The Kingless Generation

In anticipation of future outings on some of the more interesting figures we've met thus far, we bring our introductory series on the Eranos milieu to a close with a discussion of the final years, as one august old racket came to an end but was simultaneously demolitioned, flipped, spun off, and otherwise psycho-entrepreneurially aufgehoben into various other cultic milieux just as our current moment of cultic conquest of civil society began. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 and gave him carbon monoxide poisoning in the night. Join me and Scott Ryan of the Dustlight Archives Podcast as we discover an important Kingless Generation ancestor. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 known as intelligencers and used to great effect by Elizabeth’s spymaster Francis Walsingham. In his iconic depiction of the intelligencer in his picaresque novel The Unfortunate Traveller, we recognise extensive overlap with the fellowship of the Sons of the Silk Road as depicted by the 10th-c travelling Arab poet Abū Dulaf al-Khazrajī in his Qaṣīda sāsāniyya. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 just going to get this out there: please enjoy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 pure, ideal figure who must only be rescued from corruption and he will save the world. Midway through the longer versions of the novel—there are countless versions with different political slants and (on the original prints) commentary on every page by various ideologues of the time—Song Jiang finally receives his longed-for imperial pardon, but now the heroes must join the imperial army as an elite unit fighting to put down rebellions much like their own across the country, as promises of elevation to the bureaucracy are deferred again and again. When (after the smartest of the heroes go back to the thug life) they finally receive their emoluments and sinecures and retire to their country villas, one by one they are poisoned by the bureaucrats with (as the narrator quasi-grudgingly admits) the full knowledge of the emperor. A final poignant scene caps the long debate throughout the novel between Song Jiang and his loyal and simple stalwart Iron Ox, who has argued throughout against Song Jiang’s monarchist fantasies and in favor of something like socialism and democracy. Giving the lie to Eurocentric ideas that revolution is alien to East Eurasia where “oriental despotism” prevails—in fact, the roots of modernity including the modern revolutionary tradition lie in the East—this novel had a tremendous influence on China’s thwarted bourgeois revolution, Japan’s successful bourgeois revolution (it, far more than the Kojiki or anything else, is the bible of the Japanese right wing and the foundation of Japanese monarchism), and a complicated legacy in China’s socialist revolution. In Red Star Over China, Mao is seen praising the Water Margin as an inspiration, but during the Great People’s Cultural Revolution he held it up as a “negative example” (反面教材), calling Song Jiang’s desire for a pardon “capitulationism” and equating it to the attitude of the capitalist roaders. So who was correct: Song Jiang or Iron Ox? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

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 recruits to fight off the Angles and Saxons in the last days of Roman Britain—as exhaustively investigated by Higham. Then I state the obvious: that all the most distinctive features of the Arthur story appear for the first time in French chivalric romance (with many parallels in Spanish, Italian, and Catalonian stories featuring other characters) in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as the new Crusader concept of taking territory “back” from Muslims became the conceit of knightly adventure and conquest of “islands that the Emperor of Rome could not hold”, and the phenomenon of Crusaders bringing back relics from the holy land grew into legends like that of the Holy Grail. Finally, we explore one of foundational Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki’s very first literary ventures, the Arthurian story “Kairokō” (“A Dirge”, 1905) and the modern, pseudo-modern, or hyper-modern twists and turns that it imposes on earlier Arthurian stories by Malory (1485) and Tennyson (1833), while trying to steer clear of allegedly un-civilized and un-modern predecessors in Edo-period kabuki and puppet theatre—which were perhaps in fact more authentically modern because rooted in Afro-Asiatic silk road capitalism. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.

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 less openly violent name “Sanctuary” in Japan). All this they package under the racially provocatory slogan “Japanese people first!”, backed up by mass media campaigns about a wave of “crimes and annoying behavior by foreigners”—but of course tending in reality to shunt all Japanese class tensions onto the East, South, and West Asian captive nations that make up Japan’s proletariat, beef up digital surveillance and social credit systems, and further prepare Japan to become the Ukraine of the Pacific. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 you survived the Cull? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 ahuras (cf. Skt. asuras) into an absolute good creator, to whom is opposed an absolute evil which has corrupted the world and from which a series of saviors must be sent to save us, culminating in a final eschaton, a resurrection and final judgment, etc—the whole apparatus of Abrahamism is basically here already. Within this, we explore the Indo-European myth of the first man and the first king, whose Avestan expression features a societal collapse and a post-apocalyptic remnant surviving in some sort of secure underground enclosure called the wara. The new Japanese translation of the entire Avesta by Prof. Noda Keigō (2020), the first into any language in nearly a hundred years, as well as the new English Ṛigveda of Jamison and Brereton (2014), equip us uniquely well for this investigation. Our main takeaway is the sheer age of ruling class myths of the need to hole up in a cult compound to survive the collapse of class society—when in fact (even supposing we will need counter-waras and defensive tunnels of our own to survive climate collapse and extermination campaigns) it was always the ruling class who most needed to hide away, whereas the masses have always found a way out and forward in the struggle for production and human flourishing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 since he’s still such a weeb that he insists on speaking nothing but Japanese, he will be joining the show to host Japanese language episodes from time to time.俺はケビン・ガイジンソン、世界一日本語上手な人。これから本ポッドキャストで日本語ホストを務めるわけですが、まずはちょっとした身の上話を聞いてください。天皇陛下を歌カルタで倒したり、ヤクザと博打を打ったり、著名人の有閑婦人にとても丁寧に英会話を教えたり、日本人よりもよく知っている知日派として理想の生活を送っていましたが、三つ四つ目の諜報局がらみの反共カルトにうんざりきた頃、何か違うなと思ってきました。本ポッドキャストの英語ホストにそんな身の上相談をしたときの音声が今回の主な内容で、僕は日本オタクすぎて日本語しか話せないためバイリンガルの漫才のようなノリになりました。その結果、英語がさっぱりわからなくても結構面白く聞いていただけるかもしれません。ともあれ、USAID/NEDの解体で僕は浪人中ですし、このポッドキャストの日本語ホストをやることになりました。次回からは普通に日本語だけのわかりやすいポッドキャストになりますが、とりあえずはこちらのケビン・ガイジンソン縁起を聞し召せ。 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Before 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.