Shows
The Kingless GenerationA Yakuza Filmmaker Takes it Back to the Dawn of Time: Imamura Shōhei’s Profound Desire of the Gods, part 1Nathan, 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 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 squ...2025-07-231h 17
The Kingless GenerationJapanese First! (into the digital prison and the war machine) [PREVIEW]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...2025-07-1837 min
The Kingless GenerationRiffing in the Dark w/ Sina RahmaniSina 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 ex...2025-06-201h 22
The Kingless GenerationEnglish for Compradors on the Eve of the Final Enclosure [PREVIEW]: A Journey into TED Talk HellIt’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 and more eerie post-apocalyptic tunnels of the English language! Aren’t glad y...2025-06-0633 min
The Kingless GenerationWhen Karate was a Weapon of the Colonized Working Class: The “China Hand Technique” in Japanese Proletarian FictionIf 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 th...2025-05-301h 44
The Kingless GenerationEat 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 ṚigvedaWhat 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 ahur...2025-04-081h 15
The Kingless Generation総論①階級格差社会には始まりがあった人類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.2025-03-191h 00
The Kingless GenerationThe Conversion of Kevin Gaijinson ケビン・ガイジンソンの転向 [PREVIEW]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 si...2025-02-1508 min
The Kingless GenerationRitual Serial Murder and the Birth of a Ruling Class: Popol Vuh, Title of Totonicapán (Maya, 16th c.) [PREVIEW]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 practica...2025-01-1239 min
The Kingless GenerationRoasting out the old yearBefore 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.2025-01-121h 21
The Kingless GenerationFireside Chats on Turtle Island, take 1I 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...2024-08-2952 min
The Kingless GenerationThe Classic Postclassic Maya: Hunahpu and Xbalanque in the Popol Vuh (K’iche’, 1550s)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 som...2024-07-273h 36
The Kingless GenerationAsiatic Athena: karmic roots of Greek culture in Hittite class struggle (Song of Release, 15th c. BCE) [PREVIEW]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 agains...2024-05-2445 min
The Kingless GenerationConsuming the Samurai Self (“The Playboy Dialect,” 1770, Japan)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.2024-05-022h 02
ParaPower MappingUNLOCKED - Six Pointed Pedostate & the Int'l Sex Traffick: The Devil of Taganga w/ Fergal SchmudlachSub to the PPM Patreon before "3/22 as Mass Ritual (Pt. II)" crash-lands shortly:
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CSA trigger warnings abound for this conversation, friends.
Immensely grateful to my interlocutor, great friend of the show & fellow para-podcaster Fergal Schmudlach, permitting me to re-release this ep which first dropped on his pod "The Kingless Generation". Pls support him!
This is prob some of the...2024-04-042h 15
ParaPower MappingSix Pointed Pedostate & the Int'l Sex Traffick: The Devil of Taganga w/ Fergal Schmudlach (TASTER)Subscribe to the PPM Patreon to access the entirety of this wide reaching, thought provoking, & hair-raising investigation into the Devil of Taganga's Israeli sex trafficking ring in Colombia: patreon.com/ParaPowerMapping
CSA trigger warnings abound for this conversation, friends.
Immensely grateful to my interlocutor, great friend of the show & fellow para-podcaster Fergal Schmudlach, permitting me to re-release this ep which first dropped on his pod "The Kingless Generation". Pls support him!
This is prob some of the riskiest research I've ever pulled together, as...2024-03-2356 min
The Kingless GenerationThe origins of class society and revolutionary consciousness according to Second-Temple Judaism: 1 Enoch, Jubilees (Palestine, 3rd-2nd c. BCE) [PREVIEW]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 eve...2024-03-141h 12
The Kingless GenerationReturn to Camões’ “Isle of Love” w/ MinI 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...2024-02-191h 47
The Kingless GenerationParaPower Mapping the Six-Pointed Crusader State [PREVIEW]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 Ac...2024-02-1412 min
The Kingless GenerationIvan Morris, Weeb Superspy 8: a mushroom dinner, a falsified archiveIn 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.2024-01-241h 27
The Kingless GenerationIvan Morris, Weeb Superspy 7: The Shield Society of Notting Hill [PREVIEW]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/priv...2023-12-2220 min
The Kingless GenerationIvan Morris, Weeb Superspy 6: Clockwork AlbionFrom 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 charact...2023-12-131h 59
The Kingless GenerationIvan Morris, Weeb Superspy 5: Ogawa Ayako, ballet master of Cold War Japan [PREVIEW]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 w...2023-12-0113 min
The Kingless GenerationIvan Morris, Weeb Superspy 4: beasts in human guiseWe 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.2023-11-221h 13
The Kingless GenerationIvan Morris, Weeb Superspy 3: in the shadow of HUAC [PREVIEW]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 o...2023-11-1716 min
The Kingless GenerationIvan Morris, Weeb Superspy 2: communists in cashmereI 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...2023-11-101h 16
The Kingless GenerationThe Last Crusade (inshAllah) [PREVIEW]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.2023-10-1911 min
The Kingless GenerationDoraemon’s Protocols of the Elders of ZionFamily 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 direct...2023-08-181h 30
The Kingless GenerationLandback in Eurasia, 622 CE [PREVIEW]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...2023-07-1921 min
The Kingless GenerationTraces of Japanese matriliny in the Rainy Night Critique of Ranks (by 1021)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 throug...2023-06-253h 04
The Kingless GenerationKingless Reads: How To Master Secret Work, pt 2 (South Africa, 1980s)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.2023-06-0844 min
The Kingless GenerationKingless Reads: How to Master Secret Work, pt 1 (South Africa, 1980s)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.2023-06-0759 min
The Kingless GenerationRuling classes have always wanted us dead [PREVIEW]: Atraḫasīs (Babylon, 18th c. BCE); The Extinction Narrative (2young Badazz, 2021 CE)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 for decades now, and which they hope will constitute a final solution to the problem of class struggle—all the while keeping the nature and meaning of these threats carefully veiled so that most people only ev...2023-06-0524 min
The Kingless GenerationCollectivize the Buddha: Dharma talks w/ Marcus, pt 2We 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.2023-05-182h 14
The Kingless GenerationLand of the Rising Tensions [PREVIEW]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 more home-made weaponry, this time a pipe bomb—all in the run-up to elections which saw a further drift to the right, of both liberal and fascist varieties, as well as America’s increasingly desperate demands to start that pr...2023-05-0240 min
The Kingless GenerationA Host Questions a Host: Dharma talks w/ Marcus, pt 1I 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 making even the flowers tipsy? Isn’t this cup making even the flowers tipsy? The sleeves and fringed hems of lovely maid...2023-04-152h 22
The Kingless GenerationLoFi Botanical Ramble: Gerald Horne, Race War! (2004); etc [PREVIEW]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 half the original text and replaced Prof. Horne’s very nuanced and original argument with the typical postwar-Japanese boilerplate of Anglo-worshiping honorary whiteness and vehement denial of the crimes of Japanese imperialism. Hosted on Acast. See ac...2023-03-2443 min
The Kingless GenerationHammurabi’s COIN: Agushaya; The Cleaner; The Poor Man of Nippur; The Doctor; Sargon, Lord of the Lies (Akkad, 18th c. BCE seq)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 arguably lies at the base of all writing—which in turn is only known to have originated in grain states where bookkeeping was necessary to ensure maximum exploitation of the peasantry. While comparing the relationship of Sumerian an...2023-03-112h 27
The Kingless GenerationWeebs of the Ages: Ivan Morris, Mishima, and aesthetic GLADIO in Japan’s fourth reich, part 1 w/ Prez [PREVIEW]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 most elite of British boarding schools, joined American naval intelligence, and proceeded to act the proper British gentleman from his perch atop the crown jewel of American Japanology, the department at Columbia. He...2023-02-1221 min
The Kingless GenerationThe ‘Real Little Mermaid’ was Indigenous, w/ Šuŋgmánitu: The Lusíads (Portugal, 1572), Disney’s Little Mermaid (1989), Ponyo (2008)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 image of the mermaid as seen in the Disney movie mostly derives from the Age of Exploration encounter between white male explorers and Indigenous women, on which a voluminous archive exists. Sometimes this involved de...2023-01-312h 30
The Kingless GenerationTranscendental Settlerism vs Landback Enlightenment: Thoreau, Kunikida Doppo, Walt Whitman, Jairus Banaji, Arthur Rosenberg [PREVIEW]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.2022-12-0153 min
The Kingless Generationw/ Prez: Fascism from Hispania to ManchuriaPrez 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.2022-11-031h 55
The Kingless GenerationThe Islamic Picaresque and the Birth of the Bourgeoisie: al-Jawbarī, Book of Charlatans (Damascus, 1210s) [PREVIEW]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 successful of the world’s many gangsters. However, as we know the European bourgeoisie emerged from the margins of the merchant capital networks that were already flowing between China, India, and the Islamic world, and indeed...2022-10-2637 min
The Kingless GenerationMythodology with MarcusA 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, the artefact versus the container, peoples’ archaeology and anti-malarial drugs during the Cultural Revolution, the immunology of smoking mugwort on different continents, ergot bacteria and sacred exstatic experiences, iron as a democratic metal, destruction of surplus as...2022-10-052h 26
The Kingless GenerationImperial Liberalism Lost: Endō Shūsaku, “Mothers,” (Japan, 1969) [PREVIEW]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 Japanese Christian author, visiting some of the last remaining hidden Christians who refused to (re)join the Catholic church in the modern period and cling to their idiosyncratic but perhaps somehow authentically Japanese version of t...2022-09-1621 min
The Kingless GenerationKingless Reads: WitbD? ch5, The ‘Plan’ for an All-Russian Political Newspaper; ConclusionLenin’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.2022-09-121h 23
The Kingless GenerationKingless Reads: WitbD? ch 4 pt 2, The Artisanal Limitations of the Economists and the Organisation of RevolutionariesLenin’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.2022-09-111h 14
The Kingless GenerationKingless Reads: WitbD? ch 4 pt 1, The Artisanal Limitations of the Economists and the Organisation of RevolutionariesLenin’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.2022-09-101h 23
The Kingless GenerationKingless Reads: WitbD? ch 3 pt 2, Tred-iunionist Politics and Social-Democratic PoliticsLenin’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.2022-09-0954 min
The Kingless GenerationKingless Reads: WitbD? ch 3 pt 1, Tred-iunionist Politics and Social-Democratic PoliticsLenin’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.com/privacy for more information.2022-09-081h 10
The Kingless GenerationKingless Reads: WitbD? ch 2, The Stikhiinost of the Masses and the Purposiveness of Social DemocracyLenin’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.2022-09-061h 10
The Kingless GenerationKingless Reads: WitbD? ch 1, Dogmatism and ‘Freedom of Criticism’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.2022-08-251h 04
The Kingless GenerationThe Hellenistic Synthesis and the Christian Image of Man (When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible)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 Second Temple—not because of their mastery of a pure Hebrew tradition but because of their bold and broadminded adaptation of it in a cosmopolitan context. Their great literary achievement was the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures known as th...2022-08-181h 42
The Kingless GenerationHearts and Minds: Imamura Eiji, “Travelling Companion” (Changchun, 1938); Chae Manshik, “Mr. Pang” (Seoul, 1946) [PREVIEW]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 tirelessly to advance the fascist cause and sabotage socialist construction in their own homelands and around the world. The Moon organization, for example, can be directly tied to the drug and weapons trading and other logistics in s...2022-08-1137 min
The Kingless GenerationShotgun Blues: The Abe Shinzō Assassination“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 had pierced through his body. They say no bullets were recovered from inside his body.” Asahi Newspaper report on the doctors’ press conference: https://www.asah...2022-07-141h 00
The Kingless Generationw/ Laihall: Combat Techno-Transegalitarianism [PREVIEW]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 with reference to these transegalitarian relations of production. With a fully automated means of production, all the same forces tending towards a stateless, classless society return, at least as strong as they were for egalitarian hunter gatherers who could get everything they need...2022-07-0716 min
The Kingless Generationw/ Laihall: The Secret of Societies (Brian Hayden, The Power of Ritual in Prehistory, NW Turtle Island, 2018)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 the pre-contact forms firsthand and be willing to record them for posterity) from around Turtle Island, Africa, and Polynesia, archaeologist Brian Hayden argues that we should read late-Paleolithic archaeological sites from the cr...2022-07-022h 17
The Kingless GenerationThulêan Kewpie Doll ET: Doraemon’s Little Star Wars (1985/2022) [PREVIEW]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 of history—and maybe even record a cool home movie on their consumer electronics while Mom works on obliviously in her spacious capitalist kitchen. This year’s remake, supposed to come out last year but delayed until eight days...2022-05-2722 min
The Kingless GenerationTurning the Wheel of the Dialectic: Bhagavad Gītā (India, after 5 c. BCE); Ajith, “A Critique of Brahmanist Ethics”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 Brahman classes and their English masters. We notice here the emphasis on karma yoga, the spiritual practice of carrying out one’s varṇa dharma or caste destiny, within an absolute moni...2022-05-101h 54
The Kingless GenerationThe Liberality of Evil: there’s a right way and a wrong way to wither away (Ariyoshi Sawako, “Village of Eguchi,” 1958) [PREVIEW]Meditations on the differences between some similar things that we can’t afford to get twisted. Unprincipled opportunism, idealist insistence that revolutionary organizing always be only prefigurative of stateless, classless society—and meanwhile outright manifestations of reactionary class power are something we can just wink at slyly because we’re good-hearted, tolerant, liberal sophisticates. Ariyoshi Sawako’s story is a Rockefeller Foundation-funded magnum opus of postwar class collaborationism, the kind and gentle face of Fourth Reich fascism in its infancy. By contrast, principled members of the Kingless Generation use things like armies, laws, courts—things which must someday wither away—to ac...2022-04-2726 min
The Kingless GenerationAzov vs. the Orcs: a dialectical demonology of whiteness (Amadís de Gaula, James Connolly, Einsatzgruppen)The historical symbolism of the Zelyonka industrial dye attack—by which members of the Nazi Azov Battalion in Ukraine claim to be marking their victims, whether they be Roma or other central Asian peoples or just supposed Russophiles, as “orcs” tainted by Asiatic racial contagion—lies in the orcos of Spanish chivalric fantasy, the true inspiration for Tolkien’s hordes of Mordor besieging the holy city, surely much more than Beowulf as is often claimed. A kind of dialectical demonology of demonization comes into view, the hammer strokes with which whiteness was forged, as well as clues to how it can be...2022-04-071h 55
The Kingless GenerationZen was made up by a guy in Illinois: D.T. Suzuki & Paul Carus [PREVIEW]As Anglo-American capitalism swept across the globe in the nineteenth century, the school of Japanese Buddhism most closely associated with the thoroughly discredited feudal government, Zen, was struggling to rebrand. Meanwhile, Paul Carus, a German immigrant serving as court philosopher to a zinc magnate in LaSalle, Illinois, published a book identifying Buddhism as a possible source for the “Religion of Science” purified of all superstitions, which he believed must become the ideology of modern, capitalist “Teutonic peoples” (Anglo-Saxons and Germans both). Enthralled by this welcome departure from the standard dogma, accepted no less in Japan than in Anglo-America, that Christianity was the...2022-03-0817 min
The Kingless GenerationLight and Air for the ProletariatA more newsy, free-flowing episode. I see many socialists confused by paired spectacles of astroturfed extremism and carefully misdirected popular energy: caravans of hooting hollering settler hogs on the one side, caravans of moozlamic hispanic terrorists on the other. I’m pretty sure the plan is to numb you to the current violence of bio-gladio, and the climate massacres to come, by convincing you that any given authoritarian crackdown is only going to hit the invading “caravan” who fall on the “side” opposite you, not of the class divide but the partisan divide. But while you were cheering or jeering at the tru...2022-03-041h 07
The Kingless Generationw/ Khālid ibn Yaʿqūb: Idolatry, Semiotics & the Self [PREVIEW]A wide-ranging conversation on historical comparative psychology, spirituality, and leftist politics, with Khalid ibn Yaʿqūb, co-host of the Subliminal Jihad podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.2022-03-0333 min
The Kingless GenerationThe First Private Property: Mother (Sumer, 3 m. BCE); Chūshingura (Japan, 1748 CE)The first private property was the body of the woman, with the historic defeat of the female sex and the birth of the father. We catch fleeting glimpses of the extended clan (gens) family as it existed right down to the 20th century among human beings outside class society, then examine the unexpectedly cucked “traditional” family, a perversion of human community specialised to pass down private property and bring class power to bear on its members at the expense of authentic kinship. Like prisons or the police, the family is a product of class society, and there will come a day...2022-02-032h 09
The Kingless GenerationCombat Parasocialism: Book of Thoth (Egypt, 300 BCE – 300 CE?), Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations (Kenya, 1971), The Gateless Gate (China, 1228) [PREVIEW]With the internet, every ordinary social interaction is now subject to counterinsurgency tactics like COINTELPRO and GLADIO. In places like Vietnam, Kenya, and Ireland, counterinsurgency strategists have allowed the working class to organize while embedding agents within their orgs and also encapsulating these orgs within controlled structures, so that they may be manipulated, frustrated, and even misdirected to cause general chaos and drive society as a whole further toward authoritarianism. Today with Signature Reduction, Integrity Initiative, and similar programs in Japan and across the world, we know (and they want us to know) that similar forces are being brought to be...2021-12-2813 min
The Kingless GenerationMarx failed to consider: Ishikawa Jun, “Jesus of the Ruins”; Joe Moore, “Production Control” (Japan, 1945)It’s bourgeois liberal literature versus the actual history of worker and peasant struggle, as we contrast Ishikawa Jun’s very anti-human view of the unwashed masses of postwar Tokyo, with the economy of autonomous workers’ councils that seized the means of production and traded their products to feed the people for two years until they were finally crushed by a retrenched Japanese bourgeoisie, MacArthur’s occupation government, and the opportunist faction of the Japanese Communist Party. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.2021-12-101h 13
The Kingless GenerationRule by Causing to Speak: Discourses of the Eloquent Peasant (Egypt, 20th c. BCE) [PREVIEW]From the 20th c. BCE, discourses on truth and justice delivered by a peasant who has been robbed by a dishonest official. This leads us into meditations on the class basis of the State, discourses of class compromise, and finally the way that class rule can operate not only by speaking to its subjects or by silencing dissenting views but also by making them speak. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.2021-11-2417 min
The Kingless GenerationThought Living and Dead and the Mass LineA little supplement to yesterday’s episode, as my new more spontaneous and hopefully sustainable format may I fear have left some things unsaid and invited misunderstanding. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.2021-11-1721 min
The Kingless GenerationRevisionist Buddhism: Nihon ryōi ki (Japan, 9th c.)A kind of critical support or supportive criticism of the parapolitics left, particularly what we might call the vampire hunter faction, as we take a look at Buddhist folk tales from early–Heian-period Japan, a time and place where the Abrahamic worldview has no purchase but we still see religious ideology working within class struggle and relations of production in a variety of ways. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.2021-11-161h 40
The Kingless GenerationCapitalist Modernity: Kobayashi Takiji (Japan, 1930) [PREVIEW]Japanese Proletarian writer Kobayashi Takiji takes us into class consciousness, gendered violence, wage labor, the commodity, even the revolutionary potential of the working class, all through the eyes of a child, in the short story “Comrade Taguchi’s Sorrow.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.2021-09-2907 min
The Kingless GenerationWhite Devils: Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (Morocco, al-ʾAndalus, Mali, 14th c.), Esplandián (Spain, ca. 1500)A wander through the hall of mirrors that produced white supremacy, anti-blackness, and the demonic expansion of capital networks in the wake of the “re”conquista of Spain, the crusades, and the age of European exploration. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.2021-08-311h 28
The Kingless GenerationSilk Road: Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī (Iran, China, India), Ibn Faḍlān (Iraq, Russia), 10th c. CE [PREVIEW]We take a tour of the Silk Road, where merchant capital moved and grew value between the ancient empires of China, India, and the newly formed Muslim world, with its roots in nomadism and trade and frontier relationships with nomads, including future “white people” like the Viking Rus. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.2021-08-1710 min
The Kingless GenerationAncient Empires: Cain & Abel (Hebrew/Greek, 3rd c. BCE), Umisachi & Yamasachi (Japan, 712 CE)In ancient myths from opposite sides of the globe, we find ancestral memories of the violent conspiracy that gave birth to class society, and we also trace the growth of cosmologies of good and evil through class struggle and the growth of the great ancient empires: do we live in a cosmic empire? A cosmic insurgency? A cosmic counter-insurgency? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.2021-08-051h 08
The Kingless GenerationThe Grain State: Sheep and Grain (Sumer, 22nd c. BCE), Aizawa Seishisai (Japan, 1825 CE) [PREVIEW]We get an intimate view of the transition to the grain state, straight out of Sumer (modern-day Iraq) in the 22nd century BCE, and compare it to one of the last defenders of the grain state, Aizawa Seishisai in 19th-c. CE Japan, Aristotle in 4th-c. BCE Greece, and current events. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.2021-08-0310 min
The Kingless GenerationThe Hypostasis of the Archons: Human history as the history of relations of productionA quick ramble through the deep history of class struggle. We rise like Mary Magdalene through the heavenly spheres and meet each of the demonic rulers and powers of the air which we must organize to defeat as we build the Kingless Generation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.2021-07-301h 00