Lipstick Traces
A Review
Greil Marcus:
A Few Back Pages
by R.E. Prindle
The Man Who Shook The World
For even if they should say something true, one who loves the Truth should not, even so, agree with them. For not all true things are the Truth nor should that truth which seems true according to human opinions be preferred to the true Truth- that according to faith.
–Clement Of Alexandria
Clement was a man defending orthodox Christianity against not only the Pagans but competing Christian sects. Here he enunciates the credo of the true believer- it is True because we believe it, any other opinion even if true, or truer, must be considered false according to the faith.
In the twentieth century the Jewish comedian Woody Allen has a scene in one of his movies where some Jewish men are discussing things at a seder. Allen has one say that he would take God over the Truth. Or, like Clement he would sacrifice reason to the Faith or, in other words, Superstition.
There we have the crux of the matter. To criticize Jews is to criticize God in the Jewish mind. The inevitable result for those who do not accept the true Truth is to be labelled as anti-Semites. Thereon hangs the whole of Jewish history, past, present and future. It is to be devoutly hoped that the following discussion will not be defamed as Semites vs. anti-Semites but approved as Reason vs. Superstition. After all in the age of Science one would hope that Superstition is a thing of the past.
The argument will center on the ideas and career of Sigmund Freud- the man who shook the world. But first the world will have to be placed in the context of competing viewpoints within a Jewish context.
For many millennia the role of Science was given a subsidiary position below that of Religion. The truths of Science were denied because they conflicted with the true Truth of Religion.
In this environment the Jews were advantageously placed to dispute with Roman Catholics. After all Catholicism used the Jewish texts as its holy scripture. Thus in debating contests with Catholicism the Jews almost always came out the victors. This gave them great pride as being superior to the Gentiles. Their very high opinion of themselves seemed justified.
Had things remained a matter of faith the Jewish opinion of themselves would probably still be unchallengeable. However Science which had been treated by the Church more roughly than the Jews refused to be suppressed. Actually a higher percentage of Scientists were persecuted to death by the Church than Jews but this fact has to my knowledge never been considered.
The rise of Science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries not only shook the faith of the religious to its roots but actually cast the Semitic faiths into the dust bin of history. With the rise of Science Judaism became irrelevant. It could not win any debates with Science.
In the many crises of the Jewish soul this was a very significant one. It caused the breakup of medieval Judaism. For the first time the Jews left their ghettos and attempted to enter the mainstream of European life.
The Talmud which the Jews had always considered the repository of all true wisdom and knowledge now appeared to enlightened Jews to be the collection of nonsense the goys had always claimed it was.
As the Jews, then, began to enter the mainstream of European society they did so consciously as inferiors trying to impose themselves with their old dignity on superiors. The raison d’ etre of Judaism had to be replaced or the faith would just fade away.
The Talmud was useless to them in argument; they could only embrace the alien ideology of Science and try to excel the European originators of it.
Bearing in mind their desire to avenge themselves on the Europeans by befuddling them because of their expulsion from Spain they campaigned both politically and intellectually.
The first major attempt at establishing a science was that of Karl Marx who espoused ‘scientific’ socialism which was superior to ‘utopian’ socialism. Thus a Jewish social system supposedly scientifically constructed was placed in opposition to a European social system.
In the realm of Physics Einstein managed what seemed to be a more accurate description of reality. So in politics and physics the Jews had established a seeming scientific superiority.
At the same time as Einstein Sigmund Freud coalesced a theory of psychology that was superior to the fragmented state of psychology.
All three men then tried to turn their achievements to the benefit of the Jewish culture. As much as anything this was the cause of the two European wars as Hitler so accurately recognized.
As a little aside it is interesting to note the career of Immanuel Velikovsky. Like Einstein Velikovsky was a very competent Scientist, that is to say, working within an European intellectual milieu. But whereas Einstein stopped short at attempting to prove the veracity of Genesis and Exodus Velikovsky plowed straight ahead. Using his scientific skills to attempt to validate the literal accuracy of every fable he broke on the rock of superstition. Still, he wrote some very entertaining books, somewhat along Marcusian lines.
2.
The influence of Sigmund Freud on psychology has been immense while that influence has been almost entirely of a negative character. The increase in crime can be attributed to the implementation of his theories. Certainly the self-centered attitude of the homosexuals aboard the Teufelsdreck is about to lead to crimes and thwarted crimes which can be laid to Freud’s teachings. Let us review Freud’s ideas in the light of his milieu.
3.
One of Freud’s discoveries was the neurotic need to repeat. In other words, the subject repeatedly acts out the encysted subconscious fixation in an attempt to exorcise or realize the fixation. This phenomenon applies to cultures as well as individuals as Freud taught. In cultures it is called the ‘national character.’ In other words, a people must always act out its characteristic view of reality, the true Truth of the faith vs. the actual scientific state of things.
The Jews by and large have been a Stateless people since their origins. If one takes Genesis as fact, and it is psychological fact for sure, the Jews enter history ‘On The Road’ having been expelled from Ur of the Chaldees seventy-five years after having come into existence as a people. The theme of expulsion is a repeated figure in Jewish history. They are never tolerated for long. This is a fact, a truth, but in variance with the true Truth of the faith.
If we take the Jewish historian, Josephus, at face value they were expelled from Ur because of the jealousy of the Chaldean astronomers who were angry at Abram’s superior skills. The Chaldeans were known as the foremost astronomers of the ancient world so the Jewish ego must excel them at their own game.
The Jews then went to Egypt which was the home of the greatest magicians. After having outperformed Pharaoh’s magicians at feats of magic they take to the road again, fleeing Egypt.
Thus the main tenets of the Jewish character are fixed. They see themselves as an invasive people who are naturally superior to any people whose territory they invade and then they leave. These two themes repeat and repeat.
Thus in the nineteenth century when the Jews move West out of the Pale of Settlement into Vienna the migration must be seen as an invasion of a hostile culture intent on taking over the State as in Ur or Egypt.
A historical characteristic of Jewish invasions is that they are not usually militaristic but infiltratory. Like the military invasion of Hungary by the Magyars the Jewish invasion of Vienna was no less belligerent and exhibited the same needs to impose its culture.
In the biblical account of the invasion of Palestine the Jews put entire peoples to the sword to make living space for themselves. Thus they committed genocide several times over. There is no reason to believe they wouldn’t have done the same in Vienna given time and opportunity.
The bulk of the Jewish people after 1700 had been collected in Eastern Europe in what became known as the Pale of Settlement. This was mainly in Eastern Poland and Western Russia. When Poland was partitioned between Russia, Austria and Germany in the eighteenth century Austria acquired a large Jewish population in Galicia and its other Eastern provinces.
The Western Jews had already realized that the great challenge to their sense of superiority came from Science. What is called the Emancipation of the Jews was done by the French Revolution c. 1789-93. The Emancipation allowed the Jews to begin participation in European society. The work of the Church was undone. Thus the Jewish intellect came into conflict with the European intellect. In Germany this created a reaction known as the Kulturkampf. What the Germans had done was to give their intellect a name. They opposed German Kultur to Jewish Semitism. Semitism is the Jewish name for their intellect. Hence both anti-Semitism and anti-Kulturism came into existence.
Once within the Austrian Empire the Jews began to migrate toward its capitol, Vienna.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire was already an unwieldy amalgam of disputing nationalities and races. Its German governors had their hands full. Austria was sort of an early version of the United States.
Unable to destroy the Germans by the sword the Jews made a cultural assault on the institutions of the Empire. They pitted the Jewish intellect, Semitism, against the German intellect, Kultur. Freud who fully understood the meaning of Kultur wrote a book denouncing it- Civilization And Its Discontents.
Now, Jews are not smarter than anyone else although the mythology of the West so asserts. In fact, Jews are not under the same constraints as the indigenous peoples. Thus, the Jews are always a free, if circumscribed, people. The indigenous peoples were seldom as free. Medieval Europe had been a caste society in which only certain castes had freedom of movement. The Russian Serfs were both unfree and circumscribed until 1861 when they were at least nominally freed although not allowed to freely participate in society. They and other European peasants had a role akin to the American Negro of 1900 in the South who were supposed to know their place and keep it.
Thus a university education was beyond the aspirations of the indigenous lower classes but open to Jews of any class. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that social advancement is much facilitated by a solid education. The Jews accordingly flooded European universities in greatly disproportionate numbers to the population. Any Jew could thus place himself above the majority of the indigenous population.
It was inevitable that they be disproportionately represented in law, the judiciary, medicine, education, the arts and all prestigious occupations. As Semitism was unassimilable to Kultur it was inevitable that if the invasion was not resisted that Semitism would replace Kultur. This left the Germans in a difficult situation. They must either discriminate against the invaders, kill them, or go under.
Given more freedom of movement than the indigenous population and possessing a universal language, Yiddish, the Jews could form the international business corps of any community unrestrained by the business mores of the indigenous people. They could make their own rules, upsetting established traditions and customs as in Egypt and Chaldea.
This too is an established Jewish custom. Things don’t absolutely have to be done in the manner in which they are being done. When the Jews invaded Egypt they began to slaughter the sacred animals which the Egyptians had protected for millennia. The Jews saw no reason for the custom so they rudely pushed Egyptian mores aside. This habit is repeated in every country they invade. The peoples can learn to do it the Jewish way like it or not. They feel they speak with the authority of the true Truth of God.
By 1899 they were over 10% of the population of Vienna which is where critical mass begins. Muscling into the cultural life of the city they acquired a disproportionate number of seats in the symphony orchestras. As in Chaldea and Egypt they assumed that the Semitist style of playing was superior to that of Kultur. As music in Germania occupied an analogous position to astronomy in Chaldea and magic in Egypt the Jews naturally assumed they were better musicians than the Germans although music had never played a large part in their culture before.
As the scientific demands of music are greater than ancient astronomy and magic the Jews were never able to muster a composer of the first rank although their instrumentalists dominated the stage. But then all the empresarios were Jewish so they would necessarily hear with the Jewish intellect. Even today the Jews believe that without the Semitic intellect the orchestras of Europe sound nowhere as good as before the Holocaust.
They established their own newspapers and publishing houses. They used them to defame anyone who dissented from their program.
Without physical resources they had to resort to psychological means to disarm their opponents. They had to ‘psyche’ them out. Anyone who opposed or criticized them was branded as an anti-Semite and his own people were instructed by the Jews to ostracize him. Thus German nationalists became, if not criminals, at least, pariahs in their own land. The Austrian reaction to Jewish nationalism was extremely violent giving expression to itself only after the Anschluss.
These German defense forces were active and powerful during the period from approx. 1890-1914. After 1918 resistance to the Jewish invasion crumpled everywhere. The Millennial Revolution had gone swimmingly. Jews assumed the top positions or became dominantly influential in nearly all governments including the United States. The Jewish Invasion was for all practical purposes a success.
Two men were born into this Viennese environment that would have a profound impact on world history, Sigmund Freud and Adolf Hitler.
4.
Freud’s main desire was to become a great man. This idea was planted in his intellect by his Christian nurse as a child. He succeeded in realizing this in the field of psychology. Freud was himself an immoral man nor does he advocate morality for others. He advocates an unbridled self-indulgence. Like he says: Life is short. To succeed in one’s aims it is permissable to take immoral shortcuts even to use criminal means. The Mafia believes the same thing.
As a young man he was schooled in the tradition of Anton Mesmer from whom modern psychology descends. He was heavily indebted to the teaching of the French psychologist Jean Martin Charcot as well as to the school of Nancy. His own approach was an adaptation of their methods. He at first used Mesmerism or hypnotism as did the schools of Paris and Nancy but later abandoned it in favor of a form of self-hypnotism that he called free association. Hypnotism as a result went into a period of disfavor although applications are being found for it once again.
He got his real start by insinuating himself into the good graces of Josef Breuer whose work he very nearly appropriated. Having plundered Breuer he broke off with him never speaking to him for the rest of Breuer’s life. Thus does conscience make villains of us all.
Unable to admit his indebtedness to his teachers he repudiated their influence acting as though he had evolved his theories out of whole cloth. As an aspect of his character he was unable to suffer any criticism or advancement on his own ideas by others. He eventually acrimoniously broke with any of his associates with intellegence and independence.
Freud was a Jew which is to say devoutly so. He did not consider himself Austrian or German but an ethnic Jew. He believed in the supremacy of the Jewish people.
The most revealing anecdote concerning him was that as a child he was walking with his father who told him how when a young man he was wearing a new hat when a Gentile knocked it off his head into the street.
‘What did you do?’ Freud asked breathlessly expecting the answer to be that his father knocked the Gentile down.
‘I went out into the street and picked it up.’ His father replied.
Freud then lost all respect for his father which troubled him greatly for he wrote: ‘I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father protector.’ His dad wasn’t it.
So Freud’s own psychic needs distorted his approach from one of science as Jung claimed to one based on his personal needs. He falsely maintained that the father figure is the most important in a man’s life. When his disciple Otto Rank had the courage to correctly insist that the mother was the most important, Freud drummed him out of the ranks.
Disappointed by his own father he took as a surrogate father figure Hamilcar Barca, the father of Hannibal. Hamilcar Barca having suffered an injury at the hands of the Romans made his son swear on his sword, which is only a substitute for the ‘thigh’ or penis, that he would avenge him on the Romans. Clearly Freud would have promised his dad to avenge him on the Europeans if he had asked. Maybe he did.
Curiously Freud doesn’t carry Hannibal’s story through to its conclusion. The Romans exterminated the Carthaginians and razed their city.
Freud’s lapses in the application of his psychology are very peculiar. Having discovered the psychological compulsion to repeat he applied it neither to an analysis of himself or of his culture and people. He might have saved the Jews much suffering if he had. In his desire to avenge his father he became a central figure in the millennial period of 1913-28 which ended in yet another attempt to exterminate the Jews.
Post exilic history for the Jews began rather favorably. They returned to Palestine just as the Middle Eastern Empires were entering a time of troubles. The succeeding Hellenistic period left them more or less independent until in 186 BC the Seleucids interfered in their internal affairs. Under the Maccabbees the Jews were able to defeat the relatively weak Seleucid Emperors who were besieged on all sides. The victory gave them a feeling in invincibility.
The feeling was shattered by the Romans.
The Jews tried again and failed in seventeenth century Europe.
Their third repeated attempt was in 1913-28 which can be extended to the present.
Freud made the incredible and mind boggling statement on the eve of the Bolshevik, or Jewish Revolution in Russia: We tell ourselves that anyone who has succeeded in educating himself to truth about himself is permanently defended against the danger of immorality even though the standard of morality may differ in some respects from that which is customary in society. He then goes on to say especially since the existing standards of morality are beneath contempt.
Thus he advocates that a private, personal, obviously self-serving morality is superior to an ideal morality that has evolved over millennia extending those millennia anterior to the Old Testament.
What could Freud, knowing the imperfect nature of man, have found so objectionable about the existing morality? I don’t experience it as he did. It can only have been that it was based on European traditions and not Freud’s Jewish heritage.
The birth of modern Judaism was caused by the rise of the European Scientific attitude. Science was the sole creation of Europeans with which the Jews had nothing to do. Prior to the Enlightenment in their argument with Roman Catholicism the Jews had not only been equals but superiors. As the creator of the corpus followed by the Church the Jews were in a better position to understand and interpret it through the repository of the Talmud.
When as a result of the Enlightenment, scientific Europeans left the puerile biblical debates behind the Jews were hopelessly medieval. The Talmud, so effective against the bible, was worthless against science. The more intelligent or, perhaps, less traditional Jews began to reorganize Judaism to meet the Scientific times. This left them second rate beneath the Europeans, a serious affront to their amour propre.
The real challenge then was to regain their superiority. This could only be done by excelling in Science as they could invent nothing superior to it. The true Truth of religion broke on the rock of reality. If they merely excelled in Science they merely excelled in an European milieu. They were clearly then no longer the Chosen People; they became lost in the ruck. Freud at one time says that he saw no reason why the ‘wisdom’ of the Talmud couldn’t be raised to a level with Science thus bringing the Jews level with the Europeans in their dreams.
Strangely he didn’t understand that the entry into full consciousness caused by the understanding of the workings of the psyche obviated all forms of consciousness that went before including the so-called wisdom of the Talmud.
So, to whom was Freud speaking about educating himself against the danger of immorality? By Freud’s own admission his fellow Jews.
Freud’s vision of psychoanalysis is personal, dealing exclusively with the subjective workings of the subject’s mind. He doesn’t even seem to grasp that the fixations are caused by external forces. He seems to think the mind functions independently of the outside world. Input does not seem important to him.
To Jung and others Man’s relationship to his world is based more on a Challenge and Response system. In other words, the intellect, which Freud denies, plays a very important part.
Freud’s own intellect cast against his ideas places them in a different light. The man was born in 1856 in a Central European Jewish milieu. It will be remembered that the Hasidic religious movement grew out of psychological trauma that occurred in 1648. Founded c. 1700 the Hasidic movement was only about a hundred fifty years old at his birth thus retaining much of its original vitality.
Also arising out of the Jewish disappointments caused by the failed Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, in 1666 a movement was led by a follower of Zevi by the name of Jacob Frank. This movement also took shape in the first half of the eighteenth century and was still flourishing during Freud’s young manhood.
As a consequence of Zevi’s failure Frank believed that man was inherently evil thus God would never redeem him until the evil was spent. The only way to expel evil was to commit enough crimes to get it out of one’s system. Novel pyschology to say the least. Thus he taught to a large and attentive Jewish audience that one must commit evil for evil’s sake and that good will come of it. So, in a manner of speaking, one is doing good by doing evil.
Now, one can trace the spread of this idea in various forms and guises through space and time. One very interesting advocate who deserves more study is an eighteenth century English Jew by the name of Samuel Falk. Another is a twentieth century American Jew by the name of Arnold Rothstein. And of course, Marx and Freud.
Freud does not go into the external influences that formed his outlook or life or personal Weltanschauung but this emphasis on a personal morality that is superior to prevailing morality seems a sublimation of Jacob Frank and his evil for evil’s sake.
Now, to whom was Freud speaking and why? Certainly Freud considered himself a prophet of the Jewish people amidst the dawning millennium. He had an intense desire to avenge his people on the goyim. Did this Hannibal in that role have anything to do with organizing or directing the Jewish Revolution of the dawning millennium?
There is no question that his statement that anyone who has educated himself to truth about himself is permanently defended against the danger of immorality (and hence a guilty conscience) could be construed as advance absolution for any acts of the Bolsheviks that would be considered crime by ‘conventional morality.’
Freud’s statement and role resembles those a great deal of Simeon Bar Yochai, a second century rabbi of the Roman Wars. The Roman-Jewish war of 66-135 AD was perhaps the first of the Holy Wars. Its rationale and leadership was provided by the religious leaders of Judaism.
Simeon Bar Yochai was a leading architect of that war, probably its guiding light. After Bar Kochba’s defeat in 135 AD Yochai was compelled to go into hiding in a cave from which he daren’t move for many years until the Romans gave up the search. As a tribute to his influence in the war his obituary at his death said that he was the man who shook the world to its foundations.
Just before the bloodbath of 116 when the Jews rose up to slaughter hundreds of thousands of Gentiles a moral quandary arose in the Jewish community. They wondered whether it was permissable to kill ‘good’ Gentiles as well as the ‘bad.’ The rabbis without a moments hesitation replied that it was permissable to kill any and all Gentiles.
In 1666 with the expected advent of the millennium heralded by the messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, the Jews had been prepared on the strength of ‘God’s promise’ to rise up and murder Europeans much as they had done in the Roman War.
The third repeat of the Jewish Revolution of which the millennial date was 1913-28 had come to a slow boil with the Communist Manifesto of 1847.
It will be remembered that following Marx’ manifesto all the national Communist parties were over half Jewish. The non-Jew, Kropotkin, as leader of the anarchists had been discredited and the anarchists disenfranchised from the Communist Movement. The Jews than held all the leading positions.
Thus four Jews led the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia- Lenin, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Trotsky. All the abortive revolutions of Central Europe were led by Jews. They actually repeated the massacres of the Roman Wars in Russia and Hungary and were prepared to do so throughout the world as the Revolution rolled on to success.
In Russia slaughterhouses were established in which Jewish murderers ‘worked’ all day long slaughtering Gentiles until they stood ankle deep in blood and gore. Were they able to do this because Freud and made known to them truths about themselves that prevented them from committing immoral acts? Were they absolved of their crimes in advance as were the Jews of the Roman Wars? They must have been or they couldn’t have performed their ‘work.’ As it was numbers of them had nervous breakdowns as a result.
The atrocities in Hungary and the projected total annihilation in the Crimea have already been mentioned. The similarities between the Roman and European slaughters are quite pronounced in their ferocity. Of course all the details of the former had been recorded in that epistle of ‘science’, the Talmud.
Did the Jews go to Freud to justify their atrocities as they had to Simeon Bar Yochai two thousand years earlier? There is the compulsion to repeat. The Jews were very well organized before, during and after the Great War. Agents of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee swarmed over Central and Eastern Europe after the War in an attempt to rehabilitate their brethren first so they could assume control. The AJC and B’nai B’rith were the leading components of the ‘Joint.’ Freud had been a member of B’nai B’rith since 1895. He lectured to them in Austria on a consistent basis for years, even decades. As a psychoanalyst what was he telling them? His intellect deserves closer examination for what else can ‘anyone who has succeeded in educating himself to a few truths about himself is permanently defended against immorality’ mean except a license to kill. If a Jewish supremacy arose out of that evil wouldn’t good have come out of it in Jewish eyes? Yochai, Frank, Freud, there is a succession.
Placed in that context one must reevaluate the whole period as well as the careers of Hitler and Stalin, for as Freud wrote openly in a universal idiom his rationale can be appropriated by any individual for his personal morality.
The invasion of Vienna was preceded by and coincident with the rise of Jews in France. At the time of the Russian Revolution a document became prominent called the Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion. The document outlines a method for creating discord in society so that a junta can easily assume control. It was said that this document was a Jewish blueprint for world dominion. The provenance of the Protocols has never been established for certain. The Jews say it is a ‘forgery’ while their opponents say it is authentic.
Over the years the Jews have managed to discredit the document and have its study suppressed. This is a great disservice because whoever wrote it its precepts are currently being followed by several groups. Have you ever looked at Homeland Security carefully? It behooves every person interested in current affairs to be conversant with the Protocols of Zion.
In point of fact the Protocols are of Jewish provenance.
One thing all disputants agree on is that the Protocols were based on an earlier document of Franco-Jewish provenance called in English: Dialogues Between Montesquiou And Machiavelli In Hell. The Dialogues are of Jewish provenance so whether the Protocols are or not is a moot point.
The Dialogues were attributed to a French Jew by the name of Maurice Joly but internal evidence indicates several hands including that of the ‘Gibbon’ or Jewish historians, Heinrich Graetz.
The creation of the Dialogues was coordinated by a French Jew by the name of Adolph Cremieux. Little known outside Jewish circles but extremely important to a number of situations Cremieux also deserves further study. He was a lawyer and politico deeply involved in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. If one takes the Jewish ‘Gibbon’ Graetz at his word both revolutions were the result of Jewish machinations. On this point Graetz and Hitler are in accord.
Cremieux was responsible during the annexation of Algeria in 1830 under cover of that year’s revolution for obtaining French citizenship for the Algerian Jews. Thus with the annexation the barbarous medieval Jews of Algeria became full French citizens gaining precedence over the native Algerians in one fell swoop. Clever move for the Jews bad move for France.
As Jewish affairs were consolidating nicely in France twelve years after the 1848 revolution a Jewish central governing body called the Alliance Israelite Universelle was founded by Cremieux in 1860. The Dialogues were supposed to have appeared in 1862. The name means The International Alliance of Jewry or in a slightly different translation: The International Jewish Conspiracy. Actually the Alliance was the seat of the Jewish government until c. 1900 when the seat was transferred to the United States under the guidance of the financier, Jacob Schiff.
Thus the Protocols arose out of the Dialogues in direct succession sometime during the 1880s. It should be noted that the Dialogues was never seen in bookstores. The whole printing was confiscated by Napoleon III according to report against whom they were supposedly directed. It follows that the only people who could have known of the book and provided a copy as a model for the Protocols were its producers the Jews of France.
Nevertheless, as masters of misinformation, disinformation and misdirection the Jewish government was able to shame the liberal parties into rejecting Jewish provenance of the Protocols. The Liberals then condemned any Gentiles who persisted in saying so as anti-Semitic cranks. That is actually the nature of the ‘proof’ that the Protocols aren’t of Jewish provenance.
Jacob Schiff himself was a very effective Prime Minister. He was able to engineer the First Russian Revolution of 1903-05 by funding the Japanese war machine from America while he and European financiers prevented funding to the Russians.
Schiff was able to disrupt American and Russian diplomacy for the benefit of the Jews from 1900 to 1913 when he succeeded in persuading the US to break off diplomatic relations completely. Immediately with the Bolshevik succession he rushed huge loans of American dollars to their coffers even during the Great War to shore up the regime.
Thus absolved by Freud of guilt and supported by world resources from 1917 to 1924 it looked as though the Jews were on the eve of success in their millennial pursuit. With the possible exceptions of Mussolini and Ford it looked at though there were no fences facing.
However Hitler and Stalin sensed the danger. Hitler himself was always hostile to Freudian beliefs; it may be assumed that Hitler read at least some Freud. He was hostile to Freud for much the same reasons that Freud was hostile to Kultur. Living in the Vienna under the governance of the ‘anti-Semitic’ Mayor Lueger Hitler was self-educated. He spent years in the libraries organizing his view of the world.
In Freudian terms both he and Stalin certainly knew truths about themselves which prevented them from committing ‘immoral’ acts. Freud’s dictum could be construed as also authorizing their crimes.
Coming to maturity in the Red Terror of 1917-24 Hitler had a good understanding of the course of events in Central and Eastern Europe. It is silly to think that he acted solely from his own impulses. There was a civil war going on between Reds and Whites from 1918-33 in Germany. Judeo-Communist atrocities were daily before his eyes. As he said, he knew his head would roll in the sand if he lost. That was not mere rhetoric.
Hitler’s experience in Vienna convinced him of the nature of the war between Jews and Gentiles. The evidence is clear that the Viennese shared his views. Once given the upper hand over their invaders the Austrians were much more obdurate than the Germans. Never forget that an Austrian, Hitler, directed the fate of the German nation.
Hitler’s book burning in 1933 might be construed as nothing more than a vindictive censorship of ideas he didn’t like. But the books burned were those of Jewish writers, expecially Freud, it should probably be seen as an attempt to eject Semitism from Kultur. In other words the triumph of Kultur over Semitism. In the end the Germans chose to kill the Jews rather than discriminate against them or go under. You may be sure the Jews would have done the same.
As Stalin usurped power from the Jews in Russia a strange thing happened. Psychoanalytic methods assumed great importance. Spectacular show trials ensued.
When Freud’s disciple Otto Rank defected from the ranks of Freudian pyschoanalysts he was excommunicated. The validity of his views was not examined; even if true they were not the true Truth of the faith. Hence Rank was compelled to submit to criticism, confess his faults and beg for acceptance back into the faith.
The Show Trials of 1936 were conducted in the exact same manner except that the sinners were given the death sentence. The method surfaced again in Red China in 1966 when the Red Guards and Cultural Revolutionaries of Mao Ze Dong overturned that society. The accused were criticized in mass meetings, compelled to confess their ‘faults’ and beg to be allowed to rehabilitate themselves through hard labor.
Thus Marxist and Freudian ideas converged in an orgy of evil to destroy the oldest continuous civilization in the world.
The notion prevails in Politically Correct circles in the US today. Thus Freudianism has had a profound if unsuspected impact on the world.
Freud remained confident through 1928, began to waver in 1930 and by 1938 the horror of the impending destruction of the Jews as a repeat of the Roman War was before his eyes as fled Austria for England. In Moses and Monotheism he pitifully whines that the Jews had given up those notions of world dominion long ago. Or, in other words, I’m sorry.
Like Hannibal, his attempt to avenge his father resulted in the destruction of his people. As in the Roman War the Nazis conducted a manhunt to find every single Jew and kill him. Not only had Bar Kochba and Sabbatai Zevi failed the Jews as messiahs; so had the Revolution. The Jews failed in this third attempt to take over the world but the legacy of Sigmund Freud lives on in the ambiguous words of his corpus. His immediate political aims failed but his undermining of European society was much more successful.
Apart from his political intent Freud had uncovered a great scientific area of study.
5.
The Shirt Of Nessus
While Freud’s short term political goals ended in disaster for his people, as did those of his role model, Hannibal, Freud’s long term goal of destroying the social foundations of the Gentiles has succeeded quite well.
As an innovator Freud cannot be expected to have had a complete and final idea. Much of the information that became available after 1950 was undeveloped in Freud’s time, such as the Matriarchal and Hetairic periods, so he cannot be held accountable for not knowing them. Physiology has made tremendous strides since his day.
Freud’s errors do not so much lay in areas of knowledge but in the areas of intent or motive. He was unable to separate his own psychology of hatred from that of his scientific discipline. Hence his mistaken emphasis on the importance of the father figure and his misbegotten notions of the Oedipus Complex. Then too, he projected his hatred of the Gentiles into his views of religion and sexuality.
The only thing of value Freud had to offer, that of the formation of neuroses, has been rejected by the lay and medical communities alike.
Strangely his nonsense is revered as great revelations of truth, largely because they fit in with prevailing prejudices. In his attack on the Christian religion Freud was curiously unaware that the Scientific Consciousness displaced the anterior consciousnesses of Hetaira, Matriarchy and Patriarchy. Thus the people who were dependent on Religion as the basis of the mentality were people whose beliefs could not be dislodged. On the one hand were the various esoteric religions whose beliefs do not depend on the divinity of Jesus and the Fundamentalists whose belief is so secure that nothing can shake it. For those who need a supernatural agency in their lives New Age people using science as a tool have created alien intelligence from beyond the solar system to serve as their ‘God.’
If Freud thought dispelling Christianity as a religious belief would bring the Gentiles down he was mistaken. The ‘illusion’ had already been replaced by a ‘reality.’ The futility of trying to dispel religious beliefs should have been clear to Freud. The exposure of the illusion or, even delusion, of the compact between the Jewish people and their god had no effect on them; they continue to believe the compact exists and that Palestine was given to them by their tribal god inalienably.
The most potent dissolvent in Freud’s arsenal was his sexual theory. He was quite severely criticised for his sexual beliefs then and they should be rejected now.
Everything Freud believed on the subject was wrong. Basic to his misunderstanding was the physical structure of the human organism.
He quite correctly picked up the ovate and spermatic halves of the psyche but since he didn’t associate them with physical origins he mistakenly thought that men were part woman and vice versa. This was a critical misconception as it opened the door to much erroneous speculation on homosexuality.
There may be rare cases of sexual ambiguity caused by birth defects in the physical apparatus or defective hormonal systems but any other expression of ambiguity is a perversion that is not part of the most perfect specimens but comes about only when the ovate is fixated and spermatic repressed or, in other words when the organism is mentally disturbed. Psychological perversion has nothing to do with the physical organization.
Since Freud misunderstood the physical organism he equated sexuality not with the Power Train itself but only with sexual intercourse. Freud actually equated fucking with mental health. Because psychic discomfort is reflected in sexual urges he actually believed that the more fucking one did the better person one would be. Such nonsense has not only passed unchallenged for eighty years but is actually embraced today as the Gospel of Fuck.
Freud did not believe in the intellect or the effectiveness of intelligence. While he made the grandiose pronouncement: Where Id is, Ego shall be, he failed to explain how this would come about. For whatever reason he considered the intellect nonexistent and intelligence ineffective and unimportant. In keeping with his times he believed in the hereditary transmission of mental traits.
More importantly he invented a whole category of affects he identified as self-sufficient ‘instincts.’ Like the Unconscious instincts do not exist. There are no instincts, not a single one, all is a matter of learning and education.
Even eating is not an instinct but taught at the mother’s breast. Hunger may be a physical reality but it is not an instinct. Assuaging hunger must be learnt and that literally at the mother’s breast. The first lesson an infant is taught is when the mother inserts the nipple in his mouth. His mouth is blocked he has no choice but to resist by sucking. Imagine his surprise when the liquid emitted seems delicious and when he swallows it because he can’t spit it out the physical reaction is terrific. It feels good. Having learnt to eat he wants more. Being a quick learner, from that point on the infant will demand to be fed. But without that first infusion he would die hungry not knowing what the desire to eat meant.
Because Freud wanted to project his own psychic vision he gave instincts precedence over all other psychic functions. He professed that the individual was incapable of resisting or controlling what the Ancients characterized as the Raging Bull and what he called the Ego.
Both the Church and Esoteric religions have devised rigors to control or domesticate this Bull or Ego/instincts by using intelligence. Freud thought that to use your intelligence to control your ‘instincts’ was to incur damaging inhibitions and repressions. Hence he was opposed to European morality. Freud imagined this did irreparable damage to the psyche especially sexual inhibitions and repressions hence the Gospel of Fuck.
If fucking actually made a person better, then the logical conclusion is that libertines and homosexuals would be the best people in the world. Fucking dominates the libertine and homosexual mind. It is not unusual for them to commit thirty or forty sex acts a day for as many days as they can sustain it.
As the only thing that counts in this view of sexual activity is the climax it follows that if machines were placed in prominent places to masturbate the individual on an hourly basis or less that society would be darn near perfect. I don’t know why people are leery of buying the Brooklyn Bridge when they have bought the myth of sexual intercourse.
The fact is that libertines and homosexuals are the worst people in the world so the basis of Freud’s argument is very limp.
The West has generally embraced Freud’s misguided sexual theory. The United States is actually fucked. Freud’s sexual theory was picked up by the lame third rate novelist Henry Miller who actually formulated the Gospel of Fuck during the twenties and thirties in the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
Henry Miller was gaining respectability during the fifties with psychotic fringe groups in the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere. By the sixties he would have a profound impact on society with the reverence given his two volumes of the Tropics.
As Freud was interpreted in the common mind repression and inhibition were the causes of psychic discomfort. The common mind had no idea how inhibitions and repressions were caused except by not being allowed to do whatever you wanted to do. Through the forties and fifties children of innumerable families were encouraged to indulge their whims and fancies regardless of who they might hurt. They were given no instruction or correction lest they become inhibited and repressed. It was thought that when they grew up they would naturally gravitate to the intelligent choice.
The so-called ‘Me’ generation of the sixties and seventies lacked proper instruction in managing their ‘instincts.’ The pervading influence of past mores prevented them from expressing themselves with true lack of ‘inhibition’ or repression. The wave of high school shootouts of the later century when the succeeding generation had moved out from the shadow of earlier mores were committed by the offspring of the ‘Me’ generation. They are the logical progression of Freudian sexual theory.
Employing metal detectors and other ‘inhibitory’ or ‘repressive’ systems will not solve the problem. Freud has to be amended.
Freud’s thesis was advanced by the Jewish monologist Lenny Bruce as well as furthered by Jewish interests in Hollywood who produced innumerable ‘action’ films in which the uninhibited and unrepressed protagonist attempts to solve his problems from the barrel of a gun rather than reason them out.
So, this brings us up to Greil Marcus and the present. Greil Marcus is himself a Jew so the question is how does Greil Marcus and his writing fit into this Jewish cultural scheme of things. On my first reading of the book I had no idea what Mr. Marcus was talking about. I had heard of the Situationist International but knew nothing about it. Reading the blurbs I was under the impression that Mr. Marcus was going to explain the SI. Not very clearly anyway. As I turned the last page I had no idea what the book was all about.
Second reading same as the first. Then I read his 2006 effort The Shape Of Things To Come. I gathered from that that Mr. Marcus considered himself in direct descent from the Old Testament Hebrew prophets and that he had conflated Israel and the United States. Armed with that understanding I had the thin edge of the wedge. I went back to a third reading of Lipstick Traces. Pay dirt! I think.
I gather from the third reading that Mr. Marcus considers himself also a direct lineal descendent of Theodore Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, in other words The Frankfurt School or alternatively The Institute For Social Research or alternatively still The New School For Social Research. Now we’re getting somewhere. In addition his intellectual romance with fellow Jew Guy Debord who was the Situationist International seemed that in much the same way Dr. Baum assumed the soul of Dr. Mabuse in Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse I gather that Mr. Marcus may feel that like some Buddhist Lama the soul of the dead Debord has passed into himself and he is the new leader of the Situationist International. So as I perceive it Mr. Marcus views himself as an ancient Hebrew prophet, a critic in the mold of the Frankfurt School and the leader of the Situationist International.
For some in depth background on the Frankfurt School the interested reader might try Kevin MacDonald’s ‘The Culture Of Critique.’
Following the above notion of who Greil Marcus might think he is and what he thinks he’s doing I will attempt an interpretation of Lipstick Traces. Mr. Marcus as the leader of the Situationist International seems to have compiled his book which is as much a stream of consciousness impressionistic novel as anything else as a number of situations.
I will deal with each situation as a separate entity which indeed a situation is. Rather than begin with the first situation which as I see it should be last I will begin with the second situation, part of Version Two- A Secret History Of A Time That Passed- Legends Of Freedom.
The theme of the book as a whole seems to be the saying of Karl Marx that Mr. Marcus refers to repeatedly:
I am nothing and I should be everything.
End of Part II.
The Beginning Of A Review Of
Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces
She Belonged To Him:
Me And Bob Dylan
by R.E. Prindle
I was bouncing around the internet the other day and I came across a guy who wondered why Dylan since his sales were so poor had become such an overriding influence. And then I was working my way through Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces for the third time trying to figure out where he was coming from, where he wanted to go and how he proposed to get there when he posed the problem of where were the roots of Punk.
And then, I’ve been thinking about Dylan lately wondering where he went after Blonde On Blonde and I think I may be able to answer all three questions. I don’t listen to Dylan anymore, can’t, whatever charm he had for me went South and I mean South Of The Borders, I mean South of the Equator, I mean…South.
Can’t listen to him but Bob’s overriding influence remains. I still buy every book about him that comes out. Bought one today. I even bought and read and reread Chronicles Vol. I. Disappointing. Wish he hadn’t written it. But if Volume II comes out you can bet I’ll buy that too. So, Yes, Dylan was a major influence on my life but only three records- Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde. God, what great titles. The mystique was built in.
I was at grad school at the University Of Oregon in 1967-’68. My mental state was such that I began each day, right after getting up, with a side from one of those three albums. Everyday for a year and a half. You’d think I’d have those records memorized but, you know, I couldn’t quote one complete verse but I remember the tones of his voice and the moods of the songs quite well.
I don’t know what my wife thought of those records. Never said anything to me about them, never complained but she’s never put a Dylan record on the turntable and she still has never mentioned those records.
So, the influence came from those moods, those seeming articulations of the 60s angst. The lack of sales came from that godawful voice he used.
I was out in California in ’64. Had no idea what was going on in Greenwich Village in the Big Apple. I’d never heard of Bob Dylan but one day I dropped in on my brother-in-law. The guy had an impeccable ear for the next big thing at the time. He took off the Righteous Brothers and said listen to this. I don’t know what record it was of Dylan’s but one of the first three. What godawful noise, the guy couldn’t sing and he couldn’t play. Sounded like he’d just picked up a guitar and blew harmonica like a six year old. I was shocked beyond description. Well, listen to the words my brother-in-law said. Well, they still weren’t much but the guy seemed offended at everything going on in the world and was sincere. Boy, there’s a recommendation.
That’s where the Punk came in. You can interchange early Dylan with Johnny Rotten and you’ve got Punk. Dylan was an eye opener for younger kids with no talent and a lot of angst. Check out the Chocolate Watch Band and their ‘I’m Not Like Anybody Else’ Post Dylan-pre Rotten. I don’t understand why the Sex Pistols didn’t do this, uh, song.
Actually I’m grateful to Bob; he saved me from myself. In 1964 I was on my way to being a mental eighty year old man. Following Dylan I’m younger than that now. He pulled me back from the mental graveyard and restored my youth. Of course Bob would have been in the musical graveyard except for a little good luck.
I wasn’t there so what I’m going to say now comes from reading all those books. Dylan started out as a complete snit. I don’t care if he changed his name or not. Tiny Tim had the right idea. If one name isn’t working try another. Well, Dylan worked perfectly for Bob so he only needed one name change. Tiny Tim went through several. Probably looking for a new one right now if he’s still alive.
Bob’s early adventures in Minnesota may be interesting but they don’t concern me now. Somewhere along the way he developed a fixation on Woody Guthrie. God, I wouldn’t give you a quarter for any record Guthrie made unless I could turn a quick profit on it.
So, Bob shows up in New York City as a Guthrie clone. Didn’t do him any good. Dressed funny too. Like a Hollywood vision of the Dust Bowl. People said things to him about it. Dylan realized he was peddling his bicycle as fast as could down a dead end street. He decided to give it up. Had to search around for a new persona. Took him a while but he found one. Plundered all his friends of their styles but, a boy’s got to learn somewhere. What’s plagiarism to some is education to others.
He was bright and he could mangle words and images. If you really parse ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ it doesn’t hang together, makes no sense. But the MOOD, god, the mood is terrific. The lyrics don’t have to mean anything. Of course with his raucus voice and guitar banging and harp blowing the song would have just lain there. But as Bob would later sing- She belonged to him. And she planted a kiss on him the likes of which very few ever experience. Don’t want to get over confident though. Like Jesse Winchester later sang- First She’s yours and then She’s his and that’s the way it is and always will be. In ’63 and ’64 She was just toying with him. Albert Grossman was on the other end of the line. Enough to scare anybody. He formed Peter, Paul And Mary, kind of a sweet singing Kingston Trio and they picked up on Blowin’ In The Wind and coming from their sweet harmonies Bob became established as a songwriter. That’s where the mega influence came in. Pretty soon all the good singers were doing his songs. Songs that no one would listen to on his own albums. The Byrds called it Folk Rock. The generation loved it.
So people began to reverence Bob Dylan as a songwriter. Then in ’64 or so She really entered his life. Both Sides Of Dylan was a record groping for the future and in the next Bringing It All Back Home he really began to do that. We went into the future and the future sold.
Bringin’ It All Back Home was supposed to be a radical departure for Dylan; he threw over Folk for Rock n’ Roll. Smart move. He may have sounded terrible but he wasn’t dumb besides with a sharp rock band behind him you couldn’t hear him as well. Look what Frank Zappa did for Wild Man Fischer. Folk had worn out its ethic; there was no future for it; all past tense. Now, when Johnny Rotten sang no future, no future in 1975 Rock had also worn out its ethic. It was on the verge of becoming stale or already over the line, so sounding as rotten as early Dylan the Sex Pistols pulled the plug on Rock. Had to happen. Everything gets old.
Well, anyway Bringin’ It Back opened the eyes of all us doubters while Highway ’61 Revisited made us sit up and pay attention. There was something happening there wasn’t there? Not much in retrospect but it was a revelation at the time. That was when She came to live with Bob for a year or so. It was bliss, you ask him. Words just spilled out of his mouth. Highway ’61 was such an advance on rock n’ roll you just didn’t know what to think. Everyone stood around breathlessly waiting for the next one. That came out in the summer of ’66. I had just graduated from Cal State At Hayward attending summer school at UC Berkeley. Boy, was I a strange one in a state of transition from squarish to hippish. Bob’s Blonde On Blonde lay there next to Procol Harum and Canned Heat. Man, the rock revolution was really on.
She and Bob were really making it. Blonde On Blonde was such a peak no one could see how it could ever be topped. It couldn’t. That was when She and Bob split. She went one way and Bob went another. We heard about his accident. Reports came he was alive but had broken his neck. I stopped worrying about what Bob would do next; I knew it wouldn’t top Blonde. I wasn’t sure about Her but I knew his mind had stopped. I knew because I saw Her walking down the street. I tried to catch up but She was too fleet for me.
Bob recovered and came back with the insipid John Wesley Harding- Lay Lady Lay- for Chrissakes, give me a break. For Bob a kiss was just a kiss but what a kiss. The kind you never forget.
I tried to follow his career but the stuff was just, well, ordinary. Blood On The Tracks was so-so. Tangled Up In Blue was a good song but that’s just it, it was a good song. A simple narrative with a beginning, middle and end, certainly no Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands or Desolation Row. I’m not big on depression, at least not anymore, but I sure loved those songs. Stuck Inside Of Mobile Again? She was cooing in his ear during that sweet moment of bliss. Lay, lady, lay?
So Johnny Rotten did MacDougal And Bleecker Revisited and went over like the proverbial lead. Nobody liked Rotten’s crap; nobody listened to it. Don’t know what Greil Marcus is talking about; who does he think he’s kidding?
Anyway, kid, you wanted to know why Dylan is so important and sold so few records. This is the crux of the matter. Might be a little more to it. I’m still working on Greil Marcus and what he is trying to say in Lipstick Traces. I’ll get back to you on it. This is only a beginning.
Second Thoughts Greil Marcus Shape Of Things To Come
July 23, 2007
Greil Marcus
Shape Of Things To come
Second Thoughts
A Review
by R.E. Prindle
Freud in his 1921 essay Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego laid down the basis of what would later evolve into the concept of Multi-Culturalism. Thus each culture is a discrete entity governed by its own cultural iudeals or Ego. Judaism is a culture with a set of ideals and a culture. Americanism is a set of edeals without either an ego or culture of its own. Hence ‘Americans’ are eclectic borrowing from many cultures while believing in none and also while granting a sort of sanctity to these cultures because of the lack of its own.
From the Jews ‘American’s borrowed the concept of the Chosen People and redeemers of the world. Greil Marcus in his latest effort ‘The Shape Of Things To Come’ seems to know this but I don’t think he understands its implications. Mr. Marcus seems to be motivated by a sdort of cultural envy. Indeed the Jews and Americans are in competition for the role of the ‘Chosen People.’ Perhaps it is significant that like all Jews Mr. Marcus has dual passports. He is at one and the same time an Israeli and an American. In other words he is neither one nor the other but like any other American he blesses the non-American side of his split identity.
Mr. Marcus in this volume of prophecy takes on the role of one of the ancient prophets of Israel. He seems angry that John Winthrop would borrow the description of Jerusalem as a City On The Hill and apply it to New England.
Mr. Marcus takes offence at this and comes back to it repeatedly.
As he points out that as with the Jews those who form a covenant with God will be scourged by God as the Jews have repeatedly been. He seems to think that the colonial predilection for slavery is somehow offensive in the eyes of God although slavery was an institution among the ancient Jews for thousands of years. Solomon the Wise sold his own people into slavery to pay for his temple.
American slavery, offensive to the nostrils of any decent person, was first White then evolved to Black when scoundrels of various nationalities, including a hefty proportion of Jews, unloaded shiploads of Africans in America. The Blacks eventually displaced the Whites but there is many an African-American with the blood of a raped White ‘servant girl’ in his veins.
All this is neither here nor there. The point is that Mr. Marcus believes the day of retribution is at hand. That is The Shape Of Things To Come that he prophesies. He seems ato take a fair amount of pleasure in his visions of blood running in the streets.
Having established the notion that ‘Americans’ are going to get their comeupance he then goes on to give the Jewish cultural vision of America and Americans. He relies on John Dos Passos USA trilogy and the paranoid delusions of Philip Roth both of whom are Jewish. It is a characteristic of Mr. Marcus to cast his fellow Jews as virtuous while the evil persons are goyish.
As it chances I have read Dos Passos’ USA trilogy a trilogy of times. While able to plow through the occasional Roth volume no more than once although I did enjoy The Breast immensely. Perhaps Mr. Roth’s novelette may explain his psychology.
Now, Mr. Marcus entitled on of is earlier volumes The Weird Old America. I tranlsiterate the title into The Bad Old America. thus Mr. Marcus emphasizes the negative appraisal of America by Dos Passos. There is no denying the negative side of any culture. But it is wrong to speak only positively of the Jewish culture and only negatively of the American. My undersanding of the work has changed with each reading so that by the end of the third volume, The Big Money, in my third reading I was ready to vomit. If one were to contrast Booth Tarkington’s Penrod and Seventeen with the USA trilogy you would not only think yourself on another planet but in a parallel universe. I personally remember the evils of growing up but I also remember the joys. I have seen the slums, lived in them, but I have also seen the magnificent college campuses before the really big money, concrete and masses of humanity arrived.
Yes, I have had my moments of displeasure too but I have also experienced the exaltation of delight. More importantly so has Greil Marcus.
After having condemned the Bad Old America of the past from the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers on Plymouth Rock to 1936 when Dos Passos finished The Big Money to the present. All right Mr. Marcus, I’ve got it. We’re sorry for Hitler did to the Jews. OK? But let’s not forget what the Jews did to the Amalekites among numerous others. There are no innocents. Right?
As an example of how foul small town American ‘really was’ Mr. Marcus offers us the vision of an apparent psychopath, movie maker David Lynch. Mr. Lunch, apparently from Boise was responsible for an aborted TV series, Twin Peaks and a movie sequel called Fire Walk With Me which apparently entranced Mr. Marcus.
Well, why go into details. Suffice it to say who would want to live in such a hell hole. If Mr. Lynch’s vision coincides with that of Mr. Marcus I’m amazed that he can take any pleasure in living let alone living in a place like Berkeley. Seems exceedingly masochistic to me. Mr. Marcus’ fellow Berkeleyans had better hope that he never takes it in mind to reveal the real Berkeley steeped in crime and infamy.
Well, I could go on like this but I’m getting tired of all this negativity. I do agree with Mr. Marcus that it is a wicked, wicked world out there that requires a lot of caution and precaution to more or less successfully negotiate it. There is a lot of evil out there to prophesy but the real danger Mr. Marcus as another Jewish prophet, Jacob Frank once foresaw is the evil within. urge thyself Mr. Marcus. I won’t be moving to Israel anytime soon to escape the evils of America.
End Of Second Thoughts
A Review: Jack Finney: Invasion Of The Body Snatchers
July 20, 2007
A Review
Invasion Of The Body Snatchers
Pub. 1955, Revised 1978
by
Jack Finney
Review
by R.E. Prindle
Body Snatchers was one of a number of books of the mid to late fifties dealing with the loss of identity. One by Richard Matheson was titled I Am Legend. Another was The Blob from a story by Irving Milgate. They were all made into motion pictures and because they dealt with a real problem experienced by the whole population of the US have survived in memory becoming ‘cult classics.’
Finney tackles the problem in the most direct and comprehensible manner. The problem was becoming apparent about 1954-55 when I Am Legend and Body Snatchers were written. It took a poet’s mind to see it. I am not aware of the date of Millgate’s story but as the movie The Blob was conceived about ’56-’57 the story is in the same time frame.
The problem was that the doctrine of the Freudian unconscious was beginning to subvert the American consciousness. Operative from the beginning of the twentieth century Freud’s views were accelerated by the mass exodus of Freudian analysts from Europe to the US during the 1930s. The analysts were concentrated in the US cultural capitols of New York and Los Angeles. After WWII ended Freudian doctrines were promulgated from the publishing capitol of New York and the entertainment capitol of Los Angeles/Hollywood.
The average American was A-bombed, literally, out of his mind by these doctrines which were alien to him. As Finney suggests metaphorically they descended on him from outer space. Formerly normal people were now pathologized as ‘sick.’ This was the era of sickness- sick humor, sick novels, sick movies, everything was sick. You were sick, I was sick, everyone was sick. No one was normal.
Finney caught the malady perfectly, and early, in his Body Snatchers. Indeed, the wife, the husband, brother, sister, mother, father everyone you thought you knew seemed to be someone else. They seemed the same on the outside as Finney indicates but they were somehow different. They were being taught that all their ideals, morals and beliefs were wrong. Thrown into doubt they had no real defences as these ideas had ‘drifted down from outer space.’ Authorities told them that Freud was right and they were wrong. Oh, they hated Freud as one hates any other oppressor because they had to be responsible for their actions but they gobbled up his fraudulent sexual theories because they liked that, they readily accepted that, as they were controlled from the subconscious, they should not repress themselves, that they should abandon self-control but they were no longer able to discriminate between good and bad, right and wrong.
Their minds were opened to all the wrong influences while all the wrong people were in control of the hypnopaedic media. Movies, television, records, books, magazines, and newspapers all directed them on to self-destructive paths. Thus in Finney’s sense a body snatcher grew an identical person with a different set of values replacing each.
In the book the Body Snatchers got no further than Mill Valley but in real life they captured or neutralized the majority while retaining control of the hynopaedic media leaving only a minority to resist. Matheson’s legend- The Omega Man. The battle goes on.
It has taken sixty years for the intelligent to begin to organize but as evil can never triumph no matter how close it may come, the tide has now turned. Decency will triumph just as it did in Finney’s prophetic novel- The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.
End Of Review
David Kalat’s The Strange Case Of Dr. Mabuse: A Review
July 19, 2007
A Review
The Strange Case Of Dr. Mabuse
by
David Kalat
by R.E. Prindle
The message and the medium are the same. For those who like obscure but important issues a book appeared in 2001, of all years, by David Kalat entitled ‘The Strange Case Of Dr. Mabuse published by McFarland, the publishers of obscure studies par excellence.
For those unfamiliar with Dr. Mabuse, for this study may indeed be obscure, Dr. Mabuse was a film character created by the movie auteur, Fritz Lang, in 1922 when he filmed Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler. Kalat chronicles the whole series of twelve films and some related titles extending from 1922 to the present. However my concern will be primarily Lang’s The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse of 1933.
There are great similarities in Lang’s film to The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari because Lang was also involved in that film. Mabuse may be the logical extension of it.
The premise of the series is the undemining and destruction of society to be replaced by the anarchy and chaos of a Mabusian Empire Of Crime. As you can see, if you look around you, Mabuse’s goal has been all but realized.
Dr. Mabuse himself went insane at the end of The Gambler having been confined to an insane asylum administered by one Dr. Baum. Catatonic for quite some time, Mabuse began moving his hand and fingers in a gesture of writing. Baum provided Mabuse with pen and paper which Mabuse used to begin writing non-stop until he died. He wrote his criminal manifesto for destroying society as we know it. He was a master hypnotist apparently hypnotizing Baum through his writings. His soul or spirit thus entered Baum so that he, posing as the incapacitated Dr. Mabuse set in motion a whole series of crimes meant to destabilize society.
In the end Baum too went insane after becoming in actuality Dr. Mabuse himself, recently deceased.
Mabuse, in the Rosicrucian tradition, was an ‘unknown superior’ who directs the society of criminals anonymously. Baum too was one. Was Fritz Lang another? Was the film his method of transmitting instructions to all the malcontents of the world who mesmerized from the screen rather than the printed page became agents in the establishment of the Empire Of Crime? I rather suspect so.
Mabuse is very sillily supposed to represent Hitler and the Nazis but nothing could be further from the intent and nature of the Empire Of Crime. The excellent DVD of ‘Testament’ includes an interview with Fritz Lang. Lang gives an account of his interview with Joseph Goebbels just before he fled Nazi Germany.
Even though an evil Nazi Goebbels was no fool. He easily saw through the equally evil Lang’s intent and purpose. As he told Lang there was no State that could not be undermined by such methods which, once again, look around and you will find it is true. Blair, Chirac, and Bush act like brain washed zombies aiding the Mabuse program. Their acts are so contrary to reason, elementary reason, that one wonders if, indeed, they have not been hypnotized, coerced in some strange way to act against society’s and their own best interest. Manchurian Candidates every one.
So Goebbels banned the film confiscating the prints. However the canny and evil Lang had been one step ahead of him. He had concurrently reshot the whole movie in French which he had smuggled out of Germany. The French in turn smuggled the movie out of Nazi occupied France to the United States where the film was shown beginning in 1943 thus perpetuating the legacy of Dr. Mabuse which might otherwise have been lost.
As Mabuse, although based on a novel by Norbert Jacques, essentially sprang from the mind of Fritz Lang being commited to celluloid, the inescapable conclusion is that he himself was one of the many faces of Dr. Mabuse as Joseph Goebbels had no trouble realizing.
The above goes well beyond Kalat’s text. His book is a good description of the Mabuse phenomenon while providing good biographies of Lang and the German, French and Spanish movie people who perpetuated the program willingly or not. For those not familiar with the European movie scene, or part of it, of which I am one, the book is also an excellent introduction.
If you are Mabusian, whether you know it or not, you will find Kalat’s book indispensable. If, like myself, you opposed to Mabusianism the book will provide essential background. Kalat’s All Day Entertainment site has a good bargain on a combo book and movie offer. If nothing else you will be able to entertain yourself all day in the grand manner.
End Of Dr. Mabuse Review
Albert Camus: The Fall A Review
July 19, 2007
A Review Of
THE FALL
by
Albert Camus
Review by R.E. Prindle
Table of Contents.
I. Review of The Fall
II. Article and Commentary on Camus’ and Jews
III. Review Of The Outsider
IV. Comparison of The Fall and A Rebours. (Projected as of 12/27/11)
V. Comments
This novel goes to show that you can fool all the people all the time.
The cover blurb of my edition has the New York Times yodeling: ‘An irresistably brilliant examination of the modern conscience.’ which is complete and total nonsense. This isn’t even the examination of anyone’s conscience.
Camus was a French Jew from Algeria then living in France. He was not an Algerian Jew as the Jews of Algeria were made French citizens in the revolution of 1830. This distinction is important.
The Fall Camus is talking about is the post-Enlightenment destruction of the religious basis for considering the Jews as a Chosen People, or rather, The Chosen People. In Jewish mythology the world is organized God>Jews>the rest of humanity>the animal kingdom. As Camus was not unintelligent he realized that without God the Jews had no special status. HIs purpose here is to reestablish a reason for Jewish superiority over the rest of mankind. Thus he creates Jean-Baptiste Clamence as his spokesman to represent Jewry originating the role of judge-penitent for him and them.
Clamence is not an admirable person. Never was, never can be. His extreme arrogance before the Fall is characteristic of the Jewish people. The Fall was undoubtedly the extermination of Jews during WWII. While Hitler is given sole credit for the dirty work, in the Jewish mind they were rejected by the whole world. One should not underestimate the effect on the Jewish mind of the turning back of the St. Louis from Cuba. These facts were devastating.
Camus’ Clamence thus felt degraded by the Fall from confidence. He becomes libertine, criminal, degenerate, taking up his abode in the criminal quarter of Amsterdam which he seems to equate with the most criminal place in the world. He is a penitent. There in sackcloth and ashes. It is precisely because he knows extreme degradation, having once been of God’s Chosen People, that he has appointed himself a judge over all the peoples of the world.
He- the Jews- have regained their imagined position of the Chosen People through extreme debasement and degradation.
That is why they have made the Holocaust the central feature of their new identity. Their God rejected them, once again, allowing the Nazis to destroy them. Thus the Holocaust replaces God. If the Holocaust is not sacred to them and honored by the rest of the world, as their God once was, then they not only lose their place as the Chosen People but have no chance of regaining it.
That is the import of Camus’ The Fall. The book has nothing to do with an examination of the ‘modern conscience’, which is to say my conscience. I reject Camus. I reject his book. I reject his situation. He and it have nothing in common with me. His problem is not a universal problem as the NY Times states. Camus’ book is merely a tedious rendition of someone else’s angst that has nothing to do with me or mine.
End Of Review
https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/part-i-the-deconstruction-of-edgar-rice-burroughsamerica/
The below response to Robert Zaretsky’s article develops the argument of the origin of The Fall. http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/books/82555/camus-the-jew/
CAMUS THE JEW
by
R.E. Prindle
Mr. Robert Zaretsky who wrote the above titled article for Tablet Ezine is indeed an example of the absurdity he deplores. He is atavism personified. How can anyone in this post-Darwinian age be so simple and naive as to be a believing Jew. The human intellect has moved well beyond such simplicity. To be a Jew, a Moslem or even Fundamentalist Christian which is to say a distaff Jew should be a logical impossibility.
One might claim to be an Israeli, claiming allegiance to Israel, without making oneself look ridiculous but to claim nationality the same as everyone else is to renounce the extraordinaryly specious claim to some sort of special superiority based on an equally specious divine preference is quite akin to insanity in this post-Darwinian scientific world. The very idea of Yeshivas and Seminaries is repellent to contemporary knowledge.
Given this willful obtuseness one is not astonished to realize that ‘Jews’ renounce all involvement as the cause of the disorder, death and destruction from 1913, when the Jewish millennium was said to begin, to the present. In the height of arrogance the ‘Jews’ ascribe any resistance to the genocidal war begun by them in 1913 as ‘anti-Semitism.’ In other words one is to accept their dominance without a struggle; to resist is considered perverse.
Thus, what makes Camus at least an honorary Jew was his deferential embracement of the Jewish cause as his own. To Bob Zaretsky the actions of God in testing the Jews by an inexplicable defeat can only be compared to the trials of Job. Having been stripped of his children and property but remaining loyal to his perverse god:
We think we know how the story of Job ends: Rewarded by God for his loyalty, Job is paid back with even more children, sheep and property. But is this the ending? A number of biblical scholars suggest the Job we hear in the final chapter, the one who accepts and resigns himself to God’s power play, is not the same Job we hear in the preceding 40 chapters. Instead, he is a throwback to an earlier story that was grafted onto the otherwise perplexing account. Instead the real Job is Camus’ Job. He is a Job who answers God’s deafening and dismal effort at self-justification with scornful silence.
Thus, Bob, and one suspects all Jews refuse to take responsibility for their actions perceiving Camus here as some sort of intermediary. Bob, has a distorted notion of the relationship between his Jews and Europeans. He says:
In republican France Jewishness was largely a private matter: it was only when Nazi Germany buried the Republic in 1940 that Jewishness became a public matter and indifference to the fate of the Jews was no longer possible- or should not have been possible.
Bob completely overlooks the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s that underlined the basic conflict between the French and Jews. Nor did the opposition cease with the unjust reversal of Dreyfus’ conviction but simmered along through the Popular Front and Blum years until the Nazi reaction. French dissatisfaction with the Jewish situation was always prominent, especially after the Eastern Jews stampeded the border during the late thirties and early forties creating havoc and destroying the French quality of life:
Yet when the authoritarian regime of Vichy passed a salvo of anti-Semitic laws in 1940, most Frenchmen and -women did not blink. One of the few who did blink- in fact doubled over in shock and revulsion- was Camus. Working for the newspaper Paris-Soir, Camus was stunned when his Jewish colleagues were fired. In a letter to his wife Francine Faure- a native or Oran, Algeria, who was very close to the Jewish community- Camus said that he could not continue to work at the paper; any job at all in Algeria, even one on a farm, would be preferable. As for the new regime, he was merciless: “Cowardice and senility is all they have to offer. Pro-German policies, a constitution in the style of totalitarian regimes, a great fear of a revolution that will not come: all of this to truckle up to an enemy who has already pulverized us and to salvage privileges which are not threatened.”
Camus was less than prescient about the revolution and totalitarian regimes as both are succeeding now worldwide. The question is who did Camus mean was pulverized- the Jews or the French? Camus according to Bob is plainly casting his lot with the Jews although conveniently excaping to Algeria beyond the Nazi reach. This then is the background of The Fall that gives Clamence his depression. God’s trial of Job was too severe in this instance for continued belief so that rather than complain Clamence/Camus turns his back on God in a disdainful ‘silence’ while pouting and drinking his life away.
Camus is a Jew, fully so in sentiment and the Fall is in reaction to the holocaust.
End of supplement.
III.
A Review
The Outsider (L’Etranger)
by
Albert Camus
Review by R.E. Prindle
Edition: Folio Society 2011
Comes now the time to review Camus’ The Stranger, Outsider or Misfit. A commenter or two have suggested I read The Outsider and I have. The only thing I can compare it and Camus to is the Grateful Dead. It is said that the Dead are an acquired taste. Over the years I have listened to the Dead for many hours in the attempt not so much to acquire the taste as to understand it. I know that Deadheads think that Jerry Garcia, of blessed memory, was a great guitarist but I can’t penetrate his style. In fact I find the Dead so distasteful I’ve given up on them.
I put Camus in the same category as the Dead; he must be an acquired taste except for those of a similar mind. Actually, I recently read the Myth of Sisyphus on line while I read The Plague several years ago. Zero sympathy.
The Outsider strikes me as a high school novelist trying to be heavy. Camus was twenty five in 1938 when he conceived the idea of his little trilogy, that included this book. The novel must have been written in ‘40-’41 as it was published in ‘42 during the war. I suppose most of us experienced the confusion of life in much the same way at twenty-seven or twenty-eight just before the age of reason bit at thirty.
My edition contains an afterword by Camus dated 8 January 1955 in which he says:
A long time ago I summed up The Outsider in a sentence which I realize is extremely paradoxical: ‘In our society (meaning French Algeria I suppose) any man who doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral is liable to be condemned to death.’ I simply meant that the hero of the book is condemned because he doesn’t play the game. In this sense, he is an outsider to the society in which he lives, wandering on the fringe, on the outskirts of life, solitary and sensual. And for this reason, some readers have been tempted to regard him as a reject. But to get a more accurate picture of his character, or rather one that conforms more closely to his author’s intentions, you must ask yourself in what way Meursault doesn’t play the game. The answer is simple; he refuses to lie.
Camus’ evaluation of his story only proves once again that no author truly understands what he has written. Not only that but his is such a perverse interpretation as to be incredible. Meursault neither lies or tells the truth; he is just a passive receptacle of other people’s needs. Further, the book even if considered a fantasy doesn’t make sense; it doesn’t appear to be founded on human experience.
Obviously the story does not hinge on Meursault’s refusal to lie but simply his treatment of his mother and his refusal to show emotion at her funeral. That’s it. The fact that he killed a man in self-defense which is not brought out is merely an excuse for executing him for his perceived coldness toward his mother.
I don’t know the nature of French Algerian jurisprudence of the time but I find it very difficult to believe that judges adjudicating an ostensible murder would conduct the trial on the basis of whether a man cried at his mother’s funeral or not. Who knows what his actual relationship his mother had with him and so what?
The issue is the killing. As I read the story Meursault only drew his gun when the Arab flashed his knife. The glare of the sun on the blade intensified the threat so in self defense Meursault shot him. There is absolutely no reason that Meursault couldn’t have told the judge ‘the truth’- he drew a knife on me so having a gun I shot him. Where is the refusal to lie? The mother combined with the killing doesn’t make sense; there is no connection. But, maybe that’s what existentialism means, you got me.
The center of the novel which merely demonstrates the extreme passivity of Meursault doesn’t satisfactorily explain the sudden act of volition in shooting the Arab especially as he apparently didn’t construe it as an act of self-defense.
All through the main body he lacks volition just going where the wind blew. Raymond demands that Meursault be his ‘mate’ to which he complies even though Raymond is the last guy anyone would want to know while to be the mate of someone who mercilessly beats a woman is beyond comprehension. What is going through Albert Camus’ mind?
Marie, a woman he hardly knows proposes marriage to him so Meursault assents although he tells her he doesn’t love her and she doesn’t care. For me this nonsense is merely exasperating. I had no interest in any of the characters; the sequence of events make no sense other than to demonstrate the extreme passivity and lack of volition of Meursault.
The final outburst is in contrast to his passivity:
…I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world. And finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I’d been happy, and that I was still happy. For the final consummation and for me to feel less lonely, my last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred.
Why hatred? The guy just said he was happy and contented. Like I say, Camus is an acquired taste. I have no interest in him but if you do- Enjoy.
By the way, has anyone read Sartre’s trilogy, The Roads To Freedom?
Greil Marcus The Shape Of Things To Come
July 14, 2007
Notes To A Review Of
Greil Marcus’
The Shape Of Things To Come
by
R.E. Prindle
Marcus, Greil, The Shape Of Things To Come, 2006, New York.
‘The Shape Of Things To Come’ a title borrowed from the mentor of today’s left, H.G. Wells, is Greil Marcus latest attempt at a prophecy of blood, guts and the doom of the United States. The price of Black slavery he prophesies will be blood flowing in the streets. ‘Trouble coming every day.’ as Frank Zappa put it. As to that point I am compelled to agree with him although to understand the reason why doesn’t require the religious ecstasy or possession he seems to believe he has.
I have already examined this problem in my essay The Deconstruction Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America that appeared on http://www.erbzine.com and in this blog in which without the rather specious gift of prophecy from De Lawd I projected by scientific reasoning that a Negro reaction to slavery is unavoidable.
I fear that the bloodshed Mr. Marcus prophesies may be upon us by the next Presidential election if there is one. I fear that there is a chance that President Bush may cancel the election continuing in power. Barring that possibility I fear days of bloodshed will arrive with the election of Barack Obama.
Thanks to a very large extent to the efforts of Mr. Marcus’ Jewish culture the American electorate has been debased to the point where it seems to be unable to deliberate on such matters of vital importance with any degree of intelligence.
In the first place the Black people have been in open rebellion since at least the 1965 Watts revolt, or riots as it is presently known.
The opening volley was undoubtedly the Supreme Court Brown decision of 1954 that slowly built into the violent eruption of 1965-69. Since then the direction has changed into a series of escalating acts of violence against individual Whites of which the recent sadistic violence against a White man and woman in Tennessee is the most detestable example. The Cutts murder in Ohio is another. Both murders have been passed over in silence by the Liberal confederates of the Blacks in the media.
The time is now ripe for the election of a Black President while Barack Obama who is totally unqualified appers as a bland and innocuous Black candidate. Personally as attractive as a Black Jack Kennedy and twice as dangerous and that saying a whole bunch. I fear that he will be nominated and elected out of White guilt for the slavery Greil Marcus loves to dwell on.
To this point I have heard no one inquire as to who might be Mr. Obama’s appointees to his Cabinet. Key posts such as Secretary Of State or Attorney General. After the slate of incompetent non-entities of the Bush administration I think the public has a right to know exactly who the friends of Mr. Obama or any other candidate for that matter are. In my opinion they are running as a slate of candidates.
Will we, for instance, have the Reverend Jesse Jackson fulminating from the pulpit of the Department of State? The Reverend Al Sharpton as Attorney General? Just who is going to serve with Mr. Obama? He is certainly going to have to satisfy his Black constituency at the expense of the White majority.
Can such a state of affairs be tolerated? Mr. Marcus obviously thinks not. As he prophesies the Black rebellion will break open and the streets will run red with blood.
Already in the State of Mississippi where in certain districts Blacks have seized the government they have denied Whites their Constitutional rights which has required Federal intervention to redress the situation. Whether the situation will be redressed without violence remains to be seen. With the possible or probable election of Mr. Obama I see the situation spreading from Mississippi throughout the South and unltimately the nation. The only possible result as Mr. Marcus foresees is civil war.
Any open warfare between Blacks and Whites will quickly inflame Mexican and Moslem passions so that within say four years the whole United States will be in flames.
Thus Mr. Marcus and his Jewish culture will once again have destroyed another civilization, culture and people. As if the Amalekites weren’t enough the Jewish culture disrupted Spain culminating in their expulsion in 1492. Attacking the whole of Europe that civilization was reduced to rubble between 1914 and 1945.
The Jews then moved on the Middle East where that area has been in turmoil since their arrival in 1948 and is now being reduced to rubble by them and on their behalf. That leaves only the United States which I fear will soon be their next victim to be reduced to rubble.
Even a casual reading of Greil Marcus’ Shape Of Things To Come will indicate that such destruction is something he and one presumes his culture gleefully anticipate.
With the election of Mr. Barack Obama I have no doupt Mr. Marcus’ hopes, dreams and wishes are in the bag.
End Of Review
Part 4c Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs
July 10, 2007
Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs
by
R.E. Prindle
4c
How Waldo Became A Man
In the complex of meanings of Waldo the question is how much Burroughs bases the character on himself. In the question of health there is no question that Burroughs had issues after his bashing in Toronto in 1899.
Judging from the Girl From Farris’s his health was a serious problem for him at least until early 1914 when he finished Farris’s. During those years he suffered from debilitating excruciatingly painful headaches for at least half the day. He either awakened with them or they developed mid-day. There is evidence that he became interested in Bernarr Macfadden’s body building and health techniques when Macfadden opened his Chicago facilities in 1908. If he were involved then perhaps the benefits of such a regimen were becoming apparent in1913-14. In 1916 in the photograph in puttees taken at Coldwater he looks like a healthy specimen and proud of it.
ERB gives Waldo the wasting disease Tuberculosis putting him on a regimen of exercise in the healthy dry air of his island thus curing him within a few months. This process is reminiscent of Grey’s hero John Hare of Heritage Of The Desert or the development of the Virginian in Owen Wister’s novel.
Burroughs claimed that his writing was heavily influenced by his dreamworld. If so then in this story as well as his others each character must represent a real person who figures in his life; the story must represent a real situation in symbolical form.
As authors so often claim their characters are composites it is likely that Burroughs also combines memories of other people with his own dreams. As Burroughs consciously manipulates his dream material he tweaks it into shape to make an entertaining novel then overlaying his conscious desires on his subconscious hopes and fears.
page 1.
In addition Burroughs retains his literary influences using them to give form to his dreamscapes. Indeed, his influences fill his mind so full they become part of his dreamscapes. The island he creates is similar to but not identical with Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island. This becomes very apparent in the sequel, The Cave Man, when Waldo sets about to improve his little society. He isn’t as obsessive-compulsive as Verne but along those lines.
Verne’s island figures prominently in many of Burroughs narratives. Oddly the book isn’t in his library.
ERB began telling his life’s story the moment he took up his pen. While John Carter seems to be dissociated from his own personality Tarzan is a true alter ego, a psychic doppelganger. Tarzan Of The Apes is a symbolical telling of his life’s story from birth to 1896 while the Return of Tarzan covers the four years from 1896 to 1900 and his marriage. (See my Four Crucial Years In The Life Of Edgar Rice Burroughs here on ERBzine.)
The Girl From Farris’s deals with the troubled years from 1899 to, it appears, March of 1914. Thus Cave Girl addresses his difficulties in making the transition to writer and then full time writer with the attendant marital or sexual problems. These marital or sexual problems occupy him through many novels in this first burst of creativity from 1913 to 1915.
Porges in working from Burroughs’ own papers in his biography has very little input from outside sources but some. The first material we have to work with from an outsider’s point of view is Matt Cohen’s fine edition of Brother Men, the collection of the Burroughs-Weston correspondence. Weston being ERB’s friend from MMA days. At the time of the divorce they had been in touch for forty years.
However I think that figure may be a little misleading as the two men had very little contact during that period. ERB met Weston in 1895 at the MMA at the beginning of the school year. He was one year younger than ERB. As Burroughs left the MMA in May of ’96 the two must have become fast friends in just eight or nine months. It isn’t probable that they met again before 1905 when Weston was passing through Chicago with his wife Margaret. At that time both Westons would have met Emma. From that time to the end of ERB’s Chicago period except for the occasional brief layover in Chicago the relationship was carried on by correspondence although as Burroughs seems to have some knowledge of Weston’s home town, Beatrice, Nebraska as evidenced in the second half of The Mad King it is possible he and Emma visited Weston but that would have had to have been between March ’14 and August ’14. Narrow window.
Thus when Weston talks so knowingly of Burroughs’ character in the letter of 1934 I will refer to I would have to question the depth of his knowledge. At any rate he claims to have knowledge of the difficulties of the marriage.
Weston was completely devastated by the announcement of the divorce. He immediatly sided with Emma breaking off relations with ERB for several years.
It appears from the letter of 1934 reproduced on page 233 of Brother Men that he contacted Burroughs’ LA friend Charles Rosenberger for information on the divorce. We have only Weston’s reply but not Rosenberger’s letter.
In reply to Rosenberger Weston says:
Quote:
I have known Ed since the fall of ’95. He has always been unusual and erratic. I have told Margaret many times, when Ed has done or said anything which seemed sort of queer that as long as I had known him he had always done or said such things.
(One of the most significant odd things would have been Burroughs leaving the MMA in mid-term in May to join the Army. One imagines that when he didn’t show up for classes next day the faculty asked: Where’s Burroughs. Perhaps Weston was the only one who knew and had to say: Uh, he joined the Army.)
I suppose looking back, that the fact that Ed has always been unusual, erratic and perhaps queer, has been his great charm and attraction for me.
Unquote.
I don’t know about you but if my best friend talked about me like that I would be less than flattered. There is another back handed compliment that Weston made to Burroughs’ father in his defense.
Burroughs’ father had made the comment to Weston that his son was no damn good. Good to have your dad on your side too. Weston defended ERB vigorously saying that he thought there was plenty of good in ERB, he just hadn’t shown it yet. Thank you, Herb Weston.
If one judges from the actions of Ogden Secor in Girl From Farris’s after he was hit on the head and if his actions approximated those of Burroughs from 1899 on then there was probably a very good reason for ERB’s unusual, erratic perhaps queer behavior apart from the fact that ERB had developed the typical character of his difficult childhood.
In reading the correspondence Weston comes across as a very conventional and highly respectable person; in other words, stodgy. It must have been that settled bourgeois quality in him that ERB appreciated. Weston did many of the things that Burroughs would have liked to have done. Weston did go on to Yale from the MMA which is what Burroughs would have liked to have done. Weston did become an officer in the Army.
On page 157 of Brother Men is a discussion of the Spanish American War. If I read it correctly Weston actually served in Cuba with a Tennessee regiment. So Burroughs had reason to be envious of him as he failed in his own attempts to get into Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.
Nevertheless Weston’s evaluation of Burroughs uses some strong language who after all didn’t have that intimate a relationship with him: unusual, erratic perhaps queer. Honestly, I don’t think I would have a friend very long who thought of me that way.
Weston is bitterly disappointed but later in the letter he refers to Burroughs as a crazy old man so, at the least, we can assume that to the average mentality Burroughs appeared eccentric. As one in the same boat I can’t help but root for the author of Tarzan. What but an unconventional mind could have conceived such a story.
Burroughs antecedents had created his persona by 1895 so the crack on the head in Toronto merely added to his unusual persona.
Apart from any inferences about Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists the sickly character of Waldo may represent Burroughs’ own health problems from 1899 to the time of The Cave Girl.
I feel certain that Burroughs followed some sort of health or body building regimen from perhaps 1908-09 when the American body building king Bernarr Macfadden opened his Chicago facilities to 1913. Although Ogden Secor of Girl From Farris’s was still sickly in 1914 perhaps Burroughs health was improving as Waldo evolves from a skinny sickly person to a ‘blond giant’ before our eyes. ‘Blond Giant’ also brings to mind Nietzsche’s ‘Great Blond Beast.’ I think it would be pushing it to say Burroughs read Nietzsche, nevertheless Burroughs always seems to be well informed when you look closely. He might easily have picked up references to the ‘Blond Beast’ from newspapers, magazines and conversation.
Weston is especially incensed at Burroughs leaving Emma who both he and his wife Margaret seem to have preferred. They did travel to California to visit Emma while ignoring ERB.
Weston quotes Rosenberger to the effect that ERB told Rosenberger that he had always wanted to rid himself of Emma. To which Weston replies:
Quote:
Charming, unusual, erratic personality that Ed is, there is no woman on earth that would have lived with him, and put up with him except Emma, and do not be fooled! Emma suited Ed plenty, until this insane streak hit him.
Unquote.
So we have an outsider’s view of the situation. He considers Burroughs over the line in his personality to be redeemed by his charm. Weston had asked Rosenberger his opinion of the situation between ERB and Emma. ERB had apparently told Rosenberger after the split that he had always wanted to rid himself of Emma.
As far as Burroughs’ persdonality goes it would be in keeping with a person of his background who had been bounced from school to school. Waldo may in part be a nasty caricature of the East Coasters Burroughs associated with at the Phillips Academy. As is well known Easterners at the time and still today disdain those from the West. One has the feeling that Burroughs valued his Idaho experiences highly thus the transformation from the wimpy Easterner of Waldo to the Blond Giant of the great outdoors may be Burroughs snub of his Eastern classmates.
At any rate when Weston met Burroughs at the beginning of classes in ’95 ERB’s personality seems set.
By ‘saying things’ one presumes that Weston means Burroughs had an outsider’s ‘eccentric’ sense of humor. I have a feeling that a few of we Bibliophiles know where that’s at. Certainly Burroughs’ stories reflect this trait. So, between Burroughs and Weston we have a clash of two different backgrounds.
As to Emma I believe that Burroughs was always dissatisfied with the fact that he had married when he did whoever he might have married. He has been quoted as saying that Tarzan never should have married so that idea can probably be applied to him.
If circumstances hadn’t forced his hand he very likely would have remained single. According to his psychology the right time for him to find a woman and marry would have been after 1913 and his success when he was in effect born again and a new man.
So when he says he never really wanted Emma as a wife I’m sure that is true. However he did marry the woman. So from 1913 to 1920 we have Burroughs struggling with his desire to honor his life long committment to Emma and his contrary desire to find his ideal ‘mate’ a la Dejah Thoris, La, Nadara and a number of others. Not so easily done in real life and after great success but still possible.
Added to his problem was his embarrassing behavior in Idaho when he gambled away the couple’s last forty dollars. Emma reacted badly to the Western interlude in their marriage. Burroughs’ rather feckless attitude toward earning a living between the return from Idaho and his early success in 1913 undoubtedly caused emotional problems for Emma but as Weston says she stuck by him during those lean years and as he says, there were a lot of them.
Even in 1913 when the couple earned the first real money they had ever seen Burroughs was recklessly spending it before he got it based only on his confidence that he would always be a successful writer something which by no means necessarily follows.
Emma was very proud of Burroughs as the photo ERBzine published of the couple in San Diego shows however her pride obviusly conflicted with her fears so that she may have nagged ERB in what he considered an unjustified way.
On one level Cave Girl can be construed to be a record of their relationship up to the moment with Burroughs trying to reconcile the relationship according to his confident understanding of the situation.
Writing in February-March in Chicago we have this view. In September of 1913 the family left for San Diego. Writing in San Diego during October-November in the Mad King things seem to be deteriorating as Burroughs seems to be pleading with Emma to be reasonable. Thus the Mad King concerns Prince and Pauper doppelgangers who are appealing to the same woman.
This situation may have been caused by a situation that would be very reminiscent to Emma of her situation in Idaho of ten years earlier. On this trip in which ERB and Emma were as alone and isolated as in Idaho ERB was taking another very large gamble with Emma’s and her three little children’s wellbeing at stake. As ERB proudly tells it the family, no longer just a wife, but a family of five were within an ace of being flat broke if any one of the stories Burroughs wrote in 1913 failed to sell. Unlike Idaho this was a gamble the Roving Gambler won. Now, perhaps Burroughs thought this redeemed his earlier faux pas, probably to himself it did. But what about Emma? What terrific anxieties assailed her as she wondered whether they would have a roof over their heads from day to day.
We need more facts. Perhaps the move from Coronado to San Diego was forced by necessity to reduce costs. Perhaps selling the Vellie was necessary to raise cash. Thus Emma in the midst of this actual plenty of a $10,000 income was a virtual pauper in silks and diamonds. Would there be any wonder if she were cross and nagging? As Weston said there were difficulties in living with Burroughs.
Burroughs then rather than attempting to make reasonable adjustments in his behavior yearned for the perfect mate who would ‘understand’ him.
Nevertheless he had to bear the burden assigned him. Let us assume that as Weston said, at one time Emma suited Ed plenty. That’s an outsider’s opinion but the evidence of this group of novels is that ERB was doing his best to rectify his past for Emma. If Waldo is portrayed as clownish I’m sure that ERB had played the clown in real life for some time. As Weston said ERB had always said and done unusual things. He doesn’t say what they were but in all likelihood the things he said and did were meant to be jokes, to be funny. After all he describes Tarzan as a jungle joker. The jokes that Tarzan perpetrated originated in ERB’s mind so he had to think those jokes were funny. They were usually practical jokes. No one really like a practical joker. The psychological needs that go into a practical joke are compensatory.
Where he failed Emma in the past he seems to be trying to make up for it. Perhaps his financial gamble in 1913 in some way compensates for his gambling failure in 1903 reversing the outcome of 1903 and making it alright. His actions in 1913 are so zany one has to ask what he thinks he is doing.
e.
Leaving their little Eden Waldo and Nadara set out for her village where Korth and Flatfoot await him with Nagoola in the background.
Thus Waldo’s tasks as set for him by Nadara are to kill Korth and Flatfoot. Waldo quite correctly realizes that these two tasks are beyond his present powers. So, within sight of the village he makes excuses to Nadara then abandons her running away. He heads out to the Wasteland. He appears to be living in a near desert.
Over the next several months he transforms himself from a tubercular wimp into a ‘Blond Giant.’ Tarzan has black hair so perhaps Waldo has to be blond.
One can’t be sure but this period may represent the years from John The Bully to ERB’s proposal to Emma. At any rate Waldo can’t forget Nadara having a longing for her. During his period in the Wasteland he fashions weapons for himself that make him superior in prowess to the cave men. He fashions a spear, a shield and what Burroughs jokingly, I hope, refers to as a sword, that is a sharp pointed short stick with a handle. No bow and arrow. So rather than a primitive Tarzan we have a primitive Lancelot. Waldo is actually outfitted as a knight, a la Pyle, while when he acquires the pelt of Nagoola he will be, as it were, encased in armor. So Pyle, or at least Arthur, is an influence.
In a comedy of errors Nagoola manages to kill himself by falling on Waldo’s spear. In one sense this means that Waldo has invested his sexual desires in Nadara while perhaps it is symbolic of Burroughs’ desire to do the same with Emma. At the same time the panther skin makes Nadara the best dressed girl around. It is perhaps significant that he kills Nagoola first before Korth and Flatfoot.
If one looks again at that ERBzine photo of ERB and Emma in San Diego one will notice that Emma is wearing some spiffy new togs. In her father’s house Emma was a clothes horse. In another ERBzine photo showing ERB and Emma walking in the wilds of Idaho Emma is still dressed to the nines while ERB shambles along beside her in a cheap baggy suit.
From that point in 1903 to the efflorescence of wealth in 1913 Emma had to make do with whatever garb she could afford which must have been depressing for her. As Weston says that was a sacrifice she was willing to make for her man.
Not in 1913 in Cave Girl but in 1914 in Cave Man Waldo invests Nadara with Nagoola’s pelt. Now, Waldo suffered grievously to acquire this skin. That was a major battle out there in the Wasteland. Let us assume that the skin represents Waldo’s sexual desires and that in clothing Nadara in the skin he is making her his queen or princess.
Thus in 1913-14 for the first time in his life ERB is able to reestablish Emma as a clothes horse. He has finally been able to do his duty as a man and husband. She can now buy as many clothes of whatever quality she likes and ERB is happy to have her do it. So, in a symbolic way ERB had a terrific struggle that scarred him psychologically as Waldo was physically scarred by the talons of Nagoola. Now, Burroughs was proud to be able to dress Emma to her desires. In the same way that the panther represents Waldo’s investing Nadara with his sexual desires so Emma’s clothes represent the same to ERB.
It was now up to Emma to forgive ERB for his failings and treat him as her hero. Perhaps ERB was a little premature. I think that he would have had to woo her all over again. While he had conficence he would be able to go on writing indefinitely the surety of such was problematic to others like Emma and actually ERB’s editor at Munsey, Bob Davis. Davis told him point blank that guys like Burroughs start strong, shoot their wad and fall out after two or three years. As far as others were concerned Burrroughs future remained to be seen. The evidence is that Davis and other editors thought that Burroughs had Tarzan and that was it. Apart from the Mars series how much of this other stuff was pubished to humor Burroughs to cajole more Tarzan novels is a question. Still, the fans seemed to receive it well. Cave Girl was even serialized in the New York papers.
Nadara has set Waldo three tasks all of them murderous. He is to kill Nagoola, Korth and Flatfoot. Having fulfilled the killing of Nagoola Waldo after several months sets out to return to Nadara to fulfill his last two committments.
Before he invests Nadara with Nagoola’s pelt he first kills Korth and Flatfoot. These are monster battles where like the knights of old, Lancelot, Waldo is hurt near to death.
Now, what would Emma nag ERB about during those lean years? The clothes have already been discussed so that leaves the monetary success to acquire them. So the slaying of the pair of cave men may represent financial success. Financial success came with the creation of John Carter and Tarzan. So let’s assume that Korth represents John Carter and Flatfoot Tarzan. The creation of the two or the slaying of those dragons opens the way for the hero Waldo/ERB to present Nadara/Emma with the first task, clothing.
Having killed Korth and Flatfoot Waldo still has to make up with Nadara for abandoning her at the threshhold to her village. Not an easy task. Waldo pleads that he has done everything she asked but she remains obdurate. This probably relflects ERB and Emma’s situation. A situation that apparently was never satisfactorily resolved.
But then it seems as though there is a change in the characterization and Nadara reverts back to Nadara of the beginning of the book while Waldo, believe it or not, becomes a god, if Nadara had known what gods were. Waldo scrambles up some fruit trees to toss down some food that seems to bring them together. In the last pages Burroughs gets schmaltzy writing close to purple passages.
At this time Nadara spots a yacht out over the waves. The yacht is a major theme during the teens and especially in this 1913-14 period. The significance seems to be that Burroughs envisioned his early life as The Little Prince as life on a yacht. Then the big storm comes changing his life as it sinks. Then begins the struggle for existence capped by the eventual triumph.
The yacht first appeared in Return Of Tarzan. This is its second appearance. Tarzan wasn’t on the yacht in Return and Waldo doesn’t get on the yacht in Cave Girl although he does in the sequel The Cave Man but that was a year later in 1914. So things are evolving rapidly in ERB’s psychology.
In this case he plans to join the yacht that he recognizes as his father’s. Having abandoned Nadara once she imagines he is about to do so again so she runs off.
Thoughts run through Waldo’s mind as he envisions a return to civilization with Nadara.
Quote:
For a time the man stood staring at the dainty yacht and far beyond it the civilization which it represented, and he saw there suave men and sneering women, and among them was a slender brown beauty who shrank from the cruel glances of the women- and Waldo writhed at this and at the greedy eyes of the suave men as they appraised the girl and he, too, was afraid.
—-
“Come,” he said, taking Nadara by the hand, “let us hurry back into the hills before they discover us.”
Unquote.
And so Waldo decides to remain in the stone age.
He and Nadara had left the little bag containing the relics of her mother behind. The crew of the yacht discover the bag just on the inland side of the forest.
Then we discover that Nadara is in fact the daughter of French nobles. Burroughs seems to have some love affair going on with the French. Many of his most attractive characters such as Paul D’Arnot, Nadara here, Miriam of Son of Tarzan are Gallic. So Burroughs admires most the English, the French and the Virginians it would seem.
Nadara is the daughter of Eugenie Marie Celeste de la Valois so she is a legitimate princess.
Thus ends the Cave girl with seeming finality. The way is open to the sequel but the closing seems final.
I haven’t read a book that replicates the final scene but I suspect that ERB borrowed it. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn of an earlier duplicate.
End Of Part 4c.