Prepared for Democracy on the Anniversary of January 6th?

In Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941) Gary Cooper plays a homeless man who’s used by corrupt forces to control a budding populist movement.

Capra kept the plot secret until the film's release for fear of American fascists utilizing it for propaganda purposes, and filmed five different endings.

Liz Cheney has spent years learning how the Federal Government works.*
That’s why I take it seriously when Cheney says, in her book Oath and Honor, that the U.S. is “on the precipice of losing” its’ system of government because “a free society that abandons the truth—that abandons the rule of law—cannot remain free.”

On the other hand, most U.S. citizens are fairly ignorant on how Government runs.
Despite this, they seem to have great faith in the overall stability of the checks and balances system.
We seem to believe that the political system will continue ( as if on autopilot), without everyone needing to vote. 

As Rachel Maddow reveals in Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, the late 1930’s was also a time when the U.S. political system was tested.
During that period, admired hero and aviator Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974), said that Americans should “guard their heritage” from the “Mongol and Persian and Moor, before we become engulfed in a limitless foreign sea.”
Popular Catholic radio broadcaster, Father Charles Coughlin (1891-1979), called for a General Franco-style armed revolt against “invaders of our spiritual and national rights.”
(Tens of millions listened to his sermons, and some set up arsenals!)

Some artists, and thinkers, saw the danger in the 1930’s.
Little-known British author Katharine Burdekin wrote Swastika Night (1937).
This is an alternative history science fiction story in which Adolf Hitler, and the Nazis, won.
(It’s spooky that this work was written just as WWII was beginning!)
In this prescient novel, a male character muses about Democracy (italics and bold face mine):

In a democracy no man of character is willing to give up his right of private judgment. . . there is also the large mass of weaker men, who must be told always what to do . . . I still do not see how democracy can be made to last long enough to develop character in a sufficient number of people. . . And there is another thing. Has a democracy ever started in a community, a nation, where the men all really considered themselves equal, no one fundamentally and unalterably superior to any other?

In 1940, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt expressed similar (if more optimistic) thoughts in her article “The Moral Basis of Democracy” (italics and bold face mine):

If human beings can be changed to fit a Nazi or Fascist pattern or a Communist pattern, certainly we should not lose heart at the thought of changing human nature to fit a Democratic way of life. . . Real Democracy cannot be stable and it cannot go forward to its fullest development and growth if this type of individual responsibility does not exist, not only in the leaders but in the people as a whole.

Katharine Burdekin and Eleanor Roosevelt reached similar conclusions—that a Democracy was only possible if everyone (people of whatever social class and skin tone) was equal, and if everyone was willing to compromise.
(The other choice is first chaos, and then Authoritarianism.)

Italian poster for 1956’s Alexander the Great, in which Richard Burton played Alexander—the Macedonian ruler who conquered all the Greek tribes and most of western Asia.

Alexander inherited power over Macedonia from his father Philip (Fredric March).

Maintaining a Democracy isn’t easy.

It’s not even natural.
For a very long time, “might makes right” seemed to be the rule, and people are mainly concerned about their own needs.
Eventually, humankind developed “the Divine Right of Kings,” and “royal blood,” myths (so sons could succeed fathers).
(This made the passing down of power slightly less contentious.)

Servilius Casca (Edmund O’Brien) struck the first blow against Julius Caesar (Louis Calhern) in 1953’s Julius Caesar.

(Roman senators feared that Julius Caesar would make himself monarch of Rome, but actually, his fall led to a string of emperors.)

Beginning in the 6th century BC, the Greeks, and later the Romans, experimented with people ruling themselves.

In the Greek city-state of Athens, however, slaves and women were excluded from voting.
In Roman society—during the periods when people were allowed to vote—only aristocratic men could vote.
Roman society still maintained the fiction that rule was “with the consent of the governed.”

Europe began to flirt with democratic concepts in the late 1600s.
In 1689, the British Parliament established a Bill of Rights (used as a model for the U.S. 1789 Bill of Rights).

Workers riot in the 1927 science-fiction classic Metropolis.

Critics have called the politics of the film “incoherent”, since both communists and fascists believe that the movie validates their respective philosophies.

One hundred years later, in 1789, the French people rose up against aristocratic rule.
Ten years later Napoleon Bonaparte gained control of France, however, and he eventually crowned himself Emperor.
Today, the British don’t vote directly for their Prime Minister.
Presidents of France are elected by voters—usually, in a two-round system—because there are several political parties.

The U.S. was the first “modern” experiment in Democracy.
However, the U.S. was handicapped with confusion over who was in charge.
In a perfect world, the Declaration of Independence should have read “all humankind is created equal.”
Instead, Black enslaved people, Native Americans, and women were all left out.
Were some Founders really thinking “white Anglo-Saxon Protestant wealthy men,” when they proclaimed “all men are created equal?”
Have Americans always lived in a Democracy in which one group is more equal than others?

Two factors have helped to keep Democracy stable: the U.S. had a large middle class, plus plenty of room to “spread out.”
(Was it “from sea to shining sea,” and Manifest Destiny, that kept Democracy alive?)
However, the size, and prosperity, of the middle class has shrunk since the 1970s.
Today, 66.6% of the total wealth in the U.S. is owned by 10% of the earners and the lowest 50% of earners only hold 2.6% of the total wealth.
(The balance tilts further every year.)

Why are schools so relentless positive about the strength of American “checks and balances” system?
Why are the times—when the rules were bent by people in high places—discussed in academia, but not in textbooks?
We should know more about the occasions when mistakes were made, so we can prevent errors in the future.

There are many examples when “the system” failed.
In the little-discussed 1876 election, Democrat Samuel J. Tilden won the popular vote, and would also have won the electoral college vote.
However, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes still became the nation’s 19th president, in a “smoke-filled room,” allowing both parties to end Reconstruction!
In Prequel, Rachel Maddow reveals how powerful Senator Burton K. Wheeler (1882-1975) engineered the firings of two Department of Justice employees, so as not to further publicize his pro-fascist deeds.

Unless we own up to the fragility of our system, we may lose it altogether.
It seems that our schools, textbooks, religions and parents haven’t done an adequate job of building character in the American voter, or changing human nature so it fits a Democratic (rather than an Authoritarian) model.
Why are so few of us prepared for living in a Democratic system?
Why do so few people vote?

*Liz Cheney represented Wyoming in the U.S. House from 2017-23. Before that, she was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, and worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development. In Oath and Honor, Cheney explains how her parents taught her American history, and about being a citizen.

Outside the “Norm,” and Madness

Benny Russell (Avery Brooks) writes for Incredible Tales, a science-fiction magazine, in 1950s New York in the DS9 episode “Far Beyond the Stars.”

(Other members of the writing staff look on.)

In the “Far Beyond the Stars” episode (season 6, episode 13) of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) is given a vision, by an alien race, of himself as Benny Russell—a science-fiction writer in 1950’s America.

During the episode, he is beaten by two policemen, endures aggression from shopkeepers, and is criticized by his Editor for writing “unbelievable” stories in which a Negro man is a starship captain.
Benny begins to question his own sanity.

While I was writing the 10/1/23 memorandum “Fit to be Tied (in a Straitjacket),” I didn’t cover the effect of being Black, on whether people may be confined for behaving in a way that seems “mad’ or “out of the norm.”

In 1851, an American health “expert,” Samuel A. Cartwright (1793-1863), invented a new “disease of the mind.”
He called it “drapetomania”—the wish of slaves to escape from their masters.
According to Dr. Cartwright, any slave who wanted to escape from his/her state of slavery, was by definition “crazy.”
(Similar beliefs about women, caused men to place their wives in insane asylums.
If a housewife wasn’t content with her lot in life, she could be locked up, or a few generations later, lobotomized!)

After the Civil War, Southern states set up mental hospital facilities specifically for Black patients.
Between 1861-1882, asylums (with separate wings for Black patients) opened in at least seven states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia.
“Treatments” included experimental surgeries and forced sterilization.

In the Heat of the Night (the 1967 film) starred Sidney Poitier as Detective Virgil Tibbs.

Reacting to being slapped, Detective Tibbs slaps a wealthy plantation owner.

(It was Poitier’s idea for Detective Tibbs to return the slap.)

A generation later, Confederate veteran John Fulenwider Miller (1834-1905) arrived on the scene.
He was superintendent of a North Carolina state mental institution for Black patients from 1888 to 1906.
Dr. Miller claimed that the Black nervous system was “less sensitive to environments.”
At the same time, he theorized that Blacks were “unable to handle freedom,” because they were “mentally weaker” than white people.
His medical journal articles influenced generations of medical professionals, and caused great harm to patients.

Noah Cullen (Sidney Poitier) is chained to John "Joker" Jackson (Tony Curtis) in a lobby card for Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones.

Kramer’s goal was to stress that all human beings have the same nature.

About 50 years later, Clennon Washington King Jr. (1920-2000) was a university professor, minister, and politician.
In 1958, he tried to enroll at the University of Mississippi for summer classes, but was denied.
Local authorities couldn’t arrest him for this attempt, so instead Reverend King was involuntarily committed to a mental hospital, for twelve days. 

Between the 1920s through the 1980s, as many as 100,000 to 150,000 people a year (often Black, Latin, Native American, and recent immigrants) were sterilized in the U.S. and its’ territories.
Frequently, this was done without their consent.
Patients were vulnerable to this procedure because they were being confined—in mental institutions, or in prisons.

Hospital patient McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) talks with hospital orderly Turkle (Scatman Crothers) in a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Dr. Arthur L. Whaley (Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas) has stated that today Black patients are more likely to be hospitalized in mental hospitals than white patients who have the same symptoms.
Also, Blacks are incarcerated longer in mental hospitals, and are more likely to be restrained with drugs.

Not only are Blacks more likely to be forcibly committed to mental institutions; they are burdened by various false perceptions.
According to a 2017 article (published by the American Psychological Association*) Black men are perceived as larger, and more threatening, than white men of the exact same size and weight.
This has resulted in Black men—especially those undergoing a mental health crisis—being murdered in interactions with police, even when they are unarmed.
According to the same study, Black men with darker skin tones, are feared more than Black men with lighter skin tones!

The “Racial Bias” study involved men.
However, I’m sure that if a similar study were performed involving Black women, there would be a similar result.
The Kentucky police department must have perceived Breonna Tayler as a dangerous “superwoman.”
Why else were three heavily-armed policemen sent to search the apartment of an emergency room technician?
Why did Sandra Bland end up dead in a Texas jail cell?
Was it for not showing “sufficient respect” (as a Black woman) to a white male state trooper, after a lane change traffic stop?
The African American Policy Forum (#SAYHERNAME) has a lot of data on this subject. 

*”Racial Bias in Judgments of Physical Size and Formidability: From Size to Threat,” by John Wilson, PhD, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, March 13, 2017.

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.