[Original Novel] The Eternal Mysteries of Vril, Part 5
source
Previous parts: 1, 2, 3, 4
I turned my attention to my phone, thumbs a blur as I hammered out a text to Neil asking him if we could meet at the bookstore again. When I next looked up, professor Travigan had nodded off and was now snoring, spectacles dangling precariously on the end of his nose.
I saw myself out, and received a text from Neil on the drive back to my dorm. It just said “Ok” followed by a time and date. I couldn’t blame him, given that I’d cut him out of my life so abruptly. Still...I expected more than “Ok”. The more I dwelled on it, the more I realized that I still felt something for Neil.
My affections were strong as ever, just lurking in the background, overshadowed by concerns about his sanity. I experimented, on the way back to my dorm, with a new perspective. Neil as a suffering creative type. But then, what about the professor?
Folie a deux? Is he the one responsible for inspiring Neil’s delusion? Or does he simply cultivate it for his own reasons? I resolved to ask Neil directly about his relation to the old man the next time I met up with him.
It would have to wait though, as I had sociology in the evening. The lecture hall was packed, probably more so than it would be for the remainder of the semester. Plenty of these people knew enough to show up for the first few classes, but from what I’ve heard, I could expect them to thin out as the weeks wore on.
To my amusement, someone more daring than smart had one of those plug in electric griddles set up in the furthest row. By the smell of it, he was using it to to make grilled cheese sandwiches. The professor, still busy unpacking her bag and preparing the lesson, either didn’t notice or wasn’t bothered enough to call him out.
“I’ve learned from experience not to assume any of you so much as read the introductory chapter.” There was an accusatory but open inflection to it. Nobody corrected her, so she continued. “The historical crimes of European colonialists were motivated of course by the pursuit of material wealth, which is to say the natural resources of the lands they plundered.
But beauty is also a natural resource and form of wealth, for the sake of which no small number of terrible things have been done. For example, some of you may be aware that Vikings preferentially brought back only the most comely women as brides, contributing to the appearance of Northern Europeans in the modern day.” With that, she powered up the aging projector, which then took its sweet time warming up.
Beauty is out of the hands of the individual, though. Not only do you have no choice whether to be born beautiful, but also no choice as to the beauty standards of the culture you’re born into. So imagine the feelings of a Georgian peasant girl in the seventeenth century upon learning that she is considered, by all learned men, to be representative of the greatest pinnacle humanity has yet reached and might ever aspire to.”
The first image to appear on the projected screen was one of a girl laying in a field of flowers with hair just a shade lighter than mine, and piercing blue eyes. I suddenly felt the uncomfortable sensation of many eyes upon me. The instructor picked up on it. “That’s by no fault of her own, you realise! She took no part in the history of rape and plunder which shaped her genome. She harbors no such delusions about herself, but would nevertheless become a pawn in a perverse game played by powerful men over the subsequent two centuries.”
The picture changed to propaganda posters from the Third Reich depicting statuesque, well toned blonde women with their arms outstretched to Hitler. “When we first mastered the principles of heredity, and thought to apply it to moulding the overall traits of humankind, the one thing it seemed everybody could agree on is that we should all be blondes for whatever reason. Also that we should have blue eyes and other typically nordic features. That was the first consideration. Not intelligence mind you, or why blondes?”
Some scattered laughter and snickering. “No, the first consideration was, how do we destroy ugly people forever? How do we sacrifice them for our betterment? Burn them as garbage, so that we can be forever beautiful, perfect and pure? In appearance of course. The only thing that matters to regimes of that sort.
But as it turned out, blondes aren’t super humans. At least not for combat purposes. To be fair, plenty of the Soviet troops were blonde and blue eyed, as were no small number of American soldiers sent against the Reich.
I wonder what Nazi officials would think of the fact that their actions ultimately served to steeply reduce the number of blondes in the world...no doubt if we’d left anything to survive of that regime, they would regard their loss as our best Aryans defeating their own, survival of the fittest.
Never you mind that the very concept of ‘Aryan’ was rooted in foolish superstition concerning the origins of Europeans as an offshoot of Indians. That was the smallest part of it though. I could teach a whole course just about the insane fever dreams the Nazis had, about how Tibetans are hiding the entrance to the hollow Earth. The sort of thing that only makes sense when you find out that their top officials were all tweakers.
I mean shit, usually tweakers are harmless. They burn themselves out in a few years, at worst they’ll kill another junkie in a fight or something. That’s not to make light of their suffering, meth addicts are human beings. But about the worst place I can imagine for one of them to wind up is in a position where they have a guaranteed, unlimited supply of both meth and control over other people’s lives. That’s a recipe for the total devastation of Europe and Japan.
The fanatical National Socialist quest for perfection really boiled down to the quest to make everybody beautiful. A full, unironic embrace of flash over substance. A betrayal of all other principles for the sake of the superficially gratifying. So that even if no other improvements occur in the future, and even if we have to commit unthinkable atrocities to achieve it, at least we’ll all look real pretty.”
The slide changed, now depicting a set of skulls with various instruments being used to measure their dimensions. “Starting from...firm...knowledge of what their penises liked, the assuredly unbiased and in all ways distinguished gentlemen responsible for racial science of the day went about justifying, post-hoc, why blondes should become the only form of humanity.
Note the typical unexamined male perspective at work here. The features they imagined were objectively most beautiful for both men and women also happened to be the most delicate. If women had instead been the judges of objective human beauty, what would their ideal humanity look like?”
Now most of the eyes were on the only black student in the room, who by the looks of it was entirely receptive to the professor’s implication. “...But that would be no less partial!” He deflated somewhat, but took it in good humor.
“Whenever human beings set themselves up in a position of supposed objectivity to judge this or that, the outcome tends to look suspiciously in tune with their sexual preferences, whether that was their conscious intent or not. We cultivate what arouses us and diminish what doesn’t.
That’s what it came down to. The wiles of fair skinned, golden haired, blue eyed maidens from the alpine regions of Europe. Scooped up by these power mad white colonialists and made into a commodity. The Third Reich killed for it. They died for it.
Joseph Smith went so far as to create a religion devoted in large part to preserving those features. A beauty which sank a thousand ships, and I’m sorry to say will probably will sink more in our time, so long as military leadership remains male dominated.”
I felt the paper cover from a drinking straw hit the side of my neck, followed by some juvenile giggling. I didn’t bother to turn around. “By no fault of their own!” the professor reiterated. “There remains stigma against undue fetishization of these features, even in the present day. It’s one thing to appreciate a beautiful woman. It’s another to think oh, she’s got the right hair. She’s got the right eyes. Maybe there’s a chance to carry on the fight? Maybe one day, our children…”
Stay Tuned for Part 6!