The American novelist, Jack London, died at the age
of 40. He was an alcoholic who basically drunk himself to death. He wrote about
heavy drinking in his autobiographical novel John Barleycorn.
London was influenced very much by the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche who believed that civilization was born from barbarism - the strong eliminating the weak. He was also a virulent racist. Jack London said: "I am first of all a white man, and only then a socialist." He believed that every other ethnic group should be subjugated or exterminated. He wrote: "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...The dominant races are robbing and slaying in every corner of the globe."
Jack London is probably best known for two books that he wrote - 'The Call of the Wild' and 'White Fang'. Yet, two other novels that he wrote, are in my opinion very prescient and relevant today. His dystopian novel called 'The Iron Heel' chronicles the rise of a plutocratic oligarchic tyranny in the United States (Project 2025, that Donald Trump claims to have never heard of), and 'Martin Eden', a novel which in part, is an attack on the masquerade of celebrity that helps enslave the public.
Many people today are enthralled by the spectacle of celebrity lifestyles and live their lives vicariously through the soaps and the lives of celebrities like the Kardashians and the Beckham's. Years ago, it would've been Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.
In the early 1930s, before he formed the black shirt British Union of Fascists (BUF), Oswald Mosley and his glamorous wife Lady Cynthia, the daughter of Lord Curzon the former Viceroy of India, were considered two great English celebrities. Mosley had left the Labour Party and had formed the New Party. The fashionable couple visited Ashton-under-Lyne in 1931, to support the New Party candidate, Allan Young, who was standing in a by-election in Ashton, following the death of the town's Labour MP, Albert Bellamy.
In his book on Oswald Mosley, Robert Skidelsky, says that Mosley and his wife Lady Cynthia, visited local tripe shops in the area to try and whip up working-class support for the New Party. Skidelsky says that local mill girls wanted to touch Lady Cynthia's pearl necklace and were fascinated by her clothing. At a public meeting held at the Ashton Palais de Dance, on Gas Street, a heckler asked Mosley, if it was true that he'd left the Labour Party because they wouldn't make him Viceroy of India. Mosley said that it was utter nonsense and that riding elephants made him sea sick.
The New Party didn't win that election in Ashton in April 1931, but they split the vote and the Conservative candidate, John Broadbent, became the MP for Ashton-under-Lyne. They say that Mosley was lucky that he didn't get lynched that night because people were so furious and denounced him as a traitor. The Marxist, John Stachey, who was also a member of the New Party, said that British Fascism was born that night in Ashton-under-Lyne. Mosley is reputed to have told Strachey, "That is the crowd that has prevented anyone doing anything in England since the (First World) war." Mosley and Jack London had a lot in common when it comes to a belief in white supremacy and dominant races.
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