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WHITECROW BORDERLAND
Christian Identity
Note 2: Revilo P. Oliver: On Western Christianity (July 1989) or Pequot Revisited. 8/18/99.
In discussing the Latin verse written by the Reverend Mr. William Morrell in 1625, after his visit to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in America, Revilo P. Oliver, a Professor of the Classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana until his death in 1994, notes that Morrell
"had the missionary's itch to crowd Jesus's Heaven with black, brown, red, yellow, and drab souls and to commit treason to our race by imparting to alien and necessarily rival races the arts and techniques on which depends the precarious superiority by which alone we can survive in a hostile world."
Oliver's denunciation of Morrell stems from the fact that his poetry "ends by enjoining on Christians their sacred duty to help the benighted Indians," a proposition and a concept Oliver sees as the surest way to "commit treason" against the white race and thereby destroy the "precarious superiority" white people have enjoyed over everyone else since before time was counted, apparently, in any meaningful way by the barbaric races who gave rise to Greece and Rome. Oliver's history on these points in his article "Western Christianity," originally published in Liberty Bell in 1989, are at best a bit fuzzy. His essential hatred of "black, brown, red, yellow, and [other] drab souls," however, is as clear as anything can, or needs to, be.
In citing the Latin verse of a second English clergyman, the Reverend Mr. Philip Vincent, who also visited Massachusetts in the seventeenth century (1637), Oliver notes that his poetry generally tended to be much better than Morrell's. He notes that Vincent arrived in the same year that a member of the Pequot nation killed an "English trader" and subsequently "succinctly celebrated the colonists' victory [over the Pequot nation] in well-turned elegiac couplets." Oliver's use of language is significant. In describing the incident, Oliver does not say that a Pequot individual killed the "English trader," but that the "Pequot Indians" did so. This may seem an insignificant point to make, nit-picking at someone else's writing style, as it were, but for the fact that "frontier" justice in the English colonies during the seventeenth century was supposed to have been based on English Common Law. In that context, which usually revolved around the notion of "an eye for an eye," and so on, in Puritan circles, with which we are certainly dealing in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, punishment for a capital crime, even one committed by a native American against the foreign invaders, was exacted against the guilty party and not against anyone else. Oliver's suggestion here that the entire Pequot nation was guilty of killing the "English trader" flies in the face of reason simply because it does not take a village (men, women, and children) to kill a single Englishman, even if Europeans always already do consider themselves to be vastly and excessively superior to native Americans, but does serve an important purpose in justifying the account Oliver then gives of how the brave and powerful colonists reacted to the murder of one of their own.
He continues his account, apparently of the Reverend Mr. Vincent's poetic description, in these terms:
"The inhabitants of the little colony, under Major Mason and Captain Underhill, attacked the stockade in which the tribe thought itself secure, killed a good part of the Indians and then pursued the fugitives, overtaking and killing them. Some captives were taken and sold to slave-traders for export to the West Indies. A few Pequot escaped, and their enemies, Mohawks, took care of most of them. The tribe became extinct."
While there isn't anything blatantly untruthful in any of this, it certainly gives the impression that the "little colony" was acting with perfect justification in the way it handled the conflict of how to go about punishing an inferior savage who had dared to commit murder against a superior race. In fact, Mason and Underhill (I decline to give them credit for being members of any kind of army) surrounded the Pequot "stockade" in the dead of night with every able-bodied man in the colony who was willing to commit genocide, set the stockade on fire, and butchered every man, woman, and child who attempted to escape being burned to death. The idea that a just punishment for the killing of a single white person is the extinction of the entire tribe to which the criminal belonged, and make no mistake here either by believing that Oliver sees anything wrong with the behavior of his ancestors, goes so far beyond what is justifiably reasonable that anyone named Mason or Underhill living in America today, using the same kind of reasoning that guided their forbearers, ought to be taken to court and charged with genocide. Anyone who celebrates this kind of action against the other, as both the Reverend Mr. Vincent and Professor Oliver have done, deserve no better fate than the one they condone and promote.
To continue with Oliver's assessment of Vincent's poetic flights of fancy, and in a way that does distance him personally from any charge one might think to raise against his suitability to teach children in a major American University, he notes that
"The Reverend Mr. Vincent succinctly celebrated the colonists' victory in well-turned elegiac couplets. There isn't the slightest hint of a mawkish wish to do good to the aborigines. The destruction of the Pequot tribe, he said, produced peace in the only possible way. It was an admirable example of effective action and it permitted conversion of the wilderness to the agrarian fertility of civilization."
The idea that "civilization" can, and should, be built on the ground of genocide against the original inhabitants of the continent, especially when it is expressed with such open contempt for the slaughtered people who have been driven to extinction, coming as it does from a Christian "minister" of God's divine law and one of his latter-day and saintly admirers, puts the blame for this kind of thinking precisely where it belongs. One should also recall, of course, that a different version of this historical incident claims the reason for the extinction of the Pequot nation stemmed from the refusal of Cotton Mather, who gave orders to Mason and Underhill as the governor of the colony, to negotiate the "purchase" of land (which the colonists clearly intended to steal anyway) with the woman who represented the nation that had always lived on it. The "English trader" who was killed must have been the "spirit" of Cotton Mather as he contemplated the necessity of having to negotiate anything at all with a twice soul-less person, first because she was a woman and again because she was a heathen. The remedy in every good-Christian-and-true's mind for being confronted with such abominations is burning women and children to death in their sleep, selling any survivors to the slave-traders for profit, and letting the noble Mohawk take care of the rest.
Oliver draws to this conclusion about the nature of his and Vincent's understanding of the way things are in the real world:
"He understood that whatever may be true in theological doctrine, we live in a world subject to natural laws, and that the first law of nations is that the strong and resolute survive, while the weak and fanciful go under."
It must warm the hearts of white people everywhere to realize that a man like Revilo P. Oliver taught lessons like this one to an entire generation of American children at the University of Illinois at Urbana. The next time someone like Buford O. Furrow or Benjamin "August" Smith shows up in a day care center, or in the streets of your city or town, with his assault rifle looking for the children of the "mud people," as their kind so fondly refer to everyone they hate with all the force of their hard-won white Christian heritage, don't even bother to ask the question yet again about how such a thing could happen. Revilo P. Oliver is the darling of Christian Identity in the mask of Buford O. Furrow, and is inspiration to the World Church of the Creator in the skin of Benjamin "August" Smith, because every white racist web-site on the Internet features his Liberty Bell musings as preeminent examples of how white people, good Christians and true everyone, must relate themselves to the "mud people" if the white race has any hope of maintaining its "precarious superiority" over everyone else on the planet. If you think your children are safe from the guns and murderous rage of this Christian ideology, contemplate the fact that Oliver taught your children his lessons of hate at an American University for thirty years. What a crop of assassins he must have sown. Guess who gets to reap it.
From a native American point of view, there are only two kinds of white people: those who openly applaud and celebrate the glorious victory of the "little colony" over the Pequot nation, and the ones who cannot be bothered to find out who teaches their children the lessons of hate. Whichever one you are--be sure to have a nice day.
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