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...

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...

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...

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...

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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...

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...

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...

Lenin’s *What is to be Done?* in the illuminating new Lars T. Lih translation. 5. The ‘Plan’ for an All-Russian Political Newspaper: a) Who was offended by the article ‘Where to Begin?’; b) Can a newspaper be a collective organiser?; c) What type of organisation do we need? / Conclusion Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lenin’s *What is to be Done?* in the illuminating new Lars T. Lih translation. 4. The Artisanal Limitations of the Economists and the Organisation of Revolutionaries: d) The sweep of organisational work; e) A ‘conspiratorial’ organisation and ‘democratism’; f) Local and all-Russian work Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lenin’s *What is to be Done?* in the illuminating new Lars T. Lih translation. 4. The Artisanal Limitations of the Economists and the Organisation of Revolutionaries: a) What are artisanal limitations?, b) Artisanal limitations and economism, c) Organisation of workers and organisation of revolutionaries Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lenin’s *What is to be Done?* in the illuminating new Lars T. Lih translation. 3. Tred-iunionist Politics and Social-Democratic Politics: e) The worker class as advanced fighter for democracy, f) Once more ‘slanderers’, once more ‘mystifiers’ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lenin’s What is to be Done? in the illuminating new translation by Lars T. Lih. 3. Tred-iunionist Politics and Social-Democratic Politics: a) Political agitation and its narrowing by the economists, b) The story of how Martynov made Plekhanov deep, c) Political indictments and ‘education for revolutionary activeness’, d) What do economism and terrorism have in common? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In which Fergal revisits his old TradCath stomping grounds, discovers why so many of his old TradCath friends have now converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, and comes away with a deep appreciation for the contribution made to ideas of revolutionary transformation of society, universal human brotherhood, and scientific knowledge of history, by the Jewish people of the Hellenistic diaspora under the Second Temple—not because of their mastery of a pure Hebrew tradition but because of their bold and...

After my conversations with Keith Allen Dennis and Recluse of the Farm podcast, I keep thinking how it’s the second-string fascists, the Nazi and Japanese imperial collaborators of Ukraine and Korea, who go on to be the absolute MVPs of the Cold War–era fascist international. Operating from the American puppet ROK and the Ukranian diaspora, this passionate minority within each country worked tirelessly to advance the fascist cause and sabotage socialist construction in their own homelands and...

“According to the hospital, there were two bullet holes in the right front side of Mr. Abe’s neck, spaced about five centimeters apart. It appears that the bullets went into his body from his neck, damaging his heart and the large arteries in his chest. Doctors say a large hole had been opened in the wall of his heart. On his left shoulder there was one wound which seemed to be from a bullet that had pierced through his body. They say no bullets were recovered from inside his body.” Asahi...

My second conversation with Laihallll is followed by my own extended meditations on the secret society in prehistory and the present. I develop my hypothesis that the post-capitalist dystopia which the ruling class are currently ushering us into may be most accurately described as not techno-feudalism but rather techno-transegalitarianism. Indeed, I suspect that the term “transhumanism” was coined with reference to these transegalitarian relations of production. With a fully automated means...

It’s not every day that you get to learn about a whole new mode of production, or phase in the meta of class society—much less the earliest one that we are (possibly) able to reconstruct or learn anything about—but here we are. Coordinating with anthropological data (problematically enough collected by and for settlers during the narrow window in which any Indigenous person would both still know the pre-contact forms firsthand and be willing to record them for posterity) from around Turtle...

Doraemon: Nobita’s Little Star Wars (1985) was a masterpiece of late–Cold War bourgeois libertarian mythmaking: the kids of the Doraemon world join a miniature alien race in a righteous struggle for liberty from a totalitarian (aggressively Soviet-coded) regime, using Doraemon’s shrink ray to move back and forth between branded action figure size and regular size to bring about the triumphant end of history—and maybe even record a cool home movie on their consumer electronics while Mom works...

We have seen how D.T. Suzuki’s take on zen was a very modern thing, tailor made in Illinois as a bourgeois ideology. This time, under the guidance of Ajith’s dialectical materialist critique of Brahmanism, we take up the Bhagavad Gītā (India, post 5th c. BCE), especially its modern bourgeois idealist interpretations as represented by Tilak’s Gītā Rahasya, a foundational text for India’s comprador Brahman classes and their English masters. We notice here the emphasis on karma yoga, the...

Meditations on the differences between some similar things that we can’t afford to get twisted. Unprincipled opportunism, idealist insistence that revolutionary organizing always be only prefigurative of stateless, classless society—and meanwhile outright manifestations of reactionary class power are something we can just wink at slyly because we’re good-hearted, tolerant, liberal sophisticates. Ariyoshi Sawako’s story is a Rockefeller Foundation-funded magnum opus of postwar class...

The historical symbolism of the Zelyonka industrial dye attack—by which members of the Nazi Azov Battalion in Ukraine claim to be marking their victims, whether they be Roma or other central Asian peoples or just supposed Russophiles, as “orcs” tainted by Asiatic racial contagion—lies in the orcos of Spanish chivalric fantasy, the true inspiration for Tolkien’s hordes of Mordor besieging the holy city, surely much more than Beowulf as is often claimed. A kind of dialectical demonology of...