The Gods Must Be Furious–Chapter Eleven

The rich and powerful, however, as well as their sycophantic media, reacted with predictable derision, even though it was people from their very walk of life who were killed in those four incidents. No alternative, scientifically plausible explanations were given for the four incidents. The reporters had simply been given orders to give minimal, if any, coverage of what happened. The gods, wishing to leave them to blunder about in their error, allowed the media blackout.

One example of a conservative commentator on TV had this to say: “Have any of you heard about those four ‘neopagan’ prophets of doom? What were their names? I forget—three women and a man, the man was named Gary, and the women were…Shelly, Nina, and…Michelle, I think? Anyway, just last week, I heard them on a podcast, claiming that—remember those four freak accidents that killed a bunch of rich people: Kurt and Samantha Wells in front of their mansion, killed in the thunderstorm; those people on the Plantagenets’ yacht in the sea storm just off the coast of California; those old men in the country club golf course in Indiana; and the owner of the mine in Texas, the one who fell in and died—anyway, the four neopagans that I referred to before, do you know what…actually, who…they think was the cause of the four accidents?”

“Who?” a female guest on his show asked. 

“Get this…the gods!” He shook his hands in the air for dramatic effect.

Loud laughter was heard for a dozen or so seconds after that.

“You’ve got to be kidding me, Mike!” she said.

“No, really, Vera,” Mike said. “They think these incidents were warnings that the gods are going to destroy the world if those greedy capitalists don’t stop their ecocidal war on the Earth for profit.”

More laughter from both of them.

“When are these la-di-dah liberals going to be destroyed by the gods?” Vera asked. “I’m getting really sick of their nonsense.”

“Me, too,” he said. “It’s bad enough when we get liberals trying to regulate the market, which should be free, punish the successful with high taxes, and burden us with ‘environmentally friendly’ policies. Now we have to deal with nut-cases who, not wanting to face the realities of modern life, indulge in escapism with their weird, heathen religions.”

Vera, still laughing, said, “And these liberals laugh at us for our belief in Biblical creation. They are the ones with the junk science!”

Liberal commentators were hardly kinder than the conservative ones. Other examples of ridicule, if anything ever was said in the media about the four neopagans, came from political analysts on YouTube, for example, this one:

“Look, I believe we need to tax the rich and curb global warming as much as the next guy,” he said. “But angry gods were responsible for those four freak occurrences? And what is the proof that they were the result of divine intervention? Some people claim they saw faces in the shadows of the clouds, the ocean, the grass, and the underground rock? Really? Zeus, Poseidon, the earth mother goddess, and Hades? We’re supposed to believe this nonsense? No offence, here, but somebody needs to lay off the drugs.”

On their own podcast, Michelle, Gary, Nina, and Shelly had to endure endless ridicule from people calling in. After about a half-hour of it, the four of them, in their sensitivity to harsh criticism, couldn’t take it anymore. Examples of comments made include the following:

“You guys do a lot of acid, don’t you? I’ll bet you did way too much back in the Sixties.”

“I bet someone can recommend a good therapist for the four of you.”

“You people haven’t been taking your meds in a while, have you?”

“If I accept Zeus as my personal saviour, will I be saved?”

“There’s only one God, and He ain’t Greek, you know.”

Michelle’s mother expressed her agreement with this last commenter, though for her daughter’s sake, she expressed that agreement much more gently: “I hate to say it, Michelle, but that last comment was right.”

“So, what’s gonna come after your heathen Armageddon, your Ragnarök? Communism? Did Karl Marx come to you in a drug-induced vision and tell you all this anti-American crap?”

“Did you Satanists perform a human sacrifice to appease the devils you worship? If not, maybe you should try it. Kill your local commie Democrat, and maybe you’ll save the day. In any case, you’ll be doing us real Americans a favour.”

Finally, Gary received this comment from Cam: “Gary, you’re embarrassing our family with this pagan nonsense. Please, for the love of God, stop.”

Analysis of ‘Persona’

Persona is a 1966 Swedish film written, directed, and produced by Ingmar Bergman. It stars Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, who respectively play a young nurse treating a stage actress who has suddenly stopped speaking…but which one is really giving the therapy, and which one is really receiving it?

Persona is an avant-garde film exploring themes of duality, identity, motherhood, and abortion, with even overtones of vampirism and lesbianism. There has been much critical analysis, interpretation, and debate of the film.

Though edited at first because of its controversial subject matter (which includes a sexually explicit monologue by Andersson and a split-second flash of a phallus towards the beginning), Persona was well-received. It won Best Film at the 4th Guldbagge Awards, and it was the Swedish entry for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. The censored content was restored in English-language versions in 2001.

Many consider Persona to be one of the greatest films ever made and Bergman’s magnum opus. Furthermore, the performances of Andersson and Ullmann are considered two of the best of actresses in movie history (Andersson won the Guldbagge Award for Best Actress in 1967, and she was nominated for a BAFTA Award in 1968). The film was ranked the 5th-greatest film of all time in Sight and Sound‘s 1972 poll, and 17th in 2012. It influenced such directors as Robert Altman and David Lynch.

Here is a link to quotes from the movie in English translation, and here’s a link to the full movie.

Crucial to understanding the meaning of the film is that of its title. Persona is the Latin word for ‘mask,’ worn by actors in ancient drama. The word came also to mean a character, a role played by an actor. In other words, a persona is a fake self the actor plays, as opposed to his or her real self, and this is where Jung‘s use of persona comes in, since so many of us (if not all of us) present false selves to the world.

Elisabet (Ullmann) is already an actress who takes on personae as her art form, but in the story, she takes on one of a mute, even though it’s obvious to her doctor (played by Margaretha Krook) that she isn’t mentally ill. In listening to the one-way chatter of Alma (Andersson), Elisabet is also taking on the role of psychoanalyst, even though the giving of therapy is supposed to be Alma’s role, her persona as nurse. The process of the film is to get both women to remove their masks and expose their vulnerabilities.

Since, as we learn through the process of watching the movie, that both women are as much each other’s therapist as they are each other’s patient, there is a strong theme of duality, a dialectical unity between two characters who are supposed to be on opposite sides, a dialectic of self vs other.

Going along with the theme that Persona is about people playing roles and pretending to be someone they aren’t, the film opens, closes, and is interrupted in the middle by images of projector film, and at one point towards the end by movie cameramen filming. This all gives Persona a Brechtian alienation effect (as we also saw Bergman do during the opening credits for Hour of the Wolf), reminding the audience that they are seeing a movie, dispelling with the illusion that the events seen on screen are ‘real.’ The very film itself is a mask, a pretense of reality.

With these abrupt, jarring projector images, Persona starts off by immediately telling the audience that it is an experimental film. Among the many, seemingly random images thrown at our faces are a nail being hammered into (Christ’s?) hand, a slaughtered lamb (the Lamb of God?), and a spider.

Then we see shots of an old woman, an old man, and a boy, each lying on what seems to be an autopsy table with a blanket on his or her body, as if each of them is in a morgue. The boy, however, wakes up, puts glasses on, and after looking in a book for a moment, gets up and reaches out at a huge, blurred image of a woman’s face: is it Elisabet’s, or Alma’s? Since the boundary between the identities of the two women is blurred, which one she is will be a valid question, for the boy is her son (played by Jörgen Lindström)…presumably Elisabet’s, but given that blurred boundary between the women, and Alma’s weakening mental stability and deepening insecurity as to who she really is, we wonder if it could instead be hers.

As we come to understand by the end of the movie, Elisabet’s going mute is triggered by her anxieties and conflict over motherhood, which is on a collision course with her acting career. Her love/hate relationship with her son has come to a head, and she can no longer cope.

She goes mute in the middle of a stage performance as Electra. If you’re familiar with the Electra myth, you know she hated her mother, Clytemnestra, for taking a lover, Aegisthus, while her husband, Agamemnon, was fighting in the Trojan War; she and Aegisthus murdered Agamemnon, whom Electra dearly loved, when he returned from the war. Her hate of her mother and love of her father inspired Jung to call the female version of the Oedipus complex the “Electra complex.”

I suspect that part of Elisabet’s reason for not wanting to be a mother, though socially pressured into being one, is unconsciously linked to a hatred of her own mother. She didn’t want to become like her own mother, which she felt compelled into becoming by unconscious promptings from object relations (i.e., her mother’s internal object pushing her into being the same despicable person, because she knows no other way to be a mother). So pregnant Elisabet tried to abort the fetus, and having failed, had her son raised by relatives and a nanny.

I believe the old man and old woman seen on the autopsy tables are Elisabet’s parents, seen in a dream of hers as wish-fulfillment: her father, like Agamemnon, was already dead, and her mother, like Clytemnestra, killed by Electra’s brother, Orestes, is now thankfully dead, it seems, too (until her eyes open!). Still, though, Elisabet’s son, with his hand out as if to touch the face of his mother in that dream, feels an Oedipal longing for her. He’s woken from his sleep-of-death on his autopsy table, so her wish for his death, because so conflicted, remains unfulfilled.

When Elisabet plays Electra (the former name almost a pun on the latter), her identifying with the character–something any actor must do in order to play the role, the persona, convincingly–is too much for her to handle. Wanting the death of her mother as Electra, combined with Elisabet’s guilt over hating her son, feels almost like wishing death on herself. Of course, she doesn’t completely want her own death: part of her still wants to live and be an actress. So she meets things halfway and stops talking, and for a while, even moving.

After receiving her assignment from the doctor to look after Elisabet, Alma goes into the hospital room where Elisabet is staying. She is lying in bed, just as those on the autopsy tables were lying down, and just as–according to the doctor’s report to Alma–Elisabet’s maid had found her in bed, just after her failed performance. Lying in bed, motionless and speechless, is as close as Elisabet is willing to kill the Clytemnestra inside herself.

Alma–her name meaning “soul” in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, yet also derived from the Latin almus, for “kind,” “fostering,” or “nourishing”–is having misgivings about taking care of Elisabet, since as her “soul,” she can already feel a sense of kinship and identity with her new patient. After all, we will learn of Alma getting an abortion, and though soon to marry her fiancé, Karl-Henrik, she will be on a collision course similar to Elisabet’s, as a woman with a nursing career on the one hand, and having to be a wife and (future) mother on the other. Since this movie takes place in the mid-1960s, the reality of sex roles all too often meant a woman’s having to sacrifice her career and intellect, for apparently, “a woman’s place is in the home.”

So, is that boy Elisabet’s, or is he really Alma’s?

The two women will stay at the doctor’s cottage by the sea, and while still not talking, at least Elisabet is now moving around. Alma talks enough for both or them…and this is where matters start to get psychologically screwy.

Alma, as Elisabet’s nurse, is supposed to be providing therapy for her; but by doing all of the talking, Alma is unwittingly playing the role, the persona, of the free-associating analysand, while mute Elisabet is playing the role, the persona, of the observant, listening psychoanalyst.

Alma appreciates how, in Elisabet, she feels that this is the first time in her life that someone is actually listening to her. So Alma talks and talks, revealing uncensored details of her personal life as a patient might do with a therapist. Elisabet seems sympathetic, so Alma feels encouraged to continue. Playing the persona of therapist, though, Elisabet is actually “studying” Alma.

What should be noted here is that Alma as a nurse is in a quasi-maternal role, taking care of Elisabet. Yet Elisabet, in her capacity as Alma’s ‘therapist,’ is also taking care of her, rather like a mother. In this, we can see how the one character is a double of the other.

So while both of them have been scared of becoming mothers, hence the attempted or successful abortions, both can enjoy playing the role of mother for each other. In Elisabet’s case, she may dislike being a mother to a son, but may prefer the maternal role to a daughter–transference in Alma, perhaps because, as I suspect, Elisabet’s mother wasn’t loving to her for the same reasons Elisabet isn’t loving to her son: a fear of motherhood as a form of career-killing bondage.

In wishing to avoid being a mother to her son, Elisabet is experiencing a female version of the Laius complex, a fear of the son killing and supplanting the parent, as Oedipus did Laius. Elisabet of course isn’t afraid of her son literally killing her, as Orestes did Clytemnestra, but of him symbolically killing her by forcing her to give up her acting career to be a full-time, stay-at-home mother. Acting is her life. All that Elisabet is centres around being personae. So while she can’t be a mother to her son, she can play the role of maternal psychoanalyst to Alma.

What causes Elisabet guilt, though, is that her son has an Oedipal love for her, not an Orestes hate for her, even though his very existence implies an Orestes-like threat of annihilation of her. He sees in her a Iocaste; she sees in herself the Clytemnestra of her own mother, as I suspect. Her mother didn’t love her, so she cannot love her son. Her hate of him is really hatred of herself.

Anyways, in her ability to speak freely about her life without inhibition, to engage in free association with Elisabet, Alma tells her about a sexual encounter she and a girl friend had with two boys while the girls were sunbathing in the nude. Alma, in all frankness, vividly describes the orgasms. Now, she had already been seeing Karl-Henrik when this sexual encounter happened, so she felt guilt about it and had the abortion to conceal the pregnancy.

Her ability to trust Elisabet is shattered when, on a drive alone, she reads Elisabet’s unsealed letter. Alma learns Elisabet has written to the doctor about the sexual encounter, that she’s flattered by Alma’s near-lesbian feelings for her, and that she has fun “studying” Alma. Alma’s furious, but in reading the letter, she has violated Elisabet’s trust, too. In this way, the two women are doubles of each other once again.

After Alma’s returned to the cottage, the women fight, which includes her threatening to throw scalding hot water on Elisabet and getting her finally to speak, begging Alma not to. Note how, on the one hand, the near-lesbian attraction Alma has for Elisabet, and on the other hand, the hostility both show each other are reflective of their mutual transferences. As I said above, each of them, as a giver of ‘therapy’ and care to the other, is a mother-figure to each other. Transference often involves a mixture of love and hatred for one’s therapist, and the mother-figure element introduces Melanie Klein‘s notion of the loving good mother who provides her baby her breast, and the frustrating bad mother who doesn’t provide it.

Prior to the fight, and upon Alma’s return from the car drive, she’s had some time alone to ruminate on her feeling of betrayal from Elisabet because of the letter. It’s around this point, in the middle of the film, that the projector acts up, and we see a white hole in the middle of the film, then a moment of only white, then fragments of sound and silent movies, the nail hammered into Christ’s hand again, and a blurred image of Elisabet walking around the room.

The disorienting effect of all of these seemingly incoherent images gives off the feeling that Alma, feeling the Brechtian alienation effect of Elisabet’s persona as false friend, is experiencing psychological fragmentation. She’s in danger of losing herself to a psychotic break from reality, since she’s losing her sense of her individual identity, it being merged with that of Elisabet. In her confusion, she doesn’t know if she’s the giver of therapy, or its recipient.

At the end of that disorienting sequence of images, the camera refocuses, and we see Elisabet looking around anxiously for Alma, then she smiles with relief at finally finding her outside, by the beach. After their fight, Alma tells Elisabet how “rotten” she thinks she is, and now Elisabet is furious and runs off, forcing Alma to run after her and beg her for forgiveness. As we can see, both women need each other, because both women complete each other. Each is only half a human being without the other (recall the shot later of halves of the women’s faces put side by side).

This combination of love/need and hate, so essential to a therapist/patient transference (and countertransference), is also reflected after Alma’s climactic twice-telling of Elisabet’s hate of her son, Alma then slapping her hard, banging her hands on a table, scratching her arm ’til it bleeds, and Elisabet sucking the blood like a vampiress. In the duality of the two women’s merged identity, we see literal and symbolic projection and introjection of their mutual love and hate, and of their self-hate and guilt.

About an hour into the movie, Elisabet is lying in bed at night, and she sees on the bedside table a photo of some Jews being rounded up by Nazis after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. One point of focus is a Jewish boy with his hands up.

The concern on Elisabet’s face here is comparable to her pained expression upon seeing, far earlier in the film, footage on TV of a Buddhist monk having immolated himself in Saigon in 1963, in protest over the South Vietnamese government’s ill-treatment of Buddhists. These two males’ experiences can be tied in with the image of Christ’s crucifixion (and the slaughtered lamb), or whoever’s crucifixion that early image was supposed to be, since thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Jews were crucified after failed revolts against the Roman occupation of Judea.

In Elisabet’s eyes, these persecuted males are equated with her son, whose unrequited Oedipal love for her he has unsuccessfully protested. The three male protestors died (with the possible, but unlikely, exception of the Jewish boy), just as she has wished death on her son. The pain she feels on contemplating these acts of violence against the three is simply her guilt.

Shortly after, Elisabet’s husband (played by Gunnar Björnstrand) arrives at the cottage to see her, but since she’s been sleeping, Alma answers the door and sees him. It seems that he’s mistaken her for his wife, and she tries to correct him, but he won’t be corrected. When Elisabet, suddenly all dressed as if she’d never been asleep, arrives and is standing right behind Alma, it’s as if the identities of the two women are fused into one.

He makes love with Alma right in front of Elisabet, who doesn’t mind at all, and Alma ecstatically receives him as if she really were his wife. Before the lovemaking, Elisabet has taken Alma’s hand and put it on his cheek; she’s clearly projecting herself onto Alma, making their identities fuse and removing her guilt from her relationship with her husband and son. He has black sunglasses on, as if he were blind, but he doesn’t seem to be wrong about which woman is his wife…is Alma really the guilty one about not wanting a son?

He takes the sunglasses off and looks on Alma with eyes that clearly see; and at this point she embraces him and gushes with love for him as a wife that Elisabet cannot be. Elisabet has successfully projected herself onto Alma, who then makes love with him, while his actual wife stands by without showing any emotion, as if an automaton.

It is around this time in the film that we see its iconic overlapping of faces, something mimicked and parodied many times, and which is symbolic of the merging of the women’s identities into one, of Elisabet’s projecting hers into Alma, and Alma’s introjection of Elisabet…and vice versa. Elisabet imagines she’s purged herself of her unmotherly hate of her son…or has she?

Alma confronts Elisabet with the photo of her son, the one that she tore up earlier; and Alma tells her–twice, significantly–that she knows that Elisabet’s muteness was triggered by her anxieties about motherhood. She didn’t want motherhood to end her acting career, yet she also felt socially obligated to become one, hence, her conflict over her boy. The telling Elisabet twice is linked to the theme of duality in the film, since Alma has similar misgivings about motherhood ending her nursing career, though they’re not as severe for her as they are with Elisabet. Nursing, after all, is similar enough to maternal duties. Still, it’s a job without Alma having to be a kept woman.

It’s significant, also, as I mentioned above, that Persona, a film about such conflicts in women, came out in the mid-1960s, when women were pushing to get out of the kitchen and pursue careers. We see the overlapping of their faces again as Alma tells Elisabet of her conflict over her boy, reinforcing their shared identity. Elisabet tried playing the role, the persona, of mother, but found she couldn’t, and in her conflict became mute onstage. In trying to take care of Elisabet, Alma has tried playing the role, the persona, of nurse, but finds she can’t, and she goes crazy, hitting Elisabet, banging her hands on the table, and scratching herself. The women’s shared identity is reinforced yet again with a shot showing half of Alma’s face merged with the other half of Elisabet’s face.

Tearing up the photo of the boy is a symbolic castration of him, he who in his Oedipal longing for his mother desires to be, as Lacan would have put it, the phallus for her, which would explain that split-second shot of a phallus at the beginning of the movie. Instead of the father castrating the boy, it’s his mother who does so, for Elisabet has a feminine version of the Laius complex.

Alma, in telling Elisabet of her conflicts, is also in denial that she has the same ones; for indeed, her discussion of those conflicts has been projection of them onto Elisabet. Alma wants to play the roles of nurse and mother, and at the point of her Alma’s denial, we see the merging of the halves of the two women’s faces.

We see Alma in her nurse’s uniform again when she bangs her hands on the table, scratches her arm, gets the blood sucked out, and slaps Elisabet repeatedly. Alma is at the height of her conflict right when she’s costumed in her nurse persona. She can get Elisabet to say only “Nothing,” in all dialectical irony. Both women are doing the opposite of what their personae would have them do: a mute actress isn’t much of one, and an abusive nurse isn’t much of a nurse, either.

The film ends with them leaving the cottage, and there’s a film crew seen shooting the scene, to remind us all that “all the world’s a stage,” or in this case, a film (we also see the film projector again). We all act out our personae, but some things make it especially difficult to do so, such as when a boy interferes with that acting out, because of his Oedipal longing for the mother’s face he wants to touch. And which woman is the mother trying to avoid being his? The blurring of their faces, as he has his hand held out, maintains that ambiguity.

Are we really who we think we are, or are we someone else? And how do we handle anyone who challenges our sense of self, the personae we play every day?

The Gods Must Be Furious–Chapter Ten

Michelle, Gary, Nina, and Shelly went out trying to warn the world online, on TV, on the radio, and in newspapers and magazines everywhere. They wasted no time giving their message maximum circulation.

Naturally, though he didn’t get along with his brother, Gary tried to convince Cam to be prepared for what was surely to come. They were arguing in Cam’s office in the country club.

“Oh, come on, Cam!” Gary said in frustration. “The earthquake at the golf course didn’t convince you, the thunderstorm at the Wellses’ mansion, the sea storm that killed the rich people on that yacht out in the Pacific Ocean, and the death of Lipton in the Texas mine: none of these things is even coming close to making you suspicious of what’s going on?”

“None of it,” Cam said with a smug smirk. “They were just freak accidents, Gary. Stop overthinking what happened. Stop making them into something that they weren’t. Stop making connections where there aren’t any. You and your ridiculous pagan gods. Christ!”

“Cam, I’m begging you. You’re my brother. I don’t want you and your wife to die. Give me an opportunity to get you to a safe place.”

“Gary, I have work to do in this country club. I’m much too busy to be wandering off somewhere to find some ‘giant box.’ We have to repair damages caused by the earthquake. We have customers we have to reassure, so they’ll keep coming back.”

“The earthquake that claimed the lives of at least a dozen members, whom we saw die that day, killed by the gods, who clearly sympathize with neither your business nor your clientele.” 

Cam sighed. “Go home, Gary. Pray to your gods if this is so important to you.”

Gary sighed and left the room, saying, “Well, I tried.”

Many of the common people, though, not just Wiccans and other neopagans, but also many who knew of how supernatural each of the four incidents were, took the warnings seriously and would find the four boxes that Michelle, Gary, Shelly, and Nina told them about. Other boxes would be provided for all the other parts of the world where there was a substantial number of people willing to heed the warnings. They would all manage to fit in, despite the mass of the multitudes, for the gods’ power would help them all find room.

Michelle, for example, was much more successful than Gary was in convincing her family and close friends to go with her and find the huge box provided for them. This was so in spite of the fact that none of them shared her pagan beliefs.

“Here it is,” she said to those in her car as they all looked at the box from the base of a grassy hill where it sat on top. Like all the others, it looked like a giant wooden rectangular crate, though it also shone and glistened in a special way that those who looked at it could intuitively feel it was safe…for the gods were giving them that reassuring intuition. “Isn’t that amazing?”

“Yeah,” her mother said as she looked out the window from the passenger seat beside Michelle. “As strange a thing as that is to go inside, I’m getting this even stranger, but reassuring feeling that I’ll be perfectly safe in it. I’m not getting that reassurance from Jesus, though. I have no idea why I’m feeling that way, but I am.”

“I can tell you why, mama,” Michelle said. “It’s because the gods are giving you that feeling. Everyone who sees those things, wherever they appear on the Earth—and that’s around the world, from the reports I’m getting on social media—gets the same reassuring feeling that they’ll be perfectly safe in those boxes, as unlikely as such a feeling would be had the gods not been telling us.”

“I see,” her mom said, with a skeptical, but open-minded attitude. I insist on there being only one God in three persons—though I’ll admit that I’ve been wrong before. Those books Michelle bought me certainly challenged my faith, and they were written by an Episcopalian, of all people, as I am, so I can’t just dismiss the ideas outright. Finally, there’s that dream I had, which Michelle also had, the exact same dream. I’m still not sure: were the speakers gods, or God’s angels?

Nina was talking to Steve that night about the coming danger.

“Look, honey,” he said. “I’m cool with you practicing your…pagan spirituality, whatever it is…but I don’t share your beliefs in it. I respect your views; can you please respect mine?”

“Steve,” Nina said. “This isn’t about agreeing to disagree. Something terrible is about to happen—all over the world, and I don’t want you to perish in it, because you will, if you don’t come with me to the giant box where it is.”

“I don’t get how we’re going to be safe in a…giant box…from the end of the world, as you’re describing it,” he said. “No offence, honey, but this all sounds crazy. I think you need to see a doctor. As wild and as scary as what happened to me and Lipton at the mine, I’m still convinced it was just a freak occurrence. The voice I heard from the hole must have been a hallucination, because of the stress of the moment.”

“It was the voice of Hades!” Nina insisted. “I heard his voice at the mine!”

“I’m sure there must be some kind of scientific explanation for it. You’re making way too big a deal out of it. The stress from all of your concern for the environment is getting to you.”

“And the stress of being a miner is not getting to you?” she said. “You don’t think flying out of that hole was supernatural? What scientific explanation could cover what happened out there? Look, just come with me in the car, and let me show you where the box is. When you see it, you’ll understand.”

“How is ‘seeing it’ going to make me automatically understand, Nina?”

“I can’t explain it to you, but I know that many other people have had the experience of just seeing one of the boxes, and they know, intuitively, that going in them will be good for them. Please, Steve, indulge me. Let’s just go for a ride in the car and see the box. I’ve seen it; I know where it is.”

“Very well,” he said with an exasperated sigh. “If it will make you feel better, I’ll do what you want.”

“Trust me. You won’t regret it.”

They had been driving for about twenty minutes, Steve sneering and sighing the whole time in the passenger seat of their car. Then, far off on top of a hill, Nina was straining her eyes to see a tiny, shining rectangular box.

“Look!” she said, pointing straight ahead. “There it is!”

“What?” he said, squinting his eyes to see. “I don’t see—“

Then, the rectangle got bigger as they neared it, and it shone more clearly.

“What the—?” he asked, sneering in disbelief.

They were now close enough to see it properly. She stopped the car at the foot of the hill. She looked over at him with a smirk.

“Do you believe me now?” 

He just stared through the passenger window at the shiny giant box, in a trance.

“Let’s make sure we’re here…when the time comes,” he said in a monotone voice.

“Good,” Nina said with a smile. “Very good, Steve.”

Shelly didn’t even bother trying to convince those she knew wouldn’t believe the warnings. She simply planned to take them on rides in her car as she looked for the box. When it was finally found, they would see it, and instinctively they would know to get in when the time came.

“Come on, everybody,” she said to them as they sat bored in the living room, watching a TV that had nothing interesting on. “What do you all say we get in the car, go for a ride, get some fresh air, and have a picnic?”

“OK,” her husband said. “Where will we go?”

“I’ve already prepared the food and drinks,” she said. “Let’s just get in the car, be spontaneous, and I’m sure we’ll find a good place.”

“Well, alright,” her sister, Jeannine, said. “We’ve nothing better to do here, and the weather’s nice out, without being too hot. Let’s go.”

As they were driving and driving, her at the wheel, she was whispering to the gods to guide her to wherever the box was.

“Shelly?” her husband asked as he looked with a sneer at her moving mouth. “Are you talking to yourself?”

“Oh?” she said, then fumbled in her mind for an explanation. “Oh, I’m just singing the words to a song to myself.”

“I don’t hear a melody,” he said.

“Well, you know what a bad singer I am.” 

He chuckled.

Then, she felt a kind of psychic pull in the right direction.

“Oh, I know where to go,” she said, then she took a right turn at an intersection.

“Where’s that?” Jeannine asked.

“You’ll see, soon enough.”

“Where?” her husband asked.

“I want it to be a surprise.”

“Oh, very well, then.”

After another two minutes, they found a hill with a box on it, shining and huge.

“Look up there, everybody, to your right,” she said. “Up at the top of that hill.”

Her husband, sister, and mother all looked out their windows and saw the box.

“Do you all see it?” she asked.

“Yes,” they all said as if in a trance.

Then her husband said, still in that mesmeric state. “I have a feeling…we’ll need to come back here again soon.”

“I have that feeling, too,” Jeannine said.

“Me, three,” her mom said.

“Good,” Shelly said. “Very good.”

She opened her car door and got out.

Her husband got out next. “We’re having our picnic here?”

“Yes,” she said, then shut her door and went to the trunk to get out the picnic basket.

“I like it,” he said as he stared at the box. “I like it a lot.”

“Me, too,” Jeannine said, also staring at the box in a trance.

“Me, three,” their mom said.

I’m so glad I didn’t have to argue with them or convince them, Shelly thought as she took the basket out of the trunk. When it comes to getting people to do things your way, sometimes less is more.

Analysis of ‘A Star Is Born’

A Star Is Born is a 1937 film produced by David O Selznick, directed by William A Wellman, and written by Wellman, Robert Carson, Dorothy Parker, and Alan Campbell. The movie stars Janet Gaynor and Frederic March, with Adolphe Menjou, May Robson, Andy Devine, Lionel Stander, and Owen Moore. It was the first colour film (done in Technicolor) to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

A Star Is Born based its plot extensively on 1932’s What Price Hollywood?, a film that wasn’t as widely known; but the success of the 1937 movie would spawn three remakes–one in 1954, one in 1976, and one in 2018…all three of these being musicals, unlike the original. The 1954 remake parallels the 1937 film much more than the other two, so I’ll be comparing the first two.

Apart from the Best Picture Oscar nomination, A Star Is Born also got nominated for Best Director (Wellman), Best Actor (March), Best Actress (Gaynor), and Best Original Score (which it won), among others. It also won an Academy Honorary Award for cinematographer W Howard Greene.

The film entered the public domain in 1965.

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

One could argue that, in a peculiar sense, there is something of the ‘hour of the wolf’ in A Star Is Born, in that it involves a time, according to Ingmar Bergman‘s film (which I analyzed here), when most deaths and births begin. I say this because this film could be just as legitimately called A Star Is Dying as it is called A Star Is Born.

Indeed, just as we see the rise of new movie star Esther Victoria Blodgett (Gaynor), who is renamed Vicki Lester, so do we also see the decline and fall of the alcoholic movie star Norman Maine (March). The movie is far more of a tragedy for him than it is a hurrah for her.

The film begins and ends with an interesting framing device: we see pages of movie scripts indicating descriptions of the opening and closing scenes. Since neither scene indicated is from a film being made with Maine, Lester, or any other movie star in the story, but is rather just a scene from ‘real life,’ we can see in this framing device a sense of when Jacques, in As You Like It, said, “All the world’s a stage…” (or in this case, all the world’s a film set).

In other words, if “all the men and women [are] merely players” of the play or movie of life, then we can see the fakery of all of the posing and posturing that people do, even if they aren’t actors. Indeed, we’ll see much of that fakery in the transformation of naïve farm girl Esther Blodgett into screen siren Vicki Lester, all made up and glamorized. On the other side of the coin, Norman Maine’s descent into alcoholism and resulting fading star are his giving-up of the illusion of glamour and return to dull, vulgar reality.

She begins in the film on her family’s farm in North Dakota. Here, her life corresponds to the earliest of Jacques’s ‘Seven Ages of Man.’ She’s going through equivalents of “the infant” and “the whining schoolboy,” that is, the naïve child who has studied the movies she sees, worships, and dreams of being a part of, while complaining that no one takes her dreams seriously. The naysayers in her life include her Aunt Mattie (played by Clara Blandick, who the viewer may recognize as also having played Auntie Em in the 1939 film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz) and a bratty little brother who mocks her fantasied ‘stardom.’

At the other end is Norman Maine, who in his self-destructive alcoholism is comparable to being in the “last scene of all…second childishness and mere oblivion…sans everything.” Of course, in the middle of the film, both Vicki and Norman are “the lover[s], sighing like furnace,” when they fall in love and get married.

Esther will get some needed encouragement from her Grandmother Lettie (Robson), who gives her some money to go to Hollywood. Of course, her rise to stardom won’t be easy. She can’t even find extra work when she gets to Hollywood and asks around. Equally obvious, though, is that it’s not what you know, but who you know, that determines whether or not you’ll become a star.

In this sense, Esther’s lucky break comes from meeting two important people: first, at her boarding house, she meets assistant director Danny McGuire (Devine), who will get her acquainted with the second important person, Maine, first at a concert (where he demonstrates his drunken loutishness for the first time in front of her), then at a fancy Hollywood party.

It’s interesting, when considering that loutish behaviour of Norman’s when she first sees him in person, to compare March’s portrayal of Maine to James Mason‘s portrayal of him in the 1954 remake. March’s Maine is brusque and gruff, smashing the camera of a nosy paparazzo at the concert, while Mason’s Maine–though equally drunk–is much more charming and cordial. Indeed, the Mason portrayal is much more likable and sympathetic, despite him having the same faults and inadequacies as the March portrayal has.

Later, Danny helps Esther get a screen test from his longtime producer and friend, Oliver Niles (Menjou). Niles is impressed with her and gives her a contract, as well as her new name, derived from her middle name–Victoria shortened to Vicki–and an L added to Esther, making her “Vicki Lester.”

In the process of transforming Esther into “Vicki,” press agent Matt Libby (Stander) asks her a number of questions about herself, and being disappointed with her dull, prosaic answers, invents some romanticized ones to make her origins seem more interesting. She’s also given lessons in enunciation and improving her posture, walking with a book on her head. Among all of these changes and the glamorous makeup job she gets, we can see all of the fakery involved in transforming a humble farm girl into a starlet.

Norman helps Vicki by getting her the lead role, opposite him, in his new film, The Enchanted Hour. The film makes her an overnight star, eclipsing his fame.

Mason’s portrayal of Norman is all the more likable in how he encourages Esther (here played by Judy Garland) to abandon her small dream, of being just a successful singer with a #1 hit song on the Hit Parade, in favour of the big dream of being a successful singer/actress in Hollywood musicals. He is captivated by, and convinced of, her talent when she sings “The Man That Got Away” with her band.

Back to the 1937 movie, Norman proposes to Vicki, and they get married privately, to avoid all the nosy press attention, which annoys Libby; indeed, we see in this an example of how Libby is losing his patience with Norman, who has also promised Vicki to give up drinking. Libby, nonetheless, will make the marriage a publicity matter, and he’ll know that any promises from Norman to give up drinking will prove empty ones.

After Norman and Vicki return from their honeymoon, it becomes clear that as her star is rising, his is not only falling, but it has fallen. It is preferred to have photos taken of her alone over those of both her and Maine, whom nobody really likes anymore. In fact, Niles arrives at Maine’s palatial home to tell him, however reluctantly, the bad news: his last three performances have not pleased the critics, his fan mail, however much it may be, is so cheap to send him that it’s insignificant, and Niles plans to have Vicki star in a film of her own, opposite another rising actor named Pemberton, instead of with Maine. Norman offers to have his contract called off, but Niles still thinks there’s hope, however small, for him to make a comeback.

We can see in all of this an example of the dialectic at work in Vicki’s rise coinciding with Norman’s fall, of her star’s birth vs his star’s death. Indeed, the large ad poster for The Enchanted Hour is changed to say it stars Vicki Lester rather than Norman Maine. His fan mail dwindles, while hers piles up; and finally, his contract with Niles is cancelled after all, as it is reported in the entertainment news.

Norman finds himself idling about at home while his wife is busy working…and this is all at a time when traditional sex roles would have had it the other way around, so Norman can only feel ashamed. When the phone rings, it’s always to ask for her, never for him. To give the ‘househusband’ something to do, he’s learning to cook and prepare food, so he’s made some sandwiches for them to eat when she finally comes home after a busy day of acting. Still trying to leave the booze alone, he’s having a glass of milk with his sandwich.

Their brief moment of happiness together is interrupted by the doorbell. Norman answers it: a deliveryman has a package for Vicki, but he doesn’t recognize Norman, who tells him he’s her husband. He’s then asked to sign for the package, being addressed as “Mr. Lester.” With his depression returning, Norman gives her the package, relays the telephone messages for her (including a table offered at the Academy Award’s ceremony), and leaves their sandwiches and milk to go fix himself an alcoholic drink. There is an equivalent scene to this one in the 1954 film, as there is in the following scene.

At the Academy Awards, Vicki receives one for Best Actress. When she accepts it, a drunk Maine appears and interrupts, gruffly demanding that he receive an award for Worst Actor (he’s too early for the Razzies, which wouldn’t come to be until their first ceremony in 1981). Mason’s Maine, though equally drunk and awkward, is more sympathetic, with him simply asking for more work. The same goes for his accidental slap of Vicki, for which we especially see his pained remorse.

Anyway, to get back to March’s Norman, the juxtaposition of Vicki’s Best Actress Oscar with his wished-for “Worst Actor Oscar” is another example of the dialectic of her rise and his fall. His drunk, frank bluntness as against the sober graciousness and artificiality of the ceremony is another example of that dialectic. Hollywood fakery has been taken to such an extent that, earlier, when Norman was taking phone messages for Vicki, a gossip columnist named Artie Carver said he’d make up a figure for how much Norman supposedly received as a settlement when ending his contract with Niles, after he told Artie he didn’t want any money.

So though winning the Oscar should be the happiest moment of Vicki’s life, the dialectic returns when Norman’s public disgrace can’t make her any sadder. Niles later visits her at her dressing room to congratulate her on her continuing success, but he can see that her grin is meant to conceal her tears. Norman is in a sanitarium, and he really wants to stop drinking, but all she can do is fear for him and his self-destructive nature. (Here’s the equivalent scene from the 1954 film; after her tears, we see her do a number in which she, grinning, sings, “Go and get your long face lost!”.) Niles offers to get another role for Norman.

At the sanitarium, Niles visits Norman and offers him a small, supporting role that Niles insists will have the audience all thinking about Norman throughout the picture, in spite of the role’s brevity. Norman tries to show a positive attitude during the visit, even referring the white-uniformed man–ever so solicitously watching him in case he tries to sneak an alcoholic drink–as “Cuddles.” Too proud to accept such a small film role from Niles, Norman lies to him about being too tied up with other major offers in movies. There’s an equivalent scene to this one in the 1954 film.

At the Santa Anita Park race track, after he’s been let out of the sanitarium and can be trusted not to drink anymore (or so it is assumed), Norman orders a mere ginger ale at the bar. Libby shows up there, too, and now that Norman’s a has-been, Libby can express his dislike and contempt of him all he likes. The altercation leads to an exchange of punches, with Libby flattening Norman. The surrounding crowd assumes he’s on the floor from being drunk again, so in his shame he orders a double scotch. Again, there’s an equivalent scene in the 1954 film.

His drinking binge has gone on for four days, and Vicki and Niles are worried sick about him. They learn he’s been arrested on a drunk driving charge. The court gives him ninety days in jail, but Vicki intervenes, promising she’ll keep a close watch over him if his sentence is suspended. Of course, the gossipy newspapers make a huge drama of the incident.

Back at home, Vicki tells Niles that she plans to give up her acting career to help Norman, who is in bed in the other room. He hears her words and knows he can’t let her sacrifice her talent just for him. Again, there’s an equivalent scene in the 1954 remake that shows a powerful emotional reaction in Mason’s Norman, showing how much more sympathetic his version of the character is. He comes to the conclusion that he must commit suicide (by drowning himself in the ocean) in order to stop her from sacrificing her career; he’ll instead sacrifice his life for her.

But before he does this, he must show her a happy face to cheer her up, if only for the moment. This is especially well done in the 1954 version, once again showing how much more likable and sympathetic Mason’s Maine is. In all four versions, though (in one sense or another), there is Maine‘s touching wish to take another look at her. With his death, she is shattered: “There is nothing sadder than/A one-man woman/Looking for the man/That got away.” Once again, she’s thinking of ending her acting career, now out of grief.

Specific to the 1937 version is Esther’s grandmother intervening to stop her from quitting acting. Lettie tells her of a letter Norman sent her when they got married, stating how proud he was of her and how much he loved her.

So at the end of the movie, with Vicki continuing as Vicki, she announces herself (as she does also in the 1954 version) as “Mrs. Norman Maine,” obviously not to be understood in the traditional patriarchal sense of deference to a woman’s husband, but as a loving tribute to him, a dialectical contrast to when he had been called “Mr. Lester.” As I said above, the film ends with the last page from the script, reminding us that all the world’s a stage.

The Gods Must Be Furious–Chapter Nine

At the appointed time, the four neopagans waited, with other neopagan family and friends, for signs from, again, to use the Greek names that they were all accustomed to using, Zeus, Poseidon, Gaea, and Hades.

After a mere ten minutes of waiting, Shelly and those with her saw a face form in the clouds, one with a beard.

“Zeus,” she called out to the sky. “May I call you Zeus?”

“If you wish, mortal,” the sky-father said in a booming voice. “Your Earth names for us are all acceptable.”

“Thank you,” she said. “What is your will, Zeus? Why are all of these killings happening? We believers suspect your motives, but we want to be sure.”

“We gods have been dormant for millennia,” he said. “Not any longer, though. I tire of the smoke that blackens my skies, and of the acid rain.” His voice was heard in the minds’ ears, as it were, of all the others watching, waiting, and listening for signs in all four mutually faraway places, and anywhere else in the world where people had ears to hear. Cellphones weren’t even needed: the gods made all voices, human and divine, heard as if everyone was in the same room.

Around that time, Michelle saw a face forming in the water near her feet as they, dangling from the pier, touched the surface.

“I have endured the senseless killing of my children—fish, whales, coral reefs, sharks, and all others,” Poseidon said. “I’ll endure the pollution and scathing of my babies no longer.”

Gary was watching the wind blow on the grass of the golf course his manager brother had allowed him to come in. At one point, the wind shaped the grass into a woman’s sad face. His eyes widened as he saw the ‘mouth’ begin to move.

“I have been as patient as I could while trees, grass, bushes, and animals—all my children—have been butchered,” she said in sobs. Gary saw a dew-like tear drop from grassy shadows shaped into her right eye. “I have been prepared to forgive man’s brutality and disrespect. I cannot afford to keep waiting for man to show remorse. Either I kill him, or he kills everything.”

If only Cam were here to see and hear this, Gary thought with a frown on his face. He’d have all the proof he needs; but he never listens to me or opens his mind to any of this! How am I going to save him from the gods’ coming wrath?

Nina was sitting by the opening to the mine, having put away her phone, since she could naturally hear what was being said among the others, who also heard all the voices of the gods and human participants, loud voices from far off, to be heard as if whispered right by their ears, so everyone could participate in this conversation among such far-away places.

Just when Gaea had finished speaking from the grass on the golf course, Nina was startled by the loud, bass voice coming from the hole: “Man is making the Earth his hell, his grave. We will accelerate the process.”

“But, what of us, we who have always honoured you?” Michelle asked when Hades had finished speaking. “Surely you don’t plan to kill the good with the wicked.”

“No,” Gaea said. “You will be spared. But be careful. Take cover as we bring disaster to the sinful. Make sure you distance yourselves from them.”

“Warn the evil, too,” said Zeus. “None of them will listen to you, but at least give them fair warning.”

“They will scoff at you, and mock you,” Poseidon said. “But do what is just.”

“Their scoffing will come back on them…hard,” Hades said.

“But how can we be sure that we will be safe?” Nina asked. “And how can we save innocent children?”

“We will provide…huge wooden boxes…for you to be protected in, giant versions of the chest given to Deucalion and Pyrrha,” Gaea said. “Put as many children in them as you can fit, as well as yourselves, your families, and your friends.”

“Warn the world,” Zeus repeated. “So those with ears, who listen, will come to your boxes and be saved.”

“Yes, Zeus,” Michelle said. “We will do your bidding, and we will look for your boxes.”

On Liberalism and Fascism, vs Communism

I: Introduction

A week or two before I started work on this article, I shared a post on Twitter that said, “Liberal response to fascism,” under which was a photo of Neville Chamberlain, Edouard Daladier, Hitler, and Mussolini, among others in a room just before signing the Munich Agreement in 1938, to allow Nazi Germany to annex the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. On the same post and to the right of that photo was the iconic one of a member of the Red Army holding a Soviet flag on the Reichstag building in Berlin, after they defeated Nazi Germany in 1945; above this photo, it said, “Communist response to fascism.”

You can call the use of the two photos ‘commie’ or ‘tankie’ propaganda if you wish, Dear Reader, but it’s also basic history, far from being a pair of insignificant details. The liberal West was appeasing fascism right up until the Nazi invasions of Poland and France, whereas Stalin had been strenuously trying, with no success, to create alliances with the capitalist West against the fascists. After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June, 1941, some of the bloodiest fighting in military history happened between the two sides (i.e., the Battle of Stalingrad), and in the end, about 27,000,000 Soviets died in the fighting against Naziism, ultimately doing most of the work liberating Europe from fascism (even bourgeois historians acknowledge this fact).

I mention all of this as a reaction to a response to my Twitter post from some shit-lib who imagined they were providing “context” to it. This “context” was another post mocking the one I’d shared, with a photo of Western Allies dropping bombs on Germany, above which it said, “Liberal response to fascism,” and beside this, a photo of Stalin shaking hands with Joachim von Ribbentrop after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact; above this photo, it said, “Communist response to fascism.”

[Incidentally, the needed context behind the treaty between the Soviets and the Nazis is that it wasn’t an alliance or a ‘friendship’ of any sort: Nazis and communists have always hated and opposed each other. The treaty was a non-aggression pact, which means, “If we don’t get in your way, you won’t get in our way.” A full explanation of why the treaty was agreed on can be read here, but I’ll give you a few key points: the Soviet Union needed to buy time in order to complete their industrialization and prepare for war, since they knew all too well that the Nazis could not be trusted, and they’d invade soon enough; also, many Western capitalist states also signed treaties of the sort with Nazi Germany, not just the Munich Agreement–these included Poland, France, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Albania, Slovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria.]

I wanted to respond to this blatant liberal propaganda, but the response to my post was set up not to allow me to do that, so I was furious, and this is why I’m writing this article now. It should be always remembered that Twitter is owned by a man who brazenly and shamelessly did a Nazi salute on TV during Trump’s inauguration. Musk didn’t do that out of ‘social awkwardness,’ as some in the liberal media tried to portray it: he’s known for having far-right sympathies, and he was clearly demonstrating to the world that the American government had removed its liberal mask and exposed its fascist face; we were meant to understand that there is nothing we can do about the current resurgence of fascism in the West, and so my article here is about the close relationship between liberalism and fascism, and communism’s diametrical opposition to the two sister ideologies.

II: Of Horseshoes and Fish Hooks

Most people in the West subscribe to the liberal belief in the horseshoe theory, which holds there to be a nearness between the far left and the far right, in spite of the fact that the two ideologies are at diametrically opposite ends of the political spectrum. The liberal centre is regarded as a comfortable middle point between the two extremes, which makes liberalism seem more attractive as an ideology–a convenient appearance for it to have, something those who espouse liberalism must surely, and smugly, be happy about.

Now it is of course true that fascism is an extreme and ugly ideology to support–you won’t get any disagreements from me on that point, I assure you, Dear Reader. As for Marxism-Leninism being regarded as another unwanted “extreme,” well, while it is true that communists have taken a hard line against those who oppose their goals, they have had far better reason to do so than fascists ever did. There were and are pressures put on communists, by such things as capitalist encirclement, that forced them to resort to authoritarianism, and decades of Cold War anticommunist propaganda has wildly exaggerated the violence communists used against their foes, as well as taken much, if not all, of that violence out of its proper historical and political context, as I’ve argued elsewhere, in one form or another.

Furthermore, it is crucial to understand what make fascism and communism polar opposites, so much so that the horseshoe theory–as implied by that second Twitter meme mentioned above–is such a slap in the face, not just to communists, but also to leftists of any stripe. Consider the goals of fascism, as opposed to the goals of communism. Fascists want a militarily strong nation well-protected against what is perceived as the threatening presence of foreigners; this belief naturally leads to racial and ethnic prejudice and bigotry, xenophobia, and violence against anyone deemed the “other.” Communists want the means of production to be controlled by the workers, not by bosses, an abolition of private property; such a change would result in a democratic workplace where workers receive the full fruits of their labour; furthermore, communists want this change to be global, since capitalists of other countries would push for a capitalist counterrevolution in any country that has had a socialist revolution.

Fascists are nationalists; communists are internationalists. Fascists see their own as naturally superior and worthier than the “weak,” “uncivilized,” and “backward” foreigners and other “undesirables” (e.g., LGBT people, etc.), and therefore fascists regard all of these people with utter contempt. Communists see all of humanity, regardless of race, ethnicity, country of origin, colour, sex, sexual orientation or identity, ability or disability, etc., as of equal worth and thus deserving of equal rights and of having all of our basic needs met (food, shelter, healthcare, education, employment).

Yet somehow, because of “authoritarianism,” liberals cannot tell fascists and communists apart.

Finally–and now we come to the more important point to be made, and which should remove all of this confusion–it is fallacious to think of political life, or any aspect of life, really, as being in a state of permanent stasis. The point shouldn’t need to be made, but it does. As Heraclitus once said, “Everything flows.” A central idea in Marxist philosophy is dialectical and historical materialism, which contends that contradictions in the physical world have collided throughout history (e.g., the rich vs the poor), forcing change in the form of sublations (going from ancient slavery to feudalism, then to capitalism). So that liberal “centre” doesn’t just stay in that “reasonable” place forever.

Anyone who has carefully observed political history should know that, in spite of and often because of, worker agitations to push our world in the more egalitarian left direction, the ruling class has relentlessly pushed our world in the rightward direction. Since the ruling class, by definition, has the power, their efforts have always been far more successful than those of the people. Facing such formidable difficulties is why we on the left must take a hard line against any reactionary elements even within our own ranks. These difficulties force us to be authoritarian, when we’d rather just liberate the world. Fascists, on the other hand, are authoritarian because they are bullies.

So the above should explain why the horseshoe theory is at best inadequate, and at worst an outright lie, for showing the relationship between fascism and communism. The only way to do a comparison between the two opposing ideologies is to see them in a dialectical relationship, that is, in the context of the unity of opposites.

Now, one mustn’t confuse the unity of opposites with an identity of opposites, which is an idiotic, ridiculous idea. I years ago wrote an article called Everything Flows, in which I discussed the dialectical unity of opposites, yin and yang, Heraclitus, Hegel‘s philosophy, and all of that sort of thing. After sharing the article on a page on Facebook, some bitch trolled me about it, saying she hated all ‘that yin and yang shit’ (her words, more or less), and absurdly claiming such an idea would require us to see good in something like leukemia: talk about the most moronic of reductio ad absurdum arguments, which only demonstrated a total ignorance of how dialectical thinking works.

One is not trying to say that black is white, or good is bad. One is saying that we cannot have a sense of black without one of white, or one of good without one of bad. The unity lies in a continuum of varying shades of lighter and darker grey, and of all the intermediate points between good and bad. One extreme reacts against the other.

As I discussed in my article, The Ouroboros of Dialectical Materialism, fascism’s rise in the 1920s was a reaction against the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the attempted communist revolutions in Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Romania in the 1910s and early 1920s. When fascism was defeated (or more accurately, suffered a setback) at the end of WWII, socialist states proliferated in East Europe to replace the fascist ones. That is the dialectical unity of the opposites of fascism and communism in action in history. The unity is a movement between opposites: everything flows.

Anyways, a far better representation of the relationship between fascism, liberalism, and communism is the fish hook theory. If you click on the link and look at the picture, you’ll see one of a fish hook lying on its side. On the left is the end that’s to be attached to the fishing line, and the hook begins to curve up from the centre, with the far right hooked around at the top, and the barbed end pointing back at the centre. Obviously, the left is communism and socialism in general, or anti-capitalism; the centre is liberalism, and the far-right hook is fascism.

Here we see the true relationship between liberalism and fascism: the former leads towards the latter, and the latter falls back on the former when necessary. The left, on the other hand, is left out.

III: Examples of the Truth of the Fish Hook Theory

To start off, we need to recall a quote from Stalin that I’ve used a number of times, but will now quote in its entirety, so that its meaning is clearer: “Firstly, it is not true that fascism is only the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie. Fascism is not only a military-technical category. Fascism is the bourgeoisie’s fighting organisation that relies on the active support of Social-Democracy. Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism. There is no ground for assuming that the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of Social-Democracy. There is just as little ground for thinking that Social-Democracy can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie. These organisations do not negate, but supplement each other. They are not antipodes, they are twins. Fascism is an informal political bloc of these two chief organisations; a bloc, which arose in the circumstances of the post-war crisis of imperialism, and which is intended for combating the proletarian revolution. The bourgeoisie cannot retain power without such a bloc. It would therefore be a mistake to think that “pacifism” signifies the liquidation of fascism. In the present situation, “pacifism” is the strengthening of fascism with its moderate, Social-Democratic wing pushed into the forefront.” –J. V. STALIN, from , “Concerning the International Situation,” 1924.

In this quote, when Stalin says “Social-Democracy,” we can read the word liberal, for social democracy is as far left as liberalism is willing to go to appease the working class: we see manifestations of this tendency in Bernie Sanders, AOC, and the rest of the Squad. Any liberal who is less left than that, or more centrist, is simply closer ideologically to fascism, in spite of how “anti-Trump” he or she sounds.

More importantly, though, we can read in Stalin’s quote an explanation of how the fish hook theory works. Both liberalism and fascism support each other: the former is (objectively) the moderate version; the latter is the extreme version. The former wears a mask of benevolence; the latter, lacking the mask, shows its ugly face.

Both ideologies serve capital, just in different ways. Only socialism and communism are a challenge, and a threat, to capitalism, and that’s why liberalism and fascism oppose the left. Liberalism is willing to make a few concessions here and there to the working class, to keep them at bay; but if the working class still insists on socialist revolution, then the gloves are off as far as the liberals are concerned. The fascists are then let off their leashes.

An example of social democratic opposition to communism, in favour of the capitalist status quo, was when the Majority Social Democratic Party (MSPD) of the Weimar Republic used military force (i.e., the Freikorps) to crush the Spartacist uprising in January, 1919. The SPD had wanted Germany to stay in WWI, which the German far left had opposed, leading to a split between them and the SPD centre left; furthermore, the far left–led by people like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht–wanted Bolshevik-style revolution as against SPD reformism.

The crushing of the Spartacist uprising, which included the extrajudicial killings of Luxemburg and Liebknecht by members of the volunteer Guards Cavalry Rifle Division, done with the tacit approval of the MSPD, further established the split in the German left, leaving them all too weak to stop the rise of the Nazi Party a decade later. So the centrist Weimar MSPD was “left” in theory and pro-capitalist reactionary in practice. In all of this, we can see a prime example of how social democratic liberalism enables fascism, in spite of its paying lip service to opposing racism. Now the Stalin quote’s meaning should be clear.

In the US, Teddy Roosevelt, the “Progressive,” could be seen as an example of the country moving in a social democratic direction, to redistribute the wealth in a non-revolutionary way. Elsewhere, though, was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which paved the way for US imperialism in Latin America, interfering in their political affairs if those southern countries do anything the US government disapproves of. This means that whenever a Latin American country elects a left-wing government, as Guatemala or Chile did, the US and their CIA intervene, bring about a coup d’état, and replace it with a far-right government to ensure US-friendly policies. Once again, social democracy leads to fascism–Stalin’s quote rings true.

After WWII, when liberal agendas in many parts of the Western world echoing the New Deal of FDR (who also put Japanese-Americans in internment camps during WWII, recall) were in effect, with such social democratic reforms as welfare capitalism, strong unions, and the like, other, sinister things were going on in the shadows. As I said above, fascism wasn’t really defeated at the end of WWII: it merely suffered a major setback. While some ex-Nazis were tried and punished for war crimes, many others were given government jobs in the US (Operation Paperclip), including work in NASA and NATO, and in the West German government.

The capitalist West knew that, during the Cold War, there was no one better at fighting communists than fascists. Such an alliance between the socially-democratic-oriented West with fascism also included Gladio in Europe, and Operation Aerodynamic with Ukrainian fascists, a precursor to the war going on there now with Russia.

Indeed, ex-Nazis in West Germany made East Germans nervous enough to build the Berlin Wall, or Anti-fascist Protection Rampart, as the GDR called it. Contrary to popular belief (which was spawned by Cold War anticommunist propaganda), the purpose of the Berlin Wall was not to cage people up cruelly inside a “totalitarian” state (though there was a legitimate concern about “brain drain,” that is, the GDR feared losing their much-needed scientists, doctors, engineers, professors, and other highly-skilled people to the temptation of high wages in West Germany and West Berlin); most East German workers were content to live in a country with lots of workers’ benefits, and in fact, there has been much nostalgia and regret among workers in the former GDR over the loss of those benefits, as has also been true in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Bloc. The Wall’s existence was mainly about keeping the West German fascists, the ex-Nazis, out–hence the East German name for the Wall. West Germany’s 1955 inclusion in NATO–clearly an enemy and a threat to global communism–heightened the tensions and need for protection.

Going back to the US, while LBJ in the 1960s was concerned with the War on Poverty and the Great Society, again a kind of social-democrat agenda, his administration also used the Gulf of Tonkin incident (a lie, incidentally) to justify more American involvement in the Vietnam War, which involved maiming and napalming poor Vietnamese who had, a number of years back, just shaken off the yoke of French colonialism and were now trying to achieve self-determination. Elsewhere in the mid-1960s, the CIA helped Suharto to overthrow Sukarno, and the former’s new regime then also killed between half a million to a million Indonesians who were either leftists or suspected of it. Suharto would rule Indonesia with an iron fist for many years, like a true fascist. In these incidents we can see yet again a marriage of liberalism with far-right-wing violence.

Next, we have another liberal, President Jimmy Carter, under whose administration Zbigniew Brzezinski helped the mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight Soviet influence there, leading to the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s, as so propagandistically portrayed in the movie, Charlie Wilson’s War. A genuine attempt was being made, with the aid of the Soviet Union, to modernize the country, establishing socialism and helping to improve women’s rights in Afghanistan, for example; yet the US, fearing the influence of “commies,” preferred having the country ruled by reactionary religious fanatics, leading ultimately to the Taliban and a setting-back of women’s rights far into the past (not to mention setting the stage for bin Laden et al).

[Note that as I go through all of this history, I’m being selective with my examples, since there are so many more out there that also prove my point, yet limited space won’t allow me to include them all. This is, after all, just a blog post, not a book. Still, my selectiveness is caused by such constraints; it’s not about excluding any supposed anti-fascist liberal tendencies.]

IV: The Liberal Conditions That Gave Rise to Trump’s Fascism

Liberals, in their collective delusion that they all share ‘progressive’ values, like to imagine that Trump’s election was something that suddenly appeared out of nowhere, that there had been no political precedent to his supposed deforming of the system. As I have argued in other posts, though, such an idea is as far away from the truth as anything could possibly be. Trump is no aberration…he’s the culmination of a system that has always been the problem.

Trump personifies the truth of the fish hook theory: that liberalism enables and inevitably leads to fascism; by using Trump as controlled opposition, the fascism of the system also relies on liberalism to steer the people away from supporting a truly revolutionary politics by getting them to rely on leaders who promise change, but who ultimately lead the people back to voting for one of the mainstream parties. Sanders and AOC are two examples of such sheepdogs of the left; that civil meeting between Trump and Mamdani in the Oval Office before reporters should also raise a lot of red flags…and I don’t mean the Soviet or the Chinese kind.

To see how we got to Trump via liberalism, I’ll make a summary of the major events from the dissolution of the USSR to the present. We already know of all of the Cold War anticommunist propaganda used to discredit Marxism-Leninism, all while using social-democratic welfare capitalism to make life reasonably comfortable for the Western working class. That was the two-pronged first step in liberalism’s gradual slide towards today’s fascism…though few saw it coming.

The next steps were taken during the Clinton administration in the 1990s, after the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union had been achieved. Many Russians, immediately disillusioned with the return to capitalism and its empty promises of a “free market” horn of plenty, wanted a return to the Soviet system, and were ready to vote for communist Gennady Zyuganov in 1996, since Yeltsin was so unpopular (and for very good reason). Clinton, however, intervened, and his help ensured the reelection of Yeltsin. Indeed, this blatant foreign interference in Russia’s democratic process was frankly acknowledged in Time magazine…and liberals hypocritically complain about Putin’s supposed interference (which never happened) in the 2016 US election, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton.

So getting rid of communism, and keeping it away were necessary first steps in liberalism’s gradual slide towards fascism. Wiping out free-market resistor Slobodan Milosevic, fracturing the former Yugoslavia in the process in the US/NATO “humanitarian war” of 1999, was another early step. Bill Clinton also killed welfare, and enacted NAFTA (which has continued harming the local Mexican economy to this day) and the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Clinton may have started off with talk of how he’d raise taxes and deal with the problem of the American healthcare system, and he even spoke of allowing gays into the military, but such promises to a great extent didn’t materialize as hoped. Instead, apart from the issues I mentioned above, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 resulted in mergers and acquisitions in the media, leading in turn to about 90% of American media being controlled by six huge corporations. This means that the information most Americans have access to is decided on based on the agenda of the rich, not on what’s relevant to the needs of the people.

So when the American empire has an enemy (translation: there’s a country out there not willing to bow to the agenda of the empire), the media is used to smear said country with fables of oppressing its people in order to manufacture consent for war. The control of media narratives is used for this manufacture of consent. This is what happened in the former Yugoslavia, in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Russia vis-à-vis Ukraine, and now Iran, causing much more mayhem in the areas than the purported intent to end such mayhem. They want to do the same to China via Taiwan.

Of course, it would be unfair to blame the entire problem on the Democratic Party, since George W. Bush’s administration did some awful things, too (the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay, etc.). But when Obama became president, all of his promises to “spread the wealth around,” and undoing what Bush did (“Change we can believe in”) ended up just being more empty talk. The capitalist class did very well under the Obama administration in spite of right-wing nonsense that he was a “communist” promoting “socialism.” He signed legislation to extend the Patriot Act’s surveillance provisions, the kind of things Edward Snowden blew the whistle on. Obama was also the “Deporter-in-Chief,” using ICE to deport huge numbers of immigrants, showing that as bad as Trump is now, he’s not alone in perpetrating the evils. Obama was a liberal leading us to Trump’s fascism.

As for the Biden administration, we must not forget that it was with him that the Gaza genocide began and was allowed to continue. In spite of the hot air that AOC blathered about the administration working “tirelessly” to bring about a ceasefire (a word that means absolutely nothing to the Israeli government and military), not a finger was lifted by the US government to stop the Zionist killing rampage, which has included the killing of south Lebanese. Instead, American weapons kept being sent to Israel, as has been the case with the current Trump administration, which is proposing another 2.8 billion-dollar arms sale.

Biden never made his Zionism a secret. He also explicitly gave the reason for American support for Israel in a speech in 1986, saying that the Jewish state’s existence was “to protect [American] interests in the region.” Yes, Israel works for the Western empire, not the other way around, and the antisemites would have us all believe.

All mainstream liberal politicians support Israel every bit as much as conservatives do. This includes such liberals as Sanders and AOC, who pay lip service to the need to stop sending weapons to Israel, and who criticize Netanyahu and the IDF. Our former Canadian prime minister, the Liberal Justin Trudeau, proudly declared his Zionism in a speech while the Gaza genocide has been going on; he had only criticisms of ‘antisemitism,’ which is usually just anti-Zionism, the perfectly legitimate stance, as Israel has always been a fascist, racist, apartheid ethnostate.

The communist position, in contrast to that of liberals, conservatives, and fascists, is anti-Zionist. There was only one exception to their position, when regrettably in a momentary lapse of reason and a case of realpolitik, the USSR supported the creation of Israel out of a hope that the new Jewish state would be a socialist one, giving international communism some leverage over the Middle East, geo-strategically an extremely important area (hence the Western capitalists’ support of Israel); but when Israel showed itself clearly to be a bourgeois ally of the US, the Soviets quickly came to their senses, resumed their principled anti-Zionism, and maintained solidarity with the Arabs.

So in their unflinching support for Israel, liberals have once again showed how easily their ideology slides into fascism. Biden’s pro-Israel policy during the Gaza genocide easily and seamlessly became Trump’s policy.

V: Conclusion

Liberalism’s professed support of progressive values and causes is only a superficial one. They’ll have ‘girl-bosses,’ black bosses, gay bosses, etc., but no replacing of bosses with workers’ collective ownership of businesses, as communists would have. Liberals will have the rich taxed, but never expropriated, as the communists will have it. Some charity will be given to the poor by liberals, but an ending of the class conditions that cause poverty will never be considered by liberals, as it would be by communists.

Liberal “humanitarian war” helped normalize imperialist war and regime change in recent decades. Liberals’ extension of Patriot Act surveillance and ICE deportations have smoothly moved over to Trump’s more blatant forms of these. Liberal Zionism has enabled the current bloody, fanatical version. Social-Democratic crushing of communism enabled the rise of fascism, past and present. Liberals may back progressive legislation for whites in one’s home country, then back the fascistic overthrow of leftist governments abroad.

The ruling class uses liberalism and fascism as a “good cop, bad cop” routine, respectively to keep the populace at bay during good times, and to beat the working class back during bad times. Liberalism maintains the illusion of democratic freedom of choice; fascism is a removal of the illusion when the masses refuse to be fooled by the liberal mask.

The only way the international proletariat will ever be liberated from oppression is when they throw away the liberal illusion for good; educate, agitate, and organize, and keep fighting tirelessly to end the bourgeois charade forever.

The Gods Must Be Furious–Chapter Eight

“I’m telling you,” Michelle typed in a message shared with three other neopagans in a private conversation on Facebook. “There are people who have come forward and said they saw faces in the sky, in the ocean, on the grass in the golf course, and in the underground mine.”

“I’ve heard a couple of claims like that, too,” said Gary to the others. “The claims could be true—we don’t know.”

“What’s interesting, regardless of whether these face stories are true or not, is that all the people killed were rich people publicly known for not caring about the environment at all,” Shelly said. “Not that these connections, of course, were ever acknowledged in the mainstream media, who are on the payroll of the rich. To know the connections, you have to do additional research, as I did.”

“That’s right,” said Nina. “I did a little of that independent research, too. The victims made no secret about their contempt for the poor and for our Mother Earth. Any staff in the areas where these natural disasters occurred survived. At worst, they got a little hurt and a big scare, like my miner husband. Then there are the shared dreams we have all had. All the evidence suggests intervention from the gods to save our planet.”

“So, what should we do?” Gary asked.

“Gary, you live close to that golf course your brother manages,” Michelle said. “How about you go there and wait for signs from Gaea? I’m near the California Yacht Club; I’ll go sit by the pier, watch the water, and wait for a sign from Poseidon. Nina, since you live near the mine in Texas, can you go over there, as close as they’ll allow you, and wait for signs from Hades?”

“My husband’s a miner, as I said before,” Nina said. “Steve was badly hurt and got one hell of a scare from the experience, but thank the gods he’s going to be all right. He refuses to believe the gods had anything to do with what happened, but he can get me inside the property with a key he once stole from Lipton’s office. Now that he is dead, Lipton won’t object to the petty larceny. I can get right up to the holes and listen for Hades’ words.”

“Good,” Shelly said. “I can drive up near the Wells mansion in Vermont. I’ll park there, look up at the sky, and wait for signs from Zeus.”

“We can also message each other by phone to keep the conversation a four-way one, with each god, too…we hope,” Michelle said.

“Great,” Gary said. “Let’s all do this, well, at 10:00 PM my time. You can all work out the time zones in your areas. You know mine: Gary, from Gary, Indiana—so easy to remember.”

The other three responded with “Yeah, lol.”

And before I go on the green in the golf course, I’ll make another attempt to get my brother to listen to me about the coming danger, Gary thought. The rest of our family are opening their minds to this. Please, gods, help me to get him and his wife to open their minds!

Similarly, Michelle prayed, Please, gods, help my mother to see my gods as real as she does her Jesus.

And Nina prayed, O gods, help Steve to understand that he didn’t hallucinate Hades’ voice!