Review of Reich of the Black Sun by Joseph P. Farrell

It’s not a good book. For me, as a writer, researching science-fiction horror, it was fairly useful but it is not good.

I’ll jump right to the biggest problem with The Reich of the Black Sun – it’s unintentionally pro-Nazi. The thesis of the book is that Nazi scientists when they discarded as “Jewish science” relativity were able to make incredible scientific and technological advances – including anti-gravity and perpetual motion machines that could power long-ranged submarines – even though the Nazis lacked the wealth and freedom of the West (and, particularly, the unbombed United States that benefited from the immigration the largest portion of Jewish scientists fleeing the Nazis). That’s not an obviously racist thing to think, but it as I read the book, it became increasingly anti-Semitic: the only thing holding back science from technologies like anti-gravity and free energy was the pernicious influence of “Jewish science.”

I don’t think this is intentional on Farrell’s part, just the ignorant blindness of most conspiratologists. Like most conspiracy theorists, Farrell is driven by his passions past the point of all reason. There is no evidence of sympathy for Nazi goals in the book, merely an ecstatic gushing about his line of reasoning that puts Nazi scientists on divergent lines of technological development that lead to amazing places.  His prior work is a bizarre theory that the Giza pyramid is an alchemical “death star,” and that it was used to destroy a planet that threatened the earth.  This guy doesn’t seem to be ideological, just passionate about his untrue beliefs.

To create the illusion that the Nazis had superscience, he created from whole cloth a silly hypothesis that Nazi scientists were freed by ignoring the contributions of Jewish scientists – that, somehow, the partial science of the Nazis could develop faster than a complete science used in other nations. That his thesis has racist implications is, I suspect, invisible to him, because he believes he’s illuminating facts. (He’s not. There are few to no facts to be found in this book.)

Once past the racist interpretation of science, which is a hell of a barrier, the book is a test in either a person’s credulity or tolerance to punishment to see how many stupid things can be strung together before madness takes root.

Like most conspiracy theory books, it starts off with the most palatable parts – in Reich of the Black Sun, the idea that the Nazis had tested an atomic bomb before their surrender. It’s not true – the Nazis didn’t have the facilities or technologies to create an atomic bomb; their failure to make a working atomic reactor sealed that fate – but it’s not inherently ridiculous. Much of the science that would go on to create atomic weapons was of German origin, after all. Late 19th and early 20th century physics is a catalog of German-speaking people.

However, as unproven assertions pile up, as speculations in one chapter are transformed into certain facts in the next, leading to increasingly outrageous speculations that in turn become more facts for more speculation without either citation or physical proof. . . Well, before long, it wasn’t that the Nazis tested an atom bomb. They used them against the Russians, and Stalin hid it. Also, Americans used Nazi bombs captured on a German submarine to bomb Japan. And the Nazis had antigravity because this Austrian forester saw a trout swimming in a stream and created a free-energy machine that was used in Nazi flying saucers, which is also a perpetual motion machine. Plus, the Nazis have a secret base in Antarctica, in the Andes, and in the Canadian Arctic, but they also have taken over the US military-industrial complex.

The book ends by saying that the UFO crash in Roswell – which the author doesn’t even feel the urge to defend as ridiculous; by this point Farrell assumes you believe that what happened in Roswell was a flying saucer crash – and the Kecksburg UFO incident was, in truth, accidents with Nazi UFOs. When presenting the “evidence” – and if you don’t know what Majic/Majestic-12 is, the whole last part of the book will likely be opaque to you – Farrell doesn’t see the glaring inconsistencies and technical absurdities presented as proof of a hoax or prank, but those contradictions are “proof” that the UFOs were of Nazi design and not from outer space!

I’d give it a miss unless you’re researching the bizarre beliefs of conspiracy theorists and are looking for a good laugh.

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