Click here to see PDF ad. 9/6/2017.
Dangerfield was memorialized with a plaque in Queens in August, 2017 (here).
Monday, August 28, 2017
Only in LA: Staged Reading from the Rodney Dangerfield Institute
Only in LA...the Rodney Dangerfield Institute holds a theatrical staged reading of the classic script of BACK TO SCHOOL. The Rodney Dangerfield landmark was released in 1986.
Sunday, August 20, 2017
Freud's Myelin Stain: Did He Lie About It?
The August 20, 2017, New York Times reviews a new biography by Berkeley's Frederick Crews on Freud, with the indicative title: Making of an Illusion. (NYT here, Amazon here.) His book has a couple pages based on obscure medical history research I did during my postdoc and residency 1990-1994.
Crews' book has several footnotes to meeting abstracts and an unpublished white paper from that period by me (I also published an obscure book chapter on it.)
In this blog I provide a summary of my experience, what I found, and a cloud link to the white paper.
For an overview, click on figure:
Sigmund Freud wanted to be famous from the beginning of his medical training.
One route to success around 1880 was brain anatomy, and fame was guaranteed to anyone who invented a major new method. Freud claimed in 1883/1884 to have invented a major new reliable method for brain anatomy - but it proved unreliable and was forgotten. Of interest, at the very same time he was publishing the method as highly reliable, he was complaining to his finance Martha that it was very difficult and unreliable. The gap between his published claims and the reality would have leaked out by the time he was coming before a promotion committee. With his science career closed off, he switched to clinical care and clinical research.
I know the story because I worked on a closely related microscopic method around 1990 and spent a couple years assembling a large archive of obscure German anatomy papers on the topic. The tale merits a couple pages in a new 2017 biography of Freud.
_____
In 1990, I worked on a gold chloride brain tissue stain similar to one Freud worked on.
In 1989/1990, I did a postdoc with Prof. Ann Graybiel at MIT where we worked on heterogeneous zones in the basal ganglia, called striosomes. I made some innovations on a gold chloride myelin stain which had been developed variously by Freud, Fleisch, and Gerlach in the 1870s and 1880s. triggered by a new paper on a gold chloride myelin stain that had just appeared in 1990.
Freud? Freud's first goal, as is well-known, was to be a famous laboratory scientist, and only barriers to promotion led him to a subsequent clinical career. His laboratory work focused development of invertebrate nervous systems, and included an independent publication on the value of his improved gold chloride fiber stain.
Working in Prof. Graybiel's laboratory, using the gold chloride stain, I showed that the primate striatum had clear, myelin-based striosomes using this technique, although the figures were essentially occult with conventional myelin stains like luxol fast blue. I found that the stain was made more reliable by addition of trace hydrogen peroxide. In this sense, I felt my method with hydrogen peroxide and gold was an improvement on a gold chloride method published by Lawrence Schmued in 1990; Schmued noted the idea of gold chloride fiber staining (though uncommon) had an older history (see his 1990 paper here) but did not mention the particular citation trail that led to Freud and Gerlach. (Schmued also holds a patent on this technique).
In 1992-1993, I collected lots of obscure 1880s German medical literature on the topic. My work appeared in some abstracts and finally in a 1994 book chapter from a basal ganglia symposium. The book chapter notes the history of gold chloride fiber stains dates to 1872, and was essentially revived (briefly) by Freud in 1883. (The published 7 page 2004 book chapter by Quinn & Graybiel is in the cloud here.)
What's Not in My 1994 Book Chapter
While in my neuropathology fellowship at UCLA in 92-93, I spent a lot of times in the library archives and had quite a trove of 1870s and 1880s articles, mostly in German, which I may have lost over the decades in one or another household move.
The main finding of interest was that in Freud's letters to his wife from 1883/1884, he talks about how difficult and tortuous the gold stain was, but in his publication at the same time, he describes the stain as highly reliable and always working.
Freud's lab career came to a very rapid end. This was a pivotal event in his life, and created Freud the Clinical Psychiatrist as opposed to Freud the Neuroanatomy Researcher. He could have been turned down for many reasons - anti-Semiticism, or favoritism, or maybe his research to date was just unimpressive. However, a feasible reason for his failure at promotion might have been that his stain, published and touted by himself as highly reliable, proved to be highly unreliable, and this would mark him as a braggart scientist who overhyped his benchwork and was not worthy of promotion. It's speculation, but the puzzle pieces could be arranged that way.*
Now in August 2017, I've dug up my 1994 Word manuscript and offering it to the Cloud, for what it's worth.
After seeing the new Crews book and reviews, I recalled that over 25 years I appear to have lost my treasured box of 1990-era photostats of 1880-era original journal publications. And my heart skipped a beat today when I was uncertain if I still had even one an electronic copy of my rough, 1994 manuscript, which I had shared with Crews some years ago. I found one on my wife's computer, dated 2004, which would be very minor revisions of my 1994 manuscript.
The word document about Freud's possible scientific fraud is an awkward document. Half of it tells the story of the 1880s use of gold chloride myelin stains, including some speculation on Freud's misbehavior, and then half talks about the use to show striosomes in primate basal ganglia. That said, here it is, as a Word document, in the cloud.
The full Freud-Martha engagement letters (he wrote a multi page letter nearly daily) for 1882, 1883, 1884 are now published in 3 dense German volumes, "Die Brautbriefe, Vols 1,2,3," 1500 pp, Gerhard Fichtner et al., 2011,2013,2015, Fischer Verlag. I haven't fully studied yet.[**]
______
TO LEARN MORE...
___
Also archived in the cloud is a 2004 web publication on Freud's neuropathology contributions, by David Galbis-Reig, here.
____
* The short blunt form would be that Freud hyped and misled in his publications about his benchwork, was found out, and it got him sacked.
[**] E.g. in Brautbriefe vol 3, page 108, 29 Jan 1884, we read, "Ende dieser Woche hoffe ich die Abfassung der methodischen Mitteilungen in zwei Sprachen beendigt zu haben." (By the end of this week I hope to have finished the composition [Abfasshung] of the methodologic communication [article] in two languages.)
In this blog I provide a summary of my experience, what I found, and a cloud link to the white paper.
For an overview, click on figure:
 |
| click to enlarge |
Summary
Sigmund Freud wanted to be famous from the beginning of his medical training.
One route to success around 1880 was brain anatomy, and fame was guaranteed to anyone who invented a major new method. Freud claimed in 1883/1884 to have invented a major new reliable method for brain anatomy - but it proved unreliable and was forgotten. Of interest, at the very same time he was publishing the method as highly reliable, he was complaining to his finance Martha that it was very difficult and unreliable. The gap between his published claims and the reality would have leaked out by the time he was coming before a promotion committee. With his science career closed off, he switched to clinical care and clinical research.
I know the story because I worked on a closely related microscopic method around 1990 and spent a couple years assembling a large archive of obscure German anatomy papers on the topic. The tale merits a couple pages in a new 2017 biography of Freud.
_____
In 1990, I worked on a gold chloride brain tissue stain similar to one Freud worked on.
In 1989/1990, I did a postdoc with Prof. Ann Graybiel at MIT where we worked on heterogeneous zones in the basal ganglia, called striosomes. I made some innovations on a gold chloride myelin stain which had been developed variously by Freud, Fleisch, and Gerlach in the 1870s and 1880s. triggered by a new paper on a gold chloride myelin stain that had just appeared in 1990.
Freud? Freud's first goal, as is well-known, was to be a famous laboratory scientist, and only barriers to promotion led him to a subsequent clinical career. His laboratory work focused development of invertebrate nervous systems, and included an independent publication on the value of his improved gold chloride fiber stain.
Working in Prof. Graybiel's laboratory, using the gold chloride stain, I showed that the primate striatum had clear, myelin-based striosomes using this technique, although the figures were essentially occult with conventional myelin stains like luxol fast blue. I found that the stain was made more reliable by addition of trace hydrogen peroxide. In this sense, I felt my method with hydrogen peroxide and gold was an improvement on a gold chloride method published by Lawrence Schmued in 1990; Schmued noted the idea of gold chloride fiber staining (though uncommon) had an older history (see his 1990 paper here) but did not mention the particular citation trail that led to Freud and Gerlach. (Schmued also holds a patent on this technique).
In 1992-1993, I collected lots of obscure 1880s German medical literature on the topic. My work appeared in some abstracts and finally in a 1994 book chapter from a basal ganglia symposium. The book chapter notes the history of gold chloride fiber stains dates to 1872, and was essentially revived (briefly) by Freud in 1883. (The published 7 page 2004 book chapter by Quinn & Graybiel is in the cloud here.)
What's Not in My 1994 Book Chapter
While in my neuropathology fellowship at UCLA in 92-93, I spent a lot of times in the library archives and had quite a trove of 1870s and 1880s articles, mostly in German, which I may have lost over the decades in one or another household move.
The main finding of interest was that in Freud's letters to his wife from 1883/1884, he talks about how difficult and tortuous the gold stain was, but in his publication at the same time, he describes the stain as highly reliable and always working.
- Was he gilding the lily (so to speak) in his publications, hoping for promotion to go through, before anyone found out his stain was unreliable, which is how he described the stain to his wife?
- Or do the letters to his wife describe his tortuous research path, but however, he truly believed he had found a reliable method as recorded his published manuscript?
- The short timetable between the letters and the journal submission make this less likely.
- Did the unreliability of his gold myelin stain contribute to his rejection for tenure, one of the most pivotal events in his career path? Could this have cast him as a "self promotion and hype guy" rather than as "reliable researcher?"
Freud's lab career came to a very rapid end. This was a pivotal event in his life, and created Freud the Clinical Psychiatrist as opposed to Freud the Neuroanatomy Researcher. He could have been turned down for many reasons - anti-Semiticism, or favoritism, or maybe his research to date was just unimpressive. However, a feasible reason for his failure at promotion might have been that his stain, published and touted by himself as highly reliable, proved to be highly unreliable, and this would mark him as a braggart scientist who overhyped his benchwork and was not worthy of promotion. It's speculation, but the puzzle pieces could be arranged that way.*
Now in August 2017, I've dug up my 1994 Word manuscript and offering it to the Cloud, for what it's worth.
After seeing the new Crews book and reviews, I recalled that over 25 years I appear to have lost my treasured box of 1990-era photostats of 1880-era original journal publications. And my heart skipped a beat today when I was uncertain if I still had even one an electronic copy of my rough, 1994 manuscript, which I had shared with Crews some years ago. I found one on my wife's computer, dated 2004, which would be very minor revisions of my 1994 manuscript.
The word document about Freud's possible scientific fraud is an awkward document. Half of it tells the story of the 1880s use of gold chloride myelin stains, including some speculation on Freud's misbehavior, and then half talks about the use to show striosomes in primate basal ganglia. That said, here it is, as a Word document, in the cloud.
The full Freud-Martha engagement letters (he wrote a multi page letter nearly daily) for 1882, 1883, 1884 are now published in 3 dense German volumes, "Die Brautbriefe, Vols 1,2,3," 1500 pp, Gerhard Fichtner et al., 2011,2013,2015, Fischer Verlag. I haven't fully studied yet.[**]
______
TO LEARN MORE...
- Book Chapter from 1994. The short and formal publication without any speculation on Freud's intentions is: Quinn B & Graybiel AM (1994) Myeloarchitectonics of the primate caudate-putamen. In: Basal Ganglia Vol. IV, Advances in Behavioral Biology Book Series. At Springer, here.
- Pages in the cloud, here.
- Couple Pages from Crews 2017. I've uploaded a couple pages of paragraphs of the story as newly published in Crews 2017, which I think is within fair use of the 500 page book...
- Crews book pages on the topic: here.
- Nerdy Deep Dive Version. The lengthy and informal Word manuscript version, full of obscure citations and including speculation on Freud's misbehavior, follows:
- Quinn, Myelin Stains and Myeloarchitectonics: A neuropathologic historical vignette from Freud's laboratory, and modern applications in basal ganglia research.
- HERE.
- Zip File of Very Old Papers.
- Two of Freud's gold chloride papers, three by Upson in the same era, a review in 1937 by Jellife, and some BQ notes, in a zip file here.
- More Freud-Bernays letters have been released in German 2011-2015 than I had access to in 1992-4. (Brautbriefe, Vol 1-3, e.g. here, vol. 4-5 planned.) Vol. 2 covers to December 1883 and Vol. 3 covers 1884, the periods of the gold chloride adventures. Images may also be available at Library of Congress. I have the books on hand in my home.
___
Also archived in the cloud is a 2004 web publication on Freud's neuropathology contributions, by David Galbis-Reig, here.
____
* The short blunt form would be that Freud hyped and misled in his publications about his benchwork, was found out, and it got him sacked.
[**] E.g. in Brautbriefe vol 3, page 108, 29 Jan 1884, we read, "Ende dieser Woche hoffe ich die Abfassung der methodischen Mitteilungen in zwei Sprachen beendigt zu haben." (By the end of this week I hope to have finished the composition [Abfasshung] of the methodologic communication [article] in two languages.)
Friday, August 18, 2017
Judy Garland as Biracial, Mickey Rooney in Blackface (Waitin' for the Robert E Lee)
We may lose some of the statues of Robert E Lee, but song and dance are preserved in blackface on Youtube. Click here for music and dance.
"Down on the levy, in old Alabammy...."
___
The charming first female singer in the clip is Virginia Weidler.
The Robert E Lee big band number above, is an expansion of an earlier smaller scale Rooney/Garland blackface act, here.
 |
| Blackface and Biracial (mulatto) |
___
The charming first female singer in the clip is Virginia Weidler.
The Robert E Lee big band number above, is an expansion of an earlier smaller scale Rooney/Garland blackface act, here.
Interpretation Through Poetry (Fragments)
Tweets scuttling across our brains like ragged claws.
We've been rolled, we've been rolled,
I will wear my trouser belt around my neck
until I'm cold.
I saw the worst minds of my generation made bold by madness.
A Coney Island of the Mindf---s.
Marx predicted the decline and fall of capitalism, but adds, jeez, you guys are being ridiculous about it.
French demand tearing down the Burgers of Calais, the old bastards.
British neo nazis hold torch rallies on St Crispin's Day, celebrate Anglo victory over the genetically inferior French at Agincourt in 1415.
Italian neo nazis tear down Michelangelo's David.
Taliban feels left out, nothing left to tear down.
War never solved anything. Another round of War over here, it's always Ides of March somewhere.
The Fog of War broke in on little cat feet. Barbarians at the Watergate.
North Korea could quickly escalate into another Vietnam, except with more of the "bombing them into the stone age" part.
Issues executive order, "Tear down Statue of Liberty; two can play at that game," by the way, a phrase he just made up.
Into the Valley of Death rode the 700 Club.
In America, anyone or anything can become president.
Robert E Lee doing a very good job and getting a lot of attention lately.
Under a real Neo Nazi presidency, they would improve the interstate highway system.
We've been rolled, we've been rolled,
I will wear my trouser belt around my neck
until I'm cold.
I saw the worst minds of my generation made bold by madness.
A Coney Island of the Mindf---s.
Marx predicted the decline and fall of capitalism, but adds, jeez, you guys are being ridiculous about it.
French demand tearing down the Burgers of Calais, the old bastards.
British neo nazis hold torch rallies on St Crispin's Day, celebrate Anglo victory over the genetically inferior French at Agincourt in 1415.
Italian neo nazis tear down Michelangelo's David.
Taliban feels left out, nothing left to tear down.
War never solved anything. Another round of War over here, it's always Ides of March somewhere.
The Fog of War broke in on little cat feet. Barbarians at the Watergate.
North Korea could quickly escalate into another Vietnam, except with more of the "bombing them into the stone age" part.
Issues executive order, "Tear down Statue of Liberty; two can play at that game," by the way, a phrase he just made up.
Into the Valley of Death rode the 700 Club.
In America, anyone or anything can become president.
Robert E Lee doing a very good job and getting a lot of attention lately.
Under a real Neo Nazi presidency, they would improve the interstate highway system.
Monday, August 14, 2017
"Blood and Soil" Really Is A Core Nazi Concept
In the past month in the U.S. there has been increasing quotation of "blood and soil," as used by US-based alt-right groups. You may see it casually referred to as a Nazi concept - but what did it really mean? For many readers the three words are probably next to meaningless (although Wikipedia gives a good overview, [0].)
If you go back to original German 1930s writings, some of which are available in English, you realize that "Blood and Soil" was a fundamental, chilling, and scary Nazi concept.
In plain English, the phrase has little intrinsic meaning. Every nation has people with "blood," and every nation as "soil." OK, so, yes, blood-and-soil.
But by "blood," or Blut, Nazis very specifically referred to their "scientific" concepts of race, including the predetermined racial inferiority of Jews, blacks, and the disabled. And Boden (or sometimes Erde) - variably translated as "land" or "soil" - embodied the greater senses of nation, politics, and economics, e.g. geopolitics. It meant far-right political nationalism, hatred of adjacent countries and their "different" land and people.
Blood and Soil. For the Nazis, in the 1930s, the simplistic and simple sounding phrase was a doorway to horror. "Blood" rose into the national German conversation followed by anti-semitic laws banning mixed marriages, then genocide. They didn't kill six million Jews to punish them; they killed them because of bad "blood," a "bloodline" that had to be eliminated from Germany and the soil of its newly conquered lands and the same "blood" of the chant "blood and soil." Listen closely for several uses of the word "blood" in this dramatization of the Wannsee Conference (3 min; here). "Soil" rose into the national German conversation, and then the takeover of the Sudetanland (the Germanic part of Czechoslovakia), Austria, and finally war with Poland. And eventually, Germany and the neighboring countries lay in rubble.
Blood and Soil comes to life for us in the books of Johannes Stoye. Johannes Stoye was a workaholic attorney in Leipzig who produced in the mid 1930s three large works that aimed to bring other countries to life for German readers via the Nazi viewpoint - works on the U.S., on the British Empire, and on Spain. Stoye presented these foreign nations for his German readers through the dominant National Socialist interpretation and lens. Interesting that some of the books were also translated abroad.
Stoye's first book, about the USA, USA Lernt Um! (1935), was never translated but is available in used copies in German on Amazon (here).[1][2] The title means "the US is retrained or retooled" and the subtitle says the book is about the FDR "revolution." It was for German readers, showing them how to view the USA through Nazi eyes and come to the correct conclusions about the people and politics of the USA. To give you an example of his viewpoint, Stoye presents the then-horrifying Dust Bowl as the result of unfettered American liberal capitalism that was uncontrolled by the State. Stoye then states that the Dust Bowl crisis will improved quickly by a powerful, centralized new U.S. government with FDR as Leader. [3] For Stoye, the New Deal wasn't so much about "jobs for poor people" as "making the State really big and really powerful under a mighty leader (FDR) and that's good."
Stoye's second book The British Empire was published first in German, then in English translation in 1935 and revised in English in 1936. Thus, "The British Empire" is far more accessible for most American readers. Stoye's preface to the second edition says that the first English edition had sold well and was well-received in major English newspapers (there was also a French edition.)
Stoye also wrote on Spain's economics and politics, but I have never seen this one [4]. Stoye was prolific from the mid 1930s into the early 1940s; he appears to have died in 1948 in a Russian concentration camp.[5]
In his books, Stoye describes his approach - which is the Nazi approach, not just Stoye's - as "geopolitical," bringing countries into focus one by one through the true lens that is provided by a systematic dual analysis of the nation by Blood and Soil thinking.
Stoye's "The British Empire." Regarding the U.K. and "blood," he acknowledges that Great Britain is made up of multiple "races" (Anglo Saxons, Viking invaders, etc), but largely proceeds as if its national character was genetically determined.
Regarding "land," Stoye views geography as fundamental to politics and progress, which is true in many ways. Having established both "blood" and "soil"as his "lenses," as as the only valid way to assess a nation, Stoye then gives us 300 pages of analysis of Great Britain and its British Empire. (No doubt Stoye also was seeking parallels between the recent global British Empire and the planned future Third Reich German Empire.)
In conclusion, Stoye's book "The British Empire" is a living historical example - in English and easily available in used copies - of what the Nazis meant by "blood and soil" or "blood and land."
_____
"Blood and Soil" in the April 2016 NYT. See an essay by Kevin Baker on the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s. Today, the Immigration Act is usually overshadowed by the contemporary Civil Rights Act. Baker remarks that the U.S. Immigration Act of 1965 (which turned us away from racial quotas) as "the opposite of blood and soil" thinking. Baker's article is here. I would guess that Baker's offhand "blood and soil" remark - an allusion to Nazis - probably went over the heads of many readers.
_____
[0] Blood and Soil: What it means; in English. If you take the effort to find it, Wikipedia does a pretty good job with the phrase "blood and soil," here.
[1] Johannes Stoye. I became aware of Stoye's work in early 2017 when I was reading the book, Hitler's American Model, by James Whitman of Yale. Overall, Whitman's book describes how 1930s Nuremberg race laws in Germany were modeled on our own US race laws of the time and earlier. Whitman provides a single footnote to Stoye's "USA Lernt Um." (Another model for Nurenburg may be Germany's own earlier race laws as had been developed when Germany had African colonies around 1900; here). I got a used copy of USA Lernt Um and then an English translation copy of The British Empire.
[2] The title USA Lernt Um! is based on the verb: Umlernen (Lernt um!] means to retrain or to take a new view. The subtitle "Sinn und Bedeutung der Roosevelt-Revolution" sense and significance of the Roosevelt Revolution.
[3] In framing the arrival of FDR to rescue us from the Dust Bowl, Stoye sees FDR as a "powerful leader" who amassed governmental authority unto himself, and Stoye in 1935 saw that as a good thing. (See also the conservative 2006 book, "Three New Deals: Why the Nazis and Fascists Loved FDR," by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, here.)
[4] The Spain book was called, "Spanien in Umbruch: Leistungen und Ziele der Franco-Regiering," or Spain in Revolt: Methods and Goals of Franco Regime. Here.
[5] This Google Books page suggests Stoye was really a book mill, apparently with sister books on Japan and France as well.
A source called World Cat lists Stoye's lifespan as 1900-1948 and lists about a dozen books in total, click here.
If you take the card catalog's lifespan of 1900-1948 and then google it with the name Johannes Stoye, you hit a gravestone index website, here.
Stoye is listed as being as being buried in a "Speciallager" of the "NKWD" and together these mean that he died in a Russian concentration camp during the postwar Occupation, that is, a camp where the occupying Allies separated Nazi proponents from the rest of Germans.
Other than this, I have been unable to find any proper biography, even a paragraph, of Stoye.
A note on translation. Stoye himself, in British Empire, within a few pages says alternately "Blood and Soil," "Race and Soil," "People and Soil." There are also variances in German: at least one recent German book is titled"Blut und Erde" rather than the more common "Blut und Boden." Contemporary 2017 newspaper article in the US almost always used the term "Blood and Soil."
Representing something by a small symbolic part is "synecdoche," e.g. "soil" represents "national" and "blood" represents a race of people and their genetics. Here, the use of simple nouns for these political concepts also functions to downplay the significance of the ideas being signaled. A commonday word, "Blood," is a dog whistle reference to racial purity = racial genocide + murder of the mentally handicapped adults and children.
___
Historic book reviews on Stoye include here and here and here.
For an earlier work with some parallels to Stoye's style, here.
If you go back to original German 1930s writings, some of which are available in English, you realize that "Blood and Soil" was a fundamental, chilling, and scary Nazi concept.
In plain English, the phrase has little intrinsic meaning. Every nation has people with "blood," and every nation as "soil." OK, so, yes, blood-and-soil.
But by "blood," or Blut, Nazis very specifically referred to their "scientific" concepts of race, including the predetermined racial inferiority of Jews, blacks, and the disabled. And Boden (or sometimes Erde) - variably translated as "land" or "soil" - embodied the greater senses of nation, politics, and economics, e.g. geopolitics. It meant far-right political nationalism, hatred of adjacent countries and their "different" land and people.
Blood and Soil. For the Nazis, in the 1930s, the simplistic and simple sounding phrase was a doorway to horror. "Blood" rose into the national German conversation followed by anti-semitic laws banning mixed marriages, then genocide. They didn't kill six million Jews to punish them; they killed them because of bad "blood," a "bloodline" that had to be eliminated from Germany and the soil of its newly conquered lands and the same "blood" of the chant "blood and soil." Listen closely for several uses of the word "blood" in this dramatization of the Wannsee Conference (3 min; here). "Soil" rose into the national German conversation, and then the takeover of the Sudetanland (the Germanic part of Czechoslovakia), Austria, and finally war with Poland. And eventually, Germany and the neighboring countries lay in rubble.
Blood and Soil comes to life for us in the books of Johannes Stoye. Johannes Stoye was a workaholic attorney in Leipzig who produced in the mid 1930s three large works that aimed to bring other countries to life for German readers via the Nazi viewpoint - works on the U.S., on the British Empire, and on Spain. Stoye presented these foreign nations for his German readers through the dominant National Socialist interpretation and lens. Interesting that some of the books were also translated abroad.
Stoye's first book, about the USA, USA Lernt Um! (1935), was never translated but is available in used copies in German on Amazon (here).[1][2] The title means "the US is retrained or retooled" and the subtitle says the book is about the FDR "revolution." It was for German readers, showing them how to view the USA through Nazi eyes and come to the correct conclusions about the people and politics of the USA. To give you an example of his viewpoint, Stoye presents the then-horrifying Dust Bowl as the result of unfettered American liberal capitalism that was uncontrolled by the State. Stoye then states that the Dust Bowl crisis will improved quickly by a powerful, centralized new U.S. government with FDR as Leader. [3] For Stoye, the New Deal wasn't so much about "jobs for poor people" as "making the State really big and really powerful under a mighty leader (FDR) and that's good."
Stoye's second book The British Empire was published first in German, then in English translation in 1935 and revised in English in 1936. Thus, "The British Empire" is far more accessible for most American readers. Stoye's preface to the second edition says that the first English edition had sold well and was well-received in major English newspapers (there was also a French edition.)
Stoye also wrote on Spain's economics and politics, but I have never seen this one [4]. Stoye was prolific from the mid 1930s into the early 1940s; he appears to have died in 1948 in a Russian concentration camp.[5]
In his books, Stoye describes his approach - which is the Nazi approach, not just Stoye's - as "geopolitical," bringing countries into focus one by one through the true lens that is provided by a systematic dual analysis of the nation by Blood and Soil thinking.
Read Actual Scary German "Blood and Soil" Mentality
Tranlated into English and Straight Out of the 1930's:
I've put a few pages of Stoye's 1935 The British Empire,
in the cloud (here).
Tranlated into English and Straight Out of the 1930's:
I've put a few pages of Stoye's 1935 The British Empire,
in the cloud (here).
Regarding "land," Stoye views geography as fundamental to politics and progress, which is true in many ways. Having established both "blood" and "soil"as his "lenses," as as the only valid way to assess a nation, Stoye then gives us 300 pages of analysis of Great Britain and its British Empire. (No doubt Stoye also was seeking parallels between the recent global British Empire and the planned future Third Reich German Empire.)
In conclusion, Stoye's book "The British Empire" is a living historical example - in English and easily available in used copies - of what the Nazis meant by "blood and soil" or "blood and land."
- Blood meant racial characteristics and how you defined racial superiority and control of other races.
- Soil meant national boundaries - boundaries you build a wall around. And Lebensraum - living space - expansion of the good blood of Aryan people onto more land.
So the next time you see Neo-Aryans drop the phrase "blood and soil," it is a true call-out to Nazi ideals and political philosophy, and closely tied both the racial genocide and aggressive militarism.
_____
"Blood and Soil" in the April 2016 NYT. See an essay by Kevin Baker on the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s. Today, the Immigration Act is usually overshadowed by the contemporary Civil Rights Act. Baker remarks that the U.S. Immigration Act of 1965 (which turned us away from racial quotas) as "the opposite of blood and soil" thinking. Baker's article is here. I would guess that Baker's offhand "blood and soil" remark - an allusion to Nazis - probably went over the heads of many readers.
_____
[0] Blood and Soil: What it means; in English. If you take the effort to find it, Wikipedia does a pretty good job with the phrase "blood and soil," here.
[1] Johannes Stoye. I became aware of Stoye's work in early 2017 when I was reading the book, Hitler's American Model, by James Whitman of Yale. Overall, Whitman's book describes how 1930s Nuremberg race laws in Germany were modeled on our own US race laws of the time and earlier. Whitman provides a single footnote to Stoye's "USA Lernt Um." (Another model for Nurenburg may be Germany's own earlier race laws as had been developed when Germany had African colonies around 1900; here). I got a used copy of USA Lernt Um and then an English translation copy of The British Empire.
[2] The title USA Lernt Um! is based on the verb: Umlernen (Lernt um!] means to retrain or to take a new view. The subtitle "Sinn und Bedeutung der Roosevelt-Revolution" sense and significance of the Roosevelt Revolution.
[3] In framing the arrival of FDR to rescue us from the Dust Bowl, Stoye sees FDR as a "powerful leader" who amassed governmental authority unto himself, and Stoye in 1935 saw that as a good thing. (See also the conservative 2006 book, "Three New Deals: Why the Nazis and Fascists Loved FDR," by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, here.)
[4] The Spain book was called, "Spanien in Umbruch: Leistungen und Ziele der Franco-Regiering," or Spain in Revolt: Methods and Goals of Franco Regime. Here.
[5] This Google Books page suggests Stoye was really a book mill, apparently with sister books on Japan and France as well.
A source called World Cat lists Stoye's lifespan as 1900-1948 and lists about a dozen books in total, click here.
If you take the card catalog's lifespan of 1900-1948 and then google it with the name Johannes Stoye, you hit a gravestone index website, here.
Stoye is listed as being as being buried in a "Speciallager" of the "NKWD" and together these mean that he died in a Russian concentration camp during the postwar Occupation, that is, a camp where the occupying Allies separated Nazi proponents from the rest of Germans.
Other than this, I have been unable to find any proper biography, even a paragraph, of Stoye.
A note on translation. Stoye himself, in British Empire, within a few pages says alternately "Blood and Soil," "Race and Soil," "People and Soil." There are also variances in German: at least one recent German book is titled"Blut und Erde" rather than the more common "Blut und Boden." Contemporary 2017 newspaper article in the US almost always used the term "Blood and Soil."
Representing something by a small symbolic part is "synecdoche," e.g. "soil" represents "national" and "blood" represents a race of people and their genetics. Here, the use of simple nouns for these political concepts also functions to downplay the significance of the ideas being signaled. A commonday word, "Blood," is a dog whistle reference to racial purity = racial genocide + murder of the mentally handicapped adults and children.
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Historic book reviews on Stoye include here and here and here.
For an earlier work with some parallels to Stoye's style, here.
Monday, August 7, 2017
Kakistokleptocracy
While there are 2M Google hits today for Kleptocracy (government by thieves), and a lesser but still notable 164,000 hits for Kakistocracy (government by the worst), there are only 8 for Kakistokleptocracy.
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