I got a call today from an Austrian National Broadcasting Corporation journalist who asked me about the true story of my second book. A young Canadian professional ice hockey player disappeared without a trace in the Austrian Alps in August 1989 and his body turned up 14 years later. In my book, I present evidence that he was killed in an accident that resulted from gross negligence, and that the negligent actor chose to conceal his body instead of reporting the accident to the police.
The young journalist couldn’t believe that anyone would conceal a deadly accident instead of reporting it.
“I have a very hard time believing that someone would be capable of doing such a terrible thing,” she remarked.
I replied by asking her if she had ever read the play Biedermann und die Brandstifter (Biedermann and the Arsonists) written by the Swiss playwright Max Frisch and published in 1953. She said that she had not. I then told her the following synopsis.
The play’s protagonist, a businessman named Gottlieb Biedermann, reads in the paper that arsonists are afoot in his town. Their modus operandi is to introduce themselves as door-to-door salesmen in need of overnight accommodations, and to talk the house owners into allowing them to stay in the attic, where they then set fire to the house. Mr. Biedermann marvels that anyone could be so gullible, and he is confident that he would never be taken in by such an obvious trick.
The arsonists then arrive at his house, and through a combination of apparent normalcy and charm, they persuade Mr. and Mrs. Biedermann to allow them to stay in their attic. In a key scene, one of the arsonists proclaims, “The best disguise, even better than humor and sentimentality, is the truth, because no one believes it.”
The naive couple can’t see what is about to happen to them precisely because it is so out in the open. They mistakenly assume that such perfidy would be cleverly concealed and not hiding in plain sight. The arsonists then set the house on fire, which spreads to the neighboring houses and burns down the entire town. In the final scene Mr. and Mrs. Biedermann are transported to the gates of hell, where they encounter the arsonists, who introduce themselves as the Devil and his companion Beelzebub.
People cannot see evil because it’s so often right in front of them, and because it operates it in the world by claiming to be in the service of good intentions and good causes.
Because Elon Musk has amassed such an enormous fortune, it is a natural inclination to suspect that such vast wealth could not have come about by honest and fair means. And yet, in what strikes me as the greatest paradox in our era of finance capitalism, his Tesla fortune was not made through leveraged investments in financial assets, but through (of all things) car manufacturing.
That’s right, Elon Musk doesn’t just use money to beget more money. He actually builds things and puts people to work in the enterprise of building things. In the act of building things, they are confronted with technical problems that they must solve, and in solving them, they acquire the know-how to create additional new things. In this way, creation begets creation.
Okay, okay, he was able to leverage generous tax credits because electric vehicles are purportedly “green” technology. While I doubt that lithium ion batteries are a green technology, I cannot hold it against him for taking advantage of an opportunity that presented itself. After all, there was nothing to stop his long established automotive manufacturing competitors from doing the same.
I hope that Mr. Musk will not be discouraged by the malevolent lunatics that are arrayed against him. Instead, he should take it as a sign that he is doing great work. It seems to me that way too many wretched hives of scum and villainy have been able to establish themselves in recent years. Mr. Musk is apparently the only guy out there who has the resources and the balls to challenge their nefarious interests.
Their senseless acts of rage and violence are not against tyranny, but against a quirky individual who—by an extraordinary quirk of history—has climbed into the ring to duke it out with tyrants.
In his interview with Sean Hannity this evening, he posed the question of who is funding the lunatics who are setting fire to Tesla dealerships.
As an investigator for the McCullough Foundation, I have often dreamed of having sufficient the funds to hire a crack team of investigators to help me figure out what in hell is going on in our world. There is strong evidence that destructive, tyrannical, and irrational forces are being organized and funded.
The malevolent spirit embodied by the arsonists in Max Frisch’s play are, in our current era, receiving generous financial support from very bad people. Who are they?
Perhaps Mr. Musk would consider funding an independent, non-profit research organization to investigate who is behind the various destructive forces operating in the public forum. Such an investigative institution could be modeled after the Cochrane Network that conducts independent medical research to produce systematic reviews to help people make informed health decision.
In this way, perhaps Mr. Musk can expose the arsonists operating behind the scenes to destroy our civilization.
You're a brilliant writer, John Leake.
The inciteful rhetoric that comes from the Left is truly frightening and they have been doing it for decades. There are many weak-minded people on their side who are easily persuaded to commit violence. Yet the ringleaders always manage to melt into the background and disappear.