Do You Know Of The Racism Of Progressive Hero Jack London?

Reason magazine, April 1997: Call of the Whites

The Yukon city of Whitehorse announced plans last year to rename one of its main streets Jack London Road. London was in the Yukon during its 1890s gold rush, leaving with only scurvy and his literary inspiration. Before Whitehorse could put up its new street signs, however, a local Indian tribe called the Kwanlin Dun objected. Some of London's personal letters, they charged, contained racist views. According to an account in The Washington Post, these "appeared to advocate white superiority." His defenders tried to save the day, arguing, in the Post's words, that London "was relatively progressive for his era." But an embarrassed Whitehorse decided to drop London.

Actually, both of these characterizations -- that London "appeared to advocate" racism, and that he was "relatively progressive" -- are not only true, they are real understatements.

Read the rest here.

The article cites many of London's writings, including The Unparalleled Invasion, a story about a Western invasion of China and exterminating Asians with germ warfare.  That one story on its own is no evidence of racism.  In my fiction, I write of all sorts of horribles that happen to the main characters, bigotry, torture, involuntary sexual servitude, etc. that I do not want happening to anybody in reality.  Hopefully that is obvious by my non-fiction, serious positions on these issues.  Jack London obviously wanted his non-fiction bigotry to flow through his fiction and Unparalleled Invasion was his bigoted, genocidal dream.  Perhaps it is this habit of so many fiction writers, to fictionalize their true desires, that causes people to assume none of us can just make things up in the quest for an interesting story.

The denial that the American Left grew from the same branch of Socialism that the German National Socialists grew from borders on criminal.  The antics of the American Left truly are criminal.

One reason that the American Left exists at all is an accident in good fortune.  The same sort of accident that benefited Mahatmas Gandhi in India benefits the Left in America: an enemy with a soft heart.  I am still searching for a laissez-faire, free market, "Right Wing" regime in the history of the world that brutally suppressed Socialists.

The closest that I have found is the Pinochet government of Chile.  The only problem there is, that regime began with a Socialistic command economic frame and left power after moving the economy toward the free market.  Even while they were operating as a Socialistic military dictatorship, they were not particularly brutal.  In comparison, the number of people Che Guevara murdered in Cuba is about the same number of opponents that Pinochet had merely jailed in Chile.  Pinochet's victims were freed, Guevara's are lost forever.

If anybody has a candidate for a laissez-faire, free market, "Right Wing" regime, please let me know for inclusion, with attribution, in How Many Borders Would You Like With That Socialism?