Give Us Edgar!

Great piece at Lew Rockwell today, "Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned From Edgar Rice Burroughs." Link. Excerpts:

Perhaps the first thing I noticed about Burroughs is that, much like Robert Heinlein, none of his women characters are victims. And he was writing in the early 1900s. Were he alive today, I suspect he would hold Stalinist fruitcakes like Betty Friedan and Andrea Dworkin in contempt. Such whiney, self-pitying women, who think everything would be just fine if society was destroyed (and men's characters, too) and remade according to the crackpot fantasies infesting their heads, can't even begin to compare with a brave, smart, resourceful woman like Tavia in A Fighting Man of Mars, who hacked off the arms of a couple of 15-feet-tall six-armed Martian apes.

The third thing I learned is that maybe kings and queens are better than democracy. Barsoom was ruled ”“ and ruled justly ”“ by John Carter and Dejah Thoris. They barely appeared to rule at all. I really don't remember a list of laws in any of Burroughs' novels, other than the simple ones we all know ”“ you don't murder, you don't steal. Otherwise, you could do as you pleased.

But there's not a word in any of his novels about mob rule. Most of them read as if they could have been partly based on Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Democracy: the God that Failed. In fact, Burroughs doesn't have a good word to say about mobs. In The Gods of Mars he does a hatchet-job on the blind fanatical mobs that fall for that combination of the State, corrupt religion, and Big Business.