Fantastic and Inscrutable Titles: God and the Asylum of Ignorance. (Nazis by any other name...)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 454

Asa Turian, the author of this 1938 Outsider Logic pamphlet, was sort of steeped, in a light way, in gathering quotes from the moderns and the ancients--in the end, none of them seem to help. Ultimately he seems to me to create some new vocabulary to repackage the NSDAP, which even in 1938 was still gathering frothy American pro-Bund crowds at Madison Square Garden. (The scion of American Olympic sports and head of the International Olympic Committee, the  Nazi/racist Avery Brundage*, spoke to a crowd of 20,000+ American Bundists at The Garden in 1938, finding little fault with the Nazis.  He went on to a long and  distinct career-- some of which in deep furtherance of his political ideologies--as did thousands of other pro-Nazis.)  The title is taken from Exodus 32:1 and is a plea, very late in the Depression, from Turian to find some sort of Moses to lead the United States out of the despairing economic situation.  He notes that although many people were talking about the depression, no one was talking  (like Mark Twain's complaint about people discussing the weather) about what to do about it.  Which is odd because FDR had been hammering away at it for six years by the time this pamphlet was written.  No matter for Turian, who doesn't bother mentioning Roosevelt.

After quoting many, Turian suggests that the way out of the Depression was via a light Dictatorship ("an alternative between Democracy and Dictatorship by means of the separation of Government and Industry") that defies simple explanation.  Half-way through this Bush-IQ-thin text the Democracy part of this partnership slips away, saying simply that "we must maintain our present form of Government and resort to Dictatorship as well".  I think that the way this plays out is that a combination of democracy and dictatorship is just a dictatorship.  Industry is divided from government, and then  would be further divided "between Capital and Labor" and then "running it on a partnership basis" governed by the Corporate Dictatorship. He further suggests getting rid of money and putting the entire economy on a 100-billion (the unit of measurement not explained) "bartership basis".  I have no idea how this barter would work overseas, as international trade doesn't come up at all in Turian's economic homage to liberation logic, though there is a lot of discussion of "state controllership" and "the status of the corporation dictatorship".   There are some other societal revolutions that come and go, but the biggest of them all was the establishment of some sort of economico-religico tripartate God/Mammon/Something Else oracle to lead us away from all bad economic temptation.  Wow.   I'm not sure exactly what the author was getting at, but if you take away the barter bit, it sounds quite a bit like Nazism in different terminology.  I guess this just goes to show you that you can Reality-Compromised and still come up with either (a) your own version of Nazism or (b) a paint-by-numbers Nazi who changes the colors but not the numbers. 

*I'd like to discuss Brundage more fully at some point.  For now, let's just say that he was a man without quality.   It was Brundage who sold out Jim Thorpe in a rant against professionalism in the Olympics but who said nothing about the Olympic industry and paid Olympians in the Soviet Bloc.  It was Brundage who disqualified and exiled Tommie Smith and John Carlos in Mexico '68 for their giving the Black Power salute but who said nothing at all about the Nazi salute in his highly cherished 1936 Berlin games.  And it was Brundage who cluster fucked the 1972 Munich Olympics--in ways too numerous to go into here--and who allowed the games to continue after a one day interruption following the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by the Black September Palestinian terrorist group.  Brundage, as President of the IOC, spoke at the ceremony the day the Olympics restarted, and unbelievably equated the massacre of the Israelis with the boycott of the racist all-white Rhodesian team: (the bold is mine, just in case):
"The Games of the XXth Olympiad have been subject to two savage attacks. We lost the Rhodesian battle against naked political blackmail. I am sure that the public will agree that we cannot allow a handful of terrorists to destroy this nucleus of international cooperation and goodwill we have in the Olympic movement. The Games must go on...."

Why the man wasn't struck by lightning on the spot and turned into carbon sizzle is a sacred mystery. I am sure that a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion must've been on his library shelf. Or half-shelf.

The man was utterly shameful, and yet was the leading American for the Olympics for almost thirty years.

Comments

[Jeff]

I believe that should be "cluster-fucked." When in doubt, use a comma or hyphen, that's my rule. Love 'em.

[John F. Ptak]

"Clusterfucked" shows up with 22k hits on google, while "Cluster-fucked" has 11k hits. Tomato, toe-mahto.

[Jeff]

22,000 people CAN be wrong. As can 22,000,000. (How many hits for "cluster fucked," which is what Brundage did in 1972?)

[John F. Ptak]

True enough. 62 million people bought Geo Bush in 2004 (and 50 mil did so in 2000). That's a lot of positive attention and a lot of wrong in spite of the numbers.
As long as I'm at it, I think that a movie about Brundage would be more interesting than the thing about von Stauffenberg with that man in the staring role. I can only take so many Good Nazi rubbings--well, von S never did become a Nazi, so I can't even say that. But he did take until July 1944 to actually get something "on"--an effort to stop Hitler when it was obvious that the end of the war for Germany was just a matter of time. Leave it to me to grumble about the man taking so long, or taking until the point that the war was lost, to jump into action. It would've been more interesting if he decided that Hitler was "no good" and had to go while the war was still sorta being won by Germany. The awfulness of Brundage's story hasn't been told so far as I can tell, and I suspect that most people associated with the Olympics would want him to stay nice and buried.