Episodios

  • Asiatic Athena: karmic roots of Greek culture in Hittite class struggle (Song of Release, 15th c. BCE)

    Asiatic Athena: karmic roots of Greek culture in Hittite class struggle (Song of Release, 15th c. BCE)
    May 24 2024
    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.

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    46 m
  • Consuming the Samurai Self (“The Playboy Dialect,” 1770, Japan)

    Consuming the Samurai Self (“The Playboy Dialect,” 1770, Japan)
    May 2 2024
    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.

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    2 h y 2 m
  • The origins of class society and revolutionary consciousness according to Second-Temple Judaism: 1 Enoch, Jubilees [PREVIEW]

    The origins of class society and revolutionary consciousness according to Second-Temple Judaism: 1 Enoch, Jubilees [PREVIEW]
    Mar 14 2024
    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.

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    1 h y 13 m
  • Return to Camões’ “Isle of Love” w/ Min

    Return to Camões’ “Isle of Love” w/ Min
    Feb 19 2024
    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.

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    1 h y 47 m
  • ParaPower Mapping the Six-Pointed Crusader State [PREVIEW]

    ParaPower Mapping the Six-Pointed Crusader State [PREVIEW]
    Feb 14 2024
    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.

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    13 m
  • Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 8: a mushroom dinner, a falsified archive

    Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 8: a mushroom dinner, a falsified archive
    Jan 24 2024
    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.

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    1 h y 27 m
  • Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 7: The Shield Society of Notting Hill [PREVIEW]

    Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 7: The Shield Society of Notting Hill [PREVIEW]
    Dec 22 2023
    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.

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    21 m
  • Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 6: Clockwork Albion

    Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 6: Clockwork Albion
    Dec 13 2023
    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.

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    2 h