Robert S. Griffin writes in his biography of William Pierce: Revilo Oliver was one of the founding members of the John Birch Society and wrote a number of pieces for William Buckley’s magazine National Review in its early years. Oliver and the Birch Society parted company when Oliver’s publicly stated racial views made its leadership uncomfortable. Oliver was said to have made an observation in a speech he gave to the conservative Daughters of the American Revolution to the effect that the pre-Castro Cuban government under General Batista was probably as good as one could reasonably expect in an island largely populated by mongrels.2 Oliver’s overt anti-Semitism made him similarly persona non grata at the National Review. At one public meeting, Oliver reportedly referred to the thought of the “vaporizing” of the Jews as a “beatific vision.”3
Oliver’s writings have been collected and published in a book called America’s Decline: The Education of a Conservative.4 The book was published in London. It is doubtful that what Oliver has to say in the book would be acceptable to the publishing and distribution industries in this country. In the introduction to the collection, Sam Dickson, an American lawyer and revisionist historian (on the far right, the term “revisionist” refers to someone who is bucking what they see as the official Jewish liberal party line on World War II in general and the Holocaust in particular) refers to Oliver as a “leader of the racial nationalist movement.”5 Dickson makes the point in his introduction that Oliver focuses on racial self-love among whites rather than animosity toward blacks or Jews. Dickson says that Oliver believes that whites would do well to emulate the loyalties that Jews demonstrate toward their own people and traditions.6
In order to understand racialists such as Oliver and Pierce, one must keep in mind that they look upon the human being as an animal like any other animal in nature. To them, the human being is a species of animal, with the races being sub-species or breeds. That is to say, they don’t see simply one human race. They see one human being, or human animal, and a number of human races. Oliver writes: “Liberals are forever chatting about ‘all mankind,’ a term that does not have a specific meaning, as do parallel terms in biology, such as ‘all marsupials’ or ‘all species of the genus Canis,’ but the fanatics give to the term a mystic and special meaning… [that imposes a] transcendental unity on the manifest diversity of the various human species.”7 Liberals, Oliver argues, engage in “frantic and often hysterical efforts to suppress scientific knowledge about genetics and the obviously innate differences between the different human sub-species and between the individuals of a given sub-species.”8
“I reached the conclusion,” Oliver reported in one of his writings
included in America’s Decline, “that our race [those of northern European background], including specifically the Americans, was a viable species, and that therefore, like all viable species of animal life, it had an innate instinct to survive and perpetuate itself.”9 He believed that those of his race do not realize their precarious status on this planet: “Aryans [Indo-European, Nordic, non-Jewish] are a small and endangered minority on this planet, but how many members of our race seem to have even an inkling of that fact?”10
Are Aryans superior to other races of men? It depends on what
values you bring to answering the question, said Oliver. “We must
understand,” he argued, “that all races naturally regard themselves as superior to all others….We are a race as are all the others. If we attribute to ourselves a superiority–intellectual, moral, or other–in terms of our standards, we are simply indulging in a tautology. The only objective criterion of superiority among human races, as among all other species, is biological: the strong survive, the weak perish. The superior race of mankind today is the one that will emerge victorious whether by its technology or its fecundity–from the proximate struggle for life on an overcrowded planet.”11 Oliver contended that the quality of human beings cannot be judged by the intelligence, academic record, or proficiency in a profession alone. He pointed to “mattoids,” as he called them, to make his case. These are individuals who are geniuses in some areas and imbeciles in others. Examples of mattoids Oliver listed were Shelley, Einstein, Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao.
