A Review:  Einstein’s Jewish Science

by

Steven Gimbel

 A Study In Religious Relativity

 by

 R.E. Prindle

Gimbel, Steven: Einstein’s Jewish Science, 2012, Johns Hopkins Press

There is absolutely only one place to start in reviewing Steven Gimbel’s Einstein’s Jewish Science and that is at the Revolution’s declaration of Jewish emancipation.  The year 1789 marks the beginning of the Revolutionary era that ended on 9/11/01.

Actually we have to begin the discussion with some background on Jewish and Aryan

 

Steven Gimbel

or European differences.  The Jewish point of view standing from behind is that Judaism is the stock, the parent tree onto which Christianity, hence Europe, was grafted.  Thus Jews confuse Europeanism with Christianity calling all Europeans Christians against all the rules of logic.  As Christianity was grafted onto a Jewish source then, it follows that the sap that nourishes Christianity rises through Jewish roots.

While the view from this perspective from behind pleases Jewish vanity, if one steps into the front of the object and views it through the European vantage point another entirely different prospect is presented to the eyes.  This is called relativism.  In the view of European science, Judaism was only one of several Mediterranean sources that was melded into Catholic Christianity.  Among the most important are those coming from the Greeks Plato and Socrates.  One can even argue that Judaism is Judaism because it drank from the well of Plato.  Hence the water that nourishes the roots of the Judaic tree are from a European source.  Further the religion of Egypt from which Judaism originated was equally important to Christianity as the Egyptian goddess Isis  essentially became the Virgin Mary  and hence Christ a version of the god Osiris.  About the year 1000 Isis triumphed in purely Catholic regions becoming the  immaculate virgin Mary thus actually displacing Christ as the principal religious archetype of Catholicism.

Manichaeism, the religion of the Persian Mani also takes a central role in Catholicism as well as the Persian god Mithras.  In many ways then from the frontal view Judaism serves a subordinate but nevertheless important role in the development of what is essentially a Mediterranean not specifically Jewish religion.  Judaism itself is a hodge podge of Mediterranean influences beginning with their religious birth on the transition from the Taurean to the Arien Age.  Proto-Judaism was a reactionary movement of the Aryan Astral religion.  So, if one takes the relative stance above the object to view it yet another picture emerges, in which Judaism is beholden to ‘Christianity.’  It’s all relative to how you look at it, isn’t it?  Or is there a certain answer as science says?

The Catholic Church tolerated Judaism because of the Mediterranean connection but controlled it as tightly as possible.  In 1789 the Revolutionists emancipated the Jews or in other words freed them from the discipline of the Catholic Church.

Aryan Europeans had been freeing themselves from the Catholic discipline for hundreds of years.  With the triumph of the Enlightenment embodied  in the French Revolution rationalism as evidenced by the scientific mind rejected the religious solutions of society, Catholic or Jewish, completely.

The light of reason completely dispelled the fogs of religion leaving the religions with no means of counter attacking, science was non-fiction, religion was fiction, or, seemingly so.  Even during the savage horrors of the Revolution the scientific mind continued to evolve.  The scientific ethos was in place as the Napoleonic era ended replaced by the productive Bourgeois ethos.

Along with Catholicism and Judaism the Scientific Revolution destroyed the possibility of continuing Aryan European beliefs such as the sprites and fairies.  That religion died too, but their memory lived on in the Romantic Movement.  Those religious beliefs  had existed alongside Catholicism and Judaism.  Their demise is beautifully expressed in Charles Nodier’s tale of Trilby and Jeannie.  In the neo-Romantic revival that arose along with the Jewish concept of Relativism a hundred years later the English novelist, George Du Maurier revived Nodier’s legend in his book appropriately titled Trilby but in a nineteenth century European-Judaic context.

Barbara Spectre

So, as the Napoleonic Era ended Christianity, Judaism, Science and Romanticism contended for pre-eminence.

Catholicism and Romanticism which were Aryan experiences could only be eventually subsumed into Aryan, or what Jews call European, science but Judaism was a different story.  The Jewish people at that time lived in Western and Eastern Europe as well as the Middle East and North Africa.  The Americas were only beginning to emerge as new lands for settlement at that time.

The East, the Pale Of Settlement, was an impermeable block to science.  It is doubtful that Eastern Jews even heard of science until the late nineteenth century when Western Jews attempted to modernize their Jewish brethren of the Pale.

In the West Jews were completely demoralized.  Their relationship to the Church was no longer pertinent while science completely invalidated religious Judaism.  It took the Jews a hundred years to come up with a counter to science and that counter would be the doctrine of relativism developed around the end of the nineteenth century amidst the Romantic revival.

Aryan romanticism had been replaced by the Positive scientific concept of August Comte who was the great systemitizer of the scientific method.  While Comte, a Frenchman, has lost relevance in our times his was the basis on which scientific research developed.  His work was specifically attacked by the Jewish relativists.

Following Comte in the intellectual evolution of science was an Englishman by the name of Herbert Spencer also now superseded and forgotten.  Of course, Darwin, who is given credit for the concept of Evolution and has been  the great bug-a-boo of the Creationists.

In fact during the nineteenth century the Aryan or European mind as evidenced by science had if not evolved far ahead, moved far ahead of all other cultures, most especially religious cultures such as Catholicism and Judaism.  The essence of science is Evolution; the essence of Judaism is Creation.  Thus when presented with the incontestable evidence of Evolution all three Semitic religions based on the concept of Creation found their common enemy in science and collaterally Europeans or Aryans.  Science is the true enemy of Catholicism, Judaism and Moslemism.  The Moslems were outside European culture hence as immune to scientific inroads as the Jews of the Pale.  Christianity being European and disavowed could only stultify with its rationale gone.  The Jews after a hundred year struggle came up with the notion of relativism as a riposte.

The matter of Steven Gimbel’s Einstein’s Jewish Science is the conflict between Evolution and Creationism, Positivism and Relativity.  Einstein’s so called science then is merely Jewish relativism applied to physics.  His so-called science must be Jewish.

2.

How Johns Hopkins, in my youth the foremost American scientific college, could even consider publishing Steve’s rant is too incredible for belief.  The acceptance merely indicates how successful Jewish relativism has been against science and the scientific method.

The cover of the book itself, a very nice design, gives away the conclusion of the book.  What appears to be our solar system depicts an absolute immovable sun in the form of a  Star Of David thus showing Judaism as the immovable center around which all else revolves.

The nine planets, Pluto is included as a planet, orbit the Jewish sun in crazy off center orbits that overlap and collide.  Thus the game is given away without the necessity of reading the book.

The question Steve asks is whether there is such a thing as Jewish science as the Nazis asserted.  If there is a Jewish science then there must be a data base of Jewish knowledge.  While Steve may not be aware of it, although it would be an unaccountable omission, Barbara Spectre began an organization based in and funded by Sweden called Paideia.  Paidea is an Aryan Greek  name for education.  So the European foundations of Judaism are betrayed.  So this very Jewish woman gave her organization an Aryan name.  Strange, but not unusual.

The purpose of her organization is to negate what she calls nineteenth century European knowledge and in the future replace it with its counterpart, Jewish knowledge.  Thus in the future Europeans won’t have the exclusive claims to knowledge that had so humiliated the Jews in the nineteenth century, that claim will have to be shared, at least, with Jewish knowledge.  It is all relative of course but her organization currently in its second decade propagates the notion that there is a specific Jewish knowledge although she is cagy enough to conceal whatever passes for Jewish knowledge so that it can’t be tested and evaluated in a scientific manner..

It would seem then that the Nazis were not too far off base when they call relativism Jewish science.  So that issue is probably more obfuscated than even  Steve thinks.

In fact Steve begins his book with the usual Talmudic, one suspects this is what Babs Spectre calls Jewish knowledge, obfuscations.  Steve asks a question that should have a simple answer, that is, do we really know who is a Jew and who isn’t?  He will hammer away at this non-issue all through his book.  Einstein himself self-identified as a Jew.  But this is not enough for Steve.  Just because Einstein knew he was a Jew doesn’t mean he was.

Steve goes on to quote Einstein, p. 4:

Quote:

Jews are a group of people unto themselves.  You can see their Jewishness in their appearance and notice their Jewish heritage in their intellectual work and perceive a profound connection between their nature and the numerous interpretations they give to what they think and feel in the same way.

Unquote.

Hey, the greatest mind, the greatest intellect in all of Jewish and human history has spoken.  You can see Jewish identity in their intellectual work.  How wrong could the Nazis have been?  One would think that the question was settled and the book finished by page 4.

Steve clearly does not understand the nature of relativity.

I quote Steve, same page 4, as he picks up his narrative:

Quote:

Perhaps stranger still is that the author of this argument that Jewish qualities might be inherent and recognizable in the intellectual work of Jews is none other than Albert Einstein himself.  Einstein’s own words suggest that we must take seriously the possibility that the Nazis were in some sense correct about his theory.  Maybe relativity is “Jewish Science” after all.

Unquote.

No, relativity isn’t science. It can’t be.  Steve’s sub-title is: Physics at the intersection of Politics and Religion.  So we’re not really talking science we’re talking politics and religion, more especially religion.  Well, Steve’s got 241 pages to go so he’s got some hash slinging to do and he is capable of slinging that hash.

The essence of Judaism is creation not evolution.  Something that is created is whole and entire at creation, no evolution is necessary.  There is no evolving to do, thus Steve’s Jewish mind can only deal in Creative relativism but no evolution.

Einstein’s field of expertise was physics thus he is pitted against what was formerly thought of as the greatest intellect in the world, that of Isaac Newton.  Therefore in order to top Newton Einstein had to be billed as the most incredible cherry sitting on top of the sundae possible.  The most astonishing mind the world not only has seen but will ever see.

Now, Einstein lived some two hundred years or so after Newton.  The latter worked in the earliest stage of scientific knowledge with little to go on and the determined hostility of the semi-Semitic Catholic Church.  Much of science and physics originated with Newton but scientific learning evolved rapidly after him, and because of Newton. Einstein’s late nineteenth century youth coincided with the fabulous scientific evolution of the nineteenth century.  Einstein was not the rival of Newton that Steve presents but a successor beginning somewhen after Newton left off.

Thus Steve, in the Jewish way of the juggler’s legerdemain compares apples to oranges, but then, it is relative, isn’t it?  If Steve wants us  to believe with the Nazis that Einstein’s was Jewish science then Newton’s  must have been Catholic Christian science, Steve says his science was no different than Einstein’s except Catholic rather than Jewish but still religiously based.  No, but actually Einstein stood to Jewish religion in his time as Newton had stood to Catholicism in his.  The difference is that Newton was instrumental in freeing science from religion, he was shedding religion.  Einstein was adapting religion to science so that Jewish Knowledge, that is a return to religious thinking, could reign supreme.  Thus Newton’s science was evolutionary while Eintein’s relativity was regressive to atavistic Jewish religion.  Einstein was attempting to negate  evolution and science.

This idea is very clear in Steve’s book.

Like Barbara Spectre Steve believes that nineteenth century science marginalized the Jewish people, in other words made their BS irrelevant.  And…this is true.  Hence Jewish development across all fields of inquiry was that of relativity; relativity was a sort of Jewish version of Aryan neo-Romanticism.  The notion was not an invention of Einstein but was part of the assault made on nineteenth century scholarship across the board.  Einstein covered physics, Freud-Fliess took control of psychology, Henri Bergson presented  a Creationist version of evolution while denouncing Spencer and Comte, Schoenberg brought relativism to music, Anatole France attacked literature, Franz Boas tackled Anthropology.  In every possible discipline Jews countered the prevailing European scholarship with relativism while slandering the European leaders in the field.

Dada appeared in 1917 disparaging Western art with a general condemnation of European civilization.  Following shortly after Critical Theory was originated as the Frankfurt School that developed methods to undermine every phase of Western Civilization.  Relativism was the mode of attack.  The notion was not an invention of Einstein, he merely applied it to physics.  Hence Steve’s dogged comparison of him as a superior to Newton.  But that’s all relative.  If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull-shit.  If you can’t even tell who the hell is a Jew how can you possible tell if he is a scientist?  How can you tell anything?  You can’t, it’s all relative.  And that is the point of the Jewish Knowledge of the Talmud.  The only thing you can know for sure is that Jews are the center of the solar system, Jews are always right as the cover of the book indicates and everyone else is eccentric.

So, the nineteenth century marginalized the Jews.  They couldn’t compete.  In fact they weren’t the center of the solar system.  Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler got there before them.  The consequence of the humiliation was that the Jews identified with every other group they considered marginalized by the bad old bogy White man or European.  They aligned themselves with the others to defeat Europeans and European knowledge.  Thus will she nil she Barbara  Spectre and her Paideia  organization  is the keystone of the argument.

Steven chops his hash over the couple hundred pages remaining without getting anywhere.  We are left uncertain as to whether not only was Einstein’s science Jewish but whether Einstein was actually Jewish.  One would think that if Einstein couldn’t positively be proven to be Jewish the science would be a moot point.  Of course it is always possible that one could be European and practice Jewish science as clearly stated by Barbara.

If Steve’s main text was lackluster his conclusion was a rip roaring finale.  Perhaps inspired by Bob Dylan’s line from Chimes of Freedom that goes:  the confused, abused, misused, strung out ones and worse (or marginalized) the very passionate Steve unlooses this tirade:  p.210,

Quote:

But for those who saw the change (from Aryan to Jewish science) as a part of human progress, of cultural growth, he was part of the engine driving us (he means Jews by us) forward.  His science was revolutionary, but it wasn’t just his science.  Einstein the man, as much as the theory of relativity, became the symbol of the new way.  He eschewed belts and socks.  His hair, that iconic hair, stoked a sense of nonconformist to that which is merely social construction.  Here was a great mind that rejected the trivial.  Think of the quotations that one sees attributed to Einstein on bumper stickers:  “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”  “Great thinkers have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”  What one celebrates abut Einstein is his embrace of a certain form of Enlightenment values:  that humanity progresses when it thinks creatively, (read:  religiously)  when it stops accepting culturally enforced strictures and frees itself in the search for truth.  We (whoever We may be) take Einstein to be the epitome of the open mind.

Unquote.

Well, gosharoonies, was that ever a masterpiece of overblown purple prose, a wonder of kitsch, a parody of heartfelt emotion.  Indeed!!!  Indeed!!!

‘His science was revolutionary, but it wasn’t just his science.’ Was his science revolutionary?  Whatever he may have found of value was just science, a part of mankind’s treasure, a contribution along with all other contributions.  Nothing he thought belonged to him; Einstein was just another laborer in the vineyard.  European scientific discoveries were not proprietary.  Research was conducted openly, open source as they say on the internet, published in a myriad of scientific journals so all qualified could participate.  Nor was Einstein a new growth; he was merely standing on the shoulders of the giants who came before.  He was not a competitor of Newton he was a successor employing all the discovered, not created, knowledge of the past.  Einstein would never have existed except for Newton.  Unfortunately Newton didn’t have to courtesy to have been Jewish, but even if he had according to Steve how could it have been known that he was really Jewish.

As proof of Einstein’s genius Steve gives us this:  He eschewed belts and socks.  Bravo!  Clap, clap, my god what a man.

‘His hair…that hair….  What more do you need to be a genius?  Look at Bob Dylan’s hair.  Weird hair?  Of course he’s a genius.  Look at my hair, by the way.  Newton didn’t have weird hair, how couldn’t Einstein be a greater genius?

‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’  Why, of course, why hadn’t that occurred to me before.  Why study physics when you can just imagine physics and it’s true.  ‘Knowledge?  We don’t need no steenking knowledge.’

‘We take Einstein to be the epitome of the open mind.’  Who is this ‘we’?  Who is this ‘us’?  Is Steve speaking for Europeans as well as Jews? Or are the we and us exclusively Jews.  As Bob Dylan says:  Watch those pronouns.  And then the piece de resistance… p. 212

Quote:

But this love of Einstein is broader than that of the Jewish community, because the liberated cosmopolitan future he represents is not at all tied to a connection between Judaism and relativity.  (Is that statement positive or relative?)  Einstein was a secular Jew, but he very well could have been a religious Jew like Nobel laureate I.B Singer:  He could just as well have been a Hindu like Nobel laureate Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman;  he could have been an Arab (Moslem) like Nobel laureate Ahmad Zewail, he could have been a woman like Nobel laureate Marie Curie; he might have been a gay like mathematical genius Alan Turing.  Einstein is Einstein because he says to every oppressed group that he could have been like you.  His theory, his irreverence, his politics, and the opposition he found represent an opening up and destruction of the confining structures that limited whose voice could be heard, in what language it could be spoken, and with what accent.  His place in history was pivotal moment at which the future no longer resembled the past.  That future will no longer be dominated by the powers that entrenched themselves (Aryan males) over the past several centuries and Albert Einstein is a symbol that all of us can participate in the future.

Unquote.

Myopia is a new religion?  Heil Babs Specter!  What a presentation of inner wishful thinking and misconstrued reality.  What was wrong with the editors at Johns Hopkins?  What a misconstruction of the nature of science.  Contrary to Babs Spectre and Steve Gimbel there was no one preventing scientific contributions from wherever or whomever.  It was impossible for anyone not of the European culture from 1650 to 1900 to make contributions because they had neither the knowledge or scientific imaginations to make scientific contributions.  The world has now evolved.  Steve and Babs are right this is not the nineteenth century.  The rest of the world in varying degrees have caught up with the idea of science given by the Aryan.  They have evolved.  They are no longer who they were in the nineteenth century.  Look at the pictures.  If they contribute now it is not because Aryans allow them to it is because they now can because they can absorb the knowledge, but the majority still can’t.

Relativity itself is not scientific but a religious distortion of science as Steve acknowledges in his sub-title.

It is interesting that no European male  is included in Steve’s list of the oppressed that Einstein supposedly made equal  although at least half of European males were marginalized and forbidden to participate because of class reasons.  Russian serfs even if theoretically freed were more oppressed than the Jews.  Jews flooded Russian and European universities while Russian serfs and European commoners had to fight to gain entrance.  In all ways Jews had it easier and were treated better than the lower classes of Europeans after emancipation.  Steve is not looking at things in an objective enough manner.  He is blinded by his subjectivism.

Steve had better stick to philosophy because he is certainly no historian or scientific researcher.  As to his book, as a ‘visiting professor’ I can give Steve only a courtesy C for effort.  Subjectivity, inner wishful thinking, creativity are fine for religion but have no place in the cold hard positive reality of science.

Anything Less Than Real:
Warren G. Harding Rings In The New Era
by
R.E. Prindle

Dedicated to Ann Coulter who is the only other person I have heard of who realizes the importance of Warren G. Harding.

It is time to reevaluate the Harding presidency as well as perhaps the Republican Interregnum between the Socialist Wilson and FDR administrations.

Perhaps the first thing to do is to dispel the notion that the Harding Administration was extraordinarily corrupt as administrations go. If one is going to call the administration corrupt then it must be against a normal standard and not isolated as a phenomenon. While Harding inherited Wilsonian corruption after the Great War, Roosevelt created the corruption of post-WWII. The money involved in the latter dwarfed anything that preceded it by incalculable amounts.

A major source of corruption after the Great War was the disposal of stores purchased for the war. These were fairly trivial amounts by later standards. In contrast the Roosevelt administration sequestered some piddling amounts of Japanese property and mega enormous amounts of German property including huge companies and scads of patents, copyrights and trademarks. Yet one never hears of these thefts, only a couple refrigerators left on back porches by Japanese. Ask yourself why? These German properties were under the personal authority of Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the officer of the Alien Properties Custodian of David Bazelon. Bazelon was both a Jew and associated with the Super Mob and Chicago’s Outfit.

After the war Bazelon used his office to enrich both Jews and criminals by selling off the pittance of Japanese properties and, in today’s values billions and billions of German properties for a penny or so on the dollar thus stealing from the Germans and defrauding the US Government of billions.

I don’t think it is necessary to list other financial malfeasances; Bazelon alone surpassed any corruption of the Harding years including Tea Pot Dome and Elk Hills. So yes, there was the inevitable postwar corruption in the Harding Administration, but not by it, of negligible proportions compared to Roosevelt.

Having put that out of the way let us now consider the state of the nation Harding inherited from the Democratic Wilson Administration. Two new developments, unprecedented developments, had occurred that were novel for a new administration to deal with. One was the terrible advent of Prohibition and the other was the women’s vote.

In this first election in which women cast their ballots we had the first landslide victory in US history. Harding captured sixty percent of the vote and all but a hundred or so of those of the Electoral College. Apropos of that Harding has been ridiculed because his campaign manager, Harry Daugherty said that Harding looked like a president should. Well, he did.

His opponent, Cox, on the other hand, looked like a mousy dip, which isn’t to say he was one, he looked like one. He was unhandsome. The choice for women thus was between a nice, big handsome Harding who looked the part and a mousy Cox who didn’t. The election was the first landslide in US history. I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.

The ground rules had changed whether you believed in it or not, elections could no longer recite the issues as men understood them but campaigns had to be crafted to include the very different concerns of women. In my estimation Harding clearly benefited from the female vote.

Prohibition was an entirely different challenge. Prohibition was an achievement of female politics. The campaign for it was carried out by criminal means. The most famous prohibitionist was the violent, psychotic Carrie Nation who entered people’s places of business and began laying about with an axe. She was allowed to get away with it. The promoters of prohibition were too limp brained to think the matter through to its conclusion apparently unaware that alcohol could easily be smuggled in from abroad or even, heaven forbid, manufactured illegally.

Some form of alcohol, wines and beers, had been part of civilization from its inception and gave some surcease from the cares of life. While the vast majority of drinkers were able to manage the pleasures there was naturally a percentage who abused alcohol. When distilled liquors became available the problem of abuse was compounded.

Nevertheless, wine, beer and strong spirits comprised a huge industry employing undoubtedly tens of thousands of people. In the reformers’ mind, as always, it seemed better to punish the majority to suppress the few.

It should have been obvious to these unhappy reformers trying to make everyone’s life as miserable as theirs that an entire illegal industry would rise from the ashes of the legal and that that illegal industry would necessarily have to be criminal and clandestine. What can one say about reformers?

Thus when the Volstead Act was passed an unprecedented wave of criminality swept over the country like a tsunami. We can blame Prohibition on the Wilson Administration on whose watch the bill was passed and enforced. Thus the Harding Administration was called on to deal with this enormous level of corruption generated by do gooders. Once again Prohibition far exceeded any of the usual political corruption of the twenties.

Now, the control of prohibition passed into the exclusive control of two immigrant groups, those of the Italians, actually Sicilians, and the Jews. Using the incredible profits of Prohibition Jews and Sicilians then were able to assume a dominant if not controlling position in US politics while being able to buy into legitimate businesses. As incredible as it may seem by the mid- to late thirties many people considered crime as just another way of doing business, an industry. Needless to say bootleg profits were used to corrupt politics at every level. How could the Harding Administration escape? Once again, just look at the FDR Administration with open eyes.

The US has always taken a romantic or sentimental view of immigration, still does. As if it justified immigration the Romanticists said that the immigrants were only seeking a better life, content themselves in the superiority of having created not only a better life than anywhere else but the best life. Liberals believe in their own superiority.

One imagines that the only reason to emigrate from one’s homeland at any time in history was to seek a better life. Perhaps invaders drove you from your country making it necessary to find a life, better or worse, somewhere else and at someone else’s expense. Perhaps one’s situation was so bitter that any place else was more attractive. Actually the prime motivating force was US employers seeking cheap labor. Not very romantic really.

Nevertheless unlimited immigration began after the Civil War during the seventies increasing yearly until 1914 when the Great War began cutting off all emigration. It was then that problems not seen as too significant became prominent. US immigration had been from Europe and when the continent went to war these old national loyalties caused fractures. It became apparent that the Melting Pot notion had failed and as Teddy Roosevelt said, the US was nothing more than an international boarding house. Sentiment was strong for the Central Powers, who we have all been taught to despise, but not as strong as that for the Allies, who we have all been taught to revere.

The Irish acting on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend openly sided with the Central Powers against the English hence targeting US shipments to England for sabotage. The Jews whose chief enemy was the Russians refused cooperation with the Allies until Germany took Russia out of the war and then at that time and only at that time, the Jews gave the Allies full cooperation against the Germans who they then believed that they could include in the Bolshevik Revolution post war.

The Italians took a stance but issued a recall of men back from the US to fight in the war. After the war Mussolini attempted to send the Italian wounded back to the US to be medically cared for at US expense.

Of all the immigrants US nativists considered Jews and Italians as unassimilable. If nothing else, Prohibition proved that assertion as US laws meant nothing to either group. Thus it was left to the Harding Administration to deal with the long deferred problem of immigration. It would do so for the first time from a realistic perspective rather than a sentimental or romantic one.

A concomitant of immigration was that a great many of those ’seeking a better life’ had left their homelands a step or two ahead of the police as either criminals or political fugitives. They were revolutionaries seeking to overturn their own governments, Communists in a word. Their position had been strengthened by the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia while the Wilson Administration was actually Socialist in sentiment and had the war lasted a year or two longer, in fact. Wilson was on the verge of establishing a third term dictatorship to do just this, not unlike what Roosevelt achieved, when he was struck down by his stroke thus aborting that plan.

The Revolution did not confine itself to Russia but was actually being attempted through 1919 and 1920 into 1921 and the Harding Administration. The country was nearly in total disorder when Harding was sworn in, March of 1921. A necessity of the first importance was to restore order, that is, put down the Revolution. Harding was equal to that task. The Chinese proverb and curse is that may you be born into interesting times. While the elements defeated by Harding have successfully maligned his memory Warren G. Harding was actually one of the greatest US presidents.

2.

No historian I have ever read regards the problems Harding had to solve or his lack of experience in doing so. Harding was the editor of the small town newspaper of Marion, Ohio, West of the Alleghenies in Middle America. Harding worked hard, applying himself intelligently, making a success of his paper.

He became friends with Harry Daugherty, an Ohio politician who propelled him first to the Senate and then in 1921 to the Presidency. Years before his election Harding began an affair with a young women by the name of Nan Britton by whom he had a child. Naturally Harding had no desire to have this publicized yet he behaved honorably always supporting Nan and his child. He was a decent and good man.

Much has been made of this affair as though this were immorality of an extreme nature. Historically affairs and illegitimate children have been common. No big deal. How can one be expected to condemn Harding when the later John F. Kennedy had mistresses in the White House when Jackie was not about. What is one to think of Kennedy when he had his secret service agents rounding up prostitutes from the street, three at a time, for his dalliance?

FDR publicly lived with his mistress in Georgia while his beauteous wife, Eleanor pined away up North. Bill Clinton kept his member limber by having his female aides give him fellatio during business hours in the Oval Office. Hillary didn’t object.

Was Harding a moral reprobate? Hardly.

Then, the historians attempt to make him an ignorant oaf. A competing presidential candidate William McAdoo described Harding’s oratorical abilities, not surprisingly, as ‘an army of pompous phrases marching across the landscape in search of an idea.’

Oh well, politicians, how much sense do you get out of one of them? As an example of supposedly meaningless blather they offer this pre-election statement of Harding:

Quote:

America’s present need is not heroics but healing;
not nostrums, but normalcy;
not revolution but restoration;
not agitation, but adjustment;
not surgery, but serenity;
not the dramatic, but the dispassionate;
not experiment, but equipoise;
not submergence in internationality, but triumphant nationalism…

Unquote.

Rather than the nonsense it is portrayed as by his detractors, the speech details the problems the country was facing and the results Harding hoped to bring about and in which he largely succeeded. I’m sure his audience would have understood, whether consciously or unconsciously, exactly the issues to which he was referring. Only absurd historians have made a jumble of it. What the list amounts to is an eight point program not too different in approach than Wilson’s fourteen points. So we have a sort of political continuity between the administrations.

Let’s consider the list:
1. Not heroics, but healing. Refers to any number of problems, the waves of industrial unrest, hysterical politics and what not, a general calming down, a reduction from hysterics to the dispassionate.

2. Not nostrums but normalcy. A nostrum is a pet scheme for bringing about some social or political reform. There were enough of those going around- Prohibition, Communism et al. The issue here was the use of the word normalcy which in 1920 was incorrect although in common usage now. Normality would have been the correct word but normalcy actually carries the correct meaning that normality misses. His use of normalcy was a cause of immense hilarity and satisfaction to his detractors.

3. Not revolution but restoration. An obvious reference to the Bolsheviks and the social unrest they were causing.

4. Not agitation but adjustment. Once again political and social agitation were rife calling for the discard of current ways for impossible utopian ideals.

5. Not surgery, but serenity. Agitators called for drastic social surgery when once again calm and reflection were called for.

6. Not dramatics, but dispassion. Calm down, lower the level of hysterical passion.

7. Not experiment, but equipoise. Prohibition was a disastrous social experiment from it conception, what was needed was balance.

8. Not submergence in internationality, but triumphant nationalism. Clear enough, the League Of Nations was unworkable, out; tariffs were in, America First. The Naval Treaty.

As Harding was elected by a landslide one has to believe that the electorate knew exactly what Harding meant and whole heartedly approved of his choices. Nor did Harding disappoint; he was very popular during his presidency only successfully denigrated after his death when he was unable to defend himself.

3.

In office only two and half years before he died in suspicious circumstances how did Harding conduct his administration? One can’t imagine today the tremendous political energy released by the Bolshevik Revolution. The world was terrified while an angry civil war ensued across the Western world financially and militarily over an exhausted Europe. The civil war lasting for several years was fought on several fronts. The war had turned from a national war to an ideological war. Reds versus Whites. In Russia the ideological war was fought on three fronts, the North of Archangel, South in the Ukraine and in Siberia East of the Urals. American troops and munitions were involved. In the end the Whites, or Czarist troops lost.

Revolutionary activities sprang up in all countries including the US. While the US was aiding the Whites, the Jews raised enormous amounts that they traitorously funneled to the Bolsheviks under the eyes of the Wilson Administration. Jacob Schiff, the Jewish Prime Minister, was called to Washington by Wilson to defend himself against charges of Bolshevism. Wilson let him off the hook. Thus as in the Viet Nam war of the 1960s and 70s Government efforts were nullified by Fifth Columnists aiding the enemy.

The Bolshevik victory in Russia gave Socialism a political base from which to operate so the Socialists and Communist cells in the US were activated lending their support to Soviet efforts. Suddenly a socialist presence was clear in labor, the churches, the arts, publishing, across the board. While official Communist membership was relatively low so that it could be denigrated as no threat it must be remembered that the successful Bolshevik Party in Russia was just a splinter of US numbers, so size is irrelevant; organization is the key.

America’s first reaction was sharp as A. Mitchell Palmer, the Attorney General of the Wilson Administration rounded up several thousands of Communists for deportation to Russia. Here the Fifth Columnists sabotaged this wise response citing peacetime US practices for this wartime attack instead of the wartime provisions Wilson had used during WWI. Palmer was compelled to release all but a couple hundred who were put aboard ‘the Soviet Ark’ and sent to Russia including Leon Trotsky who had been living in New York City and without whom the Russian Revolution might have been reversed. Trotsky was actually temporarily detained but then released for some reason.

There were substantial crackdowns on all Socialist activities including the IWW or Industrial Workers Of The World who were reduced to impotence. Their leader, Big Bill Haywood was spirited out of the country to Russia. As Harding came to office there was a virtual civil war in progress. The fact has been obscured or erased by subsequent historians who are compelled to take the Red point of view.

At the same time as this undeclared war was being fought the troops were being brought back from the land of hinky, dinky parlay voo. How ya gonna keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree. Even though their lives had been totally disrupted very often destroyed for no reason now that their job was done they were thrown on the trash heap. Except by Warren G. Harding, the new president.

A not overly favorable biographer, Samuel Hopkins Adams, writing in his biography of Harding, The Tragic Years, comments favorable thusly, p. 284-5.

Quote:

The glory of heroes is soon departed. The public which welcomed with oratory, banquets, and ticker-tape our fighters, returning victorious from Europe, quickly forgot those of them most sorely in need of care. Two years after the Armistice the plight of war’s human debris was pitiable. Of these the most desperate cases were 71,000 mental patients and 38,000 tuberculosis victims. F.W. Galbraith, Jr., National Commander of the American Legion, estimated on the basis of an investigation, that there were 10,000 of the disabled in cellars, poorhouses, and insane asylums. T.W. Salmon, a disinterested and competent investigator, thus reported:

“Veterans with nervous or mental troubles were without provision for care and were quartered in institutions for the criminal insane, addicts, and vicious degenerates, without Federal supervision.”

No agency in Washington was equipped to handle a problem of this magnitude. Nor was there any special public interest in it. The war was over. “Let’s forget its’ expressed the attitude of a people sated and bored with emotion.

The President (Harding) did not feel that way about it. His humanitarianism revolted from such neglect. He acted wisely and constructively in welding the disparate, overlapping guardianships into one official entity, the United States Veterans Bureau…

Unquote.

Compare that to the neglect and humiliation of the returning veterans of Viet Nam. The so-called Red tribunes of the people, these creeps who sabotaged their brave men’s efforts on the battlefields, heaved garbage on them as they debarked from ships and planes.

Even WWI vets who had been promised a bonus or tip for the needless disruption of their lives were denied their due by the People’s Commissar Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They were compelled to storm Washington in a semi-violent attempt to compel the fulfillment of the government’s promise. The same army they had served in was turned against them. So much for FDR and the New Deal.

With the end of the war a whole host of what were actually revolutionary acts were released. Palmer of the Wilson Administration certainly treated them that way. As a result his house was bombed putting his teeth on edge. A huge bomb not unlike that used in OK City of recent memory was detonated on Wall Street. Law and order was rapidly breaking down. Mail robberies were a daily occurrence while millions of dollars of stolen Liberty bonds were being traded. Those millions today would represent a billion dollars or more. This was big money happening. Incredible amounts of money that no group of individuals could possibly spend. Where was the money going?

A very able member of the Harding cabinet, Post Master General Will Hays tackled those problems and solved them in short order. Such a man was a danger to the Lords of Misrule. What happened to Hays? In addition to all the other problems, the Guardians of Decency were alarmed, justifiably so, at the moral content of movies. Rather than accept outside censorship of the movies the moguls decided to police themselves and as their Top Cop they lured Will Hays away from his post by an offer he could have refused but found it impossible to do. The offer was for 100,000 dollars a year. That right 100K in 1922. Was that bribery or what? After only nine months in office Hays was offered the equivalent of five million dollars a year to supervise Hollywood morals. Who wouldn’t take that while being flexible enough not to lose the job?

Since the offer came from Hollywood that tells you who was behind the mail robberies and stolen bonds and lets you know what they were worth.

Harding outlawed the Communist Party briefly in 1921 getting right on that offense too but the Fifth Columnists got that overturned.

Thus within months of being in office Harding had cleaned up a large part of untoward activity while if couldn’t actually suppress Communist activity he was at least able to force them to turn their damper down while forcing them into even deeper clandestine activity.

But, as you can see he was building up a lot of enemies who wished him dead while wanting his memory exorcised.

And then Harding had to deal with the problem of immigration, also within the first months in office. The cry for the restriction of immigration, whether it came from North, East or South had been voiced at least as early as the 1840s when the potato famine drove a couple million Irish to the New Island. Really teeming masses. And then the Forty-eighters came over as a result of the failed Communist Revolution of 1848, more wretched refuse, that led ultimately to the post-war revolutionary activity.

These members were relatively small but in the 1870s Jewish immigration from the Pale of Russia began in earnest resulting in several million people who the restrictionists believed, as it turns out, rightly, were unassimilable. And then in the nineties the Sicilians added New York to the terminal end of their migratory route from Buenos Aires through Brazil and Central America. These people too were thought rightly to be unassimilable.

And then those sweet little old ladies hacked Prohibition through the Amendment process apparently believing that the law was the law and everyone would abide by it. They held that futile belief even though they had engaged in rampant lawlessness to get the Amendment approved.

Well, a void had been created and you know what nature thinks of voids. They get filled; nature abhors them or, so we are told. What people rushed in where angels, or at least, less venturesome mortals fear to tread? These two unassimilable peoples, the Jews and Sicilians.

Nobody gets credit for being right in such situations the restrictionists were right.

In most analyses of any period the activities of Jews are always suppressed; you never are allowed to see them until they want to be seen. Nobel awards time being one. While being Omni-present we are asked to believe that their only effect on society is to win Nobel prizes. In point of fact Jews, having great presence of mind, always work behind and under the scene. Thus to understand their effort on the America of the Harding Administration one has to set a background. I’m not going to go back too far settling on the transfer of the Jewish World Government from France when the Alliance Israelite Universelle was sent to the US and became the American Jewish Committee by 1906. This was the international Jewish government that Henry Ford referred to in his Dearborn Independent articles later collected and published under the misleading but accurate title: The International Jew. The articles were published during the Battle For Ford Motors largely during Harding’s tenure.

The leader or Prime Minister of the world Jewish government was a man named Jacob Schiff, himself descended from the German Forty-eighters rather than being a Russian Jew.

In the Jewish war against the Russian Czarist government Schiff played a leading part. He was personally responsible for engineering the Russian defeat during the Russo-Japanese war of 1905.

During that war the Jews of Europe and the US denied the Russians loans to conduct war properly while Jacob Schiff personally provided the Japanese with the funds without which they couldn’t have waged war.

While Schiff himself lacked enough of the ready for the war he was on the board of the Equitable Life Assurance Society. The Equitable was sitting on a hoard of 200 million, in today’s dollars, billions. Schiff illegally used this money to loan to the Japanese. The loan caused a tremendous scandal in which Schiff skillfully avoided detection shifting the blame to the other directors.

The peace treaty was chaired by Theodore Roosevelt in the US at which proceedings Schiff led a delegation of Jews who participated as a Jewish National delegation. Stacking the deck against the Russians.

Not content to punish the Russians for alleged injustices toward Jews in Russia, Schiff and ‘the international’ Jews worked to cause the US to sever diplomatic relations with Russia which result was achieved in 1913. Thus the US became dupes of the Jews.

In 1913 the Federal Reserve System was created as a private corporation owned by ten other corporations of which nine were Jewish firms from the US and Europe. The tenth was the Rockefellers. This private firm printed US currency that it loaned back to the US government at interest, thus creating a tremendous income to be used for worldwide Jewish machinations for which there was no accounting. I would call it a brilliant move but when you’re dealing with Liberal suckers it isn’t much of an achievement.

While the Jews had had no presence in Washington DC prior to the Wilson Administration, beginning in 1913 Wilson flooded his government with them much to the consternation of the English led government of the previous hundred years plus since independence. You know, it’s not like people couldn’t see what was going on.

Coincidentally as Jews were taken into government the Anti-Defamation League of B’Nai B’rith was established to counter any objections on ethnic grounds. Wilson himself was a socialist so that when the US entered the Great War a socialist takeover of the industrial system began. The railroads were immediately nationalized while the War Industries Board required all industries to submit financial details and to submit them for governmental regulations by the WIB controlled by Jews under Bernard Baruch essentially setting them up for seizure.

Of course, this provoked a violent reaction especially from Detroit and the auto industry. Ford and the Dodge Brothers objected strenuously. The Dodge Brothers used intemperate language reflecting on Baruch’s ethnic heritage that Baruch never forgave. Ford was more restrained but tarred with the Dodge’s brush. The Dodge Brothers died mysterious deaths in 1920 while their company went into limbo for years until Wall Street persuaded Walter Chrysler to take the company. An attempt was made on Ford’s life. This confrontation was also the beginning of the Battle For Ford Motors, begun in 1918 but aborted by the war ending. It was begun again on a financial front by Jewish banks trying to force a takeover.

So, the Socialist/Communist takeover of the US was very narrowly avoided. Yet the Socialist revolution had to be financed with hard cash that the Socialists didn’t have. Where was the cash to come from? From the US. The Jews had created the Federal Reserve System in 1913 very fortuitously it would seem just before the major expansion of the money supply caused by the World War. That war from the Allied side was financed entirely by the US. At war’s end the European debt to the US was enormous while it would never be repaid. It was just forgotten. Consider that when you get exercised by the current US debt. It can be forgotten too.

Yet the ten merchant banking firms who owned the Federal Reserve collected interest on every dollar of that debt. Thus the US dollars went to nine Jewish firms in both the US and Europe plus the Rockefellers.

As I have noted, as soon as the Bolsheviks seized power, Jacob Schiff rushed huge loans provided by those banks to finance the Bolshevik takeover. At the same time the devastation of the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe was total. There were still roughly five million Jews in those areas. Jewish American ‘charitable’ organizations operating under the name of the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee began to funnel enormous amounts of cash and supplies destined only for their co-religionists into this volatile political environment where the first people on their feet would have a commanding role. Socialism or no socialism money was the key, as always. As the aforementioned Liberty bonds in Jewish hands had been stolen that was a pile of free money that was laundered. Crime was about to be organized in a way that would provide other funds in large amounts. There was a succession of Jewish crime lords that generated the money. The first in the teens was a fellow called Monk Eastman, as his criminal methods became outdated he was sent to jail to be replaced by the notorious Arnold Rothstein who set up the modern organized crime structure but as his methods became outdated he was replaced, murdered, and Lepke Buchalter took over the role to be replaced in the forties by the major fund raiser Meyer Lansky who engineered that huge cash cow, Las Vegas and gambling. As different methods were needed he, in turn, was replaced by Sidney Korshak of the Super Mob. Thus the Jewish over world was integrated with the Jewish underworld functioning as a unit.

In celebration of these criminals the Jews recently created the National Museum Of Organized Crime in its capitol of Las Vegas, Nevada. The nationality referred to in the National Museum is that of the Jews otherwise they would have called it either the American-Jewish Museum or simply the American Museum Of Organized Crime. So you can go to Vegas and admire the criminals deeds of these stellar Jews.

Seemingly almost a gift from heaven to the criminals, Prohibition came along in 1920. This gave the financial basis for organizing crime as a ‘business’ thus opening vistas only dreamed of before the Volstead Act. Prohibition also created an insuperable problem that plagued the Republican Interregnum. Amazingly Prohibition began in a Democratic Administration and ended almost by fiat in the Democratic Administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt twelve years later, one of the those coincidental linkages between Wilson and FDR. Upon taking office Roosevelt held up a glass of obviously bootleg beer and announced that Prohibition was over. Just like that. Was the fix in from the beginning to end or wasn’t it?

But, back to the Battle Of Ford Motors for a moment. The bankers wanted Ford Motors not only because they hated Henry Ford but because Ford Motors was a bonanza waiting to be realized almost bigger than Prohibition.

Ford valued his company at something over a billion dollars. He had completely vertically integrated his company. That means he not only made the cars but he owned the metal mines and smelted the ores, he owned huge forests he cut and processed, coal mines to fuel his furnaces and even the railroad that carried the coals from the Line to River Rouge. He had subsidiaries worldwide. By 1920 Fords could be bought actually in any country in the world. Like Sherwin-Williams boasted of their paints, Ford covered the world.

The value of the company was compacted. In the bankers’ hands the company could be broken up into its component parts increasing the stock market value to three or four billion, all free money, especially as they were trying to buy Ford at the bankruptcy rate of 10 cents on the dollar. So you see how fiercely the Battle For Ford Motors was fought. You can see why Ford fought back by running his exposes of Jewish machinations, which were true, in his Dearborn Independent. The Independent was also the first nationally distributed newspaper by the way.

Henry Ford won the battle but ultimately lost the war.

So as you can see, Harding was elected into one of, if not the, most tumultuous times in American history and acquitted himself extremely well. His efforts were also appreciated by the American public that awarded him the highest approval ratings during his term in office.

His actions also made him many enemies not least of whom were the Communists and Jews. While Jews were prominent in Washington during the Wilson years and again in the Roosevelt years they were conspicuously absent during the Republican Interregnum. The Communists too, while if not destroyed, were harassed and suppressed forcing them to adopt different tactics while frustrating their desire for an immediate conquest.

On the immigration front too, Harding’s policy of realistic restricted immigration frustrated the desires of the sentimental immigrationists. Harding passed a restrictive bill quickly in 1921 that was augmented under Coolidge’s Administration in 1924 and survived almost intact until 1965 thus giving the country much needed breathing room to attempt to assimilate those already here to attempt to turn them into one national unit. It didn’t happen.

It is not particularly well known but in 1914 the Jews had formulated a plan and organized it to transfer the entire Jewish population of the Pale of Settlement to the US utilizing the ports of New Orleans and Corpus Christi, those ports being less conspicuous than New York City and Boston.

The war, of course, aborted that plan, and just as the Jews were about to activate the plan after the war Harding slammed through a restricted immigration act based on quotas seemingly aimed directly at excluding Jews period. This was an unforgivable crime in Jewish eyes while also forcing them to change their plan of the conquest of the New Promised Land.

Harding also dealt with internationalism rejecting the League Of Nations in favor of nationalistic policies. In the first years of the new century the Japanese had sent paramilitary troops for the pre-invasion of California, thus all the Japanese immigrants were men without women. The Californians who had already forced passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 objected vehemently to the Japanese invasion. Rather than offend the Japanese by protecting his own country the Teddy Roosevelt Administration came to a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ whereby the Japanese would no longer send ‘working men’ but only doctors and lawyers. I think Teddy called his administration the Square Deal. He must have known what he was talking about; that solution was certainly square.

After the war then with no military invasion imminent these men demanded women. Thus began the strange phenomenon of the Japanese Picture Brides. The men and women exchanged pictures making their selection on that basis and then the women were sent to California for marriage. Many interesting situations arose from that.

Still there was a great deal of hostility between the US and Japan. The hostility was actually caused one sidedly by the US. Very embarrassing situation. It began in 1853 when Admiral Matthew Perry ‘opened’ Japan at the mouths of his cannon. What’ll it be he sneered from the poop deck: Yes or no.

The relationship was exacerbated in the 1870s when anti-slavery Yankee planters landed in Yokohama and forcibly abducted a hundred or so Japanese to labor on their old plantations in Hawaii. I can see how the Yankees got so exercised by Southern slavery in the US. So, while I have to side with the US the Japanese have always had a legitimate grievance that could only be satisfied by war. I mean, come on, they had to regain their manhood after having been emasculated in 1853.

Nevertheless in 1908 TR said we would have to fight those fellows within thirty years and he only missed by a few years.

Thus in 1922 the Washington Naval Treaty was negotiated as, we suppose, an example of triumphant nationalism as opposed to the internationalism of the League of Nations. The Naval Treaty limited the size of naval fleets inadvertently favoring the Japanese. But the belligerence remained at a high level that left the then territory of Hawaii vulnerable. Naval fuel was shifting from coal to oil so while coaling stations had been established there were no oil storage facilities on Oahu the site of the Pearl Harbor Naval Station.

This was a dangerous situation. It was difficult to get Congress to act so some enterprising American oil men, Doheny and Sinclair, set about to remedy the situation on their own. Now, too oil fields, Tea Pot Dome in Wyoming and Elk Hills near Bakersfield, had been set aside as Naval Preserves. The storage facilities in Hawaii would be naval, so there is a connection.

Doheny and Sinclair set about to build the oil storage on their own and to fill the tanks they negotiated to use the naval preserves Teapot Dome and Elk Hills for oil supplies. This deal was used as an excuse to create a huge scandal, although after Harding’s death. Nevertheless the storage facilities were built and filled with oil so that when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor duly came the US was duly prepared.

Two and a half years into his presidency Harding began a tour of the West Coast during which he suddenly died. Some said poison some said heart attack but they got him into the ground so quickly there was no autopsy. Anytime the rules are broken its cause for suspicion. Some said his wife killed him but I have a hard time believing that.

Of course we have no way of knowing whether he was assassinated or not but there were many who may have wished his dead. Harding had sidetracked the Revolution, derailing it, while forcing the Bolsheviks further underground. His immigration act had thwarted Jewish plans to bring over five million fellow Jews. So actually Harding was ‘responsible’ for the death of all those Jews in the holocaust although I don’t think he’s ever been officially accused.

Neither the Jews nor the Communists have earned a reputation for being forgiving so both groups certainly had a motive. But, the problem is incapable of solution so let it drop.

Harding was only in office for two and a half years but what a two and a half years, hey? What a bunch of insoluble problems dealt with and well. He defused the Revolution, ended unrestricted immigration, tried to limit naval armaments and battled old Demon Rum. I suppose if he had had the chutzpah of FDR he would have said simply that Prohibition was nonsense and refused to implement the law. Would he had.

The profits of Prohibition went to establish Organized Crime. And from booze the criminals went on to gambling breaking down US legal resistance by using States Rights to legalize gambling in Nevada. From Nevada it has spread to every State in the Union. Carrie Nation is ultimately responsible for creating Organized Crime and hence the corruption of the Nation. That’s what happens when you put the girls in charge. And the little girl didn’t even have the vote. No, but she had the Power Of Positive Thinking. Just get it done.

My point is that Warren G. Harding rather than being the worst president of the United States was perhaps one of the greatest. It was just that he offended some vindictive people and they had the power of the press…and radio…and the movies…and…

The Protocols of Zion were so Nineteenth Century. Post-war America was the New Era of the Twentieth Century.

Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Revolt Against Civilization
A Review Of
Lothrop Stoddard’s Eponymous Title

by

R.E. Prindle

Lothrop Stoddard

Lothrop Stoddard

Stoddard, Lothrop: The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace Of The Underman, 1922, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, First Edition.

In the name of our To-morrow we will burn Rafael
Destroy museums, crush the flowers of art,
Maidens in the radiant kingdom of the Future
Will be more beautiful than Venus de Milo.

Quoted by Stoddard p. 202

A perennial problem in Burroughs’ studies is what did he believe? Was he a racist? Was he an anti-Semite? Was he an irredeemable bigot? Shall we just say he was not of a contemporary Liberal frame of mind. If you listen to Richard Slotkin author of Gunfighter Nation and a professor at Case Western Reserve at the time he wrote his book a couple decades ago, Edgar Rice Burroughs was an evil man responsible for all the evil in the US from 1912 to the present. Slotkin even sees him responsible for the My Lai massacre of Viet Nam.

Himself a Communist Slotkin can overlook all the crimes of the Soviet Union in which tens of millions were exterminated to find the ultimate evil in the killing of a few dozen people in Viet Nam.

Slotkin, who rampages through his history disparaging any non-Liberal writers as atavistic bigots firmly attaches Burroughs’ name to two scholars, Madison Grant and his Passing Of The Great Race of 1916 and Lothrop Stoddard and his historical studies of the twenties. He considers the two hardly less evil than Burroughs. To someone less excitable, perhaps, or lessLiberal, the two writers have written responsible and astute studies. I certainly think they have.

When I first read Slotkin I rejected the notion that Burroughs had been influenced by either. Ten years on I have to retract that opinion. It is now clear that Burroughs read both while being heavily influenced by Lothrop Stoddard, especially his 1922 volume, The Revolt Against Civilization. While the studies of both Grant and Stoddard would at best supplement Burroughs already developed opinions The Revolt can easily be seen as a template for Burroughs’ writing after he read it. While the study complemented his own developed social and political opinions I am sure that Stoddard’s explication of the history provided Burroughs with many new facts. Based on its opinions that appeared in ERB’s novels I would place the reading somewhere about 1926 or 1927.

Contrary to what some admirers want to make him ERB was what today would be considered a very conservative man, today’s Liberals would be anathema to him. He was decidedly anti-Communist, a Eugenicist, while not bigoted he was not a Negrophile or Semitophile. He was essentially a man with a social and historical outlook that was formed before 1900, a pre-immigration outlook formed while the Indian wars were still in progress. In short he was a man of his times.

Thomas Dixon Jr. to whom he is often compared was one of the most successful writers of the period who carefully examined both the Civil War and Reconstruction as well as the growing Socialist/Communist movement. He was not a bigot as he is always construed but a man of his own people. Burroughs was influenced by his work and thought well of him. He did not abhor him. ERB read many of Dixon’s novels and admired the movie based on his books, The Birth Of A Nation. He sympathized with Henry Ford in his struggle for the welfare of America and read the Dearborn Independent, Ford’s newspaper. In short, Burroughs was a stand up guy.

Now, what evidence is there he read The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace Of The Underman? Let’s begin with this quote, p. 34 et seq.

Quote:

Down to that time the exact nature of the life process remained a mystery. The mystery has now been cleared up. The researches of [August] Weisman and other modern biologists have revealed the fact that all living beings are due to a continuous stream of germ plasm which has existed ever since life first appeared on earth and which will continue to exist as long as any life remains. This germ-plasm consists of minute germ cells which have the power of developing into human living beings. All human beings spring from the union of a male sperm-cell and a female egg-cell. Right here, however, occurs the basic feature of the life process. The new individual consists, from the start, of two sorts of plasm. Almost the whole of him is body plasm – the ever multiplying cells which differentiate into the organs of the body. But he also contains germ- plasm. At his very conception a tiny bit of the life stuff from which he springs is set aside or carefully isolated from the body-plasm, and forms a course of development entirely its own. In fact, the germ-plasm is not really part of the individual; he is merely its bearer, destined to pass it on to other bearers of the life chain.

Now all this was not only unknown but even unsuspected down to a short time ago. Its discovery was in fact dependent upon modern scientific methods. Certainly, it was not likely to suggest itself to even the most philosophic mind. Thus, down to a generation ago, the life stuff was supposed to be a product of the body, not differing essentially in character from other body products. This assumption had two important consequences. In the first place, it tended to obscure the very concept of heredity, and led men to think of environment as virtually all important; in the second place, even where the importance of heredity was dimly perceived the role of the individual was misunderstood, and he was conceived as a creator rather than a mere transmitter. This was the reason for the false theory of “the inheritance of acquired characteristics,” formulated by Lamarck and upheld by most scientists until almost the end of the nineteenth century. Of course, Lamarckianism was merely a modification of the traditional ‘environmentalist’ attitude: it admitted that heredity possessed some importance, but it maintained environment as the basic feature.

Unquote.

Now there you have the argument of God in Tarzan And The Lion Man of 1933 nearly word for word. I hink it unlikely that ERB actually read Weisman who published following 1900 and who ERB may never have heard of, so his source was in all probability Stoddard.

Stoddard’s presentation nicely straddles the change of consciousness from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. It sounds a trifle naïve to our ears but was cutting edge at the time. Weisman’s theories were a big step in the direction of the discovery of DNA a short 26 years after Stoddard’s study.

It is important though to remember that more than fifty percent of the US population today rejects the concept of evolution while being more Lamarckian in outlook than might be supposed. We are as a whole not quite as advanced as we think we are.

As a quick affirmation of the influence of Stoddard on ERB on pages 95-96 he gives an account of the famous Jukes family of degenerates that appeared in ERB’s 1932 novelette, Pirate Blood.

Stoddard was well aware of what was happening historically and presently and one can see that he passed that understanding on to ERB. Almost as though writing today, on page 237 Stoddard writes:

Quote:

Stressful transition is the key-note of our times. Unless all signs be faulty, we stand at one of those momentous crises in history when mankind moves from one well-marked epoch to another of widely different character.

Unquote.

Extremely prescient observation in 1922 while his study has been borne out in detail. The chapter titles give a clear outline of the contents:

1. The Burden Of Civilization
2. The Iron Law Of Equality
3. The Nemesis Of The Inferior
4. The Lure Of The Primitive
5. The Ground Swell Of Revolt
6. The Rebellion Of The Underman
7. The War Against Chaos
8. Neo-Aristocracy

As can be easily seen novelists such as Rider Haggard, ERB, Edgar Wallace as well as many others from 1890 to the 20s were grappling with the problems indicated by the chapter titles.

The natural tendency in humans is to be rather lax in mental activity. Precision calls for an active mentality and concentration. Not everyone is capable of this, yet, beginning in the nineteenth century such mental qualities were increasingly necessary. Such disciplines as Chemistry and Physics didn’t allow for personal vagaries or individual style. One couldn’t bend the disciplines to one’s own desires, precise measurements were necessary requiring mental concentration. A little bit off and who knows what might happen. In a way then the Overman and Underman were created. Either you could or you couldn’t and if you couldn’t you slipped beneath- an Underman. Higher civilization was impossible for you.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Burroughs addressed this problem continually. In his character Tarzan he resolved the problem giving his creation a split personality, in a loin cloth he was one man, in a tuxedo he was another. Two separate gorillas in one and always a beast. In real life society split into two possibilities- the Over and Underman.

Worse still scientific methods were able to measure the ineffable, the unseen. In chemistry sub-tiny atoms were able to be detected and their sub-miniscule weights actually measured. Measurement is the bane of the Underman. A Mole contains 6,022 x 10 to the 23rd power of atoms, an incredible incomprehensible number that still might weigh 12 grams or less. Astonishing. Beyond the comprehension hence belief of the Underman. As the process can’t be seen it can’t be believed.

In human intelligence the Englishman Francis Galton began to devise measuring devices of intelligence in 1865 shortly after Darwin announced Evolution in 1959. Thus uncertainty about mental capacity was eliminated. As Stoddard calls it, The Iron Law Of Inferiority. Biology and measuring excluded something like eighty-five percent of the population from the ranks of the most intelligent. Without that high measurement of intelligence 85% of the population was automatically excluded from the possibility of higher attainment while at the same time being prejudged.

Big strapping fellows, all man, were relegated to manual labor while wimps like perhaps, John D. Rockefeller, became billionaires. Not right, the big strapping fellows said, but not measuring up in intelligence, which they couldn’t see, they were condemned to the shovel for life.

Intelligence measuring tests were improved between 1865 and 1920 although not as accurate as could be desired. Men entering the armed forces in WWI were an excellent testing group. Of 1,700,000 tested intelligence levels were fairly accurately determined. It was then discovered that only four and a half percent were very bright with another seven or eight percent bright, while the huge bulk were C+ to C- descending from there.

One imagines Burroughs read this with extreme thoughtfulness.

So, now as the bulk of the good things were going to those who could do, what were those who couldn’t do about it? The great issue since 1789 has been equality; the Underman demanded equality as a first condition. He could organize. He could sabotage. He could rage. And that is what the Underman has done.

The Communist Party was formed. And what was their chief demand? Equality. Absolute equality. As they couldn’t rise to a natural equality then the only other feasible solution was to bring the Superior intelligences down to their level. Thus they raged against that great equalizer, education. Screw science, screw physics, screw chemistry, screw biology. Who needed what you couldn’t see and that especially included intelligence measuring?

One of ERB’s bete noires was the I.W.W.- The Industrial Workers Of The World, syndicalists. Imagine his reaction when he read this:

Quote:

Viewed in the abstract, technical sense, Syndicalism does not seem to present any specially startling innovations. It is when we examine the Syndicalists’ animating spirit, their general philosophy of life, and the manner which they propose to obtain their ends, that we realize we are in the presence of an ominous novelty,- the mature philosophy of the Under Man. This philosophy of the Under-Man is today called Bolshevism. Before the Russian Revolution it was known as Syndicalism. But Bolshevism and Syndicalism are basically one and the same thing. Soviet Russia has really invented nothing. It is merely practicing what others had been preaching for years- with such adaptation as normally attend the putting of theory into practice.

Syndicalism, as an organized movement, is primarily the work of two Frenchmen, Fernand Pelloutier and Georges Sorel. Of course, just as there were Socialist before Marx, so there were Syndicalists before Sorel. Syndicalism’s intellectual progenitor was Proudhon, who in his writings had closely sketched out the Syndicalist theory. As for Syndicalism’s savage, violent, uncompromising spirit, it is clearly Anarchist in origin., drawing its inspiration not only from Proudhon but also from Bakunin, [Johann] Most, and all the rest of that furious company of revolt.

Georges Sorel

Georges Sorel

“Revolt!” This is the essence of Syndicalism: a revolt, not merely against modern society but against Marxian Socialism as well. And the revolt was well timed. When, at the very end of the nineteenth century, Georges Sorel lifted the red banner of Syndicalism, the hour awaited the man. The proletarian world was full of discordant and disillusionment at the long dormant Marxian philosophy. Half a century had passed since Marx first preached his gospel, and the revolutionary millennium was nowhere in sight. Society had not become a world of billionaires and beggars. The great capitalists had not swallowed all. The middle classes still survived and prospered. Worst of all, from the revolutionary viewpoint, the upper grades of the working classes had prospered, too. The skilled workers were, in fact, becoming an aristocracy of labor. They were acquiring property and thus growing capitalistic; they were raising their living standards and thus growing bourgeois. Society seemed endowed with a strange vitality! It was even reforming many of the abuses which Marx had pronounced incurable. When, then, was the proletariat to inherit the earth?

The Proletariat! That was the key word. The van, and even the main body of society, might be fairly on the march, but behind lagged a rear guard. Here, were, first of all, the lower working class strata- the “manual” laborers in the narrower sense, relatively ill paid and often grievously exploited. Behind these again came a motley crew, the rejects and misfits of society. “Casuals” and “unemployables”, “down-and-outs” and declasses, victims of social evils, victims of bad heredity and their own vices, paupers, defectives, degenerates, and criminals- they were all there. They were there for many reasons, but they were all miserable, and they were all bound together by a certain solidarity- a sullen hatred of the civilization from which they had little to hope. To these people evolutionary, “reformist” socialism was cold comfort. Then came the Syndicalists promising, not evolution but revolution; not in the dim future but the here and now; not a bloodless “taking over” by “the workers” hypothetically stretched to include virtually the whole community, but the bloody “dictatorship” of The Proletariat in its narrow revolutionary sense.

Here, at last, was living hope- hope, and the prospect of revenge! Is it then strange that a few short years should have seen revolutionary Socialists, Anarchists, all the anti-social forces of the whole world grouped under the banner of Georges Sorel? For a time they went under different names syndicalists in France, Bolshevists in Russia, I.W.W.s in America but in reality they formed one army, enlisted in a single war.

Now, what was this war? It was, first of all, a war for the conquest of Socialism as a preliminary to the conquest of society. Everywhere the orthodox Socialist parties were fiercely assailed. And these Socialist assaults were formidable, because the orthodox Socialists possessed no moral line of defense. Their arms were palsied by the virus of their revolutionary tradition. For however evolutionary and non-militant the Socialists might have been in practice, in theory they had remained revolutionary their ethics continuing to be those of the “class war”, the destruction of the “possessing classes” and the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

The American economist, Carver, will describe the ethics of socialism in the following lines: “Marxian Socialism has nothing in common with idealistic Socialism. It rests not on persuasion, but on force. It does not profess to believe, as did the old idealists, that if socialism be lifted up it will draw all men to it. In fact, it has no ideals; it is materialistic and militant. Being materialistic and atheistic, it makes no use of such terms as right and justice, unless it be to quiet the consciences of those who still harbor such superstitions. It insists that these terms are mere conventionalities; the concepts mere bugaboos invented by the ruling caste to keep the masses under control. Except in a conventional sense, from this crude materialistic view there is neither a right or wrong, justice nor injustice, good or bad. Until people who still believe in such silly notions divest their minds of them they will never understand the first principles of Marxian socialism.

“Who creates our ideas of right and wrong?” asks the Socialist. “The ruling class. Why? To insure their domination over the masses by depriving them of the power to think for themselves. We, the proletarians, when we get into power, will dominate the situation; we shall be the ruling class; we shall determine who is right and wrong. Do you ask us if what we propose is just? What do you mean by justice? Do you ask if it is right? What do you mean by right? It will be good for us. That is all that right and justice ever did or ever can mean!
Unquote.

People ask what Burroughs believed? Was he a racist? Was he an anti-Semite? Well, Burroughs’ beliefs can be extrapolated from the above quote as well as Stoddard’s whole book. If Burroughs could have expressed himself concisely he would have written The Revolt Against Civilization. You don’t have to look any further.

There could be no more ardent anti-Communist, anti-Socialist, anti-IWW than ERB. The book was published five years after the Russian Revolution, a mere three years after the narrow quelling of the Communist disturbances of 1919 while in 1922 the Harding administration was putting the finishing touches on the suppression of that Communist revolution in the US. Make no mistake the crimes of 1919 were part of an American Bolshevik revolution. Things would not return to what Harding called normalcy but it would be a reasonable facsimile that would endure until the engineered great crash of 1929 opening the way for the Communist revolution of FDR in the US.

These were perilous times ERB was living in no less than those of today. One can’t be sure when Burroughs read Revolt but many of the same themes almost in quotation were employed in his 1926 novel The Moon Maiden. And from the Moon Maiden he went to the more sophisticated approaches of his great political novels from Tarzan At The Earth’s Core to Tarzan And The Lion Man.

As Stoddard thinks the Underman breeds at a very fast rate while the Overman limits his family the obvious consequence is that people of intelligence decrease rapidly in relation to the Underman. Of course Stoddard has all kinds of tables and charts to prove his point. As this was published in 1922 the results are heavily skewed to prove the English are the top of the heap; a result not uncongenial to Burroughs’ sensibilities.

One imagines that as of induction time in 1917-18 a great many of the recent immigrants at least had underdeveloped English language skills that affected the results but at this point it no longer matters; the general idea has been proved sound.

As we have a war between the Underman and the Overman and make no mistake, as far as Sorel and the Syndicalist/Bolshevik ideology goes it is a war to the knife, it may be asked what Stoddard’s formula for the Overman’s success might be.

This returns us to the Underman’s great fear that science, that is objective analysis supported by an array of facts will condemn him to the virtual condition of servitude. It might be surmised that this is an intolerable but inescapable conclusion unless education and science are destroyed reducing the more intelligent to the masses.

 

Stoddard then relying on Darwinian and Weismanian evolution and the notion of Eugenics introduced by Francis Galton resolves the problem by ending the reproduction of the ‘defective’ classes, that is, forced sterilization. Forced sterilization was actually employed. It is interesting that he never brings in the issue of race thus on the surface his book is neither racist for anti-Semitic. However as the book assumes that the superior intelligences are English or Nordic the text qualifies as anti-Semitic in Jewish eyes and hence has been placed on the Jewish Index Of Forbidden Literature.

One may be horrified at the Eugenic solution to the intelligence problem but one must be equally horrified at the Underman solution to their Overman problem. Liquidation is more horrifying than sterilization and Liquidation was employed by the Underman in Russia and will be employed again if they can consolidate their gains in the US and Europe today.

The problem is that while being founded in reality it is impossible in execution. The human mind is too subjective to be trusted with such a great responsibility. Many statues were placed on the books commanding forced sterilization and many such were executed.

Schools classes were organized based on supposed mental aptitudes. How objectively I will demonstrate by my own example. Until Jr. High in my home town schools did not systematically differentiate based on mental capacity, however at the end of the ninth grade just before I.Q. testing in the tenth there were three options, Trade School for those deemed not of academic ability, in other words destined for the labor force, and once in high school a division between business, that is white collar, and college prep. This was still a process of self-selection thus I signed up for high school however someone changed my papers to trade school.

Thus when I showed for classes at high school, I was told I was enrolled at trade school. Now, this was the fight of my life, and for it. I was told I was in trade school and to get out. I said I wasn’t leaving and sat down where I waited for four days for the situation to resolve itself. My argument was that the law required that I be given an education and it wouldn’t be at trade school. Whatever the behind the scenes machinations were I was reluctantly allowed to enter but they then insisted it would be business level while I demanded college prep. With an unexplained prescience I was told that I would never go to college so I should be in business. Nevertheless I won that struggle too.

I am sure that if enforced sterilization had been possible at the time I would have been compelled to undergo it.

Now, here’s the kicker. Came time for I.Q. tests and I placed in the upper four percent. I have no idea what the reaction to that was although my critics had to tone down their act. So human passions invalidated the whole Eugenic idea.

In other words there is no equable solution to this terrible human dilemma.

In that sense the solution offered by Aldus Huxley in his famous comic novel Brave New World is of some interest. In Huxley’s story he enlists science, chemistry, to produce different levels of mental competence. The zygote is nurtured in test tubes while at certain levels of development certain chemicals are introduced limiting the development of the fetus. Thus the labor problem is solved by creating classes only capable of menial tasks. The upper classes are bred like race horses to various degrees of excellence. Huxley was tongue in cheek to be sure but, actually the only solution to this otherwise insoluble problem.

Stoddard didn’t introduce any ideas to which Burroughs wasn’t already familiar and in agreement. At best Stoddard’s superb research and explication clarified ERB’s understanding for him. I don’t know how familiar he was with Georges Sorel. Today Sorel is unknown except to specialists although I am beginning to see his name pop up so with the Communist regime of Barack Obama perhaps the way is being prepared for Sorel’s extreme measures of exterminating the Overman.

At any rate I have come to the opinion that Richard Slotkin is correct in thinking the Burroughs had read and was in accord with both Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. However Slotkin evaluates their work through the distortion of his own Communistic lens which is only valid to those of his point of view.

His view does not make Burroughs a racist or anti-Semite. It makes him an objective and accurate observer and analyst of the situation of his time. As indicated above Burroughs absorbed Stoddard’s information, that point of view and used it to create his wonderful works of the late twenties and first half of the thirties. If one bears Stoddard’s book in mind while reading those novels it will make them make great sense while presenting his view of the political and social situation

Of course the novels are not confined solely to dealing with these issues; Burroughs had a much more far ranging mind, both subjectively and objectively.

Stoddard’s The Revolt Against Civilization is a major study as relevant today as the day it was written. The last ninety years have only borne out his theses. The Revolt Against Civilization is well worth a read, perhaps two. At any rate you will have an accurate idea of Burroughs’ social and political beliefs.

Chap. 6, Marianne Faithfull: Faerie Queene Of The Sixties

by

R.E. Prindle

Chapter 6

Orders From Headquarters

This chapter will center around the Global Communist Cultural Revolution phase kicked off in 1968 while being managed by Mao Tse Tung who replaced the Russians as managing director.

The purpose of the CR was to destroy the Bourgeois past replacing it with itself. Hence Ira Levin who wrote Rosemary’s Baby in which Satan’s child is named Andy posited 1966 as the Year One much as the failed new dating of the French Revolution of 1789. ‘89 was the Year One of that Revolutionary calendar. Perhaps in preparation for the CR in 1965 in the US new immigration reform was pushed through Congress that opened the gates of the US to the world, especially Africa, Mexico and the East. By 1968 West and East Asians were flooding into the country. As seems obvious now this was with the intent to subvert and destroy the Aryan hold on the US.

In his song Bob Dylan would sing: In the museums infinity goes up on trial, in an opening blast on destroying past culture as displayed in museums. In China Mao was less timorous as huge gangs of the Red Guards coursed through museums smashing irreplaceable cultural artefacts. They even invaded peoples homes ransacking the houses destroying anything of value. Culture bearers such as college professors or any educated persons were rounded up and sent out to reeducation camps to work at manual labor; tens of millions were murdered outright. Regular people were called before neighborhood re-education cells to confess their bourgeois faults and pledge to Communists faults.

Outside of China local agents were recruited from Communist ranks; college campuses suddenly sprouted Chinese Communist stores selling Mao’s Little Red Book and those pretty little pins sporting a

Chairman Mao Ze Dong

Chairman Mao Ze Dong

gold Mao against a red enameled background. Nice work and cheap too. Any campus that hadn’t been disrupted by ‘Free Speech Movements’ now came under attack by the Cultural Revolution. The end result would be Kent State.

As no one knew what was going on the Cultural Revolutionists seized the institutions beginning to establish the tone, the matrix with which opinions would be considered. This was established in subtle ways that few noticed and even they hadn’t a clue as to who or why. The Revolutionists had seized the cultural venues of movies, TV, newspapers, magazines and music, or, recordings. One of the key units in recorded music was the Rolling Stones. Mick was a Communist, at least since his London School of Economics days.

Even before the Redlands Bust he had been bleating that victory was his side’s because ‘they had the kids’ in the palm of their hands. The bust had been a cold douche that rankled Mick to his core. The revolutionists were of the mind set that they were going to fight and win and never lose. Thus the mild reprimand of the bust struck Mick as foul play, an unforgivable insult and injury.

Many people in the US were brought up short when their outrages were tried and sentences passed. I know people who went to prison for their outrageous criminal acts. They were considered martyrs. They couldn’t comprehend what they had done wrong anyway. Of course, by their own revolutionary lights what they had done was right; unfortunately the law, the authorities and the people, who Nixon called the Silent Majority were not of the same mind.

Mick found this out to his chagrin although he vowed revenge. Like Sigmund Freud and many another if he couldn’t move the higher powers he would enlist the aid of the lower. Thus after escaping his prison sentence the Stones metamorphosed into Satanic sorcerers for the cover of their Dec. 1968 album, Their Satanic Majesties Request.

Mick After A Lifetime  Walking Down The Long And Winding Road

The title itself was a play on the Queen’s request on British passports for the visited countries to allow the visitor to pass. Thus in the Freudian sense Mick elevated himself to a competing royal status with the crown as their Satanic enemy. One presumes that being a Stones’ fan was the entre into Satanic circles.

Mick was not new to Satanic ideas. He ran with Bob Fraser and Chris Gibbs while having at least met the US Satanist Kenneth Anger who was associated with the West Coast big daddy of Satanists, Anton La Vey. In addition he was probably already known to Donald Cammell who would star Mick in his film Performance and Marianne in his Lucifer Rising.

In June of ‘68 Mick would be recording his song Sympathy For The Devil in studio while being filmed by Jean Luc Godard for his revolutionary film One+One, retitled Sympathy For The Devil. Sympathy was inspired by Satanic Russian novel titled: The Master And Margarita. The novel had been given to him to read by Marianne.

The Master And Margarita

For the promoters of The Master And Margarita the novel is an astounding mind blower. Maybe if you’re Russian and haven’t been exposed to the stunning variety of truly astonishing unending mind blowing fiction and movies of the US. The cultural scene in Russia was primitive compared to the unbroken line of development in the West where very few limitations, none actually, were placed on expression. Bulgakov has his Satanic girls running around without clothes as though that were something not routine in the West. I mean, beginning in the sixties there was a pornographic explosion. Movies were made that would have made the Marquis de Sade blush. That poor guy was egregiously defamed according to current standards. De Sade’s puerile novels were thrown into the shade. By 1972 a movie like Deep Throat was being shown in legitimate theaters to the general public. How’s that for a cultural revolution?

Before the wars we had Edgar Rice Burroughs whose female characters on both Earth and Mars ran around robust except for a few ornaments. Woo woo Bulkagov.

My god, we had the Shadow and Doc Savage and then in the thirties comic books were invented. Superman was born the same year I was in 1938 but he grew up faster and already had a job by 1948 while I was sitting in the orphanage as a kid. Superman, Batman, Capt. America came in a flood of characters that was unceasing. There were marvels presented every month that exceeded anything Bulgakov can come up with. And then…and then…William C. Gaines at EC Comics (Educational Comics, and what an education it was) came out with Tales From The Crypt with its copycats. You want to talk about mind blowing!!! There I was a ten year old kid permeated with terrific pornographic images, sadistic violence and mayhem that even I said, reading on, they shouldn’t let ten year old kids see this. I don’t know what kind of brain damage they did but I feel OK. But they did and I read every single story. Now that was mind expanding.

Of course the parents of America did catch up with Gaines forcing him to withdraw the comics. Then as if to thumb his nose at the United Parents of America he created the aptly named Mad Magazine. Boy oh boy, those were the days. Never see those again.

And then the science fiction through the fifties. My god. There was school and there was school and the best school was the sci-fi. Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End, John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos and its two movies The Village Of The Damned and the sequel Children Of The Damned. I mean, Jack Schaefer and William Tenn. Try to top those two. The movie Dr. Strangelove Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. Christ! And for God’s sake the stunning James Bond movies. I could go on an on. The clearly Satanic Bus Stop TV series. Jesus Christ! All the scripts could have been written by Charlie Starkweather. All that and more. Much, much more before 1967 when M&M was published. Since then, I mean, have you seen the TV shows Dexter or Breaking Bad? Hell on wheels, guys, hell on wheels. All men to their battle stations. It’s not that M&M isn’t decent sci-fi/fantasy/horror, but that’s all it is. Doesn’t even compare with Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But, then, maybe I’m over educated. Still, I think of myself as an average All American Boy.

Hey, have you seen A Giant Crab Come Forth? I have. Have you seen a single octopus tentacle demolish the city of San Francisco? I have. Have you seen the eggplant that ate Chicago…I could go on.

I don’t know how deeply or extensively the Russian author Mikhail Bugakov’s novel has penetrated the Western mind. It was certainly unknown in the sixties except to the initiated. Definitely not a best seller. I can’t remember ever hearing of it until the turn of the century when references to it as a literary marvel began popping up in my reading. In 2010 the book was published as a selection of the Folio Society of which I have been a long time member and so I acquired a copy. I have read it twice and while I recognize its purpose I am unimpressed with it as a novel.

Essentially a manual of social deconstruction the book is being heavily promoted in Communist circles. In Russia the book has been turned into a TV series, at least a couple movies and several stage plays for Western consumption.

In addition to the book I have acquired a three disc set of Vladimir Bercko’s film version and the TV series. The blurb on the back cover gives some idea of what the book means to its promoters:

Quote:

…An imagined world where one’s consciousness actually perceives and experiences sorcery. The Master And Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, the novel on which this film is based, is a rare, mind-expanding pleasure, a journey whenever one takes and reads. The book is about the great, burning, perennial areas of the human predicament, story of the Christ, seen by Matthew, Judas and Pilate; the tale of Faust’s pact with the devil; the confrontation between individual genius and the demands of an ideologically driven State; the meaning of entertainment in society; and the love of man and woman. Bulgakov is an early precursor of the literary genre of magic realism exemplified by the South American writers Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Unquote.

The above seems somewhat overblown to me; about the only thing I would agree to unequivocally is that it is of the sci-fi/fantasy/horror genre. Its actual purpose is as a manual for disrupting society, of cultural upending; in other words, of furthering the Cultural Revolution.

After the novel was finished , in a long post-climax, this passage is inserted into the novel.

Quote:

…the two blackguards marched down the asphalt path under the lindens straight to the veranda of the unsuspecting restaurant.

A pale and bored citizeness in white socks and a white beret with a nib sat on a Viennese chair at the corner entrance to the veranda, where amid the greenery of the trellis an opening for the entrance had been made. In front of her on simple kitchen table lay a fat book of the ledger variety, in which the citizeness for unknown reasons wrote down all those who entered the restaurant. It was precisely this citizeness who stopped Koroviev and Behemoth.

‘Your identification cards?’ She was gazing in amazement at Koroviev’s pince nez, and also at Behemoth’s primus and Behemoth’s torn elbow.

‘A thousand pardons, but what identification cards?’ asked Koroviev in surprise.

‘You’re writers?’ The citizeness asked in her turn.

‘Unquestionably,’ Koroviev answered with dignity.

‘My sweetie…’ Koroviev began tenderly.

‘I’m no sweetie,’ interrupted the citizeness.

‘More’s the pity,’ Koroviev said disappointedly and went on: ‘Well, so, if you don’t want to be a sweetie, which would be quite pleasant, you don’t have to be. So, then, to convince yourself that Dostoevsky was a writer, do you have to ask for his identification card? Just take any five pages from any one of novels and you’ll be convinced, without any identification card that you’re dealing with a writer? And I don’t think he even had an identification card, what do you think?’

‘…You’re not Dostoevsky,’ said the citizeness who was getting muddled by Koroviev.

‘Well, who knows, who knows,’ he replied.

‘Dostoevsky’s dead.’ Said the citizeness…

‘I protest!’ Behemoth exclaimed hotly. ‘Dostoevsky is immortal!’

‘Your identification cards, citizens,’ said the citizeness.

Unquote.

This passage served as a blueprint for obstructionists. Passing into common use by the late seventies Village Fucks of this variety harassed innocent clerks to distraction. As an instruction manual how then did the book fit into the continuum of the proto-Cultural Revolution from the end of WWI to the present, for there is a question of authorship found here.

The passage concerning Koroviev and Behemoth might well have been written by the Dadaists of the Café Voltaire in Zurich. Their efforts were meant to disorient European culture, knock it off center. Themselves Jewish they were followed by the establishment of the Jewish Critical Theory school in Germany. Critical Theory meant that European customs, ideas and politics were to be denigrated whether virtues or vices as though by superior beings viewing from above and apart. This led to the debunking school of the twenties in the US by which all American heroes were attacked turning their virtues into vices and vices as evidence of ghastly criminality. Eventually the Critical Theorists would leave Germany migrating to the US en masse along with the entire Freudian psycho-analytic establishment. How this must have cheered Hitler.

One then begins to see the similarities between The Master And Margarita and this Jewish continuum. The protagonist of the novel was Satan going by the name of Woland (Woe to the Land) who was a master hypnotist dealing in counterfeiting.

Woland is almost a duplicate of Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse who was also a counterfeiter and a master hypnotist. He also was out to destroy European society. Lang’s first effort was the silent flick Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler of 1922 which it is possible Bulgakov might seen but the events of the Russian Civil War make that improbable. There is no chance that Bulgakov could have seen Lang’s talkie sequel of 1933 The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse in which Dr. Mabuse having been placed in an insane asylum in 1922 has hypnotized his analyst, Dr. Baum, through his writing, into carrying out his subversive schemes. While Bulgakov couldn’t have been influenced by Lang the similarities are so close one may posit a central organization directing the publication of books and movies of this sort. This becomes more evident when one looks for similarities in the US.

In the US a coordinating agency had been founded in 1906 called the American Jewish Committee, the AJC, under the direction of Jacob Schiff and Louis Marshall. Those are two names that don’t mean much outside of Jewish circles but they should. Louis Marshall’s collected correspondence is very interesting.

Now, the Great War of 1914-18 devastated Europe to be following by the greater devastation of WWII from approximately 1938 to 1945. At the same time in the Far East Japan opened hostilities that engulfed and unsettled that area beginning in the 1930s also through 1945. Hostilities continued in China through 1950 between the Communists and the Nationalists aided and abetted by massive shipments of US arms which even though granted to the Nationalists passed directly into Communist hands and then the Korean conflict began that ran through 1953.

In contrast the US and North America were not directly affected by these wars allowing permitting a unique uninterrupted culture to develop.

This period also coincided with astonishing technological advances that only the US was able to take full advantage. Thus radio became a reality beginning in the twenties although it didn’t become commercially effective until the early thirties. Perhaps even more significant was the introduction of sound to movies. The talkies made movies the most effective propaganda tool available until the emergence of television in the fifties.

As is probably not all that well known TV was commercially feasible in the late thirties but WWII postponed its introduction into homes until after the war.

Significantly the first successful talkie was the Jewish themed The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson. Following that would be the series of films featuring the Marx Bros. Their movies would mesh with the Dada attack in art and the emerging Critical Theory school riding over a bed of Freudian psychology. All were direct attacks on Aryan Culture. As Joseph Goebbels told Fritz Lang when he denied a license to show The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse: No government could withstand propaganda if its kind. The truth of Goebbels statement was proven in 2008 with the US election of the Communist Barack Obama. After decades of the most vitriolic criticism and denunciation of US politics and society by the Left, all of a sudden such criticism was denied the opposition who were described as Domestic Terrorists and denied access to the media with the exception of the internet.

So, from 1930 to 1954 the Marx Bros. systematically mocked and vilified as many social institutions and Aryan mores as they could. In Germany before the wars this was called the Kultur kampf or culture wars, an early version of the Cultural Revolution. And of course the same program was carried on in films in general. Naturally it was all denied but now looking at those same films through the new spectacles provided post 9/11 it all seems clear and apparent. One sees with new eyes. Thus there are great similarities between the techniques of the Marx Bros. and The Master And Margarita.

What I consider the greatest of the Marx Bros. movies, although the Marx Bros. didn’t appear in it, was the movie of the Year One, 1966, A Funny Think Happened On The Way To The Forum starring the very Jewish Zero Mostel. The movie was the ultimate instruction manual for the demolition of society that The Master And Margarita follows very closely. Forum appeared in 1966 in the US while M&M was discovered in Russia the very same year #1. A succession of similarly themed movies followed of which the most significant perhaps was the movie Cabaret.

The question of the provenance of The Master And Margarita remains. Its similarities to the cultural trend of the previous decades is too strong to be coincidental. It is possible that in old religious terms the book could be called a pious fraud, something along the lines of The Protocols of Zion.

The provenance is certainly somewhat suspect. According to the legend that is impossible to adequately check, the novel was labored over for ten years by Bulgakov at which time he realized that Stalin would take the novel as a personal affront insuring that it would never be published while he would end up in the infamous Lubyanka Prison where in all likelihood he would receive a bullet to the base of his skull. No, better to put it in a drawer and forget about it until a better day should a better day ever come.

So who was Mikhail Bulgakov? He was apparently a novelist and a playwright. As improbable as it may seem, during the Russian civil war between the Communist Reds and the Royalist Whites after the Great War ended he was on the side of the Whites. In Revolutionary terminology white referred to the white cockade of the French royalists and not the color or their skin. Nevertheless according to legend he was a favorite of Stalin who actually favored this enemy of the State. Wouldn’t let his stuff be published but still thought him a fine fellow worth preserving. Bulgakov survived all the purges so common to the era.

Time passes, WWII, the rape of the German women, the Atom Bomb, the Korean War, the death of Stalin in 1953 while the precious manuscript sits quietly yellowing in its drawer. I might add that five hundred hand written pages fills a good sized drawer.

Beria and Khruschev follow Stalin followed in turn by Leonid Brezhnev and then this astonishing twist of fate happened. From the Orlando Figes Folio introduction:

Quote:

After Bulgakov’s death in 1940, the manuscript was hidden in a drawer by Elena Sergeevna until 1966, when, by one of the most ironic twists in Russian literary history, unknown until recently, it was prepared for publication by Konstantin Simonov, one of Stalin’s henchmen in the Writers’ Union who had taken part in the persecution of many writers before the Khruschev thaw. In 1956 Simonov had been made the chairman of the commission in charge of Bulgakov’s literary estate by the writer’s widow, who was an old acquaintance of Simonov’s mother, Alexandra Ivanisheva. (nee Princess Obolenskaya). Simonov then gave the manuscript ..to his ex-wife Evgenia Laskina, who was the working at Moskva (Magazine)…

Unquote.

To make a long story short, Moskva was a failing magazine and as there was great doubt in Simonov’s mind as to whether it would pass the censorship of now premier Leonid Brezhnev’s stringent rule he, I guess, decided to let his ex-wife take the fall if it didn’t pass. Better her than him and a subtle revenge indeed. But, why even take the chance against apparently insuperable odds.

Well, golly, the book did get past some very stupid or traitorous censors and the rest, as they say, is history, although the time line is very tight.

Moskva published Part One in its November 1967 issue doubling its subscriber list Moscow was so bowled over, and Part Two in January 1968. Now, Marianne received a copy of the translation of the American Grove Press imprint, read it, got it to Mick who by the June recording sessions for Sympathy For The Devil had read and digested it. Not much time in there for the Russian publication, translation into English and publication and distribution by the Grove Press, shipment to England and acquisition by Marianne. I mean, what was the big rush for something that might not sell? Therefore I believe something else must have been uppermost in certain minds. As I said earlier this book reeks of a fraud or forgery. Its happened before. The Donation Of Constantine as an egregious example.

The 1997 Hollywood movie Wag The Dog demonstrated exactly how it is done. In Wag The Dog the President of the US asks a Hollywood producer to stage a phony war to shore up his flagging popularity. The producer does this but as Shakespeare wrote: What a tangled web we weave when first we deceive. As the variables unfold in unforeseen manner the producer’s ingenuity is strained but equal to the task. He creates a war hero who while on the way to the ceremony dies. Consequently he manufacturers a sentimental story about Schumacher, the dead would be hero, who they dub Old Shoe.

The producer contacts a couple songwriters, explains his needs and they come up with an old timey 20s-30s type country cum folk ditty. The performance is doctored to sound like a scratchy old 78RPM.

Now, here’s the key point. It is arranged to place a copy of this forgery in the appropriate thirties archive location in The Library Of Congress. Miracle of miracles the forgery is ‘discovered’ becoming a hit generating a worshipful attitude for ‘Old Shoe.’ Old Shoe is buried in Arlington Cemetery, full military honors and mission accomplished.

There you have it- that was a forgery no different than, say, The Donation of Constantine or The Protocols of Zion.

The question then is why did The Master And Margarita surface in Year One in 1966 in time for the Cultural Revolution already begun actually but not announced by Mao until 1968, Year Three.

Quite simply it was necessary to place an instruction manual into the hands of certain key people and agitators. The passage I quoted at the beginning of this chapter is an example of a lesson. Mick received his copy through Marianne and understood. How then did this unknown Russian novel immediately find its way into Marianne’s hands upon publication of the English translation of Grove Press?

I mean, how did the Jewish translator, Mirra Ginsburg, receive a copy immediately after the Russian book publication. I imagine she didn’t. The window of opportunity between January 1968 and end of May 1968 is too narrow. She must have been involved either immediately after the Moskva publication of Part One or possibly even before. Therefore that indicates a plan by somebody.

We know for a fact that the novel as published was not as written by Bulgakov. We are told that several hands altered the text including various censors. A full sixty pages were deleted in Mirra Ginsburg’s translation to be restored thirty years later…to reflect what?

There is plenty of reason then to believe the book was a put up job or, indeed, intended as a disguised instruction manual for easier distribution to interested parties…like Mick.

Mick when he received his copy immediately began to write or conceive the lyrics for Sympathy For The Devil. Satan the key figure in the novel is a master magician and hypnotist. He hypnotizes virtually the entire city of Moscow. As a refresher on continuity lets remember that Dr. Sigmund Freud was a master hypnotist seeking the destruction of European civilization and so was Lang’s Dr. Mabuse who was based on Freud.

We know that Bulgakov couldn’t have been aware of Lang’s Mabuse and I doubt that Bulgakov was much of a Freudian so that leaves forgery as the most probable explanation. As a point of fact the AJC, American Jewish Committee, has employed a stable of writers in the US since at least the thirties to churn out plausibly academic diatribes condemning those they consider anti-Semites. The AJC was global in scope having been active in European politics from its beginning so it would be easy enough to concoct The Master And Margarita either in toto or possibly a revision and claim to have discovered it in a drawer in 1966 The Year One by one Simon-ov in much the same manner that the fictional ‘Old Shoe’ was discovered in the Library Of Congress.

Jean Luc Godard

In an interview Mick said that the Master and Margarita influenced the writing of Sympathy For The Devil. In the furtherance of the Cultural Revolution Jean Luc Godard of the French Nouvelle Vague school of film makers made his revolutionary movie One+One, reissued as Sympathy For The Devil filming the Stones recording the song. So the Stones are placed in the heart of The Cultural Revolution.

Mick was fully aware of hypnosis as, actually, were a very great many of the rockers, so that he and Keith set the piece to a Samba rhythm. As Mick said in the interview the Samba is a very hypnotic rhythm. Thus, by creating a hypnotic mode everyone would receive the lyrics as suggestion. The suggestion being that the devil is a good fellow and one should have sympathy for him discarding one’s prejudices. There was actually a strong effort to rehabilitate Satan in the years following Year One. It will be remembered that both Mick and Marianne were tight with the Satanist Kenneth Anger who had a huge LUCIFER tattooed across his chest. Marianne would later perform in Anger’s Lucifer Rising while Mick performed a soundtrack for another of Anger’s offerings.

Kenneth Anglemeyer aka Kenneth Anger

Kenneth Anglemeyer aka Kenneth Anger

Mick beginning shortly after Year Three would turn his act into performance art of a highly suggestive nature accompanied by an intentional hypnotic beat with stun gun volume, flashing lights and the stimulated hysteria of the crowd reaction. A proper atmosphere for hypnotic suggestion.

Mick’s vengeance for the drug bust then was to play the Pied Piper to lead the ‘kids’ to their destruction.

Marianne would be a casualty of his mania as she sank into the deepest of depression.

Chapter 7 follows.

EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS VS. THE COMIC BOOK HEROES

by

R.E. Prindle

 

Adventures In The Unconscious

In the attempt to put together a historical puzzle the missing piece or pieces, the clarifying pieces, appear from time to time. Thus with the release of the movie, Captain America this year a significant piece of the puzzle falls into place that clarifies the role of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his literary creations in the panorama of the twentieth century- the fabulous twentieth century.

It is difficult today to conceive of how the early twentieth century was perceived as a complete break with the Victorian nineteenth. One only has to compare the streamlined Santa Fe Chief in this picture alongside a nineteenth century locomotive to see how the Twentieth Century was perceived as the century of absolute exciting progress. The time certainly justified General Electric’s motto: Progress is our most important product.

Twentieth Century Unlimitied. Santa Fe Super Chief Alongside Nineteenth Century Locomotive- San Diego Calif. Back when the future was something to look forward to.

Burroughs role in this fabulous century is essentially the story of how Edgar Rice Burroughs created the concept of the super hero on the cusp of the emergent movie and comic book industries. It is in the latter two industries that the super hero found his definition.

Photographing The Past- Edgar Rice Burroughs

Just as in the days of yore mankind projected its needs in the psychological projection of Gods so the twentieth century saw the beginning of the demise of the old gods and the birth of the new. While the creators of the Old Gods have disappeared into the mists of time, and there must have been human creators of the Gods, the creators of the new gods can be easily traced.

The predecessors of the Superheroes can be found in the rise of the mega intellects of the nineteenth century detectives such as Monsieur LeCoq, Sherlock Holmes and arch fiends such as Dr. Moriarty and the French Fantomas. Influenced by such as these Edgar Rice Burroughs created the actual prototypes of the mid-century superheroes in the characters of John Carter of Mars and Tarzan The Ape Man. While John Carter is less well known than Tarzan, who became a household word within a half dozen years of his creation, Carter truly had super human powers having been transported from the higher gravity of Earth to the lower gravitational field of Mars, or Barsoom, as Burroughs renamed the planet.

While not able to leap over tall buildings his saltational powers functioned at a level of efficiency unattained by any other Barsoomian. For a decade or so Burroughs had the superhero field to himself while his lessons sunk in to the minds of those following him.

The Shadow Knows

The two most significant men of extraordinary if not super human powers to follow Tarzan and John Carter were Maxwell Grant’s superb character, The Shadow and Lester Dent’s Doc Savage. Preceding the comic book character Superman by a few years Doc Savage was actually advertised as a superman, undoubtedly in reference to Nietzsche.

Then in the early thirties in addition to movies, in which Tarzan was a stellar attraction, the modern comic book or magazine came into existence. Of course newspaper comic strips had been developing from the turn of the century but the actual comic book was a development of the thirties.

As fate would have it the comic book industry like the movie industry became a province of the Jews.

Doc Savage- The Man Of Bronze And Crew

Thus two streams of influence formed comic book heroes. On the one hand the Jewish writers and cartoonists were influenced by John Carter, Tarzan, The Shadow, and Doc Savage and on the other by a fifteenth century Jewish super creature known as the Golem. This was a creature fashioned from clay, as per Adam of the Old Testament, by a Prague Rabbi named Loewe who breathed life into his creation as God had breathed life into Adam. The Golem was created to wreak vengeance on Jewish victims as a sort of avenger as would be the status and role of the latter day Jewish superheroes of the comic books.

First out of the box in 1938 was the prototype of the rest of the comic book heroes, Superman. Like Burroughs with his creations the two Jewish creators built Superman’s origins from the Biblical story of the Exodus. Tarzan of course was born to noble English parents in Darkest Africa who then died or were killed by the Great Apes while the she ape, Kala, snatched him from the cradle and raised him as an ape.

Superman was born of noble parents on the planet Krypton which was about to be destroyed, and sent on a rocket ship to Earth while his parents died. On Earth he was raised by kindly goy Earth people. Thus we have two different versions of Moses in the bullrushes. Superman, then, combined John Carter and Tarzan.

Superman was a good thing in commercial terms being the equivalent of a literary best seller. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery so that while Superman imitated Burroughs’ great characters a host of comic book superheroes soon trod in Superman’s footsteps. Next in 1939 there was Batman, probably the most successful of the Jewish superheroes, and then in 1940 the temporarily successful Captain America, really the product of WWII, losing his popularity with the end of the war. The most successful of all the superheroes was the strange goyish creation, Capt. Marvel but he doesn’t concern us here.

2.

From Out Of The Unconscious Depths

 

The above is very interesting I’m sure but what significance does it have; what is its meaning; what is going on? Well, the back story is very interesting indeed. One must remember that our lives are not lived in a social vacuum of unrelated incidents. All is part of a continuum that does not just happen but is created by the participants. All is a drive to attain a desire. The question is who are the participants? As has already been indicated, the Jews and the Gentiles or goyim. From what do those desires arise? Suggestion. Suggestions having been received, when a body of suggestions have been ingested, our minds begin to digest those suggestions. One then interprets the suggested reality according to one’s temperament which itself has been built on a body of suggestions.

All society is education, indoctrination and conditioning, in other words hypnotic suggestion. Burroughs was born in 1875 as the scientific revolution was in an advanced stage of development; by 1893 when Burroughs was seventeen the whole of human knowledge and scientific advances was put on exhibition at the Chicago Columbian Exposition. The Expo was probably the high water mark in Western Civilization or, at least, its confidence in itself. The Expo was an unparalleled achievement of human endeavor far surpassing all expos of the nineteenth century with the possible exception of the 1851 London Exposition. Interestingly both were burned to the ground by anti-civilization elements. The Columbian Expo of 1893 was the most powerful element of Burroughs’ education.

Shortly before the boy’s birth in 1875 the character of immigration changed. In 1871 Jews from the eastern European Pale of Settlement began to flood the country until in 1914 possibly half of European Jewry had been transferred to the United States. The great immigration myth is that the immigrants were assimilated into the ‘Melting Pot’ of the United States; nothing could be further from the truth. The immigrants merely transferred their national cultures to the United States where because they were compelled to speak English it appeared that they had been assimilated. In reality the immigrants came to the sparsely populated United States where they established an outremer population on the New Island as the Irish had it, a new Sicily, a new Zion etc. They came in such numbers that they actually were colonists. The old cultures were merely adapted to the new realities and developed along side the Native peoples.

These alien or invading cultures then shaped the development of the United States in their image as much as possible. Thus they were able to blame their cultural shortcomings on ‘America’ while emphasizing their virtues as their own. Hence ‘America’ developed into a sort of dirty word, a catchall for the crimes of the immigrant cultures. This state of affairs was masked until the Great War when the social conflicts came into the open and were immediately subsumed into the Communist ideology after 1917.

Young Burroughs observed this immigration phenomenon or suggestion with misgivings associating himself with Nativist views although he remained independent to our knowledge of association with Nativist organizations. Thus while interpretations of these social suggestions are found through out his early writings the conflict didn’t come to a head until after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in what became the USSR as Russia disappeared from the map. With all the national dissidents operating under the rubric of Communism the world was divided into us and them- ostensibly Communism and Capitalism. The dichotomy was created by the Communists. However each national culture could function with representatives in each camp while furthering their parochial objectives.

It was a new world the morning after the Bolshevik Revolution. Burroughs immediately came into collision with the new realities. As this new world was us and them it was possible to hate Communism while retaining virtue in the Capitalist camp. However one couldn’t detest national, religious or racial components even though they may have been Communists. As Communists always denied being Communists one was always dealing with cultural groups that dissembled their Communism.

When Burroughs began his career in literature even as he wrote the movies began to assume a transcendent place in US and world culture. By the end of the second decade it was evident that movies were where the big money was. That’s when Burroughs’ troubles began.

He quickly ran afoul of the Communists who controlled publishing and the Jews who controlled the movies. The Communists wished to suppress all non-Communist writers who refused to put out the Communist message. The Jews wished to discourage all criticism of their activities. Burroughs was marked out as one to be destroyed.

Rabbi Silver- A History Of Messianic Speculation In Israel, 1927

Behind the Communist outrage and obscured by it was the Jewish attempt to realize the Messianic age which assault was begun in Europe and the United States in 1913 and was to continue to 1928 according to Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver. While the assault was violent in Europe emanating from the transformation of Russia to the USSR, in the United States it was more peaceable after the violent year of 1919 while being conducted on a propagandistic and social level buttressed by the doctrines of Sigmund Freud as executed by his nephew and disciple Edward L. Bernays and others. You should become acquainted with Edward Bernays if you aren’t already.

Among the first of these propagandistic efforts was the promulgation of a ‘Jewish Bill Of Rights.’ This document along with a questionnaire was sent to the prominent men and women of America to discover their ‘anti-Semitic’ propensities. Burroughs failed this test so that he was black balled in Hollywood after 1922. The blacklist was broken by Joseph Kennedy and his FBO Studios in 1928. MGM then stepped in with a different approach from blacklisting. They bought the movie rights to Tarzan from Burroughs for much less than a song. Burroughs then was essentially neutralized in 1931 while MGM acquired the supreme super hero Tarzan to shape or mishape as they pleased. Within a few years there were not many who remembered that there was a literary Tarzan. My amazement when I learned there were Tarzan books when I was twelve in 1950 was a revelation of the first order.

The movies were able, of course, to shape all the goy literary heroes from Frankenstein to Sherlock Holmes into their own intellectual mold from then into the present while comic books added Jewish superheroes to displace them.

3.

 

Tired Old Man- Easy To Manipulate

The planned Jewish revolution hadn’t succeeded by 1928 but the groundwork had been laid leaving the future promising and open. While in the US the Jews were able to sweep all opposition aside even to the extent of putting their creature, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, into the White House for an unprecedented four terms, in Europe unexpected opposition occurred when Wolf Hitler was elected chancellor of German in 1933. While having their creatures Joseph Stalin as Premier of the USSR and FDR in the USA with Popular Front governments if office throughout Europe with the exception of Germany, Italy and Spain, the Jews seemed to be in a position to realize their millennium.

Indoctrination and conditioning was still important in the US thus when sound movies were introduced at the very end of the twenties and the comic book in the early thirties the Jews had two of the most powerful propaganda tools available under their ownership and control.

Their need in the thirties was to isolate and marginalize the Nativist opposition. This would be achieved in the forties wartime conditions when FDR had the prominent Nativists arrested and charged with sedition. At that point the Jews had succeeded in capturing the government and mind of the country although a long mopping up process would be necessary into the fifties and sixties. Thus while Wolf Hitler rounded up Jews in Europe, Jews were rounding up Nativists Americans in the US while advising any dissidents to keep their heads low.

The movies and comic books would play a big role in indoctrinating Americans to believe that the Nativists were Fascists and/or Nazis and not true Americans. It was at this time that Edward L. Bernays succeeded in changing the definition of Democracy from that of individual opportunity to recognition of groups having rights to a share of government based on group identity rather than individual identity. This would be a key concept as the century developed.

4.

 

After the Bolshevik Revolution the American reaction to Communism was strongly against it. The Communist Party was even outlawed for a time until the Fellow Travelers and Parlor Pinks had the ban lifted. The silent movies of the twenties then were not heavily influenced by the Reds although as indicated the Tarzan movies of Edgar Rice Burroughs were blacklisted. By the thirties the Reds were better organized while with the arrival of sound playwrights capable of producing dialog were needed. The Red exodus to Hollywood began.

The US Communist Party as with all national Communist Parties, was a majority or plurality Jewish affair to the point where an attack on one was an attack on the other. Thus as the thirties advanced the drum roll for US involvement in a war against the Nazis began. This would involve the formation in the US of an opposition led by the America First Committee which was opposed to any involvement in foreign wars as a reaction. As this was opposed to Jewish wishes the America First Committee was designated as Fascist while its putative leader, Charles Lindbergh was designated Hitler’s stooge.

Samuel Dickstein- Congressman From Hell

In order to discredit the opposition, no sooner was FDR sworn in than Samuel Dickstein, a Jewish representative from New York, began to agitate for a House Un-American Activities Committee to stamp out Nativist opposition. As Dickstein was a Soviet agent this meant that the Nativist opposition was un-American while the Jewish Roosevelt government were the true Americans. So, the Jews were well on the way to usurping the American identity which the comic book superheroes represented. Dickstein was successful in establishing his HUAC committee in 1938 but the chair eluded him and went to a real American, Martin Dies of Texas, who then used the committee to harass Communists as well as ‘Fascists’ much to the dismay of Dickstein and FDR.

Hollywood in support of Dickstein began turning out anti-German movies and by implication anti-Nativist well in advance of American involvement in 1942. Involvement in the European conflict was of course brought about by forcing Japan to declare war on the US in late ‘41.

The comic book industry forming about 1932 was becoming real by 1938 when the two Jews from Cleveland devised their Golem character Superman followed by Batman and Captain America. The comic book heroes fell in with the anti-German propaganda. If the Jews, British and FDR were not yet openly promoting the war against Germany the tendency was well formed in that direction.

All those comics were openly anti- German with Capt. America socking Hitler on the cover of the first issue. Capt. America was a creation of two Jews from Brooklyn, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. To quote the Rabbi Simcha Weinstein from his book Up, Up, And Oy Vey!: How Jewish Culture And Values Shaped The Comic Book Superhero:

Rabbi Simcha Weinstein

Kirby and his partner, Joe Simon, worked at Martin Goodman’s Timely Comics, where the mostly Jewish staff openly despised Hitler. When Goodman saw the preliminary sketches for Captain America, he immediately gave Kirby and Simon their own comic book. The character was an instant hit, selling almost one million copies an issue. “The U.S. hadn’t yet entered the war when Jack and I did Captain America, so maybe he was our way of lashing out at the Nazi menace. Evidently, Captain America symbolized the American people’s sentiments. When we were producing Captain America we were outselling Batman, Superman and all the others.” Simon later commented.

Well, not quite all the others, as Whiz Comics Captain Marvel was the best selling comic of both the war years and later forties. Certainly my favorite. As in the years before the war the America First Committee enjoyed overwhelming popularity amongst ‘Americans’ I would question Simon’s notion that Captain America overwhelmingly represented American opinion. As there were six million Jewish ‘Americans’ in the country I might suggest that the response from that culture of ‘Americans’ was more overwhelming than elsewhere. Jews might easily have accounted for sixty to eighty percent of sales.

It is also probable that no real American would ever have invented a corny jingoistic persona like Captain America, in fact, none did. The image was certainly repulsive to me as a child. My prime comic reading years were from 1947 to 1950 and I and my entire generation rejected Captain America while embracing Captain Marvel. Even then Superman was a distant competitor to Captain Marvel which is why DC comics sued Whiz for copyright violation.

Rabbi Simcha Weinstein- The Story Of Jewish Comic Books.

All the Jewish comics were openly anti-German, thus the FDR administration, the movies and comic books were fighting for the Jewish ‘good war.’ When Charles Lindbergh pointed this out he was immediately portrayed as an agent of the Nazis whereas he was merely telling the truth while being an ideal American. Philip Roth in his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, recounts the Jewish atmosphere of the time while he postulates that Lindbergh was elected president in 1940 as a satrap of Hitler. Thus the Jews became the real Americans and the real Americans were totalitarians out to destroy the Democracy the Jews had created.

In his essay in the New York Times of 9/19/04 titled: The Story Behind The Plot Against America Roth says that he is recreating America as it really was in 1940 but that is not so. As Roth lived in a New Jersey Jewish colony he and his family was out of touch with the real America as his fictional brother who had gone to Kentucky tries to tell him.

In fact in the America of the time in which Samuel Dickstein was an evil presence the American Jewish Committee and The Anti Defamation League were paramilitary organizations conducting spying operations against the non-Jewish public. Numerous agents unaffiliated with any government agency crisscrossed society looking for any activity that might be considered against Jewish interests. These forays were gathered together in 1943 under the assumed name of John Roy Carlson and published as an indictment against Jewish ‘enemies.’ Many of them were arrested and tried as ‘un-Americans in 1944. So, Roth’s paranoia is at best unbalanced.

Roth says the idea of Lindbergh’s having been elected occured to him while reading Arthur Schlesinger’s autobiography:

     I came upon a sentence in which Schlesinger notes that there were some Republican isolationists who wanted to run Lindbergh for president in 1940. That’s all there was, that one sentence with its reference to Lindbergh and to a fact about him I’d not known. It made me think, “What if they had?” and I wrote the question in the margin.

While this may be how Roth came upon the notion his was not the first such idea. As Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner in their Radical Hollywood of 2002 point out, Donald Ogden Stewart in his script for 1943’s Keeper Of The Flame, Charles Lindbergh is posited as a plotter of a coup to replace FDR in alliance with Hitler. This would have been propaganda to indict Lindbergh for the upcoming trial of the Nativists. I don’t know whether Roth saw the movie as a boy but if he did perhaps the idea festered in his brain for several decades until he was reminded by Schlesinger’s book while his mind was half prepared.

So the actual plot of the Jews to take over the American government was displaced to Lindbergh and the Nativists. The Jewish coup was represented in the comic book character of Captain America. This situation is made clear in the current (2011) movie Capt. America: The First Avenger. Thus Philip Roth and Stan Lee of the comics recapitulate and clarify Jewish activities in the 1933-43 era. Captain America is actually Jewish assuming an ultimate American identity.

The origins of Captain America then emanated from the Jewish dream subconscious of Jack Kirby which was quite different form real Americans. He therefore, as all writers must, made Capt. America in his comic book existence from his own dream fantasies. Thus giving his creation the goy name of Steve Rogers he nevertheless gave him a Brooklyn Jewish origin. As Rabbi Weinstein also a Brooklyn Jew explains, Jews have a sort of dual identity as powerless Jews posing as goys in a powerful goy world. Thus the sickly ineffective Rogers undergoes a scientific experiment that turns him essentially from a 98 lb. weakling into an all powerful goy Charles Atlas without the hard work of body building. I’m sure Kirby saw those ads growing up.

Rogers having now been turned into a Superman had to have a name. Superman being taken Super Jew was out for obvious reasons, or even Super Hebrew, there was no Israel at the time, so Kirby settled on Captain America. Rabbi Weinstein again:

Of course a more literal reading of the costume is that it is the American flag brought to life. Captain America’s star is, after all, five pointed, not six pointed like the Star of David. The flag-as-costume [this is what used to make we boys puke] notion reinforces the ideal of assimilation [Jews ‘becoming’ Americans.] By literally cloaking their character in patriotism, Kirby and Simon became true Americans.

In 1940 there was a desperate struggle going on between the Jews and America First who the Jews styled as American Fascists, I.e. actual Hitlerites. By that line of reasoning the Jews became the true Americans, creators and protectors of genuine American Democracy while Anglo-Americans or Native Americans or America Firsters were out to destroy the great American Dream the Jews had created. This is the theme of Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America backdated to this period. The current movie Captain America could easily be subtitled The Plot Against America Foiled.

Rabbi Weinstein again:

Despite the patriotic appearance, Captain America’s costume also denotes deeply rooted [Jewish] tradition. Along with other Jewish-penned superheroes, Captain America was in part an allusion to the golem, the legendary creature said to have been constructed by the sixteenth century mystic Rabbi Judah Loew to defend the Jews of medieval Prague. “The golem was pretty much the precursor of the Superhero in that in every society there is a need for mythological characters, wish fulfillment. And the wish fulfillment in the Jewish case of the hero would be someone who could protect us. This kind of storytelling seems to dominate in Jewish culture,” commented Will Eisner.

According to tradition a golem is sustained by inscribing the Hebrew word emet (truth) upon its forehead. When the first letter is removed, leaving the word met (death) the golem will be destroyed. Emet is spelled with the letters aleph, rem and tav. The first letter, aleph, is also the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the equivalent of the letter A. Captain America wears a mask with a white A on his forehead- the very letter needed to empower the golem.

I hope this makes clear that Superman, Batman and Captain America are Jewish in identity and what their purpose is in American society.

5.

 Having created a competing line of Jewish superheroes the problem then became how to discredit and supplant the goy super heroes. As should be clear by now what we have going on is a religious war but fought by propagandistic means. In other words the battle field was literature, comic books and the movies. As in all religious conflicts the goal is to displace the religious icons of the other; thus, in early Christian times churches were built on the sites of pagan temples while sacred groves were cut down. Nothing has changed; nothing can change. The Jewish goal was the elimination of ‘Christian’ or goy symbols.

Capt. Marvel was gotten rid of in 1953 when the Jews sued him out of his cape. As I’ve pointed out in my review of Tarzan And The Lion Man, parts 8,9.10, a key text in this colossal battle, MGM attempted to destroy the character as well as Burroughs when they bought movie rights to Tarzan in 1931. They got his birthright for a mess of pottage. It may be coincidental but in 1942 after the success of the Jewish comic book super heroes MGM discarded their lucrative rights to Tarzan to movie maker Sol Lesser presumably as worthless or, at least, of no more interest to them. Of course Lesser continued the franchise with phenomenal success. This necessitated a continued campaign to debase the character continuing today. At the same time that Tarzan is debased the Jewish characters, Capt. America is now one of a group of four ‘Avengers’, hence the double entendre of ‘The First Avenger’, who are increasingly Judaisized, while presented in a positive way in the attempt to marginalize Tarzan.

Now, some seventy years after the demise of the man, the continued demonization of Wolf Hitler is becoming less relevant, even annoying if you’re not Jewish, so in Capt. America Wolf Hitler is demoted to an incompetent dead threat while the scepter is passed to the mega Nazi/anti-Semite recreated in the mental projection of Red Skull or the Hydra. The mythical symbol of the Hydra is well chosen to represent anti-Semitism as no matter how many heads you cut off another one, two or three grow back. The threat never ends and the paranoia is justified.

Thus in the Freudian sense Jews have a dual personality: on the one hand you have the ineffective completely innocent assumed goy persona of Steve Rogers, who is the equivalent of Abel, the Chosen one and the crazed madman Hydra who is a projection of the negative aspects of the Jewish character imposed on the other as the anti-Semite. Thus the Jewish character is always at war with itself in the Freudian sense and hence never successful in its aims.

Captain Marvel And Billy Batson

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#15 Tarzan Triumphant

by

R.E. Prindle

Part 5

In The Footsteps Of The Lord

a.

     If anything the action of this novel reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s Illustrated Man just as the invasion of Opar brings strong recollections of the last story of Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles.  In the latter all the great fictions of mankind, fairies, ogres, and whatnot have been driven from earth by Reason taking refuge on Mars.  But as the true condition of Mars becomes known their world crumbles and disappears as there is no place in the universe left for them.

     That fate will never overtake Tarzan as he represents very real hopes, dreams and desires of mankind.  Even as the old world and old heaven of the Piscean Age begins to heave and crack as the new Age of Aquarius struggles to come into existence, the archetype of the Age is forming around Tarzan.  Tarzan will emerge triumphant.

     The next two scenes of Burroughs’ tapestry which come to life not unlike the pictures on the tattooed man are as vivid as any scenes Burroughs wrote.  The agony of Gunner Patrick when he awakes to find himself alone is palpable.  There is even an element of tragedy in his situation if one has sympathy for murderous criminals.  Burroughs rather sneers that without his machine gun Patrick is a pathetic figure.  But, while the machine gun represents advanced tochnology man’s prowess has always depended on his weapons, whether they be stones, spears and bows and arrows, an old harquebus or the machine gun or stealth bombers and self-guided blockbusters.  The fellow with the latest model is always top gun on the block.  Without his weapon he is naturally nothing.  Even Tarzan would have been a dead man long before this without his father’s knife.  What makes Gunner Patrick so reprehensible is that he uses his weapon for injustice rather than justice.  Thus without his weapon he is subject to the same injustice he would inflict on others.

     Still, he’s our criminal so we have to take his side.  One would say he is less criminal than the men who stole Jezebel from him except that out there they live by a different lawless code.  As Patrick would say:  They ain’t no cops out there.

     Law is a matter of the strongest; so Tarzan as the strongest and justest will reestablish Law and Order according to his terms.  He acts as the judge and jury which some people with an opposing notion of Law might find offensive or even dangerous to their plans.  How much of a coincidence then is it that in Tarzan’s New York Adventure he is stripped of his status as lawgiver and subsumed to a different legal code?  No coincidence at all in my mind.  The legal decision declaring Tarzan a criminal also showed who was strongest in Hollywood.  In fact, in late 1941 and into ’42  Burroughs had been ousted from Hollywood himself, living in exile in Hawaii.

     The Golden Girl, Jezebel, had been taken into custody by Capietro but Stabutch has eyes for her.  The two men decide to play poker for her, best three out of five.  Strange that an Italian and a Russian should be familiar with the quintessential American card game, but there you have it, they were.

     Stabutch loses but calls Capietro a cheat.

     This scene recalls ERB’s own loss when he and Emma were in transit in Parma, Idaho.  While Emma waited upstairs ERB got cleaned of the couple’s last forty dollars in what may very well have been a crooked game.  I haven’t played poker a lot but I’ve never been in a straight game, so as a stranger in Parma, the odds are that Burroughs’ game was crooked.  He doesn’t say so, of course, but I’d be willing to bet he thought so.  The memory was a horrendous one for ERB; it crops up frequently in the corpus.  My memory of a Navy game is always with me.  In fact, someone I hadn’t seen for forty years brought it up the first thing.  These things are like the scar on Tarzan’s forehead.

     Capietro and Stabutch fight, one out of one, that Stabutch wins.  He then flees with Jezebel.  the Gunner who has been gathering his wits above the scene sees the two ride out the gate.  He follows in pursuit on foot.

     Stabutch and Jezebel put up for the night during which a lion scares their horses away.  Hungry the next day, Stabutch stashes the Golden Girl in a tree while he goes hunting.  Staking out a water hole he is surprised to see Tarzan drinking.  A golden opportunity to accomplish his mission but the strain is too much for his nerves; he misses his shot.  Running as fast as he can, Tarzan following torments his victim with a couple of arrows before, as Stabutch begs for his life, putting an arrow through his throat.  His throat! I was ready for ‘his black heart’ but was surprised by ‘his throat.’  As a probable surrogate for Stalin who sent him, why his throat?  At any rate Tarzan has now completely defeated the Communists; once in Invincible and again here.

     Patrick has been miraculously reunited with Jezebel but now all three are captured by the shiftas.  The outcome is clear.  The faithful Waziri stage a frontal attack on the shifta stockade.  Patrick and Jezebel, who have been bound and left in the same tent, free themselves.  The hard thing Patrick has been lying on turns out to be ‘his better half’, the machine gun.  He then opens up on the shiftas from the rear.   No contest.

b.

     The final picture in the web then, is the successful bringing together of all the threads and strands which began two thousand years previously in an entirely unrelated event, when Paul was martyred in Rome and Angustus fled for the African hinterland bringing his slave girl with him.

      Lord Passmore as it turns out is Tarzan in disguise.  He assumed the identity so as not to arouse suspicion.  So once again Tarzan displays an effeminate side.  A disguise hardly seems necessary for the Big Bwana but as ERB needed the faithful Waziri for the big battle scene finale, perhaps so.

     Tarzan at this point seems to be a solo act; there is no hint of Jane awaiting him back in Kenya.  Lafe Smith and Lady Barbara are brought together.  Thus the bright alter ego of Burroughs is paired up with a member of the English aristocracy who may represent the writer Dorothy Sayers,  perhaps a match ERB would have liked in real life.

     Already three or four years into his affair with Florence, of which surely Emma was aware, one wonders what she thought when she realized she had been written out of the story.  Well, she did turn to drink.

     More interestingly, Burroughs’ dark alter ego, Danny ‘Gunner’ Patrick and the Golden Girl, Jezebel are brought together.  He is going to leave Chicago taking Jezebel to somewhere in LA to buy a service station.  A worthy ambition; for some  reason the movie, The Postman Always Rings Twice, pops into my mind.  The screenplay for that movie was written by Raymond Chandler who, for no explicable reason, I associate with Burroughs.  There must be some similarity between Philip Marlowe and Tarzan.  Marlowe did get sapped a lot.  Chandler even turns sapping into an art form.

     In pairing Jezebel/Florence off with his dark side ERB may be hinting at the direction his relationship with Florence will take.  His life with her was certainly different than his life with Emma as he let his hair down and began dressing like quite a dandy, or, perhaps, Lord Passmore.

     On that score, in this novel, Burroughs selects his dark side to take the obligatory bashing.  One wonders then if he attributes this dark side to the bashing in Toronto.  Is he saying that his dark side was the result of the bashing?  Did he begin living some sort of double life some few years after he was laid out?  Was his character even more erratic than it appears?  How much did Emma put up with?

     His emphasis on the notion that every man has two characters that may diverge as did Jekyll and Hyde give reason to think so.  At any rate the following couple years ERB himself would be leading a double life.  As Lafe Smith with Lady Barbara/Emma and as the desperado Danny ‘Gunner’ Patrick with his amour Jezebel/Florence Gilbert Dearholt.  Jezebel is certainly appropriately named.

     The next two novels explain his own relationship to Florence and Emma.  Leopard Men, which I have already reviewed, deals with his opting for Florence while City Of Gold deals with his rejection of Emma.  But first some conclusions and organization.

To be concluded in Part 6: Threads and Stands Of The Web

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#15 Tarzan Triumphant

by

R.E. Prindle

Part 4

The Born Again Lafe Smith

The time has come the Walrus said

to speak of many things;

Of shoes and ship and sealing wax

Of cabbages and kings.

And why the sea is boiling hot

And whether pigs have wings.

Lewis Carrol

     The learned nonsense of Lewis Carrol was never far from Burroughs’ mind.  In the long list of influences Carroll ranks fairly high although more disguised than others.  Both adventures of Alice as well as The Hunting Of The Snark formed the backbone of Burroughs’ ideology.  Thus the entrance to the Land Of Midian in many ways resembles Alice’s descent into the rabbit hole.  The sexual implications of the rabbit hole should be self-evident as is the the entry into the Land of Midian.

     The Lafayette of Smith’s name refers of course to the revolutionary Marquis de Lafayette who fought against the monarchy in the American Revolution.  Recently General Pershing had repaid the debt when, as he stepped ashore in France he grandly proclaimed:  Lafayette, we are here.  A famous utterance then and now so that it appears that Burroughs is associating freedom and liberation to his alter ego.  He might exclaim as he stepped through the hole: I am Lafayette and I am here.

     Smith is studying the geology of the area when he discovers a cleft in the mountain which he enters.  In some ways Burroughs old life ended when the Reds invaded Opar.  La was forced out into the the real world when her people rebelled because of La’s fixation on Tarzan.  The Big Bwana restored her to her throne having destroyed the rebel chiefs.  We are led to believe that La reigned happily ever after even though her manifestation as well as Opar disappear from ERB’s dream world.  With the death of his old dream world ERB seeks to find another; one which other people cannot enter.  Jungle Girl written shortly after this novel provided one such place in the ancient Khmer kingdoms of Cambodia and Thailand.

     Thus Midian is a pale reflection of Opar.  While the way to Opar was known to the world, indeed, Zveri, Stalin and the Communists as well as many Africans knew of the fabulous wealth of Opar and where the city was located.  They didn’t know where the gold was located because in was in Burroughs’ mind.

     Having had his dream world  violated ERB creates another but this time the location is so remote and the entrance so difficult, although identical to that of Opar,  to find that none but his Anima and Animus figures can find it.

     Like the great red and gold city of Opar Midian is surrounded by high cliffs but unlike Opar they are unscalable from either side.  No casual visitors are going to get in there.  Like the actual city of Opar the only entry is through a cleft in the walls.  In Opar once through the cleft one climbs a stairway to enter the ruins.  Here, led by his interest in geology Smith enters the cleft in the mountain reft by titanic forces ages ago to follow it deep within the mountain wall.  To insure that he continues on down the rabbit hole Burroughs sends a lion in after him blocking any exit should he wish to turn back.  Thus the lion as Fate is forcing him to his destiny.  The role of the lion in the oeuvre  remains elusive to me; I fail to grasp the nuances as well as the essence.  The lion may be another side of Tarzan, the Lion Man, who is helpful.  On the other hand the lion as an expression of Burroughs’ Anima is extremely dangerous and hateful falling beneath Dad’s knife repeatedly, these are usually female.  Still a problem for me.

     Following the cleft for some way Smith reaches the end which is a very small hole that he can just force his way through.  The symbolism of birth is quite clear; the descent from the womb and the breakthrough to the other side through the vagina.

     Both aspects of Burroughs’ Anima are already inside Midian.  Lady Barbara parachuted there while Jezebel was born there.  Thus, it would seem that the La, Jezebel, Balza figure was native to Burroughs’ X chromosome while Jane, Lady Barbara, Rhonda Terry was an acquired image.

     Smith will also be joined by the two remaining Animus figures, Gunner Patrick and Tarzan.  All five of his Anima/Animus figures that he acknowledges were then functioning in his dream world.   This may have represented his brain or the womb or a combination of both.  What seems to be clear is that with the destruction and death of his old dream world he is being born again.  The resurrection scene will follow.

     When Tarzan enters Midian as when he is entering the cleft of Opar it is necessary for him to manipulate his shoulders through by turning them sideways.  Thus there is a clear reference to birth.

     Perhaps when Burroughs began self-publication he felt as though he were making a break with his past.  Leaving McClurg’s and Joe Bray behind, making a new start as it were, he was beginning a new life.  That was probably part of it as was the invasion of Opar by his enemies but I’m sure there is personal development involved that isn’t clear to me yet.

     Once inside, convinced that the lion is following him although one believes the small hole would have baffled the lion, Smith finds the convenient tree in front of the hole into which he climbs for safety.  Then Smith does exactly what Patrick, the dark side of the ego, will do, he goes down to the lake and gorges himself on water.  This could be construed as baptism of the born again man; the living water of redemption.

     He then meanders in the direction of Midian.  As night has fallen the bonfires attract him.

     By this time Lady Barbara after a few refreshing skinny dips waiting for her clothes to dry, Burroughs actually writes these strange interludes, finds her way back to Midian.  For some strange reason the Midianites pay no attention to her mind boggling miracles, sometimes you can’t buy a thrill, choosing to disregard the apparent will of their god.

     She and Jezebel are condemned to be crucified and burned to death.  Both have been placed on the crosses with faggots piled round when Smith and his trusty nickel plated .32 burst upon the scene.

     Now we have the resurrection of Smith and his Anima figures.  The implication is that the trinity have symbolically died and are now resurrected.  This is some fancy footwork.

     Imagine the scene:   Two crosses are erected.  The Anima figures are placed on the crosses.  As I imagine it there is a space of four to eight feet between the arms.   Smith forces a way to a place in fornt of the crosses as he kicks away the burning faggots between the two crosses.  Although not on a cross himself he is symbolically so he and Burroughs assume the role of Jesus Christ in the middle while the Anima figures represent the two thieves, one on either side.

     Thus we are playing out a reenactment of the Christian crucifixion that will have a different result.

     The Christians are pressing in on Smith.  This is yet another version of Burroughs’ confrantation with John the Bully on the street corner.  Back then he turned and ran.  Now Smith is in a quandary.  Christ in the same dilemma turned the other cheek saying:  Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.

     We have all been taught to revere turning the other cheek.  Some even attempt to practice the precept.    I’m sure the ploy may work from time to time but in nine times out of ten it won’t.  That is more or less the dilemma of the Western world today.  it is steadfastly trying to turn the other cheek but every time it does a steel-toed boot gets planted on it.

     Thus as Smith is dithering a clear cultured English female voice comes down from the cross saying:  You’re going to have to shoot to kill, you know.  In other words, turning the other cheek is sure death.  Burroughs is especially good at surprise twists like this.

     Astonished, perhaps thinking the angel of the Lord had spoken to him Smith complies, firing into the crowd.  As the joke is that his aim is so poor he couldn’t hit the side of a barn he is fortunate enough to actually kill someone.

     Momentarily stunned by the magical weapon but not overawed the crowd pauses long enough to allow Smith to get Lady Barbara down.  Thus Burroughs chooses the older more stately aspect of his Anima rather than the Wild Thing, sex kitten.  Perhaps as Florence was out of town ERB temporarily shifted bazck to the Jane Anima aspect.  Within a matter of weeks or days he will decide on Jezebel/Balza/Florence when Florence unexpectedly returns and he writes Leopard Men in celebration.

     Smith succeeds in lowering Lady Barbara but then Jobab challenges the efficacy of his .32.  Smith fires at Jobab point blank missing him.  Jobab vindicated rushes Smith knocking the gun out of his hand.  Lady Barbara scoops it up, places the muzzle against Jobab’s side where he learns the efficacy of the Colt.  Thus the Anima and Animus of Burroughs have now killed a man.

     This give the crowd pause once again so that Jezebel is lowered and the Trinity run away.  The two Anima aspects and Burroughs’ bright Animus are now whole.  The confrontation with John the Bully has been resolved.

     They attempt to find the opening but in the process wander into North Midian where they are captured by the fair haired, blue eyed, small nosed but no less superstitious North Midians.  They manage to escape.

     They capture a kid to eat but in the process the goatherd misses it.  What the symbolism of eating the ‘lamb’ is escapes me just now.  Smith and lady Barbara are recaptured, taken to the village.

     In the meantime Tarzan and Patrick enter the crater.  Burroughs now has all five of his Anima and Animus figures in the crater.  Tarzan separates from Patrick.  The latter comes across Jezebel who had escaped the North Midians.  The meeting is apparently love at first sight so the Wild Thing Anima and the killer Animus are united.  As they are tired they lay down together.  You can draw your conclusions but Jezebel appears to be ready for any ‘beautiful’ man who comes along.  Whether a comment on Floence isn’t clear however Burroughs in his mind would be seeing her in his Desperado aspect while she would be his Wild Thing or little Flapper girl.

     Perhaps with Smith/Lady B ERB is representing his Dr. Jekyll side, his married status while with Jezebel/Patrick he is representing his Hyde side in his affair with Florence Gilbert.

     Jezebel and Patrick leave the crater.  On the outside they are spotted by Capietro’s men who bash the Burroughs surrogate on the head leaving him for dead while they carry Jezebel off.  This would be the same situation with John the Bully  or the bashing in Toronto however it may also represent Ashton Dearholt’s taking Florence out of town for a cooling off period.

     Burroughs interjects a comedy routine back in North Midian with a lampoon of religosity over whether Paul had yellow hair or black hair.  The upshot is that Smith is to die.

     However a pair of eyes are watching the scene.  An unknown lurker to the North Midians, Tarzan to us.  Tarzan’s own role in this story is his battle with Capietro and Stabutch.  Otherwise he functions as a deus ex machina– a God from the machine a common feature of Greek drama to resolve an otherwise unresolvable plot point — to get the Anima figure out of difficulty.  He does in this case too.

     Then leaving he crater Tarzan escorts the pair to his friend Lord Passmore’s safari leaving them there in safety with the faithful Waziri.  Then he goes back to deal with Stabutch and Capietro.

     Thus Fate and Burroughs go about weaving their web.  The similarity to Penelope of the Odyssey is close with the exception that Burroughs does not unravel the previous day’s work.  But one is invited to see this story as a series of pictures woven into the tapestry somewhat like the contest between Athene and Arachnae.  One might also compare the novel, in the classical mode, to the Shield of Achilles which is decorated around the edge with a series of pictures portraying the life of the Bronze Age.  So Burroughs has woven a series of such pictures into his tapestry.  A clever idea and well executed.  How many people have ever gotten it except for us is open to question.

     So far Burroughs has insulted the Jews and ridiculed religion in general and Christianity specifically.  He now turns to the strand of Communism, humiliating them in his dreamworld.  It is all well that he should take the attack to them but one is surprised that he either didn’t anticipate a counter attack or didn’t anticipate the direction from which it would come if he was even yet aware that his defenses had been overrun by MGM.

     The man was playing with fire without an awareness of real life consequences.  It would be amusing to know if a copy of Tarzan Triumphant was rushed off to Stalin.  One can be sure that the ADL/AJC/MGM combination had an advance copy perhaps even the chapters as they were being written.   It is inconceivable that his enemies had no spy within his organization.  That is just the way things are done and had to have been done in this instance.  The usual mode is to capture the position of secretary through whom all information passes.  That means that ERB’s typist may have been the conduit, Cyril Ralph Rothmund or perhaps even both.  I’m betting on Rothmund for sure.  I would love to see his finances.  He may also have been on the ADL/AJC/MGM payroll was well as Burroughs’.  Itr was he who negotiated the contract Burroughs signed giving away the control of Tarzan.

     The next picture on the web is the reunion of Jezebel and Patrick followed by the battle of Tarzan and the Communists.

To be continued in Part 5:  In The Footsteps Of The Lord

A Review

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

by

R.E. Prindle

ERB The Scholar

Part 2

Lady Barbara Drops In

     As always ERB is the consummate multi-culturalist both ethnic and social.  Barbara is the daughter of the English Lord Whimsey, Smith is a college professor, Capietro is an Italian Communist renegade, Stabutch is a Russian Communist, the Midianites represent an ancient religious culture derived from the Jewish, Tarzan is Tarzan of Africa and Lord Passmore of England and then we have a cast of animal characters including a tribe of baboons who interact with Tarzan on the cultural level.  All are represented as being culturally distinct.  ERB is more of a right multi-culturalist than a left.

     If a culture is in fact a culture it must be distinct or it couldn’t qualify as a culture.  To be of the French culture there must be characteristics that can be identified as specifically French.  Else, why call yourself French?  The Left multi-culturalists need to define their terms a little better.  They come across as rather shabby intellectually.

      Then, of the hundreds, probably thousands of cultures, are they all to be considered equal?  For instance is it considered desirable to be of the Prison culture?  Pedophile culture?  No, of course not; not all cultures are equally beneficial.  Each culture must be analyzed on its own merits and faults, completely analyzed by objective analysts.  No particular culture need be nor can be taken at its own evaluation.  Obviously many cultures are to be avoided completely.  Others should be isolated or quarantined.  Which is which can only be determined by an analysis of its positive contributions.  The results of analysis can be unkind; the truth frequently hurts.  As the French say:  C’est la vie.

     In his analysis of group cultures ERB does draw conclusions.  There’s no doubt he thinks that the Communist culture is a negative to be avoided.   Thus Zveri in Invincible was ignominiously defeated by Tarzan as Stabutch will be in Triumphant.

     In almost every case ERB is very hard on religious cultures as he will be in this novel.  Is he unjust or is the truth about religion just too hard for devotees to bear?  Everyone will have their own opinion while I have made my position abundantly clear:  the religious consciousness is outdated, having been surpassed by the vastly superior Scientific Consciousness.  I won’t be changing my mind soon.

     Lady Barbara Collis is about to parachute into a culture two thousand years in the past.  ERB commits a major gaffe here in the opening pages of his novel.  Lady Barbara is attempting a non-stop flight of 7500 miles in a 1930 plane, clearly impossible.  Rather than taking a direct route up the Nile she is lost several hundreds of miles to the East over Ethiopia and, get this, already running on empty.

Dorothy Sayers

  I don’t know who calculated her fuel needs but I should imagine he would be looking for a new occupation.  But, that doesn’t interfere with my enjoyment of the story any more than the donut atmosphere of Poloda in Beyond The  Farthest Star.  Who knows what goes on beyond the farthest star.  They probably even suspend the laws of gravity.

     There Lady Barbara is, way up there without the means of propulsion.  she does the manly thing: she jumps out.  This is real Twilight Zone stuff; little does she know she will leave the twentieth century and land in 80 AD or so.  The Land Of Midian has been frozen in time for the last two millennia.

     The Midians assembled within the walls of their crater hear the drone of the airplane, which sound they are unable to identify and then to their amazed eyes a little white cloud appears through the mist with a human form dangling below it.  To their religiously distorted senses it must be the Angel of the Lord.

     Thus we have a nice confrontation between two different cultures.  The modern scientific of Lady Barbara and the ancient religious culture of the Midians.  The Midians could stand as a metaphor of the religions of Burroughs’ day which, not unlike the Midians, were roooted in a culture two thousand years old and of a different and inferior consciousness.  Not only had the Scopes trial recently ended but the sensatinal affair of Aimee Semple Mcpherson was still fairly warm, plus ERB had recently read Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry.  That novel did not sit well with ERB nor does it sit well with me.  Burt Lancaster’s movie Elmer Gantry, by the way, is totally dissimilar to the Gantry of the book.

     According to ERBzine Burroughs took offence at Elmer Gantry, deploring Lewis’ habit of ridiculing

Aimee Semple Mcpherson

and demeaning people rather than presenting the story as entertainment.  Lewis does ridicule and belittle every character in his book in a detestable holier than thou manner which is very annoying.  Burroughs turns the story around and disparages practices which I suppose makes it entertainment.  For instance both the fictional Gantry and the real life Mcpherson are what are known in military slang as ‘Sky Pilots.’  Thus there is a certain amount of humor in Lady Barbara as an angel of the lord sky piloting into the religious Land of Midian.

     When the Midianites drown a young woman while dragooning her, Lady Barbara, after the manner of Mcpherson, brings her back to life by ‘a laying on of hands’, that is artificial respiration.  Clever of ERB.   It will be remembered tha Mcpherson had a roomful of crutches and wheelchairs from people she had supposedly cured by a laying on of hands.  I have no idea how many readers might have gotten the joke when the novel was released but there the joke is if you care to look for it.

     So we have the Scopes Trial, Aimee Semple Mcpherson and Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry all rolled up in a series of jokes ‘highly fictionized.’  There is probably more to be found if one could steep

Sinclair Lewis

oneself in the ephemeral culture of the time.

     As mentioned, Lady Barbara parachutes through two thousand years of time to find herself among a Pauline Christian sect that hadn’t changed one iota since c. 80 A.D.  The emphais on Pauline Christianity is important.  At about this time ERB was becoming involved with the Vedantist mission in Hollywood so discussions of early Christianity may possibly have made an impression on him.  Paul was, of course, a Jew who adapted the Jewish Christian sect for dissemination among the Gentiles.  The Catholic Church was founded on Sts. Peter and Paul while the medieval Knights Templar based their Christianity on the Gospel of John thus being Johannites.  There was a cultural divide between the Church and the Templars which did necessitate action no less than between the Paulites  and the Arians.  ERB’s emphasis is intended to indicate the Jewish origins of the Midianites.

     It will be remembered that Angustus was a Jewish Christian who arrived in company with a Nordic slave girl.  So for two thousand years the Midianites have been inbreeding.  ERB is considering the results of inbreeding, as a year later he will write Pirate Blood that deals with the famously inbred Jukes family.  Pirate Blood is perhaps his most despairing story as his mind tips toward Lamarckian evolution in an apparent attempt to explain to himself why he can’t resolve his psychological problems.

     Thus the genetic and Lamarckian traits of Angustus and the slave girl have been passed down through approximately seventy generations.  Angustus’ genes have predominated while those of the slave girl appear occasionally in sports.

     Angustus was characterized by a huge nose that was an actual deformity, a chinless face and epilepsy.  Thus if one imagines this, Lady Barbara is confronted by a group of people with huge noses covering most of their faces with no chins, the throat sweeping back from just under the lips and writhing on the ground in epileptic fits.

     There can be no mistaking that ERB is caricaturing the Jews.  Angustus was a Jew and he was a Pauline Christian.  As a Christian, ERB disguises his Jewish nationality.  The leader of hte Midianites, Abraham the son of Abraham certainly puts the Midianites into a Jewish context, as does the fact that they consider themselves the ‘chosen people.’  Ludicrous enough from their physical description.

     ERB’s caricature is one that was prevalent when he was a young man, while one that couldn’t be missed by the gentlemen of the ADL/AJC and MGM.  They would neither forgive nor forget.  In fact Tarzan would be potrayed in The New Adventures Of Tarzan as chinless and with a huge nose.  While Herman Brix/Bruce Bennet had neither a bulbous nose nor was chinless the effect was achieved through photographic lighting and shadowing.  Either that or the film has deteriorated through time to achieve that effect.  (DVD, The New Adventures Of Tarzan, Alpha Home Entertainment, www.oldies.com )

      If you think there isn’t a war going on here, look more closely.

     Even though of Jewish descent, the Midianites are Christians, but of the most primitive stripe; they make sects like the Nazarenes look liberal.  Their minds are uncompromisingly dark.  The girl who was dragooned was sentenced to death for smiling.  Joy was considered of the devil in Midian.  Here ERB characterized a number of Christian sects correctly.

     Among the people who greeted Lady Barbara was a genetic sport who harked back physically and mentally to the original slave girl.  She is Jezebel.  She and Lady Barbara are immediately attracted to each other by their beauty.  The attractive and intelligent Midianites were invariably fair haired and blue eyed while the unattractive ones were dark haired, brown eyed and stupid.  Little doubt that the AJC/ADL would consider the book ‘racist.’

     Jezebel is an interesting character in that she is a little more than light headed.  She is governed entirely by surface appearances.  As in Lion Man where the hybrids were expelled from Henry’s village, so the more attractive males were exiled to the other side of the crater.  Obviously we have an example of eugenics here.  They were more warlike than the Midianites occasionally raiding them.  Jezebel remarks that they are so good looking she hopes they will capture her.  When the Midianites  honor ‘the angel’ with her own cave and offering of food, Jezebel is depicted laying back eating grapes like a spoiled young thing with a box of bon-bons.  ERB later describes her as a Golden Girl which relates her to Balza of Lion Man and hence to Florence.

     Whatever ERB tells himself about Florence in his conscious mind his depiction of her in his unconscious life seems to be quite different.

     At first Lady Barbara is treated quite well but familiarity breeds contempt.  Abraham Ben Abraham begins to suspect her divinity.  Even the miracle of the laying on of hands that restored the girl to life being no less a miracle than the raising of Lazarus cannot dissuade Abe Ben Abe from testing Lady Barbara.  Thus she too is dragooned but instead of being dunked three times she is thrown into the lake wrapped in a net with the net weighted.  Here is proof positive that ERB read Dumas’ The Count Of Monte Cristo.  The scene replicated Dantes being thrown into the sea from the Chateau d’If.

     Lady Barbara has her handy jackknife so that she is able to cut her way free.  Thus we leave her here crawling gaspingly ashore while we check in on Lafayette Smith and Danny ‘Gunner’ Patrick.

The Big Bwana

Tarzan And The River

Part II

Edgar Rice Burroughs In Aspic

by

R.E. Prindle

When ‘Omer smote his bloomin’ lyre,

He’d heard men sing by land and sea:

An’ what ‘e thought ‘e might require,

‘E went and took- the same as me!

The market-girls an’ fishermen,

The shepherds and the sailors, too,

They ‘eard old songs turn up again,

But kept it quiet- same as you!

They knew ‘e stole, ‘e knew they knowed,

They didn’t tell, nor make a fuss,

But winked at ‘Omer down the road.

An’ ‘e winked back= the same as us.

-Rudyard Kipling

I want a dream lover,

So I don’t have to dream alone.

–Bobby Darin

 First published  in the Burroughs Bulletin

Spring 2003 issue.

Last Night He Had The Strangest Dream

     As an author Edgar Rice Burroughs belongs to the generation of writers who wrote between the wars.  He is or should be placed beside Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Aldous Huxley, P.G. Wodehouse, H.G. Wells, John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck, among others.  Further, of all those authors ERB was the best selling writer in the entire world.  His reign came to an end in 1939 and then only after his talent was dissipated.  This is a remarkable achievement against some very qualified and important writers.  One doesn ‘t often hear of Steinbeck societies.  Hemingway or any of the others but Burroughs societies exist in many countries around the world.

     I consider myself an intellectual and literary snob, yet I acknowledge ERB as important an intellectual and literary figure as any of the savants mentioned above.  ERB did not parade his knowledge and savvy as most writers are wont to do.  He incorporated a fairly deep understanding of many contemporary issues without a hint of the lamp.  Tarzan Triumphant is a case in point.  Obviously the two religious groups in the novel refer to Jews and Christians, but there is no reference to either sect.  One is left to infer that the Old Testament crowd led by Abraham, son of Abraham, is of the Old Testament while their rivals are New Testament.  In so far as ERB allows the story to involve religious discussion, the moral is ‘a pox on both your houses.’

     Even more remarkable is that over the writing of the published twenty-one Tarzans before 1940 all the novels are interrelated.  ERB was able to keep his Tarzan facts in order over a twenty-seven year period of writing while being involved in the writing of dozens of other books.  In point of fact the Tarzan oeuvre is a roman a fleuve- a river novel.

     A River novle is a series of novels which traces the course of a nation, people, a family or an an individual over a period of at least decades.  The first novel ever written was a River novel, that was the story of the Greek invasion of Troy.

      The two surviving complete books of this remakarble story are Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.  Moreover, many fragments exist predating the events of the Iliad and after.

     Perhaps the most prodigious of all River novels is the Vulgate Lancelot chronicling  the adventures of King Arthur and his knights.  The story runs on for thousands of pages.

     In modern times Alexander Dumas’ five volume epic concerning the adventures of the Three Musketeers constitute a River novel.  Trollope wrote two, that of the Pallisers and the Barchester series.  The model for the twentieth century was Remembrance Of Things Past by Marcel Proust.

      Edgar Rice Burroughs has always been treated frivolously, yet the Tarzan oeuvre is a work of some magnitude which does not compare unfavorably with Proust.

     Proust’s work looks backward as he relives his life trying to make order of his psychology.  Burroughs’ Tarzan oeuvre records his psychological development on a current basis as it evolves year by year.

     ERB’s work is characterized as imaginative fiction while Proust’s is considered realistic fiction.  In other words, realistic fiction builds on real life experience in real life situations, while the imaginative writer is compelled to ‘invent’ incidents.

     Thus while the realistic writer draws primarily from personal experience and observations, the imaginative writer has to draw from published sources of either fiction or nonfiction or convert real life experiences  into symbolic form.  The latter is more true of science and fantasy fiction.  If the science fiction writers of the forties and fifties hadn’t had a couple thousand years of esoteric literature to draw on there would have been little science fiction.  Of course the writers so disguise their sources  that without an extensive education in esoteric writings oneself the stories seem incredibly original.

     Borrowing from every source is extensive.  For instance, Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End is the same story as H.G. Wells’ Food Of The Gods with different detailing.  Wells himself extrapolated his story farom Darwin’s Origin Of Species and The Descent Of Man.  Darwin of course turned to nature, the ultimate source of suggestion, for his story.

     That Burroughs borrowed extensively and sometimes blatantly is of little consequence, especially as his original contributions were so extensive and satisfying.  As the opening poem by Kipling indicates, at least he was honest enough to admit of outside influences.

     The Russian Quartet, or first four novels, is a tentative beginning to the Tarzan oeuvre.  It is possible that the first novel, Tarzan Of The Apes, was just an attempt to express certain ideas about heredity and such related topics that ERB wanted to say with no thought of sequels.  The story itself is absurd enough that it seems a miaracle that it was accepted and published.  It is perhaps less surprising that it was so readily accepted by the reading public as the great figure of Tarzan rises shining from the pages.  One ignores any story telling flaws to get a glimpse of the bronzed forest giant, the great Tarmangani, the jungle god, the Lord of the Jungle, Tarzan.  A writer should be so lucky to come up with such an archetypal figure.

     Return and Beasts find Burroughs groping for a direction.  Beasts is is heavily influenced by H.M. Stanley’s writing on Africa as well as that of Mungo Park, not to mention Edgar Wallace’s Sanders Of The River.  The story of Paulevitch’s experience in the jungle was obviously taken from Mungo Park’s Travels In The Interior Of Africa.  Beasts itself which also has a lot of Defoe in it, is absurd to the extreme yet somehow redeems itself as one becomes entranced by the outrageous notion of apes and men row-row-rowing their boat down the stream.  Somewhere either before the beginning of Beasts or after the end, ERB interweaves the story of Barney Custer and the Mad King and the Eternal Lover to bring his own psychology into the Tarzan character.  Thus ERB pictures himself as the Son Of Tarzan in the novel of that name.

     Having resolved, after a fashion, his conflicts with this father and somewhere in that tremendous gush of writing having integrated his personality, ERB then turns to himself as the conflicted Animus of Tarzan the Hero and Tarzan the Clown to resolve that psychological dilemma over the next seventeen volumes published during his lifetime.

     The Russian Quartet was written over a period of three years.  The eight novels between Son and Lost Empire were written over fourteen years.  Whether the ‘Lost Empire’ refers to Emma and Opar is open to conjecture.  In any event Lost Empire signifies a terminal junction in ERB’s psychology.

     Then as the problems of his Animus and Anima resolve themselves ERB rapidly turns out six volumes over four years.

     He had difficulty writing Tarzans while struggling with his psychology but wrote quickly once he had made up his mind.

     From 1934 in psychologically related volumes to 1938 he published the three additional novels of Quest, Forbidden city and Magnificent.  The psychologically relevant Madman was discovered and published in 1964, fourteen years after his death.  Perhaps the thought the novel was too personal and painful to publish himself.

     As noted “Foreign Legion’ is a propagandistic after thought to the oeuvre.

     As ERB didn’t begin writing until he was thirty-six it is fair to say that his writing represents the effort of a mature mind.  This is even more evident when one reflects that the majority of the Tarzan oeuvre was written between the ages of forty-one and fifty-eight.  Lion Man, which is the culminating volume of ERB’s psychological odyssey was written at the last age.

     The novels written between 1930 and 1934 which I consider excellent work and the best of the Tarzan oeuvre are the ones most often dismissed as repetitious.  One of the very best, Tarzan And The Leopard Men, is, oddly enough, often dismissed as ‘hack work’.  Very strange.

     But to return to Opar and move forward from there.  From 1912 or 1911 if you consider from the first moment ERB put pen to paper to 1915, things developed very rapidly in ERB’s mind.  The rich experience of his lifetime, all his opinions, thoughts and fancies were so compressed within his skull that as I say he erupted with more than the force of Spindletop.  It took him three years to cap that gusher and then the flow was strong and steady until 1934 when he realized himself.

     Return was written in 1913 when his Anima, La of Opar, first pops up.  She then disappears until 1916 when wife Emma apparently sneered at the wealth ERB had laid at her feet.  She would not so soon forget the first twelve years of her humiliation.

     Her rejection of ERB the Hero must have hurt Burroughs to the quick.  Following Return he wrote The Mad King in which after numerous trials and tribulations and after he had disposed of Custer’s inept doppelganger, the Mad King, Barney Custer and the Princess Emma were reconciled.  In all likelihood the story was a day-dream of wish fulfillment in the Freudian manner because in The Eternal Lover which followed quickly Barney Custer goes to Tarzan’s Equatorial estate but with his sister Victoria and not the ‘Princess Emma’.  His marital relationship is obviously still very troubled.  As noted, The Eternal Lover is a myth of the nature of Pysche and Eros, the Anima and Animus.

     Interestingly, Boy Jack’s wife, which is to say ERB’s at the end of Son of Tarzan is no longer a princess but the daughter of a general.  Emma had apparently been demoted in ERB’s emotions.

     In a psychological quandary ERB has Tarzan leave Jane in 1916 to return to Opar and La for more gold to lay at Jane/Emma’s feet.  This story is crucial for the rest of the oeuvre.  ERB’s dream lover, La, spares his life and offers to marry him or in other words take him away from Jane/Emma.  At this point in his life ERB is faithful in body if not in spirit.  He declines her offer having his faithful Waziri stagger back to Jane under a load of one hundred twenty pounds of gold each.

     Apparently the wealth of Opar of which tons of gold remained to be tapped as well as bushels of the very largest of diamonds (move ahead to the Father of Diamonds in the Forbidden City) is not enough to assuage Jane/Emma’s anger at Ed’s failure for the first twelve years of married life.  She rejects ERB’s present income.  This must have been a staggering blow for Burroughs who at this point in his life wanted to abandon his clown role for that of the hero.

     He had already begun Jungle Tales Of Tarzan, which he managed to finish, otherwise from Jewels of Opar to Tarzan the Untamed there is a hiatus in Tarzan novels for thirty-nine months.  For over three years he and Emma were apparently at a stalemate making it impossible for him to write further Tarzan adventures.

     When Tarzan returns it is as The Untamed and he and Jane have been separated, possibly for good as Tarzan has no idea where she is; common report is that she is dead.

     One may infer that the marriage is all but over.  It takes another twenty-three months before Tarzan The Terrible appears.  Tarzan goes from Untamed to Terrible.  Apparently ERB and Emma are now temporarily reconciled as Tarzan finds Jane in the forgotten land of Pal-ul-don (paladin?) and he, she and Jack go swinging down the jungle trails to return to Equatoria.  the family is reunited.  But is it?

     After the passage of twenty-two months Burroughs follows Terrible with Golden Lion.  Now the title Golden Lion is somewhat misleading as the Lion doesn’t play that large a role in the story.  The Lion seems to have sprung from Burroughs’ subconscious as a defense against the Lion of Emma.  In this story Tarzan leaves Jane for a fairly extended visit to his dream lover, La in Opar.  They are together for some time as they adventure into the adjacent lost valley called The Valley Of Diamonds.  (Once again, see Tarzan And The Forbidden City.)  Possibly the Father of Diamonds represents the Jewel of Great Price which turns out ironically to be a piece of coal.  This was after ERB left Emma for Florence.

     Golden Lion introduces the great doppelganger of Tarzan, Esteban Miranda.  I am absolutely fascinated by this character.  Miranda looks, talks and walks so much like Tarzan that not only can’t Jane/Emma tell them apart but Miranda even fools the faithful Waziri.

     Golden Lion is paired with Tarzan And The Ant Men.  You have to read both to get the whole story.

     Esteban Miranda is a London actor, a clown and a cowardly fool.  ERB goes to great lengths to deliniate the character of this unpleasant but goofily amiable alter ego.

     In the confusion Miranda is captured by a savage tribe of Blacks where he is spared because of his resemblance to Tarzan.  He escapes finally although he is a blithering idiot who has lost his memory.  Get that!  Even Tarzan’s doppelganger loses his memory.  I haven’t been able to fugure out ERB’s problems with his memory yet.

     He is discovered by the Waziri where he is once again mistaken for the real thing.  He is taken to the ranch house where Jane nurses him back to health.  Still mistakes him for the real Tarzan, he is about to be embraced lovingly by Jane when the terrible, untamed Tarzan appears through the French windows.  Tarzan himself had been off having incredible adventures with the Ant Men returning just in the nick of time.

     Here apparently Jane rejects Burroughs the Hero in favor of Burroughs the Clown of the first twelve years of her marriage.  This is something which ERB can’t forgive.  His resentment turns into a divorce about ten years later.

     There is then another long hiatus of approximately forty months before Tarzan returns as Lord of the Jungle with Jane in a very subsidiary role.  So in twelve years Burroughs wrote only about five Tarzan novels.  Then between 1929 and 1934 he whipped out an additional seven.

     The change of pace was caused by the quickening resolution of ERB’s psychological dilemma.  He was obviously living his life vicariously as Tarzan.

     It is this development of his psychology recorded through Tarzan that makes the oeuvre the most fascinating of River novels.

     Let us understand that a writer, any writer, is always discussing his own psychology.  this applies both to so-called non-fiction as well as fiction.  Properly speaking there is no such thing as non-fiction.  The difference between the two is that in non-fiction a writer describes actual events through a prism of so-called objectivity.  In other words in writing about Edgar Rice Burroughs I am bound to adhere to the facts of ERB’s life and I cannot invent details to improve the story.  However, in actuality I see what my own psychology has prepared me to see.  My psychology, that is, in conjunction with my intelligence and emotional perspicuity.

      Anyone who has read the autobiography of Frank Harris knows that his favorite adage is that no man can see over the top of his head.  Therefore it behooves every man to broaden and develop his experience so that he can stand as tall as possible.  In that way he can at least hopefully see over the heads of all his fellows.  I was once fortunate enough to try this on a crowded street in Hong Kong where I stood head and shoulders above my fellow Chinese pedestrians.  You could see the heads and shoulders of all the American sailors inching slowly along like icebergs in a sea of Chinese.

     But seriously, one must develop one’s intelligence and that is exactly what Edgar Rice Burroughs did throughout his life.  ERB was an avid reader both of fiction and non-fiction.  He makes frequent allusion to Poe, Wells, Doyle and who I think he respects most, Rudyard Kipling.  If you have read the great African explorers you will have no difficulty identifying sources.  ERB was quick in picking up new titles also.  Forbidden City was, I believe, based partially on Digging For Lost African Gods by Byron Khun de Protok published in 1926.

     ERB was also forced to respond to hectoring outside criticism.  I’m sure he little knew the effect that the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 would have on him personally, but by 1933’s Leopard Men he was thrown on the defensive by what H.G. Wells called the ‘Open Conspiracy’ or the Red Revolution.  I will deal with it in the last essay in our series called ‘Star Begotten.’

     All of Burroughs stories are many layered if you care to look beyond the surface details.  After Golden Lion ERB develops a whole jungle family of attendant animals which follow him through all the stories.  Each novel is merely one episode in the life of Tarzan/Burroughs and each leads to the next novel in true River fashion.

     This is wonderful stuff.  There is no difficulty understanding why Burroughs was the best selling author of his time.

     After recording the difficulties of reconciling himself with Emma from 1916 to 1928 ERB reluctantly threw in the towel when he wrote Tarzan And The Lost Empire.  The double entendre of the lost empire is explicit in between the lines.  It is not only the Lost Empire deep in the Heart Of Darkness but also his dream of building a great empire with Emma.  The dissolution of his marriage and his search for a real live La of Opar begins with the book.

     At this point he has also come under attack by the Reds who cannot tolerate the success of a Conservative writer.  Consolidating rapidly from 1917 to 1923, by this time the Revolution was in control of publishing.  They could deny access to new conservative writers, creating the myth that all the best new writers were Communist in faith, but they still had to destroy the reputations of older, non-conforming writers.

     I don’t know that any studies have been made of literary or journalistic attacks on ERB, but he responds as though there were many.  In 1929 he took time out from his personal psychology to write a major counter-attack against the Revolution with Tarzan At The Earth’s Core.

     While this may appear to be simply a critique of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, in fact Einstein was as much a political figure as a scientific one.  Both he and Freud were prominent agents of the ‘Open Conspiracy’ along with that literary political agent, H.G. Wells, so that Earth’s Core is a counter-attack on his detractors.

     Then in quick succession ERB turned out Tarzan the Invicinble, (watch the titles) Tarzan Triumphant, Tarzan And The City Of Gold, Tarzan And The Leopard Men and Tarzan And The Lion Man.

     After a long struggle Burroughs quickly resolved his psychological dilemma.  He rectified his Animus, disposing of the clown side of his nature while at the same time reconciling his Anima.  He divorced Emma while marrying what he fancied was a La of Opar in Florence.  The final conflict with Emma is recorded in City Of Gold.  The basic idea for City was probably borrowed from Bulfinch’s The Legends Of Charlemagne.  In Legends, an enchantress has captured many of the leading palladins of Charlemagne which she has imprisoned in a city of gold.  The medieval writers borrowed the story of Odysseus and Circe from Homer.

     In Burroughs’ story the enchantress Nemone has ‘captured’ a bemused Tarzan who may escape any time he chooses but he elects to stay around to see what will happen.

     Lion Man is notable for the way Burroughs blends psychology, fiction, the movies and how the movies affect the perception of reality of movie-goers.  Film, which was developed during Burroughs’ young manhood, had a profound effect on the movie-goer’s ability to distinguish real life from movie fantasy.  Burroughs was qite precocious in understanding this.  There are earlier references to the matter in his work but here he gives it a full scale examination, both as when the fictional Tarzan replaces the even more fictional Obroski in Africa and when as a Burroughs doppelganger Tarzan mixes on set with the movie people in Hollywood where they fail to recognize him as the real thing, Lion Man is perhaps the most interesting of all the Tarzan novels.

     After Lion Man, which both rectifies his Animus and reconciles his Anima, his motive for writing fast and furious disappeared.  In fact, his subject matter disappears.  He had in effect run out of material.  Tarzan’s Quest and Tarzan And The Forbidden City record his lingering problems with his two ladies at the age of sixty-three.  You can see why he wrote it as a farce.

     Tarzan And The Madman caps the story of his pschological development although he did not publish the novel during his lifetime.

     At the end, as is not unusual, he returned to the beginning as in The Mad King.  The totally farcical Forbidden City is an example of what his writing might have turned into if he had been allowed to publish under his pseudonym, Normal Bean.  As a comic novel, Forbidden City is actually very funny, if absurd, as Tarzan is driven from pillar to post by his two women.  This undoubtedly  reflects his real life situation.  In the end, he says, the fabulous diamond he and everyone else is seeking, the Jewel Of Great Price, is merely a mirage turning out to be as worthless as a piece of coal.

     Both Lion Man and Forbidden City seem to have influenced Aldous Huxley, one of the major intellectual writers of the period.  His novel, After Many A Summer Dies The Swan (1939), has allusions to Burroughs’ two novels.  The theme of ‘Lion Man’ of the mad scientist, God, who reverts to a half-ape, half-man creature is replicated in Swan in which an English nobleman who has lived for two hundred years reverts to an apelike existence.

     That the theme may be more than coincidental is the fact that Huxley incorporates an imaginary University of Tarzana into the story.  Thus one of the great intellectuals of the period found much of deep interest in ERB’s novels while also reacting to Wells.

     Edgar Rice Burroughs was in fact a great literary artist, if a trifle coarse.  He is, in fact, a great talent which if the critics fail to realize it, the people don’t.

     Surviving a hundred years is no small matter, it takes some talent to do that.  Yet, after those hundred years ERB is still an active force in the literary coal mines.  Well, it’s not like coal doesn’t burn with a pure blue flame and under pressure turn into diamonds.

Tarzan Meets The Wizard

April 21, 2011

The Big Bwana

Tarzan Meets The Wizard

by

R.E. Prindle

     I opened the door…(this was way back in nineteen-fifty when I was twelve years old and bought my first Tarzan book)…and stepped inside the Argonaut Bookstore.  This America was in a parallel universe compared to what you see today.  What I’m telling you here seemingly happened millions of years ago on another planet in a different universe.  Believe me, you couldn’t function in the world I’m talking about.

     The Argonaut was downtown.  That won’t mean anything to you now, but in those days there were no shopping malls.  Things weren’t big and strung out.  Downtown was not only the center of activity, there was no other activity.  You had to shop downtown.  Thus if your store wasn’t located on the four main blocks of Genessee, and two didn’t really count, your store was, as they say, marginalized.  The Argonaut was half a block off Genesee but in the center street off the two good blocks on the right side, the left side was a lot weaker than the right.  There was a chance someone might turn the corner and see your store.  Not too likely though.

     The scale would amaze you.  This was small.  Imagine yourself as you playing with your Lionel electric train.  Yeah, it was that small in comparison.  Barnes & Noble mega bookstores weren’t even a gleam in a booksellers’ eyes.  The thought would have been incredible.  It would have taken up one of the two good blocks on the right side.  The Argonaut was maybe twelve feet wide and fifty feet deep.  Mahogany shelving down one side beginning waist high with storage underneath, nothing there, a couple display tables down the middle, check out to the right.  The prop. would have been lucky to take home two hundred fifty dollars a day.  So out of a hundred dollars markup he not only met all expenses but lived as a respected business man.  As I say, a different world.

     The owner dealt only with White people.  The only minority was the Black folk and they were confined to the First Ward.  The Italians were emerging from their ghettoes in the post-war world so pizza shops were showing as a novelty.  The owner only had to stock his shelves for one buying public.  Half of his inventory would have been ‘the classics.’   There were virtually no novels published after WWI on sale except for current literature and that was generally considered inferior to the classics.

     Great immigration changes were in the air while the last vestiges of the previously dominant English club style were slowly disappearing.  Thus the Argonaut was designed to look like it might have been Lord Greystoke’s personal library, mahogany, dark woods and all.

     I was only two years out of the Orphanage and feeling my way to some sort of identity.  I would never find it in my old home town, it wasn’t there.

     I hadn’t ever bought a book at the Argonaut before, as an Orphan I would have been shooed out in the most unkindly manner.  As it was the classiest  and only real book store in town I was anxious with anticipation.  The library at the Orphanage had been my refuge, a very nice library too, as big or bigger than the Argonaut and all kid’s books.  The other orphans viewed it as The Black Hole Of Calcutta so I had always had the place to myself.  Donations to the Orphanage  were terrific so I was familiar with the whole range of children’s books from Raggedy Ann And Andy to my favorites, the Oz series.  In those days I was mystified by the change of authorship after the first dozen books but I was quick to note the inferior style of his successors.

     I don’t remember any Tarzans or other Burroughs.

     I was a free rover back in the Orphanage days so I knew about the Argonaut as it was across the street from the magazine store where I bought my Blackhawks, Daredevil and Plastic Man comics.  They were only a dime so all I had to do was pick up five bottles with a redemption value of 2 cents each and I was in business; but now I was going to spend a dollar.  Don’t know where I got it.

     I had scouted the place and knew where everything was so when I entered and looked down the long row of shelves stocked with what would now be a miniscule library I knew to turn left just inside the door to the space alotted to Juvenile Literature.  Tom Swift and the Rover Boys among others were still available but nobody bought them.  Stiff stuff.   Swift was too stiff for words.  I never could enjoy the stuff although the oldtimers swore by him.  And there next to the Oz books was Tarzan.  There were only about eight of them available at the time along with five of the Martian series.

     The Burroughs stuff was all put out by Grossett and Dunlap, my favorite publishers.  Something about the paper and the binding.  There were several other publishers who put out classy kid books, Cupples And Leon.  They had the look and feel that made you feel like a man on the way.  Now the Barnes and Noble Juvenile section, bigger than the whole Argonaut, is a pile of indoctrination in generally offensive looking  and feeling volumes.  Lot of ’em made in China.  Chinese don’t know a thing about paper and books.  I’m glad I spent my youth in that other universe.

     Back then you could buy Whitman Co., Racine, Wisconsin, abridgments for fifty-nine cents if you didn’t have a dollar.  I could never get over why Whitman’s were published in Racine when everything else was published in New York City.  I’m sure there was some weird reason.  I had my dollar in my hand.  I focused my concentration in a steady beam and was intensely glancing from title to title comparing the dust jacket illustrations when, as though from afar, faintly a voice partially intruded into my conscious to say:  ‘I’m Jason, can I help you?’

     It was so faint I didn’t really hear it, the voice merely brushed past my concentration; then I felt what I thought was a very hard tap on my shoulder.  Wincing, I looked up.

     ‘I’m Jason, can I help you?’  he said more imperiously, left hand on hip with his left leg resting on the tip of his shoe.

     ‘Help me do what?’  I asked uncomprehendingly.

     ‘Find the book you’re looking for?’  He replied with a condescending, well, not a sneer, but you know what I mean.

     At the same time I realized that although I wanted a Tarzan book I didn’t have any idea which one was the best to start with.

     This guy Jason as I surveyed him in my pre-teen way was a pretty impressive guy  He was an easy six feet.  I was about four feet ten, imperially slim (a phrase I’ve always wanted to work in) dressed to the nines in a collegiate cut suit, blue button down oxford cloth shirt (still the only kind of shirt material), and rep stripe tie.  (Never liked rep stripes, prefer paisleys and foulards).  He was good looking, he could have stepped out of an Arrow shirt ad or modeled for one of those German postage stamps of the late thirties.  God, those Leyendecker ads were just awesome.

     Jason would have been a killer with the girls too, if he had just come unstuck from himself.  But, heck, if I looked like that I might have been satisfied with myself too.

     He stood there leaning on the counter with his right arm, his left arm cocked on his hip and his right leg across his left leg.  God, I’ve never seen a pair of pants with a crease like that and I never will again.  I’ve never been able to get it and I’ve bought more suits than Huey Long who couldn’t get that crease either.

     I can say that I was overawed by Jason.

     ‘I wanted to buy a Tarzan book.’  I began timidly.  ‘Do you know anything about them?’

     ‘Do I know anything about them?’  He said with a knowing chuckle as he brought his bent fingers up for a minute examination of his nails.  ‘I should think so.  I’ve read them all.’

     ‘OK.  Which one.  I’ve got my dollar.’

     ‘Which one?’  He asked irritatingly.  He had this annoying habit of repeating your question as well as his now constant steady admiration of his finger nails.  He did have a good manicure.  A manicure of any kind was a rarity in our town.  Hair cuts were pretty common.  First he would do one hand and then the other.  Sometimes both at once.  He was something to watch.  Enjoyed preening for me too.

     ‘Hmm.  For you?’  He said musingly as though I were a special case.  ‘Well, you know, there’s only eight available out of twenty so you can only choose from those eight.  I’ve got them all, every one.  Had to go to second hand stores which I’m loath to do but this case called for an exception.  Those eight are new though.  I’ve thought about the Tarzan novels a great deal.  I divide them into three categories for convenience.  The first four I call the Russian Quartet, the next eight I call the Jungle Rhapsodies and the eight after them, Political Undertones.

     These eight are all from Grosset and Dunlap and they’re all that’s available new.  The titles Burroughs self-published are all out of print…

     ‘What do you mean Russian Quartet?’  This was the beginning of the McCarthy Reaction and I was a pretty keen anti-Communist, or about to become one.

     ‘Well, it seems to me that Burroughs concieved the first four volumes as a unit without plans to go further.  Of course, the first volume introduces Tarzan but then he used the literary devices of the two Russian nihilists who are after Tarzan to continue the story through volumes two and to four.  He kills off the last Russian in Son Of Tarzan and then leaves no room for a continuation of the series.

     The Quartet is probably written in too literary a style for you.  Burroughs was trying hard to follow the rules of fine literature in the Quartet.’

     ‘What happened then?’

     ‘What happened then?’  There he went again bringing up both sets of nails for scrutiny and adopting that wide apart stance of that famous picture of Burroughs flexing his muscles.

     ‘I think he was at a loss what to do next.  I think he had written out his original conception of Tarzan.  I mean, Tarzan was virtually a moribund old man at the end of Son of Tarzan.’

     ‘Yeah, but you said there’s a whole bunch of other books.’

     ‘His original conception, I said.  About this time he went way out West in Hollywood, where I’m going soon, I’m going to be a big movie star with my looks, where he met L. Frank Baum.  Baum wrote a number of the Oz stories, have heard of him?’

     ‘Of course I have.’  I snuffed, deeply offended that anyone would think I didn’t know who L. Frank Baum was.  Ozma of Oz was the first book I ever read on my own.

     ‘Uh huh.”  He said, condescendingly looking down his nose, but impressed.  ‘I think that he and Baum had some long walks and summer talks and Baum gave him some pointers.  Baum was older than Burroughs.  He was born in eighteen fifty-fix and died in nineteen-nineteen just after he passed the torch to Burroughs, so to speak.’

     ‘How do you know when L. Frank Baum lived and died, I wonder?’

     ‘It’s my job to know these things.’  He smiled condescendingly.  ‘Just like Burroughs was born in eighteen seventy-five and died the day before yesterday.’

      ‘You’re kidding me, now?’   I said, unwilling to be taken in.

     ‘I kid you not, kid.  Day before yesterday he breathed his last breath.  Expired, just like that.  As I was saying, Baum probably told him to make Tarzan and Africa over on the model of Dorothy, the Wizard and Oz.  That way he could move Tarzan North, South, East and West just as Baum did with his characters in the Oz series.  Oz has its metropolis of the Emerald City and then the outlying areas where all these odd creatures live.

     Burroughs listened.  So in the fifth Tarzan book, Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar, the story changes from a more or less realistic vision of Africa to one of hidden cities, lost empires and strange mythical locations like the giant boma of the Ant Men or Pal-ul-don.  Tarzan, as the Wizard, works out of his estate in East Africa as a substitute for the Emerald City.

      By adopting Baum’s formula Burroughs was able to keep his series going until he died, the day before yesterday.  His writing style changes too, from formal to Baum’s loose…’

     ‘Gridley,’  Came the voice of the proprietor, ‘You’ve got a customer over here if you can spare the time.’

     ‘What am I, a grilled cheese sandwich?’  I thought resentfully looking over to the cash register where I saw a man holding a copy of James Jones’ From Here To Eternity.  ‘Oh, that’s different,’  I rationalized.  That was worth two-fifty in this man’s Democracy so I could see why he was going for the big money first.

     Jason grabbed a copy of The Jewels Of Opar, thrust it in my hands and said:  ‘Here, kid, start with this one.’

     I was leery of the Russian Quartet for obvious political reasons while Jason had said that Jewels Of Opar was like Oz so taking his expert advice it was my first Tarzan.

     This guy having purchased his James Jones walked over me like I wasn’t there, didn’t even look down, he was only about five-six too.  I put my Tarzan and dollar on the counter, received my bagged book in return.

     ‘Come again, kid.’  Jason said flippantly as I opened he door.

     ‘I guess you’ll be off to Hollywood starring in movies before then.’  I waved.  ‘I’ll be back.’  Then it was down Genesee and back to home, the proud possessor of my first Tarzan book that I still have.

     Last I time I checked they were selling the same book for forty-five dollars without a dust jacket.  Mine still has an excellent jacket.