American people's rulers, who rule in the interests of our evidently allied, if not identical, enemies.

On 16 March and 3 July 1984, huge clouds, glowing as though with reflected incandescence, appeared in the evening skies above Argentina and Chile, producing, of course, a great deal of excitement among mercurial people. The current SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, no doubt correctly, identified the phenomenon as caused by the firing of the fourth stage of a rocket carrying an intercontinental missile that the Soviet will equip with activated nuclear warheads when the time comes. I assure you that such missiles do not know they are "outlawEd," and would not in the least deviate from their course if they did.

In the meantime, however, there is a very large number of Americans who believe in "international law," "flying saucers," "brotherhood," leprechauns, and ghosts. Even the most resolute optimist cannot deny that damning fact. And such persons naturally talk seriously about "negotiations" to "limit armaments" and "SALT agreements."

As Euphues said, "It is a foolish bird that stayeth the laying of salt on her tail." Hence our proverb, which, so far as I know, comes from Lyly, although we may doubt that there are such birds.

There is, however, a species of small gannet, now nearing extinction, that is so extraordinarily stupid that sailors can entice one to alight on or near the deck of a ship, using almost any kind of lure, and then wring its neck. Now although the etymological dictionaries would have it the other way around, I am quite sure that sailors called those small gannets 'boobies' because of their obvious similarity to the boobs who people our great "democracy."