Jack London: Working Class Hero or Monster

[Phil The Cat]

http://www.slate.com/id/2261928/

In an article on Slate, Jack London, noted socialist and author of "The Iron Heel" is presented as being a violent genocidal racist!

:wtf:

According to this article:

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And yet there is an infected scar running across his politics that is hard to ignore. "I am first of all a white man, and only then a socialist," he said, and he meant it. His socialism followed a strict apartheid: It was for his pigmentary group alone. Every other ethnic group, he said, should be subjugated—or exterminated. "The history of civilization is a history of wandering—a wandering, sword in hand, of strong breeds, clearing away and hewing down the weak and less fit," he said coolly. "The dominant races are robbing and slaying in every corner of the globe." This was a good thing, because "they were unable to stand the concentration and sustained effort which pre-eminently mark the races best fitted to live in this world."

---------------------------

Why do geniuses have to be idiots?

Note: Edited for misspelling

[bluestateguy]

1. Plenty of socialists, progressives and New Dealers were racists

and plenty were not.

[proteus_lives]

2. Raised with poison, live with poison, die with poison.

Some people can't overcome it.

Geniuses may have a rougher time of it. It seems that a lot of times, the more creative a intelligent a person is, the deeper they feel and connect to things.

People are complex and nearly impossible to pigeon-hole.

[aquart]

3. Oh, good grief. That was a normal mindset for the time.

Not the only one, but a perfectly socially acceptable way to think for his time.

Judging him by our standards is ridiculous.

I have been downloading and reading free ebooks available through the Gutenberg Project. There are a million throwaway statements by well-known authors that are simply brain-rattling today.

[ixion]

4. spot on, that...

n/t

[Phil The Cat]

6. Since Slavery was "Socially Acceptable" at the time

We shouldn't despise 17th/18th/19th Century slaveowners? :wtf:

Some may argue, in certain quarters, homophobia is socially acceptable (ex. Prop H8)! By this reasoning, these folks are A-OK, as long as they have something "we" like about them!

"Oh, but he was a socialist! He was for the working man!" seems to whitewash (pun intended) the fact that he apparantly not only believed in discrimination, but GENOCIDE!

I'm sorry, no other opinions, no "other place and time" excuses the desire to slaughter innocents in the quest for racial "purity"!

[arbusto_baboso]

9. Indeed, he doesn't sound much different from Teddy Roosevelt.

[aquart]

14. People we look on as having been good and enlightened thought like that.

Reading their work can be incredibly shocking for us today. But it's important to do it. For one thing, many Republicans still think that way. In their worldview, they only think the way everybody they ever knew has always thought and our views are bizarre and new and strange and unsettling. They are "conservative" in that they still preserve the views of their grandfathers. It isn't that they are bad or evil, although the results of their thinking are, it's that they see a virtue in preserving a world in which the white Christian male ruled. It made them happy and secure and they want to keep it forever. I tend to see a baby clinging to his blue binky when I think of Republicans.

[no_hypocrisy]

5. I'm not surprised. He's the son of his Times.

Imperial Britain having its imprimateur on every continent

Queen Victoria/Prince Albert

White Man's Burden

Britain's Mad dash at colanizing any country not yet claimed

Britain's cultural influence in the States

[MisterP]

7. H. Bruce Franklin's "War Stars" covers the whole milieu of early SF

and its connections with warmongering and more genocidal styles of warfare, such as the Bomb and firestorms: as a Marxist, Franklin can see that such genocidal imaginings fitted neatly with actual genocidal and colonial wars (though neither was a cause or effect of the other). Invasion literature since the 1890s imagined the US conquered by damn foreigners (one ends with the Qing yellow dragon flag hoisted over the Capitol; another during WWII has every American city obliterated by Japan with help from internee fifth columnists). In pre-Trinity SF, not only would glorious victory come about quickly with new technology, but that victory would bring eternal peace (often because the new, all-American superweapon was simply too horrible to use more than once).

another work is Richard Hofstadter's (before he got tedious) "Social Darwinism in American Thought" which covers the rise of that proto-fascist philosophy across the US and Europe; several US socialists were influenced by whites-are-the-fittest (London) and competition-is-God (Edward Bellamy) narratives. Some scientists may drop a brick when I say this, but there's still the legacy of your-genes-are-you and life-is-struggle in some sciences (Gould and Lewontin got red-baited for opposing such Social Darwinism, and for pointing out SD in, and accusing others of SD).

[MilesColtrane]

8. He was a mean drunk too.

[LostinVA]

10. Jack London was, for the most part, a mean drunken poser

And, not everyone in his time and place with his politics were as bad as he was. Most weren't.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

11. Total monster. When he wasn't killing minorities, he was busy punching hippies.

In fact, it's well known that Jack London invented the insidious game of Slug Bug (or "Punch Buggy" as it's known east of the Mason-Dixon line).

"Save up the blows and use 'em on the wimmin and children!" a hashish addled Jack London was once heard to say, moments before shivving a Nez Pearce Indian.

[Ichingcarpenter]

12. I just finished a few of his Sci Fi Short stories which I liked

I had them on my iPod which I downloaded from a LibriVox recording of science fiction short stories.
I particularly liked "Goliah,"


Goliah," in Revolution and Other Essays (1910). A machinist discovers Energon, a new form of energy that enables the ending of war and wage slavery.

I also enjoyed the novel 'The Iron Heel'




He was a product of his times and I think if he had lived longer
would have repudiate social Darwinism and his racist overtones.

Article on his science fiction.




Jack London and Science Fiction

By Clarice Stasz, Ph.D.


"Despite ample, indeed pervasive, evidence in his writings that Jack London had a naturally strong proclivity for fantasy fiction, he has no appreciable reutation today as a practitioner, much less as an examplar, of that for of expression. This fact is particularly odd in light of the proliferation of reprinted fiction works by obscurer literary figures...whose contributions to the genre are, in many instances, patently inferior to London's."

--Dale Walker, The Alien Worlds of Jack London
Jack London was a lifelong fantast. The first money he ever received as a professional writer was for the science fiction story "A Thousand Deaths" published by The Black Cat in 1899. Thirteen of his 188 published short stories and four of his twenty-two novels fall readily into the category, and other stories contain fantastic elements.

London explored numerous styles of science fiction: pre-history, apocalyptic catastrophe, future war, scientific dystopias, technocratic utopias. Running through most stories are the ideas of social evolution, racialism, and anti-capitalism. In some stories, London emphasizes "social science fiction," the problems of society, particularly the exploitation of workers and the materialism of capitalism. By positing extreme cases of social order or disorder, he hopes to convey how human suffering based in economic inequality may be eliminated. In other cases, his imaginary societies were meant to demonstrate the validity of Social Darwinism with its emphasis upon the rise of the superior Anglo-Saxon race.

London's science fiction shows the influence of such horror fantasy writers as Mary Shelley and Edgar Allen Poe, and the popular science fiction writers of the late 19th century, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard, and Stanley Waterloo. Themes already familiar to turn-of-the-century readers reoccur in London's stories: invisibility, humans turned into beasts, worldwide pestilence, cataclysmic war, indefinable terrors, ghosts, time travel, extra sensory perception (this, before the term was even in the vocabulary).


http://london.sonoma.edu/Essays/scifi.html

[Brother Buzz]

13. Horatio Alger - rags to riches theme with an Anglo-Saxon flavor ran strong in many of his books

The Valley of the Moon is a good example. I read it decades ago and was bothered at the time, but I grew to understand it in a broader context of turn-of-the-century California history, and moved on.

[mdmc]

15. ..