Might is Right
“”One cannot help imagining Ragnar Redbeard as a wild-eyed red-head bedecked with Viking headgear typing madly, while laughing lustily, swigging from an over-sized beer stein and ripping off pieces of raw meat with his teeth. On the other hand, he may well have been a hen-pecked, frustrated Walter Mitty type.
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| —Donna Kossy[1] |
Might is Right is an 1890 book written by a mysterious individual who called himself Ragnar Redbeard. It is a lengthy rant endorsing an uncompromising form of social Darwinism.
Redbeard argues that "Socialism, Christianism, Democracism, Equalityism, are really the whining yelpings of base-bred mongrel-multitudes". Commenting on Jesus' command to "do unto others as you would have others do to you", he scoffs that "No baser precept ever fell from the lips of a feeble Jew". Elsewhere Redbeard rewrites the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are the Iron-handed, the unfit shall flee before them. Cursed are the Haters of Battle, subjugation is their portion".
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[edit] Race
Although remembered chiefly as a sort of proto-Ayn Rand tract, Might is Right is also a white supremacist screed, a result of its belligerence mingling with contemporary views on race. Redbeard is dismissive of the notion of racial equality: "What white father for example, would encourage the marriage of a hulking thick skulled Negro with his beautiful and accomplished daughter?", he asks. "Would he enthusiastically 'give her away' to the matrimonial embraces of a Chinaman, a Coolie or the leper-hugs of a polluted 'mean white'?"
He goes on to argue that "You have only to look at some men, to know that they belong to an inferior breed. Take the Negro for example. His narrow cranial development, his prognathous jaw, his projecting lips, his wide nasal aperture, his simian disposition, his want of forethought, originality, and mental capacity: are all peculiarities strictly inferior." He adds that "Similar language may be applied to the Chinaman, the Coolie, the Kanaka, the Jew, and to the rotten-boned city degenerates of Anglo- Saxondom: rich and poor. Vile indeed are the inhabitants of those noxious cattle kraals: London, Liverpool, New York, Chicago, New Orleans".
This has made the book popular with modern white supremacists. In 1999 14 Word Press issued an "Exclusive Millenial Wotansvolk Edition", boasting a preface by Katja Lane (wife of white nationalist David Lane) and hilariously wonky illustrations of muscly barbarians by Ron McVan; presumably intended to portray Aryan ubermenschen, they actually looked more like grotesquely deformed freaks.
[edit] Influence on Satanism
The book appealed to Anton LaVey, who pinched large chunks of it for his Satanic Bible. Redbeard's memorable statement that "I gaze into the glassy eye of your fearsome Jehovah, and pluck him by the beard — I uplift a broad-axe and split open his worm-eaten skull", for example, is copied word-for-word by LaVey, as was the passage "Can the torn and bloody victim ‘love’ the blood-splashed jaws that rend it limb from limb? Are we not all predatory animals by instinct? If humans ceased wholly from preying upon each other, could they continue to exist?".[2] Indeed, The Satanic Bible can be seen as a sort of Might is Right Lite, with the anti-Semitic, racist, and proto-fascistic elements removed (LaVey having come from a Jewish background) and replaced with mysticism.
[edit] Authorship
Curiously, there have been suggestions that the author of this work is someone like Arthur Desmond or Jack London, both of whom were strongly socialist in philosophy. In other words, there's an excellent chance that Might is Right was meant to be a satire of Social Darwinism, in the same vein as Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. As the 14 Word Press release indicates, Poe's Law definitely applies here.
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Strange Creations: Aberrant Ideas of Human Origins from Ancient Astronauts to Aquatic Apes, p. 154
- ↑ http://www.dpjs.co.uk/criticism/smulo.html