Losing “Home”
The modern world is a world of ephemerality in every way. Accordingly, the concept of a home has been lost to the meat-robots who are rapidly replacing humans. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, “a person in the United States can expect to move 11.7 times in their [sic] lifetime”; the propensity of Americans to wander about is a perennial topic of discussion. In Europe, many of the War stories I find most tragic are not of individuals who died, but of the destruction and dispossession of family homes that had been established for centuries before the United States even existed. And in my own life experience, I have too oft found myself surrounded by chic cosmopolites, who deem excessive attachment to living in one place to be a sign of emotional immaturity—perhaps even of mental illness.
The following article, which was nestled alongside a heart-rending review of Silesian Inferno (Schlesisches Inferno) at pp. 15–18, is a peculiar favorite of mine. I have tried showing it to people, but never yet found anyone who understands it.
To Professor Oliver’s observations about “abolishing humanity”, I can add only that humans are indeed being replaced by fungible wetware computing assets, programmed and managed by more reliable, more intelligent machines. ®
Coming Home
By Revilo P. Oliver
Liberty Bell, November 1992, pp. 11–15.
[*11] The Manchester Guardian may have been a liberal publication when it was founded in 1821. When I first began to glance occasionally at copies of it, a hundred and thirty years later, it had already become an evangel for “Liberal intellectuals,” telling them what to think—or to recite without troubling their consciousness with thought. I am, by the way, becoming very tired of putting quotation marks about a phrase that designates a horde of chatterboxes who are neither liberal[1] nor intellectual. “Liberal intellectuals,” as Joseph Sobran once dared to say publicly, to the displeasure of his editor-in-chief,[2] are only slightly disguised Communists, i.e., votaries of the Marxian religion, although some may be too ignorant to know it.
As one would expect, recent issues of the Guardian’s weekly supplement, which is widely distributed in this country, are filled with passionate yelps that the “rich nations” (that means you, sucker) [*12] must reduce their own standard of living so that they can give trillions of dollars to the “poor nations” (and that means billions of niggers, wogs, and other biological détritus) to help them “save the planet” (by breeding faster). (That is the hogwash purveyed by the Gore who is now, incredible as it seems, a candidate for the office of Vice President.)[3] There is naturally no mention of the only pollution from which the planet needs to be saved, the horrible overpopulation by billions of vocal anthropoids that are multiplying like guinea pigs, thanks to the fatuity and subconscious death-wish of our own ill-starred race.
Occasionally, however, the Guardian Weekly prints something worth reading. In the issue for 21 June 1992 there is an item by Ralph Whitlock, which, I hope, may have reminded the paper’s habitual readers that there is much that neither they nor we can understand about our fellow creatures, who have as much right to this planet as we do, although our race, long bemused by a pernicious superstition, thought that they were made for our swollen-headed species to use and abuse. It is worth quoting.
Mr. Whitlock says that last May he and a neighbor were commenting on the late return of swallows and house martins when
Over the meadows before his house, dipping and diving toward us as they hawked insects on the wing, were four or five martins. Suddenly they were with us, and, losing their interest in flies, they made straight for the sites of their fast year’s nests. Without hesitation and with no exploratory reconnoitering, they flew directly to the vestiges of the nests that had survived the winter’s gales, and clung to them twittering. It was as if they were saying, “Well, here we are Home again! and so glad to be here!”
And I fell to marvelling at the unerring instinct that had brought them all those 7,000 miles from their winter quarters in South Africa, 14,000 miles if you reckon the autumn journey. When the time came to begin the journey the birds must have had a clear picture of their destination, and a detailed programming of their route. … And there was no mistaking the impulse which guided them, for, the next day, they were busy laying the foundation of a new nest under the house eaves, using what remained of their nest of the previous year.
In the martins and many other species of birds, as I remarked when commenting on Dr. Rhine’s imposition on the credulity of the [*13] public,[4] we have a genuine instance of “extra-sensory perception.” Their astonishing journeys are certainly not explicable in terms of the five senses that we possess. The most plausible theory is that they somehow perceive the lines of force in the earth’s magnetic field and, perhaps, the angle of the sun’s rays. But whatever the explanation, we have here a phenomenon of what can be called a “spiritual force” and is much more worthy of our attention than absurd religions about supernatural beings, whether old and outworn superstitions or newly invented by the hucksters of marvels for the gullible.
The same inexplicable power of perception is present in various species of mammals. If you ride a horse over winding trails in the foothills, which he has never visited before, the instant his head is turned homeward he will know it, although you may not, if you have not consulted a map. There are apparently unquestionable reports that if a baboon is carried, in a vehicle from which he cannot look out, a hundred miles along the two legs of a right-angle triangle, he will, when released, start homeward across the hypotenuse.