A Review

The Novels Of George Du Maurier

Peter Ibbetson, Trilby, The Martian

Part IV

Peter Ibbetson

Singers and Dancers and Fine Romancers

What do they know?

What do they know?

-Larry Hosford

Review by R.E. Prindle

Table of Contents

I.  Introduction

II Review of Trilby

III.  Review of The Martian

IV.  Review of Peter Ibbetson

     Peter Ibbetson is the first of the three novels of George Du Maurier.  As elements of the later two novels are contained in embryo in Ibbetson it would seem that Du Maurier had the three novels at least crudely plotted while a fourth dealing with politics but never realized is hinted at.  Actually Du Maurier has Ibbetson who writes this ‘autobiography’ write several world changing novels from inside the insane asylum to which he had been committed.  In the Martian Barty Josselin wrote several world changing books while ‘possessed’ by an alien intelligence, in a way, not too dissimilar to the situation of Ibbetson.  Du Maurier himself comes across, as I have said, as either a half demented lunatic or a stone genius.

     He has Ibbetson and the heroine, The Duchess of Towers write in code while they read encrypted books.  Du Maurier says that Ibbetson and hence the two following books deal with weighty subjects but in a coded manner that requires attention to understand.

     On page 362 of the Modern Library edition he says:

     …but more expecially in order to impress you, oh reader, with the full significance of this apocalyptic and somewhat minatory utterance (that may haunt your fever sense during your midnight hours of introspective self-communion), I have done my best, my very best to couch it in the obscurest and most unitelligible phraseology, I could invent.  If I have failed to do this, if I have unintentionally made any part of my meaning clear, if I have once deviated by mistake into what might almost appear like sense, mere common-sense- it is the fault of my half French and wholly imperfect education.

          So, as Bob Dylan said of the audiences of his Christian tour:  Those who were meant to get it, got it, for all others the story is merely a pretty story or perhaps fairy tale.  The fairy tale motif is prominent in the form of the fee Tarapatapoum and Prince Charming of the story.  Mary, the Duchess of Towers is Tarapatapoum and Peter is Prince Charming.  It might be appropriate here to mention that Du Maurier was highly influenced by Charles Nodier the teller of fairy tales of the Romantic period.  Interestingly Nodier wrote a story called Trilby.  Du Maurier borrowed the name for his novel Trilby while he took the name Little Billee from a poem by Thackeray.  A little background that makes that story a little more intelligible.

     Those that watch for certain phobias such as anti-Semitism and Eugenics will find this story of Du Maurier’s spolied for them as was Trilby and probably The Martian.  One is forced to concede that Du Maurier deals with those problems in a coded way.  Whether his meaning is derogatory or not lies with your perception of the problems not with his.

     Thus on page 361 just above the previous quote Du Maurier steps from concealment to deliver a fairly open mention of Eugenics.  After warning those with qualities and attributes to perpetuate those qualities by marrying wisely, i.e. eugenically, he breaks out with this:

     Wherefore, also, beware and be warned in time, ye tenth transmitters of a foolish face, ye reckless begetters of diseased or puny bodies, with hearts and brains to match! Far down the corridors of time shall clubfooted retribution follow in your footsteps, and overtake you at every turn.

          Here we have a premonition of Lothrop Stoddards Overman and Underman.   The best multiply slowly while the worst rear large families.  Why anyone would find fault with the natural inclination to marry well if one’s handsome and intelligent with a similar person is beyond me.  Not only is this natural it has little to do with the Eugenics Movement.  Where Eugenics falls foul, and rightly so, is in the laws passed to castrate those someone/whoever deemed unworthy to reproduce.  This is where the fault of the Eugenics Movement lies.  Who is worthy to pass such judgment?  Certainly there are obvious cases where neutering would be appropriate and beneficial for society but in my home town, for instance, no different than yours I’m sure, the elite given the opportunity would have had people neutered out of enmity and vindictiveness.  that is where the danger lies.  There is nothing wrong with handsome and intelligent marrying handsome and intelligent.  How may people want a stupid, ugly partner?

     Du Maurier had other opinions that have proved more dangerous to society.  One was his belief in the virtues of Bohemians, that is say, singers and dancers and fine romancers.  On page 284 he says:

     There is another society in London and elsewhere, a freemasonry of intellect and culture and hard work- la haute Ashene du talent- men and women whose names are or ought to be household words all over the world; many of them are good friends of ine, both here and abroad; and that society, which was good enough for my mother and father, is quite good enough for me.

     Of course, the upper Bohemia of proven talent. But still singers and dancers and fine romancers.  And what do they know?  Trilby was of the upper Bohemia as was Svengali but Trilby was hypnotized and Svengali but a talented criminal.  What can a painter contribute but a pretty picture, what can a singer do but sing his song, I can’t think of the dancing Isadora Duncan or the woman without breaking into laughter.  And as for fine romancers, what evil hath Jack Kerouac wrought.

     I passed part of my younger years in Bohemia, Beat or Hippie circles, and sincerely regret that Bohemian attitudes have been accepted as the norm for society.  Bohemia is fine for Bohemians but fatal for society which requires more discipline and stability.  Singers and dancers and fine romancers, wonderful people in their own way, but not builders of empires.

     In that sense, the promotion of Bohemianism, Du Maurier was subversive.

     But the rules of romancing are in the romance and we’re talking about Du Maurier’s romance of Peter Ibbetson.

     Many of the reasons for criticizing Du Maurier are political.  The  man whether opposed to C0mmunist doctrine or not adimired the Bourgeois State.  He admired Louis-Philippe as the Beourgeois king of France.  This may sound odd as he also considered himself a Bohemian but then Bohemians are called into existence by a reaction to the Bourgeoisie.  Perhaps not so odd.  He was able to reconcile such contradictions.  Indeed he is accused of having a split personality although I think this is false.  Having grown up in both France and England he developed a dual national identity and his problem seems to be reconciling his French identity with his English identity thus his concentration on memory.

     In this novel he carefully builds up a set of sacred memories of his childhood.  He very carefully introduces us to the people of his childhood.  Mimsy Seraskier his little childhood sweetheart.  All the sights and sounds and smells.  In light of the quote I used telling how he disguises his deeper meaning one has to believe that he is giving us serious theories he has worked out from science and philosophy.

     Having recreated his French life for us Peter’s  parents die and Ibbetson’s Uncle Ibbetson from England adopts him and takes him back to the Sceptered Isle.  Thus he ceases to be the French child Pasquier and becomes the English child Peter Ibbetson.  A rather clean and complete break.  From this point on his childhood expectations are disappointed with the usual psychological results.  He develops a depressed psychology.  The cultural displacement prevents him from making friends easily or at all.  His Uncle who has a difficult boorish personality is unable to relate to a sensitive boy with a Bohemian artistic temperament.  Hence he constantly demeans the boy for not being like himself and has no use for him.

     This is all very skillfully handled.  We have intimations that bode no good for Peter.   The spectre is prison.  The hint of a crime enters into the story without anything actually being said.  But the sense of foreboding enters Peter’s mind and hence the reader’s.  This is done extremely well.  It’s a shame the Communists are in control of the media so that they can successfully denigrate any work of art that contradicts or ignores their beliefs.  For instance the term bourgeois itself.  The word is used universally as a contemptuous epithet even though the Bourgeois State was one of the finest created.  Why then contempt?  Simply because the Communists must destroy or denigrate any success that they canot hope to surpass.  I was raised believing that what was Bourgeois was contemptible without ever knowing what Bourgeois actually meant.  It is only through Du Maurier at this late stage in life that I begin to realize what the argument really was and how I came to accept the Communist characterization.  I’m ashamed of myself.

     Hence all Du Maurier criticism is unjust being simply because it is the antithesis of Communist beliefs.  The man as a writer is very skillful, as I have said, a genius.  If I were read these novels another couple of times who knows what riches might float up from the pages.

     Colonel Ibbetson apprentices Peter to an architect, a Mr Lintot, which, while not unhappy, is well below Peter’s expectations for his fairy Prince Charming self.  As a lowly architect he is placed in a position of designing huts for the workers of the very wealthy.  The contrast depresses him even further.  He has been disappointed in love and friendship and then he is compelled by business exigencies to attend a ball given by a wealthy client.  He definitely feels out of place.  Psychologically incapable of mixing he stands in a corner.

     At this ball the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, The Duchess of Towers, is in attendance.  From across the room she seems to give him an interested glance.  Peter can only hope, hopelessly.  As a reader we have an intimation that something will happen but we can’t be sure how.  I couldn’t see.  Then he sees her in her carriage parading Rotten Row in Hyde Park.  She sees him and once again it seems that she gives him a questioning look.

     Then he takes a vacation in France where he encounter her again.  After talking for a while he discovers that she is a grown up Mimsey Seraskier, his childhood sweetheart.  Thus his French childhood and English adulthood are reunited in her.  Wow!  There was a surprise the reader should have seen coming.  I didn’t.  I had no trouble recognizing her from childhood in France but Du Maurier has handled this so skillfully that I am as surprised as was Peter.  I tipped my imaginary hat to Du Maurier here.

     Perhaps I entered into Du Maurier’s dream world here but now I began to have flashbacks, a notion that I had read this long ago, most likely in high school or some other phantasy existence.  I can’t shake the notion but I can’t remember reading the book then at all.  Don’t know where I might have come across it.  Of course that doesn’t mean an awful lot.  If asked if I had ever read a Charles King novel I would have said no but when George McWhorter loaned me a couple to read that he had in Louisville I realized I had read one of them before.  Eighth grade.  I could put a handle on that but not Peter Ibbetson.  Perhaps Du Marurier has hypnotized me.  Anyway certain images seem to stick in my mind from a distant past.

     It was at this time that Mary, the Duchess if  Towers, formerly Mimsy, enters Peter’s dream, in an actual real life way.  This is all well done, Peter dreamt he was walking toward an arch when two gnomish people tried to herd him into prison.  Mary appears and orders the gnomes to vanish which they do.  ‘That’s how you have to handle that.’  She says.  And that is very good advice for dreams that Du Maurier gives.  As we’ll see Du Maurier has some pretensions to be a psychologist.

     She then instructs Peter in the process of  ‘dreaming true.’  In such a manner they can actually be together for real in a shared dream.  Now, Trilby, while seemingly frivolous, actually displays a good knowledge of hypnotism.  More than that it puts Du Maurier in the van of certain psychological knowledge.  Hypnotism and psychology go together.  Without an understanding of hypnotism one can’t be a good psychologist.  If he wasn’t ahead of Freud at this time he was certainly even with him.  Remember this is 1891 while Freud didnt’ surface until 1895 and then few would have learned of him.  He wrote in German anyway. 

     Freud was never too developed on auto-suggestion.  Emile Coue is usually attributed to be the originator of auto-suggestion yet the technique that Mary gives to Peter is the exact idea of auto-suggestion that Coue is said to have developed twenty or twenty-five years on.

     Du Maurier speaks of the sub-conscious which is more correct than the unconscious.  He misunderstands the nature of the subconscious giving it almost divine powers but in many ways he is ahead of the game.  Now, Ibbetson was published in 1891 which means that Du Maurier was in possession of his knowledge no later than say 1889 while working on it from perhaps 1880 or so on.  It will be remembered that Lou Sweetser, Edgar Rice Burroughs mentor in Idaho, was also knowledgable in psychology in 1891 but having just graduated a couple of years earlier from Yale.  So Freud is very probably given too much credit for originating what was actually going around.  This earlier development of which Du Maurier was part has either been suppressed in Freud’s favor or has been passed over by all psychological historians.

     So, Mary gives Peter psychologically accurate information on auto-suggestion so that he can ‘dream true.’  I don’t mean to say that anyone can share another’s dreams which is just about a step too far but by auto-suggestion one can direct and control one’s dreams.  Auto-suggestion goes way back anyway.  The Poimandre of Hermes c. 300 AD is an actual course in auto-suggestion.

     Peter is becoming more mentally disturbed now that his denied expectations have returned to haunt him in the person of Tarapatapoum/Mimsey/Mary.  Once again this is masterfully done.  The clouding of his mind is almost visible.  Over the years he has generated a deep seated hatred for Colonel Ibbetson even though the Colonel, given his lights, has done relatively well by him.  Much of Peter’s discontent is internally generated by his disappointed expectations.  The Colonel has hinted that he might be Peter’s father rather than his Uncle.  This completely outrages Peter’s cherished understanding of his mother and father.  The Colonel according to Peter was one of those guys who claimed to have made every woman he’d ever met.  One must bear in mind that Peter is telling the story while the reader is seeing him become increasingly unstable.

     While Peter doesn’t admit it to himself he confronts the Colonel with the intention of murdering him.  He claims self-defense but the court doesn’t believe it nor does the reader.  It’s quite clear the guy was psycho but, once again, Du Maurier handles this so skillfully that one still wonders.  Given the death penalty his friends and supporters, the influential Duchess of Towers, get the sentence commuted to life imprisonment.

     Then begins Peter’s double life in prison that goes on for twenty years.  By day a convict, at night Peter projects hemself into a luxurious dream existence with his love, Mary, the Duchess of Towers.  Quite insane but he has now realized his expections if only in fantasy.  Now, this novel as well as Du Maurier’s other novels is textually rich.  The style is dense while as Du Maurier tells us it is written in more than one key, has encoded messages, so I’m concentrating on only the main thread here.  That concerns memory.

     While it is possible to subconsciously manage one’s dreams, I do it to a minor extent, of course it is impossible for two people to dream toether and share that dream.  This is to venture into the supernatural.  Spiritualism and Theosophy both dealing with the supernatural as does all religion including Christianity, were at their peak at this time.  Du Maurier has obviously studied them.  Just because one utilizes one’s knowledge in certain ways to tell a story doesn’t mean one believes what one writes.  Ibbetson is written so well that the writer seems to have fused himself with the character.  If I say Du Maurier believes that may not be true but as the same themes are carried through  all his novels without a demurrer it seems likely.

     Du Maurier seems to be pleading a certain understanding of the subconscious giving it as many or more supernatural powers as Freud himself will later.  This might be the appropriate  place to speculate on Du Maurier’s influence on Mark Twain.  We know Twain was an influence on Burroughs so perhaps both were.

     Before he died Twain wrote a book titled the Mysterious Stranger.  This was twenty-five years after Peter Ibbetson.  Operator 44, the Mysterious Stranger, is a time time traveler who has some sort of backstair connecting years as  a sort of memory monitor.  Peter and Mary over the years work out a system that allows them to travel back through times even to prehistoric times.  Thus Peter is able to sketch from life stone age man hunting mastodons, or Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo.  They are present at these events but as sort of ghost presences without substance.  they have no substance hence cannot affect reality.

     This would be a major them in fifties science fiction in which, for instance, a time traveler steps on a grub, then comes back to his present time finding everyone talking a different language.  Change one item and you change all others.  Du Maurier avoids this problem that he very likely thought of in this clever way.

     We can clearly see the future of twentieth century imaginiative writing taking form here.  One can probably trace several twentieth century sci-fi themes back to Du Maurier.

     Peter and Mary have a magic window through they can call up any scene within their memories.  In their dream existence they are dependent on memory they can only re-experience, they cannot generate new experiences.  The memory extends back genetically although Du Maurier speaks in terms of reincarnation.  Peter hears Mary humming a tune he has never heard before.  Mary explains that the tune is a family melody written by an ancestress hundreds of years before.  Thus one has this genetic memory persisting through generations.  This gives Du Maurier room to expatiate on the persistence of memory through past, present and future.

     Du Maurier has worked out an elaborate scheme in which memory unites past, present and future, into a form of immortality.  This is actually a religious concept but a very beautiful concept, very attractive in its way.

     Peter and Mary had elected to stay at one age- twenty-six to twenty-eight- so for twenty years they retained their youthful form and beauty.  Then one night Peter enters the mansion of his dreams through a lumber room to find the way blocked.  He knows immediately that Mary has died.  He then learns that in attempting to save a child from a train she was herself killed.

     Peter goes into an insane rage attacking the prison guards while calling each Colonel Ibbetson.  Clearly insane and that’s where the send him.  The mad house.  Originally he continues to rage so they put him in a straight jacket where he remains until his mind calms enough to allow him to dream.  In his dream he returns to a stream in France.  Here he believes he can commit suicide in his dream which should be shock enough to stop his heart in real life.  Something worth thinking about.  Filling his pockets with stones he means to walk in over his head.  Then, just ahead he spies the back of a woman sitting on a log.  Who else but Mary.  She has done what has never been done before, what even Houdini hasn’t been able to do, make it to back to this side.

     Now outside their mansion, they are no longer young, but show their age.  This is nicely done stuff.  Of course I can’t replicate the atmosphere and feel but the Du Maurier feeling is ethereal.  As I say I thought he was talking to me and I entered his fantasy without reserve.

     Here’s a lot of chat about the happiness on the otherside.  When Peter awakes back in the asylum he is calm and sane.  He convinces the doctors and is restored to full inmate rights.  Once himself again he begins to write those wonderful books that right the world.

     One gets the impression that Du Maurier believes he himself is writing those immortal books that will change the world. Time and fashions change.  Today he is thought a semi-evil anti- Semite, right wing Bourgeois writer.  I don’t know if he’s banned from college reading lists but I’m sure his works are not used in the curriculum.  I think he’s probably considered oneof those Dead White Men.  Thus a great writer becomes irrelevant.

      It’s a pity because from Peter Ibbetson through Trilby to The Martian he has a lot to offer.  The Three States of Mind he records are thrilling in themselves, as Burroughs would say, as pure entertainment while on a more thoughtful read there is plenty of nourishment.   Taken to another level his psychology is very penetrating.  His thought is part of the mind of the times.  Rider Haggard shares some of the mystical qualities.  The World’s Desire is comparable which can be complemented by his Heart Of The World.  The latter may turn out to be prophetic shortly.  H.G. Wells’ In The Days Of The Comet fits into this genre also.  Another very good book.  Of course Burroughs’ The Eternal Lover and Kipling and Haggard’s collaboration of Love Eternal.  Kipling’s Finest Story In The World might also fit in as well, I’m sure there are many others of the period of which I’m not aware.  I haven’t read Marie Corelli but she is often mentioned in this context.  You can actually slip Conan Doyle in their also.

     Well, heck, you can slip the whole Wold Newton Universe, French and Farmerian in there.  While there is small chance any Wold Newton meteor had anything to do with it yet as Farmer notes at about that time a style of writing arose concerned with a certain outlook that was worked by many writers each contributing his bit while feeding off the others as time went by.

     I don’t know that Du Maurier is included in the Wold Newton Universe (actually I know he isn’t) but he should be.  He was as influential on the group as any other or more so.  He originated many of the themes.

     Was Burroughs influenced by him?  I think so.  There was no way ERB could have missed Trilby.  No possible way.  If he read Trilby and the other two only once which is probable any influence was probably subliminable.  ERB was not of the opinion that a book could change the world, so he disguised his more serious thoughts just as Du Maurier did his.  He liked to talk about things though. 

     Singers and dancers.  What do they know?  What do they know?  In the end does it really matter what they know.  Time moves on, generations change, as they change the same ideas come around expressed in a different manner.  They have their day then are replaced.  The footprint in the concrete does remain.   Genius will out. 

    

 

 

A Review

Thuvia, Maid Of Mars

by

Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Part III-C

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Review by R.E. Prindle

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Civilization And Its Malcontents

     Let us say that for the fifty years or so before the 1920s there was a growing sense of societal malaise.  This malaise was reflected most notably in the creation of  Edgar Rice Burroughs’ psychological projection, Tarzan Of The Apes.   One has to account for the immediate acceptation by society of such an absurdity.  Tarzan, in fact, completely rejected civilization for the life of the  romantic ‘unrestrained freedom’ of the jungle.  The noble savage in fact.

     Thus in a metaphor Burroughs reflected the malaise of his time so brilliantly that his creation was accepted as virtually a real person.  Writers like Grant and Stoddard put the same theme into more scholarly terms.  As noted, contrary to Richard Slotkin’s idea, Grant had little or no influence on Burroughs while the slightly later Lothrop Stoddard whose three relevant works appeared only from 1920 to 1922 could have had no influence on Burroughs’ formative years.   It seems probable that Burroughs did read Stoddard and was influenced by his work but only after his ideas were fully formed.  Even then  The Revolt Against Civilization appeared after Burroughs had examined some of the same problems in his rejected manuscript, Under The Red Flag of 1919.

     The problem of the malcontents and their war on civilization was examined by a number of writers during the twenties and thirties so why Slotkin singled out Burroughs, Grant and Stoddard isn’t as clear as it might be.  Postwar German cinema was intensely concerned with the matter as why should it not?  Germany was under asault by what Stoddard called the Underman.  Nor need Slotkin think Stoddard was alone.  I’m sure there were dozens of forgotten books prophesying the end of the world by one means or another including the Undermen of Communism.

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     The Underman, or the Communist, was not even a term unique to Stoddard.  Gustave Le Bon, the French scholar on whose work Sigmund Freud based his study Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego wrote prolifically on the psychological foundations of the Underman.  Freud based his book on Le Bon’s 1895 study  The Psychology Of Crowds.  Unless I’m mistaken he based his 1930 study Civilization And Its Discontents on Le Bon’s 1921 book The World In Revolt: A Psychological Study Of Our Times.

     On the cinematic side the problem was examined in the great silent films The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari and Fritz Lang’s 1922 film Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler.  Lang would follow that ten years later with the sound film The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse.

     Even though Buroughs’ Under The Red Flag was rejected in 1919 he persisted, rewriting and extending the text into the 1926 story, The Moon Maid.   This story reflects a possible reading of The Revolt Against Civilization but such a reading was much more evident in 1934’s Tarzan And The Lion Man.

     The development of the problem was evident to all these writers which it seems to have escaped Slotkin who attributes the recognition of societal evolution to mere ‘racism’ in the writers.  One thinks that perhaps Slotkin is too involved in his own agenda.

     Rider Haggard enunciated the problem quite clearly in his 1888 novel Allan Quatermain  in which Quatermain grouses about the ‘strict limits’ of civilization compared to the ‘natural’ life of the African Zulus.  It might almost seem that the idea of Tarzan arose in Burroughs’ mind from that observation.  In fact science was undermining all the comforting beliefs that mankind had been settled in for a hundred thousand years.  During that long period characterized by the mental mode of what is called mythopoeic thinking man’s mind devoid of true knowledge projected a vision of reality that resulted in the notion of God.  Thus reasoning from insufficient knowledge man’s mind came up with an erroneous result.  You can’t get out of a mind what isn’t in it; all education is suggestion.

     As Freud was to say, man’s settled view of reality received its three great shocks when Galileo disproved the geocentric notion of the universe, Darwin disproved the uniqueness of man’s position in the animal kingdom and he, Freud, displaced the conscious mind with his vision of the unconscious mind.  Once again Le Bon was there ahead of him.

     Thus as the nineteenth century opened and progressed the bases of mankind’s notions of reality were shattered leaving him emotionally and intellectually bereft of foundations of belief.  Adrift without an anchor.

     As if that were not bad enough the great cataclysm that ushered in the modern era, The French Revolution, was based on the the absolute notion that not only were all men created equal but remained equal in all aspects of their existence.  The advance of civilization would toss this certainty into the trash can of history also.

     As civilization placed greater and greater demands on the intelligence and self-discipline of men and women the incontestable gap between those less intelligent and those more intelligent became more and more obvious.  Thus as the century progressed the notion of the Overman and the Underman began to become clear.

     At the same time the first tentative efforts at measuring the intellectual potential of the individual began to become possible.  Of course the basic inequality of men and women in its physical aspect had always been apparent.  Some men were naturally stronger and better muscled than others.  But, even that was changing. The science of physical culture was making it possible for the 98 lb. weakling to develop himself into a man mountain.  Thus artifically developed srongmen like the Great Sandow ushered in the golden age of the strong man topped off by Charles Atlas who guaranteed he could turn you into a man mountain if you followed his program.

     There was the promise that you could dethrone that bully and kick sand back in his face.  On the other side Francis Galton was originating the first primitive tests to measure intelligence potential.  Burroughs would have seen both proponents during his miraculous summer of 1893 at the Chicago Columbian Exposition.  I mean to say that both facts entered his mind where they could be digested and emerge later.  Nothing can come out of your mind that didn’t go in it.

     And then after the turn of the century Binet devised he first actual IQ test.  Thus, just as Sandow and Atlas could measure the size of muscles, the psychologists became able to measure the intelligence potential.  Those with high IQs were set up; those with low IQs were cooked.  The upshot was that all men were not created equal nor could they ever attain intellectual equality.

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     To a very large extent what became the Communist Party recognized the inequality while demanding equality against reason.  Recognizing subconsciously, perhaps, that men could never be intellectual equals rather than try the futile task of raising the less fortunate they sought to destroy education which brings out the inequality but doesn’t create it.   No matter what happens there are always going to be the more intelligent just as there will always be the physically stronger.  As Le Bon points out, if you needed to hear it, nature don’t know from equality.

     Thus the Communist Party devised the well sounding slogan- From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.  Good plan for the needy, slavery for the able.  The needy were organized beginning their struggle to achieve superiority by collective action.  This was accomplished in Russia in 1917.  The battle was joined.

     Just as individuals are created with different capabilities so are peoples and races.  Some can achieve and some can’t.  Slotkin who must be a Communist thus takes offence at what he perceives to be, and is, an attitude of White Supremacy in Burroughs, Grant and Stoddard.  While I am aware there are those who will disagree with White superiority it is nevertheless not an attitude but an evolutionary fact.  That is the reason Communists have Darwin under attack.  While Darwin doesn’t say it, it is the inevitable result of his studies.  Just as it was necessary for the Undermen to destroy education in the hopes of creating intellectual equality so it became necessary to destroy White achievement of the last five hundred years.  The whites must be demonized and made to feel evil and inferior morally.  That is the import of Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation.

     At that level all three writers are guilty.  As has been stated in Canadian courts- Truth is not a defense.  So there’s nothing to discuss.  Might is right and whoever has the might will prevail.

     It is a fact that all three writers were anti-Communists so it may be assumed that whatever Communists believe, they didn’t.  And why should they?  Might may be right but it can still be nonsense.  Communism is a flawed ideology based on a false premiss.  It always fails wherever it is introduced.  Failure is not evidence of a bad plan in Communist eyes.  One just continues to shovel sand against the tide and pray.  So succeed or fail they always think they can succeed by the same flawed ideology.  The fault for failure lies elsewhere.

     In that sense Burroughs was wasting his time assailing this religion of failure with his Under The Red Flag and its successor The Moon Maid.  The only people who would applaud his effort would be we non-Communists but he could never convince anyone with Communist leanings.  Of course that wasn’t well understood at the time.

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     If Burroughs were accused of not believing in equality that would be true.  Not only are John Carter and Tarzan superior to any contemporaries on two worlds but Burroughs has a whole hierarchy of value.  John Carter is the Warlord of Mars ruling from the top city  of Mars, Helium.  The races of Mars pretty much reflect those of  Earth and their relative stations.  The main exception is the ruling Red race.  As Whites do and have existed on Mars in Burroughs stories  while at one time being the dominant race perhaps the Red race is some sort of amalgam of the various Eropean immigrants of the United States.  I believe the Green Men represent the American Indian.  Both roam the great plains while being essentially savages.

     Tarzan though always spoken of as being White is described as a bronze giant.  Bronze is a fairly dark metal so that Tarzan and the Red men of Mars may be more or less identical in color.

     Tarzan is the man-god so there are none superior or even equal to him.  Below him come the English who are the cream of mankind.  Perhaps slightly below the English are the French and then the rest of the Whites.  Tarzan himself is psychologically an animal having been raised by the Apes.  Not your ordinary gorilla or Chimp but a species intermediate between Gorilla and the Negro.  Slotkin hasn’t read enough Burroughs to make an intelligent comment but the undeniable attitude of Burroughs is enough for Slotkin to condemn him as an unregenerate bigot.  The reader may believe as he likes.  I have stated my opinion eslewhere and that is enough. Whether any of these opinions of Burroughs influenced American soldiers at My Lai is open to question.  The burden of proof is on Slotkin and he hasn’t provided  it.

     Along with the Undermen however, speaking through Tarzan, Burroughs is heartily discontented with civilization.

      The spectacle of Chicago of the 1890s as a dirty unpleasant place haunts Burroughs.  In contrast to the great White City of the Columbian Expo was what was afterwards known as the Black City of everyday Chicago.  The contrast was so strong and so offensive to the Undermen that within a year of the Expo’s closing the entire White City was burned to the ground with the exception of one building.  Hence perhaps the decayed crimson and gold ruins of Opar and the crimson and gold twin cities of Helium.  One wonders what effect the sight of the ruin of the White City had on Burroughs when he revisited the site sometime after his miraculous summer of ’93.  The mind creates nothing from nothing so there must have been models of the great cities of ERB’s imagination.

     There are points at which Burroughs and Communism have quite similar views.  It will be remembered that Burroughs only reluctantly married and throughout his life expressed discontent with the institution.  To some extent or other ERB must have been an advocate of free love.  Communists would have heartily approved of ERB’s women who went nude except for certain ‘adornments.’  Communists of course want women to be accesible to any man who wants them at any time while they have always advocated bare breasts.

     In many ways when the Communists appropriated Tarzan for the MGM movies it took but slight changes to make Tarzan conform to their ideals.   The MGM Tarzan and Jane were not married.  While Burroughs’ Tarzan was a highly educated on-again off-again sophisticate the MGM Tarzan was a stupid illiterate oaf and one who rejected the attributes of civilization high up there in the Cloud Cuckoo Land of the Mutia Plateau.

     On the essentials though Burroughs rejected the demands of the Underman as The Moon Maid clearly shows.  There was very little in Stoddard’s The Revolt Against Civilization that Burroughs would have disagreed with.  At the same time there was probably very little he didn’t already believe although he had never codified his information as Stoddard had.  Slotkin’s contention that Burroughs was influenced by either Grant or Stoddard is surely wrong.  ERB had already taken hs positions before either men had begun to write.

     Each writer was, in his own way, an advocate of White Supremacy.  It now become clear that White Supremacy has nothing to do with a fringe element in Liberal ideology.  All Whites are White Supremacists in that ideology unless they reject ‘White skin privilege’  whatever that is.   Ayers and Dorhn explain in their recent Race Course In White Supremacy.  Interestingly constructed title.  Nor as Slotkin would have it is the attitude based on mere racial pride and bigotry but on a solid record of achievement unattained by any other people.  The quesiton is not was it right for some people to rule or be supreme because in the nature of things some people will rule and be supreme but which of the peoples are most qualified to be supreme.

     All people have had equal opportunity so that one can only conclude that the race has gone to the most qualified participant.  In the contest the Whites  unified the other peoples against them as must inevitably be the consequence of being the top people.  As they say, getting there is the easy part; staying there is the hard part.

     Slotkin merely represents the envious losers, the Undermen.  who clutch at any firebrand to burn the White House down.  Who is most to be admired and emulated?  Builders or destroyers?

Finis of Thuvia, Maid Of Mars Review

 

Edgar Rice Burroughs On Mars

A Review

Thuvia, Maid Of Mars

Part III-B

by

R.E. Prindle

     ERB was born in 1875 before education had been affected by the ideologies of either the Communists or Dewey.  He was given a Classical versus scientific education in his critical Jr. High years.  Thus he must have known Latin reasonably well.

     The current High School system of the US came to fruition only during the twentieth century.  Universal literacy only became realizable a very short time ago.  Child labor didn’t disappear until after the Second World War.  Thus ERB really had a favored childhood.  ERB must have been familiar with memorization and drill; methods of education now highly discouraged.  Therefore his education was directed toward a full consciousness than sink into the inherently criminal unconscious which Communist method prevails today.  As there was no audio-visual culture at that time his was a print mentality through say 1910 when the movies began to have significance.  By 1920, at least, he was fully involved in a print-movie culture hence a more unconscious mode of thinking.  Still, his early training led him to a conscious approach to experiencing and analyzing.

     One can’t know for sure which year he became aware but it is safe to assume 1888-90.  Thus his immediate past extended back to about 1850 just as for me the twenties and thirties form my immediate past.  Yours can be computed as about twenty years before you were born.  As we grow up these years form the topic of discussion we overhear from our elders.

     ERB’s near past then can be calculated as about 1800 so that dying in 1950 as he did his life straddled, as it were, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  The nineteenth century was quite stunning in its diversity.  As a boy and young man ERB was alive at the time of ‘the winning of the West.’  His early life was lived in the high tide of ‘Western world supremacy.’  His heroes such as Teddy Roosevelt and Owen Wister epitomized the high tide.  The ‘Scramble For Africa’  of the last quarter of the nineteenth century formed the centerpiece of his literary corpus, that of Tarzan Of The Apes.  Also a key to his world outlook was the American Civil War that ended only ten years before he was born.  While I have found no direct evidence of the San Domingo Moment that occurred at the very beginning of the nineteenth century it is possible that he conflated San Domingo with the Civil War in the Martian series when the First Born, or Negroes, defeated the White Holy Therns nearly exterminating them.  Thus while ERB’s works are ‘pure entertainment’ if you look closely you’ll find some serious historical and social commentary.  If it weren’t there you wouldn’t have the Liberal Coalition condemning him as a bigot.  They do.

     For the purposes of this essay I will use a professor from Case-Western Reserve by the name of Richard Slotkin as a representative of the Liberal Coalition or Communist school.  In his essay Gunfighter Nation he lays the blame for everything he dislikes at the feet of Burroughs and two other writers- Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.  We will get there soon enough but first lets consider the ‘humanitarian’ record of the Coalition.  In one form or another the Coalition and its constituents date back to the French Revolution and hence San Domingo.  Thus the Coalition was born in blood and murder.  Murder on a grand scale, genocide in fact.   The ideology of the Coalition is that of the Communists.  The men Slotkin so roundly condemns are all anti-Communists so the ideological differences are clear.

     Over the two centuries plus since the Revolution over a hundred million people have been murdered by units of the Coalition with hundreds of millions more projected for the near future.  Yet Mr. Slotkin proposes to represent our trio as indescribably evil because he attributes the My Lai Massacre in Viet Nam not to them personally but as a direct result of their writings.

     So there we have the basic issues.  The hypocrisy of Mr. Slotkin should be self-evident.

     What was the opinions of Messers Burroughts, Grant and Stoddard that so inflame Mr. Slotkin?

     Quite simply they are conscious, objective scholars as opposed to the unconscious method of Liberal writers.  Liberal views are products of the unconscious and cannot stand up to critical analysis.  The unconscious is selfish and criminal hence wishful.  The attitude is not what is but what I want.

     The high tide of Western world supremacy was ending as it was cresting.  This was noticeable to more acute intellects as early as 1900 and perhaps a decade earlier.  Burroughs hints at this when he describes the Lotharians as an ancient auburn haired White race who ruled a thalassocracy or a maritime empire.  Thus in his hierarchy of Martian races there was an earlier White race than the Therns.

     The Lotharians sailed forth to win Mars for the city at home much as European mariners won the world for Europe beginning with the Portuguese voyages of the fifteenth century,  Columbus and all the sea captains of the glorious age of discovery.  The seamen were only defeated by the stay-at-homes who sabotaged their efforts.

     Burroughs gives a valid interpretation of the age of European exploration and conquest from the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries.  Thus the story of the Lotharians, now shadows of their former selves, is a very poetic rendering of that history.

     The period ended with the 1899-1900 enunciation of the Open Door Policy in China by the American SecretaryOf State, John Hay.  China was in the process of being acquired by the European States at the time which the Open Door prevented thus guaranteeing China’s integrity.  This was a sea change in world politics.  the conquered peoples now began their counter offensive against the West.

      This change was noted by Burroughs, Grant and Stoddard.

      Madison Grant was of the earlier generation of TR while Burroughs and Stoddard were near contemporaries.  Burroughs born in 1875, Stoddard in 1883.  They both died in the same year, 1950.

     None of the three applauded the sea change but lamented it, running counter to Liberal ideology which applauded the change and latterly aroused the ire of Prof. Slotkin.  Thus he and his Coalition fellows demonize the three.

     They were only writers..  Until recently Grant and Stoddard had been all but forgotten.  Grant’s two best known works are The Passing Of The Great Race of 1915 and Conquest Of A Continent of 1933.  His main offence in the eyes of the coalition is that the Great Race is the Nordic race, which implies superiority, and his use of the term Nordic.  There was a tremendous effort at the time to ridicule and deny Nordics and Anglo-Saxons.  This is most notable in the vitriolic work of the bigot H.L. Mencken.  Nordic is a curse word within the Coalition.

     The Great Race is an interesting period piece but seems obsolete in its science.  Conquest is still usable as a guide for the Nordic migrations within the US.  I think it questionable that Burroughs was influenced by Grant who wrote after ERB had already committed himself although as Great Race made a splash it isn’t improbable that he read it.

     Lothrop Stoddard is a different story.  Here is a scholar done a great injury by the likes of Slotkin and the Coalition.  Stoddard wrote several books that might even be considered prophetic.  As noted he was eight years younger than ERB while graduating from Harvard.  Unlike Grant I think Slotkin is right that he was an influence on Burroughs but only after 1920 when Burroughs was fully formed.  It is possible that ERB accessed his research for his own purposes.

     Stoddard’s first book in 1914 was a terrific examination of the San Domingo Moment titled The French Revolution in San Domingo.  while the book was issued too late to affect ERB’s knowledge for use in Thuvia in 1914 events were transpiring that would have put Haiti, San Domingo’s later name, in his mind’s eye.  Beginning in January of 1914 several US warships landed troops in a very disorderly Haiti.  The bankers had precipitated yet another financial crisis by imprudent lending practices.  As was to become customary they called on the US government to bail them out.  In order to insure their loans the taxpayers were called upon to foot the bill.  The occupation of Haiti by the Marines began the next year and that lasted until well into the thirties before the troops were withdrawn.  Having gotten Haiti into trouble the bankers than looted the country for a couple decades.

     Another interesting sidelight in Haiti and the Caribbean was that 1914 was the year that McClurg’s released Tarzan Of The Apes.  Now, Ogden McClurg the ostensible owner of McClurg’s was only a figurehead.  The company had become employee owned after the last fire about 1900.  Ogden McClurg was living ERB’s fantasy life.  He was an officer in the Navy having spent the decade or so previous to 1914 as an operative in the Caribbean during a period when the US was famous for gunboat diplomacy among the Banana Republics.  It’s possible that he often worked undercover as a secret agent.

     ERB’s contact was Joe Bray who actually ran the day to day operations of the firm.  I’ve been told that McClurg had little to or no contact with the authors and indeed, it seems unlikely he could have being out of the country so much, yet ERB seems to have formed a jealous relationship with McClurg speaking of him as though he did know him.  That could only have been between 1914 and 1917.  Ogden was in Europe for three years or so during the war and after while ERB left for LA in 1919.  Deserves investigation.

     Back to Stoddard.  In 1920, 21 and 22 he issued his three most important books, the ones that so infuriate the volatile Liberal Coalition.  The titles were The Rising Tide Of Color Against White World Supremacy of 1920,  The New World Of Islam of 1921 and 1922’s The Revolt Against Civilization- The Menace Of The Underman.

     All three were prophetic and indeed, as of today, the prophecies have come to pass.  The first volume, The Rising Tide Of Color needs no explanation for the violent reaction of the Coalition.  By this time their agencies of the ADL, AJC and NAACP operating under the umbrella of the Communist Party were well able to defame anyone they chose with immunity from prosecution.

     The mere mention of White Supremacy was enough to make them foam at the mouth.  The reasons are clear and they were already formulated by the Revolution of 1792,  Now, we do have the problem of slavery which casts a pall over all discussions.  There is no justification for slavery although the institution still survives having now spread to America and Europe and it will flower everywhere once again before the century is half over.  So, really, the slavery issue is irrelevant.  ERB himself accepted the practice as a universal fact of life; the practice exists in all his stories.  

     Stoddard:  This analysis applies to the US of today as aptly as that of San Domingo in 1792.  “These men’ are the proto-Communist Jacobins of the French Revolution:

     “If you (the San Domingan Whites) are sufficiently united to follow my counsel, I guarantee the salvation of San Domingo.  But, in any case, let no one cherish the hope of mercy from these men, let no one be deluded by their sly tricks of policy; the negroes alone find room in their affections, and all the whites without distinction, all the mulattoes as well, are doomed; all whites are dangerous to their projects, all alike will be sacrificed as soon as these men shall have disposed of the officers, gotten rid of the troops of the line, and become at last the undisputed masters.”

      As San Domingo in 1792, so Euroamerica in 2010.  We were promised change but none has or will ocuur.  Two hundred years later same words, same tune.  So, Slotkin would have us believe that decent self-respecing scholars and writers such as Burroughs, Grant and Stoddard were responsible for My Lai rather than Robespierre,Danton and Murat.  Well, you can fool some of the people all the time….

     Just as his first of this trio of books prophesied the coming race wars, so Stoddard’s World Of Islam prophesied the current invasion of Euroamerica and the religious wars, for that is what ‘terrorism’ is.  The third book The Revolt Against Civilization has also come to pass as the asault on Western culture, which is to say, civilization continues on an accelerated pace.

     It was this book that had the greatest influence on ERB that would surface in 1934s Tarzan And The Lion Man.  Stoddard is much influenced by the evolutionary theory of Auguste Weis.  Especially the notion of body and germ cells that ERB embraced so enthusiastically  in 1934.  ERB’s interpretation was certainly pure entertainment but based on current scientific knowledge nonetheless.

     As for ERB’s notions he was expressing developed opinions on the social scene under cover of entertainment long before he could have been influenced by either Grant or Stoddard so Richard Slotkin is quite wrong in his prejudicial interpretation of ERB as in ignorant spouter of bigotry based on the other two.

     In fact Slotkin ignores the content of all three men to denounce them as ignorant, uninformed bigots who were nevertheless taken so seriously by gunslinging Americans that by Slotkins own words they caused the My Lai Massacre.   But enough of Slotkin who sabotages his own thesis by confessing to inadequate research.  A much more interesting topic is The Revolt Against Civilization of which it can truly be said that revoltagainst civilization applies to ERB as well as his arch enemies- the Liberal Coalition.

Part III-C will involve civilization and its malcontents.

 

 

 

Edgar Rice Burroughs On Mars

A Review

Thuvia, Maid Of Mars

Part III-A

What We Have Here Is Change

by

R.E. Prindle

     In the recent American presidential campaign in the US the winner won by promising the inevitable, Change.  A very safe promise as the history of the world is one of change.  Indeed, the life of the individual is one of unending change from the cradle to the grave.  Change is now and forever.  The question is, what response is made to the changes.

     The times of Edgar Rice Burroughs were a period of the most earth shaking and rapid of all.  At the same time most perilous, as the evolution of actual scientific knowledge in all fields was in its infancy and subject to misinterpretation.  One might say in Burroughsian imagery that a series of doors stood before mankind, entering the right door would be more beneficial than the wrong doors.

     Burroughs and others made tantative moves for the right door but others entered by the wrong door drawing most others through with them.  What looked like progress turned into a regression.  To shut up criticism the regressives began to demonize all those of different opinions.  Burroughs was among those.

      Some say he adapted poorly to the flood of change but the peole who do so are so confident in their opinions that to disagree with them is to be accused of being not only wrong but either criminal or insane.  One doesn’t take their opinions too seriously as change will certainly demonstrate their opinions as ludicrous if it hasn’t already.  Nevertheless as they are quite vocal in their condemnation of Edgar Rice Burroughs we have to consider the accuracy of their accusations as well as that of their own viewpoint.  How well do they understand the issues?

     ERB has some interesting observations on the changes occurring in the history, society and racial matters of his times as well as the concealed role of hypnotism in the transformation of that society.  The basis of hypnotism is suggestion.  As ERB say in Thuvia all is based on suggestion and counter-suggestion.  If one conciders life and learning from that angle it presents some interesting possibilites.

     What is learning?  What is suggestion?

     When the child is conceived he must of necessity have a mind with a blank slate.  Freud, Jung and many others seem to seriously believe that newborns can inherit ancestral memories even though there is no one beyond the womb who has ever recalled any.

     In fact without experience or learning that has has been introjected into the mind there is nothing for the mind to consider, hence no cogitation at all.  This mind can only begin to form with the ejection from the womb.  This occurs with a brain still in the process of formation.  The development of the brain can only be considered completed shortly after puberty.

     It seems obvious then that you can’t get out of a mind what isn’t in it.  It behooves society then to begin loading the mind of a child as soon as the child  is capable of handling education.  The education of the mind must be built step by step to provide a firm foundation for the intellectual superstructure.  Whatever is in the mind must come from or be suggested from outside the mind.  There is no internal system of knowledge.  Thus all knowledge is suggested to the child’s mind by his caretakers.  They may be good or bad, well or ill intentioned.  The brain is organized to receive suggestions or, in another word, experience.  The reactive structure may already be in place dut to experiences in the womb and the actual birthing process but the actual learning process begins the moment the newborn emerges from the womb and receives a slap on the bottom to get his lungs started.

     Thus the mind of the child is extremely malleable during the time until about puberty and shortly thereafter.  If education is neglected during this early period and shortly thereafter it is unlikely that the adult can ever make up the lack.  For instance if the basics or reading, writing and arithmetic are not loaded into the brain during this malleable period it is very rare that the skills can be acquired at a later time.

     Thus, as it was always known that the child is father to the man various doctrinaire organizations such as the Jesuits believed that if they could form the education of the child or, in another word, indoctrinte him, they could shape the future in their own image.  In Burroughs’ time the mechanisms of education were more fully understood.  Various schemes were proposed to revise educational methods many of which were just odd or crude, but the better thought to change the direction of society toward a higher ideal.

     The Communists were well are at the time that suggestion was the basis of education.  Lothrop Stoddard writing in his The Revolt Against Civilization of 1922 quotes Eden and Cedar Paul from their book Proletcult of 1921:

     “There is no such thing as “scientific” economics or sociology.  For these reasons…there should be organized and spread abroad a new kind of education, “Proletcult.”  Thus…in a fighting culture aimed at the overthrow of capitalism and at the replacement of democratic culture and bourgeois ideology by ergatocratic culture and proletarian  ideology…”  The authors warmly endorse the Soviet government’s prostitution of education and all other forms of intellectual activity to Communist propaganda, for we are told that the “new education” is inspired by the “new psychology”, which “provides the philosophical justification of Bolshevism and supplies a theoretical guide for our efforts in the field of proletarian culture…. Education is suggestion.  The recognition that suggestion is auto suggestion, and that auto suggestion is the means whereby imagination controls the subconscious self, will enable us to make a right use of the most potent force which has become available to the members of the human herd since the invention of articulate speech.

     I’m sure you can find appropriate application of the doctrine since Stoddard wrote in education, movies, TV, books and phonograph records and CDs.  While I would disagree with the Pauls’ notion of suggestion and auto suggestion the Freudian influence is quite clear.  This would be abetted by John Dewey’s notions on education that deemphasized the educational foundation while directing it more toward ideological considerations, or ‘relatively unstructured, free, student-directed progressive education.’

     God only knows what free, progressive education is but this sort of social engineering was the wrong turn being taken in this era of rapid change.

     So, loading the brain to deal with life’s exigencies is of necessity a slow process. As the brain continues to develop outside the womb there is plenty of room for malfunction.  As man is incapable of creating anything original the education of the child may be compared to the loading of a computer.  First the operating system.  Whether consciously or unconsciously since all man knows is his own brain he has replicated it in his machine.  A computer functions just like a brain, which should astound no one, as man can only devise what he already knows.

     Now, human experience dates back about a hundred thousand years.  I intentionally leave out the African development as it had nothing to do with the education of mankind.   The African contribution is nil.  Education began outside Africa.  Having painfully and laboriously accumulated the huge fund of knowledge it must be entered into the brain of the new being.  This sort of suggestion is called education.  There’s not much room for anything called ‘free’ or ‘progressive.’  Getting it ain’t going to be free, the child has to work like a mule.  This is a slow, laborious process as extensive foundations must be laid down before any superstructure can rise.  Thus years are consumed just to teach the child reading, writing and arithmetic.  With these three tools he can learn anything else.  Inexplicably this fact seems to have been lost sight of in today’s educational theories unless of course the Pauls’ dictum is being followed.

     Once the foundation has been laid, a form of suggestion and actually hypnosis, the child, now a student, must be taught how to manage and interpret what he learns at an increasingly rapid pace.  Unfortunately there will be children left behind; any other expectation is fatuous, some are just brighter than others.  Managing and interpreting comes from within the experience of the organism.  Here’s the real problem because the same data will by analyzed differently and produce different results and opinions.

     Along with learning factual matters the child must at the same time develop emotionally and psychologically.  Nasty work.  This is a difficult part.  As the child has little ability to understand and even less ability to accurately analyze it he has to reason from faulty premisses.  This ignorance of reality is what forms Freud’s notion of the unconscious or Id.  Correcting this unconscious to consciousness is the conversion of Freud’s Id to Ego.  A child misinterprets suggestions.  Some become fixated in his un- or subconscious.  The fixations are what distort consciousness from the subconscious interfering with the integration of the subconscious and the conscious.  While the child is made more conscious in his ability to understand and reject harmful suggestions these fixations like post-hypnotic suggestions control his responses.  The fixations must be exorcised which is the intended function of the psychoanalysis of Freud and Jung.

     Once again, suggestion is everything outside your mind.  Your mind cannot function without these suggestions because there will be nothing in the mind to function.  Be carefull of what you put into your mind or, at least, that you do put something of value into it.  Whether ERB realized this or not, his ideas of hypnosis and suggestion indicate he might have, he pursued a program of continuing education all his adult life.  At the time of writing Thuvia he was working through Edward Gibbons’ Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, a vast minefield of amazing and truly educational suggestion.

Part B follows.

http://fakekarl.blogspot.com/2009/03/bob-dylans-6548th-dream.html

 

Exhuming Bob XIX: Bob And Karl

by

R.E. Prindle

A Spoof.

     Hey man.  Come on over here.  I’ve got the Ruminatin’ Blues and I’m going to ruminate all over you.  You’ll be able to take home a bucket or two.  Now dig this, I’m sittin’ at my computer and up comes this site Karl Lagerfeld’s Guide To Life. It pops up on my computer.  I thought it was a virus or somethin’ but it turns out to be a message to me from Bob.

Lagerfeld, The Guide To Life
Lagerfeld, The Guide To Life

  

     This things turns out to be, if you can believe this, Bob Dylan’s 6548th Dream.  Putting my Freudian training to immediate use I begin to study the number .  Notice the 654 desecends by one unit that makes three then the last digit 4 is doubled to make an increase of four that adds up to seven.  Pretty heavy huh?   Next I added up 65 & 48 and the number was 113.  Wow! I knew I was on to something..  Then I added up all four numbers seqentially and get this- 23.  That’s right, 23!  Twenty-three skiddoo.  Get it?  This was a personal message from Bob Dylan to me.  Wow!  That internet is somethin’ else, isn’t it?

     I take a look at the picture of Lagerfeld showing me his ass and I can tell you I’m less then impressed.  Moving down the page I notice the guy has turned around.  Dig this, this can’t be a coincidence, he’s wearing the same dark glasses I do.  Boy howdy, hey?  And he looks like a guru from beyond the farthest star.  So do I.  Now I’m really getting excited.  The only thing separating me from this new reality is the darn computer screen.  I can’t get through it. I try but I can’t figure it out.  Doesn’t matter which key or combination of keys I press.

     Aw, shoot, I’m forgetting the most important part, Bob Dylan’s dream.  Mr. Cool is going to relate directly to me.

     The thing is written in some kind of mysterious code, some kind of hip patois, New Yorkese or whatever.  Dylan has been commanded apparently by his guru Lagerfeld to commit his thoughts to this blog.  Wow, I said to myself, this Lagerfeld has the force behind him.  Imagine telling Bob Dylan what to do!

     Now, we all know that Dylan says that what he writes has no objective meaning.  He says he writes meaningless stuff that is understood differently by whoever reads it.  That must be why I think his stuff is heavy, because I’m a really, really heavy guy. I don’t have the look down yet, like this Lagerfeld guru, but I ‘m working on it.

     Dig this quote:

    And here’s a song I wrote, uh, some time ago back when I was raking in these blondes, man.  Could say I was raking in the pennies.  (Pennies. Get it.  Pennies are heavy.  Bob was heavy.)  I was doing more than raking these chicks though.  If you dig.

     Do I dig?  I’ll say I dig.  A super sleuth am I actually so I really dig, raking in the blondes has several covert meanings.  Bob’s a poet, but, hey, that’s one of the things I do best, too.  So Blonde on Blonde was released in ’66 so he wrote the poem that follows in ’66.  Sharp deduction don’t you think?   Blonde on Blonde means one blonde after another, heaps of ’em.  Bob’s probably the cocksman of the century.  So Bob’s got his dick out and  he’s not wavin’ it to the empty air…if you dig.   No sir, Bob is planking those blondes.  He was actually known for his generosity with his dick.  One time Liam Clancy was out touring so as a friendly gesture Bob went over and planked Liam’s wife so she she wouldn’t be so lonely.  That’s the kind of guy Bob is.  Yeah.  Now that’s friendship, isn’t it?

     Back when he was young he did more than rake blondes chicks he says.  I don’t know what ‘more than rake’ means.  Maybe S&M or something really exciting like that.

     Further along Bob get deep into the dark meat.  See what I mean about me bein’ a poet too?   He wouldn’t touch anything else.  Did the whole darn chorus line.  Get real heavy with one of the back up singers, married her and had a little ebon baby.  Nobody’s seen him though.  He didn’t even grow up to be a soul singer as far as I know.  Lived in Tarzana- yeah.

     I’m going to tell you though I don’t think I woulda published Dream #6548.  23 skiddoo, indeed.  I’d a been outta there before the door hit me on the ass.  Back in those days of blondes Bob was heavy, well he was heavy in a lot of ways but he was heavy into drugs, too.

     Check this quote out:

…I spotted some kids…and I walked right over to them.

=======

I said kids, “could I interest you in some visions?”

Some visions of Johanna, someone’s gonna get stoned;

They asked me if it tasted kinda like a milkshake

I said yes, and took out some pills

Then a policeman came most hurriedly

And arrested me on account of free love…

Bob And The Little Children

Bob And The Little Children

     What is one to think?  I know this Lagerfeld guru is a way out guy.  I used to buy his soap and boy was it slippery.  It was the slickest soap I ever used, almost couldn’t hold onto the bar and it was huge too.  Lagerfeld is suspected to be completely sexually liberated too, as well as everything else.  I mean, man, this guy is free, free as the breeze, free as the Fourth Of July, like, look up free in the dictionary and his picture is the definition.  So, I guess that means he won’t stop at nothin’ and he’s Bob Dylan’s guru.

     Don’t know what he’s tellin’ Bob but I wouldn’t even make bad jokes about corrupting innocent little kids as a candyman.  Speaking of candy, here’s another quote:

“Oh” said the boy, as I gave him a lolly

And offered him a ride in my Cadillac car…

Now at this point the boy’s mother comes in,

And she’s waving and wailing at me like I done something wrong.

     I don’t know who Bob’s been fraternizing with, other than Soapy Lagerfeld, and I know there is no meaning to anything Bob writes except what I think it means but then if the only meaning is what I think then that meaning must be true, Freud again, and since it means what I think it means I wouldn’t have published it lest someone think I’m serious.

     Probably just some unconscious posturing but a position I wouldn’t want to assume.

    

Edgar Rice Burroughs On Mars

A Review

Thuvia, Maid Of Mars

by

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Part I

Review by R.E. Prindle

     This very interesting sdtory was written shortly after ERB returned to Chicago from his first San Diego excursion.  It was placed between the Girl From Fariss’s, the last story written in San Diego and The Cave Man.

     The material deals almost exclusively with suggestion and hypnosis.  Although hypnosis is a recurring theme in Burroughs one is startled by his concentration on the subject and his seemingly informed ideas of  it, especially  the role of suggestion.

     One wonders why his interest surfaced at this time and where ERB learned or developed this information.  He was just back from San Diego and I’m going to suggest he picked it up from his hero, L. Frank Baum.  As Baum was such a significant influence on Edgar Rice Burroughs perhaps it may be worthwhile to attempt an assessment on Baum’s role in literature and history.  There can be no question but that the OZ series of Baum took a central place in the American psyche and a place in the European psyche.  Baum’s books have been in demand since 1900 when he began writing them to the present.  Baum put Kansas on the map.  The Wizard, Dorothy and Toto are household names.  Baum’s play from the Wizard was a box office success while MGM’s movie is certainly in the top ten of influential movies, perhaps even in a tie for first with Gone With The Wind.  Even American Negroes made their own Black version called The Wiz.  The list goes on.

     I’m going to suggest that Fritz Lang, the movie Director, was highly influenced by Baum as reflected in his important film, The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Lang was also very familiar with Burroughs.

     Baum himself was a committed Theosophist.  Introduced to the religion by his mother-in-law Baum picked up his card in 1893.  By 1913 when he met Burroughs he had been a practicing member for twenty years.  When he left Chicago he first went to Coronado across the Bay from San Diego.  Katherine Tingley had established her Theosophical organization on Point Loma near that city.  Baum must have been an important member of that congregation.  Perhaps he had a falling out with Tingley but he did remove himself to Hollywood in 1910.  In Hollywood he undoubtedly connected with the Pasadena Theosophical Society that at present is the mother organization.

     As a Theosophist Baum would have had to have been familiar with the works of Madame Helena Blavatsky.  Her great works are Isis Unveiled and The Secrect Doctrine.  Theosophy of course is on a par with the Semitic religions of Judaism and Christianity.  While Madame B is often referred to as nonsense she is in fact very learned in the ancient religious doctrines of the human mind that went to form all Middle Eastern religious expressions.  Hence while Madame B’s works are metaphysical in nature they are no less relevant to the development of the human intellect than say, St. Augustine or others of the metaphysical ilk.

     Madame B had some strong opinions on hypnotism.  Hypnotism had come to the fore of Euroamerican consciousness in the years preceding the French Revolution through the efforts of  Dr. Franz Mesmer.  Though discredited as as a charlatan he was dealing with the real thing as subsequent history shows.  He originally called hypnotism Animal Magnetism.  That was changed to Mesmerism and then to Hypnotism.  As far as possible influences on Burroughs it will be remembered that Edgar Allan Poe wrote Mesmeric Revelation in 1844 and The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar in 1845.  There are clear indications that ERB was familiar with the Valdemar story.

     Now, the essence of hypnotism is the suggestion.  Suggestion is perhaps the most important intellectual or psychological phenomenon.  Suggestion isperhaps the basis of intellect, intelligence and psychology.  C.G. Jung in his investigations of symbols was dealing with the nature of universal suggestion from nature.  Freud early learned to separate suggestion from the hypnotic trance.  Artfully used suggestion obviates the need for trancelike states.   Thus people don’t understand that and how they are hypnotized by movies and TV.

     The art of successful literature is merely to suggest scenes and situations and have the reader visualize them in his own mind.  Once accepted the suggestion becomes part of the intellect of the reader.  He may be able to reject it later but that is a separate volitional act.  The great writers realize this.  Freud understood perfectly, while Baum developed the art of the concrete image to a remarkable degree.  His works are a series of remarkable images.  If Freud had had Baum’s skill, and he wasn’t far short, he would have been even more effective than he has been.

     The prescient Fritz Lang picked up on Freud, Baum and hypnotism in his remarkable Dr. Mabuse series of movies.  The first story, Dr. Mabuse The Gambler of 1922, concerns a Freudlike megalomaniac named Dr. Mabuse.  Freud’s activities during the Great War and after would be known to the cognoscenti.  It would be foolish to think that Adolf Hitler and other Volkish leaders wouldn’t have been aware of what Freud was up to.  Mabuse is into all kinds of criminal activities to undermine society and the State, as was Freud.  He is also a master hypnotist as was Freud.  In a scene reminiscent of the scene in Thuvia where Jav says ‘You want to see them?  Then, look.’  The scene of ancient bustling Lothar then appears to Carthoris and Thuvia’s wondering hypnotized eyes.  As well as mine, certainly.  I had no trouble seeing what Burroughs wanted me to see.  So Dr. Mabuse in his role of stage hypnotizer, the man wore many hats, makes a parade appear before the wondering eyes of his audience.  It can be done.  I saw a man make Diamond Head disappear before the whole world on TV.  Pretty amazing.

     At the end of the movie Mabuse is captured and conveniently tucked away in an insane asylum.  He goes catatonic until 1930 or so when Lang made the sequel The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse.  The Dr. emerging from his catatonic state makes signs that he wants pen and paper which the head of the asylum, one Dr. Baum, provides.

     Mabuse then turns out page after endless page of instructions to destroy civilization not unlike what Herr Dr. Freud was doing from his study in Vienna.  The writing had an hypnotic effect on Dr. Baum who executes the plans of the cell bound Dr. Mabuse.

     The use of the name Baum could be a coincidence but Dr. Baum like the Wizard Of Oz is an unseen superior.  He issues orders but is otherwise an unknown to those he directs.  In issuing his orders we are led to believe that he sits behind a curtain unseen while giving his directions.  Then, just as Dorothy did, the hero dares to pull back the curtain and he finds…a phonograph player.  Unlike Dorothy who finds a tubby timid little imposter, there is no one there.  Surely this is a parody of Dorothy’s famous scene which makes the name Dr. Baum less of a coincidence.

     So it would seem that L. Frank Baum’s influence extended to Germany and an originator of film noir.  Not so unlike as Baum’s stories are much darker than they might appear at first reading.  At any rate his literary images make long remembered illusions of reality not unlike that of Dr. Baum while being of a suggestive hypnotic nature.  I can still visualize Dorothy pulling the curtain back exposing the mild mannered Big Brother sixty years after.  I can remember the image I formed.

     So, my suggestion is that L. Frank Baum was the direct inspiration for Thuvia of Mars.  As noted ERB was probably familiar with Poe’s stories of hypnotism while I am certain that he had read George Du Maurier’s Trilby concerning the hypnotist Svengali and probably also Du Maurier’s other two novels, Peter Ibbetson, and The Martian both related to unusual psychological states.  Len Carter believes that ERB read William Morris who also uses some hypnotic themes in his fantasy novels.  Lew Sweetser, ERB’s mentor in Idaho via Yale, might also have given him some information on hypnotism while ERB was still a boy.  Plus I’m sure hypnotism was a hot topic of popular discussions.

      ERB’s emphasis on suggestion as the operative means of hypnotism points to some more direct instruction.  Most think that ERB first met Baum in 1916 which means the two formed a fast friendship immediately.  I think it more likely that they met in 1913 renewing the acquanitance in 1916.  Whether Baum had read any of Burroughs’ stories in 1913 which seems would be paying pretty close atention to literary trends in pulp magazines he may have heard of Tarzan.  Probably aware of this ERB may have brought along a magazine or two to show Baum.  If Baum then read the proffered stories he certainly would have seen his influence in the Mars stories if ERB didn’t actually point them out to him hoping for the Zeusian nod of approval from the master.

     Probably flattered Baum would have encouraed the relationship.  Assuming that to be true the two men having similar interests would certainly engage in conversations on Theosophy, hypnotism, writing techniques and whatever.

     Certainly Burroughs writing style which while always colorful was a little heavy on the narrative side seems to open up to a more allusive suggestive style blossoming significantly in 1915’s Tarzan And The Jewels of Opar.

     I can’t find a more immediate source for ERB’s sudden interest in hypnotism.  But, on to the story.

A Review

Kevin MacDonald:

Psychoanalysis In Its Death Throes

by

R.E. Prindle

MacDonald, Kevin: http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/paper-CrewsFreud.html

 

     This is a review or commentary of Kevin MacDonald’s paper of 1996: Freud’s Follies: Psychoanalysis As Religion, Cult And Political Movement.

     The paper has apparently been retitled here as Psychoanalysis In Its Death Throes: The Moral And Intellectual Legacy Of A Pseudoscience.

     I don’t know Kevin but I have had some correspondence with him over the internet so I hope he won’t find me presumptuous by referring to him as Kevin.  As a Professor at California State University At Long Beach Kevin MacDonald has a distinguished record adding to the luster of the faculty.

     His book Culture of Critique is a valuable addition to the literature.  Generally speaking I endorse all his conclusions in this paper  with the exception of his condemnation of psychoanalysis.  I do not believe the discipline to be a pseudo-science.  The problem is with Freud and not psychoanalysis.  The investigation of the mind was in its elementary stages at the time Freud entered the picture.  Indeed people had a horror at the very notion of almost any psychological concept and still do.  To my mind Freud’s most valuable contribution was the The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life.  Even the study of simple everyday psychologically revealing traits was derided.  The thought that a ‘Freudian slip’ could give away one’s inner thoughts was too horrifying to contemplate.

     But there it was in bold relief- the subconscious, or unconscious as Freud called it.  Freud neither invented nor discovered the unconscious as many people still believe.  The unconscious had been a topic of investigation for some time.  It was a mystery then, a mystery to most now, many people disbelieved the concept then, many still do.

     The trouble with Freud’s vision of the unconscious is that he believed it was inherently evil, uncontrollable and actually a separate entity of the mind but connected somehow.

     His error was pointed out to him at the time but as Kevin points out Freud had insulated his vision of psychoanalysis by making an Order of it.  He thus separated his thoughts from scientific criticism building a wall around them just as his Jews built a wall around Torah.  As Kevin points out:

     The apex of the authoritarian, anti-scientific institutional structure was the Secret Committee of hand-picked loyalsits sworn to uphold psychoanalytic orthodoxy, described by Phyllis Grosskurth in ‘The Secret Ring: Freud’s Inner Circle And The Politics of Pyschoanalysis.  By insisting the Committee must be absolutely secret, Freud enshrined the principle of confidentiality.  The various psychoanalytic societies that emerged from the Committee were like Communist cells, in which the members vowed eternal obedience to their leader.  Psycholanalysis became institutionalized by the founding of journals and the training of candidates; in short an extraordinarly effective political society.

     Thus Freud was able to separate his doctrine from scientific scrutiny while creating a terrific mystique about himself and his ‘science.’

     In fact while his doctrine was based on sound, for the state of learning at the time, factual research he fashioned the facts into a tool or weapon for a specific purpose for which any changes to the doctrine would weaken its effectiveness.  It was essential that it stay the same.

     As Kevin points out Freud was a politician first, researcher secondly and a scientist thirdly.  While more scientific outsiders were critical Freud’s fellow Jewish insiders picked up the ball and ran with it.

     Freud was a member of the International Order of B’nai B’rith.  He attended meetings regularly in Vienna while lecturing on psychological matters frequently.  Can it be a coincidence that the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith was created in the United States in 1913?  Does anyone believe that the subtle psychological methods weren’t worked out in Vienna?

     When the Frankfurt School Of Social Research was organized in Germany in 1923 incorporating Freudian psychology does anyone believe that was a coincidence?  The Marxists embraced a Freudian agenda.  You may be sure that Franz Boas applied Freudian doctrines to Anthropology.

     There was a good deal of natural reisistance to Freudian doctrines in Europe but the Nazi disaster played into Freudian hands completely.  After Hitler’s election in 1933 droves of Freudian analysts and the whole Frankfurt School fled Germany most choosing to settle in the United States in the cultural capitols of NYC and Hollywood.

     While psychoanalysis was all the rage through the fifties the reaction set in during the sixties.  There was much to disagree with in what was essentially an unchanging doctrine that was hostile to the non-Jewish world.  Freud’s reputation has gradually been demolished among the goyim since the sixties.  However this is irrelevant.  It doesn’t matter what the goyim think.  The tool, the wapon is in the hands of Freud’s fellow Jews where it has been and is being wielded effectively.

     So, while Kevin MacDonald’s critque and condemnation is accurate and effective among the goyim it is of no consquence to the effective application of the doctrine by Freud’s fellow Jews.  It’s like Machiavelli.  Just because you’re appalled by his doctrines doesn’t mean they don’t work and aren’t being used.

     One would do better to educate people to defend themselves against this pernicious doctrine than to merely condemn it.

     While I agree with Kevin’s analysis I do disagree with his condemnation of the effectiveness of a psychoanalytic approach.

     The key to Freud’s  misuse of psychological analysis is his description of the unconscious.  As a scientist it is diffiicult for me to believe that he actually perceived the unconscious in such a way.  I have to believe that his private understanding was quite different then his public description.  It is possible that his understanding is purely religious based on Kabbalah and Talmud and having nothing to do with science.  The notion that the unconscious exists independently of both mind and body is absurd on the face of it.

     One thing to bear in mind is that Freud was well informed on the subject of hypnosis.  He studied (for a couple months) under the Frenchman Jean-Martin Charcot who associated hypnotism quite correctly with hysteria.  Freud also visited Bernstein of the Nancy hypnotic school.  He must have had a reasonable understanding of hypnosis and its active agent, suggestion.

     When he says that he abandoned hypnosis for subliminal recall which he says he found just as effective he is betraying a profound knowledge of the relationship of the un- or subconscious mind and conscious actions.  He actually discovered that he no longer needed to put people into a trance to obtain the same results.  Contrary to his statement I’m sure he was very effective as a hypnotist.

     In point of fact in the interchange between the conscious and the unconscious he had discovered the true nature of the subconscious.  That is what the interior dialogue is- a discussion between the clear conscious mind and the fixated subconscious which distorts reality to conform with its mistaken understanding.

     Further, I would be surprised if Freud didn’t understand that fixation was merely hypnotic suggestion.  By suggestion I dont limit the notion of spoken suggestions by others but to suggestion by circumstances.  For instance if one is defeated at a game by another this may suggest a lack of manliness on one’s own part.  In retreating into a hypnoid state the suggestion of unmanliness may be translated into a fixation of emasculation that renders one effeminate in relation to other men.  This is done unawares to oneself but the fixation controls all future responses  unless exorcised.  It is possible that an exorcism may occur spontaneously in relation to another event later in life but otherwise the fixation has to be recognized and rectified by analysis.

     The inadequacy is a diminution of ego.  Such a diminution of ego always takes a response of a sexual nature.

     In fact, Freud’s work centers on hypnosis and suggestion, emasculation and sex.  He himself was severely emasculated and sexually repressed.  So there you have the core of Freudian psychology.  This understanding is then used to further the Jewish cause in the warfare with European ‘Christian’ society.  I exclude America because Freud was too European to extend his interest further.

     Freud then devised a plan to mass hypnotize, confuse and psychologically conquer Europe and by extension the West.  Running his special knowledge as an Order, as Kevin indicates, he was under no compunction to share his knowledge in a scientific manner.  In other words he sought to control his knowledge uninfluenced by outside contributions that would render his intent ineffective.  Even inside the Order as Kevin points out Freud strictly controlled psychoanalysis by the use of his Secret Committee and strict disciplining of what he considered deviant thought.

     Both facets were absolutely necessary if his plan of subversion was to work.  So far the plan has functioned perfectly.

     There is no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water however.

     Freud and Freud’s doctrine should be repudiated.

     Psychoanalysis however is a valid psychological approach.  However administration of it take great skill.  Once a correct understanding of suggestion and hypnosis is adopted as the basis of psychology and its relationship to fixation in  a subconscious having an active relationship with the conscious, fixations can be located and exorcised freeing the mind from compulsive behavior.

     The individual with a proper understanding can then be put on guard to prevent new fixations.  I think it may require a certain amount of intelligence.

     Freud’s system completely negates the role of intelligence and the conscious mind in favor of compulsive behavior.  Thus by emphasizing the individual’s ability to control both his conscious and subconscious minds he will be able to master his own will and act without interference from fixations.

     Those are the key factors.  While I second Kevin MacDonald in his analysis of Freud and Freudianism I affirm the scientific nature of psychoanalysis itself.  Just because Freud used his knowledge dishonestly doesn’t mean he wasn’t onto something.

Exhuming Bob XVIII:
My Son, The Corporation
by
R.E. Prindle
Texts:
Goodman, Fred: The Mansion On The Hill, 1997
Russo, Gus: The Outfit, 2001
Russo, Gus:  Supermob, 2006

Electrified Dylan

1.
Andrew Krueger from Duluth unearthed an interesting article from the archives of the Duluth News-Tribune dated October 20, 1963.  ( http://www.areavoices.com/attic/?blog-35238 )  The article is entitled ‘My Son, The Folknik’  by one Walter Eldot.
Mr. Eldot was apparently a longtime reporter for the newspaper.  He as well as the Zimmermans was Jewish.  For whatever reason he writes derisively of Dylan even belittling to some extent his parents.   Robert Shelton notes and quotes Eldot in his own No Direction Home as one who habitually wrote sarcastically of Dylan.
This may have been because he perceived Dylan as a ‘folknik’ or Bohemian, both derogatory terms in his lexicon.  Especially in 1963 Beatniks, Folkniks and oddities in general were well outside the pale of  ‘polite’ society.  People like Eldot would have had no use for them.  Maynard G. Krebs of Dobie Gillis would be a good example of what they saw.
Quoted by Shelton in No Direction Home Eldot says that the Iron Range had produced some strange characters over the years including Bob Dylan and Gus Hall.  Hall was the leader of the Communist Party.
Eldot in his short article does answer a few questions while raising a few more.  His tone is prejudicial so that one has to take his opinions with a grain of salt.  Still, I think they reflect generally accurately the impression Dylan made at the time of this outrageous oddball who had somehow, against all expectations, made it big.
…Bobby stems from a middle class background in which much emphasis is placed on education and conformity and plans for a respectable career.
Bobby didn’t quite fit into that framework and preferred a more bohemian type of life.  His parents say he frowns on being called a beatnik, and they don’t like that designation for him either.  But he was in fact adopting some of the manners associated with beatniks- or folkniks- in an area where that makes a person stand out as a strange character.
That may explain some of the apparent hostility between Dylan and his hometowners.  The town geek had become more successful than they.  Hibbing would have been no place for him.  Most people of his temperament, like myself, have found it preferable to move to the coasts.
Once in New York Dylan invented his persona attempting to assume it completely.  Eldot obviously thinks this is living a lie.

Zimmerman as Dylan

People who knew him before he set out to become a folknik chuckle at his back country twang and attire and at the imaginative biographies they’ve been reading about him.  They remember him as a fairly ordinary youth from a respectable family, perhaps a bit peculiar in his ways, but bearing little resemblance to the sham show business character he is today.
Obviously Eldot expected Dylan to present himself as a well scrubbed, middle class lad the Range could be proud of instead he essentially disowned Hibbing claiming a fanciful pedigree that bore no relation to Hibbing or the facts as they knew them.  There is no reason Dylan shouldn’t have adopted a show biz name and perhaps a stage persona.  After all short punchy names work better than the polysyllabic ones that may confuse the audience.  Even Ethel Merman changed her name from Ethel Zimmerman and to good effect.
Dylan took it a step further.  He tried to hide the fact that he was Jewish.  He didn’t just invent a stage persona for himself but he tried to invent a whole new persona for himself based on false information that could be seen as actual deceit that he tried to pass off as true.  (Abe said it was all an act.)  Dylan went so far as to deceive his girl friend, Suze Rotolo, who only found out the truth when Dylan came home stumbling drunk and the  secret fell out of his pocket.
That seems a bit extreme and perhaps psychotic.  Indeed the psychological stresses were so great that Dylan’s personality seemed to split.  He began to live two different lives.  While apparently on the closest terms with his parents, in constant contact, he let on that he was an orphan and his parents dead.
In itself the latter is fairly common.  Jim Morrison of the doors let on his parents were dead but then he had nothing to do with them.  He rejected them completely.  Dylan being at the same time dependent and estranged makes him a special case.
Abram Zimmerman is quoted by Eldot:
“He wanted to have a free rein.” says Zimmerman.  “He wanted to be a folk singer, an entertainer.  We couldn’t see it, but we felt he was entitled to the choice.  It’s his life, after all, and we didn’t want to stand in the way.  So we made an agreement that he could have one year to do as he pleased, and if at the end of that year we were not satisfied with his progress he’d go back to school.”
That’s sort of possessive.  Obviously there were heated discussions between son and parents.  Dylan obviously didn’t want to make a clean break or he, perhaps, wanted financial support and could only get it that way.  I mean, at eighteen you’re on your own.  At any rate while claiming his parents were dead Dylan was in close phone contact all the while.  Now, this is a betrayal of who we were led to believe he was at the time.
“It was eight months after that, says (Abe)  Zimmerman, that Bobby received a glowing ‘two column’ review in the New York Times.  So we figured that anybody who can get his picture and two columns in the New York Times is doing pretty good.  Anyway it was a start.”
So Robert Shelton’s article had the effect of buying Dylan’s parents off.  Indeed, who wouldn’t be impressed?
The question is why Eldot chose this moment to write about the Folknik.  I think that can be explained by “his Carnegie Hall debut next Saturday.”
In the Midwest, at least, we were raised to reverence both New York and Carnegie Hall.  We were led to believe that only the greatest of the great and then only as a reward for lifetime achievement were granted the privilege of playing SRO at Carnegie Hall.  Our teachers were adamant about this.
I was shocked when relative nobodies began playing Carnegie.  It required a major adjustment in my attitude.  Eldot is apparently stunned that Dylan, not only from small town Hibbing on the Iron Range but a Folknik to boot, I mean, you know, a Bohemian, a mere boho, was playing the Hall.  One can also understand better the effect on Abe and Beattie Zimmerman sitting in the audience in Carnegie Hall, the proud parents of the Star.
Eldot also says:
His rise in barely three years has been almost as impressive as the fortune he has already amassed…
As Dylan had done very little in the way of touring and had few record sales as of 1963, while he hadn’t received any royalties from PPM recordings yet, the mention of a considerable fortune raises eyebrows as does this quote from Father Abe:
My son is a corporation and his public image is strictly an act…

Hard to follow this act.

Yeah.  He’s more middle class and respectable than he looks.  Well, the public image wasn’t strictly an act but I found the information that Dylan had incorporated himself very interesting.  That means he was two separate legal entities while being an employee of his corporation and therefore on salary.  That brings to mind the movie ‘Who Is Harry Kellerman And Why Is He Saying Terrible Things About Me.’  The movie was loosely based on Dylan.  It opens in the penthouse of the skyscraper that hero, Georgie Solloway, owns.
2.
Dylan was obviously getting advice from his manager, Albert Grossman.  Let’s think about Grossman for a minute.  There hasn’t been a lot written about Grossman.  Here are the bare facts as recorded by wikipedia:
Albert Grossman was born in Chicago on May 21, 1926, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who worked as tailors.  He attended Lane Technical School and graduated from Roosevelt University, Chicago with a degree in economics.
After university he worked for the Chicago Housing Authority, leaving in the late 1950s to go into the club business.  Seeing folk star Bob Gibson perform at the Off Beat Room in 1956 prompted Grossman’s idea of a ‘listening room’ to showcase Gibson and other talent, as the folk movement grew.  The result was The Gate Of Horn in the basement of the Rice Hotel, where Jim (Roger) McGuinn began his career as a 12 string guitarist.  Grossman moved into managing some of the acts who appeared at his club and in 1959, he joined forces with George Wein, who founded the Newport Jazz Festival, to start up the Newport Folk Festival.  At the first Newport Folk Festival, Grossman told New York Times critic, Robert Shelton:  “The American public is like Sleeping Beauty, waiting to be kissed awake by the Prince of Folk Music.
Grossman obviously considered himself that Prince while being unaware of the obvious fact that the Kingston Trio had already kissed the American public awake and were the Princes of Folk Music.  Now let us flesh out the facts with what must have been.
Grossman was a Chicago native born and bred.  Chicago is a tumultuous  city; the criminal ethic rules both the underground and the overground.  They are joined at the hip.  The underground is known as The Outfit being ruled by Sicilians in conjunction with Jews who act as semi-legit facilitators.  Grossman was Jewish.  The location in Chicago where he was born isn’t available to me but I would guess the Jewish areas of Maxwell Street or Lawndale.
Born in 1926 Grossman was able to evade World War II, although Robert Shelton born in the same year did serve, while Grossman was also the too old for the Korean War.  Missed both.  A fortunate child.
He graduated College possibly in 1949 or ’50 taking a job in the public sector at the Chicago Housing Authority.  Whether he used his degree in economics isn’t clear but in 1956 at the age of thirty he saw Bob Gibson perform and realized that he could cash in on Folk Music while pursuing social and political objectives.  He immediately opened what became the premier Folk club in the US,  The Gate Of Horn.  Legendary.  I always regret never having been able to attend.
Contrary to what seems to be the prevailing opinion today Folk music throve throughout the fifties from beginning to end.  Grossman could open a club because there was a thriving Folk scene.  The Gateway Singers, Bud and Travis, Gibson, Odetta, Josh White and many, many others  Black and White toured and performed.  So when the Kingston Trio scored on the pop scene in 1958 they didn’t come out of the blue but Folk music began to explode.  The Brothers Four appeared at about the same time.
When Grossman went into the club business he must have inevitably been drawn into contact with the Chicago Outfit as the Chicago version of the Mafia is known.  All the suppliers and unions he had to deal with were mobbed up.  As a Jew he would have had an entree to what Gus Russo calls the Supermob.  The Jewish lawyers and politicians who acted as facilitators.  Thus Grossman must have established connections.  Not because he necessarily wished to but because it was necessary to survive, let alone prosper.
As lawyers and politicians the Jews always played by their own rules bending and distorting the rules everyone else was taught to play by.  Grossman would learn his lessons well changing the rules dramatically when he hit New York.
It would seem likely that Grossman would have learned the attitude from these very monied, devious and powerful men.  The word scrupulous had a very different meaning for them.  Chutzpah was more useful.  It would be interesting to know exactly who Grossman came into contact with.
As Wikipedia notes he managed ‘socially conscious’ performers like Odetta but none of the people he handled were capable of breaking out of or changing the folk format into pop stardom.  Where the money and influence was.  The money and the influence to move society in the directed he wanted it to go.
Taking his lesson from the more pop oriented groups like Belafonte, the Kingstons and Chad Mitchell Trios, The Brothers Four and The Highwaymen, in 1961 Grossman assembled a folk trio of two men and a woman.  A slight variation on the proven formula.  Grossman was no innovator.  But he had his social and political agenda.  He called the group Peter Paul And Mary giving it a subliminal Judaeo-Christian religious tinge.
His key member was Peter Yarrow, a Jew with a degree in psychology.  Apparently both he and Grossman were simpatico.  The other male was another Jew named Noel Stookey who performed as Paul.  The female was a shiksa named Mary Travers.
The group as well as Grossman was political and subversive from the start.  As the PPM website says: ( http://peterpaulandmary.com/history/bio/htm )
In the decades prior to the 60s, through the work of such avatars as Woody Guthrie, the Weavers and Pete Seeger, folk music had become identified with sociopolitical commentary, but the notion had been forced underground in the Senator Joe McCarthy witch-hunting era… Peter Paul and Mary came together to juxtapose these cross currents and thus to reclaim folk’s potency as a social, cultural and political force.
In other words Grossman and PPM would renew and reinvigorate the Communist offensive providing a foundation and incentive to the Boys of ’64.  Of course the Communists were the witches McCarthy was hunting.
‘If I Had A Hammer’ and all that Communist junk was alright for one time around but when Dylan made the scene with a fresh departure on traditional political folk Grossman saw the future.  PPM’s third LP in 1963 had three songs by Dylan.
Dylan’s career was effectively launched by Robert Shelton’s astonishing writeup of Dylan in 1961.  As Wikipedia notes Grossman had known Robert Shelton since at least the ’59 Newport Folk Festival.  It is possible that Grossman knew Shelton from Chicago in ’57 or ’58.  Robert Shelton himself, was from Chicago, graduated from the Northwestern School of Journalism.  He left Chicago for NYC in 1958 to become the music critic of the paper of record, the New York Times.  How lucky can you get.  Of course, the Times itself was and is owned by Jews.  As he was a folk critic in New York, practically living in the folk clubs, there seems little reason to doubt he was a habitue of the Gate Of Horn in Chicago.  As a  journalist it would be probable that he introduced himself to its owner, Albert Grossman.  There may be articles filed by him in Chicago.  So when Shelton interviewed Grossman in 1959 it is likely that he already knew him.
Why Shelton gave Dylan the incredible boost isn’t clear.  The entire folk community was astonished.  It may be that Grossman had already fixed on Dylan and he may have begun a buildup before he even signed him.  Shelton’s review of Dylan in the New York Times seems to be too incredible to be true, not that things like that don’t happen, but they don’t happen often and seldom without cause.
Still I find it difficult to believe those people thought Dylan was that talented a performer.  After all every folk label in the Village rejected Dylan from Vanguard and Elektra to Folkways.  They didn’t hear it, and those labels had some pretty lousy singers on them.
Perhaps the review in the Times was a signal to John Hammond at Columbia.  Imagine being refused by Folkways and being signed by Columbia.  Think about it.  One has to suspect the reason Hammond signed Dylan.  I don’t have tin ears and I can’t see why the LPs, Bob Dylan and Freewheelin’  are anything to shout about.  I can sure see why they didn’t sell.
Dylan began to really demonstrate his song writing prowess in early ’62 when Blowin’ In The Wind was first performed.  The song caught on quickly while Grossman who had been watching him decided to make his move.  He became Dylan’s manager in August of ’62.  Possibly he had asked his Chicago pal Shelton to write Dylan up earlier.  At any rate sometime between August ’62 and September ’63 Dylan incorporated himself most likely on his manager’s advice.
PPM had been a hit out of the box.  Both their first two albums without Dylan songs were mega hits as was their third with Blowin’ In The Wind  and two other Dylan songs.  In November ’63 all three albums were in the Top Ten so that Grossman’s two money machines were working in synch.
If Dylan hadn’t amassed the fortune Eldot mentions he soon would.  Eldot published his Duluth article on October 20, 1963.  It is difficult to believe Eldot’s statement that Dylan ‘had amassed a considerable fortune’ at that time.  Perhaps Papa Abe was gilding the lily to justify his son being a corporation.
I have never seen the fact mentioned before.  If Dylan did incorporate himself there should be a public record.  This is all the more remarkable as Dylan is universally portrayed as having been naive to the point of simplicity in business matters.  Can’t be quite true.
As the corporation has never been subsequently mentioned to my knowledge one wonders for how long it existed or if it still exists.  One wonders what the assets were and if dissolved in what manner the assets were distributed.  One thinks of Georgie Solloway of  Who Is Harry Kellerman.
Dylan’s father died in 1968 ending that influence on his life.  But Dylan had already been granted his own head by his parents.  Abe is quoted by Eldot:
“We have absolutely no part in his affairs.  Those are his own operation.  He’s a corporation and he has a manager.”
Being a corporation and having a manager…what more is there to life?

The Burden Of Being Cowboy Bob Dylan

Exhuming Bob XVII

A Napoleon In Rags

by

R.E. Prindle

Hoffman, Michael, Judaism Discovered, 2008

Jay Michaelson: http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=1725

Cornyn, Sean: http://www.rightwingbob.com/weblog/archives/1850

Hartley, Mick: http://www.mickhartley.typepad.com/blog/2008/10/dylans-true-message.html

Prindle, R.E. https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2008/06/25/exhuming-b0b-x-lubavitcher-bob/

 

     How does the ‘Napoleon in rags’, Bob Dylan, conceive himself in his role as a reformer of Judaism because that is what Messianic Judaism is.  What does this believer in the Bible as the literal word of God see as his mission?  One should note that as Dylan places the Bible above the Talmud he is a Rabbinical Judaic outlaw as Michaelson says.  Did Dylan really just wake up one morning and say: ‘Oh L-ordy, I have crashed.  I need the crutch of Jesus’ as Michaelson, Cornyn and Hartley suggest or was there an ulterior motive?  Perhaps a conceptual idea if not a well thought out program.

     Jay Michaelson, claiming to be a ‘secular’ Jew takes exception to ‘Messianic’ Judaism.  What exactly is Messianic Judaism?  The notion may take many readers by surprise; those who are only familiar with mainstream Judaism and Christianity.  Most non-Jews don’t realize that Judaism has as many sects as Christianity.

     For instance Dylan’s stance smacks of Karaitism.  the Karaites are a Jewish sect that denies the authority of the oral law or Talmud and hence the Rabbis.  They are outlawed as a cult.  Messianic Jews accepting Jesus as the Jewish Messiah and hence the New Dispensation are and always have been by definition Outlaws, being outside THE LAW.

     The Rabbi David M. Hargis of The Messianic Bureau International is quoted by Michael Hoffman in his Judaism Discovered p. 844:

     “Messianic Judaism” is a means for subverting Christianity by incorporated reverence for the rabbis who are heirs to the religion and customs of the ancient Pharisees as recorded in the Talmud.  The claim of Messianic Judaism is that historic Christianity is “pagan” and imbued with “gentile culture” needlessly alienating and offending Judaics who might otherwise convert to Jesus Christ.  Their “solution” is to fashion a supposedly pagan-free form of Judaism that allegedly believes in Jesus.  ‘We believe it would be the best and is ultiamtely necessary for all Jewish people to know their Messiah Yeshua, but we do not believe that God has called any Jewish person to become Gentile or Western Christian in custom.  Rather, we believe it would be best and is ultimately necessary for Christianity to remove its pagan influences and return to the roots of Judaism, that is, to return to the way of Yeshua as He walked by example and set forth in His entire Word….However this does not mean that Modern Rabbinical Judaism does not have truth within it.”- Rabbi David M. Hargis & Messianic Bureau International, “Basics of Messianic Judaism.”  www.messianic.com/articles/basics.htm (as of Feb. 25, 2008; it may be altered after that date.)

     So it would appear that Messianic Jews want a return to pre-Pauline Jesusism deleting all non-Jewish influences in Christianity.  These would include Platonic influences, the Dionysian Kyrios Christos,  the Persian influences, Gnostic influences and the Egyptian influence that made Mary the Mother of God as patterned after Isis.  In other words the Messianic Jewish Jesus would be one that Christians would scarcely recognize.

     As can be seen by the title of Rabbi Hargis’ organization that it is an international one; indeed, Dylan’s outfit Jews For Jesus is international in scope.  You can call that a conspiracy if you like as Cronyn and Hartley do.    

      It would be fair to assume that Mitch Glaser’s and Al Kasha’s organization, Jews For Jesus, also an international organization, is affiliated to, or at least is associated with the Messianic Bueau International in some way or other as like minded organizations.  We know for certain that Dylan was and is associated with Jews For Jesus.  A purpose of Messianic Judaism is to strip Western, that is to say “pagan” influences from the figure of Jesus returning him to the status of ‘pure’ Semite.

     That is to say that the Greek cult of Kyrios Christos is to be abstracted so that Jesus is no longer The Christ.  So the purpose of Messianic Judaism is to take back Jesus from the Christians while reuniting Messianic and Rabbinical Judaism.  The messianics are willing to concede that there is some ‘truth’ in Rabbinical Judaism.

     Dylan was not merely preaching Messianic Judaism to Jews but whiffing it past Christians also.  It is true that he thinned out his audience rather quickly having apparently misjudged the religiosity of his following.  As a Jew of Orthodox sensibiities Dylan, in his mission as Messiah, or King of the Jews as Michaelson styles him, would have to learn something of Christian beliefs and sensibilities.  It would seem likely then that he approached Dwyer of the Vineyard Fellowship to pick his brains.  The question then was Dylan exploited by the Christians as Michaelson believes or was Dylan exploiting the Christians?

     A question then arises as to whether Dylan wasn’t ‘speaking falsely now’  when he said ‘he never wanted to be the voice of his generation, and he certainly never asked to be ‘King of the Jews’ or a vessel for our hopes and dreams.’  Can we believe the denial of this self-styled ‘Napoleon in rags?’  If Napoleon wasn’t a ‘leader’ who demanded following who has ever been?  How mistaken could his contemporaries have been in taking this ‘Napoleon in rags’  as their spokesman.  Can Dylan have changed direction in 1979 when he wanted to become a great Messianic spokesman leading his people to some Promised Land?  What else could have been his intent in becoming a Jim Jones style religious preacher?  ‘There’s something happening here and you don’t know what is, do you Mr. Jones?’

     Dylan definitely confuses Michaelson who opines ‘his latest incarnation, as a mustachioed journeyman musician, is made of equal parts of authenticity and con’ and ‘Dylan, who always seems to be in on the con when he’s not perpetrating one himself.’  Indeed.  Dylan does project a duplicitous character; speaks out of both sides of his mouth at once.  Or once again as Michaelson understands it:  ‘…like him, I think I can understand the appeal of authentic religious experience in the context of superficiality and doublespeak.’  Uh huh!

     Thus Dylan’s double edged mission was and is to strip ‘Christians’ of their ‘pagan’ sensibilities- i.e. Western culture- while converting Rabbinical Jews to Messianism or Jesus.  So, whether Cornyn and Hartley believe it or not, yes, there is a ‘Great Bob Dylan Conspiracy.’

     It is embarrassing that at this late date in the evolution of human consciousness that Bob Dylan believes the Bible to be the literal word of God.  Consciousness has evolved to that level that the sham of the Religious Consciousness should be apparent to all.  Both Science and Communism have been proclaiming the falsity of the religion and extreme Jewish nationalism that Dylan affects for a hundred years or more.

     I certainly have to reject the Religious Consciousness.  As such I feel defrauded by Dylan’s early career and my attachment to it.  Dylan willfully misrepresented himself, doublespeak, and cheated me as well as all his fans who thought he was enlightened.  I was misled.

     Sorry Bob, but you’re a fraud.

 

 

Sigmund Freud And His Vision Of The Unconcious

Redefining A False Vision

by

R.E. Prindle

Texts:

Bakan, David, Sigmund Freud And The Jewish Mystical Tradition,  Orig. Issued 1965, Dover edition of 2004

Movie:  The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse, 1932, Fritz Lang, auteur.

https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2007/10/01/something-of-value-i-2/

freud-6

     Sometime after I wrote the first part of Something Of Value (see above for link) I read David Bakan’s Freud And The Jewish Mystical Tradition.  Bakan’s book confirmed my findings while developing Freud’s relationship to his culture’s mystical tradition based on Bakan’s understanding of the Zohar and the Jewish Kabbalah, which I haven’t read or studied; nor do I intend to unless I exhaust my other pursuits which doesn’t seem likely.  You never know though.

     However a point to consider is how Jewish is the Jewish mystical tradition, that is, what are its antecedents?  Are they rooted in Judaism or elsewhere?  Bakan seems to believe that the Jewish Kabbalah is derived entirely from Jewish sources independent of the general milieu.  I don’t believe this to be true.  The Jewish mystical tradition like all others is based on the very ancient Egyptian traditions as is a great deal of ancient Jewish culture.  Bakan believes that the Kabbalah arose in the first century AD.  This is probably true.

     The Hermetic tradition which is equivalent to a European Cabala took form as such in Alexandria during the Ptolemaic period when Greek and Egyptian ideas interreacted.  Hemeticism evolved from much earlier doctrines centered around the Egyptian god Thoth.  The Zohar and Cabbalah then is Hermetic material adapted for Jewish needs.  The whole can be traced back to Alexandria.  It will be remembered that there was a large colony of Jews in Alexandria from long before the first century AD.

     The Zohar is a mystical book, which is attributed to the first and second century Rabbi, Simeon Bar Yohai, and it was rewritten, edited and whatever in twelfth century Spain in the sixteenth century.  Its influence then was transmitted to the seventeenth century Jewish messiah, Sabbatai, Zevi.

     According to Mr. Bakan Freud was familiar with the Zohar and Kabbalah.  I couldn’t go so far as to claim so myself but Mr. Bakan can quote chapter and verse.  While Freud claimed to be scientific Mr. Bakan relates almost all of Freud’s psychology to the Kabbalah showing Freud’s dependence on Sabbatianism and Frankism as I indicated in Something Of Value Part I.

     Thus while seeming to be working from a scientific point of view Freud is actually blending a bit of scientific method acquired from European sources, as there is no science in Jewish culture, with his Jewish religious material to subvert the European moral order.  While Freud himself was at war with European civilization, the international Jewish organizations of which he was a member extended his field of influence to the United States and Canada.  Thus while Freud speaks specifically of Europe he can be taken to mean Euroamerica.

2.freud-3

     A further background for his psychology, Freud’s central childhood fixation, appears to be the incident in which a European knocked his father’s hat into the gutter which his father meekly, or wisely, depending on your point of view, accepted without a demur.  Because of this story Freud wished to avenge himself on all Europeans.

     Probably at this point Freud assumed the Moses complex that stayed with him to the end of his life.  He, Freud, would lead his people to triumph over the Europeans as Moses had led the People out of Egypt while Pharaoh and his army were drowned in the Red Sea.

     However, oddly enough, as he claimed to be wholly Jewish, Freud was conflicted in his attitude toward Europeans.  As a child he had a Roman Catholic nurse who introduced him to Christianity by taking him to church.  Most probably she also tried to wean him from Judaism.  This experience had a great effect on young Freud.  In the following anecdote, as with most fixations, he seemed to have lost the exact memory of the situation.  From Bakan:

     …that my ‘primary originator; (of neuroses) was an ugly, elderly, but clever woman who told me a great deal about God and hell, and gave me a high opinion of my own capacities.

     On October 15, 1897 he quotes his mother speaking about the old nurse who took care of him when he was very young:

     “Of  course,” she said, “an elderly woman, very shrewd indeed.  She was always taking you to church.  When you came home you used to preach and tell us about how God conducted his affairs.”

     His memory had become confused while it does not appear that he ever exorcised his fixation, for fixation it was.  He apparently loved this nurse at the time rather than hating her.  When she was later accused and convicted of stealing from the Freuds she was dishonored and actually sent to jail.  Freud was heartbroken while changing his opinion of her.  But, he had had contact with Christian Europeans which left a lasting impression on him that he could not consciously recognize or acknowledge.  If I am correct, this impression resurfaced when he came into contact with C.G. Jung who he adopted as a surrogate for this nurse transferring his love and hatred of her to Jung.

     Just as he loved this nurse there were apparently strong homosexual overtones in his relationship with Jung.  As Freud would have known, the compulsion toward repitition would have been a component in his relationship with Jung through his nurse although he apparently did not recognize this.  So much for his self-analysis.  He found reasons to break off with Jung or drive him away while bitterly claiming to be betrayed by Jung just as his nurse had been accused and convicted of theft thus betraying the love of the child Freud.  Thus once again his contact with a Christian European was brief ending in sorrow for himself.

     A third situation occured late in life when he wrote Moses And Monotheism.  Rather startlingly he claimed that Moses was not Jewish but was an ethnic Egyptian.  This means Freud, who had a Mosaic fixation, split his personality between his Christian longings and his professed Jewish identity.  Another result would be that monotheism was not a Jewish invention but actually a goyish invention so that all the evil arising from monotheism was not the fault of the Jews but the goys.  A neat job of transference.   Thus Freud’s notion of Moses may have been a sort of dream reversal of facts.

     Whatever the results of Freud’s self-analysis back before the turn of the century, it is quite clear that he was unable to resolve his fixations nor, one believes, was he aware of their influence on him.  He never integrated his personality remaining under the influence of his subconscious fixations.  No wonder he ignored the conscious mind.

3.

     Like most people Freud had to find his way from adolescence to adulthood and his true ambitions by a freud-5circuitous route.

     The editor’s note to 1927’s The Future Of An Illusion says this:

     In the ‘Postscript’ which Freud added in 1935 to his  Autobiographical Study he remarked that a ‘signficant change’ had come about in his writings during the previous decade.  “My interest,” he explained, “after making a long detour through the natural sciences, medicine, and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking.”

     He undoubtedly refers to his experiences in church with his Christian nurse contrasted with the ‘Christian’ who knocked his father’s hat into the gutter.  As Freud is very duplicitous in his use of language one should try to be very sensitive to the personal meanings behind the general meaning of his words.  Thus I believe his use of the term ‘cultural problems’ can usually be understood as his inner conflict between his Christianity and Judaism.

     As Bakan points out, that while Freud rejected Rabbinical religious Judaism he was deeply immersed in the Jewish mystical tradition of the Zohar and Kabbalah.  Thus one can discount his claim to be an ‘atheistic’ Jew.  Or else atheism has a more specific meaning for him.

     I would place the change of emphasis in his writing or, at least the beginning of the change, in 1915.  My guess would be that Freud was unaware of the coming Jewish Revolution  until he joined B’nai B’rith in 1895.  That knowledge would have shaped the direction of his researches.  Whatever science was involved would have been subordinated toward achieving the Revolution.  At the same time that he was working out the nature of psychoananlysis as Bakan indicates he must also have been studying the Zohar and Kabbalah.  I haven’t read or studied either so I have to rely on Bakan’s analysis of their influence.  Bakan traces strong mystical influences running side by side with what passed for science in Freud’s mind.  As Freud persistently says he’s going to ignore the facts if favor of projections one must assume that there is more mysticism than science in Freud’s construction of psychoanalysis- as he says ‘his creation.’

     Bakan points out that Freud transited from the role of physician to that of ‘healer.’  That is analogous to the hands on approach of Christian Fundamentalism.  Freud then for all practical purposes abandoned medicine for healing.  Then, sometime between 1913, the year of the beginning of the Jewish revolution, and 1915 he abandoned psychoanalytical research for his ‘cultural’ studies.’  In other words, he began to apply his psychological studies to the manipulation of cultures through his developing ideas on Group Psychology.

     Just as Freud learned that there were screen memories that transformed more painful memories into something more acceptable to salve those injured feelings so Freud learned that he could develop ‘screen’ language to serve up unpalatable meanings in palatable ways.  Thus what he says has a reasonable meaning to the uninitiated but has a totally different meaning to the initiated- those with the key.  In many ways it is the same as a criminal argot.  Those who understand the argot can discuss topics openly without the uninitiated understanding, while only those with the key can twig it.  Ya dig?

     The key incident that fixed his mind on ‘cultural interests’ was his father’s story of the guy who knocked his hat into the gutter.  Freud then, in attempting to diguise his hatred for ‘Christianity’  while secretly admiring it because of his nurse who gave him an inflated opinion of his importance, and his desire to avenge his father and hence all Jews through his Moses fixation, developed his program.  Thus he acted in his own mind altruistically and need feel no guilt.

     Freud was very seriusly conflicted, also suffering from depression according to Bakan.  Hence his purpose was to knock the whole of European Christianity into a cocked hat in the gutter, which is to say the actual persons of Europe.  Compare Freud to Rebbe Schneerson in America.

     Thus, the use of terms like ‘Culture’ and ‘Civilization’ should always be placed in the context of Jews and Europeans.  In this manner he avoids the appearance of bigotry and hatred while sounding ‘scientific.’

     Now, this obsession and extreme form of vengeance for something that, after all, didn’t happen to him nor did he witness it, might certainly be considered a neurosis, probably a psychosis and possibly a degree of insanity.  In reading Bakan there is a hint that he believes Freud had a disordered mind.  Indeed, Fritz Lang’s movie The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse should be held steadily in mind when reading of Freud’s later career.  Lang must have had Freud in mind when he filmed the movie.

     Lang also had a hand in the making of The Cabinet Of  Dr. Caligari from which film he was dismissed.  Lang’s departure from Caligari changed the ending of that movie to the conventional note of the victim, or whistle blower, being declared insane.  Lang reversed this by making the perpetrator Caligari/Mabuse insane as in real life with Freud.  Further the disciple of Mabuse, the head of the asylum, Dr. Baum was also declared insane.  Although the problem appeared to be solved the threat of the conspiracy continuing from Mubuse’s cell, now occupied by Dr. Baum who has assumed Dr. Mabuse’s identity, looms like a spectre over the denouement.

     While Freud was never incarcerated as he sould have been, he was imprisoned in his mind no less than Drs. Mabuse and Baum or the character in Gradiva which held such fascination for Freud.  It is interesting that Freud had a plaster cast of the relief of Gradiva’s heel on which the story of Gradiva was based that the displayed prominently in his office.  The story obviously had greater significance for him than his ‘objective’ analysis of the story would lead one to suspect.

     Thus from 1915 to 1935 like Dr. Mabuse he sat imprisoned in his projection of reality churning out page after page, volume after volume of criminal plans for the subversion of civilization which is to say of Euroamerican civilization but not Jewish culture.  He makes a definite point of that illusion of whose future he is discussing applies only to Europe and Christianity rather than religion in general which would include his own Judaism.  At this point he is not aware of the burgeoning Wahabi Moslemism so that his message is that Jewish beliefs  are real while Christian beliefs and Scientific reality are illusory.  One has to penetrate the screen language and convert it into the proper psychological intent.

     As David Bakan points out Freud lived his whole life in a sort of Jewish ghetto having very little contact with Europeans.

     His choice of Jung as the potential heir to his ‘creation’ may have had as much to do with a desperate attempt to reestablish a connection similar to that of his childhood Christian nurse.   Thus his overtures to Jung while under extreme stress were driven from his unconscious while he himself was unaware of his true motivations.  This would have been an expression of a repetition compulsion.  Thus as his nurse disappeared from his life under discreditable circumstances he replicated the situation with Jung.  His attempt to convert Moses (hence himself) into an Egyptian may have been a last attempt to replicate and resolve this early contact with Christianity.  His view of European civilization then was filtered wholly through a Jewish projection of possibilities.  He really had no intimate knowledge of European mores.

     From 1915 on, then, his writings were obsessed with hatred for Euroamerica and a desire to wreak vengeance on them by destroying the basis of their civilization.  His ideas for the subversion of European civilization were carried to America by the international B’nai B’rith organization to be adopted and employed there.  In addition Revolutionary plans executed in Europe in 1917 were financed and organized by the world Jewish government in the US.  While functioning according to local conditions the Revolution was conducted on an international scale.  Act locally, think globally.  Hence Jewish revolutionaries left the US for Russia after 1918 to aid in the consolidation going on there.  This is really an incredible repressed story in the Freudian cultural manner.  Very Freudian that such phenomenal criminal activity that were best left invisible was repressed into humanity’s unconscious.

     At this point I think it mght be well to examine Freud’s vision of the unconscious in more detail.  While there can be little doubt that there is a subconscious function to the human mind usually referrred to as the unconscious after Freud that had been an accepted fact amongst scientific researchers for a hundred years Freud has been given the credit for discovering it.  The exact nature had not been determined before Freud nor does Freud determine it.  His view is merely a projection of his own conscious and subconscious needs.

4.

      In David Bakan’s view Freud made a compact with ‘Satan.’

     Certainly not in the literal sense but in the figurative sense that Freud would do anything, abandon any freud-1moral precepts, to achieve fame.  Bakan points out the supercription to Freud’s Interpretation Of Dreams a quote from Virgil: Flectere si nesqueo, superos, Acheronta movebo.  Translated as: If the gods above are no use to me, than I’ll move all hell.  Freud further blurred the line between good and evil or amalgamated the two from the influence of Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank who cast off all morality.  Since Freud has been successful in altering both Euroamerican and Jewish morality toward these immoral or amoral beliefs by false ‘Satanic’ criminal doctrines it is imperatvie to debunk his personal projection of the ‘unconscious.’

     As he ‘made a pact’ with powers below- the unconscious- against the powers above- the conscious- he invested his projection of the unconscious with the attributes of ‘Satan’ or evil.  This view of the subconscious is a self-serving fiction not based on any science.

     He sets up the unconscious as an autonomous entity with the main function of blighting the conscious.  He give the powers of hell supremacy over the powers of heaven.  The notion is mere fantasy; it cannot be.  There is no possibility that the function of the subconscious doesn’t have a positive function in and of itself and in relation to the conscious.  If you actually think abut it for a moment you wil realize this must be true; every part of the body works to the benefit of the whole; there can be no exception for the subconscious.

     Now, nature is not flawless.  The order that the religious seem to find is not there.  Nature functions in a much more imperfect or haphazard way.  It takes only one peek through the Hubble to see that.

     However the relationship between the conscious and subconscious is delicate and easily disrupted especially in the early years of the organism when it has no experience with which to evaluate the events occurring to it.  The Ego and Anima are not part of the subconscious and possibly not of the conscious but functions through the conscious and subconscious minds.

     The conscious mind perceives phenomena and acts on them but the terrific inflow of impressions is more than it can deal with so the day’s input is received into the subconscious for further reference.  Thus a major function of dreams in the sleeping state is to review and process, organize the information into a coherent whole for future reference.  The subconscious then is able to compare incoming information with experience for the appropriate response.  When the conscious and subconscious minds are attuned, that is to say, the personality is integrated, the system works properly, otherwise the response is distorted by one’s fixations.  This is very easy to see in Freud.

     However, especially in youth when experience is scant, the mind may be challenged with some devastating new experience for which there are no reference points.  If an appropriate response is made there is no problem.  If an inappropriate response is made against which future experience may be in variance, the earlier response which has become fixated will over rule the current response and substitute the fixated inappropriate response.  Thus the current response will constellate around these earlier fixations which gives one bizarre symbolic dreams and inappropriate responses.

     The inappropriate response will usually result from an insult to the Ego or, in other words, one’s sexual identity.  In turn the response to this insult will be expressed in a sexual affect.

     The purpose of psychoanalysis, which is real science, although Freud didn’t see that, is to locate and exorcize them allowing the conscious and subconscious aspects of the mind to function properly as a unit.  Dreams are actually important because they are an analysis of life’s experience providing responses.  None of this, of course takes in intelligence, discipline and other functions of mind and character that Freud dismisses as irrelevant.

     Now, in the cultural war between Judaism and Euroamerica, or as the Jews express it, Christianity, Freud infused the Jewish subconscious with a disregard for morality al la Jacob Frank in relation to Sabbatai Zevi.  Any evil was excused so long as it seemed to advance the cultural war.  While this infusion may not have reached down through the ranks of Jewry- which is to say they behaved in a certain way but didn’t know why- the ideas were thoroughly planted in the minds of what Henry Ford would call the International Jew.

     The cold war between Jews and Europeans became a shooting war in the wake of the Great War.  Men, money and munitions flowed in a wide steady stream from the United States to Russia.  Coordinators established themselves in strategic locations.  If one reads restricted, censored literature the impression is made that horrible anti-Semites harassed and hated innocent unresisting Jews.  Jews may have been killed but they were not innocent or unresisting.  To the contrary freed from guilt, or supposedly so, by Freudian/Sabbatian/Frankist precepts, abattoirs were established throughout Russia where unsuspecting Russians were led in one door and flowed out the other in liquid form.  This is not the place to dwell on gruesome details.  The literature exists but the collective Jewish mind has repressed the deeds into the collective unconscious.  In other words, history has been denied and censored so that the crimes can’t be known.  Actually Whittaker Chambers, the Red spy, translated a number of these books concerning the Hungarian atrocities of Bela Kun and Tibor Szmuelly, but those are impossible to come by.  All this slaughter was made possible and justified by the doctrines of Freud.

     In relation to the 1919 atrocities of the Jews in Hungary and the response which expelled them from power it should be noted that Israeli troops were recently introduced into Hungary to reestablish the tyranny of Kun and Szmuelly.  Don’t ever think that historical memories are short.  Remember the Amalikites.

     Freud sat confortably in Vienna looking on as the carnage occurred.  If, as believed, the tenor of his writing changed in 1925 that was probably due to the death of Lenin in 1924.  By 1925 it was apparent that the Jewish Revolution in Russia was on shaky grounds as Stalin began his rise to power so that Freud may have renewed his cultural attack or, on the other hand, as 1928 was the terminal projected year of the Jewish Revolution Freud may have been celebrating the death of European Civlilation when he published The Future Of An Illusion.  By the illusion he meant European Christianity and he meant European civilization was finished.  The Rome of the Popes should have fallen.

     In Illusion and Civilization And Its Discontents Freud makes us believe that the malcontents of civilization are synonymous with civilization rather than being a minority that always exists during great revolutionary changes.  Freud whose Judaism was challenged by the Scientific Revolution as much as Christianity or Moslemism must have been aware of the reactionary ‘instinct’ as he himself was in reaction to both European Christianity and the Scientific Revolution.

     David Bakan closes his volume with these words:

     …under the ruse of “playing the devil” (Freud) served Sabbatian interests.  In this respect, however, just as Freud may be regarded as having infused Kabbalah into science, so may he be regarded as having incorporated science into Kabbalah.  Sabbatian-wise, by closing the gap between Jewish culture and Western Enlightenment he acts as the Messiah not only for Jewish culture but for Western culture as well.

     Note that Western Enlightenment is reduced to Western culture putting it on a par with Jewish culture which is a tacit admission that there is no science in Jewish culture and none is wanted in Western ‘culture’.  Language as a screen.

     Bakan’s is a hefty statement.  Under the guise of the Devil Freud becomes the Messiah not only for Jews but for Euroamericans.  Truly in this scenario good comes from evil in the Jewish mind, assuming that the Messiah is good.  In case you missed it, Freud according to Bakan was the Second Coming.  Narrowing the gap between the two cultures means the imposition of Jewish culture as the Chosen or Abelite people over Western or Cainite culture.  Thus the age old goal of reversing the Cain and Abel story so that Cain is obligated to give preference to Abel is accomplished.

     By infusing Kabbalah into science, science has been subjugated to the unscientific Jewish culture so that the Catholic/Jewish situation of Medieval Europe has been restored.  The Enlightenment that invalidated Judaism, Christianity and Moslemism has been obliterated, hence the revival of religion happening today.  Thus in Bakan’s eyes and according to Freud’s intent Judaism has deconstructed Euroamerican society so the reconstruction according to Jewish cultural mores can commence.

     The result has been accomplished by the destruction of the Scientific Consciousness as there is little of science in Freud’s cultural writings.  He just says what he believes and wants you to believe and asserts it as a fact.  As always there were some Westerners who resented the encroachment of the strict limits imposed by science.  Rider Haggard in his Allan Quatermain made that as clear as possible.  The topic is the dominant theme of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan novels.  Henry Ford and his mass production methods was a symbol of that rebellion against the strict limits set by the clock.  Some denounced it as Taylorism; but with each passing decade the West became more acclimated to the change as the reactionary mood became acclimated to the new reality.

     Freud invents ‘instincts’ and their ‘renunciation’ to give sense to his arguments; the renunciation of instincts’ almost sounds scientific but it isn’t.  there are no instincts nor does Freud even attempt to demonstrate their existence.  Like the rest or Freud’s psychology the notion is just something Freud made up.  As always he notes only the negative societal destructive effects.  He says nothing of the ‘instinct’ to be around people which would conflict with his instinct against civilization- the last is a vague enough term the way he uses it.  But as Fritz Lang points out the hypnotic spell cast by Mabuse negates criticism so that the head psychologist of the asylum, the objective scientist himself, Dr. Baum, suspends critical judgment falling under the spell of Mabuse to the point of becoming a disciple just as Lang himself did.  Indeed, as the West has.  Hitler was a blessing in disguise for the Jewish Revolution.  The guilt caused by Hitler completely disarmed the West allowing the reconstruction of Western mores to proceed at a faster pace than would have been possible otherwise.  Indeed, the Nazi Era drove the entire psychotic Jewish Revolution to the shores of the United States beginning in the early thirties.  Thus the deconstruction of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America was assured.

     To return to 1919.

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