by Miles Mathis
First published November 13, 2015
As usual, this is all just my opinion, based on personal research.
I was alerted to London's possible spook status by a reader, who sent me to discover that several of London's direct ancestors had testified in the Salem Witch Trials. I then scoured his Wikipedia page as well as a recent Slate article by Johann Hari—which tries to make an even bigger hero out of London. . . but fails miserably. These two sources alone already confirmed what my reader had implied: London's entire bio is a fake.
I should lead by admitting none of this makes me happy. I liked The Call of the Wild and White Fang as much as any boy. Although I will show London is basically a precursor of Hemingway—his life being used by Hemingway as a sort of palimpsest—I never had any suspicions about London. Of course, I had never read his bio, so I was clueless. I had only his famous books to go on, and read them only as a young teen. I was blissfully ignorant until today.
I will show you the evidence in a moment, but since I always take my readers on the same journey I took, I want to pause to tell you what my first question was upon seeing the light. I thought, “How is The Call of the Wild a piece of propaganda?” If London is a spook, it follows that his most famous books must be propaganda. But how is a story about a sled dog propaganda? I then looked up the plot as a refresher, and indeed there are signs there. One of the clearest was London's manufacture of “Yeehat natives” who kill the dog's nice master Thornton. We must assume this helped to blackwash the eskimos and other Natives further south, who we now know are the most peaceful of Native tribes. And the spin on this remains to this day, since if we search on the Yeehats, we are taken to this article at bannedbooks.world.edu, where the authors says this about the library censoring of London:
So, here we are again, having an early American novel about a period in history challenged because it paints a picture of a past that is dark and bloody that we’d much rather forget about than admit to, or learn from.
That's misdirection, since I don't have a problem with the fake Yeehats for that reason. I have a problem with London's description because he turns history on its head, making the Natives look like the aggressors and us look like the victims. But it was we that wiped out the Natives, not the reverse, remember? It is impossible for a reader to “learn from” an inverted and false account of history. I can stomach a dark and bloody history as long as it is a true history. What I can't stomach is another fistful of lies.
On a re-reading, many other parts of the novel begin to give off a stink as well, such as London's description of the “Scottish half-breed” man. What is a Scottish half-breed man? I have a considerable amount of Scots blood, does that make me a half-breed? Funny, I had thought all people in the US were mutts of some sort, even the richest and blue-blooded among us.
But the ickiest parts of the novel can't be comprehended without reading the book as an allegory for slavery. The dog Buck is sold into slavery early on, and if we rewrite the story replacing the dogs with Africans, for example, we begin to see some curious things. Just notice how the dog learns to survive via his beatings, and becomes stronger and smarter from them. The lesson seems to be that you don't survive by revolting, or by trying to be an individual. You survive by merging with the group and obeying the rules, whether you like them or not. We will soon see why London might be pressing that education on you.
But let's go back to the beginning. As usual, we get the best clues from London's early life and family. His mother Flora was from the very wealthy Wellman family, which does indeed go back to the Salem witch trials and before. Three Wellmans from this same family testified against Sarah Cole. Since I have recently shown that event was faked, we have indication the Wellman family has been involved in Intelligence operations since the 17th century.
Finding London connected to major wealth reminds us of all the others we have recently outed in the same way, most of them—like London—sold to us as poor or middle class. Think John Reed, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Samuel Parrish, Karl Marx, Jack Kerouac, and just about every other famous person we have researched. They are always promoted as being part of some Lost or Beat Generation, down-and-out and flying by their bootstraps, creating art or literature from some bohemian flat in the white ghettoes, but with a little digging we find just the opposite is true: they are from millionaire and often billionaire families, tied to the most prominent fascist families in the country, and the art they claimed to have created turns out to be the committee creation of bunch of hired hacks in Intelligence, manufactured as propaganda and then sugar-coated to feed to the masses.
Flora Wellman was a spook of another kind, being involved in the spiritualist movement at the end of the 19th century. She claimed to have channeled the spirit of the Native chief Black Hawk, among many others. Actually, Flora was probably twice a spook, since the whole spiritualist movement of the time has turned out to be another Intel project. See my paper on Theosophy, where I show its founder Henry Steel Olcott was a high-ranking agent, having worked as a spy all the way back to the 1840's. It now looks like all the so-called spiritualism coming out of the US and England at the time was part of a project, the main point of which was to destroy Christianity and any other serious and established religion. Intelligence therefore created a series of hoaxes that could later be debunked, making all believers—and thereby all faithful—look like rubes and ninnies. Secondary points of these projects included the creation of confusion, as now with the various COINTELPRO and CHAOS programs, as well as the creation of fear, hysteria, and new marketing opportunities. London's father was also a spook, being a cult leader and faux-astrologer, in the pattern of all the more recent manufactured cult leaders that will jump to mind. The patterns of Intelligence haven't changed much over the centuries, as it turns out. Just think of River Phoenix's Jewish mother moving to California to join a newly formed new-age cult led by a channeling fake-Christian. In the same way, London's mother moved out of her parents' 17-room mansion and joined London's father in a newly formed cult. We are told very little about him, her, or Jack's childhood, but what little we are told makes not a lick of sense.
Let's start with that 17-room mansion. Please pause and chew on that for a while. London's grandparents owned a 17-room mansion and his grandfather was one of the wealthiest men in Ohio. London later went to a fancy prep school and then to Berkeley. So now try to fit that in with all the other things you are told about his childhood. For example, we are told Jack London was given at birth by Flora to a poor black woman and former slave. Although we are told this black woman was a maternal figure for Jack and was a great influence on him, we find his mother Flora had him back before he turned one. Beyond that, there is no chance Jack was abandoned to this woman at all, for any period, since—remember—Flora's wealthy family had around 15 rooms sitting empty. Do you think Jack's grandparents would leave him to be raised by a poor black woman? No, at best this woman was a housekeeper in the family mansion. I also don't believe she was a wet nurse, since these millionaire families in 1876 didn't allow black women to nurse white babies. More on that below.
That photo is tagged Jack London studying at Heinold's Pub. You might want to ask why they chose a small photo with little resolution where the boy is covering his face, preventing identification, or why he has blonde hair sticking out the back of his cap. Jack London had very dark hair, even as a boy:
This photo is also faked:
The face has been pasted in, and that isn't even his hair. The hair and sweater have a lot of natural detail, but the face was pulled from a much poorer print.
You see, we are being sold a poorly manufactured story from the first. More indication of that is the claim that although London was supposed to be impoverished and living on the streets as a child, or working 18 hours a day in a pickle cannery like David Copperfield or something, he allegedly borrowed enough money from his poor black nurse to buy an oyster sloop and become an oyster pirate.
What? Why not borrow even more money from Grandpa, buy a yacht, and enter the America's Cup?
Do you know how old London was supposed to be at the time of this oyster sloop story? Thirteen! This was 1889 and he was born in 1876. You do the math. We are told London also stole the mistress of the man he bought the ship from. At age thirteen? This sloop became damaged beyond repair within months, and London was hired by the California Fish Patrol. At age fourteen. At age 17 [1893] he signed on a seal hunting schooner to Japan, and within the next 12 months he sailed to Japan and back and held grueling jobs in a jute mill and in a railway power plant. All that had to be in about one year, because in 1894 he was allegedly marching across the country with Kelly's Army to protest unemployment. He was allegedly arrested in Buffalo, and that would have been in April of that year. But that is a problem as well, since Kelly's Army didn't go through Buffalo. It marched on the Capitol from Ohio, passing through Pittsburgh. Since London would have been coming from California, what was he doing way up in Buffalo? He was about 150 miles too far north. Where was he marching from? Toronto?
Conveniently, if we have any questions about London's early life, we are told all the documentation burned up in the 1906 San Francisco fire.
We have a similar problem with the seal hunt story. For such a trip, a lad needed to be 19 years old and have three years of experience at sea. London had none and had just turned 17. We are told Johnny Heinold vouched for him, but Heinold was just the owner of a pub. What did he know about seal hunting, other than listening to drunken stories? Besides, these were “minimum requirements”. Go look up the meaning of that. You can't vouch your way past minimum requirements, can you? No, vouching works when, say, you otherwise meet the minimum requirements but the guy hiring still thinks you aren't good material. If enough trusted people then vouch for you, he may hire you against his better judgment.
We are told London proved his mettle aboard by working hard and winning a fight with a “huge Swede”. Right. Because rich pretty boys always go sailing with no experience and whip the biggest guy onboard. In this same story, we are told London read Madame Bovary in his spare time. Reading Madame Bovary and filing his nails one moment, the next moment getting a giant Swede in a headlock: is there anything they wouldn't try to put past us?
No, nothing, because they then tell us this ship on a seal hunt—leaving from San Francisco and going to the Bering Sea—went to the Bonin Islands first for water and repairs. That's only about 5,000 miles out of their way, across the entire North Pacific. That's like being told that a ship leaving from New York and hunting for penguins went first for water in Ireland. We should have gotten the clue from the “jungle-covered volcanic peaks” and the “scent of the tropics”. They were hunting for fur seals, and there aren't a lot of fur seals in the tropics, for obvious reasons. I really encourage to take that last link above to the Art of Manliness website and read the whole story. If you aren't giggling by the end, you aren't reading closely enough.
We are told London was sentenced to 30 days in jail for vagrancy in Buffalo on his way to Washington in 1894. He was 18. Here he claims to have been introduced to “man-handling” or homosexuality. I have no doubt he had been introduced to such things by that time, but I don't believe this is how he did it. They wouldn't have put a pretty young boy serving time for vagrancy in with hardened criminals. They don't rape one another in the drunk tank or the vagrant tank. But even if you are inclined to think they do, you are forgetting the story from the seal hunt ship less than a year earlier, where London whipped a giant Swede. If he could whip a giant Swedish sailor, toughest guy on the ship, why couldn't he keep his cellmate off his butt? Again, the story is full of outrageous contradictions.
London supposedly returned to San Francisco the same year and began preaching on street corners, yelling for the workers to rise up. Remember, he was just 18. Nonetheless, we are told he made the front pages, being called the “Boy Socialist”. Were the papers in the area leftist rags in 1894? No, they were owned, then as now, by billionaires. Hearst owned all the important papers in that area by that time, which is a big clue in this story. Like John Reed a couple of decades later, London's socialist bent was just a pose. If he took part in any real events, it was only as a mole for the billionaires.
Then, “He was offered a place at a posh prep school”, and the author at Slate implies it was due to his appearance on the front pages. But posh prep schools didn't recruit boy revolutionaries then, and they don't now, so this is again completely unbelievable. He obviously went to this prep school due to the influence and on the dime of his millionaire family, not due his notoriety as a boy socialist. The Art of Manliness article tells us this school was the University Academy of Alameda [p. 88], which was extremely expensive and admitted only 44 boys that year. It was a feeder for Berkeley and Stanford exclusively, and afterwards London went to Berkeley. Berkeley is and was both expensive and exclusive, so it is the height of absurdity for Wikipedia to tell us this “hobo and sailor” boy qualified for admittance, or could afford tuition. Plus, remember that Berkeley has had ties to the Hearsts since the beginning. It now has a Hearst Gym, a Hearst Pool, a Hearst Mining Building, a Hearst Greek Theater, a Hearst Museum, and a Hearst Commons. This is because the Hearsts adopted Berkeley in the 1890's, wishing to compete with the wealthy Stanford family. I suspect they adopted Jack London about the same time.
This bio of London is quickly becoming the most ridiculous thing I have read in years, and I really can't believe they publish it in so many conflicting forms. We see this again immediately with his alleged time in the Klondike. His landlords in Dawson were Marshall and Louis Bond, educated at Yale and Stanford. They were the sons of Judge Hiram Bond, who went to Harvard Law. Strange guys to find connected to London in the Klondike, right? So let's take a quick peek at the bio of this Hiram Bond. He was hired before graduation by the Vanderbilts and became their floor broker on the NY Gold Exchange. On Bond's Wikipedia page it admits,
Vanderbilt employed a private intelligence network on the front line reporting early news. Hiram Bond's position led to his prominent contacts on Wall Street, in the military, and in politics. He is described by Professor Richard Lowe as having fnancial dealings during the Civil War with Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. Among the other investment houses acting in collaboration with Commodore Vanderbilt and Tobin, and that Hiram Bond was acquainted with, was that of the two Jeromes Addison Jerome and Leonard Jerome who was the grandfather of Winston Churchill.
Hmmm. A private intelligence network. Hiram Bond was then appointed to a federal judgeship in 1866 by the always corrupt Andrew Johnson. He was just 28. Curiously, I could find no indication Bond had returned to Harvard to finish his degree or pass the bar. In 1872 Bond was in Denver, nobnobbing with. . . wait for it. . . Grand Duke Alexis of Russia. Guess who else was there? George Custer, the subject of my previous paper. The tangled webs they weave. Bond bought a large ranch outside Denver the same year and immediately organized a goldmine with the mayor of Denver. He works fast, doesn't he? Bond was already Master of Bankruptcy for the state of Virginia, and now he was processing ingots for the Denver Mint. In 1881, Bond joined the Havemeyer family as a founding officer of the misnamed New York Grape Sugar Co. It was misnamed since it dealt in corn sugar out of Iowa. In 1887 he became General Manager of a large Alabama Coal Mine. In 1889 he became CEO of the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Co. So he was involved in everything. His connection to California was the California Fruit Association, which he founded. He owned fruit packing businesses in Santa Clara. This is probably where he met Hearst, who was nearby in similar businesses. So rather than being a hobo or a boy socialist, London looks very much like a protégé of both the Hearsts and the Bonds.
Jack London wasn't just a tenant in the Bond house in Dawson, he knew the Bonds personally. He visited them at their huge ranch in Santa Clara, where they owned a fleet of polo ponies. What was this poor hobo lad doing there? Cabana boy?
This is where we get two stories for why he didn't have any front teeth. Wiki tells us it was due to scurvy acquired in Alaska. Other sources tell it was from never brushing his teeth. I doubt both stories, since it is rare to lose front teeth from poor care in your early twenties. It takes longer than that. Plus, from studying his photos, he looks vain. Vain rich guys normally take better care of themselves, especially obvious things like their teeth. For the same reason, it is very doubtful he had scurvy. He was living in the house of billionaires, so why would he be so malnourished? They were fruit packers back in Santa Clara, so if anyone in the Klondike would have access to fruit it would be Jack London. It does appear he had trouble with his teeth, since he is never smiling in any photos, but I suspect a congenital problem. Either that or he got them knocked out by hitting on some huge Swede who didn't happen to be gay.
The Art of Manliness website calls London the uber-man, but we soon get easy evidence London was gay. In about 1900 London became “best friends” with poet George Sterling. London was living on a villa on Lake Merritt, but he soon moved to Piedmont to be near Sterling. London called Sterling “Greek” as a pet name, and Wikipedia tells us it was due to Sterling's aquiline nose. But wait, that doesn't make sense, does it? The aquiline nose wasn't a Greek characteristic, it was a Roman. Obviously, “Greek” applies to the Classic Greek preference for boys and pretty men. Still think I am making it up? Here they are together:
Sort of reminds you of Cary Grant and Randolph Scott, doesn't it?
Here is what Sterling looked like when he and London met.
He does have an interesting nose, and I say that as a portrait painter. But I re-published this photo for a different reason. Notice the signature (not on the card, on the photo itself). See how curly it is? Looks like a girl's handwriting, doesn't it? This would suggest to any psychologist, handwriting expert, or other student of humanity that London wasn't hanging out with him for his manliness. Or at least not “manliness” in the sense we have been sold.
I will be told that many men had fancy handwriting at the time, and not all of them were gay; but it is not the just the presence of flourishes I am looking at here. My handwriting is fancy with flourishes, but not in this way. Handwriting analysis looks at many things together. It is the kind of flourishes, among other things like the size of the writing, the size of the capitals, the slant, the connectedness of the letters, and so on. Notice how small and curly his capital M is, for example. His capital F is also small and has multiple tight loops. His g's and y's are also a clue, since although many people loop the tails, Sterling loops in a way that is seen far more often in females, with the tail curving forward before it loops. This is what I mean by curly. Also notice how although he is writing in cursive, most of his letters fail to connect. He has done everything here but put little hearts over his i's.
Of course that is still not proof of anything. I simply point it out as an indication. Taken with other evidence, it indicates a strong feminine bent and may point to homosexuality. But of course handwriting isn't 100% predictive of sexuality or anything else, and I would be the first to admit that. It in only one small piece of the puzzle here.
You will tell me London was married and had kids. Yes. So have many other gays, especially ones that felt they needed to convince the world they were not gay. Biographer Russ Kingman admits,
they were comfortable together... Jack had made it clear to Bessie that he did not love her, but that he liked her enough to make a successful marriage. [p. 98]
Why else would a—by all accounts—great looking charmer with money like London marry a woman he didn't love? If what we are told was true, he should have had his pick of beauties he did love. It wasn't for her money, since London already had his own and would have much more. Apologists say he did it for “Darwinism and eugenics”, but that isn't much of an apology, is it? That would just take us into the whole turn-of-the-century eugenics thing, which would sully London far more than being gay. Do you really want me to go there? I won't, since I don't have time, but it is a mine to be tapped. London was indeed a eugenicist of the nastiest sort.
Biographer Clarice Stasz admits that his wife Bessie didn't like to sleep with London, but spins it as a fear London was sleeping with prostitutes [p . 80]. But once again that isn't the logical spin. The logical spin is that she was afraid he was sleeping with male prostitutes, or at least with Sterling and other buddies.
For more indication of that, in 1904 London and his pal Sterling went to the nearby Bohemian Grove for “Summer High Jinks”. If you have followed Alex Jones, you know all about the Bohemian Grove and what a huge red flag this is, in both directions. If you don't know what it is, Google on it and come back. You will find it is a bunch of all-male billionaires and political fatcats running around naked in the forest and burning effigies in front of a giant owl. No, really. And with the discovery London and Sterling were there, we now have more evidence they weren't just running around naked. Their hijinx weren't all on the run.
We'll come back to this, since London gives us a lot more ammunition, but I agree it isn't that important or interesting. He was gay, so what? Yes, but in this case it is just more proof the whole story of London's life was a lie. And not even a convincing one.
By 1904 London was working as a war correspondent for the San Francisco Examiner. Hearst's flagship newspaper, remember? London was still only 28. That was just a year after publishing The Call of the Wild, which should have propelled him to fame and fortune. In fact, we are told it did. So why is he taking the newspaper assignment, for which he has to travel to Japan again?
For starters, notice this is the second time Japan has come up in the bio. He supposedly sailed to Japan in 1893 when he was 17, although there was no reason for a fur seal hunting boat to go to Japan. The seals were up north and there was no reason to sail all the way across the Pacific Ocean. The second clue is that London was arrested three times by the Japanese on this second trip in 1904. The Japanese would have no reason to arrest a real reporter for the Examiner, so we must assume they considered London to be a spy. They were right. Just as we saw with John Reed and his arrest by the Russians a few years later, US Intelligence was using the sons of rich families to spy, sometimes under the cover of newspaper reporting, sometimes under the cover of Socialism.
One thing that surprised me in London's bio was the fact that John Muir was a member of the Bohemian Grove. I knew the environmental movement had been hijacked, but had it been hijacked that far back? Not sure, but it demands more research. I suspect Muir, being too old for “hijinks”, was just used as cover, giving the group some respectability. But who knows. Even after all this time I resist losing my heroes.
After this, London's bio sorts of unwinds completely and we get no good information about anything. We are told he remarried and that his second wife was wild about sex, but of course we can have no proof of that. They didn't have any children. The whole sexy wife thing looks overplayed anyway. If you are really a heterosexual who likes his wife, you don't need to convince the world of it. Real men don't brag in public or in writing about how much sex their wives like to have. You only need to do such a thing if you are a closet homosexual and the world is catching on to your homosexuality. If you are in the public eye and need the world to believe you are straight for whatever reason, you date or marry some hot girl or slutty dresser and get it in the papers. It happens all the time to this day. See George Clooney or hundreds of others.
In his last decade, London spent huge amounts of money on a ranch and on traveling, far more money than can be accounted for by his writings. Most of his novels didn't sell well, and you don't become a millionaire selling short stories to magazines. So what was he really doing with his time and for his money? I have given you a suggestion, but finding proof of it is unlikely. The best we can probably hope for is much circumstantial evidence. I suspect he continued to work as a spy. He may have also gotten a huge inheritance from Grandpa.
He allegedly died at age 40 in 1916, either from alcoholism or a morphine overdose or suicide. Curiously, he died on the same day as President Kennedy, November 22. He was cremated and his funeral was attended by only about 20 people. I was already thinking of a fake death, for reasons that won't surprise anyone, before I saw that. Like John Reed, Jack London's life began to unwind pretty early as more and more people began to see through him. He was facing a raft of significant plagiarism charges in his thirties, and the press had even turned against him. It is now admitted that he bought plots and novels from a young Sinclair Lewis, which goes a long way to proving my thesis here. [In that link, you will something else in my favor: Gore Vidal admits that when Sinclair Lewis sold these things to London, he found London “far more interested in playing bridge than in being a sea wolf”.
Lewis saw right through London, in other words, and was young enough not to hide it.]
London's biographers all admit that in the years after his death, he was usually dismissed as a drunken womanizer who committed suicide. It took decades of serious whitewashing to get him back to where he is today: the false lion of the Art of Manliness. But even these early harsh dismissals fell short of the mark by a long draw: it now looks (to me, at least) like London was a manizer spook who faked his death to avoid a total outing.
Although he had protectors in the Hearst papers, the Hearsts didn't own the entire media. They couldn't protect him from a reputation that was unwinding. Only a faked death could keep the lawsuits from coming and creating an ever-growing mountain of negative press. But it wasn't just plagiarism lawsuits and lurid accounts by gay lovers* that London wanted to avoid. On top of all that, he had just spent two million dollars on a ranch house which immediately burned down. That was the same year as his death. So I would be curious to know what kind of life insurance policy his wife had on him. I suspect a very large one.
[London's Death Certificate is odd as well, seeing that his real name isn't on it. Where it says “full name” we find Jack London. But his given name at birth was John Griffith Chaney, so the death certificate is wrong in at least three ways on one line—the most important line. Some sources say John London adopted Jack, but others are careful to say that it was “London's name that Jack adopted”. See the difference there? In fact, biographer Clarice Stasz admits that Jack was never adopted by London. But even if he had been, his full name would have been John Griffith London, not Jack London.]
Even the press will give a reprieve to the dead, at least for a while, and in that gap Intelligence could begin its mop up, eventually resurrecting their sullied agent. But as you can see, it hasn't been easy: London's story is the most desperate I believe I have ever seen, as well as the most daring. It is just one more indication Intelligence believes the US public will believe anything, and one more indication they have been right. It has continued to this day, as we saw in 2010 with that article at Slate I linked in the first paragraph. There they try to sell us the notion that Jack London was an “angry, edgy radical” and the “most-read revolutionary Socialist in American history”. What? How did they get there? The only way they can get there is by applying “most-read” to The Call of the Wild and White Fang, while applying “revolutionary Socialist” to his pretend Socialist writings no one read. This article is a complete waste of ink until the author accidentally(?) admits on page 2 that Sea Wolf is
a novel about a shipwreck survivor who is rescued by a ship captain only to be enslaved and tortured in increasingly deranged and homoerotic ways by him. [bolding mine]
I doubt Johann Hari intended to support my thesis of homosexuality here, so I say “accidentally”. But maybe not, for Hari immediately start his next paragraph with this:
If you read his work today, you can see literary semen spraying across the American century as he makes possible some of the most important writers in the United States and beyond.
Literary semen? Yuk! That seems to me—how shall I say—unnecessarily vivid way of putting it, a sort of Too Much Information, so maybe Hari really is giving us a clue. But regardless of that, when Hari then links London to Hemingway, the Beats, Brando and James Dean, we must assume he doesn't intend to do so in the way I do in my papers of the past two years. Hari wants you to think London was radical like they were, but I have shown they were all fake radicals probably funded by the CIA. So the link exists, but it isn't the one he is trying to sell you.
Hari also links London to Orwell, but even Wikipedia admits Orwell called London a fascist. London was a fascist, in ways Orwell doesn't even begin to address, but this leaves us to analyze the true connection between Orwell and London. Could Orwell have really believed in the reality of Marxism, at any level? Given his connections, is it possible he didn't know what was going on? We will have to look at that in a future paper.
As much as I resist, Hari continues to push us back to the sexuality question. He says,
Look at the pictures of his handsome bulk insolently confronting you from a leather jacket, and you see Marlon Brando and James Dean decades before their time.
Actually, I don't remember any pictures of London in a leather jacket. Perhaps they were drowned out by all the pictures of him in his fanny underwear:
Those two pictures alone sort of deflate the entire 20th century, don't they? They should use that second photo on the cover of Martin Eden. It would take you into the novel in the proper frame of mind.
But although Johann Hari allows us this amusing diversion, he quickly reverts to the ink-wastage. He follows up with this:
The richer London became, the more radical his politics were. He was soon praising the assassination of Russia's political leaders and saying socialism would inevitably come to America.
He is talking about the murder of the Romanovs, but of course the fake Socialists weren't the only ones praising the killing of Kings and Czars. The Industrialists were also licking their lips, since their richest competitors were taking a dive. This meant London's billionaire buddies like the Hearsts and the Bonds were winning the war against the aristocracy for worldwide domination. Funny how Hari completely misses that connection.
Hari admits London was a peculiar Socialist, in that he hired battalions of servants to run his ranch; but he tries to spin that as somehow ironic, in that these servants would be waiting on trade unionists visiting the ranch. But it isn't ironic, it is just the continuation of a con, that con being that these trade unionists visiting London were plants like him—fake unionist moles hired by the Hearsts and others to infiltrate and destroy the movement.
Suddenly, a few paragraphs from the end, Hari turns 180 degrees and admits London was a racist of the first order. He also implies he was a fascist, though he doesn't use the word. Hari tells us London was like this because his mother was a crazed racist, hating to live near black people. But wait, doesn't that contradict what we were told in all the other bios about Jack being raised by a black lady? If Flora hated blacks, why would she allow one to wet-nurse her boy and basically take over his rearing? Hari actually asks this question, at least regarding Jack's opinion on blacks. He admits there is a huge contradiction there, but never considers the possibility the contradiction lies not in the mind of London, but in the fake biography. He never considers the obvious answer to his question: the real Jack London was a rich boy from a rich family who wasn't raised by a black lady, wasn't poor, didn't work at a pickle factory, didn't sail an oyster sloop, didn't study at Heinold's, didn't hunt fur seals, wasn't a Socialist, didn't like women, didn't write most of his books, and wasn't manly at all. He was a gay spook working for fascist old families, and so he mirrored their opinions of the world in every way. All the progressive stuff was just a fake veneer, created to sell him to mainstream America as the opposite of what he was. We have seen that you could say that about almost every famous person in US history, the published bio being an inversion of the actual bio.
Of course Hari can't go there: he is writing for the mainstream press, which—like George Washington hanging by his heels—cannot tell the truth. But at least he could be consistent. How could he admit London was a racist and a fascist and then sell him in the first paragraphs as a radical Socialist? How could he admit London's bio was a mass of silly contradictions, and then sum up by telling us London deserves better than he got? I have shown you just the opposite is true: London doesn't deserve the ridiculous whitewashing he has been privy to. He deserves a thorough exposé, way beyond what I have been able to achieve here. His entire oeuvre needs to be thoroughly deconstructed in the light of his true origins, opinions, and political contacts. London and all the other literary fronts and puppets of the Industrialists need to be hung out to dry and ultimately relegated to the dustbin of failed propaganda.
But of course for that to happen, the propaganda first has to start failing. So far it has been a smashing success. For 150 years or more, this pathetic and pitiable propaganda has been the central success story of our age. It has fooled almost everyone and continues to do so. It determines the economic and mental life of most people, to startling and saddening degrees. Although the central story is a tissue of lies on a closer look, nobody looks closely. The story can have the loosest of weaves, since it was discovered no one could focus tightly. The MATRIX would need to be seamless only if people could see seams, but few can. And so we find history a tattered garment, hardly fit for a scarecrow.
To continue that analogy, we see the vultures circling down, set to pick your bones ever cleaner. Will you continue to allow it?
As a sort of postscript, I feel I must address briefly the way Nietzsche is slandered over and over in London's bio and works, by London himself and all those who have commented on him. Whenever anyone admits—as Hari did—that there is a distinctive if not pervasive thread of anti-Socialism (or, more accurately, anti-Republicanism—Socialism by the current meaning is just a creation of Intelligence) running through the works of London, Nietzsche is brought up as the one London learned this from. Even Orwell makes that connection. Well, it is false like the rest. Nietzsche was never a fascist, proto-fascist, or precursor of fascists. Yes, he was a fierce defender of hierarchies and a despiser of false equalities, but that did not make him a fascist. Why? Because fascism is a form of government, and—like Thoreau—Nietzsche had very little interest in government, other than in keeping it from inconveniencing him personally. Nietzsche was not a bookend of John Locke or Karl Marx, since he almost never wrote about economics or politics. As anyone who has actually read Nietzsche closely knows, his books concern personal psychology, not principles of government. Although he is often quoted by Nazis, fascists, and other totalitarians, he would have no use for any modern governments, fascist, socialist, or otherwise. Nietzsche's overriding concern was protecting artists, thinkers, and other great souls from everyone else, including clueless majorities, fake intellectuals, priests of all kinds, and governors of any persuasion. If Nietzsche had lived into current times, he might have added spooks to the list.
Although those such as Ayn Rand have bastardized Nietzsche into an apology for the Industrialists, Nietzsche himself would have nothing but contempt for these people, including Rand. The Industrialists always sell themselves as nation builders, but they have turned out to be nation eaters instead. They are predators, great vampires sucking every last drop of wealth from the earth and its people. Nothing in Nietzsche's philosophy ever promoted or justified this rapine, whether it is performed by aristocrats or plutocrats or supermen of any other fake stripe. In the philosophy of Nietzsche, one cannot imagine a great man or woman ruling over the earth in order to gorge upon it, since greatness was not defined that way. Nietzsche's great man would have no interest in enslaving the earth, since that would just standardize and extend the slave morality he found so revolting. Supposing Nietzsche's great man had any disposition to rule or govern, he would naturally wish to govern a free and able people, for the freer and abler they were the less he would have to govern. He would wish to govern as little as possible, since he would not be using government as an excuse or front for wealth gathering. A great man is not interested in wealth gathering, since he has more important and interesting projects to attend to.
So setting up Nietzsche as the founder and patron saint of fascism is a non-sequitur. It could not be further from his intention. Nietzsche was the opposite of a company man, and the modern Industrialist is a company man par excellence. Just because you own the company doesn't mean you aren't a company man. In fact, it makes you the primary company man, by definition. We can say the same for any CIA directors when they start quoting Nietzsche or finding themselves Nietzschean. Nietzsche would respond that they are members of what is now the largest company in the world, so they are just fooling themselves in thinking they are any sort of ubermenschen. You will never find the true ubermensch in a gang or a mob, not even as the capo. Why? Because the ubermensch is allergic to all groups, which he knows from experience can only limit both his freedom and his productivity. This is why any such person who agrees to lead or govern will do so only as a great self-sacrifice. Compare that to our current leaders, who claim to be self-sacrificing, but who are really gorging themselves on the public trough while sacrificing everyone around them and the nation in general.
This means that, once again, the whole Nietzsche question has been sold to you as a false dichotomy. Two sides of the argument have been manufactured, with the truth on neither side. The truth is, Nietzsche despised the socialists and the industrialists about equally. And if he had dug a little deeper, he would have found that the socialists were the industrialists, just in a poor disguise.
*Think of what John Travolta has been through in the past decade and you will understand why London might have wished to fake his death.
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