WWII: The Greatest Crime Of The Ages.

WWII:  The Greatest Crime Of The Ages

by

R.E. Prindle

German Must Perish! and The War Goal of World Plutocracy by Theodore Kaufman and Wolfgang Dieverge,  reprint of the two 1941 editions by Ostara Publications, no date.

The history of the Second World War of 1939-45 is not as the orthodox version describes.  That history has been molded and shaped to conform with the desires of some interested parties.  In other words, it has been falsified.  The skewed history is more than merely one of interpretation.  Whole swaths of incidents have been suppressed, obscured or forced into a false narrative.  While your attention has been directed to a certain narrative, the real story lies exposed like geological strata.

I offer concrete undeniable facts to bring your attention to what was really going on.  The demonstration will focus on a book published in 1941 by one Theodore Nathan Kaufman.  Kaufman was an operative of the American Jewish Committee, the AJC.  For those not familiar with the AJC it is the directing governmental body of Jews in the United States.  It is essentially an espionage unit spying on the American people dedicated to rooting out what they are pleased to call ‘anti-Semites.’  They were also behind the effort to lead the United States into the war with Germany.  Their whole goal was to destroy Germany physically and to commit the genocide of 80 million Germans.

I know you are shocked and in total belief that 80 million people could be murdered but you shouldn’t be.  After all, the Chinese autocrat Mao Ze Dong murdered thirty million or more of his fellow Chinese and the world said nothing.  Not that much of stretch from 30 to 80 million.

Consider the facts: In 1933 the AJC executive, lawyer Samuel Untermyer declared irrevocable hatred of the Germans and war on the Germans.  Then began a whole series of boycotts and sanctions against Germany from the United States, a nominally neutral country by law.  This was done by its newly elected Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR.  FDR as he is familiarly known was in the pocket of the Jewish governing body, the American Jewish Committee.

There were six key nations fighting this proposed war:  England, Russia, France, Germany, the United States and the Jewish Nation, the last spread out through Europe and the Americas.  The Jewish Nation was very carefully screened so that there would be minimal appearance of their maximum role.  They made themselves appear innocent victims while they stoked the fires of war.

We should be clear: there was no chance that Germany could win the war and this was against the combined might of the Soviet Union in the East and the United States to Germany’s West.  Zero chance and this was recognized by the warmakers at the time.

We now get to Theodore Kaufman.  Remember as he was writing his screed it was acknowledged that Germany could not win the war.  At the time Germany Must Perish, Kaufman’s book, was published England, France and the USSR were one block.  Germany Must Perish was published in March of 1941 before Germany had invaded the USSR and nine months before the US declared war on Germany.  So neither the US or USSR was at war with Germany of the time of publication.  Yet Kaufman was calling for the extermination of the Germany.  By whom then?

The agitation for US entry was conducted by England, Roosevelt and the American Jewish people.  England because it could not defend itself after being the first people to declare war on Germany in 1939.  England, because the country could not defend itself needed the US to fight the war for them.  England had neither the men nor the resources to even think of getting into the war on its own.

The Jewish Nation because the Jews wanted the whole German nation exterminated.  Kaufman explains:

Quote:

Today’s war is not a war against Hitler.  Nor is it a war against the Nazis.  It is a war of peoples against peoples….  This war is being waged by the German people.  It is they who are responsible.  It is they who must be made to pay for the war.

Unquote.

Remember that in 1933 the Jews declared war on Germany with no response from Germany.

So then, who is this Theodore Nathan Kaufman?

He was an AJC operative.  He is portrayed in the US as an insignificant shopkeeper from the Jewish colony of Newark, New Jersey.  A mere voice in the wilderness, perhaps a crazy Jewish prophet.  But, as a crazy Jewish prophet he publishes from the remote Newark Jewish colony a screed like Germany Must Perish calling for their total erasure from the Earth.  This book was not ignored, instead it was given maximum countrywide attention.  No such crank would have had access to the President of the United States but Kaufman did, no penniless shop keeper from Newark can launch a multi-million dollar campaign to publicize his book.  That just doesn’t happen.  He was a member of the AJC and the AJC was spending millions and millions on espionage, publishing books by the score while Jewish attorneys were filing lawsuits on every side.

Now, these deeds, these books, these acts have at the very least been disregarded or obscured, if it were possible to erase such a public campaign all evidence would have been scrubbed.  But, Kaufman and his book are inescapable evidence, not only fact, but concrete evidence of the activities of this Jewish Nation to draw the US and its resources into their, not the US’s, but their fight against the German people.  The war was between the Jewish Nation and the German Nation with the Jews as the aggressors.

The American People had no dog in this war but the Jewish People as Kaufman said, did.  What dog did Roosevelt have in the fight?  Why was he anxious to sacrifice the lives of tens of thousands of men in the prime of their lives?  Why was he so willing to strip America of its tremendous resources to badger a country that was no threat to the US?  Forget all that today Europe, tomorrow the world stuff.  Even if the Germans fancied it, had they conquered the whole of Europe including the Soviet Union, they would have been exhausted and unable to keep what they had.  That’s right, the Germans would never have been a threat to the US.

The Soviet Union unaided and without immense US supplies would have defeated Germany, it might have taken longer but as Stalin knew when he declared:  God is on the side of the big battalions.  Germany could not have won the war.  FDR certainly knew this.  Why was he subservient to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics? No contradiction there.  Because he was a socialist if not a Communist.  His old World War I master, Woodrow Wilson was a socialist.  FDR’s administration was a continuation of Wilson’s.  FDR even faked the League of Nation under the name of the United Nations through thus completing Wilson’s heritage.

Ah, I hear voices saying, you can’t genocide eighty million people.  The AJC and Kaufman thought you could.  It was simple.  You’ve heard of Eugenics haven’t you?  Of course you have.  Kaufman’s plan was simple.  You simply sterilize all Germans of child bearing age and children.  As Kaufman said, who was probably frightened by the word castration, sterilization doesn’t mean castration.  Sterilization for men is a simple operation, a little more complex for women.  I see no reason to examine the techniques of such a plan but if you have seen pictures of Germany bombed flat, Germans carving dwellings out the ruins,  ‘honorable allied soldiers’, American soldiers, turning German women into prostitutes with Hershey bars, you will realize how easy it would have been.  The plan only lacked will and it became within an ace of happening.  By Americans.

The Jews of course were ready.  The hitch came when Americans, less the Jews, were horrified at the notion.  The plan had the tentative backing of FDR and it was only his death on the eve of the end of the war that blocked the plan.

If we remember Kaufman’s book was published in 1941 before Germany had invaded the Soviet Union or the US had entered the war.  Kaufman’s was a pre-emptive plan.  Thus the representatives of the Jewish Nation had the system of genocide in place, Total War, before the Final Solution of the German Jewish problem was put into effect.

The Germans naturally were aware of Kaufman’s book shortly after publication, so it follows that the Final Solution was a variant of what Kaufman called the Total Solution of the Jewish Nation’s German problem.  Therefore, much of the Final Solution is mitigated by the Total Solution.

As to whether the whole Jewish People was responsible, Kaufman said that this was a war between peoples—the Jewish Nation versus the German Nation.  The Jews initiated its Total War, the desired end of which would be the total extermination, genocide, of the German People, that is a holocaust.  So, how can the German People be found guilty of attempting the genocide of the Jewish People except as an act of self-defense?  The slaughter was of course terrible, but so was the murderous war against Germany.  And that war was conducted with the full overwhelming power of the USSR and the USA against them.  Fleets of nightly bombers from the West and relentless artillery barrages from the East.  Germany had no chance of winning such a war; its doom was clear.

In March-April of 1941, then, the Germans learned of the Jewish menace.  They were horrified.  Copyright laws prevented the book from being published in Germany.  For whatever reason the law abiding Germans honored the copyright law.  The Germans were sticklers for the law and thus observed it refusing to print the book and alerting the German People of this threat from the Jewish People.  This side of story has never been told.

However, the Germans did print reviews of the book using extensive quotations which were ‘legal’ under copyright laws. A pamphlet was published by the German government titled The War Goal of World Plutocracy  by one Wolfgang Diewerge.

What Dieverge called the World Plutocracy meant the Jewish led coalition against Germany.  The title failed to indicate the urgency of the real issue, that of the declared war of the Jewish Nation against the German Nation.  Perhaps the Germans meant to implicate England, the US and Russia as well as the Jews which was a mistake.  Four nations were involved but only three countries.

There is more than one legal system with its laws and customs involved here.  On has the English and American variations of the Common Law, Soviet law, German law and Jewish law.  Today all countries are using a variant of Jewish law.  Under Jewish law the defendant is considered guilty and can only mitigate the charges.  Thus we have the situation in the US today of the Judeo-Liberal party that alleges that the accused is guilty, or he or she wouldn’t be accused would they?  Thus, the crime can only be resolved by accepting the guilt of being ‘wrong’ and accepting the judgment of the Party.  Bear in mind that in this so-called democracy the Jewish-Liberal party isn’t even the majority.  They are a minority that has appropriated the government regardless of who is president.  Thus, it is false to think we live in a democracy when we live in a Jewish flavored theocracy.

2.

Given that the Jews can manage the writing of history and the dissemination on knowledge and control discussion of the narrative it should come as no surprise that the German side of the story is suppressed.  The narrative is cast in the form of The Children Of Light vs. The Children Of Darkness.  All right then resides with the former and all fault with the latter.

As it is clear that the Jews first broached the notion of genocide when they were managing the overwhelming power of the US and USSR it follows that to avoid a German holocaust that the Germans were justified in a pre-emptive Jewish holocaust.  Both holocausts were to be managed in a scientific manner.  Thus, the Germans have no more cause for guilt than the Jews.

As might be supposed, since the plan for German genocide was trumpeted loudly throughout America, free copies were sent to influential people, Time-Magazine gave an approving review, newspapers nationwide disseminated the plan in an approving manner.  It should have been one of those things read with incredulity.

At the time the America First Committee was lobbying very actively, very actively, to prevent the US from entering another European war.  The American public was decidedly against any involvement in the war.  In March of ’41 a war with Japan seemed a remote possibility.  Roosevelt touted democracy and freedom yet he disregarded the vast majority and put US soldiers on the front lines both in the Pacific and the Atlantic.

And then we have a Jewish appeal for a German holocaust.  Without the US having yet no sinews of war, no will to war, what were the Jews thinking in making such a strange proclamation?  As Charles Lindbergh pointed out in his Des Moines speech, the Jews were finagling the US into a criminal war against Germany.  Forget any notion of a good war.

The Germans quickly obtained copies of the book or pamphlet that had been distributed to millions in the US with a copy sent free to every influential American.  The Germans were aghast.  Had the death of eighty million people ever been proclaimed before?  By a nation that refused to call itself that publicly?  Pretending to be Englishmen, Frenchmen, Russians, Americans, whatever.  The disguise was total and the danger was real.

The Jewish government presented Kaufman as an anonymous loner, something like Lee Harvey Oswald who may have fired at President Kennedy.  But was he? He was no fanatic rejected by World Jewry, no insane creature, but rather a leading and widely known Jewish figure in the United States.

The Germans published their answer to Kaufman in a pamphlet by Wolfgang Diewerge titled The War Goal of World Plutocracy.  He did a little research and came up with this:

Quote:

The Jewish president Kaufman is no anonymous loner, no fanatic rejected by World Jewry, no insane creature but rather a leader and widely-known Jewish figure in the United States.

Unquote:

Diewerge then says that Kaufman was a member of Roosevelt’s Brain Trust.  I’ve never read that before but then one can’t be sure that orthodox histories are ‘definitive.’  Diewerge goes on:

Quote:

He belongs to Roosevelt’s so-called “Brain Trust”, the staff of intellectuals and political advisors to the American President.  This circle provides the material for the hateful speeches against National Socialist Germany that President Roosevelt like to give…

The half-Jewish mayor (mother was Jewish) of New York, La Guardia, along with Roosevelt’s close confidante and friend, Bernard Baruch (“the unofficial president of the USA) also belongs to this group, which maintains closest ties to the leading men of the Soviet Union.

Unquote.

Baruch wasn’t so much a confidante and friend of FDR as a Grey Eminence giving direction to FDR.  As the war progressed and Kaufman’s proposal was tentatively accepted by Roosevelt, Kaufman’s plan was adapted by Secretary of the Treasury, the Jew Henry Morgenthau Jr. who did bill himself co-president with FDR.  Thus while Baruch was actually co-president with Woodrow Wilson during WWI, Morgenthau filled that role with Roosevelt.

Diewerge goes on:

Quote:

The book Germany Must Perish is the background music to the major policy deception that the leaders of the world plutocracy, President Roosevelt and his business partner in international warmongering, Winston Churchill, have launched to support their ally, Stalin.

Unquote.

That was an accurate description.  Stalin, by the way, was the brilliant mastermind pulling the strings of Churchill, Roosevelt and, actually, Hitler.  All three were duped by Stalin.

While Roosevelt preached Total War against the ‘aggressor nations’, unconditional surrender,  while the US was neutral after a fashion, Diewerge gives the German side of who the aggressors were:

Quote:

A digression is in order here.  Who declared war on 3 September 1939?  England and France used the local conflict over Dantzig and the Corridor, where justice was indisputedly on the side of Germany, to declare war on Germany and thus cause a world conflagration.

Unquote.

This was true.  Germany saw itself as rectifying the injuries it endured by the one-sided Treaty of Versailles.  It was also true as Diewerge was right when he next records:

Quote:

And the United States has been trying to “get into the business” for months with repeated provocations.  It prays daily for another “Lusitania” and regrets the case of the “Athenia” German attentiveness ruined their finely spun plans.

Unquote.

So, who were the aggressor nations?  First in order is the Jewish Nation with its proclaimed war of peoples.  Second was Stalin and the Third International, then Churchill and England and tied with Churchill was Roosevelt.  The Versailles Treaty that was designed by England and France in 1918 guaranteed another war in twenty years as was recognized at the time and as it happened.

Now, as to the Jewish desire to exterminate the Germans, consider how the war was fought:  there were actually two operations going on at the same time.  One was the war of land battles fought with armies and one was merely a series of bombing raids to destroy German cities, that is Germany, bomb it out of existence and bombing civilians to kill racial Germans.  In other words, aerial genocide.

During the war only the Anglo-American group had heavy bombers; the others had only tactical support bombers to support the ground troops.  The English developed the Landcaster with the capability of carrying twenty-thousand pound bombs along with incendiaries.  The Americans provided huge fleets of the smaller B-17s and then the bigger B-29s.  In a one of a kind situation that won’t be seen again the huge flotillas  of these behemoths dropping long strings of bombs, you’ve seen this in movies, with no other purpose than killing civilian Germans and destroying Germany.

The crowning achievement was Churchill’s decision to bomb the city of Dresden which at that time was packed with German people, women and children, displaced by the war.  Purely murderous.  There was no war industry there and not a single anti-aircraft gun.  Flotillas of bombers flying over low unloading everything from ten ton blockbusters to scads of incendiaries creating a fire storm.  This was purely a raid against unarmed civilians.  A holocaust pure and simple.  And if one horror wasn’t enough, they came back the next day to bomb the ruins.

As will be remembered, Kaufman and the AJC said that this was a war against a people- the Jews vs. the Germans.  Certainly the terrific bombing campaigns leveling German cities and killing millions was no less a crime than the Germans killing their avowed Jewish enemies in extermination camps like Auschwitz.  One might say tit for tat.  Also remember that the English was the aggressor, declaring war first.  Also, the bombing began long before the death camps were put into operation so one cannot say that the camps were not retaliatory.

Dresden was not like the end of horrors for the Germans but merely the beginning.  While the English and Americas were bombing the hell out of the civilians, the Eastern front against the Germans had been collapsing in an orderly fashion but tens of thousands of German troops had been captured and were never seen alive again.  They died in the Gulags where the camp commandants were with one exception were Jewish.

Once again, the fate of the German immigrants in Russia had little or nothing to do with the war.  Prior to the unification of the Germans under Bismarck, the Russian Czars had invited German colonists to settle in the Ukraine and the Volga Delta.  Always orderly and industrious the Germans prospered farming the Ukraine making that underpopulated desert bloom.  The contrast between the Jewish, the Russian and the German farmers was sharp and distinct.  Germans quickly moved to prominence in the government.

Then, when Germany consolidated all the petty principalities that the West found amusing,  into a unified State, and began functioning on modern Western methods they became a threat being more capable than the English and French, while the Czars began to view their German citizens although thoroughly Russified as a potential Fifth Column and persecuted them.  Thus German hatred began to grow.  Disabilities were placed on the Ukrainian and Volga Germans.  They were discriminated against.  When the Soviets replaced the Russians and Stalin replaced Lenin, the former minister of minorities collected the Volga Germans en masse and sent them to Siberia for extermination.  Thus, combined against the Germans in WWII were the Soviets in the East and Americans in the West and the Jewish Nation distributed throughout in influential, directing positions.  If you think the Germans could not see what was going on you should question your analytical abilities.  Actually, Germany was fighting for survival.

As the Soviet armies breached the German border, the ever clever Stalin who had thought this moment out thoroughly drove the civilian German population before him.  This horrific rout is described as a population transfer by orthodox historians.  One must question their analytical abilities.  The East Germans then murdered and raped by the advance troops were driven pell mell westward in the depths of winter.

The entire East German population of twelve to fifteen million people were displaced in a moment, driven West.  Such intense and concentrated suffering had never been seen in the world and this includes the child’s play of Auschwitz.

The Soviet armies consisted of primitives who had never seen a wrist watch before and were entranced.  They had never tasted real wine.  They had never had their way with beautiful White women.  Now they tortured and raped to their hearts’ content.  Women were gang raped like the flotillas that bombed Dresden.  You have to be heartless not to understand and sympathize.  Auschwitz?  Phooey!

In the dead of winter, ill clad and ill fed, at risk every moment these millions upon millions of wretched people fled just in advance of the total destruction of their destination.  They arrived in Berlin just in time for the most fearful artillery bombardment ever. The Soviets made up for their lack of bombers with terrific and devastating artillery bombardments.  Now remember, the Soviets had only been enabled with these abilities because Roosevelt stripped America of its resources and was supplying Russia with the sinews of war.  Thus the Americans. In effect, were giving it to the Germans both East and West, materially.

Berlin was completely destroyed blown into bits of rubble.  That anyone survived this terrible onslaught both from the air and from the land is a miracle

Now, I was brought up to believe that American soldiers where saints who though brave were never brutal.  And I believed what I had been told.  I didn’t question the propaganda.  And then, my elders made a mistake- they taught me how to read.  And I resent how terribly I was misled.

The Americans were hardly less brutal than the Soviets under the direction of Dwight David Eisenhower.

Kaufman said that the war had nothing to do with Hitler but that it was a war between the Jewish and German peoples.  As such the shooting war ended in 1945; the war of the Jewish people on the German people didn’t.

The Americans and Soviets drove the Germans down but now the Jewish people wanted to finish the job, enforce their plan.  As the Anglo-American and Soviet troops entered Germany for the Jews then, don’t forget Dresden, the horrible truth of the extermination camps was revealed.  The Jews were appalled and now in power over the Germans could get on with exterminating them.  But there was a hitch, Roosevelt died.

In the US the Kaufman Plan had morphed into the Morgenthau Plan of the Secretary of State, Henry Morgenthau Jr.  Roosevelt would have carried out the plan except that he passed in April of ’45 a month before the shooting war ended.  His replacement, Vice President Harry S. Truman was completely ignorant of the plans of the FDR cabal.  Truman entered office with no knowledge of the State of the Union.  Even though FDR was sitting with his feet dangling in the grave he didn’t think it expedient to inform his obvious successor of the state of affairs.  Did he think that his cabal was so evil that Truman would be repulsed?  Let me put it this way, Truman was repulsed when he learned what was going on.  Among other things on his mind was his discovery of the Manhattan Project and its Atom Bomb.  Blindsided by Rooseveltian politics.

However Truman was not so sympathetic to Jewish machinations as FDR had been.  Thus their power was broken.  As members of what might be called FDR’s shadow government they faded away.  Samuel Rosenman, perhaps the closest to FDR no longer had any place in DC.  Sidney Hillman was gone.  Henry Morgenthau himself tendered his resignation unable to work with Truman.  Truman gladly accepted it.  The tyranny of FDR fairly quickly evaporated.  A weight was lifted from the American people.  Don’t think there wasn’t rejoicing either.

While Truman was being quickly briefed on the actual state of affairs, the mopping up operations in German continued more or less according to the Kaufman/Morgenthau Plan.  The Supreme Commander in Europe was Dwight D. Eisenhower.  His advisor and confidant was Bernard Baruch, a man who wanted to be the greatest Jew of all time, and who was, indeed, a very large ranking member of the Jewish World Government. 

As mentioned, he had actually been co-president with Woodrow Wilson during what could now be called WWI.  He had meddled with Republican politics during the interim of 1921-33 and came into power again with the Roosevelt Administration in 1933.  Diewerge described him as co-president with FDR which is not exactly true but may have seemed so to outside observers.  The relationship was more adversarial, but face to face Baruch was able to intimidate FDR.

 Dwight Eisenhower had been disciple of Baruch’s for twenty-five years.  Eisenhower considered him the wisest man alive.  There was a tremendous furor at the time as to how to treat the Germans.  The Jewish faction wanted to dismember the German State completely parceling out the German territories to the surrounding countries.  The dividing of Germany into Allied administrative units perpetually occupied was decided upon.  The German people were to be kept impoverished and starved to death with no relief.

Eisenhower had under his control several German armies.  Although the shooting war was over and there was absolutely no chance of Germany conducting any resistance these men were not released nor, were they treated humanely according the Geneva conventions.  Eisenhower mean to destroy as many as he could.  Remember that Bernard Baruch had direct connections to him and wanted to further the murder of the Germans.  Hence Eisenhower unilaterally declassified them as soldiers and reclassified them as enemy combatants who were not covered by the Geneva Conventions.  The men were crowded together in open fields with no covering and no amenities, ill clothed and ill fed.  Civilians were forbidden on pain of death for comforting them in anyway.  Women trying to pass food through the barbed wire were shot down without compunction.

Nor did this criminal conduct end quickly but was continued until 1950 when the Americans, England and France realized that they needed a buffer state between themselves and the Soviet Union.  And so, the war in the West came to its grudging end.  The Soviets were much more brutal, so much so that there was a continuing drain from the East German Sector of the USSR as Germans fled to the West necessitating the building of the Berlin wall.

As may easily be seen the orthodox version, the academic version, of the period is so distorted as to be a fantasy of the reality.  The root of the war as per Kaufman’s plan was the Jewish Nation’s hatred of the German Nation.  That hatred went back many centuries and was fully developed.  Having essentially captured the US, England and USSR governments the Jewish Nation was able to direct their energies toward a Total Solution of their German Problem which was the total genocide of the German people.  WWII was the greatest crime ever perpetrated.

All this has been obscured and ignored and hidden if not nearly erased.  The world is so conditioned to view the period from the Jewish point of view that they find the truth incomprehensible.  To expose that truth is to expose one’s self to many hazards.  Many such people now have permanent homes in prisons.  Laws in nearly all countries have been passed to make even the objective discussion of the period a criminal offence, France and Germany being the worst offenders with England close behind.  They must protect their narrative at all costs.

And so, nearly a hundred years after the war goes on unabated.  Circumstances have changed but the situation hasn’t.

Why Socialism Always Fails

by

R.E. Prindle

 

Back before 1917 there were a bunch of Socialist punk conspirators called Bolsheviki who were led by a punk called Vladimir Lenin.  These punks mainly clubbed around Switzerland talking about Social Justice and other incomprehensible stuff  and how they would create the Workers’ Paradise if only they got the chance.

Well, during WWI the dumb Germans gave them their chance, put them in a few sealed cattle cars and shipped them from Switzerland to the Finland Station.  When they got to St. Petersburg, later called Leningrad, then again St. Petersburg, they really didn’t know what to do except hang around but for one punk with the unlikely name of Trotsky.  Trotsky got the ball rolling and the Bolsheviki took over.  They were now in control of the biggest, richest country in the world.  But, they were still at a loss of what to do except throw people in jail and kill them.  In their zeal for Social Justice, as witnessed by all those prisoners, they forgot one thing- it takes a lot of money to make things work.

None of them had ever had any money so they probably didn’t know what to do to get it unless they stole it, their usual method.  So, they had this great big country but they didn’t have a clue.  Well, there’s only two ways to get money and that is to borrow, work for it, or steal it.  Is that three ways?  Really?  Well, three then.  They didn’t know how to do the middle part so that left borrowing and stealing.  That’s two.  Isn’t that what I said?

There weren’t any socialists with money around so the only people with money were the capitalists.  Some called that planning; others called it theft.   They were a happy prosperous lot, already driving around in Cadillac cars, Fords for the hoi polloi otherwise known as workers, and flying airplanes. 

The Bolsheviki tapped the first source.  The Kuhn Loebs and the Rothschilds of the world were only too anxious to funnel millions their way.  However, let us not overlook the fact that it takes more than millions to run the biggest country in the world.

The Bosheviki had already destroyed the Russian economy because the word economics smells of Capitalism. So they looked around and discovered the accumulated wealth of things in Russia.  For a few hundred years  the Russians had been making money and buying things so they had lots of stuff like famous pictures, diamonds and jewelry and fur coats, the churches were loaded with artefacts so to these Bolsheviki who didn’t understand making money to buy this stuff, this stuff looked valuable, the real thing.  Same as money, right?  Guess what they did.  They stole it.  The greatest heist of all time.  This was sensational.  They looted the people who had the stuff and drove them out of the country.  There went the productive people of Russian society.

Now they had warehouses of this stuff.  Warehouses and warehouses, thousands of used fur coats and this other used stuff.  Second hand.  But, you can’t run a country because you possess heaps of decorative crap.   They had to sell those stolen goods to get at the cash.  Who had the cash to buy this junk?  You guessed it!  People in the so-called Capitalist countries.  So these criminals had to set up fences to turn this stuff into cash.  They recruited, amongst others, some American (loosely defined) shlub to help move this crap by the name of Armand Hammer.  Imagine the Bolsheviki found a guy named Arm and Hammer.  What a coincidence.

So Armand Hammer packed a bunch of stolen pictures, sounds like the Nazis doesn’t it, under his arm and beat the bushes of the US finding people to buy this stuff, really nice pictures too.  He didn’t have much trouble.  The Mellons, the Edward G. Robinsons lined up to get these bargains.  So it was all over the world.  The Smithsonian bought some, other museums bought this stolen artwork and they knew where it came from too.  When it came to diamonds even the British monarchs bought some of the Russian crown jewels, those of the Czars.  What a wonderful time to have a few spare dollars hey?

But you know how it is with fenced goods.  They go for a fraction of their value.  Even with loans the proceeds weren’t enough to run the country.  The Bolsheviki got desperate.  They formed the NEP.  New Economic Policy.  Oh, oh, that word that smacks of Capitalism.  But now, guess what?  Work worked.  The country began to prosper.  But then the Bolsheviki realized that they were dabbling in Capitalism so they knocked that crap off right away and the country sank back into absolute poverty.

So that’s why Socialism will never work.  Because Socialists don’t understand the function of money.  They think money just exists like water.  If you have a barrel of water it gets used up and no more water.  That’s ow money worked, they thought.  There’s only so much and greedy Capitalists have discovered ways to capture all the money leaving none for the poor.  They never think of refilling the barrel.  And that friends is why Socialism always fails.  Socialists aren’t very bright.

Pt. II Time Traveling With R.E. Prindle

Pt. II:  Time Traveling With R.E. Prindle

G.W.M Reynolds On Vice And Virtue

by

R.E. Prindle

G.W.M. Reynolds 

This essay will concentrate on the novels, Robert Macaire or, The French Bandit In England, The Mysteries Of London, Faust, and Wagner, The Wehr Wolf.  Their respective dates were 1840, 1844-48, 1845-46 and 1846-47.  As can be seen the latter two novels are encompassed by the dates of The Mysteries Of London and they must be related to the greater novel- two side excursions, so to speak.

We know that Reynolds went out on his own in a foreign country at the age of sixteen, going immediately to take up residence in France with a fair sized sum of money in his pocket inherited from his father as he hints in his novel Faust; then in 1833 at the age of nineteen he inherited a bit more through his mother.  He was a natural scholar so that he studied extensively in many fields including literature and history.  For such a young man, twenty-five and twenty-six in 1839-40 he writes with an astonishing, indeed, unbelievable maturity and knowledge both experientially and from study.  Apart from being fictionalized his history seems to be accurate.

He is especially interested in vice and virtue in humanity.  The configurations of his interest were formed by his reading of the Marquis de Sade; he read and internalized de Sade’s novels Justine, Juliette and Philosophy of the Boudoir.  While de Sade, from whom the term Sadism is derived, is probably known by name only to most.  I append here a short biography so that the reader knows how I understand him.  De Sade was born in 1740 and died in 1814, the year Reynolds was born so we may assume that de Sade was still something of a sensation when Reynolds hit Paris in 1830.

Marquis de Sade

De Sade’s fame as the source of the term Sadism was well earned although somewhat stale in the 21^st century as films and novels have far surpassed his exploits.  There is no longer anything to astonish in his novels.  His problems began when his parents denied him marriage to the woman of his choice thus causing an extreme reaction.  His reaction was so extreme and notorious, causing his parents such grief, that they had him imprisoned where he began writing his novels.  Released by the French Revolution, which was crazier than himself, he functioned well.  Napoleon, not so tolerant, had him committed to the famous insane asylum of Charenton.  This aided immeasurably in making him a cult figure which he remains to this day.

He committed his grief to two most read novels, Justine and Juliette.  He posited as a universal reality that a life of virtue led to unhappiness, pain and failure as characterized by Justine; and a life of libertinage and self-indulgence characterized by Juliette led to happiness and self-fulfillment.

When Reynolds read de Sade’s novels between 1830 and 1837 isn’t known.  My guess is that he read them sooner than later and the antitheses between virtue and vice worked in him as he began writing.

An echo of Justine and Juliette can be found in the Mysteries of London.  Reynolds transposes the sexes and has two male brothers Eugene and Richard Markham as protagonists.  They are associated with two trees. (The symbolism of the two trees isn’t yet clear to me.)  A financial disaster hits the Markham family leaving it and them destitute.  Eugene, following the path of Juliette’s example opts for a life of crime to repair his fortunes while Richard decides to pursue virtue.  They are to meet by the trees twenty years on to compare results.

This gives Reynolds the means to display his knowledge of vice and virtue.  He certainly seems to know the ways of criminality.  This investigation is continued in the first two novels written in conjunction with Mysteries titled Faust and Wagner the Wehrwolf.  The first of his crime novels was Alfred de Rosann, quite astonishing as a novice novel, I will deal with it later, followed by Grace Darling, the Heroine of the Ferne Islands and the Robert Macaire or the French Bandit In England.  After a hiatus of two years from 1842 to 1844 when he wrote nothing Mysteries began.   Faust and Wagner were written in succession. 

Eugene Sue - Mysteres de Paris and Wandering Jew
 

The third of his crime novels was Robert Macaire or the French Bandit In England.

One imagines that Reynolds first heard of the famous French bandit at the theater either in 1833 or ’35 or perhaps he saw both.  Macaire was a famous French highwayman, but as Reynolds has Macaire tell his sidekick Bertrand, times were changing and the place of the highwayman was becoming as obsolete as buggy whips would in the twentieth century.  Thus while Macaire was involved in stagecoach situations his milieu was shifting to swindling and financial crimes.  The future was clear.  Reynolds has his ear to the ground.

Published in 1840 Macaire was his third effort following Pickwick Abroad.  By this novel he has pretty well learned his craft although his powers will grow exponentially by Mysteries.  Macaire is tightly plotted and well written with every evidence of Reynold’s powerful mind.  It shows little evidence of de Sade, clear evidence, even borrowing, from Frederic Soulie.  Soulie was a French writer of ghastly crime/horror fiction who was, at least, an early model for Reynolds.

As in Mysteries of the Court of London an inspiring incident carried throughout the story ends it.  The novel involves an enmity between the practitioner of virtue, Charles Stanmore, and the follower of vice, Robert Macaire.  Close to the plots of de Sade’s Justine and Juliette.

The novel opens with Macaire in France holding up a stage containing Stanmore and killing two people while sadistically tying Stanmore to one of the large wheels.  If the horse hadn’t remained still as Stanmore remarks he would surely have been killed by the revolving wheel. A sadistic crime in itself.

Papers taken from Stanmore tell of a banker in England who looks ripe for the plucking so Macaire and Bertrand head for England.  It is not clear how these two desperadoes pass themselves off as businessmen, especially the clownish Bertrand but they do and Pocklington, the English businessmen invites them in, indeed, ask them to take up residence while in London.  He has a beauteous sixteen year old niece, Maria, who falls head over heels for the forty some year old Macaire.  As she is to inherit a large fortune Macaire plays the swain.

It so happens that Stanmore also has his eyes on Maria so he develops an inveterate hatred of his rival not realizing that the French bandit and Macaire are the same.  Now, it also happens that Stanmore’s father had disappeared on a journey to Lyons in France where he was to establish a new business five years previously.  He had waylaid by Macaire, robbed and murdered in a town thirty some miles from Paris on the way to Lyons as will appear later in the story.  Macaire was acting as a member of an organized ring of criminals to which he still belongs being one of the leaders.

After mentioning that Macaire is posing as the financial agent named LeBeau who he learns is now on his way to London the two bandits determine to kill him before he arrives to prevent his ruining their plans.  Using old skills they waylay his stage on his way to London, brutally drag him from the stage and stab him to death.  These two are thoroughly evil men.  This is important because while Reynolds is contrasting virtue and vice, he also holds that virtue and vice are equally mixed in a person so that after a life of vice, Macaire will very improbably turn to a life of virtue.  But, Reynolds believes he can and it’s his story.

Stanmore becomes suspicious of Macaire and more especially Bertrand so he returns to France to investigate them.  His findings lead him to an inn in the town in which his father was murdered.  He is directed to the out of the way inn in which the murder occurred.  The innkeeper intends to kill Stanmore for his money, but the latter overhears the plot being discussed and in the ensuing struggle kills the innkeeper.  Questioning the innkeeper’s wife about his father she points out the place in the inn where Stanhope’s father’s body was immured.  Concentrating on opening the wall Stanhope fails to notice that the wife has set the building on fire and fled. 

The wife runs for some woods where Stanmore overtakes her.  Then borrowing an incident from Frederic Soulie (pronounced Souliay) he ties the woman to a tree while he goes back to main road and inn and forgets her in the rush of events.  By the time he gets back to her she is dead, half eaten by varmints.

Macaire has to return to France to account for Lebeau’s absence.  Macaire gets into financial schemes and is recognized by the police and arrested.  He would have been a goner except for his criminal network.  Having pulled off a couple successful escapades Macaire does the necessary repairing to the gang’s den to distribute their share of the booty.  This gets an immediate reward when his confederates help him escape from two different prisons.

This brings up the question of Reynolds’ own relationship to the law.  Reynolds provides such exact descriptions of various prisons, police quarters, court affairs and prison customs that one wonders how he obtained his knowledge and familiarity.  As a newspaperman he would have perhaps entered the various criminal retreats but that doesn’t seem a satisfactory explanation.  Dick Collins, an eminent researcher of Reynolds and the period of Penny Dreadfuls gives Reynolds a questionable character.

Collins seems to have ransacked official sources for his information but fails to reference them.  In addition to cheating at dice, that rather indicates that Reynolds was one of the shifty hangers on in Paris that he mentions in Pickwick Abroad.

Quote:

Collins says:  It is alleged- on poor evidence- that Reynolds stayed at the expensive Long’s Hotel in Bond Street and was arrested for trying to steal jewelry to pay the bill.

Unquote.

And there were a series of bankruptcies.  One in France in which he was arrested in Calais trying to flee.  Then in England in 1939 he spent six months in the Queens Bench Prison for unpaid debt.  After becoming a leader in the Chartist movement he displeased the leadership because of unnamed financial schemes.  So, let us say that Reynolds was probably flexible in his attitude toward strict probity.  One does get that feeling.

One wonders then, was Reynolds personally aware of these criminal hangouts; did he actually mingle with them?  His knowledge seems too precise for sheer invention.  Also he seems too complimentary of the gendarmes who he says have absolute integrity and are the only upright characters in his novels.  Was he trying to stay on their good side just in case?

In any event his descriptions of the prisons from which Macaire escapes are described in minute detail.  Having once been caught in the meshes of the French police Macaire seems doomed to remain there as the police are hot on his trail after his last escape.

Now, at the inn at which Macaire had murdered his father, a beautiful young orphan girl, Blanche de Longville, had been placed there by Macaire who for some reason had been made her guardian.  She had captured Stanmore’s heart, making him forget Maria, and resulting in a marriage.  They were living in a posh area in Paris.

Macaire, quite desperate to escape finds his way to Stanmore and Blache’s mansion to throw himself on her mercy after maltreating through her teen years, expecting  what that mercy might be wasn’t clear.  Stanmore returns home to find police combing the area and Macaire, his arch enemy, in his wife’s boudoir.  However Blanche manages to placate him explaining that if Macaire escapes the police and finds his way to Switzerland he is going to change his ways and end his days as the archetypal French bandit. 

So, this Macaire, who had robbed him, possibly condemned him to death by tying him to the carriage wheel, actually murdered and robbed his father, beat him out for the love of the delectable Maria and other crimes too numerous to mention as well as heading up organized crime in France, throws himself on the mercy of Stanmore.

Well, love conquers all, doesn’t it?  Rather than offend his wife, Blanche, Stanmore forgives all, gives Macaire traveling money, lets him out the back door and directs the police in the opposite direction, and sententiously pats himself on the back for redeeming a hardened criminal.  Reynolds has Macaire living out his days living quietly in Switzerland and that redeems his murders and crimes, for you see good and evil are equally mixed in men.  No one is totally bad.

His next novel, Master Timothy’s Bookcase concluded his first period and after a two year hiatus when, one presumes, Reynolds was recharging his batteries, perhaps searching for a more successful approach, organizing himself for the grand charge he began his magnum opus The Mysteries of London, that was a great compendium of crime.  He was in fact inspired by Eugene Sue’s Mysteres de Paris but Mysteries of London doesn’t reflect much derivation from that work, however, this was apparently because he couldn’t fit much of it into his story.

Wonderful details preyed on his imagination  so that at the same time he was writing Mysteries he also wrote two longish novels, Faust in 1845-46 and Wagner the Wehr Wolf in 1846-48.

Faust is rather an extraordinary novel.  Here his inspiration was derived from the European myth of the man who sold his soul to Satan.  He combines this story with the story of the German criminal organization called the Holy Vehm.  As an adjunct to all he gives an exciting account of the Borgias, Pope Alexander VI, Caesar and Lucretia, or Lucreza as he spells it, Borgia.  An amazing novel.

In this novel Reynolds extends his field from France and England to encompass Central Europe—Germany, Austria, Carniola and Italy.  Eventually he will draw a circle from England into the Mediterranean touching the Africa of Homer’s Lotus Eaters, through the Dardanelles to Mingrelia or ancient Colchis where the Golden Fleece was kept through the Crimea thus encircling historic Europe.  Interesting conception.

Whether he visited these parts during his period in France isn’t clear and his details are fairly sketchy although fairly sharp for Italy.  Carniola is an Alpine province of Austria along with Styria and Corinthia.  Reynolds probably chose this province for a couple of reasons, the first because as no one had probably heard of it, it was therefore exotic and secondly because a ferocious sexual pervert who lived there in a castle as recorded by de Sade in his novel Juliette.  This guy was so incredible that even de Sade hastened away.

Murder, crime and gore in profusion, Reynolds seems in a frenzy to outdo de Sade, Frederic Soulie and Eugene Sue combined and a fine job he does of it too.

Eugene Sue in his magnificent Wandering Jew, that great Armageddon, as his story unfolds the great march of Cholera out of the East that advances at the rate of thirty miles a day closes in on the Paris of 1830 and its revolution of that year.  Sue knew how to erase millions of people at a time.  What a story, and it goes on for over a thousand pages.  Now, if Reynolds did reach Paris in 1830 he must have witnessed the devastation caused by the Cholera epidemic or, at the very least, its aftermath which would have been a topic of conversation.  If as Collins suspects he arrived in 1833 he still would have heard stories of the great Cholera terror.  If the hints in Reynolds novel, Grace Darling, are correct he places the time of that novel in 1833  so he might likely have still been in England at that time.  His descriptions of the Revolution of 1830 in Alfred de Rosann are so sketchy that he may not have arrived in France in 1830 on the heels of the action as he claims.

In Faust he replicates the Cholera epidemic of Sue when Faust orders Satan to create an immense bubonic plague in Vienna and Europe that like the Cholera epidemic rises in the East and rolls over Europe.  Thus the spectre derived from Sue’s Rodin makes its appearance in Reynolds.  Further both the Cholera and bubonic plague are accurate history.  Reynolds’ Faust takes place from 1480 through the first decade of the sixteenth century.  Reynolds is very careful with his dates so that events actually occurred in the years he indicates.  The bubonic plague he mentions occurred between 1500 and 1503.  Interestingly he doesn’t blame fleas from rats in Genoa but, like the Cholera, has it arrive from the East.  Current theories indicate that that may have been the case.  The first plague of mid-fourteenth century swept through Europe so quickly that there must have been another source than ship rats.  In the first place no crew would have been immune to the flea bites hence the Med would have been filled with ghost ships while the spread would have been slower and the diffusion more easily traced.  Reynolds always appears to have read and thought deeply.

Faust is essentially a historical novel so that the eruption of Vesuvius in 1485 is accurate but the accuracy of the description of the actual eruption must be fictional.  The eruption was however a major one.

So also Reynolds account of the Borgias is historically accurate allowing for description and motives to be interpretations.  The villains of Sue’s Wandering Jew are the religious sect of the Jesuits, Reynolds replaces them with the German organization of the Holy Vehm whose description is accurate given a little novelistic license.  What we have here, then, in this story is a magnificent contrast between virtue and vice, good and evil.  The contrasts are carried out on many levels.  The Vehm operates as a government within the government just as the Jesuits were a church within the church.  In this case the Austrian government is upright but the Holy Vehm is not.  Faust once he has sold his soul to Satan is the representative of a blend of virtue and vice with vice having the upper hand.  Faust as the story develops is guilty through his machinations of the deaths of millions.  As the representative of vice Faust’s counterpart is Otto Pianella who represents undivided virtue.  Faust’s wife represents virtue, or Justine, while Faust’s mistress, Ida, Otto’s sister, represents Juliette or vice.  Of course, she is as nothing compared to the mighty Lucreza Borgia, the scariest woman who ever lived.

Reynolds while considered a feminist is, actually, a realist.  In general, he deplores the manner in which women are treated but he isn’t so silly as to believe all women are above reproach, thus one has a variety of female types.  Lucreza Borgia in the novel is a willful completely evil woman while Nisida in the next novel, Wagner the Wehr Wolf is a ‘strong’ woman but a blend of good and evil.   Thus, Reynolds avoids the sappy feminist sentiment of the present.

He was perhaps overawed b Lucreza’s ruthless exercising of her will so that there is no good mixed with her evil.  Lucreza was not going to go to Switzerland and while away her time after the Borgias’ power was destroyed.

Mortally offended by de Sade’s dictum that vile living always succeeds on this Earth while virtue always leads to unhappiness, in this novel practicing virtue succeeds while vice fails.  Perhaps in Sue’s breathtaking Armageddon in which all the characters but one are immolated, Reynolds changes the end so that each virtuous character lives happily in the end while all the vicious characters die or end unhappily.

The Holy Vehm is destroyed, Ida checks out early, the Borgias seemingly on the way to success are thwarted, first their power is broken, then as fugitives Caesar Borgia after a number of failures is killed in an ignominious battle in Spain while Lucreza suffers a horrible death at the hands of her husband on the island of Lissa belonging to the Duke of Ferrara near Venice.  This is one of the most terrifying depictions in the novel.  Disregarding Lucreza’s terrible reputation the Duke of Ferrara espouses her with the assumption that she will reform her wicked ways, that is, give up vice.

Apparently, she has until Otto Pianella and his family are marooned on the way back to Vienna by snowstorms in the Julian Alps of Carniola.  They put up on Lissa which comes to Lucreza’s attention.  She arrests Otto and places him in the Iron Coffin.  I won’t replicate the entire story that Reynolds makes as suspenseful as possible, but the Iron Coffin is a large room made of iron shaped like a giant coffin.  The walls are moveable and gradually compress down to the size of an actual coffin in which the victim is entombed, where he gradually dies of starvation and dehydration.

As Otto’s situation grows dire Satan appears offering him the Faustian deal.  No, no, says Otto, never, never, I put my faith in a higher power.  So, in a choice between vice or virtue Otto remains true to God, or virtue.  Well, one of Lucreza’s retinue finks to the Duke who is outraged that Lucreza has violated her oath so, at the last moment he releases Otto, justifying Otto’s trust in God, while condemning Lucreza to what would have been Otto’s fate.  Thus, the terrible end of the truly vicious Lucreza Borgia.

Now, we are down to Faust himself.  Faust had driven a lousy bargain  with Satan receiving only twenty-six years of seeming prosperity and unlimited power.  Now both hands of the clock, or clysidra, clocks hadn’t been invented yet, are pointing straight up.  Remembering Reynolds’ description of the 1485 eruption of Vesuvius Satan takes Faust to the edge of the boiling caldera and after a lengthy triumph and lecture Satan pushes Faust in.

De Sade is repudiated, the results of Justine’s and Juliette’s lives are reversed and Reynolds triumphs over the Marquis de Sade.

While the main novel, The Mysteries Of London, raged on in its contests of virtue and vice, Reynolds began another rather lengthy novel he titled Wagner the Wehr Wolf.

And why not?  While good and certainly interesting it doesn’t quite toe the mark made by Faust.  Faust was well above the average while Wagner is closer to average but still with all of Reynolds’ inventiveness.

Too few people die and Nisida the villainess is a pale reflection of Lucreza Borgia, but still no slouch as a ‘strong’ woman.  Nor is there a Jesuit Order or the Holy Vehm, just a highly organized criminal gang that is terrorizing Florence Italy.  Reynolds may have lifted that idea from Dumas’ Count of Monte Christo and the gang in the Italian catacombs.  The main story takes place in Florence but changes location to more exotic places including Constatinople, name not yet changed to Istanbul, and Sicily.

Reynolds’ geography embraces a rather large area from England, France, Central Europe, the Balkans, Italy to just off the coast of Africa to include the Greek Islands, Western Anatolia and Mingrelia on the East Coast of the Black Sea, formerly the Colchis of the Argonauts then turning west to the Crimea following in the tracks of the Argonauts and that pretty well encompasses the parameters of historical Europe.  One wonders how Reynolds is writing all these novels, maintaining a growing family, keeping up on his reading and accumulating fairly detailed historical studies and he wrote several historical novels, Faust being one.

The adoption of a fantastic Werewolf story seems strange, but then, James Malcolm Rymer, his contemporary Penny Dreadful author was scoring big with his novel Varney The Vampire and would soon after write the classic story of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.  Sweeney Todd, a hit musical  fifty years ago was the barber who turned his customers into sausages and sold them to another set of customers.  Who would believe cannibalism in nineteenth century England?

Varney the Vampire, an incredibly long novel must have nudged Reynolds’ interest in that supernatural direction so he chose to explore another of the great medieval myths or legends of Medieval Europe, that of the Wehr Wolf.  So, really, this era produced the subject matter for the next hundred and fifty years or so, Frankenstein, Faust, Varney the Vampire, Sweeney Todd and Werewolves and organized crime.  The Curse of the Mummy would come later.

Wagner has a highly organized criminal gang that is central to the story maintaining its connection to the main frame of Mysteries of London.  It is a true underworld inhabiting caverns deep into the earth.  Whether meant intentionally or not by Reynolds its lower levels rest next to the lower levels of the Catholic nunnery that has an extensive underground.  The doings in the nunnery in its underworld are as criminal as those of the criminals only a few feet awaythrough the rock.  The two worlds are blended when the crime world is attacked, and the walls accidentally broken through and down.  Thus, both the criminal underworld and the equally criminal nunnery were destroyed.

Reynold’s religious interests are intriguing.  At this time in his life Reynolds was thirty-two.  The Mysteries had solved his financial problems to this moment so his mental comfort zone was probably elevated.  He had every reason to believe he could continue his success although the success of his future blockbuster, Mysteries of the Court of London might have astonished even him.  At any rate he was relieved of youthful anxieties; he was successfully launched.

How he developed, or found time to develop his religious ideas isn’t obvious to me.  Collins alleges that he did write a book of biblical criticism in 1833 when he was only 19 years old and would have had to have been in London at that time.  At this point he has the North European abhorrence of the Catholic Church although an apparent strong belief in the existence of God or a deity, however, that could have been a front so as not to offend the reading public.  His attitude toward the Moslem world seems to be a tolerant affection.  Wagner makes a visit to then Constantinople, now Istanbul, a mere twenty-five  years after the Christian capital fell to the Moslems.  He forms connections and in order to free Florence from the dominion of the criminal gang he marches a Moslem army to Florence to do it.  I must say I read that episode with a certain amount incredulousness. 

One imagines that his fantasy was that he could unite the two worlds.  The novel was placed in the years following 1516, a mere twenty-four years after the Moorish expulsion from Spain and the completion of the Reconquista.  The Moslem slave raids probably hadn’t begun and from this time to 1830 when the French annexed Algeria and wiped out the Corsairs, the Moslem predations on the Mediterranean coast was constant.  Eugene Sue’s The knight of Malta is a good representation of the situation and reads as well as Reynolds.

Sue, as Reynolds, was entranced with Byron’s epic poem The Corsair; the sentiments seem to coincide with their own.  Indeed, The Knight of Malta can be read as Byron’s poem in novelized form.  The opening lines of Byron establish the mental state:

Quote:

O’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea,

Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free,

Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam,

Survey our empire, and behold our home!

These are our realms, no limits to their sway—

Our flag the scepter all who meet obey.

Ours the wild life in tumult still to range

From toil to rest, and joy in every change.

Unquote.

To a large extent The Corsair forms a part of the mental equipment of all these early Victorian authors.

In addition to Christian and Moslem concerns one considers his evaluation of the Jews as an independent nation living in and on its host; this is difficult because Westerners have been indoctrinated and conditioned to believe that Jews are innocent victims.  They are not, not in Hellenic times, not in Roman times and not in Medieval times and certainly not now.  During early Christian times they were given the greatest boon that could be imagined:  the monopoly of loaning money at interest.  Christians, the Catholic Church, laid its congregation at the feet of the Jews to be exploited.

Do not believe that the Jews became money lenders because they were forced to.  They have always been money changers.  They did so on the porches of the temple where Jesus overturned their tables as sacrilegious.  As usurers, even the simplest mind could easily figure out that the entire money supply must inevitably be in their hands.  Nor did they loan on reasonable terms but at expropriatory rates of forty or fifty percent for a single day.  The West was impoverished so that in Florence first, a State pawn shop was instituted to save both the State and its people financial grief.  Other cities followed Florence’s example.

Thus Reynolds introduces us to the Jewish money lender, Issachar.  Now, both Reynolds and Dickens had had their run in with Jewish damage controlmen.  Dickens was disciplined over his Jewish character in Oliver Twist, Fagin.  Reynolds had been dressed down for some remarks in Grace Darling.

Jewish emancipation from the rule of the Catholic Church had begun in France by Napoleon after 1800, by 1840 it was working its way through Central Europe.  The Jews qua Jews didn’t become powerful until after Napoleon’s defeat and Nathan Rothchild’s capture of the English currency in 1815. As a result of England’s victory the Rothschilds were in the early stages of consolidating their power.  Naturally one of the first steps was controlling the press and publishing, at that time the only effective means of disseminating information.  By the time of Wagner Disraeli had published most of his novels and was becoming a power in the State.  Both Dickens and Reynolds had heeded their chastening, Dickens submissively and Reynolds with his usual cheek.

Issachar is portrayed as the archetypal Yiddish money changer living in dirty squalid quarters but above the physical portrayal of the usual Jewish caricature he is lauded as the long suffering noble victim, a man of virtue unfairly maligned and Jews so for millennia.  Thus Reynolds has fulfilled his obligation to laud the Jews.  He describes Issachar as a man of integrity however Issachar is the biggest cheat and crook alive.  Nisida’s mother had pawned the family diamonds with Issachar, however, Issachar without hesitation steals the diamonds replacing them with paste.  The father being something of an expert immediately discovers the imposture.  Issachar justifies himself in some unsatisfactory way and Reynolds blithely goes on about the long suffering Jews.

It is generally thought therefore that Reynolds was genuinely sympathetic to the Jews.  I’m not sure that’s true.  I think he was just doing to wise thing so he could go on publishing.

For story continuation, we have Wagner, a ninety year old man, living deep in the Black Forest of Germany with his beauteous grand-daughter.  Reynolds is very keen on sixteen year old beauties.  They abound in his stories.  According to Dick Collins Reynolds married his wife Susannah when she was seventeen.  Collins says Reynolds may have been her second husband, she having already been taken to wife at 14.

Clara, Wagner’s granddaughter and main support, disappeared one day no one knew where.  Wagner is unable to support himself and about to expire when a demon appears offering to restore him to youth.  This a much better deal than Satan offered Faust in the previous novel.  All Wagner has to do is spend one day a month as a wolf.  He knows the day because his fate is based on the lunar calendar.  The contract ends when Wagner fails to honor it.  As can easily be seen this, on the face of it is good deal, what makes it a great deal is Wagner also gets a substantial guaranteed annual income.  Wagner may be old but he is no fool; he signs the deal.

Now a sprout of forty with cash in hand Wagner need no longer skulk about the woods of the Black Forest where all things strange happen.  Anyone who is up with German stories of this period knows there are so many desperadoes haunting these woods that they are no place for a fun loving young Wehr Wolf.  Wagner hies himself to Florence, Italy where the climate agrees with his clothes.

There he runs into his granddaughter Clara.  It wasn’t easy to pass himself off to her as his grandfather but like any young guy of independent means Wagner is a smooth talker.

He then finds some digs and runs into Nisida, the daughter of a Lord who, in fact, turns out to be the reason that Clara disappeared from the Black Forest.  He has persuaded the virtuous and beautiful Clara to abandon her virtue and become his secluded mistress.  Daughter Nisida learns this determining to kill Clara and therein hangs the tale.

Reynolds throws in the description of some of Wagners transformations which are exciting and well done.  On his monthly rampage Wagner merely tears through the countryside like a tornado.

The other part of interest is at the end when Wagner establishes contact with the Rosicrucian Order in Sicily.  This perhaps establishes Reynolds’ own religious position.  He is a Rosicrucian.  He is said to have been a Deist so that fits.  I rather accept that Rosicrucianism was his faith.  Having studied the religion somewhat I consider myself a Rosicrucian also if one needs a label.  And we all do.

Between 1844-48 then Reynolds has launched his career successfully with his Mysteries of London, worked through his French period and examined a major legend of Germany and Central Europe.

In Part III I will deal with Dickens early output in relation to Reynolds.