The Kingless Generation

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 making even the flowers tipsy? Isn’t this cup making even the flowers tipsy? The sleeves and fringed hems of lovely maidens that sport and play in the waters of the great River flow out to the side like clouds off a mountaintop. And as the flowers and the birds of the clouds become one with the winds of Spring, we are transported to the cloud-road and on it we climb up and up, accompanied by the Queen Mother herself. Shall we rise on the road of heaven, accompanied by the Queen Mother herself, and away we go, we know not where?On Yōmeishu: https://www.yomeishu.my/power_of_herbal/On Tōtōshu: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%99%B6%E9%99%B6%E9%85%92 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 and Akkadian to that between Chinese and Japanese today, we explore the deep consciousness of class struggle and the fragility and perversity of the grain state and early ancient empires which can be seen on nearly every clay tablet on which this literature comes down to us. We see how the goddess of state violence is thwarted by the god of wisdom, who creates a goddess of revolt to stop her and put her in her place in the Agushaya, an epic poem dating to the reign of Hammurabi, famous for the first law code—though it was really only the first punitive code, whereas human beings outside class society have usually depended on the much more productive practices of restorative justice. We explore vignettes of various trades in the early grain state, as well as the story of a lone hustler who overcomes a greedy bureaucrat with some very picaresque tricks. Finally, a parody on the epic tradition in praise of King Sargon (which dates earlier than any extant example of that tradition) uses puns on similar-sounding words in Sumerian and Akkadian to encode a clandestine critique of class rule. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 is most famous for his work on Heian court literature, as well as his promotion of anti-Communist liberals like Maruyama Masao, but in fact he was also the preferred translator and close companion of Japan Romantic aesthete and fascist paramilitary leader Mishima Yukio. In what became his final book, and a classic among the Japan Panic–era Anglo-American business class, Morris gave an interpretation of Mishima’s spectacular death by outlining a series of tragic heroes in Japanese history, from which he derives a Japanese national character that is chivalric and militant enough to achieve honorary whiteness but ultimately docile, clumsy, and non-threatening. Meanwhile, at the core of Morris’ most important chapter here lies an interpretation of medieval Japanese political economy that seems utterly alien to the subject at hand but which bears striking resemblances to the PR logic of GLADIO and the strategy of tension. Sadly no further explanation was forthcoming from Morris himself, as he was mysteriously found dead in a cheap hotel in Bologna shortly thereafter and only a few years before the Bologna train station bombing... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 denizens of feudal Europe having their minds blown by the complex galaxies of non–hetero-patriarchal deep kinship and community that exist in Indigenous societies where the family is not specialized to pass down private property. But most of the time we can see from diaries that they were just rolling up on Indigenous women and r*ping them, and in fact there is an entire canto of an epic poem celebrating this practice: Canto 9 of Camões’ Lusíads has the goddess Venus reward Vasco da Gama and his brave sailors for their labors in blasting and murdering their way into the Silk Road of the Indian Ocean by preparing a magical sex island for them where they can force themselves (only role-play! they swear) on a host of minor sea sprites whom she has gathered, Epstein-like, for this purpose. So the really remarkable thing is that the old Disney little mermaid was white! The sailor guy she falls in love with seems to be an explorer on the seven seas, but somehow he’s exploring places where there are white mermaids? Her whiteness is the only thing (quite artificially) keeping us from thinking about the colonial origins of this whole story as it exists in the modern imagination, making her only just a metaphor for accepting the role of housewife in the Disney style picket fence Lebensraum, etc. I am joined by Lakota organizer and podcaster Šuŋgmánitu of Chunka Luta, recently rebranded from Bands of Turtle Island. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.

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 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 we find many Islamic precedents for the picaresque in the numerous stories, songs, and plays about the banū sāsān, the gentleman (and woman) thieves who live free and easy (sometimes not so easy) from Morocco to India and beyond. The most voluminous of these works, which sadly does not survive, was written in al-ʾAndalus (Muslim Spain) itself, and so they give us a window into the biome of class struggle that birthed the modern European bourgeoisie, as well as provide hints how we proletarian hustlers might draw on the energies of the “dangerous class” to bring about the Kingless Generation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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, 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 value producing spectacle, Jim Jones as stage magician, Hegel and ritual cannibalism, the word “apophatic”, the pedastal and the figurine, Thomas Aquinas’ friends boiling the meat off his bones, the whip inside the mind, the (di)vision of labor, Sino-Japanese comparisons, restoration versus acceptance in curatorship, insides and outsides of Kyoto and the rule by retired soveregns, Buddhist clerks and bean counters, Amino Yoshihiko: peasants are more than just farmers, Japanese castles are all fake, Latin poetry under Mussolini, the division of labor as the thing that the most successful Indigenous societies kept at bay, Adam’s calendar in Mpumalanga, southern Africa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 the faith—and, on the other hand, his own childhood which was troubled by his parents’ divorce, his mother’s various obsessions, and his secret discovery of violent male sexuality. We discuss the unspoken colonial and imperial background to the story, Endō’s prominent placement in the Cold War pantheon of “Christian Democratic” writers, his mysterious trip to France to “study the works of the Marquis de Sade,” etc. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.