I'm merging the variety of topics I've blogged about--which include literary and film analyses, anarchism, socialism, libertarian-leaning Marxism, narcissistic abuse, and psychoanalysis--into a coherent philosophy centred on dialectical materialism, dialectical monism, and object relations theory. Now, one dialectical opposition is that between the erotic and the ascetic, so accordingly, my writing encompasses the sexual as well as the philosophical; the former can be found in my publications on the Literotica website, as well as my self-published (erotic) horror writing on Amazon.
Back in Hell, Alexa, Megan, and Tiffany had all achieved their revenge on everyone who had hurt them badly enough to deserve getting the grief that they had all given.
The three girl-ghosts hit their enemies far harder than they had been hit themselves. They were beyond satisfied in that regard.
Yet, their own pain hadn’t subsided.
It had only grown worse…much worse.
The melting and decay of their ghostly apparitions was now at such an advanced stage that the three no longer had humanoid forms. There wasn’t even a distinction between any of the three of them anymore.
They were hill-like blobs of melted flesh that oozed into and mixed with each other.
The ghosts of all their victims–still with human apparitions–were there, too, facing them with expressions that were a mixture of hatred, gloating (over the three girls’ ugliness), and revulsion.
Furioso appeared between both groups.
So, he said. Everybody is here at last.
This pain is unbearable, Alexa said in a raspy voice.
I don’t regret having my revenge, Megan said in a similar voice, but I feel worse now than I did before.
Is there no way to stop this pain? Tiffany asked, also in that voice.
No, Furioso said. There is no way that is easy. No way that will give you comfort. There is only pain for you all, from now on, forever and ever.
Then why did you goad us into getting revenge on all of them over there? Megan asked, pointing to the mass of victims behind Furioso. You said we’d get relief through our revenge. We feel no such relief at all.
I never said your revenge would ease your pain, he said. Only that you’d feel satisfaction, a brief pleasure, in making those poor souls on the other side share your pain. And you got it.
But now, with them all looking at us with so much malice in their eyes, Alexa said. It feels like they’re all going to resume their former bullying on us.
Yes, Tiffany said. They all hunger for revenge on us.
We can see it in the eyes of their apparitions, Megan said.
How could you lure us into a situation with even more suffering than the kind we’d started out with? Alexa asked. How could you take advantage of us like that, as vulnerable as we were?
Well, I am a devil, Furioso said, shrugging. Did you really expect anything better than this? You’re in Hell. Here, hope is to be abandoned forever.
What benefit do you get by deceiving us with thoughts of revenge? Megan asked. Damning all their souls with ours?
The same benefit that you get, he said. By bringing down here more and more souls, by passing the pain off to others, I feel a relief…if only a temporary one. People on Earth do it all the time. They, your bullies, did that to you, for that very same reason.
But our pain feels so much greater now, Tiffany said.
Yes, it always feels worse and worse, Furioso said with a sigh and a frown.
Then what good is that temporary relief through passing pain on to others? Alexa asked.
Because the pain worsens regardless of whether you pass it on to others, or not, he said. Temporary relief, by causing others’ grief, is the closest thing to happiness that the damned can ever hope to have in Hell. Is there anyone else on Earth you’d like to afflict, for a brief taste of satisfaction?
NO!!! all three girl-ghosts shouted together.
Then I’m afraid that there’s nothing that can be done for you, he said with a shrug. You’ll just have to stay here and suffer, without any kind of relief, even temporary relief.
Wait! Megan shouted. You said before that there’s no way to stop this pain…no way that is easy. No way…that will give us comfort.
That’s right! Tiffany shouted. So, there is a way.
A hard way, but a way, at least, Alexa said.
Well, yes, but you won’t like it at all, he insisted.
We don’t like our situation here at all! Alexa said.
Yeah, what difference will it make? Tiffany said.
Tell us what this hard way is, Megan said.
If it will get us out of Hell, we’ll do it, Alexa said.
You’re talking about enduring a pain far more acute than you are experiencing now, Furioso said.
But the pain will all end, right? Megan asked.
It will end because you, as individuals, will end, he said.
That’s fine with me, Tiffany said. We originally wanted to end our lives, anyway. We hated life because all we did was suffer in it. Existence is only suffering for us, on Earth, or here in Hell. So wiping out our existence means ending our pain. It’s nirvana, basically.
That’s true, Furioso said, but prepare for an ordeal you could never even imagine.
We’re in Hell, Alexa said. Where there’s no hope of ever feeling happiness again. This is the ultimate ordeal. How much worse can anything else get?
You’ll find out, he warned.
Tell us, Furioso! Megan said. What do we have to lose?
What do we have to do to get out of this? Alexa asked.
You really won’t like it, girls, he said, shaking his head.
TELL US, DAMN YOU! all three melting ghosts shouted.
He let out a sigh. Look at all those ghosts behind me, he said, gesturing to the girls’ victims. All those damned souls that you hate so much, and who now hate you. You must let go of your hate. Let go of your pride, and love them. Feel compassion for them, and for the suffering you’ve caused them.
WHAT?!!! all three girl-ghosts shouted together in disbelief.
Yes, he insisted. That’s the only way out of here. To end your suffering, you must endure far greater suffering. That’s the paradox of salvation.
The three ghosts were speechless. They mulled the matter over in a collective sulk.
What will be even harder, he said, is that you must allow yourselves to feel the very pain you caused them. You must suffer with them, for that is what compassion means.
The three melting spirits continued contemplating this solution to their problem in miserable silence.
It is your decision, he said. Either go through this ordeal, or be trapped here forever, continually melting until you’re an unconsolable puddle.
Could this be a trick? Tiffany wondered. He tricked us before with the revenge idea.
It sounds like too shitty a solution to be a trick, Megan said. If it were a trick, he’d make it sound more enticing.
As I said, it’s your decision, he said.
If we have to pity those bitches and bastards over there, Alexa said, why not have all of them experience this with us? Have them pity us, too.
Yeah! Tiffany said. It’s only fair. Then they can escape Hell, too.
They’ll ultimately benefit, too, Megan said. Since we’re supposed to be sympathizing with them, we’d want to help them, too. Also, they’ll know the pain they caused us, and they’ll understand why we wanted our revenge. And their hate will change to pity and remorse. I think that could be really satisfying for everyone.
Very well, Furioso said, then he turned to face all of those ghosts on whom the three girls had avenged themselves. All of you, who have had your lives ruined by these three! You don’t wish to remain in this infernal prison forever, do you?
No, they said in a weary sigh.
You heard me explain the only way out of this suffering? he asked.
Yes, they all moaned together.
Then swallow your pride as the girls must do, let go of your hate for them, as they must let go of their hate for you, and join them in this collective outpouring of compassion, he said.
With the most lethargic of reluctance, the mass of ghosts nodded.
The Three Unities, as I discussed them in this post, are those of Space, Time, and Action, mystical ideas whose verbal expression I derived and modified from the theatrical notion of the three classical unities. After all, “All the world’s a stage,” isn’t it?
The Unity of Space is my idea for expressing the oneness that exists everywhere, within and without, underneath all the material, surface differences as perceived by the senses. The Hindus would call it Brahman, of which each manifestation in each individual person is an example of Atman. In some Mahayana Buddhist traditions, it’s called the dharmakāya, as understood in a panentheistic sense. For modern physicists, it can be understood in the particle/wave duality, in the unity of all particles everywhere, which can also be seen as waves.
These ubiquitous waves can be symbolized by the waves of the ocean, a metaphoric ocean that spreads out everywhere, in all directions, forever and ever, hence the name of my blog, as well as this song I wrote (lyrics here), recorded, and sang and played all the instruments on. I discuss ideas similar to these in my old post, Beyond the Pairs of Opposites.
My dialectical monism is closer to dialectical and historical materialism than it is to any form of spirituality, hence in my Beyond post, I emphasized a disavowal of any intention for these ideas to constitute a religion; this disavowal was meant to anticipate and prevent the possibility, as extremely unlikely as it is, of anyone misappropriating my ideas to establish a new religion with which to exploit the gullible. Thus, I wash my hands of such a misuse of my ideas, if it arises.
I don’t believe in God/gods, eternal souls, or spirits. This unity I write of is grounded in particle/wave unity/duality. Hence, it is all materialist, though materiality is to be contemplated from a different angle, the oneness of matter as understood to be underneath all the surface differences as perceived by the senses.
I believe that contemplating this oneness of all that is inside and outside, combined with contemplating the Unity of Time (which is understood both as cyclical and as an eternal NOW) and the Unity of Action (the dialectical resolving of all contradictions in life, including its ups and downs), can help us achieve peace of mind, something desperately needed in today’s troubled times, with everything around us falling apart.
The contemplating of the Unity of Space, I believe, can also help us cultivate more empathy; for in meditating on what is the same inside ourselves with what is outside, in others, we can reconcile the self-other dialectic, learning more intuitively that there is much in ourselves that is in others, and much in other people that is inside ourselves. This heightened understanding can inspire us all to care for each other more, to build solidarity, and to fight for a better world for all of us.
As Che Guevara once said, ““At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”
Meditation, regardless of whether one is spiritual/religious or not, is known for giving people many physical and mental health benefits, including improved empathy, inner peace, alertness, better powers of concentration, etc. Therefore, it’s well worth doing.
One of the biggest problems so many of us have (and yes, I very much include myself with the people who have this problem) is that we focus far too much on our egos, on our own personal grievances, and we don’t think enough about helping other people with their problems. I’m hoping that the meditation I’m about to describe and propose that we do will help us to come out of our egocentric shells and be more inclined to empathize with, and therefore be more motivated to help, others.
My aim, in devising the meditation I’m about to describe, is thus to blur the egoistic distinction between self and other, and to help us develop an instinctive sense of how the self is in the other, and vice versa. The blurring is to be achieved by visualizing oneself and everything around oneself as an ocean whose soothing waves pass into, through, and out of oneself.
One should try to sustain this ‘oceanic feeling’ for as long as possible, concentrating on it and keeping distracting thoughts as few and far between as possible. One should feel one’s whole body vibrating, from head to toe, and in this state of hypnotic trance, a state in which one’s mind is most suggestible, one should whisper affirmations to oneself, the kind of affirmations of ways one wishes to improve oneself.
I am a giving person. Every day, I become more and more selfless. I care more about others. I am naturally good at listening. Every breath I take calms me. I will care more about others than myself. I will release my negative energy. I am a good person. I am patient and kind. I like people. I like the world around me. All is one. The world within and without are one. I like the world outside, so I like myself, too.
Of course, any other affirmations more suited to your needs can replace the above suggestions, if you wish to use others.
My other oceanic meditation, described previously, involved–after lying on one’s back, closing one’s eyes, and relaxing by taking long, slow, deep breaths in and out–imagining water at one’s feet, then slowly, the water rises up one’s legs to one’s torso, arms, chest, neck, and head. While imagining oneself totally immersed in the water, one imagines one’s body dissolving and becoming totally at one with the water, which is now imagined to be everywhere.
You can begin this new variation on the meditation in the above way if you wish, or you can simply begin by imagining yourself already immersed in and at one with the water, visualizing the waves flowing into you from one side, flowing through you, and flowing out of you on the other side.
After establishing this feeling of the wave movements, you need to emphasize a sense in your mind that the waves and water are not just in your immediate position, but everywhere else, also, including farther away from your body. The oceanic feeling isn’t to be limited to the ‘Atman,’ as it were, of your body, but to be extended out far enough to give you a sense of ‘Brahman,’ the infinite ocean that you wish to be at one with.
So, to get that sense of the vibrations extending beyond your immediate position, to feel a blurring of the boundary between self and other, between Atman and Brahman, within yourself and outside of it, during this meditation you can visualize the undulating waves moving up from where you are (i.e., from your chest level as you lie on your back) to one or two feet above you. Keep the undulations above your body for several seconds, to impress on your mind the idea of the infinite ocean really vibrating above you as well as within you.
Then, visualize the waves moving back down to your chest area, then moving a foot or two below your body. Again, visualize the vibrations staying down there for several seconds before mentally bringing them back up to your chest level.
Next, move the waves a foot or two to your left, keeping them there for a few seconds before returning them to your chest area. Then move them a foot or two to your right side and leave them there for a few seconds.
After visualizing the waves coming back to your chest area again, mentally move them down to your feet and beyond, leaving them there for several seconds before moving the waves back up to your chest, then beyond to your head, and past that to behind your head, so you can sense the waves back there before returning them to your chest area.
As you imagine the undulating waves, try to visualize them as being as still as possible, always undulating, but with only slight crests and troughs. This will feel more soothing, and it will also impress on your mind the fact that the ups and downs of life aren’t always as extreme as they seem. The Unity of Action, a dialectical unity of those ups and downs, should emphasize their unity, not their duality. One of the forms of emotional healing we’re attempting is to cure psychological splitting, replacing it with a more emotionally integrated worldview. After all, it is our negative belief systems (capitalism, racism, etc.) that cause so much of our pain, not so much the world as it really is.
If you have visualized this meditation correctly, that is, if my description of it has accurately conveyed my meaning to you, Dear Reader, you should feel a vibrating sensation all over, with no sense of it being limited just to where your body is. It should feel as though your body is at one with the symbolic waves you feel all over–you’re at one with the cosmic ocean.
And in this state, you’ll also be in a hypnotic state of trance, suggestible to any ideas you want to feed into your unconscious mind, to make changes in your thinking (i.e., those affirmations I discussed above). You’ll want to maintain this meditative state for as long as possible to gain the best results, from time to time repeating those displacements of the waves above and below you, to the left, to the right, down beyond the feet, and up behind your head.
As you do it, focus on what’s happening all over your body at the moment (i.e., fuse the Unity of Space with the Unity of Time, focusing on NOW), not allowing any distracting thoughts; keep this focus on the eternal NOW for as long as you can. Do this meditation as often as possible, for as long each time as you can, to achieve the best results.
If you have problems with anxiety, depression, etc., I hope my meditation idea will help you. The basic principle behind meditation is to do one thing–to focus on one thing–and remain focused on it for lengthy periods of time (at least ten to twenty minutes each time), to improve concentration and to relieve emotional pain by turning off your negative thoughts (worry, regret, etc.) and by just being.
George just sat there at his mother’s side, watching her sleep. Another tear ran down his cheek.
He watched the rising and falling of her chest, each rise and fall reassuring him, if only for the moment, that she was still alive.
He checked her vital signs as they were displayed on the medical equipment by her bed. All was fine.
Still, he had that fear of something going wrong. The paradox was that he felt compelled to be there with her at all times, to watch over her and make sure she was OK, but also, there was that haunting voice that had kept telling him the only danger to her life was him.
She just lay there, sleeping peacefully. Her chest kept rising and falling, as it should have. The vital signs display still showed no problems.
He let out a huge sigh of relief.
She’s fine, he reassured himself in his thoughts. Don’t worry. You’re thinking too much. That voice in my head is probably just my unconscious expressing my resentment over never having been freed from her to live my own life. Such resentment is natural, it’s understandable; but it doesn’t mean I’m really, literally planning on murdering her. It’s just my mind acting out, in all probability. We all have dark thoughts: even the saints do.
He looked at her again–sleeping like a baby. Her chest kept rising and falling…good. He checked her vital signs one more time; no problems.
He let out another sigh.
Then he heard that voice again…this time, though, it was a little differently worded.
You’re going to murder her…today.
He jumped up from his chair with a yelp that woke up his mother. His heart was pounding. Now, a drop of sweat was running down his cheek.
He looked around the room frantically to find the source of that voice. Every time he’d heard it before, the whispered voice of what seemed a teenage girl, no one was there to be seen. This time, however, he saw her: Tiffany, the goth-girl ghost, with those malevolent red eyes.
“Tiffany?” he gasped with agape eyes.
Suddenly, the ghost flew into his chest with the speed of a racing arrow. His body shook as the spirit took possession of his body.
“George?” his mother asked in the weakest of voices. “What’s wrong? You woke me. Are you okay?”
His back had been to her, but now he turned around to face her with an icy expression.
“George? Please don’t look at me like that. You’re scaring me. Are you alright? You seem…a little…”
He ignored her words…that is, bodily, he ignored her. The George in his mind, however, desperately wanted to tell her he was not alright, that he was sorry for scaring her with that cold look on his face, that he was sorry for having woken her. He wanted to scream out to the hospital staff to come in the room and stop him from doing what he knew Tiffany’s ghost was making him do.
But he couldn’t say or do any of those things.
He felt himself compelled to get up and walk over to where his bag of medical instruments was, by his bed. He picked it up and unzipped it.
Tiffany, he thought. What are you doing?
He was made to take out a syringe. He walked back with it to his mother’s bed. He was eyeing her IV external tubing, through which blood was going into her body. He put two and two together.
Oh, my God! he thought. She wants to give my mother an air embolism. No, Tiffany, no!
Her ghost made him stick the syringe into the tubing and introduce an air bubble into it.
He had absolutely no control over his body. He couldn’t fidget or jerk his arms in the slightest. Tiffany’s ghost even made him look into his mother’s eyes to see the terror emanating from them.
“George,” she gasped. “What did you do that for? You’re killing me. Why?“
He couldn’t weep. He couldn’t say sorry to her.
She looked at the long air bubble moving in the tube, getting closer and closer to her body. She began yelping, but the ghost made him cup his hand over her mouth to muffle out the sound.
As she fidgeted and struggled, she whined audibly enough that, if one of the hospital staff should have been close enough to their room, he or she just might have heard his mother’s muffled cries for help. Since he still had no control over his body, he could only hope a staff member was close enough to be in earshot, rush into the room, and stop him in time.
No such luck.
That air bubble, long enough to have been a three-to-five millilitres per kilogram dose, was inching closer and closer to entry in her body. She kept struggling and whining; he kept one hand on her mouth, the other on her chest to minimize the noise of the shaking of her bed.
Tiffany’s ghost forced him to look straight in his mother’s horrified eyes. He would not be spared a thorough observation of her pain, her terror, and her heartbreak over his oh, so unfilial act.
…and he had no way of telling her that it wasn’t himself who was doing this to her.
Why? her eyes kept asking him. Why, George?
I can’t tell you, he thought. I’m so sorry, and you’ll never even know I’m sorry. Tiffany, I may have bullied you in school, but punish me, not her.
Now, the ghost made him watch the air bubble reach her body and enter her. He looked back at her face. She was shaking all over for several seconds, then she moved no more.
The ghost left his body and, visible, faced him.
Finally, a waterfall of tears was soaking his face.
“I wish that block of ice we hit you with had killed you,” he hissed at the apparition.
Don’t be mad, George, she said. I did you a favour. I freed you from her. Now you can live your own life. She giggled at his teary face.
“Free to do what?” he asked in sobs. “Go to jail for murder? You fucking bitch.”
Only one thing left to do, George, Tiffany’s ghost said with a grin.
“Yes, I know,” he said. “I’ll see you in Hell…and when I get there, I’ll get you.“
She laughed. There’s nothing to get. We’re in Hell. We’re already suffering beyond hope. How are you going to add to that?
“I’ll figure out a way.”
He walked back over to his bag, found a scalpel in it, slashed his wrists, and lay on the floor, soaking it with his blood until a nurse walked in and screamed.
As a resident of this island for, as of the end of the month of this article’s publication, what will be twenty-six years, I feel I must voice my opinions of the locals, especially as regards the attitude of many of them to China. What I’m about to say here is not a scientifically authoritative set of observations; it’s just the idiosyncratic opinions of a Canadian expatriate who has lived here and informally watched the locals for over two and a half decades.
Take these opinions with a grain of salt; I’m about to say some things many of the locals won’t like to read, but things I feel must be said. Be prepared, for much of what I’ll say will be critical, but with compassion: my intent is to help Taiwan save herself, not to be malicious. Furthermore, the criticisms are not meant to be sweeping generalizations of all of the locals, or even necessarily a comment on most of them, but rather a comment on as many of them as would be enough to prod Taiwan in the direction of provoking a war with China. More on that later.
I find the Taiwanese attitude to outsiders to be a curious one, full of contradictions. While some of them like China, from whence they came in waves over the years (mostly from Fujian province in particular, then with Chiang Kai-shek when Mao’s communists took over the mainland), many others detest the country of their ethnic origin. It’s a classic case of what Freud once called “the narcissism of small differences.”
On the other hand, the one country for which one would think the Taiwanese would have an abiding hatred, Japan, which had occupied the island from 1895 to the end of the Second World War, actually is a country the locals like so much that they visit it constantly, perhaps more than any other country, to my knowledge. My beloved Taiwanese wife, with whom I’ve vacationed in Japan many times, speaks Japanese very well. Just so we’re clear, though, Japanese rule here could be brutally repressive, as with their response to the Wushe Incident, which was dramatized in the Taiwanese film, Seediq Bale.
The locals’ attitude towards Westerners, whom they typically call waiguoren (“foreigners”) or meiguoren (“Americans”), is a mixture of contradictory feelings. Sometimes, they’re fascinated with us, reacting as if we were movie stars, or something. Little kids (and, occasionally, even adults) stare at us as if in a trance, as if there’s something shocking about how different we as non-Asians look from them.
At other times, a minority of locals, those with a more xenophobic attitude (sadly, a reaction any foreigner or racial minority will have to face from time to time in any country) will regard us as comical-looking; these ones may use the racial slur a-do-ah (“big nose”), or mock us by saying “Hello!” and “How do you do?” in an exaggerated tone, equivalent to white racists mocking Asians by bowing, squinting their eyes, sticking out their upper-front teeth and saying something ignorant like “Ah-so!” (which, incidentally, is Japanese, not Chinese, whitey.)
What all these contradictory attitudes have in common is the preoccupation with how ‘different’ we are from them. Such a preoccupation seems to stem, at least in part, from how the locals’ society conditions them, from early childhood, to be remarkably conformist. Social conformity, of course, exists in all countries and all cultures; but some places are more obviously conformist than others. A common way to reprimand bad behaviour among the locals is to call the offender qiguai (“strange”); one is bad because one is different from everyone else.
The real enforcing of conformity happens during elementary, junior, and senior high school…naturally. Kids here are bombarded with piles of homework not only from these schools, but also from their cram schools (buxiban) of many subjects (English, math, science, etc.), home tutors, and music lessons. In all of this intense study, we see how these kids are being prepared for the long working day–as of 2019, the fourth longest hours in the world.
Unlike in the West, the Taiwanese didn’t experience a radical 1960s countercultural rebellion against “The Man.” They’re essentially as we Westerners were back in the 1950s. To be sure, there are a number of individual cases of Taiwanese who go against the grain: I had the pleasure here of teaching a young woman, a violinist, who is now in the US studying the arts and is in a happy relationship with her female partner. I’m delighted every time I encounter such an exception; I’d encourage much more of it if I had the opportunity. But when I speak of conformity, I’m describing the large majority of the locals I’ve encountered, a largeness that I hope, for their sake, will soon shrink…if it hasn’t already, without my noticing.
Now, of course, East Asians have no monopoly on conservatism and conformity. Consider the recent, outrageous overturning of Roe vs. Wade by those Americans far too influenced by religious authoritarianism. But at least there’s a significant number of left-leaning Westerners trying to resist such reactionary behaviour. Sadly, I see far too little of such resistance here; by this, I’m referring to the Western pockets of resistance to such things as the mask and vaccine mandates. I know of no such questioning of authority here; anyone who does, please enlighten me–I’d be so happy to see examples of it here.
Alongside the locals’ non-questioning of authority, their homogeneity, which leads to their frequent over-reactions to foreigners as described above, their self-absorption (brought on, I believe, by their media’s constant focus on Taiwan, with scant exposure of international news to the locals), and their fear of a Chinese invasion, comes their belief that this island is a country, rather than a breakaway province of China. The locals are, essentially, ethnic Chinese, just as a huge percentage of the Ukrainian population is made up of ethnic Russians. Constitutionally, Taiwan is the Republic of China; the ruling Democratic Progressive Party keeps selling the public the idea that Taiwan is a ‘sovereign’ country.
I’m sorry, Taiwanese readers, but I must be frank with you. Nationalism is a form of collective narcissism. One thinks one’s country is ‘great’ because one was born there.
Just so we’re clear: nationalism has a danger of degenerating into fascism. See what’s happened to Ukrainian nationalists to see what I mean. Excessive patriotism, combined with economic hard times, tends to lead to such things as Naziism. Note today’s economy, and do the math to see what I’m getting at. Now, most Taiwanese are kind, gentle people who are very unlikely to develop the violent ways of fascism, but I worry that the combination of economic hard times, this nationalistic pride among the locals, and especially, American manipulations of the people here towards Sinophobia could make some disturbing changes in my home.
Indeed, the US government in its evil machinations encourages Taiwanese ‘nationalism’ as much as it can. Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State under Trump and confessed liar for the CIA, made a visit to Taiwan to embolden the locals in an anti-China stance. At one point during his visit, he wore a mask designed with a combination of the American and Taiwanese flags. The obvious message behind this design is that an ‘independent’ Taiwan is to be inextricably linked to the American empire. Translation: Taiwan is to be subservient to American interests.
If the Taiwanese think that, with their long work days as mentioned above, a link to ultra-capitalist, imperialist America will give them freedom, they should think again.
Indeed, far too many Taiwanese naïvely think that the US is here to protect us against a Chinese invasion, so they welcome neocon assholes like Pompeo. They don’t realize that the American government has ulterior motives: namely, to Balkanize China (and Russia, by the way), thereby weakening her. Call Taiwan a country, break Hong Kong off from China, use the unsubstantiated hoax of the Uyghur ‘genocide’ to justify breaking Xinjiang off from China, etc.
Though only fairly recently did Taiwanese news media start to show a substantial amount of international news, when they (and Western media) discuss such important stories as the Russian/Ukraine war, it’s to see how the conflict is to be paralleled with the danger of such a war happening here with China. Sadly, their coverage of Ukraine largely parrots the disingenuous Western reporting of the war (e.g., Taiwanese news reports of international news all too often show CNN reports with Chinese subtitles).
Accordingly, the average Taiwanese, if not the great majority of them, accept uncritically the MSM narrative that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was an “unprovoked” act of aggression by the villainous Putin. I suspect that a precious few Taiwanese (if any–indeed, my “precious few” is me being generous and hopeful that more locals are properly informed of what’s really going on in eastern Europe than I think) are aware that the Russian intervention is actually a reaction to eight years of Ukrainian neo-Nazi provocations.
It started with the broken promise not to push NATO “one inch” eastward beyond reunified Germany. Never a friend to Russia, NATO has absorbed many of the former SSRs, to the uncomfortable point of touching Russia’s borders at Latvia and Estonia. Belarus has held out, but the push to make Ukraine and Georgia join NATO means, if one day achieved, nuclear missiles can be placed in those countries and pointed at Russia, something this nuclear-armed country can never be expected to tolerate.
(It’s useful to compare such a predicament to the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the USSR tried to give missiles to Cuba to point at the US. The Taiwanese might also want to consider how the people of China feel about the Trump administration’s sale of a billion dollars of weapons to Taiwan to be used one day on China. The Taiwanese see it as defence; China sees a threat.)
Tensions escalated in 2014 when the CIA helped to orchestrate a violent coup d’état in Ukraine, ousting the democratically-elected Viktor Yanukovych and replacing his government with one that includes neo-Nazis, as their military also includes. The eight years since that coup, leading to the war starting in late February of this year, have involved the neo-Nazis, in their bigoted hatred of the ethnic Russians of the Donbass regions, not only to pass legislation denying those Russians the right to use their language (naturally leading to Russian separatism in those regions), but also to violent attacks on those Russians, causing thousands of deaths.
Finally, contrary to the nonsense and propaganda of the Western mainstream media, Ukraine is losing the war…badly. They haven’t the necessary equipment or organization, and Ukrainian soldiers are refusing to fight, knowing they face certain death if they try. The purpose of the MSM lies that Ukraine is ‘winning’ is to promote the US/NATO agenda of protracting the war, using Ukrainians as cannon fodder, in order to bleed Russia slowly, and thus weaken her, as the mujahideen in Afghanistan was successfully used in the 1980s to weaken the Soviet Union.
I bring up all of this in keeping with the paralleling of the Russia/Ukraine war with a possible China/Taiwan war, so the locals here can understand how the US plans to use Taiwan as cannon fodder to provoke such a war here, while lying in the media that a Chinese invasion will be ‘unprovoked.’ The Taiwanese typically think that China is going to invade Taiwan just because the CPC ‘wants to,’ or something (actually, China wants to reunite with Taiwan peacefully, and will use military force only if they have to). Similarly, the locals here usually buy into the Western media narrative that Russia invaded Ukraine just because Putin ‘wanted to.’
Since the Taiwanese are naturally terrified (as I, a resident here, am) of this island becoming a war zone, the first step toward preventing such a calamity is to see what’s happening in Russia/Ukraine and China/Taiwan in its proper geopolitical context, something the MSM (and therefore also the Taiwanese news media, part of the TV version of which, by the way, is aptly called TVBS!) will never allow us to see: that these conflicts are actually US/NATO moves on a global chessboard, if you will, to prevent the replacement of US unipolar hegemony with a much more sensible multipolar world, including Russia and China as emerging powers, which could create a balance of power that in turn could conceivably promote peace and end our decades-long plague of American imperialism.
It would be laughable (if it weren’t so infuriating) that the American government–whose Attila-the-Hun-conservative, Bible-thumping Supreme Court just overturned its women’s right to abortion–goes around judging Russia and China as ‘autocratic’ and ‘authoritarian.’ The government of the same country that spies on its citizens and censors its media left, right, and centre has the gall to judge Russia and China as infringing on human rights. The country’s government that has been invading and bombing countries all over the Middle East and occupying countries all over the world with its military bases, has the audacity to judge Russian and Chinese “aggression.” The government of the country that has, over and over again, interfered with the democratic and electoral processes in many countries has the cheek to accuse Russia, baselessly, with interfering in the 2016 US election to give it to Trump, who ended up putting sanctions on Russia anyway!
Still, the average Taiwanese knows little of these issues, since the local media largely doesn’t discuss them, and any time I discuss them with my adult English students here, they never mention any prior knowledge of the issues. They just parrot the mainstream opinions heard on the TV.
Granted, many–if not most–people in Western countries also parrot those mainstream opinions, but we also have access to alternative forms of media that can give us the news from different perspectives. To my knowledge, there isn’t any such alternative media here in Taiwan, and if there is, it must be extremely scant. If, on the other hand, anyone out there reading this knows of such alternatives, please give me some links in the comments; I’d really like to be proven wrong about this, though I don’t think I will be.
My theory for why such alternative media here is generally lacking ties in with what I was saying above about how most Taiwanese are conservative and conformist. Apart from accepting uncritically far too much of the American spin on world affairs, the locals here simply don’t have sufficient time to examine world events from different angles. This is not their fault.
Starting in childhood, they get up early and go to school or work, where they slave away all day until they finally get home, too exhausted for any deep thinking. To be sure, they’re just as capable of deep thinking as we are in the West, but their version of the capitalist system brainwashes them, from childhood, into being little more than obedient workers whose whole life objective is making as much money for the family as possible.
Of course, the notion of TINA has been spread around the world, not just here, thanks to the hateful neoliberal agenda; but at least there are significant pockets of leftist resistance to it in most of the rest of the world, to varying degrees. I’m aware of no such resistance here, to any significant degree. Again, this is not the fault of the locals. As I said above, their time is so consumed with work and the need to make money that they simply can’t make the needed level of commitment to doing such things as promoting workers’ rights, or opposing imperialism.
Indeed, I remember back in the 2010s when an attempt was made to set up an IWW union here, and it barely materialized beyond one meeting of us in Taipei on a Sunday afternoon. The leader, an American with, I’m sorry to say, an attitude far too abrasive for his own good, got frustrated with our inability to commit to regular union meetings. Two Taiwanese members emailed him a long message explaining, among other issues, how difficult and unpleasant it was for them (as it also was for me, by the way) to wipe out their one day off to go from their city of residence to Taipei for these monthly Sunday meetings (we often work on Saturdays here: that’s how bad capitalism can get in Taiwan).
People here are so tired from their long workweeks that long sleeps over the weekend are, for them, the highest bliss. There is simply far too little time for most locals to spend questioning the system that wears them out so much. That little bit of weekend free time is for family, exercise (often in the form of hiking in the hills), online games, or watching the latest, mindless Hollywood action or superhero movie. Free time is usually about escape, not fighting the Man.
And along with far too little time for political protest is far too little time for questioning mainstream media narratives, learning the historical background to things like the Ukrainian conflict, the real reason for NATO‘s existence, and US imperialism. Yet without this learning, how will the Taiwanese be prepared when the American empire starts increasing its provocations on China as they’ve done on Russia?
The locals naïvely think that the American weapons sold to Taiwan and the US military training given to the Taiwanese army are to protect them from a Chinese invasion, rather than part of a provocation of such an invasion. The CIA has been working with Ukraine in its war with Russia, and all those weapons were sent there. Far from being ‘protected,’ Ukraine is being crushed. The same will happen here if the Taiwanese continue to trust the perfidious American government.
I think many Taiwanese already realize, from NATO’s non-intervention in Ukraine to stop Russia (which otherwise would escalate into WWIII and could go nuclear), that the American army won’t intervene to stop a Chinese invasion of Taiwan (to avoid the same cataclysmic escalation). The locals are not that politically naïve.
Still, they must understand that the American government is a false friend; they’ll come to this understanding by studying the history of American interference in other countries’ affairs, the American ruling class’s contempt for the rights of American women, people of colour (including Asians!), the working class, etc. If the American capitalist class doesn’t care about the people of their own country, why would they care about the people of Taiwan?
Understanding these sobering realities will result from the Taiwanese coming out of their shell–not thinking of the rest of the world as some strange, far-away place that has no relevance to the locals’ lives–and learning about the rest of the world in depth. I’m not saying that the Taiwanese know nothing, or next to nothing, about the rest of the world, but to survive the danger of the American government luring them into becoming cannon fodder against China, they’ll need to do much more learning about the world than they’ve done so far.
Let’s all hope that, unless many of them have already done this kind of comprehensive study of these issues, and I’m therefore wrong in my assessment of what they know, they will do this thorough study, and do it soon. Our lives will depend on it.
George Kelly’s 72-year-old mother was in bad shape. Just a few days before, she took a nasty fall down the stairs from the second floor to the ground floor of her apartment. She was already quite brittle, so one particularly hard knock on her upper right arm fractured it on the corner where the tread and riser of a stair meet.
Fortunately, George–who still lived with her–was there when the accident happened, having heard her scream from her apartment, which was right by the stairs. She’d meant to go to the grocery store just down the street to buy something, and she’d assured him that he didn’t need to accompany her; he could just relax in the living room and watch TV, for she’d be right back.
If only he’d accompanied her.
Instead of going to the grocery store, she of course went in his car to the hospital where he worked. He was a nurse, and he insisted on taking care of her personally.
She lay in her recovery room on a bed the upper half of which was raised up at about a forty-five degree angle. Her right arm was in a cast, going straight out from the side of the bed to the elbow, then going straight up from there.
George virtually never left the room. The rest of the staff liked and respected him enough to let him focus all of his care on her during his nursing shifts, and when his shifts were finished, he was allowed to stay with her even when she was sleeping and therefore not to be disturbed, which he of course would never do. He slept in a bed on the other side of the room, had a change of clothes handy, and food was sent to him as well as to her.
Why did he insist on being with her as much as possible? His love for her went far beyond the usual love of the most dutiful of sons. George, in his late thirties, never married. He was straight, but no woman could ever replace his sweet mother.
Though as a high school student, he’d bullied Tiffany along with Faye and all the others, George was far more of a ‘weakling’ (in the form of a ‘mama’s boy’) than Tiffany could ever have been. By calling her a “wimp,” he was really just engaging in projection.
His father died when he was six, so his mother’s burden of raising their one child was enormous. She’d been a timid, reclusive sort, with virtually no friends in the neighbourhood, so he became her best friend…in the Norman Bates sense, though without the psychopathy.
She was his entire world, and vice versa. Terrified of abandonment, she couldn’t bear the idea of him meeting a girl and marrying her, then moving away to some far-off city, his mother never seeing him again except for the ever-so-occasional visit.
So, in anticipation of such a scary prospect, his mother subtly manipulated her boy into such a state of emotional dependency on her that the idea of marrying and moving away would have been unthinkable to him. She even influenced his decision to become a nurse, so she’d have someone to take care of her in her old age…and now he would do just that for her.
On the third night of her hospitalization, he sat by her bed, his eyes tearing up. He knew in his intellect that with proper care, which she of course was getting, she would be fine and well again; but her fear of abandonment was something she’d managed to project onto him, so his emotions overruled his intellect, and any significant injury she’d sustain would put him in terror of her approach to death being at all pushed forward.
She lay there asleep. The medical equipment indicated, at a glance, that her heart rate and other vital signs were fine. He could see the rising and falling of her chest to indicate breathing; but the fear remained in his heart that that rising and falling would stop, even though he knew, in his medical expertise, that there was no reason for such a stopping to occur all of a sudden.
“Wake up,” he whispered in a barely audible voice. “Mom, please wake up.” He wanted her to wake up, but he didn’t want to be the cause of her waking up.
Her eyes opened. She looked at him and smiled.
“George,” she said in the frailest of voices.
“Oh, Mom,” he said, with a smile and a tear running down his right cheek. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“No, dear,” she said. “I just had a really good, long nap. I actually feel quite good, especially with you here. It’s comforting knowing my son, the best nurse in the world, is so dedicated to my recovery.”
“I am, Mom,” he sobbed. “Yet I’m so mad at myself for not insisting on going with you to the grocery store. When you slipped, I could have grabbed your arm and stopped you from falling.”
“We didn’t know this would happen. Don’t blame yourself.”
“You’ll be OK, Mom. Don’t worry. I’ll be sure of that.”
“I’m sure you will, son. But if you’re so sure, why are you crying?”
“I just hate to see you get hurt, Mom. There’s always that fear, in the back of my mind, of something…anything…going wrong.”
“What could possibly go wrong, honey?”
“Well, we assumed you’d be OK going to the store by yourself, and look what happened.”
“Oh, just because one thing went wrong doesn’t mean all manner of other things will go wrong, too. George, tell me: what’s worrying you so much? You always seem so afraid for me, and that’s sweet and all, but you’re making yourself needlessly unhappy, and that will affect your own health. What’s wrong?”
“Oh, nothing, I guess,” he said, looking down at his hands, which drooped between his knees. “I guess I’m just thinking silly thoughts.”
“Well, stop thinking silly thoughts,” she said, giving him a firm look. “Oh, I’ve gotten sleepy again. Back to sleep for me.” She closed her eyes.
“Good, Mom. Get some more rest.”
Actually, his thoughts weren’t all that silly. He just couldn’t tell her about the voice he’d hear, from time to time, a voice that he’d been hearing over the past year.
A voice that said, You’re going to murder her one day.
…and the speaker of that voice, invisible, was at that very moment hovering right beside him.
Back in the 1980s, Sting wrote a song called “Russians.” Though powerful artistically and melodically (even incorporating a theme from Prokofiev‘s Lieutenant Kijé), the song was a typical liberal perspective on the Cold War of the time, taking a ‘neutral’ stance as far as political left and right are concerned, the kind of stance that only helped ensure that the right won by the 1990s.
The song ends with the line “what might save us, me and you/is if the Russians love their children too.” What might save us from MAD is something one would naturally assume that we all do, but do ‘them Russkies’ also do it? I’m not sure if Sting meant his words to be taken at face value, or if he was being ironic; but with all the Russophobia and anti-Putin hysteria going on since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, many in the West seem to be doubting that the Russians love their children, among other things deemed natural for most of humanity.
It doesn’t seem to occur to these Russophobes that it’s actually the Western ruling classes that don’t seem to love their children…not those beyond their own immediate families, anyway. Consider all the billions that have gone into military spending and into prolonging the Ukrainian war with Russia, billions that could end homelessness in the US and feed American schoolchildren at lunchtime.
Sanctions against Russia largely haven’t harmed the country, which is now trading in rubles, as China is slowly trading in the yuan in foreign markets. The sanctions have backfired on the West, raising gas prices, causing food shortages, and hurting low-income families who were already struggling before the global economic meltdown of 2020, which was of course exacerbated by the pandemic.
Trading in other currencies is causing the petrodollar to go down in value. If this continues much more, it could crush the already-ailing American economy beyond repair. What we’re witnessing could be that final collapse of capitalism.
Now, in my post, The End of the World?, I was being extremely pessimistic, as the title indicates. I’m a little less pessimistic now, though, provided things continue on the trajectory on which I see them going; it’ll still be terribly painful, and there may still be no good end to the world’s troubles, but there is a faint hope that a nuclear WWIII between the West on the one side, and Russia and China on the other, could at least be prevented.
What might save us is the complete self-destruction of the United States and its war machine.
Allow me to clarify what I mean by the above, provocative statement. No, I’m not advocating a genocide of the American people. I’m referring rather to the ending of the warmongering, imperialist, white settler colonial state, replacing it with a federation of socialist entities, allowing full civil rights for people of all colours, but also owned and governed by the aboriginals, as I discussed here. Such a transformation of American society would be excruciating, a phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes kind of thing, but it would be a necessary, growing pain, a death/rebirth. Recall what Gramsci once said: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
Granted, I would hate to imagine the suffering of ordinary Americans from such an economic and civilizational collapse, but the reduction of the petrodollar to next to nothing could be the one thing that just might also cripple the ruling class and its ability to continue promoting wars for the defence contractors. Will the collapse of the petrodollar be extreme enough to reduce the value of the capitalist class’s billions to insignificance, an insignificance sufficient to nullify their ability to buy their way out of their problems, to pay for their protection?
I have no way of being able to answer my question with an assured affirmative, but if the masses of poor Americans suffer (and they already are, and will doubtless continue to for far too long a time), I hope the ruling class gets a good scathing, too. Another thing the aggravated suffering of the poor could (and should) provoke is revolution.
Rainer Shea has written a number of articles on how American leftists can organize, train, and protect their groups against infiltration by opportunists, wreckers, agent provocateurs, and anyone with an adventurist, gang mentality, as an anticipation of the civilizational collapse. Shea also wrote an article that made a reference to a rich man’s worries about not being able to pay his security men when, because of the anticipated economic and civilizational collapse, money will no longer have value. Hence, my speculation that the collapse of the petrodollar could wipe out the spending power of even the ruling class.
This collapse of the American economy, if it’s as extreme as I imagine it could be, would have a ripple effect on all the other countries of the world. Canada, with the US as our number one trading partner, will suffer. Europe is already suffering, not being able, due to the sanctions on Russia, to buy their ever-so-needed Russian oil, unless in rubles. The desperation all of this will cause could very well trigger revolutions in these areas and elsewhere, too.
Russia, in contrast, is doing well, at least for now. The ruble has gone up in value. In response to all of the Western businesses that have left the country, Russia has, for example, simply replaced McDonald’s with “Vkusno i tochka.” Elsewhere, China is considering buying Saudi oil in the yuan, which would be more bad news for the US dollar.
Far from slowly bleeding Russia dry, as had happened to the Soviet Union during the American proxy war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, this new US/NATO proxy war in Ukraine is losing badly to the Russians (despite all the propaganda that Ukraine is winning), to the point of Ukrainians no longer being willing to fight. China is watching this debacle, not needing to do a thing: they’re calmly waiting for the self-destruction of the US to unfold.
If this American collapse happens, the failed Ukrainian proxy war just might deter the US from provoking a similarly disastrous Taiwanese proxy war with China. Taiwan could then peacefully rejoin China and benefit from the latter’s socialism. As a resident of the island, I’d no longer worry about my home being torn apart as a war zone; sensible Taiwanese would accept joining with China, as war is hardly a reasonable alternative. Xi Jinping could move China further leftward, eliminating the billionaire status of the country’s wealthiest and reduce its income inequality, a process that newly-joined Taiwan could enjoy, too.
A US as economically, and thus politically, crippled as I’m imagining it could become might have an even farther-reaching ripple effect. Latin American countries might be able to elect left-wing governments without fear of the kind of CIA coups of the Operation Condor years. US war criminals might no longer have the wealth to avoid being tried in the International Criminal Court. Without the wealth and influence of his persecutors, Assange might get freed. Leftists worldwide would be encouraged to pursue revolutionary change.
Now, I’m probably dreaming just a little too much here, and my predictions of the collapse of the petrodollar are probably wildly exaggerated, based on my own wish-fulfillment for the capitalist system to lose. After all, the economic experts are assuring everyone in the West that the petrodollar won’t be all that badly affected by all these recent upsets. I suspect, however, that these experts are reassuring everyone less because of what they objectively know than out of a wish-fulfillment of their own. They don’t want to see the West lose.
We must remember what a huge deficit the US has already had for many years: it’s a ticking time bomb that’s only grown larger and larger. Sooner or later, that debt–now in the trillions!–is going to have to be paid, and it will be a lot harder to pay if the value of the petrodollar plummets. Add to this all the grievances of an impoverished American people, many of whom have no jobs, who have crumbling infrastructure and increasingly trigger-happy desperation.
A major thing that will stop a communist revolution in the US is a probable takeover by fascists and their sympathizers–socialism, or barbarism. This is why American leftists must train hard when everything comes to a head…which will be sooner than we think.
To get back to Sting’s song, though, he recently re-recorded it with a cellist as a comment on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Predictably, he meant it as a liberal defence of Ukraine and a judgement on Putin, sympathizing with the “peaceful, unthreatening” Ukrainians.
It saddens me that a man as erudite, intelligent, and talented as Sting is could be so horribly wrong about a conflict that actually started in 2014, when a violent coup d’état replaced the democratically-elected Viktor Yanukovych with a government and military including neo-Nazis, who had been killing ethnic Russians in the Donbass region for the eight years between the coup and the current war. This is a problem that the mainstream media acknowledged before the war, but is now either denying, downplaying, or rationalizing. (I go into these issues much moreinthesearticles, so you can read about them there, as I don’t feel like going into it in detail here.)
I’m sure there’s a large peaceful, unthreatening portion of the Ukrainian population that opposes these neo-Nazis, but it’s apparent that far too many of another portion of Ukrainians dosupport them. In any case, Sting’s well-intended, but misguided support for them (his area of expertise is music, not politics) reminds me of what Stalin once said of similarly liberal-minded people: “Social-democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.”
To conclude, I’ll tie in Sting’s song with what I’ve been saying in the middle of this post, ending it by altering the last line of his song: What might save us, me and you, is if the richest lose their money, too.
Infinite Ocean 
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