The Tanah–The Preaching: The Remaining Spells for Preventing Sin

[The following is the thirty-first 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, and here is the thirtieth–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.]

The following are the remaining spells for preventing sin–their instructions and verses.

[Find an expansive, flat area of land. Perform a ritual with one group of people at one side, and another group of people at the other side. As the verse is chanted, the first group will march together to the other side, as if to take it from the second group of people; then the second group will do the same, marching to the first side while grabbing the arms of the people in the first group, as if to take their land and enslave them. This will all be done while repeating the following verse, louder and louder, and with more and more emotional intensity.]

What you from (others) take(,) others
>>>………………………………………..<<<

Commentary: The verse is to be read thus: “What you take from others, others take from you.” The syntax in the original language allows a smooth reading back and forth.

[Collect coins of gold, silver, and copper, and pile them in a hole in the ground; do this ritual on a windy day. Surround the pile with dirt, leaves, and kindling. As the verse is chanted, burn the leaves and kindling, then put out the fire with water, and bury the coins in the dirt. Chant the following verse repeatedly and in a growing volume and emotional intensity.]

Weleb, Crim of air, blow away my greed!
Nevil, Crim of fire, torch my greed!
Priff, Crim of water, drown my greed!
Drofurb, Crim of earth, bury my greed!

Commentary: It should go without saying that, as the wind blows on the coins, Weleb’s line is chanted repeatedly; as the leaves and kindling are burned, Nevil’s line is chanted repeatedly; as the fire is put out with the water, Priff’s line is chanted repeatedly, and as the coins are buried, Drofurb’s line is chanted repeatedly.

[Prepare a bag of coins to be ‘stolen,’ in this ritual of mock-robbery. Participants in the ritual will run around, each ‘stealing’ the bag while having it ‘stolen’ from him soon after. This running around and ‘stealing’ will continue, again and again, as the following verse is repeatedly chanted.]

When you from (others) steal(,) then others
>>>………………………………………………….<<<

Commentary: As with the verse above meant to prevent the stealing of others’ land, this verse, meant to prevent the stealing of others’ wealth or possessions, is to be read in a similar back-and-forth manner, to represent the karmic nature of the Echo Effect: “When you from others steal, others then steal from you.” Again, the syntax of the original language allows for a smoothness of reciting that cannot be properly reproduced in English.

[This ritual is to be done by one man alone. He is to stand in a flat, open field on a windy day. A circular ditch is to be dug, surrounding him. Leaves and kindling are to be left surrounding him, too. As he chants the verse over and over, he is to light the leaves and kindling on fire, then put it all out with water, then go in the ditch and crawl around in it, rolling in the dirt until his whole body is filthy.]

Weleb, if I think of myself alone, may I be alone!
Nevil, if I think of myself alone, may I be alone!
Priff, if I think of myself alone, may I be alone!
Drofurb, if I think of myself alone, may I be alone!

Commentary: Again, each act in the ritual is to correspond with the Crim repeatedly invoked, so Weleb is addressed during the blowing wind, Nevil during the burning, etc.

[Prepare a weighing scale, piles of dirt, small amounts of water, leaves and kindling, and do this ritual on a windy day. First, put unequal amounts of dirt in the two bowls of the scale so they’re uneven; then as the line addressing Drofurb is chanted, move some dirt from the heavier bowl to the lighter bowl to reverse the unevenness. As the line addressing Priff is chanted, have unequal amounts of water in the bowls, then move some water from the heavier bowl to the lighter one, again, to reverse the unevenness. Do the same with the leaves and kindling, lighting them on fire while addressing Nevil with his line. Finally, let the wind blow against the scale while chanting the line for Weleb.]

Drofurb, may my unfairness come back to me!
Priff, may my unfairness come back to me!
Nevil, may my unfairness come back to me!
Weleb, may my unfairness come back to me!

Commentary: As with the rituals meant to prevent the stealing of land or money, and to prevent selfishness, this ritual, to prevent unfairness, dramatizes how the Echo Effect punishes our sin, and so it is meant to instill in the tribe the importance of knowing never to bring bad karma on oneself.

Redacted

******************those************
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****girls***************************
**********************did**********
***********************************
**********nothing******************
************************************
**************************wrong***
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Analysis of ‘Aqualung’

I: Introduction

Aqualung is a 1971 album by Jethro Tull, their fourth. It was their first album to have John Evan (keyboards) as a full-time member, and their first with Jeffrey Hammond (bass–billed jokingly as “Hammond-Hammond” at the time); incidentally, the new bassist had already been referred to in a number of Jethro Tull songs: “A Song for Jeffrey,” “Jeffrey Goes to Leicester Square,” “For Michael Collins, Jeffrey, and Me,” and even “Inside” (i.e., in the line, “Old Jeffrey makes three.”). Aqualung would also be the last album with Clive Bunker on drums; when he was replaced by Barriemore Barlow, band leader Ian Anderson (vocals, flute, acoustic guitar, etc.) would be the only remaining original member of the band as of Thick as a Brick.

Aqualung was a great success for Jethro Tull, with four classic songs: the title track, “Cross-Eyed Mary,” “Hymn 43,” and “Locomotive Breath.” The band would go on to become a major radio and touring act in the 1970s. Aqualung is Jethro Tull’s best-selling album, having sold more than seven million units worldwide, being generally well-received critically, and being included on several music magazine best-of lists.

Though it’s been understood by many to be “an antichurch/pro-God concept album” (George-Warren/Romanowski/Pareles, page 495), the band has consistently denied that Aqualung was ever intended to be a concept album, and that only a few songs share common themes. I plan, however, to show that certain themes presented in the lyrics–homelessness/destitution, sin/perversity, prostitution/being of the working class/Lumpenproletariat, etc. on Side One (those down low), and religious authoritarianism and of the powerful on Side Two (those up high)–are more consistent than that.

There is indeed a dialectical relationship here between both sides of the album, fittingly subtitled Aqualung and My God. The “least of [Christ’s] brethren” would represent God far better than the Pharisee-like Church authorities scorned on Side Two. Christ came for the sick, and not the healthy, after all, hence His sitting and eating with sinners, as well as His forgiveness of Mary Magdalene, the “Cross-Eyed Mary” of His time. He never condoned her sin, nor that of the adulteress, nor of the tax collectors; with His mercy, He would have them “go, and sin no more.” (John 8:11)

Such is the real meaning to be found in Aqualung. We’ll find God in the sick and the oppressed, not in the powerful and holier-than-thou. When we look at the cover of the album and see the filthy homeless man on it, his long hair and beard may remind us of Christ’s. Consider also the text on the back cover of the album, which reverses the Creation by having Man create God, and later form Aqualung out of the dust of the ground, Man’s Adam, who in being cast out of Eden is thus made homeless.

So, in helping these least of His brethren, one is helping Christ, which thus equates Aqualung, “and a host of others likened unto his kind”, with Christ, and therefore in turn with God, an ideal created by Man. But Man cast all of the Aqualungs into the void, out of Eden, made homeless. Thus, Man became the God he created, that is, the stern Church authority figure to “rule over all the earth.”

Man isn’t seeing the Spirit that lives on within all men, and even in Aqualung–that creative, divine Spirit within all of us, a ruach-breath made sick from Man’s mistreatment of Aqualung. Man had better start looking for that Spirit, though, if he wishes to save himself and his world.

Here is a link to all of the lyrics on the album, and here is a link to the whole album.

Side One–Aqualung

II: Aqualung

The character of Aqualung was inspired by a number of photographs of homeless people on the Thames Embankment, taken by Anderson’s then-wife, Jennie, who co-wrote the lyric for the title track.

The song begins with a riff played by lead guitarist Martin Barre: D, G, A-sharp, C, C-sharp, C-natural. The shift from the perfect fifth (D) of the tonic key (G minor) to an augmented fourth (C-sharp) is significant, for this latter note is a tritone in relation to the tonic.

Finding the tritone dissonant, unsettling, and difficult to sing, the Church called the interval the diabolus in musica, or the “devil in music.” If we rename the augmented fourth with the enharmonic interval of the diminished fifth (or the flattened fifth), we thus can see in its descent from the perfect fifth a symbolic fall from ‘perfection’ to ‘devilishness,’ or to ‘sin.’ We will hear this descent from perfect fifth to tritone again in the main chord progression of “My God” (see below).

Speaking of sin, this is exactly what we find Aqualung doing on that park bench, looking lustfully at pretty little girls there, like a sex pervert. Though we naturally would never condone his pedophilia, his “watching as the frilly panties run,” matters will get more complicated. We look on him with disgust for his “bad intent,” for the “snot running down his nose,” and his “greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes”; yet we also pity him for his “broken luck.”

He’s “drying in the cold sun” because without a home, one is often cold even when the sun is out. When we go from the first verse to the second, Barre’s angry electric guitar riff changes to Anderson’s sad acoustic guitar strumming, a musical shift from the judgemental attitude towards Aqualung’s proclivities to compassion for “an old man wandering lonely.” Perhaps if we’d pitied, rather than shamed, him, he wouldn’t have stooped to the low of lusting after children.

Another thing to remember in connection with his pedophilia: many men in positions of religious authority have been guilty of the same thing, as well as having gotten away with it, thanks to that very religious authority (at least in the case of Aqualung, he’s only had impure thoughts that he, presumably, hasn’t [yet] acted on). Note what I said above in connection with this moral equivalence: there is a dialectical relationship between those in the lowly state on Side One and those in the exalted state on Side Two. These least of Christ’s brethren are equivalent to ‘Him’ (i.e., to the Church) in sin; they’re equivalent to the real Christ in piteousness, though.

With pain in his leg, Aqualung picks up cigarette butts, discarded ‘dog ends,’ since they’re all the penniless man has available to smoke. When he has to use a public washroom–a “bog”–he gets some of his piss on his feet, warming them, which ironically makes his soiling of them seem comfortable.

He’s alone, and the Salvation “Army’s up the road,” that is, not near him to give him aid and comfort. The Salvation Army has been known historically, by the way, for being rather selective with those to whom they want to be charitable. An interesting point to be made here is the reversal of the words “Salvation” and “army” in the two lines of the verse, which seems to represent a reversal, or inversion, of moral values: one isn’t charitable to whom one should be.

Anderson ends the verse with more sympathy for the “poor old sod,” then with the beginning of the third verse, the tempo and energy pick up the pace. He imagines the “agony” that Aqualung must have felt in the last, freezing cold winter, out there without any shelter.

The derelict’s “rattling last breaths/with deep-sea diver sounds” bring us to the meaning of the song’s title, which is a reference to the name of one of the first SCUBA devices. Aqualung’s heavy, laboured breathing, probably a result of pneumonia or emphysema from his smoking, exposure to air pollution, viruses, and bacteria, sounds like someone breathing in SCUBA gear.

This difficulty breathing in turn can be related to what I said above about the ruach (“breath,” “wind”) of God. This relation can symbolize the corruption and other problems of the Church, which make it difficult for the Spirit of God to flow effectively. More on this later.

The rest of the song’s lyric is repeats of the previous verses. That angry, judgemental first verse, with Barre’s electric guitar riff, ends the song, with the chord progression moving from the G minor tonality up a tritone to C-sharp major, D-sharp major, and F major. Evan finishes the song off with some piano arpeggios in that final chord.

III: Cross-Eyed Mary

The song begins with minor third tremolos on Anderson’s flute (What is a Jethro Tull song without the flute?), backed with Evan’s piano chords and Mellotron (strings tapes). The transition, from this instrumental opening to the rock riff and Anderson’s vocals, comes with a few trills on his flute.

The first two lines of the first verse are a reference to an old traditional English counting rhyme, “Tinker, Tailor,” which includes this line: “rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief.” Anderson’s lyric, though, reverses the poor men and other Lumpenproletariat with the “rich man,” as he did previously with the Salvation Army in “Aqualung.” Again, this restates the album’s theme of a reversal of how things normally would be.

Here, however, instead of things being reversed to become bad, they’re reversed…perhaps…to become good, with the poor coming first and the rich last, as Jesus would have had them. Only in the case of this song, the poor coming before the rich is in the form of Cross-Eyed Mary, a teenage high school prostitute who offers her services to dirty old men…if they have the money.

Being a prostitute, she is a member of the Lumpenproletariat, like Aqualung, who is referred to later on in the song. These two are the ‘low-lives’ of Side One; Anderson himself referred to her as such. With the other poor wretches of the Aqualung side of the album, they’re meant to contrast sharply (and dialectically) with the highly-placed religious authorities of the My God side.

As I said above, it’s the men who have the money who pay for her services, for “she dines in Hampstead village,” a wealthy area of London, hence her clients will be moneyed businessmen. The “jack-knife barber” who “drops her off at school” is a back-alley abortionist who illegally solves her pregnancy problems.

Also as I said above, it’s older men whom she services, not “little boys.” If only Aqualung had the money for her, since he’s got her attention as he watches her lustfully “through the railings” to the schoolyard. If he can manage to scrounge up a few pounds, though, he might get lucky with her, for “she’ll do it for a song.” With the money she gets from her rich clients, she can do charitable sexual favours for poorer men, thus making her “the Robin Hood of Highgate” (one of the most expensive suburbs of London, and the site of the St. Mary Magdalene House of Charity, for the rehabilitation of “fallen women,” or prostitutes).

So where Aqualung is the Adam, having been kicked out of Eden and into homelessness, Cross-Eyed Mary is the Eve of the album, a fallen woman. These are the sinners and the lowly who are judged by those on high, the religious authorities on Side Two…yet they’re men who really aren’t any better from a moral standpoint, if one regards such men more closely.

IV: Cheap Day Return

This short song opens with Anderson playing a brief prelude on his acoustic guitar, with Evan backing him on the organ. Anderson is singing about his sick father in hospital, hoping the nurse is taking good care of him. Thus, his father is another of the wretched, deserving of pity, one of “these least of [Christ’s] brethren.” and so he’s like God.

Also, being Anderson’s father, he can be seen to represent God the Father, who is sick because of Church corruption and lost of faith in Him. The nurse would thus represent the priesthood, who are trusted to guide us in understanding God, just as Anderson hopes the nurse will do well in nursing his old man back to health.

Yet the nurse, knowing Anderson to be a rock singer, asks him for his autograph, which to him is “What a laugh.” This hero-worship of a singer is like the idolizing of a false god, symbolically implying Church corruption, which has made God so sick in the first place. Such idolatry makes religion cheap, hence the Sunday service is on a “Cheap Day.”

V: Mother Goose

The title of this song reminds me of a quote from Clarence Darrow: “I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose.” Thus, the song’s title could be seen to represent the God of Church authority that is no longer believable.

The song lyric has been described as being a surreal pastiche with images of the same abstract ideas as in “Cross-Eyed Mary.” Indeed, there are schoolgirls in the song: is Mary one of them?

I suspect that, underneath the ‘surreal’ imagery, Anderson was–if only unconsciously–dealing with the loss of faith in the Church and the resulting indulgence in sin. If God is as unbelievable as the fairy tales of Mother Goose, then having “turned her loose” is a renunciation of that faith, leaving the Church authorities “screaming” at Anderson’s apostasy.

The Church and its faith can seem like a circus, or like a school, drawing the attention of “a foreign student” of Sunday school, as it were. The foreigner, knowing so little about the local faith, imagines that its ‘circus’ is full of fanciful animals–“elephants, lions, too,” like those in Noah’s Ark, when the place is really Piccadilly Circus, a not-so spectacular place, like our world, without the Biblical miracles and whatnot.

Since the Church’s teachings make it like a school, it’s fitting to hear Barre play a descant recorder and Hammond play an alto recorder, reminding us all of the instrument we as kids used to play in music class at school. Mother Goose tales tend, directly or indirectly, to teach morals (i.e., Charles Perrault‘s renderings of them), just as the Church teaches, through Christ’s parables. Anderson doesn’t want to learn all that, though, so he went “down by the bathing pond to try and catch some sun.” All those schoolgirls were there, too, and they probably didn’t know he was playing truant.

To get back to the circus-as-Church imagery, we learn of Anderson being chided by “a bearded lady” to stop “misbehaving,” or sinning. Apparently, though, a red-bearded man’s sister driving a lorry is far weirder. Could it be that the bearded lady of the Church-circus sideshow ‘freaks’ is really a man speaking for women, who are supposed to be silent in church (1 Corinthians 14:35), while a woman driving a lorry is all the more brazenly defying of traditional sex roles, since she, like Anderson, is giving up on her faith?

I suspect a sexual meaning in Anderson’s putting and having “popped ’em in their holes.” Other men seem to be doing the same, “four and twenty” of them, to be exact, like the “Four and twenty naughty boys/Baked in a pye” of the original version of the nursery rhyme, “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” (I’m sure the original rhyme meant something far less naughty than what I’m implying about the “pie,” but my concern is with Anderson’s lyric, not the original verse.) The labourers are “digging up their gold,” again, there’s an implied sexual meaning, while Anderson, as cunning and opportunistic Long John Silver, is figuring out a way to get at that treasure of girl-gold (the schoolgirls, including Cross-Eyed Mary?).

Another example of sinning is when Johnny Scarecrow stole a “jet black mac…from a snowman.” This kind of sinning, along with the lechery and truancy cited above, is what worries the Church authorities when the flock loses its faith. Such sinners might sink low, down to the depths of Aqualung, Cross-Eyed Mary, and others among the Lumpenproletariat.

VI: Wond’ring Aloud

This is an acoustic guitar ballad about a loving married couple, though there’s some implied sexual meaning…or sinning…in the lyric, too. This combination of love and sexuality in a married couple suggests the sensual love expressed in the poetry of the Song of Songs, whose male and female lovers the Church often allegorizes as the love of Christ (the bridegroom) for His Church (the bride).

That the groom and bride “are [their] own saviours,” like Christ and His Church, leads us to wonder “will the years treat [them] well,” that is, will their faith in the Church remain intact, or will they lose faith in it, and will that lack of faith lead to sinning, as we saw in “Mother Goose”?

The sinning could be in the form of unbridled passion, the kind that priests might warn newlyweds of (recall Friar Laurence‘s admonition to Romeo and Juliet to “love moderately” [II, vi, 14]). After all, “the butter runs, then she comes, spilling crumbs on the bed.” The reference to crumbs sounds a lot like crumpet in this context.

Since “it’s only the giving that makes you what you are,” we hear what sounds like a negating of the Church doctrine of salvation by grace through faith. The giving, or the act of generosity, is an example of good works, which Paul insisted could not, in and of themselves, save you (Ephesians 2: 8-9). So here again, we see an example of Aqualung‘s theme of rejecting the morality of Church authority.

VII: Up to Me

This song begins with a blues-oriented riff, at first on Anderson’s flute and acoustic guitar, in E.

The verses of this song give us a series of vignettes of the life of an ordinary, working-class man: going to the movies with a friend, leaving him in a Wimpy fast-food restaurant, getting into a drunken fight with someone (with broken glasses and beer bottles not put away), being stuck in the cold or in the rain, and what seems like a sexual encounter with a smoking (and presumably smoking hot) girl…Cross-Eyed Mary, by chance? as she’s looking up to him while having something other than a cigarette in her mouth.

As contrasted with the sins of the lower classes, we also have the excesses of the upper classes: they who have a Silver Cloud (a kind of Rolls Royce), one big enough to fit inside it the tennis club they’re members of, and the indulgence in the ephemeral fashions of the time (e.g., bell-bottoms, etc.)

One notable manipulation in the lyric is the multiple meanings given to “up to me”: “running up to me,” “that one’s up to me” (i.e., it’s my responsibility), the high social status of the rich “was up to me” (i.e., “up” in relation to my low status as a worker), and the naughty girl with yellow fingers from smoking “is looking up to me” as she smokes…something else. It’s also “up to me,” that is, an uphill battle, to scrounge up money and ask of it from others “when the copper fades away” from the pockets of “a common working man.”

And so, this is the last of the songs of the lowly: the homeless, the prostitutes, the hospitalized, the sinning apostates, the lustful lovers, and the working class. From the Aqualung Side One, we move on to the My God Side Two, and deal with those highly-placed…and see what’s wrong with them.

My God

VIII: My God

The song begins with Anderson doing an acoustic guitar solo, one very dark in mood. First, we hear octaves in A, with a few Gs thrown in, all played accelerando, before other notes come in, giving us an A minor tonality with an added ninth. Played in a fast 3/4, the solo repeats the same basic motif, but ends in an A minor chord with an added high tritone (E-flat).

After a run of single notes up the A natural minor scale, from the root up to the minor sixth (F), we go into the main riff of the song, which is the strumming of an A minor triad and an inverted B seventh chord. This involves, as I pointed out with the electric guitar riff of “Aqualung,” the perfect fifth descending to the tritone (i.e., to the major third of the B-seventh chord, a dropping from the A minor triad’s E to an E flat). And as with the album’s title track, this going down, from the perfect interval to the ‘devil’s’ interval, symbolizes a descent from grace into sin…only this time, it isn’t a lowly, homeless pervert who is falling–it’s the Church authorities who are doing so.

Jesus is in a “golden cage,” the wealth of the Catholic Church. Now, that golden cage isn’t limited to religion, for many in the Western ruling classes have used Jesus to justify their accumulation of wealth, their wars, their bigotries, their colonization, and their right-wing tendencies in general. Indeed, mankind has “made Him bend to [man’s] religion.”

Just as the lowly on the Aqualung side of the album aren’t only sinners, but are also the working class (proletariat) and those destitute and outside of society (the Lumpenproletariat), so are those on high on the My God side of the album not just the Church authorities, but the rich bourgeoisie as well.

If all one can see in God is the God of the religious and political establishment, then He is no real God at all–“He is the God of nothing.” In the next two lines of the second verse, Anderson seems to be hinting at his pantheistic leanings when he says that “the God of everything” is “inside you and me.” What’s more, if the God of nothing is He of the establishment and those in power, then the God of everything is He of the people, the working poor and the global proletariat, those least of Christ’s brethren, those equated with Him.

We should “lean upon Him gently,” that is, have Christ as a figure of comfort, love, and aid to the wretched, and not as a figure to judge others with. We shouldn’t “call on Him to save us,” that is, use Him as a crutch to limp our way to heaven and to help us save face when our sins disgrace us publicly. Salvation is supposed to be about real moral betterment, not about social status and being with ‘the right group’ or social circle.

“The bloody Church of England” would have been used as the religious justification for British imperial conquest and the “white man’s burden.” Going to “the vicarage for tea” reminds me of the line in “Aqualung” about the Salvation Army “and a cup of tea.” Instead of prioritizing the poor, the Church all too often prioritizes social gatherings; it’s all about that being in the right group, an exclusive social circle, and keeping the Aqualungs out.

Next, Barre does a blues-inflected guitar solo, then Anderson comes in with his trademark breathy flute-playing, similarly full of blues licks. After that, instead of the flute being backed by the band, we hear the “odd voices” of Hammond, sounding like a church choir…only the music doesn’t have the usual peace-inducing effect it’s supposed to have; it sounds rather eerie, suggesting how disturbingly corrupt the Church has typically been.

To get back to the lyric, we’re reminded of how the second Commandment condemns the use of images for God, or any god, for that matter; yet Christians have images of Christ all the time, including the crucifixes they wear–Jesuolatry is even acknowledged in the New Testament itself (Colossians 1:15). Does God actually get a kick out of this excessive emphasis on His Son?

Will “confessing to the endless sin,” which one all the same will continually fall into, actually lead to salvation? One will be “praying to next Thursday,” or before Good Friday (or even before the Muslim day of congregation), “to all the gods that you can count,” because far too many people out there think that only saying, “Lord! Lord!” is sufficient, as opposed to actually doing the good deeds that God wants us to do (Matthew 7:21).

The song ends with some soft flute playing…that is, not with a bang, but a whimper.

IX: Hymn 43

This song, in D, continues the criticisms of Church corruption, with its hoarding of wealth and violence to secure its ends. God on high looks down on Christ (or on His Church, anyway), as we the lowly looked up on Side One. We ask Jesus to save us from our sin instead of correcting ourselves.

Examples of that violence have been the genocide of the Native Americans to make the US into a ‘Christian nation.’ Then, Western movies in Hollywood portrayed the white man as the hero and vilified or denigrated the aboriginals.

Again, we ask Christ for forgiveness while we, “the gory glory seekers…use His name in death.” As was complained about in “My God,” we find hypocritical believers praying for forgiveness, then committing the same sins, the worst ones (killing), over and over again.

A heavy riff is heard a number of times on Barre’s guitar: these notes–D, D, D-C-A, F, G–then his pick scratches on damped strings, four groups of three scratches each, with Bunker pounding the same rhythm on the drums to emphasize it all.

Jesus is said to have been sighted in places from those as mundane as a city to those as legendary as the Mountains of the Moon, yet the bloody violence of the Church throughout history makes us doubt such miracles of His as the rolling of His stone to leave Joseph of Arimathea‘s tomb, to indicate His resurrection.

So, why is the song named “Hymn 43”? It’s an arbitrary title Anderson used to reflect how the song is just one of many ‘hymns’ or critiques of Church corruption and hypocrisy. Normally, hymns are given specific names, dealing with particular issues in a meaningful way, whereas the generic, random number of 43 shows that the issues critiqued here are generalized ones, widespread and having occurred throughout the history of the Church.

X: Slipstream

The song begins in a cheerful E major, with Anderson singing and playing his acoustic guitar. If you pay close attention to the song lyric, though, things are not all that cheerful.

“The lush separation [that] enfolds you” is your alienation, as one of the common people, not only from each other, but also from the luxurious life of the ruling class, who would separate you from themselves “and the products of wealth.” You go “on the bow wave” of the slipstream (a pun on a stream that you slip on–then “you paddle right out of the mess”–and an actual slipstream), one of the “spiritless, undying” rich, who have no souls, yet never seem to disappear from the world.

You give “God’s waiter your last dime,” leaving you penniless “as he hands you the bill”: in this we see how the Church, far from doing what it’s supposed to do–to help the poor–instead has a way of propping up the bourgeoisie (We need churches to do more than just react to homelessness, for example…we need them to help prevent it.). “You spin in the slipstream,” like so many whom the religious and political establishment have ruined and left behind, and all alone you have to solve your own problems, unaided.

Anderson’s singing and strumming are accompanied by an arrangement for strings by David Palmer (who would become a member of Jethro Tull in 1976). His arrangement is similarly cheerful…until the end, when it changes to creepy-sounding, dissonant glissandi, as one might hear in a horror movie. The effect is to tell us that the ‘cheerful, free life’ promised by capitalism and the Church is an illusion, and when we finally wake up from the dream, we find waking reality to be a nightmare.

XI: Locomotive Breath

The song begins with some bluesy/jazzy piano playing by Evan, soon to be accompanied with Barre’s bluesy guitar licks. Then the song proper begins.

The rhythm, with more electric guitar scratching, is meant to imitate the chugging sound of a train. As for the lyric, Anderson had grown worried about overpopulation, hence, our world is a “runaway grain” because “of population growth and capitalism,” as Anderson himself explained. Is the train going to crash because of overpopulation, capitalism, and the using-up of our Earth’s limited resources? In the years since he wrote this song, in which so much more population growth has undoubtedly happened, Anderson has grown much more worried.

The steam power “of the locomotive breath” can be linked thematically with Aqualung’s laboured breathing, partly a result of air pollution, coming partly from trains. As with Aqualung’s difficulty breathing, the smoky “breath” of the runaway train can represent the diseased breath of the ruach–God’s spirit–in today’s troubled world.

Indeed, there’s an almost apocalyptic quality to a song about a runaway train that “won’t slow down,” one in danger of crashing because of not only overcrowding, capitalism, and the using-up of Earth’s natural resources, but also Cold War fears of a nuclear Armageddon–a fear from back then as well as of now. The train can thus be seen to represent our imperiled planet.

“The all-time loser” would have to be Satan, since with the dying of Christ on the Cross, the Devil has lost the battle for our souls. Still, as “the god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4), Satan has control of the train, and he’s running it “headlong to his death,” endangering us all, too. I suspect that “Old Charlie” who “stole the handle” is also Anderson referring to the Devil, since the name can be associated with a demon, and such an interpretation is consistent with the rest of the song.

In other posts, such as this one (scroll down to VIII: Conclusion), I’ve used the metaphor of a runaway train racing to a cliff, to represent how neoliberal capitalism is driving us all to the abyss; it’s rather similar to what Anderson is singing about. I wrote of Marxist-Leninists as being the ones actually jumping off the train in time to save themselves from the inevitable crash. In “Locomotive Breath,” Anderson sings of “children jumping off at the stations, one by one.” These kids are sensible enough not to have any more kids (perhaps like millennials today?), while the Devil is “crawling down the corridor, on his hands and knees”: the Devil is like the conservatives, liberals, and moderate leftists of my analogy–they’re either staying on the train, or they’re not moving fast enough to get off in time.

Meanwhile, the Devil’s “woman and his best friend [are] in bed and having fun.” The horned cuckold doesn’t care that his woman is getting pregnant with another man’s child…because he doesn’t care about rampant population growth. After a flute solo by Anderson, we hear the final verse.

Satan “catches angels as they fall,” just as he caused the fall of the rebel angels, as well as his own fall, in his failed war with God and the good angels (Revelation 12:7-9). Thus, as he’s the all-time loser, God is the “all-time winner,” who’s “got [Satan] by the balls.”

An amusing side note ought to be made here. Since this song would be a single played on the radio, many were uncomfortable with tender ears hearing the word “balls,” so in one of the most ridiculous examples of censorship ever, the word “fun”–from the second verse, where the melody is the same–was spliced in the place of “balls,” rendering the new line as “got him by the fun,” and giving us a new, amusing euphemism for that part of the male anatomy.

Anyway, the “all-time winner” seems more accurately to be the Church rather than God, since the Devil finds Gideon‘s Bible (presumably in the hotel room where his woman and his best friend are in bed and having…balls?), and on page one it says “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth” (Genesis 1:28), implying that the corrupt Church is also at least partially responsible for the population boom problem. After all, “God, he stole the handle” now, rather than the Devil holding it.

XII: Wind-Up

As the last song of the album, “Wind-Up” sums up what Anderson has been saying the whole time. There’s a huge difference between blindly following the dogmas of the Church and having a genuinely spiritual relationship with God, the Divine, or whatever you would call the Ground of All Being.

With Anderson singing about having been “packed…off to school” as a kid, we’re reminded of the references to school in “Cross-Eyed Mary” and “Mother Goose.” The point is that conforming to the ways of the Church is like going to school: not merely learning the three Rs, but also being made to conform to a way of living, “how not to play the game,” or not to sin. In the other two songs, we have examples of people who played the game sinfully…Mary, and Anderson the truant/apostate.

As a child, Anderson was “groomed…for success,” and he had “their God tucked underneath [his] arm,” that is, the Bible, or the family’s idolatry of the Good Book as linked with a bourgeois wish that he grow up to make a lot of money; recall the Church’s “money games” from “Hymn 43” in this connection. “Their half-assed smiles” indicate the hypocrisy of a self-righteous, ‘loving’ bourgeois Christian family “and the book of rules.”

In prayer to God, Anderson got the reply that God is “not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays,” that is, you don’t have to wind up in church to know Him, and you don’t have to get wound up over Him there, shouting “Holy, Holy!” and “Hosannah!” Anderson doesn’t care if the Church excommunicates him for playing truant from Sunday school; as in “Mother Goose,” he didn’t want to be inside on a sunny Sunday–he instead wanted “to try and catch some sun,” not catch the Son.

Instead of conforming to Church dogma, Anderson would “rather look around [him], compose a better song, ’cause that’s the honest measure of [his] worth.” As he sang in “Wond’ring Aloud, “it’s only the giving that makes you what you are.” We’re justified to God based on the good we do, not on the faith we conform to, a conformity based more on a fear of what will happen to us after we die than on sincere piety.

XIII: Conclusion

Though the members of Jethro Tull have denied that Aqualung is a concept album, I’d say that it is unconsciously a concept album…and I’m a strong believer in the power and meaningfulness of the unconscious mind.

In any case, the issues raised on the album–homelessness, lechery over underaged girls (including those involved willy-nilly in sex work), people needing proper health care, the working poor, questioning Church authority (and the despair that often accompanies it), and apocalyptic fear from overpopulation, ecocide, and nuclear war–are more relevant than ever.

In a world where the ruling class, including evangelical Christians, rationalize an ongoing genocide, we can see how what is not being done for these least of Christ’s brethren, the Aqualungs of the world, is something that should make us all say, “My God, ‘people, what have you done?'”

The Tanah–The Preaching: Four Spells for Preventing Sin

[The following is the thirtieth 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, and here is the twenty-ninth–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.]

Four Spells: their instructions and verses

[Light a fire, surrounded by rocks, on a windy day. If it is winter at the time of preparing this spell, have snow or blocks of ice to put out the fire; otherwise, use water to do so. Chant the following verse over and over, louder and louder, with increasing…then decreasing…emotion, to the four Crims of air, fire, earth, and water/rocks.]

Lust,
the
son
who grew out of fire,
must
shrink
back.

Commentary: Ai (pronounced like “eye”) is the son of Nevil, the Crim of fire. Ai is the demon of lust, who tempts us to practice fornication. Ai also drives people to act aggressively and to intervene unwelcomely in others’ affairs. This spell is meant to drive him away.

[Take two sticks of long but brittle wood and strike them together repeatedly until one breaks. Then break the other in two. Chant the following repeatedly as the sticks are struck together.]

He
who
will
is thus to hurt himself and be
[by]
other
men

Commentary: The cross shape of the verse represents the two sticks being struck together. It is recited thus: “He who will hurt other men is thus to hurt himself and be hurt by other men.” The breaking of the sticks, by sympathetic magic, is meant to represent cruelty killing cruelty and being killed by it, an enactment of the Echo Effect.

[Make a life-sized effigy of a man. Tie a rope around its waist with one end, and around the waist of a living man with the other. Pull the effigy far enough the opposite way of the man so he is pulled with the effigy. After doing this for some time, let go of the effigy and let the man pull it back to the starting place. Then burn it, douse it with water, and bury it. Do all of this while repeatedly chanting the following lines to the Crims.]

What you pull one way

will pull you the other way.

Nevil, Priff, and Drofurb: stop the pulling!

Commentary: This ritual is meant to prevent the controlling of people.

[Have two men in the tribe dramatize a fight with wooden swords on a windy day. After a while of clashing swords, one man pretends to stab the other; then the fallen one reaches up to stab his killer. Both men lie on the ground, pretending to be dead. Then the swords are to be burned, doused with water, and buried. This is all done while chanting the following, over and over, to the four Crims.]

The
man cuts, stabs, and kills
who

is
cut, stabbed, and killed. to
be

Commentary: These verses are to be read thus: “The man who cuts, stabs, and kills is to be cut, stabbed, and killed.” It’s a plea to the Crims to ensure the karmic retribution of the Echo Effect on all of those who would wage war.

Xylophone

Oh,
it’s as if the IDF were tapping mallets
on

the bones of Palestinian bodies, each skeleton
a xylophone to play macabre music on.
Each death is celebrated, rather
than mourned remorsefully.
Pitiless percussionists
play tunes to taunt
& haunt the ears.
The sharp, dry
attacks of
mallets

on
the dead must stop to have peace at
all.

What Is Feared of Communism Is Here in Capitalism

I: Introduction

Several weeks before I started writing this post, I shared a meme on Facebook, one whose pro-Soviet content I don’t remember (and which isn’t all that relevant, anyway), but which also got me a troll reaction from some liberal who said, “No Gulags.” This comment is what has inspired the current article.

I’ve already written a number of defenses of communism in such articles as these, as well as a number of criticisms of capitalism, from both my former anarchist and my current ‘tankie’ perspectives, as can be found here. In this article, though, I feel I need to address something different.

There’s always this fear among many in the West, including many on the left: what if we ‘tankies’ are in denial about how the dictatorship of the proletariat will inevitably become totalitarian and oppressive? My answer in this article is that capitalism has already become so. We’d might as well try socialism. What else have we to lose, but our chains?

II: The Forms of Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism, tyranny, an oppressive state–whatever you want to call it–takes on many forms. I’ll list off pretty much the main forms here. First, and most obviously, totalitarianism discards these:

–a free press
–freedom of speech, and
–democracy

Then, with its intrusive government, we start to go into totalitarianism’s harsher forms:

–cults of personality
–surveillance, and
–police brutality

Finally, we come to the most horrifying forms:

–concentration camps, and
–mass murder, or genocides

Communism, of course, has been accused of perpetrating all of the above. Fascism, even more obviously (or, at least it should be more obvious), has been genuinely guilty of all of these. The horseshit horseshoe theory would have you believe that the extreme left and extreme right are similar in having supposedly led to the same outcomes, leaving liberal democracy as the only viable alternative.

A far more accurate representation of the relationship between the left, centre, and right, however, would be the fishhook theory, in which we can see liberal centrism backsliding into fascism. Recall Stalin’s words on the subject: “Social-democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.” Note in this connection that social democracy is as left-leaning as liberals get; the rest of liberalism moves only further rightward.

A casual observation of Western politics, especially from the dissolution of the USSR to the present day, should demonstrate the truth of Stalin’s words. First, liberals demonized communism in lockstep with conservatives. Then, declaring an “end of history” with communism’s demise and the “free market” as the only viable system, liberals helped to chip away at social welfare, since there was no longer any fear of socialist revolution. Finally, as leftist agitation revives, they’ve used fascism to thwart it.

And here we are.

One must take seriously the notion of a fear of communism, through its association with the atrocities listed above, to understand the great lengths to which right-wingers will go to defend capitalism. Note that these right-wingers are usually of the petite bourgeoisie, the useful idiots of the ruling class, whose real reason for fearing communism is the loss of their wealth; so they fear monger in the media they own to tell the middle and lower classes about communist ‘atrocities.’

As a result, the conservative and liberal masses will tolerate any horrors that go on in our society today so as to prevent a resurgence of socialism. If the poor are so bad off, it’s because they’re lazy, talentless, incompetent ‘losers,’ or they waste money that they should be saving. Never mind that class mobility is a myth. People generally stay in the class they were born in.

When one tries to tell these bootlickers of the rich that the root of the problem of the poor is systemic, the inevitable result of capitalism, they claim that our political problems stem from ‘corporatism,’ because apparently, ‘real capitalism’ and the government are mutually-exclusive antitheses of each other. Never mind that capitalists have always used the state to protect their private property interests: that’s what the cops are for.

Even today’s boot-lickers of the rich cannot deny that the political system, especially that of the past twenty-five years or so, has been nothing less than an unmitigated disaster, one that continues to get worse and worse. What they cannot bring themselves to admit is that this disaster has been the result of the neoliberal experiment, which is a subordination of everything, the government in particular, to the Almighty Market. Hence the need to describe our growing totalitarianism as ‘socialist,’ even when it should be obvious to anyone with half a brain that the current system is anything but socialist.

Politicians on both sides of the political fence accuse each other of being ‘communist.’ Trump and his administration spew constant verbal flatulence about the dangers of ‘radical Marxist extremists,’ when if anything, even among today’s progressives, Western Marxism is practically moribund. Liberals are similar, with Kamala Harris bizarrely calling Trump a ‘communist.’ At first, this comment just seems to be yet another air-headed one from her; yet on closer inspection, we can see how its purpose was really to associate today’s totalitarianism with communism rather than with its true source–fascism.

Her Democratic Party has also joined Republicans in issuing a blanket condemnation of socialism just before Trump’s meeting with ‘socialist’ Zohran Mamdani. This bipartisan fear of socialist ‘totalitarianism’ is bogus given their recent embrace of fascist totalitarianism, as I’ll attempt to prove below. Their real fear, as I mentioned above, is the plan to have workers take control of the means of production, and therefore to take the excess wealth of the billionaire class and redistribute it among the masses. Such a taking of wealth is a taking of power from the ruling class.

But let’s now look at all of the ways that capitalism has turned totalitarian.

III: No More Free Press

This loss didn’t come about in one fell swoop (i.e., with Trump). It started decades ago, and gradually got worse before we came to where we are today. While the mainstream Western media has always been bourgeois in ideology, we can see the beginnings of this particular problem with the abolition of the fairness doctrine in 1987. Introduced in 1949, the fairness doctrine was a policy requiring the media to present controversial issues of importance from differing points of view. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Eastern Bloc would come not too many years since the abolition of this policy, it’s easy to see how the already anti-communist stance of the media during the Cold War would become even more insistently pro-capitalist after that.

Next came the Telecommunications Act that Clinton signed into law in 1996, which allowed mergers and acquisitions in the American media, leading to today’s control of about 90% of the US media by only six corporations. This change thus means that most of Americans’ access to information is decided by the ruling class, and therefore reflecting their agenda and interests. There’s an international networking of media to tell essentially the same stories from largely the same political points of view, so this problem is not limited to the US.

The situation got worse in 2013, when Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post. Just so there’s no misunderstanding that the centibillionaire supposedly has no interest in the political content in his newspaper, in 2025 he announced that the WaPo would essentially promote right-wing views only, euphemistically worded as defending “personal liberties and free markets.” Well, we all know what conservatives mean when they say that.

Additionally, Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, idiotically renaming it “X.” The social media website has also become a haven for right-wing views, which should not be surprising, given its owner’s Nazi salute during Trump’s inauguration and other manifestations of Musk’s far-right leanings.

Indeed, Mint Press News (MPN) published an article in late November of 2025 about how seven oligarchs, including of course Bezos and Musk, are now controlling key elements of the mainstream media. Remember in this connection Mark Zuckerberg’s ownership of Facebook. Larry Ellison is to purchase CNN as of the writing of my article, and CNN has already been partisan to the Democratic Party/liberal wing of the ruling class.

When you have oligarchs like these controlling the average person’s access to information, who needs a state-owned media to brainwash them into compliance (and, incidentally, the presence of ex-FBI agents, ex-CIA officials, ex-generals, and former security state operatives in the news–all of whom work for imperialist capitalism, in case there was any misunderstanding–is enough to make one wonder if American media is anything other than state-owned)? The attendance of elites like Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk at Trump’s inauguration should have been sufficiently and disturbingly portentous of things soon to come.

Now, there are still left-wing voices like mine and those in alternative media, like MPN or ChatNews Net, to give the people a dissenting voice, but firstly, our voices get nowhere near the circulation of the establishment ones, and we also get trolled a lot by reactionary types, either the useful idiots of that establishment, or paid trolls whose job is to discourage us from being those necessary ones shouting in the wilderness.

The point is that a stifled free press marks the beginning of totalitarianism, because no free press means no freedom of speech, which brings me to my next topic.

IV: No More Freedom of Speech

The one crowning example of a lack of freedom of speech in recent years has been the suppression of pro-Palestinian protestors on the campsites of American universities. This suppression is of crucial importance, for it is about preventing the one basic thing anyone in a truly democratic society should be given the freedom to do: protest injustice.

Injustice has always been a part of human experience, and overcoming it has sadly never been easy. We should, however, at least be able to talk openly about injustice and make demands that it stop. This is especially true if the injustice is as extreme as an ongoing genocide. If the powers-that-be can suppress the protesting of ethnic cleansing, it will become all the easier to suppress the protests of smaller injustices, which leads to…

V: No More Democracy

Let’s start by defining what democracy actually is. At the risk of sounding pedantic and condescending, I’ll use an etymology you should already know: the word comes from Greek words meaning “people rule.” Now, what does the rule of the people actually entail? Mindless voting for a particular political party, with little thought as to what the real issues are (i.e., “Vote blue, no matter who”)? Or does it mean ensuring that the policies enacted serve the will and interests of regular, working-class people?

I’ll put my money on the latter definition.

Let’s compare, for example, Libya under the rule of Muammar Gaddafi, as contrasted with the years of revolving-door voting for different leaders, say, every four to eight years or so in the US, the UK, Canada, etc. Neoliberalism has, over the past forty to fifty years, eroded economic democracy by crushing unions; it has cut welfare funding and regulations to allow the rich to gain more profit at the expense of the people and the environment; and it has generally immiserated the poor, leading to an epidemic of homelessness. How is any of this power for the people? How is it democratic?

Contrast that with the ‘despotic’ rule of Gaddafi. His Jamahiriya, or Third International Theory, was a kind of Islamic socialism that provided for the basic needs of Libyans throughout the years of his rule of the country. The benefits that his government provided included guaranteed universal housing, education, and health care, as well as free electricity and the free starting of farming businesses, bursaries given to mothers with newborn babies, cheap gas, and the raising of Libyan literacy from 25% to 87%.

How is ‘Western democracy’ better than that?

The notion that Gaddafi was a ‘brutal dictator’ would be based on the idea of his suppressing of anyone opposed to his system of government; but who would have opposed such a system? Anyone opposed to the kind of thing his government was providing, of course–that is, opposed to giving the benefits described above to his people (such opposition would have included Islamic fundamentalists, who were often imprisoned during his rule). I don’t know about you, Dear Reader, but I don’t have much sympathy for those opposed to giving the Libyan people the aforementioned benefits.

My point is that Gaddafi may have been a dictator, but whatever actual objective flaws he may have had, he was by any reasonable standard a benevolent dictator. Why is his having stayed in power for over forty years a problem if he had provided those benefits to his people; whereas having an assembly line–as it were–of presidents or prime ministers who change every half- or full decade or so, but largely serve the rich instead of the ordinary people, is considered more democratic?

Another important point must be considered: are the candidates available to be voted for truly representative of the wishes and interests of ordinary people in Western elections, or are they people chosen–directly or indirectly–by the ruling class, while more truly representative candidates are deliberately marginalized, and therefore unavailable?

As anyone who has read enough of my articles should already know, I am no supporter of Bernie Sanders, but note how not only does he not have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever being elected (let alone of being allowed to tax the rich to gain the revenue needed to pay for the FDR-New-Deal kind of social programs that are so popular among working-class Americans), but he is correctly understood to be a sheepdog for the left. The establishment uses people like him and AOC to sell hope to the masses, then at the last minute, he bows down and tells his crestfallen supporters to vote instead for the newest corporate whore of the Democratic Party. This is by design.

Similarly, because of their left-wing political positions, the Green Party of the United States stands no chance of even being in a position to challenge the corrupt and morally bankrupt two-party system of the US, let alone to win elections and implement their policies.

Anyone with any sense knows that the Democrats and the Republicans are, at best, mere variations on each other, and at worst, two wings of the same party, the Capitalist Party, with virtually identical, imperialist policies. While generally less extreme than in the US, the bourgeois political parties of any country under capitalism are of essentially the same nature.

This sad state of affairs is actually worse than having a one-party state (and contrary to bourgeois propaganda, there was and is far more democracy in the Soviet and Chinese systems than is assumed in the West), because in multi-party bourgeois politics, there is the illusion of choice that fools the public into thinking they needn’t change the system. The ruling class will never allow any party to challenge the capitalist system; they’ll never allow anyone to legislate them out of their wealth. Recall Goethe’s words.

Voting does not work. I haven’t even gotten into the corruption of the US electoral college or gerrymandering. Revolution is the solution.

VI: Intrusive Government

Thanks to anti-Soviet propaganda like George Orwell’s Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-four, as well as Leon Trotsky‘s description of the USSR as “totalitarian” and his description of their labour camps as “concentration camps,” we in the West have come to associate big, intrusive government with socialism and communism, when associating them with right-wing and fascist governments is far more apt, as I’ll try to demonstrate.

The association of intrusive government with communism is so consummate in the minds of so many in the West that whenever one sees examples of such intrusiveness in the US, it’s assumed that the country has become ‘communist.’ This is especially true when the Democrats are in power, since they are assumed by the politically illiterate to be ‘left-wing.’

Recall in this connection the conservative reaction to Obama becoming president, and how they idiotically said “there’s a communist living in the White House,” and he would enact socialist policies, when in reality he did nothing of the sort. He extended George W Bush’s Patriot Act, ordered more drone strikes than Dubya, was the Deporter-In-Chief, helped oust the actually socialist Gaddafi, and helped the capitalist class do particularly well during the economic crisis of the late 2000s and early 2010s, including bailing out the banks. He was in fact groomed by the ruling class to do things like these. The colour of his skin is completely irrelevant.

The problem of NSA surveillance was exposed by Edward Snowden back in 2013, during Obama’s very capitalist administration. AI is only going to make this surveillance worse, as I’ll demonstrate in its section below.

Obama’s continuation of Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as his administration’s involvement in the regime change operations in Libya and Syria, are clear, blatant examples of capitalist imperialism in those countries, not of socialism. When people speak of ‘human rights violations’ in Cuba, I have two words to say to them: Guantanamo Bay, something Obama allowed to continue from Bush’s administration, and which continues to this day, though with fewer people imprisoned.

The point is that the US government, like any capitalist, imperialist government, is so intrusive that it insinuates itself into the affairs of other countries, places it doesn’t belong, either through military invasions or coups d’état. Right-wingers think of intrusive government as being an essentially socialist affair (welfare, single-payer healthcare, etc.), while ignoring the military, NSA, and CIA as branches of the government, which are totally bloated.

The libertarian notion of ‘small government’ is a con game, anyway. It’s not about whether government is ‘big’ or ‘small’; it’s about who the government serves–the people, or the wealthy elite. Similarly, the validity or invalidity of taxation depends on two things, as I see it–who is being taxed the most, and how the tax revenue is being spent. If the rich pay the most taxes, and the revenue is spent on social programs for the poor, taxation is valid; if the middle and lower classes are being taxed up the kazoo, while the rich pay little if any taxes, and if the tax money is being spent mostly on the imperial war machine and to bail out the banks, taxation is invalid.

So, intrusive government can be totally capitalist; socialism has no monopoly on the problem.

Since I’ve been criticizing the Obama administration a lot, and since liberals are always fawning over him and finding no fault in him at all, this brings me to my next point.

VII: Cults of Personality

Anti-communists love to quack about how we tankies supposedly revere men like Stalin and Mao as if they were gods. We do no such thing. It must also be understood that Stalin and Mao rejected the idea of being raised up on such pedestals, contrary to bourgeois propaganda. We Marxist-Leninists are also thoroughly willing to acknowledge their faults as leaders.

Their achievements in helping to modernize Russia and China are enough to explain that their people simply loved them rather than ‘worshipped’ them. Indeed, decades after it was ‘necessary’ to love Stalin, huge numbers of Russians still love him, and it shouldn’t be difficult to see why: over a mere two and a half decades or so, he transformed the USSR from being a backward, agrarian state into an industrialized, nuclear-armed superpower, while also having defeated the Nazis.

Mao’s attempts to modernize China went on a rockier road, admittedly (with the deaths from the Great Leap Forward wildly exaggerated), but the foundation he built was essential to the glorious success of China today. Again, the Western painting of Stalin and Mao as cruel tyrants has far more to do with bourgeois, Cold War propaganda than it does with reality.

Still, all of that is secondary to the point I want to make, which is that the political right has its cults of personality no less, if not much more, than the left has. Hitler and Mussolini had cults of personality, and contrary to the delusions of many right-wing libertarians, fascism is a capitalist ideology, not a socialist one. The whole purpose of fascism is to crush leftist uprisings (which, by the way, should explain the recent rise in fascist totalitarianism); Hitler’s big business donors ensured that he’d never take seriously the S in NSDAP.

But even more to my point is how we can see a cult of personality in recent, capitalist presidents like Obama and Trump, in each of whom one could write up an epic catalogue of awful things both have done. Still, their worshippers refuse to find fault in them, or they at least minimize their faults.

How many times have we seen nauseating praise of Obama has having led the US for eight years without any scandals, and how he was all grace, style, and class? Let’s just conveniently ignore his drone killings, his prosecuting of (and, based on political and social status, double-standards on) whistle-blowers, his expansion of all of the evils of his predecessor’s administration, and everything else I mentioned above? Eight years of grace, style, and class war…there, I fixed it.

Then, there’s Trump’s even more obvious cult of personality. Many among the religious right have imagined that God sent Orange-face to take on the “deep state” and to “drain the swamp” of corruption. If that isn’t a cult of personality, I don’t know what is.

Not only will the MAGA crowd believe such nonsense about Trump, they’ll also do all kinds of mental gymnastics to do away with their cognitive dissonance upon facing the truth. They claim, for example, that as with King David (who committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her cuckolded husband, Uriah the Hittite, killed so he could marry her), God chose a sinner in Trump to do His will. This is so even in light of how it’s pretty much settled that Trump is guilty of having joined in on the sexual exploitation and abuse of underage girls with Epstein et al.

And the ‘president of peace’? Apart from his failure to end the Russia/Ukraine war (which I figured he wouldn’t have been able to do even if he’d sincerely wanted to), his banging of the war drums against Venezuela–not to stop a drug cartel, but to steal their oil, a motive freely admitted to–proves that he’s no less of a warmonger than any other US president. The MAGA crowd still won’t admit that they were conned…that their Lord and Saviour is as much a sheepdog for the right as Bernie Sanders is a sheepdog for the left.

VIII: Surveillance

Now, if there’s any one thing that we associate with totalitarianism, it’s surveillance. We can thank Orwell for that: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, telescreens that, as you watch them, people on the other side are watching you, the Thought Police, etc. Furthermore, also thanks to the snitch, totalitarian surveillance is also associated with socialism. So, if people today feel themselves to be surveilled, they all too often tend to think theirs is a socialist government.

Well, we’re far beyond what Snowden discovered over a decade ago as of this writing, and as I’ve endeavoured to demonstrate to you, Dear Reader, ours is a capitalist world. Only a small handful of countries today are of the Marxist-Leninist ideology (and some leftists dispute whether a few of those even are truly socialist). People are going to have to confront the reality that it’s our capitalist government that is oppressing us.

To start with a relatively minor example, you must have noticed by now that whenever you show an interest in this or that product online, you tend to see ads for similar products, or ones associated in one way or another with that product. Obviously, capitalists are surveilling you, and trying to get you to part with your money to buy their product and line their pockets. BIG BUSINESS IS WATCHING YOU.

There are surveillance cameras on streets, ready to catch proof of drivers violating traffic laws (including relatively trivial ones) as an excuse to pass out fines and take more money out of your pockets. There seems to be less of an interest in driver safety than there is in controlling people.

Of course, surveillance has recently been enhanced through the use of AI in the forms of smart homes, smart TVs, smart cars, and smart cities. Orwell’s telescreens had nothing on this. Keep in mind also how this AI is linked with some of the richest men in the world: Jensen Huang, cofounder of Nvidia, as well as Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg. There has been growing concern that tech bros like these are further eroding democracy (News flash: they’re all capitalists!)

This surveillance can, of course, be used to help the ruling class track any and all revolutionary activity, on- or offline. Remember how a number of those tech bros are buddying up with Trump. Palantir is another big tech company using AI in aid of government surveillance, helping to enable such things as Trump’s deportations.

Two of Palantir’s founders, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, have publicly shown themselves to be particularly problematic in their attitudes to human rights, democracy, and warmongering. Thiel has been described as both an Ayn Rand libertarian and a ‘skeptic’ about democracy–something many might find contradictory, but not me, for the reasons I’ve given above and in other posts. As for Karp, one need only watch him ranting in YouTube videos to get a clear sense of how unhinged (and/or addled by narcotics, most likely) he is, fanatically defending imperialist war, Zionism, Western chauvinism, and ICE.

Seriously, do we want loose cannons like these in charge of AI and surveillance? Now ICE, among other things, brings me to my next topic.

IX: Police Brutality and ICE

Now, let’s start going into the truly nasty and violent aspects of our growing totalitarian world, in case what I mentioned above wasn’t enough to convince you, Dear Reader. I know I’ve been focusing a lot on the US, the belly of the beast to which ICE is specific, but manifestations of the militarization of police can be found in many countries around the world–not just in the US, but also in Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, and the UK, as well as in Africa. I should hardly need to go into great detail about the harm police militarization does to democracy, to public trust, to marginalized communities in particular, and to civilians perceived as enemies. The Thought Police, NKVD, and Stasi had nothing on these cops.

A lot of white people in the US and elsewhere in the West show little, if any, sensitivity to how these cops brutalize blacks, Latin Americans, and LGBTQ+ people. If such white and conservative people had ever had the experience of being disproportionately targeted by militarized police, though, they’d not only realize what a totalitarian world we’ve been living in, they might also realize that those marginalized groups…are…actually…people, too, no less so than the straight white crowd.

We always hear stories of how the secret police of socialist states would round up dissidents in the middle of the night, using torture and intimidation to crush political dissent. What we don’t hear is how these dissidents were, or were at least perceived to be, the kind of capitalist sympathizers who, if left to do whatever they wanted, would have all the sooner and surer brought back capitalism, leading in turn to the capitalist totalitarian nightmare we’re in now…which includes having the same kind of cops doing the same kind of thing to the anticapitalist dissidents of today.

We’ve already seen the extent to which ICE will terrorize people in the Latin American community on the pretext that they’re illegals, kidnapping them, separating children from their parents in cages, then deporting them. Venezuelans have been sent to CECOT in El Salvador; others have been sent to “Alligator Alcatraz,” places that are actually concentration camps (more on that below), where they’ve suffered all kinds of abuses. These cops often nab them at night, too.

We’ve known for ages about police brutality and the killing of blacks, often with impunity. Note that none of this started under Trump, whom liberals like to blame for everything while ignoring the sins of their favoured presidents: the Obama and Biden administrations presided over a lot of this kind of brutality, as well as the ICE deportations. Fascism has been building and growing in the West for a long time.

Things have taken a recent turn for the worse under the second Trump administration, with Pam Bondi announcing that law enforcement officials are to investigate Antifa and other supposed domestic terrorist groups. This will be nothing less than a crackdown on leftist groups perceived as a threat to the American capitalist government. Note that ‘Antifa’ just means antifascist, which should be deemed a perfectly reasonable stance to have, especially in our increasingly fascist world. So criminalizing an ‘organization’ not clearly defined as such should tell you what kind of a government the US really has. Now, let’s talk about those…

X: Concentration Camps and Prisons

Before I get into the current situation, it might be fitting to point out that, contrary to anti-Soviet propaganda that came from such groups as the CIA during the Cold War, the CIA themselves knew that being in the Gulag labour camps was nowhere near as bad as we’ve been led to believe. Among the many facts given in the link above, the Soviet archives reveal that 20 to 40 percent of Gulag inmates were released every year, and the vast majority of inmates were charged with nonpolitical offences: murder, assault, theft, and any of the other usual crimes punishable in any society.

The Nazi concentration camps, on the other hand, were genuine death camps, in which up to 11 million inmates were victims of murder for being Jews, Roma, gay men, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the mentally ill and mentally or physically disabled, political and religious opposition to the regime, etc. And fascists were and are allied with capitalism, not socialism…in case you forgot.

As for today’s capitalist concentration camps, I’ve already mentioned those in El Salvador and in Florida, where many have been held without charge or due process, and where many are being subject to beatings, psychological and sexual abuse, inhumane living conditions, denial of medical care, incommunicado detention, overcrowding, inadequate food rations, etc.

Let’s now do a comparison of the characteristic detainees: in CECOT and Alligator Alcatraz, the great majority of inmates are Latin Americans; in the Nazi concentration camps, the inmates were mostly “Untermenschen“–Jews, Roma, gay men, the mentally ill and disabled, and political prisoners; in the Gulag, they were mostly criminals. Seriously, which political stance is far, far guiltier of using labour camps as places for abuse and injustice–the far left, or the far right?

Next, we can look at the for-profit prison system, which uses inmates to do labour for corporations and typically pays them wages far below the minimum wage, making the work hardly distinguishable from slavery. Prisons for profit are perhaps most notorious in the US, but they also exist in countries around the world, including the UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, South Africa, South Korea, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Jamaica, Peru, etc., to varying extents.

Note how capitalistic such prisons are (i.e., the motive is maximizing profits for the corporations). The near-slave status of the prisoner-labourers is easily comparable to that of the slaves in the Nazi concentration camps, who generally worked for nothing. In the US, the 13th amendment permits prison slavery. In contrast, in the Gulag, inmates were paid or given food, given more or less of it depending on how productive their work was.

Of course, the very worst concentration camp in the world–and it can legitimately, if metaphorically, be called one, for its victims (innocent men, women, and children) are trapped in the place and murdered and brutalized every day–is the open-air concentration camp that is Gaza. The totalitarian mass murder going on there and elsewhere is my next topic.

XI: Mass Murder

Before I go into the capitalist mass murder of today (and of so many years and decades before that), we need to take a brief look at the nonsense that bourgeois propaganda has said about the deaths blamed on communism, or more accurately, how many deaths there supposedly were due to communism, as opposed to how many deaths there actually were.

The spurious sources of the ‘100 million killed by communists’ idea are such books as The Black Book of Communism, the lies of Robert Conquest, and the like. Please click on the links if you want more detail on that, since I don’t wish to waste time and space going into that. Suffice it to say that the 100 million figure is wildly exaggerated and deliberately contrived for maximum propagandistic effect. Bourgeois paranoia about the spread of communism during the Cold War necessitated, from the ruling class’s point of view, exaggerated numbers meant to shock, not to inform. You know the old cliché: in war, the first casualty is the truth.

In any case, even if one accepts the absurdly high number of 100 million deaths as accurate, this otherwise bloated figure is dwarfed by the millions of people who have died, and who continue to die annually, under capitalism. We’ve been able to feed the entire world for a long time, but we don’t because there’s no profit in doing so. The combined wealth of oligarchs like Musk, Ellison, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Buffett, Thiel, Karp, and others could feed the world, build hospitals and schools, provide affordable (if not free) housing, and the like. The deaths resulting from starvation, disease, homelessness, and war are largely preventable: only the ruling class’s greed and psychopathy prevent it.

The endless imperialist wars cause constant, needless deaths. The Iraq War alone resulted in at least a million deaths. Contrary to what right-wing libertarians think, war is not just ‘government stuff.’ War is a business. Weapons manufacturers like Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, and others are laughing all the way to the bank with all the glorious profits they’re making off of human suffering and death. The stealing of natural resources, like the oil in Iraq and Syria and the oil to be stolen from Venezuela, is a crucial aspect of capitalist imperialism and the obvious motive for these wars.

The recent genocides in Yemen, Palestine, and Sudan are the most egregious recent examples of capitalist mass murder, though. Again, weapons from many countries around the world have been sold to the killers in these genocides: the Saudi-led coalition killing Yemenis, the IDF killing Gazans and those in the West Bank, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) killing the Sudanese.

Special attention ought to be given to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, though. The real reason for the support of so many countries around the world, especially the Anglo-American NATO-allied empire, for Israel–apart from the obvious business interests (i.e., the buying and selling of weapons)–is how crucial the Jewish state is as an ally in maintaining imperial control of the region. There’s a lot of oil there, and so a lot of money is to be made. Israel is needed to kick ass in the region to secure those capitalist imperialist interests.

The official number killed in Gaza since October 7th, 2023, as of this writing, and excluding the thousands estimated to be buried under the rubble, is over 70,000 people. The ‘ceasefire’ is of course complete bullshit, since the IDF has still been killing Gazans without interruption, and of course we can see no end to the killing any time soon, for the whole point of the killing is not to stop Hamas, but total extermination.

What should be particularly chilling about all of this is that not only are the people with the power and authority to do so aren’t lifting a finger to stop the killing, but also that these genocides can be seen as a template for possibly wiping out any other group of people who try to stand up to imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism in general. With AI surveillance, any of us in the resistance can be fingered and hit with a drone strike, if not a balls-out genocide like in Yemen, Palestine, and Sudan. The psychopaths in power simply have no respect for human life.

XII: Utopian Thinking

Critics of communism like to claim that we leftists all dream of a perfect world with no pain, and that we’ll force our vision on everybody with a globe-spanning government. It is especially amusing to get this charge of utopianism from the supposedly anti-government right-wing libertarians, who imagine that the “free market” is naturally self-regulating and efficient (easily seen as total bullshit when we consider wasted food and starving people, as well as empty houses and homelessness, to give just two examples), and that the “invisible hand” will magically make everything right.

This “free market” ideology has been increasingly the dominant one in our world since the Reagan/Thatcher years, of course. It would be far more correctly called neoliberalism, since this new liberalizing of the market (translation: let the capitalist class be “free” to be as selfish, greedy, and hoarding as they like) really involves a subordinating of the government (and everything and everyone else) to the whims of the market, not an eliminating of the government.

Just as right-wingers imagine there’s no such thing as governments eradicating poverty (even though many governments have at least made impressive progress in doing so), so do we on the left (as well as anyone with a modicum of common sense) know there’s no such thing as allowing “rational” selfishness to run rampant and magically provide for everyone’s needs, while also not needing a government to protect capitalists’ private property.

For people so supposedly anti-government, many right-wing libertarians sure like getting into it. Look at the ‘libertarian’ Koch brothers, who pumped so much of their wealth into the Republican Party. Look at libertarians Ron Paul and Rand Paul, who work in the government. And look at Argentina’s current president, Javier Milei, a self-proclaimed “anarcho”-capitalist, who is set to receive $40 billion from the Trump administration in exchange for forcing Argentinians to vote for Milei, whose policies ruined the country’s economy. I thought it was bad to let the government intervene in the economy, and to force its will on the people.

Apparently not.

XIII: Cold War Fears of Nuclear War

Now, as if all of the above wasn’t bad enough, the one peace dividend we were supposed to enjoy from the end of the Cold War–no more fears of the two great superpowers, the US and the USSR, going into a hot war and killing everybody all over the world through nuclear annihilation–is no longer to be had. The US/NATO provocation of war with Russia over Ukraine, as well as the looming war with China over Taiwan, has killed even that one peace dividend.

That nut-job I mentioned above, Alex Karp, envisions a three-way war between the West on one side, and Russia, China, and Iran on the other. With the connections between the tech bros (and their AI in the US military) and Trump’s right-wing government, such fears of the world’s annihilation are well-founded.

XIV: Conclusion

So, even if socialist revolution leads to the totalitarian nightmare that the right-wingers are so scared of…so what? What’s the difference between that kind of totalitarianism and the right-wing kind we’re currently living in?

I’ll tell you what the real difference is…and yes, the capitalists are terrified of it. Ordinary people will gain access to free healthcare, housing, and education up to university, full employment, food security, a social safety net, etc…all of their basic needs met, and recipients will include people in the Third World. Getting all those things, however, will also mean that the ruling class will lose all their excess wealth–that’s the real reason they’re so scared of socialist revolution.

Let’s scare them.

The Tanah–The Preaching, Translator’s Introduction, and First Spell

[The following is the twenty-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, and here is the twenty-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.]

Translator’s Introduction

And now, after all of those mythical narratives and moral injunctions, we finally come to some spells. This book is called “The Preaching,” since it concerns itself as much with the danger of using spells for evil or selfish purposes as in the previous books; but in this book, the difference is in the wish to use magic itself to prevent the use of evil or self-serving magic.

What follows is a series of verses, each coupled with instructions on how to perform the spell. These include the materials to be used–usually the air, earth, fire, and water that correspond to the four Crims, or Weleb, Drofurb, Nevil, and Priff, to whom the magic practitioners prayed to resist the temptation to do evil with magic–as well as how to use the materials for these good purposes.

Once the materials are prepared and used properly, the verses are to be chanted repeatedly, many, many times, with increasing volume, speed, and emotional intensity. Something that cannot be rendered with justice in English is the original language’s deliberate repetitions of sounds–assonance, consonance, alliteration, and even some rhyming, as well as the pounding rhythmic cadences. In these sound repetitions was the believed power and effectiveness of the magic, for it was believed that the whole universe consisted of eternal undulations, and so through sympathetic magic, an imitation of those undulations–“the rhythms of everything”–one could influence what happens in the world.

Each magical incantation attempts to prevent the committing of each of the sins listed in Chapter One of The Laws, Book 2. So we will find verses meant to stop the use of magic in aid of fornication, cruelty to others, controlling others, starting wars, taking others’ land, gaining excessive wealth, stealing, selfishness, and treating others unfairly. The verses also have a visual presentation, as did those at the end of each chapter in Beginnings, though our rendering of them inevitably will fail to preserve that visual element perfectly.

Here is the first spell of the book; others will follow in later installments. Note the shape of the verses, which represents a symbol this ancient civilization used to represent unity in plurality.

[Collect rain in a large basin. On a windy day, set a fire with clumps of dirt surrounding it. Use some of the water to put out some of the fire. Let the wind blow out some of the fire. Any remaining fire is to be smothered in the clumps of dirt. Do all of the above while chanting the following verses, over and over, louder and louder, with more and more emotion.]

All
is
the
the Void is all

Rain
falls
into
the ocean is rain

The
many
make
the One, from which many come

Water
drowns
the
water, by fire, is made air

Commentary: This is an introductory, generalized spell meant to promote oneness in the community before dealing with the specific sins. For ‘rain,’ and ‘many,’ read the Pluries. For ‘the Void,’ ‘ocean,’ and ‘the One,’ read Cao. For ‘water,’ ‘fire,’ and ‘air,’ read Priff, Nevil, and Weleb, respectively.

As for the first, second, and fourth verses, they are meant to be read as “All is the Void; the Void is all,” “Rain falls into the ocean; the ocean is rain,” and “Water drowns the fire; water, by fire, is made air.” These four verses are all meant to represent the back-and-forth movement of everything, the undulations of the universe that unify all plurality. The remaining verses will appear in subsequent installments, as mentioned above.

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