The Kingless Generation

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 might make even 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Tatar 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We finish our run through Ivan’s parents’ adventures, including their support for Kenyan Mao Mao revolutionaries and participation in the American-sponsored “Kenyan airlift” that also produced Barack Obama Sr, supporting Greek, Turkish, and Mexican communists in their way, but for one reason or another being unable to stop their son Ivan from becoming the essentially conservative creature of the British establishment that he became, really quite naturally given the course that they had consistently set him on: elite boarding school, Harvard—and then came Hiroshima... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We follow Ivan’s parents, the peripatetic idle rich leftist novelist/journalists Ira and Edita Morris, from their wartime career “writing” in Haiti on the eve of the coup that brought the progressive President Estimé to power, then making “democratic” anti-fascist propaganda for the American Office of War Information and the Voice of America while moving in Brecht’s circle including the Eisler siblings, whose persecution by the House Un-American Activities Committee led the brothers to flee to Europe and the sister, Ruth Fischer, to turn anti-communist professor at Harvard. In this context, Edita leaves behind a most puzzling letter to a member of the Eisler family, talking mysteriously about “the step which I have taken”... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I remain haunted by the ghost of a weeb, a shitlib superspy who, after cutting his chops as a naval intelligence officer in U.S.-occupied Hiroshima and Tokyo, wrote some of the first English-language scholarship of any depth on the Tale of Genji and the martial ballads, published geopolitical strategic analysis on how the Fourth Reich might best rule Japan, and was the preferred translator and lifelong friend of aesthetic GLADIO agent Mishima Yukio—all at the same damn time. On this outing we begin to deal with his parents: I promise you’ll never guess what they did for a living. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A chatty episode to break the hiatus. I discuss recent news of the new final solution being demoed by the Zionist entity in Gaza. These days I’m walking around with posture like a ballerina because I’ve been de-settlerising and un-domesticating my leg muscles by running in huaraches and doing squats. We take a look at the First Crusade as seen in Arab chronicles, as well as the image of the rose in the Zohar, among other things. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Family movie day with the Schmudlachs in Tokyo usually results in a special episode of the Kingless Generation, as I dissect the petit bourgeois propaganda to which I’ve been subjected in an (arguably) more constructive forum than ranting to my kids—but this latest Doraemon film outdid even last year’s Ukraine War puff piece, and I had to call on Prez of the Minyan to help me recover some sanity points. This time we have a tale of utopian hopes betrayed, dramatizing point for point the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: there are definitely hints in the direction of Jewish identity for certain bad guys, and explicit “early-20th-century German” atmospherics for the good guys for some reason, but more than anything the true main point of the Protocols—that anyone who tries to get you to strive for a better world, to struggle against the ruling class, is only plotting to brainwash and enslave you and become an even more dangerous ruling class—is the central and bombastically delivered message of this film. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How does an Indigenous-led movement rebuild in the wake of imperial decline? With the spectacular collapse of both Sassanian Persia and Byzantime Rome in 622 CE, a certain revolutionary communal movement led by masses of nomadic herders, merchants, and farmers, provides us with one of the greatest and earliest examples, albeit one poorly attested in surviving contemporaneous sources. We turn to recent historical-critical scholarship on the birth of this movement (often quite tendentious in ways we’re not so interested in) for hints about its genesis and growth. To keep me from perfectionism in the face of this daunting topic and to perform the conditions of pure orality in which this movement would have begun and spread, I record while walking through a midsummer Japanese mountain forest. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kinship in Heian Japan (roughly 800–1200 CE) was matrilocal, which means it was men who moved in with their wives’ families and lived largely under their control. Although already thoroughly patriarchal in most respects, these last vestiges of what Engels calls Mother Right create fascinating tensions in a society where the world-historic defeat of the female sex was not quite complete—and reveals to us that it was never set in stone. This scene from the Tale of G*nji gives us an engaging tour of a sex/gender system which seems quite exotic today (though it has many close relatives throughout history): where women were cultivated to possess every cultural accomplishment and practical skill, and it is the men who were socialized to pursue the refinement of emotional and aesthetic taste to help them choose—and they were empowered (by now) to choose—whose boudoir to visit. This leads us into meditations on the possibilities of kinship, particularly the open question of what arrangements (plural) might work best as we pursue revolutionary leveling of material relations of production. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Purely for purposes of historical and mythological interest, here is a reading of a pamphlet on underground work by the Communist Party of South Africa.https://manifestopress.bigcartel.com/product/how-to-master-secret-workhttps://ycl.bigcartel.com/product/anti-apartheid Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Purely for purposes of historical and mythological interest, here is a reading of a pamphlet on underground work by the Communist Party of South Africa.https://manifestopress.bigcartel.com/product/how-to-master-secret-workhttps://ycl.bigcartel.com/product/anti-apartheid Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.