Worshipping "Aryan" Blondness

Poster promoting the 1936 Berlin Olympics in England and America.

It’s amused me that Nazis placed the tall, blond, blue-eyed, square-jawed “Aryan” on a pedestal despite the fact that Hitler (and most Germans) didn’t fit the Aryan stereotype.
This memorandum describes two science fiction alternative history novels—one from 1974 and another from 1937—that dealt with the blond Aryan stereotype and Nazism.
This piece also touches on the roles for blond men on screen. 

“Aryan” was originally just a language term.
It referred to the prehistoric peoples who spoke Indo-European languages, and “Indo-European” covers a big area, Europe, the Iranian plateau, and northern India.
During the 1850s, the term “Aryan” was “adapted” by French “thinker” Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882) to refer to “white” Europeans (that is, Northern Europeans who weren’t Jewish).
Adolf Hitler, and the Nazis, fixed upon De Gobineau’s discredited theory that “whiter-skinned” Europeans were intrinsically “superior” to Southern Europeans (and the rest of the world population).

The original cover for The Iron Dream illustrated its’ yellow-haired hero (shown above).

Later editions showed Hitler on the cover, to clarify that The Iron Dream was a satire!

In 1974, Norman Spinrad spun the satirical science-fiction tale The Iron Dream.
(I’m told it was a big hit on college campuses.)
The Iron Dream contains a post-apocalyptic novel called “Lord of the Swastika” (written by an alternate-universe Adolf Hitler), along with an afterword by a fictional editor/historian called Homer Whipple.
The afterword is set on an Earth in which WWII was never fought, and in which Hitler immigrated to the U.S. (in 1919) and became a hack science-fiction illustrator/writer, in New York City.

According to the Iron Dream afterword, “Lord of the Swastika” was Hitler’s final work, written just before his death (in 1953) of causes probably related to syphilis.
In Whipple’s afterword—supposedly written five years after the Hitler novel was created (1958)—most of Europe and Africa (including Great Britain), had become the “Greater Soviet Union.”
The U.S. and Japan are tight allies, because only they hadn’t gone Communist.

Hitler’s novel, on the other hand, is set on a post-apocalyptic Earth in which a nuclear holocaust has made most humans mutants.
While a few settlements remain in which human-looking people predominate, most cities contain deformed mutants, plus another type of mutant (Dominators).
Like Professor X in the Marvel Universe, the Dominators are able to telepathically control others.
Their power is so frightening to “true humans” that Dominators are killed as soon as they’re identified.
The Earth is living in an uneasy truce. 

Doc Savage, the 1930s pulp hero created by Lester Dent, was not an Aryan superman.

His eyes weren’t blue; they were light brown, flecked with gold.

A "hero" (named Fenric Jaggar) comes on the scene to claim his "birthright as a genotypically pure human"
(“Feric” is close to the German word for iron (ferric); “Jaggar” is similar to a word for warrior or hunter.)
Feric is described as “a tall, powerfully-built true human in the prime of manhood.
His hair was yellow, his skin was fair, his eyes were blue and brilliant.
His musculature, skeletal structure, and carriage were letter-perfect, and his trim blue tunic was clean and in good repair.”
(As you can see from this excerpt, Spinrad was trying his best to imitate the over-the-top writing style of a pulp writer.)

At first, Feric just wants to live in a “true human” society.
After he discovers that “true humans” are living in close proximity to mutants, he decides on genocide as the best solution.
As Feric builds a following, he uses visual symbols—flags, swastikas, and uniforms of “shiny black leather”—to manipulate the mass psyche.
These tools are just as important as his magic weapon (the “Great Truncheon of Held”) that he found in the Emerald Wood, and which only he is able to wield.

Feric gains power among “his people,” and begins a bloody World War against the Dominators and the rest of the lizard and parrot-people mutants.
In Whipple’s afterword, he decries the “nauseating violent excesses,” “blatant phallic symbolism,” and complete lack of female characters in “Lord of the Swastika.”

I didn’t enjoy the endless battle scenes, but I did enjoy the ending before the ending of The Iron Dream.
The ancient leader of the Dominator mutants faces off with Feric, and before the mutant dies, he’s able to push a button, and set off several nuclear bombs.
Feric survives, but he’s no longer a “genotypically pure human.”
Neither is anyone else born on the planet Earth.
(This wasn’t the actual ending of the novel, but I wish it was.)

(Control-click on the cover to enlarge to read the cover text)

Cover of Swastika Night. British author Katharine Burdekin used the pen name Murray Constantine.

Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night is a much better read, and (unlike The Iron Dream) rich in psychological insights.
This science-fiction tale also deals with the tall, blond, blue-eyed, square-jawed “Aryan” stereotype.
However, it was written in 1937, thirty-seven years before The Iron Dream was written, and the very year that WWII began.

Swastika Night is set on an alternate Earth more than 700 years after Germany and Japan have won WWII.
The two countries have split the world between them, and a main character is Alfred EW 10762, an ordinary-looking thirty-year-old airplane technician who’s traveled from subjugated Britain to visit the “Holy Places” in Germany, where long-dead Adolf Hitler is worshipped in the Nazi state religion.(There’s a sacred spot along the Rhine River where Hitler swam across.)

Englishman Alfred meets an elderly Nazi Knight named Frederick Van Hess (descended from Rudolf Hess).
(The ruling class doesn’t have numbers in their names.)
Van Hess has preserved a family manuscript for over 25 generations that reveals the long-hidden true history of the world.
This manuscript contains a real photograph of Adolf Hitler.
Alfred learns that Hitler was not a seven-foot-tall warrior with long golden hair, and a “noble rugged brow.”
Germans didn’t create civilization, and weren't always the “Master Race.”
One subject of Swastika Night is how Alfred deals with the discovery that everything he’s been taught since childhood is a lie.

In some ways, Swastika Night was a precursor to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
Unlike Atwood’s vision, however, women aren’t split into two separate classes—“elevated wives” and “child-bearing women.”
Instead, in Burdekin’s Nazi society, all women are “kept in pens: their heads are shaved bald, they wear formless gray sacks, and their only purpose in life is to produce sons for their masters.” 

Rosa Klebb (Lotta Lenya) and Grant (Robert Shaw) in the James Bond film From Russia with Love.

Since blond hair usually darkens with age—and only 2% of the world population has blond hair anyway—many actors have resorted to peroxide to represent the blond, blue-eyed “superman” on stage and screen.
Dark-haired English gentleman, Robert Shaw, dyed his hair blond to play the muscular villain (Grant) in From Russia with Love, and Panzer tank commander Col. Hessler in Battle of the Bulge. 

Hamlet (Lawrence Olivier), with Yorick’s skull, in a photo released for the 1948 film Hamlet.

Actually, unless blond hair is matched with a muscular build, blond men aren’t always “supermen.”
According to theatre lore, Lawrence Olivier dyed his brown hair platinum blond so he could play the “archetype Dane” in Hamlet.
(As a result, other actors—especially younger actors in student productions—began to sport blond hair when playing “Hamlet.”)
Olivier believed that blond hair weakened the forcefulness of his appearance, and was better suited for the part.

Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry) views his “Creation” (Peter Hinwood) with appreciation, in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I’m pretty sure that Peter Hinwood, the “Creation” in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), was a natural blond.
However, he dyed his hair lighter for the role.
(His physical form was perfect, but his personality was a bit “wimpy” in Rocky Horror.)

Speaking of blond hair indicating weakness in a man, according to a 2011 study* brown hair in men is associated with being attractive, intelligent and competent, while blond hair in men is associated with being “needy.”
After all, isn’t it “tall, dark and handsome?” and not “tall, blond and handsome?”

*”British Men’s Hair Color Preferences: An Assessment of Courtship Solicitation and Stimulus Ratings,” V. Swami and S. Barrett, Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, Vol 52, 2011, December.

So Ye Have Done It to Me

 Mike Johnson became the 59th Speaker of the House on October 25, 2023.
When questioned as to his world view, Mr. Johnson commented that all one needed to do to understand him was to read the Bible.
I hope he was referring to the New Testament, and not the Old.
The New Testament contains less contradictions on what constitutes good behavior.

It’s always interested me that the Bible says many contrary things, but people still use the Bible to prove their points, ignoring the conflicting material.

In the American South of the 1800’s, Protestant ministers (and Roman Catholic priests) used passages from the Old Testament to justify slavery.
They quoted Ephesians 6:1: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters.”
However, they ignored Exodus 21:16, about putting one to death who “stealeth a man and selleth him.”

Oxford student Lord Fancourt Babberley (Jack Benny) dresses up as Charley Wyckham’s aunt, and accepts a kiss from Miss d’Alvadorez (Kay Francis), in 1941’s Charley’s Aunt—a slapstick comedy in which the joke is men wearing women’s clothing.
(The Brandon Thomas play was originally performed in 1892.)

Although Jesus famously said that clothing is unimportant (and to look at the lilies of the field), there are sartorial proscriptions in the Old Testament.
These include: not wearing a “garment mingled of linen and woolen” (Leviticus 19:19 and Deuteronomy 22:11); not wearing the apparel of the other sex (Deuteronomy: 22:5) and not trimming hair in a round shape (Leviticus 19:27). 

The Old Testament contains various dietary rules that have long been ignored by European and American Bible-readers.
According to Leviticus 11:3-7, people shouldn’t eat the meat of camels, hares, or swine.
Leviticus 11:10 says not to eat shellfish.
Yet, pork is a common protein, and mussels have been sold as a street food in cities (like London) since the 1600’s.

Carl (Rod Steiger) in a poster for 1969’s The Illustrated Man.

According to a 2023 Pew study, 32% of Americans have at least one tattoo, ignoring Leviticus 19:28 which bars printing any “marks upon you.”

Leviticus 18:22 says “thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind.”
However, Leviticus 18:19 also forbids sex during menstruation; “pulling out” and not completing the sex act (Genesis 38:9); and not immediately cleaning up semen stains (Leviticus 15:2-13). 

Indeed, Leviticus proscribes many behaviors, but gives little information on which actions are worse: putting “a stumbling block before the blind” (Leviticus 19:14); going “up and down as a talebearer among the people” (Leviticus 19:16); or “seeking after wizards” (Leviticus 19:31 and 20:20).

The one issue that the Bible seems very firm on, in both the Old and New Testaments, is treating strangers well.
In Leviticus 19:33-34, the reader is told to not vex strangers, and “love them as thyself.”
In Matthew 25: 40, the Bible says “as ye have done it unto the least of my brethren, ye have done it to me.”
How does this square with declaring the U.S. is closed, and Governor Abbott setting up a 1,000-foot floating barrier in the Rio Grande River?

A political pin honoring Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

E.C.S. and her husband (Henry Brewster Stanton) had seven children.

Their 47-year marriage lasted until his death.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) was a leader in the U.S. Women’s Rights movement.
She was both a devout Christian, and a rationalist.
During her long life, she corresponded with various Protestant ministers: among them, Reverend Theodore Parker (an American minister, who believed that the Bible needn’t be taken literally) and Bishop John William Colenso (a Cornish cleric who preached that the customs of one society shouldn’t be imposed on all societies).

Eventually, she put together a committee and published The Women’s Bible,* when she was 80 years old.
One fact that E.C.S. points out in this work is that the punishments against women in the Bible are frequently much worse than the punishments against men.
(For example, a woman may be scourged, but a man just pays a fine, for the same sin.)
As E.C.S. comments on Numbers 12: “As women are supposed to have no character or sacred office, it is always safe to punish them to the full extent of the law.”

The Women’s Bible focuses on the many contradictions in the Bible.
A table on page 18 points out the two contrary descriptions of the creation in Genesis (the Elohistic and the Iahoistic), asking how both can be literally true.
Was land created after water, or before?
Were man and woman created at the same time, or was woman created after vegetation and animals? Which order was it?

German poster of 1949’s Samson and Delilah, which featured Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr in the title roles.

Clara B. Neyman commented on Judges (in The Woman’s Bible), that: “The absence of moral traits is very evident in Samson, and this is the reason why he fell easy prey to the wiles of designing women.
One of the great charms of The Woman’s Bible is its’ sarcastic humor.
(Although there were more than 30 co-authors, two-thirds of book is by E.C.S.)

Poster for 1966’s The Bible: In the Beginning.

When God talks to Noah in this film, the Director (John Huston) played both parts.

Commenting of the story of Noah’s Ark in Genesis, E.C.S. says “the ark made by unseen hands, like a piece of Indian rubber, was capable of expanding indefinitely.”

Of course, there was an immediate outcry against The Women’s Bible, and this outcry effectively ended E.C.S.’s leadership in the Suffrage movement.
However, E.C.S. believed until the end of her days that although the Bible contained many redeeming passages, it was essentially made up of “‘religious superstitions’ which. . . perpetuated women’s bondage.”
As a mother of the Women’s Rights movement, she felt she needed to fight against a literal reading of the Old Testament for the ultimate good of “her girls,” that is, women.

*The Original Feminist Attack on the Bible (The Women’s Bible), by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, with an introduction by Barbara Welter, 1974, Arno Press.

Reframing Our Relationship to Life

Ismael (Richard Basehart) and Queequeg (Friedrich von Ledebur) in the 1956 film version of Moby Dick. “Heathen” Queequeg represented the goodness that Christianity preaches, but seldom obeys in practice.

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville (1851), is arguably one of the greatest works in literature, and the subject of many critical studies.
One of the clearest interpretations* I’ve found is that Captain Ahab represents the will to dominate the world (above all other considerations), while the white whale represents unpredictable Life.

Captain Ahab (Gregory Peck) dies plunging his harpoon into the white whale. Ahab didn’t care about his ship staying sound or the lives of his crew; he only desires revenge. (Does this remind you of a presidential candidate whose name begins with a T?)

Stories in which the creatures of the ocean fight back against humanity are also found among the first science-fiction tales.
In 1870, French author Jules Verne (1828-1905) wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, in which giant squid capsize ships.

1912 book cover of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

H.G. Wells (1866-1946) wrote the short story “The Sea-Raiders” (1896), about large predatory squid that creep ashore to devour human beings.
In 1936, Karel Čapek (1890-1938) wrote War with the Newts, a novel about intelligent salamanders who win primacy over the earth.
The Kraken Wakes, by John Wyndham (1953), is the story of entities from beneath the oceans attacking coastal towns, eliminating the glaciers, and sinking vessels.
In Frank Schätzing’s The Swarm (2015), a team of marine biologists are able to communicate with an amoeba-like intelligence that is attacking humankind, and has lived in the oceans for millions of years.
This memorandum compares the last three novels in the above list.

Book cover of Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts.

War with the Newts begins with a Czech seaman Van Toch “discovering” intelligent newts off the coast of Sumatra.
Captain Van Toch finds that the nearly human-sized black salamanders are “teachable” and willing to bring him precious pearls in exchange for human-made tools.
He travels back to Czechia to persuade a businessman (Mr. Bondy) to fund money-making schemes that use the newts.
For the first few years, their company just uses the newts to gather pearls.
(However, that industry merely reaps a 30% profit.)
Unsatisfied with those numbers, the company begins to use the newts for elaborate hydro-engineering projects.
During the next few years, humans become ever more dependent on the newts: as a free labor source, and as consumers for human goods.

Book cover of The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham.

Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes is told from the viewpoint of a married couple (Phyllis and Mike Watson) who are science writers for a British competitor to the BBC.
Another main character is a scientist named Alastair Bocker.
At first, Dr. Bocker believes that humankind can coexist with the beings from the deep, but he later realizes that war is necessary.
The mysterious entities begin to sink ships, and the observation chambers sent to investigate them.
Then, they send gigantic jellyfish-like beings to carry off humans, injuring those that they don’t absorb.
Eventually, the creatures melt the icecaps causing the sea level to rise, so that the earth population is reduced by at least four-fifths.

Original German book cover of Frank Schätzing’s Der Schwarm.

In Frank Schätzing’s The Swarm, marine biologists gradually begin to understand that attacks by sea creatures, worms that destabilize the continental shelf, lobsters that spread poison, and swarms of white eyeless crabs are all a connected strategy.
They’re able to communicate with the amoeba-like creatures (controlled by a collective intelligence, the Yrr) that attacked humanity.
The novel concludes with a seeming truce between humankind and the newly-discovered marine life-form.

Čapek’s War with the Newts deals with humanity becoming dependent on sentient beings that it considers “inferior.”
However, the “subservient” amphibians become the primary power on the planet, as they remake the globe to match their own needs.
In The Kraken Wakes, an intelligence comes from the stars, and proceeds to remolding the earth as its’ new watery habitat.
(In both novels, the battle isn’t so much a war against humankind, as gentrification.)
In The Swarm, the goal of the “hive mind” may be to increase ocean area, but its’ other goal is likely to stop humanity from harming the ocean ecosystems. 

Book cover of Out of the Deeps, the American (heavily-edited and shortened by one chapter) version of The Kraken Wakes.

Motivations aside, the actions of the creatures are similar.
The newts create earthquakes which result in tidal waves, causing great loss of human life, and many more livable shorelines for the salamanders.
The alien creatures, in The Kraken Wakes, melt the polar ice caps raising the sea level by 120 feet, thereby killing and displacing millions of humans.
In Frank Schätzing’s The Swarm, worms (created by the amoeba-like Yrr) destabilize the continental shelf, causing a massive tsunami, again killing millions.

One quality that the three novels share with Moby Dick is a dark view of human behavior.
In one segment of Čapek’s The War with the Newts, a German newspaper proposes that “because of its German environment that this [the German] newt had developed into a different and superior sub-species, indisputably above the level of any other salamander.”
The Kraken Wakes also points out human defects: the ridiculous infighting as human governments drop nuclear bombs willy-nilly, blame each other, and fail to cooperate against the deep-sea menace.
The Swarm finds comic qualities in the grotesque, nativist belief systems of U.S. government officials.

All three of the science-fiction novels deal to some extent with religion.
In War with the Newts, humankind’s cruelty to sentient creatures is on constant display.
(American Black ministers are among the few that show any compassion toward the enslaved newts.)
In The Kraken Wakes, Mike Watson (speaking of humanity and the creatures in the Deep) tells his wife: “We can’t both inherit the earth.”
In The Swarm, religious groups are thrown into chaos by the concept that humans aren’t the primary life-form on the planet.
(In the epilogue, a Catholic bishop sprinkles “the waves with holy water and ordering the devils to depart.”)

The Swarm is more driven by ideas on ecology than either War with the Newts or The Kraken Wakes.
In the earlier novels, the salamanders and the alien entities (that arrive on earth via fireballs) wish to remake the earth, to make it a better home for their species.
However, the hive mind in The Swarm—by sinking and disabling ships, disrupting deep sea cables, and starting epidemics—seems set on saving the marine ecosystem from humanity.
Only when the Yrr realizes that it may have some commonality with humankind, does it stop its’ onslaught. 

Although many passages in the Bible preach that humanity should live peacefully with nature, people seem most impressed by the line in Genesis 1:26 about humankind having “dominion.”
Most ignore Genesis 9:1-19 in which Noah promises God that he, and his progeny, will become good stewards for “every beast of the earth.”
U.S. history shows that although the first stewards of the North American continent—the 600 Native American tribes—wanted to live in harmony with nature, the conquering (European Christian) worldview was to use the earth as a wealth source: killing beavers and bison to extinction, searching for gold and other minerals, creating havoc in ecosystems.

According to an article in Hakai (hakaimagazine.com), and reprinted in Smithsonian Magazine, humans “kill, collect or otherwise use about 15,000 vertebrate species, mostly for nonfood reasons.”
According to Dr. Andrea Reid (a scientist quoted in *”Humans Take Out More Wild Species Than Any Other Predator on Earth”) “if we want wild species—fish and beyond—to survive, we need to reframe our relationship with them, perhaps from predator to steward.”

*War in Melville’s Imagination, by Joyce Sparer Adler, The Gotham Library, 1981, pages 55-78.

Pink Flamingos and White Eyeless Crabs

Babs Johnson (Divine) outside her trailer with pink flamingo lawn ornaments in Pink Flamingos.

The above title isn’t a reference to the 1972 John Waters film Pink Flamingos.
Instead, the title comes from a long-ago discussion, when I was fifteen.
I was walking (in a Michigan neighborhood) with a German foreign exchange student.
We passed by a front yard bedecked with pink flamingo* lawn ornaments, when my new friend commented that this was the way she expected all American homes to look.
I got it.
She expected all Americans to be vulgar, ignorant and low-class.
It’s just the way Europeans thought of the U.S.A.
(I tried not to take it personally.)

This memorandum compares the 2006 English translation of the German eco-thriller The Swarm, to the 8-part mini-series (based on the novel), which aired on European TV in March of 2023, and in the U.S. on CW (sadly, the lowest-rated American network).
A future memorandum will deal with science-fiction novels that deal with humankind’s relationship with nature, and the oceans.

The Swarm deals with humanity destroying the oceans—dumping radioactive and industrial waste; laying down deep sea cables with magnetic fields (that interfere with the homing instincts of salmon and eels); and laying waste to ecosystems and coral reefs.
As the result of this activity, entities in the oceans begin to fight back.
Although the novel is science-fiction, and not a scientific book, most critics say The Swarm presents marine biology and geology very accurately.

Board game for The Swarm.

The Swarm novel sold over 4.5 million copies and has been translated into 18 languages.
The mini-series has an international cast, and the mini-series was the most expensive German TV show ever made.
There’s also a popular strategy board game, based on the novel, in which each player sends scientists to confront the ecological catastrophes.

Frank Schätzing, creator of the novel, is of the same generation as the German exchange student I knew in the late 1960s.
In his novel, the U.S. President talks about the “ridiculous little countries” of the U.N., and says that “God’s still holding His protective hand over the West.”
CIA Deputy Director Jack Vanderbilt wears “a bright yellow T-shirt bearing the words ‘Kiss me, I’m a Prince,’ stretched over his expansive belly,” when he greets a team of scientists.
The U.S. Defense Secretary arrogantly says to the President: “We are the free world. Europe is part of the American free world.”
(Most of the American government officials featured in the novel are hyper-nationalistic jerks.)

While the basic plots are the same, scientists versus a higher intelligence—that’s existed in the oceans for millions of years—a lot of material couldn’t be used from the 881-page novel.
Some characters (Norwegian biologist Sigur Johanson, American astrophysicist Samantha Crowe, and Canadian biologist Leon Anawak) carry over from the novel, but they’re altered, both in appearance (age and ethnicity) and in personality.
New characters were created, and the novel’s main American villains—General Judith Li, and CIA Deputy Director Jack Vanderbilt—are completely erased from the mini-series plot (probably, because of misguided hopes for reaching the “American market.”)

Scientist Sigur Johanson (Alexander Karim) in the mini-series The Swarm.

At the beginnings of both versions of The Swarm, we’re introduced to several scientists as they begin to realize that a superior intelligence exists deep in the oceans, and is moving against humanity.
Whales overturn ships, and millions of white eyeless crabs invade the shorelines.
A species of marine worm (with teeth) destabilizes the continental shelf, causing a tsunami that kills millions in Northern Europe.
Eventually, some of the scientists are united on a big ship, and attempt to communicate with the intelligence (named the Yrr by Dr. Johanson).
In the novel, the scientists unite on a gigantic U.S. Navy ship.
In the mini-series, a Japanese industrialist finances the mission.

Despite calling out many countries (including Germany) for their non-ecological methods, the novelist does focus, in a few instances, on American actions.
According to one section on the Vietnam War dolphin experiments, the U.S. Navy created a:

Swimmer Nullification Program. . .Those animals were trained to tug at divers’ masks and flippers and disconnect their air-supply. . . The navy strapped hypodermic needles to their beaks and the dolphins were ordered to ram the divers. . . Our animals killed over forty Vietcong and two of our own guys by mistake.

While I’ve read that the U.S. Navy did use dolphins to blow up ships during the Vietnam War, the idea of dolphins being turned into “killing machines” is a bit hard to accept.

A beached orca in the mini-series The Swarm. Its’ brain has been tampered with by the Yrr.

Another sequence deals with the U.S. Navy Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System (SURTASS), and how its’ brain-damaging sonar makes whales beach themselves.
(“Evidently the Americans couldn’t pass up on the opportunity of putting 80% of the world’s oceans under surveillance,” says a Canadian character in the novel.)
However, the U.S. already has plenty to feel guilty about in terms of polluting the oceans with DDT, nuclear waste, and chemicals (in case you’ve never read Rachel Carson’s 1962 science book Silent Spring).

In the novel, the first “physical” interaction with the Yrr occurs when dolphins return to the ship hanger with Yrr and murderous orcas.
Alicia Delaware, and other crew members, die gruesomely, and she’s taken over zombie-style.

Mini-series episode 7 is far less violent than the novel.
In it, after oceanographer Charlie Wagner (Leonie Benesch) and a robotics expert return to the ship in a submersible, they unknowingly bring the Yrr along.
Later, Alicia Delaware (Rosabell Laurenti Sellers) is alone in the hanger, when she spots a strange glowing form in the water.
The Yrr hijack her nervous system (just as it took over sperm whales, orcas, lobsters, and crabs).
Delaware is the Yrr’s first human experiment, and rather than becoming a zombie, she goes into a coma.

The final chapters of the novel involve the heroes fighting (action-movie style) with part of the U.S. Government.
Aware that destruction of the Yrr might end in earth’s extinction, the scientists hope for co-existence.
However, the American officials just want to eradicate the Yrr. . . no matter the consequences!
(In an attempt to implement their plan, Li and Vanderbilt kill many of the hero-scientists.)

The cover of a new American edition of The Swarm.

The novel ends with the big ship going down, and journalist Karen Weaver traveling down 3,466 meters in a submersible and dropping off a corpse (full of pheromones), for the Yrr to examine.
Only a few scientists and crew members survive the sinking.
Canadian biologist Leon Anawak rescues Karen Weaver from the water in a helicopter.
A year-later, an epilogue reveals that the nations of the earth are slowly recovering from the tsunamis and the Yrr-created pathogens.
We don’t learn much about the Yrr, but they do give surface creatures a reprieve.
However, at the point that the novel ends, humankind has gone into in a deep funk over its’ “loss of primacy,” and armed conflicts are spreading across the globe.

The mini-series ending is not quite as dark as the end of the novel.
Episode 8 concludes with oceanographer Charlie Wagner traveling deep in the submersible (to show “good faith” to the Yrr?), communing with them/it, and (strangely) washing up alive on shore.
Even a comatose Alicia Delaware seems to survive!
Since the last episode was listed as a season finale, and not a series finale, there’s the possibility of a second season.

In Frogs,  millionaire Jason Crockett (Ray Milland) represents those who want to “use up” the earth’s resources, and nature photographer Pickett Smith (Sam Elliott) represents those who respect the environment.

Putting The Swarm into context, it’s in the tradition of eco-thrillers. The 1968 Japanese film Genocide, also released as War of the Insects, tells of insects attacking humanity because of humanity's nuclear threat.
(Brave scientists battle the unreasoning American military in that film, as well.)
In 1972’s Frogs, reptiles, insects and amphibians stalk rich patriarch Jason Crockett after he uses poisons against creatures on his estate.
In Phase IV, ants (taken over by a superior intelligence from outer space) wage war against humankind in the American desert. 

Phase IV was released in 1974 with a truncated ending. The “real” ending (“discovered” in 2012) shows people merging with the ants, and a new species being formed. (Paramount found that ending too disturbing to use in the initial release.)

*According to the Wikipedia article on pink flamingos, some U.S. homeowner associations forbid the placement of these lawn ornaments because they lower real estate values.

You Can’t Tell the Players Without a Scorecard

2009’s District 9 in which members of an extraterrestrial race line up for food in a militarized refugee camp.

The book Round Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880-1930, by Mark Wyman, explains how millions of immigrants weren’t “immigrants” at all.
They were migrants.
Although there were 20 million migrations between 1890-1924, the return rate for that period averaged 35%, and many “immigrants” crossed the ocean back and forth several times.
Regions with the highest return rates were Southern Italy (60%), Romania (66%), and Slovakia (57%).
Between 1908-1923, 60% of Southern Italians returned to Italy (969,754 Italians out of 1,624,353).
Migrants labored in U.S. mines and stockyards, sweated in factories, and built U.S. transportation systems, but then traveled back home.
Many never considered living in the U.S. long-term, or becoming citizens. 

One reason for returning home was that although American wages were higher, the working conditions were worse.
In 1895, Chicago stockyard workers—mostly migrants—labored alongside children in rooms “flooded with water, foul smells, smoke, and steam” for 10 hours a day and 16 cents an hour (the equivalent of $5.86 per hour today).
Children made half that amount.
25% of the immigrant workers at the Carnegie Steel South Works (in Pittsburg) died or were injured between 1907-1910.
According to Round Trip to America, “travelers on returning ships were repeatedly struck by the large numbers of injured, broken, or ill immigrants on board and the multiplicity of widows.” 

Another reason for people returning home was nativist resentment.
One line from the poem by Emma Lazarus describes immigrants as “the wretched refuse of your teaming shore,” and that’s how migrants—especially those from southern Europe—were perceived.
An immigration inspector claimed in 1887 that the U.S. was “now receiving installments of the ignorant and degraded, a class that is little superior to the Digger Indians of the West.”
(“Digger Indians” is a derogatory term that was created to facilitate Manifest Destiny.)
More than 125 years later, former president Trump proclaimed (in 2023) that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

As soon as many immigrants recognized what they were getting into, a good share (especially those who wanted to stay) stopped working for others, and became entrepreneurs.
The first millionaire American (from 1810 until his death in 1831) was Stephen Girard—a banker and shipowner who was born in France.
In the 1920’s and 30’s, many immigrants started their own grocery stores, bakeries and butcher shops.
Other immigrants founded small toy and food-stuff factories—idea-based businesses.
In 2023, immigrants are still the principal force behind new American businesses.

“Forgotten man” and former socialite Godfrey Park (William Powell) wasn’t an immigrant, but he was “down on his luck” in 1936’s My Man Godfrey.

As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the 1830’s: “in no country in the world are private fortunes more precarious than in the U.S.
It is not uncommon for the same man in the course of his life to rise and sink again through all the grades that lead from opulence to poverty.”
Fortunes are still precarious, in this modern country.

Christopher Columbus (Gerard Depardieu) in 1492: Conquest of Paradise—a film that concealed (rather than revealed) many disturbing facts about his treatment of Native Americans.

The Columbus Day holiday had an interesting origin.
It began in 1891, when eleven dark-skinned Sicilian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans.
(There were false rumors that the Sicilians had been “let off,” after killing a white man.)
Italian consulates throughout the U.S. were incensed.
A year later, President Harrison helped create a holiday that would kill two birds with one stone.
It would honor the 400th anniversary of the “discovery of America,” and help Italians enter the mainstream of American society. 

A lobby card for 1944’s Fighting Sullivans, a film about five Irish-American brothers who died fighting for their country in WWII. It’s a myth that after the Sullivan brothers died, siblings were prevented from serving together.

During the Civil War, 25% of the men in the Union Army were immigrants, and another 25% were first-generation Americans.
During WWI, 18% of the U.S. soldiers were immigrants.
Detailed counts (on origins) weren’t kept for WWII.
However, Italian-American soldiers comprised at least 10% of the volunteers, and Polish-American soldiers at least 8% (far above their percentages in the U.S. population).
Scores of first generation Irish and German Americans volunteered to fight on the Allied side in WWII, seeking to prove their patriotism.

The current immigration policy is supposed to be based on three main factors—family reunification, labor market needs, and diversity.
The system is being overwhelmed, however, by asylum seekers (many bringing children).

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. has a labor shortage.
More workers—skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled—are needed in many fields: medicine, agriculture, hospitality, teaching, construction and manufacturing.
On the other hand, American business seems determined to widen the salary gap between upper management and blue-collar jobs, so many of the available jobs don’t pay very well.

Immigration is a very difficult issue.
An article by the Cato Institute in 2021 called the present system “archaic and barely coherent.”
An article on the Brookings Institute website, in 2023,* tells us that 80% of new technical jobs will go unfilled.
Are we allowing for asylum-seekers who may just want to work here, and find safety for their families?
Is it possible to recreate the immigration system so it isn’t tainted by nativism and prejudice?

* “Industrial Policy Will Require Immigration Reform,” Greg Wright and Emma Berman, September 29, 2023.