A conversation with author Dominic Fahey, the “Great Dictator”

A New Zealand Gerald exclusive

Dominic Fahey, author of the eagerly anticipated Healing Hitler: A Reiki Approach to Understanding the Founder of the Third Reich, is a writer unlike all the others I’ve met in a career spanning 20 years. For one thing, he claims not to have written or typed a single word since he burned down his high school at the tender age of 13.

“Ah, those were the days,” recalls Fahey. “Nobody could prove it was me, of course. It was while I was watching the fire from a secure vantage point that I had a sort of epiphany – I realized that I had to become a great dictator.”

And so began Fahey’s life-long habit of forcing people in his vicinity to write down everything he says, whenever he gets the urge to oralize. It wasn’t long before he acquired the nickname “Little Hitler”, which could not be more appropriate: Fahey is 5’ 2” and, when dictating, gesticulates in a style that instantly brings to mind the Scourge of the Jews.

Fahey admits to having what he calls a “not soft but not hard either” spot for Austria’s most infamous export. He agrees that he was a monster, but stresses that he was a misunderstood monster.

“I was astonished to find that no one had approached Hitler from the Reiki angle before,” Fahey says. “My book proves that Reiki is the key to understanding the Führer. I discovered some amazing things during my research trip to Berlin [funded by Creative New Zealand]. Things like the fact that Hitler had what I call a großen Mutter (Big Mother) complex, and that he burned his first book at the age of 2. Stuff like that.”

Fahey digresses for a moment to reveal that his own mother is an extraordinarily tall woman. Gertie Fahey is 6’ 5” in her nylons, he tells me, and used to have a job cleaning the eaves of Grey Lynn villas.

“Poor old mum has never really been altogether there up top,” he chuckles. “In her 50s she started cleaning people’s eaves without asking them first. Caused all sorts of trouble. In the end I had to put her in a home. Have you ever been to Jervois Rest Home & Hospital? Their eaves are the cleanest eaves you’ll ever see. They have to tie her down at night or she’d be cleaning them 24/7, bless her size 16s.”

Fascinated by that image, I asked him to explain what a Big Mother complex was.

“It’s quite simple really. Basically Hitler loved his mother, Klara, madly. When she died of breast cancer on December 21st, 1907, young Adolf was devastated. The attending doctor said he had never seen anyone so overcome with grief.

“Adolf became so incensed at the failure of Western medicine to cure his mother that he forced the doctor to burn all his medical textbooks at gunpoint. He then convinced himself that his mother (who was Austria’s first Reiki Master) was dictating to him from beyond the grave. Mrs Hitler had also managed to double in height post mortem, as it were. When she left this earthly realm she was 5’ 4” but when she merged with the 'mysterious atmosphere' (the most common translation of reiki) she shot up to 10’ 8”.”

The exact contents of Healing Hitler will remain under wraps until August 2nd, the 77th anniversary of Hitler becoming Führer of Germany. I asked Fahey what he thought readers would make of the book, the second in his “Great Dictators” series, which began 5 years ago with Ministering to Mussolini: How Benito Benefited from Chinese Medicine.

“They’ll love it,” Fahey says with the conviction of the dictators whose dependencies on alternative medicine he has made it his life’s work to bring to the light.

“Those of them who practise Reiki will be able to get a feel for the book via an exclusive download from the mysterious atmosphere,” he concluded with a wink.

It's a kind of magic: Budget 2011

Bill English has always considered himself to be the mutt’s nuts, and with a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp, it must be conceded that there is something top-doggish about his appearance. But the reality is very different. As he staccato barked his way through his third budget yesterday, he resembled nothing so much as a career con man whose latest parole had been granted only on the condition that he learn how to read.

A “remedial English” was what was being dangled in front of us yesterday, a carrot attached to a stick attached to a spin-doctored John Key. Now remedial English lessons are of course pitched at the lowest common denominator. They rely heavily on stories – students are read stories, they read stories and they write stories. Kids are forever being told to use their imagination, and the stories judged to be the best by teachers are invariably those that are the most imaginative. The very imaginative story Bill English told us yesterday starred the nameless wizards at the Treasury, a sort of Hogwarts for adults, who have conjured up the following happy ending:

And lo, GDP growth will reach 4 per cent in the coming year, followed by 3 per cent and 2.7 per cent rises. No less than 170,000 new jobs will be created in the next four years. In 2015 the country will be back in surplus and everyone will live happily ever after. 

It sounds rather like the Book of Revelation in reverse: lots of suspiciously exact figures and a promise of Heaven, rather than Hell, on Earth. This week Stephen Hawking, long hailed as the greatest mind on the planet, was quoted as saying:

I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

Unfortunately, we live in a universe in which some components of the human brain stop working but do not stop overall brain function. The technical names for these components are “common sense”, “higher reasoning” and “grip on reality”. Bill English’s budget is an assault on all of these. The Government is manufacturing a positive ending in the same way reality TV producers do. “It’s a kind of magic,” National is singing through Auto-Tune in our karaoke parliament, “There can be only one.”

New Zealand's best unknown poet?

Last week I stumbled upon something extraordinary in the Ellerslie Book Exchange. This fine establishment always rewards the patient browser, and as I scanned the NZ poetry shelf my eye was drawn to a thin duodecimo volume clad in worn red leather. My first thought was that I was in the presence of an errant copy of the little red book, Quotations from Chairman Mao. As a fumbling undergraduate I had bought this atrocity because I was under the impression that reading it was vital if one wanted to know what the “C” word was all about. My faith in the book’s seminality was so strong that I didn’t even flick through it before purchase, and it was only on dipping into it at home that I realized that it had been written by a man who made Baron Munchausen look like Honest Abe. Here, for example, is Mao on the masses:

To link oneself with the masses, one must act in accordance with the needs and wishes of the masses . . . It often happens that objectively the masses need a certain change, but subjectively they are not yet conscious of the need, not yet willing or determined to make the change. In such cases, we should wait patiently . . .

                              “The United Front in Cultural Work” (30 October 1944)

Mao presumably felt he was acting in accordance with the needs and wishes of the masses when he orchestrated the deaths of roughly 55 million of them during his regime. Wait patiently indeed.

My historical relations with little red books not being what you might call cordial, it was with some relief that I found that the diminutive spine of the one in front of me read “I.A.M. POEMS”. And indeed it was.

“I.A.M.”, I learned upon opening the volume, stood for Imogen Amelia Marsh. The book was a collection of her poetry and had been printed in Hawera in 1951. No publisher was given and the printing and binding had a very bespoke look about them. Underneath the year, set in smaller type, appeared “3 of 10”, which convinced me that the book in my hands was one of an edition of only ten, and that it had been privately printed and bound, possibly at the instigation of I.A.M. herself.

How did this 60-year-old little-read red book from Hawera come to be in the Ellerslie Book Exchange? Who was I.A.M.? What was her poetry like? Of these questions only the last seemed to be in any way immediately answerable, and so I licked the old index finger, turned over the title page, and was confronted with this:

"The End of Nothing"

The leaves fell like so many lead balloons

That autumn; his crime of the century,

His litany of lies, left truth marooned

Like the naked trees in a leafy sea.

She didn’t need spring to feel creative,

She made a papier-mâché effigy,

His happy smiling face looked elated

Atop a pyre of leaves. The liturgy

Of his poems she then glued to his skin.

The flames rose, destroying his lying art,

His words changed into confessions of sin,

The sweated nothings grunted to his tart.

She left him forever, to die and smoulder;

A leaf landed unfelt on her cold shoulder.

It was in sonnet form, yes, but it was a sort of anti-sonnet. Sonnets of course were originally written by a man to a woman and sang the praises of the addressee in the hope that they she would admit the man into her favour, as it were.

I will not record any more of my own reactions to “The End of Nothing” at this juncture. Instead, I’d like to ask my sextet of loyal readers what they think of the poem. I am currently pursuing all avenues in an effort to find out more about I.A.M., and will of course post any details as they come to hand. Should “The End of Nothing” be considered the start of something by you, dear readers, more of I.A.M.’s poetry will follow.