Origin Story: Chapter 2 None Dare Call It...21-23

 A decade or so ago, I started reading the original books that inspired "firsts." I read Casino Royale (James Bond), Starship Troopers, Nothing Lasts Forever (Die Hard is based on this book), etc. I found it interesting to see what changed and how far things had come since those initial ideas. The most interesting part of this "mission" was finding out the origin of things we take for granted. Starship Troopers, for example, is the origin of the powered robotic solder suit or "mech" in science fiction. There are so many tropes in that book that are just normal now. I read Pride and Prejudice because that's the book that created the trope of the two people that hate each other that eventually get together. Largely I had forgotten that I did this until I read this week's section. 

Chapter 2 is titled: "Socialism--Royal Road to Power for the Super-Rich"

Why am I doing this again? No one is paying me for it...sigh, here we go. 

Politically, I have socialist leanings--I think it's good for some things but bad for others. I recognize that Socialism has some philosophical problems in its practice. Still, I also understand that people who scream about Socialism do not understand it, know about it, or have ever even thought about it. Sometimes we get this impression that people in the past were smarter or, at least, more erudite, but that's not necessarily the case. 

Right away with chapter 2, we know that this book is dropping any pretense to knowledge. The chapter title doesn't make any sense. The phrase itself, "Royal road to power," is strange since Marx explicitly writes against the class system. Clearly, this book is written when the fear of Communism was at its nadir, but we ought not to let that excuse such a non-sensical chapter heading. 

So the chapter starts with Hitler. Oh, did you expect a chapter titled "Socialism..." to be about socialism? I was, and then I remembered that this book predates Godwin's law, and I didn't notice a Hitler reference in the previous chapter. This might be because the war was so fresh in everyone's mind. It also might be because people like Allen might have an uncomfortable familiarity with Nazi ideology. That's not me Godwinning; that's just history. The 1930s US had a lot of sympathy towards German fascism, much more than our history books might want to remember. 

So Hitler. The book gives us a brief biography: he was poor; he sat in a cold garret one day and poured out his plans for world domination. The book claims, "Nobody ever accused him of being cultured." 

Really? The painter with a love of Chaplin films wasn't cultured? Maybe the 60s were different, but Chaplin revolutionized filmmaking. Hitler loved art; that's not a disputable fact. While he may not have been a refined aristocrat, I would think he was a cultured starving artist. 

We move past Hitler to discuss Lenin. It's almost the same story; Lenin came from a poor background and then one day decided he would rule the world, and then he became the Lenin that we all know and fear. Except we don't, Stalin is the guy who bears focus here but let's put that aside and discuss the book's treatment of Lenin. Did Lenin come from a poor background? Not really. Allen claims that his father was a bureaucrat of no importance. Again no, Ilya Ulyanov was the director of primary education for an entire region of the Russian Empire. Ilya came from poor serfdom but rose up to become a hereditary nobleman. Lenin was not a Tsarist royal court class member, but he wasn't in poverty either. That he sat in a cold garret scheming out his ambitions to conquer the world is not something we know because it's false. Lenin wrote, but it was about toppling the aristocratic system, not conquering the world. As I mentioned earlier, Stalin is the guy they want. Came from a poor background, criminal, and then eventual despot of the Soviet Union. I don't get this omission.

After setting up the poor writer that tries to conquer the world, the book then dramatically shifts asking, "Is it not theoretically possible that a billionaire could be sitting, not in a garret, but in a penthouse, in Manhattan, London or Paris (lack of Oxford comma makes me hate this book more) and dream the same dream as Lenin and Hitler?"--pg. 21

That might be difficult since it is unlikely Lenin and the billionaire want to tear down the monetary system. I do have to admit it is theoretically possible, given that rich billionaires have manipulated the economic system to keep themselves rich. Still, the excuse they use is to do otherwise (like raise taxes on their class) is socialism. 

That aside, what's confusing is to go from poor intellectual making his schemes to the rich person doing the same. Fine, I agree; let's stop the rich people by taxing their incomes so that they cannot buy laws anymore. Wait, do I agree that we should inject a little Adam Smith-style regulations to prevent the uber-wealthy from becoming above the laws like Allen? No, he doesn't know what he is saying. 

Further adding to the confusion is that in a list of despots, which finally includes Stalin: it also includes Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. Ok, relax, Allen, because now you're really stepping in my wheelhouse. He wants to include Caesar? Caesar conquered Gaul and then used Roman legal technicalities to be promoted to the office of dictator. The Roman office of dictator was initially temporary, but Caesar used his guile to get that title for life because Rome was now in a civil war. Rome doesn't become an Empire until his nephew Augustus. Again, the wrong target, but it's even more incorrect to try and compare him with Lenin and Hitler. 

The Alexander comparison is even worse. The son of the King of Macedon, tutored by the most brilliant mind in the ancient world, Alexander wasn't shifty or sneaky. He fulfilled his role as a bronze age leader. To compare him to genocidal paranoiacs like Stalin and Hitler seems out of place. Maybe contemporary accounts would talk of Alexander as a madman in the same way that Cicero described Marc Antony. Still, this whole section reeks of historical name-dropping to build intellectual credibility. As a former coworker of mine used to say, "I can't even..." 

How you may ask, do name-dropping historical figures work in a chapter that is supposed to be about Socialism? I have no idea. Most conspiracy works have the historical narratives they employ on point with the story they are about to tell--even though those narratives are typically incorrect. This seems to be a mystery because only Lenin was a Socialist. 

What I think I may have found is the origin of the right-wing conspiracist screed of claiming that everything they hate is "socialist." The chapter title has no awareness of the definition of "socialism," and the next two pages ignore the topic altogether.