The Kingless Generation

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 being a high school dropout, but then after moving his family to a country house for their safety after his organizing work got him in some heat during the Years of Lead, he died at age 39 when his water heater suddenly malfunctioned an...

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 resort in Switzerland. Jung disciple Gustav Heyer memorably called their activities there Aetherhurerei “aether whoredom”. I am joined by Scott Ryan of The Dustlight Archives Podcast for the opening episode of a series on this little-known but very important gathering which has deep...

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, inspired imitators among the crusaders and (re)conquistadors of Spain and Italy and, through them, a strange little island nation called England. This time we savor the acerbic wit of Thomas Nashe, poet of the continental wanderers know...

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 established by world historians like Janet Abu-Lughod, Andre Gunder Frank, Samir Amin, Emmanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, et al, because Europe was in fact a late-comer to industrial modernity, borrowing all the basic in...

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 be a pretty great statement of core Kingless Generation themes packed with updated information and analysis, so I’m ju...

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, and played by a blue-eyed English actor—which is especially interesting because the real Lafcadio was a brown man born of the last Crusade, or maybe the first color...

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 to capitalist upheaval in early modernity, known internationally by the Russian name “Good Tsar, Bad Boyars”—the breakdown of feudal order under market relations is blamed on the ministers around the monarch, while the monarch himself is seen as a p...

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, scientists are finding that body parts other than our brains can even store memories (maybe even participate in thought!), and the total state of the whole nervous system may be the minimum unit that we can ca...

A quick, chatty, catch-up episode recorded in a park in central Tokyo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 the End of History, Fire in the Minds of Men, by Ronald Reagan’s Librarian of Congress—followed by a wide-ranging conversation with the roaring River, of the must-lis...

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 their imaginations the spiritual homeland of a fictional Europe innocent of Semitic influences (both Muslim and Jewish). First, we run through all the major Arthurian theories—including the all-time banger whereby Arthur was a Croatian-Roman general who led nomadic Iranian horse-rider recrui...

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 postwar Japanese cultural theme of Japan as hotbed of incestuous “bed-creeping” (yobai), a feature which is either the dysgenic cause of the nation’s staunch patriarchy, persistent class rule, and gangsterismo (as in less helpful versions), or (as Nathan and I...

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.

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 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...

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...

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, 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...

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-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...

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 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...

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 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...

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.