Looking For A Miracle: The Sixties And Its Religion
August 3, 2013
Looking For A Miracle
The Sixties And Its Religion
by
R.E. Prindle
Sigmund Freud
The deliberate pursuit of whatever type of sex is considered deviant by one’s own culture is part of the program of spiritual seekers as far removed from each other in time and space as Tantric Hindu, California Satanists, Daoist sorcerers, Siberian shamans, and paunchy English “witches”, with their scourges and “sky-clad” retreats in the New Forest. To break tabu is a necessary stage in vama marg tantric ceremonies, for instance, in which dietary and sexual tabus are deliberately broken one after another. It is recognized by these technologists of the spirit that deviation from socially accepted mores is a powerful tool for awakening the sleeping powers within us, provided that this deviation takes place within the occult engines they have designed.
Peter Levenda- Sinister Forces, Book III, pp. 211-12
The key to the Sixties is Sigmund Freud. The Sixties was when Freud’s schemes came to fruition. He turned Aryan civilization on its head.
As unpleasant as it may be to recognize Freud was Jewish and his activities were based on his Jewishness and the age old prophecies that govern Jewish activities. Freud’s father came from the Galicia that was a stronghold of Hasidic magical Judaism. Freud himself was a student of the magical Zohar and Kabbalah.
Along with them he acquired the Jewish hatred of the Other, specifically Europeans or Aryans. He identified his psyche with the Semite Hannibal who attacked Rome- Freud’s symbol for Europe. In actuality Hannibal defeated Rome in the field. The Romans retreated within their walls refusing to come out and fight. Unable to sustain his army Hannibal was forced to vacate Italy. Thus, although he had won all the battles he couldn’t win the war. This was a real dilemma Freud had to solve and he did.
Freud began his career as a biologic researcher looking for eel gonads. Seeing no route to universal fame from that research he became interested in psychology. Here was some room to move.
Freud was born in 1856 in the midst of the great unfolding of the Aryan mind. He became associated with a fellow Jewish doctor, Joseph Breuer, who had become involved in researches into hysteria. This led Freud to the center of research in hysteria at the Salpetriere hospital run by Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris when Freud was about thirty years old. He could only afford Paris for a few months but they were eye opening months. He learned the nature of hypnotism and its control element- suggestion. This would be the stratum on which he built psychoanalysis.
Following Charcot Freud’s first book is an analysis of hysteria. The book caused no stir. Turning to associate Breuer and his proto-psychoanalysis Freud studied the nature of dreams. He characterized dreams as the ‘royal road to the unconscious.’ Following Sherlock’s advice Freud carefully studied the literature on dreams which was fairly extensive. His dream book flopped failing to make Freud a household word.
While issuing a steady stream of articles he contributed his greatest work in the form of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1901. In 1905 he contributed the useful Jokes And Their Relation to the Unconscious and another significant work that gave a clear indication of Freud’s direction Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality. This small volume finally created the fire storm he had been trying for. At the time the book was considered close to or actual pornography. At any rate it attacked prevailing European or Aryan morality breaking all sexual tabus.
While one may argue that Freud’s was a scholarly approach there is undeniable smut to it. Freud in general reveled in smuttiness. He always leaves you with a slightly sickened feeling. There was controversy then as well as now as to his intent.
D.H. Lawrence who was no stranger to sexual theory and controversy denounced Freud in The Plumed Serpent for wishing to destroy prevailing European morality let alone reforming it. In this opinion he was correct. Both Sexual Theory and his Theory of the Unconscious and mass hypnosis would be his primary weapons.
Freud, contrary to popular opinion was not the originator or the discoverer of the unconscious nor even an early investigator. The unconscious had been a hot topic in European thought ever since Anton Mesmer arrived in Paris in mid-eighteenth century. There were many different ideas concerning the nature of the unconscious but by 1915 Freud had swept them off the board so that by the end of The Great War his perverted version stood alone. The question was how to use this tool he designed to destroy the conscious mind and manipulate the unconscious to attain his and Jewish ends.
In the nineteenth century the only mass media that could be used to manipulate public opinion, the unconscious, was the newspaper, but the newspaper requires consciousness making access to the unconscious difficult. It was only in the twentieth century that the great media capable of manipulating the unconscious directed arrived. Perhaps the most important of these was modern advertising that arose alongside the movies to be followed by radio, talkies and television. Color photo magazines are not to be overlooked either. Photographic images go directly into the unconscious.
Of these media the most overlooked is the power of advertising to quickly change mores, for it was mores that Freud had to alter or modify, the way of looking at and thinking about things.
Freud had a nephew in the US by the name of Edward Bernays. Bernays being Freud’s wife’s maiden name. Eddie Bernays became a publicist with George Creel and the Committee on Public Information during WWI turning to publicity as a vocation after the war. Thus he became a premier advertising consultant. His influence today is greatly overlooked.
The CPI was a tremendous propaganda, indoctrination and conditioning machine. The Wilson administration bludgeoned the American public into its party line. Bernay’s would use those techniques to change the mores of the American people post-war following Freud’s ideas. First he visited his Uncle Sigmund in Vienna where they had long summer walks and quiet talks. What was said isn’t known but can be inferred from Bernay’s subsequent career.
According to Wikipedia quoting his daughter Anne Bernays felt that the public’s democratic judgment was ‘not to be relied upon,’ and he feared that [the American public] could very easily vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing, so that they had ‘to be guided from above.’
Of course, who is to judge who is the wrong man and on what basis as well as the wrong or right thing. Who is the infallible ‘above’ who is going to force his candidate on the erring people?
In other words, Bernays wanted a dictatorship of virtue. Unable to disturb the political system in one fell swoop it would to be don incrementally. Using techniques imbibed from his uncle’s political agenda Bernays did just that experimenting first through the commercial field.
Old fashioned advertising in print, as radio and TV hadn’t come into existence as yet, consisted of long prose pleas trying to persuade the conscious mind. When color printing came into common use an attractive image coupled with product ID and snappy slogan, or propaganda, would prove to be more effective. Thus to promote Lucky Strike cigarettes there was an incredibly attractive slender woman smoking a Lucky with the slogan ‘Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.’ The ad then carried a number of subliminal messages as well as the plea.
When Bernays began his work the Aryan female ideal was the Arthurian conception portrayed most notably in the Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Virginal and desirable as a wife. Freud’s sexual goal was to invert that image to turn Aryan women into sluts. Smoking in women was considered sluttish at the time just as cosmetics were symbolic of the prostitute or painted woman. Good girls didn’t wear lipstick. Bernays through his advertising techniques was to change all this.
Meanwhile back in Vienna, Freud was developing techniques to change the mind. As always an avid student of literature Freud latched onto a small book by the Frenchman Gustav Le Bon titled: The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Freud incorporated Le Bon’s studies into his own Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. By ego he meant group ego not the individual ego.
The analysis of Le Bon meshed with the advertising propagandistic ideas of his nephew. Freud then combined their work with his understanding of sexuality, drugs and his version of the unconscious to undermine Aryan civilization. Remember he was successful in imposing his vision of the unconscious as the only version of the unconscious on the entire psychological and psychiatric discipline, hence society as a whole.
Aiding the effort was the triumph of Adolf Hitler in 1933 in Germany. Hitler’s anti-Jewish stance drove the whole horde of Freud’s disciples out of Europe to the United States. While Freud knew what he knew the other members of his psychoanalytic order didn’t. I don’t mean to be unkind to Freud’s personal lumpenproletariat but they just didn’t grasp what he was talking about. Nevertheless they were accepted at face value becoming not only influential but directors of US culture during the fifties and sixties after which their prestige began to wane.
Most of them settled in the two culture capitols of the US, NYC and LA so that the media took their lead from them. While few, if any, understood Freud his vision of the unconscious as a discrete entity extraneous to the mind and actually the body while controlling one’s actions to the exclusion of the conscious mind was readily accepted and adopted as was his notion of repression in a completely distorted form.
The reality of Freud’s vision of the unconscious was quickly picked up by sci-fi writers who turned out a stream of such novels as Jack Schaefer’s I Am Legend, Jack Finney’s Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters. Not that we consciously understood at the time.
The State of Israel had come into existence in 1948 setting the Middle East ablaze in a series of wars. The 1956 war was a turning point for the Jews. They had been shamed by their non-resistance to the death camps so the ‘56 war allowed them to assert their manhood and become fierce warriors driving US tanks and jet fighters. The war also had intellectual consequences.
Aryan Europe and America had astounded the world by its astonishing scientific discoveries and intellectual development unshared by the rest of the world including the Jews. Emboldened by their military success they set out to reassert their pre-scientific religious dominance they felt they had enjoyed throughout history until the nineteenth century. Indeed a Jewish woman named Barbara Spectre has established the Paideia Foundation in Europe to claim a parity between what she calls Jewish Knowledge and Aryan Knowledge. She specifically says that the future will not be like the nineteenth century when science wrested the crown from the Jews.
This is apparently not the first such crisis of the Jewish mind. A site called Jewniverse published a short piece credited to Daniel M. Bronstein on 7/19/13. I reproduce it here in full:
Quote:
Talmudic lore offers many episodes of rabbinic sages intellectually defeating the luminaries of the Hellenistic world. Far less common are instances of rabbis dismembering their pagan nemeses. So 2nd-century Rabbi Joshua Ben Hananiah really stands apart.
Acting on Roman Emperor Hadrian’s dare to abduct Athens’ top philosophers, Ben Hananiah traveled all the way to the celebrated city-state and coerced a local into revealing the secret location of the philosophical academy.
Upon reaching the heavily defended abode, the esteemed rabbi tricked the academy’s elders into killing the guards.
In a match of wits, Ben Hananiah demonstrated his intellectual superiority while exposing the vapidity of Greek wisdom. After kidnapping 60 of Athen’s best, he brought the scholars before Hadrian, who placed their fate in the sage’s hands.
Using what can only be called magic, Ben Hananiah caused the philosophers’ shoulders to be violently wrenched from their bodies. All of them were killed. Other sages, like Hillel the Elder, have been praised for almost superhuman patience. But Ben Hananiah’s actions present another view of the sages: as people who were extraordinary, but flawed.
Unquote.
Of course Plato’s academy had neither a secret location nor was it heavily guarded but it makes a good story that flatters Jewish sensibilities, apparently of a highly bloodthirsty order. Thank god he didn’t pull Moses, trick and send ten plagues on the poor nitwit, stupid Platonic academicians. How Barbara Spectre is going to replicate Rabbi Hananiah remains to be seen. Let’s hope she doesn’t operate in the same realm of fantasy as the good rabbi.
Just as Moses through Yahweh destroyed Pharaoh, as Rabbi Hananiah demolished the hated Platonic Academy so Freud had calculated the destruction of nineteenth century Aryan science.
Nineteen-sixty was the critical year. Western American society reached its apex in that year, but the demands of the scientific attitude exceeded the ability of the body politic to rise to it. The people slipped back to a pre-scientific mentality. Whether we saw it or not the crash of Western society that resulted in the Manson murders and the Rolling Stones at Altamont began in 1960. Actually the much celebrated Woodstock concert of ‘69 was evidence of the intellectual retreat also, a premonition of Altamont.
By 1960 TV had reached a certain level of maturity. During the fifties when programming was developing most locales had only one or two networks while there was some concern TV wouldn’t make it commercially. By 1960 the three networks and independent system was in place. The sitcom and drama setup was well organized. Hollywood had learned the Freudian formula of using the medium for indoctrination and conditioning.
The fifties had been the great creative period for science fiction both in literature and movies. This whole body of outstanding material was now mined by TV. Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone successfully invaded the minds of millions while the gold standard was probably Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek. Both producers were Jewish.
It is impossible now to recount the propaganda, indoctrination and conditioning of the many, many series and thousands of episodes representing tens of thousands of hours of viewing that made war on established beliefs gradually weaning the multitudes from old mores to new. Mostly the old mores with different content much as new religions build their religious edifices on the old religion’s sites.
The new religion was Saturnic or in another word, Satanic and the hallmark of Satanism is violence. Few people now remember the TV series, Bus Stop, but that show was a direct assault on established beliefs and attitudes toward violence. Incredible gratuitous mindless violence for the time far surpassed today when sadistic pornographic violence with nudity or nakedness perhaps a better word, thrown in.
One of the Twilight Zone episodes was a depiction of Charles Beaumont’s short story The Howling Man, the script also written by him, in which Monks somewhere in Ruritania had captured Satan and had him safely locked in a cell where he howled incessantly all night long. A passing traveler asks for a night’s lodging. Against their own strict rules forbidding it the Monks weakened and allowed him in carefully explaining to him to pay no attention to the howling man in the cell. No good deed shall go unpunished. The traveler naturally listens to the Howling Man’s pleas releasing him. Satan laughing maniacally shouts Fool and rushes out the door.
Beaumont had divined the situation and put it into symbolic story form. In the TV episode the sorry Fool spends his life searching for Satan to put him back in his cell.
It is prescient that Beaumont wrote the story in 1959. By 1966 Ira Levin would develop the theme further when he wrote Rosemary’s Baby about the birth of the son of Satan who replaced Jesus that was made into a very influential movie a year later by that evil presence Roman Polanski. We’ll get to that.
As is well known Sigmund Freud was a cokehead, a drug addict. He well knew the deleterious effect of drugs on the mind and morality. Dreams may be the royal road to the unconscious but drugs are the destroyer of morality. The Unconscious corrupted by drugs is the end of all law and order.
As Freud, the old cokehead, said there are no coincidences so it follows that the drug explosion of the Sixties is the effect of a premeditated cause. After all, Arnold Rothstein, a Jew, did organize the drug distribution network of the US in the 1920s. It can also be no coincidence then that Dr. Feelgood, Max Jacobson, latched onto amphetamines as the great corrupter of society. Jacobson also claims to have conferred with Freud in Vienna. Getting underway in the US in post-war NYC in the forties, by 1960 Max was dispensing amphetamines by the gallon. Imitators sprang up who poured their own gallons of amphetamine into the veins of New Yorkers. This is fact, now it should come as no surprise then that by 1966 NYC was overrun by criminal behavior, that seemed to explode in that year. Or shall we say lack of morality caused by drugs. In essence New Yorkers could no longer tell right from wrong. Satanism ruled. It should be needless to add that Dr. Feelgood was a Jew. There were many factors causing the erosion of morality in the Sixties not all pertaining to religious developments that are our interest here.
The rise of science caused the intellectual disenfranchisement of all religions but more particularly within the Aryan ranks in which science developed, hence Aryan’s became disenchanted with Christianity while Jews and Moslems reinforced their belief systems against science.
Aided and abetted by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity the notion of moral equivalence took hold. This was, one might say, cemented by the movie Mondo Cane of 1962. While moral equivalence should have applied to all religions or moral systems it was turned exclusively against Aryan belief systems. Movies and advertising reflected the animus against Christianity, Aryans and what Negroes called White Supremacy, that is, White rule and knowledge- science or in Negro terms, Acting White.
With all systems supposedly equal or morally equivalent while consciousness, that is objectivity was suppressed in favor of complete subjectivity or the Unconscious was endorsed, it became an easy matter to inject voodoo, witch craft and Satanism into Aryan belief systems. Now, the transition to a satanic sensitivity was fully supported by movies and advertising as well as print media. In 1966 the cover of Time Magazine proclaimed the message ‘God IS Dead’ in black. To the informed that was not a revelation as old gods do die while history is littered with the remains of old gods as epitomized by Shelley’s Ode to Ozymandias. To the religious Time’s announcement was a huge blasphemy but then, the jury was still out concerning on which side the Luce’s were.
As if in celebration of the Luce’s announcement the Jew Ira Levin published his novel Rosemary’s Baby that concerns the birth of the Son of Satan although definitely by maculate means. The novel was a commercial success bringing the little Satan Roman Polanski on the scene who turned the novel into his equally successful movie in the year of revolution, 1968.
The impact of Polanski’s movie was quite extraordinary. Certainly in the aftermath of the movie Satanism had been, one might say, popularized. Of course Levin and Polanski didn’t create modern Satanism but they contributed to its manifestation. The voo doo Saturnian cult had taken root on the East Coast being prominent in NYC. Santeria as well all the Negro voodoo cults in the New World, of course, derived from Yoruba practices in Nigeria. The Yoruba people combined aspects of Christianity with their own Yoruba beliefs themselves derived from Greco-Roman religious practices to create a very hybrid religion based completely in magic which through slavery passed into the New World.
Scientology, created by Ron Hubbard, one of those called UFO religions, in the forties somehow gets mixed up in this. Certain disaffected members established their own church in England in ‘63 called the Process Church of the Final Judgment. This outfit tried to combine Satan, Lucifer and Jesus into one religion. No science involved here. Charles Manson at the end of the decade would be influenced by both Scientology and the Process.
The idea was that Jesus said, Love your enemy. Satan was the enemy of Jesus so Jesus was compelled to love Satan. So the two along with Lucifer combined to share humanity so that virtue and evil were morally equal bringing in relativism, so right and wrong are irrelevant because what one calls right another calls wrong and vice versa. So the law was that ‘it’s all good.’ Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Everything is permitted. A recipe for disaster no doubt. A state of social confusion had been created, almost a state of sustained hysteria.
After 1966 LSD became significant reifying whatever beliefs one had into stone. The fact is that nothing can be gotten out of a mind other than what is in it. Education is everything. To really expand one’s consciousness one has to develop it. With drugs learning stops, especially with LSD. If anything one only reifies one’s existing opinions. One may think one is talking to God but notice that God isn’t saying anything back. You’re only having a dialogue with yourself. You don’t need LSD to do that.
A biker by the name of John Griggs dropped a tab, saw God, changed his ways and began his own religion based on LSD called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Begun in the LA coastal town of Laguna Beach the cult, or more aptly perhaps, commercial enterprise expanded up and down California and into Oregon where it was especially prominent in Josephine County of Southern Oregon. It is said the BEL dominated or controlled the marijuana, hash and LSD supply of the West Coast but rather strangely none of the authors concerning themselves with the Process Church or Manson’s Family have heard of it. These authors seem to think that the Process had a monopoly on that drug trade although dealing with biker groups. Perhaps the role of the biker BEL wasn’t apparent to them. All three ‘religious’ groups mentioned above were seriously involved in drugs and hence lead a Freudian unconscious life.
The Process Church founded by Robert and Maryanne DeGrimston in London in 1963 as an offshoot of Scientology soon moved to the sinister sounding site of Xtul on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. There its Satanic, Luciferian and Jesusite form took shape. As one can see, under the influence of Freudian psychology and the rejection of the conscious mind science had been discarded while consciousness has regressed some thousand years more or in some cases less. Magic and superstition have once again taken center stage. Behind the magic cults lay the teaching of one Aleister Crowley of the Golden Dawn and the infamous OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis) with its emphasis on sex magic(k). The K Crowley added to distinguish his magick from stage magic. May not look like much of a distinction but it is significant.
So, in 1967 we have Charles Manson being released from prison just as the Hippie thing with its legions of underage runaway girls took shape in the Haight-Ashbury district of the city of San Francisco. The Haight was a hustler’s paradise and Manson was the man to mine that particular mountain.
More than anything the Hippie phenomenon was a symptom of the rejection of science, or objectivity and the conscious mind in favor of superstition, subjectivity and the unconscious mind of Freud. In connection with Freud it should be remembered that the motto of his 1900 book The Interpretation Of Dreams in his Latin quotation from Dante’s Inferno was Flectere si nequeo Superos, Acheronta movebo which translated means: If I cannot move heaven, I will stir up the underworld.
Freud had failed at the conscious level of science, which he attributed to anti-Semitism, so when he became aware of the unconscious through Breuer and Charcot he had found his underworld. But that hell was part and parcel of his upbringing as Judaism is pure subjectivity hence rampant egoism capable only of creating a hell on Earth- hence Hollywood.
The Unconscious in Freud’s vision was the source of Satanic magic. Hence it can be little wondered that at the very least per the Process Church the world was shared by Jesus and Satan with the Jesusites compelled to love their enemies and presumably turn the other cheek which is to say that Satan Rules. In his own way the great Satanist Aleister Crowley had won the battle sharing the triumph with Freud.
By the way, the Process Trinity mirrors Greek mythology in which Zeus is the god of Heaven, Poseidon the God of the waters and Hades the god of the underworld. Earth was the common property of all three. So the Process reflects old age beliefs.
Because of the horrific nature of his Satanic practices all the attention has been focused on Charles Manson who identified himself as both Jesus and Satan. Half or better of the biker groups derived their identity from Satan- Hell’s Angels, Straight Satans, Satan’s Disciples, etc.
In point of fact Manson was not doing anything his betters , i.e. Roman Polanski et al., weren’t. The whole of Hollywood film was involved in Satanic practices. Nor were Satanic practices new to the LA basin. All of this cult stuff, snuffings and all was common knowledge in the fifties when I was there in the Navy. I have no doubt it dated back through the forties and thirties. Read Raymond Chandler and let your imagination go. Watch the movies closely.
Manson said the reasons for the Tate-La Bianca killings were not what was thought but that he was no snitch. It also means likely that these unknown forces were doing their best to help him once arrested as evidence disappeared, police bungled the process so that Manson and the Family might have beaten the rap except for the persistence of Bugliosi.
Manson appears to have been associated with the Polanski clique involving a large selection of A-list Hollywood. They were involved in drug related Sado-masochistic practices and filmed themselves doing them. Not surprisingly Manson was doing the same with his group. Perhaps under the influence of hallucinogenics the significance of a filmic trail didn’t seem so important. In any event the police confiscated hours of Sado-masochistic films from the Polanski residence. Not unusually these have disappeared although they were offered for sale by the police.
In addition there were huge dope deals on the table that if Polanski wasn’t involved in he was well aware of. His close friend Frykowski, a Pole from Red Poland, was involved in a scheme to distribute the amphetamine MDA and that would have been through the Polanski residence. Shortly before the murders a dealer accused of burning them in a dope deal was brought to the residence where in the course of a large party he was strung up and tortured.
A few days later when Polanski was out of town Manson instructed his devotees to strike. The result was horrific. While it is said that the dope dealer Frykowski was the actual target it was the horrific death of Polanski’s pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, that garnered the headlines.
We have an interesting thing happening here that seems to have gone unnoticed. It was a transition of consciousness that affected every member of society though few actively participated. As an example to illustrate what was happening from 1967 through 1969 I quote from an online publication by an anonymous author concerning the transition from the Weimar Republic to the Nazi Government of Germany. ( hppt://thespawnofthesphinx.com ) chap.17, p. 4:
Quote:
In his book, “In The Garden Of The Beast”, Erik Larson relates first hand accounts of what it was like to be an outsider (in particular the American Ambassador and his daughter) observing Hitler’s rise from Chancellor to tyrant in 1933. It was during that year that Germany became absolutely transformed. “It was like watching a dear friend go insane.” as one outside observer put it. After the great transition and assimilation, German’s collective mind was “coordinated.”
Larson quoted:
“Beneath the surface, however, Germany had undergone a rapid and sweeping revolution that reached deep into the fabric of daily life. It had occurred quietly and largely out of easy view. At the core was a government campaign called Gleichshaltung- meaning ‘Coordination’- to bring citizens, government ministries, universities, and cultural and social institutions in line with National Socialist beliefs and attitudes.
‘Coordination’ occurred with astonishing speed, even in sectors of life not directly targeted by specific laws, as Germans willingly placed themselves under the sway of Nazi rule, a phenomenon that became known as Selbstgleichschaltung, or ‘self-coordination.’ Change came to Germany so quickly and across such a wide front that German citizens who left the country for business or travel returned to find everything around them altered, as if they were characters in a horror movie who come back to find that people who once were their friends, clients, patients, and customers have become different in ways hard to discern. Gerda Laufer, a socialist wrote that she felt ‘deeply shaken that people whom one regarded as friends, who were known for a long time, from one hour to the next transformed themselves.”
Unquote, unquote.
The same thing happened in the US in the fifties as Jack Finney recorded in his Body Snatchers, is happening again here at the end of the sixties and is happening now as Obama/Hitler transforms the Aryan mind. We now have a call for a ‘meaningful dialogue’ on race which means ‘accept our views or be punished.’ There is no dialogue just an order from headquarters.
On a longer wave than Germany one entered the fun house in 1960 and through a bizarre series of dioramas one exited into an entirely different world in 1970. On the shorter wave the rapid transition took place from 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby to the Rolling Stones fiasco at Altamont in December 1969 which had been scheduled for December 7, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, but was delayed by a day to December 8th.
As Dylan sang, there was something happening here but few if any knew what it was. There was no way for anyone to gain sufficient facts to interpret the whole but those with certain roles observing specific parts knew what to do.
Thus the public had no idea what Manson was doing before or after the Tate-La Bianca killings. The killings themselves obscured everything. Manson based his attitudes on Robert Heinlein’s novel of 1961 Stranger In A Strange Land. Stranger was one of the formative novels of the 60s fitting right in with the psychedelic revolution even though Heinlein had a forties-fifties mentality while adding numerous terms to the vocabulary such as ‘grokking’ and ‘water brother’.
One can imagine Manson reading it in his cell. Then when he was released actually being a stranger in the very strange land of Haight-Ashbury. At the same time he realized it was a parallel universe designed with him in mind. He combined aspects of the two lead characters, the human Valentine Michael Smith raised on Mars and his terrestrial guru Jubal Harshaw. Jubal means father of all, a role Manson assumed. He also named his son Valentine Michael. Smith transformed terrestrial culture as so in his way did Manson.
While on Mars Smith learned the Martian method of mind and body control which Manson adopted and extended to his disciples. After the killings Manson began living out some desert fantasy in Death Valley. It was there he really overstepped the bounds bringing the Park Department down on his head which then led to his charge of the murders, but it’s the desert adventure that interests us here. While the vast majority was unaware of the Death Valley escapade detailed in Ed Sanders, The Family, (make sure you read the first edition) Mansonites saw and learned. In the desert Manson nearly created his own country living by his own laws. Unfortunately his prison mentality kept him from grasping his full opportunity . He was too much the outlaw.
While I didn’t realize it at the time his influence spread up the coast to Eugene, Oregon where I was living at the time. Those were rough and rowdy times. There were many crimes, frequently using shotguns. An especially outlaw area was called Fall Creek. At one time a truck with a light rack pulled up before a camp site turning the light rack on the campers from the road. They stood like deer staring into the lights. The occupants turned rifles on the campers man, woman and children and mowed them down.
As far as I know the police chose not to apprehend them. It would have been easy. A brown pick up with a light rack in a small town? I knew the truck while finding a brown pick up with a light rack should have been easy. Couldn’t have been more than one in the county.
I was lured out to the area once with my wife by a couple posing as friends. All of a sudden at eleven o’clock at night they shooed us out of their house. As one neared the highway a narrow stone bridge crossed Fall Creek, almost a ditch at that point. As we approached a guy came up from under the bridge, stood in the middle of the roadway waving his arms. I wasn’t going to stop and there was room to drive around him. No sooner had I crossed the bridge than another guy came up from under it bearing an automatic with what looked like a silencer on it. Both began calling me names. So, I at least, would have been murdered on the spot.
As a footnote Diane Downs of the famous murder case in the same area said she was stopped by a guy waving his arms in the middle of the road. She was disbelieved subsequently spending her life in prison. I know she was stopped and I believe her story. What the DA’s problem with her was I don’t know but she was sure railroaded.
The revolutionaries flooded into the hills above Fall Creek building concrete bunkers a la Manson that they stocked with food and weapons in preparation for the Day. Strange robberies and shootings happened fairly frequently. There were Manson cultists around for several years. They may still be there, or here, actually, but I no longer have reason to be in contact with them.
Of course, Manson combined Heinlein with the various Satanic cults, the writer of the Spawn Of The Sphinx calls them UFO cults, to create his unique mixture.
Manson has taken the rap for what was going on but as I have indicated Polanski and a large part of Hollywood were as deeply connected to Satanism as he was. Remember actually billions of tablets of prescription amphetamines and barbiturates were being sold annually in addition to the hundreds of millions of hits of illegal LSD, marijuana and God only knows what. Frykowski was negotiating to become a large distributor of the amphetamine MDA.
Drugs were not solely a Hippie phenomenon; drugs were endemic.
Polanski, who can possibly be seen as a successful Manson, continued his nefarious career being arrested in 1977 on charges of child porn or statutory rape. While it is said that the girl’s mother rented her out for the purpose the charge was still statutory rape. Remember Manson said that the Tate-La Bianca victims were into kiddie porn. Polanski believing he would be sentenced to hard time, possibly even being in the same prison as Manson, who knows, took it on the lam. Today he is a fugitive from justice living in Europe where he has powerful protection. Still makes movies though.
The Manson trial was docked in December being very much in the news at the time of Altamont, as was the Zodiac killer, so there was a certain atmosphere surrounding the concert.
The last half of ‘69 was in some ways the apex of Aryan consciousness while at the same time its nadir. Even as powerful rockets were propelling a manned vehicle to land on the moon carrying an astronaut to leave a footprint three inches deep in the lunar dust the unconscious was burying the conscious mind on Earth. A giant step forward for mankind on the moon while a two thousand year regression on Earth.
Almost simultaneously as the lunar module blasted down on the moon a half million of what used to be the hope for America’s future gathered in a muddy field in New York to show a level of culture not seen since the Anabaptists four hundred years ago.
While my generation celebrates Woodstock as the high point of Sixties culture I can see it only as an embarrassment. Not wishing to go into detail I will only mention one thing. Columbia Records released an album call Beautiful People, an ironic insult to the Woodstock Nation as Hippies called themselves in mockery of the Jetset beautiful people. But, if you look at the album cover closely, in the upper lower quadrant you will see some guy standing up haveing sexual intercourse with a sheep. Beastiality as well as NAMBLA maybe endorsed by some but damned if I’ll join in.
I know I’d never be forgiven for saying so but I consider Woodstock to be the penultimate nadir of the Sixties. The nadir was, of course, Altamont, Satan’s triumph.
While the Rolling Stones, under whose auspices the event occurred refused to take responsibility for it, the Stones were as responsible as Levin, Polanski, the Process Church and Manson for the rise of Satanism.
The Manson trial was about to commence. Manson to a large extent incorporated Rock into his philosophy although basing his notions more on the Beatles Double Album than the Stones. Also bear in mind that Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land was his bedrock. One could only hope that he had been captivated by the bible of evildoers, The Catcher In The Rye.
The character of society changed greatly after 1968 almost like Nazi Germany. Sixty-eight was the year of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the horrors of which in China are still unlearnt in Europe and the US. The Cultural Revolution was global. Sixty-eight was the year of Mao’s Little Red Book and his red and gold portrait pins. Sixty-eight was the year SDS exploded and the formation of the idiot Bomber Billy Ayers’ Weathermen organization as well as the Jewish Defense League, its offshoot The Jewish Defense Organization and the criminal activities of Rabbi Meyer Kahane. Over the period of a couple years there were thousands of bombings in US cities. So many that very few were ever publicized.
While the Tate-La Bianca killings dominated the headlines organizations like the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the Black Panthers and numerous cults such as The Process Church were stirring up the folk. One was practically dizzy. In action at the same time as Manson the Zodiac killingts of the Bay Area where Altamont would be held were going on. There was just way way too much for people to absorb or begin to understand. As most people were busy trying to live their lives all this crazy activity had remarkably little effect. It was just ‘news.’
Apropos of Altamont the Stones were relatively heavily involved in Sastanic matters, that, if I am right came to a head at Altamont.
Marianne Faithfull and Jagger had been familiar with Satanism before the Redlands bust. Anita Pallenberg, formerly with Brian Jones and then Keith Richards, was deep into Satanism. At one time she had Brian and herself dress in Nazi uniforms. The Nazis were a fascination of the Process Church so rather than being an innocent lark she may have been showing the Church she was in a position to influence the Stones. Indeed, they were in awe of her.
Through the art dealer and man about Hippiedom, Robert Fraser, Marianne and Jagger had met the arch American free lance Satanist Kenneth Anger, with whom they were deeply involved, and who was associated with the arech US Satanist, Anton La Vey. La Vey would play Satan in Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. That would imply that Polanski was involved in Satanism leading back to the Tate-La Bianca killings.
Post Redlands, Mick was thrown into a frenzy of hatred of society probably having thought he was a notch or two above the law immune to arrest. Indeed he thought the enforcement of the law against him was a violation of his ‘freedom.’ Marianne had been a bit of an innocent, too naïve for her own good. Mick now enraged turned to Satanism posing as Satan himself in his song Sympathy For The Devil of 1968. He allowed the Stones to be featured in Jean Luc Godard’s bizarre revolutionary movie titled One+One subsequently changed to the title of Jagger’s song. Marianne would let herself be exploited in a couple of French films while becoming involved with the Process Church itself while starring in a Satanic film of Anger’s.
It is said now that Satanism was a minor flirtation on their parts but the indications are that the involvement was much deeper and more serious, especially on the part of Marianne that was reflected in her persona and activities in the first two years of her parting with Jagger.
It was perhaps the Process that alerted Marianne to the publication of a Soviet Satanic novel The Master And Margarita published in early 1968. The novel has since attained a high cult status in the US and GB while becoming an industry in the former USSR. A number of films of the novel have been produced in Europe. A much overrated literary effort, in my opinion but a key Satanic document.
Marianne pressed Jagger to read the novel as he was about to begin production of Donald Cammel’s movie Performance, also a Satanic film, shot in the summer of ‘68, that revolutionary year. The movie would not be released until 1971 so has no effect on the period.
Whether or not Jagger or Marianne took their Satanism as more than a hallucinogenic lark the effect of their Satanism on their fan base was intense. Jagger was viewed as the Great Satan or, at least, a wannabe.
So the aura surrounding Altamont was imbued with Satanism. Haight-Ashbury was Satanic. Satanic was.
The Altamont was an almost perfect Satanic location. The Altamont is a pass over the hills surrounding the East side of the San Francisco Bay, the East Bay. To the North of the pass lies Contra Costa County; to the East is Stockton, Sacramento, Modesto, and the Central Valley. To the South are barren hillsides, desert for miles all the way to San Jose and beyond.
The pass is only a thousand feet but very windy while when the pacific fog comes in at night cold and dewy. Today, they’ve covered the area with wind turbines, must be more spooky than ever at night.
When I was in the Navy in the late fifties I used to hitchhike back and forth from San Diego and Oakland every weekend. I would have a friend drop me off at the thousand foot level to begin the return trip. Gloomy place but a quick place to pick up perhaps a very decent ride. The demolition derby grounds were off on the right side going down, maybe at 900 feet. Real desert.
So, through a series of misadventures, given only a couple days to set up this site straight out of hell, cold enough to freeze a witch’s tit the Stones held a free concert. There was no parking, cars strung out along the side of Highway 40 for miles.
Everything was jerry built. The stage was so low and surrounded by so many Hell’s Angels that few could even see the stage in the dark. The sound was terrible. Out into the darkness stretched a couple hundred thousand drugged shivering people. I mean it gets cold and damp there any time of the year and this was December.
So, picture the symbolism. The chief Droog, the Great Satan himself is going to take the stage surrounded by Hell’s Angels and begin shouting out ‘Let me introduce myself…’ OK. Hello, Satan.
Well, now. Jagger and the Stones had been positioned as the bad boys of rock n’ roll by their first manager, Andrew Loog Oldham back in ‘64. Their reputation kept getting worse and now they have improved this rep to being the house band of Hell, Satan’s own rock n’ rollers. Huzzah! ‘I’m a man of wealth and taste…’
There’s a Negro in a green suit who has pushed himself stage side, right behind the not so straight Satans, the Hell’s Angels. I mean, these guys had a worse reputation in the Bay Area than Satan himself. They used to have their club house just down the street from me. We will never know the Negro’s motives but he does have something on his mind and he has a pistol in his pocket. Are we looking for trouble, do you think? He’s apparently been waiting for the moment Jagger opens his mouth to introduce himself. Jagger begins belting it out and at that moment Meredith Hunter, for that is the Negro’s name, whips out his pistol. Waving it in the air he begins a charge through the Hell’s Angels for the stage. There’s a few Angels between himself and Mick who cut short Meredith’s pilgrim’s progress.
No one can say for certain that he didn’t want to put a bullet between the Great Satan’s eyes but I am positive his intent was not to take out six Hell’s Angels and then run like hell. I’m not a gambling man but I would wager on that.
The Angels were cranked out on drugs, pot, LSD, crank or something while getting high on being tapped for the very important function of furnishing security for The Greatest Rock And Roll Band On The Entire Planet and, perhaps.- the Universe.
Wham! Bang! Oh God! Meredith today rests for all eternity on the Altamont or for however long it takes Time to wear down those hills to sea level. If not Meredith, then his shade.
As Jagger made a dash for the helicopter somewhat reminiscent of the last evacuees from Saigon he was heard to mutter, ‘Something weird always happens when we play that song. Could have a clue, Mick. A Clockwork Orange wasn’t released for another couple years but that was the popular impression of you up on the screen, Mick. Bad boy, bad boy, the bad boy of rock n’ roll.
Nor did Jagger abandon the persona after that disastrous experience. He developed his ambi-sexual persona further appearing on stage as a sadistic agitator lashing the stage with his studded belt. The Chief Droog.
Thus by the end of the sixties the suppression of the conscious rational mind had been accomplished in favor of the vision of the unconscious as a satanic separate being whose external control of the individual was irresistible. Sex and drugs were used to place a generation beyond redemption.
In support of sex and drugs, TV and movies pounded out the message that rage and violence were the proper responses to one’s inability to realize one’s fantasies.
While some may pooh pooh the advancing Satanism of the Sixties and on to the present time TV and movies did advance the agenda into the present. As incredible as it would have been to a person of the fifties when the mention of leg for lower limb was still frowned upon, copulation, not simulated even, but actual, is shown commonly on TV and in movies. Murder as an occupation or even pastime has openly been promoted on TV shows such as Dexter that celebrates a serial killer and portrays him sympathetically, even as a hero to emulate.
In the series Breaking Bad a mild mannered high school chemistry teacher gets into manufacturing meth and slowly turn into a Death Dealer not unlike Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The Dexter TV series is a very special case as it seem to have been designed around the philosophy of the Process Church and that of Manson.
Dexter develops around the career of serial killer, a Death Dealer in the Process term. It is nothing less than a series of snuff films recording many, many ritual killings. The ritual theme is highly developed. The ritualistic aspects are quite startling while many of the settings are quite Satanic.
The question of incest is raised as Dexter and his sister are quite close and as the series develops they become romantically in love. Then Dexter involves Deb, the sister, in his ritual killings. This cause a moral conflict in her character against her love for her brother. After an attempt to resolve the conflict by an attempted suicide and killing of Dexter by driving the car they are riding in off the road into a lake. She is rescued by a convenient observer then goes back to save her brother.
Both are under the care of a female psychologist who his fully aware of Dexter’s career because she analyzed Dexter’s father who had trained his son but then committed suicide when Dexter’s avidity for the kill disappointed him. The series is really astonishing. The psychologist is then converted into an accomplice of Dexter.
In a touching scene reminiscent of the Egyptian statue of Isis beholding her son as the father stands behind her throne, one watches as the sister/wife psychologically accepts the role of serial killer, justifying it in her mind, very well acted, now Dexter’s full accomplice. The psychologists nods her assent as Deb wonderingly says: The family that kills together stays together.
Thus the whole philosophy for which Manson has spent his life in prison is legitimized for public emulation. Charles Manson told his Family: You can’t kill kill. And there on your television screen in an incredible reversal of morality in the short space of 60 years from 1960 to the present you have the rejection of God for Satan. If in the Sixties only 2% of the population according to Scientology could be cold blooded killers the entire population of the United States, potentially, has been indoctrinated and conditioned to kill. It only remains for Dexter, his sister and their psychologist to become cannibals.
Thus, through the efforts of Time Magazine, Ira Levin, Roman Polanski, The Process Church and numerous other Satanic cults aided by the Sado-masochists of Hollywood Satanism has slowly displaced Godliness. Satan has murdered Jesus. The unconscious of Freud has displaced the conscious mind of the Aryan past.
The road to chaos has been paved. Can the momentum be stopped?
The Sixties: A Comic Book Heaven
February 17, 2013
The Sixties: A Comic Book Heaven
by
R.E. Prindle
Look Out Sixties, Here I Come
Of course, everyone is, and always has been, slightly mad. Still, repressing the unreasonable side of his nature man in the Western world has, since the eighteenth century, built a civilization based on scientific reason and classic Aristotelian logic- the heritage of the Enlightenment. And the result, especially in this country [US] during the past fifty years [article dated 1970], has been a rational society that has made one technological break through after another, from the invention of the pop-up toaster to the ability to land men on the moon. Here, until recently, two plus two had inevitably equaled four, not five, as Eastern mystics suggest, and no one other than J.D. Salinger had been able to imagine the sound of one hand clapping.
–Thomas Meehan- Horizon Magazine, Spring 1970.
Comic books were first sold in 1933-34. Thus the first two comic book generations coincide with those too young to serve in WWII while many of the first generation was obliged to serve in the Korean war while the second generation missed both.
How deeply the mind of the first generation of comic book readers was formed is problematical. Comic books didn’t take their classic form until 1938 when the character of Superman was formed. The number of comic characters proliferated during WWII but as these, i.e. Capt. America, were war specific they fell out of favor after WWII.
The first generation of potential comic book readers, those born from 1933-34 formed the substratum for the sixties when they created rock and roll and the base for 60s pop culture during the 50s. That was Presley, Sanford Clark, Cash, Vincent, Nelson et al.
Following the war those born in 1937-38 and subsequently through about 1943-44 had their minds formed by comic books although not all to the same degree. A significant percentage of them were forbidden to read comics by their parents, perhaps wisely. There were some who indulged themselves indiscriminately. I was one of those. I read them all, avidly. The question is how were we affected?
There was a terrific reaction against comic books. Angry parents fought to have them banned. In perhaps the only, certainly of a very few, successful efforts of censorship, comics were banned in 1954. The survivor, of course, was Mad Magazine published by the worst offender, William C. Gaines. All of the comic book readers plus many of those formerly excluded shifted to Mad thus further polluting our brains. While I never gave up reading the comic books till their banning I did abandon Mad for political reasons after a year or so.
Now, with the exception of Capt. Marvel, and that may only be partial, the comics were exclusively of Jewish origins. Thus we in the US, Britain was excluded, were shown the Jewish point of view without our knowing.
One of the key themes was the all male group of do-gooders. These were some of my favorites. The tops, perhaps, was the very influential Blackhawks comics. The Blackhawks were a group of five ex-WWII pilots who each owned his P-38 fighter and flew around the world, Third World mainly, if I remember correctly, righting wrongs they recognized more quickly and efficiently, that is vigilante style, than organized government could or would. I remember the Blackhawks as terrific, I loved them. The fellowship of the pilots, each with a different character, each loyal to the others was something that I and I suppose every reader wished to emulate, especially the notion of a bonded group of five like minded guys.
Another was called the Daredevil. He had a red and blue set of body tights upper right and lower left red and vice versa for the blue. Weird but that’s the way he was. Daredevil was a surrogate father figure to five orphan boys, same character makeup as the Blackhawks, who righted wrongs in their neighborhood and lived in the same clubhouse. The later musical group The Monkees was probably based on them. The Monkees were short one, being four, which lessened their impact. If they’d had that fifth member I would have been an avid fan although older by then.
The Blackhawks- Vigilante Justice At Its Best
Thus in 1954 the origins of Top 40 began on radio. Twenty four hours round the clock seven days a week full time music. An innovation created by the arrival of television. The first generation of rockers were solo artists. Some came attached with a band such as Bill Haley And The Comets or Gene Vincent And The Blue Caps who were proto-Blackhawk type groups but mainly they were solo artists with a band not a group. Presley, Sanford Clark and that curious mixture of both, Ricky Nelson.
The societal maturation process was continuing and then in the mid-sixties the Charlatans came down from the hills of Virginia City dressed in movie style cowboy outfits to home base San Francisco and the first group of costumed crusaders a la the Blackhawks burst forth in full flower.
2.
In Britain the situation was somewhat different although coeval with the US. While the US escaped devastation in WWII the South of England was bombarded mercilessly destroying millions of buildings. A good representation of the situation may be found in John Boorman’s I suppose accurate, I wasn’t there, movie, The Hope And The Glory. As Boorman, who was there, portrays it, acres and acres of rubble stretched in every direction. The kids who scavenged and roamed the area are portrayed as little savages. An interesting education for the age cohort that came of age in the fifties.
Those born in the early forties, the core of the second generation of rockers, themselves played in this same although shrinking devastation. But rations were short in hard hit Britain, restrictions were not lifted until 1954. How their psychology was impaired isn’t so clear, although in the mid-sixties a wild party time called Swinging London appeared. Gay abandon one might say.
The group situation there may have been the result of the generation’s discovery of American slave music- Rhythm And Blues. R&B as a new entry to the British music scene met with resistance so that the devotees were possibly forced to form small groups who recognized each other, many wanting to play the music so they naturally formed groups, two guitars, drums, bass and a singer.
At any rate the British invasion of the US consisted of these four and five man groups coinciding with the comic book groups of the US.
3.
Other formative influences other than comics and radio were films and TV. Those all involved a specific point of view repeated ad nauseum or lessons from a know-it-all crusader cum super hero.
Of course we all grew up with Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry among others during the forties but with the fifties came the fantastic science fiction movies. One of the most important was The Day The Earth Stood Still with its famous characters Klaatu and Gort. The premise was preposterous but no one got it. Klaatu is an alien landing a saucer in the US. He is here to vet Earthlings to see if the they are ready to enter the intergalactic community in which peace reigns. Alas, Earthlings, you and me, are hopelessly primitively addicted to violence. Klaatu boards his saucer with a sign of benediction delivering a long sermon about shaping up and saying he’ll be back if we ever sort things out. Alright.
Movie after movie repeated the same message until today people actually believe that extra-terrestrials are all peaceful and Earth is the only rogue planet in the universe. Ask anyone. Flying Saucers were portrayed as hovering out there where the communications satellites would soon be. There they carefully studied mankind for any sign of the diminution of violence. Boy, I bet they think they’ve been wasting their time. Imagine circling Earth for seventy years waiting for indications of peacefulness. Obviously they’ve been sadly disappointed while being joined by the Negro Mother Wheel that appeared some time in the seventies to keep them company Hello, Earth calling Mother Wheel.
These movies established the idea that the whole universe except for Earth is highly developed and pacific along with the idea that Earthlings are worthless, hence most people accepted as fact we were being watched by superior beings and found wanting. We were inferior.
The movies established the notion that there were millions of inhabited worlds out there inhabited by superior beings who could travel billions of light years and get to home base in time for dinner. ‘Honey, I’m home.’
Now, at the same time, pulp magazines existed. Monthly editions of Amazing Stories, Astounding Tales and others poured out endless reams of the most astonishing stuff imaginable. Thus, all three, comics, pulps and movies, sci-fi and movies were rushing through our minds, forming expectations. Of course, the number of us who read sci-fi, almost as despised by parents as the comics, was small, but then as TV developed, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone and Star Trek came along both of which mined the sci-fi stories of the fifties while spreading the notions throughout the entire population. This reduced the intellectual discrimination of the people whose minds were prepared to accept anything.
4.
The Bunny Himself
These years of the fifties were very crowded with the most exciting new developments. TV was perhaps at the top of the list. Bear in mind that cable didn’t exist. There weren’t even three channels in most places including a major market like the San Francisco Bay Area. People didn’t think TV would be profitable. The channels didn’t even broadcast until noon and shut down at ten o’clock prime time. There was no 24/7 TV.
There wasn’t even enough original programming to fill a ten hour day so they ran old movies and almost anything anyone could think up. Arthur Godfrey’s show ran for hours every day.
One of those odd things they chose to fill time was a character called Crusader Rabbit. I don’t know how well remembered the Rabbit is today but he had a profound effect in forming the minds of the 60s generation. Crusader Rabbit was a distant relative of the Blackhawks. While they flew around the world able to determine who were the good guys and who the bad, Crusader Rabbit was a self-righteous little bastard of a vigilante squad who instilled certain little minds with his self-righteousness and made them think they should impose their vision of reality on the world by mounting ‘crusades.’ Hawkeye of the later TV series Mash combined Crusader Rabbit with the Blackhawks.
Now, all this was happening in a short six years from 1950 to 1956. In many ways this was a major intellectual/psychological revolution preceding those revolutions of the sixties.
Equally, if not more important, was what was happening in the classrooms of our schools.
5.
If an astonishing variety of educations was going on outside the classrooms what was going on inside was no less astonishing. I don’t know if everyone saw it the way I did but I had a tough time assimilating what I heard. Of course American superiority and the inferiority of Europeans was standard staple. At the same time we were warned to be humble as bearers of these great gifts and to share them with our inferiors who after all couldn’t help it that they weren’t born Americans. True enough I suppose.
And, because of the success of our own American revolution, barring any negative thoughts caused by the French and Bolshevik revolutions, we were taught, indeed, indoctrinated and conditioned to believe that revolution per se was good, indeed, a blessing. Ignoring whatever may have been going on in the world we were taught to revere the South American George Washington, Simon Bolivar, who flitted from country to country on the whole continent until he came to end of it in Venezuela tossing the Spanish aside like so much chaff. Viva Bolivar, hey? Well, Viva Zapata next.
Well, I came from the orphanage and I had a different idea of right and wrong. Heroes were much scarcer for me than for the kids from normal homes.
By the time we got to high school, 1953-56, teachers were preaching revolution, revolution, revolution full bore. Revolution was everywhere. Minute changes in processed breakfast cereals were described as revolutions. Crusader Rabbit was a revo. Who wasn’t?
The reverence for revolution continued in college too. Another four years of revo, rah, rah, rah followed in college which ended for my class in 1960. Portentous year, what? That was the year our limp President, John F. Kennedy created the Peace Corps. We were eager to share our wonderful achievement so recent college graduates with absolutely no knowledge of the world and inadequate educations sallied forth to tell the world how to do it right. OK? How’s that for arrogance?
Now, there were plenty of revolutions in progress in 1960 and all those graduates from say, 1954 to 1959, were primed for revo. Lived for it, breathed it. They didn’t even have to be recruited; they went searching for it. Give us revolution, they screamed.
These were years of the magnificent march of progress too. Years of change and hope, revolutions one might say, in all areas of endeavor. The people born from 1938 to 1945 leaped in with both feet and arms flailing. The sixties belonged to us, it was a world that we would make ourselves.
The next age cohort born from ‘46-’53 would be instrumental in forming the seventies, the eighties going to the next age cohort. Of course these cohorts created nothing merely extending the ethic of the 60s’ cohort. The interesting thing is that there was a fairly complete break between us and The Greatest Generation as our fathers have been styled.
Those revolutionary minded teachers of ours were mostly born c. 1890 so they were at the tail end of the post-Civil War corps, lived through two world wars and the Great Depression. Our fathers born somewhere around 1918 caught the Depression and WWII while witnessing the Korean War. We younger ones, in the US, avoided that while TV, Top 40 and other assorted wonders made us rather distinct, nothing alike in outlook. Our fathers didn’t really like, couldn’t trust us, and certainly were not going to accord us the dignity of adulthood and the authority that goes with it. So we grew distant from them not really thinking an awful lot of them or giving them our trust. Fuck, they couldn’t even deal with the Mafia.
Politically they kept control during the sixties while culturally and socially we managed affairs. As it was a new beginning of sorts the succeeding age cohorts respected us and what may be called our achievements, sex, drugs and rock and roll, but still maintaining that sense of breakfast cereal revo.
To make the break even sharper, in 1960 the real old guard headed by Eisenhower checked out and an Irish upstart son of a bootlegger, Jack Kennedy, leader of the Celtish Camelot and a guy who could twist the night away even with a bad back, attempted to lead the way.
His best wasn’t very good and he caught a piece of flying lead allowing that pale Texan reincarnation of FDR to see how badly he could muff it. He did a good job of muffing it too.
So, there we were on the brink of 1960 raring to show the world what we could do. Really revo the whole machine? We’ll see.
6.
Charlie Whitman
Richard Speck
The psychological background of the sixties as exhibited by the second rock generation from 1938 to 1945 is a major manifestation of an effort begun back in the WWII days. It is the realization of the theologico-metaphysical notion of what Sigmund Freud dubbed the Unconscious. As the quote opening this essay indicates the sixties was the undoing of the several hundred year effort to realize the conscious. We thought we’d seen enough of the unconscious to last much more than a millennium. As the effort was begun before the awareness of the nature of the Un or subconscious the effort was achieved as Mr. Meehan states by the repression of sub-conscious motives not their elimination.
Freud quickly discerned this and he understood the function of dreams that he called the ‘royal road to the unconscious.’ Thus the motto he appended to his volume The Interpretation Of Dreams published appropriately in 1900 is ‘Flectare si nequeo, Superos, Acheronta movebo.” which translated means ‘If I cannot deflect the will of heaven I shall move hell.’
Freud interpreting the conscious mind as heaven chose to deemphasize consciousness in favor of his vision of the unconscious that he interpreted as Hell. Thus, you will find almost nothing in Freudian psychology referring to the conscious mind while he enthrones his Unconscious as the moderator of the human mind. He actually believed that the Unconscious was an agency separate from the body. In theological terms it had a supernatural existence. Thus, he has negated consciousness, or Science, in favor of Religion. As he has rejected God or Heaven then it follows that he embraced Satan and Hell.
As the sixties progressed the generation abandoned consciousness embracing unconsciousness. Time Magazine proclaimed in 1966 ‘God Is Dead’ while Satanism came alive, indeed according to Ira Levin in his novel, Rosemary’s Baby, Satan’s son, Andy, was born in 1966 just as God died. Levin continued his story in 1999’s Son Of Rosemary. Interesting.
It is no coincidence that Freud was both a druggie and a homosexual. Now, the royal road to free the mind of consciousness or Heaven is an obsession with sex and the free indulgence of drugs especially Freud’s favorite, cocaine backed with a pounding jungle beat. Eh voila- the sixties.
Sex, drugs and the hypnotic jungle beat of Rock and Roll. The sex was facilitated by the introduction of the birth control pill and anti-biotics; the amusing Shel Silverstein sang of Penicillin Penny who always had VD. If the girls took the pill both they and their boys were freed from the fear of pregnancies while the ga-ga types had no fear of Venereal disease because the cure was quick and easy by a regimen of anti-biotic pills. Almost paradise here and now and on Earth. For less than a buck you could get a nice big piece of pie too.
Freud had achieved his goal; he had overturned Aryan society.
Freud essentially by fraud allowed us to indulge forbidden appetites and responsibility from forbidden acts, for after all as the conscious mind had no authority and the will of the unconscious was unresistible we had no responsibility for our acts- If it felt good, we did it, as the mantra was. Hence by 1966 we had Richard Speck killing all those nurses in Chicago and Charlie Whitman up his clock tower at UT blowing away his fellow students. Guns aren’t the problem; Freud is the problem.
Hell, Dick and Charlie just wanted to be free. Indeed, freedom in the freest of all societies became a problem to the generation.
Sally Banks in her Greenwich Village 1963, Chapter 5, appropriately titled, Dreaming Freedom, explains her views on what being free actually meant to her and a very large part of the age cohort. She is writing from New York City.
In 1963 freedom was a vital political issue charged with artistic consequences for both the mainstream and avant-garde. Part of the avant-garde’s utopian vision was that liberty could be found within community. But, in fact, the very concept of freedom sets autonomy and the notion of individualism in conflict with the bondedness of community. For social life is a potent source of restraint [suppression of freedom], yet, paradoxically, total freedom would mean the humanly unrealizable (and unbearable) state of complete isolation. Thus there is a deep ambivalence in Western culture toward freedom and social life. The dream of community, itself, may be incompatible with the dream of freedom, a contradiction the avant-garde sought to discover.
The Sixties artists constructed an art that re-imagined daily life in terms of achieving both liberation and community. If such a situation proved illusory, in 1963 it seemed necessary- and it still seemed possible given the booming economic infrastructure- to find a model that would make these imaginings concrete.
Yes, people wanted total freedom- that is a disconnect from the reality of having to deal with unpleasant facts- free from all restraints including gravity and mostly free from themselves. The drugs seemed to serve as those releases. Under the influence people could imagine themselves as someone else who ‘really had their shit together‘, miracle men and women able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, move mountains with the wave of a hand, fly through the air like a host of angels but they inevitably came back down where if they were anywhere near a mirror they could watch their bodies disintegrate.
Freedom from reality has its price.
So, the sixties that began with such ‘High Hopes’ to realize ‘The Impossible Dream’ of Camelot began to crash in 1966 just as like a flash of lightning in the sky the realization of those dreams seemed to dawn. As Lewis Carroll said, be careful that your Snark is not a boojum, for you see….
7.
The Truth Is No Defense
The sixties, then, was when the impasse between the Scientific Method came into its latter day conflict with the Theologico-Metaphysical mindset. The T-M system is merely a mental state that not only does not require objective validation but positively rejects it in favor of subjectiveness; what Freud called inner wishful thinking.
While the sciences of sociology and anthropology and biology produced irrefutable, by logical methods, results that ran counter to the inner wishful T-M thinking, as there were no means to refute the scientific results the T-M people merely denied them and forced scientists to suppress their accurate but uncongenial truths.
To ensure that the truths were suppressed and remained suppressed the T-M partisans passed laws making it criminal to express these truths. These laws called ‘hate’ laws were then applied to any who spoke these truths. As the truths were undeniable T-M partisans corrupted the law, common sense, and, one might say, the will of God to declare in a court of law by the judges that ‘the truth is not a defense.’
The truth is not a defense! Think about it. Such a rule of law is the triumph of absolute criminality and ignorance. And this happened during the watch of an age cohort that claimed to love freedom and revolution. Well, it was a revolution, one that enslaves the mind.
Now, in a position to punish those who disagreed with them the beneficiaries of the T-M mentality were able to enshrine their will as the law of the land. As the law was no longer concerned with the judgment of facts as evidence but the religious beliefs of the T-Ms the US at that point turned into a theocracy. The religious left became an established religion running counter to the old dispensation of the Constitution in favor of something not yet codified and something not approved by the former electorate that now became passive and an ineffective annoyance to the new slave masters.
8.
The ruling social ethos in the US when the sixties dawned was the theory of the Melting Pot formulated by the Jewish writer Israel Zangwill c. 1900. According to that theory that had nearly the effect of a law all the disparate social elements forming the population of the US would fuse into one people of uniform American belief.
In 1960 or thereabouts the new theory of multi-culturalism was introduced which stated that each culture should have an autonomous existence. This was the dream, wishful thinking, of the wannabe Jewish Autonomous people. Nothing new, it was their age old dream. Thus the body politic of the US as a matter of principle was fractured into many warring cultures.
While the Melting Pot had always been a fantasy having no real existence in fact multi-culturalism was alive and real and exacerbated in 1965 when the immigration act was reformed allowing unlimited immigration to all the peoples of the world. And if they didn’t come willingly members of the T-M mentality went into the actual jungles of Africa, dragged the natives out, put them on a plane, free fare, and flew them to the US.
What can one say to such zaniness.
The whole notion of freedom advocated by the age cohort was thus negated. Dozens of laws were passed giving these ‘immigrants’ precedence over the rights of the native population, depriving the natives of equal rights. This is a true story. Incredible but true.
9.
And lastly, for this essay we come to the complete overturn of reason in favor of a comic book utopia and the installation of an age of inner wishful thinking caused by the introduction of drugs as a mass phenomenon.
Drugs in the sixties were nothing new. Drugs begin to show up in literature during the nineteenth century Romantic period. Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions Of An English Opium Eater is the first famous confession or novel on the topic. Opium was much used in Victorian England as an ingredient in Laudanum which was given to infants to make them stop crying.
Opium was further reduced to morphine and then heroin. Freud is famous as the promoter of the joys of cocaine, synthesized from the coca plant. As chemistry developed, synthetic chemical drugs such as amphetamine began making their appearance at the end of the century.
Drug labs were busy and soon creating drugs that attacked any area of the brain. LSD was discovered in 1938 and popularized after 1943. Drugs like Miltown and other tranquilizers began filling women’s purses after 1950. Pot and hash had been simmering below the Hot 100 for some time but moved up the charts after 1960. So the whole pharmacopeia was available as the decade began. New formulas would be discovered in the following decades as drugs became part of the entertainment industry.
Drugs of course suppress the conscious mind exposing the raw wiring of the user. They also lower resistance to hypnotic influence. Hypnosis is merely a heightened sensitivity to suggestion. A drugged out population can be swayed by propaganda as no other, which is merely suggestion by another name, in any direction. They can be swayed but you mist control the means to do so. The mass media was the means, namely TV, Movies and records, and it was in the control of Jews with their special agenda.
Thus Movies, TV and Records propagandized a pro Jewish revolution agenda along with its subordinate Negro revolution agenda.
It is strange how all trends worked to favor the Negro/Jewish agenda. Of course, Jews had been instrumental in breaking down Aryan resistance to Negro music. Jewish DJs such as Alan Freed and Cousin Brucie along with Jewish song writers such as the hugely influential Leiber and Stoller and Goffin-King led the assault.
The songs they wrote were performed by Negro artists. While the Jewish song writers were not so familiar with Aryan culture as is supposed it was enough to bridge the Aryan-Negro gap making the Negro performances potable while paving the way for Barry Gordy’s Motown label.
As of 1960 there was virtually no one who listened to or was familiar with Negro Blues. The Blues was
Robert Johnson
brought forward by the British Invasion who apparently listened to that crap. I am always astonished by White Blues artists citing Robert Johnson as a source. There was nothing available by Robert Johnson until 1960 when CBS released its first collection that virtually no one bought. The second collection was released in ‘62 with the same result.
I first heard of Robert Johnson in 1968 when I owned a record store. Many people talked about the Blues but when I started a first rate Blues section the records remained untouched and unsold. I doubt that I ever had a Robert Johnson sale.
I was in a university town and when such Blues artists as Lightning Hopkins were brought to town the ‘séances’ were held in someone’s living room with maybe fifteen people attending, ten of which were girls worshipping blackness. Nevertheless White Blues was popularized by the British, spreading to American performers.
I should point out that White performers of the forties and early fifties such as the Singing Cowboy Gene Autry sang many Blues based songs. Autry’s song The Yellow Rose Of Texas is of course about a Negro woman, high yellow.
By decades end the cohort’s fascination with exaggerated notions of freedom and revolution had turned into drug addiction and violence. By the late sixties looney tunes like Bomber Billy Ayers and his female side kick Bernardine Dohrn with their Weatherman organization and the Jewish Defense League and its offshoot the Jewish Defense Organization were killing and bombing at will and furthermore they would get away with it. ‘Free as a bird and guilty as Hell.’ as Bomber Billy Ayers would put it.
So by the end of decade ending with the Caped Crusader, Mick Jagger, at Altamont a comic book vision of reality had triumphed over the real thing. Who can forget Mick Jagger mounted on a giant inflatable cock on stage before sixty thousand people. Now, there was a comic book fantasy. Two and two added up to any number you wanted.
Ride ’em High Mick
A Review
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
by
R.E. Prindle
ERB The Scholar
Part 2
Lady Barbara Drops In
As always ERB is the consummate multi-culturalist both ethnic and social. Barbara is the daughter of the English Lord Whimsey, Smith is a college professor, Capietro is an Italian Communist renegade, Stabutch is a Russian Communist, the Midianites represent an ancient religious culture derived from the Jewish, Tarzan is Tarzan of Africa and Lord Passmore of England and then we have a cast of animal characters including a tribe of baboons who interact with Tarzan on the cultural level. All are represented as being culturally distinct. ERB is more of a right multi-culturalist than a left.
If a culture is in fact a culture it must be distinct or it couldn’t qualify as a culture. To be of the French culture there must be characteristics that can be identified as specifically French. Else, why call yourself French? The Left multi-culturalists need to define their terms a little better. They come across as rather shabby intellectually.
Then, of the hundreds, probably thousands of cultures, are they all to be considered equal? For instance is it considered desirable to be of the Prison culture? Pedophile culture? No, of course not; not all cultures are equally beneficial. Each culture must be analyzed on its own merits and faults, completely analyzed by objective analysts. No particular culture need be nor can be taken at its own evaluation. Obviously many cultures are to be avoided completely. Others should be isolated or quarantined. Which is which can only be determined by an analysis of its positive contributions. The results of analysis can be unkind; the truth frequently hurts. As the French say: C’est la vie.
In his analysis of group cultures ERB does draw conclusions. There’s no doubt he thinks that the Communist culture is a negative to be avoided. Thus Zveri in Invincible was ignominiously defeated by Tarzan as Stabutch will be in Triumphant.
In almost every case ERB is very hard on religious cultures as he will be in this novel. Is he unjust or is the truth about religion just too hard for devotees to bear? Everyone will have their own opinion while I have made my position abundantly clear: the religious consciousness is outdated, having been surpassed by the vastly superior Scientific Consciousness. I won’t be changing my mind soon.
Lady Barbara Collis is about to parachute into a culture two thousand years in the past. ERB commits a major gaffe here in the opening pages of his novel. Lady Barbara is attempting a non-stop flight of 7500 miles in a 1930 plane, clearly impossible. Rather than taking a direct route up the Nile she is lost several hundreds of miles to the East over Ethiopia and, get this, already running on empty.
Dorothy Sayers
I don’t know who calculated her fuel needs but I should imagine he would be looking for a new occupation. But, that doesn’t interfere with my enjoyment of the story any more than the donut atmosphere of Poloda in Beyond The Farthest Star. Who knows what goes on beyond the farthest star. They probably even suspend the laws of gravity.
There Lady Barbara is, way up there without the means of propulsion. she does the manly thing: she jumps out. This is real Twilight Zone stuff; little does she know she will leave the twentieth century and land in 80 AD or so. The Land Of Midian has been frozen in time for the last two millennia.
The Midians assembled within the walls of their crater hear the drone of the airplane, which sound they are unable to identify and then to their amazed eyes a little white cloud appears through the mist with a human form dangling below it. To their religiously distorted senses it must be the Angel of the Lord.
Thus we have a nice confrontation between two different cultures. The modern scientific of Lady Barbara and the ancient religious culture of the Midians. The Midians could stand as a metaphor of the religions of Burroughs’ day which, not unlike the Midians, were roooted in a culture two thousand years old and of a different and inferior consciousness. Not only had the Scopes trial recently ended but the sensatinal affair of Aimee Semple Mcpherson was still fairly warm, plus ERB had recently read Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry. That novel did not sit well with ERB nor does it sit well with me. Burt Lancaster’s movie Elmer Gantry, by the way, is totally dissimilar to the Gantry of the book.
According to ERBzine Burroughs took offence at Elmer Gantry, deploring Lewis’ habit of ridiculing
Aimee Semple Mcpherson
and demeaning people rather than presenting the story as entertainment. Lewis does ridicule and belittle every character in his book in a detestable holier than thou manner which is very annoying. Burroughs turns the story around and disparages practices which I suppose makes it entertainment. For instance both the fictional Gantry and the real life Mcpherson are what are known in military slang as ‘Sky Pilots.’ Thus there is a certain amount of humor in Lady Barbara as an angel of the lord sky piloting into the religious Land of Midian.
When the Midianites drown a young woman while dragooning her, Lady Barbara, after the manner of Mcpherson, brings her back to life by ‘a laying on of hands’, that is artificial respiration. Clever of ERB. It will be remembered tha Mcpherson had a roomful of crutches and wheelchairs from people she had supposedly cured by a laying on of hands. I have no idea how many readers might have gotten the joke when the novel was released but there the joke is if you care to look for it.
So we have the Scopes Trial, Aimee Semple Mcpherson and Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry all rolled up in a series of jokes ‘highly fictionized.’ There is probably more to be found if one could steep
Sinclair Lewis
oneself in the ephemeral culture of the time.
As mentioned, Lady Barbara parachutes through two thousand years of time to find herself among a Pauline Christian sect that hadn’t changed one iota since c. 80 A.D. The emphais on Pauline Christianity is important. At about this time ERB was becoming involved with the Vedantist mission in Hollywood so discussions of early Christianity may possibly have made an impression on him. Paul was, of course, a Jew who adapted the Jewish Christian sect for dissemination among the Gentiles. The Catholic Church was founded on Sts. Peter and Paul while the medieval Knights Templar based their Christianity on the Gospel of John thus being Johannites. There was a cultural divide between the Church and the Templars which did necessitate action no less than between the Paulites and the Arians. ERB’s emphasis is intended to indicate the Jewish origins of the Midianites.
It will be remembered that Angustus was a Jewish Christian who arrived in company with a Nordic slave girl. So for two thousand years the Midianites have been inbreeding. ERB is considering the results of inbreeding, as a year later he will write Pirate Blood that deals with the famously inbred Jukes family. Pirate Blood is perhaps his most despairing story as his mind tips toward Lamarckian evolution in an apparent attempt to explain to himself why he can’t resolve his psychological problems.
Thus the genetic and Lamarckian traits of Angustus and the slave girl have been passed down through approximately seventy generations. Angustus’ genes have predominated while those of the slave girl appear occasionally in sports.
Angustus was characterized by a huge nose that was an actual deformity, a chinless face and epilepsy. Thus if one imagines this, Lady Barbara is confronted by a group of people with huge noses covering most of their faces with no chins, the throat sweeping back from just under the lips and writhing on the ground in epileptic fits.
There can be no mistaking that ERB is caricaturing the Jews. Angustus was a Jew and he was a Pauline Christian. As a Christian, ERB disguises his Jewish nationality. The leader of hte Midianites, Abraham the son of Abraham certainly puts the Midianites into a Jewish context, as does the fact that they consider themselves the ‘chosen people.’ Ludicrous enough from their physical description.
ERB’s caricature is one that was prevalent when he was a young man, while one that couldn’t be missed by the gentlemen of the ADL/AJC and MGM. They would neither forgive nor forget. In fact Tarzan would be potrayed in The New Adventures Of Tarzan as chinless and with a huge nose. While Herman Brix/Bruce Bennet had neither a bulbous nose nor was chinless the effect was achieved through photographic lighting and shadowing. Either that or the film has deteriorated through time to achieve that effect. (DVD, The New Adventures Of Tarzan, Alpha Home Entertainment, www.oldies.com )
If you think there isn’t a war going on here, look more closely.
Even though of Jewish descent, the Midianites are Christians, but of the most primitive stripe; they make sects like the Nazarenes look liberal. Their minds are uncompromisingly dark. The girl who was dragooned was sentenced to death for smiling. Joy was considered of the devil in Midian. Here ERB characterized a number of Christian sects correctly.
Among the people who greeted Lady Barbara was a genetic sport who harked back physically and mentally to the original slave girl. She is Jezebel. She and Lady Barbara are immediately attracted to each other by their beauty. The attractive and intelligent Midianites were invariably fair haired and blue eyed while the unattractive ones were dark haired, brown eyed and stupid. Little doubt that the AJC/ADL would consider the book ‘racist.’
Jezebel is an interesting character in that she is a little more than light headed. She is governed entirely by surface appearances. As in Lion Man where the hybrids were expelled from Henry’s village, so the more attractive males were exiled to the other side of the crater. Obviously we have an example of eugenics here. They were more warlike than the Midianites occasionally raiding them. Jezebel remarks that they are so good looking she hopes they will capture her. When the Midianites honor ‘the angel’ with her own cave and offering of food, Jezebel is depicted laying back eating grapes like a spoiled young thing with a box of bon-bons. ERB later describes her as a Golden Girl which relates her to Balza of Lion Man and hence to Florence.
Whatever ERB tells himself about Florence in his conscious mind his depiction of her in his unconscious life seems to be quite different.
At first Lady Barbara is treated quite well but familiarity breeds contempt. Abraham Ben Abraham begins to suspect her divinity. Even the miracle of the laying on of hands that restored the girl to life being no less a miracle than the raising of Lazarus cannot dissuade Abe Ben Abe from testing Lady Barbara. Thus she too is dragooned but instead of being dunked three times she is thrown into the lake wrapped in a net with the net weighted. Here is proof positive that ERB read Dumas’ The Count Of Monte Cristo. The scene replicated Dantes being thrown into the sea from the Chateau d’If.
Lady Barbara has her handy jackknife so that she is able to cut her way free. Thus we leave her here crawling gaspingly ashore while we check in on Lafayette Smith and Danny ‘Gunner’ Patrick.
The Big Bwana
A Review: Beyond The Farthest Star by Edgar Rice Burroughs
February 26, 2010
A Review
Beyond The Farthest Star
by
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Review by R.E. Prindle
There’s a kind of a hush all over the world.
Sadness all over again. The agony of another world war. Tears and sorrow. One would say that it was with a weary pen that ERB wrote the tale of dreary events to come were it not for the fact that he claimed that the story was transmitted across the eons from the farthest star as his typewriter keys began mysteriously clacking by themselves. One almost believes him as the story was completed in only eleven days from 10/24 to 11/05 in 1940.
It must have been with some fear and trepidation that his generation faced the horrifying repeat of 1914-18 in 1940. In that earlier conflict ERB expressed his thoughts in an equally short novel titled Beyond Thirty. As a result of the Great War he forecast an abandoned England, a Europe invaded by Africa and turned Negroid, an Eastern empire ruled by a beneficent China and the New World of North and South America governed benignly and peaceably by the United States.
Faced with the grim reality of possible total destruction from the air he now drew a much more dismal picture. His old rival H.G. Wells in The Shape Of Things To Come was even more desolated. Burroughs’ agent of destruction was accurately projected. It was the great air fleets of, as it turned out, B-29 bombers that flattened whatever they flew over.
“Planes!” said Yamoda’s mother bitterly, “Planes! The curse of the world. History tells us that when they were first perfected and men first flew in the air over Poloda, there was great rejoicing, and the men who perfected them were heaped with honors. They were to bring the peoples of the world closer together. They were to break down international barriers of fear and suspicion. They were to revolutionize society by bringing all people together, to make a better and happier world in which to live. Through them civilization was to be advanced hundreds of years; and what have they done? They have blasted civilization from nine tenths of Poloda and stopped its advance in the other tenth. They have destroyed a hundred thousand cities and millions of people, and they have driven those who have survived underground, to live the lives of burrowing rodents. Planes! The curse of all times, I hate them. They have taken thirteen of my sons and now they have taken my daughter.
So ERB projects a view of planes and that was before the B-2 bomber was constructed or the A-bomb perfected. At that dim far off time at the beginning of the twentieth century when the Wrights flew the first heavier than air craft the hope was that it would eliminate war but now forty years later after a rapid series of improvements the airplane was the ultimate weapon of destruction. Of course both Burroughs and Wells had foreseen such a development. Burroughs in his great Martian air fleets and Wells in his sky darkening flotillas in The War In The Air.
The great B-29 fleets were already being discussed so that Burroughs merely projected what within a few short months would be a reality in Frankfurt when bombs and incendiary devices rained down creating a fire storm with such intense heat that hydrogen and oxygen molecules in the river separated with the inflammable hydrogen being fed by the oxygen.
Forty-three thousand people- men women and children- died in that fire storm that devastated several square miles creating winds of 150 miles per hour. The devastation was unequaled until the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima. The level of destruction was almost equal in each.
It was almost as though Burroughs had the image of the firestorm before his eyes as he wrote.
As the scene of this great air war that had been fought non-stop for over a hundred years he selected the planet Poloda part of the stellar system beyond the farthest star indicating that war was so endemic to humans that even beyond the farthest star there was no escaping it.
At that time Burroughs placed the farthest star 450,000 light years from earth. One is astonished at the low level of astronomical knowledge of the times. The truer figure for a farthest star would be well over 12 billion light years but that would have been incomprehensible at the time. One is startled to think that the vast knowledge, still a fragment, we now possess was unknown even as the fifties began when I was a child. Everything I learned in school was invalidated by the time I graduated. The novel geologic idea of tectonic plates whereby all the continents had been connected and drifted apart was ridiculed while I was in college in the mid-sixties but shortly prevailed. Astronomical horizons were pushed further out as everything that was believed to be true was transfigured before your eyes, nearly on a daily basis. Today the Hubble telescope penetrates space as far as it has even been penetrated yet has still to find the farthest star. Burroughs farthest star was pretty close. At any rate it made a great title.
In many ways Burroughs’ description of the two competing political systems on Poloda, those of Unis/Athens and Kapara/Sparta more anticipated the post-war struggle between the West and the Communist East rather than the Nazis and the West even though the Kapars seem to be clearly based on the Nazis. Burroughs old hatred of Germans stemming from the days of athe Haymarket Riot in Chicago through the Great War was now reactivated and cast in concrete.
The war on Poloda mirrored the reality on earth projected into a distant galaxy. Nor was ERB wrong as WWII morphed into the Korean War and from thence into Viet Nam and now into the great conflict with the Moslem States. We’re not too far from the centenaryof the beginningof the Great War- a full hundred years.
On Poloda as a result of the constant bombing raids from Kapara the Unisans had created retractable cities. When the air raid sirens went off whole cities were hydraulically lowered beneath the earth until the raid was over. Then the cities were elevated while work crews went out to reconstruct the terrain into livable space again.
In Kapara, somewhat like in North Korea during the incessant bombing of the Korean War, the Kapars had tunneled into their mountains in steel reinforced redoubts.
The Kapars had subjugated a race somewhat as the Spartans had the Messenians who had returned to the lowest subsistence level actually having reverted to cannibalism.
While thus portraying life on Poloda ERB was giving intimations of his fears for his own planet. The devastation of the ensuing war was not quite so complete but it came very, very close.
Of ERB’s wide ranging interests astronomy was one. As I indicated earlier the level of astronimcal knowledge in the first half of the twentieth century was fairly primitive. At the time man first walked on the moon in the sixties outer space was still largely a mystery. It is only since then with the huge arrays of radio telescopes on earth and the Hubble stationed in space above the earth that some of the mysteries of the universe are becoming more clear; even then compared to what there is to be known little is that clear.
Thus ERB imagined a solar system in which a ring of eleven planets circled a smaller sun from a distance of a million miles through an atmospheric tube shared by all eleven planets. The pollution from the incessant warfare on Poloda would be shared by all eleven planets in the tubular atmosphere returning back on Poloda.
Titillating stuff. ERB was always inventive.
I, of course, scoffed at the idea of more than one planet being in the same orbital plane but then all my notions of regularity and order were blasted when the Hubble found two gas giants close to each other on the same orbital plane, close to their sun, completing a revolution in three days. A three day year, think of it, something a million of their light years away would be right next door.
I imagine ERB would be having a field day if he were still alive.
I, Dynamo 