The Kingless Generation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 ever consciously perceive them as forces of nature or blind human folly, rather than class power wielded shrewdly and mercilessly. An Old Babylonian epic reveals that they have been at this a long time, since the days when they were cult leaders in a little backwater called Mesopotamia, spinning stories for their tiny captive audience about the first ever final solution. Nevertheless, this is not so long ago compared to 300,000 years of human history, and it is nothing compared to the eons of human flourishing we can build if we refuse to give in to panic or despair, if we reject mechanistic or economistic understandings of class struggle and instead put politics in command.https://twitter.com/2youngBadazz/status/1451303496351825931 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.

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 proxy war on China. Meanwhile, spectacular wall-to-wall coverage of Japanese people beating Americans at baseball is performing its diversionary function perfectly. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.