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Jack London was born John Griffith Chaney in San Francisco on January 12, 1876. An adventurer and Jack of all trades in his youth, London achieved fame and fortune as a fiction writer and journalist. But he never forgot his working class roots and remained a life-long advocate of workers’ rights, unionism, and revolutionary socialism. (See his essay “What Life Means to Me.”)
But Jack London was no ordinary leftist, for he was acutely racially conscious (see, for example, “The Yellow Peril“) and had such a marked Nietzschean/Social Darwinist ethical sensibility that Ragar Redbeard’s infamous Might is Right or The Survival of the Fittest was widely, though mistakenly, attributed to him. Thus London is also a favorite writer of New Rightists and White Nationalists, particularly West-Coast White Nationalists and those who hope for the re-emergence of a racially conscious left.
Jack London, age 9, with his dog Rollo
London’s best known books are Call of the Wild and White Fang, drawing upon his experiences in the Klondike Gold Rush; The Sea-Wolf, a psychological thriller and portrait of a brutal sea captain; and The Iron Heel, a dystopian novel about oligarchy and revolutionary socialism which became one of the literary inspirations of William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries.
The Library of America has published two handsome hardcover volumes of London’s principal works: Novels and Stories: Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Sea-Wolf, Klondike and Other Stories
In 1905, Jack London bought a ranch in Sonoma County where he experimented with ecologically sustainable farming and ranching techniques. In 1916, Jack London died of kidney failure. He was only 40 years old. He left two daughters, plus 20 novels, 10 collections of short stories, three plays, three collections of essays, two autobiographical memoirs, and countless other works.
Counter-Currents has published the following works by Jack London:
- “What Life Means to Me”
- “The Yellow Peril” (German translation here)
See also the following works about Jack London:
- Andrew Hamilton, “Jack London’s ‘To Build a Fire’”
- Instauration, “Jack London”
- Dietrich Wolf, “The Soul of Jack London,” Part One, Two, Three, and Four
The following articles mention Jack London:
- Julius Evola, “The Overcoming of the Superman”
- Greg Johnson, “West-Coast White Nationalism” (French translation here)
3 Comments
My favorite London novel is “The Star Rover” in which he delineates his metaphysical belief of reincarnation. It is a profound vision of upward striving by continuous strife and the best marrying to the best. One of my favorite short stories is “The Gods Of My Fathers” in which two valiant white men remain racially loyal to a cowardly christian preacher whom agitates a tribe of indians and then runs away after denying his christian god. The brave white gold prospectors fight until the end, maintaining their racial loyalty. When the indian chief offers to let the last man live if he rejects his god, the offer is refused. When the last man is asked if he has a god, he replies, “Yes, the god of my fathers,” and dies on a spear. It is obvious the last man is referring to Thor or Odin. The only objection to London’s writing is that the protagonists are usually mated to a non-white. Still, he is one of my favorite white nationalist writers.
I was able to bring up Jack London in a debate the other day with a Leftie when explaining that I too was a socialist and that there was a long history of race-conscious socialists in the country.
It was convenient to link to the Counter-Currents work on the subject.
Regarding the racially conscious left, it’s worth noting that the pioneers of racial anti-Semitism were socialists. Gustave Tridon (Du molochisme juif), Eugène Gellion-Danglar (Les Sémites et le sémitisme, aux points de vue ethnographique, religieux et politique), Edmond Picard (L’Aryano-Sémitisme), Albert Regnard (Aryens et Sémites), Eugen Dühring (Die Judenfrage), and others wrote books explicitly addressing the Jewish problem as a racial problem.
What Tridon wrote long ago remains true:
“The Semites are the stain in the picture of civilization, the bad genius of the earth. All their gifts are pests. To combat the Semitic spirit and Semitic ideas is the task of the Indo-Aryan race.”
“The task of the modern mind is therefore to completely overthrow the Semitic spirit and to return to the ancient destiny of our race.”
Incidentally, it seems that the term “socialism” was coined by Pierre Leroux, who wrote a work titled Les Juifs, rois de l’époque, after the work by the socialist and proto-ecologist Alphonse Toussenel.