Hunter

by Andrew Macdonald

  “Well, I… I’m not sure what you’re trying to say, Ryan.” Oscar felt his anger rising again. “I certainly had my eyes opened by the evidence I found. I know that the public often doesn’t seem very bright, but there must be lots of others out there like me who will be challenged to find out more when they’re presented with facts like those in the Churchill article. And I intend to make it easy for them, with references to books where they can learn more. All they have to do is go to the library….”

  Oscar was interrupted for a third time by Ryan’s laughter, which came in peals this time and left Ryan gasping for air, with tears rolling down his cheeks. “Go to the library! How many of the voters in this country do you think have ever seen the inside of a library since they left school? It’s less than three per cent, according to the American Library Association, and nearly all of those use the library only as a source of cheap romances. Americans simply don’t read serious books.

  “But that’s not even the worst of it. Listen, you could get around the library problem by leaving off the references and just packing the facts into a pamphlet. A couple of dozen pages should suffice to present the facts about the control of the mass media. You could stand on a street corner with a stack of such pamphlets and a pocketful of money, offering all corners 20 bucks to sit down and read a pamphlet right there on the spot. You’d get a lot of takers, but it wouldn’t make an iota of difference. It’s like I just told you: they don’t care. They don’t give a shit. They’re not interested in ideas. They’re not interested in truth. They couldn’t recognize a fact if it ran up and bit ‘em on the ass. Furthermore, they wouldn’t even absorb the information and pass it on to someone else in casual conversation, because they’ve been programmed not to absorb that sort of thing.

  “You said there must be lots of others like you out there, but there aren’t. You’re unique. You don’t like the race mixing that’s going on in this country, so you did something about it. You started blowing away mixed couples. You strangled the biggest promoter of race mixing in the Congress. You blew a committee of race-mixing celebrities to smithereens. There are millions of other people out there who don’t like race mixing either. The last Gallup poll I saw said 27 per cent of White Americans disapprove of marriages between Whites and Blacks, and I personally think that the actual percentage is a good bit higher than that. But what have any of those folks done about it? Nothing. Not a damned thing. Not even the ones who really get steamed when they see a White woman with a nigger. They’ve got no balls. They’ve got no imagination. They’re constitutionally incapable of doing anything original.

  “Do you really believe this country’d be in the mess it’s in today if its citizens could think? I mean really think and then act accordingly, like rational individuals. They wouldn’t even have to have balls; all they’d have to do is act rationally in the privacy of the voting booth. What you don’t understand, Yeager, is that they’re not rational individuals; they’re a bunch of fucking animals, and I’m talking about the Ph.D.s and the corporation executives as well as the cab drivers and the housewives. They don’t think; they only feel and react according to a batch of conditioned reflexes.”

  Ryan paused to catch his breath, and then his words came more calmly: “Sure, everybody knows that there are a lot of smart people, people who can figure how to get laid or how much income tax they owe or how to make a computer do what they want it to. Problem solvers. But not rational individuals.

  I’ll give you an example: that Illustrated Sunday Herald article on the Jews by Churchill you mentioned being so impressed by. Don’t you realize that right-wingers have been reprinting and distributing that article for more than 70 years, without making even the slightest dent in the fortunes of the Jews? My father first gave me a copy of that to read nearly 40 years ago, when I was a teenager. If people were rational, they would have done something about the facts in that article. They would at the very least have quarantined the Jews, put them back into ghettos with strict limitations on their activities, the way Europeans did in the Middle Ages. That was rational, although it’s passed off as superstition and prejudice by the controlled media these days. It was based on a recognition of the danger presented by the Jews and a determination to protect the people from that danger. The popes and emperors who made the Jews stay in their ghettos were rational people, who recognized facts and acted on them.

  “I’ll give you another example. For you the Jewish control of the mass media is a big, new discovery. But it’s nothing new to anyone in the government. It’s one of the most widely recognized facts of life in Washington. Everybody knows it, but no one does anything about it. And some of those people really do care what happens to the country, believe it or not. It’s not rational. People behave exactly as if they’re programmed. With very few exceptions, even those able to recognize a truth are unable to act on it if action would require climbing out of a rut of conditioned behavior and doing something new or different.

  “Or, to shift the onus of irrationality from the right to the left for a moment, consider the cases of South Africa and Israel. The Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories are treated infinitely worse than the niggers are in South Africa. But do you ever hear any of the bleeding-heart clergymen or movie stars who demonstrate against South Africa utter a cross word against Israel? It’s not that the facts aren’t known, and in most cases it’s not even hypocrisy. A lot of those nigger lovers would as soon weep for Arabs as for Bantus, but they would have to overcome their conditioning first.”

  “Are you trying to tell me,” Oscar came back with incredulity and defiance in his voice, “that there is no point in trying to educate people, that it does no good at all to point out their errors to them and give them facts?”

  “I’m trying to tell you that you can’t educate them — that is, you can’t change their behavior — with pamphlets. The only way to persuade the population of this country that they need to change their ways is to give them a good, hard boot in the ass — about 600 times. They need to be reprogrammed, and that takes order and discipline, not books or leaflets.”

  “Ryan, you have a pretty dim view of human nature.”

  “Bullshit, Yeager! My view is realistic. I know how people function, both as individuals and in the mass. Making people do what I want them to do, whether they’re violent criminals in a hostage situation or my own subordinates in the Bureau, has been my job for nearly as long as you’ve been alive, and the reason I’ve been successful at it is because I’ve been realistic about human nature. I’m even a little bit of an optimist, which is why I’m enthusiastic about my new job. I think I may be able to do some good.”

  “By kicking people in the ass?” The sarcasm in Oscar’s voice was heavy.

  Ryan looked at Oscar for a moment, sighed, shook his head, and said, “I’m really amazed that you did such good work on Kaplan and Feldman. If I didn’t know it was you who’d taken them out, I wouldn’t believe you capable of it. You talk like a goddamned intellectual, the worst sort of intellectual, the kind who can’t face life as it really is. I’ve just told you a few of the facts of life. Instead of being grateful to me you’re resentful.”

  He paused, then continued, “Let me give you a real nugget of wisdom: Whatever is necessary is good. Whatever the good Lord designed into our world is good. Try to change the things that are changeable, if you think they need to be changed. But don’t be resentful toward the things which by their very nature are unchangeable.

  “You think it’s terrible that people aren’t rational, that they behave like animals and have to be manipulated like animals. You want everyone to be like you. But that’s childishly egocentric. If everyone were like you there could be no society, no civilization. Everything would fly apart. If there were only a thousand men like you in this country it would be ungovernable. It was just a fluke that I caught you, after half the Bureau had been tearing its hair out for months because of you. If there were 50 of you at work in Washington, 50
in Chicago, 100 in New York… we’d be utterly incapable of dealing with the situation. You’d bring the government down.

  “If you like to read books, then you should be grateful that most men aren’t rational, because it takes a pretty big herd of irrational animals to provide the infrastructure for just one printing press. To be able to afford one philosopher we need a million drones operating on their conditioned reflexes. So be happy that people have to be manipulated instead of educated. That’s the way the Lord designed things. The government accepts that and acts accordingly — at least, this part of the government does,” he said, tapping his chest with his thumb. “So do the Jews.

  “If it offends your humanist sensibilities to reform the behavior of the American people with hunger and the toe of a boot and the threat of a bullet, then there are gentler methods, more ‘educational’ methods. If you had the television networks under your control you could feed the public a new brand of pablum and accomplish in 20 or 30 years a part of what needs to be done. That is, you could change the content of the ‘ideas’ that they parrot back and forth to each other. You could have them wringing their hands over what’s happening to the Palestinians and demanding a boycott of Israel, instead of demonstrating against South Africa. You could chase the queers and the other freaks back into the closet. You could cut race mixing down to almost nothing.

  “You could do all that — you could partly reprogram the herd — by changing the plots of the soap operas and the biases of the talk-show hosts, by reworking the dialogue and being careful about the complexions of the characters in the animated cartoons for the kiddies, by telling your anchormen when to sneer and when not to while they’re reading the evening news. Of course, you’d still need to give the majority of the people a good kick in the ass to make them break a lot of the bad habits they’ve picked up.” Ryan placed his hand on Oscar’s arm and assumed a fatherly tone. “Anyway, since you don’t control the television networks, we’re going to have to do things my way. Be glad that you have a chance to help. It’s not often in history that two rational men are able to work together on a project so worthwhile. And, for Christ’s sake, forget about pamphlets.”

  Oscar felt stunned. He didn’t want to accept what Ryan had just told him. He fought against it. But he knew that he would end up accepting at least a substantial part of it. He might be able to convince himself that things weren’t quite so stark as Ryan had painted them, but the bulk of Ryan’s message had the unmistakable ring of truth. It was a truth that already had been hiding inside his own mind, and Ryan’s brutal words had simply stripped away its cover. It was Oscar’s turn to sigh. So far as his personal strategy was concerned, it was back to the drawing board again.

  Ryan glanced at his watch, then smiled and patted Oscar’s arm. “I’m going to be very busy for a couple of weeks. You do your homework, and I’ll be calling you when I need you.”

  XXI

  Oscar was not ready to give up his pamphleteering ambition immediately, despite the cold water Ryan had poured on it. If education were as ineffective as Ryan indicated, then Harry’s organization, the National League, should have discovered that fact. The day after his meeting with Ryan he gave Harry a call and received an invitation to attend a meeting of local members being held at eight o’clock the following evening, a Friday.

  Persuading Adelaide to go with him was not difficult, although she made him promise that he would take her out to dinner afterward. The meeting was in the home of a member whose address Harry had given him. It was a much larger house than Harry’s and was located in a wooded neighborhood of Arlington with large lots and expensive homes. Only a dozen other persons — nine men and three women, including Harry and Colleen — were present when he and Adelaide arrived.

  The meeting itself lasted only a little over an hour and consisted mainly of informal progress reports of their activities by the members, followed in each case by a brief discussion, with questions or suggestions from the others. One man reported on his success in obtaining a mailing list of nearly 50,000 buyers of historical books from a commercial source which initially had refused to rent the list to the League on political grounds. Another reported on the preparations being made to mail League book catalogs and other promotional materials to the list.

  A woman member, who was a commercial artist, showed an art poster she had just completed and sketches for several possible new posters. The completed poster seemed very striking to Oscar. Under the slogan ‘Save the Endangered Species’ it portrayed various endangered animals: On one side a surfaced whale was being attacked with harpoons from a whaling ship. On the other side, in the foreground, a leopard in a jungle setting was being shot by a Black poacher, while in the background there was a New York fur store with a leopard-skin coat in the window and a greasy-looking proprietor in the doorway counting a handful of money. And in the center, larger than the rest, was a White family — a man, a woman with a baby in her arms, and a small child, all with handsome, Nordic features and coloring. The Whites were standing huddled together on a boulder, distress and fear evident on their faces, while all around them pressed a threatening, packed mass of non-Whites, like a rising tide about to engulf them, with brown and black and yellow arms stretching up to grasp their legs. The opinion was expressed that all of the large environmental organizations would be afraid to touch the poster, but that it might sell well to students, many of whom would buy it because of its controversial theme.

  Three other members were working on a video drama. One, who had written the script and would do the directing, was presently involved in the casting and appealed to the others present to provide him with an actor for one role as yet unfilled. Another, his wife, was making the wardrobe. A third was building sets in his garage.

  When the business of the meeting was concluded, Harry introduced Oscar and Adelaide to the others present, including Kevin Linden, a broadcast engineer, who was the coordinator of the local group. Harry apologized for the fact that Saul Rogers, whom he especially had wanted Oscar to meet, was not present. “Saul’s a schoolteacher, and he’s often burdened with extracurricular duties. Tonight they’ve got him frisking students for drugs and weapons at a school basketball game,” Harry explained.

  Oscar commented on the high degree of professionalism among the members he had met. “Not exactly what I had expected a gang of wild-eyed, neo-Nazi revolutionaries to be like,” he joked.

  “The people we’re interested in now-in fact the only kind of people we can use — are those who are willing and able to do things,” Kevin told him. “And since the main thing we’re doing is propagating facts and ideas, our people tend to be ones who have specific skills which are useful for that work.

  Actually that covers a pretty wide range, from writers and artists to engineers and businessmen, but it is true that in this phase of our program we have a rather high percentage of professionals and relatively few street fighters and bomb throwers, despite the image of us painted by the controlled news media. In fact, Harry is the only real bomb thrower here tonight,” he finished with a grin and then excused himself.

  Oscar turned to Harry and asked, “What do you think the Horowitz Act will do to your ability to continue producing and distributing your materials?”

  “Some operations will have to go underground, but most of what we’re doing probably won’t be affected right away,” Harry responded. “We’ve always taken a pretty positive approach, with an emphasis on raising the racial consciousness of our own people, instead of pointing out the shortcomings of others. The list of books we distribute starts off with the Aeneid and Beowuif and includes many of the other classics of Western history and legend. Much of it’s the sort of thing that every graduate from our better universities used to be familiar with, before democracy came to the academy and the standards were lowered so that the Hottentots and wetbacks could get degrees too. Then, of course, there was a deliberate weeding out by the egalitarians of books which were considered to be written from the vi
ewpoint of the White male — racist and sexist, you know,” Harry added primly, larding his tone with an affected self-righteousness. Then he switched to sarcasm: “Unless a book was written by a militant lesbian, a revanchist American Indian, or a Negress with AIDS who’d converted to Judaism, it was suspect. The exception was anything about the ‘Holocaust,’ for which Jewish male authors, even those of the heterosexual persuasion, were acceptable.

  “Now some of the classics are hard to find, even in the universities, and so we perform a useful service by making them available from a single source. I don’t think that the government is ready yet to start locking people up for reading the Iliad. There are some books we carry which deal with the Jews which they might try to ban, if that were all we carried. We also have books which provide more historically accurate versions of ‘sensitive’ historical subjects — the Second World War, for example — than the officially approved books, and they’d really love to consign those to the flames. I doubt that they’ll go after any of our books now, however. I think they’ll be afraid that if they attack us for any one title we carry, that’ll just attract attention to the rest of our books and raise some issues they’d prefer to avoid for the time being.

  “What they’ll do first is go after the surviving Klan groups and the publishers of low-brow racial or anti-Jewish material: things like The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion or some of the crude anti-Black material that’s floating around. The pseudo-intellectual libertarian types won’t squawk about banning that, and it’ll allow the book-burners to establish useful legal precedents. Then, in three or four years, they’ll come after us, but we’ll worry about that as the time approaches. For right now we’re establishing alternate channels of distribution for our most vulnerable material — mainly our original video tapes. We have a few dramatic productions on tape that are quite powerful, and the Jews are itching to keep them out of circulation. Since we produce those ourselves, though, and aren’t dependent on any outside suppliers, we have a lot of freedom in changing the way we do things in order to make it much harder for the government to stop us.”