Who Was Revilo P. Oliver? A Biography

Revilo P. Oliver was a giant of the Old Right and a critic par excellence of spiritual, political, cultural, and academic decline in America. The web site dedicated to his writings, the chronicle of additional works at National Vanguard, and the Oliver biography, are well worth the time of the BATR reader and browser.

A Moderately Happy Birthday, Bill Buckley! by Paul Gottfried

By Paul Gottfried

[Recently by Paul Gottfried: The Neoconservative Vision) Parallel Lives: William F. Buckley vs. Samuel T. Francis]

William F. Buckley, the former conservative pundit, celebrates his 81^st birthday today (November 24). His eightieth birthday last fall provided liberal journalists with an opportunity to praise someone who, according to Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, had saved the Right from extremism. According to Dionne (Buckley: The Right's Practical Intellectual Washington Post, October 11, 2005, A17), echoed a few days later by a Goldberg variation in NRO (Golden Days, October 27, 2005), Buckley had made heroic efforts throughout his career "to rid the right of the wing nuts." In fact, according to Dionne, Buckley became " the scourge of an anti-Semitism that once had a hold on significant parts of the right. He also blasted the strange conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society. "

But, contrary to this puff piece, Buckley had vented much of his youthful bile on Murray Rothbard, Ronald Hamowy, and other predominantly Jewish libertarians. These figures had disagreed with Buckley’s stated willingness to support an ever-growing public administration designed to prosecute the Cold War.

Wonder-Working Power: The Roots and Reach of the Religious Right: Daniel McCarthy

Wonder-Working Power

The roots and the reach of the religious right.

Daniel McCarthy | December 2006 Print Edition

In Defense of the Religious Right: Why Conservative Christians Are the Lifeblood of the Republican Party and Why That Terrifies the Democrats, by Patrick Hynes, Nashville: Nelson Current, 288 pages, $24.99

The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege, by Damon Linker, New York: Doubleday, 304 pages, $26

The Christian Coalition was instrumental in the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, but before long its power seemed to be waning. In 1996 Bill Clinton—the draft-dodging, pot-smoking, abortion-rights-supporting womanizer who embodied everything Christian conservatives abhorred—handily won re-election against Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.). Two years later, Republicans lost ground in Congress as they prepared to impeach Clinton, and Paul Weyrich, the man who had first suggested to Jerry Falwell the name “Moral Majority,” adapted a phrase from Timothy Leary: It was time, he told Christian conservatives, to “turn off,” “tune out,” and “drop out.”

Death by Government: The Missing Chapter by Thomas DiLorenzo

Over the past decade a number of researchers have attempted to document the extent to which various governments during the twentieth century committed acts of mass murder against their own citizens. The millions of deaths catalogued by such researchers as R.J. Rummel, author of Power Kills and Death by Government, and by the authors of The Black Book of Communism, are not deaths caused by foreign armies, but by all those unfortunate souls’ own governments.

The glaring omission is the 300,000 Americans who were killed by the Lincoln regime from 1861–1865. According to some conservative estimates, some 50,000 Southern civilians were also killed. The southern secessionists certainly were a significant opposition to the ruling regime; they absolutely denied the validity of the regime’s absolutist ideology – nationalism and a "mystical" union (as Lincoln called it) that must be held together at all cost; they were certainly dissenting to the Lincoln regime’s goals and its nationalistic ideology; and Lincoln did refer to the original, peaceful acts of secession as a "rebellion." Indeed, the "official" U.S. government title for the War to Prevent Southern Independence is "The War of the Rebellion."

More than half of the 300,000 or so southerners (one out of four adult men) who died, perished from disease. Nevertheless, it was the war, which forced those men to live in conditions where they would be subjected to being exposed to epidemics, that was the root cause of their death.

Bush's Defeated Foe: U. S. Civil Liberty by Paul Craig Roberts

George Orwell warned us, but what American would have expected that in the opening years of the 21st century the United States would become a country in which lies and deception by the President and Vice President were the basis for a foreign policy of war and aggression, and in which indefinite detention without charges, torture, and spying on citizens without warrants have displaced the Bill of Rights and the US Constitution?

If anyone had predicted that the election of George W. Bush to the presidency would result in an American police state and illegal wars of aggression, he would have been dismissed as a lunatic.

Video: A Mother's Prayer

Friday 10 November 2006

Orangeburg, South Carolina - Elaine's son, Spc. Darius Jennings, age 22, was killed in action in Iraq on November 2, 2003, when his Chinook helicopter was shot down, taking his life and the lives of fifteen other soldiers.

The war in Iraq has also been devastating for Elaine's community: "There were four soldiers from the same area as my hometown killed in a short time, and Darius was one of them," she said. "This has been a great loss for the community and has hit hard, because a lot of young men go into the military."

Three graduates of Orangeburg-Wilkinson High School (South Carolina), where Darius went to school, were killed in Iraq in the space of just three months. Ms. Johnson, who works at an industrial plant in the Orangeburg area and is a member of Gold Star Families Speak Out, spoke out immediately after her son's death, questioning why U.S. troops remained in Iraq. She publicly challenged Bush a week after Darius was killed, questioning why he could come to South Carolina for a $2,000-a-plate Republican fundraiser, but could not bother to contact her and offer his condolences.

"I forced the president to meet with us," she said. "I asked him why soldiers like my son were still dying in Iraq, and he said 'to finish the mission'. I asked what the mission was, but he was already leaving the room."