According to Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, Wernher von Braun, the Nazi’s leading rocket scientist, wrote a science fiction book called “Project Mars.” (If you want to see a caricature of von Braun, he’s played by Peter Sellers in “Dr. Strangelove.”)
The book is about a colony on Mars, and the political system is described:
The Martian government was directed by ten men the leader of whom
was elected by universal suffrage for five years and entitled “Elon.” Two houses of Parliament enacted the laws to be administered by the Elon and his cabinet.
The colony on Mars is part of God’s plan to create the Ubermensch. After a nuclear war, the right people can escape to Mars.
This is from a novel, but evidently grown men believe it’s a blueprint. As George W. Bush whispered to Barack Obama during Trump’s first inaugural address: “This is some weird shit.”
Info for this post is from Fintan O’Toole, “From Comedy to Brutality,” New York Review of Books, (Mar. 13, 2025), pp. 10-14.
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