Official Edgar Rice Burroughs Tribute and Weekly Webzine Site
Since 1996 ~ 10,000 Webpages in Archive
Volume 1450

What's Going On?
Edgar Rice Burroughs Among The Dystopians
by
R.E. Prindle

Probably you will not even betray me.
By that time I may be dead, or I shall have become a different person, with a different face.
                                                                  ~ George Orwell - 1984

I gotta da bellache-a alla da time. ~  Giuseppe Zangara

     What the above novels have in common is that they can be described as paranoid dystopias.  A dystopia is, of course, a negative utopia.  An interesting point is that with the exception of Philip Roth all the authors have a connection with H.G. Wells.

     Wells wrote the first of these dystopias When The Sleeper Wakes in 1899 after having written a host of paranoid short stories as well as The Time Machine, The Island Of Dr. Moreau, and The War Of The Worlds, all paranoid masterpieces.  Rather than being the father of Science Fiction he might better be known as the father of the paranoid dystopia.

     All of these novels are posited on a world that has already disappeared; the living past of the author's early life.  It is impossible to write accurately about a world that has not come into existence, or, in other words, a projection of the present into the future,   They are also based on the false and unrealistic premise that evil forces have seized control of the destiny of mankind requiring the forces of 'good' to go on the offensive to combat overwhelming odds to defeat the forces of evil.

     This is a psychological projection, a self fulfilling prophecy, based solely on internal fantasies which do not match up with external realities.

     The roles of 'good guys' and 'bad guys' change according to the writers' own social orientation but the stories are all identical except for the details.  Sleeper involves producers and labor as does The Iron Heel with GGs and BGs the same, that is, unskilled labor is good, the producers are bad.  The Moon Maid involves Communism and Americanism with the latter being the good. It Can't Happen Here. involves Fascism and Liberalism with Liberals the good guys.  The Plot Against America involves Semites against the World with the World bad.  And, of course, 1984 reverses The Plot Against America  where we have totalitarianism against the world with the world as the good guys.

   The anomaly in the batch is Phil Roth's The Plot Against America which, while published in 2004, is placed as though Phil's Semitic fears when he was ten were a reality.  Thus the novel which takes place in 1942 fits neatly into this scheme of these paranoid fantasies.

     The least successful and well known of the novels is Burroughs' Moon Maid.  All the rest were reasonably good sellers and have become standard works.

     Of the social backgrounds of the authors Wells and London came from deprived backgrounds.  Burroughs and Huxley from well-to-do backgrounds with blighted hopes.  Sinclair Lewis and George Orwell came from well-to-do backgrounds with advantages.  Roth comes from a middle class Semitic background raised in a ghetto.  All had two parents although Huxley's mother died when he was sixteen which had disastrous consequences for him.  Not surprisingly Wells and London wrote totally depressing dystopias; Burroughs and Huxley wrote dystopias of more or less successful resistance.  Sinclair Lewis wrote a straight satire of a dystopia while Roth and Orwell wrote with runaway paranoia and defeat.

     All of the dystopias are reflections of the social and political possibilities of the period from 1899 to 1946.  Surprisingly only two, Wells and London may be considered Reds.

...as the twig is bent so will the tree incline...

     Where shall we start?  How about 1776 and Adam Smith's Wealth Of Nations?  Certainly ol' Adam leaves the medieval world behind.  He is definitely talking about the future until, say, 9/11/'01.  The philosophy of Adam Smith no longer applies but folks won't realize it until the well runs dry.

     The French Revolution of 1789 ended the political domination of the medieval mentality as Smith's did the economic.

     Big changes, but the history of mankind is the history of adaptation to change.  It was never easy and the change to the modern world, that of 1776 to 2001 was equally fraught with trauma.

     If I didn't say it, I meant to:  There has never been a time when the world was equally just to all people.  Never.  Don't look for it soon; it's like the millennium or Lefty or Godot; everybody's waiting but they never get here.  There has always been a guy at the bottom and another at the top.  If you want to argue about that then mumble to yourself for it is so.  Some wear robes; some wear rags.  In medieval times one was born to one's robes or rags; in our times one gets to choose.  That's as close to 'social justice' as we're ever going to get.  Most of the people bleating about social justice just haven't tried and are filled with envy of those who have.

     OK.  Now you know where I stand.

   That said, the transition to an industrial economy was shockingly cruel.  Partially through ignorance of how to go about things and partially the Arien stupidity of the Semitic Bible, which even more cruelly proclaimed and believed:  The poor shall always be with us.  Thus the ideology and technology didn't match up.

     This in turn created a dichotomy between the doers and the consumers.  The latter styled the doers Capitalists, which was a smear, and themselves Socialist/Communists.  Themselves were good the others were bad.  So while the SCs can produce nothing they wish the something that is produced be given to them for nothing by those who are making the effort to produce.  This is called the Labor Theory Of Value and social justice.

     At the same time economics and politics were developing in this fanciful manner human knowledge began to explode which completely demolished both the Arien and Medieval thought systems.  Thus a conflict between Science and Religion.  To pick another convenient date, we'll use 1859 when Darwin's Origin Of Species was published, as a dividing line.  Even today you either accept Evolution or God.  The god view being Creationism or as more recently styled, Intelligent Design.  I don't know where either intelligence or design come in. It looks more like trial and error to me.

     Having set the preliminaries let us approach our first author and book, H.G. Wells and his When The Sleeper Wakes.  This is a seminal work for our times.  The granddaddy of the genre which flowered with Orwell's 1984.  The genre grew exponentially after Orwell's 1984 especially when the movies got hold of it.  My notion of the two most perfect dystopias are the Arnold Schwarzennegger movies The Terminator, which is the Semitic vision, and The Predator which is the Astrological version.

     By the post-1984 years the emphasis had shifted from the political to the religious.  Of the seven volumes under consideration six are political with The Plot Against America being religious.  The Producers who you probably erroneously think of as 'Capitalists', per the SC slander, because you let Karl Marx do your characterization for you.  Bad mistake.

     Wells, who was actually a self-centered individualist, professed to be a Socialist before 1920 and a Revolutionary after, was not a collectivist as socialists are so H.G. always had a split personality.  Not only split but fairly multiple.  Of course, stress will do that to you.

     It was stress, I believe, that produced what in my opinion is his masterpiece, When The Sleeper Wakes.

      Wells came from well down the social scale although he was fortunate enough to have two parents who stayed together.  Nevertheless the poverty, not extreme poverty, but poverty, of his youth left its mark on him.  He rose through his intellectual abilities to be a successful writer with a handsome income.

     The transition from poverty to wealth is never transited without difficulties.  Most of this group of writers who made substantial or even enormous incomes were never what one might call rich; they lived from hand to mouth and died waiting for the next royalty check.  Give an artist a million dollars and he spends the whole thing right away.

     In our time these guys make so much money that even they can't spend it all on receipt.  It's the only way any of them could ever become rich, which many now are.

     Nevertheless Wells found himself ahead of the game in 1899 when When The Sleeper Wakes was published.  The transition from the long sleep of poverty to the awakening to wealth was giving him nightmares, which as the title implies the book is all about.

     The hero is put in a trance that lasts for several hundred years but he is not actually dead.  Therefore the legacy left him by a relative has been accruing interest all those centuries, which has resulted in the Sleeper actually owning the world.

     A little college has grown up which administers this wealth.  The problem arises when the sleeper wakens and challenges the administrators for his own.  Naturally the Sleeper's sympathy lay with the downtrodden which he was before he went to sleep; they in turn try to rescue him from the administrators.

     The atmospherics of the novel are terrific.  The whole ensemble of the futuristic effects of science fiction are given birth at once.  The only thing Wells' city lacks is a glass bubble over it.  This is terrific reading and the best of the paranoid dystopias.  Just thinking about it you can hear the sirens wailing in the night while the searchlights play across the sky.  It is an insane society which brings to mind Fritz Lang's 1931 movie The Testament Of  Dr. Mabuse or even The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari with the burning chemical plant at the end.  Great stuff.  I've never read the Producer/Labor conflict into Sleeper but if you're political enough it's there.

     Well, you can't write something like that without someone reading it.  Two who did were Jack London and Edgar Rice Burroughs.  London was an ego-centric Socialist of the stripe of Wells, he didn't have the collective mentality either.  London came from approximately the same background as Wells but in the United States way out West in Oakland, California.

     Oakland!  What a place.  Jack London was about all they ever had.  Oakland is the place about which Gertrude Stein said, there's no there there.  I don't like Gertrude Stein but at least she knew what she was talking about with Oakland.  There wasn't any there there when I was there in the sixties either.   But they were still talking about Jack London like he'd just died.  His favorite hangout, The First And Last Chance Saloon down on Jack London Square was still there, too.  They had the trap door where after they conked you on the head they dropped you through into the Bay, too.  Whether that had been added or not since London's day I don't know but the place was still a tough talking joint after all those years.

    So, anyway, Jack claimed to be a Socialist.  Like I say he read Well's book and in 1908 he published his own version entitled The Iron Heel.  This book unlike Sleeper tackles the social problem from the side of the Reds against the Producers.  London styles the latter the Iron Heel which Orwell later described as stamping on your face and then going on stamping it forever in his 1984.

     The Iron Heel could also be the prototype for the Terminator.  Same story, slightly different details.

     Just as the Sleeper takes  place several hundred years in the future, which means things had been going on for a long time, London sets his story seven hundred years in the future then tells it from the point of view of a diarist living at the beginning of the twentieth century.

     While Wells' story written by a thirty-three year old man born in 1866 has a mid-nineteenth century feel to it, London a thirty-one year old born in 1875 has a more modern feel but lacks the spectacular atmospherics of Wells although the story is clearly derived from Sleeper.

     The transition from the manual age to the machine age is especially disturbing to London.  Like most, if not all, Red authors London assumes that the conditions of the present represent the shape of things to come, so that he projects his experience with factories and machines in unaltered form into the indefinite future.  His vision of reality resisted change.  He was no prophet.

     Without a change in the social mindset except for technological advances his notions might have remained true.  However the Semitic Biblical mindset which had stultified HSII & III aspirations for nearly two thousand years was about to change.  If one believed the Bible then George Baer's statement at the end of the century when asked by what right he and his fellow plutocrats were so rich, replied 'God gave it to us.'  This was quite true from a religious point of view in which nothing exists except as ordered by god.  This notion should present a real problem for believers, such as one of our authors, Philip Roth.  However, even good Biblical people displayed their hypocrisy by rejecting Baer's claim.  It didn't stop them from using the same argument against Evolution however.  Of course, we all know:  A foolish inconsistency is the bugabear of small minds.  One might also ask:  Why doesn't god see things the same way we do?

     But this reality on which both Wells and London based their beliefs was about to change.  By applying intelligence to the problem rather than a foolish faith based on ancient Arien beliefs of a segment of the Middle East, men like Frederick W. Taylor and Henry Ford were about to overturn the Semitic belief system.

     London was quite right to complain of Biblical industrialism in which little children were worked nearly to death while safety precautions for both children and adults were non-existent as well as compensation for crushed or maimed bodies.

      That was all about to change and it had nothing to do with Socialist/Communist naysayers.  Ignoring Freud's vision of the unconscious Frederick Taylor applied scientific principles to come up with a system of efficient management.  This was new and you couldn't expect those steeped in the old Biblical ways to understand.

     Taylor devised ways to make work easier and not so hard on mind and body.  His notion was to do things correctly which would maximize the return to both producers and unskilled labor.  This change which violated Biblical teaching was stridently resisted by both industrialists and workers steeped in the old ways.

   However the brand new auto industry which was despised and ignored by the horse and buggy Biblical bankers was about to be dominated by a visionary by the name of Henry Ford.  Rather than having men and machines opposing each other, through his assembly line procedures he made man and machines cooperate for maximum efficiency.

     During this period 'efficiency' is a major concern.  Not only Burroughs seems obsessed by efficiency but even Jack London  goes on an on about being efficient.  So concern with efficiency as introduced by Taylor pervades the period.

     At the same time Ford turned old industrial practices on their ears by providing workers with clean, airy, well lighted work spaces.  The assembly line delivered the work to the worker at a pace well within his functioning capacity without unduly tiring him.  Ford reduced the work day to eight hours divided into shifts, once again to provide maximum efficiency as tired overworked men can't be efficient.

     When he was told that his innovations wouldn't work because history was against him.  His reply was that if history is against me than history is bunk.  In order to discredit him his opponents shortened the retort to:  History is bunk!  It has made a good smear.

     On top of it, giving the workers a share in the increased efficiency, which had nothing to do with their efforts, he doubled the going wage forcing other industries to follow him for which he received their bountiful enmity.

     Thus Taylor and Ford overturned in a few years two thousand years of the Biblical enslavement of the minds of HSII & III.  The Semites responded by doing everything in their power to destroy both Ford and his factories.  It is no accident that when the Communists marched on his factories in 1936 it was their intent to smash his machines if not level his plants with the ground.  What kind of reactionary madness was this?

     But that's a different story.

     In its own way this conscious effort by Taylor and Ford contradicted the unconscious control of the conscious mind as propounded by Freud.  But let the master speak for himself.  In a letter to Theodore Herzl's son as quoted by John Farrell in his Freud's Paranoid Quest:

     Your father is one of those who has turned dreams into reality.  This is a very rare and dangerous breed.  It includes the Garibaldis, the Edisons, the Herzls.... I would call them the sharpest opponents of my scientific work.  It is my modest profession to simplify dreams, to make them clear and ordinary.  They, on the contrary, confuse the issue, turn it upside down, command the world while they themselves remain on the other side of the psychic mirror.  It is a group specializing in the realization of dreams.  I deal in psychoanalysis; they deal in psychosynthesis.

     What then is the issue?

     Yes, men like Taylor and Ford were the sharpest opponents of Freud's work.  So was Edgar Rice Burroughs.  Substitute the term 'religious' for 'scientific' work and you have the true nature of Freud's goal.  Rationality or 'psychosynthesis' is contrary to his system.  Interestingly he equates the unconscious with psychoanalysis and the conscious with psychosynthesis.  Freud is opposed to consciousness.  A little premonition of '1984'.  If you read the book carefully you will see that Orwell has penetrated the secret of Freudian psychoanalysis.

     Following the Freudian vision of the unconscious this little bit of enlightenment of Taylor and Ford shouldn't and couldn't have occurred.

     The Socialism of Wells and London based in nineteenth century conditions couldn't ingest these new developments let alone digest them.  That usually takes another generation or two.  It wouldn't have made any difference if they had as subsequent events show.

     The horrific vision of reality in Sleeper and The Iron Heel became a reality in 1917 when the Bolshevik Revolution succeeded in Russia.  Thus, ironically, the Iron Heel of London came down on the boot not of the producers but of the workers.  The hell he envisioned came from his own socialists.

     Jack London had cashed in his chips at the end of 1916 at the early age of 40 so one will never know how he would have reacted to this triumph of unbridled paranoia.  He had resigned his membership in the Socialist Party just before he died because he was disappointed that the Socialists had taken part in a 'Capitalist' war.  Perhaps he would have applauded Lenin's withdrawal from the war.

     Wells had established his reputation before 1900 while London surfaced just after.

     London's contemporary, Edgar Rice Burroughs, was struggling through his mental problems during both writers' successes.  He picked up his pen in 1911 writing virtually non-stop until his death.  Unlike Wells and London Burroughs was not a socialist.  When the Bolsheviks triumphed in 1917 he was horrified, turning his pen against the revolution.

     London died; Well's cracked up unable to bear the strain of the carnage of the Great War.  The destruction of life during the war was paralleled only by the Thirty Years War.  Wells' agony was well recorded in a series of books including his quite excellent The Soul Of A Bishop.  His breaking point was recorded in his remarkable God, The Invisible King.  He was unable to sustain his faith in god turning instead to the Revolution as his source of faith.  This faith was sorely tested by the antics of Josef Stalin as recorded in his 1938 book The Holy Terror.

     His 1923 novel Men Like Gods confirms his conversion to the Revolution.

     The year 1920 was a turning point not only for Wells but for the world.  The Russian Revolution with its Communist International set the rules for the new politics through the end of WWII.  A new crop of writers emerged including Aldous Huxley but the tolerance for free speech began to be ground under by the Semito-Communist juggernaut.  Anyone who didn't follow the Party line had to be destroyed.  In my own naivete as a young reader I failed to pick up the socialism of Wells and London as well as the so-called Fascism of Burroughs and Huxley.  Huxley would publish his great dystopia Brave New World in 1932.

     Wells' successful novelistic career ended with the war.  While he would continue to turn out novels year after year they were little read.  Mint first editions today can be had for a few dollars.  If you like Wells they all have their redeeming points but if you don't like Wells there is no reason to bother reading them.  I do like Wells and I have read them all at least once, some twice or thrice.

     As he became a committed member of the Revolution he apparently was assigned the role of literary hatchet man by Moscow.  He took it upon himself to attempt to discredit writers like Burroughs and Huxley and, incidentally, Orwell.  He went so far as to parody their styles.

     This literary warfare between Wells and non-revolutionary writers has either gone unnoticed or has been obscured for political reasons.  I suspect the latter.  All of the evidence I have been able to uncover is literary.

     I suspect Burroughs called attention to himself in 1919 when he circulated his manuscript Under The Red Flag for publication.  The story was uniformly rejected, whether for political or literary reasons isn't known.

     The next stage in the literary war appears to have been a sneering parody of Burroughs in Wells' Men Like Gods of 1923 which Burroughs appears to have answered with his novel The Moon Maid which was a rewrite of Under The Red Flag with additional material.  The Moon Maid was, as common with Burroughs, a trilogy.  Part I was the Moon Maid, Part II was the Moon Men, Part III being The Red Hawk.  The Moon Men was a rewrite of Under The Red Flag with the invaders coming from the moon rather than Russia.

     The novel shows clear affinities to both When The Sleeper Wakes and The Iron Heel although Burroughs writes from the other side taking the part of the producers.

     The first part, The Moon Maid, seems to be an answer to Wells' Men Like Gods.  Wells had earlier written a novel in 1901 entitled The First Men In The Moon.  The book is a rather humdrum affair without any real imaginative touches.  It's the sort of thing a high school student might do.  In what I interpret as a put down of Wells Burroughs pulls out the stopper in his version, running imaginative circles around Wells.  If one reads them side by side, parallel columns so to speak, the glamour of the Burroughs' story pales that of Wells.

     So that, if Burroughs was responding to Wells he chose a way to do so in which he humiliated the 'founder' of the science fiction genre.  The next volume The Moon Men then makes a direct attack on Bolshevism, sticking a finger directly in Wells' eye.  Assuming the conquest of America Burroughs shows the results of applied Bolshevism or Semito-Communism.  He thus got the point of Under The Red Flag across disguised as an invasion of totalitarian moon men.  It is interesting that twenty or so years later Orwell would be allowed to publish 1984 which has many similarities to Burroughs' story.

     Like both Wells and London Burroughs' story covers several hundred years.  Taking a cue more from London than Wells he invents a family of warriors, the Julians, perhaps a reference to Julius Caesar, whose various descendants carry the story forward.

     Even though London could get a virtual socialist tract published in 1908 the same latitude was not allowed Burroughs in 1919, probably to his best interest, so that he was compelled to write a better story than London although in competition with the Sleeper he fell well below Wells effort.

     As Burroughs came from a background of affluent expectations unlike either Wells or London as well as having a strong military background, a race of fighters so to speak, he lacks the inferiority complex which allowed Wells' Sleeper to be beaten and London's socialists to subdue reason after 700 years, winning by default, he sets to work fighting the moon men which takes up the third volume, The Red Hawk.

     Of course the world as anyone had known it had been destroyed with mankind having reverted to savagery.

     The Moon Maid was published in 1926.  In 1928 Wells answered with his Mr. Blettsworthy Of Rampole Island.  Perhaps not his best known novel while being rather weak as a story, Blettsworthy fails to rise to the imaginative level of any section of the Moon Maid.

     The novel unmistakably parodies several of Burroughs' stories  including The Lad And The Lion and The Land That Time Forgot which indicates that Wells was thoroughly familiar with Burroughs.  The gist of his story is that Burroughs was insane.

     Since The Lad And The Lion had only seen magazine publication at the time, Wells was only familiar with the short version.  Burroughs added another entire story line when he rewrote the tale for book publication in 1938.  The parallel story concerning a revolution in Eastern Europe might be read as a response to Wells.

     Thus Wells was going to some effort to stay current with Burroughs.  It follows that Burroughs must also have been keeping current with Wells since he answers him.

     At the same time Wells was monitoring other 'dissident' writers such as Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.  Unlike Burroughs who probably never met Wells, Huxley had had social relations with Wells, visiting him at his house on the Riviera.  They had a falling out when Huxley published his dystopia Brave New World.  Wells found this work 'counterrevolutionary'.  In a hot discussion Wells told Huxley that he should never have published the novel and ought to withdraw it.  Wells who was gaining a reputation for being cranky was obviously allowing his ideology to supplant his scientific training.

     Wells would subsequently defame Huxley in print in his 1933 novel The Shape Of Things To Come.  Burroughs continued a hot exchange with Wells in his 1931 Tarzan The Invincible, Tarzan And The Leopard Men of 1933 and 1934's Tarzan And The Lion Man.  In Tarzan The Invincible the Reds penetrated his imaginary Opar forcing La out into the wide world.

     The world had changed a great deal since Wells published his seminal novels like War Of The Worlds and When The Sleeper Wakes.  Not only had science and technology advanced faster than the human mind could keep up with but ideas of mind and behavior had taken major advances apart from Freud.

     Wells, born in 1866 matured entirely in the nineteenth century.  While he kept up on developments in psychology, biology and other disciplines his understanding was conditioned by his earlier years.  For instance airplanes and autos were novel inventions to one who had lived most of his life in the horse and buggy days.  Some of his most comic inventions have to do with his problems understanding the automobile, not too far from Toad in Wind In The Willows.  Even as the Wrights were lifting off at Kitty Hawk Wells thought flying, if it were done at all, was in the distant future.  Even though he may have known of the psychological and technological advances he was not so familiar with them that he could manipulate the ideas like Huxley in Brave New World.

    Burroughs had at least reached his majority in the old century being twenty-five in 1900 and while he doesn't seem to have incorporated psychology and technology in his work as well as Huxley he seems to have been intermediate between Wells and Huxley in his understanding which comes as no surprise.  All of these writers were remarkably well educated.  I would estimate that the intelligence of the these three was approximately equal.

     So, Huxley, born in 1894, had little contact with the old century coming to awareness and maturity as the scientific and psychological marvels unfolded; yet Huxley was familiar with nineteenth century theories of the unconscious such as those of FWH Myers.  As well he was friends with his fellow writer D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) who had some decidedly divergent opinions of the unconscious compared to Freud.

     Thus while When The Sleeper Wakes, The Iron Heel and The Moon Maid are rather crude affairs, Huxley's Brave New World is a thoroughly modern zippy Twentieth Century Limited model.  He brings science, technology and psychology together in a manner pointing to the future rather than reflecting just the past.

     Huxley is able to play with such concepts as eugenics of which Wells, London and Burroughs were all advocates in a fresh, stimulating way.  In Huxley's mind the experiments and discoveries of the past few decades were transmuted into novel extensions of a futuristic world.  Until the arrival of 1984, Brave New World had the field to itself.

     Huxley took the psychological concepts of hypnotism and conditioning, joining them with the technological inventions of movies, records and loudspeaker systems to come up with the concept of hypnopaedic conditioning for the manipulation of minds which obviated such political concepts as democracy, freedom of will, speech, conscience and everything else.  As hypnopaedically conditioned by the state, the unit, a person, was no longer an individual but became a virtual automaton.  Hypnopaedic conditioning has been largely realized in our time.

     Huxley's distopia was a much kinder one than the dystopia of Orwell's 1984 but raised the ire of Wells nonetheless.  One wonders what his reaction to 1984 would have been although by 1949 the Socialist dream of the pre-Bolshevik revolution had been made a mockery of by the proletariat.

     It would seem that Huxley was familiar with the role of Wells as communist literary hatchet man.  The blatant smear in The Shape Of Things To Come did nothing to increase his regard for Wells.  He would wait until his The Genius And The Goddess of 1955 to equally slam Wells describing him as like a river a mile wide and an inch deep.  Of course by then Wells was beyond replying.

     Huxley seems to have been aware of the feud between Wells and Burroughs as in his 1938 novel After Many A Summer Dies The Swan incorporates Tarzana into his story while his story seems to be influenced by Burroughs' Tarzan And The Lion Man of 1934.

     While these unrecognized battles were going on between  these literary giants of the twentieth century the conditions of warfare were changing.

    The revolutionaries of the pre-1917 Revolution had been violent but lacked a territorial and political base.  While we know Burroughs had a pure American point of view which abjured all foreign political schemes one can't be sure how deeply Wells was involved in revolutionary violence, although I am convinced he was to some degree.  Certainly it was never thought fit to knight him as were so many of his literary contemporaries.

     Post 1917, even if communism hadn't triumphed in Europe, Socialism had influenced all European governments.  To counter the International Communism of the Soviets a variant socialism arose in Italy known as Fascism or National Socialism.  The latter was perfected in Germany under the direction of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.  National Socialism is the antithesis of International Socialism so that while the Soviets hated the national socialists the hatred was abundantly returned.  The real battle of WWII was between National and International Socialism.

     Just as there were Communist Parties and Soviet organization in the various States so National Socialism and the various 'shirt' organizations came into existence:  Black Shirts, Red Shirts (I always favored narrow red and blue horizontal stripes) and in America a ridiculous organization known as the Silver Shirts run by a man named William Dudley Pelley.

     As Americans like Edgar Rice Burroughs knew, some funky foreign political ideology like Fascism had neither a place nor a future in America.  You had to be super paranoid to believe otherwise.

     Pelley's organization was miniscule, many times smaller than the Communist Party which in itself was considered miniscule, while no one could have gotten away with an SA in America which was an essential for success.  At the same time the religious elements infused into Communism which became prominent in the Great War and Bolshevik Revolution were now the central focus of politics.  I refer of course to the Semites.  The severe challenge from science fell on the Semites hardest who were incapable of altering their religious beliefs.

     The Arab Semites were still confined to Arabia and the Middle East while the Judaic Semites were mingled throughout the Moslem and European States as well as North America.  Their goals while compatible with Western Europe, England and the United States were incompatible with the National Socialists and the Soviets but for different reasons.  Thus both States began to purge their Semites.

     While the Semites believed themselves to be in control of the Soviets, which was quite mistaken, they made the National Socialists their enemy targeting their destruction.  A simple dip like William Dudley Pelley thus fell under their displeasure.  He, too, was targeted for destruction.

     Thus as unbelievable as it may seem a major writer of the era undertook to write a propaganda tract denouncing Pelley and his Silver Shirts.  Although the novel made the best seller lists, Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here is a dud.  The novel is not futuristic but takes place in the here and now with William Dudley Pelley or his namesake, defeating FDR in the 1936 election.  The premise is laughable from the beginning because if an unknown like Alf Landon couldn't do FDR in William Dudley Pelley had even that much less a chance.  But paranoia strikes deep.

   There is a great deal of similarity between It Can't Happen Here and the next book on our list The Plot Against America by Philip Roth.  Roth is the only Semite on our list hence his novel represents Semitic paranoia which now begins to take prominence in American politics. While written in 2004 Phil sets the time period back to 1942 when he was ten or eleven.  He presents his story as a memoir telling it himself in the first person using his own immediate family as characters as well as, one presumes, his extended family and acquaintances.

     Just as Lewis' novel attacks one Semitic bete noir who no one now remembers, Phil Roth attacks another Semitic bete noir, the famous Charles Lindhberg, in an attempt to smear his name or try to expunge it from the history books.  We edge closer to 1984.  The book is total defamation of character.  What the book doesn't achieve I'm sure the movie will.  Oh yeah, there's bound to be a movie.

     The basis of the defamation is a speech made by Lindhberg when he served as spokesman for the America First Committee.  While currently the European War of 1940-45 is represented as an inevitable holy campaign against unspeakable evil, it was not so seen at the time.  Except for Pearl Harbor the US might never have been drawn into the European conflict.  In fact, just as the majority of Americans once backed Joseph R. McCarthy the vast majority of Americans were opposed to becoming embroiled in what they considered another foreign entanglement.

     In order to maintain his popularity Franklin Delano Roosevelt, not too long before he mobilized America, swore to the mothers of Pittsburgh that he would never send their sons to fight in Europe.  The mothers of Pittsburgh accepted this pledge without a dissenting vote. And yet there were those who wanted the US involved in this European conflict and although a minority they would achieve their goal.  Hence America First was created by responsible and reasonable men to counter their interests.

     In a speech at Des Moines, Iowa Charles Lindhberg representing America First, foolishly as it turned out, named these interests.  What is otherwise called exposing the miscreants - when the shoe is on the other foot.  The British, the Jews and our man in Washington himself, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  It was true that these three agents were trying to involve the United States in a war which was not its concern except that Hitler was fighting Communism, which it was in US interests to support.  But both the Semites and FDR were sympathetic to the Socialist/Communist cause.  Lindhberg had the good sense not to mention this last fact.

     Perhaps the three agents actually believed that no one knew of their covert activity, something like your friendly neighborhood burglar.  Like the latter who is enraged when he is exposed so were these three agents.  They began a defamation campaign against Lindhberg which as is evidenced by Phil Roth's book goes on today.  The point is obviously to make Lindhberg's memory execrated prior to writing him out of the history books.  I think 'marginalizing' is a current expression.

    In the thirties as a covert agent of the US government Lindhberg had been employed to survey the German airfleet which he was glad to do for his country.  This necessitated establishing good relations with the Nazi hierarchy which it was easy for him to do as the international celebrity who had made the first solo flight across the Atlantic only a few years before.

     His detractors now say that he only made the flight for the prize money.  Why, of course! Why else?  If prize money is an ignoble reason then what would be the noble reason?  The cash reward was the very ignoble reason I and everyone I ever knew went to work everyday.  It would perhaps have been more noble to have worked for the benefit of mankind gratis but the world is so ignoble that it doesn't reward nobility with a full dinner pail, a square deal, a new deal, or free rent.  What nonsense these people gush.

     And then having surveyed the German airfleet and turned in his report to the Roosevelt Administration he in turn was accused of being a Nazi.  How ignoble was Roosevelt to display such ingratitude?

     While studying the European scene as an independent intelligent man Lindhberg came to the conclusion that the problem was an age old European one that was working itself out and should be left to run its course.  This opinion violated the cherished dogmas of the Liberal Coalition.  This opinion is also used to prove he was a Fascist.

     Thus Roth attempts to create an actual alternate reality, to edit history to meet his mental needs, a historical revision in which in 1940 Lindhberg, who was not even running for president, defeated Roosevelt in the latter's third term bid.  This turn of events is even more laughable than Sinclair Lewis' notion of Pelley defeating Roosevelt in 1936.  Phil must have been rewriting It Can't Happen Here from a Semitic point of view.  At the same time the idea of editing history for partisan purposes is very reminiscent of Orwell's 1984.

     Thus we have six paranoid delusions all of which are projections of the personalities of the authors.  While the delusions are based on possible turns of events in fact no author was able to extrapolate the course of history from his understanding of the facts as perceived by him at the time.

     The unskilled labor/producer problem as perceived by Wells and London was altered by Taylor and Ford so that the relationships and conditions changed.  While Burroughs' extrapolation of the political confrontation between the Bolsheviks and the West  was grounded soundly in facts the world too has evolved in a much different manner.

     Of the writers so far considered Huxley's vision of the future has been closest but as a scenario which rejected religion and ignored Third World concerns its application too fails although remarkably accurate within the context of Western society.

     Lewis' vision which while perhaps amusing in a satirical way was too absurd for any real consideration while the full blown psychosis of Phil's is pitiable.

     While both Burroughs' and Lewis' visions were plausible in the American context that of Roth's is almost, well, actually deranged.

     Phil apparently grew up in an ethnic enclave completely divorced from an integration into American society.  I can understand this as I spent several formative years in the orphanage which is also a sort of ghetto divorced from normal reality.  His reasoning is based not on circumstances in the United States or even Western Europe but his ethnic enclave is still emotionally and intellectually attached to Central and Eastern Europe- That is Germany and the countries of the Pale.

     It is as though the great ethnic enclaves of New Jersey in which Phil grew up, New York, Philadelphia and Boston were provinces of Central and Eastern Europe rather than integral territories of the United States.  In terms of Freud's group psychology Phil's ethnic group had not separated itself from its European parent.

     Thus compared to Burroughs and Lewis Phil, who himself was born and raised in the United States although within an ethnic enclave, makes egregious errors about American society which while plausible to ghetto notions are nevertheless surprising.

     In one very revealing passage Lindhberg after having been elected and established his Nazi government in junior partnership with Hitler (Phil is apparently not ashamed to write such drivel) in a sort of outreach program sends members of the enclave out of their self-imposed ghetto into the hinterlands to see how the country lived and worked.  Phil's (remember he uses his own name in this novel) brother is selected to live with a Kentucky family.  On returning in a completely liberated even transcendent state he tries to explain to Phil that out there it's wonderful.  It's not like the mental image those of the enclave project on it.

     Phil Roth is outraged at his brother's obvious apostasy while manipulating his story to reverse his brother's opinion.

     Phil is describing real ghetto mentality which makes this a valuable book.  Nearly the same story was true of the playwright Arthur Miller who left the New York enclave of Brooklyn to attend college at the University of Michigan.  He too could not make the transition to liberation returning to the comfort of the ghetto mentality with its reliance on its Eastern European connection.

     As Burroughs and Lewis could have told Phil there was no chance that Lindhberg would embrace either Fascism or Communism as they were foreign ideologies having nothing to do with native Americanism.  The extent and depth of Phil's paranoid delusion is startling.  None of us are Fascists, none of us have any love for Communism, none of us, I'm even of  Polish descent, have any connection with Eastern Europe.  This is a paranoid delusion of his ethnic group.

     To cap off his misunderstanding that the America of the forties and Central and Eastern Europe were identical in outlook Phil makes a gaffe that not one real American can tolerate.

     In the first place, as a Semite, he makes the same error that the Semites have been making since Sumer, five thousand or more years ago.  As the Bible plainly states the Semites are destined to live in houses they never built and to reap crops they never sowed.

     While literalists will undoubtedly shake their heads in wonder over the above prophecy the allegorist will realize that what is being said is that the Semites will replace cultures and civilizations with their own while the inhabitants will sow crops as servants for the benefit of the master race.

     The problem is that the Semitic intellect while subtle enough to move the nest's occupants out like some cowbird haven't the intellect to maintain what they have stolen.

     Thus the Sumerians created a glittering civilization which the Semites preempted only to have their success turn to ashes in their mouths as they could not maintain what the Sumerians had built.  This is as it was and as it will always be.

     The beauty of the ancient Egyptian civilization took millennia to bankrupt enduring wave after wave of invasion until finally with the Arab occupation beginning in the seventh century Semitic sterility has succeeded in squashing Egyptian society today.

     One might attribute the destruction of ancient Rome to the Jewish Wars of the first two Christian centuries.  In those wars the Semites attempted to core out the Roman influence and set up a Semitic theocratic  State within the eviscerated structure.

     So it went down through the ages with culture after culture and civilization after civilization being gutted and discarded as the Semites looked for the Next Big Thing.

     The glitter of German culture of the nineteenth century attracted them.  Once again they believed they could hollow out the living organism placing themselves inside but one can only create in one's own image, according to the contents of one's own character and so by 1945 the whole of Germany lay one huge smoking ruin.  This is the Semitic heritage; this will always be the Semitic heritage.  For the Semites America is the Rome of the twenty-first century.  When that has been destroyed who will be next?

     Thus in his psychosis, Phil Roth in The Plot Against America having  been attracted by the glittering creation of yet another culture, claims that his fellows represent the true America while those who created the glittering reality are plotting against this true Semitic fantasy of themselves.

     This was a repetition of Semitic history while the ashes of Germany still glowed; the Semites bored in and hijacked American culture and civilization.  Phil can't stand the reflection he sees in the mirror so to avoid seeing it he passes 'hate' laws meant to prevent anyone from holding up a mirror to him.

     As a stamp collector in his novel Phil symbolically disfigures the America he professes to love by superimposing a swastika on the National Parks series of stamps.  He uses the Yosemite National Park stamp with a superimposed swastika on the cover of his book.  Doesn't he realize what a gross insult this is to Americans?  Is it intentional?

     Phil Roth should study the works of he whom he bills as one of the three greatest men of the twentieth century- Sigmund Freud.  If he does he will realize that he is quite mad, projecting his own crazy paranoia onto a reality that looks nothing like his paranoid fancies. He has projected an astonishing vision.

     Edgar Rice Burroughs or even Sinclair Lewis could have told him that none of those 'fake' Americans he imagines out their beyond the ghetto streets even thought in terms of either swastikas or its mirror image the Star Of  David.  If an American superimposed anything it would be the American Flag.

     One shudders at the thought of what Phil's reading habits must be, but if he had read 'fake' American literature like Burroughs' 'The Moon Maid' he would have read pages about the sanctity of the Stars and Stripes.  After hundred of years of battle when the Semites had reduced the world to primitive savagery, after the Americans had driven the Moon Men to the sea at Los Angeles, Burroughs' hero, the Red Hawk finally plants Old Glory back on the shores of the Pacific.  Swastikas? Sickles and hammers?  Stars of David?  Who does Phil think he's kidding?

     Swastikas are a paranoid projection of Phil's own twisted gonads.  He may believe that America is a land of Fascist jugglers managing to keep eight swastikas in the air at one time but Phil, it's you baby, it's you.  What you see exists only in your own paranoid mind.

     While speaking of paranoia let us turn to the last of our series of dystopias, the most inspissated of all paranoid dystopias, George Orwell's 1984.  Nobody has been able to top this one.  For two or three generations students have been taught this paranoid madness as reality.

     To project the past into the future to explain the present:

     The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia.  He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago.  But where did that knowledge exist?  Only in his consciousness which in any case must be annihilated.  And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed-  if all records told the same tale- then the lie passed into history and became truth.  'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.'  And yet  the past, though of its own nature alterable never has been altered.  Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting.  It was quite simple.  All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory.  'Realty control,' they called it:  in Newspeak, doublethink.'

     The year Orwell published those lines was in 1949.  A careful reading of the text reveals that Orwell was reacting to Semito-Communism.  The novel has had a huge impact.  Its sophomoric simplicity allowed it to replace 'Brave New World' as a blueprint for the future although there is clear evidence in Orwell that he was familiar with Huxley as well as Wells and possibly London and Burroughs.

     In the post-war era the fear of totalitarianism was directed at Communism without an awareness of the religious content of the ideology.  The Arab Semites were still quiescent the Moslem invasion of the West not yet having begun.  With the demise of the Soviet State the true nature of the conflict emerged: that of the Semites against the world.

     As I have pointed out before, the Israeli Semites and the Arab Semites are two branches of the same faith.  Moslemism is Judaism each faith belonging to a different branch of the Semitic family tree.  This is a fact.

     The problem then for each branch was how to impose its belief system on an unwilling world.  The Arab Moslems prefer a form of force or intimidation short of an open war which they at present cannot win.  The Israelis prefer a form of persuasion or thought control following the dictums of their great innovator and leader, Sigmund Freud.  Thus the Israelis seek to control how the past is seen, through the past, the future so that they must control the present so that thought can be filtered through their lens.  So we have Phil Roth's 'The Plot Against America' which reverses the facts seeking to alter the past, which is to say falsify it into a projection of Semitic desires, to control the future.  Marx, Freud and Einstein then become the heroes against which all are measured while Lindhberg and Burroughs' fighters for truth become mere bigots.

     In this vision anyone who refuses to accept the psychological projection of the Semitic world view is a bigot who must be taught to cease 'hating' and to love 'Big Brother.'  Toward this end the Semites have as the Party even persuaded what Orwell  would call 'the proles' to enforce the indoctrination against dissenters.

     I refer of course to people like Ernst Zundel.  Now, the historical problem, and there is an historical problem, is how many Semites were exterminated in the Nazi death camps.  To deny the existence of the camps is futile.  There is nothing clearer than that Hitler attempted to exterminate what he considered to be inferior peoples, among them Poles, Jews, Ukrainians and Slavs in general.  Let's face it, the man had a vision, a projection of reality.

     Considering the extermination attempt a given, Zundel and others question the number of Semites which were actually destroyed.  The Semites have always claimed six million as a point of pride and I must confess that I have always unquestioningly accepted the figure.  Now that I've been forced against my will to think about the matter, on the face of it the figure cannot be accurate.  It is almost impossible that the exact number would be an even six million so that the figure must be accepted as an approximation only for rhetorical use.  Personally I have nothing psychologically invested as to whether the number was one million, six or even twelve million.  However, especially in the light of Phil Roth's willful distortion of history concerning Lindhberg, I do object to a man being imprisoned first by the compliant Canadians and then the even more compliant, shall we say obsequious, Germans simply because he questions the veracity of questionable Semitic figures.

     Putting a man in prison because he questions the Party line is a realization of the horrors of what should be Orwell's fantasy.  Will they offer Zundel a rat mask down in room 101?

  I'm sure I don't know any better than Zundel or the Semites how many Hitler destroyed but as I have done some study of the Semites in Europe and the United States let us look at some facts.

     In 1914 when the Semites intended to transfer the entire Semitic population of Central and Eastern Europe to the United States before their plans were interrupted by the Great War their figures included only five and a half million remaining after almost an equal number had emigrated to various parts of the world.

     Central and Eastern Europe was not only completely devastated by the War but in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution according to Semitic sources the warfare between the Semites and eastern peoples resulted in the destruction of whole populations in the Pale of Settlement.

     If this were true, and I don't necessarily believe any of this, then the whole population of Semites in say, 1922, couldn't have been more than four million.  Between 1928 and 1945 according to Semitic sources Stalin eliminated two million.  In 1953 he intended to eliminate the million and a half Semites then remaining in the Soviet Empire.

     You begin to see the problem, I presume.

     As I say it matters little to me who is right.  Whether one million, six million or twelve seems to me to be a moot point.  I just want to know where those six or twelve million came from when they weren't in the census figures.

     Numbers aside, what we have in the case of the Nazi exterminations and Phil Roth's rewrite of American history in The Plot Against America in Orwell's Newspeak is 'doublethink':  in other words, the West is willing to set aside its great scientific heritage to honor religious superstition and bigotry.

     I consider this very strange.  It is too late for the Canadians to review their position but as of this writing it is not too late for the Germans to live up to their scientific heritage.  Let's hope they do.

     So from Wells' When The Sleeper Wakes through Orwell's 1984 the whole gamut of the paranoid dystopia was run.  Two, Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984, have been reasonably accurate blueprints for what has actually come to be.

     The problem comes down to whether or not mankind can make the leap from the religious consciousness to the next level of the scientific consciousness.  Will we continue to embrace the mentality of Freud's religious vision of psychoanalysis or will we accept Edison, Taylor and Ford's scientific psychosynthesis.  The future lies before us, to coin a phrase, the only question is whether that future will be a denial of reality and a return to religious futility or a bold leap where man has been trying to go for at least a century.  Let us hope the latter.