Part 2 Something Of Value I

October 14, 2007

Something Of Value I

Part 2

by

R.E. Prindle

Back To Solid Ground, More Or Less

     At the same time Stevenson and Haggard appeared, another of the great mythographers made his appearance.  Arthur Conan Doyle brought his great psychological projection Sherlock Holmes onto the world stage.  Doyle listed Poe as his second most influential author with whom he had been familiar since his youth.  All the great mythographers were well acquainted with Poe.  He was the great originator.

     Holmes is the first great psychological projection of the Scientific Consciousness.   He fulfills the role of Mastermind.  His intellectual greatness fulfilled Poe’s dictum of the analytical mind.

     As the two Dupins fulfilled the roles of ego and alter ego so Doyle gave Holmes Dr. John H. Watson as alter ego and foil.  Holmes represented the future while Watson was a relic from the religious past.  As the evil Hydelike representative of the subconscious Doyle provided us with the infamous criminal mastermind Dr. Moriarty.

     With the introduction of Holmes the Scientific mythology began to take shape.

     The new mythology was based on the new discoveries of science.  The scientific mind was pouring out new technological wonders almost on a daily basis but it was the discoveries in the sciences of biology and psychology that would most undermine the Religious Consciousness.

     Darwin had organized biology along the new scientific lines when his Origin Of Species appeared in 1859.  There was no greater challenge to the orthodox belief system than this.  When a few years later Darwin issued The Descent Of Man things really erupted.  According to the religious viewpoint, since the origins of consciousness the notion had been that man was descended from the gods, later monotheistically amended to God.  In a really inept choice of words Darwin states, or his followers did, that man was descended from monkeys.  The idea of evolution might have met with less reistance had Darwin titled his book:  The Ascent Of Man since, properly speaking, Homo Sapiens is an advance on monkeys and all that has gone before.  Thus man could have been said to ascend the evolutionary scale from apes but descend from God meeting somewhere in the middle.  Darwin wasn’t so farsighted.

     At the same time great advances were being made in psychology.  The Frenchman, Jean Martin Charcot, was proving the effect of the subconscious on our minds in his studies of hysteria and hypnosis.  The sub or unconscious mind had been a topic of consideration since the days of the Enlightenment but discussion was carried on in vague terms.  In 1886 the English psychologist FWH Myers identified the subconscious by the name of the Unconscious preparing the way for Freud who would set the world on its psychological ear the way Darwin had its biological ear.

     The way was now prepared for one of the two greatest mythographers, H.G. Wells (1866-1946).  Wells had a split personality.  On the one hand he was a mythographer and on the other he was a Red/Liberal/Utopian.  In 1920 the Utopian side won out and he became a whole-hearted Revolutionist.

     Wells began writing about 1893.  His early work was in the genre of scientific fantasias, as they were called at the time, of which genre he is said to be the founder.  Wells noted quite correctly that about mid-century a new type of scientific man became increasingly apparent.

     Let there be no mistake but that a few centuries earlier these scientific disturbers of the peace would have been murdered.  The reaction by the beginning of the twentieth century was that science was evil and ought to be stopped.  George Griffith, himself writing a scientific fantasia for Pearson’s Magazine, Stories Of Other Worlds, put these words into his heroine Zaidie’s mouth as she was on the way to Mars:

     “They’re very ugly aren’t they?”  said Zaidie; “and really you can’t tell which are men and which are women.  I suppose they’ve civilized themselves out of everything that’s nice, and are just scientific and utilitarian and everything that’s horrid.”

     And Zaidie was a sweet thing too.  Against an even more hostile background Wells understood that tempers against science were running high but he came down on the side of the New Men.  In his interesting fantasia The Food Of The Gods he postulates that the new men had perhaps been fed some new synthetic food which made them intellectual and physical giants.

     Actually they had been around for centuries but had been suppressed by the Religious Consciousness in the form of the Judeo-Catholic religion.  As their forces gathered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they became strong enough to defy the Judeo-Catholics.  Thus when the evidence of their emergence became evident in mid-nineteenth century they were already too numerous and too strong to be set aside.  The two consciousnesses came into conflict with the Religious Consciousness splitting into the reactionary Devout group and the other the more forward leaning Red/Liberals.

     Thus Wells on his Utopian side became the advocate of a form of the Religious Consciousness as he struggled with his Scientific Consciousness.  After the Russian Revolution he wholeheartedly went over to the revolution.

     While very influential on subsequent mythographers Wells was unable to create a psychological projection of his own while after 1920 he became a member of religious communism turning out politico-religious tracts.

     Emerging at about the same time as Wells the Irishman Bram Stoker contributed the master psychological projection of the twentieth century in his masterwork, Dracula  while E.W. Hornung (1866-1921) created the minor projection, the Amateur cracksman- A. J. Raffles.  A cracksman was a burglar; Raffles was the archetype of the gentleman thief.  While Raffles himself has virtually disappeared from the collective memory the notion of the gentleman criminal has taken hold on the mythological consciousness.  Raffles is not to be confused as a version of the earlier Robin Hood who ‘stole from the rich to give to the poor.’  No, Raffles unashamedly kept and spent all the proceeds.

     In the background all this time the greatest of the creative mythographers, Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) was waiting for his consciousness to mature.  It matured in 1911 when he first created John Carter of Mars then followed up  with the prodigious psychological projection of Tarzan Of The Apes.  Shew, bigger than an A-bomb.

     Burroughs was the plateau to which all other roads led and from which all other roads proceeded.  He managed to consolidate all the mythological trends of the previous decades into his work where he refined and perfected them sending them on to new heights.

     Edgar Rice Burroughs.  To coin a cliche, Burroughs was an enigmatic figure.  While himself a great original writer he managed to incorporate the various strands of the myth into his writing in such a way, either clumsy or tributary, as you wish, that he stands accused of being a plagiarist.  This is nonsense of course.  Like any mythographer he had to work with established materials.  Myths are not original– they are cooperative efforts.  The great Greek cycle, of which Homer is the center, was the work of many hands.  The fact does not diminish Homer’s contribution.

     Burroughs was able to incorporate the two most significant disciplines of psychology and evolution into his work in such an entertaining manner that the seriousness of his thought was lost in the glamour.

     While the sources of Burroughs’ evolutionary ideas which will be discussed in Part II, are relatively easy to trace his psychological sources are more difficult.  That he had already thought deeply on psychological matters before he began writing is obvious.  That he continually added to his learning in psychology as well as evolution is clear from the development of his thought throughout the corpus.

     Burroughs was especially concerned with the nature of the unconscious.  He was an intelligent man who knew that his own behavior was controlled from his subconscious.  I am certain that he was familiar with the 1886 work of FWH Myers, as well as Myers’ 1903 work Human Consciousness.  As Freud was not translated into English before 1912 it seems certain that he had not had direct contact with the man’s work before then, however, by 1916 in his short story ‘Tarzan’s First Nightmare’ it seems evident that he had read at least The Interpretations Of Dreams.

     Still, Burroughs had considerable contact with practicing psychologists as he indicated in The Gods Of Mars.

     As the notion of the unconscious  was discussed in various journals he very probably had read a number of articles, while as the notion of the Freudian slip was current in the second decade of the twentieth century he may have been familiar with Freud’s Psychopathology Of Everyday Life.

     At any rate his writing of that decade drove relentlessly toward the goal of integrating his personality which is to say unifying the subconscious and conscious minds which he succeeded in doing by 1917 when he published The Oakdale Affair or, as alternatively titled, Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid.

     In his portrayal of the big Bwana, Tarzan has an integrated personality from his beginning in 1912.  In his other works Burroughs constantly offers many portrayals of the subconscious.

     The contrast between the conscious, or intelligent mind, and the unconscious, subconscious or ‘instinctive’ mind is one of the central tenets of the myth.

     For Burroughs the study of the subconscious was to liberate, for Freud it was to subjugate the human will.  Make no mistake, I consider Freud an evil presence while being the most destructive force of the twentieth century equal to any number of atomic bombs.  Freud’s notion of the subconscious as a Hydelike repository of horrid repressed criminal needs was very mistaken.

     One has the feeling that Freud learned much more about the human psyche than he told and that he told what he did with ulterior motives in mind.  Those ulterior  motives did not go unnoticed at the time.  As D.H. Lawrence expressed it is his Psychoanalysis And The Unconscius of 1911:

     And does it need a prophet to discern that Freud is on the brink of a Weltanschauung- or at least a Menschenschauung, which is a more risky affair?  What detains him?  Two things.  First and foremost the moral issue.  And next, but more vital, he can’t get down to the rock on which he must build his church.

     Actually the unconscious was the rock but another rock was how to turn the basis of psychoanalysis, which is emasculation, into something palatable.  Freud stumbled over his concept of castration which he was apparently sincerely unable to extend into the workable concept of Emasculation.  The Castration Complex is only a symbol for Emasculation.  And then there was the difficult moral issue.  Lawrence again, same work:

     First and foremost the issue is a moral issue.  It is not here a matter of reform, new moral values.  It is the life and death of all morality.  The leaders (Freud, Ferenczi, Abraham) among the psychoanalysts know what they have in hand.  Probably most of their followers are ignorant, and therefore pseudo-innocent.  But it all amounts to the same thing.  Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man. (My italics.)

     Lawrence put his finger on the criminal intent.  Freud was in fact running an Order in which one learned the true intent as one moved from initiate to adept.  Freud in fact did wish to destroy the concept of Christian, that is to say European morality, and he had his reasons.  But why the ‘unconscious’, why something which in his vision lies outside, even beyond, our minds, some alien evil force which controls our actions against our will.  Lawrence persists:

     It is obvious we cannot recover our moral footing until we can in some way determine the true nature of the unconscious (Percipient O!) The word unconscious itself is a mere definition by negation and has no positive meaning.  Freud no doubt prefers it for this reason.  He rejects subconscious and preconscious, because both of these would imply a sort of nascent consciousness, the shadowy half-consciousness which precedes mental realization.  And by his unconscious he intends no such thing.  He wishes rather to convey, we imagine, that which recoils from consciousness, that which reacts in the psyche away from mental consciousness.  His unconscious is, we take it, that part of the human consciousness which though mental, ideal in its nature, yet unwilling to expose itself to full recognition and so recoils back into the affective regions and acts there as a secret agent, unconfessed, unadmitted, potent, and usually destructive.  The whole body of repressions makes up our unconscious.

     Here Lawrence states the obvious, there is no such thing as the unconscious.  There is a subconscious that he rightly understands Freud to have rejected for ulterior motives.  A subconscious is part of us which can be dealt with while an unconscious which is metaphysical cannot, it therefore follows that there cannot be an unconscious which would be a religious symbol, or in other words, supernatural.

     However Lawrence while he scoffs seems to understand the function or a function that Freud gave to his unconscious which is in fact partially true of the subconscious.  ‘The whole body of repressions makes up our unconscious.’  Not a fact because when the personality is integrated  and fixations or what Freud call repressions disappear there is still a function to the subconscious which is unrelated to the fixations or repressions.  I believe repression to be an inaccurate term.  Rather what Freud calls repressions are fixations.  A Challenge that the mind finds overwhelming is received and perpetuated as a fixation in the subconscious that in its control of the personality appeared to Freud as repression.  Freud repeatedly reports the symbol as the fact whether through misconception or in intent to deceive is not always clear.

     What is clear is that as Lawrence perceived so clearly in 1911 was Freud’s intent to destroy morality in a Jekylllike intent to release the Hydelike repressions on the world.  In this he succeeded quite well.  Much to his own injury.  Just as Hyde brought destruction on himself so Freud brought destruction on the Jews in this Jewish millennial period.

     At this point it might be instructive to examine an aspect of the intellectual milieu in which Freud developed.  A large part of personal psychology is integral in one’s group psychology and general psychology as in, for instance, education.  By education I do not mean schooling per se, but all the influences which constitue character formation.

     Freud’s father came from the area of the Pale known as Galicia.  This area is very close to the homeland of the ecstatic variant of Judaism known as Hasidism, and in fact his father was a Hasid.  This sect arose out of the period of the last great messianic individual, Sabbatai Zevi.  This man was active during the period 1640-66.  As might be expected in group psychology when the Day approaches the faithful raise their expectations, growing elated, becoming forgetfull of niceties.  This is what happened to the Jews of the southern Pale in 1648.  As auxiliaries of the Poles who had conquered the Ukraine the Jews suffered the same fate as the Poles when the Ukrainians revolted.  this massacre occurred at the same time as the expected millennium which was a complete contradiction in terms, or in other words, how mysterious can the ways of God be?  Then in 1666 the whole millennial illusion collapsed when Zevi failed as a messiah.

     One result of the failure was the attempt to regenerate Judaism by means of ecstatic Hasidism.  By all rights Yahvey, not for the first time, having failed his people should have been renounced.  The Jews couldn’t do this.  There was also a second effect.  Out of the wreckage of Zevi a man named Jacob Frank evolved another strain of Judaism in which he said that the age of the millennium would never appear until the Jews had exhausted their proclivity for evil.  It was therefore necessary for Jews to indulge in whatever evil impulses they had to purge their systems to make way for the good or millennium.

     Here also is where the Jewish notion of good arising from evil finds its clearest expression.  Jewish ideas are never distinct from the ideas of the general community, in this case European.  A European reaction to Judaeo-Catholicism had been going on for centuries passing through many manifestations such as the Beggars, the Free Spirtis, Anabaptists and others.  All of these like the Frankists believed, like Freud, in the free expression of subconscious impulses.

     Now joined by the Frankist notions after the beginning of the eighteenth century the basis of the Revolution was formed.

     By mid-eighteenth century many of these groups, now styled Libertines, were functioning openly in England and on the Continent.  Perhaps the most famous organization representing these beliefs which were integral to the Revolution which had been developing for centuries were clubs like the Hell Fire Club of England.

     These groups of people were quite extreme.  Their credo was startlingly expressed in Tobias Smollett’s 1748 novel Roderick Random.  Note the date, which is just before the destruction of the notorious prisons, Newgate in England and the Bastille in France.  Smollett’s novel is forty-one years before the outbreak of the French Revolution which was supported in England by members of these clubs.

     Smollett’s hero, Roderick Random, was introduced into the home of one of these incendiaries to whom he attribute the following poem:

Thus have I sent the simple king to hell

Without or coffin, shroud or passing bell.

To me what are divine or human laws?

I court no sanction but my own applause!

Rapes, robb’ries, treasons, yield my soul delight;

And human carnage gratifies my sight;

I drag the hoary parent by the hair,

And toss the sprawling infant on my spear,

While the fond mother’s cries regale my ear.

I fight, I vanquish, murder friends and foes;

Nor dare the immortal gods my rage oppose.

     Sound like any two revolutions you may have heard of?  The above pretty much defines Freud’s intent in his use of the subconscious while forming the framework of his personal Weltanschauung.  Whether Freud was consciously aware of these notions or whether they were part of his subconscious is open to question.  Much of the education of this sort is absorbed on the subliminal level perhaps never being or becoming conscious.  Most of this primal education is buried so deep that one is never aware of its source.  I scoff at Freud’s claim that he was able to analyze himself in just one year at the turn of the century.

     Now, the majority of Freud’s thought was completed by the time he published his Introductory Lectures In Psycho-Analysis in 1917 just before the Bolshevik Revolution.  In order to explain the results of the Freudian ideas of the ‘unconscious’ let me provide a framework by moving ahead a little.

     What we are talking about here is the context of Freud’s notion of the castration complex.  Castration is a specific symbol while the generalized concept is Emasculation.  the Castration Complex is not even an affect but only a symbol.  If Freud was aware of the generalized Emasculation concept he nowhere lets us know.  Emasculation is caused by an unresolved affront to the Ego from which all men and women suffer to some degree.

     The scapegoat for our sins or arch-villain of all time as some would have it was and remains Adolf Hitler.  Hitler was seriously emasculated.  Having read all the major Hitler biographies while delving is some detail into the hisory of post-Great War Germany I was at a loss to explain the man and his time down to the Rock of his Church.  Having folowed through on Freud’s notion of the Castration Complex exlucidating it into the Emasculation theory I came across the novels of that most horribly emasculated and repulsive figure in modern literature, Jean Genet.

     For those not familiar with Genet, he wrote plays which I have not read and five novels I have which I list:  Our Lady Of The Flowers, The Miracle Of The Rose, Funeral Rites, The Thief’s Journal and Querelle Of Brest.

     Genet was a vicious homosexual and criminal which is to say he was completely emasculated.  He wore women’s dresses but not as a transvestite.  Any self-respect he had was totally negative.  However, it is possible to recognize something of oneself in his hurt.  He knew how to universalize his anguish.  His degradation gave him some insight into his times and its personalities.  He traveled in Nazi Germany between 1930 and 1940.

     While not using these terms he understood and applauded the criminal annexation of Law and government to the uses of Freud’s concept of the unconscious or, in another word, criminality.  The criminal nature of the regime was so in accord with his own perversions that he had no desire to thieve as such crimes seemed to him to be no insult to society in Germany.

     It seemed to him that Hitler was one with himself in his desires.

     I don’t believe Hitler was a practicing homosexual but he was emasculated to the point of deformity.  Which is what I suppose revolted his contemporaries so.  However, as all emasculation is expressed in a variant homosexual manner, self hatred being a form of homosexuality, one may believe that he was a ‘latent’ homosexual.  One wonders about his relationship with Hindenburg; what exaggerated respect and smoldering resentment must have been there.

     In may ways Genet forms a link between the ante and post WWII worlds.  In his own goals and aims he was peculiarly related to Freud.

     Shortly after the Great War Freud wrote ‘Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego.’  The essay is applied Freudianism; it doesn’t do you any good to have the scientific knowledge if you don’t apply it.  Man has his individual ego while sharing it in one or more group egos.  The question then becomes how does one engineer the individual ego into a group ego so that the individual within an artificial group can achieve your desired political ends will he nil he, hypnotized as it were.

     Freud tackles this problem in Group Ego.  The book raises several interesting questions.  Freud based this work on an 1895 study by the Frenchman Gustave Le Bon titled: The Crowd: A Study Of The Popular Mind.  Le Bon’s was a seminal work still in print after 110 years.  He might be said to have originated the concept of group psychology which Freud appropriated.

     ‘Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego’ is virtually the Crowd rewritten with better organization and definition.  At the risk of quoting too extensively I have abstracted several quotes from Le Bon used by Freud in Group Ego which form the basis of Freud’s essay.  Le Bon’s book may be illustrative of the manner in which Freud built several of his

     The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological group is the following.  Whoever be the individuals who compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a group puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think and act in manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think and act were he in a state of isolation.  There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into being, or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of individuals forming a group.  The psychological group is a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each of the cells singly. (p. 29)

     It is easy to prove how much the individual forming part of a group differs from the isolated individual but it is less easy to discover the causes of this difference.

     To obtain at any rate a glimpse of them it is necessary in the first place to call to mind the truth established by modern psychology, (1895) that unconscious phenomena play an altogether preponderating part  not only in organic life, but also in the operations of intelligence.  The conscious life of the mind is of small importance in comparison with its unconscious life.  The most subtle analyst, the most acute observer, is scarcely successful in discovering more than a very small number of the conscious motives that determine his conduct.  Our conscious acts are the outcome of an unconscious stratum created in the mind mainly by hereditary influences.  The substratum consists of the innumerable common characteristics handed down from generation to generation, which constitute the genius of a race.  Behind the avowed causes of our acts there undoubtedly lie secret causes that we do not avow, (The issue is not issue, Mark Rudd) but behind these secret causes there are many others more secret still, of which we ourselves are ignorant.  The greater part of our daily actions are the result of hidden motives which escape our observation. (Ibid. 30

      A necessary transition note from Freud. (Page 8, Group Psychology).  ‘Le Bon thinks that the particular acquirements of individuals become obliterated in a group, and that in this way their distinctiveness  vanishes.  The racial unconscious emerges, what is heterogeneous is submerged in what is homgeneous.  As we should say, the mental superstructure, the development of which in individuals shows such dissimilarities  is removed, and the unconscious foundations, which are similar in everyone, stand exposed to view.

     In this way individuals in a group would come to show an average character.  But Le Bon believes that they also show new characteristics which they have previously not possessed, and he seeks the reason for this in three different factors.’

     Freud quoting Le Bon again:

     The first is that the individual forming part of a group acquires, solely from numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to interests which, had he been alone, he would perforce have kept under restraint.  He will be the less disposed to check himself, from the consideration that, a group being anonymous and in consequence irresponsible, the sentiment of responsibility which always controls individuals disappears entirely.  (Ibid. 33)

     The second cause, which is contagion, also intervenes to determine the manifestations in groups of their special characteristics, and at the same time the trend they are to take.  Contagion is a phenomenon of which it is easy to establish the presence but which it is not easy to explain.  It must be classed among those phenomena of a hypnotic order, which we shall shortly study.  In a group every sentiment and act is contagious, and cantagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest.  this is an aptitude very contrary to his nature, and of which a man is scarcely capable, except when he makes part of a group.  (Ibid. 33)

     A third case and by far the most important, determines in the individuals of a group special characteristics which are quite contrary at times to those presented by their isolated individual.  I allude to that suggestibility of which, moreover, the contagion mentioned above is also an effect.

     To understand this phenomenon it is necessary to bear in mind certain recent physiological discoveries.  We know today that by various processes an individual may be brought into such a condition that, having entirely lost his conscious personality, he obeys all the suggestions of the operator who has deprived him of it, and commits acts in utter contradiction with his character and habits.  The most careful investigations seem to prove than an individual immersed for some length of time in a group in action soon finds himself– whether in consequence of the magnetic influence given out by the group, or from some other cause of which we are ignorant– in a special stae, which much resembles the state of ‘fascination’ in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer.

     …The conscious personality has entirely vanished; will and discernment are lost.  All feelings and thoughts are bent in the direction determined by the hypnotizer.

     Such also is approximately the state of the individual forming part of a psychological group.  He is no longer conscious of his acts.  In his case, as in the case of the hypnotized subject, at the same time that certain faculties are destroyed, other may be brought to a high degree of exaltation.  Under the influence of a suggestion, he will undertake the accomplishment of certain acts with irresistible impetuosity.  This impetuosity is the more irresistible in the case of groups than in that of the hypnotized subject, from the fact that, the suggestion being the same for all individuals in the group, it gains in strength by reciprocity.  (Ibid. 34)

     We see, then, that the disappearnce of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in the identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested idea into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a group.  He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will. (Ibid. 35)

     The remainder of Freud’s Group Psychology is the application of Le Bon’s observations as a manual for psychologically manipulated groups through hypnosis and suggestion to achieve an agenda.  I will repeatedly refer to Group Psychology in Freud’s plan hereafter.  While it is clear that Freud read Le Bon’s 1895 book absorbing much, the book was immediately translated into English in 1896 where it became accesible to a world public, it is therefore probable that a number of other people read the book taking what they needed for their purposes.

     One of these may very well have been Edgar Rice Burroughs.  I know of no way of determining the fact that he read the book but one asks is there any evidence in his novels that would indicate that he had.  I’ll be darned, there is.  As I said, because of the frivolous nature of the novels one dismisses Burroughs as an uneducated fantasist.  He himself said that he would take a political or social idea and highly fictionalize it into something else.  If one reads his 1914 novel Thuvia, Maid Of Mars one finds a story suspiciously like Le Bon’s ideas in The Crowd but highly fictionalized.

     Burroughs’ psychological ideas are difficult to trace but well developed.  Throughout his corpus Burroughs is well informed about hypnosis.  It appears to be a subject he gave special attention to.  Le Bon’s ideas are based on group hypnosis.  In Thuvia the hero finds his way to the Martian kingdom of Lothar.  He engages his invaders in a battle with the Lotharians.  The city walls of Lothar are manned by innumerable bowmen firing arrows on the Green Men of Mars.  The field is strewn with dead Green men killed by the arrows of he phantom bowmen.

     The fight ending the hero looks away for an instant breaking eye contact with Lothar.  When he looks back the field is strewn with dead Green Men but the arrows are gone.  Wondering about this he looks back at Lothar to find the bowmen are gone too.

     As it turn out the Lotharians no longer exist in physical form but are merely psychological projections who have learned to mass hypnotize their enemies into believing that they do exist and are shooting real arrows.  Their enemies believe they are real arrows and so die by them.

     Thus it is quite possible that in Thuvia we have a fictionalization of Le Bon’s ideas which Burroughs must have picked up from the 1895 book converting them into fiction in 1914 well ahead of Freud and Hitler.

     Oh yes. Him again.  Hitler.  Whether historians would agree that Germany was ‘stabbed in the back’ or not, it was universally believed by Germans, especially by Hitler, and they and he acted on that belief.  Thus the psychic injury suffered by the privations of war, the loss of the war, and the belief that victory had been taken from them by traitorous means made a curious form of group emasculation  of the collective ego shared by each individual creating the conditions for a group psychology which under the influence of a hypnotizer they would not be responsible for their acts.  The group ego is where the emasculation occurs being then relegated to the group subconscious where it surfaces under various names and impulses.  As the American Jew Mark Rudd was to say in respect to his group’s post-WWII emasculation:  The issue is not the issue.  In other words, their complaint was the disguise for their emasculation which is what they were really trying to address.

     Jean Genet was not a philosopher or a politician so that he did not understand that Hitler was not the protagonist but the antagonist.  He was not acting but reacting.  What was he reacting to?  Let’s go back to Freud.

     End of Part 2.  Go To Part 3

Posted in Arthur Conan Doyle, Consciousness, Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Emasculation, Greek Mythology, H.G. Wells, Homer, Mythology, R.E. Prindle, Religion, Religious Consciousness, Scientific Consciousness, Sigmund Freud, Subconscious, Tarzan, Uncategorized, Unconsciousness, Writing | Leave a Comment »

Something Of Value I

October 1, 2007

Something Of Value I

by

R.E. Prindle

If a man does away

With his traditional way of living

And throws away his good customs,

He had better first make certain

That he has something of value to replace them.

–Basuto proverb as quoted by Robert Ruark

Dedicated to

Greil Marcus

 

Part One

One Hundred Years In The Sewers Of Paris

With Jean Valjean.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sigmund Freud

And The Myth Of The Twentieth Century

1.

The Concepts Of The Unconscious And Emasculation

 

     It has been truly said that man does not live by bread alone.  He also requires a mythic foundation on which to base his actions.  In the neolithic era his mythology was governed by a Matriarchal vision of reality.  In the subsequent Egypto-Greco-Mesopotamian mythology the Matriarchal series went through a revision being replaced by an advanced Patriarchal mythological consciousness.  This system was followed by the Judaeo-Christian mythological system which endured as the basis of mythological belief until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the belief system was subverted by the emergence of the Scientific Consciousness.

     Unlike the mythopoeic consciousness which preceded it the Scientific Consciousness left no place for supernatural explanations; all had to be explained within a rational scientific framework.  This placed a great strain on a significant portion of the population which did not have the intellectual equipment to evolve.  Thus the basis of psychological comfort provided by religion was destroyed.  The code of behavior seemingly sent down from the sky had lost its validity.

     In place of an apparent unified consciousness it now became noticeable that EuroAmerican man had an unconscious or subconscious mind as well as a conscious mind.  Thus another evolutionary degree of differentiation unfolded that separated the advanced Scientific Consciousness  from the anterior Religious Conciousness.  A struggle has ensued in which advanced people are compelled to reintegrate their conscious and subconscious minds while the Religious Consciousness divided into the two camps of the Devout and the Reds resist.

     The discovery of what was known as the Unconscious began with the emergence from the Religious Consciousness during and  after the Enlightenment.  Anton Mesmer with his discovery of Animal Magnetism or hypnotism may have been the first stage.  Goethe and others carried the discussion forward until the Englishman FWH Myers isolated or identified the subconscious by the name of the unconscius in 1886.

     The notion of the unconscious as known during the twentieth century was formulated by Sigmund Freud during the twentieth century’s first decade.  Both Myers and Freud misconceived the nature of the sub or unconscious.  Myers’ conception was more generous than Freud’s and more in accordance with proto-scientific Patriarchal Greek mythological conceptions which were also mistaken but visionary.

     In Myers’ vision of the unconscious it had two aspects: the destructive aspect which he gave the Greek name of Ate and the constructive aspect he termed Menos.  Thus he recognized that the unconcious could be good or bad.

     Myers’ vision may have been based in Greek mythology.  It will be remembered that the creative god, Hephaestus, was married to the emotional goddess, Aphrodite.  Hephaestus and Aphrodite had their digs at the bottom of the sea which is to say the symbol of the unconscious which corresponds to the seeming location of the unconscious at the bottom of the mind or, in other words, the brain stem.

     Thus it is said that Aphrodite, the goddess of love, which is to say irrationality, emerged from the sea on the half shell.

     So, I suppose, love, being never rational is a subconscious decision which is one sided or a half shell.  Love may be either constructive or destructive.

     Thus also good ideas, a la Hephaestus, seem to rise unbidden from the subconscious or the depths.

     Hephaestus and Aphrodite were ancient gods dating back to the Matriarchy.  The incoming Patriarchal god, Zeus, had no part in their creation; they were solely a part of Hera the great goddess of the Matriarchy.  She was much older than Zeus but the youthful Zeus united with her in the form of a cuckoo bird who as she clutched it to her breast slipped down her dress and ravaged her.  So the Patriachy subsumed the Matriarchy.

     When Hephaestus later sided with his mother against Zeus, the great Olympian threw him from heaven laming him.  Then Aphrodite was given to him to wife.  Unbridled lust combined with creative activity, Ate and Menos.

     Aphrodite was not happy with the lamed god.  While Hephaestus was on trips to Olympus she dallied with another Matriarchal god, Ares, the symbol of uncontrollable desire or rage.  Hephaestus having been informed of Aphrodite’s infidelity set a trap for her and Ares.  He constructed a finely meshed net of gold which he suspended over his bed.

     Aphrodite, unbridled lust, and Ares, uncontrollable rage, were literally caught in the act being unable to disengage.  Thus we have two aspects of Ate, lust and rage, caught by the efforts of creativity in the depths of the sea or the unconscious

     Hephaestus called the other gods to witness.  Athene, a new Patriarchal goddess who was the counterpart and antithesis of Ares and Aphrodite turned away in disgust.  Apollo, another new Patriarchal god and the antithesis of Hermes just laughed.  Hermes, the patron god of thieves, a Matriarchal god, said he would change places with Ares in a second.  Thus, lust, rage and dishonesty are combined in one figure of Ate in the subconscious.

     The image of Ate and Menos is what Myers meant by his idea of the unconscious.  Freud, on the other hand, understood the unconscious as pure Ate.

     Both the Greeks and Myers attempted scientific explanations while Freud gave the unconscious a religious and supernatural twist.  He seemed to believe that the unconscious has an independent existence outside the mind of man which is beyond man’s control while being wholly evil.

     Opposed to morality, Freud then wished to unleash this conception of the unconscious on the world.  He was uniquely prepared to do so.  All he had to do was manipulate the symbols of psychoanalysis of which he had full control.  The question then is did Freud have deeper understandings that he concealed in order to bring about his desired ends?

     Such is the case with his conceptions of sexuality.  There is no need for him to have had deeper understanding, after all he was a pioneer opening a new field of inquiry.  On the other hand…

     Defining the unconscious was done by many men preceding Freud so that his is only one of many understandings, not necessarily the best, although today in  common belief he invented the concept of the unconscious.

     Next he chose to define the concepts of sex.  He was equally successful in this field as far as the public was concerned, although I differ in understanding the matter as I do with the unconscious.

     In analyses with patients Freud discovered that there was a fear of castration out of all proportion to actual incidents of sexual mutilation.  It follows then that castration symbolizes something other than the removal of the genitals.  I contend that it was impossible for Freud to have missed the signficance of castration as a symbol.

     Castration as a symbol represents the broader concept of Emasculation, in this case psychological emasculation.  This does occur in everyone’s life in many different manifestations while being something to really fear or avoid.  Unless I am mistaken all neuroses and psychoses depend from it.

     Understanding Emasculation is as much a ‘royal road to the unconscious’ as dreams.

     I do not accept Freud’s map of the mind but we both agree that the Ego or Animus is the key to identity.  Freud fully understood the significance of the Ego.  Thus when the Ego is challenged with an affront or insult to which it is either unable or doesn’t know how to respond to successfully emascualtion to some degree takes place.  There is no unconscious, just as there are no instincts so that a fixation is suppressed in the subconscious as a result of the affront.  These fixations produce effects, which can be grouped in categories such as hysteria, paranoia, obsessive-compulsiveness and the whole panoply of general affects.  The affects then find expression physically and psychologically, or in another word, psychosomatically.  The mind and the body is one unit.  These affects answer to what Freud called neuroses and psychoses.

     When the Ego or Animus is denied its right to assertion the denial is frequently espressed in a hysterically sexual manner corresponding to the the insult.  If the victim feels he has been taken from behind he will undoubtedly resort to anal intercourse as one type of underhanded response in an attempt to get back his own as in the case with homosexuality.  Homosexuality is Emasculation par excellence.

     The human mind is very limited in its inventiveness so all these affects can be catalogued and matched with the insult so that, absent resistance under analysis, they can easily be addressed and exorcised.  The problem is not as complicated as it has been made out.

     Freud understood so much more than he was willing to tell the goys but then he was not a scientist but a Jewish prophet.  In his Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego to which we will return he gave the game away.

     The individual can and does submerge his own ego into a, or at various times, many group egos.  Prominent among these group egos are ethnic, national and religious group egos.

     Just as the individual can be emascualted so can ethnic, national or religious groups be emasculated which the individual will share.  I mention the Jews only as the most obvious case although Negroes, American Indians or any defeated people suffer emasculation to one degree or another.

     Thus I will discuss the unconscious from a general point of view with Freud’s concept prominent while the concept of Emascultion will be discussed by my understanding based on the studies of Freud on the castration complex and group psychology.

     Bear in mind that I think Freud criminally distorted scientific knowledge for ethnic, national and religious ends.

2.

Quo Vadis?

     Born with an integrated mind, circumstances soon disintegrate the personality so that the mind must be reintegrated  to return to a state of psychic wholeness.  A sort of personal mythology is created by one’s early disintegrative experiences which form one’s dreamscape in an attempt to deal with an overwhelming reality.  However, when a person gains some control over external reality when the personality is integrated and the initial  dreamscape based on early memories is eliminated  a sort of distressing vacuum ensues that exists until a new dreamscape is formed which, while sufficient to ease the discomfort lacks the depth and substance of the fully mythologized dreamscape of childhood.  One had reached a scientific consciousness.  It may not be as satisfying but it fills the space while not controlling one’s behavior.

     Western man, Euroamerican man, as the only segment of mankind so differentiated had then to begin to work out a new mythology based on rational scientific ideas.  In other words he had to create a comfortable basis from which to understand and interpret the world.

     Thus after a couple proto-mythographies in the early nineteenth century a cluster of writers or neo-mythographers began to create a mythology for the Scientific Consciousness.

     The destruction of the Religious Consciousness began to become obvious after the eighteenth century Industrial Revolution in  England.  With the advent of steam the problem began to become acute.

     The proto-mythologers may be Walter Scott, Byron, Peacock and the Shelleys.  There is a departure in feel and style with these writers.  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein posits the scientific problem laying a foundation for the new mythology but does not itself deal with the psychological effects.

     The first mythographer to make an attempt to explain the split consciousness from my own researches was the American, Edgar Allan Poe, 1801-49.

     Poe began his writing career as a psychologically troubled man ending it insane.  Along the way he wrestled with the problem of the void in the subconscious created by the elimination of the supernatural.  His message was received by the later group of mythographers who read him without exception all being influenced by his work.

     Poe caught the great intellectual change as it emerged.  The period from 1830-1880 was the period of the great initial scientific advances that would change the world.  From Poe’s death in 1849 to the emergence of the new breed of mythographers beginning in the 1880s was a period of literary quiescence.

     Poe began his influential masterpiece The Murders In The Rue Morgue with the paragraph:

     Quote:

      As the strong man exhibits his physical ability, delighting in such excercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in the moral activity which disentangles.  He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his intellect into play.  He is fond of enigmas, conundrums, hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension as praeternatural.  His results brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have in truth the whole air of intuition.

     Unquote.

     By analysis Poe didn’t mean the sort of educated guesswork that had passed for analysis in the pre-scientific consciousness.  No, this was scientific analysis that disassembled a problem into the component parts revealing the secret than reassembling the problem to its original state.

     In doing so Poe revealed himself as a master mythographer as well as a scientist.  In C. August Dupin, the initials spell cad, Poe created the archetype of the eccentric madman who would be the here of countless novels.  As a projection of Poe’s own mentality Dupin and his unnamed alter ego live in a dilapidated house.  The house is the psychological symbol for self which Poe used almost to exhaustion.  As the Fall of the House of Usher prefigured Poe’s own descent into insanity as to a number of alter egos representing his sane side figure in the House of Usher, William Wilson, Rue Morgue and most notably in the System of Dr. Tarr And Professor Fether in which his sane alter ego drops his other half off at the door of an insane asylum.

     The two Dupins live in a darkened house during the day, creaking not unlike the House Of Usher, going out only into the depressed asylum of the night.

     Poe thus presents the separation of the conscious and subconscious modern man in the riddle of the murders in the Rue Morgue.  In the Rue Morgue the subconscious is represented by the Orang u tang or animal side of human nature while the conscious is represented by the sailor owner.  From Poe to at least Freud the subconscious was popularly considered a dangerous wild side of man.

     In Dupin and his alter ego versus the sailor and the Orang, Poe may have perceived the emergence of a new species much as H.G. Wells was to do at the end of the century.  Thus both men perceived that the antecedent consciousness and the Scientific Consciousness were not just matters of learning but a genetic difference although they didn’t put it that way that couldn’t be bridged.

     Both aspects were brought out brilliantly by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) in his 1880 novel: The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde.  This book may properly be said to be the first true represention of the scientific myth.

     In this case the good Dr. Jekyll is the disciplined, self-controlled scientist committed to doing good in the world.  Beneath his intelligent exterior he feels the primitive wild man lurking.  The primitive of what is in fact a predecessor Homo Sapiens is very very appealing to him.  Unable to bring this aspect of his psychology to the surface by conventional means he resorts to drugs.

     Having once freed his wild side, who he names Mr. Hyde, he is unable to put Hyde back into the bottle or syringe, whichever the case may be.  Hyde assumes control of the personality which leads both aspects of the personality to destruction.  This is not unlike Freud’s notion of the unconscious.

     Thus Stevenson brilliantly prefigured the twentieth century future in which the scientist is dragged back to the level of the predecessor species through a psychological inability to take the great leap forward and turn his back on his past.

     The same sense of the alienation from a predecessor existence was evidenced in the work of a great transitional figure, H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925).  Let me say that Haggard is a much neglected literary figure.  As his topics concerned Esoterica and Africa, the former which is scorned and the latter ignored, his literary reputation has been allowed to virtually disappear.  Having read a large part of his work in the pursuit of these studies I would rank Haggard very highly, certainly among the top ten authors, possibly as high as number five.  one and two are Walter Scott and Balzac, while Dumas holds down third and possibly Trollope in the fourth spot.  Haggard is a writer of genius.

     He spent his late teens and early twenties in the South African provinces of Natal and Zululand where he acquired a vision of the difference between the first Homo Sapiens, the Negro, and the current scientific man.  As the saying goes, there’s something to be lost and something gained when you move up the ladder.

     Haggard never made it to scientific man himself being stuck in the Religious Consciousness.  He belonged to the Esoteric side rather than the Christian.  In the third novel of his great African trilogy, Allan Quatermain, Haggard examined the difference between the African and European in this manner.

     Quote:

     Ah! this civilization what does it all come to?  Full forty years and more I spent among savages, and studied them and their ways; and now for several years I have lived here in England, and in my own stupid manner have done my best to learn the ways of the children of light; and what do I find?  A great gulf fixed?  No, only a very little one, that a plain man’s thought may spring across.  I say that as the savage is, so is the white man, only the latter is more inventive, and possesses a faculty of combination…but in all essential the savage and child of civilization are identical.

     Unquote.

      In the same book Haggard also put the problem more poetically:

…he dreams of the sight

of Zulu impis

breaking on the foe

like surf upon the rocks

and his heart rises in rebellion

against the strict limits

of the civilized life.

      Here Haggard states the central thesis of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde.  In the evolution of the species there is always a small gulf between two adjacent species: nature does not take great leaps, it moves in small increments.  Thus it may be a small leap between the two, expecially when the next transition creates not only a new variety but a new species, but the leap is backwards as in Jekyll’s case while it is impossible for Hyde to make the leap forward, nor is he capable of adjusting to the new strict limits.  Wasn’t Stevenson precocious?

     Haggard who was not of the Scientific Consciousness was left behind while his work formed the basis of the greatest of the scientific mythographers.

     Before moving on let us here consider the patron saint of the future Red/Liberal aspect of the Religious Consciousness, the Frenchman, Victor Hugo (1802-85).

Paris Is A Leaky Basket

Paris has another Paris under herself; a Paris of sewers; which has its streets, its crossings, its squares, its blind alleys, its arteries and its circulation, which is slime minus its human form.

~Victor Hugo- Les Miserables

     As Haggard was a transitional figure for the mythographers one might say that Victor Hugo created the literary foundation for the Red/Liberal faction of the Religious Consciousness.  His Les Miserables with its tragi-comic format forms the bedrock of Revolutionary beliefs.  Hugo was himself a Revolutionary.  His novel Les Miserables is the account, so he says, of the apotheosis of Jean Valjean from bestiality to salvation.  Along the way to his apotheosis Valjean makes a detour through the sewers of Paris.

     Hugo was a poet; his account of the sewers of paris is, shall we say, poetic.  In fact a scatalogical masterpiece worthy of our own Lenny Bruce.  If Lenny had studied Vic a little he would have been able to say everything he wanted to say while staying out of jail at the same time.

     One wonders whether Freud read Hugo.  There are certain similarities in style.  Certainly they both seem to have had the same notion of the unconscious.  Valjean’s trip through the sewers of Paris, he with the bleeding Marius on his back must have been intended as a representation of the unconscious.  And a very funny one at that.

     Freud would certainly have agreed with Hugo when the latter wrote:  The history of men is the history of cloacae.  From Hugo’s description of the sewers of Paris it is clear that Paris was not anal retentive.

     Freud was no less scatological in his approach to psychology than this astonishing  section of Hugo’s book.  Who wouldn’t be miserable down in a sewer; miserable enough if only your mind was in the sewer.  In Hugo one gets the same macabre, morbid sense of humor Freud exhibits in his own work.  Oh yes, read properly Freud tells a lot of jokes.  Didn’t he write a book titled: Jokes And Their Relation To The Unconscious?  Sure he did.  Knew what he was talking about too.

     The first chapter of the section of Hugo’s book, The Intestines Of Leviathan is a series of morbid one liners which are as funny as anything Lenny Bruce came up with.  Double entendre?  To say Paris is a leaky basket!  In the underworld homosexual argot of Jean Genet the term basket refers to a man’s crotch and penis.  Undoubtedly the same argot was current in Hugo’s time.  He was a student of criminal argot.  So Paris being a leaky basket is equivalent to saying Paris was incontinent, pissing all over itself.  Don’t you think that’s funny?

     And then: “The sewer is the conscience of the city.” Hm?  ‘This can be said for the garbage dump, that it is no liar.”  I ask you, does Victor Hugo know how to get down and boogie?  Let us follow Jean Valjean into the “Conscience of Paris” “which is no liar” from which Hugo says Villon talks to Rabelais.  Fabulous funny images, morbid but fabulous and funny.

     To be sure, psychology in 1862 when Les Miserables was published, had not been developed, yet notice how closely Hugo’s tongue-in-cheek, laughing in his sleeve, description of Jean Valjean’s journey through the pitch black maze of this subterranean worker’s paradise into which from time to time faint glimmerings of light enter answers to the images of Freudian Depth Psychology.  Depth psychology?  Was that a pun or play on words?

     Just imagine Jean Valjean as he enters the sewer.  Take time to construct concrete images in your mind.  After this, shall we say, harrowing of hell not unlike that of Theseus and Peirithous, from which Perithous never returned, Valjean receives his apotheosis not unlike Hercules.  One might also compare this scene with the temptation of Christ.

     Valjean is carrying the bleeding Marius on his back who might or might not be dead.  Hugo doesn’t let us know.  This might be compared to one’s old self before or during the integration of the personality.  In fact Valjean sheds Marius after emerging from the sewer from which the gatekeeper of Hell, Thenardier, allows him to emerge after being paid his obol.

     The sewer is certainly a symbol of the unconscious for the scatological Freud who seems to revel in such fecal images.  Amidst a chatty history of the sewers of Paris which Hugo keeps up as Valjean plods through the darkness always intuitively heading in the right direction, down.  He evades the thought police who are searching for him or someone just like him in the sewers.  A shot sent blindly down his gallery grazes his cheek.  Jesus!  Isn’t a man safe from harassment in the depths of his own mind?  If you think Paris is dangerous, try the sewers.

     Valjean is exhausted from his long walk carrying Marius on his back, poor suffering humanity, the sign of the cross, nevertheless with the heart of a lion he plods on.  He moves forward through deepening fluids as his bare feet sink into fecal matter “which does not lie” while Hugo carries on a charming separate conversation with we readers about little known facts of the Paris sewers.  No, the fecal matter, as well as Hugo, tells the truth however hard that may be to decipher from the material at hand as well as underfoot.

      As the fluid (also however that may be composed as Hugo is writing scatologically) rises, his feet sink up to his knees into “the conscience of the city.”  Get this!  Valjean is one of the great strongmen, he lifts the dead weight of Marius above his head on his extended arms still sucking his feet from the muck.  Hugo does not reveal whether Valjean lost his shoes during this ordeal or not but surely a while back.  Perhaps of all the details Hugo records this particular item which consumes my interest had none for him.

     Nevertheless, heedless of the the danger to her shoes, Valjean plods on.  Plod, plod.

     Now, here’s a detail of interest Hugo does record.  Feet and legs deep in the conscience of paris, Marius held above his head visualize this, the fecal fluid had risen above Valjean’s mouth and nose so that he has to tip his head back, I’m not sure this would have been effective, until only a mask can be seen rising eerily above the surface, as well as two arms and Marius.  He ain’t heavy, he’s my other self.  Seen in Stygian darkness that is.

     If we’re all in the same sewer here imagine particles of the conscience of Paris, scatologically know as turds, bumping up against the mask probably trailing behind Our Man Of The Sewer in a wake of fetid glory.

     Even in the pitch black Thenardier is watching this spectacle.  Fortunately the psychic crisis is past.  Valjean leaves the conscience of Paris which does not lie, you can say that about it, behind striking solid, er, ground.

     A striking vision of Freud’s and the Revolution’s reality.  Had Valjean been given the name Spartacus the Revolutionary vision would have been complete.  The Red/Liberals had spent a hundred years or more in the sewers of Paris before they turned this primary text of theirs into the Broadway musical of Les Miserables.  Next time you see it put it into this context of the sewers of Paris.  The songs will take on new meaning.

Part II of Something Of Value I follows.

Posted in Anima, Animus, Aphrodite, Apollo, Ares, Ate, Athena, Consciousness, Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Emasculation, Greek Mythology, Greil Marcus, H. Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells, Hephaestus, Hera, Hermes, Les Miserables, Liberals, Matriarchy, Menos, Mythology, Patriarchy, R.E. Prindle, Religious Consciousness, Scientific Consciousness, Sigmund Freud, Subconscious, Tarzan, Unconsciousness, Victor Hugo, Writing, Zeus | Leave a Comment »

Part II Lipstick Traces Greil Marcus: Some Important Back Pages

July 29, 2007

Lipstick Traces

A Review

Greil Marcus:

A Few Back Pages

by R.E. Prindle

 

The Man Who Shook The World

For even if they should say something true, one who loves the Truth should not, even so, agree with them.  For not all true things are the Truth nor should that truth which seems true according to human opinions be preferred to the true Truth- that according to faith.

 –Clement Of Alexandria

 

     Clement was a man defending orthodox Christianity against not only the Pagans but competing Christian sects.  Here he enunciates the credo  of the true believer- it is True because we believe it, any other opinion even if true, or truer, must be considered false according to the faith.

     In the twentieth century the Jewish comedian  Woody Allen has a scene in one of his movies where some Jewish men are discussing things at a seder.  Allen has one say that he would take God over the Truth.  Or, like Clement he would sacrifice reason to the Faith or, in other words, Superstition.

     There we have the crux of the matter.  To criticize Jews is to criticize God in the Jewish mind.  The inevitable result for those who do not accept the true Truth is to be labelled as anti-Semites.  Thereon hangs the whole of Jewish history, past, present and future.  It is to be devoutly hoped that the following discussion will not be defamed as Semites vs. anti-Semites but approved as Reason vs. Superstition.  After all in the age of Science one would hope that Superstition is a thing of the past.

     The argument will center on the ideas and career of Sigmund Freud- the man who shook the world.  But first the world will have to be placed in the context of competing viewpoints within a Jewish context.

     For many millennia the role of Science was given a subsidiary position below that of Religion.  The truths of Science were denied because they conflicted with the true Truth of Religion.

     In this environment the Jews were advantageously placed to dispute with Roman Catholics.  After all Catholicism used the Jewish texts as its holy scripture.  Thus in debating contests with Catholicism the Jews almost always came out the victors.  This gave them great pride as being superior to the Gentiles.  Their very high opinion of themselves seemed justified.

      Had things remained a matter of faith the Jewish opinion of themselves would probably still be unchallengeable.  However Science which had been treated by the Church more roughly than the Jews refused to be suppressed.  Actually a higher percentage of Scientists were persecuted to death by the Church than Jews but this fact has to my knowledge never been considered.

     The rise of Science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries not only shook the faith of the religious to its roots but actually cast the Semitic faiths into the dust bin of history.  With the rise of Science Judaism became irrelevant.  It could not win any debates with Science.

     In the many crises of the Jewish soul this was a very significant one.  It caused the breakup of medieval Judaism.  For the first time the Jews left their ghettos and attempted to enter the mainstream of European life.

     The Talmud which the Jews had always considered the repository of all true wisdom and knowledge now appeared to enlightened Jews to be the collection of nonsense the goys had always claimed it was.

     As the Jews, then, began to enter the mainstream of European society they did so consciously as inferiors trying to impose themselves with their old dignity on superiors.  The raison d’ etre of Judaism had to be replaced or the faith would just fade away.

     The Talmud was useless to them in argument; they could only embrace the alien ideology of Science and try to excel the European originators of it.

     Bearing in mind their desire to avenge themselves on the Europeans by befuddling them because of their expulsion from Spain they campaigned both politically and intellectually.

     The first major attempt at establishing a science was that of Karl Marx who espoused ‘scientific’ socialism which was superior to ‘utopian’ socialism.  Thus a Jewish social system supposedly scientifically constructed was placed in opposition to a European social system.

     In the realm of Physics Einstein managed what seemed to be a more accurate description of reality.  So in politics and physics the Jews had established a seeming scientific superiority.

     At the same time as Einstein Sigmund Freud coalesced a theory of psychology that was superior to the fragmented state of psychology.

     All three men then tried to turn their achievements to the benefit of the Jewish culture.  As much as anything this was the cause of the two European wars as Hitler so accurately recognized.

     As a little aside it is interesting to note the career of Immanuel Velikovsky.  Like Einstein Velikovsky was a very competent Scientist, that is to say, working within an European intellectual milieu.  But whereas Einstein stopped short at attempting to prove the veracity of Genesis and Exodus Velikovsky plowed straight ahead.  Using his scientific skills to attempt to validate the literal accuracy of every fable he broke on the rock of superstition.  Still, he wrote some very entertaining books, somewhat along Marcusian lines.

2.

     The influence of Sigmund Freud on psychology has been immense while that influence has been almost entirely of a negative character.  The increase in crime can be attributed to the implementation of his theories.  Certainly the self-centered attitude of the homosexuals aboard the Teufelsdreck is about to lead to crimes and thwarted crimes which can be laid to Freud’s teachings.  Let us review Freud’s ideas in the light of his milieu.

3.

     One of Freud’s discoveries was the neurotic need to repeat.  In other words, the subject repeatedly acts out the encysted subconscious fixation in an attempt to exorcise or realize the fixation.  This phenomenon applies to cultures as well as individuals as Freud taught.  In cultures it is called the ‘national character.’  In other words, a people must always act out its characteristic view of reality, the true Truth of the faith vs. the actual scientific state of things.

     The Jews by and large have been a Stateless people since their origins.  If one takes Genesis as fact, and it is psychological fact for sure, the Jews enter history ‘On The Road’ having been expelled from Ur of the Chaldees seventy-five years after having come into existence as a people.  The theme of expulsion is a repeated figure in Jewish history.  They are never tolerated for long.  This is a fact, a truth, but in variance with the true Truth of the faith.

     If we take the Jewish historian, Josephus, at face value they were expelled from Ur because of the jealousy of the Chaldean astronomers who were angry at Abram’s superior skills.  The Chaldeans were known as the foremost astronomers of the ancient world so the Jewish ego must excel them at their own game.

     The Jews then went to Egypt which was the home of the greatest magicians.  After having outperformed Pharaoh’s magicians at feats of magic they take to the road again, fleeing Egypt.

     Thus the main tenets of the Jewish character are fixed.  They see themselves as an invasive people who are naturally superior to any people whose territory they invade and then they leave.  These two themes repeat and repeat.

     Thus in the nineteenth century when the Jews move West out of the Pale of Settlement into Vienna the migration must be seen as an invasion of a hostile culture intent on taking over the State as in Ur or Egypt.

     A historical characteristic  of Jewish invasions is that they are not usually militaristic but infiltratory.  Like the military invasion of Hungary by the Magyars the Jewish invasion of Vienna was no less belligerent and exhibited the same needs to impose its culture.

     In the biblical account of the invasion of Palestine the Jews put entire peoples to the sword to make living space for themselves.  Thus they committed genocide several times over.  There is no reason to believe they wouldn’t have done the same in Vienna given time and opportunity.

     The bulk of the Jewish people after 1700 had been collected in Eastern Europe in what became known as the Pale of Settlement.  This was mainly in Eastern Poland and Western Russia.  When Poland was partitioned between Russia, Austria and Germany in the eighteenth century Austria acquired a large Jewish population in Galicia and its other Eastern provinces.

     The Western Jews had already realized that the great challenge to their sense of superiority came from Science.  What is called the Emancipation of the Jews was done by the French Revolution c. 1789-93.  The Emancipation allowed the Jews to begin participation in European society.  The work of the Church was undone.  Thus the Jewish intellect came into conflict with the European intellect. In Germany this created a reaction known as the Kulturkampf.  What the Germans had done was to give their intellect a name.  They opposed German Kultur to Jewish Semitism.  Semitism is the Jewish name for their intellect.  Hence both anti-Semitism and anti-Kulturism came into existence. 

      Once within the Austrian Empire the Jews began to migrate toward its capitol, Vienna.

     The Austro-Hungarian Empire was already an unwieldy amalgam of disputing nationalities and races.  Its German governors had their hands full.  Austria was sort of an early version of the United States.

     Unable to destroy the Germans by the sword the Jews made a cultural assault on the institutions of the Empire.  They pitted the Jewish intellect, Semitism, against the German intellect, Kultur.  Freud who fully understood the meaning of Kultur wrote a book denouncing it- Civilization And Its Discontents.

     Now, Jews are not smarter than anyone else although the mythology of the West so asserts.  In fact, Jews are not under the same constraints as the indigenous peoples.  Thus, the Jews are always a free, if circumscribed, people.  The indigenous peoples were seldom as free.  Medieval Europe had been a caste society in which only certain castes had freedom of movement.  The Russian Serfs were both unfree and circumscribed until 1861 when they were at least nominally freed although not allowed to freely participate in society.  They and other European peasants had a role akin to the American Negro of 1900 in the South who were supposed to know their place and keep it.

      Thus a university education was beyond the aspirations of the indigenous lower classes but open to Jews of any class.  It doesn’t take a genius to realize that social advancement is much facilitated by a solid education.  The Jews accordingly flooded European universities in greatly disproportionate numbers to the population.  Any Jew could thus place himself above the majority of the indigenous population.

     It was inevitable that they be disproportionately represented in law, the judiciary, medicine, education, the arts and all prestigious occupations.  As Semitism was unassimilable to Kultur it was inevitable that if the invasion was not resisted that Semitism would  replace Kultur.  This left the Germans in a difficult situation.  They must either discriminate against the invaders, kill them, or go under.

     Given more freedom of movement than the indigenous population and possessing a universal language, Yiddish, the Jews could form the international business corps of any community unrestrained by the business mores of the indigenous people.  They could make their own rules, upsetting established traditions and customs as in Egypt and Chaldea.

     This too is an established Jewish custom.  Things don’t absolutely have to be done in the manner in which they are being done.  When the Jews invaded Egypt they began to slaughter the sacred animals which the Egyptians had protected for millennia.  The Jews saw no reason for the custom so they rudely pushed Egyptian mores aside.  This habit is repeated in every country they invade.  The peoples can learn to do it the Jewish way like it or not.  They feel they speak with the authority of the true Truth of God.

     By 1899 they were over 10% of the population of Vienna which is where critical mass begins.  Muscling into the cultural life of the city they acquired a disproportionate number of seats in the symphony orchestras.  As in Chaldea and Egypt they assumed that the Semitist style of playing was superior to that of Kultur.  As music in Germania occupied an analogous position to astronomy in Chaldea and magic in Egypt the Jews naturally assumed they were better musicians than the Germans although music had never played a large part in their culture before.

     As the scientific demands of music are greater than ancient astronomy and magic the Jews were never able to muster a composer of the first rank although their instrumentalists dominated the stage.  But then all the empresarios were Jewish so they would necessarily hear with the Jewish intellect.  Even today the Jews believe that without the Semitic intellect the orchestras of Europe sound nowhere as good as before the Holocaust.

     They established their own newspapers and publishing houses.  They used them to defame anyone who dissented from their program.

     Without physical resources they had to resort to psychological means to disarm their opponents.  They had to ‘psyche’ them out.  Anyone who opposed or criticized them was branded as an anti-Semite and his own people were instructed by the Jews to ostracize him.  Thus German nationalists became, if not criminals, at least, pariahs in their own land.  The Austrian reaction to Jewish nationalism was extremely violent giving expression to itself only after the Anschluss.

     These German defense forces were active and powerful during the period from approx. 1890-1914.  After 1918 resistance to the Jewish invasion crumpled everywhere.  The Millennial Revolution had gone swimmingly.  Jews assumed the top positions or became dominantly influential in nearly all governments including the United States.  The Jewish Invasion was for all practical purposes a success.

     Two men were born into this Viennese environment that would have a profound impact on world history, Sigmund Freud and Adolf Hitler.

4.

         Freud’s main desire was to become a great man.  This idea was planted in his intellect by his Christian nurse as a child.  He succeeded in realizing this in the field of psychology.  Freud was himself an immoral man nor does he advocate morality for others.  He advocates an unbridled self-indulgence.  Like he says:  Life is short.  To succeed in one’s aims it is permissable to take immoral shortcuts even to use criminal means.  The Mafia believes the same thing.

     As a young man he was schooled in the tradition of Anton Mesmer from whom modern psychology descends.  He was heavily indebted to the teaching of the French psychologist Jean Martin Charcot as well as to the school of Nancy.  His own approach was an adaptation of their methods.  He at first used Mesmerism or hypnotism as did the schools of Paris and Nancy but later abandoned it in favor of a form of self-hypnotism that he called free association.  Hypnotism as a result went into a period of disfavor although applications are being found for it once again.

     He got his real start by insinuating himself into the good graces of Josef Breuer whose work he very nearly appropriated.  Having plundered Breuer he broke off with him never speaking to him for the rest of Breuer’s life.  Thus does conscience make villains of us all.

     Unable to admit his indebtedness to his teachers he repudiated their influence acting as though he had evolved his theories out of whole cloth.  As an aspect of his character he was unable to suffer any criticism or advancement on his own ideas by others.  He eventually acrimoniously broke with any of his associates with intellegence and independence.

     Freud was a Jew which is to say devoutly so.  He did not consider himself Austrian or German but an ethnic Jew.  He believed in the supremacy of the Jewish people.

     The most revealing anecdote concerning him was that as a child he was walking with his father who told him how when a young man he was wearing a new hat when a Gentile knocked it off his head into the street.

     ‘What did you do?’  Freud asked breathlessly expecting the answer to be that his father knocked the Gentile down.

     ‘I went out into the street and picked it up.’  His father replied.

     Freud then lost all respect for his father which troubled him greatly for he wrote:  ‘I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father protector.’  His dad wasn’t it.

     So Freud’s own psychic needs distorted his approach from one of science as Jung claimed to one based on his personal needs.  He falsely maintained that the father figure is the most important in a man’s life.  When his disciple Otto Rank had the courage to correctly insist that the mother was the most important, Freud drummed him out of the ranks.

     Disappointed by his own father he took as a surrogate father figure Hamilcar Barca, the father of Hannibal.  Hamilcar Barca having suffered an injury at the hands of the Romans made his son swear on his sword, which is only a substitute for the ‘thigh’ or penis, that he would avenge him on the Romans.  Clearly Freud would have promised his dad to avenge him on the Europeans if he had asked.  Maybe he did.

     Curiously Freud doesn’t carry Hannibal’s story through to its conclusion.   The Romans exterminated the Carthaginians and razed their city.

     Freud’s lapses in the application of his psychology are very peculiar.  Having discovered the psychological compulsion to repeat he applied it neither to an analysis of himself or of his culture and people.  He might have saved the Jews much suffering if he had.  In his desire to avenge his father he became a central figure in the millennial period of 1913-28 which ended in yet another attempt to exterminate the Jews.

     Post exilic history for the Jews began rather favorably.  They returned to Palestine just as the Middle Eastern Empires were entering a time of troubles.  The succeeding Hellenistic period left them more or less independent until in 186 BC the Seleucids interfered in their internal affairs.  Under the Maccabbees the Jews were able to defeat the relatively weak Seleucid Emperors who were besieged on all sides.  The victory gave them a feeling in invincibility.

      The feeling was shattered by the Romans.

     The Jews tried again and failed in seventeenth century Europe.

     Their third repeated attempt was in 1913-28 which can be extended to the present.

     Freud made the incredible and mind boggling statement on the eve of the Bolshevik, or Jewish Revolution in Russia:  We tell ourselves that anyone who has succeeded in educating himself to truth about himself is permanently defended against the danger of immorality even though the standard of morality may differ in some respects from that which is customary in society.  He then goes on to say especially since the existing standards of morality are beneath contempt.

     Thus he advocates that a private, personal, obviously self-serving morality is superior to an ideal morality that has evolved over millennia extending those millennia anterior to the Old Testament.

     What could Freud, knowing the imperfect nature of man, have found so objectionable about the existing morality?  I don’t experience it as he did.  It can only have been that it was based on European traditions and not Freud’s Jewish heritage.

     The birth of modern Judaism was caused by the rise of the European Scientific attitude.  Science was the sole creation of Europeans with which the Jews had nothing to do.  Prior to the Enlightenment in their argument with Roman Catholicism the Jews had not only been equals but superiors.  As the creator of the corpus followed by the Church the Jews were in a better position to understand and interpret it through the repository of the Talmud.

     When as a result of the Enlightenment, scientific Europeans left the puerile biblical debates behind the Jews were hopelessly medieval.  The Talmud, so effective against the bible, was worthless against science.  The more intelligent or, perhaps, less traditional Jews began to reorganize Judaism to meet the Scientific times.  This left them second rate beneath the Europeans, a serious affront to their amour propre.

     The real challenge then was to regain their superiority.  This could only be done by excelling in Science as they could invent nothing superior to it.  The true Truth of religion broke on the rock of reality.  If they merely excelled in Science they merely excelled in an European milieu. They were clearly then no longer the Chosen People; they became lost in the ruck.  Freud at one time says that he saw no reason why the ‘wisdom’ of the Talmud couldn’t be raised to a level with Science thus bringing the Jews level with the Europeans in their dreams.

     Strangely he didn’t understand that the entry into full consciousness caused by the understanding of the workings of the psyche obviated all forms of consciousness that went before including the so-called wisdom of the Talmud.

     So, to whom was Freud speaking about educating himself against the danger of immorality?  By Freud’s own admission his fellow Jews.

     Freud’s vision of psychoanalysis is personal, dealing exclusively with the subjective workings of the subject’s mind.  He doesn’t even seem to grasp that the fixations are caused by external forces.  He seems to think the mind functions independently of the outside world.  Input does not seem important to him.

     To Jung and others Man’s relationship to his world is based more on a Challenge and Response system.  In other words, the intellect, which Freud denies, plays a very important part.

     Freud’s own intellect cast against his ideas places them in a different light.  The man was born in 1856 in a Central European Jewish milieu.  It will be remembered that the Hasidic religious movement grew out of psychological trauma that occurred in 1648.  Founded c. 1700 the Hasidic movement was only about a hundred fifty years old at his birth thus retaining much of its original vitality.

     Also arising out of the Jewish disappointments caused by the failed Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, in 1666 a movement was led by a follower of Zevi by the name of Jacob Frank.  This movement also took shape in the first half of the eighteenth century and was still flourishing during Freud’s young manhood.

     As a consequence of Zevi’s failure Frank believed that man was inherently evil thus God would never redeem him until the evil was spent.  The only way to expel evil was to commit enough crimes to get it out of one’s system.  Novel pyschology to say the least.  Thus he taught to a large and attentive Jewish audience that one must commit evil for evil’s sake and that good will come of it.  So, in a manner of speaking, one is doing good by doing evil.

     Now, one can trace the spread of this idea in various forms and guises through space and time.  One very interesting advocate who deserves more study is an eighteenth century English Jew by the name of Samuel Falk.  Another is a twentieth century American Jew  by the name of Arnold Rothstein.  And of course, Marx and Freud.

     Freud does not go into the external influences that formed his outlook or life or personal Weltanschauung but this emphasis on a personal morality that is superior to prevailing morality seems a sublimation of Jacob Frank and his evil for evil’s sake.

     Now, to whom was Freud speaking and why?  Certainly Freud considered himself a prophet of the Jewish people amidst the dawning millennium.  He had an intense desire to avenge his people on the goyim.  Did this Hannibal in that role have anything to do with organizing or directing the Jewish Revolution of the dawning millennium?

     There is no question that his statement that anyone who has educated himself to truth about himself is permanently defended against the danger of immorality (and hence a guilty conscience) could be construed as advance absolution for any acts of the Bolsheviks that would be considered crime by ‘conventional morality.’

     Freud’s statement and role resembles those a great deal of Simeon Bar Yochai, a second century rabbi of the Roman Wars.  The Roman-Jewish war of 66-135 AD was perhaps the first of the Holy Wars.  Its rationale and leadership was provided by the religious leaders of Judaism.

     Simeon Bar Yochai was a leading architect of that war, probably its guiding light.  After Bar Kochba’s defeat in 135 AD Yochai was compelled to go into hiding in a cave from which he daren’t move for many years until the Romans gave up the search.  As a tribute to his influence in the war his obituary at his death said that he was the man who shook the world to its foundations.

     Just before the bloodbath of 116 when the Jews rose up to slaughter hundreds of thousands of Gentiles a moral quandary arose in the Jewish community.  They wondered whether it was permissable to kill ‘good’ Gentiles as well as the ‘bad.’  The rabbis without a moments hesitation replied that it was permissable to kill any and all Gentiles.

     In 1666 with the expected advent of the millennium heralded by the messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, the Jews had been prepared on the strength of ‘God’s promise’ to rise up and murder Europeans much as they had done in the Roman War.

     The third repeat of the Jewish Revolution of which the millennial date was 1913-28 had come to a slow boil with the Communist Manifesto of 1847.

     It will be remembered that following Marx’ manifesto all the national Communist parties were over half Jewish.  The non-Jew, Kropotkin, as leader of the anarchists had been discredited and the anarchists disenfranchised from the Communist Movement.  The Jews than held all the leading positions.

     Thus four Jews led the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia- Lenin, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Trotsky.  All the abortive revolutions of Central Europe were led by Jews.  They actually repeated the massacres of the Roman Wars in Russia and Hungary and were prepared to do so throughout the world as the Revolution rolled on to success.

     In Russia slaughterhouses were established in which Jewish murderers ‘worked’ all day long slaughtering Gentiles until they stood ankle deep in blood and gore.  Were they able to do this because Freud and made known to them truths about themselves that prevented them from committing immoral acts?  Were they absolved of their crimes in advance as were the Jews of the Roman Wars?  They must have been or they couldn’t have performed their ‘work.’  As it was numbers of them had nervous breakdowns as a result.

     The atrocities in Hungary and the projected total annihilation in the Crimea have already been mentioned.  The similarities between the Roman and European slaughters are quite pronounced in their ferocity.  Of course all the details of the former had been recorded in that epistle of ‘science’, the Talmud.

     Did the Jews go to Freud to justify their atrocities as they had to Simeon Bar Yochai two thousand years earlier?  There is the compulsion to repeat.  The Jews were very well organized before, during and after the Great War.  Agents of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee swarmed over Central and Eastern Europe after the War in an attempt to rehabilitate their brethren first so they could assume control.  The AJC and B’nai B’rith were the leading components of the ‘Joint.’  Freud had been a member of B’nai B’rith since 1895.  He lectured to them in Austria on a consistent basis for years, even decades.  As a psychoanalyst what was he telling them?  His intellect deserves closer examination for what else can ‘anyone who has succeeded in educating himself to a few truths about himself is permanently defended against immorality’ mean except a license to kill.  If a Jewish supremacy arose out of that evil wouldn’t good have come out of it in Jewish eyes?  Yochai, Frank, Freud, there is a succession.

     Placed in that context one must reevaluate the whole period as well as the careers of Hitler and Stalin, for as Freud wrote openly in a universal idiom his rationale can be appropriated by any individual for his personal morality.

     The invasion of Vienna was preceded by and coincident with the rise of Jews in France.  At the time of the Russian Revolution a document became prominent called the Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion.  The document outlines a method for creating discord in society so that a junta can easily assume control.  It was said that this document was a Jewish blueprint for world dominion.  The provenance of the Protocols has never been established for certain.  The Jews say it is a ‘forgery’ while their opponents say it is authentic.

     Over the years the Jews have managed to discredit the document and have its study suppressed.  This is a great disservice because whoever wrote it its precepts are currently being followed by several groups.  Have you ever looked at Homeland Security carefully?  It behooves every person interested in current affairs to be conversant with the Protocols of Zion.

     In point of fact the Protocols are of Jewish provenance.

     One thing all disputants agree on is that the Protocols were based on an earlier document of Franco-Jewish provenance called in English:  Dialogues Between Montesquiou And Machiavelli In Hell.  The Dialogues are of Jewish provenance so whether the Protocols are or not is a moot point.

     The Dialogues were attributed to a French Jew by the name of Maurice Joly but internal evidence indicates several hands including that of the ‘Gibbon’ or Jewish historians, Heinrich Graetz.

     The creation of the Dialogues was coordinated by a French Jew by the name of Adolph Cremieux.  Little known outside Jewish circles but extremely important to a number of situations Cremieux also deserves further study.  He was a lawyer and politico deeply involved in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848.  If one takes the Jewish ‘Gibbon’ Graetz at his word both revolutions were the result of Jewish machinations.  On this point Graetz and Hitler are in accord.

     Cremieux was responsible during the annexation of Algeria in 1830 under cover of that year’s revolution for obtaining French citizenship for the Algerian Jews.  Thus with the annexation the barbarous medieval Jews of Algeria became full French citizens gaining precedence over the native Algerians in one fell swoop.  Clever move for the Jews bad move for France.

     As Jewish affairs were consolidating nicely in France twelve years after the 1848 revolution a Jewish central governing body called the Alliance Israelite Universelle was founded by Cremieux in 1860.  The Dialogues were supposed to have appeared in 1862.  The name means The International Alliance of Jewry or in a slightly different translation:  The International Jewish Conspiracy.  Actually the Alliance was the seat of the Jewish government until c. 1900 when the seat was transferred to the United States under the guidance of the financier, Jacob Schiff.

     Thus the Protocols arose out of the Dialogues in direct succession sometime during the 1880s.  It should be noted that the Dialogues was never seen in bookstores.  The whole printing was confiscated by Napoleon III according to report against whom they were supposedly directed.  It follows that the only people who could have known of the book and provided a copy as a model for the Protocols were its producers the Jews of France.

     Nevertheless, as masters of misinformation, disinformation and misdirection the Jewish government was able to shame the liberal parties into rejecting Jewish provenance of the Protocols.  The Liberals then condemned any Gentiles who persisted in saying so as anti-Semitic cranks.  That is actually the nature of the ‘proof’ that the Protocols aren’t of Jewish provenance.

     Jacob Schiff himself was a very effective Prime Minister.  He was able to engineer the First Russian Revolution of 1903-05 by funding the Japanese war machine from America while he and European financiers prevented funding to the Russians.

     Schiff was able to disrupt American and Russian diplomacy for the benefit of the Jews from 1900 to 1913 when he succeeded in persuading the US to break off diplomatic relations completely.  Immediately with the Bolshevik succession he rushed huge loans of American dollars to their coffers even during the Great War to shore up the regime.

     Thus absolved by Freud of guilt and supported by  world resources from 1917 to 1924 it looked as though the Jews were on the eve of success in their millennial pursuit.  With the possible exceptions of Mussolini and Ford it looked at though there were no fences facing.

     However Hitler and Stalin sensed the danger.  Hitler himself was always hostile to Freudian beliefs; it may be assumed that Hitler read at least some Freud.  He was hostile to Freud for much the same reasons that Freud was hostile to Kultur.  Living in the Vienna under the governance of the ‘anti-Semitic’ Mayor Lueger Hitler was self-educated.  He spent years in the libraries organizing his view of the world.

     In Freudian terms both he and Stalin certainly knew truths about themselves which prevented them from committing ‘immoral’ acts.  Freud’s dictum could be construed as also authorizing their crimes.

     Coming to maturity in the Red Terror of 1917-24 Hitler had a good understanding of the course of events in Central and Eastern Europe.  It is silly to think that he acted solely from his own impulses.  There was a civil war going on between Reds and Whites from 1918-33 in Germany.  Judeo-Communist atrocities were daily before his eyes.  As he said, he knew his head would roll in the sand if he lost.   That was not mere rhetoric.

     Hitler’s experience in Vienna convinced him of the nature of the war between Jews and Gentiles.  The evidence is clear that the Viennese shared his views.  Once given the upper hand over their invaders the Austrians were much more obdurate than the Germans.  Never forget that an Austrian, Hitler, directed the fate of the German nation.

     Hitler’s book burning in 1933 might be construed as nothing more than a vindictive censorship of ideas he didn’t like.  But the books burned were those of Jewish writers, expecially Freud, it should probably be seen as an attempt to eject Semitism from Kultur.  In other words the triumph of Kultur over Semitism.  In the end the Germans chose to kill the Jews rather than discriminate against them or go under.  You may be sure the Jews would have done the same.

     As Stalin usurped power from the Jews in Russia a strange thing happened.  Psychoanalytic methods assumed great importance.  Spectacular show trials ensued.

     When Freud’s disciple Otto Rank defected from the ranks of Freudian pyschoanalysts he was excommunicated.  The validity of his views was not examined; even if true they were not the true Truth of the faith.  Hence Rank was compelled to submit to criticism, confess his faults and beg for acceptance back into the faith.

     The Show Trials of 1936 were conducted in the exact same manner except that the sinners were given the death sentence.  The method surfaced again in Red China in 1966 when the Red Guards and Cultural Revolutionaries of Mao Ze Dong overturned that society.  The accused were criticized in mass meetings, compelled to confess their ‘faults’ and beg to be allowed to rehabilitate themselves through hard labor.

     Thus Marxist and Freudian ideas converged in an orgy of evil to destroy the oldest continuous civilization in the world.

     The notion prevails in Politically Correct circles in the US today.  Thus Freudianism has had a profound if unsuspected impact on the world.

     Freud remained confident through 1928, began to waver in 1930 and by 1938 the horror of the impending destruction of the Jews as a repeat of the Roman War was before his eyes as fled Austria for England.  In Moses and Monotheism he pitifully whines that the Jews had given up those notions of world dominion long ago.  Or, in other words, I’m sorry.

     Like Hannibal, his attempt to avenge his father resulted in the destruction of his people.  As in the Roman War the Nazis conducted a manhunt to find every single Jew and kill him.  Not only had Bar Kochba and Sabbatai Zevi failed the Jews as messiahs; so had the Revolution.  The Jews failed in this third attempt to take over the world but the legacy of Sigmund Freud lives on in the ambiguous words of his corpus.  His immediate political aims failed but his undermining of European society was much more successful.

     Apart from his political intent Freud had uncovered a great scientific area of study.

5.

The Shirt Of Nessus

     While Freud’s short term political goals ended in disaster for his people, as did those of his role model, Hannibal, Freud’s long term goal of destroying the social foundations of the Gentiles has succeeded quite well.

     As an innovator Freud cannot be expected to have had a complete and final idea.  Much of the information that became available after 1950 was undeveloped in Freud’s time, such as the Matriarchal and Hetairic periods, so he cannot be held accountable for not knowing them.  Physiology has made tremendous strides since his day.

     Freud’s errors do not so much lay in areas of knowledge but in the areas of intent or motive.  He was unable to separate his own psychology of hatred from that of his scientific discipline.  Hence his mistaken emphasis on the importance of the father figure and his misbegotten notions of the Oedipus Complex.  Then too, he projected his hatred of the Gentiles into his views of religion and sexuality.

     The only thing of value Freud had to offer, that of the formation of neuroses, has been rejected by the lay and medical communities alike.

     Strangely his nonsense is revered as great revelations of truth, largely because they fit in with prevailing prejudices.  In his attack on the Christian religion Freud was curiously unaware that the Scientific Consciousness displaced the anterior consciousnesses of Hetaira, Matriarchy and Patriarchy.  Thus the people who were dependent on Religion as the basis of the mentality were people whose beliefs could not be dislodged.  On the one hand were the various esoteric religions whose beliefs do not depend on the divinity of Jesus and the Fundamentalists whose belief is so secure that nothing can shake it.  For those who need a supernatural agency in their lives New Age people using science as a tool have created alien intelligence from beyond the solar system to serve as their ‘God.’

     If Freud thought dispelling Christianity as a religious belief would bring the Gentiles down he was mistaken.  The ‘illusion’ had already been replaced by a ‘reality.’  The futility of trying to dispel religious beliefs should have been clear to Freud.  The exposure of the illusion or, even delusion, of the compact between the Jewish people and their god had no effect on them; they continue to believe the compact exists and that Palestine was given to them by their tribal god inalienably.

     The most potent dissolvent in Freud’s arsenal was his sexual theory.  He was quite severely criticised for his sexual beliefs then and they should be rejected now.

     Everything Freud believed on the subject was wrong.  Basic to his misunderstanding was the physical structure of the human organism. 

     He quite correctly picked up the ovate and spermatic halves of the psyche but since he didn’t associate them with physical origins he mistakenly thought that men were part woman and vice versa.  This was a critical misconception as it opened the door to much erroneous speculation on homosexuality.

     There may be rare cases of sexual ambiguity caused by birth defects in the physical apparatus or defective hormonal systems but any other expression of ambiguity is a perversion that is not part of the most perfect specimens but comes about only when the ovate is fixated and spermatic repressed or, in other words when the organism is mentally disturbed.  Psychological perversion has nothing to do with the physical organization.

     Since Freud misunderstood the physical organism he equated sexuality not with the Power Train itself but only with sexual intercourse.  Freud actually equated fucking with mental health.  Because psychic discomfort is reflected in sexual urges he actually believed that the more fucking one did the better person one would be.  Such nonsense has not only passed unchallenged for eighty years but is actually embraced today as the Gospel of Fuck.

     Freud did not believe in the intellect or the effectiveness of intelligence.  While he made the grandiose pronouncement:  Where Id is, Ego shall be, he failed to explain how this would come about.  For whatever reason he considered the intellect nonexistent and intelligence ineffective and unimportant.  In keeping with his times he believed in the hereditary transmission of mental traits.

     More importantly he invented a whole category of affects he identified as self-sufficient ‘instincts.’  Like the Unconscious instincts do not exist.  There are no instincts, not a single one, all is a matter of learning and education.

     Even eating is not an instinct but taught at the mother’s breast.  Hunger may be a physical reality but it is not an instinct.  Assuaging hunger must be learnt and that literally at the mother’s breast.  The first lesson an infant is taught is when the mother inserts the nipple in his mouth.  His mouth is blocked he has no choice but to resist by sucking.  Imagine his surprise when the liquid emitted seems delicious and when he swallows it because he can’t spit it out the physical reaction is terrific.  It feels good.  Having learnt to eat he wants more.  Being a quick learner, from that point on the infant will demand to be fed.  But without that first infusion he would die hungry not knowing what the desire to eat meant.

     Because Freud wanted to project his own psychic vision he gave instincts precedence over all other psychic functions.  He professed that the individual was incapable of resisting or controlling what the Ancients characterized as the Raging Bull and what he called the Ego.

     Both the Church and Esoteric religions have devised rigors to control or domesticate this Bull or Ego/instincts by using intelligence.  Freud thought that to use your intelligence to control your ‘instincts’ was to incur damaging inhibitions and repressions.  Hence he was opposed to European morality.  Freud imagined this did irreparable damage to the psyche especially sexual inhibitions and repressions hence the Gospel of Fuck.

     If fucking actually made a person better, then the logical conclusion is that libertines and homosexuals would be the best people in the world.  Fucking dominates the libertine and homosexual mind.  It is not unusual for them to commit thirty or forty sex acts a day for as many days as they can sustain it.

     As the only thing that counts in this view of sexual activity is the climax it follows that if machines were placed in prominent places to masturbate the individual on an hourly basis or less that society would be darn near perfect.  I don’t know why people are leery of buying the Brooklyn Bridge when they have bought the myth of sexual intercourse.

     The fact is that libertines and homosexuals are the worst people in the world so the basis of Freud’s argument is very limp.

     The West has generally embraced Freud’s misguided sexual theory.  The United States is actually fucked.  Freud’s sexual theory was picked up by the lame third rate novelist Henry Miller who actually formulated the Gospel of Fuck during the twenties and thirties in the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.

     Henry Miller was gaining respectability during the fifties with psychotic fringe groups in the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere.  By the sixties he would have a profound impact on society with the reverence given his two volumes of the Tropics.

     As Freud was interpreted in the common mind repression and inhibition were the causes of psychic discomfort.  The common mind had no idea how inhibitions and repressions were caused except by not being allowed to do whatever you wanted to do.  Through the forties and fifties children of innumerable families were encouraged to indulge their whims and fancies regardless of who they might hurt.  They were given no instruction or correction lest they become inhibited and repressed.  It was thought that when they grew up they would naturally gravitate to the intelligent choice.

     The so-called ‘Me’ generation of the sixties and seventies lacked proper instruction in managing their ‘instincts.’  The pervading influence of past mores prevented them from expressing themselves with true lack of ‘inhibition’ or repression.  The wave of high school shootouts of the later century when the succeeding generation had moved out from the shadow of earlier mores were committed by the offspring of the ‘Me’ generation.  They are the logical progression of Freudian sexual theory.

     Employing metal detectors and other ‘inhibitory’ or ‘repressive’ systems will not solve the problem.  Freud has to be amended.

     Freud’s thesis was advanced by the Jewish monologist Lenny Bruce as well as furthered by Jewish interests in Hollywood who produced innumerable ‘action’ films in which the uninhibited and unrepressed protagonist attempts to solve his problems from the barrel of a gun rather than reason them out.

     So, this brings us up to Greil Marcus and the present.  Greil Marcus is himself a Jew so the question is how does Greil Marcus and his writing fit into this Jewish cultural scheme of things.  On my first reading of the book I had no idea what Mr. Marcus was talking about.  I had heard of the Situationist International but knew nothing about it.  Reading the blurbs I was under the impression that Mr. Marcus was going to explain the SI.  Not very clearly anyway.  As I turned the last page I had no idea what the book was all about.

     Second reading same as the first.  Then I read his 2006 effort The Shape Of Things To Come.  I gathered from that that Mr. Marcus considered himself in direct descent from the Old Testament Hebrew prophets and that he had conflated Israel and the United States.  Armed with that understanding I had the thin edge of the wedge.  I went back to a third reading of Lipstick Traces.  Pay dirt!  I think.

     I gather from the third reading that Mr. Marcus considers himself also a direct lineal descendent of Theodore Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, in other words The Frankfurt School or alternatively The Institute For Social Research or alternatively still The New School For Social Research.  Now we’re getting somewhere.  In addition his intellectual romance with fellow Jew Guy Debord who was the Situationist International seemed that in much the same way Dr. Baum assumed the soul of Dr. Mabuse in Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse I gather that Mr. Marcus may feel that like some Buddhist Lama the soul of the dead Debord has passed into himself and he is the new leader of the Situationist International.  So as I perceive it  Mr. Marcus views himself as an ancient Hebrew prophet, a critic in the mold of the Frankfurt School and the leader of the Situationist International.

     For some in depth background on the Frankfurt School the interested reader might try Kevin MacDonald’s  ‘The Culture Of Critique.’

     Following the above notion of who Greil Marcus might think he is and what he thinks he’s doing I will attempt an interpretation of Lipstick Traces.  Mr. Marcus as the leader of the Situationist International seems to have compiled his book which is as much a stream of consciousness impressionistic novel as anything else as a number of situations.

     I will deal with each situation as a separate entity which indeed a situation is.  Rather than begin with the first situation which as I see it should be last I will begin with the second situation, part of Version Two- A Secret History Of A Time That Passed- Legends Of Freedom.

     The theme of the book as a whole seems to be the saying of Karl Marx that Mr. Marcus refers to repeatedly:

I am nothing and I should be everything.

End of Part II.

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Greil Marcus The Shape Of Things To Come

July 14, 2007

Notes To A Review Of

Greil Marcus’

The Shape Of Things To Come

by

R.E. Prindle

Marcus, Greil, The Shape Of Things To Come, 2006, New York.

 

     ‘The Shape Of Things To Come’ a title borrowed from the mentor of today’s left, H.G. Wells, is Greil Marcus latest attempt at a prophecy of blood, guts and the doom of the United States.  The price of Black slavery he prophesies will be blood flowing in the streets.  ‘Trouble coming every day.’  as Frank Zappa put it.  As to that point I am compelled to agree with him although to understand the reason why doesn’t require the religious ecstasy or possession he seems to believe he has.

     I have already examined this problem in my essay The Deconstruction Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America that appeared on http://www.erbzine.com and in this blog in which without the rather specious gift of prophecy from De Lawd I projected by scientific reasoning that a Negro reaction to slavery is unavoidable.

     I fear that the bloodshed Mr. Marcus prophesies may be upon us by the next Presidential election if there is one.  I fear that there is a chance that President Bush may cancel the election continuing in power.  Barring that possibility I fear days of bloodshed will arrive with the election of Barack Obama.

     Thanks to a very large extent to the efforts of Mr. Marcus’ Jewish culture the American electorate has been debased to the point where it seems to be unable to deliberate on such matters of vital importance with any degree of intelligence.

     In the first place the Black people have been in open rebellion since at least the 1965 Watts revolt, or riots as it is presently known.

     The opening volley was undoubtedly the Supreme Court Brown decision of 1954 that slowly built into the violent eruption of 1965-69.  Since then the direction has changed into a series of escalating acts of violence against individual Whites of which the recent sadistic violence against a White man and woman in Tennessee is the most detestable example.  The Cutts murder in Ohio is another.  Both murders have been passed over in silence by the Liberal confederates of the Blacks in the media.

     The time is now ripe for the election of a Black President while Barack Obama who is totally unqualified appers as a bland and innocuous Black candidate.  Personally as attractive as a Black Jack Kennedy and twice as dangerous and that saying a whole bunch.  I fear that he will be nominated and elected out of White guilt for the slavery Greil Marcus loves to dwell on.

     To this point I have heard no one inquire as to who might be Mr. Obama’s appointees to his Cabinet.  Key posts such as Secretary Of State or Attorney General.  After the slate of incompetent non-entities of the Bush administration I think the public has a right to know exactly who the friends of Mr. Obama or any other candidate for that matter are.  In my opinion they are running as a slate of candidates.

     Will we, for instance, have the Reverend Jesse Jackson fulminating from the pulpit of the Department of State?  The Reverend Al Sharpton as Attorney General?  Just who is going to serve with Mr. Obama?  He is certainly going to have to satisfy his Black constituency at the expense of the White majority.

     Can such a state of affairs be tolerated?  Mr.  Marcus obviously thinks not.  As he prophesies the Black rebellion will break open and the streets will run red with blood.

     Already in the State of Mississippi where in certain districts Blacks have seized the government they have denied Whites their Constitutional rights which has required Federal intervention to redress the situation.  Whether the situation will be redressed without violence remains to be seen.  With the possible or probable election of Mr. Obama I see the situation spreading from Mississippi throughout the South and unltimately the nation.  The only possible result as Mr. Marcus foresees is civil war.

     Any open warfare between Blacks and Whites will quickly inflame Mexican and Moslem passions so that within say four years the whole United States will be in flames. 

     Thus Mr. Marcus and his Jewish culture will once again have destroyed another civilization, culture and people.  As if the Amalekites weren’t enough the Jewish culture disrupted Spain culminating in their expulsion in 1492.  Attacking the whole of Europe that civilization was reduced to rubble between 1914 and 1945.

     The Jews then moved on the Middle East where that area has been in turmoil since their arrival in 1948 and is now being reduced to rubble by them and on their behalf.  That leaves only the United States which I fear will soon be their next victim to be reduced to rubble.

     Even a casual reading of Greil Marcus’ Shape Of Things To Come will indicate that such destruction is something he and one presumes his culture gleefully anticipate.

     With the election of Mr. Barack Obama I have no doupt Mr. Marcus’ hopes, dreams and wishes are in the bag.

End Of Review

                              

 

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Part 4c Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs

July 10, 2007

Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs

by

R.E. Prindle

4c

How Waldo Became A Man

 

     In the complex of meanings of Waldo the question is how much Burroughs bases the character on himself.  In the question of health there is no question that Burroughs had issues after his bashing in Toronto in 1899.

     Judging from the Girl From Farris’s his health was a serious problem for him at least until early 1914 when he finished Farris’s.  During those years he suffered from debilitating excruciatingly painful headaches for at least half the day.  He either awakened with them or they developed mid-day.  There is evidence that he became interested in Bernarr Macfadden’s  body building and health techniques when Macfadden opened his Chicago facilities in 1908.  If he were involved then perhaps the benefits of such a regimen were becoming apparent in1913-14.  In 1916 in the photograph in puttees taken at Coldwater he looks like a healthy specimen and proud of it.

     ERB gives Waldo the wasting disease Tuberculosis putting him on a regimen of exercise in the healthy dry air of his island thus curing him within a few months.  This process is reminiscent of Grey’s hero John Hare of Heritage Of The Desert or the development of the Virginian in Owen Wister’s novel.

     Burroughs claimed that his writing was heavily influenced by his dreamworld.  If so then in this story as well as his others each character must represent a real person who figures in his life; the story must represent a real situation in symbolical form.

     As authors so often claim their characters are composites it is likely that Burroughs also combines memories of other people with his own dreams.  As Burroughs consciously manipulates his dream material he tweaks it into shape to make an entertaining novel then overlaying his conscious desires on his subconscious hopes and fears.

page 1.

     In addition Burroughs retains his literary influences using them to give form to his dreamscapes.  Indeed, his influences fill his mind so full they become part of his dreamscapes.  The island he creates is similar to but not identical with Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island.  This becomes very apparent in the sequel, The Cave Man, when Waldo sets about to improve his little society.  He isn’t as obsessive-compulsive as Verne but along those lines.

     Verne’s island figures prominently in many of Burroughs narratives.  Oddly the book isn’t in his library.

     ERB began telling his life’s story the moment he took up his pen.  While John Carter seems to be dissociated from his own personality Tarzan is a true alter ego, a psychic doppelganger.  Tarzan Of The Apes is a symbolical telling of his life’s story from birth to 1896 while the Return of Tarzan covers the four years from 1896 to 1900 and his marriage.  (See my Four Crucial Years In The Life Of Edgar Rice Burroughs here on ERBzine.)

     The Girl From Farris’s deals with the troubled years from 1899 to, it appears, March of 1914.  Thus Cave Girl addresses his difficulties in making the transition to writer and then full time writer with the attendant marital or sexual problems.  These marital or sexual problems occupy him through many novels in this first burst of creativity from 1913 to 1915.

     Porges in working from Burroughs’ own papers in his biography has very little input from outside sources but some.  The first material we have to work with from an outsider’s point of view is Matt Cohen’s  fine edition of Brother Men, the collection of the Burroughs-Weston correspondence.  Weston being ERB’s friend from MMA days.  At the time of the divorce they had been in touch for forty years.

     However I think that figure may be a little misleading as the two men had very little contact during that period.  ERB met Weston in 1895 at the MMA at the beginning of the school year.  He was one year younger than ERB.  As Burroughs left the MMA in May of ’96 the two must have become fast friends in just eight or nine months.  It isn’t probable that they met again before 1905 when Weston was passing through Chicago with his wife Margaret.  At that time both Westons would have met Emma.  From that time to the end of ERB’s Chicago period except for the occasional brief layover in Chicago the relationship was carried on by correspondence although as Burroughs seems to have some knowledge of Weston’s home town, Beatrice, Nebraska as evidenced in the second half of The Mad King it is possible he and Emma visited Weston but that would have had to have been between March ’14 and August ’14.  Narrow window.

     Thus when Weston talks so knowingly of Burroughs’ character in the letter of 1934 I will refer to I would have to question the depth of his knowledge.  At any rate he claims to have knowledge of the difficulties of the marriage.

     Weston was completely devastated by the announcement of the divorce.  He immediatly sided with Emma breaking off relations with ERB for several years.

     It appears from the letter of 1934 reproduced on page 233 of Brother Men that he contacted Burroughs’ LA friend Charles Rosenberger for information on the divorce.  We have only Weston’s reply but not Rosenberger’s letter.

     In reply to Rosenberger Weston says:

     Quote:

     I have known Ed since the fall of ’95.  He has always been unusual and erratic.  I have told Margaret many times, when Ed has done or said anything which seemed sort of queer that as long as I had known him he had always done or said such things. 

 (One of the most significant odd things would have been Burroughs leaving the MMA in mid-term in May to join the Army.  One imagines that when he didn’t show up for classes next day the faculty asked: Where’s Burroughs.  Perhaps Weston was the only one who knew and had to say:  Uh, he joined the Army.)

      I suppose looking back, that the fact that Ed has always been unusual, erratic and perhaps queer, has been his great charm and attraction for me.

     Unquote.

     I don’t know about you but if my best friend talked about me like that I would be less than flattered.  There is another back handed compliment that Weston made to Burroughs’ father in his defense.

     Burroughs’ father had made the comment to Weston that his son was no damn good.  Good to have your dad on your side too.  Weston defended ERB vigorously saying that he thought there was plenty of good in ERB, he just hadn’t shown it yet.  Thank you, Herb Weston.

     If one judges from the actions of Ogden Secor in Girl From Farris’s after he was hit on the head and if his actions approximated those of Burroughs from 1899 on then there was probably a very good reason for ERB’s unusual, erratic perhaps queer behavior apart from the fact that ERB had developed the typical character of his difficult childhood.

     In reading the correspondence Weston comes across as a very conventional and highly respectable person; in other words, stodgy.  It must have been that settled bourgeois quality in him that ERB appreciated.  Weston did many of the things that Burroughs would have liked to have done.  Weston did go on to Yale from the MMA which is what Burroughs would have liked to have done.  Weston did become an officer in the Army.

     On page 157 of Brother Men is a discussion of the Spanish American War.  If I read it correctly Weston actually served in Cuba with a Tennessee regiment.  So Burroughs had reason to be envious of him as he failed in his own attempts to get into Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.

      Nevertheless Weston’s evaluation of Burroughs uses some strong language who after all didn’t have that intimate a relationship with him:  unusual, erratic perhaps queer.  Honestly, I don’t think I would have a friend very long who thought of me that way.

     Weston is bitterly disappointed but later in the letter he refers to Burroughs as a crazy old man so, at the least, we can assume that to the average mentality Burroughs appeared eccentric.  As one in the same boat I can’t help but root for the author of Tarzan.  What but an unconventional mind could have conceived such a story.

     Burroughs antecedents had created his persona by 1895 so the crack on the head in Toronto merely added to his unusual persona.

     Apart from any inferences about Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists the sickly character of Waldo may represent Burroughs’ own health problems from 1899 to the time of The Cave Girl.

     I feel certain that Burroughs followed some sort of health or body building regimen from perhaps 1908-09 when the American body building king Bernarr Macfadden opened his Chicago facilities to 1913.  Although Ogden Secor of Girl From Farris’s was still sickly in 1914 perhaps Burroughs health was improving as Waldo evolves from a skinny sickly person to a ‘blond giant’ before our eyes.  ‘Blond Giant’ also brings to mind Nietzsche’s ‘Great Blond Beast.’  I think it would be pushing it to say Burroughs read Nietzsche, nevertheless Burroughs always seems to be well informed when you look closely. He might easily have picked up references to the ‘Blond Beast’ from newspapers, magazines and conversation.

     Weston is especially incensed at Burroughs leaving Emma who both he and his wife Margaret seem to have preferred.  They did travel to California to visit Emma while ignoring ERB.

     Weston quotes Rosenberger to the effect that ERB told Rosenberger that he had always wanted to rid himself of Emma.  To which Weston replies:

     Quote:

     Charming, unusual, erratic personality that Ed is, there is no woman on earth that would have lived with him, and put up with him except Emma, and do not be fooled!  Emma suited Ed plenty, until this insane streak hit him.

     Unquote.

     So we have an outsider’s view of the situation.  He considers Burroughs over the line in his personality to be redeemed by his charm.  Weston had asked Rosenberger his opinion of the situation between ERB and Emma.  ERB had apparently told Rosenberger after the split that he had always wanted to rid himself of Emma.

     As far as Burroughs’ persdonality goes it would be in keeping with a person of his background who had been bounced from school to school.  Waldo may in part be a nasty caricature of the East Coasters Burroughs associated with at the Phillips Academy.  As is well known Easterners at the time and still today disdain those from the West.  One has the feeling that Burroughs valued his Idaho experiences highly thus the transformation from the wimpy Easterner of Waldo to the Blond Giant of the great outdoors may be Burroughs snub of his Eastern classmates.

     At any rate when Weston met Burroughs at the beginning of classes in ’95 ERB’s personality seems set.

     By ‘saying things’ one presumes that Weston means Burroughs had an outsider’s ‘eccentric’ sense of humor.  I have a feeling that a few of we Bibliophiles know where that’s at.  Certainly Burroughs’ stories reflect this trait.  So, between Burroughs and Weston we have a clash of two different backgrounds.

     As to Emma I believe that Burroughs was always dissatisfied with the fact that he had married when he did whoever he might have married.  He has been quoted as saying that Tarzan never should have married so that idea can probably be applied to him.

     If circumstances hadn’t forced his hand he very likely would have remained single.  According to his psychology the right time for him to find a woman and marry would have been after 1913 and his success when he was in effect born again and a new man.

     So when he says he never really wanted Emma as a wife I’m sure that is true.  However he did marry the woman.  So from 1913 to 1920 we have Burroughs struggling with his desire to honor his life long committment to Emma and his contrary desire to find his ideal ‘mate’ a la Dejah Thoris, La, Nadara and a number of others.  Not so easily done in real life and after great success but still possible.

     Added to his problem was his embarrassing behavior in Idaho when he gambled away the couple’s last forty dollars.  Emma reacted badly to the Western interlude in their marriage.  Burroughs’ rather feckless attitude toward earning a living between the return from Idaho and his early success in 1913 undoubtedly caused emotional problems for Emma but as Weston says she stuck by him during those lean years and as he says, there were a lot of them.

     Even in 1913 when the couple earned the first real money they had ever seen Burroughs was recklessly spending it before he got it based only on his confidence that he would always be a successful writer something which by no means necessarily follows.

     Emma was very proud of Burroughs as the photo ERBzine published of the couple in San Diego shows however her pride obviusly conflicted with her fears so that she may have nagged ERB in what he considered an unjustified way.

     On one level Cave Girl can be construed to be a record of their relationship up to the moment with Burroughs trying to reconcile the relationship according to his confident understanding of the situation.

     Writing in February-March in Chicago we have this view.  In September of 1913 the family left for San Diego.  Writing in San Diego during October-November in the Mad King things seem to be deteriorating as Burroughs seems to be pleading with Emma to be reasonable.  Thus the Mad King concerns Prince and Pauper doppelgangers who are appealing to the same woman.

     This situation may have been caused by a situation that would be very reminiscent to Emma of her situation in Idaho of ten years earlier.  On this trip in which ERB and Emma were as alone and isolated as in Idaho ERB was taking another very large gamble with Emma’s and her three little children’s wellbeing at stake.   As ERB proudly tells it the family, no longer just a wife, but a family of five were within an ace of being flat broke if any one of the stories Burroughs wrote in 1913 failed to sell.  Unlike Idaho this was a gamble the Roving Gambler won.  Now, perhaps Burroughs thought this redeemed his earlier faux pas, probably to himself it did.  But what about Emma?  What terrific anxieties  assailed her as she wondered whether they would have a roof over their heads from day to day.

     We need more facts.  Perhaps the move from Coronado to San Diego was forced by necessity to reduce costs.  Perhaps selling the Vellie was necessary to raise cash.  Thus Emma in the midst of this actual plenty of a $10,000 income was a virtual pauper in silks and diamonds.  Would there be any wonder if she were cross and nagging?  As Weston said there were difficulties in living with Burroughs.

     Burroughs then rather than attempting to make reasonable adjustments in his behavior yearned for the perfect mate who would ‘understand’ him.

    Nevertheless he had to bear the burden assigned him.  Let us assume that as Weston said, at one time Emma suited Ed plenty.  That’s an outsider’s opinion but the evidence of this group of novels is that ERB was doing his best to rectify his past for Emma.  If Waldo is portrayed as clownish I’m sure that ERB had played the clown in real life for some time.  As Weston said ERB had always said and done unusual things.  He doesn’t say what they were but in all likelihood the things he said and did were meant to be jokes, to be funny.  After all he describes Tarzan as a jungle joker.  The jokes that Tarzan perpetrated originated in ERB’s mind so he had to think those jokes were funny.  They were usually practical jokes.  No one really like a practical joker.  The psychological needs that go into a practical joke are compensatory.

     Where he failed Emma in the past he seems to be trying to make up for it.  Perhaps his financial gamble in 1913 in some way compensates for his gambling failure in 1903 reversing the outcome of 1903 and making it alright.  His actions in 1913 are so zany one has to ask what he thinks he is doing.

e.

 

     Leaving their little Eden Waldo and Nadara set out for her village where Korth and Flatfoot await him with Nagoola in the background.

     Thus Waldo’s tasks as set for him by Nadara are to kill Korth and Flatfoot.  Waldo quite correctly realizes that these two tasks are beyond his present powers.  So, within sight of the village he makes excuses to Nadara then abandons her running away.  He heads out to the Wasteland.  He appears to be living in a near desert.

     Over the next several months he transforms himself from a tubercular wimp into a ‘Blond Giant.’  Tarzan has black hair so perhaps Waldo has to be blond.

     One can’t be sure but this period may represent the years from John The Bully to ERB’s proposal to Emma.  At any rate Waldo can’t forget Nadara having a longing for her.  During his period in the Wasteland he fashions weapons for himself that make him superior in prowess to the cave men.  He fashions a spear, a shield and what Burroughs jokingly, I hope, refers to as a sword, that is a sharp pointed short stick with a handle.  No bow and arrow.  So rather than a primitive Tarzan we have a primitive Lancelot.  Waldo is actually outfitted as a knight, a la Pyle, while when he acquires the pelt of Nagoola he will be, as it were, encased in armor.  So Pyle, or at least Arthur, is an influence.

     In a comedy of errors Nagoola manages to kill himself by falling on Waldo’s spear.  In one sense this means that Waldo has invested his sexual desires in Nadara while perhaps it is symbolic of Burroughs’ desire to do the same with Emma.  At the same time the panther skin makes Nadara the best dressed girl around.  It is perhaps significant that he kills Nagoola first before Korth and Flatfoot.

     If one looks again at that ERBzine photo of ERB and Emma in San Diego one will notice that Emma is wearing some spiffy new togs.  In her father’s house Emma was a clothes horse.  In another ERBzine photo showing ERB and Emma walking in the wilds of Idaho Emma is still dressed to the nines while ERB shambles along beside her in a cheap baggy suit.

     From that point in 1903 to the efflorescence  of wealth in 1913 Emma had to make do with whatever garb she could afford which must have been depressing for her.  As Weston says that was a sacrifice she was willing to make for her man.

     Not in 1913 in Cave Girl but in 1914 in Cave Man Waldo invests Nadara with Nagoola’s pelt.  Now, Waldo suffered grievously to acquire this skin.  That was a major battle out there in the Wasteland.  Let us assume that the skin represents Waldo’s sexual desires and that in clothing Nadara in the skin he is making her his queen or princess.

     Thus in 1913-14 for the first time in his life ERB is able to reestablish Emma as a clothes horse.  He has finally been able to do his duty as a man and husband.  She can now buy as many clothes of whatever quality she likes and ERB is happy to have her do it.  So, in a symbolic way ERB had a terrific struggle that scarred him psychologically as Waldo was physically scarred by the talons of Nagoola.  Now, Burroughs was proud to be able to dress Emma to her desires.  In the same way that the panther represents Waldo’s investing Nadara with his sexual desires so Emma’s clothes represent the same to ERB.

     It was now up to Emma to forgive ERB for his failings and treat him as her hero.  Perhaps ERB was a little premature.  I think that he would have had to woo her all over again.  While he had conficence he would be able to go on writing indefinitely the surety of such was problematic to others like Emma and actually ERB’s editor at Munsey, Bob Davis.  Davis told him point blank that guys like Burroughs start strong, shoot their wad and fall out after two or three years.  As far as others were concerned Burrroughs future remained to be seen.  The evidence is that Davis and other editors thought that Burroughs had Tarzan and that was it.  Apart from the Mars series how much of this other stuff was pubished to humor Burroughs to cajole more Tarzan novels  is a question.  Still, the fans seemed to receive it well.  Cave Girl was even serialized in the New York papers.

     Nadara has set Waldo three tasks all of them murderous.  He is to kill Nagoola, Korth and Flatfoot.  Having fulfilled the killing of Nagoola Waldo after several months sets out to return to Nadara to fulfill his last two committments. 

     Before he invests Nadara with Nagoola’s pelt he first kills Korth and Flatfoot.  These are monster battles where like the knights of old, Lancelot, Waldo is hurt near to death. 

     Now, what would Emma nag ERB about during those lean years?  The clothes have already been discussed so that leaves the monetary success to acquire them.  So the slaying of the pair of cave men may represent financial success.  Financial success came with the creation of John Carter and Tarzan.  So let’s assume that Korth represents John Carter and Flatfoot Tarzan.  The creation of the two or the slaying of those dragons opens the way for the hero Waldo/ERB to present Nadara/Emma with the first task, clothing.

     Having killed Korth and Flatfoot Waldo still has to make up with Nadara for abandoning her at the threshhold to her village.  Not an easy task.  Waldo pleads that he has done everything she asked but she remains obdurate.  This probably relflects ERB and Emma’s situation.  A situation that apparently was never satisfactorily resolved.

     But then it seems as though there is a change in the characterization and Nadara reverts back to Nadara of the beginning of the book while Waldo, believe it or not, becomes a god, if Nadara had known what gods were.  Waldo scrambles up some fruit trees to toss down some food that seems to bring them together.  In the last pages Burroughs gets schmaltzy writing close to purple passages.

     At this time Nadara spots a yacht out over the waves.  The yacht is a major theme during the teens and especially in this 1913-14 period.  The significance seems to be that Burroughs envisioned his early life as The Little Prince as life on a yacht.  Then the big storm comes changing his life as it sinks.  Then begins the struggle for existence capped by the eventual triumph.

     The yacht first appeared in Return Of Tarzan.  This is its second appearance.  Tarzan wasn’t on the yacht in Return and Waldo doesn’t get on the yacht in Cave Girl although he does in the sequel The Cave Man but that was a year later in 1914.  So things are evolving rapidly in ERB’s psychology.

     In this case he plans to join the yacht that he recognizes as his father’s.  Having abandoned Nadara once she imagines he is about to do so again so she runs off.

     Thoughts run through Waldo’s mind as he envisions a return to civilization with Nadara.

     Quote:

     For a time the man stood staring at the dainty yacht and far beyond it the civilization which it represented, and he saw there suave men and sneering women, and among them was a slender brown beauty who shrank from the cruel glances of the women- and Waldo writhed at this and at the greedy eyes of the suave men as they appraised the girl and he, too, was afraid.

—-

     “Come,” he said, taking Nadara by the hand, “let us hurry back into the hills before they discover us.”

     Unquote.

     And so Waldo decides to remain in the stone age.

     He and Nadara had left the little bag containing the relics of her mother behind.  The crew of the yacht discover the bag just on the inland side of the forest.

     Then we discover that Nadara is in fact the daughter of French nobles.  Burroughs seems to have some love affair going on with the French.  Many of his most attractive characters such as Paul D’Arnot, Nadara here, Miriam of Son of Tarzan are Gallic.  So Burroughs admires most the English, the French and the Virginians it would seem.

     Nadara is the daughter of Eugenie Marie Celeste de la Valois so she is a legitimate princess.

     Thus ends the Cave girl with seeming finality.  The way is open to the sequel but the closing seems final.

     I haven’t read a book that replicates the final scene but I suspect that ERB borrowed it.  I wouldn’t be surprised to learn of an earlier duplicate.

End Of Part 4c.

 

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Prindle Of The Apes

June 7, 2007

Prindle Of The Apes

by

R.E. Prindle

Intro.

This is a snapshot of the world as it appeared to one man c. 1960.  This was all before the technological advances of the late 70s wiped the old world off the map.

If the reader was born after 1955  it may seem that I am describing a foreign country which in many ways I am.

But, as the wise man said, an unexamined life is not worth living.  I hope you like my little memoir such as it is.

Prindle Of The Apes

 

…he dreams of the sight

of Zulu impis

breaking on their foes

like surf upon the rocks

and his heart rises in rebellion

against the strict limits

of the civilized life.

H. Rider Haggard

from  Allan Quatermain

It was the Big Bwana.

Tarzan And The Ant Men

      The layers of Prindle’s education as he began his adult life were many.  As with no other earlier generation his nervous system had to be organized to differentiate many different forms of experience.  Primal of course was the living of his own life:  what may be called objective reality.  Mixing with his real live memories into a subjective reality in a manner in which they had to be compartmentalized were many forms of pseudo-experience.  There was radio which in Prindle’s  early life in the forties and fifties was composed of real life news and current events, fictional radio dramas by night, soap operas by day and the fantasy world of pop music.  After the advent of  Top 40 music radio his listening world converted to the psycho-sexual wailings  of the psychologically wounded who made pop music.

     The fiction of movies, animated films and the real life portrayals of the news reels entered his mind where they had to be stored and differentiated from his real life experiences as well as categorized as truth or fiction or a combination of the two.

     Television added another several dimensions of experience to his young mind.  For the first time he could watch actual events as they happened in far off locations like New York or Washington and after the introduction of the coaxial cable about 1950 he could watch or listen to real time events on the West Coast a full three times zones away.  What was happening in daylight on the West Coast was relayed to the nighttime Eastern Standard Time.

     Thus he could watch an LA Rams game live or view the Kefauver organized crime investigations and the demise of the demigod, Joe McCarthy in the Army hearings.

     He watched the Bill Paley/Edward R. Murrow character assassination of McCarthy from which Big Joe had no defense or recourse.

     And then there was the printed word.  Newspapers and magazines poured out an endless stream of matter of which so much seemed of such timeless quality that he swore he would never forget it.  He read the daily poem of Edgar A. Guest which entranced him by the seeming facility of composition while he was disgusted by the maudlin content.  Yet day after day, month after month, year after year a new poem of creditable quality appeared.

 page 2.

     There were the comic strips of the papers and the comic books of super heroes that stood in large stacks until his mother threw them away.  What did any mother ever know?  He didn’t understand why but then how much ephemera can one boy, let alone a family, accumulate.

     And then there was that great body of literature called Juvenilia.  Some was truly drivel like the beloved Hardy Boys written as mere enterainment for immature minds.  Yet much of it was great literature which had been degraded over the decades to be considered suitable for juveniles.  Not least of these were Dumas’ Three Musketeers and Scott’s Ivanhoe both among the greatest creations of literature.  Not that Prindle understood these complex works except on the action level but he was to return to them more than once in the succeeding years.

     He read the pulps regularly, magazines printed on the cheapest pulp paper.  He read them all:  Westerns, Science Fiction (lots and lots of Science Fiction), Detective and True Romance as well as Argosy and True Magazines.  His mind was well stocked with the incredible and fantastic yet he never confused fiction with reality.  His intellectual life was a feast.  The wonder of it all.

     The greatest of all his early reading was the stuff that was the staple of B movies.  L. Frank Baum, Conan Doyle’s great detective hero Sherlock Holmes who actually exists in most people’s minds on the cusp between fiction and reality.  And of course, the one, the only, the most incredible hero of all times:  Tarzan Of The Apes.

page 3.

     Around the figure of Tarzan formed the immense and important psychological complex of the Dark Continent.  The very heart of darkness, the Africa of both fact and fiction.

     He imbibed the mystery of Africa that was no longer believable after the watershed year of 1960 when what was over ended and what would be began.  A whole aspect of the education of Prindle became obsolete and slid to the ground like one of the towers of the World Trade Center.  There was no better obituary for the European past in Africa than Alan Moorehead’s fine recapitulation issued in that year under the title of ‘The White Nile.’

     One associates the history of White rule in Africa as being several hundreds of years in duration so Prindle was astonished to learn that central Africa only came under European dominion between 1860 and 1900.  The Scramble For Africa.  In fact two life spans of sixty years each bridged the entire era.  The whole period could be encompassed by the memories passed down to no more than three generations.  In 1960 one man could have remembered the whole history of European discovery and annexation from the Scramble till then.

     One of the natives standing in one of those National Geographic photos of 1920 could tell the whole story.  At least from his point of view.  He would be unable to tell of the impact of Africa on the White Man.

page 4.

     The Heart Of Darkness.

     The savage primitiveness of Africa and its art made a deep impression on the European psyche ripping asunder several layers of civilized overburden to reveal the primitive origins of its naked self.  At the time this was called ‘the thin veneer of civilization.’  The primal call of the wild beckoned to White men with irresistibility.

     The bizarre untutored art of African tribes invaded the European subconscious to call forth wondrous responses.  The crude wooden images, the strong primal masks, the scrawled designs all roused the subliminal imagination of Europeans.

     About 1960 a recording of a mass by Blacks titled: The Missa Luba, performed by the Luba people of the Lower Congo took White Bohemia by storm.  The combination of the primitive Luba recitation and the sophistication of the Catholic Mass was a stunning performance that seemed to unite the subconscious mind of Africa with the conscious mind of the White man.  The power of the Missa Luba is undeniable. It is as moving today as it was in 1960.

     Beginning in 1959 the Nigerian Ibo writer, Chinua Achebe, writing from the African point of view describes the designs drawn on the bodies of women as beautiful.  To a Western eye they merely appear as rude but interesting squiggles.  Go through some Geographics of the twenties.

     The great explorers wrote the books describing the discovery or rediscovery of the source of the White Nile from which Moorehead drew his account.  the great books by Burton, Speke and H.M. Stanley had appealed strongly to an earlier generation of writers.  At the fount of imaginative novels of the mysteries of the Dark Continent stood the fantastic H. Rider Haggard.  Himself a onetime resident of Natal, South Africa  for several years, Haggard’s triumverate of African novels, King Solomon’s Mines, She and Allan Quatermain set the trend of an Africa full of undiscovered valleys, deserts and moutain ranges that could only be reached, even if only in your imagination, by the most intrepid or desperate of travelers.  Strange places that time forgot still lived according to the ways of some distant epoch often prehistoric.

page 5.

     Africa was still mysterious and unknown when Haggard began to write in 1885.  Central Africa had not yet been explored.  General Gordon was making his last stand at Khartoum.  Explorers outfitted themselves for treks into Africa at the then legendary Abercrombie and Fitch store in New York City as they sat around explorer’s clubs just before setting out.  After his terms as President ending in 1908 Teddy Roosevelt trekked across Africa shooting at anything that moved, big game or small.

     I don’t know whether his trek fired the imagination of the greatest of the novelists of Africa but in 1912 Edgar Rice Burroughs began the series chronicling the adventures of the Big Bwana himself, Tarzan Of The Apes.

     Tarzan Of The Apes found a place in the imagination of every American male from the series’ inception to the watershed year of 1960 when he was replaced by the Lord Of The Flies.  That was a significant transition from what was to what was to be.

page 6.

     Burroughs himself has never had his place in American literature and psychology recognized.  From 1912 to his death in 1950 thirty-eight years later Burroughs turned out a total of 22 Tarzan books as well as dozens of other titles.

     His creation Tarzan created a life for Burroughs as incredible as the Big Bwana’s.  Tarzan’s success  in books and movies was such a bonanza for Burroughs that he was able to found a city named after his hero in the San Fernando Valley of California named Tarzana.

     In the light of racial events after 1960 the name is ironic, for Tarzan in Burroughs’ invented lingo means White from Tar and skin from from Zan.  Must be a joke in Tar meaning White.  Tarzan is named White Skin while Tarzana would therefore mean White Skin City.  An amusing fact.

     Burroughs was very fortunate to begin writing just as the movies came into prominence.  Tarzan was a natural for the screen.  Many silent movies featuring various Tarzans were made.

     The movies incidentally rescued Rider Haggard who had fallen on hard times of destitution.

     Burroughs had a marvelous facility for incorporating current developments into his novels.  While Rider Haggard relied on time worn themes of Esoterica for his stories Burroughs was very up to date on the latest scientific discoveries.  This was sometimes woven into the story completely unawares to the reader such as his answer to the Freudian interpretation of dreams in 1919’s Jungle Tales Of Tarzan.  Only after finishing the passage does one realize what one has just read.

     This was often done in fantastic juxtapositions.  In Tarzan Lord Of The Jungle of 1928 Jim Blake a contemporary New york executive on a photo shoot safari gets lost somewhere North of Victoria Falls where he enters a hidden valley populated by descendants of the Third Crusade of Richard I who became lost ending up in this hidden valley.  Finding them dressed in Templar chain mail Blake asks them to lead him to their Director.  He has confused an authentic seven hundred year old Knight Templar society with extras from a movie set.

page 7.

     Of course by 1928 Burroughs was very familiar with movie sets of Tarzan.  With the advent of sound in 1927 the Tarzan that Prindle’s generation knew was about to hit the screen.  The great Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller assumed the role as sound came into existence.  This truly Tarzanic figure epitomized the great Tarmangani.  Mangani- ape in Burroughs’ talk, Tar= White, Tarmangani, white ape.  The role was adapted to feature Weissmuller’s swimming acrobatics.  Crocodile fights became much more common.

     Weissmuller perfected the triumphant victory cry of the Great Bull Ape which every boy tried to emulate and perfect. Even today the icon of victory is that the victor puts his right foot on the body of his dead victim, beats his breasts with both fists and yodels out the cry of the great bull ape.  The jungle was relatively quiet until Tarzan arrived.

     Many hours were spent in basements and attics as boys practiced the famous yell.  Many were the discussions and arguments over who had mastered it and who hadn’t.

     Even movie heroes grow old so it became necessary for Weissmuller to retire.  The fierce competition for the job went to a guy named Lex Barker who nobody had ever heard of.  Most of us turned our backs on Barker.  His own successors in the fifties never had a chance.  I didn’t even know there were successors at the time.  The role is still assumed but it is just not the same.

page 8.

     The age of exploration was over; social conditions prevented the notion of the Great White Ape ruling over a Black Africa and living on.  Dracula, Frankenstein, the Phantom Of The Opera and Sherlock Holmes had long successful careers before them but the Great White Ape vanished like the legendary Africa of old. (Revived on Broadway since I wrote this essay.)

     Still, Edgar Rice Burroughs succeeded in creating a mythic character who could take his place alongside the timeless emanations of the subconscious.  Few creations have.  Homer hit the groove sharp as a knife in the Iliad.  The knights of Arthur’s Round Table fill the need.  Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes gratifies the itch in spades.  Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man and The Mummy rank with H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man.  They fill specific but limited areas of the subconscious but Tarzan Of The Apes encapsulates the psychic needs of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.  A new or improved expositor of the faith is needed now.

     No matter that so much of Tarzan is implausible not counting finding Crusaders in contemporary Africa.  If one looks closely at Tarzan swinging through ‘the middle terraces’ of the trees of the jungle faster than you and I can sprint a hundred one wonders why no branches impede his swings on his trusty grass rope.  While monkeys chatter in the ‘upper terraces’ Tarzan swings through the ‘middle terraces’ to escape an arboreal panther.

page 9.

     But to examine the problem of ‘the middle terraces’ is to miss the point.  It is like searching for the historical Arthur and the locations of his twelve battles or trying to find Sherlock Holmes address at 221B Baker Street.

     Perhaps Arthur and his twelve battles did exist but they have no bearing on the story.  Prindle has  stood across the street from the approximate address of Holmes on Baker Street but the reality bears no relationship to the fiction.  Prindle looked at the windows across the street for Dr. Moriarty and his air gun but could find no evidence the arch villain had ever been there.

     So Prindle disregarded the difficulties of the middle terrace and all other difficulties.  He just allowed Burroughs to amaze him.  Prindle only read seven of the earliest novels.  Over the years the stories and plot lines faded from his mind.  He remembered only a few details of the stories and often those inaccurately.

     What did stick with him was a vision of Africa.  What affected him although the notions had slipped through his conscious mind into the subconscious were the beliefs and ideals of Burroughs as placed in the Tarzan stories.

     Tarzan was a very scrupulous man of high ideals.  While others might stoop to skullduggery to achieve their ends Tarzan never did.  He faced every problem squarely, solved it and acted on the highest principles.

     Prindle ‘remembered’ many maxims which he was able to repeat verbatim although he had no idea not only where he got them but that they weren’t his own original thoughts.  There were half a dozen from Sherlock Holmes that were actual guidelines for his life.  Chief among them was Holmes dictum that whenever you eliminate the impossible whatever remains must be the truth no matter how improbable.  Prindle repeated the dictum constantly as his own not knowing where it came from.  In rereading Holmes in later life he was startled to come across these dicta word for word.

page 10.

     One of the most astonishing remembrances not from Tarzan but from the movie ‘The Incredible Shrinking Man’ which he saw in 1957 almost shattered him.  Prindle had had a dream in which a spectacular image had occurred to him which seemed so original that he was amazed at himself.  In the dream the detail was that he was standing before two men holding up a huge Gordian Knot on a large dowel.  Standing in front of them Prindle’s only way to cut the knot was to manipulate a huge pair of scissors.  The scissors were so large that he could barely raise the handles from the ground let alone open them to cut the knot.

     He asked for help from the two men but all they did was hold the knot higher and shake it.  Dream Prindle put the scissors under his right arm and leaned on them like a crutch.

     This unusual image struck him as something entirely original of which he was very proud.  However on reviewing the Incredible Shrinking Man he came across a scene in which The Shrinking Man is battling a spider.  The Man is of the size where a needle is an appropriately sized means of defense.  On the table beside him is a spool of thread and a pair of small child’s scissors.  He drops the needle off the edge dangling from the string.  He then tries to use these now huge scissors to cut the string which he cannot do.

page 11.

     Thus this image worked away in Trueman’s subconscious to emerge transformed as an impossible solution to his own psychological problem twenty-five years later.  Prindle was forced to ask himself;  Is anything truly of one’s own making?

page 12.

     Tarzan in any size, and in Tarzan And The Ant Men he was shrunk to minature, or situation would have been superior to anyone and ever triumphant.  He was always magnanimous.  Having experienced the entire range of existence from beast to civilized man he never ill treated the African natives or even the prehistoric men and women he met along the way.  The Blacks or Gomangani (Go = Black, Mangani = apes) may have been primitive savages but they were worthy of respect as men in every way.  The same attitude was true of Rider Haggard.  Neither he himself nor his heroes ever referred to Blacks as Niggers.

     Haggard’s hero, Henry Curtis, in King Soloman’s Mines even goes native in battle donning the Black’s headdress and gear to take his place in the Black army’s ranks where of course he proved that with or without the veneer of civilization the Englishman was best of all warriors.

     The Blacks may have been almost another species but they were always thought of and treated as men among men.  This was quite in contrast to Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness in which the Blacks were seen as sub-human.

     In Burroughs’ fantastic Africa the Black natives were only one of many species of hominids.  Burroughs himself was very widely read, educated on the up to the minute scientific theories.  He was well versed in evolution.  He seemed to intuit that there were many vanished varieties of hominids and he peopled his Africa with them back in those hidden valleys.

     In Tarzan The Terrible Burroughs has a cave man riding a Tricertops like Alley Oop of the Funnies plus two varieties of tailed monkey-like hominids that undoubtedly came before the cave man  but were more highly developed.  Of course there is the crown of creation Tarzan himself.  As is habitual with Burroughs he introduces the present into the prehistoric past bringing World War I into it  with a struggle between a German officer and Tarzan for Jane.  Son Jack and his rifle are also on the way.  All this going on in a land that time not only forgot but never imagined.

page 13.

     Prindle recalled none of these details but they prepared his mind to deal with scientific realities when it became necessary for him to resolve the issues in his own mind.

     The balance tipped in the watershed year of 1960.

     Whites and Blacks presented an insoluble problem to any thinking person coming of age in 1960.  That there was and had been racial inequality was an undeniable fact.  Prior to 1960 however the general consensus was and had been that racial equality was based on fact and not prejudice.  Tarzan had, of course, treated all people of good will well regardless of race as deserving of respect.  Underlying his feelings as well as those of American society was the notion that White people were the crown of creation while the yellow and Black peoples, poor fellows, were in fact evolutionarily inferior.  The Whites were Bwanas to the lower races and Tarzan in Burroughs’ words was the Big Bwana.

     Not their fault so no reason to condemn them but rather to pity them.  They were, in fact, ‘the White Man’s burden.’

     Prindle never took anyone’s word for anything so he neither sided with those who said all men were in fact created equal or those who said White men were created superior.  The question was one to be decided at some future time.  The two avenues open to him were personal observation and experience and study.

page 14.

     Of the Negroes with which he came into contact he saw that they were quick at learning manual skills like football and basketball but when it came to perceiving general principles and applying them there seemed to be something lacking in their minds that prevented them from making connections.  Not that Blacks couldn’t take an item and perceive different uses for it than that for which it was intended but they failed to understand the underlying principle.

     This was true in all fields of endeavor, they seemed unable to move from the specific to the general on their own initiative.

     When, looking at Blacks in their home environment of Africa it was obvious that from the moment Homo Sapiens evolved from the Last Hominid Predecessor to the beginning of the nineteenth century when Africa fell under the White Man’s dominion that Blacks had made no advances from the Stone Age.  They had merely matured as Stone Age peoples.

     They had never discovered the wheel, they had no writing, they had no metallurgy, no plow had broken the African plain, they had nothing but the most primitive social organization.  They were in fact untutored savages.

     This fact was somewhat puzzling to Prindle as everwhere else in the world with the exception of the aborigines of Australia and the various tribes in backward areas every people had advanced up the ladder of civilization.  In fact the most advanced was the White civilization of Euroamerica; regretable to many but undeniable to all.

     Whether White guilt prevented acknowledging the fact or not, it was so.  The Peace Corps of 1961 created by Kennedy tacitly observed that truth.  White superiority was so in every field of endeavor from art and literature to science and mathematics.  There was no other people that competed with the White race most especially they of Africa.

     Prindle could offer no explanation in 1960 at the age of twenty-two so we will have to use the year 1960 as a fulcrum balancing the past with the future.

     A Nigerian Ibo writer began his literary career in 1959 when he published a book entitled ‘Things Fall Apart.’  Chinua Achebe began to explain the Black point of view of what happened when Black and White culture collided in his part of Africa.  He directed his polemics at the West as he was from Southern Christian Nigeria and not the Moslem North.

     He is not very explicit as to time, dates and location but it gradually emerges from his corpus that his home was on the coast in Eastern Nigeria.  The times he describes seem to be between 1910 and 1930.  As was Prindle’s experiences with the American Blacks Achebe doesn’t seem to be able to relate the specific to the general; in other words, he has no science.  He has a wealth of carefully selected detail but no penetration.

     Insofar as the details he does use they appear to be the same as those noted by White observers but seen from the other side.  The photos of Africa taken in the 1920s and 1930s which portray a completely primitive people with bizarre body piercing, strange ornaments and squiggly designs on their bodies, strange scars and tattoos  are seen as beautiful and exquisite by Achebe.  Truly, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

page 16.

     While reading Achebe late in life Prindle’s ideas

formed in his early life were merely reinforced.  He could see no reason to change opinions of Africans so eloquently expressed in Mooerhead’s White Nile.  Those opinions were edited out in later editions to conform to subsequent notions.  Nevertheless subsequent events in Zimbabwe, South Africa and elsewhere merely reconfirmed Prindle’s earlier opinions.

     Nor were contacts with Europeans of the nineteenth century the first outside contacts Africans had made.  As Moorehead pointed out a map prepared by the Greek geographer Ptolemy in 150 AD clearly and with very reasonable accuracy depicted sub-Saharan Africa from West Africa to Central and East Africa.  The course of the Niger in West Africa was accurately shown minus the effluent which remained a mystery until the nineteenth century when the Niger was related to the Oil Rivers at the Bight of Benin.  The true course of the White Nile was also depicted although the strong arrogance of academic European scholars forbade their acknowledging the accuracy of any of the ancient writers.

     Ptolemy’s information came from  Greek traders who penetrated Central Africa from the area of future Zanzibar so we may assume that ancient intercourse with Central Africa had been going on for centuries. Yet African developed little or technology.

     The same is true with West Africa for Herodotus records a Libyan expedition which occurred well before his time of c. 450 BC.

     The Romans built roads across the Sahara that were well trafficked.

     After the ancients the Arab slave traders made descents on Africa continually for perhaps two thousand years or more.  Black slaves are common in the Arabian Nights depicting a time of 700-800 AD.  By the time Europeans came into conflict with the Arab slavers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the slavers were all Moslems.

page 18.

     This fact gave Trueman matter to wrestle with as American Blacks decried the slave trade as something peculiarly American.  In fact slavery had been endemic to Africa from time immemorial.  In Chinua Achebe’s story ‘Things Fall Apart’ he makes no mention of Moslem slavers or indigenous slavery dealing only with European slavers.

     Yet from c1500 to 1830 African slave raiders abducted untold numbers of Europeans from Mediterranean shores who disappeared into the Dark Continent never to be seen again.

     The European slave trade was in existence only a couple hundred years after which shame made them abandon the trade.  By the time Europeans came into contact with Moslems in Africa they had abolished the slave trade amongst themselves now taking what must have appeared as a hypocritical stance to Moslems in attempting to force them to desist from slaving.

     As inhumane as the European slave trade may have been it was peanuts compared to the inhuman attitude of the Moslems.  Anyone who has read The Arabian Nights must be struck by the contemptuous attitude of the Moslems toward Blacks.  This was certainly reflected in their methods of capture and transportation.

     Moorehead quotes Stanley’s account of the great slave roundup he witnessed after he met Livingstone.  The Moslem slavers opened fire on the Blacks like Teddy Roosevelt opening fire on the fauna of Africa slaughtering many while dozens of others who took to the river to escape drowned.  Once captured the Blacks were marched yoked together hands tied behind their backs for a thousand miles to the coast.

page 18.

     Once there they were packed into decks only eighteen inches apart for the long torrid voyage to Arabia, Persia and India.  The torture of being unable to roll over or change your position must have been exquisite not to mention the stench and filth.  If it doesn’t kill you as they say it makes you stronger.

     There was nothing in the Koran to forbid such practices although there was in the Christian bible.  However the very humanity of the New Testament may have placed Christianity at a disadvantage compared to Moslemism.

     Moslemism did not call for any changes in social conduct or the organization of society.  The introduction of Moslemism left the African social structure intact calling only for a belief in Allah and his prophet Muhammed.  Slavery was already endemic to African society so that, strangely, while the Arab slavers annually corralled tens of thousands of Black Africans into slavery or death there was an acceptance rather than a rejection of Arab religion.

     Christianity clashed with nearly every tenet of African religion including slavery, polygamy, native medicine men and nearly the whole fabric of African society.  Therefore while Moslemism shared most native beliefs the issue of slavery was a man to man thing and not a moral problem.

     The European invaders placed themselves in opposition to both.  The enslaved Blacks and the enslaving Moslems.  While Europeans were successful in eliminating the Moslem slave trade centered from Zanzibar  they were never successful in eliminating the slave trade above Victoria Falls.  Even today the slavers are active in the Sudan and the Horn of Africa.

page 19.

     At the present time several thousand Somalian female slaves and their masters are transported to Portland, Oregon every year as immigrants to the United States.  It is indeed a strange world.

     Christianity also tended to destroy the social order of African tribes.  The tribes were all small organizations  located in specific geographical locales.  There was no such thing as nations or countries such as Kenya or what was then Tanganyika now Tanzania.  These agglomerations were artificial administrative units set up for the convenience of Europeans.

     Thus the natives no longer were able to look to their old center for the resolution of their problems but to White men located in an administrative center far from their own tribal boundaries.

     As Christianity made no allowance for native customs the established order had no incentive to adopt the religion unlike Moslemism which required no change of conduct.  The appeal of Christianity and the White Man’s Power then was to the disenfranchised and outcast classes.  As Achebe’s Thing Fall Apart clearly shows the ‘untouchables’ were the first to respond.  Christianity in which all men are equal then made the ‘untouchables’ discard the trapping of their class making them visual equals of the ‘big men’ of their tribes.

     As the representatives of the White Christians these native outcasts became the political superiors of the former upper classes.  That was the meaning of Achebe’s title:  Things Fall Apart.

page 20.

     While the Moslem areas of Black Africa were relatively complacent a huge antagonistic split existed in the Christian areas.  The antagonism did not take long to surface.  Within less than sixty years from their actual annexation the Central and West Africans had thrown off their White colonial rulers.

     The French and English had no real liking for West Africa with its oppressive heat and humidity but the English were more desirous of holding on to the more equable Central and Southern Africa.  While it can’t be said that civilian English settlers moved into West Africa they did in Central and Southern Africa.  In these areas the Whites resisted Black independence movements more staunchly.

     The Europeans bequeathed a national state to men like Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta who was himself merely a member of a small tribe.  He now posed as a national ruler over both diverse Black tribesmen and a unified civilized English population.

     The fearsome Mau Mau, a group of natives straight out of Tarzan erupted on the world consciousness in the early fifties as they terrorized and murdered the English settlers in the most primitive manner.

     Alan Moorehead didn’t concentrate on the Mau Mau which he obviously found distasteful but the Mau Mau showed the obvious difference between Europeans and Black Africans.

     Fifty or sixty years is a very short time to convert stone age peoples to a level of civilization that took many thousands of years to achieve even if the two peoples had been of equal mental abilities.

page 21.

     Edgar Rice Burroughs who was a fairly astute student of evolution seems to have captured the general feel of the evolutionary process.  He has his hero Tarzan experience each level of development from animal to Homo Sapiens.  Thus Tarzan on one level is a pure beast raised among the great apes of Africa in the tribe of Kerchak by Kala his ape mother.  Following Freudian theory Tarzan kills his father Kerchak although he mourns his mother’s death rather than following in his father’s wake.

     At the age of twenty he leaves Africa for Europe and America where within the short space of two years he takes on the ‘thin veneer of civilization.’  Well, it was thin, you know.

     Returning to the jungle he becomes the chief of a Black African tribe named the Waziri.  While for Burroughs the Black Africans are by no means despicable they nevertheless appear to be an evolutionary way station between the pure beasts and the civilized Whites.

     Tarzan, of course, inherits the English title Viscount Lord Greystoke so as John Clayton he stands at the apex of civilization as well as evolution as an English gentleman entitled to sit in the House of Lords.

     Although the current genetic information wasn’t available to him Burroughs intuited, or accepted, the obvious evolution of the hominid from beast to Homo Sapiens.

     While it may be controversial to place the White species at the top of the evolutionary scale there is evidence that such may be actually so.  All men may not, in fact, be created equal.  Perhaps an unpleasant fact but then nature is not concerned with pleasantness.

page 22.

     It is generally assumed by scientists that because 97% of Homo Sapiens genes are shared by the Great Mountain Ape while the Chimpanzee shares 98% that those two species of anthropoids are evolutionary predecessors of Homo Sapiens.  In other words that the earliest hominid predecessor of Homo Sapiens mutated from the Chimpanzee.   I don’t know what the actual percentage is but I am sure that fifty percent or more of the genes of the fruit fly are shared by Homo Sapiens.  All species most likely utilize fifty percent or more of the same genes as why not if evolution is indeed a fact.Are all the product of evolution?  You bet.  So what are you going to make of that?

     One may assume that if evolution is progressing from the less intelligent to the more intelligent that the process need not necessarily stop at the apex of Homo Sapiens.  In fact, there are three obvious main species of Homo Sapiens as well as two or more at the upper end of the scale not so obvious and a couple at the lower end of the scale also going unnoticed.

     In coventional parlance if race is admitted as a fact those three divisions are known as races although they may be differentiating species.  Scientists tell us that there is only four tenths of one percent genetic difference between the races as though a mere four tenths disproves something.  Recent genetic discoveries indicate that genetic mutation is still occurring so that differences are accruing rather than remaining static or decreasing.

     If we are going to accept and apply scientific evidence this then raises the issue of which race or sub-species in actuality is the most evolved and bears the evolutionarily active gene line.

     It is assumed that the first hominid came into existence in Africa somewhere about two million years ago because the earliest traces of hominids yet found have been found there.  Many unwarranted assumptions based on this notion have been made for racist reasons.  For instance, because only Blacks were found in modern sub-Saharan Africa it is assumed that this early hominid was also Black or Negro as though there were some distinction in being  possibly the same color as the Last Hominid predecessor.  In fact no one knows what color the Last Hominid Predecessor was nor is there any way of ascertaining the fact.

page 23.

     The distance between this early hominid who must have been much more closely related to the Chimpanzee following the logic is unknown.  Perhaps it was merely half of one percent genetic difference.  Perhaps the visual relationship between this hominid and the Chimp and Ape was approximately that as now exists between the Homo-Sapiens sub-species.  No one knows.

     Homo Sapiens is said to have appeared in sub-Saharan Africa only one hundred fifty thousand years ago.

     So far as I know there are no remains existing of the hominid from which Homo Sapiens evolved.  Nor is there much of a record for extinct hominids between the remains found in Olduvai Gorge and the evolution of Homo Sapiens.  All earlier forms have disappeared.  The various forms of another anthropoid, Homo Erectus, all existed alongside Homo Sapiens.  Whether they preceded him is not clear but that they became extinct possibly with the passing of the last ice age.

     Everyone agrees that the sub-Saharan Homo Sapiens was in fact Black and that the Whites and Mongolids evolved from this Black predecessor.  This may be proven true if it is allowed to examine genetics objectively rather than impose subjective hopes on the facts.

     However objectivity may be denied because reason suggests that the first species evolved from the Last Hominid Predecessor is probably the least evolved Homo Sapiens intellectually.  It is possible that the first evolved Homo Sapiens is physically superior in the animal sense to subsequent mutations.

page 24.

     There may be some physical law that a sub-species once manifested is no longer capable of further evololution.  Thus the Great Mountain Ape probably is little different than its two million year old predecessor.  The same would apply to the Chimp.  Once having attained perfection for its specific limitations a species is as it were fossilized in form.  Thus the Black as the earliest Homo Sapiens sub-species is probably as developed intellectually as it was, is and ever will be.  Further Homo Sapiens evolution will be carried to conclusion by the Whites.  Each step in the evolutionary scale however leaves the others behind as the Chimp left the ape behind and Homo Sapiens left the Chimp behind. Whatever color predecessors may be they must become predecessors and hence less evolved.  This is a fact that if you can’t accept then you merely refuse to accept it for ideological reasons and your reasoning is invalid.

     One must assume that at some point another evolutionary step will occur creating an entire new species leaving Homo Sapiens behind in the same relation to it as the Chimp is to Homo Sapiens.  You must be able to grasp this point.

     Politically and socially this conclusion must be unpopular but one either adheres to scientific truth no matter how unpopular or falsehood is allowed to reign.

     If one goes from mere appearances it would seem that a hierarchy of intellectual ability leads upwards from the Blacks to the Mongolids to the Whites.

     While all scientific achievement may not be attributable to Whites yet all scientific achievment is based on methods introduced by Whites.  In an age where all scientific information is shared almost instantaneously  Black and Mongolid contributions are miniscule compare to that of Whites.  Further no people in the world have made scientific contributions which were not based on White science.  Nothing has come from the Orient, nothing has come from the Semitic lands and nothing has come from Africa.

page 25.

     While today Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness is dismissed for racial and political reasons yet the novel has its basis in fact.  The contrast between the European invaders and native Blacks throughout Africa was too pronounced to dismiss.  Nor was the difference merely quantative but qualitative too. 

     There is an ancientness to the Africans.  There is the sense that they were and are incapable of rising above the stone age mental processes that characterize them.  The Africans seem to have developed stone age thinking to a logical and stultifying conclusion by the time the Whites arrived.

     The Uganda described by the earliest explorers was organized in such a sophisticated stone age way that terrifying customs abandoned by Europeans over two thousand years before had fossilized into a permanent and unchangeable way of looking at things.

     When Moorehead describes the king of Uganda killing thirty people for the entertainment of a visiting dignitary one has to recoil in horror.  Yet in one form or another such was the case throughout Africa.

     The delicacy of Europeans prevents their acknowledging certain facts primarily because if they did they would have to accept the truth.  Cannibalism was a norm nor did the Africans give up such customs.  In addition to the Mau Mau Leopard Men in Kenya in the fifties Moorehead reluctantly concedes that medicine men still donned the skins of the great cats to ritually murder infants at the time of his writing in 1960.  Chinua Achebe admits that humans were still sacrificed in times of great need in Nigeria in his time.

page 26.

     Sekou Toure who was the Prime Minister of Guinea after 1960 famed as a poet in France still kept human flesh in his refrigerator like the American madman Jeffrey Dahmer.  He explained that there were certain things White Men couldn’t understand.  Well, apparently Dahmer could.  With that explanation the ‘poet’ was excused while Jeffrey Dahmer who wrote no poetry was sentenced to life imprisonment.

     In general the Black nations of Africa have rejected an uplifting Christianity which would force them to change their ways for a more tolerant Moslemism which makes no such demands on them.

     Thus the Africa of Tarzan, the National Geographic and the Explorers Clubs passed away by 1960.  Moorehead’s interesting book was the epitaph of the period.

     Not all Blacks remained in Africa.  The forced diaspora of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had spread the species throughout the New World from Brazil through the Caribbean to the United States.

     The predominant slave populations of the Caribbean quickly politically dominated their areas reducing the White population to an ancillary status without any real rights.  Whites lived apologetically on the islands barely tolerated by the Blacks.

page 27.

     There even after extended contact with Whites and White science the Blacks made no advances over their Black brethren in Africa.  They remained on the same intellectual level.  Anyone who would deny that would deny the Holocaust.

     In the United States the story was no different.  It is true that from the seventeenth century to emanicipation in 1863 the Blacks were slaves.  Still, there were ‘house niggers’ and ‘field niggers’.  If the field Black was given no opportunities for education this could not have been true of the household help.  Yet by 1960 as Prindle was entering young manhood there was no indication to him that Blacks had made any intellectual advance.

     The Black situation was not a small problem to him while as the Black rebellion then in progress developed the problem became of the first magnitude.

     The practical effect was a barbarian assault on the institutions of the United States hitorically unparalleled since the incursion of the Roman Empire by the German barbarians which culminated in the fifth century AD.

     The result of the invasions in both cases will be the same although the Germans bearing the higher genetic development were able to develop civilization over time.  The same will not be true of the Blacks who can only bring civilization down to their stone age level.  Sad but true.

     Were the Germans capable of intellectual development while Blacks are not?  This was a burning question of Prindle’s youth.  Were Blacks genetically inferior to Whites or was it merely a question of educational opportunities?

page 28.

     At the time the only means of determining racial intellectual abilities was testing.  This was in the form of the IQ test.  Whites invariably scored higher on the average than Blacks and not just by a point or two either but the gap ws significant enough to raise wonder.

     The Blacks countered that the tests were racially weighted in favor of the Whites.  It was suggested that if tests were written in Black patois Whites wouldn’t do quite so well.

      Perhaps.

      But classes were not taught in either Black or White patois but in a good clean English which was the language of the people, land and literature.  People from educated families probably had a few points advantage over those from families where intellectual prowess was not quite so demanded but such a fact could not be avoided.

     Barring these natural variations in opportunity the playing field was level for all.  The Blacks also advanced the notion that more money was spent per White student than for a Black student.  While well received and even believed against clearly visible evidence to the contrary by Whites this argument too proved fallacious.

     By 1970 every school district in America was fully integrated.  Those in the North and West had been for decades.  In fact the same amount of money was spent on every student White or Black.  While this fact should have been clear yet Whites and Blacks advanced the opposite notion as fact.

page 29.

     It was also true that all White schools had a better record than integrated schools where the levels were brought down by the Blacks.

     Prindle was an independent thinker.  He looked beyond the rhetoric at the true facts of education.  Beyond education he drew from his personal experience.  He noted that no matter how clever or how adaptive a Black might be his intelligence seemed to stop at the training level.  They seemed to lack the ability to associate ideas and take the next step forward.  This fact was noted by even such a sympathetic observor as Rider Haggard.

     There were many, although out of favor and ostracized, who believed that Blacks inherently lacked intellectual ability.  Prindle silently concurred with them yet he thought there was insufficient proof to commit himself one way or the other.

     Edgar Rice Burroughs had come to definite conclusions as early as 1919.  Burroughs was very well read while being absolutely up to date.  Most of what he believed was still being put forth by Time/Life books in their series on prehistory although recent advances have invalidated some of Burroughs’ thought while  he would have been eager in updating himself.

     As Burroughs named it in 1919 the quality to be sought was ‘imagination.’  As he noted the beasts had none at all.  He attributed to Blacks a modicum.  He thought that only Whites were capable of imaginative flights and this as he judged it was only one in a hundred thousand.  That would have been more or less evolutionarily correct.

     Since Burroughs time and especially since 1950 the bounds of human knowledge have been moved forward incredibly in all areas.  Most importantly for my argument in the field of genetics.  With the discovery of DNA in the forties science has progressed to the point where the ‘human’ genome can be read entirely.  All twenty-three chromosomes have been completely mapped or soon will be.

     The mechanism of mutation or evolution can be understood.  And evolution is going on constantly; a mutation that seems to leading to a species of astounding ‘imagination’ or intelligence.

     Genetic findings allowed Prindle to put his mind at rest concerning the relative abilities of the three sub-species.  It was clear to him that as the first species of Homo Sapiens to evolve from the Last Hominid Predecessor, the Black species stagnated while the Mongolids and Whites contintued to mutate adding intellectual capabilities to their Homo Sapiens shells.

     Whatever the genetic difference between Whites and Blacks that difference was expressed in scientific intelligence in Whites while Blacks remained metally lethargic.

      It does no good to say that many Whites are mentally lethargic while some Blacks seem to express scientific aptitude.  Even if true on an individual basis that has no effect on the general proposition.  As of this writing nearly all scientific advancement is coming from Whites.  Contributions by Chinese and Japanese are slight involving mainly improvements to existing models and not leaps forward.

     The Black species is notably absent in the ranks of scientists.

End of Essay

 

 

 

 

 

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Part 2 Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs

June 5, 2007

 

 

Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs

Part II

by

R.E. Prindle

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Civilization And Its Discontents.

     The period of Burroughs’ life was one of those great pivotal times of civilization.  Civilization was in the midst of one of its great metamorphoses, scientific, political and intellectual.  Changes which had been building up the last few centuries could no longer be absorbed by the existing religious structure.  That structure was no longer viable.  Its bursting mode was not only for the new Scientific Consciousness  but the increasing scientific examination of the past opened the way for the revival of forgotten forms such as the Matriarchy.  Thus along with the inevitable Patriarchal religious  reaction the Matriarchy  as well as suppressed occult religions forced their way through.

The reaction from contacts between civilizations sent various alien religions and ideologies into the Western leaven.

Confused with these intellectual challenges the agricultural basis of civilization evolved into a technological one.  In the mid-teens for the first time in the United States there were more urban residents than there were rural residents.

New demands were placed on consciousness as more precision was required of the human mind.  Man had had little difficulty adapting his methods to cycles of the seasons but the adaptation tothe rigors of the assembly line caused him problems.

That there was a backlash from this tremendous succession of changes should take no one by surprise.  Adjustments were difficult and critical.  In 1930 the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, published what may be his most famous title:  Civilization And Its Discontents in response to this challenge.  His notion of who the discontents were and of what they were discontented about is vague, indeed undecipherable.

In my estimation he doesn’t deal with the malaise at all.

On the other hand Edgar Rice Burroughs not only dealt with the malaise but offered a reasonable, if difficult to apply, solution to the problem.

page 1.

The malaise found many expressions.  On the political front the socialists, Communists and anarchists were the most prominent reactionaries.  Their activities reached a fever pitch in the first two decades of the Twentieth Century resulting in the two phases of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and ’17.  The institutionalized discontents had their homeland after the latter date.

While Freud’s discussion of Discontents sounds generalized by the way he writes he is actually talkiking about himself and the members of his own Jewish culture and their problems with Western Civilization.

Thus Freud’s notion of Discontents falls somewhere between a general malaise and the discontent of the Communists.

The Religious Conciousness of course faced a problem that could only be resolved by surrender or reaction.  There was no middle way.  The evolution into Scientific Consciousness completely invalidated the religious approach.  All religions are based on a false premise and Science exposed that falsity.

The transition to the Scientific Consciousness must be difficult and demanding as so few attain it.  In my opinion this is because of the ongoing evolution of the brain.  The Scientific Consciousness can apparently only be grasped by the further evolved.  This doesn’t mean that those of a Religious Consciousness can’t work with scientific knowledge which requires only basic intelligence and a scientific environment provided by others but they are unable to envision advances.

Thus they find themselves left behind intellectually.  It is the same as the difference between high and low IQ.  Nothing can be done about that.  However the Religious reaction is to attack those of the Scientific Consciousness to lower them to their own level.

page 2.

The problem was especially acute with Freud and his culture as Science per se invalidated all Semitic religious pretensions.  This means all Semites and not just Jews.  Neverthless as Jews were embedded in Western Civilization at that time and other Semites weren’t the Jewish culture was ‘discontented’ and was forced to negate science and the Scientific Consciousness.

Led by the Semitic surge of both Judiaism and Moslemism the very serious attempt to bury the Scientific Consciousness through genocide might just succeed.

As I point out in Part VII of The Deconstruction Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America the Jewish campaign to ‘abolish the White ‘race’ should be taken very seriously.  Just because it sounds preposterous doesn’t mean it’s a joke.  A segment of Whites is the bearer of the evolved gene or genes or combination of genes so that if this advance species were destroyed the wild religious reaction would succeed.  Sounds just like some science fiction movie doesn’t it?  Well, it isn’t.

The Scientific Consciousness created its own malaise in the newly evolving species.  As literary and artistic types are always the monitors who pick up these trends first, if they don’t necessarily understand them, we shouldn’t be surprised to find a number of literateurs immersing themselves in the problem.  One of the big texts is H.G. Wells important but neglected novel:  The Food Of The Gods.  In this novel Wells postulates that the emerging scientific Consciousness is a new species of human being.  As with the real religious reaction Wells’ predecessor people wish to kill the new species.  In earlier times when the world was less populated new or different species of human beings could move away from the old species.  Now, the question is what makes Homo Sapiens Homo Sapiens and makes it different from the Last Hominid Predecessor?  It is assumed by our scientific community that the Negro is the first Homo Sapiens species having evolved in Africa.  This means that the Negro evolved from some sub-human Homo Sapiens predecessor.  It’s easy, it has to be.  So far no one has been able to produce an example of the Last Hominid Predecessor.

Now, the Negro was not the only, how shall we say, hominid species in Africa.  The Negro apparently orginated in West Africa.  The rest of Africa was inhabited by other species such as the Bushmen and Hottentots.  These peoples are not Negroes and originated in Africa so the question is are they predecessors of the Negroes who we are told are the first Homo Sapiens or are they Homo Sapiens who precede or follow the Negro in evolution.  Or, are they a separate non-Homo Sapiens species or are they  perhaps the Last Hominid Predecessor.  They are not Negroes so a place has to be found for them.

In any event the Negro and Arab combined to produce a new race or sub-species known as the Bantu peoples.  The Bantus then invaded the territories of the Bushmen and Hottentots who ranged all of Africa South of the bulge, so we are told, driving the Bushmen before them.  As I understand it the Hottentots are now extinct while Bantu pressure on the Bushmen is driving them toward extinction.

At the same time a newer hybrid of Black and Semite is driving the Bantu before it from its base in the Northeast corner of Africa known as the Horn.

So, Wells novelistic problem was that there was no longer a place on Earth for his new species to isolate itself.  He was presented with the choice of his new species either displacing or killing off the anterior species or being eliminated itself much as the Hottentots and Bushman have been eliminated by the Bantu and as the Bantu and Negroes are being displaced and elminated by the new Black and Semitic Hybrid.

page 4.

So this was the problem c. 1900.  This solution was repulsive to the existing Religious Consciousness that was psychologically unequipped to deal with this impasse.

As can be seen the Semitic special consciousness does not fear the problem  In Africa in Darfur and the South of the Sudan they are actively pursuing genocide.  In Euroamerica the Jewish Semitic culture is pursuing or advocating the same resolution of their problem with the White Euroamerican population.  Following Semitic actions in Africa it should be clear to American Blacks what is in store for them.

So, Wells dealt with the problem in its political aspect.  The internal aspect, the split in consciousness between the old and new was ably handled by a number of writers.

For a good introduction to the contrast between the Scientific Consciousness compare Holmes and Watson in Conan Doyle’s stories.  In this essay I will concentrate on three others as well as Freud- H. Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad and Edgar Rice Burroughs.  Not coincidentally, I think, all three writers place their most important work in Africa.  Haggard as the earlier writer rising to fame in Burroughs’ youth  quite naturally had a great influence on the younger man, although I think Burroughs would have written of Tarzan and Africa with or without Haggard’s influence.  The appeal of Africa is the contrast between the civilized White and the primitive Black.  The two aspects of White consciousness.  I hope to tackle this problem in more detail in my next essay, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sigmund Freud And The Holy Grail.

There was nothing clearer to the English explorers, as well one might note as to the Southern planters of the US, than that there was a gulf between the intellect of the African and that of the White man.

Haggard expressed this difference in his novel Allan Quatermain. I’ve used the quote before but I will include it again here to keep the problem clear before us:

Quote:

All this civilization what does it come to?  Full forty years and more I spent among the savages, and studied them and their ways, and now for several years I have lived here in England, and in my own stupid manner have done my best to learn the ways of the children of light, and what do I find?  A great gulf fixed?  No, only a very little one, that a plain man’s thought may spring across.  I say that as the savage is, so is the white man, only the latter is more inventive and possesses a faculty of combination; save and except also the savage as I have known him, is to a large extent free from the greed of moey, which eats like a cancer in the heart of the white man.  It is a depressing conclusion, but in all essentials the savage and the child of civilization are identical.

          The great Liberal H.G. Wells was also clear on this difference.  The nature of the gulf was the Scientific intellect of the White and the non-Scientific intellect of the Black.  The question is how large did these nineteenth century men perceived the gap to be.  Haggard in his Allan Quaterman, quoted above perceived the gap to be small while if one is to judge by the distance between Tarzan and the Africans Burroughs perceived it be not only large but insurmountable.  Haggard thought the gap easily bridged while judging from Tarzan Burroughs thought it unbridgeable.

page 5.

It should be noted that Haggard was of the Old Religious Consciousness while Burroughs was of the advanced Scientific Consciousness.  Of the two men Haggard writes from the experience of having viewed Africa or at least South Africa first hand.  Everyone talks of Africa as though it were a county in Kansas whereas it is a huge continent of many diverse cultures.  But, perhaps as the cultures seem to share the same level of consciousness perhaps that is the justification for speaking of Africa and Africans as a single unit.

Haggard lived in South Africa for several years as a young man while he was an astute historian and anthropologist.  As a mythologist he was of the most gifted.  His understanding is astonishing.  He was quite familiar with all the Black peoples from the Zulus, Swazis and Basutos tothe Hottentots, Bushemen and Griquas.  His judgements of the various intellects seems quite reliable.  His writing is of most interest for the current rage of Zulu interest.  His actual story telling ability is beyond compare.

Now, this is difficult to speak of because of the ideological stance of the Liberals and their Religious Consciousness that take the procrustean stance of trying to fit facts and reality into ideology whether they can be conveniently forced or not.  They are currently anti-White and pro-African even going so far as to call for the genocide of the White species as I pointed out in the Deconstruction Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America.  This is more than evidenced in their support of the genocide being executed in South Africa by the Shona chief robert Mugabe and the Bantu peoples of the Union of South Africa.

page 6.

There’s not much evidence that Haggard was interested or even aware of the theories of evolution which, if I may be so daring, it seems clear that Burroughs either was at the beginning of his career or became so as he aged aware of all the various strands of evolutionary theory.  Thus Haggard comes across as more humane while Burroughs is more accurate.

A third opinion on the nature of the situation was provided by Joseph Conrad in his novelette: The Heart Of Darkness.  One can’t be sure how much contact Conrad had with the situation he describes, but the influence of the primitive African mentality had the effect of dragging down the White intellect.  As the advance in intellect was not so pronounced as Haggard noted the attraction of the primitive was so strong that many Whites retrogressed.  Conrad’s hero Kurtz was an ivory buyer in the heart of the Congo.  Through fraternization with the African he indeed loses his ‘thin veneer of civilization’ going native.  On his death bed in viewing his period in the interior he exclaims ‘The horror, the horror’ and then ‘Exterminate the brutes.’

In point of fact if, as we are told, Homo Sapiens originated in Africa and the Negro is the departure point from the Last Hominid Predecessor which may be the Bushman or Hottentot then if this departure occurred  c. 150,000 years ago, at the time the African came into contact with Whites he had made no move toward becoming civilized.  Nor was he inclined to when given the example.

When H.M. Stanley interviewed the Uganda chief Mtese, that chief was incapable of visualizing anything other than trading.  As he said he noticed that goods traded by the Arabs, who were first in the area, all came from Europe so he assumed that Europeans were more clever than the Arabs however he had no inclination to acquire the knowledge or skills.  Nor have Africans attempted it to this day.

page 7.

As unpleasant as it may be to deal with facts or accept the science of the matter it is nevertheless necessary to consider that in the course of evolution the African brain has evolved to a certain level and stopped much as all the Hominid Predecessors did.  Although Bruce Lahn of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute has been silenced his researches made it clear that the human brain was still evolving but not in all human species, only one.

It should be clear to even the most prejudiced observor that Robert Mugabe the Shona leader of Zimbabwe is in way over his head while as savage in his methods as any character Joseph Conrad could create.  Nor is the reason  unclear to certain Africans.

Writing in the Kampala Monitor of February 7, 2007 in an article entitled  Uganda:  Why Black People Have Remained Backward by Elias Biryabarema the author examines the problem:

     Uganda has been fairly stable long enough.  The conditions for an economic takeoff have been there for 20 years.  Mr. Musevini has enjoyed generous goodwill from nearly all the world’s rich governments.  Their largesse has poured in ceaselessly and in hefty amounts.

Uganda should have taken off.  We haven’t.  We’re stuck.  And so is Tanzania, Sudan, Ethiopia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Eretria, Malawi, Congo Republic and pretty much all of Black Africa, excluding the regions sole economic power, South Africa.  This led me to pose a question to myself:  Can Black people build prosperous societies?

Just about every reason- from slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism to inequitable world trade rules- cited for the backwardness of Black African nations has been so debunked that it has now become necessary to look beyond the realm of such contemporary explanations.’

http://allafrica.com/stories/200702061131.html

Mr. Biryabarema concludes that Africans ‘only rise and touch a low ceiling.’  A disheartening realization but a cruel fact of nature because of the progression of evolution.

page 8.

So Africa came to represent an attractive past to Whites while the psychical split caused by the evolving brain caused them discomfort too.  The brain had not evolved far enough to make a clean break with the animal past.  What was Man, all species to do?  Haggard relapsed into nostalgia.  A longing to go back while nevertheless retaining his cranial development.  His hero, Allan Quatermain while retaining his intellectual superiority to the Africans attempts to establish his kinship with his ‘Black brothers.’  Thus he takes a ‘Liberal’ attitude toward African/White relations that while seemingly humane has resulted in the atrocities against Whites being perpetrated by the likes of Mugabe and the South African leaders.

One shudders at Conrad’s Kurtz’s exclamation to ‘exterminate the brutes’ and yet the choice has turned out to be exterminate or be exterminated,  while Africans have inexplicably opted for the latter.  What can one say?

Burroughs on the other hand working from a philosophical point of view came up with a different solution.  Nor is it entirely impracticable on the intellectual level.  Both he and Freud begin from the same base.  Both are reacting to the inhibitions and repressions placed on Man by civilization.

Burroughs seems willing to accept the ‘thin veneer of civilization’ in certain places and under certain conditions but he demands the right to be able to move freely from the primitive to the civilized state.  Thus when Tarzan takes off his clothes he also removes the ‘thin veneer of civilization.’

page 9.

The basic problem for Haggard, Conrad, Freud and Burroughs is that they wish to retain the advantages of the intellectual aspects of civilization; none of them wish to opt for the ‘low ceiling’ of the primitive.   They all wish to retain their advantages while indulging their primitive ‘natures.’  In some way each has to remain superior to the primitive state.

One can contrast this attitude with Mugabe of Zimbabwe and the ANC of South Africa who seem to be edging in the direction of removing all vestiges of the civilized state.  They seem to be opting for a nostalgic return to the their savage past.  They must have some understanding of the results of their destructive acts against civilization but choose to ignor them.

Conrad says simply- exterminate the brutes.  Haggard adopts an avuncular attitude toward perpetual children.  Burroughs assumes the role of…well…a god.  Freud wishes to assume the role of plantation owner.  The problem is insoluble except by the Shona method of  ‘exterminating the arrogant bastards.’

For Burroughs as well as for Freud sex seems to be the key.  Burroughs position is difficult to fathom.  In all his cultures, societies and civilizations, and he creates a great many, nudity or near nudity is the ideal although as he is writing for popular consumption his characters  remain sexually unexited and incredibly chaste under the most provocative conditions.  Freud of course had everybody going at it like bunnies.

In Cave Girl Burroughs’ hero, Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones is the example of the over intellectualized man of extreme and enervating culture.  Quite the opposite of Burrughs who obviously feels he has reached an ideal balance between the intellectual and the physical.

Waldo is meager then and consumptive when he lands on the island.  He is obligatorily cowardly.  He will find his Anima ideal in Nadara who is the antithesis of the civilized Jane being both nude and perhaps the most obviously sexually unihibited of any of ERB’s female characters.  Burroughs contrasts her natural uninhibited sexuality with the inhibited sexuality of Waldo.  There is a nice comparison with Freud possible here.  Also with the Burroughs corpus there is room for an analysis of Nadara, La, and Balza.

During the course of his stay on the island , the natural primitive life will flesh Waldo out, build him up, give him conficence and make him courageous as well as curing his TB.  Of course he never loses his intellectual attainments while using them to better his opponents and improve his situation.  Thus neither Haggard, Conrad, Freud or Burroughs  is able to resolve the conflicts of the discontents caused by civilization.  As attractive as the primitive is it must remain an intellectual ideal.

Go to Part 3.

In The Beginning.

 

 

 

During the course

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