Spinning Wheel
Got to Go 'Round
I first got online in the 1990s, using a "build your own website" service called Tripod, which (I recently discovered) still exists in some umpteenth generation. With the impending implosion of Twitter, I was sorely tempted to come full circle, to return the beginning and know it for the first time and create something over there.
But every student of dystopia, real or imagined, knows that you can’t turn back the march of progress. Heedless of consequence, we soldier forth, venturing reckless into the unknown, no matter the danger, no matter the cost. Horizons unfold before us, not behind us, and the wind is ever at our backs.
All of which it to say, um, I got a Substack now.
Until the next Twitter arrives, I will try to keep in touch with you all through this newsletter and a couple of alternative platforms, which I will list at the end of this post. When Twitter gives up the ghost, I’ll try to start doing a digest of important stories in extremism, disinformation and technology. Until then (which could be tomorrow), I’m aiming to post here every other week — a short commentary on something current, some dystopian trivia, and professional updates.
In this edition:
I am waxing long this week, but will try to be briefer in the future.
Let’s get to it.
All quiet on the electoral front
Kind of miraculously, the midterms have come and mostly gone without any major eruptions of violence, and (so far) without any spectacularly impactful legitimacy problems. Misinformation batted mostly around the edges, and fraud narratives did not immediately take hold, although could still change once the final votes have been counted. All things considered, though, everything went a lot better than expected.
Many people, myself included, expected worse. To some extent, that’s a hazard of being an expert on extremism and/or political violence and/or fascism. When it’s your job to stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you. But I think there were also some factors that we couldn’t really assess until we saw them play out, including:
Donald Trump’s reduced platform. If you take one lesson away from Elon Musk’s Twitter Catastrophe, let it be this. There’s no substitute for Twitter when it comes to capturing attention. Trump still screams into the void on his pet platforms, but his power to disrupt has been reduced.
Similarly, Trump’s spoiler power over the Republican Party may be wearing thin. It’s increasingly clear that Trump’s power to make Republicans lose by attacking them does not correlate to an ability (or even a desire) to help them win by endorsing them. It was noteworthy that a lot of his candidates conceded their races without a fight, and it’s clear a lot of Republicans are tired of him. But we’ve heard this song before, so I’m not hugely optimistic it will stick.
Policy and politics are not my specialty, but it’s obvious abortion rights are popular, and attacks on trans and LGBTQ+ people are not, except in the deepest red spaces. One insight from studying extremism is that people generally prefer to maintain the status quo. Fascists selling a return to the golden days are really selling a continuation of the old order. But over the last few years, abortion rights and LGBTQ+ rights have become the status quo. They have institutional weight behind them now, and it’s not so easy to move the needle back.
Political violence is still obviously in play, as the attack on the Pelosi household shows, but similar to the previous point, Joe Biden’s America is a calmer and more predictable place than under The Former Guy. The J6 prosecutions combined with a period of relatively low uncertainty probably helped mitigate some of the risks on Election Day.
All of this is good, but we’re not out of the woods yet. More on this in weeks and months to come. I have some projects in this space, if I can find a venue and funding.
Weird world conquests
CW: Racism, racial epithets
Longtime aficionados may remember my Foreign Policy article on The Red Napoleon, a 1929 racist anti-Communist novel by newspaperman Floyd Gibbons, in which a Mongolian warlord conquers the world with the goal of miscegenating everyone until our skins are all a nice uniform tan color.
Many of these narrative threads came together in The Last of the Japs and the Jews, an exceptionally weird artifact from the dystopian race wars of the early 20th century, which may have written in response to The Red Napoleon.
Author Solomon Cruso was a Russian Jew who emigrated to America around the turn of the century. When he turned 18, Cruso placed an advertisement in the Philadelphia newspapers seeking to be imprisoned in solitary confinement for 10 years so that he could study languages and science. It was unclear why anyone would be inclined to take his “imprisonment” on as a hobby.[i]
Perseverant, he wrote to a Kansas City judge a few years later, asking to be sentenced three years in prison so that he would have time to memorize the dictionary.[ii] Cruso’s stick-to-itiveness finally paid off in 1930, when he received two years in prison for embezzling from a New York finance company.[iii] One year after his release and two years after the publication of The Red Napoleon, Cruso published the first volume in his trilogy of dystopian novels.
Narrated by a 25th century historian, The Last of the Japs and the Jews looks back at the history of the late 20th century, when a racial world war led to the near-extinction of white people. An alliance among China, Turkey and India—referred to repeatedly as the “yellow-swarthy” army—conquers Europe and America, razing the latter to the ground and returning the Western hemisphere to its indigenous inhabitants.
Cruso’s intent in writing the book is decidedly ambiguous; it alternates between lamentations over the end of white civilization and a scathing critique of white civilization’s history persecuting other races. The first book is “dedicated” by the future narrator to “the Caucasian Race, the white Aryans,” who would die in the course of the story; the second is dedicated to the “victims, all of races and nations, who … have been sacrificed at the altars of Religious Intolerance, Racial and National Hatred, Envy, Greed, Vengeance, Persecution, Supremacy, Imperialism, Totalitarianism, and Aryanism.”
These mixed messages would continue throughout the trilogy.
The main action of the first book takes place in the 1980s, after a mid-century world war unites America, Europe, Germany and Japan against Soviet Russia. Japan is subsequently and apparently entirely coincidentally struck by a massive earthquake, disappearing beneath the ocean, like a modern-day Atlantis, and all its people with it.
But wait, there’s more! Much more! After some time passes, Cruso introduces a mixed-race prince of Russian-Jewish-Chinese-Swedish-Tartar ancestry, suspiciously reminiscent of Gibbons’ warlord. The new guy’s superhuman qualities win the heart of a Mexican woman of Spanish descent. Unfortunately, their racial and nationalistic differences prove irreconcilable, radicalizing him and setting him on an extremely circuitous path to world domination, which involves, among other things, a shipwreck and the discovery of a temporarily resurfaced portion of Japan. This small island conveniently contains the near-limitless wealth of Japan’s national treasury and a defense research vault filled with highly advanced military technology.
The prince, improbably named Chang Kochubey, is whiter in appearance than Gibbons’ Karakhan, but no less radical. He offers white people one chance to right their historical wrongs, which he enumerates at length, ordering them to abandon their colonies and make reparations to the non-white races they have treated cruelly for so long, including Africans and especially Jews, or else face the consequences. When white civilization declines to accommodate his demands, he uses the money and technology he recovered from the ruins of Japan to unite China, Turkey and India in an apocalyptic war:
But not a war of one white nation against another. It was race against race; Asia against Europe; yellow man against white man; with the black, brown, and red men as onlookers, as if they were spectators in a theatre, or circus, or moving picture, witnessing a drama played by biped beasts, in a fierce struggle of destruction, devastation and annihilation. …
This war is a racial war. It is a war of skin-color, with the Mongolian race now the aggressive, fighting the white race for superiority, supremacy, indirectly fighting the battle of other oppressed, persecuted races, like the black, red, brown and other hated races and nations. This war is a war of color, pride, and trampled feelings, more than a war for power, riches and plunder.
The prince’s efforts to honor his Jewish heritage backfire badly, in part because his ultimatum had emphasized Jewish grievances throughout recorded history, leading the white nations believe that the Jews are behind the war. As a result, the white nations massacre all the diaspora Jews who live in their lands, before being massacred themselves by the prince’s armies.
In the wake of the prince’s eventual victory, the relatively small number of surviving white people are treated fairly, as long as they don’t interfere with the regime, in which case they are enslaved. Slavery of all non-white races is strictly forbidden. Meanwhile, the yellow-swarthy alliance undertakes a campaign of encouraging voluntary amalgamation—to “intermingle all races of the world, except the red, into once race, delivering a crushing blow to the racial abcess.” While most white authors of the day would portray such an outcome as dystopian, Cruso seems to think it’s for the best:
And if ever these radical teachings materialize, it will be in the same time, when all the races will have melted into one race; when all the five races will assume one color; when the entire humanity will become either all white; or all yellow; or all brown; or all red; or all black; or assume some other strange color, from the melting of the five races.
And those offsprings, of the combined mixed bloods of the five races, will certainly be the happiest people since the creation of the world, for they will all be equal—socially, economically, politically, and racially.
The subsequent volumes of the trilogy got weirder still, with white folk emigrating to an artificial moon to live separately from the other races, all of which have merged into one mixed society that subscribes, oddly, to the religion of Judaism, despite all the ethnic Jews having died in the first book.
You may be surprised to learn that Cruso’s work was not a best-seller, but it did capture many confused racial impulses that had been churning through white American and European societies since the conclusion of the Civil War, with threats perceived from every racial direction—black, yellow, brown, red and white.
Writing from a minority perspective, Cruso also captured legitimate fears about an ascendant strain of animosity toward Jewish people, an ancient bigotry that had been very recently renewed and expanded with a dystopian twist.
In the next newsletter, I will look at Cruso’s work in the context of the contemporaneous spread of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
[i] The Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) · 21 Oct 1908, Wed · Page 5. This is also the source of the picture.
[ii] The Eskridge Tribune-Star and Eskridge Independent (Eskridge, Kansas) · 26 Dec 1912, Page 4.
[iii] St. Louis Post-Dispatch · Wed, Jul 30, 1930 · Page 3
Professional update
Well, this was way longer than I intended. I will try to be shorter next time.
The biggest recent development: I’ve finished my new novel, and I am looking for an agent or a publisher, if you know someone, or if you know someone who knows someone. The book is first in a series, a high fantasy-style epic about extremism and magic, and I’ll probably talk about it a bit more here soon.
I would tell you the title, but some bastard just released a movie using my title, so I have to come up with a new one.
In the meantime, as some of you already know, I am actively looking for work, since in the short term, the book isn’t going to pay the bills or cover my healthcare. I have some hopeful leads, but nothing is locked down. Please feel free to reach out if you hear of something that might make sense for me. For the record, I’m pretty much all in on extremism theory, historical context, and current DOMEX. I am not so current on the jihadist scene these days, and especially with the Twitter situation, I don’t think I could get up to speed fast enough to work in that space right now.
You can reach me here, ish, somehow? Or at one of the following online spots:
https://mastodon.social/@intelwire
https://linkedin.com/in/jmberger1/
https://youtube.com/@intelwire
https://facebook.com/jmbergerauthor/
https://www.amazon.com/J-M-Berger/e/B004D79QH4/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_ebooks_1
Bye for now…