The Kingless Generation

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.

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 baroque version known as Calcutta II. There, we find the first-person narrative interludes removed, or at least refocused away from the process of establishing a secure communication channel between the worker go-betweens, on behalf of the elite patrons. That process also becomes top-down rather than bottom-up, as the negotiation of the connection much more clearly follows an elite commission rather than arising on the initiative of the workers themselves. Meanwhile, textual change has obscured some storytelling choices we saw in the post-1450 version, sometimes strengthening the story but also often leaving loose ends dangling and vestigial inconsistencies that only make sense if we know what the passage used to say. In the way, the text of Calcutta II embodies the growth of oriental despotism or decadence precisely in the time of occidental colonization, both in its form and in its content. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 call a conscious entity—in the same way, political organizations on the left, where transparency and trust are of the essence, must conduct audits of local organs with member-decided questions. The lack of organizational proprioception can and does lead to organizations being encapsulated and misdirected, as they are in the many proxy wars of national liquidation that form the basis of the emerging necro-capitalist world system today: gangs and counter-gangs like ISIS and YPG shredded Syria and broke the back of regional resistance to Zionist aggression, and one would hate to see, for example, a CIA-encapsulated leftist militia emerge to fight ICE but end up only running cover for further controlled demolition of society for the workers and colonized peoples of Turtle Island—speaking purely hypothetically. 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-listen podcast River to Reality. The final song my incompetent rendition of “Happy Paddle”, a song about going by canoe to a festival, composed by Casey James of the Musqueam nation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 think) rather the effect of the mythopoetic comprador infestation of working-class movements and Indigenous resistance to dispossession which we have been discussing in this series. 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 squads—so you know we have to check it out. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 existence)—which future must lie beyond the whiteness that Japan too has claimed for itself in the postwar, thereby following a path of delusion that many countries in Africa and West Asia are still being forced down today pending the working and peasant classes rising up and showing the way. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 the usual WACL suspects: Moon Seonmyeong of the Unification Church, his high-ranking lieutenant Jhoon Rhee, Sasakawa Ryōichi—as well as Zionists like Menachem Golan and Haim Saban. Moreover, the hyper-individualism and hierarchicalism of this WACL school of karate, far from being inherent to the art, represents its co-optation and enlistment in a fight against its true roots in the struggles of the colonized and the working class in the Japanese Empire. In the proletarian fiction of 1920s Japan we find a little-known earlier chapter in the story of karate, when it was a new and exotic weapon, developed by Ryukyuan peasants under early-modern feudal and mercantile rule, and now wielded by Ryukyuan proletarians and the Korean and Japanese comrades to whom they taught it, to devastating effect against the bosses and their yakuza goons. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.