The Kingless Generation

China as #1 in Japanese Literature: Battles of Coxinga, pᵗ 2 [PREVIEW] Sep 29, 2026 57:37 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

China as #1 in Japanese Literature: Battles of Coxinga, pᵗ 1 (Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 1715) Sep 15, 2026 1:26:02 In part one of this second installment of our series on China as a silk road great power in pre-modern Japanese literature, we read Japanese playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s puppet play “The Battles of Coxinga,” about the half-Japanese, half-Chinese hero Coxinga (Zheng Chenggong) who fought the Manchu Qing dynasty in an attempt to restore the Ming dynasty. Chikamatsu’s most successful play in his

China as #1 in Japanese Literature: “Taishokan” [PREVIEW] (Kōwaka ballad, by 1553) Sep 4, 2026 41:32 Next in our ongoing series ReOrient-ing early modern literature across Eurasia, we discuss the most widely visually represented of the sixteenth-century Japanese short-form ballads known as kōwaka, which arguably surpassed the noh theatre for patronage among the warrior elite of Japan’s age of civil war. First appearing in performance records at the height of the Tally Trade (勘合貿易) with China—wher

Dethrone the Dictaphone Aug 18, 2026 1:42:41 A chatty hangout episode on recent events, the class politics of fashion in our post-cultural moment, and an American (...?) Broadway musical from the End of History as performed in Japanese in air-conditioned chambers surrounded by hordes of shrink-wrapped Teslas on reclaimed land developed Tel Aviv–style in the middle of Tokyo Bay. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An Infant ‘West’ meets a Middle-Aged ‘East’ [PREVIEW]: Galland’s retelling of Shams-al-Nahār & Ibn Bakkār (1704–1717) Aug 11, 2026 33:39 In this final episode of our first series on the 1,001 Nights, we take up Frenchman Antoine Galland’s adaptation, where we see a Europe that has only begun to see its nearest Afro-Asiatic merchant-capitalist great power as a different , “eastern” civilization whose cultural products must be held at arm’s length and ethnographically explained—rather than adopted wholesale without comment, as storie

Oriental Despotism comes w/ Occidental Colonization: Ibn Bakkār & Shams-al-Nahār in the Calcutta Ⅱ Nights (1839–42) Aug 4, 2026 1:29:48 In addition to filling in more background knowledge from a scholarly article that I did find on this tale by Jamel Eddine Bencheikh, as well as some musings on the formation of the discipline of Anglophone Japan studies under the influence of Francophone Arabology, we explore this same tale in the nineteenth-century colonial-era British-Indian edition of the now much expanded and more textually ba

Truth and Testimony, Drugs and Attachment in Bourgeois-Revolutionary Baghdad [PREVIEW]: Re-Orienting Ibn Bakkār and Shams-al-Nahār in the Arabic manuscript of the 1,001 Nights Jul 28, 2026 46:08 I dust off my Arabic for some weird scenes in Silk Road–era Baghdad: a story of drugs and ego death, deadly secrets and the workers who keep them. The only tragic love story in the Nights, the story of the Persian prince Ibn Bakkār and the courtesan Shams-al-Nahār also features, only in this earliest available Arabic manuscript tradition, a meta-narrative device whereby first-person interviews wit

1,001 Nights: A murdered ancestor to European Romance Jul 21, 2026 1:05:29 One symptom of the neglect in Anglo-Zionist historiography of Arabic literature and culture—despite its role as the main heir to axial-age Mediterranean and Persian cultures and, as the western representative of the Afro-Asiatic merchant capitalist world system, key progenitor of “the West”—would be the neglect which the 1,001 Nights has suffered in literary scholarship. Everything I can find in E

Eranos 4 [PREVIEW]: It was us (all along)... Jun 24, 2026 47:31 In anticipation of future outings on some of the more interesting figures we've met thus far, we bring our introductory series on the Eranos milieu to a close with a discussion of the final years, as one august old racket came to an end but was simultaneously demolitioned, flipped, spun off, and otherwise psycho-entrepreneurially aufgehoben into various other cultic milieux just as our current mom

Eranos 3: Mircea Eliade, Mellon Fellow of Death, w/ Scott Ryan of the Dustlight Archives Jun 10, 2026 1:20:23 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Eranos pᵗ 2 w/ Scott [PREVIEW]: Furio Jesi vs the Satanic-Orientalists May 29, 2026 35:12 More ideological and world-historical groundwork, as we introduce, for me, the real hero of this story, the Jewish Italian Communist mythologist Furio Jesi (1941–1980), a rival to many in the Eranos crowd who critiqued their Aryo-heroic, Christian-Kabbalist, and I would say satanic-orientalist project from the outside. He got a professorship at the University of Palermo on sheer merit despite bein

Aether Whores: Eranos and the 20th-c liberal-bourgeois vanguard, w/ Scott of the Dustlight Archives May 20, 2026 1:12:11 From 1933 to 1988, the liberal spiritualist wing of the trans-Atlantic bourgeoisie had something of a think tank for spiritual and cult technology and grand strategy in the yearly gatherings of philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists like Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Gershom Scholem, known as Eranos and organized by the wealthy socialite and occultist Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn at a lakeside res

(15)90s kids: Thomas Nashe [PREVIEW], A Son of the Silk Road in Merry Old England May 7, 2026 44:27 We continue our study of Elizabethan England, which is often mistakenly treated as an origin point of bourgeois revolutionary culture but which I hope to show is actually an endpoint for the subjectivity of the “Sons of the Silk Road” of Arabic literature, whose literary, religious, cryptographic, and financial antics in the bazaars and marketplaces of West Eurasia, Africa, and the European Ummah,

(15)90s Kids Know: Lizzie’s bois, overture Apr 10, 2026 1:05:01 Building on our discussion of the Water Margin (the most important surviving versions dating to the 1590s), we go “back”—notice the scare quotes!—to what is usually at least passively assumed to be the source of the culture of capitalist modernity, merry aul England. What we will find, of course, is that we need to re-orient our view of the birth of modern capitalism along the lines long establish

Casual chat, core content [PREVIEW] Apr 10, 2026 40:22 I swore I wasn’t going to do a chatty one but rather a hard core cultural-historical content for the next premium episode, but I just gave myself podcaster’s block again as I have several irons in the fire none of which feels quite ready. But so much has been happening in the world that I just had to sit down and catch up, so here’s a good old podcast hug, and in fact I feel like it turned out to

Weebs of the Ages: Lafcadio Hearn, the “Brownie” who taught Japan to want whiteness Feb 9, 2026 1:12:33 Living in Japan, the dominant image of Lafcadio Hearn is something like: he’s that white man who came to Japan and told us he believed in us—he knew we had it in us to become the honorary-white vassal of Anglo-America that we are today! A new TV drama on the national broadcaster NHK lavishes screen time on a klutzy Lafcadio adorably befuddled by Japanese culture, baffled by the Japanese language,

Organizing Bourgeois Revolution in East Eurasia [PREVIEW]: The Water Margin (水浒传) w/ River Jan 28, 2026 33:59 First externally attested in 1524, the Ming-dynasty Chinese novel Water Margin collects legends about a band of merry men of genius who love righteousness, and who fight to stop a corrupt imperial bureaucracy from exploiting the people. However, the leader of these social bandits, Song Jiang, comes to see his mission in terms of a monarchist restorationism which is a common conservative reaction t

Organizational Proprioception w/ River Jan 27, 2026 1:21:10 Seasoned organizer and noided leftist River from River to Reality joins us to share their theoretical concept of organizational proprioception: just as our nervous systems need to communicate well with all parts of our bodies in order to experience all the parts of our bodies as our own and have control and feedback signals flow back and forth unimpeded through our nervous systems—incidentally, sc

A Holiday Ramble in Hibiya Park [PREVIEW] Jan 10, 2026 8:30 A quick, chatty, catch-up episode recorded in a park in central Tokyo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Left=Noided, Noided=Left: w/ River (featuring Fire in the Minds of Men) Jan 10, 2026 2:16:59 On this podcast I have often argued against the “anti-conspiracy left”, but now that everyone and your mom can’t help but be noided, the relevant question is no longer, “If you’re on the left, can you be noided?” but rather, “Since you’re noided, should you be on the left or the right?” To argue this question, I do a quick hate-read of the Bible of 20th-c anti-revolutionary ideology on the cusp of

Britain is a Figment of the Crusader Imagination [PREVIEW]: King Arthur as Farang Mahdī Sep 3, 2025 38:34 Much modern scholarship on King Arthur has revolved around the question of his historicity and origins, the recent greatest example being Higham’s magisterial 2018 survey of all the major theories—except the one that I advance here: Arthur was only one of many legendary chivalric heroes with whom continental Crusader and Reconquistador storytellers populated the North Atlantic archipelago, in thei

Sisterfucker: Profound Desires of the Gods w/ Nathan, pt 3 Aug 13, 2025 2:12:06 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 po

The Birth of the Comprador Chief and the Defeat of the Secret Society [PREVIEW]: Profound Desires of the Gods w/ Nathan, part 2 Aug 2, 2025 45:10 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Yakuza Filmmaker Takes it Back to the Dawn of Time: Imamura Shōhei’s Profound Desire of the Gods, part 1 Jul 23, 2025 1:17:19 Nathan, AKA KUBARK Stare, @postcyborg on Twitter, 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 slumberin

Japanese First! (into the digital prison and the war machine) [PREVIEW] Jul 18, 2025 37:39 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

Riffing in the Dark w/ Sina Rahmani Jun 20, 2025 1:22:08 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, t

English for Compradors on the Eve of the Final Enclosure [PREVIEW]: A Journey into TED Talk Hell Jun 6, 2025 33:20 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-wo

When Karate was a Weapon of the Colonized Working Class: The “China Hand Technique” in Japanese Proletarian Fiction May 30, 2025 1:44:36 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 s

Eat the Yellow Powder, Get in the Wara [PREVIEW]: The first king, the first collapse, and the first underground bunker society in the Avesta and the Ṛigveda Apr 7, 2025 1:15:49 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

総論①階級格差社会には始まりがあった Mar 19, 2025 1:00:03 人類30万年。その大半を占めるさまざまな平等・自由・創造性ある先「史」社会、そして穀物国家における階級闘争五千年のごく小さな誕生。 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Conversion of Kevin Gaijinson ケビン・ガイジンソンの転向 [PREVIEW] Feb 15, 2025 8:25 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 da

Ritual Serial Murder and the Birth of a Ruling Class: Popol Vuh, Title of Totonicapán (Maya, 16th c.) [PREVIEW] Jan 12, 2025 39:55 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 cla

Roasting out the old year Jan 11, 2025 1:21:38 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fireside Chats on Turtle Island, take 1 Aug 29, 2024 52:21 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 shall

The Classic Postclassic Maya: Hunahpu and Xbalanque in the Popol Vuh (K’iche’, 1550s) Jul 27, 2024 3:36:56 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

Asiatic Athena: karmic roots of Greek culture in Hittite class struggle (Song of Release, 15th c. BCE) [PREVIEW] May 24, 2024 45:50 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

Consuming the Samurai Self (“The Playboy Dialect,” 1770, Japan) May 2, 2024 2:02:21 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.

The origins of class society and revolutionary consciousness according to Second-Temple Judaism: 1 Enoch, Jubilees (Palestine, 3rd-2nd c. BCE) [PREVIEW] Mar 14, 2024 1:12:41 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 o

Return to Camões’ “Isle of Love” w/ Min Feb 19, 2024 1:47:09 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 d

ParaPower Mapping the Six-Pointed Crusader State [PREVIEW] Feb 14, 2024 12:53 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 destruct

Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 8: a mushroom dinner, a falsified archive Jan 24, 2024 1:27:00 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.

Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 7: The Shield Society of Notting Hill [PREVIEW] Dec 22, 2023 20:46 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

Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 6: Clockwork Albion Dec 13, 2023 1:59:30 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

Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 5: Ogawa Ayako, ballet master of Cold War Japan [PREVIEW] Dec 1, 2023 13:21 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 Ja

Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 4: beasts in human guise Nov 22, 2023 1:13:24 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 B

Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 3: in the shadow of HUAC [PREVIEW] Nov 17, 2023 16:02 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 sib

Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 2: communists in cashmere Nov 10, 2023 1:16:56 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 lif

The Last Crusade (inshAllah) [PREVIEW] Oct 19, 2023 11:47 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 i

Doraemon’s Protocols of the Elders of Zion Aug 18, 2023 1:30:58 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 p

Landback in Eurasia, 622 CE [PREVIEW] Jul 19, 2023 21:12 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 re

Traces of Japanese matriliny in the Rainy Night Critique of Ranks (by 1021) Jun 25, 2023 3:04:18 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

Kingless Reads: How To Master Secret Work, pt 2 (South Africa, 1980s) Jun 8, 2023 44:56 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.

Kingless Reads: How to Master Secret Work, pt 1 (South Africa, 1980s) Jun 7, 2023 59:02 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.

Ruling classes have always wanted us dead [PREVIEW]: Atraḫasīs (Babylon, 18th c. BCE); The Extinction Narrative (2young Badazz, 2021 CE) Jun 5, 2023 24:12 Plague, famine, flood; nuclear holocaust, nuclear winter, global warming. Seen through a class lens, these existential threats to humanity are threats indeed, but they are ultimately threats directed by the capitalist ruling class at the rest of humanity: that if they are truly faced with losing their position, they will carry out the mass depopulation that they have been plotting in myriad ways f

Collectivize the Buddha: Dharma talks w/ Marcus, pt 2 May 18, 2023 2:14:15 We continue our free flowing conversation about our respective journeys as sketchy gaijin wandering in and out of the capitalist puppet states of East Asia and searching for ways to build the revolutionary saṃgha. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Land of the Rising Tensions [PREVIEW] May 2, 2023 40:14 A newsy update on the non-release of the Abe Shinzō autopsy; the apparently accidental crash of a Japanese SDF helicopter which left multiple high-ranking military and intelligence officers dead including the leader of arguably the most important division of Japan’s Western Command (and about whom I have an interesting discovery to share); and finally an assassination attempt on PM Kishida using m

A Host Questions a Host: Dharma talks w/ Marcus, pt 1 Apr 15, 2023 2:22:04 I interview Marcus of the podcast Return of the Repressed about his journey, partially with reference to Dōgen’s Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (Japan, 13th c.) and the Record of Linji (China, 9th c.), and featuring a song from the noh play “Xiwangmu,” or the Queen Mother of the West.On the Feast of Winding Water, block the flow with your hand and watch the water wind around, and isn’t this cup m

LoFi Botanical Ramble: Gerald Horne, Race War! (2004); etc [PREVIEW] Mar 24, 2023 43:42 We take a ramble through the diverse forest, plains, and mountainside biomes of a historic botanical garden here in Tokyo while discussing, among many other things, Gerald Horne’s fascinating first book on Imperial Japan and Black America, as well as that book’s perfidious falsification in Japanese translation, the rights to which were somehow given to a far-right press who translated less than ha

Hammurabi’s COIN: Agushaya; The Cleaner; The Poor Man of Nippur; The Doctor; Sargon, Lord of the Lies (Akkad, 18th c. BCE seq) Mar 11, 2023 2:27:23 In the 19th c., working backwards from Old Persian to Hittite to Amorite, modern scholars rediscovered the long-forgotten Semitic language Akkadian, and then an even older language, Sumerian. The logographic cuneiform script which was created to write Sumerian was adapted to write Akkadian, and a complex matrix of graphic and linguistic play was opened up by the power of the rebus principle, which

Weebs of the Ages: Ivan Morris, Mishima, and aesthetic GLADIO in Japan’s fourth reich, part 1 w/ Prez [PREVIEW] Feb 12, 2023 21:18 In this ongoing series, we savor the weebery of the greatest weebs of history, pondering the roles they play in various regimes of class struggle including whiteness, patriarchy, capital, and data counterinsurgency. This time, the President of the United States joins me from the Minyan to explore the life of Ivan Morris, a Swedish-Jewish man who grew up in rural France and New York City, attended

The ‘Real Little Mermaid’ was Indigenous, w/ Šuŋgmánitu: The Lusíads (Portugal, 1572), Disney’s Little Mermaid (1989), Ponyo (2008) Jan 31, 2023 2:30:16 The Rob Marshall–directed live-action Little Mermaid, which should be coming out this May, was buzzed up by a good old culture war psy-op of which the two sides were: 1. Errm, the real Little Mermaid was white! This is cultural appropriation of marginalized white settler bodies and spaces and voices!; 2. The Little Mermaid is a fictional character, dumbass! But it occurred to me that the modern im

Transcendental Settlerism vs Landback Enlightenment: Thoreau, Kunikida Doppo, Walt Whitman, Jairus Banaji, Arthur Rosenberg [PREVIEW] Dec 1, 2022 53:33 We go long, looking at “progressive” settler idealism in Throeau and Walt Whitman, and a Japanese analogue, the romantic or naturalist novelist Kunikida Doppo. Connections are drawn to the mass appeal of fascism which comes in part from its partaking of the settler relation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

w/ Prez: Fascism from Hispania to Manchuria Nov 2, 2022 1:55:17 Prez of the Minyan is here to discuss the dialectical deep history of fascism, starting with some readings from the Japanese far right and ranging back to Anglo settler colonialism, Iberian conquistadors, crusaders, even Mongol absolutism and tanistry. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Islamic Picaresque and the Birth of the Bourgeoisie: al-Jawbarī, Book of Charlatans (Damascus, 1210s) [PREVIEW] Oct 26, 2022 37:10 The picaresque, a genre of satirical novel which is usually traced from Spain to Britain to America, where Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn would be the best-known examples, follows the adventures of hucksters, preachers, and charlatans on the underside of capitalist society—as opposed to those on the top of “respectable” society, who, these works often hint, just happen to be the most succes

Mythodology with Marcus Oct 5, 2022 2:26:48 A free-rambling conversation with Marcus, the host of Return of the Repressed, a podcast on the psychology of mass movements both good and bad, an ordained Pure Land Buddhist monk, a painter of temple walls across China, an expert in natural farming, a new father, and a new resident of Japan. Topics include———Marcus’ travels around China and Europe, Daoist geomancy and natural foods, archaeobotany

Imperial Liberalism Lost: Endō Shūsaku, “Mothers,” (Japan, 1969) [PREVIEW] Sep 16, 2022 21:42 The author of Silence, the famous novel of Japan’s early-modern persecution of Christianity recently adapted to the screen by Martin Scorsese (and actually drawing in revealing ways on Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory), bares his soul and reveals some of the sources of his obsession with the late-medieval Japanese Christians in a short story that switches between scenes of him, the famous J

Kingless Reads: WitbD? ch5, The ‘Plan’ for an All-Russian Political Newspaper; Conclusion Sep 12, 2022 1:23:48 Lenin’s *What is to be Done?* in the illuminating new Lars T. Lih translation. 5. The ‘Plan’ for an All-Russian Political Newspaper: a) Who was offended by the article ‘Where to Begin?’; b) Can a newspaper be a collective organiser?; c) What type of organisation do we need? / Conclusion Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kingless Reads: WitbD? ch 4 pt 2, The Artisanal Limitations of the Economists and the Organisation of Revolutionaries Sep 11, 2022 1:14:14 Lenin’s *What is to be Done?* in the illuminating new Lars T. Lih translation. 4. The Artisanal Limitations of the Economists and the Organisation of Revolutionaries: d) The sweep of organisational work; e) A ‘conspiratorial’ organisation and ‘democratism’; f) Local and all-Russian work Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kingless Reads: WitbD? ch 4 pt 1, The Artisanal Limitations of the Economists and the Organisation of Revolutionaries Sep 10, 2022 1:23:29 Lenin’s *What is to be Done?* in the illuminating new Lars T. Lih translation. 4. The Artisanal Limitations of the Economists and the Organisation of Revolutionaries: a) What are artisanal limitations?, b) Artisanal limitations and economism, c) Organisation of workers and organisation of revolutionaries Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kingless Reads: WitbD? ch 3 pt 2, Tred-iunionist Politics and Social-Democratic Politics Sep 9, 2022 54:57 Lenin’s *What is to be Done?* in the illuminating new Lars T. Lih translation. 3. Tred-iunionist Politics and Social-Democratic Politics: e) The worker class as advanced fighter for democracy, f) Once more ‘slanderers’, once more ‘mystifiers’ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kingless Reads: WitbD? ch 3 pt 1, Tred-iunionist Politics and Social-Democratic Politics Sep 8, 2022 1:10:51 Lenin’s What is to be Done? in the illuminating new translation by Lars T. Lih. 3. Tred-iunionist Politics and Social-Democratic Politics: a) Political agitation and its narrowing by the economists, b) The story of how Martynov made Plekhanov deep, c) Political indictments and ‘education for revolutionary activeness’, d) What do economism and terrorism have in common? Hosted on Acast. See acast.co

Kingless Reads: WitbD? ch 2, The Stikhiinost of the Masses and the Purposiveness of Social Democracy Sep 6, 2022 1:10:44 Lenin’s *What is to be Done?* in the illuminating new translation by Lars T. Lih. 2. The Stikhiinost of the Masses and the Purposiveness of Social Democracy: a) The beginnings of the stikhiinyi upsurge, b) Kow-towing to stikhiinost: Rabochaia mysl, c) The Self-Liberation Group and Rabochee delo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kingless Reads: WitbD? ch 1, Dogmatism and ‘Freedom of Criticism’ Aug 25, 2022 1:04:58 Lenin’s *What is to be Done?* in the illuminating new translation by Lars T. Lih. Foreword; Chapter 1: Dogmatism and ‘Freedom of Criticism’: a) What does ‘freedom of criticism’ mean?, b) New defenders of ‘freedom of criticism’, c) Criticism in Russia, d) Engels on the significance of theoretical struggle. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Hellenistic Synthesis and the Christian Image of Man (When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible) Aug 18, 2022 1:42:13 In which Fergal revisits his old TradCath stomping grounds, discovers why so many of his old TradCath friends have now converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, and comes away with a deep appreciation for the contribution made to ideas of revolutionary transformation of society, universal human brotherhood, and scientific knowledge of history, by the Jewish people of the Hellenistic diaspora under the Secon

Hearts and Minds: Imamura Eiji, “Travelling Companion” (Changchun, 1938); Chae Manshik, “Mr. Pang” (Seoul, 1946) [PREVIEW] Aug 11, 2022 37:02 After my conversations with Keith Allen Dennis and Recluse of the Farm podcast, I keep thinking how it’s the second-string fascists, the Nazi and Japanese imperial collaborators of Ukraine and Korea, who go on to be the absolute MVPs of the Cold War–era fascist international. Operating from the American puppet ROK and the Ukranian diaspora, this passionate minority within each country worked tirel

Shotgun Blues: The Abe Shinzō Assassination Jul 14, 2022 1:00:35 “According to the hospital, there were two bullet holes in the right front side of Mr. Abe’s neck, spaced about five centimeters apart. It appears that the bullets went into his body from his neck, damaging his heart and the large arteries in his chest. Doctors say a large hole had been opened in the wall of his heart. On his left shoulder there was one wound which seemed to be from a bullet that

w/ Laihall: Combat Techno-Transegalitarianism [PREVIEW] Jul 7, 2022 16:51 My second conversation with Laihallll is followed by my own extended meditations on the secret society in prehistory and the present. I develop my hypothesis that the post-capitalist dystopia which the ruling class are currently ushering us into may be most accurately described as not techno-feudalism but rather techno-transegalitarianism. Indeed, I suspect that the term “transhumanism” was coined

w/ Laihall: The Secret of Societies (Brian Hayden, The Power of Ritual in Prehistory, NW Turtle Island, 2018) Jul 2, 2022 2:17:49 It’s not every day that you get to learn about a whole new mode of production, or phase in the meta of class society—much less the earliest one that we are (possibly) able to reconstruct or learn anything about—but here we are. Coordinating with anthropological data (problematically enough collected by and for settlers during the narrow window in which any Indigenous person would both still know t

Thulêan Kewpie Doll ET: Doraemon’s Little Star Wars (1985/2022) [PREVIEW] May 27, 2022 22:38 Doraemon: Nobita’s Little Star Wars (1985) was a masterpiece of late–Cold War bourgeois libertarian mythmaking: the kids of the Doraemon world join a miniature alien race in a righteous struggle for liberty from a totalitarian (aggressively Soviet-coded) regime, using Doraemon’s shrink ray to move back and forth between branded action figure size and regular size to bring about the triumphant end

Turning the Wheel of the Dialectic: Bhagavad Gītā (India, after 5 c. BCE); Ajith, “A Critique of Brahmanist Ethics” May 10, 2022 1:54:43 We have seen how D.T. Suzuki’s take on zen was a very modern thing, tailor made in Illinois as a bourgeois ideology. This time, under the guidance of Ajith’s dialectical materialist critique of Brahmanism, we take up the Bhagavad Gītā (India, post 5th c. BCE), especially its modern bourgeois idealist interpretations as represented by Tilak’s Gītā Rahasya, a foundational text for India’s comprador

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