R.E. Prindle | I, Dynamo

Henry Ford And The International Jewish Conspiracy

September 12, 2013

Henry Ford And The International Jewish Conspiracy

A Review Of The Jewish Virtual Library Post ‘Henry Ford

Invents a Jewish Conspiracy’

R.E. Prindle

The Great Henry Ford

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/ford1.html

http://contemporarynotes.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/henry-ford-and-louis-marshall/

Jews should always avoid writing on history. Because of their extreme ethnic bias they can produce only the most self serving twaddle. This is no more evident than in their Jewish Virtual Library post concerning Henry Ford. The mere title of the post expresses its falsification of history. Ford neither invented a Jewish conspiracy nor the International Jewish Conspiracy. In the course of events he was swept up into the Jewish War against Europeans much against his wishes.

The JVL isn’t even capable of putting Ford and the auto industry into a historical context without which Ford’s actions cannot be understood. Among the many battle events that appeared after 1900 was that of the bankers versus modern industry. There were of course Aryan banking firms and Jewish banking firms, at the time quite distinct from each other and in competition on an ethnic basis.

The railroad industry had dominated the banker’s attention in the nineteenth century thus they pooh poohed and disparaged new industries such as that of autos.

Both Jewish and Aryan banking firms refused to loan to the auto makers so the makers in turn developed new methods that freed them from dependence on loans from bankers while still allowing them to develop rapidly without interference from bankers. The two stellar auto makers were Henry Ford at Ford Motors and William C. Durant at Buick. Durant, perhaps the most imaginative auto genius but an inveterate over reacher attempted to gather the most prominent auto makers into a combine he called General Motors with which Ford initially flirted.

William Crapo Durant ‘Billy Durant’, A Great Visionary

Now after 1910 when autos seemed to be a permanent fixture and Durant overextended himself the bankers moved in and pushed Durant out. Now as several recent bailouts attest bankers don’t even know how to run banks much less than an auto company in the teens. Under the bankers Buick stood still while Ford shot ahead. Durant regrouped using the auto of Louis Chevrolet to reenter the field while using its success to recapture Buick and regenerate General Motors.

Ever expansive he once again overextended himself being forced out once more. This time the bankers installed an auto maker management that made GM a success capable of challenging and surpassing Ford.

While this was going on WWI was being fought. Woodrow Wilson then president was a socialist so that when the US entered the war in 1917 the government seized either control or direction of industry. The rails were nationalized while industry in general fell under government controls administered by an agency called the War Industries Board, the WIB.

One of Ford’s supposed faults according to the JVL was that he was opposed to government regulation of business. True, but so were all industrialists and such opposition could only be considered a fault by Communists qua socialists. The WIB was the agent of that regulation.

Now, whether the writers of the JVL like it or not it is a fact that Warburg came to the United States where he immediately organized the Federal Reserve System that was owned as a private enterprise by these so-called Socialists by nine international Jewish banking firms plus Rockefeller. This is an undeniable fact.

The Federal Reserve controlled, and still controls, US currency lending it to the US for use. Thus the dollar was a Jewish financial instrument for the use of which US taxpayers paid the Jewish owned Federal Reserve System interest every year. Apparently the Jews thought Ford and others were ignorant of what was happening. Quite fatuous on their part.

While, as I understand it, the Jews still deny that Wilson brought rafts of Jews into government beginning with his inauguration in 1913. In 1917 the WIB board was virtually a Jewish agency. This was all known at the time but strenuously denied by the Jews. Its director was Bernard Baruch who became the grand old Jewish advisor of presidents later in life.

Wilson appointed the first Jew, Louis Brandeis, to the Supreme Court. Brandeis, an ardent Zionist, was reputed to be the wisest of the wise, the sagest of the sage and a universal genius. FDR, a disciple of Wilson in these years, would brand Brandeis during his own administration ‘our Isaiah.’ So while the writers of JVL may simper because ‘rumors were dredged up’ that Wilson took ‘secret’ orders from Brandeis over the phone, while deleting the pejorative word secret, it is not unlikely that Wilson did discuss situations with the ‘wisest of the wise’ whether over the phone or face to face. Nothing would be more likely.

Louis Brandeis ‘Our Isaiah’

Indeed, the Jews so loved Justice Brandeis that they named their national university in the US Brandeis University after him. He and the arch criminal Arnold Rothstein were the big Jewish men of he teens and twenties. Just recently the Jews opened a ‘national’ museum in Las Vegas celebrating Rothstein and other specifically Jewish criminals.

While the railroads were nationalized the Wilson Administration demanded that the major industries file financial statements and business plans with the WIB. The auto industry objected to this rightly believing that through the Jews who ran the WIB their industrial knowledge would pass into the hands of the Jews giving them an inestimable advantage.

One imagines that the JVL will pooh pooh this yet it remains true that at the end of WWII the Alien Properties Board that controlled the confiscated properties of the Germans and Japanese valued into the billions was directed by the Jew David Bazelon who sold these properties without bids to his fellow Jews at less than fire sale prices making their post-war fortunes while robbing American tax payers.

The auto makers then were right to protest these regulations. They, especially the Dodge brothers, did so vociferously while using intemperate racial slurs directed at Baruch that Baruch later rapaid when the Dodge Brothers both died mysterious deaths in 1920. There was even an attempt made on Ford’s life.

After the war friction between Ford and his major stockholder James Couzens was such that Ford was forced to buy him out. Not having the necessary cash he was forced to violate his principles and go to the bankers. They shortly called the loan that Ford was unable to meet on short notice. However by drastic reorganization of his business he was able to meet the loan this thwarting a Jewish attempt to take over Ford Motors. Harboring resentments he was now his own man.

As a major condemnation the JVL says that: ‘He opposed various symbols of social and cultural change aound him, including Hollywood movies, out of house child care, government regulation of business, Eastern European immigration and new styles in dress and music.

Louis Marshall

Consider these defamatory ‘sins’ in the context of the times. Hollywood movies were under constant attack during the teens and twenties. There were many local moves to ban them. Carl Laemmle of Universal, himself a Jew, even pledged to make no more anti-Semitic movies. The Catholic leagues were pressing for censorship. In 1921 in an effort to quiet criticism Hollywood itself established the Hays Office to censor themselves. Self-censorship is always especially effective. Will Hays, Harding’s very effective Postmaster General, was lured away at a royal salary of millions in today’s currency to run it. So Ford opposed the immorality of Hollywood movies? Then he was on the right side.

He opposed government regulation of business? Well, Harding and the Republican Interregnum of 1920 to 1933 repudiated Wilsonian socialism returning the railroads to private hands and returning the twenties to the most laissez-faire period of American business. Once again Ford was on the right side.

Ford opposed Eastern European immigration? Eastern European is code for Jews. The Jews were in the process of organizing the whole of European Jewry for transportation to the US. Reacting to this the country passed restrictive laws in 1921 and 1924 thwarting the Jewish plan. Once again Ford was in tune with universal sentiment. Me thinketh that Jewish protests are spurious.

As for new styles in dress and music neither did these new modes go unchallenged by a vociferous public while as a young boy in Michigan in the late forties we were still under the influence of Ford’s musical taste singing folk songs on a daily basis in class. One might then without too much of a stretch claim that Ford was the father of the folk revival of the fifties and sixties. It will be remembered that Carl Sandburg published his compendium of old timey songs in this period also.

So, really, the writers of the Jewish Virtual Library ought to either develop better research methods or lose some their ethnocentric chauvinism and xenophobia.

Ford, then, may fairly be said to have been in a contest not of his own making with the Jews when he began to publish his newspaper the Dearborn Independent.

The implication in the Jewish Virtual Library article is that Ford was some insane irate individual crazed lone wolf anti-Semite. Once again, placed in the historical context of the times this accusation is completely false. In fact the Communist Revolution in Russia created a huge furor with large factions in all European countries pointing to the huge involvement of Jews in not only the successful revolution in Russia but all the failed national revolutions of Europe and yes, that of the US. The evidence was overwhelming, denial was absurd, however that was the tack the Jews took.

Paul Warburg

Jewish damage controllers rushed into the fray howling anti-Semitic charges right, left and down the middle. As a centerpiece they chose a negligible manifesto culled from earlier Jewish writings called the Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion. The Protocols was a pale imitation of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, hardly worth bothering about. Certainly it was amateurish next to the total Jewish assault on Western Culture led by the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory that would continue from the early twenties through today backed by the emerging technologies of movies, radio and TV. The Jews still talk about the Protocols as some sort of horror.

Ford should have dismissed the book as some sort of Jewish folly but he took it seriously and actually published it as the first volume of his four volume series of essays, The International Jew.

Ford’s use of he term international Jews did not refer to all Jews. Ford himself was tolerant of all religions and nationalities including the Negroes, more than he should have been. Ford’s point was that there was a cadre of international Jewish politicians just as there was an international Communist conspiracy. This cadre of Jewish politicians was easily identifiable although Ford did not name them, probably because they would sue him as he nevertheless was three times. For a confirmation of Ford’s allegations read my post linked above. Louis Marshall who was the international Jewish secretary of state confirms Ford’s analysis in his collected letters.

Now, Cameron’s essays approved by Ford were not wild eyed anti-Semitic rantings as the JVL claims but were well researched documented essays concerning Jewish involvement in specific areas of American society. Ford amassed a several thousand volume library of Jewish writings pro and con that were at Cameron‘s hand. When Ford discontinued his contest with the Jews he asked them what he was to do with the library. He was absolutely disgusted when he was told to donate the library to the Jewish Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. Whatever became of the library is not known.

The articles were however ‘critical theory’ of Jewish activities making them unforgivable in Jewish eyes. Thus, the astonishing campaign of vilification against Ford, slanderous, vile and mean spirited.

The International Jew articles are readily available for reading on the internet today for the inspection of the curious.

Finally, the JVL asserts: Ford’s attempt to prevent unionism at his plants produced strikes and violence, mostly provoked by Ford’s own strike breakers.

While it is true that Ford saw no need for unions as he believed that he took better care of his employee’s interests than any union thugs could.

Ford was the first industrialist to ensure a clean, well lighted, airy work environment for his employees. Even in the Communist Charlie Chaplin’s parody of Ford’s assembly line in his movie Modern Times the line was immaculate. You could eat off the floor. Ford’s line was designed so that there would be little bending and stooping. The parts passed by waist high.

Taylorite efficiency experts determined the most efficient movements to do a task with maximum efficiency. Every consideration of the employee was taken. I, myself, have worked the line at a GM assembly plant, I know how it is done. I know the human material that has to be managed and it is difficult material. Molding the steel is easier.

In addition when Ford realized the money that could be made by efficient operation combined with an unsaturated seemingly inexhaustible demand he voluntarily with no prompting doubled the wages of his employees.

From 1914 to the Depression he increased wages so that by the beginning of the Depression he was paying eight dollars a day or better than three times his 1914 wage. The Depression contrived by the Judaeo-Left forced him to lower wages rather than raising them which he would have continued to do. This reduction caused Ford great anxiety as though he had failed his employees.

Now, the Reds had never forgiven Ford for doubling wages back in ‘14. They hated him and wanted to destroy that symbol of capitalist efficiency, Ford’s River Rouge plant.

While writers such as at the JVL seem to assume that unions were universally favored and Ford was alone in not favoring them, nothing could be further from the truth. Remember the JVL is Jewish fantasy and not history. Workers except for Red doctrinaires didn’t want unions. Unions made little to no headway until the Reds got their man, FDR, into the White House where he passed laws declaring companies and workers had to accept them whether they wanted them or not. Most workers didn’t feel the need for another boss and more fees, taxes by another name, extorted by union thus and they were criminal thugs that nobody can deny. Even today after seventy yeas of favoritism less than 25% of workers belong to unions.

Using FDR’s Wagner Act then the Communists organized a march on River Rouge with the express intent of smashing the assembly line and destroying Ford Motors. Of course the writers at the JVL think any thwarting of their wishes is criminal so Ford’s successful defense of his property in their eyes is a criminal offence. Suffice it to say that in the Battle Of The Overpass two opposing armies were fighting a war that Ford won.

That the JVL can write such twaddle as the Ford article and hope to pass it off as objective history is amazing. After all, the whole world is not only watching but reading. This will not pass.

It is writing such as this at the Jewish Virtual Library that gives the internet a bad name. These people should be ashamed of themselves.

Carl Sandburg- The Great American Songbook

Posted in America, Bolshevik Revolution, Civilization, Communism, Communists, Consciousness, Dodge Brothers, Henry Ford, Jews, Liberals, Psychology, R.E. Prindle, Religion, Reviews, Semites, The Plot Against America, War Industries Board, WIB, Woodrow Wilson | Tagged Bernard Baruch, Federal Reserve System, Ford Motor Company, Jewish Virtual Library, R.E. Prindle, William C. Durant | 2 Comments »

A Review: Part III Tarzan And The Madman by Edgar Rice Burroughs

October 13, 2010

A Review

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#23 Tarzan And The Mad Man

Part III

That Old Time Religion

The Aquarian Archetype

Burroughs’ stories are always concerned with religion in one respect or another. He never stopped investigating religion or religions. When Swami Prahavananda brought Vedanta to LA from Portland, Oregon of all places Burroughs if not the first in line was not that far back. It’s no surprise that the novels of the first half of the thirties all reflect Vedanta or Hindu religion to some extent.

The Tarzan series was virtually founded on the avatar of sun worship, La of Opar. She appeared sporadically until 1930 when she was entombed in Opar and abandoned by Tarzan and Burroughs. Here she appears again in the form of the mundane normal rich girl, Sandra Pickerall, the Scottish beer heiress. A common place White Goddess.

One should always bear in mind the original White Goddess, She, of Rider Haggard. Thus one always compares Burroughs’ White Goddesses to the original. Apart from Greek mythology’s White Goddess, represented as the moon, I think the White Goddess reigning in a Black or off-tone population, was actually a Haggard original. Of course, La was a carbon of She. An aside- I’m discoverying that I’m using some outdated terms incomprehensible to younger people. Carbon copy is one of these. You get the blankest of stares. For any readers not familiar with carbon paper, in the days before printers turned out endless perfect copies of documents if one wanted a copy of a typed letter, typed in a typewriter, one inserted a piece of carbon paper between the original and the desired copy. One side was coated with carbon so that the stroke imprinted on the clean sheet. Those were the days, children, when we walked three miles to school through eight foot snow drifts. Life wasn’t so easy back then.

So, La was a carbon of She. Not quite; She was actually two thousand years old. Burroughs couldn’t figure out how to do that without being a carbon copy of Haggard so he made the priestess of the Flaming God part of a multi-thousand year tradition. Sandra was a one off with short duration. There was no mystique there; this is the common woman triumphant. Rand himself was a phony Tarzan who was also a phony rather ditso god.

While there was no real historical basis for She but a tenuous connection to Egypt’s influence on Sub-Saharan Africa that Haggard repeatedly invokes there was a historical basis for the Portuguese colony of Alemtejo in Ethiopia. A fairly remarkable one and one that Burroughs knew of. Possibly the story was gleaned from the pages of the National Geographic also bu there is a basis for it in Burroughs library

Let’s tackle the groundwork for Haggard’s White Goddess first. Obviously with Haggard and Burroughs we are dealing with men and writers of stupendous imagination. These men are able to build cities and civilizations from the merest scraps of evidence. And then in Haggard’s case, from his sojourn in South Africa he was familiar waith legends and archaeological evidences unknown except to the specialist and possibly not to them. Burroughs read many books of African history including J.W. Buel’s Heroes Of The Dark Continent. The book mentions legends and stories that Haggard heard but so fleetingly one wonders what impression they could have made on the forming mind of ERB. Buel himself took his early history from a fabulous Arab work called The Travels Of Ibn Batuta, sort of the Richard Burton of his culture.

The Renowned Arab Traveler- Mohammed Ibn Batuta

Writing in the fourteenth century Ibn Batuta had visited the East African coast trodding the soil of Kilwa Island on the southern border of Tanganyika, now Tanzania. Zanzibar replaced Kilwa as the Moslem trading entropot on the East Coast. Haggard apparently had done the same as he mentions ruins that dated back to before the tenth century. So, we have established commercial activity in Southern Africa before the arrival of the Shona people in Zimbabwe.

The ruins of Zimbabwe are, of course, famous but the builders are undetermined although the relics are claimed by the Shona which is impossible. There are additional stone ruins further South than the Shona ever penetrated. Therefore it follows that others than the Shona built them. The ruins and Zimbabwae turn up frequently in Haggard’s novels also.

I have always believed the ruins were Malagasy which is also Trader Horn’s position. I wasn’t clear on the arrival of the Malagasy but then ERB’s novel Jungle Girl showed me the way. Jungle Girl is concerned with the Khmer people and the ruins of Cambodia and Thailand. Few of us, I believe, have any idea of the history of this area and its connection to India.

According to some somewhat limited research on my partI find that the Balinese were a major naval power in the archipelago and the adjacent mainland. When the Khmer king threatened the Balinese king the King of Bali mounted a thousand ship expedition to the Mekong to punish the Khmer king. This would be a substantial flotilla if true and not legendary. If each ship transported twenty to fifty soldiers that would be an army of twenty to fifty thousand men. Logistically a superior achievement, especially just to punish one guy.

Bali today is 90% Hindu in religion so that the Hindus or Indians had made a religious conquest of Bali by the ninth century. One assumes that contact was continuous from, say, 800 to 1500 AD so that Balinese regularly sailed to India. The Balinese also have fabulous ruins such as the magnificent manmade mountain, Borobudur that date from the earlier period.

Now, the Malagasy of Madagascar are genetically linked to a Bornean people opposite Bali on inland sea. It is highly doubtful that the Borneans made any voyages to India. Let us assume however that those people of Borneo were troublesome to the Balinese, harassing their shipping and possibly raiding Bali. Now, there doesn’t appear to be continuous migration to Africa; the migration seems to have been a one time affair.

Let us suppose then that the Balinese knew of Africa from their excursions to India. After all, the Chinese admiral, Zheng He touched on Africa if not claiming it for his Emperor in the fifteenth century. There are Africans with Chinese DNA from sailors shipwrecked from that expedition. Kilwa was active from at least the ninth century when Persians established a colony leaving ruins behind. Pottery sherds found on Kilwa come from the whole of the East including China.

In an effort to solve their Bornean problem, then, let us assume the Balinese organized a flotilla and shipped the entire troublesome Bornean population to Africa in one shot. It could easily have been done by revictualing and rewatering at several points on the way to India or Ceylon at which point the monsoon could be used to aim for the African coast. Whether Madagascar was known or not the flotilla could easily have blundered on it. It was uninhabited at the time. The Bantus had not yet penetrated that far. Their presence was probably insignificant on the mainland- Mozambique and Zimbabwe. That was it- a people transported from Borneo in one consignment.

Finding the malarial coast uninhabited but unhealthy the Malagasy’s then moved up on the plateau where the air was more salubrious. The Shona may or may not have already been there. In any event the population would have been small. It is possible they began to filter in some time thereafter settling North of actual Zimbabwe. The ruins then were built by the Malagasies either as protection from wild beasts or as defensive forts. As the additional ruins are further South the Malagasies either prospered and expanded or unable to maintain themselves against the Bantu Shona kept retreating further South as did the Bushmen. On the other hand the kingdom of Monomotapa that existed in this area at approximately this period must have been founded by the Malagasies. That it was stamped flat by the Bantus would indicate that it was a culture alien to theirs much as the White culture now being exterminated by the Bantus. With the Whites gone and the ruins of the cities dotting the plains the Bantus could then claim their ancestors built them. An exact duplicate situation. Shoot, even Mugabe could claim he built Salisbury.

Now, there are a variety of complexions in Zimbabwe tending toward a red. That could only come about by the mixing of the Black Shona and the copper Malagasy. So, obviously the Malagasy were either killed or bred out of existence on the mainland although still existing on Madagascar.

The Shona having no use for the stone forts which were unfamiliar to them ignored them for their traditional grass hut villages.

The Malagasies mined for gold probably trading with Kilwa Island although that is some distance and there seems to be little refuse in Zimbabwe to suggest a trading period. Nevertheless the gold was mined and it isn’t there now.

Using whatever knowledge he had of the legends or history of Zimbabwe Haggard created his own magnificent legends of King Solomon’s Mines and the superb She. She was was placed somewhere on the coast between Zimbabwe and Kilwa Island.

For his shadow of the story of She Burroughs then moves the location of She up to Ethiopia also incorporating the story of the Portuguese expedition of the fifteenth century to that formerly mythical and fabulous country thought to be the home of the equally mythical and fabulous Prester John.

ERB combines two threads of history. On the one hand Vasco da Gama the explorer did send his brother Cristoforo da Gama on a military expediton to Ethiopia to aid the Queen of Ethiopia. Initially successful Cristoforo was untimately defeated although the Portuguese left the country rather than building ERB’s castle on the Mutia Escarpment. On the other hand the Galla people subsequently invaded Ethiopia where they existed against the Ethiopians in the sort of standoff that ERB depicts.

The faux Tarzan, Rand, then parachutes into the midst of the Portuguese castle of Alemtejo. In his descent the wind slams him against a turret causing the inevitable amnesia. Tarzan’s loss of memory that recurs periodically means that ERB is severely stressed. Tarzan’s losses of memory always occur at periods of extreme stress for ERB when he is facing difficult problems.

Rand had embarked on his expedition to prove he could rough it a la Tarzan for thirty days so his mind occupied by this illusion he believes he is Tarzan. As he descended from the sky the Portuguese, now a cholcolate brown, believe he must be God, not a god but the God. Even though God Rand takes orders pretty well. Da Gama orders him to find a goddess as God must have a goddess. After having had his Black candidates rejected Rand goes back to find a White Goddess.

At this point Rand, the faux Tarzan, finds the beer heiress Sandra Pickerall. Thus God and goddess are in reality ordinary folk, the common people. The descent has been from the immortal She to the mortal but still divine, La, who was the high priestess, to an ordinary girl dressed in ordinary clothes who knows nothing of the goddess mystique. ERB’s hopes had deflated quite considerably.

This was on the eve of ERB and Florence’s departure into exile from LA to Honolulu so there is a bewildered sadness to the story. It’s as though ERB were asking: Where did the dream go wrong?

There is a faint echo of The City Of God story from Tarzan And The Lion Man. In this case Tarzan/Rand/ERB is God and Sandra/Florence is his goddess but no longer the vision of his dreams he imagined in 1926. He’s pretty disappointed.

The religious scene is quite astounding, presenting aspects of the whole history of religion. ERBs’ life study of religion is here condensed into a few paragraphs and scatterings throughout the text.

Ruiz stood behind a low, stone altar which appeared to have been painted a rusty brown red.

For a long time Ruiz the high priest held the center of the stage. The rites where evidently of a religious nature that went on interminably. Three times Ruiz burned powder upon the altar. From the awful stench Sandra judged the powder must have consisted mostly of hair. The assemblage intoned a chant to the weird accompaniment of heathenish tom toms. The high priest occasionally made the sign of the cross, but it seemed obvious to Sandra that she had become the goddess of a bastard religion which bore no relationship to Christianity beyond the symbolism of the cross, which was evidently quite meaningless to the high priest and his followers.

She heard mentioned several times Kibuka, the war god; and Walumbe the god of death, was often supplicated, while Mizimo departed spirits, held a prominent place in the chant and the progress. It was evidently a very primitive form of heathenish worship from which voodooism is derived.

What reading, what study went into this religious scene isn’t clear but it is clear that ERB’s reading here led back to the religious practices of the Yoruba people of Nigeria, or perhaps it might better be said the lower Niger River. In what they call the Yoruba diaspora the people as slaves were dispersed throughout the Americas, South and North and the Caribbean.

Apparently deeply religious the Yoruba took their religion with them grafting it unto a semblance of Catholicism, bastard religion here in Burroughs. Perhaps that is what ERB means when he says the Alemtejos took the cross as a symbol but it had no meaning to them. The Yoruba religion took different names and forms from Brazil to New York. As ERB points out here the Yoruban religion in Haiti developed into Voodoo while in Cuba it became known as Santeria by which name it passes into the US. Chief centers are Atlanta and New York City.

While Burroughs merely says that Voodoo was derived from some ancient form implying lost in the mists of time he may very well have known that these new world religious impressions were derived from the Yoruba of Africa.

And then a little further on, Ballantine, p. 55, ERB goes on to describe a different religious ritual:

Looking up, she saw a dozen naked dancing girls enter the apartment, and behind them two soldiers dragging a screaming Negro girl of about thirteen. Now the audience was alert, necks craned and every eye centered upon the child. The tom-toms beat out a wild cadence. The dancers, leaping, bending, whirling, approached the altar; and while they danced the soldiers lifted the still screaming girl and held her face up, upon its stained brown surface.

The high priest made passes with his hands above the victim, the while he intoned some senseless gibberish. The child’s screams had been reduced to moaning sobs, as Ruiz drew a knife from beneath his robe. Sandra leaned forward in her throne-chair, clutching the arms, her wide eyes straining at the horrid sight below her.

A deathly stillness fell upon the room broken only by the choking sobs of the girl. Ruiz’s knife flashed for an instant above his victim; and then the point was punged into her heart. Quickly he cut the throat and dabbing his hands in the spurting blood sprinkled it upon the audience, which surged forward to receive it…

To consider this scene from several angles: I hope no one will be offended but put into current Hollywood cinematic terms this is the very purest of pornography. It there was a battle at this time to get James Joyce’s Ulysses through customs, Joyce is smirkingly smutty compared to Burroughs here.

I mean, a dozen naked dancing girls leading the procession, a child snuff scene; the dwelling on the flash of the knife, its point entering the body, the spurting blood from the child’s cut throat then the sprinkling of the surging, screaming crowd with the blood, truly they were washed in the blood of the lamb.

If the Voodoo harked back to an early period it was before this intermediate sacrificial period. On the one hand La of Opar seemed to flash back to to Aztec ceremonies in ERB’s mind. In that gory society the victims were indeed laid out face up beneath the Flaming God as the priest no only stabbed them but cut the heart out holding the still beating vessel aloft for the sun’s acceptance.

Here ERB seems to combine the Aztec practices with the Semitic practices of child murder from which the term ‘blood of the lamb’ must be derived. Blood purifications were common in the various Classical religious consensuses. With Mithraic worshippers of the bull god Mithras communicants were lowered into a pit while a bull was slaughtered on a slatted platform above them, the blood dripping down on the initiate then washed the communicant in the blood of the bull, or in another word, Mithras.

Among the Semites, Carthaginians of North Africa and the Jews of Palestine child murder was the chief offering to placate the gods or God. The Carthaginians had a huge statue of Baal with oustretched arms on which the child was placed to roll down into a flaming pit.

The Valley of Hinnon was the site of the Jewish sacrifice of the first born. While the practice was suspended in the story of Abraham and Isaac when the sheep or lamb was allowed to be substituted for the first born. While the practice was suspended in the story of Abraham and Isaac when the sheep was allowed to be substituted for the born the idea lived on in the imagination of the Jews.

Then commenced the eternal round of sacrificing in the temple when the priests stood before a large basin called the brazen ocean and sacrificed sheep from sun up to sun down. The blood collected in the brazen ocean was used for its special purposes. Think washed in the blood of the lamb and compare it with the Mithraic rite.

Even then before the Jews left Egypt they smeared their lintels with the blood of the lamb or first born to save themselves from God’s slaughter of the first born of Egypt. Thus the Jews were symbolically washed in the blood of the lamb. The slaughter of the innocents in Herod’s time will also come to mind. Jesus as the first born would have been sacrificed as the lamb if the slaughter had been successful.

Certainly if read properly it is easy to understand why Sandra fainted. Perhaps in 1940 ERB found his psychological situation unbearable reacting by creating this bit of sado-masochistic pornography.

Having completed this part of his survey of religious evolution ERB moves on to what might be described as the late Classical to Medieval phase, Ballantine p. 67:

“Well, what of it?’ demanded da Gama. “I am king. Do I not sit on a level with God and his goddess? I am as holy as they. I am a god as well as a king; and the gods can do no wrong.”

“Rubbish!” exclaime the high priest. “You know a well as I do that the man is not a god, and the woman no goddess. Fate sent the man down from the skies- I don’t know how; but I’m sure he’s as mortal as you or I; then you get the idea that by controlling him you could control the country. You were jealous of me that’s all; then you get the idea that by controlling him you could control the church, for you know that who controls the church controls the country. You were jealous of me that’s all; then you conceived the idea of having a goddess, too, which you thought might double your power. Well, you have them; but they’re going to be just as useful to me as they are to you. Already, the people believe in them, and if I should go to them and say that you had harmed the god, they would tear you to pieces…”

Here we have the cynical conception of priest craft that was still current when I was a kid. Religion as the opiate of the people. Priests and kings who are totally insincere in their beliefs, the divine right of kings, a potent belief in its time ridiculed in another.

This could be the stuff of a stand up comedy routine by Bob Newhart in 1960 or the Smothers Brothers with some modifications of the struggle between the English Tudors with the Catholic Church.

“…you don’t stand any too well with the people, Chris, anyway; and there are plenty of them who think da Serra would make a better king.”

“Sh-h-h,” cautioned da Gama. “Don’t talk so loud. Somebody may overhear you. But let’s not quarrel, Pedro. Our interests are identical. If Osorio da Serra becomes king of Alemtejo, Pedro Ruiz will die mysteriously; and Quesada the priest will become high priest. He might become high priest while I am king.”

That would have gotten a knowing laugh from ERB’s readers who would have felt they had been let in on a cosmic truth. And with the proper inflection and delivery you have some stand up.

Of course the spectre of Christianity is running through this. ERB then tosses in a Moslem bit to bring things up to time; Sandra has bneen captured by Rateng the hunter, a Moslem Galla, Ballantine, p. 132:

“What do you want of me?” she asked. “What are you going to do with me?”

“You should know,” he said. “You are a woman.”

“I am not a mortal woman. I am a goddess.” She grasped at a straw.

Rateng laughed at her. “There is no god but Allah.”

“If you harm me you will die.” she threatened.

“You are an infidel,” said Rateng, “and for every infidel I kill, I shall have greater honor in heaven.”

Thus we have the last testament of Edgar Rice Burroughs on religion. Having delivered this he got on the plane for Honolulu leaving LA. His epic struggle to free himself from 1911 to 1940 ended in defeat. Ironically he was on a salary of 250.00 a month in Honolulu which had been his salary at Sears, Roebuck before he began writing. Life is funny sometimes.

Recapitulation and Conclusion.

Thus ended the confrontation between Edgar Rice Burrughs and the Judaeo-Communists. Little did ERB realize that in 1919 when he excercized what he thought was his American Constitutional rights by opposing Communism that he was engaging in a life and death struggle for supremacy. Nor did he realize that when that survey sent to him by the American Jewish Committee that was fatally forwarded to in Hollywood from Chicago by the post office was coded so that he would indicate his acceptance or rejection of subservience to the Jews. Had he known he would still probably have rejected the yoke but he at least then would have known that he was in open warfare for supremacy.

The America he had been raised in and on which his thoughts had been centered had been slipping away with each boatload of immigrants that arrived. From a population of a few hundred thousand in 1890 the Jewish population had grown to several million. They now had the strength of numbers as well as an implacable will to recreate the new glittering Promised Land in their own image.

There was a short reaction led by Henry Ford before any resistance was scattered. In that brief period to 1924 ERB had aligned himself with Ford as my analysis of Marcia Of The Doorstep shows.

So in that brief period between 1919 and 1924 ERB’s fate was sealed. In Marcia he was making desperate efforts to placate the hollywood Jews who after all had control over much of his ability to earn income. His hostility to the Communists continued unabated. They weren’t protected by a charge of anti-Semitism as were the Jews. In 1926 he published his anti-Communist trilogy The Moon Maid. His defence was countered by the direction of no less than Josef Stalin himself and through his agent H.G. Wells. ERB’s resistance to both the Communists and the Jews in my estimation produced the sequence of his greatest Tarzan novels and in his other works.

Given his own shortcomings, which were fatal, he hadn’t the skill, although he may have had the resources, to resist the evil so that by 1934 and Tarzan And The Lion Man the war was all but over. The end came in 1940 when, I presume, it was politely suggested that he retire from LA. The stage of his youth had been replaced by the aeroplane so that ERB’s mode of departure was by plane and not on the stagecoach.

MGM disdainfully made another movie, Tarzan In New York, in which Tarzan as it were is led to New York with a rope around his neck. There in New York he is symbolically forced to submit to the Law . While in an American court it seems fairly clear that the Law is Talmudic Law rather than, to use the term loosely, American justice.

With the release of Tarzan In New York MGM essentially threw the character away giving Tarzan over to Sol Lesser to do as he pleased.

Apart from a spate of stories in 1940 and the war novel, Tarzan And The Foreign Legion, the voice that had thrilled a nation for nearly thirty years was silenced.

ERB’s dissidence was crushed. Nor was he the only author. While the pre-1919 publishers seem to have been all Liberals and Communist fellow travelers the authors were anti-Communist or, at least, apolitical in that sense, to a man. They all seem to have fared no better than ERB. Certainly, in my life experience the period from 1914 through the fifties is a virual literary block. The non-Communists writers of pre-1919 had their reputations obscured while after 1919 no writers but Communists were nurtured and allowed into print. Thus all the social realist third rate Communist garbage of the period has disappeared from genuine lack of interest. There are attempts to buck up the reputations of John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway with some success while there are also attempts to create some interest in failed Jewish writers of the period but that seems to be of no avail. They, like Philip Roth, are too culturally specific to hold the general interest.

One wonders why Burroughs didn’t publish Tarzan And The Mad Man. He locked the book in his safe and forgot about it. Certainly the novel is as good as any he wrote. Perhaps the admission of defeat it contains would have been too gratifying to his enemies or too painful to admit. I don’t know.

Perhaps the challenges life gave ERB were too strong. First his early childhood centered around high expectations was countered by John The Bully and ERB’s ceaseless movement from school to school orchestrated by his father who seemed to have a love-hate relationship with him; then the cruel bludgeon of fate that fell on him in Toronto which literally addled his brains for a decade if not for life perpetrated by a rival for the hand of Emma whose enmity never ceased and who plagued him in Chicago through 1919 and then the war with the Jews and Communists through the twenties and thirties.

Ah well, we all have to play the hand we’re dealt.

Posted in Doppelganger, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Emasculation, ERBzine, Freud, Hollywood Black LIst, MGM, Moslems, Muslims, Mythology, Psychology, R.E. Prindle, Religion, Religious Consciousness, Reviews, Sigmund Freud, Subconscious, Tarzan, Uncategorized, Unconsciousness, Writing, Zeus | Tagged Essays, R.E. Prindle | Leave a Comment »

Exhuming Bob IX: Pensees 6 Bob And Dave A Review

June 28, 2008

Exhuming Bob IX

Pensee 6: Bob And Dave

A Review

Dave Van Ronk: The Mayor Of Macdougal Street

R.E. Prindle

Dave At Work

Texts:

Dylan, Bob Chronicles Volume One Simon And Schuster 2004

Thompson, Toby Positively Main Street U. Minnesota 2008, reprint of 1971 text.

Van Ronk, Dave The Mayor Of MacDougal Street: A Memoir Da Capo Press 2006

Van Ronk’s memoir published in 2006 becomes part of the ongoing Bob Dylan debate. A part of the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early sixties Van Ronk little knew how his life would be affected, destroyed, by the arrival of Bob Dylan from out of the West in 1961.

At the time of Dylan’s arrival Van Ronk was one of the most important, if not the most important, folk singer in the Village. Thus Bob set his sights to suck out Dave’s substance and cast the empty husk aside.

On page 211 of the paperback Dylan is quoted at the beginning of Chaper 15:

I once thought the biggest I could ever hope to get was like Van Ronk. And it’s bigger than that now, ain’t it? Yeah, man, it’s bigger than that.

-Bob Dylan c. 1964

Once Dylan learned of Van Ronk on his arrival, it is doubtful that he had heard of him in Minneapolis, he made it his goal to insinuate himself into Van Ronk’s life. Dylan tells how he began his assault on page 21 of his Chronicles. The scene takes place in the Folklore Center:

     One winter day a big burly guy stepped in off the street. He looked like he’d come from the Russian Embassy, shook the snow off his sleeves, took off his gloves and put them on the counter, asked to see a Gibson guitar that was hanging up on the brick wall. It was Dave Van Ronk. He was gruff, a mass of bristling hair, don’t give a damn attitude, a confident hunter. My mind went into a rush. (My italics.) There was nothing between him and me. Izzy took the guitar down and gave it to him.   Dave fingered the strings and played some kind of jazzy waltz, put the guitar back on the counter. As he put the guitar down, I stepped over and put my hands on it and asked him at the same time how does someone get to work down at the gaslight, who do you have to know? It’s not like I was trying to get buddy-buddy with him, I just wanted to know.

     Van Ronk looked at me curiously, was snippy and surly, asked if I did janitor work.

     I told him, no, I didn’t and he could perish the thought, but could I play something for him? He said, “Sure.”

     I played him “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out.” Dave then said I could come down about eight or nine in the evening and play a couple songs in his set. That was how I met Dave Van Ronk.

Bob and Dave

Possibly. But one learns to take Dylan’s stories with a shaker full of salt. Bob has a difficult time separating fact from fancy. The way Van Ronk tells it he was hanging around with a bunch of the boys when someone burst in and said ‘New guy, come on, you got to hear this.’ and it was Bob. So Van Ronk would have had an idea who Bob was not that he necessarily would have acknowledged him. There are some interesting points in Dylan’s narrative which I believe is Bob at his most fanciful. That he marked Van Ronk for destruction is apparent when he says he looked like he came from the Russian Embassy. Maybe. But Bob was a Jew and the Russians were the enemies of the Jews throughout the last two hundred years so Bob was casting him in the role of the enemy. Then he identifies Van Ronk as a ‘confident hunter.’ Jews usually associate hunting with goys while traditionally despising the practice so Bob is saying that the hunter didn’t know he was being hunted. And then Bob placed his hands on the guitar as he spoke to Van Ronk indicating that he was appropriating the man’s tool or emasculating him. Very significant action.

Bob says Van Ronk was snippy and surly. Well, maybe but since I think he’s making this up he is casting a character on Van Ronk to make you dislike him. Besides who wouldn’t appear surly if you placed your hands on the musician’s guitar. The exchange after that when Dave asked if Bob did janitor’s work was a particular Jewish insult that gave Bob his excuse for hurting Van Ronk.

Then like a parasite or lamphrey eel Bob latches onto Van Ronk slowly ‘stealing everything that he could steal.’

When the process was complete and Bob was way bigger than Dave could hope to be Bob then disses Van Ronk off. As Van Ronk tells it p. 217: Van Ronk:

For myself I consider it fortunate that Bobby and I reached our parting of the ways fairly early. Shortly after his third or fourth record had come out had gone diamond or whatever, he was holding court in the Kettle of Fish and he got on my case and started giving me all of this advice about how to manage my career, how to go about becoming a star. It was complete garbage, but by that point he had gotten used to everybody hanging on his every word and applauding any idea that came into his head. So I sat and listened for a while, and while I was polite and even asked him a couple of questions, but it became obvious that he was simply prodding and testing me. He was saying things like “Why don’t you give up the blues? You do that, and I”ll produce an album on you, you can make a fortune.” He wasn’t making a lick of sense, and I finally pushed back my chair and said, “Dylan, if you’re so rich, how come you ain’t smart?’ And I walked out.

So within three years Bob met and surpassed his mentor then trashed him like he trashed everyone and everything else in his life. Beware of Bob. To a very large extent MacDougal Street is the story of Bob Dylan within the folk scene of Greenwich Village although within that context Van Ronk tells a rich and rewarding story of the emergence of Folk from 1940 to c. 1970. A fabulous book with a generous dollop of belly laughs. I loved the book.

Van Ronk himself never made it. I first heard of him in 1967 and listened to the Prestige Folksinger album. There was nothing there. Van Ronk rasped out all his vocals in a monotonous fashion in that same gargling hoarse voice with nary a variation from song to song. At that age and time I found the songs uninteresting. The arrangments didn’t grab me. The music was about as exciting as the New Lost City Ramblers which is to say a stone bore.

Van Ronk may have prided himself on his musicianship and it may have been pretty good, I couldn’t care less. I know few people who listen to records for musicianship and I don’t care to listen to records with those who do. So Dave was concentrating on all the wrong things.

There were people running around saying how great he was but I was in the record business and nobody bought his records. you can foget the Hudson Dusters. Over the years his legend grew with that of the vanished Folk Scene and I guess twenty-five years or so after the fact he was able to cash in on that basis.

There is one really great song Van Ronk did though called Don’t Leave Me Here. I have it on The Folk Box, Elektra EKL 9001. That’s a really fine four record collection compiled and annotated by THE Robert Shelton. It has selections from nearly all the folkies of the Greenwich Village scene excluding Dylan. A terrific collection and a perfect representation of the scene. Hard to find though; I couldn’t find any copies on a quick search of the internet.

However the story of Dave’s learning process is vastly interesting. His history of the folk era, especially the late fifties and the people and personalities make the book a best buy. But then we get back to Dylan.

Bob not only wheedled his way onto Van Ronk’s stage but he wheedled his way into his very household appropriating Dave’s couch for his living quarters. Now comes an interesting conjecture. In Chronicles Bob says that he met a Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel with whom he stayed for some time. Now, Bob arrived in New York in January of ’61 and he rented his apartment with Suze Rotolo in the Fall of that year becoming financially independent thereafter never going back to anyone’s couch.

So that gives him a maximum of nine months to sleep on all those peoples’s couches. He says in Chronicles that he first met Van Ronk and through Van Ronk Paul Clayton. These are two colorful characters. He then says that through Clayton he met Ray Gooch. So far, so good. But then he gives a fairly minute description of the street the Gooches lived on, the building, the apartment and significantly the church across the street.

Before w go on let us consider an incident from Van Ronk on page 4:

…Bob Dylan heard me fooling around with one of my grandmother’s favorites, “The Chimes Of Trinity,” a sentimental ballad about Trinity Church that went something like:

Tolling for the outcast, tolling for the gay,

Tolling for the (something, something), long passed away,

As we whiled away the hours, down on old Broadway,

And we listened to the chimes of Trinity.

He made me sing it for him a few times until he had the gist of it, then reworked it into the “Chimes Of Freedom.” Her version was better.

Now let’s check into a passage from Toby Thompson’s ‘Positively Main Street’ pp. 210-211:

But the larger portraits of Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel are complex and layered with mystery. Why haven’t we seen them before? Correct me if I’m wrong, but their names appear in no biography of Bob. Could they be projectionsof his own divided psyche. Ray, the competent man of the world, the toolsmith, the gun collector, the would be warrior, and Chloe, the dreamy, slightly stoned performance oriented homebody? Bob’s not certain whether they are siblings or lovers. I’m not certain they are real. Chloe was the heroine of Longus’s second century novel Daphnis and Chloe. She was an orphan, nurtured by sheep, and is described as ‘a naive lily-white girl” who falls for the youth, Daphnis. Echo is mentioned in the story. In my case the apartment Ray and Chloe inhabit on Vestry is a boho Eden, Every hipster’s wettest dream of Manhattan digs.

The Sunday after reading Chronicles, a blustery afternoon in New York I took a subway to Franklin Street and walked north then west along Vestry, looking for the building that might have housed it. Bob describes it precisely, Federal style, facing a Roman Catholic church with a bell tower, on the same block as the Bull’s Head Tavern, below Canal Street, not far from the Hudson River. The neighborhood hasn’t changed much since the early sixties, but I could find no building that resembled it. Not the church, not the Bull’s Head Tavern. Houses disappear, but churches aren’t often torn down. I wanted to locate that apartment, only because he described it so beautifully.

So I think it safe to say the whole dozen pages or so in Chronicles is a fabrication. Bob dreamed it a few times and wrote it down as fact. A clue lies in the progression Van Ronk>Clayton>Gooch. Gooch has a made up quality to it so Gooch is probably a conflation of the personalities of Van Ronk and Clayton. And possibly the pair are also a sentimental portrait of Abe and Beattie, the mother and father. Not as they were but wouldn’t it have been loverly if they had been. Ray’s background also coincides with Bob’s studies of the pre-Civil War era in the South in the New York Library.

The church across the street reflects Trinity Cathedral in Dublin as in Dave’s song the Bells Of Trinity so that places the story after his stay with Van Ronk. Note the specified bell tower on the church. Bob’s not there and neither is most of his early reported life. I’ll say again anything he says is untrustworthy. As they say in Hollywood: Based on a true story.

The last couple chapters of MacDougal tell of the changes in the Village and performance after 1960 to 1967 when drugs took the scene down. These are relevant and important chapters as he describes how Dylan’s success caused the failure of the scene. ‘There’s no success like failure and failure is no success at all.’

Altogether I give Van Ronk’s Mayor Of MacDougal Street exceptionally high marks, worth a second reading and retention as a reference work. Positively Fourth Street by Toby Thompson has a place on your shelf also. I’ll review that after a second reading. It is well worthy of study, picking up the stray hint and fact here and there.

Chronicles of course is important to understand what Dave called the convoluted workings of Bob’s mind. Bob’s an interesting study because he has managed to fool a lot of people all the time and another pack of us for a time. I tell ya folks if I could live my life over I’d do some serious homework before I began but then even that probably wouldn’t help.

Posted in Bob Dylan, Folk Music, Greil Marcus, R.E. Prindle, Reviews, Uncategorized, Writing | Tagged Dave Van Ronk, Greenwich Village, MacDougal Street, R.E. Prindle, Suze Rotolo, Toby Thompson | 2 Comments »

I, Dynamo