Analysis of ‘The Last House on the Left’

I: Introduction

The Last House on the Left is a 1972 rape and revenge film written and directed by Wes Craven, his directorial debut. It was produced by Sean S Cunningham, who helped create and who directed the first Friday the 13th film. TLHOTL stars Sandra Peabody and Lucy Grantham, with David Hess, Fred J Lincoln, Jeramie Rain, Marc Sheffler, and Martin Kove.

The movie is a kind of modern retelling of Ingmar Bergman‘s Virgin Spring, which in turn is based on the Swedish ballad “Törres döttrar i Wänge.” TLHOTL was cut many times for the MPAA to get an R rating; as a result, there are many different versions of the film on DVD and VHS reissues, and it’s difficult to get a completely uncut version of the film. Some incomplete scenes include a forced lesbian sex scene between the two victim girls in the woods, Mari (Peabody) in her room naked while reading birthday cards, and Mari raped by Sadie (Rain) in the woods. As we can see, TLHOTL is a rather “vulgarized” version of Bergman’s film, as the Christian Science Monitor News Service called it.

TLHOTL got largely negative reviews on release, but its critical reputation improved somewhat over the years, with some praising the narrative and Peabody’s and Hess’s performances. It’s now considered a cult film, and it was nominated for AFI’s 100 Years…100 Thrills in 2001. A remake was made in 2009, though it’s generally considered inferior to the original.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the full movie.

You might be wondering, Dear Reader, why I have chosen to do an analysis of this film rather than of The Virgin Spring, TLHOTL‘s inspiration, and artistically a far superior film. The fact is that it is the very vulgarity of TLHOTL that I find important to discuss, as well as the sadism of it, not only in the sexual abuse of the two girls, Mari and Phyllis (Grantham), but also in the violent revenge that Mari’s parents take on the gang who rape, degrade, and murder Mari and Phyllis.

The reason that I am so intrigued by this vulgarity and sadism is that I see a way to watch so unsettling a film, a way that makes it relevant to some of the horrors we’ve been learning of in recent years. Just as films like Salò and Eyes Wide Shut have been related to the Epstein crimes, so can TLHOTL in a way, and this latter film can also galvanize us, if watched in the right frame of mind, to push for justice for, if not outright revenge on, the rapists of those then-underaged girls whom the Epstein criminals had (Mari, while played by an older actress, has just turned 17 in the story).

It should be infuriating to all of us that so little has been done about the Epstein scandal, so watching Mari’s parents, normally mild-mannered, bourgeois people, carrying out as violent and sadistic a revenge against a gang of sadists could help galvanize us to do what’s necessary to get justice for Epstein’s victims.

II: Comparing TLHOTL, The Virgin Spring, and the Epstein Crimes

*TLHOTL*	*The Virgin Spring*	Epstein Crimes
Mari and Phyllis go to the city to attend a rock concert.	Karin and servant Ingeri take candles to church.	Underage girls go to, and are groomed by, the Epstein criminals.
Sadie assists “Weasel” and Krug in their degradation of Mari and Phyllis.	Ingeri, envious of Karin, “wills” her to be raped.	Ghislane Maxwell, Naomi Campbell, and Hillary Clinton are involved, in one way or another with (i.e., grooming for, winking at, if not outright participating in), the Epstein crimes.
Phyllis is gang-raped by “Weasel,” Sadie, and Krug, then Mari is raped by Sadie and Krug. Both are murdered. Junior watches and does nothing.	Two herdsmen rape and murder Karin. A boy who’s with the herdsmen watches and can do nothing.	Epstein, Trump, et al sexually abuse the underage girls. There are also killings, including by cannibalism, allegedly. Most others who personally knew Epstein and about the crimes have generally done nothing to help the victims find justice.
Two incompetent cops can do nothing to help the girls or Mari’s parents.	No law enforcement involved.	Law enforcement so far has been pretty much slack, if not useless, in seeking justice for the victims.
Mari’s parents brutally kill the rapists/murderers.	Karin’s father, Töre, kills the herdsmen and the boy.	What is to be done? Revolution is not a dinner party.

III: The Opening Act of TLHOTL

A postman notes all the birthday cards being sent to Mari, who is then seen taking a shower. Her mom and dad are uncomfortable about her going to the big city at night with only Phyllis to accompany her, and especially with Mari not wearing a bra; still, they let her go.

Their house is way out in the woods, isolated, hence the name of the film. We see the two girls out there for a while, enjoying themselves; our sense of sympathy for them is being established. We also get a sense of Mari’s budding sexuality, too, which will be turned into something tragic and horrifying soon enough.

In the city that night, Mari and Phyllis hope to buy some marijuana. Meanwhile, Krug Stillo (Hess), his illegitimate son, Junior (Sheffler), Fred “Weasel” Podorowski (Lincoln), and Sadie are on the lam from the cops after Krug and Weasel broke out of prison. The girls have heard a news report about the criminals on the car radio, but they don’t show much concern. They meet Junior by the building where the gang is hiding out for the moment; he promises he can get them some weed if they go up to his room with them. Once inside the room, the girls are abducted.

IV: Juxtapositions of Good and Bad

What’s interesting at this point in the movie is how scenes of the gang terrorizing the girls in that room alternate with scenes of Mari’s mom and dad preparing her birthday party (decorations, birthday cake). The hideous and the innocent are so closely juxtaposed here. This is significant given how later, the girls will be further abused and murdered in the very same woods that lead to Mari’s parents’ house, where the killers will later go for accommodations, since their car broke down, the telephones often aren’t working, and Mari took the family car into town. It’s a small world, isn’t it?

The point is that there’s a kind of providential proximity of the ‘heaven and hell,’ as it were, in this movie. As a result, karma comes swiftly.

There is, however, an odd incongruity between the film and its musical soundtrack…from time to time, at least. This incongruity was intentional, apparently, as a conscious break from conventional horror movie music scores. The writers of the music, Stephen Chapin and Hess (who also plays Krug, recall), used a mix of folk rock and bluegrass for the movie. Synthesizer noises tend to be used during violent moments, though.

The incongruity between the narrative and the music is at its sharpest in the scene when we see the gang take the girls, bound and gagged, from the apartment and into the trunk of their getaway car. While this is happening, we hear what sounds like an inappropriate choice of music: an upbeat, bluegrass instrumental called “Baddies Theme.” During what should be a great moment of terror, we hear music that, if anything, sounds flippant in attitude to the situation. A hint to the intention is in the music’s title: from the point of view of a psychopath, one who regards people as mere toys to play with, this moment of terror is sheer fun.

Indeed, there are many examples of a juxtaposition of good and bad, including extremes of these. Mari is a sweet, innocent 17-year-old virgin, yet she isn’t wearing a bra (to the consternation of her parents), and she and Phyllis hope to score some weed before going to a rock concert, the band having the name of “Bloodlust.” It’s an ill omen for them.

Her parents are the typical “nice” people, even willing to accommodate a group of strangers; then, when these strangers turn out to be the murderers of their daughter, the parents immediately plan a vicious revenge, and thus become murderers themselves. Their home is by a beautiful, serene forest, yet here is where Mari and Phyllis are degraded, raped, and murdered.

The house is a place of safety for Mari, but a place of death for her killers. The killers are perfectly safe to kill her and Phyllis in the forest, but they’re anything but safe in the house.

The cops are supposed to protect the community, but the two in question are so incompetent, they can’t even arrive at the house on time to stop Mari’s parents from killing the gang.

V: Doublings

Apart from these juxtaposed opposites, there are also a number of doublings in TLHOTL. Two girls are raped and killed, rather than the one in The Virgin Spring. Two parents avenge their daughter, rather than the one father in TVS. There are two bumbling cops.

We see Mari naked in the shower at the beginning, then she’s naked and victimized later. After her murder, we see Sadie washing the blood off of herself in the lake, then she’s killed at the end of the film. Both Mari and Sadie, when killed, are seen floating head up in water (the lake, and the family’s swimming pool, respectively).

The girls can’t find any weed and Junior never gets a “fix” for his heroin addiction. There are two families: Mari and her parents, and Junior and his abusive father, Krug.

VI: The Middle Act of TLHOTL

To get back to the story, the gang is going in their car with the girls in the trunk, but they have car trouble, and they have to stop it on the side of the road by the forest near Mari’s house. They can’t fix it, so they take the girls out of the trunk and go into the woods.

Meanwhile, Mari’s parents at home are talking with the two cops (the sheriff played by Marshal Anker and the deputy by Kove) about how Mari is missing and their worries about her. The juxtapositions of good and bad continue when Mari, though terrified and crying over what’s to happen to her and Phyllis, also sees her family’s mailbox and therefore knows she isn’t far from home, thus giving her hope. Also, when the cops leave Mari’s home, they drive past the mailbox and the gang’s abandoned car. The deputy suggests they find out whose car it is and help them, but the sheriff says they have more important things to do (helping Mari, in all irony!), so they drive away–so close to saving the day, yet so far away from it.

When the gang gets the girls out of the car, Phyllis bites Krug’s hand, making him want to hurt “that bitch.” With the girls in the middle of the forest now, Krug wants to get his revenge by humiliating Phyllis. He tells her to piss her pants right in front of the laughing gang. After seeing Weasel cut Mari’s finger with his switchblade for not doing as she’s told, Phyllis pisses her pants with a frown. Then they make her take her soiled pants off in front of them and make her hit Mari. Then the two girls are forced to get naked and engage in lesbian sex in front of them, Mari weeping the whole time.

VII: TLHOTL and Epstein

The degradation that Mari and Phyllis are being subjected to can be compared to what Epstein’s victims were put through. Mari is only 17, reminding us of the underage Epstein victims. There is the sexually perverse nature of what both the fictional and the real victims have suffered. There’s also the impotent law enforcement, who have the crimes practically before their eyes, yet they are either unable or unwilling to do virtually anything about it.

There is, however, one crucial difference between the gang in the movie and the Epstein perpetrators: the former are common criminals, lacking in money and political power, while the latter have these in abundance. Small wonder the law enforcement today cannot or won’t properly investigate and prosecute the wealthy offenders, for to do so would have to be so extensive as to bring down so many, if not virtually everybody in power, that the entire system would come crashing down like a house of cards.

I mentioned above that one of the lost scenes was of Sadie raping Mari. (Ghislaine Maxwell not only enabled the Epstein sexual abuse, grooming the girls, but also participated in the sexual abuse herself.) We may frown on the use of such language today, but–during the scene of Phyllis’s attempted escape from the gang, and upon Sadie’s catching of her, she’s hit by Phyllis with a rock–Phyllis’s calling Sadie a “stupid dyke” is understandable.

VIII: Two Shakespeare Allusions

There’s one moment in the film with a possible Shakespearean allusion, and another one with a definite allusion to the Bard. The possible one is from Othello, and the definite one is from Hamlet.

While Phyllis is running from Weasel and Sadie, and Krug has gone away to the car, Mari is left alone with Junior, who is being trusted to keep her from escaping. She hopes he’ll help her get away, though, to her nearby home, and even promises him he’ll get a “fix” (some Methadone, since her dad is a doctor). Trying to win his friendship and trust, she starts calling him “Willow.”

This sounds to me like an allusion to the “Willow scene” in Othello, in which Desdemona tells her maidservant, Emilia, about her mother’s maid, Barbary, who was in love with a man who went mad and forsook her. Barbary would sing “a song of willow” to express her heartbreak, and she would die singing it. The song is full of imagery from nature, including “a sycamore tree,” “a green willow,” and “the fresh streams,” all fitting imagery to be associated with Mari in the woods.

As for Junior, or “Willow,” he could be seen as analogous to the man Barbary loves, for “Willow” is going mad from his heroin withdrawal (to say nothing of his intimidation from being constantly bullied by his father, Krug), and he–in not sufficiently helping Mari to escape out of fear of Krug killing him–will forsake Mari, too.

She will die from a gunshot in the back from Krug as she walks in the lake, dazed in her trauma from having just been raped by him (as well as having his name carved into her chest). She’ll float head up, her body surrounded by plants, like Ophelia in Hamlet. She, too, was forsaken by the Danish prince, who also, it seemed, proved mad. If I’m right about the Othello allusion, then these two allusions are yet another doubling in TLHOTL.

IX: Bionian Psychoanalysis and TLHOTL

Please indulge me, Dear Reader, while I go off on a tangent for a moment. I’ll relate this tangent to TLHOTL soon enough.

Object relations psychoanalyst WR Bion had an application of Melanie Klein‘s notion of projective identification in which it’s not just about projecting feelings and manipulating others into embodying those feelings. For Bion, projective identification is a primitive, pre-verbal form of communication.

Such communication–originally between a baby and its mother, and later, between a (psychotic) patient and his psychoanalyst–is Bion’s theory of containment, which is normally about the mother or analyst (the container) soothing and processing the unbearable agitations of, respectively, the baby or patient (the contained). It’s normally a positive experience, helping the baby or mental patient to grow in the ability to think, learn from experience, and build a stable identity.

Bion’s notion of container/contained, represented by the female/male symbols of ♀︎/♂︎, implies a sexual symbolism of phallus (the contained) in yoni (the container), or the act of coitus. I find this symbolism extremely useful in analyzing TLHOTL, for sometimes the container/contained relationship is a negative one, -♀︎/♂︎, in which the container cannot process or manage the projections, a problem represented in the movie with the rapes, stabbings, carving of Krug’s name in Mari’s chest, him shooting her in the back, and later, with her parents’ revenge–her mother biting Weasel’s dick off and slitting Sadie’s throat, as well as Mari’s dad shooting Krug in the shoulder and finishing him off with the chainsaw.

Because of the psychopathic nature of the gang, their pain cannot be soothed or processed–it cannot be contained. Here, containment is not the quietening of a baby’s crying and soothing it to sleep; containment isn’t a psychiatrist soothing and helping to process the ranting and raving of a mentally ill man.

With the gang, the contained is a raping phallus, a switchblade stuck in Phyllis’s back, the knife cutting Krug’s name in Mari’s chest, and a bullet in her back. The container is the violated yoni of either girl, the stab wound in Phyllis’s back, the knife wounds on Mari’s chest, and the bullet wound in her back. The same goes for her parents’ revenge: the phallic contained is her mother’s teeth on Weasel’s dick, the switchblade going through Sadie’s throat, the bullet from Mari’s dad’s shotgun, and the chainsaw blade entering Krug’s flesh. The wounds that the gang received were all the yonic containers. These are all negative, destructive forms of containment, -♀︎/♂︎, for no one can process or manage such painful projections.

That we can see two perfectly straight, bourgeois parents immediately consumed with violent hate for their daughter’s murderers demonstrates projective identification utterly, even if the gang never intended to project their violence onto the doctor and his wife. The parents have become as violent and murderous as their daughter’s attackers.

X: The Final Act of TLHOTL

I said it above, and I’ll say it again: it is most extraordinary to see two straight, nice people transformed into not only killers, but bloodthirsty ones, and so quickly.

It is emphasized from the beginning of the film how straight, conservative, and nice Mari’s mom and dad are. They are uncomfortable with her wearing no bra, saying “tits,” and going to a rough area of town to attend a rock concert by a band called “Bloodlust.” Still, they’re laid-back enough to let her go.

We later see the two innocently preparing her birthday party in scenes alternating with those of Mari and Phyllis being terrorized by the gang in that apartment. They’re full of worry as they trust the two incompetent cops to find their daughter.

Mari’s parents are so nice and straight that they even give accommodations to a group of strangers, not knowing they’re Mari’s rapists and killers. They provide a nice dinner for them, Sadie gluttonously drinking their wine. They’re given Mari’s bedroom to sleep in; here, naturally, is where the gang sees photos of the girl they’d just raped and killed, and they know they must be careful of what they say with her parents potentially in earshot…though they’ll fail to be careful enough.

First, Mari’s mother picks up on clues: Junior is wearing a Peace necklace Mari’s dad bought and gave her as a gift at the beginning of the film; Junior’s heroin withdrawal and bad dreams of the murders cause him to shout out “Sorry!”, which causes more suspicion; then, her mom finds the gang’s bloody clothes in their luggage; then, she overhears the gang talking in Mari’s room about her body floating in the lake, prompting her mom and dad to go outside and find it there.

As I said above, what must be emphasized here is the sadism of the revenge that the parents get on Mari’s killers. The father doesn’t just get a shotgun and shoot all four of them, then plan to tell the cops he did it in self-defence. His and the mother’s revenge is out of unmitigated rage…stemming, ironically, from a deep love of their daughter.

The father sets up an electrocution booby trap by the back door of the house, having sprayed a slippery white cream on the floor by the door of Mari’s room, where the gang is sleeping. The mother pretends to seduce Weasel by taking him outside by the lake, and she even deliberately catches his penis in his zipper and calls it “little,” before beginning oral on him and biting it off, then leaving him to bleed to death there.

Krug fights with the father and has the upper hand until still-remorseful Junior threatens his dad with a pistol. Just to get a sense of how psychopathic Krug is, we see him manipulating his own son into pointing the gun at himself and blowing his brains out, which Junior does. Meanwhile, Mari’s father sneaks away to the basement and gets the chainsaw.

As explained above, the mother slits Sadie’s throat with the switchblade after a brief scuffle outside by the swimming pool, and the father kills Krug with the chainsaw, the cops having arrived too late to stop him. The film ends with the grieving parents knowing there’s no way they can pretend that their revenge was out of self-defence. Surely, though, they regret nothing.

XI: Conclusion

TLHOTL is a disturbing film to watch–no doubt. Knowing what the Epstein criminals did is even more disturbing, especially when we consider what little, if anything substantive, has been done about it (Were Epstein and Maxwell apprehended, or was that faked to placate us all?).

I think that a good use can be made of this movie by watching it while thoroughly identifying with 17-year-old Mari’s parents. We must imagine the Epstein victims as if they were our own daughters in order to build up the kind of rage we need to have to fight for justice (and this is just after International Working Women’s Day, as of the publication of this article)–instead of just passively accepting the crimes, imagining nothing can be done about them because the criminals in question are too rich and powerful to stop.

Just as Mari’s parents were just two ordinary people filled with rage over what was done to their daughter, driven to revenge without a thought as to how much stronger the killers were, so should we, on watching TLHOTL, be filled with a sufficient rage to rise up against the much more powerful pedophile ruling class, overthrow them (not necessarily in a sadistic manner, of course, but in a decisive one), and establish a just society.

For our law enforcement is little better than those two incompetent cops.

The Tanah: Amores–Four More Spells for Attractiveness

[The following is the thirty-ninth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, here is the thirty-first, here is the thirty-second, here is the thirty-third, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, here is the thirty-sixth, here is the thirty-seventh, and here is the thirty-eighth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Physical Attractiveness Spell

[Take a ritual bath in the manner described in previous spells. Recite the following verse over and over again as the lather is spread on your body and rinsed off.]

Weleb, blow on me a flower’s fragrance.
Nevil, make whom I love burn for me.
Drofurb, make his love as strong as stone.
Priff, give me long and flowing, lovely hair.

Comment: this spell was meant for women to use on men.

Spell for Knowing and Being Another’s Fantasy Lover

[Burn a flame in a pile of twigs surrounded in a mound of dirt. Do this on a windy day. As you hold a small pot of water just over the fire, to heat the water, stare into the flame and recite the verse below, over and over. When the water is hot enough–not so hot as to burn the skin–pour it on your arm and continue repeatedly chanting the verse.]

Weleb, blow on me the secrets of his dreams.
Nevil, teach me all of his desires.
Drofurb, make me the ground of what he wants.
Priff, pour on me the scent of all his lusts.

Comment: again, this is a spell meant for women to use on men, not vice versa.

Weight Loss Spell

[Dig holes large enough to fit your feet in, holes in a circle around a large fire. Fill the holes with water, enough to go up to your ankles. Do this on a windy day. As you recite the following verse, go around the fire with your bare feet going in the holes and splashing in the water. Make sure never to miss the holes. Continue to do so until there is no more splashing water, only mud, always repeating the verse.]

Weleb, blow thinness on me!
Nevil, burn my fat off me!
Drofurb, make my fat sink into you!
Priff, wash my fat off me!

Comment: the desired weight loss was expected to be achieved within a week or two.

Spell for Sculpting the Desired Body Shape

[Take a ritual bath as described previously. As you spread the lather all over your body, move your hands in shapes that accurately imitate the contours you wish your body to have, pushing in or pulling out wherever you want the curves to go in or out, all while repeatedly chanting the verse below.]

Weleb, blow on me the shape I want!
Nevil, burn away the curves I hate!
Drofurb, set my wanted shape in stone!
Priff, make my wanted curves flow like waves!

Comment: this, too, is a spell meant for women–usually. It was rare that men ever used it. The desired body shape was expected to come within a few days, at most.

Even though these four spells were thought to be relatively harmless as far as the elders were concerned, reliance on them to make one–usually, a woman–more attractive was still frowned on by the elders, who wished their people wouldn’t base their worth on their physical attractiveness alone.

Two Buildings

I rack my brain
thinking…How
are we going to
get out of this?

I ran so far away
from what I once
believed, but now
I know no escape.

Two Tehran
buildings have been blown up,
smoke floating up in all directions.
A leader has been charred to cinders.
Two other buildings were toppled
twenty-five years ago.
So many more reduced to rubble since.

How many
more societies must die?
How many more bombing birds
must fly south for their winters of
discontent? How about
burning down a white building, for a change?

Analysis of ‘Third’

I: Introduction

Third is (as its title already tells us) the third album by the Canterbury Scene/psychedelic/progressive rock/jazz-fusion band, Soft Machine. The album came out in 1970. It’s the first Soft Machine album with saxophonist Elton Dean, and it–with Fourth–is of the two Soft Machine albums with him, original members Mike Ratledge (keyboards) and Robert Wyatt (drums/vocals), and it’s the second album with bassist Hugh Hopper (though he’d previously been their road manager and played bass on one of the tracks on their first album, as well as him getting songwriting credits on three of that album’s tracks).

As with Pink Floyd, Soft Machine (originally The Soft Machine, named after a novel by William S. Burroughs, and which even had briefly included guitarist/vocalist Daevid Allen) was a psychedelic band before venturing into progressive rock and jazz (Floyd having ventured off into what many call progressive rock, but due to the lack of virtuosic musicianship or complexity in their otherwise long songs, I’d just say Pink Floyd’s music is just uniquely their music…defying categorization). Third, though not completing the transition into jazz just yet, is clearly many huge leaps in that direction.

Vestiges of the old trippy, psychedelic sound can be heard at the experimental beginning and ending of “Facelift,” more or less throughout Wyatt’s “Moon in June,” and at the beginning and ending of Ratledge’s “Out-Bloody-Rageous,” with its trippy, repetitive, multi-tracked electric piano parts slowly fading in and out.

The fact that Third is a transitional album between Soft Machine’s original psychedelic rock sound and the jazz-fusion sound they’d eventually settle on is significant, particularly with respect to Wyatt’s place in the band. Significantly, “Moon in June” is not only the sole song on Third to have vocals and lyrics, but it’s also the very last Soft Machine track to have them.

From this point on to Wyatt’s leaving the band after Fourth, he would feel disenchanted about the direction Soft Machine was going in. He wanted to continue as a singer as well as a drummer, while the other three wanted to make purely instrumental jazz. Accordingly, his musical ideas were increasingly rejected by the other three. (Now, while I thoroughly respect Wyatt as a great drummer whose playing was tragically cut short after an accident at a party had left then-drunk Wyatt paralyzed from the waist down, I can understand the wish to play all instrumental music, as–I’m sorry to say this–he wasn’t always a great singer…he tends to sound flat from time to time.) After Fourth, Wyatt cofounded Matching Mole, a band whose name was inspired by, and is a pun on, the French translation of Soft Machine–‘Machine Molle.’ This new band could be seen as Wyatt’s vision of how Soft Machine should have been. They made music for about three years before Wyatt’s accident.

“Moon in June” can thus be seen as the centrepiece of Third, reflecting Wyatt’s “dilemma” of going on making instrumental jazz with Soft Machine, or singing in a different, progressive/psychedelic band.

II: Facelift

This track, being Side A of the double LP, was mostly recorded live at the Fairfield Halls, Croydon, on the 4th of January, 1970. The band performing was a short-lived quintet version of Soft Machine, with Ratledge, Wyatt, Hopper, Dean, and saxist/flautist Lyn Dobson. A brief section was recorded in the Mothers Club, Birmingham, on the 11th of January, 1970. Some recordings are from the 1969 Spaced project. Parts of “Facelift” involve tape collage and speeding up, slowing down, looping, and playing tapes backwards.

The music begins with Ratledge playing a Lowrey organ put through a fuzz box and Wah-wah (It’s clearly of the Spaced musical ideas mentioned above). Later, the saxes, bass, and drums join in. The music is in E minor.

As the drums are banging away in the background, the saxes are playing a convoluted tune that seems almost to go on forever. Next, there’s a tune in seven whose progression in the bass is E, E…F♯-F♯, G-G, F♯-F♯, and back to E to repeat the cycle. On top of this, the saxes play a shrill, grating melody. Over the grating sax, Ratledge does an organ solo.

After this, things slow down, with Ratledge playing low notes on a Hohner Pianet. Some brief sax playing segues into a slow, quieter section with Dobson doing a flute solo. Some of the notes he plays are of the breathy tone we’d expect from Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull.

As the flute solo continues, the rest of the band comes in, with sax honking and Ratledge’s Hohner Pianet. Eventually, a sax takes over the soloing, Dobson’s soprano sax. This fades a bit in volume.

Finally, there’s a return to the up-and-down chords in E, F♯, G, F♯, E riff, but on the Hohner Pianet. Then there’s a return to that convoluted sax tune, doubled on the Lowrey organ. Then, two treatments of this long riff are heard backwards simultaneously. The music fades out.

III: Slightly All the Time

Here is the first Soft Machine track that is 100% jazz. What was slightly jazzy on Soft Machine’s second album, Volume Two, is now jazzy all the time. The band has given themselves a facelift, of sorts, from psychedelic band to jazz band.

This second track, Side B of the double LP, is a medley of different instrumentals that include Ratledge’s “Backwards” and Hopper’s “Noisette.”

The music begins in D, with a bass line playing roots, fifths, and octaves, up and down: D, A, D. Next, we hear bass harmonics with roots and fifths again, as well as fourths, G. Wyatt starts playing on his hi-hat.

Then, the Hohner Pianet comes in with Dean’s alto sax and the rest of Wyatt’s drum kit. The music switches from chords grounded in D Dorian down to B♭major 7th, then back up to D Dorian. Next, a move up to the subdominant in G Dorian, then to the dominant, in A Dorian. Then, the progression goes up to C Dorian, and back up to the tonic D Dorian.

The band plays a brief passage in 11/8 time (subdivided 3+4+4), then goes back to the original progression, but with Dean soloing instead of playing the composed melody of before. With every return to the D Dorian tonic, there’s an overdubbed, harmonized, ascending sax refrain in triplets, then Dean continues soloing. This cycle goes on several times, then there’s a return to the composed sax melody.

Next is a return to the fast 11/8 passage. Then Ratledge’s Hohner Pianet takes it up to E Dorian, still in 11/8, but it’s subdivided 4+3+4 this time. We hear flute soloing by Jimmy Hastings. The 11/8 part on the Hohner Pianet is usually subdivided as just described, but sometimes it’s subdivided 3+3+3+2, at a ratio of four times to one, then two to one. The flute soloing continues (actually, it’s two overdubbed flute solos).

Next comes a passage in 9/4. We hear improvisations over a chord progression on the Hohner Pianet, going up and down, of A minor ninth and G minor ninth chords. First, Dean solos, then Ratledge does on the organ. You can hear Hastings playing a bass clarinet in the background, ascending notes of G, B♭, and C.

Next, we hear a soft rendition of Hugh Hopper’s “Noisette,” the melody heard on Dean’s sax. Then we hear Ratledge’s “Backwards” chord progression, a beautiful example of jazzy parallel harmony using mostly minor 7th or minor 9th chords. Dean solos over this progression.

After this soft passage, the progression will be done in quick, lively nine-beat cycles of 4+5 or 3+3+3, so an additive metre of 4+5/8 time, and sometimes, 9/8. Dean continues soloing, backed by Ratledge on the Hohner Pianet, then later on the Hammond organ, Hopper’s fingers wandering all over the neck of his bass, and Wyatt’s drums getting more and more aggressive, culminating in a fast roll of triplets on the snare to bring this section to a climactic end.

The track ends with a louder, more intense and powerful return to “Noisette,” and a loud honk from Dean’s sax on a high A.

IV: Moon in June

Side C of the double album, this track begins in E Mixolydian. Here is a link to the complete lyric.

The song is in three parts: Wyatt plays all the instruments for the first part (I suppose this means he even played that high-pitched bass solo early on, rather than Hopper, whose fuzz bass will be clearly demonstrated about ten minutes into the track). The second part, with Ratledge and Hopper, is an instrumental passage of the jazz-oriented style we largely hear on the rest of the album. The third part is a drone featuring Wyatt doing scat singing and violinist Rab Spall, whose playing was recorded separately, with the tape sped up and slowed down to make it fit with the rest of the music.

It’s telling that “Moon in June” is not only the last Soft Machine song with lyrics and vocals, and the last Soft Machine song written by Wyatt, but also largely a solo song of his rather than one played by the whole band from beginning to end (Dean, one of the main forces moving the band in a jazz direction, significantly doesn’t appear on this track at all). I hear in this song a kind of allegorical expression of Wyatt’s increasing alienation from Ratledge, Hopper, and Dean.

Essentially, “Moon in June” (named after a 1929 play, called June Moon, which was made into a movie in 1931, about an aspiring young lyricist who goes to New York City and falls in love with a girl there; evidently from reading Wyatt’s lyric, one can see that he identifies with the lyricist in the play/movie) is about Wyatt being in New York and in an affair with a girl there, yet he also feels homesick for England.

Wyatt’s “dilemma”–about whether to stay with this girl “in New York State” or to be “home again” back in England–I believe can be seen as allegorical of his tough decision about whether to stay in Soft Machine, with its continuing move in the direction of jazz (a music form that originated in the US), or to return to his psychedelic musical roots by leaving the band and starting a new one (i.e., Matching Mole, from England) that will play music allowing him to sing as well as play the drums. (On his debut solo album, End of an Ear (1970), Wyatt described himself as an “Out of work pop singer currently on drums with Soft Machine.”)

The “dilemma between what [he] need[s] and what [he] just want[s]” is between the need to play the kind of music he was meant to play and enjoying the pleasures of being in a band where he can play gigs, make money, party, and chase women. This last pleasure, of course, is described rather explicitly in the next part of the opening verse.

In the second verse, particularly towards the end of it, Wyatt seems confused as to which choice in his dilemma is a need and which is a want (“‘Tis all the thing I want is need”). He also seems confused about his own identity: is he himself, or is he the girl? (“‘Til all the thing I are [sic] I’m you.”) “I are,” as in you are. The girl, in this context, represents Soft Machine, for from the perspective of male lust, a woman’s body is a ‘soft machine’ of sorts. He’s in the band, just as he’s in her sexually (“Between [her] thighs”).

After this second verse, we get the bass solo, which given the skill in playing it, I still have difficulty believing Wyatt played it instead of Hopper; the drums were Wyatt’s main instrument–as a secondary instrument for him, the bass would have been something he presumably little more than dabbled at playing. In any case, this confusion between Wyatt and Hopper reinforces our sense of the former’s enmeshment in the band (“I’m you.”).

In the third verse, Wyatt discusses more of his lovemaking with the girl, and his talk of “needs” and “wanting” sounds like more of the interchangeability of the two, reinforcing the sense of his dilemma: to stay in Soft Machine, or to quit? She, Soft Machine personified, is “on the [phallic] horns of [his] dilemma.”

“Oh, wait a minute” sounds like his Hamlet-like indecisiveness and delaying of an answer to his question: to be or not to be in Soft Machine? It’s “lovely here in New York State” (i.e., touring the US with the band), but he wishes he “were home again” (i.e., with a new British band, playing the kind of music he should be playing–with vocals).

It’s fitting that this album is named Third, not just because it’s the third Soft Machine album, but also because it can be understood to represent the third element of the dialectic—sublation, or a reconciling of opposing ideas. This is not to say that the first two albums respectively must be considered the thesis and negation (i.e., a purely psychedelic album and a purely jazz album; though the first album is purely psychedelic rock, it’s Fourth that’s purely a jazz album, not Volume Two, which is still largely psychedelic with some jazz leanings). So the true psychedelic/jazz dialectic, if you will, of Soft Machine is thesis (the first album–psychedelic), negation (Fourth–jazz), and sublation (Third–jazz and psychedelic rock, as heard especially in “Moon in June”).

This sublated dialectic can also be seen in the title of Wyatt’s song here. Apart from its obvious reference to the play and film mentioned above, “Moon in June” can also represent sublated opposites: the moon during one of the sunniest months of the northern hemisphere (or at least in late June). There’s the darkness of a moonlit night as against a time when the northern hemisphere is tilted towards the sun. The moon and stars give light in the darkness of the night, at a time when the days are the longest, during the summer solstice, on June 20, 21, or 22. It’s an intensely yin and yang moment.

Wyatt sings, “The sun shines here all summer; it’s nice ’cause you can get quite brown.” Here again we have the dialectic of light and dark with “shines” and “quite brown.” Also, since the song can be seen as an allegory of Wyatt’s conflict over staying in an increasingly jazz-oriented band vs returning to a psychedelic-oriented sound, “quite brown” could be understood as an indirect reference to being more and more of a musician playing a style that is to a great extent associated with African-Americans. Now, getting “quite brown” is “nice,” so Wyatt has nothing against jazz or black people, just so we’re clear. He just doesn’t want that kind of music to be the only thing he ever gets to play.

Yet another dialectical opposition is understood in the shining fire of the sun vs the water of the rain. The “ticky-tacky-ticky” is an onomatopoeia that emphasizes the drops of the rain–rather like the ‘dropping’ of LSD that psychedelic rock tries to provide a soundtrack for…and that’s the kind of music that Wyatt misses playing back in England.

In the fifth verse, Wyatt fittingly discusses the making of music, such as its “normal functions” as “background noise” for people doing anything other than actually listening to it: “scheming, seducing, revolting, teaching.” This trivializing of music as “only leisure time” rather than as serious art is “alright by [him],” which suggests that he wanted to depreciate the serious art of jazz that Soft Machine was moving in the direction of.

His conflict, over whether to stay in the band or quit, continues when he sings in the sixth verse of how he loves the eyes of his girl (Soft Machine personified, recall); yet “she’s learning to hate,” which sounds like the beginning of tensions between him on the one side, and Ratledge, Hopper, and Dean on the other. That “it’s just too late for [Wyatt]” implies that he knew already that his days with Soft Machine were numbered, for “her love…just wasn’t enough for [him].”

In the seventh verse, he addresses her and “you,” as if he is in a love triangle with two jealous women–“she” being Soft Machine, and “you” being the kind of musical project he wants to do, a return to his psychedelic rock roots…or is it the other way around? Is “she” the psychedelic project, and are “you” Soft Machine? In such ambiguity of which woman personifies which kind of music, we can see the full extent of his conflict, his “dilemma.” Which does he prefer, really?

After the end of the seventh verse, there is an instrumental passage, and it is here, about nine and a half minutes into the track, that Ratledge and Hopper finally come in and start playing, with the latter’s distinctive fuzz bass. They play a theme in three bars of 6/8 and one of 4/8, in E: E♭, F♯, D, D♭, B, D, E, D, D♭(2x), D (2x). Then Ratledge does an organ solo in E Dorian with parallel chords above and below that tonality: first F Dorian, then E♭Dorian and C Dorian. Wyatt is vocalizing in the background.

Next, we come to the final “drone” section, also in E. We can hear Ratledge’s Hohner Pianet harmonizing in the whole tone scale, Hopper’s fuzz bass humming in the background, and of course Spall’s sped-up, slowed-down violin. Wyatt’s high-pitched voice is barely audible in the background, the words he sings being references to a pair of Kevin Ayers songs. Such references to a former member of the band, back during its purely psychedelic period, once again demonstrates Wyatt’s wish to return to that kind of music.

V: Out-Bloody-Rageous

Side D of the double album, this instrumental fades in slowly with Ratledge’s overdubbed Hohner Pianet playing repetitive lines in C Dorian. The style is inspired by the music of minimalist composer Terry Riley.

After about five minutes of this, Ratledge’s acoustic piano can be heard playing what will be the bass line of the main theme. Dean will soon come in with overdubbed sax, his lines a fifth apart from each other. The time signatures alternate between a bar in 9/8 and one in 3/4.

Between the playing of this theme in C Dorian will be two brief interruptions of irregular rhythms in A Dorian. At one point, the restatement of the main, C Dorian theme will be heard briefly on acoustic piano, but with the alternating time signatures reversed to 3/4, then 9/8, then it will return to the original sax theme with the original ordering of the time signatures. A third interruption in A Dorian will be heard, with Dean’s saxes honking in three bars of 6/8.

Then Ratledge will do an organ solo in C Dorian, which alternates in parallel harmony in C♯ Dorian. He backs the solo up with acoustic piano chords, along with Hopper and Wyatt, too, all of them playing in the alternating bars of 9/8 and 3/4. Ratledge’s solo will go on for about three and a half minutes, then Dean’s saxes will arrive in the background.

There’s a brief return to the Riley-like Hohner Pianet overdubs, then a moment of Ratledge playing a sedate, yet melancholy tune on the acoustic piano. Dean soon joins in, with Nick Evans‘s trombone, too. Next comes a passage in five, still in C Dorian. Dean solos over this, then he plays harmonized themes in intervals of fourths and fifths, with the energy picking up and reaching a climax.

Finally, before the fade-out outro, there’s a climactic riff in one bar each of 4/8, 5/8, and 6/8: D, C, E♭, D, C, E♭, D, C, B♭, and variations thereof. The Riley-like outro has Hohner Pianet patterns in 6/8, 7/8, 3/4, etc., all in C Dorian. The music slowly fades out as it faded in at the beginning of the track. All so psychedelic and trippy.

VI: Conclusion–After Third

Wyatt would leave Soft Machine soon after the release of Fourth. He was replaced by drummer Phil Howard, then John Marshall. On the album Fifth, Howard is heard on Side One, and Marshall is on Side Two.

Dean quit after that album, and Six would be the last album with Hopper. Karl Jenkins (saxes, oboe, keyboards) would replace Dean, and bassist Roy Babbington would replace Hopper on Seven. Guitarist Allan Holdsworth would join the band for Bundles, then he’d be replaced by John Etheridge for the album Softs, during the sessions of which even Ratledge quit, leaving the band with no original members! (And I thought Robert Fripp had problems with constant personnel changes in King Crimson.)

From then on, Soft Machine would release a live album in 1978, then Land of Cockayne in 1981, and there were breakups and reunions of the band in one form or another over the decades, never with any original members, all of whom (as of this article) have died, except for Wyatt.

The Tanah: Amores–Four More Love Spells

[The following is the thirty-eighth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, here is the thirty-first, here is the thirty-second, here is the thirty-third, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, here is the thirty-sixth, and here is the thirty-seventh–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Translator’s Comment: apparently, men in the ancient world were as insecure about their size as they are today.

Phallus Enlargement Spell

[Burn a small flame on the ground outside on a windy day. Hold a long, thick rock over the flame, close enough that the flame is almost touching the rock. Recite the following line over and over.]

Drofurb, grow it!

Comment: try not to chuckle as much as we translators did.

Improve Lovemaking Skills Spell

[Put a pot filled with water over a small flame on the ground. Do this outside, on a windy day. As the water begins to boil, start dropping small, spherical rocks into it. Stir the rocks inside slowly with a wooden spoon as you repeatedly chant the following verse.]

Weleb, blow a lover’s skill into me!
Nevil, make my lover burn with desire for me!
Drofurb, ground, solidify our love!
Priff, have effortless pleasure flow through us!

Power Through Vulnerability Spell

[Take a ritual bath in water that has been heated in pots over a large fire. Have round stones placed on the bottom of the bath. Get naked, go in the water, and lie on your back after briefly soaking your head in it. Stay in the water as you chant the following verse slowly, nine times.]

Weleb, in my weakness, give me strength.
Nevil, in my coldness, give me heat.
Drofurb, in my nakedness, clothe me.
Priff, in my thirst, give me drink.

Comment: this spell is one of the most blatant to use the principle of the unity of contraries as a basis of the power of magic. In weakness and vulnerability, one finds strength and power, because these opposites are one, as are all opposites understood to be, for the one always flows toward the other, like Priff’s water.

Because of women’s lack of political power in the ancient world, it was women who usually used this spell to gain some kind of power, however indirectly. Being naked while doing the spell was thus indispensable for this purpose.

Resolving Arguments/Making-up Spell

[If the other party does not wish to take part in this spell, you must make an effigy of him or her, life-sized and as close in likeness to the other as possible, to make this an effective spell. Either you and the other party, or you and the effigy, must embrace tightly while reciting the verses over and over. Recite them twice as many times if with the effigy.]

Weleb, blow the two of us back together!
Nevil, change our fire of hate to love!
Drofurb, make our love as strong as stone!
Priff, make our love flow into each other’s!

Comment: this is one of those rare ‘Amores’ spells that the elders actually approved of.

Crowns Off

Crowns’ time
to fall off
is here.
We should
knock them off
the heads of
royalty.
They
aren’t heads and shoulders
above the rest of the people.

The rapist
formerly known
as a prince has no
more crown upon
his head. May
it be with
the rest
of them.
They’ve gone so low as
Salò. Let’s take them lower.

Analysis of ‘The Serpent and the Rainbow’

The Serpent and the Rainbow is a 1988 horror movie directed by Wes Craven. The screenplay was by Richard Maxwell and Adam Rodman, loosely based on the non-fiction book of the same name by Wade Davis (for a comparison of the book with the film, which added the political element, go here). The film stars Bill Pullman, with Cathy Tyson, Zakes Mokae, Paul Winfield, Brent Jennings, Michael Gough, and Paul Guilfoyle.

Roger Ebert gave TSATR three out of four stars, praising Pullman’s performance and the “stunning” visuals, while also noting the the story took the religion of voodoo more seriously than most horror movies, which merely used it as a “gimmick.”

Here is a link to quotes from the film, here’s a link to the film, and here’s a link to the script.

Davis, on whose character the anthropologist Dr. Dennis Alan (Pullman) is based, is an ethnobotanist and anthropologist whose book recounts his experiences in Haiti as he investigated what happened to Clairivius Narcisse–on whose character Christophe Durand (played by Conrad Roberts) is based–who was allegedly poisoned, buried alive, and revived with an herbal brew that made him into a “zombie.” A practitioner of voodoo allegedly did this to Narcisse, making him into a slave.

Though TSATR is marketed as a horror film, Craven saw it as more of a political drama with an exploration of the voodoo religion. The one who poisoned and enslaved Narcisse was a bokor, or Haitian Vodou priest “practicing for both good and evil” and creating “zombies.” In the film, Christophe is made into a zombie by Captain Dargent Peytraud (Mokae), commander of the Tonton Macoute–the secret police of right-wing Haitian dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier–and a bokor, thus making him the villain of the film. The screenwriters’ creation of Peytraud is the one on whom the added political element of the film is centred.

Christophe is made into a zombie because, though a mere grade school teacher, he spoke out for the people, for freedom, and this of course was a threat to Duvalier and Peytraud. The terror of the bokor poisoning, live burial, and zombification of dissidents and political agitators like Christophe is how the right-wing dictatorship of Haiti keeps the people intimidated and well under control.

According to Haitian legend, the Serpent represents Earth (how like the Midgard Serpent of Norse myth, which bites its own tail while circling the Earth!), and the Rainbow is Heaven. We all live and die between the Serpent and the Rainbow. Because we have souls, though, we can be trapped in a state between life and death, the zombie-state that Christophe suffers because Peytraud has stolen his soul. Live burial is also part of that hell of being between life and death, which leads me to my next point.

TSATR exploits a deep fear many of us have, taphophobia, the irrational fear of being buried alive. The history of this fear in the West is well-documented in the book Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear, by Jan Bondeson, which gives examples of many who were so afraid of being accidentally pronounced dead and unintentionally buried alive that one would have strings attached to bells above ground that the buried living could ring by pulling the string going all the way down into the coffin.

Peytraud’s live burials, of course, are not accidental, but as I said above, are a cruel act of intimidation and control. They make their victims experience a kind of living death, as does Peytraud’s stealing of the victims’ souls. In our experience of not only imperialism but also its boomerang now affecting the imperial core, we too–that is, the global proletariat–experience a living death of wage slavery while elites get away with atrocities…they’ve stolen our souls.

This ‘living death’ idea brings me to a discussion of a recurring theme in this film: duality and the merging of opposites. Apart from the unity of life and death, there are also the unities of the First World and the Third World, of white people and people of colour (not just the blacks of Haiti, but also the Amazon shaman seen towards the beginning of the movie), of houngans and bokors (respectively, good and evil voodoo priests, for the purposes of this film–namely, Lucien Celine [Winfield] and Peytraud), body and soul, the Serpent and the Rainbow (earthly and heavenly existence), Catholic ‘monotheism’ and voodoo ‘paganism,’ science and religion, Erzulie and the Virgin Mary (as Mater Dolorosa in particular), tyranny and revolution, even genius and idiocy.

These opposites merge, overlap, and interact with each other in a yin-and-yang, dialectical way. White Dr. Alan, an American from Harvard University, goes to the Global South (first, to the Amazon, then to Haiti) to get local drugs and bring them to the First World for use as medicines and anesthetics. It’s said that he and the people he finds the drugs for (e.g., Dr. Andrew Cassedy [Guilfoyle], head of Boston Biocorp, a pharmaceutical company, and Dr. Earl Schoonbacher [Gough], a consultant for the pharmaceutical company) have only altruistic motives in providing these drugs for the world–saving countless numbers of patients on the operating table from death because of anesthetic shock. Let’s be frank, though: in their use of these Third World drugs, the pharmaceutical businesses of the First World hope to rake in huge profits. Alan’s explorations are for exploitation.

When Schoonbacher wonders if the Haitian “zombie drug” could give proof of the existence of the soul, Alan scoffs at the idea, asking where in the ‘car,’ if you will, of the human body the soul resides, and insisting it “begins and ends with the brain.” When in Haiti, in conversations with Dr. Marielle Duchamp (Tyson) about the voodoo faith–in which she sees no conflict between religion and science–Alan hears that the Haitian God isn’t just up in heaven, but also in their bodies, their flesh (in the Serpent as well as in the Rainbow, in other words). When found in the graveyard at night, Christophe tells Alan that the zombie drug is a powder blown on people’s faces: it runs through the skin to the soul. Body and soul are one–the latter is indeed in the physicality of the brain, as Alan atheistically intuited.

Many Christians like to contrast their faith as sharply as possible with that of pagans, though the places of comparison and similarity are obvious. This close connection is even more obvious in how, as Duchamp tells Alan, “Haiti is 85% Catholic, but 110% voodoo. For [them], Erzulie and the Virgin Mary are the same.” Erzulie is a family of loa, or spirits, in Vodou. They are feminine, and Erzulie Fréda Dahomey, a spirit of love and beauty, is often identified with the Mater Dolorosa. Note that Mary is chaste, but Erzulie is flirtatious and seductive of both sexes. Mary suffers, but Erzulie has fun. Lust and chastity are one, as are desire and suffering (as the Buddhists would also observe of the latter pair). It’s significant that, immediately after Duchamp immerses Alan in the spirituality and culture of voodoo, the two make love. Not long after their lovemaking, Alan will be terrorized by Peytraud, with that nail in the scrotum.

To pursue that topic further, Haitians are being tyrannized and terrorized by Peytraud’s government precisely because the country is on the verge of revolution, and therefore of ensuing freedom (Could this be the near future of the US?). It’s always darkest before the dawn, a resurrection after death–like Christophe’s…and Alan’s.

In a Haitian man aptly named Louis Mozart (Jennings), we see the dialectical link between genius and idiocy. He’s brilliant enough to know the exact procedure to make the zombie drug, but when he unsuccessfully tries to con Alan out of hundreds of dollars for a fake drug, Alan–not one so easily conned–calls Mozart “an idiot” to his face, thus pushing Mozart to show Alan the process of making the real drug.

Later, when Alan is forced to leave Haiti on a trumped-up murder charge, while he’s on the airplane and ready to take off, Mozart comes up to him and gives him a jar of the powder for free (and a watch), foolishly hoping Alan will make him famous by telling the world he is the maker of the zombie drug. His foolish helping of Alan will in turn lead to him being beheaded by Peytraud’s men.

Let’s return to the death and resurrection theme. Note the apt naming of Christophe, Peytraud’s ‘dying and resurrecting’ victim. Since TSATR is at least as much a political thriller as it is a horror film, it’s useful to put its Christ symbolism in its proper political context, as I did in my analysis of the Christ myth. Please look at that article for the full argument of that political context, as a complete repetition of it is beyond the scope of this article. In brief, the point is this: the Jesus of history never intended to create a new religion with himself worshipped as divine; he was a Torah-adhering Jew who, seeing himself as the Messiah in the Jewish sense, tried to rise up in revolution against Palestine’s Roman oppressors and failed.

Christophe’s speaking up for the rights of the Haitian people also ended in failure, with him being drugged with the zombie powder, pronounced dead, buried alive, then revived, a Christ-like death and resurrection of sorts. As Duchamp tells Alan, Christophe once inspired courage, but now as a ‘zombie,’ he only inspires fear.

Jesus’ followers were similarly demoralized upon knowing of his arrest and crucifixion, losing all hope until believing in his resurrection. As I argued in my article on Christ (link above), we leftists can see in the Christ myth an allegory in which His death and resurrection represent failed attempts at revolution that then are revived with new hope and ultimate success. In TSATR, we can see similarly crushed and revived hopes in Christophe’s live burial and revival, then Alan’s, and the final defeat of Peytraud and revolutionary overthrow of Duvalier, freeing all of Haiti.

Interactions in TSATR between the First and Third Worlds, and between whites and blacks, are interesting enough to warrant further discussion. Imperialist incursions into the Global South to extract resources and exploit them for the benefit of the rich countries is common enough, of course, and Alan’s forays into the Amazon and Haiti for this purpose are no exception. An interesting irony, though, is in how we see a lone white man in a country of blacks, we see him terrorized by their government, and his home country is even ‘invaded,’ as it were, through Peytraud’s possession of Cassedy’s wife (played by Dey Young) at the dinner table–during the party after Alan’s return to the US. Peytraud’s attack thus is a kind of ‘inverse imperialism.’

In Dr. Alan’s first meeting with Peytraud, in his office outside of which one can hear the groans of the tortured enemies of the regime, Alan is given a simple warning not to continue nosing around Haiti with “a radical” like Duchamp, or inquiring about Christophe. Peytraud talks about the volatile political situation in Haiti, and how setting things off could return the country to slavery, as it had been with the French. We’re thus reminded of the successful black slave revolt in Haiti that sent shockwaves throughout the Western imperial world at the time, on an island just southeast of the then-slave-owning United States.

To justify his iron-fisted rule of Haiti with Duvalier, Peytraud tells Alan that the US government would like to see anarchy in Haiti (thereby giving them a pretext to take over the country and rule it with an iron fist of their own). He reminds the American Alan that Haiti isn’t Grenada, where US imperialism in 1983 crushed the people’s revolution, established in 1979 as the only Marxist-Leninist government in the British Commonwealth.

The American government under Reagan was content to have right-wing, anticommunist Duvalier ruling Haiti, for obvious reasons. If the Haitian poor were to liberate themselves from him and the likes of Peytraud, their revolution would soon backfire and lead to even worse oppression from the white West, as Peytraud reasons–hence, the ‘necessity’ of his rule with an iron fist.

So in the references to the Haitian Revolution, the Grenada revolution and counterrevolution, and the current oppression of Haitians under Duvalier, Peytraud, et al, we can see the intermingling of white imperialism in Haiti with the black Haitian pushback against it, even to the point of Peytraud’s magic going all the way to the US, infiltrating the dinner party with Alan, Schoonbacher, and the Cassedys, a kind of ‘inverse imperialism,’ if you will.

Just as I spoke of the merging of opposites in TSATR (like that of imperialism and anti-imperialism mentioned in the previous paragraphs), so is there lots of just plain duality in the film. Its very title evokes duality (heaven and earth), as does that of Romeo and Juliet, which incidentally also involves a drug to make her seem dead, and thus also involves a live burial.

Alan seeks out two drugs: one from the Amazon shaman at the beginning, then one from Mozart in Haiti. There’s the historical Haitian Revolution Peytraud alludes to, and the final Haitian revolution at the end of the movie. There’s Christophe’s live burial and zombification, and there’s Alan’s. There’s the dual Catholic/voodoo syncretic religion. There’s the nail piercing Alan’s scrotum, and there’s the revenge nail piercing of Peytraud’s crotch. There’s the good voodoo priest, Celine, and the evil priest, Peytraud. There’s Alan’s lovemaking with Duchamp (in bed, as it were, though not literally), and there’s him in bed with Christophe’s decapitated sister. There are two women momentarily possessed by spirits: Duchamp dancing in Celine’s tourist nightclub, and Mrs. Cassedy attacking Alan with a knife at the dinner table.

The duality of the nail piercings in the crotch need closer attention now. The P, t, and r of Peytraud come across almost as a pun on one of the possible inflections of pater–that is, patri, patre, etc., or “father” in Latin. The nail piercing of Alan’s scrotum is symbolically castration, reminding us of the punitive father of Freud‘s castration complex, or the father who threatens his son with castration for wanting his mother.

I’m not saying that that’s what’s going on between Alan and Peytraud, either literally or symbolically. The point of the association I’m making here is that Peytraud’s authoritarian bullying of Alan and the Haitians is like that of a cruel, tyrannical father, a Kleinian bad father, as opposed to the good father as seen in Lucien Celine.

Another point of comparison with Peytraud as the bad father is with the primordial sky-father king gods of Greek myth: Ouranos and Cronus in particular. Ouranos had his children imprisoned in a secret place in Gaea‘s body; Cronus ate his children. These two gods, fearful of being overthrown and losing their power, oppressed their children just as paternalistic Peytraud oppresses the Haitians and Alan–anyone who is a threat to him.

But just as a father can be castrating (literally or symbolically), so can a son. As I explained in my analysis of the Ancient Greek creation myth, not only did Cronus castrate his father, Ouranos, while liberating his imprisoned Titan children, so–according to an uncensored version of the story as recalled by Freud (page 469), John Tzetzes, and Robert Graves–did Zeus castrate his father, Cronus, upon freeing the eaten Olympian gods. These violent but liberating acts can be paralleled with Alan’s vengeful driving of the nail into Peytraud’s groin and the liberation of Haiti from Duvalier.

The point I’m trying to make here is that associating Peytraud with a cruel father reinforces, in a psychological sense, how oppressive he is to Alan and the Haitians. He attacks Alan and Christophe, like God the Father (in an evil Demiurge sense) sending God the Son to die, be buried in the tomb, then resurrected. Peytraud attacks them because he is threatened by them, the way a man with the Laius complex is afraid of being supplanted by his son.

Peytraud is so threatened by Alan, a white American and therefore of the imperial core, that even with him kicked out of Haiti and back in the US, he must be terrorized all the way back there, too. I mentioned above how Peytraud fears an American intervention if the Duvalier government is overthrown and the country descends into anarchy. He feels he must coax Alan back into Haiti so he can make a zombie out of him. Hence, what happens at the dinner party with Schoonbacher and the Cassedys. Part of the irony I mentioned above, of the ‘inverted imperialism’ of Peytraud’s possession of Mrs. Cassedy, is how at the dinner party there’s a black servant, Albert, who speaks with a Caribbean accent. The whites are his master, yet Peytraud is the whites’ master there, too. The imperial boomerang goes both ways.

Yet another merging of opposites occurs in how, at the very darkest (quite literally so) moment of the film, Alan’s live burial, the revolutionary overthrow of Duvalier also happens. The Christian symbolism is powerful: Alan is experiencing a kind of harrowing of hell, not just in the terror of being in that blackness (like those hellish near-death experiences many talk about), gasping and screaming upon reviving from the zombie drug, but also in his zombification, Peytraud’s stealing of his soul. Yet this is just when the salvation of Haiti begins. It’s like Satan knowing he’s lost upon Christ’s death on the Cross.

Could we now, upon learning of the total depths of depravity of our global ruling class, be–in our boiling collective rage–on the cusp of a revolution? Could the bitten tail of the ouroboros of our current oppression soon dialectically switch over to the biting head of our liberation? Could my oft-used symbol of the dialectical unity of opposites, that auto-cannibalistic serpent, be leading us to a rainbow?

The Tanah: Amores–Three More Love Spells

[The following is the thirty-seventh of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, here is the thirty-first, here is the thirty-second, here is the thirty-third, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, and here is the thirty-sixth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Hypnotism Spell

[Lure your lover into a dark place lit only with a small flame on the top of a stick or candle held in your hand. Look your lover in the eyes, recite the verse, and immediately on finishing the recitation, blow the flame out in the direction of his or her face. Your lover should lose consciousness and fall to the ground if you have recited the verse with proper diction and sufficient faith in the Crims.]

[Lover’s name], sleep for me.
[Lover’s name], yield to me.
Weleb, blow Nevil’s fire.
Weleb, give me my desire.

Comment: one of the especially wicked spells that were abominated by the tribal elders, this one was believed to be most effective if particular materials were used for the stick or candlestick: a wood favourable to Drofurb, Crim of the earth, such as silver birch, or tallow whose smoky, foul smell has been somehow minimized. As with so many of these spells, details on what specific materials are to be used are scant. Perhaps a separate, as yet unfound set of writings has these recorded?

Pheromone Perfume Spell

[Mix wood and citrus scents into the soap used for the ritual bath for this spell, a bath to be prepared with the same instructions as those for the anti-aging and sexual attraction spells previously given, but with this new verse.]

Weleb, spread my allure throughout the air!
Of Nevil’s fiery scent be all aware!
May Drofurb’s herbs be all-enticing smells!
May this bath make the best of lovers’ spells!

Comment: though there was of course no such thing as a “pheromone perfume” (i.e., using synthetic chemical compounds, as used today) in the ancient world, we felt that “Pheromone Perfume Spell” was a better translation of Akhnar Wayat Bilm than “Animal Sex Smell,” which though a literal translation, sounded off-puttingly crude to us. While this spell is largely a variation on the “Sexual Attraction Spell” given previously, two differences should be noted: firstly, this one emphasizes the scent, whereas the previous one only briefly refers to fragrance; secondly, where the previous spell is meant only to attract this or that particular lover, this new one doesn’t discriminate–any and all lovers are welcome…to the point of orgies, even.

Commitment Spell

[Make two small wooden figurines as effigies of oneself and the desired lover; their closer resemblance to the actual pair of lovers in real life, the more effective the spell. Use birch bark tar to make the two adhere to each other while repeatedly chanting the following verse.]

Drofurb, make our love as solid as stone!
Nevil, make my love burn in his bones!
Weleb, never blow his love away!
Priff, always have his love flow back my way!

Comment: this spell was generally a woman’s prayer to the four Crims to make her man commit to her, hence, our translated name of it, “Commitment Spell,” as opposed to the “Stick Him to Her Spell,” which is a more literal translation of Guro Shuk Er Im Bah, but also a cruder-sounding one, in our opinion.

From Grooming to Guillotines

When men take innocence away with
s
t
a
b
s

between the legs of weeping little ones,

it is the men’s own innocence that dies.
Their necks will feel the cut one day–
heads
hacked
off.

Trump is No Aberration…He’s the Culmination

I: Introduction

One thing we can all agree on is that the world today is at its most screwed up in a very, very long time. What we don’t necessarily agree on is who in particular is at fault, who in particular has to be removed from power, and what is the best way to remedy these problems.

At the heart of these problems is one man, whom I affectionately call Orange-face (I call him by this moniker in case any liberals in the comments mistake me for an apologist of his). The Trump phenomenon is a classic case of controlled opposition: either you worship him in a cult of personality, or you abominate him to the point of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

What you’re not supposed to do is to regard him as yet another example of the capitalist class using a demagogue to further their interests. They want us to focus on individual personalities as a distraction from the very group of people who are really behind all of the injustices of the world, people of whom Trump is just one example.

The ruling class is thrilled to have us either demonize Trump as the supposedly sole cause of our problems, or to worship him as the sole solution to these problems. The bourgeoisie would be terrified if we fingered them as the true cause of our problems, for then we might be motivated to overthrow them, not just vote in a “lesser evil” and gain satisfaction from how the new president is, at least, ‘not Trump’ (though the new policies will remain largely the same).

Apart from those in the MAGA crowd who have finally seen the light and realized that Trump isn’t doing anything to improve the lives of Americans, there are still a number of red-cap-wearing morons out there who turn a blind eye from such things as the Gaza genocide (which he’s enabling no less than the Biden administration did), the regime-change operations and other forms of imperialism (so much for the “peace-loving president”), and the Epstein scandal, not to mention the “corporatism” of his political love affair with all those tech-bros.

What the MAGA crowd and the TDS liberals have in common is their misguided belief that Trump, for good or ill, represents a huge shift in American, and therefore global, politics. The MAGA crowd continue to delude themselves that Trump is ‘draining the swamp’ and taking on the ‘deep state.’ Liberals wail, gnash their teeth, and rend their garments thinking that his second administration is an abominable deviation from how America ‘ought to be.’

To be sure, things have gotten recognizably worse since 2025, but the worsening of the world has had far less to do with his personality than it has had to do with the general worsening of things ever since the dawn of neoliberalism and the dissolution of the USSR. Let’s now go into all of the conditions that have led to Trump, and therefore learn how he is no aberration from the system, but rather, he’s its culmination.

II: Fascism

It would be a naïve mistake to think that people like Hitler or Trump are these unique monstrosities who suddenly popped out of nowhere. They didn’t pass through a membrane from another dimension. Their rises to power were a result of particular material conditions to serve the needs of the ruling class at those particular times.

Fascism in general is used by the capitalist class as a response to crises in capitalism, when the system is breaking down, and there’s a danger of the working class rising up in revolution. There were Mussolini’s blackshirts physically assaulting Italian leftists in the 1920s. There were the Nazis putting German leftists in the first of their concentration camps. And now, there’s the designation of Antifa as a ‘domestic terrorist organization’ (when it really isn’t any kind of formal organization, but just an umbrella term to describe antifascism in general…and how exactly is that a bad thing?), and there’s the intention to use ICE to target leftists.

What is more important to understand, though, for the purposes of this argument, is that fascism and ideas associated with it are far from anything new in the US. What I’m saying here is hardly eye-opening to any leftist, of course, but those of my readers in the political centre and to the right may need a bit of a history lesson.

Far from being ‘a shining example of freedom and democracy for the world,’ the US was built on black slavery, the genocide of the Native Americans, and it’s therefore a shining example of white supremacist settler-colonialism. Racism against blacks was only the tip of the iceberg.

Hitler’s fantasies of achieving lebensraum for the ‘Aryan race’–the conquering and settling of Eastern Europe and the enslaving or killing of Slavs–was inspired by American Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine. Slavs were understood to be the Nazis’ equivalent to the Native Americans, an ‘inferior’ race meant to be subjugated. Naziism didn’t inspire people like Trump: people like Trump inspired the Nazis.

After WWII, the American government, NATO, and West Germany gave jobs to ex-Nazis to help fight the Cold War–Operation Paperclip. The Ukrainian underground (which included the Nazi-sympathizing OUN) was also given help by the West to fight communism–Operation Aerodynamic. Operation Gladio was set up in Europe in the 1970s, using fascists there to fight communism, too.

In 2014, the US and NATO aided in a coup d’état to remove Ukraine’s democratically-elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, to set up a US-friendly government that includes Nazi sympathizers. The purpose of this was to stop Yanukovych’s pro-Russia, anti-IMF stance, so the US and NATO would have more control over Ukraine, as was demonstrated in Victoria “fuck the EU” Nuland’s telephone call with Geoffrey Pyatt, then-ambassador to Ukraine. Provoking Russia into war with Ukraine, then blaming Russia for the war, was all part of the plan.

Trump may pay lip service to wanting to stop the Russian/Ukrainian war (probably more to win votes in the 2024 election than out of a sincere desire to have peace), but his ‘peacemaking’ stance doesn’t explain his willingness to sell Javelins to Ukraine back in 2017. He couldn’t stop that war even if he wanted to, anyway: too many billions have been invested in it from the Biden administration.

In short, the support of fascism is as American as apple pie–it didn’t start with Trump.

III: Greenland, Venezuela, and Cuba

Trump’s recent threats to take Greenland are seen as a highly eccentric move by him, to put it mildly. But as Dennis Riches demonstrated in a blog post, the American desire to take Greenland (typically by purchase) is nothing new. Attempts to purchase Greenland go back to Seward in 1867, when Alaska was purchased. Other attempts before Trump to acquire it were in 1910, 1945-1946, and 1955. Trump’s more aggressive attempts to acquire Greenland are thus the culmination of them, not a deviation from a previous American contentment with leaving the island alone.

As is the motive for so much of US imperialism, that of obtaining Greenland is a combination of economic and geo-strategic ones: the island possesses potential reserves of hydrocarbons and rare minerals crucial for high-tech industries; economic valuations are estimated to range from $200 million to as high as $1.7 trillion; and Greenland’s location is crucial for military and ballistic missile trajectories between the US and such major powers as Russia and China (hence, Trump’s rationalizations about American ‘national security’ vis-à-vis Greenland).

As with the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and the threats to overthrow the Venezuelan government, the threats on Greenland reflect an arrogant American attitude that the US somehow ‘owns’ both American continents and every piece of land that’s a part of them. It’s nothing new: the US regards South America as its ‘backyard’; Manifest Destiny would have all of North America (including Greenland) to be part of the US eventually; and the Monroe Doctrine would refuse any foreign intervention in the Western Hemisphere, certainly not out of any sensitivity to the sovereignty of the countries within that area, but because–let’s face it–the US government imagines that it owns all of this land (as an extension of the Monroe Doctrine, the Roosevelt Corollary makes my interpretation more explicit).

The motive to control Venezuela is obvious, and even openly admitted by Trump: to steal their oil, of which Venezuela has the largest reserves in the world. Only an idiot thinks confronting Venezuela is about drugs. Many attempts have been made over the years to wrest power away from those protecting the Bolivarian Revolution. A coup tried to unseat Hugo Chavez during the George W Bush administration. Starvation sanctions have been imposed on Venezuela for years. Again, Trump’s attacks on the country are the culmination of years, decades, of toxic US foreign policy. It isn’t just about Trump being an asshole.

As for Cuba, Trump’s threats are only the latest in decades of attacks on the island, from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, to the economic embargo that’s lasted over six decades, to the hundreds of attempts on Fidel Castro’s life. Trump is the culmination of it all.

IV: Epstein

Only a fool thinks Trump is anything other than guilty as sin when it comes to the Epstein files. Was it ever a secret that he’s an old lecher? The man openly lusts after his own daughter! We’re supposed to believe that he, with his money and connections with the billionaire class, did not rape underage girls on Epstein island?

The MAGA crowd, still delusional that ‘God sent Trump to take on the deep state,’ will do mental gymnastics and believe him that the Epstein scandal is a conspiracy to bring him down. They’ll also try to deflect criticism from him by pointing out how men like Bill Clinton are also guilty of involvement in the goings-on with those girls, goings-on that sound like something out of a Marquis de Sade novel, or Salò, or that scene in the mansion in Eyes Wide Shut. I’m perfectly content to see Clinton shamed and punished, too, for I’m not partisan.

The point is that, apart from the disgusting sexual abuse these men are guilty of, the Epstein files expose something that should be obvious to everyone: people with obscene amounts of wealth feel free to commit the most obscene acts of violence, sexual or otherwise, against the poor and vulnerable, because they can simply buy their way out of being accountable for it.

We shouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent (that some are claiming he was a Russian agent is the most desperate Hasbara!). It makes so much perfect sense as to be a no-brainer that there would be a link between a Mossad agent and members of the ruling class raping underage girls, on the one hand, and on the other, the enabling of the Gaza genocide. These people have nothing but contempt for human life.

Another thing to keep in mind: the Epstein people got caught. How many other people among the super-rich have committed the same kinds of crimes elsewhere, and at other times in history, and gotten completely away with it? Very few of the current gang of criminals have been punished: Ghislaine Maxwell is incarcerated, and is Epstein even dead…murdered, or the unlikely official explanation? He’d have the money and connections to make himself disappear, even if those photos that surfaced are faked, as some claim they are–a little plastic surgery, and he could live anonymously somewhere in Israel, with bodyguards to protect him.

It seems unlikely that the rest of the guilty will ever be punished, beyond a public shaming. In any case, we’re dealing with the crimes of the rich that hardly started with Trump, and–outside of a socialist revolution–will likely continue to be perpetrated long after he’s gone.

Photo by Faruk Yu0131ldu0131z on Pexels.com

V: Israel

It’s fitting to follow up the above Epstein section with this one on Israel since, as I mentioned above, he was an Israeli agent. It’s also fitting because the Zionist regime is also guilty of committing some of the most heinous crimes against humanity, against women and children in particular, and crimes that, in all likelihood, will never be punished outside of a revolutionary overthrow of the entire global system. These crimes have in common with those of Epstein’s criminals a contemptuous disregard for the rights of the vulnerable and the poor.

A lot of people say that Israel has used the Epstein files to blackmail Western politicians into doing the bidding of the Zionists. Such coercion hardly seems necessary, given how thoroughly willing most in the upper echelons of Western politics are to support Israel. Epstein and Maxwell, as well as Trump, Clinton, Prince Andrew, and others have already been outed: where’s the power of blackmail? Epstein and Maxwell were arrested. Nobody else to date is being punished.

The notion of Israeli blackmail is surely rooted in the antisemitic canard that Israel rules the world, which in turn is rooted in the idea that the Jews rule the world–Nazi nonsense. The correct way to understand Israel’s relationship with the world, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, is that Israel is a vital ally to the Western empire. That tiny sliver of land is in a crucial area of the world geo-strategically, where there’s so much oil and thus such a great need to control the area. The Western empire needs an ally there to kick ass among unruly neighbours who don’t want that Western control and exploitation going on.

Because capitalism, as we know through Lenin, is intimately connected with imperialism (i.e., the export of capital into other countries and stealing their resources to get rich off of them), it’s easy to see how the super-rich would have always enthusiastically supported Israel as a protector of Western interests. Just as the concentration of wealth among the 1% is nothing new or started under Trump, neither is the abuse of the vulnerable, on Epstein island or in occupied Palestine. Trump’s abuses are the mere culmination of it all.

Israel’s founding in 1948 was land theft, plain and simple. The Zionists never had, and still don’t have, any right to that land. Israel as a country should not exist; Palestine belongs to the Palestinians. It’s perfectly acceptable, on the other hand, to have Jewish communities in Palestine, even large ones, enjoying full equal civil rights there with the Muslims and Christians…but not superior civil rights. Such Jews would be Palestinian Jews, not Israeli ones–therein lies all the difference. As for the excess of Jewish settlers, however, they have the right to pack up their bags and leave, as Norman Finkelstein once said.

The Soviet Union, regrettably, in a momentary lapse of reason and rationalized as realpolitik, aided in the establishment of Israel, hoping to gain geopolitical leverage in the region and–with a ‘socialist’ Jewish state–gain a crucial ally. The Zionists’ choice to side with the US and capitalist West took away the USSR’s illusions about the new country, and the Soviets quickly repented and maintained all solidarity with the Arabs from then on.

US support for Israel ever since, from both the GOP and the DNC, has of course been unwavering. Even “progressives” like Bernie Sanders and AOC, for all of their paid lip service to opposing Netanyahu, support Israel’s “right to exist” and insist on condemning Hamas, whose necessary armed resistance against Israel has been shown to be more than justified over the past few years of carnage in Gaza.

Biden and Harris willingly green-lit the genocide in Gaza, right from October 2023 until the end of their administration, and if Harris wins in 2028, there’s no reason to believe she’ll change her stance. All talk of her having ‘worked tirelessly’ to end the killing of Palestinians was and is just that…all talk. Trump’s moving of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on May 14th, 2018 (the 70th anniversary of the nakba), and his current wish to turn the mass graveyard of Gaza into a set of resorts for wealthy vacationers, as outrageous as these are, are merely the culmination of a decades-long project of ethnic cleansing.

No blackmail is needed to make Trump, or any of the other plutocrats, support Israel, for such support is already in their class interests. They want to maintain a global order that ensures more for themselves and less for everyone else. Support of Israeli settler-colonialism–just like that of the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc., as against the rights of the indigenous peoples of all of these ‘countries’–is integral to maintaining such a world order. Socialism is anathema to such a system, and that’s why billionaire Israeli agent Epstein was the very antithesis of socialism. The only way Israel needs to blackmail the West is through its most probable nuclear weapons program and the Samson Option, that is, if any attempt is made to overthrow the Israeli regime.

VI: ICE

ICE, having received training from the IDF (and having a similar contempt for human life), can be seen as a manifestation of the imperial boomerang. Now, I don’t mean “boomerang” in a strictly geographic sense, since fascist terrorizing of people of colour in the United States is nothing new. Hear the words of black Americans when they describe their victimization from police brutality to know what I mean. The violence has, however, boomeranged on white people, and while we shouldn’t use this violence to prioritize whitey and minimize the horror that should be felt at state violence against POC, we can use this new violence to point out the extremes to which the state is going now.

When an otherwise white supremacist culture is actually starting to inflict violence on people of their own skin colour, people they normally take it easy on, things have come to a pretty pass, to put it mildly. We’re horrified to contemplate the Nazi murder of Jews, the Roma, Slavs, etc., but not quite so much when King Leopold II of Belgium was responsible for the butchering of one to fifteen million Congolese. Similarly, the condemnation of the 1985 MOVE bombing isn’t quite as vehement as it should be.

My point is that we shouldn’t regard the ICE atrocities as either anything new or anything occasional in history. That many are shocked at what ICE is doing now is merely an indicator of how little they seem to be aware of such violence against non-whites for many decades…centuries. That ICE is attacking whites and American citizens now is an indication of the boomerang I’m talking about.

And while the ICE attacks have gotten particularly vicious under Trump, we shouldn’t regard the problem as just a ‘Trump thing.’ Anyone who has been following the history of ICE knows that the Democratic Party has done much over the past two decades to strengthen the law enforcement agency.

ICE was created in 2002, under the Bush administration, as part of the Homeland Security Act in response to the 9/11 attacks. There was already severe criticism for ICE’s aggressive, militarized attacks, including high-profile workplace raids, the separation of families, and civil rights violations.

ICE was awful under the administration of Obama, the “Deporter-in-Chief,” too. They deported a record 2.4 million undocumented immigrants, 40% of those deported in 2015 having no criminal conviction, and a majority of those convicted guilty of only minor charges. See here for an investigation of complaints of abuse and harsh treatment in the detentions and deportations during Obama’s first term, aired in 2011, and how it all continued in his second term.

The Democrats have helped in the increase of funds to ICE. The inhumane conditions of ICE detention centres continued under the Biden administration. The beefing-up of the agency during the second Trump administration should not be seen as an aberration from a ‘normal’ form of deportation, but as the culmination of targeting POC, finally rebounding and hitting whites, too.

VIII: Iran

The current push for regime change in Iran (while there are some Iranians with legitimate grievances against their government, the bulk of the recent protesting and violence in the country has been sparked by US and Israeli influence, not least of all by the sanctions imposed there causing economic misery) is, of course, not an aberration from usual American foreign policy. The Trump administration is just carrying on a continuation of a decades-long policy.

It can be traced back to when Mohammad Mosaddegh tried to nationalize Iranian oil in the early 1950s, wishing to use the revenue to improve the lives of his people rather than allow the West to exploit it and profit off of it. Of course, such ‘socialism’ could not be tolerated, and the MI6 and CIA helped bring about a coup d’état in 1953 to get rid of Mossadegh and install the Shah, a Western puppet who’d ensure that the exploitation continued.

The Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, would no longer be tolerated by the Iranian people by the late 1970s, and he was overthrown in 1979 to establish the Islamic Republic of Iran, then led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. During the Iran/Iraq War in the 1980s, the US gave aid to Saddam Hussein, even with him using chemical weapons on Iranian forces, fearing that an Iranian victory would threaten regional stability and oil supplies (Of course, there was some US aid to Iran, too–i.e., the Iran Contra Affair; but it was mostly about aiding Iraq.).

Israel has always felt threatened by a strong Iran, so naturally the US will snap to attention and aid the Zionists. A reflection of that US/Israeli solidarity, among so many of them, can be seen from back when Dubya spoke of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “Axis of Evil,” propagandistically exploiting quasi-Nazi language as a projection of American fascism on the three “rogue” countries just after 9/11.

The sanctions imposed on Iran, ever since 1979, have devastated the country, causing banks and firms to withdraw humanitarian trade; this has left Iranians with rare and severe diseases unable to obtain the medicine and treatments they need. The desperation felt there, combined with how the Mossad has been stirring things up, more than explains the explosion of violence in Iran. The Western hypocrites couldn’t care less about human rights issues: they just want a US/Israel-friendly regime installed there. It should come as no surprise that the former Shah’s son is to be Iran’s next head of state.

Overthrowing the Islamic Republic of Iran won’t exactly thwart the BRI, but it will certainly disrupt it, as Iran is a key component of it, and the West would like to hinder it. In any case, between attempts to overthrow the governments of Iran and Cuba, and to take Greenland, the American empire is clearly overextending itself, and history has taught that empires that do so are not long for this world.

VIII: Democrats Helping to Pave the Way

I’ve already pointed out how the Democrats are at least partially responsible for such problems as the support of Ukrainian Nazis, links with Epstein (i.e,, the Clintons), support for Israel and the Gaza genocide, the increase of funds to ICE, and the sanctions on Iran. There’s much more, as I’ll soon go into, and have gone into in previous blog posts.

The point I’m trying to make here is that it is beyond naïve for liberals to think that a mere voting in of Democrats will solve the Trump problem. In fact, it’s outright political dishonesty. Liberals being “at brunch” if Hillary or Harris had been elected means they would have turned a blind eye to Epstein, Gaza, ICE, and Iran. They certainly would have been cheering on Ukrainians fighting to the last man against their bogeyman, Putin, meaning they’d be content to see all Ukrainians die in the process (what “To the last Ukrainian!” really means), while smugly blaming Russia for a proxy war the US and NATO provoked.

To get rid of Trumpism, one has to get rid of the conditions that gave rise to Trump, and the Democratic Party’s concessions to the rise of the right have been key to creating those conditions. Liberal claims that bipartisanship makes for “better legislation” (yes, I know a shit-lib who actually said that online, and I’d say it’s a safe assumption that there are many shit-libs out there who’d say, and have said, the same thing) is their outright confession that they are a crucial part of the problem.

If one goes into the history of it, it isn’t difficult to see how right-wing libertarianism leads to fascism. First, they cut taxes on the rich and deregulate the economy, so businesses can make higher profits. This sort of thing happened under Reagan and Thatcher. It also turned millionaires to billionaires, who could then buy both political parties via Super PACs and make them steer politics in even more pro-business directions. This is all why notions of the “free market” and “small government” were bullshit right from the beginning.

Capitalism uses the government no less than any other political ideology to further its interests. The capitalist class needs the state’s monopoly on force to protect private property. That’s why we Marxists call “liberal democracy” the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and consider the dictatorship of the proletariat (i.e., a working-class state, for the people) to be true democracy. When there’s any threat to the ruling class (i.e., when the common people have had enough of our oppression, as has been keenly felt in recent years), the rich use fascism to beat back the working class: that’s what we’re seeing now under Trump. The mask has come off: keeping up the illusion of freedom is no longer profitable or sustainable.

The Democratic Party has been every bit as much a part of this rightward movement as has been the GOP. Clinton gutted welfare, helped re-elect Yeltsin, signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and bombed Yugoslavia. Obama expanded the Patriot Act, increased surveillance, and punished whistleblowers. Biden didn’t lift a finger to stop Israel’s killing of Palestinians. It’s easy to see how all of this led to Trump, if you have eyes to see.

IX: Conclusion

Liberals are living in a fool’s paradise if they think voting in a Democrat in 2028 will fix the Trump problem. We’ve seen the DNC/GOP one-two punch too many times over the years to believe that any meaningful reversal of the current fascism will happen. The Republicans in power push things disturbingly rightward, the Democrats hypocritically wring their hands about it, and when they are in power, they leave matters largely the same.

On the issue of releasing the unredacted Epstein Files in their entirety, Pam Bondi said the whole system would collapse if they were thus released (Snopes denies she ever said it, but I think one ought to pull a Snopes on Snopes, since so many of us suspect Snopes works for the powers-that-be). Anyway, if true, then in Bondi’s response we can see a hint in why the Democrats won’t reverse the move to the right, but only pay lip service to doing so. Democrats are part of that system, not a cure to it. So many people would go down with Trump et al, not just the Clintons, that the whole legal system would be overwhelmed. I would not be at all surprised if many other high-ranking Democrats would be exposed in the Epstein files, too.

But if that’s the case, so be it, I say. Tear the whole system apart. Burn it to the ground, and replace it with federations of socialist communities that will take care of the needs of the people and restore the land to the aboriginals. The damnation of the empire will be the salvation of the poor and disenfranchised. I won’t state explicitly how the tearing-apart of the system should be done, but I’ll just say this: I’m having visions of tricoteuses.

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