Taking narrative liberties…
As Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull blasts its way through theaters, it’s instructive to think back to the picture that started all of this– Raiders of the Lost Ark— and to the inspirations for that blockbuster… Spielberg has talked at length about the popcorn movies of his youth that shaped his vision for the film. But there’s been less said about the sources used by George Lucas and Phil Kauffman (who wrote the story; Lawrence Kasdan wrote the screenplay).
Well, it turns out that there was a real-life model (or at least, precedent) for Indy– a globe-trotting, Grail-seeking (and kind of dashing) scholar named Otto Rahn
…only in real life, he was a member of the SS whose story took a very different turn– and had a very different ending– from Indy’s.
The (London) Telegraph has the whole story: “The original Indiana Jones: Otto Rahn and the Temple of Doom”— it’s a (two) page turner!
As we practice with our bull whips, we might might light a birthday firecracker for Mikhail Bakunin, the collectivist anarchist thinker (influencer of Noam Chomsky, among others), founder of Russian Nihilism, and enemy of Marx and Marxism– which Bakunin believed would lead inevitably to tyranny.
Bakunin was quite possibly the first theorist of the “new class”: the administrators and “wonks” forming the bureaucratic apparatus of the state. He argued that the “State has always been the patrimony of some privileged class: a priestly class, an aristocratic class, a bourgeois class. And finally, when all the other classes have exhausted themselves, the State then becomes the patrimony of the bureaucratic class and then falls– or, if you will, rises– to the position of a machine.”
See you on K Street…