Examples of Sound Fiat Money

 

In this chapter, we will review some historical examples of the use of sound fiat money not backed by precious metals. The pattern that arises is always the same. When true sound fiat money is used, the economy works efficiently and there is no inflation. However, if the government starts issuing more fiat money than there is backing (a commodity or, more generally, human labour) for it, then inflation sets in and the economy gets into trouble. This last phenomenon usually has its origin in wars for which the government needs more money than actually exists.

Spartan Iron Money

For the first example let’s look way back to the foundation of the ancient Spartan way of life originated by its king Lycurgus in 800 BC.

Lycurgus had travelled widely, visiting India, Spain, Libya and the island of Crete. When he returned to Sparta, he took control of the government and established a constitution based on the Cretan model. He took several measures aimed at cleaning up a corrupt society “whose wealth had centred upon a very few”, according to Plutarch.

Lycurgus began with a decree that outlawed all gold and silver coinage and declared that all Spartan coins must be made of iron. He let the coin units be of low value and heavy so they were difficult to store and transport. He had the hot iron doused with vinegar to make the metal weak and fragile.

Lycurgus’ money was a sound fiat money because the total amount of money in circulation was regulated by law and the value of the symbols serving as money, called Pelanors, depended on limiting the number in circulation.

This monetary system seems to have worked well for three and a half centuries. It was abandoned around 415 BC, after Sparta started a series of campaigns to conquest foreign territories and captured large amounts of gold and silver.

The following quote is from Plutarch’s Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, Lycurgus chapter, and gives his reason for the end of this money system.

“For five hundred years, Sparta kept the laws of Lycurgus and was the strongest and most famous city in Greece. But eventually gold and silver were allowed in, and along with them came all of the evils spawned by the love of money. Lysander must take the blame, because he brought home rich spoils from the wars. Although not corrupt himself, Lysander infected Sparta with greed and luxury, and thus subverted the laws of Lycurgus.”

Rome Bronze Nomisma

When Numa Pompilius (716-762 BC), Rome’s second King, came to power most of the gold and silver that he could use as money was stored away in eastern temple establishments. However, copper was abundant and would be much easier to obtain.

Numa came from Rome’s Sabine territory and considered himself a descendant of the Spartans. He was renowned for his high intelligence. He reasoned that if he would institutionalize bronze - an alloy composed of mainly copper, some tin and a bit of lead - as money, the ability of the eastern temples or merchants to control or disrupt Rome’s money would be greatly reduced.

Thus, Numa formulated an ingenious plan. He would decree that gold and silver would merely be commodities in his kingdom. They could be traded as unmarked coins or bars, but the real money would be bronze.

This bronze money was clearly a fiat token money. It was called nummi or nomisma at a later point in Numa’s reign. Because his name was so close to nummi, some historians think Numa was named after his monetary innovations rather than the money being named after him.

The following quote from Alexander del Mar[6] describes what the Romans had to do in his opinion for the system to function properly or, in our terminology, for the money to be sound fiat money.

“Therefore, the means necessary to secure and maintain such a money were for the State to monopolize the copper mines, restrict the commerce in copper, strike copper pieces of high artistic merit in order to defeat counterfeiting, stamp them with the mark of the State, render them the sole legal tenders for the payment of domestic contracts, taxes, fines and debts, limit their emission until their value (from universal demand for them and their comparative scarcity) rose to more than that of the metal of which they were composed, and maintain such restriction and over-valuation as the permanent policy of the State. For foreign trade or diplomacy, a supply of gold and silver, coined and uncoined, could be kept in the treasury.”

The system worked well, first domestically and then internationally, until the Punic wars with Carthage.

China: The First Fiat Paper Money

China is not only credited with having invented paper but it is also generally recognized to have been the first country in the world to use fiat paper money.

The inspiration for China’s paper money actually came from the “white deerskin” money (bai lu pi bi) issued under the reign of Emperor Wu (141-87 BC) of the Han Dynasty, and the “flying money” (fei qian) of the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD). These were bills of exchange that were traded in private exchanging booths (jufang or jifupu), and in official exchange houses (bianqianwu). In addition to that, textile fabric was also common as a means of payment, as it was part of the tax system. True paper money became a major form of currency during the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127) with the issuance of the Jiao Zi and Qian Yin, and paper currency then continued under the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279) which issued the Hui Zi and Guan Zi.

In ancient China they used iron coins that were circular with a rectangular hole in the middle. Several coins could be strung together in a rope. Merchants soon realized that these strings of coins were too heavy to carry around. It was much more convenient to leave the coins with a trustworthy person and carry a receipt instead. The money could be regained using this receipt. This gave rise to the first fiat paper money, the Jiao Zi.

The Jiao Zi was first issued in 1023 together by 16 merchant princes by order of the Song prefect, Xue Tian, at Chengdu, in the Sichuan Province. This fiat paper money was a piece of paper printed with houses, trees, men and cipher to avoid counterfeiting, and it was sound because it was redeemable in coins. It worked well as long as it remained sound, i.e. backed by an appropriate amount of coins. However, there was eventually a point in time in which the state started issuing more paper money than was covered by coins and prices began to increase.

For this reason, Emperor Huizong (1100-1125) decided in 1105 to replace the Jiao Zi notes by a new fiat paper currency, the Qian Yin. This new paper money, and the subsequent ones, had also problems with inflation because they were not truly sound money[7].

The Tally Sticks

Tally sticks initially served in England as record keeping devices, from at least the twelfth century. But the English tally system originated with King Henry I, son of William the Conqueror, who ascended to the throne in 1100 AD. At that time, taxes were paid directly with goods and services produced by the people. According to the new innovative system, payment was recorded with a piece of wood that had been notched and split in half lengthwise. One half was kept by the treasury and the other by the recipient. Payment could be confirmed by matching the two halves to make sure they “tallied.” Given that no stick splits in an even manner and the notches tallying the sums were cut right through both pieces of wood, counterfeiting was virtually impossible.

Tally sticks were in use for 726 years. They were accepted as legal proof in medieval courts and the Napoleonic Code of 1804 still makes reference to the tally stick in Article 1333.

They were used by the government not only as receipts for the payment of taxes but to pay soldiers for their service, farmers for their wheat, and labourers for their labour. At tax time, tallies were accepted by the treasurer in payment of taxes.

It wasn’t long before the value of tally sticks in circulation far exceeded gold and silver money. It is estimated that by the end of the seventeenth century the tallies in circulation had a value of about fourteen million pounds, yet the coined metals at the time never exceeded a half million pounds in value. By 1694 the tally sticks evolved into being represented by paper bills and by 1697 they circulated interchangeably as money with banknotes and bank bills.

Tally sticks were a sound fiat money system for the following reasons.

1.  They were really bills of exchange, but they were interest free. They were backed by goods and services that did not exist at the time of issue, but would be produced in a short time when taxes were paid. Thus, they could be used like money because they had the King’s approval.

2.  They were virtually impossible to counterfeit.

3.  They could not be produced in unlimited amounts. The number of tallies made would be limited by the estimated production of the people. When the tallies were turned in for taxes, they were retired from the system and new ones had to be created. There could only be an increase in tally sticks if there was a corresponding increase in anticipated production. In this way, inflation was avoided.

Tally sticks are an example of how the government can increase the money supply using sound fiat money when there is no sufficient gold or silver to issue the necessary coins for a prosperous commerce.

Colonial Scrip

The thirteen American Colonies had trouble with England, the home country, over money from the beginning. This is primarily due to the fact that England wanted the colonists to send raw materials back home, but not to trade with each other. In addition, English laws forbade sending coinage to America, while at the same time the Colonies were short of it because they lacked an indigenous supply of gold or silver from which to mint coins. The scant coinage that found its way to the Colonies came from pirates or trade with the Spanish West Indies.

During the period 1632-1692, many agricultural products were legally declared to be money. However, everybody wanted to pay with the least desirable commodities and this caused inefficiencies. Another problem was seen when Virginia and Maryland made tobacco a legal tender in 1633. There was a bumper crop in 1639 and one half of the crop had to be burned to avoid inflation. After some other unsuccessful experiments with different forms of money, the West’s first fiat paper money was issued by Massachusetts in 1690 to pay for a military expedition during King William’s War. They printed paper bills from copper plates, which were called bills of credit.

The way they were used was that the colonial government first issued bills of credit to pay goods and services and later accepted these bills as payment of taxes, at which time they were retired from circulation.

Soon, other colonial governments followed suit and issued their own bills of credit to serve as a convenient medium of exchange. When they issued too many bills or failed to tax them out of circulation, inflation resulted. This happened especially in New England and the southern Colonies. Pennsylvania, however, controlled the amount of currency in circulation and it remains a prime example in history as a successful fiat paper monetary system. Pennsylvania’s fiat paper currency, secured by land, was reported to have generally maintained its value against gold from 1723 until the Revolution broke out in 1775. During this period there was little or no inflation.

Explaining in 1763 to Bank of England directors his ideas on why the colonies were so prosperous, Benjamin Franklin is quoted as saying:

“That is simple. In the Colonies we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Scrip. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay no one”

After Benjamin Franklin gave explanations on the true cause of the prosperity of the Colonies, the Parliament exacted laws forbidding the use of paper money as payment of taxes. This decision brought so many drawbacks and so much poverty to the people in the colonies that it is seen by many as the main cause of the Revolution. The suppression of the Colonial paper money was a much more important factor for the general uprising than the Tea and Stamp Act.

The Greenbacks

Before the Civil War in the United States, the only money issued by the government was gold and silver coins, and only such coins (“specie”) were legal tender.

Paper currency in the form of banknotes was issued by privately owned banks, and these notes were redeemable for specie at the bank’s office. They were not legal tender, however, and they had value only if the bank was capable of redeeming them. If a bank failed, its notes became worthless.

When the war broke out, neither side had the supplies of gold and silver coin necessary to wage such a challenge.

The Lincoln Administration sought loans from major banks, mostly in New York City. The banks demanded very high interest rates of 24 to 36 percent. Lincoln was outraged, refused to borrow on such terms, and called for other solutions.

The following passage appears in a letter from President Abraham Lincoln to Colonel William F. Elkins.[8] It gives some insight into the feelings that the President may have had with regard to the money powers, as he called them.

“The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. The banking powers are more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. They denounce as public enemies all who question their methods or throw light upon their crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe.”

The solution found by the Lincoln Administration was to bypass the bankers by issuing fiat paper money to pay for the war expenses. A legal tender law was passed on February 25, 1862. Congress at first authorized the Treasury to issue $150 million of so called Greenbacks, with a total of $450 million being put into circulation as the war continued. The Greenbacks were legal tender for all debts public and private, except duties on import and interest on the public debt, which were payable in coin. They were receivable in payment of all loans made to the U.S.

A letter written by President Lincoln to Colonel E D Taylor, considered the father of the Greenbacks, can be found in the Appendix to this book.

The Greenbacks were very difficult to counterfeit because they used a proprietary green chromium tint invented by a Canadian, Dr. Thomas Sterry Hunt, to combat photo duplication. The notes got their name from this “green” ink on their “back”. The name did not come from the Lincoln Administration but from the ordinary people, who started calling them Greenbacks.

As regards inflation during the Civil War, the American historian J. G. Randall wrote that “The threat of inflation was more effectively curbed during the Civil War than during the First World War.” Also, the American economist John K. Galbraith observed:

“It is remarkable that without rationing, price controls, or central banking, Chase (the Secretary of the Treasury at the time) could have managed the federal economy so well during the Civil War.”

The fact that the Greenbacks were not legal tender for duties on import and interest on the public debt may have been an important negative factor against the currency. In reference to this, the American financial historian Davis R. Dewey wrote:

“Hence it has been argued that the Greenback circulation issued in 1862 might have kept at par with gold if it, too, had been made receivable for all payments to the Government.”

After the war and the assassination of Lincoln, there was a concerted attack of various social groups led by the bankers against the Greenbacks until they were retired from circulation.

The German MEFO Bills

The MEFO bills were a financial instrument created by the National Socialist Government of Germany in 1933 to allow for the activation of the economy, which lay in shambles.

When Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor on January 30th, 1933, there were six and a half million people unemployed, there was no gold, and the country was in ruins. To make matters worse, astronomically high war reparations had still to be paid to the victors of World War One.

If the country was to have some economic independence, it could not loan from international banks because this would increase the financial burden even more. Thus, some new monetary device had to be found to get out of the dilemma.

Hitler describes in his book Mein Kampf that he once attended a small meeting in which Gottfried Feder’s monetary views made a deep impression on him. According to Feder (1883-1941), a former construction engineer turned economist, the money supply should be created and controlled by the state through a nationalized central bank rather than by privately owned banks, to whom interest would have to be paid.

Since Feder’s ideas were in principle too innovative and risky, Hitler decided to appoint Hjalmar Schacht, a well-known and experienced German banker at the time, as head of the Reichsbank to carry out a somewhat attenuated version of the monetary reform proposed by Feder.

After denouncing the Treaty of Versailles because the other countries had not met their obligations, the government decided that Germany would create its own sound fiat money, free of debt, through an extensive program of repairs in housing, factories and machines, and through the construction of autobahns.

Hjalmar Schacht himself describes the process in his book The Magic of Money:[9]

“The system worked in the following way: a company with a paid-up capital of one million Marks was formed. A quarter of the capital was subscribed by each of the four firms Siemens, A. G. Gutehoffnungshütte, Rheinstahl and Krupps. Suppliers who fulfilled state orders drew up bills of exchange for their goods, and these bills were accepted by the company. This company was given the registered title of Metallforschungsgesellschaft (Metal Research Company, ‘MEFO’ for short), and for this reason the bills drawn on it were called MEFO bills. The Reich guaranteed all obligations entered into by MEFO, and thus also guaranteed the MEFO bills in full. In essence all the Reichsbank’s formal requirements were met by this scheme. It was a question of financing the delivery of goods; MEFO bills were therefore commodity bills. ...

The Reichsbank declared itself ready to prolong the bills, which true to the form laid down were drawn on three months’ credit, to a maximum of five years if so required, and this point was new and unusual. Each bill could thus be extended by a further three months, nineteen times running. This was necessary, because the planned economic reconstruction could not be accomplished in three months, but would take a number of years. By and large such extensions by themselves were nothing new with the Reichsbank; it was quite common to prolong agricultural bills, but an extension over five years, together with a firm declaration that such extensions would be granted, that was most unusual. One other aspect was even more unusual. The Reichsbank undertook to accept all MEFO bills at all times, irrespective of their size, number, and due date, and change them into money. The bills were discounted at a uniform rate of four per cent. By these means the MEFO bills were almost given the character of money, and interest-carrying money at that. Banks, savings banks, and firms could hold them in their safes exactly as if they were cash. Over and above this they proved to be the best of all interest-bearing liquid investments, in contrast to long-dated securities. In all, MEFO bill credit transactions took place over a period of four years, and had by 1938 reached a total volume of twelve billion Marks.”

The Reichsbank officials were entrusted with the task of examining all bills to ensure that they were issued only against deliveries of goods, and not for any other purposes. Bills which did not meet this requirement were rejected. Thus, the MEFO bills acted like sound fiat money and were non-inflationary because they were backed by human labour.

The following words are part of a speech given by Hitler on February 20th, 1938, in which he addresses the question of the role of money in Germany at the time. (A more extensive part of this speech is given in English in the Appendix to this book.)

“It will also be our task in the future to warn the German people against all kinds of illusions. The worst illusion is to think that one can enjoy something in life that has not been previously created and produced.

It will also be our duty in the future to make clear to all German people, in the city as well as in the land, that the value of their labour is and should always be equal to their salary.

That is, the countryman can only receive for his products what the man in the city has previously produced, and the man in the city can only get what the countryman has previously obtained from his land, and all of them can only make interchanges while they are producing, and money can only play an intermediary role in this process.

Money cannot have an intrinsic value. Each new Mark that is paid in Germany presupposes an additional human labour valued one Mark. Otherwise, this Mark is an empty piece of paper that has no purchasing power.

We want however our Reichsmark to be an honourable banknote, an honourable receipt for the result of an equally honourable human labour.

This is the only real and authentic backing of a currency. In this way we have made it possible, without gold and foreign currencies, to keep the value of the German Mark stable, and we have also kept our savings stable, in times in which those countries that were swimming in gold and foreign currencies had to devalue their currencies.”

After two years of using this sound fiat money, unemployment had almost disappeared and in five years Germany was the greatest economic power in the European continent. The situation in Germany during the period 1933-1939 should be compared with that of the United States during the same period, which were mired in a depression and only got out of it when the events of World War Two forced them to mobilize the economy for the war effort.

Some historians have maintained that the economic success of Germany in the years 1933-1939 was primarily due to defence spending. However, the following table shows that this is not the case.

YearDefence Expenditure RMNational Inco

me

1933/341.9 billion4%

1934/351.9 billion4%

1935/364.0 billion7%

1936/375.8 billion9%

1937/388.2 billion11%

1938/3918.4 billion22%

The Hidden Tyranny Of Our Money

What Most Economists Don’t Know

And Few Wish To Tell

Víctor Gómez-Enríquez

On Ernst Jünger

 Conservative Revolutionary

Junger’s writings about the war quickly earned him the status of a celebrity during the Weimar period. Battle as Inner Experience contained the prescient suggestion that the young men who had

experienced the greatest war the world had yet to see at that point could never be successfully re-integrated into the old bourgeoisie order from which they came. For these fighters, the war had been a spiritual experience. Having endured so much only to see their side lose on such seemingly humiliating terms, the veterans of the war were aliens to the rationalistic, anti-militarist, liberal republic that emerged in 1918 at the close of the war. Junger was at his parents’ home recovering from war wounds during the time of the attempted coup by the leftist workers’ and soldiers’ councils and subsequent suppression of these by the Freikorps. He experimented with psychoactive drugs such as cocaine and opium during this time, something that he would continue to do much later in life. Upon recovery, he went back into active duty in the much diminished German army. Junger’s earliest works, such as In Storms of Steel, were published during this time and he also wrote for military journals on the more technical and specialized aspects of combat and military technology. Interestingly, Junger attributed Germany’s defeat in the war simply to poor leadership, both military and civilian, and rejected the “stab in the back” legend that consoled less keen veterans.

After leaving the army in 1923, Junger continued to write; producing a novella about a soldier during the war titled Sturm, and also began to study the philosophy of Oswald Spengler. His first work as a philosopher of nationalism appeared in the Nazi paper Volkischer Beobachter in September, 1923. Critiquing the failed Marxist revolution of 1918, Junger argued that the leftist coup failed because of its lacking of fresh ideas. It was simply a regurgitation of the egalitarian outlook of the French Revolution. The revolutionary left appealed only to the material wants of the German people in Junger’s views. A successful revolution would have to be much more than that. It would have to appeal to their spiritual or “folkish” instincts as well. Over the next few years Junger studied the natural sciences at the University of Leipzig and in 1925, at age thirty, he married nineteen-year-old Gretha von Jeinsen. Around this time, he also became a full-time political writer. Junger was hostile to Weimar democracy and its commercial bourgeoisie society. His emerging political ideal was one of an elite warrior caste that stood above petty partisan politics and the middle class obsession with material acquisition. Junger became involved with the the Stahlhelm, a right-wing veterans group, and was a contributor to its paper, Die Standardite.

He associated himself with the younger, more militant members of the organization who favored an uncompromised nationalist revolution and eschewed the parliamentary system. Junger’s weekly column in Die Standardite disseminated his nationalist ideology to his less educated readers. Junger’s views at this point were a mixture of Spengler, Social Darwinism, and the traditionalist philosophy of the French rightist Maurice Barrès, opposition to the internationalism of the left that had seemingly been discredited by the events of 1914, irrationalism and anti-parliamentarianism. He took a favorable view of the working class and praised the Nazis’ efforts to win proletarian sympathies. Junger also argued that a nationalist outlook need not be attached to one particular form of government, even suggesting that a liberal monarchy would be inferior to a nationalist republic.[37]

In an essay for Die Standardite titled “The Machine,” Junger argued that the principal struggle was not between social classes or political parties but between man and technology. He was not anti-technological in a Luddite sense, but regarded the technological apparatus of modernity to have achieved a position of superiority over mankind which needed to be reversed. He was concerned that the mechanized efficiency of modern life produced a corrosive effect on the human spirit. Junger considered the Nazis’ glorification of peasant life to be antiquated. Ever the realist, he believed the world of the rural people to be in a state of irreversible decline. Instead, Junger espoused a “metropolitan nationalism” centered on the urban working class. Nationalism was the antidote to the anti-particularist materialism of the Marxists who, in Junger’s views, simply mirrored the liberals in their efforts to reduce the individual to a component of a mechanized mass society. The humanitarian rhetoric of the left Junger dismissed as the hypocritical cant of power-seekers feigning benevolence. He began to pin his hopes for a nationalist revolution on the younger veterans who comprised much of the urban working class.

In 1926, Junger became editor of Arminius, which also featured the writings of Nazi leaders like Alfred Rosenberg and Joseph Goebbels. In 1927, he contributed his final article to the Nazi paper, calling for a new definition of the “worker,” one not rooted in Marxist ideology but the idea of the worker as a civilian counterpart to the soldier who struggles fervently for the nationalist ideal. Junger and Hitler had exchanged copies of their respective writings and a scheduled meeting between the two was canceled due to a change in Hitler’s itinerary. Junger respected Hitler’s abilities as an orator, but came to feel he lacked the ability to become a true leader. He also found Nazi ideology to be intellectually shallow, many of the Nazi movement’s leaders to be talentless and was displeased by the vulgarity, crassly opportunistic and overly theatrical aspects of Nazi public rallies. Always an elitist, Junger considered the Nazis’ pandering to the common people to be debased. As he became more skeptical of the Nazis, Junger began writing for a wider circle of readers beyond that of the militant nationalist right-wing. His works began to appear in the Jewish liberal Leopold Schwarzchild’s Das Tagebuch and the “national-Bolshevik” Ernst Niekisch’s Widerstand.Junger began to assemble around himself an elite corps of bohemian, eccentric intellectuals who would meet regularly on Friday evenings. This group included some of the most interesting personalities of the Weimar period. Among them were the Freikorps veteran Ernst von Salomon, Otto von Strasser, who with his brother Gregor led a leftist anti-Hitler faction of the Nazi movement, the national-Bolshevik Niekisch, the Jewish anarchist Erich Muhsam who had figured prominently in the early phase of the failed leftist revolution of 1918, the American writer Thomas Wolfe and the expressionist writer Arnolt Bronnen. Many among this group espoused a type of revolutionary socialism based on nationalism rather than class, disdaining the Nazis’ opportunistic outreach efforts to the middle class. Some, like Niekisch, favored an alliance between Germany and Soviet Russia against the liberal-capitalist powers of the West. Occasionally, Joseph Goebbels would turn up at these meetings hoping to convert the group, particularly Junger himself, whose war writings he had admired, to the Nazi cause. These efforts by the Nazi propaganda master proved unsuccessful. Junger regarded Goebbels as a shallow ideologue who spoke in platitudes even in private conversation.[38]

The final break between Ernst Junger and the NSDAP occurred in September 1929. Junger published an article in Schwarzchild’s Tagebuch attacking and ridiculing the Nazis as sell outs for having reinvented themselves as a parliamentary party. He also dismissed their racism and anti-Semitism as ridiculous, stating that according to the Nazis a nationalist is simply someone who “eats three Jews for breakfast.” He condemned the Nazis for pandering to the liberal middle class and reactionary traditional conservatives “with lengthy tirades against the decline in morals, against abortion, strikes, lockouts, and the reduction of police and military forces.” Goebbels responded by attacking Junger in the Nazi press, accusing him being motivated by personal literary ambition, and insisting this had caused him “to vilify the national socialist movement, probably so as to make himself popular in his new kosher surroundings” and dismissing Junger’s attacks by proclaiming the Nazis did not “debate with renegades who abuse us in the smutty press of Jewish traitors.”[39]Junger on the Jewish Question

Junger held complicated views on the question of German Jews. He considered anti-Semitism of the type espoused by Hitler to be crude and reactionary. Yet his own version of nationalism required a level of homogeneity that was difficult to reconcile with the sub national status of Germany Jewry. Junger suggested that Jews should assimilate and pledge their loyalty to Germany once and for all. Yet he expressed admiration for Orthodox Judaism and indifference to Zionism. Junger maintained personal friendships with Jews and wrote for a Jewish owned publication. During this time his Jewish publisher Schwarzchild published an article examining Junger’s views on the Jews of Germany. Schwarzchild insisted that Junger was nothing like his Nazi rivals on the far right. Junger’s nationalism was based on an aristocratic warrior ethos, while Hitler’s was more comparable to the criminal underworld. Hitler’s men were “plebian alley scum”. However, Schwarzchild also characterized Junger’s rendition of nationalism as motivated by little more than a fervent rejection of bourgeoisie society and lacking in attention to political realities and serious economic questions.[40]

The Worker

Other than In Storms of Steel, Junger’s The Worker: Mastery and Form was his most influential work from the Weimar era. Junger would later distance himself from this work, published in 1932, and it was reprinted in the 1950s only after Junger was prompted to do so by Martin Heidegger.

In The Worker, Junger outlines his vision of a future state ordered as a technocracy based on workers and soldiers led by warrior elite. Workers are no longer simply components of an industrial machine, whether capitalist or communist, but have become a kind of civilian-soldier operating as an economic warrior. Just as the soldier glories in his accomplishments in battle, so does the worker glory in the achievements expressed through his work. Junger predicted that continued technological advancements would render the worker/capitalist dichotomy obsolete. He also incorporated the political philosophy of his friend Carl Schmitt into his worldview. As Schmitt saw international relations as a Hobbesian battle between rival powers, Junger believed each state would eventually adopt a system not unlike what he described in The Worker. Each state would maintain its own technocratic order with the workers and soldiers of each country playing essentially the same role on behalf of their respective nations. International affairs would be a crucible where the will to power of the different nations would be tested.

Junger’s vision contains a certain amount of prescience. The general trend in politics at the time was a movement towards the kind of technocratic state Junger described. These took on many varied forms including German National Socialism, Italian Fascism, Soviet Communism, the growing welfare states of Western Europe and America’s New Deal. Coming on the eve of World War Two, Junger’s prediction of a global Hobbesian struggle between national collectives possessing previously unimagined levels of technological sophistication also seems rather prophetic. Junger once again attacked the bourgeoisie as anachronistic. Its values of material luxury and safety he regarded as unfit for the violent world of the future.[41]

The National Socialist Era

By the time Hitler came to power in 1933, Junger’s war writings had become commonly used in high schools and universities as examples of wartime literature, and Junger enjoyed success within the context of German popular culture as well. Excerpts of Junger’s works were featured in military journals. The Nazis tried to co-opt his semi-celebrity status, but he was uncooperative. Junger was appointed to the Nazified German Academy of Poetry, but declined the position. When the Nazi Party’s paper published some of his work in 1934, Junger wrote a letter of protest. The Nazi regime, despite its best efforts to capitalize on his reputation, viewed Junger with suspicion. His past association with the national-Bolshevik Ersnt Niekisch, the Jewish anarchist Erich Muhsam and the anti-Hitler Nazi Otto

von Strasser, all of whom were either eventually killed or exiled by the Third Reich, led the Nazis to regard Junger as a potential subversive. On several occasions, Junger received visits from the Gestapo in search of some of his former friends. During the early years of the Nazi regime, Junger was in the fortunate economic position of being able to afford to travel outside of Germany. He journeyed to Norway, Brazil, Greece and Morocco during this time, and published several works based on his travels.[42]

Junger’s most significant work from the Nazi period is the novel On the Marble Cliffs. The book is an allegorical attack on the Hitler regime. It was written in 1939, the same year that Junger re-entered the German army. The book describes a mysterious villain that threatens a community, a sinister warlord called the “Head Ranger”. This character is never featured in the plot of the novel, but maintains a foreboding presence that is universal (much like “Big Brother” in George Orwell’s 1984). Another character in the novel, “Braquemart”, is described as having physical characteristics remarkably similar to those of Goebbels. The book sold fourteen thousand copies during its first two weeks in publication. Swiss reviewers immediately recognized the allegorical references to the Nazi state in the novel. The Nazi Party’s organ, Volkische Beobachter, stated that Ernst Jünger was flirting with a bullet to the head. Goebbels urged Hitler to ban the book, but Hitler refused, probably not wanting to show his hand. Indeed, Hitler gave orders that Junger not be harmed.[43]Junger was stationed in France for most of the Second World War. Once again, he kept diaries of the experience. Once again, he expressed concern that he might not get to see any action before the war was over. While Junger did not have the opportunity to experience the level of danger and daredevil heroics he had during the Great War, he did receive yet another medal, the Iron Cross, for retrieving the body of a dead corporal while under heavy fire. Junger also published some of his war diaries during this time. However, the German government took a dim view of these, viewing them as too sympathetic to the occupied French. Junger’s duties included censorship of the mail coming into France from German civilians. He took a rather liberal approach to this responsibility and simply disposed of incriminating documents rather than turning them over for investigation. In doing so, he probably saved lives. He also encountered members of France’s literary and cultural elite, among them the actor Louis Ferdinand Celine, a raving anti-Semite and pro-Vichyite who suggested Hitler’s harsh measures against the Jews had not been heavy handed enough. As rumors of the Nazi extermination programs began to spread, Junger wrote in his diary that the mechanization of the human spirit of the type he had written about in the past had apparently generated a higher level of human depravity. When he saw three young French-Jewish girls wearing the yellow stars required by the Nazis, he wrote that he felt embarrassed to be in the Nazi army. In July of 1942, Junger observed the mass arrest of French Jews, the beginning of implementation of the “Final Solution.” He described the scene as follows:

“Parents were first separated from their children, so there was wailing to be heard in the streets. At no moment may I forget that I am surrounded by the unfortunate, by those suffering to the very depths, else what sort of person, what sort of officer would I be? The uniform obliges one to grant protection wherever it goes. Of course one has the impression that one must also, like Don Quixote, take on millions.”[44]An entry into Junger’s diary from October 16, 1943 suggests that an unnamed army officer had told Junger about the use of crematoria and poison gas to murder Jews en masse. Rumors of plots against Hitler circulated among the officers with whom Junger maintained contact. His son, Ernst, was arrested after an informant claimed he had spoken critically of Hitler. Ernst Junger was imprisoned for three months then placed in a penal battalion where he was killed in action in Italy. On July 20, 1944 an unsuccessful assassination attempt was carried out against Hitler. It is still disputed as to whether or not Junger knew of the plot or had a role in its planning. Among those arrested for their role in the attempt on Hitler’s life were members of Junger’s immediate circle of associates and superior officers within the German army. Junger was dishonorably discharged shortly afterward.[45]

Following the close of the Second World War, Junger came under suspicion from the Allied occupational authorities because of his far right-wing nationalist and militarist past. He refused to cooperate with the Allies De-Nazification programs and was barred from publishing for four years. He would go on to live another half century, producing many more literary works, becoming a close friend of Albert Hoffman, the inventor of the hallucinogen LSD, with which he experimented. In a 1977 novel, Eumeswil, he took his tendency towards viewing the world around him with detachment to a newer, more clearly articulated level with his invention of the concept of the “Anarch”. This idea, heavily influenced by the writings of the early nineteenth century German philosopher Max Stirner, championed the solitary individual who remains true to himself within the context of whatever external circumstances happen to be present.

Some sample quotations from this work illustrate the philosophy and worldview of the elderly Junger quite well:

“For the anarch, if he remains free of being ruled, whether by sovereign or society, this does not mean he refuses to serve in any way. In general, he serves no worse than anyone else, and sometimes even better, if he likes the game. He only holds back from the pledge, the sacrifice, the ultimate devotion ... I serve in the Casbah; if, while doing this, I die for the Condor, it would be an accident, perhaps even an obliging gesture, but nothing more.”

“The egalitarian mania of demagogues is even more dangerous than the brutality of men in gallooned coats. For the anarch, this remains theoretical, because he avoids both sides. Anyone who has been oppressed can get back on his feet if the oppression did not cost him his life. A man who has been equalized is physically and morally ruined. Anyone who is different is not equal; that is one of the reasons why the Jews are so often targeted.”

“The anarch, recognizing no government, but not indulging in paradisal dreams as the anarchist does, is, for that very reason, a neutral observer.”

“Opposition is collaboration.”

“A basic theme for the anarch is how man, left to his own devices, can defy superior force - whether state, society or the elements - by making use of their rules without submitting to them.”

“... malcontents... prowl through the institutions eternally dissatisfied, always disappointed. Connected with this is their love of cellars and rooftops, exile and prisons, and also banishment, on which they actually pride themselves. When the structure finally caves in they are the first to be killed in the collapse. Why do they not know that the world remains inalterable in change? Because they never find their way down to its real depth, their own. That is the sole place of essence, safety. And so they do themselves in.”

“The anarch may not be spared prisons - as one fluke of existence among others. He will then find the fault in himself.”

“We are touching one a ... distinction between anarch and anarchist; the relation to authority, to legislative power. The anarchist is their mortal enemy, while the anarch refuses to acknowledge them. He seeks neither to gain hold of them, nor to topple them, nor to alter them - their impact bypasses him. He must resign himself only to the whirlwinds they generate.”

“The anarch is no individualist, either. He wishes to present himself neither as a Great Man nor as a Free Spirit. His own measure is enough for him; freedom is not his goal; it is his property. He does not come on as foe or reformer: one can get along nicely with him in shacks or in palaces. Life is too short and too beautiful to sacrifice for ideas, although contamination is not always avoidable. But hats off to the martyrs.”

“We can expect as little from society as from the state. Salvation lies in the individual.”[46]

Beyond the End of History: Rejecting the Washington Consensus

Keith Preston

TAVISTOCK BEATLES?

 

Eleanor Rigby

Ah, look at all the lonely people!
Ah, look at all the lonely people!

Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been,
Lives in a dream.
Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door,
Who is it for?

All the lonely people,
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people,
Where do they all belong?

Father McKenzie writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear,
No one comes near.
Look at him working, darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there,
What does he care?

All the lonely people,
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people,
Where do they all belong?

Ah, look at all the lonely people!
Ah, look at all the lonely people!

Eleanor Rigby, died in the church and was buried along with her name,
Nobody came.
Father McKenzie, wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave,
No one was saved.

All the lonely people,
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people,
Where do they all belong?
**
Nowhere Man

He's a real Nowhere Man,
Sitting in his Nowhere Land,
Making all his Nowhere plans for nobody.
Doesn't have a point of view,
Knows not where he's going to,
Isn't he a bit like you and me?
Nowhere man please listen,
You don't know what you're missing,
Nowhere Man, the world is at your command.
La, la, la, la,
He's as blind as he can be,
Just sees what he wants to see,
Nowhere Man can you see me at all?
Nowhere Man don't worry,
Take your time, don't hurry,
Leave it all till somebody else,
Lends you a hand.
Doesn't have a point of view,
Knows not where he's going to,
Isn't he a bit like you and me?
Nowhere Man please listen,
You don't know what you're missing,
Nowhere Man, the world is at your command.
La, la, la, la,
He's a real Nowhere Man,
Sitting in his Nowhere Land,
Making all his Nowhere plans for nobody.
Making all his Nowhere plans for nobody.
Making all his Nowhere plans for nobody.
***

Hey, Hey, We’re the Beatles
Guest Post by Patrick O’Carroll

NOTE FROM JAMES PERLOFF—When I was a freshman at Colby College (1969-70), a friend in my dorm called me to his room. He had a lot of sound equipment. He played one of the Beatles’ albums backward. You could pretty distinctly hear a voice repeating “Paul is dead.” This was something of a rumor in those days, but we had no way to check into it (no Internet then). In my 2013 book Truth Is a Lonely Warrior, I briefly wrote (based mostly on Dr. John Coleman’s work) about the Beatles having most of their music written for them by the Tavistock Institute and how so many of the “screaming girls” had been hired. Then, about two weeks ago, my friend Patrick O’Carroll sent me an email. Drawing largely on the work of Mike Williams, it fleshed out many details of how the Beatles were orchestrated, and affirmed the 1966 death of the original Paul McCartney. I thought it was significant, and asked  Patrick if I could publish it as a guest post. (For younger readers who might not get the title of Patrick’s post, it lampoons the song “Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkees.” The Monkees were an artificially created rock band who were notorious for neither writing their songs nor playing the instruments on their pop hits.)  Patrick can be reached at tequila.mockingbird@gmx.ch, and Mike Williams’ website is http://sageofquay.com/.
For those who would like to see how things were comparably falsified in the American music scene during the sixties and seventies, I recommend Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon by the late Dave McGowan, who demonstrated the orchestrated success of many bands, and their surprising connections to U.S. military and intelligence services.

From the article:

The purpose of the TAVISTOCK BEATLES was to exacerbate the “generation gap” that the Frankfurt School of Cultural Marxism had already launched in the USA, Britain and Continental Europe in the 1950s. The traditional Christian family was to become “old hat.” Their idea was that “old” yet healthy ideas must be presented to the next generation as “square,” like starting a family or living as people had lived for centuries. Any “old fogies” who opposed Tavistock’s Cultural Marxism would then be ridiculed as “fuddy-duddies” or “no longer with it.” This continued until 2020 with every new wave trend that came after the TAVISTOCK BEATLES repeating the same pattern. That also explains why Tavistock and British intelligence were willing to pay a fortune to manufacture the TAVISTOCK BEATLES, to pay for airtime in the world’s Tell-Lie-Vision networks, and to even report on the wholly manufactured, artificial Tavistock opinions, slogans and statements pronounced by the band’s members, or on press conferences they gave, and to pay inordinate regard to these as the “official opinions of youth,” although totally made-up. It was the most unparalleled Psychological Operation (PSYOP) ever seen.

https://jamesperloff.net/hey-hey-were-the-beatles/

Derrida deconstructed

 Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)

It is immensely ironic that this onslaught against Western universalism effectively rationalizes minority group ethnocentrism while undercutting the intellectual basis of ethnocentrism. Intellectually one wonders how one could be a postmodernist and a committed Jew at the same time. Intellectual consistency would seem to require that all personal identifications be subjected to the same deconstructing logic, unless, of course, personal identity itself involves deep ambiguities, deception, and self-deception. This in fact appears to be the case for Jacques Derrida, the premier philosopher of deconstruction, whose philosophy shows the deep connections between the intellectual agendas of postmodernism and the Frankfurt School.115 Derrida had a complex and ambiguous Jewish identity despite being “a leftist Parisian intellectual, a secularist and an atheist” (Caputo, 1997, p. xxiii). Derrida was born into a Sephardic Jewish family that immigrated to Algeria from Spain in the nineteenth century. His family were thus crypto-Jews who retained their religious-ethnic identity for four hundred years in Spain during the period of the Inquisition.Derrida (1993a, p. 81) identifies himself as a crypto-Jew: “Marranos that we are, Marranos in any case whether we want to be or not, whether we know it or not”—perhaps a confession of the complexity, ambivalence, and self-deception often involved in post-Enlightenment forms of Jewish identity. In his notebooks, Derrida (1993b, p. 70) writes of the centrality that Jewish issues have held in his writing: “Circumcision, that’s all I’ve ever talked about.” In the same passage (pp. 72–730), he writes that he has always taken,

the most careful account, in anamnesis, of the fact that in my family and among the Algerian Jews, one scarcely ever said “circumcision” but “baptism,” not Bar Mitzvah but “communion,” with the consequences of softening, dulling, through fearful acculturation, that I’ve always suffered from more or less consciously.

This is an allusion to the continuation of crypto-Jewish practices among the Algerian Jews and a clear indication that Jewish identification and the need to hide it have remained psychologically salient to Derrida. Significantly, he (1993b, p. 73) identifies his mother as Esther, the biblical heroine who “had not made known her people nor her kindred” (Est. 2:10) and who was an inspiration to generations of crypto-Jews. Derrida was deeply attached to his mother and stated as she neared death, “I can be sure that you will not understand much of what you will nonetheless have dictated to me, inspired me with, asked of me, ordered from me.” Like his mother (who spoke of baptism and communion rather than circumcision and bar mitzvah), Derrida thus has an inward Jewish identity while outwardly assimilating to the French Catholic culture of Algeria. For Derrida (p. 170), however, there are indications of ambivalence for both identities: “I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts” (see also Caputo, 1997, p. 304).

Derrida’s experience with anti-Semitism during World War II in Algeria was traumatic and inevitably resulted in a deep consciousness of his own Jewishness. Derrida (1993b, p. 58) was expelled from school at age thirteen under the Vichy government because of the numerus clausus, a self-described “little black and very Arab Jew who understood nothing about it, to whom no one ever gave the slightest reason, neither his parents nor his friends.”

The persecutions, which were unlike those of Europe, were all the same unleashed in the absence of any German occupier. . . . It is an experience that leaves nothing intact, an atmosphere that one goes on breathing forever. Jewish children expulsed from school. The principal’s office: You are going to go home, your parents will explain. Then the Allies landed, it was the period of the so-called two-headed government (de Gaulle-Giraud): racial laws maintained for almost six months, under a “free” French government. Friends who no longer knew you, insults, the Jewish high school with its expulsed teachers and never a whisper of protest from their colleagues. . . . From that moment, I felt—how to put it?—just as out-of-place in a closed Jewish community as I did on the other side (we called them “the Catholics”). In France, the suffering subsided. I naively thought that anti-Semitism had disappeared. . . . But during adolescence, it was the tragedy, it was present in everything else. . . . Paradoxical effect, perhaps, of this brutalization: a desire for integration in the non-Jewish community, a fascinated but painful and suspicious desire, nervously vigilant, an exhausting aptitude to detect signs of racism, in its most discreet configurations or its noisiest disavowals. (Derrida, 1995b, pp. 120–121; emphasis original)

Bennington (1993, p. 326) proposes that the expulsion from school and its aftermath were, 

no doubt . . . the years during which the singular character of J.D.’s “belonging” to Judaism is imprinted on him: wound, certainly, painful and practiced sensitivity to antisemitism and any racism, “raw” response to xenophobia, but also impatience with gregarious identification, with the militancy of belonging in general, even if it is Jewish. . . . I believe that this difficulty with belonging, one would almost say of identification, affects the whole of J.D.’s oeuvre, and it seems to me that “the deconstruction of the proper” is the very thought of this, its thinking affection.

Indeed, Derrida says as much. He (1993b, p. 289) recalls just before his bar mitzvah (which he again notes was termed “communion” by the Algerian Jewish community), when the Vichy government expelled him from school and withdrew his citizenship:

I became the outside, try as they might to come close to me they’ll never touch me again. . . . I did my “communion” by fleeing the prison of all languages, the sacred one they tried to lock me up in without opening me to it [i.e., Hebrew], the secular [i.e., French] they made clear would never be mine.

As with many Jews seeking a semi-cryptic pose in a largely non-Jewish environment, Derrida (1995b, p. 344) altered his name to Jacques:

By choosing what was in some way, to be sure, a semi-pseudonym but also very French, Christian, simple, I must have erased more things than I could say in a few words (one would have to analyze the conditions in which a certain community—the Jewish community in Algeria—in the ’30s sometimes chose American names.

Changing his name is thus a form of crypsis as practiced by the Algerian Jewish community, a way of outwardly conforming to the French, Christian culture while secretly remaining Jewish.

Derrida’s Jewish political agenda is identical to that of the Frankfurt School:

The idea behind deconstruction is to deconstruct the workings of strong nation-states with powerful immigration policies, to deconstruct the rhetoric of nationalism, the politics of place, the metaphysics of native land and native tongue. . . . The idea is to disarm the bombs . . . of identity that nation-states build to defend themselves against the stranger, against Jews and Arabs and immigrants, . . . all of whom . . . are wholly other. Contrary to the claims of Derrida’s more careless critics, the passion of deconstruction is deeply political, for deconstruction is a relentless, if sometimes indirect, discourse on democracy, on a democracy to come. Derrida’s democracy is a radically pluralistic polity that resists the terror of an organic, ethnic, spiritual unity, of the natural, native bonds of the nation (natus, natio), which grind to dust everything that is not a kin of the ruling kind and genus (Geschlecht). He dreams of a nation without nationalist or nativist closure, of a community without identity, of a non-identical community that cannot say I or we, for, after all, the very idea of a community is to fortify (munis, muneris) ourselves in common against the other. His work is driven by a sense of the consummate danger of an identitarian community, of the spirit of the “we” of “Christian Europe,” or of a “Christian politics,” lethal compounds that spell death for Arabs and Jews, for Africans and Asians, for anything other. The heaving and sighing of this Christian European spirit is a lethal air for Jews and Arabs, for all les juifs [i.e., Jews as prototypical others], even if they go back to father Abraham, a way of gassing them according to both the letter and the spirit. (Caputo, 1997, pp. 231–232)

Derrida sees undeconstructed architecture as reinforcing a sense of community which sees its architecture as its natural environment that closes the community off against “the other.” Vitale (2010, pp. 217–218) comments on Derrida’s views on architecture:

I would like to explain that deconstruction of architecture implies rather the deconstruction of the political and that it can be put into effect only through the actual deconstruction of the architectural structure which the Western tradition of the political has embodied itself into.

The tradition that is itself based on the link which strengthens the identity—of the individual and the community—to a supposed original space, to the stability of the frontiers separating it from the otherness in general, from what is therefore conceived of, simultaneously or alternately, as external, foreign, stranger or strange. . . .

In the Western tradition the (individual and collective) identity is thought of as an internal, permanent, stable space, autonomous and independent from the other in general, which is represented as external, stranger and, thus, is experienced as a possible threat. 

To do space for the other, to give a place for that relation is the task of deconstruction of the political. The achievement of this task necessarily requires deconstruction of the architecture which provides such axiomatics with a concrete and durable form, with a form imposing itself upon our experience as if it were our natural environment.

Derrida’s analysis is the diametric opposite to Richard Wagner’s (1850/1869/2022, pp. 13, 16) analysis of music in which he proposes that the musical works of Jews cannot resonate with the German spirit and cannot,

rise, even by accident, to the ardor of a higher, heartfelt expression. . . . The true poet, no matter in what branch of art, still gains his stimulus from nothing but a faithful, loving contemplation of instinctive life, of that life that only greets his sight among the Folk.

Thus architecture as an art form should resonate with the spirit of the people living in the area and reflect their natural tendencies—an evolutionary aesthetics in which architecture springs naturally from the biological tendencies of the people. Derrida’s deconstruction of architecture opposes any attempt for architecture to create a natural environment; it is thus aimed at creating an environment that would weaken the sense of a natural community because such a community might erect barriers between itself and “the other.” 

Derrida published a pamphlet advocating immigration of non-Europeans into France (see Lilla, 1998). As with the Frankfurt School, the radical skepticism of the deconstructionist movement is in the service of preventing the development of hegemonic, universalist ideologies and other foundations of gentile group allegiance in the name of the tout autre, i.e., the “wholly other.” Caputo ascribes Derrida’s motivation for his deconstruction of Hegel to the latter’s conceptualization of Judaism as morally and spiritually inferior to Christianity because of its legalism and tribalistic exclusivism, whereas Christianity is the religion of love and assimilation, a product of the Greek, not the Jewish, spirit. These Hegelian interpretations are remarkably congruent with Christian self-conceptualizations and Christian conceptions of Judaism originating in antiquity (see SAID, Ch. 3), and such a conceptualization fits well with the evolutionary analysis of Judaism developed in PTSDA. Reinterpretations and refutations of Hegel were common among nineteenth-century Jewish intellectuals (see SAID, Ch. 6), and we have seen that in Negative Dialectics Adorno was concerned with refuting the Hegelian idea of universal history for similar reasons.

Hegel’s searing, hateful portrait of the Jew . . . seem[s] to haunt all of Derrida’s work; . . . by presenting in the most loyal and literal way just what Hegel says, Derrida shows . . . that Hegel’s denunciations of the Jew’s castrated heart is a heartless, hateful castration of the other. (Caputo, 1997, pp. 234, 243)

As with the Frankfurt School, Derrida posits that the messianic future is unknown because to say otherwise would lead to the possibility of imposed uniformity, “a systematic whole with infinite warrant” (Caputo, 1997, p. 246), a triumphal and dangerous truth in which Jews as exemplars of the tout autre would necessarily suffer. The human condition is conceptualized as “a blindness that cannot be remedied, a radical, structural condition in virtue of which everyone is blind from birth” (p. 313).

As with the Frankfurt School, the exemplars of otherness have a priori moral value.

In deconstruction love is extricated from the polemic against the Jews by being rethought in terms of the other, of les juifs. . . . If this organic Hegelian Christian-European community is defined as making a common (com) defense (munis) against the other, Derrida advances the idea of laying down his arms, rendre les armes, surrendering to the other. (Caputo, 1997, p. 248)

From this perspective, acknowledging the possibility of truth is dangerous because of the possibility that truth could be used against the other. The best strategy, therefore, is to open up “a salutary competition among interpretations, a certain salutary radical hermeneuticizing, in which we dream with passion of something unforeseeable and impossible” (Caputo, 1997, p. 277). To the conflicting views of differing religions and ideologies, Derrida,

opposes a community, if it is one, of the blind[;] . . . of the blind leading the blind. Blindness makes for good communities, provided we all admit that we do not see, that in the crucial matters we are all stone blind and without privileged access, adrift in the same boat without a lighthouse to show the other shore. (Caputo, 1997, pp. 313–314)

Such a world is safe for Judaism, the prototypical other, and provides no warrant for the universalizing tendencies of Western civilization (Caputo, 1997, p. 335)—one might term deconstruction as de-Hellenization or de-Westernization. Minority group ethnic consciousness is thus validated not in the sense that it is known to be based on some sort of psychological truth, but in the sense that it can’t be proved untrue. On the other hand, the cultural and ethnic interests of majorities are “hermeneuticized” and thus rendered impotent—impotent because they cannot serve as the basis for a mass ethnic movement that would conflict with the interests of other groups.

Ironically from the standpoint of the theory of Judaism developed here, Derrida (who has thought a great deal about his own circumcision in his “Circumfession,” 1993b) realizes that circumcision, which he likens to a shibboleth because of its usefulness as a mechanism of ingroup demarcation (i.e., as a mark of Jewish exclusiveness and “otherness”), is a two-edged sword. Commenting on the work of Holocaust poet Paul Celan, Derrida (1994, pp. 67–68, emphasis original) states:

[T]he mark of a covenant or alliance, it also intervenes, it interdicts, it signifies the sentence of exclusion, of discrimination, indeed of extermination. One may, thanks to the shibboleth, recognize and be recognized by one’s own, for better and for worse, in the cleaving of partaking: on the one hand, for the sake of the partaking and the ring of the covenant, but also, on the other hand, for the purpose of denying the other, of denying him passage or life. . . . Because of the shibboleth and exactly to the extent that one may make use of it, one may see it turned against oneself: then it is the circumcised who are proscribed or held at the border, excluded from the community, put to death, or reduced to ashes.

Despite the dangers of circumcision as a two-edged sword, Derrida (1994, p. 68) concludes that “there must be circumcision,” a conclusion that Caputo (1997, p. 252) interprets as an assertion of an irreducible and undeniable human demand “for a differentiating mark, for a mark of difference.” Derrida thus subscribes to the inevitability (possibly innateness) of group demarcations, but, amazingly and apologetically, he manages to conceptualize circumcision not as a sign of tribal exclusivism, but as “the cut that opens the space for the incoming of the tout autre” (Caputo, p. 250)—a remarkable move because, as we have seen, Derrida seems quite aware that circumcision results in separatism, the erection of ingroup-outgroup barriers, and the possibility of between-group conflict and even extermination. But in Derrida’s gloss, “spiritually we are all Jews, all called and chosen to welcome the other” (Caputo, p. 262), so that Judaism turns out to be a universalist ideology where marks of separatism are interpreted as openness to the other. In Derrida’s view, “if circumcision is Jewish it is only in the sense that all poets are Jews. . . . Everyone ought to have a circumcised heart; this ought to form a universal religion” (Caputo, p. 262). Similarly, in a discussion of James Joyce, Derrida contrasts Joyce and Hegel (as prototypical Western thinkers) who “close the circle of the same” with “Abrahamic [i.e., Jewish] circumcision, which cuts the cord of the same in order to be open to the other, circumcision as saying yes . . . to the other” (Caputo, p. 257). Thus in the end, Derrida develops yet another in the age-old conceptualizations of Judaism as a morally superior group, while ideologies of sameness and universality that might underlie ideologies of social homogeneity and group consciousness among European gentiles are deconstructed and rendered as morally inferior.

[←115] I noted briefly the anti-Western ideology of Claude Lévi-Strauss in Chapter 2. It is interesting that Derrida “deconstructed” Lévi-Strauss by accusing him of reactivating Rousseau’s romantic views of non-Western cultures and thereby making a whole series of essentialist assumptions that are not warranted within the framework of Derrida’s radical skepticism. “In response to Lévi-Strauss’s criticisms of philosophers of consciousness, Derrida answered that none of them . . . would have been as naive as Lévi-Strauss had been to conclude so hastily in favor of the innocence and original goodness of the Nambikwara [an African tribe]. Derrida saw Lévi-Strauss’s ostensibly ethnocentric-free viewpoint as a reverse ethnocentrism with ethnic-political positions accusing the West of being initially responsible, through writing, for the death of innocent speech” (Dosse, 1997 II, p. 30). These comments are symptomatic of the changes inaugurated by postmodernism into the current intellectual zeitgeist. While the earlier critiques of the West by the Boasians and the structuralists romanticized non-Western cultures and vilified the West, the more recent trend is to express a pervasive skepticism regarding knowledge of any kind, motivated, I suppose, by the reasons outlined in this chapter and Chapter 7.

Culture of Critique

An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements

Kevin MacDonald

Samuel Melia Legal, Truthful, Guilty: Diary of a Political Prisoner

Self published, 2026

British patriotic activist Sam Melia has just finished a new book chronicling his persecution at the hands of the state. Legal, Truthful, Guilty is a clear and accessible account of his strange experience being prosecuted and incarcerated for entirely legal political views.

In a time of pervasive censorship during the first Trump campaign, and seeing dissidents hit with measures as extreme as having their bank accounts closed, Melia was looking for a new way to take action. He had already been active in the civic nationalist pro-Israel party For Britain, but was expelled after comments he had made critical of Jews were brought to light by the far-Left pressure group Hope Not Hate. Reasoning that he needed a way to act outside of social media while remaining anonymous, he quickly arrived at the idea of a stickering campaign.

Melia took the name “Hundred-Handers” from enormous monsters who fought with one group of gods to overthrow another in Greek mythology. He organized a system whereby volunteers could print out their own stickers using only designs he personally approved. This meant that participants could remain anonymous, as they only interacted online and did not need to provide a mailing address for any supplies.

The stickers were placed in public locations such as lampposts and benches, not only in the UK but also in many other white countries, provoking a great deal of denunciation from politicians and the media. They featured phrases such as “It’s okay to be white” and “Tolerance is not a virtue,” which were enough to justify an investigation by the British counter-terror police.

It is often the case that oppressive regimes blame internal dissent on foreign influence to make any opposition appear illegitimate. The authorities initially charged Melia with international financial conspiracy, although thankfully this charge was quickly dropped for lack of evidence. After attempting unsuccessfully to pressure him to give up the password for an encrypted hard drive full of data on local activists, they ultimately charged him with “distribution of material meant to incite racial hatred” and “encouraging racially aggravated criminal damage.” The lampposts were unavailable to testify regarding the latter charge.

The case hinged on his alleged intentions, as the prosecution conceded that none of the content of any of the stickers violated any law. Supposedly he intended to incite racial harassment of minorities, despite never actually insulting them himself. They cited a book in his possession by Oswald Mosey, leader of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, as well as a copy of a historical Nazi poster which a friend had sent him as a joke, in reference to the constant allegations against present-day pro-white activists. To the surprise of both his attorney and himself, he was ultimately convicted and sentenced to two years in prison. He was placed in “Category B,” the same category as terrorists, and was sent to a high-security prison with serious offenders.

Melia served nine months before being released to an “assisted premises,” a British term for a halfway house, for most of the remainder of the sentence. Thankfully, his recounting of his time in prison is free of some of the worst things reported to happen to convicts. He was never attacked by the other inmates, attributing this to his relatively unusual habit of never going into debt, as well as never developing a reputation as a snitch. Being mostly surrounded by white people may have also played a role. He was never abused by the guards, and in fact several times managed to gain greater privileges from the authorities by being a model prisoner.

The closest thing to a Hollywood depiction of prison he recounts is being held in solitary confinement for 48 hours. His supporters were holding a protest outside the prison, which somehow the authorities suspected him of secretly organizing using a contraband cell phone, but they could find no evidence of this, so he was spared any further isolation.


You can buy Greg Johnson’s Toward a New Nationalism here.

He did however have considerable difficulty with the character of his fellow convicts. One cellmate who he had considered a friend was revealed to have spread rumors that he was an informant, while himself informing the guards of Melia’s diary, the basis of this book. This angered some of them, as he had noted their sympathy with his politics, but thankfully they returned it unharmed. The offender also denounced another prisoner, but the guards could find no evidence, and the newly exposed Judas was then shunned by the other inmates.

Although the strict “no snitching” code might seem to imply solidarity among the prisoners, they had very little regard for each other. Many were allowed to work at various jobs around the prison, but they rarely proved themselves trustworthy. Those employed in food service would routinely hoard various items for themselves and give double helpings to their friends, sometimes in exchange for drugs, so that others were left with nothing. He ultimately quit his job in “servery,” as it was called, as he found this unconscionable.

Some prisoners were friendly to Melia or even sympathetic to his work, but this did little to raise his opinion of them. One was excited to meet the man who was locked up for “anti-Zionist stickers,” and informed him that the reason the sunset was red at times was that he was using a mirror to counter Jewish influence over the weather. He was often accosted by “nutters” who would either recount their appalling life story or attempt to convey some questionable hidden knowledge.

Others were locked up for rioting after a deadly attack on young white girls by a second-generation Rwandan immigrant. One was sentenced to two years and eight months for chanting “Allah is a pedo” and for making another statement about the threat of Islam which a police officer agreed with on video. Although he sympathized with their anger, he had to admit that “I’ve only met two. . . who aren’t complete scumbags.” One had a record for weapons, robbery, and assault.

He had numerous cellmates, most of whom seemed to have endless complaints but no will to accomplish anything beyond acquiring drugs or shoes. He briefly attended a course to become an English mentor, but thought better of it after observing that his fellow prisoners were “not just thick but belligerently so,” and had no respect for teachers. As he put it, even his friends were “men who revel in violence and intimidation.” Ultimately, he concluded that all but a few of those he met during his time there were a terrible burden on society and should be executed.

Readers are presumably familiar with the hysteria on the part of Western governments in cracking down on anything perceived as “racist,” but they might still be shocked by the lengths the authorities went to in this case. Melia was told that he would be prohibited from having any contact with anyone under 18, including his own daughters, as an assessment was being done on the threat he supposedly posed to children. For approximately two months he was not allowed to see them for family visits, and even emails from his parents mentioning his nephews were rejected by the prison. The justification given by the prison was his dangerous “symbols and iconography,” in other words the Nazi poster he had been given as a joke. Thankfully, they were incompetent in enforcing these regulations, at one point letting him have a letter from his daughter, and ultimately relaxed them under public pressure.

Melia was assigned regular meetings with workers from three departments, Probation, Counter-Terror, and Prevent, the latter being a program to discourage terrorism, and had notably different experiences with them. His “intervention provider” seemed reasonable and friendly, although he described himself as “ex-far-Right,” and seemed to have only ever had a shallow understanding of politics. As his role was only to discourage violence and he never saw any evidence that Melia was violent, they got along well. Counter-Terror was similarly described as “cordial.”

His probation officers, however, were apparently very offended by his rejection of multiculturalism and would argue with him at great length. One officer in particular who he called Dick, although this may not be his real name, used every rhetorical trick the reader may be familiar with to delegitimize pro-white thinking. He accused Melia of merely presenting a façade of being level-headed and reasonable in order to advance his true agenda. The last he heard from Dick was that he had submitted a new referral to Child Services and had found it difficult to think of anything positive to say about him. He even asserted that the couple’s political views would be harmful to their children’s development because there might be “future political disagreements.”

One of the key weaknesses of highly unpleasant people is that they seem unable to put themselves in someone else’s place. They will fill in this embarrassing gap in their understanding by assuming the worst, as Melia saw repeatedly. During his trial, the prosecutor questioned him as to why he would care about the victims of the Pakistani rape gangs. He alleged that since none of the girls were friends or family, Melia could not possibly sympathize with them, and was even faking his tears when discussing the atrocities. This type of mentality may have made sense during the Ice Age, but seems quite out of place in a modern nation where rape has long been considered a crime, regardless of the victim’s connections.

Melia is described in the foreword as having high agency, and this is apparent throughout the book. During his time in prison, he found a number of things to occupy his time, including working at various jobs and building things out of matchsticks, such as a model tank and a guitar with rubber band strings. At one point he was held in a cell with a large gap under the door through which mice could get in. Rather than simply denounce these illegal immigrants, he built a matchstick skirt on the bottom of the door, which successfully sealed the border.

This attitude was also reflected in his interactions with the authorities. He and his wife Laura consistently took their own side, as they have long advocated for white people to do. At one point Child Services produced a report on them full of flaws, including the claim that Melia is “narrow-minded” and that he “does not commit to any shared social contract, including democratically adopted laws of the land.” There were various other biased or false claims which he objected to, and Laura successfully demanded that the report be considerably altered. Amazingly, one updated section largely consisted of material copied and pasted from Wikipedia. They also managed to dissuade Child Services from doing a third lengthy assessment of their family situation after the first two had found nothing untoward.

Most of this book is quite serious, but there are moments of humor. At one point after being released to the halfway house, Melia was faced with a new arrival named Max, the son of Nigerian immigrants. Max was a caricature of a black man, constantly playing rap music and boasting of his felonious exploits, both at a very high volume. At one point someone walked into the room with a banana and Max responded with “Yo! I’ll destroy a banana, me, fam! I’m a monkey!” Melia suspected he was being baited to say something “racist.”

Later the author walked in on a heated argument between Max and another newcomer named Alex over immigration, with the former extolling immigrants’ contributions in food and labor. It was not clear that Max could imagine how he would feel if he had not had breakfast that day, but the author still managed to reason with him. He asked him to imagine how he would feel if Nigeria was suffering a similar demographic decline as the UK and the government was preventing anyone from doing anything about it. Ultimately he agreed that immigration should be cut drastically, and that the British had the right to decide their own destiny. The author explains that he has often come to such an agreement in discussions with non-whites; the argument for self-determination is so compelling that at times even race is no barrier to understanding.

The only real flaw in this book is that it is mostly a diary, and as such covers details of everyday life which the reader may not have any interest in. The author himself admits that he abandoned the diary for some time as his experiences had become too repetitive to continue recording. There were also a few points where the facts were unclear; I was left wondering as to the “five spicy words” of his which he first mentioned halfway through the book as having been used by the prosecution to show criminal intent.

The authorities had the stated intention of “realign[ing] Mr. Melia’s mindset,” but they could not have been further from succeeding. On the contrary, his experiences only reinforced his view that he had done nothing wrong, and that the state’s mentality was appalling. He suggests that he would like to pursue qualifications in law, and once he finished his sentence he immediately rejoined a nationalist group which he had previously been active with. I wish him every success.

Howe Abbott-Hiss

https://counter-currents.com/

A hoaxer without his critic is like a bridegroom without his mother-in-law

The Don Juan Papers Further Castaneda Controversies Edited by Richard de Mille

Foreword

To kill an error, Darwin said, is as good a service to science as establishing a new fact or truth, and sometimes it is better. But you have to catch the error before you can kill it. The error we are hunting here is the foolish academic legitimation and irresponsible perennial promulgation of a social-science hoax. The hoax in question is ten years of reported desert field work, first published in three popular volumes, the third of which was accepted as a formal dissertation in anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. The hoaxer is Carlos Castaneda, prolific author of ingenious but suspect anthropological best-sellers. The hunters and catchers of the error give chase in this book, The Don Juan Papers.

In 1975, Richard de Mille, psychologist, academician, writer, and editor, was reading Castaneda's second volume, about "don Juan," the now legendary Mexican Indian teacher of universal wisdom, when he was struck by a stupendous scientifico-literary revelation: Castaneda's sage of the sagebrush was an invented Indian, and those eclectic metaphysical conversations in the desert were scholastic allegories. For the next six years de Mille pursued Castaneda up and down the stacks and across the realms of discourse, until he had produced Castaneda's Journey: The Power and the Allegory and The Don Juan Papers. These books, well-received by scholars and public alike, drill the didactic bones of Uclanthropus Pilt-dunides Castanedae and everywhere strike baloney — though, of course, many of Castaneda's fans, with or without Ph.D., still like to believe that Carlos and don Juan roamed Sonoran sands together, catching wild rabbits with bare hands while discussing Husserl and Wittgenstein.

Going beyond Darwin's maxim, the Don Juan Papers not only nail an academic error but ask how this quite detectable hoax could succeed so long and so well in the halls of higher learning and what that says about the morale and competence of our guardians of scholarly truth and teachers of the next generation.

James A. Clifton
Frankenthal Professor of Anthropology and History University of Wisconsin,
Green Bay Series Editor

Preface

Since the 1981 edition of this book, the positions of the disputants have changed little if at all. Carlos Castaneda has published further best-selling romances about his magico-mystical teacher, the mysterious don Juan, and continues to declare that he is not making anything up. Skeptics and subscribers go on arguing about whether his story is fact or fiction and whether the difference matters. Humanists are increasingly disappointed by his swift, unreturning flight into occultism. Occultists accuse him of muddying ancient wisdom with impudent hogwash. Parapsychologists learn from him how clever Trickster's disguises can be. Ronald Siegel, a psychopharmacologist, finds enough anomalies in Carlos's 22 wondrous drug trips to refute Castaneda's purported ethnobotany. Rodney Needham, a social anthropologist, discovers one more academic author don Juan must have been reading out there in the desert: Eugen Herrigel, who in turn pirated some of his sham zen from the German philosophical aphorisms of G. C. Lichtenberg. Bruce Bebb, a writer in southern California, recalls that in 1957, three years before Carlos met don Juan, Castaneda was already talking about meditating, saying he wanted clarity, and writing about shamans — as well as claiming to have been a barber, a tailor, a knifer of dogs, a thief, a veteran, the husband of a junkie, and a New York jazz trumpeter. Meanwhile, back at the campus, Castaneda's UCLA faculty patrons have not confessed the slightest error, and innocent students across the land are still being led astray by not entirely guiltless teachers who persist in offering Castaneda's pseudo-Yaqui, Euro-Asian wizard as an Amerindian guide to the invisible world.

From the visible world, since 1981, four important figures in this book have vanished. Ralph Beals, who roamed the real Sonoran sands and knew the Yaqui when they were still unencumbered by Wittgensteinian Upanishads, regretted in 1978 that some members of the department of anthropology he had founded had been outwitted or demoralized by a typewriting coyote; in 1985, he died at 83. R. Gordon Wasson, first recorded non-Indian to eat the psilocybic mushroom, identifier of the ancient soma, unveiler of the Eleusinian potion, finished his fifty-year ethnobotanic journey into prehistoric visionary realms; in 1986, he died at 88. Maria Sabina, shaman of Huautla, early model for don Juan, woman who spoke with God and with Benito Juarez, filled the deep sierran night with luminous language taught to her by the tiny "saint children" that had entered her body; in 1985, she died at 91.

Barbara G. Myerhoff, pilgrim in Wirikuta, witness at the waterfall, warrior in the jungle of Academe, turned to the study of her own people, saying: "I will never be a Huichol Indian . . . but I will be a little old Jewish lady." She was wrong about the second part. With scarcely a word of warning, fierce, implacable death overtook her at 49, in the midst of her work, unwilling to go, a mournful loss to all who knew her. On reading Alvaro Estrada's oral autobiography of Maria Sabina and contrasting it with the eclectic audacities of her friend Carlos Castaneda, Myerhoff wrote:

Indigenous traditions deserve accurate and respectful preservation, and these records must be distinguished from imaginative works. ... It is the obligation of the lettered to make written records of the lore of the unlettered simply a record—not a mirror of ourselves or our needs and fantasies.
And what of the fantasist himself? On 4 December 1981, I met him at last, standing at the top of the Up escalator in the Los Angeles Hilton Hotel, where (he said) he was waiting for Michael Harner. Exactly as I had imagined him in manner, he was in form surprisingly small and delicate, no longer the plump young scamp who is pictured on page 16. His elfin eyes were hollow and haunted, as if he had actually seen the other world and somehow wished he hadn't. Me, however, he was apparently delighted to see. He bounced up and down, put his hand on my shoulder, and said in a confidential tone, "We have so much to talk about." I listened for twenty minutes.

He described his strange adventures as though I knew nothing about them, contradicting specific things I had written about him, without mentioning that I had written them. He said he had no imagination at all and could only report what had happened to him. His former teachers no longer believed him, he said. Goldschmidt wouldn't talk to him. A writer he had met in the hotel bar was despondent over bad reviews. A businessman he knew had become a psychiatrist and found that both careers were empty. Fame was an illusion. "Look at Telly Savalas. Who remembers him today?" I tried to let him go. He clung to me. He said, "Ask me anything you want." I asked him about his so-called Toltecs. Toltecs was not their real name, he said; it was "just a denomination, like Democrats." Softly, solemnly he defined our inescapable, paradoxical, seriocomic collaboration: "You know, these people that I'm working with in Mexico have forbidden me—absolutely forbidden me—to read anything that is written about me. So, for that reason, I have not read your books. But I want to say that for me it is an honor—an honor — that anyone writes about me, even if he says that my books are crap." And in that moment I saw that no con has only one side, and a hoaxer without his critic is like a bridegroom without his mother-in-law.

Richard de Mille June 1989

The Shaman of Academe

Carlos Castaneda said he was bom in Brazil in 1935. His immigration record said he was bom in Peru in 1925. He said his father was a professor of literature. Time said his father was a goldsmith. He said he had no interest in mysticism. His former wife said mysticism was all they ever talked about.

In 1973 Castaneda received a Ph.D. in anthropology for interviewing a mystical old Mexican Indian named don Juan Matus on many occasions from 1960 to 1971, and for documenting the interviews at great length in three volumes of field reports, the third of which was accepted as his dissertation at the University of California, Los Angeles. In all of that, there is nothing particularly unusual.

The three volumes of field reports sold millions of copies coast to coast and around the world. That's unusual.
Don Juan, the mystical old Mexican Indian, was an imaginary person.

That's extraordinary.

“Is it possible that these books are non-fiction?" exclaimed Joyce Carol Oates. Novelists Oates and William Kennedy and science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon were quick to recognize Castaneda as a fellow story teller.

Carlos (as I call the young anthropologist in the story told by Castaneda) goes to Arizona to learn how the Indians use peyote but to his utter amazement is chosen by the imperious don Juan, whom he has accidentally met in a Greyhound bus station, to become “a man of knowledge," which means he will after long and arduous training enter “a separate reality" and see the essence of the world as mystics do.

Published during the psychedelic years, The Teachings of Don Juan and A Separate Reality recount 22 wondrous drug trips through which don Juan guides Carlos, but as new-age consciousness gained favor in the media Journey to Ixtlan suddenly discovered a wealth of neglected drugless techniques in some piles of old fieldnotes Carlos had stupidly set aside. Tales of Power and The Second Ring of Power reflected later popular trends toward occultism and feminism.

If the trendy Castaneda could write at least five best sellers in a row, why did he bother with the anthropology hoax? An obvious economic reason is that competition was too steep in the fiction market. Defective Richard de Mille style, weak dramatic structure, poverty of detail, cardboard characters that do not develop (but are suitable for allegory), stereotyped emotions, and absence of ordinary human relationships make his books unsalable except as fact. Readers love a true adventure even if badly told.

A more important, psychological reason is that anyone who would keep up such a difficult and complicated pretense for eight years before getting any material reward is a person who habitually refuses to follow the rules of society and insists on winning the game of life by playing tricks. As with Castaneda, this lifelong pattern often includes personal charm, high intelligence, and some genuine accomplishments along with the con job.

Professors do get conned, admitted Clement Meighan, a member of Castaneda's doctoral committee, "but someone's going to have to prove this."

(...)

A second kind of proof arises from absence of convincing detail and presence of implausible detail. During nine years of collecting plants and hunting animals with don Juan/ Carlos learns not one Indian name for any plant or animal, and precious few Spanish or English names. No specimen of don Juan's hallucinogenic mushroom was brought back for verification, though Gordon Wasson had challenged its identification in 1968. Don Juan's desert is vaguely described, his habitations are all but featureless. Incessantly sauntering across the sands in seasons when (Hans Sebald will tell us) harsh conditions keep prudent persons away, Carlos and don Juan go quite unmolested by pests that normally torment desert hikers. Carlos climbs unclimbable trees and stalks unstalkable animals. With prodigious speed and skill he writes down "everything" don Juan says to him under the most unlikely conditions. No one but Carlos has seen don Juan.

Since it has recently come to light that Castaneda met serious early resistance from skeptics in the UCLA faculty, we must believe any supporting evidence he had at his disposal — Indian vocabulary, plant specimens, photographs of places, tape recordings he says were made, or Carlos's "voluminous field notes"—would have been promptly pre¬ sented to counter that resistance. No such presentation occurred, which leads to the reasonable inference that no such evidence existed and that the fieldwork that would have furnished it did not exist either, except in Castaneda's highly developed imagination.

A third kind of proof is found in don Juan's teachings, which sample American Indian folklore, oriental mysticism, and European philosophy.

Indignantly dismissing such a proof, don Juan's followers declare that enlightened minds think alike in all times and places, but there is more to the proof than similar ideas; there are similar words. When don Juan opens his mouth, the words of particular writers come out. An example will show what I mean. Though I have condensed lines and added italics, I have not changed any words:

The Human Aura is seen by the psychic observer as a luminous cloud, egg-shaped, streaked by fine lines like stiff bristles standing out in all directions.

A man looks like an egg of circulating fibers. And his arms and legs are like luminous bristles bursting out in all directions.

Of these two passages, the first comes from a book published in 1903, the second from A Separate Reality, a direct quote from don Juan. What I find piquant about this seventy-year echo is the contention that don Juan spoke only Spanish to Carlos. Somehow, in the course of translating don Juan's Spanish, Castaneda managed to resurrect the English phrases of Yogi Ramacharaka, a pseudonymous American hack writer of fake mysticism whose works are still available in occult bookstores.

Could such correspondence be accidental? Despite the close matching of words and ideas, one would have to allow the possibility if this were the only example, but it is not. Of the two following passages, the first is condensed from the Psychedelic Review, the second from The Teachings of Don Juan. Again I have added italics but no words:

My eyes were closed, and a large black pool started to open up in front of them. I was able to see a red spot. I was aware of a most unusual odor, and of different parts of my body getting extremely warm, which felt extremely good.
What was very outstanding was the pungent odor of the water.

It smelled like cockroaches. I got very warm, and blood rushed to my ears. I saw a red spot in front of my eyes. 'What would have happened if I had not seen red?' 'You would have seen black.' 'What happens to those who see red?' 'An effect of pleasure.'

This goes beyond accidental correspondence. These two passages, each of which is drawn from less than a page of original text, have in common at least five specific word combinations as well as seven ideas: drug hallucination, seeing black, seeing red, unusual odor, parts of the body, getting very warm, and pleasure.

How many stylistic echoes would be needed to prove that don Juan's teachings and Carlos's adventures originated not in the Sonoran desert but in the library at UCLA? The Alleglossary, at the back of this volume, lists some 200 exhibits many of which clearly demonstrate and all of which suggest literary influence of earlier publications on Castaneda's supposed field reports. The list convinces me, but it may never convince another contributor to this volume, who said the don Juan books are "beneficially viewed as a sacred text," which prepares us "to witness, to accept without really understanding." Could that be the voice of Baba Ram Dass addressing the Clearlight Conference? No, it is Professor Stan Wilk writing in the leading official journal of the American Anthropological Association. Do most anthropologists feel that way about Castaneda?

No again. Such views are held by a small but devout minority, who see Castaneda as an emissary to an ideal world of anthropological discovery now returned to teach his colleagues perfect fieldwork. In that other world, which so far only Carlos has been privileged to visit, the fieldworker completely shares /the worldview of his informant, unobstructed by language barriers, culture conflict, grant limitations, de¬ partmental demands, fashions in theory, or modernist conceptions of reality. This monumental achievement required many years and would have been impossible without the tutelage of don Juan, a unique and persistent teacher, now departed, but some comfort can nevertheless be derived from certain knowledge that one indomitable pioneer has scaled the heights. Though Carlos's admirerers could not accompany him into those Elysian fields, they can at least still lose themselves in reports of the fieldwork written by Castaneda.

Thousands of years before there were any priests or holy books or churches, human dealings with transcendental agencies were conducted by spiritual technicians who traveled between this and other worlds, convoying the dead to safety, retrieving souls lost by the living, finding cures for the sick, and bringing back power to control the elements and knowledge of hidden realms. To make those perilous passages easier they often ate, smoked, or rubbed their bodies with visionary plants that helped them fly into the sky. Anthropologists call such special men (and sometimes women) shamans, which is what they were called by the Tungus tribe of Siberia. Shaman means "one who knows." In his singular way, Carlos Castaneda is the shaman of the academy, the special person who goes to another world to bring back indispensable knowledge only he can obtain.

Richard de Mille