Joy Connection

Two years ago, I wrote about Robert A. Heinlein and his book Starship Troopers (1959). Heinlein of course has had his great admirers and his great detractors. There seem to be a lot of words written particularly on Starship Troopers (1959). If you do a simple online search using the terms "Heinlein" and "fascist," you're sure to find plenty to read about him and his novel.

When I wrote in 2022, I referred to an interview with George Michael in which he referred to the group Joy Division as fascist. Actually it was a discussion on the BBC-TV show Eight Days a Week, and Morrissey was in on it, too. And actually the late Mr. Michael referred to what he called the "very fascist elements" of Joy Division's image. So he didn't really say that they were fascist. The host of the show was Robin Denselow. The original broadcast took place on May 25, 1984, now forty years gone and how sad. I guess this is life. Anyway, you can watch the discussion for yourself on your favorite video website.

Joy Division drew its name from the pages of a novel called House of Dolls, written by a pseudonymous author, Ka-Tsetnik 135633, and published in 1955. The reference is to brothels called Freudenabteilungen, or Joy Divisions, operated in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Joy Division's first album was an EP called An Ideal for Living. On the cover is a drawing of a Nazi Youth beating a drum. That's as much as I know about any connections the band may have had to the elements or imagery of Nazism or fascism. One more thing, Joy Division was previously called Warsaw. I bring this up on the 85th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland.

There was still something hanging out there after I wrote two years ago, for I soon remembered that after the death of Ian Curtis in 1980, Joy Division became New Order. I doubt that the creators of Star Wars have made any connections at all between their universe and the British music scene of the 1980s, but there is a New Order, as well as a First Order, in Star Wars. These are the bad guys. The First Order, from the most recent trilogy, look and act like Nazis in fact. We're supposed to think of them as Nazis and to associate them, I think, with a major political party in America. Whatever, Disney. Oddly, the name of the band New Order came from an article about--I assume--the Khmer Rouge. They were socialists, too, except that they were of the international variety. And like socialists tend to be, they were murderous, just like the Nazis.

There has been a lot of talk of "joy" these past couple of weeks. The other one of our major political parties found strength through joy at their recent national convention. I'm not sure that any insider at that convention or since has used the phrase "strength through joy" in regards to their party or their convention. Maybe I'm the one making connections here. But the phrase "strength through joy" also has Nazi origins. Kraft durch Freude, or Strength Through Joy, was an organization set up in 1933 to promote leisure, sports, travel, and so on in the new Nazi regime. It had lots of its own offices (or divisions), its own programs, too. I would hazard a guess that now, nearly eighty years after the destruction of the Nazi regime, the only remnant of Strength Through Joy is the Volkswagen Beetle. I know, it's weird. More on that in a minute.

But first, the connections go back to music. There was a band called Strength Through Joy.  They released a single called "Sheila from Chicago," backed with "She Said Goodbye," in 1982. (I think this is correct. I'm working with scant information. By the way, The Smiths had a single called "Sheila Take a Bow." I doubt she was the same Sheila. Another by the way: Morrissey had an album called Kill Uncle [1991], named for a movie that I mentioned recently in this space. Connections after connections, references after references.) There was a different band called Strength Through Joy. If you read about them, you will come across the phrase "The Force" and the words gothic, Holocaust, and KAPO. Is there any significance to any of these things? I don't know. In 1980, a Scottish band called Skids recorded an album and a song called "Strength Through Joy." The album sold with another of their albums, The Absolute Game. Their fourth album was called simply Joy.

The Nazi-era organization Kraft durch Freude, or KdF--again, Strength Through Joy--promoted the production and sale of a car it called the KdF-Wagen. That car eventually became the Volkswagen Beetle, the word Volkswagen meaning "People's Car." It's for the people, you know. Always for the people. Even when you kill the people, it's for the people.

Here's an interesting advertisement I found, from Cosmopolitan magazine, 1944. Someone else found it before I did and posted it on the Internet:

The caption begins: "A Dictator's Newest Dream--the 'People's Car'." The original idea is that the People's Car would seat two adults and three children. I guess four soldiers and a machine gun will do. By the way, you should read the bold print in the first column. I don't know about you, but I would prefer to "keep these rights" for myself.

Bob Newhart died last month, on July 18, 2024. He was ninety-four years old. He was a national treasure, I think, a very funny--a naturally funny--man with a great delivery and manner. On May 18, 1983, he appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. There is a video of his appearance on that same website I alluded to before. I might as well provide a link. Click here to watch. At the 5:10 mark of that video, hear Bob, who was one-fourth German, talk about, in a German accent, the development of the Volkswagen. What are the holes in the side for? Ventilation. Those are for ventilation . . . and he continues. (I won't give away the punchline.) So did Bob Newhart see the Cosmopolitan ad from 1944? I doubt it. These thoughts come naturally to people who went through the war and those of us who grew up in its shadow and the shadow of what Nazis did to the world and its people. It's still hard to hear a German accent or German speech and not have your thoughts go in that direction. (Erica Jong's narrator feels that way in her novel Fear of Flying, from 1973.) It doesn't help that the whole continent seems to be going in that direction, too, and at a really rapid pace. As fast as lightning maybe?

The Volkswagen is literally "the people's car." During the Nazi era, it and Strength Through Joy were promoted through propaganda. So what other kind of car is promoted through propaganda? This kind of car:

When I say "this kind of car," I don't mean a BMW. (The B stands for Bavarian, by the way. There's some history there.) What I mean is the electric car, which is, like socialism in both its national and international forms, a scam and a folly and built upon the seizure of power by dangerous people and their useful idiots. But note the blurb: "Joy Electrified." (It needs a punctuation mark!) The car is powered--you might say it gets its strength--through electricity, and by driving an electric car, you will experience joy!

Here's an actual headline of an article written by Per Soderstrom and posted on the website Warp News on March 17, 2021 (link here):

"Electric cars for the people!"

Like the KdF-Wagen, the people's car, the car of which he wrote is inexpensive. I wonder if it has any holes in the side. You know, for ventilation.

A year and two months after "Electric cars for the people!" was posted, another electric car article appeared on the website of the Volkswagen Newsroom, this one was on May 20, 2022. Its title:

"Volkswagen joins forces with 'Obi-Wan Kenobi' for the launch of the new all-electric ID. Buzz"

Who knew there would be a connection between Star Wars and electric cars, let alone a Volkswagen? I guess that if you hook your electric car up to one of the biggest moneymakers in entertainment history, it can draw on its power. Or maybe its Force. Anyway, as always, if you follow any line long enough, it will make a circle.

Three years ago today, on September 1, 2021, I wrote about The Listeners by James Gunn. The events in that story transpire over many, many years. Some of them are from about our time, the early twenty-first century. The people of our time drive steam-powered cars in the late Mr. Gunn's book. When I read it, I thought that in that way he hadn't done a good job at prognostication. But then I realized that we have actually done something far more misguided than to return to steam. We have, in actuality, gone back to another old technology that we found more than a century ago to be inferior to the internal combustion engine. (At least steam engines run on combustion.) We gave up on it then in our great practicality and wisdom. Now we're going back. (I thought we weren't supposed to go back. I thought that--like Nazis and Bolsheviks--we were always supposed to go . . . Forward!) So I guess if there's one thing every science fiction writer should know, it's that people are so often stupid, foolish, ignorant, superstitious, also historically, scientifically, and I guess in every other way illiterate. It has always been this way and always will be. Getting into the future won't make us any better or smarter. We will always be human and always fallen.

The American political party that had its national convention recently wants to force people to buy and drive electric cars. And it wants all of us to pay for them. Remember the boldface print in the Cosmopolitan ad: "You can let a government decree when you shall do, what you shall buy, how much you shall pay." That's the first alternative. I like the second one better. (There's a third one, too. We chose that one in 1775.) The same questing after power is at work in the world now as when that ad was first printed. (The same Jew-hatred, too.) The former Great Britain--now Airstrip One--has descended pretty rapidly into tyranny in the past few years. British veterans of World War II must be wondering why they did what they did and why they even fought their war. What was the point if we were just going to give up everything to totalitarian regimes anyway? We in America may not be far behind the British. And if the lights go out here, what hope is there left for this world?

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley