In this final session, we put the proverbial big old boulder into the sweltering primordial pond with meditations on myths of brother-sister marriage and divorce from the Kojiki (712), the taboo on sibling incest in the mother-right kinship structures of Trobriand Islanders as seen in the anthropology of Malinowski and his debates with dogmatic Freudians in the 1930s, and finally the persistent postwar Japanese cultural theme of Japan as hotbed of incestuous “bed-creeping” (yobai), a feature which is either the dysgenic cause of the nation’s staunch patriarchy, persistent class rule, and gangsterismo (as in less helpful versions), or (as Nathan and I think) rather the effect of the mythopoetic comprador infestation of working-class movements and Indigenous resistance to dispossession which we have been discussing in this series.
This time we hit our stride, discussing the interplay of Indigenous state and deep state, chief and secret society, sometimes in resistance to colonization and sometimes in service of comprador opportunism—though as Nathan points out, which it might be in any given moment is worked out through a collective mythopoetic process.
Nathan, AKA KUBARK Stare, @postcyborg on Twitter, and an organizer of a film club in London which listeners should check out, joins me for a conversation about noided proletarian filmmaker Imamura Shōhei’s 1968 film Profound Desire of the Gods. Former Ozu disciple Imamura rejected the neat and clean nationalist family values of his early mentor to explore the deepest and most powerful forces slumbering fitfully at the bottom of fourth-reich Japanese society. Here he goes back to the “dawn of everything” (as he conceives of such things) to take up some prime paleo-parapolitical material—outcast shamans, tribal secret societies, masked death squads—so you know we have to check it out.
I have several episodes in development, but each one I feel like I need to read at least one more book before it’s ready, so for now, some newsy musings on current events mostly in Japan, where this weekend’s election sees a far-right populist party set to pick up a dozen seats: Sanseitō, whose draft constitutional amendments would abolish all individual rights and invest sovereignty in the state and not the people, and which is heavily astroturfed by all the usual suspects, including not only the original Unification Church but also Sean Moon’s Rod of Iron (known by the less openly violent name “Sanctuary” in Japan). All this they package under the racially provocatory slogan “Japanese people first!”, backed up by mass media campaigns about a wave of “crimes and annoying behavior by foreigners”—but of course tending in reality to shunt all Japanese class tensions onto the East, South, and West Asian captive nations that make up Japan’s proletariat, beef up digital surveillance and social credit systems, and further prepare Japan to become the Ukraine of the Pacific, an outcome that I increasingly suspect not only the Amerikkkan but also the Chinese and even the Japanese post-bourgeoisies are working carefully together to bring about.
Sina Rahmani of The East is a Podcast and Red Media had planned to come on the show before this, and in light of the Zionist entity’s unprovoked attack on his ancestral country of Iran in violation of international law I offered him every chance to back out, but hardworking podcaster that he is, he joins us for some light vibing and riffing and unstructured meditations about, among other things, the unexpected similarities between the entity and postwar Japan, as well as the bright future that I nevertheless hope for in the latter (my adopted homeland in my recovering-settler existence)—which future must lie beyond the whiteness that Japan too has claimed for itself in the postwar, thereby following a path of delusion that many MENA countries are still being forced down today pending the working and peasant classes rising up and showing the way.
It’s a pungent bouquet of TED Talks! A blast from the past! Some shots from the aughts! Put on your Pynchon goggles, your Mabeuf plague mask, and your Cuttlefish gloves, because we’re opening up this most dracular document of the moment before the long 2014.
P.S. The episode art is from the actual cover art of the book in question, and it’s tragic that I neglected to discuss it: You there, third-world comprador! Walk on with me, deeper, yes, deeper, into ever darker post-apocalyptic tunnels of the English language! Aren’t glad you survived the Cull?
If you had a male-coded childhood at all recently in the Anglo-American world, you have felt the influence of the Soldier of Fortune culture of the 1980s, within which martial arts and other action films featuring Silvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, and Steven Seagal were prominent, and accompanied by dojos proliferating even in mid-sized American towns. But what you may not know is that, like the sushi boom around the same time period this shadow-reich version of the East Asian martial arts was quite deliberately seeded into the pop culture of the Reagan Era by a rogue’s gallery of all the usual WACL suspects: Moon Seonmyeong of the Unification Church, his high-ranking lieutenant Jhoon Rhee, Sasakawa Ryōichi—as well as Zionists like Menachem Golan and Haim Saban. Moreover, the hyper-individualism and hierarchicalism of this WACL school of karate, far from being inherent to the art, represents its co-optation and enlistment in a fight against its true roots in the struggles of the colonized and the working class in the Japanese Empire. In the proletarian fiction of 1920s Japan we find a little-known earlier chapter in the story of karate, when it was a new and exotic weapon, developed by Ryukyuan peasants under early-modern feudal and mercantile rule, and now wielded by Ryukyuan proletarians and the Korean and Japanese comrades to whom they taught it, to devastating effect against the bosses and their yakuza goons.
Fujisawa Takeo, “Ryūkyū’s Weapon,” December 1929, trans. Fergal Schmudlach
Karate has become very famous for its overwhelming power. In the Faculty of Medicine at Kyoto University, apparently they went so far as to invite masters in that Way to come from Ryūkyū so they could illuminate and clarify the power of karate academically.
As many people know, karate is a form of boxing, a unique cultural property born in Ryūkyū. It’s a technique for protecting yourself and defeating your enemy without weapons, using your bare hands.
In recent years, a great many Ryūkyū-born fighters have come forward and joined the workers’ struggle, and among them not a few are masters of karate. What an encouragement! I remember that the workers of Tsurumi who are great at karate make an appearance in Kataoka Teppei’s story, “We Got Strong Guys,” but there is one amazing fighter in the Kantō Free Workers, too. When they have their gatherings, the cops have a healthy respect for him: they know they need to come with a dozen some officers at the ready if they want to take him in. He’s a compact guy who doesn’t even seem strong just to look at him, but one time while fighting in a fierce fracas, as a counter-attack in defense of his Free Worker comrades, he went strutting all by himself into a crowd of twenty or thirty goons baying for blood, and in the blink of an eye he laid them all out flat, and ever since then his stock went up bigtime, so he’s known as the man you have to have on hand to deal with a fight.
The most popular karate moves would be, first, the eye poker, the ball buster, the rib breaker, and so on. The eye poker is when you stick your fingertips out stiff and straight like fire tongs, then poke them into the enemy’s eyes and crush them. The ball buster is when you jump up and then suddenly use the flat upper surface of your foot, between your little toe and the front of your ankle, to deliver a devastating kick to the enemy’s testicles. Finally, the rib breaker is when you punch the enemy in the ribs with the back of your fist. Sometimes this will break a rib and take the enemy down immediately. But if we’re talking about a master, they can decide: I want to leave this guy alive for now and kill him after this many days, so if they punch him with that in mind, after ten days or a month or whatever their appointed time, the enemy will keel over all by himself, just as if he had died from some other cause.
Also, if you become a master at that level, you can jump high just by lightly kicking the ground, or—it is just for a moment, but—you can also cling to the ceiling. Also, they hang a big hunk of pork from the ceiling up high. Then every time they jump up, their fingers are so powerful that they can rip off a handful of meat and land on the ground with it in their hand.
Of course, to become this sort of master you have to train wholeheartedly from childhood. They stick a wedge-shaped piece of wood one or two feet long into the earth, and then they go on punching it from the side to train their fists.
I had heard about karate, but the first time I saw it in real life I was shocked. I joined a Ryūkyūan worker for a meal at the home of a certain friend. This was a different person from the Kantō Free Worker mentioned above. The topic of karate came up. He made a face like he was going to light the cigarette he had just put in his mouth, held out his hand toward the large ceramic ashtray in front of me that also held the matches, and said, “Gimme that a second.” I pushed the ashtray over towards him. He spread out his fingers and pulled it over in front of his knees. When it got to him, I noticed that the ashtray was crushed into little pieces.
“How about this?” Our mutual friend pointed to the big floor-height table next to us. It was the kind you eat at.
“That’s nothing—but you’re sure you don’t mind?” he said, looking over at our friend’s wife.
“I don’t mind: do give it a go!” she answered, apparently half doubting he could really do it.
The table broke clean in half.
“This is nothing for me, to be honest. Anybody can do this level of karate,” he said.
“Well then, here’s something to remember me by,” he said on his way out the door, and then he punched a hole in the wall of the foyer.
I heard something interesting about the origins of this karate with its unbelievable power. From olden times, Ryūkyū kept being persecuted and plundered by both China and the Shimazu clan of Kyūshū, and in the midst of this oppression by two oppressors, they kept inventing weapons to protect themselves. But as soon as they would make them, one by one they would be confiscated and banned by their plunderers. Any and all weapons would be confiscated. The plunderers tried to leave the Ryūkyū islands completely bereft of weapons. How do you protect yourself without weapons? In this way, they say that by and by, necessity made the Ryūkyūans invent the weapon that is no weapon: karate.
I was so moved to hear this story: isn't it almost too perfect a metaphor for the process by which the proletarian party is refined into strong steel?
About the Ryūkyūan customs that gave birth to karate, I’ve heard one more beautiful story—in a Ryūkyūan home, at mealtimes they say the father will often hit the boys or the girls lightly on the head with chopsticks. From the time they’re three or four. A little child will easily get hit. The father keeps doing this every day. By and by he can’t hit them anymore. They say that by the time the child is sixteen or seventeen, no matter how hard you try to find an opening and take them by surprise, they can’t be hit.
That guy does Judo, he’s got a strong Yankee fist [Meriken], and even what they call that China hand technique [唐手術 Kara-te jutsu], Yaegaki style or whatever, he’s an incomparable master at that. This fucking guy, his name is Shinsuke…
I don’t know where he come from. Anyhow, was it 1925, or maybe the following Spring, Shinsuke come wandering into my Tsurumi Ward in not much more than a thin jūban jacket, looking very much the worse for wear, you know what I’m saying.
Tsurumi—round about the turn of 1925 to ’26, it was. How I miss Tsurumi, just thinking of it! Now that was a workers’ town. It was a big factory district with all the workers organized. Looking towards Yokohama Bay to the West from the shore under the swirling smoke, you had the Shiba*** Manufacturing Tsurumi Factory, A***** Glass, Niss***Brass Foundry, Asa** Cement, and on and on, countless big factories standing shoulder to steel shoulder.
He came wandering into Tsurumi looking very much the worse for wear. And what do you think he did, first thing? First thing, I’m telling you—he got into a fight.
X
You see, there was a boss rolling around Tsurumi called Iwakichi. This boss was the strongest man in all of Tsurumi. Even the wildest man in town would keep his head down around him. If Iwakichi lost it, the other guy was bound to get a beating. And when he got into a fight he wouldn’t just give ’em a beating, either: he was never satisfied unless he could throw ’em into the gutter with the sewage. So basically, this Boss Iwakichi was known far and wide as a wild man who would throw you into the gutter in a fight.
And who did Shinsuke get into a fight with on his first day in Tsurumi, but this Boss Iwakichi!
Why did those two get into a fight?—I suppose it would have been because Shinsuke, come from another country [他国者 takokusha], didn’t make way for Boss Iwakichi, who always struts around with his shoulders out broad enough to stop the wind, and that must have set him off. And then, for better or for worse, the path where they met just happened to run right next to the gutter. With a gutter alongside, it was just too good a spot for a fight, as far as the Boss was concerned, so—Come on, motherfucker!—he roared, something like that, and the Boss threw the first punch at Shinsuke, they say.
X
And then, the Boss was throwing Shinsuke into the gutter—or was he?
No, it was the reverse! Shinsuke beat Boss Iwakichi and threw him into the gutter. That was the outcome of this fight.
X
“Here I was all full of myself, thinking I was the strongest fighter in all of Japan, but—my God, I’m astounded at your skills!”
Boss Iwakichi’s attitude turned on a dime. You come and stay with me for a while, he said, and it was decided that Boss Iwakichi would look after Shinsuke and pay his expenses.
And not long after that, Shinsuke entered the Niss*** Brass Foundry as a technician.
And then not long after that, he became a beautiful Fighter [闘士 tōshi] for the Union.
Anyway, that’s how it was in Tsurumi in 1926. You could search high and low from one end of the factory to the other and not find a single worker who wasn’t a Fighter—forget about it!
X
So how about it? Have we got strong guys in the proletariat or what? But even still, Shinsuke isn’t even the strongest guy we got. There’s one more guy who’s the greatest. And that’s just at Niss*** Brass Foundry, too, you understand.
This fucking guy was called Yamashiro, right, and he was third or fourth degree in Yaegaki style, and what’s more he had second degree in Judo. And then also, too, he was fifth degree in such and such a style of China hand [Kara-te], one of those body techniques, I don’t know, but when he got anywhere near a fight, no matter with how many guys, forget about it, you couldn’t believe your fucking eyes.
“My martial arts [武術 bujutsu] are just a little bit different from the kind of ‘sports’ [supōtsu] that university students do. I can stop a real sword with my bare hands. I’ve trained against real swords all along.”
This guy Yamashiro was always bragging like that, you know: nothing special, but even I have trained enough to take on five, ten guys with my bare hands, they can come at me with swords drawn, no problem, forget about it. You think I’m shitting you, let any one of yous come at me with a fucking katana, just try it! That’s what Yamashiro would say.
So one night, at the Union joint, Yamashiro is bragging like usual.
“Come on! Any one of yous, try and cut me!”
Yamashiro is strong, no doubt. But any way you slice it, coming at someone with a real sword is a dangerous proposition. What if he fucks up and you end up hurting him? Now you both lose, and get laughed at, to boot.
That’s why nobody would take Yamashiro up on his challenge. Everybody just smirked like, oh here comes Yamashiro with his tall tales again, and thought nothing more of it.
And then Shinsuke, who had been sitting with them, got up nonchalantly.
In the corner of the room stood our red Union flag. This was what Shinsuke went and took, silently, in no time at all, and with a shout of: YA!—
By then, Yamashiro had already started talking about something else. He was caught unawares. I’m talking about right when he was most off guard, here come Shinsuke thrusting at him with the pointed spear at the tip of the pole of the Union flag.
Now this spear on the tip of the Union flag, as you all know, it’s plenty sharp, about as sharp as a bayonet. I don’t care who you are, if you got stabbed in the side with that thing you’d be skewered like a tofu kebab. And on top of that, the sharpness of Shinsuke’s hand movements as he thrust in at him! We all cried out: AH!
But in an instant, Yamashiro’s body flipped around in a half turn, and at the same moment his right hand leapt up in a flash. The spear was parried clean aside, and Shinsuke stumbled and stabbed the tatami floor: GISS!
“Oh damn, sure enough,” said Yamashiro, his voice calm, “if you catch me unawares, I guess I can’t block you properly: you got me!”
As he said this, he held out his finger to all of us, who had turned white as a sheet [lit., “blue”]. And what do you know, even the great Yamashiro had been just late enough blocking it that he was bleeding a bit from his finger.
X
At the time of the 1926 Niss*** Brass Foundry Struggle, these two Braves [yūshi], Yamashiro and Shinsuke, fought their way into a nest of twenty or thirty gangsters in the middle of the night, a true story so famous now that the old Fighters tell it all the time.
They went in just the two of them, but against dozens of men, and what’s more they came at them with swords drawn, and so they say that even the great Shinsuke thought: this might be it.
“Go home, it’s not safe for you!”
They say that’s what Yamashiro whispered to Shinsuke in that moment. And Yamashiro went and stood alone against those dozens of swordsmen.
How could he do that? You boys probably think this story isn’t true. But I swear on my conscience that these things really happened. What do you want me to do?
They say that in Yamashiro’s school, when someone comes to cut you down, you strike with your fist at the back of the hand holding the katana: EI! YAH! And then, thanks to this wondrous martial arts technique, your opponents drop their sharp swords in spite of themselves, and they go clattering to the ground.
I ain’t fucking with you, true story. And as proof, after he beat down those dozens of gangsters with his bare hands, Yamashiro bundled up their dozens of katanas, bore them up on his shoulder, and brought them back to the Union hall that very night as a trophy of his exploits. My God, the chutzpah [lit., “nose-breath”] on that Yamashiro right then, eh!
X
I tell you, when it comes to the martial arts, there were lots of masters among the Fighters I knew back then.
Sure enough, that—what’s his name—from the Shibaura Tsurumi Factory in 1926, he had been in the class struggle since he was thirteen, and he was sixteen or maybe fifteen at the time, still a boy…
Apparently he was a child of the nobility, and you could tell he had been trained in that kind of thing since he was little. Swordplay and body techniques, and they say he’s a rare talent with a bo staff.
During the labor dispute he come out in his judo-gi to join the picket line. He got arrested, and at the *******they said, “What, you do judo? I’ll show you a throw, you little shit!” and they knew he wouldn’t fight back, so a crowd of****** tossed him and kicked him around.
This kid used a bo staff. You wouldn’t believe the way he could swing that thing around. He could control all six feet of it from tip to tip so free and easy, to see it you’d think it was growing longer and shorter in his hands. This fucking kid would stand at the head of the demonstration, you know, whirling his six-foot staff around like a waterwheel, and when the stones started flying at us, damned if he didn’t bat them right back at the goons—oh, I wish I could show you how he looked in his big hakama pants!
More! More! We got more strong guys in the proletariat than you can imagine!
X
Hey! Come on, what are you all sad and slouchy for? Sure, we’re having a hard time right now. But is that any reason to be slouching around? We got more strong guys in the proletariat than you can imagine!
We can’t be slouching around! Pull yourselves together. Join hands. If we just keep our hands joined, strong guys will keep on coming forth one after another from among us.
One or two strong guys is nothing. But when we all keep our hands joined, that’s when the happy warrior tales of those strong guys can come to birth.
X
These days Yamashiro goes to the dojo in Tsurumi to train judo.
The ******come to this dojo, and so do the workers from the Union. From what I hear, it seems the master at this dojo has a special understanding with the ******.
One night, after practice, they were changing clothes. It was a bit late, so the other students had all gone home. Yamashiro was alone with the master in the big dojo under the dim electric lights.
Yamashiro finished changing.
“Well then, good night.”
The master of the dojo, and his teacher [shihan], was about to go out to his own room when Yamashiro called to him to wait.
“Hey you! You better not be having secret back channels to the ******and selling out the workers. If you do anything like that, I will **** you!”
The master marched up close to Yamashiro, his face a mask of furious disbelief.
Yamashiro just kept talking.
“In the dojo, I’m your student. But in a fight, you’re like a baby to me.”
“I didn’t say anything about fighting.”
Watching the master’s face turn white [blue] out of the corner of his eye, Yamashiro turned and slowly walked away.
What is the difference between East and West? One helpful line to draw is that between Iranian and Indo-Aryan cultures, as seen in the extremely ancient traditions of the Avesta and the Ṛigveda, respectively. Whereas the common Indo-European heritage of multiple generations of gods (ahuras/asuras vs daēwas/devas, see also titans vs gods—which, as long as we’re painting with broad brushes, we might imagine have something to do with memory of past relations of production as “ages”) is ultimately nondual, the Iranian tradition demonizes the gods (Skt. devas, Av. daēwas) and elevates one of the earlier ahuras (cf. Skt. asuras) into an absolute good creator, to whom is opposed an absolute evil which has corrupted the world and from which a series of saviors must be sent to save us, culminating in a final eschaton, a resurrection and final judgment, etc—the whole apparatus of Abrahamism is basically here already. Within this, we explore the Indo-European myth of the first man and the first king, whose Avestan expression features a societal collapse and a post-apocalyptic remnant surviving in some sort of secure underground enclosure called the wara. The new Japanese translation of the entire Avesta by Prof. Noda Keigō (2020), the first into any language in nearly a hundred years, as well as the new English Ṛigveda of Jamison and Brereton (2014), equip us uniquely well for this investigation. Our main takeaway is the sheer age of ruling class myths of the need to hole up in a cult compound to survive the collapse of class society—when in fact (even supposing we will need counter-waras and defensive tunnels of our own to survive climate collapse and extermination campaigns) it was always the ruling class who most needed to hide away, whereas the masses have always found a way out and forward in the struggle for production and human flourishing.
I know, I could have started a different feed for the Japanese language stuff, but that feels superfluous given that I’m not sure how much interest it’ll even attract, and even if it were to take off, surely it would be better to keep everybody together in one big, happy Kingless Generation, whatever language we may use. Hypothetical Japanese listeners would almost certainly be interested in hearing English episodes, too, and interacting with you all, anyway.
Recording and then obsessively editing in a foreign language is really kicking my ass, but I have six more Japanese episodes recorded and awaiting editing that I’ll be releasing ASAP. I also have a lot of English language material ready to record, though, so fear not: I will take a minute to record new content in English very soon and will upload it as an early release for subscribers so you will be able to hear it even before I’m done with this little Japanese series. As always, thank you all so much for supporting the show and being members of the Generation.
To introduce Kevin Gaijinson, the show’s new Japanese language host, I share an old conversation with him from back when he was still a raging weeb spreading Anglo-American imperialism in blissful ignorance while speaking better Japanese than the Emperor, gambling with the yakuza, and teaching very special English lessons to the bored housewives of the rich and powerful. He began a journey that day that led him to become a member of the Kingless Generation, and now that he is between jobs as a result of the dissolution of USAID, the NED, and all associated influence operations, and since he’s still such a weeb that he insists on speaking nothing but Japanese, he will be joining the show to host Japanese language episodes from time to time.
At the end of the ancient mythology section we discussed last time, the Popol Vuh (here paralleled by the Title of Totonicapán) depicts the restoration of militaristic class society in the K’iche’ corner of the Maya world in the 13th c. CE, after some centuries of relative freedom and equality following the overthrow of the Classic Maya around 950. The founders of the new ruling class are an itinerant, mountain-dwelling secret society who begin their attack on the stateless, classless society around them by prosecuting a covert campaign of ritual serial murder. For perhaps obvious reasons, this passage seems practically untouched in modern scholarship—the most recent English translation of Popol Vuh silently cuts it entirely!—but we of the Kingless Generation have all the right tools to make sense of it in our own little way: the immortal science of historical materialism, the anthropological theories of Brian Hayden regarding the roots of ruling classes in secret society religion, and leftist parapolitics research on Fort Bragg, Marc DuTroux, the Atlanta child murders, and many other modern instances of ritualized abuse and murder for which good evidence exists for the involvement of a wider network of Euro-American military, intelligence, and high bourgeois elements.
Before the dawn of what I hope will be a much more productive year for the podcast, join me in a warm and toasty room for some green tea, guitar, and guileless meditations.
I did it, folks: I returned to the burning bouncy castle that is the small town settler entity on Turtle Island. In between fulfilling various karmic obligations and reconnecting with fellow settlers, relatives and friends on both sides of the Trump/Kamala cultic divide, I managed to do some real-life investigation of Indigenous reservations, visiting museums and cultural events, albeit in a shallow, short-term capacity. Herein I share some musings on this experience of questionable depth but with fireside vibes aplenty.
This version is a longer take done later with a bit more information and a lot more vibes, and all my atmospheric fireside dead air concentrated at the end for some meditative silence, which is usually better than talking anyway.
I did it, folks: I returned to the burning bouncy castle that is the small town settler entity on Turtle Island. In between fulfilling various karmic obligations and reconnecting with fellow settlers, relatives and friends on both sides of the Trump/Kamala cultic divide, I managed to do some real-life investigation of Indigenous reservations, visiting museums and cultural events, albeit in a shallow, short-term capacity. Herein I share some musings on this experience of questionable depth but with fireside vibes aplenty.
This version is a short take which I did earlier on in the visit and which got interrupted, though it’s nice and snappy and focused. A longer take done later with a bit more information and a lot more vibes will follow on the premium feed only.
The first half of the Popol Vuh as we have it from the Kʾicheʾ colonial tradition is a quintessentially Kingless epic, as the story revolves around pre-human gods, successive generations of hero twins, who must defeat a series of aggrandizer figures, including the lords of death in the underworld, in order to bring about the dawning of the human age. Although the same basic story can be found in earlier art and hieroglyphic inscriptions which since the 1990s are being deciphered at an exhilarating pace, recent research has pointed out that this anti-accumulative tendency of the story may be somewhat unique to the Popol Vuh as we have it, which, it is hypothesised, may represent a retelling slanted toward anti-colonial resistance. While I agree that this may also be the case, I (based on my limited understanding as an ignorant outsider) think it makes more sense to take this story, written down only some thirty years after first European contact, as faithfully reflecting older layers, though perhaps not of the somewhat exploitative and stratified Classic Maya (ca 250–950 CE) but rather of the socially creative, decentralized, and egalitarian Postclassic Maya (950–1539), which represents one of the great examples in world history of the deescalation of class struggle, when people came together to build the Kingless Generation.
In a series that I hope will include Martin Bernal’s classic Black Athena (about the modern British fabrication of “ancient Greece” and its true roots in ancient Egypt), we start with the East: in recent decades, great advances in Hittite studies have illuminated much of the mechanics of transmission of Mesopotamian literature and religion to a nascent Greece from a grain state in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) which used cuneiform writing (in addition to their own distinctive hieroglyphs) and was ruled over by an Indo-European-speaking ruling class. In addition to illuminating details of class struggle between slave-owning city council members against a king who wants to free the slaves—though perhaps only in order that they may serve the cult of his ancestors in the temple—we contemplate the dependent origination and lack of perduring essence of ‘ancient Greece’, that flimsy idol enshrined at the center of the white supremacist worldview.
These days I find myself irresistibly drawn to the music of the last revolutionary juncture in world history, the funk and soul of ca. 1970. There’s some revolutionary legacy to be named and claimed here: maybe that’s why so many glossy yacht funk bands have been promoted in recent years, some featuring hard social Darwinist and eugenic themes which are prime targets for analysis on the podcast. If you’re feeling it, reclaim this groove and struggle in righteous confidence for the liberation of the global proletariat and peasantry, the dispossessed and the captive.
A close reading of “The Playboy Dialect,” a classic sharebon, or narrative of fashion and manners in the pleasure quarters of Edo-period Japan, where a consumer culture, to rival anything concocted by the capitalist dictatorships of the Century of the Self, was wielded as a weapon of class struggle by the rising urban commoner class against the de facto feudal rulers, the samurai.
The rise of ancient empires in the Eurasian continent ushered in the Axial Age, with its ideologies of absolute good and evil and the promise of revolutionary recompense for unheard-of oppression by the Occupiers of the Earth (שכני הארץ). The books of 1 Enoch and Jubilees, quoted by name in the New Testament, still contained in the Bible of the Ethiopic churches, and exerting a massive influence over the entire Christian view of human history, have recently been re-edited and re-translated with reference to the Aramaic and Hebrew originals partially recovered from the Dead Sea scrolls. Their text shows a greater class consciousness than ever, declaring, “it was not ordained for a man to be a slave, nor was a decree given for a woman to be a handmaid: but it happened because of oppression. This lawlessness was not sent upon the earth: but men created it by themselves, and those who do it will come to a great curse,” (98:4) proclaiming, “woe to those who build their houses not with their own labors, and make the whole house of the stones and bricks of sin,” (99:13) while we workers “toiled and labored and were not masters of our labor; we became the food of the sinners.” (103:11) In response to this situation—ambiguously connected with the idea of God’s angelic police (עירין “watchers”) and prosecutors (שׂטנין “accusers”) betraying Him and engaging in a kind of mafia side hustle which corrupted some humans so that they began to consume and exploit others—the patriarchs Enoch and Moses are given secret knowledge of the cosmic surveillance apparatus that will bring reward to the just, punishment to the rich, and justice to the victims of oppression. We engage in an extended meditation on the impact of these ideas as a weapon of class struggle, both from above and below, in late antique, medieval, capitalist, and our own techno-feudal times.
I thought I had a hot take in response to the Little Mermaid discourse last year, but predictably I’m not the first one to think of reading the Isle of Venus in Camões’ Lusiads against the Age of Exploration diary entries in which roving European savages discuss their adventures in more complex Indigenous kinship structures where sex was not commodified and the family was not specialized to pass down private property—as well as (what one suspects was actually much more common) rolling up on Indigenous women around the world and committing sexual violence. Sure enough, my guest Min has written an entire scholarly thesis on two different poetic re-imaginings of the Isle of Venus which highlight the colonial violence that Camões’ poem works to conceal: one by a white Anglo woman in Brazil, and another by the leader of the Angolan revolution against Portuguese domination, António Agostinho Neto.
The antisemitic, Nazi-adjacent ideology of Zionism says that members of the Jewish religion must be uprooted from their ancestral homelands and gathered into a white supremacist settler colony ruled by Jews native to Europe—a new kind of crusader state. And like the crusader states, at the behest of their Euro-American masters, the Zionist entity practices the fascist economics of nomadic destruction and chaos, taking the lead in illicit trade in weapons, drugs, and human beings. We are joined by Klonny Gosch of the ParaPower Mapping podcast to discuss the last of these as only he can.
In the final installment of the series, we cover all that is known about the mysterious death of this strangely GLADIO-brained scholar of classical Japanese literature and favorite translator of “aesthetic terrorist” Mishima Yukio.
We explore the Windsor Free Festival, Sunday Head, Albion Free State milieu of hedonist, individualist, libertarian (and decidedly anti-communist) radicalism in 1970s Britain, led by figures like Ubi Dwyer, Sid Rawle, and Paul Pawlowski, as well as scions of elite families like Heathcote Williams and Nic Albery—in light of the fact that, as we have already seen, Nic Albery and his movement appear in Nobuko Albery’s semi-autobiographical novel merged together (and not-so-subtly equated) with Mishima Yukio and his far-right Shield Society, with whom Nobuko and Ivan Morris were also closely associated.
We introduce basic rhythm and chording patterns for ‘American’ pop music, which stem from the New African Church, as well as perhaps Irish uilleann pipe drones which scintillate back and forth, moving only a few notes at a time, and then taking on the rhythm of steam-powered machinery like the locomotive engine, around which the working class lived and breathed. In the song in question, Claude François, low-brow French pop star that he was, uses this medium to sing nostalgically about the revolutionary optimism of the 1960s—of which Ivan Morris was definitely an enemy—and the deep and undying love for the masses of the people which motivated Cloclo’s performing career: much better than the one American song about meeting a hot girl.
From the semi-autobiographical novel of Ivan’s second Japanese wife, Nobuko Albery (née Uenishi), we have some very sardonic portraits of the Morrises and their upper-crust left-wing milieu in France, as well as a fascinating subplot involving a drug-trafficking, blue-blooded hippie cult leader character who seems a fusion of Mishima Yukio and Nic Albery, the son of Nobuko’s elderly second husband and a pioneering figure in post-left radical politics and early internet-style social experimentation in 1970s Britain, and who is here connected to an attempt on the life of a certain Labour prime minister—with the Ivan Morris character giving wry and knowing commentary on these antics throughout.
From 1956 through 1966, during which time he moved from London to Tokyo to New York, Ivan was married to the ballerina Ogawa Ayako, known in the society papers—by analogy with Jackie (Kennedy)—as Yakkie. In the realm of ballet, where other important Cold War battles were fought such as securing the defection of the Tajik dancer Rudolf Nureyev from the Soviet Union, Ayako became one of the first Japanese to work at the highest levels, then returned to Japan to spread her knowledge to a new generation here. Ultimately she played her part in proving Japan’s ‘eligibility’ for the honorary white status it ‘achieved’ in the postwar, as well as the supposedly unlimited translation powers of Anglo-American capitalism.
