Category: fascism

Synchronicity and September 11th

I: Introduction–What is Synchronicity?

Synchronicity is a concept that CG Jung wrote about in 1960. Literally, “unified time,” synchronicity refers to meaningful coincidences that have no causal connection. Because of this acausality, there’s no scientific way of testing the idea by way of falsifiability; one either believes in synchronicity, through personal, subjective experience, or one doesn’t believe in it.

Jung’s belief in this idea was part of his interest in spirituality, myth, and religion in themselves, not just for their psychological meaning, as atheistic Freud would have used them. This difference of opinion is essentially why Freud and Jung had a falling-out.

There are dozens of YouTube videos out there on synchronicity, describing it all too often in a sentimentalized way, linking it with ideas like the “law of attraction.” To be honest, I’d rather stay away from this kind of rose-tinted glasses interpretation.

To be even more frank, I haven’t yet made up my mind about whether or not I believe in synchronicity. As of this writing, I’ve recognized one distinct synchronicity that’s occurred over the past fifty-one years: three incidents occurring on September 11th–one in 1973, one in 1990, and one in, of course, 2001.

Notice how none of these three dates, assuming you know the history of all three incidents, are in any way ‘positive’ or sentimentalized. These three are the Chilean coup d’état of 1973, George HW Bush’s 1990 speech about us moving into a new world order (I’ll go into what is so unsettling about the speech below), and of course the terror attacks of 2001.

What these three incidents have in common beyond all sharing the same date–and this is the deeply meaningful part–is how all three tie in with US imperialism.

II: The Three September 11th Years

The Chilean coup d’état, backed by the CIA, ousted the democratically-elected president, Salvador Allende, a socialist who wanted to nationalize Chilean industries and thus thin the wallets of the American capitalists who wanted to be able to continue exploiting the country. Allende was replaced by Augusto Pinochet, a right-wing dictator and puppet of the Western imperialists. Allende’s socialist economic policies would be replaced by the “free market” ones of the Chicago Boys. Any leftist resistance resulted in imprisonment, violent punishments, killings, and being ‘disappeared,’ which included being thrown out of helicopters.

While Bush’s 1990 speech tried to present the coming new world order as a positive change in the political climate of the time, properly understood, the president was heralding a post-Soviet world, in which the “free market” had triumphed over ‘Big Brother’ government and socialism. The USSR hadn’t yet been dissolved as of the speech, but its demise was coming soon, and no one knew better that this dissolution was coming than the very people who’d been scheming about it. The fall of communism allowed the capitalists to do anything they wanted…to everyone.

As for the terror attacks in 2001, it really doesn’t matter if we go with the official narrative that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda masterminded the attacks, and that George W Bush’s administration was too careless and incompetent to have prevented the attacks; or if you believe it was an inside job with controlled demolitions, and that it was all blamed on Al Qaeda and, by extension, the whole Muslim world. What matters is how the attacks were used by the American ruling class to manufacture consent for war after war in the Middle East, not only to steal the oil and enrich themselves with it, but also to exercise their dominance over the whole region, being the capitalist imperialists that they are.

Indeed, as far as all three of these incidents are concerned, it isn’t so much what happened on September 11th as it is the aftermath. What happened on that day, these three times, was more about the warning of what was to come than the inciting event itself. For another part of this synchronicity is, how 911 can signify an emergency telephone number you ring when an urgent situation comes up.

III: The Chilean Coup D’état

All three of these incidents could be, and should have been, seen as dire warnings that matters were about to get much worse. The replacement of a socialist government with a right-wing dictatorship using “free market” economic policies was a kind of ‘laboratory experiment,’ if you will, to see how well it would go…from the point of view of the global capitalist class, of course. They never cared that the Chicago Boys’ economic policies were a disaster for poor Chileans; what mattered was the huge amassing of wealth for the rich, known as the “miracle of Chile.” As of the 1980s, this “free market” experiment would be tried in the US under Reagan and in the UK under Thatcher.

So the immiseration of the poor Chileans would be extended to Americans and the British. The lie would be propagated that the “free market” would involve minimal state intervention in the economy, when a) there’s always at least some state intervention in it, and b) state protection of private property, especially when the capitalist class accumulates a huge amount of private property, necessitates a particularly intrusive form of government…capitalist government–hence, Pinochet’s brand of fascism, hand in hand with the “free market.”

And still, right-wing libertarians and ‘anarcho’-capitalists continue to be duped by the idea that “true” capitalism is antithetical to an intrusive state. One shouldn’t be surprised in the least that Reagan‘s ‘small government’ (translation: war on the poor) would be accompanied by a great increase in military spending as part of a scheme to bring the USSR to an end. Since imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, requiring the expansion of markets and capital into other countries, an expanded military will be needed to protect the interests of capitalist globalization.

Now, where plunging people into poverty hits you immediately, and scathingly, when you live in Third World Latin America, as was the case with Chileans in the 1970s, hitting us in the First World with poverty is more insidious and gradual in its effects. Problems like homelessness certainly increased under Reagan in the 1980s, but it’s grown worse since then, and now in the 2020s, there’s an epidemic of homelessness in many cities in the US and elsewhere.

This is all why I see a synchronistic meaning in these three September 11th dates and the emergency number 911. The Chilean coup d’état was an urgent warning not to let the “free market” counter-revolution spread to other countries. It was a warning left unheeded.

IV: Bush’s ‘New World Order’ Speech

As I said above, Bush’s new world order speech was presented in rosy, optimistic language about a new era of triumphant liberal democracy, since it was understood that the Cold War was over. There would be a greater commitment to US strength as the leader of that promotion of liberal democracy. Translation: US imperialism would reign supreme, and every other government in the world was expected to do whatever the US government told them to do.

There would be a Soviet-American partnership in promoting world democracy, as Bush expected. Again, translation: Russia was expected to do American bidding as everyone else was. Gorbachev‘s compliance with all of this was further proof of his weak, treasonous leadership.

Of course, nothing like Bush’s rosy vision came to be since September 11th, 1990. The advancement of American imperialist ambitions certainly did, though. With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe in 1989, it was already known that communism was out, and that Russia’s days, in their Soviet form, were numbered.

But while the mainstream Western media of the time were hailing the end of the Cold War as a triumph for democracy and the “end of history,” it would be foolish to assume that most Russians, and indeed many in the former Soviet Bloc, were holding their arms up, ready to embrace ‘capitalist freedom.’ Most people in the USSR wanted to keep the Soviet system; Boris Yeltsin and his ilk forcibly took it away.

In fact, since then, poll after poll has been done in Russia, indicating that majorities of Russians have consistently said life in Soviet-era Russia was happier than it has been since the era’s end. Since they were provided with free healthcare, education, housing, full employment, and other government benefits, it isn’t hard to see why the Soviet system was preferred.

While the Soviet system surely had its faults, it was also an effective counterweight to Western imperialism. The USSR aided anti-imperialist liberation movements in the Third World, and its example pushed the postwar capitalist West to adopt welfare systems and public healthcare. With the USSR’s demise, though, the West has had less and less incentive to keep these social services going. Accordingly, we’ve been losing them, bit by bit, over the years.

The signing of NAFTA not only took jobs away from American workers, but also gave those jobs, at lower pay, to Mexicans. The corporate tax rate, cut way down by the Reagan administration, stayed low (and was cut even lower by the Trump administration…it’s unlikely that Biden or anyone will raise it significantly any time soon).

Clinton killed welfare in the mid-1990s. His signing of the Telecommunications Act in 1996 led to the mergers and acquisitions in the media that, in turn, has led to 90% of American media being owned by only six corporations, meaning that the vast majority of our access to information is controlled by the rich. (This American near-oligopoly on information, incidentally, is also internationalized.) The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act led, as many believe, to the 2008 financial crisis. And the government bailed the big banks out.

All of these forms of government intervention were clearly in the interest of capital…and yet there are still political idiots out there who think that the government and capitalism are musically exclusive opposites. Long live the “free market”!

The above are but a few examples of what Bush’s new world order resulted in for the US. Now we must take a brief look at what the ideas of his September 11th speech led to for Russia.

Part of the reason we should regard with skepticism Bush’s claim to greater Soviet-American cooperation (at the time, in the context of a united response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and therefore Gorbachev’s compliance with Western imperialist interests) is that, when the Berlin Wall fell, and East and West Germany were to be reunited and thus a part of NATO, it was promised to Gorbachev, most mendaciously, that NATO would move “not one inch eastward.”

Note how much farther eastward NATO has advanced to the East since then. A number of former SSRs and Warsaw pact members–the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, and Albania–joined NATO. Russia has NATO armies right on her borders now! Attempts have been made to have Ukraine join, too.

Anybody who knows anything about NATO realizes that the organization is an extension of US imperialism. These members of NATO do the bidding of the American empire, even when it’s against their own national interests to do so.

The debacle that has been the Russia-Ukraine war is squarely the fault of the US/NATO empire…but you wouldn’t know that to read the lies and propaganda of the Western media, who routinely call it “Russia’s war” and “Putin’s war.” Indeed, so much effort has been made to call Russia’s intervention “unprovoked” that in fact such a lie has been told precisely to cover up the fact that it was most definitely provoked.

Collaboration of the capitalist West with ex-Nazis, from the end of WWII to the present, has included the recruitment of Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers the whole time. Knowledge of this exposes the lie in the current capitalist mainstream media that there is no major Nazi menace in Ukraine.

Ever since a CIA-assisted coup d’état in 2014 in Ukraine, removing democratically-elected Viktor Yanukovych and replacing him with US puppets (recall Chile in 1973 and see these coups as part of a pattern), Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers have been part of their government and military, including far-right organizations like the Azov Battalion, Right Sector, and other admirers of Stepan Bandera.

These Russophobic extremists were, for the eight years between the coup and the beginning of the Russian intervention, discriminating against the use of the Russian language and terrorizing ethnic Russians in the Donbass. Putin, branded an “imperialist” and a “fascist” in a shameless act of projection by the Western establishment media, tried everything he could to find a peaceful resolution over those eight years, including the Minsk accords.

All the US and NATO have wanted to do is to keep sending weapons to the Ukrainian Nazis, including weapons that can be fired into Russia, which could provoke a wider war–WWIII, which in turn could go nuclear and bring about the end of the world. Since all of these events stem ultimately from the hypocritical words and secret schemes of Bush et al when he spoke on September 11th, 1990, we can see the 911 emergency that also went largely unheeded.

V: The Terrorist Attacks

That the terrorist attacks of 2001 were ringing the 911 emergency number is so obvious that I hardly need to explain how, but going through its consequences can remind us of the gravity of this emergency. Right from George W Bush’s statement that the attacks were “acts of war,” the red flags were waving.

Not only did the attacks give his administration a pretext for perpetual war (a “war on terror” isn’t directed at any country in particular, so there’s no clear way of ending the war), but they were also used to justify a number of restrictions on American civil liberties (the Patriot Act, which was extended during the Obama administration; racial profiling; NSA surveillance).

This authoritarian stripping-away of civil liberties is all too often assumed by propagandized right-wing idiots to be a form of socialism, since these politically illiterate morons assume that socialism is just “anything a government does.” These people are so ignorant of the political history of their own country that they’ve paid no attention to the removal of workers’ rights over the years (some of which I describe above), the cutting of taxes for the rich, and union-busting, none of which would happen under a socialist government.

These right-libertarians refuse to acknowledge the existence of authoritarian right-wing governments (recall again Pinochet). The Democratic Party–and the Labour Party in the UK–moved to the right because, as I said above, the demise of world communism meant that the West was no longer pressured into accommodating the working class.

US/NATO imperialism thus has been able to do anything it wants to any country, and to anyone within its own countries, with complete impunity. Endless war is in the interest of capital because war is a business–all those weapons manufacturers: Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, etc., have been laughing all the way to the bank profiting off of human death and suffering in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and now Ukraine, the Palestinian Territories, and potentially Russia, China, and Iran. The American military is all over Africa, the rationale being that they’re fighting terrorists.

The tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) means that these weapons manufacturers, in order to remain competitive and survive as businesses, must keep their profits up. The only way they can do that is by either having actual wars all the time or at least sustaining a constant threat of war. No war, no sale of weapons–it’s as simple as that. The “war on terror” has given these companies a most convenient excuse to keep banging the war drums.

The scapegoating of the many heads of state around the world who refuse to kow-tow to US imperialism–starting with Milošević and Saddam, then continuing with Gaddafi, Assad, Maduro, Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, and whoever comes up in the future–has led to a desensitizing to the idea of war and its horrors. There was a time when people in the West were instinctively anti-war, regardless of whether they were leftists or mere liberals/hippies; not so much now…though a ray of hope has been seen in some who oppose US support of war in Ukraine and American support of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The point is that we’re seeing not just a resurgence of cold-blooded capitalism, but also a resurgence of its extreme…fascism. We’ve seen it in the anti-immigrant policies of Obama the deporter-in-chief, continued by the “anti-establishment” Trump/à la ICE and the caging of Latin Americans, and again continued with no-less-right-wing Biden. We’ve seen fascism in the excessive surveillance online. We see it in militarized cops. We’ve seen fascism in the support of Ukraine, as I discussed above. Indeed, all of the totalitarian things we were told would happen to us under communism have actually happened to us under neoliberal capitalism.

People complain about the supposed lack of human rights in Cuba. To those people, I’ll say two words: Guantanamo Bay. This is a form of contemporary fascism and authoritarian government.

People on the right complained about intrusive government during the Covid pandemic. I’m a skeptic about its dangers, too, but I never saw a “communist plot” to establish a “one-world government.” I saw a group of pharmaceutical companies make huge profits while millions of poor people got poorer–many became homeless. I saw the fascist, authoritarian government that grew out of this problem as a threat of capitalism, not communism.

VI: The Collective Shadow

I hope, Dear Reader, that you can now see the deep meaning behind this triple 9/11 synchronicity. It’s not just three identical dates when something…political…happened. They all share common themes: the intrusion of imperialism, a shift to the political right, violent consequences, the taking away of basic civil rights, and the promotion of fascist, authoritarian government.

Now, part of synchronicity is how the inner psychic life is connected with these meaningful coincidences in the external world. For me, it’s how I saw the deeper meaning in these three September 11th dates and their aftermaths. As for those behind the three events, I’d say that the connection between the inner and outer worlds is based on the Collective Shadow.

Just as there’s a collective unconscious, a large reservoir of all of the unconscious feelings of all of humanity, going back to the earliest of us in prehistory, so is there also an accumulation of all of our worst, most hateful, most bigoted, and most destructive thoughts. This accumulation is the Collective Shadow, an amalgam of the personal Shadow of each and every one of us.

Erich Fromm, in his book, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, would have called this dark part of all of us “the necrophilous character.” He wasn’t referring to the paraphilia; he described “necrophilia” as “the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion to tear apart living structures. (Fromm, his emphasis, page 369)

Consider in this connection all that resulted from all three September 11th events: the death resulting from Pinochet’s repressions, the terrorist attacks and the imperialist wars that ensued, but also the violence done to Russia as a result of the dissolution of the USSR: Yeltsin bringing out the tanks on the Russian protestors in 1993; his re-election, as a result of American interference in the vote in 1996; the impoverishment of the Russian masses (as a result of privatization) as the elites snapped up most of the amassed Soviet wealth to make themselves the Russian oligarchs; and as I mentioned above, the Western enabling of Ukrainian Nazis to attack ethnic Russians in the Donbass.

Now, please be careful with my use of the the expression “new world order”: I’m not using it in the sense of many right-wing conspiracy theorists who fantasize about a “one-world government” run by Freemasons, “the Jews,” and other members of an imagined elite of people in some kind of secret society of Devil-worshippers (“the Illuminati”). Those who run the world are capitalists and imperialists; they aren’t of any particular ethnic or religious group. They don’t need to have formal meetings, they don’t twirl their mustaches or laugh “Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!”, as in some badly-written B-movie. They simply share similar interests, and have social get-togethers where they discuss how to further their interests as the ruling class–how to get more for themselves and less for the rest of us.

I don’t believe in the Devil because I don’t need to. Human greed, aggression, and selfishness–spawned by, and a distortion of, the evolutionary drive to survive–sufficiently explain the problem. The Devil as a metaphorical concept, though, the Collective Shadow, might be believed in.

VII: Conclusion (Including 119 and November 9th)

I don’t necessarily believe in any of these ‘supernatural’ ideas; I just want to explore some possibilities, and show how, regardless of whatever the real explanation is for these coincidences, there have been some most disturbing patterns.

I see patterns. I can’t help it.

Incidentally, just as there is the 911 emergency phone number and the three September 11ths, so is there a 119 emergency phone number in parts of Asia (including where I live) and in Jamaica. Furthermore, just for fun, we can, in this connection, look at three dates for November 9th: 1917, when the Balfour Declaration was published in The Times newspaper; 1938, when Kristallnacht happened; and 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.

Anyone who cares about the Palestinians will see the publication of the Balfour Declaration as, in a way, a kind of declaration of emergency of the oppression to come. Anyone who cares about Jews and worries about the spread of fascism will see the obvious state of emergency in Kristallnacht. And anyone who knows that the real purpose of the Berlin Wall (the Anti-fascist Protection Wall, as it was called in East Germany) was to keep bad people out, not to keep good people trapped in (the real resistance against defectors was to prevent brain drain; most of the East German workers and others in the former Soviet states were happy to stay and enjoy the government benefits that were soon to be gone by the 1990s), will see its fall as the beginning of NATO enlargement to the East, which has ultimately culminated in the Ukraine Nazi problem.

Now, you can criticize me, Dear Reader, for being selective about bad events on September 11th and on November 9th, while ignoring many good things that surely also happened on those dates, in different years. The point about synchronicity, though, is not to say that those two dates are “evil” ones; they simply represent, on these six occasions, coincidences that I find highly meaningful. I might consider these synchronicities a manifestation of two of what I call The Three Unities–that is, The Unity of Action and The Unity of Time.

Forget about the coincidental dates, though. The point is that fascism (Nazi or Zionist), and authoritarian, imperialist capitalism, along with its government and endless wars, are on the rise. None of the events of the earlier of those six dates directly caused those that succeeded them; but all of the events I discussed of those dates are disturbingly meaningful.

‘The Flourishing of the Middle Class and the Arts During the Cold War: An Anomaly in the History of Capitalism,’ from Dennis Riches’s Blog

An interesting article on the post-war economic boom and the blossoming of the arts, 1945-1975, as well as the ruling class’s involvement with both.

The Flourishing of the Middle Class and the Arts During the Cold War: An Anomaly in the History of Capitalism

Who Runs the World?

I: Introduction

No, I’m not correcting Beyoncé’s grammar.

I’m talking about something serious here.

Several weeks before the publishing of this post, I posted a meme on Facebook that says, “Once you learn a sufficient amount of history you must choose to become either a Marxist or a liar”.

A FB friend of mine expressed a sharp disagreement with this message, saying that Marx was a third or fourth cousin of Nathan Meyer, 1st Lord Rothschild [!], and that the latter was “the father of capitalism” [?]. Her source was a book called The Jewish Journey, by Edward Gelles.

According to her, this Gelles originally studied in Oxford University, but later became an independent researcher; which suggests that the academic establishment in Oxford have rejected his ideas as crackpot ones. Now, as an independent researcher myself, I’m no fan of conformist establishment academia, but saying that any one man ‘fathered’ capitalism (if anyone, that was Adam Smith, 1723-1790), as if sprung fully grown from his forehead (assuming Gelles called Meyer capitalism’s “father,” rather than my friend), and polemically linking (Jewish) Marx with the (Jewish) Rothschilds sounds like junk history to me.

Granted, my own grasp of history has more than its share of gaps, but even I won’t oversimplify economic history by claiming that the capitalist mode of production began with one man. Capitalism gradually grew, over a period of centuries within feudalism through merchants (i.e., mercantile capitalism). Marx, in his writing of The Communist Manifesto, was arguably the first theoretician of communism, though there were a host of socialists before him. Capitalism’s beginnings predate Meyer, born in 1840, by many decades.

Personally, I couldn’t care less if a British banker of German descent is connected by blood to Marx; this link, if it’s at all true (and I seriously doubt it), could be explained by the fact that there were small numbers in the said Ashkenazi Jewish community, and with that, the high level of close relatives’ marriages. What’s being implied by this link, though, reeks to high heaven of the old Nazi conspiracy theory known as Judeo-Bolshevism. The Nazis themselves made the Marx/Rothschilds link, which according to Gelles is well-known, casting doubt on the idea that this ‘history’ has been suppressed, as my FB friend imagines it to be.

Just because two people stem from the same family doesn’t mean that they have the same, or even remotely comparable, views on anything, a fact that should go without saying, and one that even my FB friend acknowledged in her comments. Yet many people seem to think that all members of a family, or of a certain tribe–as such paranoiacs would call it–must have the same ideology, or the same political agenda, while their scheme might involve presenting that unity in the form of differences and variations that are only superficial.

If this supposed family link is true and has been suspiciously suppressed, I don’t find it difficult to see why. As I said above, the Nazis made this Marx/Rothschilds link, and such propaganda led to the murder of six million Jews. What needs to be remembered today is that fascism has been coming back in style: liberals have been defending Ukrainian Nazis, minimizing, if not outright denying, their influence in the politics of the area in a way comparable to Holocaust denial; far-right groups have made gains all over Europe; and with this knowledge, I find it easy to believe that some academics with secret fascist sympathies can sneak spurious details into their books.

Israeli atrocities in Gaza are stirring up lots of bad feeling against Jews. The fact that this genocide being perpetrated against the Palestinians is so indefensible is all the more reason to be careful about using the rage we feel, justified as it is in itself, to generalize unfairly about all the Jews of the world, many of whom are as opposed to what the Zionists are doing as everyone else is. For if we do that generalizing, and go around repeating the old paranoid antisemitic slanders about Jews secretly controlling the world, that paranoia could very well result in another Holocaust, the very thing we promised would never happen again.

II: Ancient Antisemitism

The history of antisemitism that I’m summarizing here is far from exhaustive. I’m just touching on a few highlights that I consider relevant for the sake of my argument.

The earliest known examples of antisemitism come from ancient Egypt and Greece. A particularly noteworthy source at the time was Gnosticism, since it influenced Christianity. The Gnostics came to equate Yahweh–the creator of the physical world, and perceived as being angry, judgmental, and overly-legalistic–with the principle of darkness and materiality, as opposed to the principle of light and the spirit.

Gnosticism posited a dualistic universe in which the good principle of light and the spirit is at war with the evil principle of darkness and matter. It isn’t difficult to translate these ideas into the Christian God being at war with Satan…except that the Gnostics tended to equate Yahweh with the Demiurge, an evil or at least inferior god who created the physical world. It also isn’t difficult to see where New Testament verses like 2 Corinthians 4:4 and John 8:44–in which the Devil is portrayed as a ‘god’ and as the ‘father’ of the Jews, respectively–come from as ideas.

My point behind mentioning all of this is that it establishes not only the association of the Jews with the Devil, but also with the rule of the Earth. We can see here just how much of antisemitism is based on superstitious, religious nonsense, not on anything remotely scientific.

It has been noted in a number of sources that the Gospel According to John has strong Gnostic tendencies, if not being outright Gnostic in essence. The Gnostics, as I pointed out above, were strongly antisemitic, and the Gospel of John carries antisemitism to greater lengths than the Synoptics do. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the object of Jesus’ moral condemnation is the hypocrisy of the Pharisees (for example, Matthew 23 and Luke 11:37-53). In John, it’s “the Jews” in general who are judged, as seen in John 8:44 and John 7:13.

That all four Gospels worked to shift the blame for the killing of Christ away from the real perpetrators, the Roman authorities, and onto the Jews (see Matthew 27:25), in order to make it easier for the early Church to win over Roman converts, was the Biblical basis for Christian antisemitism over the past two thousand years. That the man who betrayed Jesus for thirty silver pieces was named Judas Iscariot should tell you something. (Read Hyam Maccoby‘s The Mythmaker and Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil for more details.)

We can see in these early New Testament portrayals of the Jews, as linked to the Devil, the god of this age (thanks to the Gnostics), and as having betrayed Christ for money, how such antisemitic slanders as ‘Jewish greed,’ the ‘Jewish genius at making money (i.e., the ‘fathers of capitalism’),’ and the ‘Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world’ (i.e., the ‘fathers of communism’) originated in religious superstition, not fact.

III: Medieval Antisemitism and Money-lending

Of course, the stereotypes of Jewish greed and uncanny talent at making money are not based solely on religious beliefs. Jews in medieval, Christian-dominated Europe made a living largely as tax and rent collectors, and of course as money-lenders. The antisemite believes Jews did this kind of work, considered morally despicable, because it’s in their nature to do such work; the informed reader of history, however, knows that the European medieval Jew did this kind of work because he wasn’t allowed to do much of any other kind of profession.

The Jewish faith itself frowns upon usury just as any other faith does. Still, many have thought of the lending of money at immorally excessive rates of interest as synonymous with being Jewish.

While The Merchant of Venice has often been staged and interpreted as antisemitic (one need only look at productions of the play in Nazi Germany to see how obvious this fact is), it could also be interpreted as simply commenting on the reality of antisemitism. Going against the money-loving stereotype, Shylock would rather have a pound of Antonio‘s flesh than take twice the amount of the original loan; his wish for that flesh, as reprehensible as it may be, is also understandable given the horrendous abuse Shylock has suffered throughout the play, just because he is a Jew.

Now, when the Enlightenment came about around the 18th century, which resulted in the Jewish emancipation from frequently-impoverished ghettos (a fact that knocks a few holes in the ‘rich Jew’ myth), job restrictions, and the like, some Jews became bankers, like the Rothschilds, which leads me to my next point.

IV: The Rothschilds

I’m perfectly aware of the many things out there published on YouTube, etc., claiming that the Rothschild family essentially controls everything: the banks, the media, world governments, and that they’re behind all the wars and political upheavals of the past few hundred years. Just because a nut here, or a nut there, says these things online and presents a pile of ‘evidence’ doesn’t make these claims true, though.

The Rothschilds, some being wealthy bankers, are capitalists. It’s their embrace of capitalism, not their Jewishness, that should be the basis of any criticism of them. While they were much wealthier and more influential back in the nineteenth century, they’d lost much of this preeminence since WWII, when the Nazis confiscated so much of their wealth and property. They’re far from being the world’s wealthiest family now.

The roots of the notion of this family’s ‘Satanic’ influence on world events are in a pamphlet written by someone calling himself “Satan,” of all pseudonyms. He was actually an antisemite named Mathieu Georges Dairnvael who in 1846 wrote about Nathan Rothschild being in Belgium at the time of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Learning of the outcome of the battle early, Nathan rushed across the North Sea in a storm to get to London twenty-four hours before Wellington’s messenger could and play the stock market with this knowledge, thus amassing twenty million francs, or a million sterling.

He and his brothers allegedly sold government consols cheaply, and once the prices had dropped, they made massive purchases.

There’s only one problem with this story.

It’s utter unsubstantiated bullocks.

Nathan Rothschild was in neither Wellington nor in Belgium at the time. There was no storm on the water between Belgium and England. He made no great killing on the stock market, either.

Still, Dairnvael’s canard spread all over the place, got translated into many languages, and gained such a hold on history that it’s been referred to in popular culture and scholarly works. Films were made about the story, in Hollywood in 1934, and, surprise, surprise, in a Nazi propaganda film in 1940, called The Rothschilds: Shares in Waterloo.

Alterations were made to the story when parts of it were disproven, such as Nathan’s not being in Waterloo, with such changes as the use of a carrier pigeon or special messenger to get the news to him first while he was in London. Hence, the tenacity of the canard to this day, in combination with antisemites’ tenacity.

Furthermore, Nathan wasn’t the only one to get early news of the outcome of the battle; and he had time to buy shares, apparently, but he couldn’t have had enough holdings, in the thin market of the day, to earn the millions he supposedly earned. He may have done well, but numerous rival investors did far better than he.

In any case, if people on the far right can rant and rave about evil bankers, so can leftists, including one claimed to have been blood-related to the Rothschilds: “In the fierce articles that Marx penned in 1849-1850, published in The Class Struggle in France, he took offense at the way Louise-Napoleon Bonaparte‘s new minister of finance, Achille Fould, representing bankers and financiers, peremptorily decided to increase the tax on drinks in order to pay rentiers their due.” (Piketty, page 132) The subject of this quote now leads us to my next topic.

V: Of Marx and Marxists

Though Karl Marx was ethnically a Jew, his family had converted to Christianity, and as an atheist, he rejected all religion, Christian and Jewish alike, as “the opium of the people.”

What’s more, defying the stereotype of the rich Jew, the fact remains that Marx was a poor man, often in debt. Because of his revolutionary activity, he had to hide from the authorities, often using pseudonyms. He was kicked out of Germany in 1843, and from his move to England in 1849 to his death in 1883 as a stateless man, he was in a state of abject poverty, having to live off the charity of his friend and colleague, Friedrich Engels.

The next thing we must ask is, what is Marxism? We should start by discussing what Marxism is not. It isn’t about edgy young people spiking their hair and dying it pink, wearing body piercing and tattoos, and griping at people who address them with the wrong pronouns. Some of these people may be Marxists, or they may have a smattering of the influence of Marxism, but as such, they don’t constitute the essence of Marxism. Such people are far more likely to be radlibs, who shouldn’t be confused with Marxists, even if there’d be some overlap of the two groups on a Venn diagram. People on the far right tend to think that anyone even a few millimetres to the left of them, including the centre-left liberal, is a ‘commie.’ Ridiculous.

On the other side of the coin, Marxists are sincerely concerned with the plight of the poor, and we’re trying to work out the best solutions possible to the problem of that plight, hence scientific socialism. We aren’t part of some grand Jewish conspiracy for world domination.

I bring up these two examples of what we’re not, caricatured as they may be, as a rebuttal of the ignorant nonsense many on the right believe about us. Marxism isn’t radicalism for its own sake. It isn’t utopian. And it isn’t a plot for world domination. Marxism is economics; it’s a theory about capitalism. It’s dull, dry, and difficult to understand in its statistical detail.

Another important aspect of Marxism is what’s called dialectical and historical materialism. This is derived from Hegel’s dialectic, popularly (though not by Hegel himself) represented as “thesis, antithesis, synthesis,” and understood in terms of philosophical idealism (everything has a spiritual basis), which Marx turned upside-down (or right-side up, as Marx would have had it–Marx, page 102-103) as a form of philosophical materialism (everything has a material basis).

A lot of right-wing conspiracy theorists, including those who believe in the NWO, grossly oversimplify the dialectic by characterizing the above triad as “problem, reaction, solution,” making it into a diabolical formula that the ‘elite,’ or the ‘deep state’ uses to justify bringing in more and more tyrannical legislation. I assure you, Dear Reader, the dialectic, be it Hegel’s or Marx’s version, is much more general and more broadly applied than that.

The dialectic is about reconciling contradictory opposites–theoretically any opposites. In his Science of Logic, Hegel used the example of Being, Nothingness, and Becoming to show how opposites can be sublated and therefore resolved (Hegel, pages 82-83). He used it to show how ideas in philosophy can be refined for better logical thinking. A proposition is negated in order to have the conflicting ideas resolved in a sublation, which is in turn negated and sublated to create an even better idea to be negated and sublated, and so on and so on…

Marx, on the other hand, showed how contradictions have been resolved in the physical world throughout history, in particular, the contradiction between the rich and the poor (“the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles“). First, there was the ancient slave/master contradiction, which was keenly felt in the old slave revolts led by men like Spartacus. This got sublated into feudalism, which gave us the next major contradiction, that of the feudal lords vs. the poor peasants. The tensions of that conflict climaxed in such events as the French Revolution, whose sublation led to our current contradiction, that of the bourgeoisie vs. the proletariat–capitalism.

It is predicted that our current conflict will be sublated into a socialist revolution, with the dictatorship of the proletariat (a workers’ state, which is a government of the vast majority of the people, also called real democracy) leading to the withering away of the state and the ultimate goal, communist society–a classless, stateless, and money-less society.

Note how with each “problem, reaction, solution,” the world gets better and better, not worse and worse. If I’m wrong, maybe the right-wingers would prefer feudalism or ancient slavery. Of course, they’ll never think the world will get better by going my way, because thanks to the Cold War, anti-communist propaganda for which this very political right is responsible, my way is portrayed as “extremist” and “Satanic.”

And this “Satanic” agenda is perceived by the far right as dominating world politics, rather than mainstream liberalism, since far too few people today can distinguish the left from mere liberals. Added to the right’s paranoia of “Satanism” in today’s politics is a paranoia of Jewish influence in politics, just as the Nazis had a paranoid belief that a huge percentage of the members of the Bolshevik Party were Jews, when actually far fewer than even ten percent of party members, as well as those on the Central Committee, for example, were ethnic Jews in the 1920s.

Believing Jews dominate extreme capitalism (when actually, it was the Nazis and other fascists who represented this extreme) and the far left is a typical far-right mentality. Imagining Marx was related by blood to the Rothschild family is surely a part of that mentality. Fascists may portray their ideology as theoretically a ‘third position‘ between capitalism and communism, but in practice theirs is a violent defence of the former. Beware of people who claim to be ‘neither left nor right.’ These people are rightists–libertarians, ‘Third Way‘ politicians, and Bonapartists.

VI: On Zionism

Now, I’ve been doing a whole lot of defending Jews against antisemitism, which is necessary, especially in today’s world, with the current resurgence of fascist tendencies in many parts of the world. This defence of mine, however, needn’t and mustn’t necessitate a defence of the racist, apartheid, settler-colonialism of Israel. For Zionism is a form of fascism.

Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, as long as one’s criticism and moral condemnation of Israel’s oppression and victimization of the Palestinians isn’t rooted in the kind of bigoted nonsense I was describing above. If we don’t want Zionists to play the antisemitism card whenever we criticize Israeli brutality, we mustn’t describe that brutality in terms of “Well, they’re Jews! What do you expect?”

Though Israel is the Jewish state, the establishment and maintenance of Zionism is not exclusively or even essentially Jewish. Many critics of Zionism are Jews, including those who practice Judaism. Observant Jews believe that Zion is to be established by God with the coming of the Messiah; man is thus forbidden to establish it secularly.

Many Jews, whether religious or not, have always condemned the creation of Israel on moral grounds, feeling compassion for the suffering of the Palestinians. Some of these Jews are famous: Einstein, Noam Chomsky, etc. To condemn Israel is to be human, not to be anti-Jewish. It’s about loving the Palestinians, not hating the Jews. Listen to Norman Finkelstein‘s passionate advocacy for the Palestinians to see my point. The younger generations of Jews, tending to be more politically progressive, are more critical of Israel than the older generations.

Furthermore, many non-Jews are pro-Zionist, including many evangelical Christians. Biden, a Catholic, has openly, proudly declared his support for Israel, as any American politician (who doesn’t want to kill his or her career) will do. Trump, the ‘antiestablishment president,’ is blatantly Zionist: recall his moving of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the latter being deemed Israel’s new capital; this move infuriated the Palestinians, of course, and for very good reason (it happened on the 70th anniversary of the Nakba), and their protests resulted in the IDF shooting and killing a great many unarmed Palestinians along the Gaza border. It’s the kind of thing that helps us understand why Hamas exists.

The motives of those Western leaders, who set up the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to create a Jewish state in the Middle East, were not exactly innocent, by the way. These non-Jewish pro-Zionists were acting out of antisemitic interests–they wanted to use Zion as a way of getting rid of the Jews in their own countries. Recall that at the time, decades before the Holocaust, anti-Jewish prejudice was a common and accepted attitude.

So, why is Israel so important to the Western ruling class? They may rationalize it as a form of atonement for how two millennia of European antisemitism culminated in the Holocaust. Yet if this Western guilt was among the main reasons for backing Zionism, then why did the West, right around the time of the creation of Israel, also not only pardon many ex-Nazis, but also give them high-paying, high-status jobs in the American and West German governments, as well as in NASA and NATO? We have to look elsewhere for that reason, and that elsewhere is imperialism.

Let’s go back to the question that is the title of this article. Many people believe, because of the large Jewish lobby in American politics (AIPAC), that Israel rules the US, and therefore the world, too. The hidden spark of truth behind this antisemitic slander is that the US, the capitalist, imperialist country par excellence, is what actually runs the world.

Seriously: Israel, a tiny sliver of land that’s barely seven miles wide at its narrowest point, with a population of just over nine million–as against a global population of just over eight billion–rules the world, just because those nine million are ‘God’s chosen people’ (translation: the Demiurge’s, or Devil’s, chosen people)? We can see how paranoid anti-Jew fantasies have been kept alive from ancient times by being passed down through our collective unconscious.

American support for Israel is much more rooted in Christian Zionism than in Jewish Zionism. It isn’t that Israel controls the US and the West in general, but vice versa. Christian Zionists, who at least veer dangerously close to, if they don’t completely immerse themselves in, outright fundamentalism, believe that the establishment and maintenance of Israel will speed up the End Times, the Rapture, etc. Then the Bible-thumpers can go up to heaven faster and look down on us unrepentant sinners as we burn in Hell, and they can laugh at us for not accepting Jesus as our personal saviour. How charming.

But religious nonsense aside, there’s a much more pertinent reason that the political right (which of course includes the religious right) supports Israel. The Western capitalist class needs a political ally in the geo-strategically crucial Middle East, and that ally is Israel. There’s a lot of oil in that general area, and the global ruling class needs to have a foothold there for the sake of having political leverage.

Back in the mid- to late 1940s, the Soviet Union recognized the geo-strategic importance of the area, and so regrettably they–in an act of realpolitik—gave some support to the establishment of Israel, hoping it would be a socialist state and an ally during the beginning Cold War. Since socialists have always been anti-Zionists, this brief Soviet support was a momentary lapse of reason, and when it became clear that, despite the socialist leanings of the kibbutzim, Israel would be a bourgeois state, allied with the US, the Soviet government repented of their support and thenceforth remained in total solidarity with the Arabs.

Having global power is based on the ownership of huge masses of wealth and land, not some Satanic Jewish mojo. Look at Israel on a map: it’s tiny. The US, in contrast, has military bases around the world. Israel has been able to defeat its Arab neighbours in numerous wars because of the military and financial aid of the US, the truly powerful country. The US helps Israel because Israel helps the US…and the imperialistic interests of the Anglo/American/NATO alliance.

The West uses Israel to help protect their lucrative oil interests (surely part of why Israel has a ‘secret’ supply of nukes), and so Israel can kick some ass if needed. When Israel does this dirty work, they get scapegoated so the West won’t get blamed (or only minimally blamed). It’s a perfect system for the Western powers.

VII: Conclusion

Now, with all of that said, I must conclude with a bold statement, bluntly given, and which may offend some: Israel should not exist. Let me put this statement in its proper context. As a Canadian, I also believe that Canada should not exist. The United States should not exist. Neither Australia nor New Zealand should exist. The same goes for all the other nation-states of the world founded on settler colonialism.

Does this mean we should kick all the newcomers out of their respective countries? No. As I would have it, negotiations would be made between the indigenous peoples on the one side and the settlers on the other, within the context of these places being federations of socialist communities rather than the bourgeois states that they are currently. Full, equal civil rights would be granted to everyone, regardless of race, colour, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation or identity, ability/disability, etc. But the land would be understood to be that of the indigenous people. No one would have the right, for example, to construct a gas pipeline on land deemed sacred to the aboriginals.

The same principles should be applied to Palestine, the one and only state that should exist in that area. Jewish communities should be allowed to live there and be given full, equal civil rights, but the land belongs to the Palestinians: it’s to be for Palestinian Jews, Christians, Muslims, etc., equally. The Jews there should no longer have hegemony over the land.

As for all of that antisemitic nonsense, though, I must say that I find it deeply disturbing that so many people out there, including many well-intentioned ones, have confused Nazi propaganda with some kind of ‘deep, arcane, and forbidden knowledge.’ I’d say the promotion of these ideas is yet another indication of the unsettling resurgence of fascism in today’s world. I’d like to be charitable and say that I’m sure that my FB friend, in believing all of that Rothschild nonsense, is not a Nazi sympathizer, but rather just someone who isn’t as well-informed as she thinks she is.

And this all brings us back to the message of that meme I mentioned in the Introduction: are you, or are you not, sufficiently knowledgeable of history? If you are, perhaps you aren’t convinced that you must be either a Marxist or a liar. Fair enough. But those who do know enough about history, and who also present Nazi propaganda as fact, are liars through and through. They’re also truly despicable people.

Oh, and describing oneself as having Jewish blood while believing in this Nazi nonsense doesn’t exempt one from this criticism. Zelenskyy being a Jew doesn’t in itself disprove that there are Nazis in the Ukrainian government and military, though many liberals in the media try to make that argument; there were Jews who fought for Nazi Germany; there’s Israel’s support of the Ukrainian Nazis; and finally, there are those bizarre things Netanyahu said about the Holocaust.

Now, anyone out there who objects to my judgements about the Nazi narratives, and wants to rant at me in the comment section about how the Rothschild conspiracy theories are ‘true,’ and how the Jews are supposedly behind the birth of both capitalism and communism, go ahead and present links to your ‘proof.’ Deny your Nazi sympathies all you want, but the only thing you’ll be accomplishing is outing yourself to the world as a Nazi. I hope you’re proud of yourself.

The fact is, the rulers of the world aren’t any particular ethnic group, merely because they’re of that ethnicity. Such thinking isn’t only irrational, it’s also a political distraction from the real root of the problem. The global capitalist class runs the world, through their vast wealth, political and media influence, and ownership of land. To be sure, some of them are Jews, but many of them aren’t. In any case, it isn’t their Jewishness or non-Jewishness that matters.

There’s only one minority we need to distrust: the rich.

Analysis of ‘The Lady Vanishes’

The Lady Vanishes is a 1938 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and written by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, based on the 1936 novel The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White. The film stars Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave, with Dame May Whitty and Paul Lukas.

Though filmed in London, The Lady Vanishes caught Hollywood’s attention and Hitchcock moved there soon after its release, for David O Selznick was convinced of Hitchcock’s talent and believed he had a future in Hollywood cinema. Considered one of his most renowned British films, it’s ranked the 35th best British film of the 20th century by the British Film Institute.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, here‘s a link to the full movie, and here‘s a link to White’s novel.

In the novel, the female protagonist’s name is Iris Carr, whereas in the film, she is Iris Henderson (Lockwood). In the film, Henderson gets on a train and says goodbye to her female friends; in the novel, Carr’s friends get on the train while she, tiring of what she feels is oppressive human company, refuses to join them on it.

Instead, Carr goes wandering on the slope of a mountain in “a remote country in Europe (in the film, it’s a fictional country called “Bandrika”), for she is a young Englishwoman on vacation. She gets lost out there, and after only briefly enjoying her solitude, she soon comes to regret it, so she returns to her hotel, where she finds the other English guests similarly annoying.

In the film, Henderson’s only dislike of social convention is the marriage she is only reluctantly participating in. There is a sense, much more pronounced in the novel, of Iris not wanting to go along with social conventions. This reluctance of hers will have much more importance when…the lady vanishes, as we’ll soon see.

Many of the novel’s English guests are replaced in the film with such characters as the cricket-obsessed Charters and Caldicott (played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, respectively), the comic relief of the film who would become very popular with filmgoers and reappear in such films as Night Train to Munich and Dead of Night (the Charles Crichton sequence).

As for Miss Froy (Whitty), in the novel, she’s just a governess and music teacher who accidentally learns of the misdeeds of the story’s antagonists, who then abduct her with the intention of killing her to silence her. In the film, however, she is a spy pretending to be a governess and music teacher. (In the novel, a character named Max Hare, who on-and-off helps Iris, imagines a hypothetical situation in which Froy could be secretly a spy [in Chapter XXV, “Strange Disappearance”].)

In the novel, Hare–a young British engineer who knows the local language–is replaced by Gilbert Redman (Redgrave), a musicologist. Gilbert begins by irritating the hell out of Iris by playing his clarinet to stomping dancers in the hotel room directly above hers. After she has the manager remove Gilbert from his room, the uncouth musicologist imposes himself on her by using her room for his accommodations without her consent, infuriating her all the more. But about halfway into the film, he proves himself the only real friend she has, in that he’s the only one who believes her that Miss Froy exists.

So a recurring theme in both the film and novel is that nothing is as it seems. Gilbert seems a cad, but he becomes not only a true friend to Iris but also her love interest by the end of the film. Miss Froy in the film seems to be a mere governess and music teacher, a sweet and innocent–if rather chatty–middle-aged woman, but it turns out she is a spy. A patient with bandages all over her face, we learn close to the end of the novel and an hour and thirteen minutes into the film, is the abducted Miss Froy. The Todhunters are believed to be honeymooners, but we eventually learn that they are an adulterous couple.

Just before getting on the train to leave the hotel, Iris becomes a tad disoriented after something drops on her head (in the novel, she suffers sunstroke). Her disorientation is used by the schemers who have abducted Miss Froy to make her doubt her memory and perception. I’ll come back to this issue soon enough, and I’ll expand on its significance.

Froy speaks, at a hotel dinner table with Charters and Caldicott, of how much she loves it in Bandrika. The two men, unimpressed with anything other than cricket, have no interest in the country or its culture, so as she is rambling on and on about the snow-capped mountains and the ubiquitous singing, the men rest their heads on their hands in boredom waiting for her to stop. (In the novel, it’s Iris on the train who is annoyed with Froy’s ceaseless chatter).

Froy’s interest in the locals’ music isn’t merely a sentimental one, though, as we eventually learn. As she is listening, from her hotel window that night, to a man singing a tune and playing a guitar, she’s tapping her hands to the music’s rhythm, for in this tune is a secret code she must bring back to England, something connected with certain unsavoury things the movie’s antagonists are planning to do. For this reason, the singer/guitarist is killed, and Froy is to be abducted, the antagonists pretending she doesn’t even exist. These intrigues for which she must be silenced aren’t in the novel, though.

Instead, in the novel, Froy is aware of “a small but growing Communist element” that she euphemistically calls “the leader of the opposition” in the country where she’s working as a governess. This “element” has accused her late, aristocrat employer “of corruption and all sorts of horrors” (which shouldn’t be surprising, since communists consider feudalism to be far worse than capitalism). Froy feels that these political matters are none of her business, so she doesn’t want to take sides. Still, one night she witnesses her employer using her bathroom to wash up (Chapter VIII–“Tea Interval”). She innocently thinks nothing of it, but later on we learn that he was washing blood off of himself after having committed a murder (Chapter XXVI–“Signature”). The aristocrat family employing her don’t know how much she knows, which she might share with the Reds, so the lady must…vanish. Hence, the Baroness in the coupé with Froy and Iris.

Now, when the lady vanishes from her seat on the train, and Iris asks the others in their coupé, they all deny Froy’s existence. Iris is shocked and amazed that they could deny her friend, for Froy has clearly been among them up until Iris, still reeling from her hit on the head (or sunstroke), needed to take a brief nap.

This denial of Froy’s existence extends to everyone on the train, though not necessarily for the same reasons as the Baroness and her family. Still, these people are lying in their denials, denying something so obvious to Iris. In this lying, we see an early example of something that would eventually get the name of gaslighting. Now, The Wheel Spins was published in 1936; The Lady Vanishes came out in 1938; and Patrick Hamilton‘s play, Gas Light, premiered in December of that year. The American movie version of his play, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, came out in 1944 (and incidentally, Dame May Whitty also had a supporting role in that film). So there is an amazing prescience in both the novel and Hitchcock’s film.

Gaslighting isn’t the only thing that The Lady Vanishes is prescient about, though. There is a political subtext in the film suggesting, in allegorical form, the lead-up to WWII. The conspiracy not only to abduct Miss Froy but also to deny her very existence is ignored by the British passengers on the train (apart from Iris and Gilbert, of course), except for when the train is detoured and stopped in a forest, where the British are now forced to confront the antagonists, who plan to shoot them all. These antagonists can be seen to represent such European fascists as those of Nazi Germany, Italy under Mussolini (recall the Italian magician in Iris’s cabin, Signor Doppo, played by Philip Leaver, who gets into a fight with Gilbert over the acquisition of Froy’s eyeglasses), Romania, Hungary, Poland, and Francoist Spain.

This late involvement of the other British passengers in Iris’s and Gilbert’s confrontation with the Bandrika conspirators can be paralleled with British appeasement of, if not outright support of, fascism in the 1930s (recall that infamous footage of members of the British royal family doing Nazi salutes). One needn’t look to Chamberlain‘s appeasement of Hitler in Munich, which happened just a week or so before the release of The Lady Vanishes.

[Note how Chamberlain-like Mr. Todhunter wants to avoid conflict with the antagonists right to his very death, when he foolishly gets out of the train to wave a handkerchief as a flag of surrender, then gets shot. I’m as anti-war as they come, but even I know when an enemy is so implacable, as the film’s antagonists are, that war with them is unavoidable.]

The fact is that fascism has always been used to further the interests of the ruling class, regardless of whether they’re capitalists or feudal aristocrats like the Baroness and her family in the film and novel. Britain and the other western capitalist countries began to oppose the fascists only when the latter began muscling in on the former’s imperialist turf, rather like when Charters picks up a pistol to shoot at the antagonists only after one of them has shot him in the hand.

So the climactic shoot-out in the train in the woods can be seen as prescient of, and therefore in this sense allegorical of, WWII, or of political conflicts in general, anyway. It is in this political context that we can begin to understand not only the true meaning of the gaslighting of Iris but also her sense of social alienation and Froy’s abduction, disappearance, and denial of existence. This understanding applies in both the film and the novel. In Chapter XXXII–“The Dream,” we learn of how “When she [Iris] was a child she suffered from an unsuspected inferiority complex, due to the difference between her lot and that of other children.” This feeling of being different, of not being able to fit in with other people, can lead to a tendency to see the world differently from the mainstream crowd, and to see injustice where others don’t see it.

How often are criminal acts, the ones that really matter, hidden from the public view, as Froy’s abduction and disappearance can be seen to symbolize? The ruling classes, the imperialists, the settler-colonialists, and the fascists commit the worst crimes in the world, and through their wealth and power, they usually get away with their crimes. Indeed, in the novel, Hare tells Iris that the Baroness will use her influence to evade being implicated in the conspiracy now that the doctor and his assistants have been arrested (Chapter XXXIII–“The Herald”).

Similarly, the powerful use their influence to marginalize all those who would challenge power structures and demand inquiries into any injustices committed, as Iris is isolated when she demands that Miss Froy be found. Evidence of crimes is eliminated or denied, as is the very existence of Miss Froy. Such an elimination of evidence is happening right as I type this, with the cutting-off of communications in Gaza while the genocide of the Palestinians is going on; elsewhere, many still deny that the Holocaust ever happened.

All of this brings us back to the central theme of the film, which I brought up earlier: nothing is as it seems. Dr. Hartz (Lukas) seems helpful to Iris and Gilbert, yet he participates in the gaslighting and intends to drug the two. In fact, the “nun” (bizarrely wearing high heels and played by Catherine Lacey), who under Hartz’s orders is to drug the drinks of Iris and Gilbert, never does so; our two protagonists fool Hartz by pretending to be unconscious until he leaves their cabin.

The nun is not only pretending to be such, but also to be deaf and dumb; furthermore, her loyalty to Hartz and the other conspirators is only apparent and ephemeral, for as soon as she realizes that Iris, Gilbert, and Froy are British, her own British patriotism is kindled, so she quickly switches from the antagonists’ to the protagonists’ side.

Hers is an example of the many British passengers waiting so long before switching to the good side, these Chamberlains of the film. The Todhunters don’t want to acknowledge Froy for fear of an inquiry leading to publicity and a scandalous exposure of their affair to their spouses. Charters and Caldicott won’t acknowledge Froy for fear of the resulting inquiry delaying the train, making them miss their so-fetishized cricket match (which ends up being cancelled due to flooding, anyway).

We see in these examples how selfishness gets in the way of justice, and it’s the obstinacy of our social misfits like Iris who ensure justice in spite of the odds. After all, she’s such a misfit, at the last minute she decides not to get together with her fiancé when back in England, preferring the uncouth Gilbert instead.

Making Froy into a spy, rather than just someone who’s innocently stumbled upon a criminal act without realizing its significance, was an improvement on the novel. Ending the film with a reunion of her–playing the coded tune on the piano–with Iris and Gilbert was also an improvement on the novel’s rather dull, anticlimactic ending, with Froy arriving at home and reuniting with “Mater,” “Pater,” and their dog, Sock, which is rather drawn-out and sentimentalized. The story works best as a political thriller, showing how going against the grain is often the best way to win out against the wicked in the world.

The Danger of Counterrevolution

Introduction

Thanks to bourgeois propaganda, when the average person hears a communist say a word like counterrevolution, it is assumed that the speaker is paranoid about his ‘idealistic’ system being overthrown and replaced with something ‘reasonable’ like bourgeois liberal democracy. Recall, for example, the scene in The Last Emperor, when a communist shouts at Puyi that he is “a traitor,…a collaborator, and…a counterrevolutionary!” (You can find the lines almost mid-way into the script here; I can’t find a YouTube video of the scene, but I remember how hysterically the man shouts the line.)

The fact is, though, that as the past thirty to thirty-five years have shown, the danger of counterrevolution is no paranoid fantasy, and ‘liberal democracy’ is not all it’s cracked up to be, as I intend to prove.

Stalin, during a speech at The Seventh Enlarged Plenum of the E.C.C.I. (December 1926), famously said, “What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.” 

Such a black reaction is exactly what has happened in the world.

Since I don’t wish to go through another rehashing of my defenses of socialism and communism, you can look at these, Dear Reader. My focus here is on how the post-Soviet world has been an unmitigated disaster, one that makes the faults and problems of socialism trivial in comparison.

New World Order

When George HW Bush did his “Towards a New World Order” speech on…egad!…September 11th, 1990, he was talking about the emerging post-Soviet world, since the West knew that the USSR was soon to be dissolved (for this was their plan all along–counterrevolution, with Gorbachev‘s help). Though “new world order” wasn’t meant to be understood as the totalitarian world government of the conspiracy theory, this new world order that emerged in the 1990s would certainly have disastrous consequences.

In his speech, Bush was talking about a new era of international cooperation, promoting peace and democracy, and all that kind of bullshit, all while the run-up to the Persian Gulf War was going on. We can always rely on politicians to put a positive spin on something that will ultimately prove diabolical. As would become apparent soon enough, this post-Cold War world order would actually be one of unipolarity, with the US as the one world superpower, the global policeman.

Though of course I don’t agree with the conspiracy theorists about the exact character of this new world order (i.e., such absurd ideas that it’s based on Satanic secret societies, the end-time emergence of the Antichrist, etc.), I would characterize this totalitarian, one-world government as being based simply in Washington, DC. We’re dealing here with plain-old American, capitalist imperialism, a globe-spanning empire with US military bases all over the world, backed by its quisling NATO allies.

Accordingly, among the first things we saw these imperialists do, after reuniting Germany and thus including the former East Germany in NATO, was to lie about not moving NATO “one inch” eastward, when moving eastward would most certainly be the plan. Now, NATO allies, former members of the Warsaw Pact, are right against Russia’s border, antagonizing and provoking the nuclear-armed country.

Similarly, the former Yugoslavia was being carved up. All attempts to preserve socialism in the area were being thwarted, with a socialist champion in Slobodan Milošević being demonized in the media. This demonizing would soon become a standard way of manufacturing consent for more and more wars, a normalizing of pro-war sentiment that is getting increasingly dangerous.

The False Dichotomy of Conservative vs. Liberal

Before I continue discussing the depredations of post-Soviet imperialist war-mongering, I need to discuss a popular political myth: the confusion of liberals with socialists. It is assumed, far too often, that the American Democratic Party, the Liberal Party in Canada, the Labour Party in the UK, George Soros, etc. are on the left.

THIS IS NONSENSE.

Just because the Republicans in the US, the Tories and Canada and the UK, etc., are further to the right than their liberal counterparts, this doesn’t make their opposition way over at the other extreme. Their liberal opposition is ‘leftist’ (if it can be called that at all) only as a matter of degree…and by degree, it’s usually only a few degrees left of the Attila-the-Hun political right, which should tell you something.

It’s truly remarkable, especially over the past fifteen or so years, how much more conservatives and liberals have agreed, on most policies, than they have disagreed. Nevertheless, the mainstream media in its usual mendacity exaggerates the significance of any disagreements we see between conservatives and liberals. I’m not a fan of Noam Chomsky, in whom we can see an example of a ‘leftist’ who’s really just a liberal, but he does have one useful quote that fits the occasion: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

I wrote an article on the liberal mindset, which you can look at here, Dear Reader, but I want to go more into the problem now. Liberals are not on the left; rather, they bend and sway left or right depending on which way the political wind happens to be blowing at the time. Back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, liberals tended to sway towards the moderate left. In the 90s, they drifted to the centre, and since the 2000s, they have drifted further and further to the right. Now, liberals are virtually indistinguishable from conservatives, except perhaps on such social issues as the support of transgender rights, and as for economic reforms, they’ll advocate raising taxes on the rich, acknowledging that an unregulated market is far from infallible. Apart from these, the difference between the two tends to be a matter of…to Trump, or not to Trump…

As far as the issues that really matter to the world are concerned, though–keeping the class system intact, as well as furthering the interests of imperialism and Western hegemony–liberals are quite at one with conservatives. Prominent Democrats supported the Iraq War (including Hillary Clinton, Biden, and John Kerry); liberals like Hillary Clinton supported the US/NATO ruining of Libya, they supported the destruction of Syria (even cheering for the Trump administration’s bombing of the country), and now, they support Ukrainian Nazis, even to the point of the Canadian Liberal Party’s embarrassing celebration of a Ukrainian ex-Nazi from WWII!!! (Recall also Chrystia Freeland‘s Ukrainian grandfather, who worked for a pro-Nazi newspaper back in WWII.)

Still, the myth that liberals are far detached from conservatives persists, and both conservatives and liberals proudly distinguish themselves from each other. Conservatives often idiotically call liberals “communists” and “socialists,” and liberals consider men like Trump to be utter abominations in politics, even though the things the Trump administration did–awful things, to be sure–were essentially the same things Obama did and Biden is doing.

As surreal as it is to distinguish two approximately equal sides, it is nonetheless a politically useful thing for the ruling class to do, especially if liberals can be convinced that a right-wing policy is acceptable when liberals get behind it, whereas if conservatives support it, only then is it evil.

Examples of this double standard include NAFTA, which George HW Bush originally tried to push through, but couldn’t quite do it because of considerable Democratic opposition at the time. Then Clinton signed it in late 1993 without much difficulty. NAFTA devastated Mexico’s rural sector and increased poverty. This is the kind of thing that began to happen in the post-Soviet world, with a weakened socialist movement to curb the excesses of capitalism.

Elsewhere, Republicans would have loved to cut huge gashes out of Welfare during the Reagan years, but again, Democratic opposition prevented it at the time. Then Clinton came along, and in the mid-1990s he gutted Welfare with little, if any, Democratic opposition. Again, this kind of thing would have been much harder to do if the Soviet Union had still existed, and with it the threat of more socialist revolution if the capitalist class continued to provoke the working class.

The Clinton administration also interfered with the Russian election in 1996, ensuring that America’s puppet, Yeltsin, would stay in power instead of voting back in the Communist Party, still popular with many Russians (and there are right-wing morons out there who think that the Democrats are all “communists”!). Poll after poll has consistently shown that at least slight majorities of Russians preferred the Soviet system to the current one, or at least dislike the current one, while feeling some nostalgia for the Soviet one. It’s easy to see why there was such nostalgia. An attempt was made in 1993 to bring down Yeltsin’s government and restore the Soviet system, but he brought out the tanks and prevented it from happening. No, the return to capitalism in Russia was no triumph of freedom and democracy, and it wasn’t “the end of history”: it was a counterrevolution, plain and simple.

Normalizing War

In the lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, though many were so shaken up by 9/11 (including myself, I must guiltily admit) that we supported the invasion, many others had the good sense–and no illusions about the true motives of US imperialists, of which I, at the time, was quite ignorant–to oppose the upcoming war. When the invasion happened, and Saddam’s supposed WMDs were nowhere to be found, the world was righteously angry with the Bush administration for its lies, as well as those of the Labour Party’s leader, Tony Blair.

The world had already demonized Milošević, who recall was found innocent of war crimes. Saddam was demonized in the media for supposedly having WMDs and working to enrich uranium to make nuclear weapons, and it turned out that there was no evidence of any of these dangers. Has the Western world since learned from our mistakes in hastily vilifying those heads of state that the American government wants us to vilify? Not at all, it would seem.

They demonized Gaddafi, and with the destruction of Libya came his sodomizing with a bayonet. Obama may have regretted the debacle in that country, but his remorse rings hollow given the subsequent demonizing of Bashar al-Assad and the ravaging of Syria soon after. Liberals and fake leftists backed this ‘civil war’ in part because the Obama administration was behind the plan for regime change, imagining that the fraudulent White Helmets were doing a legitimate service. Currently, the US army is controlling a third of Syria and stealing the country’s oil and wheat, while the media is mostly silent about these crimes.

With the multiplying of all these wars, something once abominated from the days of the hippies to the protest against the Iraq War, anti-war activism has since become scanted. There was minimal outcry against the war in Yemen, while the governments of the US, Canada, the UK, and European countries were selling billions of dollars in weapons to the Saudis so they could kill Yemenis. While some, during a DNC rally back in 2016, were shouting “No more wars!” during Leon Panetta’s speech, other voices were chanting “USA! USA!”; in a video I remember seeing of the situation, the voices of the latter group were drowning out those of the former group.

…and to bring matters to the worst state they could possibly be in, the US and its allies have, for the past five to ten years, been provoking two nuclear-armed countries, Russia and China, all because their rise means the decline of the US as the sole superpower in the world. Don’t listen to the propaganda against these two countries being ‘autocratic’: the US, with its rule-by-the-rich, dual party system, its surveillance of the people, its extreme income inequality, and its censorship of the media and internet (to say nothing of 90% of its ownership by only six corporations, who therefore control the access of information to Americans), is hardly in any position to be judging the democratic faults of Russia, China, or any other country on the Earth.

Again, there is far too little opposition to Western hostilities against Russia and China, which are far more threatened by the US and its allies than vice versa. Russia and China don’t have their navies along the east and west coasts of the US, but above I mentioned the NATO buildup along the Russian border, and American military bases are surrounding much of China in what has been compared to a noose.

This is beyond dangerous. The one peace dividend we were supposed to have gotten from the dissolution of the Soviet Union was that at least the Cold War was over, and so we didn’t need to worry about nuclear war with Russia anymore. Now, we’re in a new Cold War with both Russia and China. I remember when the Doomsday Clock was set to two minutes to midnight: now, it’s at ninety seconds to midnight.

Neoliberalism

As we can see, nothing good has been gained from the counterrevolution against the socialist states of the twentieth century. People are by no means freer. Many have been plunged into poverty, while a few rich oligarchs have risen to the top. Cutting taxes on the rich and deregulating the market have not brought about economic prosperity to the world as was promised by the market fundamentalists; in fact, we’ve had two major economic crises over the past fifteen years. The neoliberal agenda is the true god that failed.

…and yet, millions are still fooled by the fairy tale of the “free market.”

Again, I do not wish to repeat all my arguments that debunk the idea of “true capitalism” as being the “free market.” If you want to see those, Dear Reader, you can go here, here, and here. Even market fundamentalists have the modicum of intelligence needed to understand that the current political way of doing things has been an absolute nightmare.

They just can’t admit that the problem is capitalism.

Owning private property (factories, farmland, office buildings, apartment buildings, etc.,…not toothbrushes or underwear!) is part of capitalism. Producing commodities to maximize profits is capitalism. Accumulating capital is capitalism, hence the name of this particular mode of production. How much, or how little, the state is involved in the economy is completely irrelevant if the above conditions apply.

The past thirty years have been nothing less than a disaster–a capitalist disaster called neoliberalism, which means the new liberalizing of the market. Yes, neoliberalism, like imperialism (hence, all these wars), is a right-wing ideology. This is part of why conservatives and liberals are far closer to each other than is commonly assumed.

This capitalist disaster has hurt us both locally and globally. We see it locally in such forms as the homelessness epidemic, a problem exacerbated recently by the Covid pandemic, which in turn exacerbated the injustice of the superrich getting even wealthier through the profits made from the vaccines and online shopping on sites like Amazon.

The global hurt of this disaster has been in the form of imperialism, as I brought up above. The market fundamentalists tend to deny how imperialist war and plunder are connected with capitalism, since they naïvely think that capitalism is just about Mom and Pop store owners innocently buying and selling things on a market, and that warmongering is just a ‘government thing,’ rather than acknowledge that the government works for the capitalists.

On the other side of the coin, such liberals as the hippies dream of a world at peace, and wring their hands asking why we can’t have peace and love, yet they make no attempt to answer why we can’t. To solve the problem of war, we must understand the problem, and an understanding of the problem of war must centre on economics.

The survival of the capitalist system depends on endless expansion, to offset the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This means that when markets dry up in one’s own country, one must seek out markets in other countries. Exporting capital to other countries is one of the major factors resulting in imperialism, as Lenin argued. The truth of this should be easy to see when we consider the real reason for the Iraq War, which was for the imperialists to get their filthy hands on Iraqi oil, not that nonsense about ‘freedom and democracy.’

Similarly, the real motive behind achieving regime change in Libya was to stop Gaddafi from creating financial independence from the West in Africa by establishing the continent’s own currency. The purpose of regime change in Syria was to stop Assad from making business deals with Russia and Iran, two major economic rivals of the US, over Syrian oil, when the US wanted an oil pipeline to be built to provide Europe with the oil.

Part of the purpose of the US and NATO provoking Russia to invade Ukraine was to end German use of cheaper Russian oil, and to have Germany buy the more expensive American oil instead. Hence, the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, of which–along with Norway’s help–was most obviously the doing of the American government…they practically confessed to it.

…and all of this bellicosity against China? The American government wants to stop the Chinese government and industry from profiting off of TSMC. The building of a new TSMC in Arizona is in the works, along with the hiring of many Taiwanese there, in a desperate attempt to replicate the success of the original TSMC. There has even been talk, if a war with China happens, of the US army bombing TSMC in Taiwan! So much for ‘defending Taiwan from China,’ or for defending ‘freedom and democracy.’

Ultimately, imperialist war is linked with capitalism because war is a business. Smedley Butler knew this ages ago. As all of this killing has been going on, weapons manufacturers like Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, and Northrop Grumman have been laughing all the way to the bank. These companies must keep the war going to perpetuate a maximizing of profit. To know what’s going on in the world, follow the money.

These defence contractors are currently capitalizing big time on Israel’s current, ongoing genocide in Gaza. This killing could provoke a larger conflagration in the region, making WWIII even deadlier than it will be with China and Russia.

Conclusion

Though the socialist states of the twentieth century certainly had their share of faults and problems (particularly after the death of Stalin, and these problems were at their worst under Gorbachev’s leadership), they at least were a counterbalance to, and represented a hope of one day defeating, Western imperialism. They gave support to liberation movements, in the Third World especially, and they fought the hardest against fascism, and after WWII, the capitalist West took the surviving Nazis in and gave them lucrative jobs in NATO, NASA, and the American and West German governments, punishing only a minimum of them.

At their best, the socialist states also provided a safety net for the poor, provided free healthcare, free education up to university, and universal housing and employment. With the demise of most of the socialist states, there has been a sad decline in the enjoyment of these social benefits.

Meanwhile, the imperialist war machine has gone on for decades unchecked, as I demonstrated above, with manufactured consent for war largely replacing the peace movement, and uncritical acceptance of the demonizing of the leaders of any country who dare to defy the rule of the American empire.

These evils all resulted from counterrevolution, and they all prove how real the danger of counterrevolution really is. If we socialists ever manage to spread communism around the world the way we did in the twentieth century, we must be all the more determined to root out and prevent the spread of reactionary ideas…not because we “hunger for power,” but because we hunger for world liberation.

Analysis of The Dark Knight Trilogy

Introduction

Given the subversive interpretation of these three movies that I’m about to make, I find it fitting that the actor cast to play billionaire/playboy Bruce Wayne and his alter ego, the Batman, should be the same actor who only five years earlier played yuppie psychopath Patrick Bateman, a personification of the cruelties of capitalism, as I observed in my analysis of that film.

Though director Christopher Nolan is undoubtedly one of the best talents in filmmaking over the past two decades, he’s also a very bourgeois one, and this trilogy of films solidly demonstrates bourgeois liberal values, if, on occasion, in a somewhat conflicted way. Though Batman, Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman), Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes, and later, Maggie Gyllenhaal), Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine), Robin John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) are, of course, supposed to be the heroes, and Ra’s al Ghul (Liam Neeson), the Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy), the mob, the Joker (Heath Ledger), Bane (Tom Hardy), and Catwoman (Anne Hathaway) are supposed to be the villains, there’s a moral ambiguity in the Batman story that leaves a huge grey area between the black and white of stereotypical good and evil.

For the true centre of evil, as powerfully given in these three movies, is Gotham City itself, a city said–repeatedly by those who wish to destroy it–to be impossible to save. A city in which the hero, a billionaire and a glorified, militarized policeman, represents justice, and in which many are so poor and desperate that they have to resort to crime in order to survive, is one in which the mob (i.e., criminal businesses) rules–this tells us all we need to know about what Gotham City symbolizes…capitalism.

As we know, what prompted the reboot of the Batman franchise was the disastrous failure of Joel Schumacher‘s Batman and Robin (1997), which gave us the generally loathed, campy presentation of Batman, as opposed to the preferred dark antihero version as seen in Nolan’s trilogy. A nauseatingly fitting song in the soundtrack of Schumacher’s film is “Gotham City,” by R. Kelly, with a lyric that includes the line “A city of justice, a city of love, a city of peace…” a line that is as totally misrepresentative of the fictional city as it is barf-inducing in its mawkishness.

If Gotham City is a place of justice, love, and peace, why is Batman needed? Why are villains like Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy, and Bane there? No, the very last things that Gotham City represents are justice, love, and peace: its name, which to me suggests a pun on Gothic, has connotations of darkness and evil that Schumacher’s film willfully avoided presenting to moviegoers in its proper tone.

In terms of theme and its presentation of the subject matter, Nolan’s trilogy has an aesthetically appealing ABA structure, as in much classical music: statement, departure, return. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises share not only references to Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows, if not outright presenting them, but also the theme of fear. The Dark Knight, on the other hand, has the theme of escalation, and as far as the Joker and Harvey Two-Face are concerned, the latter is referred to and briefly shown in Rises, while the former is never referred to or shown, not even once, though the effects of his actions are thoroughly felt in Rises.

Batman Begins

With the establishment of the fear of bats of young Bruce Wayne (played by Gus Lewis), we are also introduced to his father, Thomas Wayne (played by Linus Roache). Billionaire Thomas is a doctor, head of Wayne Enterprises, and a liberal through and through. As a kind and charitable man, he is not only a child’s ideal father, he’s also the exemplar of bourgeois generosity. Still, all these virtues are a mask, a distraction from the plain and simple fact that billionaires simply shouldn’t exist, especially in a city riddled with poverty, desperation, and crime.

What must be emphasized in such a world is that the only difference worth noting between businesses like Wayne Enterprises and the mob is that the former are law-abiding capitalists, while the latter are not law-abiding capitalists. As far as law enforcement is concerned, the cops touch neither group of capitalists because they are paid for through two channels: the former, through taxes; the latter, through bribes. All three groups–legitimate business, the mob, and the law enforcers–keep the capitalist, class system intact.

The first and third of these groups thus represent the government-regulated forms of capitalism, while the mob represents the deregulated, “free market” form. Incidentally, there will emerge another character, who in his lawless, privatized form of law enforcement, will also represent that “free market” form of capitalism…the Batman.

That we.see such an intermingling of the state-regulated vs. deregulated forms of capitalism–sometimes cooperating and complementing each other, sometimes fighting with each other–in this trilogy makes it a perfect portrayal of our neoliberal world.

It’s interesting to compare and contrast the Thomas Wayne of this film with him in Joker, the film I looked at here, and more in depth here. Nolan’s Thomas is so kind, gentle, and liberal, whereas the Thomas of the 2019 film (played by Brett Cullen, who also played Congressman Byron Gilley in The Dark Knight Rises) is gruff, mean-spirited, and even Trumpish. Could it be that the superrich and those in power are…two-faced? (For reasons that should be obvious to you, Dear Reader, I’ll be exploring this idea much more in the Dark Knight section of this analysis.)

With Joe Chill‘s killing of young Bruce Wayne’s parents, it’s only natural that he, as a kid, will be focused on only his own pain. His focus on his own trauma stays with him until his young adulthood, when he considers shooting Chill when he’s about to be released early in exchange for testifying against crime boss Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson). A woman hired by Falcone shoots Chill instead.

It takes Rachel Dawes, now no longer just a childhood friend of Bruce’s, but a DA, to get him to understand that it’s the mafia of Gotham, with their control of the economy, police, and politicians, that drives the poor to such desperation that people like Chill rob and kill. Up until this point, we’ve been sympathizing with Bruce; now, we finally manage to spare some sympathy for the poor.

What’s not acknowledged in this liberal film is that Bruce Wayne’s family is part of the problem. The rich become that way not through hard work, contrary to popular belief, but through exploitation of the working class. The money the rich get through their profits, surplus value, is just money not paid to their employees. Put another way, the rich get rich through stealing from their overworked, underpaid workers…and it’s all legal.

Though as I said, this reality isn’t acknowledged in the film, that doesn’t mean there are no Freudian slips that occasionally give away the hidden meaning. William Earle (Rutger Hauer), CEO of Wayne Enterprises, tells young Bruce around the time of the funeral of Thomas and Martha Wayne that he’ll be watching over “the empire” until Bruce grows up and can take over. Don’t get me started on how capitalism leads to empire. Read this and this instead.

As a young man, Bruce travels to the Far East to learn about such things as hunger and the drive to commit crimes. Bruce, you’re still a billionaire: you can take a vacation from starvation and desperation any time you like; the scrawny, dirty East Asians all around you cannot.

His hanging out with and helping criminals steal show, in symbolic form, the blurred line between law-abiding capitalists and the criminal businesses of the mafia. Still, when arrested, Bruce insists that he not a “犯人.” In a Bhutan prison, he often has to fight off the local prisoners, who just see in him a rich white man. It doesn’t matter whether or not they know he’s billionaire Bruce Wayne: in the Third World, anyone from the First World is correctly understood to be the 1% of the Earth, regardless of whether they happen to be of the ruling class, the middle class, or even the working class of the richer countries.

The League of Shadows learns not only of Bruce being in East Asia, but also of him fighting off groups of prisoners, so “Henri Ducard” goes to the prison to offer Bruce membership in the League, as well as training, and “a path.” Upon release from the prison, Bruce goes to find Ducard in the mountains.

Bruce learns all he needs to know about engaging groups of fighters and taking them all out. He learns that “training is nothing” and “will is everything.” Ducard also tells Bruce of how, many years back, he lost his “one true love,” something that will be developed in the third film, one of many examples of the ABA structure of the trilogy that I mentioned above.

When Bruce finishes his training and proves himself to be the best pupil of the League of Shadows, he is disappointed to learn that he is expected to practice extrajudicial killings. The liberal in Bruce, something he learned from his father and from Rachel, cannot just execute a man without there first being a trial for him.

Ducard insists that in a world of corrupt bureaucrats, there is no such thing as a fair trial. What we see in the contradiction between Bruce’s liberal point of view and the hard line of the League of Shadows is what essentially amounts to a straw man, if looked at more closely. The hard line is portrayed as cruel, extreme, and unreasonable compared to the liberal position. This becomes especially apparent when Bruce learns that he’s expected to lead the League of Shadows into Gotham City and destroy it, which of course he’ll never do.

When we remember that Gotham, permeated throughout with corruption and crime, represents capitalism, which cannot be reformed or saved, the League of Shadows’ position is not so unreasonable or extremist. Also, the film portrays the group of assassins as mere destroyers, rather than revolutionaries who would rebuild a just society on the ruins of the old, capitalist one. We thus see a narrow Overton Window that misrepresents our options as only capitalism, or nihilist destruction…no room for socialism.

Wayne’s belief that there are some good people in Gotham, as against Ducard’s insistence that there isn’t even one good person there, reminds one of Abraham’s negotiating with God (Genesis 18:20-33) over whether there are any in Sodom and Gomorrah who are worth sparing the destruction of the sinful cities by fire and brimstone. Such a suggestion reinforces the idea that Gotham City is beyond redemption, in spite of Bruce’s protestations. Note in this connection the “immortality” of Ra’s al Ghul (Ducard’s secret identity, as we learn soon enough), which makes him rather Godlike in relation to Bruce-as-Abraham.

Bruce escapes and destroys the home of Ra’s al Ghul, thinking he’s left him for dead, too (though actually killing an Asian decoy played by Ken Watanabe), and saving “Ducard.” Bruce returns to Gotham to take over the helm of Wayne Enterprises, only to learn that William Earle, thinking Bruce is dead, is making the company go public. In this we see how Earle, another cutthroat capitalist, is trying to wrest the power of Wayne Enterprises from the Wayne family.

Bruce discusses with Alfred his plan to save Gotham from the mob by presenting himself as a symbol, wearing a mask to conceal his identity and thus keep safe those he cares about. Since bats have always frightened him, he’ll dress in a Batsuit. By ordering the different parts from various manufacturers in places all over the world, he hopes it will be harder to trace them all to him. Adding to this all of the equipment he’ll get from Lucius Fox (the cape, the utility belt, the Batmobile, etc.) and the cave beneath Wayne Manor, the Batman is born.

Note how the Batmobile has been reimagined to become “the Tumbler,” essentially a kind of tank. This ties in well with what I said above, that Batman is a glorified, privatized, militarized policeman. The police, properly understood, don’t ‘fight crime’ per se, or ‘enforce justice’ so much as they protect the interests of the capitalist class. The recent militarizing of the police, a perfect preparation for any attempts at proletarian revolution, has made them particularly threatening to the common people.

It is in this context that we should understand the Dark Knight, a metaphor expressing the idea of protecting a king, a wealthy, landowning ruler. It should come as no surprise that this Dark Knight should be a billionaire, called “Master Wayne” by his butler. This masked vigilante is privatized law enforcement helping the cops; this combination of private and state law enforcement is symbolic of the combination of free enterprise and state-regulated economies, just the right combination for the convenience of the ruling class: “free market” (i.e., low taxes and minimal social programs, to ensure a maximization of profit at the expense of the poor) when convenient, and government involvement (e.g., state subsidies for corporations) when convenient…the essence of neoliberalism.

Batman’s fighting of the mob, who are just another kind of capitalist (as I’ve argued elsewhere), and his helping the cops to fight the mob, should thus be seen as different factions of the capitalist class competing over who will rule the city. Some represent a more state-regulated version of capitalism (the cops), while others, in their relative or extreme lawlessness, represent the “free market” version, Batman and the mob.

Note how the “free market” representatives can be ‘good’ (Batman) or evil (the mob). The representatives of the state-regulated version of capitalism (the cops) can be horribly corrupt, too, as becomes especially apparent in the second movie.

Now, with the excesses of this kind of world, with the extreme wealthy on one side, as well as the mob and the corrupt cops, and the desperately poor and exploited on the other side, it is inevitable that all of these contradictions and conflicts will lead to massive numbers of cases of mental illness.

Here’s where Dr. Jonathan Crane, the Scarecrow, comes in.

As a psychiatrist with a fear toxin, a hallucinogenic drug, that he uses to induce insanity on anyone deemed a threat or just because it’s convenient to do so, Crane is an example of the corruption in the field of psychiatry that I discussed here. Though he thinks that his collaboration with Ra’s al Ghul, to threaten Gotham with his fear toxin, is meant to hold the city to ransom, it will actually be used by the League of Shadows to make the people of Gotham tear each other apart with fear and madness, thus destroying the city as Ra’s al Ghul intended.

Of course, Batman also uses fear to fight crime, as we see him do to Arnold Flass (played by Mark Boone Junior), a corrupt cop working for Falcone and corrupt Commissioner Loeb. Though in the scene in question, we see Batman intimidating a cop, Batman as privatized cop (even though he insists he doesn’t look like one!) is simply doing what we know regular cops do all the time, those bullies with bullets. And as the ‘good,’ privatized cop going after the corrupt state police, we see another example of the neoliberal agenda in The Dark Knight trilogy.

While Batman is one mask that Bruce wears, another is the act he puts on as Bruce Wayne, billionaire playboy, going about everywhere in public with beautiful women on his arms. But of course, this playboy persona isn’t the “real” Bruce, either, since our hero is far too noble to be chasing skirt in earnest. Besides, he’s still in love with Rachel.

And since Rachel is the love interest of this conservative trilogy, she must also be the damsel in distress…in spite of, or rather because of, her pluck as an assistant DA fighting corruption in Gotham. First, Falcone hires some muscle to kill her, from whom Batman saves her; then, after she’s exposed to Crane’s fear toxin upon her discovery that it is being put into the city’s water supply, Batman has to rush her to the Batcave to give her the antidote Fox has made.

What’s interesting is how interconnected all the actors are in the conspiracy to destroy Gotham City. Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows are at the centre of the conspiracy, but not only is the Scarecrow involved–as mentioned above–with his fear toxin, but also Wayne Enterprises is, through the use of a powerful microwave emitter that will vaporize the liquid toxin so all of the people of Gotham breathe it in and go mad with fear.

Though Bruce doesn’t know about the microwave emitter until the climax of the film, William Earle and other senior staff at Wayne Enterprises surely know about it, some of them–including Earle in all probability, since he fires Fox for asking too many questions about it–also being in on the conspiracy to at least some extent. That these capitalists, along with a corrupt psychiatrist and at least some corrupt cops like Flass, have at least an inkling of the plot to destroy capitalist Gotham is symbolic of how it’s been predicted that capitalism will one day destroy itself through its own contradictions.

Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows, on the other hand, represent a leftist revolutionary movement, though in this bourgeois film, such a political movement can only be portrayed unsympathetically. They’re just destroyers, bent only on tearing down the old, oppressive order. As such, they’re more like nihilists or Trotskyists, since Ra’s al Ghul’s boast that the League of Shadows has existed throughout history, tearing down one decadent city after another, sounds a lot like permanent revolution. There’s never an interest in rebuilding society along socialist lines, such as providing universal free education and healthcare, subsidized housing for all, 100% employment, and a social safety net for the poor. A bourgeois film like this one is content with such omissions.

Wayne Enterprises having the microwave emitter, which can be used to make the Gotham population kill each other through maniacal fear, has its parallel in the third film (recall the trilogy’s ABA structure) with the fusion reactor, ostensibly meant to provide eco-friendly energy, but which can also be converted into a nuclear bomb that Bane will use to destroy Gotham. And Bane is an excommunicated member of the League of Shadows.

Part of the destruction of Gotham as a nerve-centre of capitalism is the burning-down of Wayne Manor by the League of Shadows, an arson even Bruce himself has spoken of wanting to commit. If revolutionaries don’t destroy capitalism, it will destroy itself by its own contradictions. But of course, liberals will fight to keep capitalism alive by attempting to reform it, either by social democrat means or through the libertarian ideal of market fundamentalism. We see this symbolically through the joint efforts of Gordon and Batman defeating Ra’s al Ghul.

…and one day, when Batman retires, Bruce can have a real love life–but with Rachel?

The Dark Knight

Batman Begins ends with Gordon, promoted to lieutenant, warning Batman of the dangers of escalation and giving him the Joker’s card. This anticipates not only the arrival of the Joker, of course, but also the main theme of the second film: escalation.

Normally, we think of the Joker as being just a murdering psychopath, a mad dog chasing tires and foaming at the mouth. Now, unlike the Joker whom Joaquin Phoenix played, Heath Ledger’s Joker has very little backstory to explain how he became a homicidal maniac, apart from his two contradictory stories for how he got his Glasgow smile.

However he got those scars, be it from an abusive father (far more likely than him giving them to himself, in an attempt to appease the woman he loved), they’re an obvious sign of trauma that, among other things presumably, drove him to a life of crime. Bourgeois ideology have very little interest in exploring the real roots of crime in class conflict; hence, we get very little, if any, backstory on the Joker, as we do in the 2019 film.

What we do know of this Joker, though, is surprising. Consider who he attacks throughout the movie. We see him and his gang of wearers of clown masks rob a bank…run by the mob. He kills cops and imitators of Batman, who as I’ve said above is a glorified cop himself. We’ve never sympathized with the mafia, and sympathy for the cops has recently–at best–been dwindling. By the end of the film, the mayhem he’s caused results in the bulk of Gotham’s criminals behind bars, aided by the myth of Harvey Dent’s heroism. Is the Joker the secret hero of this film?

Now, the Joker isn’t an anarchist in the strict sense of the term. We don’t see him set up the anarchist, i.e., stateless, version of socialism because, as I said about Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows, the bourgeois liberal ideology of these films insists on an Overton Window narrow enough to exclude even the contemplation of socialist possibilities. This is because ‘There Is No Alternative to capitalism,’ apparently.

The Joker does, however, personify the anarchist solution to the problem of capitalism, if only in a stereotyped form. He speaks of the only sensible way to live being one without rules, and that he’s an “agent of chaos.” Now, such ideas are not truly anarchist, of course, but they are stereotypically associated with anarchism (meaning “no rulers,” not “no rules,” actually), and this film’s bourgeois agenda would have you continue to believe the misleading conception of anarchism, in the hopes that you’ll never consider such a radical solution to society’s ills. His saying to scarred Harvey, “Introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos,” is meant to reinforce the stereotyped association of chaos with anarchy.

At the same time, who does the Joker kill, for the most part? Cops, mafia men and their bosses (criminal capitalists, remember), lawyers, judges, anyone in a position of power and authority. No rulers, in effect. Yet as with the League of Shadows, there’s no rebuilding of society, because the bourgeoisie cannot allow the people to see a newer, better world.

The Scarecrow makes a brief appearance, having sold his fear toxin as a supposed narcotic. A mobster known as the Chechen (played by Ritchie Coster), who works for Sal Maroni (Eric Roberts), is upset that the fear toxin’s ‘bad trip’ won’t produce “repeat customers.” In this scene, we see an example of how the mob are just another kind of capitalist. The Scarecrow doesn’t care about money, though: he, being a psychopath, just wants to spread fear into the world, his toxin being symbolically a projection of his own fears and traumas brought on by his having been bullied and abused as a child.

In all of the imitators of Batman, we see people admiring the notion of Batman as the ‘Great Man,’ another myth the ruling class has always used to justify its existence. The faux-Batmen can never measure up to the real Dark Knight, of course, because they wear “hockey pants” instead of the proper armoured Batsuit. In other words, these ordinary men lack the money to pay for a proper Batsuit, which Bruce can even afford to replace with one that will let him turn his head more comfortably.

The new district attorney, Harvey Dent, represents the lawful way of defeating the mob, and therefore Bruce has high hopes that Dent will make Batman no longer necessary. Then, he imagines, he can be with Rachel…only she’s been seeing Harvey.

In the shift from Batman being Gotham’s hero to Harvey being that hero, that is, from lawless protector to lawful protector, we see how capitalism can shift from a deregulated to a regulated system, depending on the social, economic, and political conditions of the time. Yet even at this early point in the movie, those corrupt cops Harvey has been monitoring have already been calling him “Two-Face.” This unflattering nickname suggests the dual nature of the capitalist system: regulated at one time, when convenient, and non-regulated at another time, when convenient.

It’s an economic system of multiple faces, with a liberal smile, a libertarian sneer, and a fascist scowl.

Since the Joker has been stealing the mob’s money, and Batman has been giving them a hard time, Sal Maroni, Gambol (played by Michael Jai White), and the other mafia men have had to meet in secret places. Lau (played by Chin Han), a mafia banker from Hong Kong, has moved all their money to keep it safe where he is.

The Joker barges in on their meeting, laughing at Lau’s feeble promise of protection, knowing that even though the Chinese would never extradite Lau, Batman has no jurisdiction: he will bring Lau back to Gotham, make him squeal, and get the cops all over the mob, which, of course, the Batman does.

Batman catches Lau in Hong Kong, making him beg Batman to let go of him and promising to give him anything he wants. This is the first time we’ve known Batman to go outside of Gotham to catch a criminal; note that Hong Kong can be seen as a capitalist Gotham in its own right. In this scene, we see again how Batman, in his lawless fighting of crime and defying China’s forbidding of the extradition of any of its citizens, represents the deregulated, privatized form of policing. His apprehending of Lau, a mafia capitalist, is also an example of how these three films aren’t so much about good vs evil as they are about competing forms of capitalism.

As a result of Lau’s squealing, Harvey, Rachel, and the police are able to arrest a whole slew of the mob; only high-ranking members like Maroni and the Chechen have the money to make bail. In this great success of Harvey’s, Bruce sees a real hope that he can hang up his cowl soon, and then be with Rachel. He hosts a fundraising party for Harvey in his new home (while Wayne Manor is being rebuilt), repeating the slogan, “I believe in Harvey Dent.”

Bruce’s entrance to his party, from a helicopter, wearing a nice suit, and with not one, not two, but three beautiful women (Russian ballerinas, I assume) on his arms, deserves comment. I’m sure I’m far from being the only man who was awed by this amazing entrance of Bruce’s, back when the film came out in theatres. A similar feeling comes when one sees the home, cars, suits, and technology of Tony Stark in the Marvel movies: the effect is to engender more simping for billionaires among young men, who fantasize about attaining such wealth themselves one day.

Now, hitting the mob as hard as Batman, Dent, and Gordon have done is not going to pass without any retaliation. Here is where the escalations begin. Maroni, the Chechen, et al decide to hire the Joker to go after Batman. By saying he’ll kill people for every day that Batman doesn’t reveal his true identity (something Batman will never do, of course), the Joker is making Batman into a scapegoat for all of these deaths. Once again, we see a blurred line separating the ‘good’ from the bad.

Commissioner Loeb’s liquor is poisoned, a judge is killed by a car bomb, the Joker crashes Bruce’s fundraiser, looking for Dent and dropping Rachel from a window, forcing Batman to rescue the damsel in distress again. Disguised as a policeman, the Joker makes an attempt on the life of Gotham mayor Anthony Garcia (played by Néstor Carbonell), for whom Gordon takes a bullet, seeming to kill him and causing his grieving wife to blame Batman.

To stop the violence, Bruce is ready to reveal himself as Batman and turn himself in to the cops, who are portrayed very sympathetically in this conservative film. But Harvey claims to be Batman, and Bruce lets him do it. Just before doing so, Harvey tries to reassure the frightened public that “the night is darkest just before the dawn,” implying that the film’s title is a pun on The Dark Night, a reflection of how bad the escalations are getting.

Of course, Harvey, as a reflection of how the law ‘should’ be enforced, as someone so ‘incorruptible,’ and as someone taking the fall for Bruce, is Gotham’s White Knight…but if you’re familiar with my ouroboros symbolism, you’ll know how quickly and easily the whitest of innocence can fall to the darkest of evil. “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

After the exciting car chase scene, in which the Joker fires a bazooka at the armoured police vehicle carrying Harvey, and when Batman’s Tumbler takes the hit, totaling his armoured vehicle and making Batman convert the remains into his Batcycle, or “Batpod,” the Joker is apprehended, and we learn that Gordon never died…he’s soon to be promoted to commissioner by the mayor, too.

The pressure is being put on both Harvey and Batman when they realize that Rachel is being targeted by the Joker. They are increasingly being tempted to sidestep the rule of law to stop the bad guys, putting themselves in danger of becoming bad guys themselves. And when law enforcement, whether in its privatized or state forms, protects the capitalist system as illegally as the mob practices capitalism, we know that Gotham’s ‘good guys’ are no better than its bad guys.

When Harvey, pointing a gun at the Joker’s paranoid schizophrenic henchman Thomas Schiff (played by David Dastmalchian), is flipping a coin with two good sides, we know he’s showing his potential for evil already. He’s already Harvey Two-Face. When Batman, as the “bad cop,” is beating the crap out of the Joker, and Gordon as the “good cop” assures the other cops watching the beating that it’s “in control,” we see again how the police’s defence of private property is nowhere near as justified as it would seem to be. Such a lack of justification is all the more apparent when we see Batman, the privatized form of ‘law enforcement,’ is also willing to bend the law by using a cellphone surveillance system to monitor all of Gotham, violating citizens’ privacy, in order to catch the Joker.

The Joker’s method is a form of accelerationism. He pushes the law enforcers to their limit to get them to show their repressed, ugly sides. Killing Rachel and burning half of Harvey’s face, as well as burning one side of his coin, has turned him from a liberal defender of the class system to one comparable to a violent fascist. The Joker tries to do the same with Gotham’s citizens, with the threats to blow up hospitals if Wayne Enterprises employee Coleman Reese (played by Joshua Harto) isn’t killed for trying to reveal Batman’s identity, and with the threat to blow up the two boats (with the “sweet innocent civilians” on one, and Gotham’s “scumbag” convicts in the other), but without the same success.

When the Joker, disguised as a nurse in Gotham General Hospital, tells Harvey that no one gets upset if a truck of soldiers gets blown up, a theory was formed that the Joker could be an Iraq War veteran, his trauma from that causing his psychopathy. When people from the bottom part of society are killed, like troops or a “gangbanger,” who cares? But if someone from the top, like a mayor, is killed, “then everyone loses their minds,” because such upper echelon deaths are not “part of the plan.”

The Joker, as an ‘anarchist’ of sorts, is trying to prove the point that no one group of people is inherently better than another. We’re all beasts, underneath it all…but more importantly, no one has the right to exercise authority over another; so if those in authority can decide who dies and who doesn’t, so can people like the Joker. The film portrays his attitude as being merely loving of destruction for its own sake, as with the League of Shadows: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” This is how the bourgeoisie wants us to understand socialists’ aims to be.

Though Harvey himself–overwhelmed with how deep the corruption is among the Gotham police, how the Joker and the mob can so easily pay off cops like Wuertz (played by Ron Dean) and Ramirez (played by Monique Gabriela Curnen) to have Rachel killed–betrays the very justice system he condemns these cops for betraying, Gordon and Batman know they can’t let the public know of Harvey’s crimes, including the killing of cops. All of those Harvey has had incarcerated would go free, and Gotham would no longer have any hope in eradicating crime.

The lie of the efficacy of conventional law enforcement must be maintained in this lie.

This lie must be maintained in Gotham City because it must be maintained everywhere that the capitalist system is upheld. If not, we’ll have either socialism, or barbarism.

…and we all know that socialism cannot even be considered.

So Batman has to be a kind of Christ-figure and take the fall for something he didn’t do: kill all those Harvey killed. Gordon reluctantly calls it in, to have his cops chase Batman for the killings, as well as for the threat Harvey made to his wife, himself, and his little boy.

Everybody knows that the police all too frequently use excessive force, engage in police brutality, and kill needlessly (often blacks, often with impunity). Such is the two-faced nature of law enforcement and the protection of private property. In his attempt to tear the whole system down, to remove all systems of authority–which, one might hope, would be replaced with a socialist system that produces commodities for the general need, instead of for profit–the Joker, in trying to make Gotham “[his] city,” was trying to save it.

The Joker is not interested in having huge sums of money, comparable to the way an anarcho-communist wants a society without money, so he burns it. Batman “completes” him in a dialectical sense: the Joker imagines he’ll be fighting Batman forever, an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, in an eternal contradiction between, on the one hand, the capitalist use of state (or privatized) authority for the sake of the protection of private property, and on the other hand, the revolutionary aim of destroying those very capitalist forms of authority.

But instead of saving Gotham in the accelerationist way the Joker initially intended, the corrupt police system has remained intact; still, at least all the major criminals are behind bars. So as far as the Joker being the real hero of the second film is concerned, some might say, what he has ended up achieving is close enough.

The Dark Knight Rises

Though the streets of Gotham are generally clean, our protagonists are scarred right down to the bone. Gordon is racked with guilt over years of never telling the truth about Harvey Dent, and how he threatened the lives of the Gordon family, causing his wife to take their son and leave him. Bruce, with an injured leg, is still mourning the loss of Rachel, and has become something of a recluse.

As I mentioned above, though the Joker is never, not even once, mentioned in this third film, the effect of what he did in the second is still felt, throughout this one. Also, as I said before, this film’s themes and subject matter return us to those of the first film…fear in particular.

Bruce was mourning his parents in the first film, grieving for years afterwards; now, he’s mourning Rachel, wounded by her loss for years. His emotional wounds are symbolized by that bad leg of his. As at the beginning of the first film, at the beginning of this one, there is no Batman. Batman began in the first movie; the Dark Knight must rise in this one.

Another motif in this film, a new one, is hell. Bane and his men, the villains according to the trilogy’s bourgeois ideology, work and plot in the underground of Gotham. After Bane beats Batman in their first fight, incapacitated Bruce is put in an underground prison somewhere in the Middle East, a hell in which all hope is to be abandoned precisely because the tantalizing hope of climbing up and escaping is frustrated by its near-impossibility.

Despair is dialectically strengthened by this perpetually frustrated hope. Finally, there’s one obvious underground hell to outdo all hells: the Batcave, the headquarters of our privatized, militarized policeman who defeats the mob (hope), but keeps alive the very capitalist system that spawns more mafia (despair).

Selina Kyle is an interesting case of the dialectical opposition between seeming to be one kind of person vs actually being a completely different kind. At first, she seems timid and submissive, then revealing herself to be sly and a formidable fighter. As a cat burglar trying to find a way to wipe out her criminal record, she’s a villain going so far as to steal Bruce’s fingerprints to bankrupt him and help Bane in his revolution; yet she also turns heroine, helping Batman in the end and even killing Bane with the guns of the Batpod.

For these reasons, she is yet another example of the moral ambiguity of this trilogy. That moral ambiguity, of course, goes both ways: the one in accordance with bourgeois values, as described in the previous paragraph, and the one in accordance with the Marxist values I’ve been trying to argue for here. As I said above, billionaires shouldn’t exist; and though her saving of Batman is in aid of capitalism, her earlier helping of Bane is the helping of a revolution that needs to be properly interpreted. Recall what she whispers in Bruce’s ear: “There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.”

Bane’s agenda, being a return to that of Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows, is the destruction of Gotham, a city regarded as far too corrupt to save…and as a symbol of capitalism, I’d have to agree that it can’t be saved. Still, as with the previous two films, the revolution ends in mere destruction: we don’t see any socialist rebuilding of society because the trilogy’s bourgeois ideology won’t have it.

What sets Bane’s revolution apart from those of Joker and Ra’s al Ghul is that Bane doesn’t just destroy Gotham immediately after beating Batman and putting Bruce in the underground prison in the Middle East: he takes over the city and protects his revolution with his men and their use of such weaponry as Tumblers from Wayne Enterprises. Such a protection of his revolution, through military force, suggests the Marxist-Leninist notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which in this bourgeois film is inevitably portrayed as a kind of death cult.

The use of the Wayne Enterprises weaponry, the blowing-up of all but one bridge connecting Gotham City to the outside world, and the relatively brief time that Bane’s men control the city, implies that Bane’s revolution, if understood as a kind of leftist one, is comparable to the short-lived Paris Commune, where cannons were kept to protect the working-class revolution.

The conversion of the fusion reactor core into a decaying neutron bomb seems meant to remind us of the fears the West has had of nuclear weapons programs in the USSR, Mao’s China, and the DPRK. Of course, so many of us in the West conveniently forget which government created the original nuclear weapons program and used it the one and only time to kill people.

If Bane’s revolutionary government and kangaroo courts seem terrifying and oppressive to you, Dear Reader, recall that, apart from the films’ propagandistic, denigrating portrayal of such revolutionary change as I’ve explained above, the Dent Act, incarcerating people based on the lie and, indeed, cult of personality surrounding Harvey, is hardly innocent, democratic, or respectful of the rule of law. Bourgeois government is predicated on force and violence every bit as much as, if not more than, proletarian government. In The State and Revolution, Lenin explained how any state, whether capitalist or socialist, is used by the dominant class to rule over the dominated class. In socialist governments, the workers rule over the capitalists; in bourgeois governments (the vast majority of governments around the world), it’s the other way around. Either way, someone is stepped on; why not have the common majority control the rich minority for a change?

Gotham Mayor Garcia has refused to repeal the Dent Act, in typical bourgeois state fashion. Gordon, for all his ‘goodness,’ hasn’t grown the courage to admit that the circumstances surrounding Dent’s death were depicted dishonestly. The rich of Gotham, the real thieves of the poor there, continue to live in luxury without ever being held accountable.

One such example of such a vampiric capitalist crook is John Daggett (played by Ben Mendelsohn), who hopes Bane will help him absorb Wayne Enterprises, and arrogantly thinks his wealth gives him the right to boss others around…fatefully, even Bane. It’s easy to feel no sympathy for him when Bane kills him, but Bruce, Gordon, Garcia, et al are in principal no better…except in how they lack Daggett’s obnoxious attitude. A capitalist nonetheless is still a capitalist, and a protector of such vampires is still a protector of them, whether polite or rude. The same applies when comparing the vices of Trump with those of Biden, Obama, Gates, etc.

Officer John Blake, being a Robin-esque cop, blurs the line between state and privatized police in a manner comparable to Batman, but as an orphan, he reminds Bruce of his social duty as a “billionaire orphan” not to forget the orphans he used to give charity to. In the end, he gives Wayne Manor to those orphans who have grown too old to stay in orphanages. Such charity is as far as liberals will allow, when the best solution to the problem of the homeless, orphan or non-orphan, is to provide housing for all, as such examples of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Cuba do.

Blake, becoming fed up with the shackles of state law enforcement by the end of the movie, will give up on being a cop. He’ll discover the Batcave at the very end, and we are to assume that he will take up the mantle of Batman once Bruce has left Gotham and retired his role as the Dark Knight…or perhaps ‘Robin’ will become Nightwing. In any case, his switch from state cop to privatized cop once again reflects the trilogy’s implied neoliberal agenda.

While The Dark Knight Rises is generally a well-made film, it is also riddled with plot holes, these mostly being based on how incapacitated Bruce becomes by the middle of the story. One must assume that the strapping-up of his bad leg is left intact by Bane’s men when he is taken to the underground prison; otherwise, that near impossible leap he makes to escape the prison just becomes all the nearer to impossible.

Also, though his cellmate fixes the vertebra in his back, surely it continues to hurt like the hell he’s trapped in, right up to his leap to freedom, again, making the leap all that harder to do, as well as making it harder for him to fight Bane again…let alone defeat him. And how was Bruce, without his money, a passport, or any of his Batman equipment, able to get back to Gotham without being detected by Bane’s men?

Apart from filling in these gargantuan plot holes with an added, impractical story arc that would have lengthened an already long film by at least another thirty minutes (Bruce presumably contacting a rich, influential friend in the Middle East, someone to lend him some money, help him get a new passport to get him back to the US, etc.), seeing him back in Gotham, with all of his miraculous return’s willing suspension of disbelief, reinforces the ruling class’s myth of the “Great Man,” able to overcome impossible odds by “the most powerful impulse of the spirit.”

The ability or inability of escaping the prison is to be understood dialectically. The only ones who have ever escaped–young Talia al Ghul, as we eventually learn, and Bruce–did so without the aid of a rope, which makes them have to look fear right in the face. Having the security of the rope, however, ensures failure.

One surprising plot element of this third film, which is a kind of return to an element of the first film, yet in the form of its dialectical opposite, is Alfred’s commitment to helping Bruce, through thick or thin. In Batman Begins, Alfred twice says he’ll “never” give up on Bruce. Yet in The Dark Knight Rises, in the hopes of getting Bruce to give up on trying to revive Batman and to save his life from almost assuredly being killed by Bane, Alfred does give up on Bruce! He quits!

This giving up, this quitting, is related to despair, another major theme of this third film, related to the hell motif described above (recall how Bruce, having been taken to the Middle East prison, that underground hell, wishes in his despair that Bane would kill him). The wish to destroy Gotham, as opposed to the wish to reform the city and purge it of its mafia element, is also related to despair. No inkling of an intent to rebuild Gotham along, say, socialist lines is even to be considered, of course. It is either to be a reformed capitalism, or it must be “ashes.”

Note how Gotham as a symbol of capitalism is expanded to one of American patriotism with the little boy singing The Star-Spangled Banner. The football fans, deeply moved by his “lovely, lovely voice” (which even Bane acknowledges as such), give the boy enthusiastic applause. Shortly afterwards, Bane blows up most of the football field; since his revolution is, as I described above, akin to the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, these detonations are symbolic of an anti-imperialist act, tearing American hegemony and hubris down to size.

The entirety of the Gotham police are, around the time of these detonations, trapped in the underground hell of the city. When Batman frees them, they can do battle with Bane’s army, who, far better armed, threaten the cops with violence if they don’t back off…in a manner we expect of riot police. Such an understanding exposes this presentation of belligerents as a form of projection: those cops were trapped in an underground hell because they are like John Milton‘s fallen angels turned demons. Still, we sympathize with them, not those who threaten them on the street the same way riot police would threaten protestors.

If we are to think of the Gotham kangaroo courts as being unfairly denigrated as such due to the trilogy’s biased bourgeois ideology…that is, if we should really condone the people’s condemnation of the rich, and those who work for the rich, like Philip Stryver (played by Burn Gorman), for “living off the blood and sweat of people less powerful,” then does this suddenly make Dr. Crane, the judge of these courts, a good man, in my estimation? No…as a psychopath no less corrupt than the other bad ones of Gotham, Crane is a mere opportunist in the new order, taking advantage of the vicissitudes of the time, and avoiding punishment with all the other guilty Gothamites. Having him as judge, though, for the purposes of the film’s bourgeois agenda, only reinforces the notion of the cruelty of these courts.

As far as the chanting, in 5/4 time, of “Deshi Basara” (“Rise!”) is concerned, the sympathetic, galvanizing character of the music, first heard when we see Bane’s men take over and crash the plane with the CIA men in Uzbekistan, is a case of a Freudian slip in this otherwise bourgeois film. The cruelties of the CIA over the years are so many that one should find it hard to sympathize with their agents, so seeing Bane bash the face in of one of them, while “Deshi Basara” is playing, should be quite gratifying to watch.

Conclusion

Nolan flatly denies that there’s any political message in his Batman trilogy, but the political elements, regardless of whether you assess them my way, the opposite way, or any other way, are so obvious that they scream out at you. The only way Nolan’s denials could have any honesty in them (apart from being a deflection of leftist criticisms, he presumably just wants to prevent any limits to the films’ interpretations) is that neoliberalism as an ideology has so smothered all of political and cultural life over the past several decades that many of us simply haven’t noticed it as such. (Of course, to be fair to Nolan, capitalism as a standard economic way of doing things was already so entrenched in the comic and previous TV shows, cartoons, and movies, that Nolan had only this to work with in his adaptation.)

The bourgeois liberal way of doing things is so ‘standard,’ such a default position, that the average moviegoer sees the resolution of the trilogy as satisfying. Though Bruce most charitably has given Wayne Manor to the orphans and given his estate to Alfred, he must still have plenty of money for himself (the fraudulent circumstances of his bankruptcy having been exposed), for how else could he and Selina have gone to Florence, where they see Alfred at a restaurant? Since Blake has found the Batcave (with the help of a package from Bruce), he is obviously to be the next Batman, anticipating future crime in Gotham, crime of a magnitude requiring another superhero crimefighter…or, as I would call him, another glorified, militarized cop.

All of these things mean that the class structure of Gotham City has remained intact, with a few rich at the top and a multitude of poor people at the bottom. New mafia will rise up to replace Falcone and Maroni; they will exploit the poor, driving them to desperation and more crime. Blake with have to deal with this problem, as well as any new ‘supervillains’ bent on destroying Gotham, since such a capitalist city needs to be destroyed. The trilogy ends with these contradictions only seeming to be resolved, to a ‘reasonable’ extent, at least.

Getting rid of a few billionaires (Bruce and, I assume, some of the exiled Gothamites who fell through the ice and drowned), while providing Bruce’s home to some orphans, may seem to liberals to be a generous sacrifice, but such concessions are far from enough to solve the problems of extreme class conflict. Furthermore, portraying the revolutionary but real solutions to these problems as cruel and extremist only further ensures that no real solution will even be tried, because such a solution will be deemed unthinkable.

There may be sunny skies at the end of the third movie, but a dark night will rise on Gotham again, and soon, a night that may never end in a dawn, as many of us fear the 2020s are such a night.

Analysis of ‘My Dinner with Andre’

My Dinner with Andre is a 1981 film directed by Louis Malle. It was written by André Gregory and Wallace (‘Wally’) Shawn, who also star in it, playing fictionalized versions of themselves having a discussion at dinner in Café des Artistes in Manhattan, the topics including experimental theatre, the nature of theatre and of life, and Andre’s spiritual experiences.

Just as Andre and Wally are based on the actors who play them, Andre’s experiences as described in the movie are based on the real-life experiences of Gregory from the mid- to late 1970s: his growing misgivings about the theatre, the fear of a trend towards fascism in the US (he and Shawn are Jews), his trip to Poland to work with Jerzy Grotowski on experimental theatre before private audiences, and his years spent with spiritual communities like Findhorn.

The film has received universal acclaim, with a 92% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 25 reviews. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert praised it highly on Sneak Previews, which kept the film in theaters for a year.

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

A fascinating irony about this film, brilliantly made fun of at the end of Waiting for Guffman, with Corky’s “My Dinner with Andre action figures” [!], is that the bulk of the film is just these two men sitting at a table in a restaurant chatting…and yet Andre is discussing these out-of-this-world experiences in remote places like Poland, Tibet, India, the Sahara, and Scotland. Andre is advocating going out there and experiencing real life in all of its mystical ecstasy, hallucinatory madness, and tear-inducing trauma…yet he and Wally are just sitting in a restaurant in New York, chatting the whole time, never leaving the city.

Since both men are playwrights and actors, in real life as well as in the film, we see a blurred distinction between the acting world and the real world, reminding us of Jacques‘s famous speech in As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage…” Andre’s ‘sermon,’ if you will, spoken during this ‘last supper’ with Wally, is that we need to break free of the phoniness, the ‘theatre,’ of our boring routines and experience real life. Andre’s dropping out of the New York theatrical scene to travel the world is thus symbolic of such a break with the numbing routine of ordinary life.

Wally, his dialectical opposite, defends this routine, though. The film begins with him on his way to meet Andre at the restaurant, walking the streets of New York, getting on a graffiti-covered subway, and thinking about all of his day-to-day troubles as a struggling playwright, barely making ends meet. He only reluctantly is going to meet Andre, having not seen his old colleague in years, and having heard dauntingly bizarre stories of what the theatre drop-out has been doing.

Wally lived an easy life as a kid in a rich family, always thinking about art; but now, he’s 36, and only thinking about money. As the pragmatic realist of the two men, Wally is preoccupied with the material issues of life. Andre, having much more money and thus able to travel the world, is more preoccupied with abstract, idealistic things.

Wally would rather his girlfriend, Debbie, cook his dinner than eat with Andre. Instead, she has to be a breadwinner for them, as a waitress, rather than ‘play the role’ of housewife. In the dull routine of his life, the phony existence of his that’s symbolized by his work as a dramatist, he’s so conformist as to have his girlfriend cook for him instead of him cooking for himself.

In his private thoughts, a soliloquy given in voiceover as he’s on the subway, he remembers Andre’s “amazing work…with his company, the Manhattan Project (the actual name of the real André Gregory’s theatrical company). When we consider Andre’s misgivings about the role of theatre in modern life, how he, in his discussion at dinner with Wally, talks about how fake our interactions are with others, how like actors pretending and not living real life, we can see how fitting it is that Andre named his company after the research undertaking that resulted in the first of those very weapons that can wipe out all life on the Earth.

The notion of Andre suddenly dropping out of the theatre, traveling the world, and ‘talking with trees,’ when he never used to want to leave his home and family, suggests to Wally that “something terrible had happened to Andre,” as opposed to what Andre will insist were deep, mystical, enlightening experiences.

Just before entering the restaurant, Wally puts on a tie: all actors must put on their costumes before walking onstage. Given Andre’s problems, Wally wonders if he is supposed to play the role of doctor, of psychiatrist, for his apparently ill former colleague.

It’s interesting that the chosen restaurant is called the Café des Artistes, where two men of the theatre will engage in a theatrical dialogue of their own, with Wally doing an acting job of pretending to be interested in whatever Andre has to say. Wally waits for him to arrive at the bar.

Wally has heard a recent story of Andre being seen sobbing because he’d seen a scene from Autumn Sonata, in which Ingrid Bergman‘s character says, “I could always live in my art, but never in my life.” These words touched Andre so keenly because this has precisely been his problem as a dramatist: his whole life has been only fakery, acting, pretending; it has never been a real life. All the world’s a stage…

Andre arrives, sees Wally, and gives him a warm hug and a big smile. Wally, the actor, puts on his fake smile for Andre, says Andre looks “terrific,” though Andre insists that he feels terrible. (Falsely saying an ailing or profoundly unhappy person looks “terrific,” a phoniness that infuriates Andre, will be dealt with again later.) Fittingly, Wally notes that he’s “really in the theatre” at this moment.

Early on in their conversation, Andre mentions Grotowski, his old theatrical mentor who’d also dropped out of the theatre. Their table is ready, and they can go sit down: the rest of the film, minus Wally’s taxi ride home at the end, is just them sitting at their table chatting, for about an hour and forty minutes out of the total hour and fifty-one minutes.) Kids, get out Corky’s action figures and have some fun!

Since Wally is feeling very nervous about having to socialize with Andre for the whole duration of this dinner, he figures the best way he can get through it all is to ask him questions. He’s sometimes thought of himself as a private investigator, as a detective: once again, Wally is finding himself an actor playing roles instead of just being himself. He still has that fittingly fake smile on his face. They order their meals, Wally hardly understanding the French on the menu, while Andre orders expertly…even though Wally has always known Andre to be quite ascetic in his eating habits. Maybe Andre is being a bit of an actor here, too.

Though at first reluctant to talk about what he’s been doing for the past five years, Andre finally opens up about it. First, he discusses going to Poland to be with Grotowski and a group of Polish actors in a forest there. None of these actors could speak English.

As the leader of a group of people who couldn’t understand a word he was saying, and vice versa, Andre had no frame of reference by which he could communicate with them or organize the improvisational theatrical events. Out in a forest, they were far away from modern civilization and all of the things that Andre had been coming to dislike. The actors would act on impulse, doing anything that came to mind…but they, as improvisors, weren’t trying to embody any kind of character from a play. They were being themselves.

They weren’t speaking from a script. They weren’t pretending to be someone else. They weren’t being fake, or following a plan. They were being real, as natural as their green setting. Andre was seeing real life in action, a breaking-free from the routines of New York.

Andre speaks of Grotowski’s “beehives,” paratheatrical events that involved simple interactive exchanges and unstructured work that Andre was fascinated with. Grotowski made Andre lead a beehive, which made Andre very nervous, since he didn’t know what to do to organize an event with a huge number of Polish strangers. But that was the point: there was to be no organization at all. The group of people ended up singing a beautiful song of St. Francis, a song these people didn’t even know how to sing.

Now, Grotowski’s beehives–in real life, that is–generally weren’t successful as attempts to blur the line between performer and audience, to bring about genuine creative spontaneity; the participants mostly gave stock emotional reactions, causing stereotypical, clichéd performances. Andre’s beehive, however, seems to have been a glorious success with this St. Francis song, sung over and over again.

There were no costumes or makeup for the performance, but it was a performance all the same. The beehive was, as it were, a sublation of the opposites of performance and non-performed, spontaneous, natural action. People were singing the song and dancing an impromptu dance; it built into a group trance, something Andre compares to one of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies (this being one of a number of references in the film to Naziism), so we see how trance can be heavenly or hellish.

Nonetheless, all of this improvisational work in Poland has been like an enlightening, mystical experience for Andre, a discovery that theatrical performances can still be genuinely felt, as long as they maintain this level of spontaneity. Life, like drama, can be real if unscripted, free of routine.

An example of one of the wonderful experiences he had with the Polish improvisers was seeing two of them fall in love. This, during an improvisation about being on an airplane with a bad motor, and therefore fear among the passengers that they might die. Here, we see the heaven and the hell of the mystical state felt in trance-like improvisation, the fusion of acting with real life.

These two lovers, having left the group to be alone in the forest, understood the real meaning of these unstructured improvisations: it was all about really living.

On the last day of the improvisations in the forest in Poland, the group arranged a christening, a baptism for Andre. It was a simple ceremony, with flowers, candles and torches set up all over a castle in “a miracle of light.” Again, this was a spontaneous act, yet also a ceremony, a fusion of the planned with the impulsive act, a dialectic of theatre and life. A man and a woman played the roles of Andre’s godfather and godmother. He was named Yendrosh, and it really felt like a new name for him; it could be said that Andre felt reborn.

He says that this experience in the forest was the first time in his life that he’d ever felt truly alive. Again, such a mystical experience has both a heavenly and a hellish aspect to it; such spiritual feelings are not a mere sentimental removal of all of one’s pain. In Andre’s feeling of being truly alive, there’s also the frightening realization of the opposite of that state…death. He will later discuss an experience he had during Halloween of almost dying that is the dialectical opposite of this experience in the Polish forest. The mystical feeling of being connected to everything means also being connected to death.

Andre’s next major topic of discussion is The Little Prince, and certain feelings of synchronicity associated with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry‘s book. Andre discusses a trip to the Sahara with a Japanese monk (whom Andre imagines to embody the little prince) to work on a play based on the book. Analogous to Andre’s travels around the world, the little prince also leaves his tiny planet to visit a number of other planets, including Earth, where he meets a pilot who’s crash-landed in the Sahara, far from civilization…rather like the Polish forest. So if Kozan, the Japanese monk, is the little prince, in this context, does this make Andre the pilot?

A recurring criticism in The Little Prince is that of adults; the little prince considers them to be very strange. Andre’s experience in the Polish forest, with the unstructured improvisations, was that it made everyone like children at play again, something he found to be wonderful. The little prince’s nobility is in his childlike state: he’s a prince because he’s little. Andre and the improvisers were truly alive because they were children again.

Other parallels between My Dinner with Andre and The Little Prince can be found, thus further justifying Andre’s discussion of the book in the movie. Both stories involve two males, the one telling the other about his travels to many places, meeting interesting and even strange people. Wally thus is the pilot, and Andre in this context is the little prince. Wally at first dreads having to have dinner with Andre, worrying about his own personal, financial problems; the pilot is at first annoyed with the little prince wanting him to draw a sheep for him, when he urgently needs to repair his plane. Just as the little prince cares for the flower that he’s left behind on his little planet, and is fearful of her dying, so does Andre care about his wife, Chiquita, and his two kids, Nicolas and Marina, and he grieves bitterly over his mother’s death.

One major difference between the two stories, though, is that while in The Little Prince, the two friends meet in a desert, the pilot having a limited supply of drinking water, in My Dinner with Andre, the two friends are eating in a fine restaurant, with Andre ultimately treating Wally. This opposition of famine and feast, however, can be interpreted dialectically, as can the film’s other oppositions: theatre vs life, routine vs spontaneity, ecstasy vs agony, staying in the same place vs going out there into the world.

Andre’s noting of the oft-repeated word “tame” in The Little Prince is also worthy of commentary. The little prince tames his flower, the fox, and by implication, the pilot, making them all his friends. Andre tamed his Polish improvisers, making them all his friends, too. We all need taming, so we can be each other’s friends. In the act of spontaneously experiencing real life in those improvisations, the group of people collectively experiences a mystical, ecstatic oneness, inspiring mutual love.

In any case, nothing productive came from the trip to the Sahara with Kozan, so Andre, still acting on impulse (a habit he no doubt picked up from the Polish improvisations), brought the Japanese monk with him to New York to stay with him and his family. Kozan ended up staying with them for six months, taking over, since Andre, always wanting to travel to places like Tibet and India, wasn’t being much of a father.

It was as though Kozan and Andre were trading places. The monk taught the family about meditation, Asia, and his monastery, but he also began wearing Gucci shoes under his robes, as well as eating beef. Just as Andre had been neglecting his children, Kozan came off as not liking them, either. His taking over was like him being the new father…the implication being that Andre, wanting to go to Tibet, getting into meditation, and having these mystical experiences, was turning into a kind of Buddhist. In these two men we see another instance of the unity of all things, the blurred boundary between self and other.

Andre speaks of a hallucination he had in a Catholic Church on Christmas Eve: he saw a six-foot-eight apparition, half-man, half-bull, with blue skin and violets coming out of its eyelids! It remained for the whole Mass. Andre couldn’t erase the monster’s presence from his mind. With enlightenment also comes madness, paradoxically–that mixture of heaven and hell. And indeed, he did feel some enlightenment with this madness that wouldn’t go away, for Andre felt that the creature was there to comfort him, that even though he wasn’t being productive as a dramatist, all was okay, just a part of the journey. Hang in there, Andre, for the bad luck would soon change to good.

Around when Kozan left, Andre got this odd idea of getting a flag, and he ended up getting one with a Tibetan swastika on it. Though, of course, it was nothing at all like the Nazi swastika, one cannot help making the association, and so when he took the flag home, his wife and daughter found it intolerable to look at. Again, we see in this flag associations of extreme opposites: the ancient, Tibetan meaning of the swastika, a symbol of divinity and spirituality; and the Nazi meaning, linked with virulent racial hatred.

After this, he went to India in the hopes of finding great spiritual enlightenment, but he left the place disappointed, feeling his experiences were no better than those of a tourist. After that, he went to Findhorn in Scotland, and found far better spiritual inspiration among the people there and their plants. He tells Wally of having run in the forest there, in a state “where laughter and tears seem to merge.” He was also having lots of wild hallucinations at the time: once again, enlightenment meets madness, heaven meets hell in the realm of mysticism. Indeed, Andre alludes to William Blake, who wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

In the fall, after these experiences, he had his last wild one, on Long Island. This was the hellish one to contrast with the heavenly one he had in the Polish forest. It was during Halloween. He and the other participants were made to write out their last will and testament. After this, he had to wear a blindfold and run through a field. Then he was taken to a basement and made to get naked. He was so scared, he was thinking about Nazi death camps and secret police.

The participants of this Halloween event took photos of him, naked and blindfolded; he was made to run naked in a forest, still blindfolded, and taken on a stretcher through forests and lowered into the ground. It was one of six graves, each eight feet deep! Wood and dirt were put on him, and a sheet was put over his head, all to make him feel buried alive. He was left in there for about a half-hour, though he didn’t know how long he’d been left there…then he was “resurrected,” as it were.

The blindfold was taken off, and they had him run through fields until he came to “a great circle of fire” with music and wine, “and everyone danced until dawn.” So his first experience in the Polish forest was the ecstatic, nirvana-like one that he wanted in some way to relive as best he could in places like the Sahara, India, Findhorn, and this Halloween event…but this last one was so traumatizing that Andre didn’t want to do these things anymore. Still, in all of it, he was really living.

The extremes of these experiences, going to heaven and back, and later to hell and back, are rather like going all the way along the coiled body of the ouroboros, as I’ve described it and used as a symbol of the dialectical relationship of opposites, something I’ve written about in so many other blog posts. The biting head represents one extreme, and the bitten tail represents the opposite extreme, them both meeting at the bite, of course, while the rest of the serpent’s coiled body symbolizes all the intermediate points on a circular continuum.

When Andre, so disillusioned as he was with the state of the theatre in New York in the mid-1970s, left it to experience the blissful spontaneity of the beehives in the Polish forest, he moved up the serpent’s coiled body from the back half, near the tail, to the biting head. He loved it, like a cocaine high, and he tried to sustain that high, tried to stay as close to the serpent’s biting head (if you’ll indulge me in my mixed metaphor, Dear Reader!) as he could.

It is a reality in life, though, that the initial ecstasy of the ‘religious experience’ will wear off over time, and one will come back down to a middling experience, one around the halfway point between the head and the tail. Still, Andre felt the urge to return to that point of extremity, but he went the other way during the Halloween event…he went to the bitten tail, where a kind of harrowing of hell led back to the biting head, the circle of fire, the wine and the dancing–heaven.

This going all the way around the circular continuum that I’d have the ouroboros symbolize is the essence of what Andre would deem living real life. It isn’t a sentimental place where one never feels pain again…on the contrary, one can feel torturous pain as well as profound joy. All of it, all the same, is experiencing life to the fullest.

Wally, on the other hand, prefers life in the comfortable, safe area in the middle of the coiled body of the ouroboros–not too happy, but not too scary, either. Hence, towards the end of the movie, he vehemently defends his enjoyment of simple pleasures: coffee, an electric blanket to keep himself warm in winter, writing his plays, and being satisfied with just staying in New York.

The extremes that Andre has gone through have made him feel as though he’s guilty of some kind of delusion of grandeur, and thus he’s a terrible person, as bad as someone like Albert Speer, the Nazi architect and Minister of Armaments and War Production. Andre compares himself to the man because he imagines himself, like Speer, to be guilty of narcissistically thinking himself above the normal rules of human conduct, that they don’t apply to him.

Since Andre has seen a lot of death around him over the past several years, he knows that when you die, you do it alone. None of your life’s achievements matter anymore. Dying alone feels like facing judgement before God, as it were; so Andre is feeling guilt over the excesses he’s been experiencing. Were they any less theatre than the plays he’s done? Were those events he participated in any less phony than his plays? The trauma of the live burial, combined with the deaths and hospitalizations in his family (a family he left behind, he abandoned, to travel the world) must have gotten to him.

His mother died, other family members have had medical problems…and he had left these important people in his life in a Buddha-like quest for enlightenment in India, Tibet, etc. Far from attaining his desired spiritual growth, Andre was indulging in some kind of self-absorbed solipsism–if anything, a spiritual degeneration…or so he feels, at least.

In his feeling that he was fooling himself in this spiritual quest, we see another example of the dialectical relationship between good and evil, heaven and hell, saint and (Nazi-like) sinner. He starts complaining about some talkative Norwegian director, telling story after story, and sounding pompous. Yet what has Andre been doing this whole time, if not talking and talking endlessly, telling story after story, while Wally patiently listens? Just as with Kozan, this Norwegian is another double for Andre, another case of the blurred boundary between self and other, further proof of the oneness of everything.

The Norwegian gabbed about his mother constantly, and Andre found him so intolerable that he politely asked his garrulous guest to leave. Recall that, around this time, Andre’s mother died. He wept, since this guest had been a good friend of his for some time. Then after the man left, Andre saw a man on the TV win at some sporting event, “smiling malevolently at his friends,” and Andre judged the guy harshly…then he realized he was projecting his own bad qualities onto him.

Just as he’d projected his own chattiness onto the Norwegian.

At a show on Billie Holliday, Andre was similarly judgmental of some businessmen-types, then again realized he was no better–just projecting his own vices onto them. When Andre’s speaking at this point in his discussion with Wally, his words are all shot out rapid-fire, like bullets from a machine gun. He is in quite an extreme, turbulent emotional state. He hates the theatrical phoniness of the world, yet he feels himself to be no less theatrical or phony!

And Wally, the whole time, is just listening to Andre pouring out his thoughts in an endless torrent, listening as if he was Andre’s psychoanalyst, making the occasional comment or interpretation, trying to figure out just what is troubling him.

Andre, in his highly emotional state, feels the world is getting worse and worse. Few people seem aware of how bad things are. He recently met a number of people who said he looked ‘wonderful’ (i.e., his physical appearance), when he really felt awful; recall that Wally, when he first saw Andre in the restaurant, said he looked “terrific,” yet he’s really been feeling awful.

Only when Andre met a woman, whose aging, beloved aunt was in hospital for a cataract and was crippled from a fall from her poorly-prepared bed (therefore the woman was very upset for her aunt), did he find in her someone who, in her own pain, could clearly see how awful he felt! Only those of us in deep pain, roused from the torpor of our comfort zones, can see “with complete clarity.” The rest of the complacent world cannot, because they’re living in a kind of insane dream world.

Andre’s observations here tie in with what he was talking about before, with the Halloween event, and how I interpreted it above, in terms of my ouroboros symbolism. His having gone to hell and back, from the trauma of the serpent’s bitten tail to the enlightenment of its biting head, is like this woman’s pain for her aunt’s sake giving her the empathic insight to see Andre’s pain for what it really is.

Wally can empathize with Andre, too, for he can understand that those who thought Andre looked “wonderful” couldn’t see the real him–they only saw what they wanted to see, being in their insane dream world. Andre discusses his dying mother in the hospital, and how infuriated he felt with a doctor who saw her and said it was so “wonderful how she’s coming along.” Andre felt she looked as awful as any survivor of Auschwitz or Dachau. Again, this doctor was in a complacent dream world.

This idea of Andre’s, that most people are in some kind of fog, in a trance, a dream world, also ties in with the idea explored above about how life is like theatre, a display of false emotions and scripted words, planned routine, lacking spontaneity and genuine creativity. As Wally is growing more sympathetic with what Andre is saying, we can see Wally going from just politely agreeing with him, acting out a role of his own, waking from his own dream world, to offering some experiences of his own of this kind of inappropriate communication, from friends whose words are ultimately hostile to him.

Social convention, Wally observes, requires one to express oneself indirectly, resulting in awkward, inappropriate word choices. This is the phony theatre of life that Andre has been trying to escape from. In fact, the hostile words of Wally’s friends were in the context of a theatrical performance in which there were serious problems with Wally’s costuming, a cat suit he’d be uncomfortable wearing onstage, making him hear everything wrong. His friends, colleagues in the performance, were pointing these problems out in a taunting way, as if to laugh at him and make him feel humiliated onstage in front of a presumably large audience. Here is an example of how My Dinner with Andre uses theatre as a metaphor for life.

Wally, in his having not yet woken from his own torpor from the societal dream world, hadn’t known what to think about his colleagues’ taunting words. Over the course of his listening to Andre’s recounting of his extreme experiences, though, Wally is beginning to wake up to the kind of world we’re all living in.

Andre and Wally continue to discuss how bizarre people’s topics of conversation can be, such as the death of Mary Jo Kopechne–and laughing about it. This joking about macabre things is a reflection of social alienation and a lack of consciousness…it’s also another example of people performing, in the theatre of life, rather than being themselves. Hence, Grotowski left the theatre, as Andre attempted to.

People, in these public performances, know exactly how they ought to act and present themselves, yet privately, they don’t know who they are or what they should be doing, what Marx called alienation from one’s species essence. We focus on goals and plans, the structure of the performance of the theatre of life, but none of those goals and plans have anything to do with reality. Life becomes habitual, dream-like, and meaningless.

Very rarely do things happen in a spontaneous way anymore, since if they did, people would be too disoriented by the shock to deal with it, as happened when Brando rejected his Godfather Oscar, having Sacheen Littlefeather decline it on his behalf as a protest against Hollywood’s negative portrayal of Native Americans. Andre insists that if we’re always living by habit, those planned performances in the theatre of life, then we’re not really living.

In Sanskrit, he says, the root of their verb for “to be” is the same as “to grow,” or “to make grow.” To exist in a meaningful sense, we must grow and help other people and things grow.

Andre then discusses a mathematician associated with Findhorn who refused to have any kind of imaginary or dream life, yet who saw, in the gardens of Edinburgh, a faun! A man who insisted on having only a direct perception of reality, apparently saw a mythological creature! Again, the boundary between fantasy and reality has been blurred. All is one. The extreme insistence on experiencing only direct reality, the serpent’s biting head, can lead to the experience of fantasy, the bitten tail.

We’re so stuck in our states of habit that we lose consciousness of what we’re doing or saying, ignoring such things as the taste of our food or the macabre things we laugh about, and thus we enter that dream world that Andre dreads so much. Wally, enjoying the comfort of his electric blanket or the taste of the food he’s eating in the restaurant, has far less of such a dread.

Andre, not liking such technological advances as electric blankets, feels that the comforts provided by these things lull us into a dangerous comfort that blinds us to direct perception of reality. When, lacking the electric blanket, you feel the discomfort of the cold of winter, not only are you aware of your own discomfort, you’re also aware of the discomfort of your cold partner lying beside you, and you feel compassion for him or her. Schopenhauer noted how the hell of suffering leads to the heaven of compassionate love, as I observed here.

Andre complains about how we treat one another in our semi-conscious state, and Wally agrees that this is a problem. Some of this alienation is due to class differences, and some of it, as Wally observes, is based on being focused only on our experiences in our own part of the world, ignoring what’s outside of it.

Though Wally admits that he ignores large parts of the world, like Africa, which are not relevant to his immediate place in it, he enjoys writing plays that he feels connect him with some sense of reality. He agrees with Andre that the theatre (a metaphor for real life, remember) is in terrible shape, yet at least a few years ago, people acknowledged what bad shape it was in. Now, it’s so bad that people can’t even see what’s wrong with it.

Andre, too, understands that the theatre, if done well, can bring the audience face to face with reality. He tells Wally about a production he did of The Bacchae when, at the point of the dismemberment of Pentheus, he’d wanted to have a head…a real one…passed around the audience. The actress playing Agave, for obvious reasons, refused to do this. Andre wants a kind of theatre that shocks people out of their dream-state, but contemporary theatre lulls people further to sleep by just presenting things all too close to everyday life, so close to it that people don’t notice what’s wrong.

Still, Wally, who is becoming more and more engaged in the conversation, insists that one shouldn’t need to escape all the way to Mount Everest to experience the fullness of life. Surely, one can experience that fullness just from a trip to the local cigar store, provided one’s consciousness is sufficiently sharpened. Surely one can still write meaningful, realistic plays today, too! All of reality, human experience, is uniform on a deeper, mystical level…all is one, so where one experiences it is irrelevant.

Andre agrees with Wally’s argument in principle, but most people are blind to this uniformity of truth. Most cannot see that nirvana and samsara are the same, as the Mahayana Buddhists see these opposite states of being. This blindness of most people has become more and more serious in recent years, as Andre has come to understand.

Now, Andre comes to an extremely important point, perhaps the most important one of the entire film. This inability of most people to see the nirvana in samsara, the hidden Mount Everest, so to speak, inside the ordinary cigar store, comes from a boredom, an apathy to life that in turn comes from a self-perpetuating kind of brainwashing.

…and with this brainwashing, things start to get scary.

This self-induced brainwashing, this conditioning not to care about what’s going on around us, was started “by a world totalitarian government based on money.” Now, I suspect that most people who hear Andre’s words at this point focus on “world totalitarian government” (which it surely is), but pay far less attention to “based on money” (a.k.a. capitalism).

So many people in recent years have been lulled into believing in the popular NWO conspiracy theory, which tends to be a far-right-wing conspiracy theory (though admittedly, some leftists believe in a version of it). They imagine that its centre of evil is in the government-as-such, rather than in the love of money, and the power that comes from owning billions of US dollars.

The far-right ideologues that believe in the coming totalitarian ‘One-World-Government’ also think it is a kind of socialism, since, apparently socialism is ‘anything a government does,’ rather than how I explained it here and here. But Andre isn’t talking about a left-wing world government; he’s talking about fascism (recall all of his references to Naziism in the movie). Our current world government is in Washington, DC, NATO is an extension of it, and American military bases can be found all over the world.

The totalitarianism we need to fear isn’t communism; it’s capitalist imperialism, which has plundered the Third World for resources in a big way since at least the years of the Scramble for Africa. Meanwhile, those of us living in the imperial core, like Wally, have wandered about apathetic to the problem, because if we did wake up to it, and began to care, the powers-that-be would feel threatened. Those powers have an investment in keeping us all asleep.

Andre tells Wally of a man who no longer reads newspapers or watches TV, to escape the brainwashing. He speaks of another, a man from Findhorn in his eighties who’s trying to save the trees, who goes everywhere with a backpack because he could end up anywhere tomorrow. This old man told Andre that New Yorkers never leave the city, even if they say they really want to. He told Andre that the reason for this staying in New York is because they’re psychologically imprisoned there; the Big Apple has become a kind of concentration camp that the inmates have built for themselves. Their pride in what they’ve built (symbolic of nationalism?) keeps them imprisoned in the city.

Andre says that he and Chiquita have had the same, growing fear that they need to get out of this Auschwitz that they’re living in…except that every city, in every country around the world, is growing into its own Auschwitz. There’s nowhere to escape to anymore. In this predicament, we see the sublation of the dialectic of Andre’s wanderlust and globetrotting on the one hand, and Wally’s preference to stay in New York on the other, all encapsulated in a film the bulk of which is just two men chatting at a dinner table, going nowhere else.

Andre then states his belief that the 1960s were the last decade “of the human being, before he was extinguished.” For him, this moment being 1981, when the movie was made, is the beginning of “the rest of the future, that from now on, they [the people, that is] will simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing, and there’ll be nothing left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being, with feelings and thoughts…”

It’s significant that this beginning of “the rest of the future,” especially now, understood by us in hindsight, should be the early 1980s, with the beginning of the ‘Reagan Revolution.’ Recall that this “world totalitarian government” is “based on money,” that is, it’s a capitalist government…and Reagan and Thatcher were the ones who inaugurated the neoliberal, “free market” version of capitalism in the 1980s.

As I’ve argued many times, right-wing libertarian ‘small government’ is a con game, which, by cutting taxes for the rich and deregulating businesses so capitalists can maximize profits, allows the wealthy to become super-wealthy and thus buy all the political parties in order to control them better. When the common people try to resist, this capitalist government becomes more authoritarian…fascist, even.

Back in the 1960s, political leftism was still a formidable force, pushing liberals to the left, if only relatively so. Now, after all the ill effects of Reaganite neoliberalism have set in, liberals are so far to the right, without even realizing it, that they’re banging the war drums against Russia and supporting Ukrainian Nazis!

Technology has numbed us with smartphones, tablets, and social media to the point where we scroll and scroll while ignoring those sitting next to us. Andre is being prophetic about these social ills we now have, and his fears of a resurgence of fascism, way back in the 1980s, when the ideology was still latent, were also foretold by Frank Zappa, who was scoffed at for it…and yet what Reagan began has become much more apparent in the 2020s, with such things as the overturning of Roe vs Wade and the authoritarian measures used to deal with the pandemic.

Now, Andre has some hope that we can “preserve the light” through these new dark ages. Pockets of resistance are popping up here and there with organizations like Findhorn, the kind of thing Andre was trying to do with his spontaneous beehives. He wants a new language, one of the heart, as there was in the Polish forest, where language wasn’t needed. He wants us all to have a “sense of being united to all things,” because all is one.

After hearing all these wacky things that Andre has been going on and on about, Wally offers his thoughts about it all. As Andre’s dialectical opposite, Wally isn’t concerned with deep, spiritual issues or political conspiracies; he’s just trying to survive. He is living on the plain, ordinary, surface level of material existence.

Accordingly, Wally derives happiness from simple things: being with his girlfriend, Debbie, drinking coffee, and reading Charleton Heston’s autobiography. He gains intellectual satisfaction from writing plays and reading those of other playwrights, as well as reading reviews of those plays. Simple stuff.

He has a notebook with lists of errands and everyday responsibilities–his routine to which he adheres, all antithetical stuff to Andre’s hyper-spontaneous philosophy of life. Wally can’t imagine there being anything more than his simple, hum-drum life. Why can’t we just be happy with what we have? he wonders.

The dialectical opposition between Andre and Wally is that the former is hovering–to use my ouroboros symbolism again–around where the serpent is biting its tail, at the extremes, while the latter is in the moderate middle of the serpent’s coiled body. Ironically, both Andre and Wally are, each in his own way, experiencing a verson of both opposites together: Andre has had heaven and hell thrust in his face in a vivid, shocking way, while Wally has had both in the sense of being in the middle of them, a dull experience of half of the one and half of the other. This is the unity of their opposition to each other, further proof that all is one.

Wally also rejects Andre’s synchronicity, affirming modern science over a belief in heavenly-ordained coincidences. Wally can understand the temptation to believe in synchronicity, but his rational mind cannot accept a belief in omens or portents of the future.

Now, Andre and Wally don’t completely disagree: Andre acknowledges that total belief in omens can be abused in order to avoid responsibility for one’s own actions. The occasional agreement of dialectical opposites is their sublation, a manifestation of their unity in opposition. Such unity is a further example of how My Dinner with Andre uses dialectical opposites to show how all is one.

Andre acknowledges that the kind of spirituality he’s been exploring can grow authoritarian, even fascistic; but science, too, if held in too high an esteem, can also be perceived as a kind of “magical force” capable of solving anything. He sees a destructiveness in science that people are reacting against.

The two men agree that both religious feeling and a credulous acceptance of science, taken to excesses, can be equally bad for humanity. So again, we see the dialectical opposites in Andre and Wally being sublated.

Wally observes that the whole purpose of Andre’s workshops was to strip away all purposefulness in order to experience “pure being,” which seems Zen-like. Not doing any particular thing, a state of ‘no-thing-ness.’ Wally objects to such a project, feeling instead that one shouldn’t have moments of not trying to do anything. It’s in our basic human nature to have purpose, he argues.

Andre notes that the idea of doing nothing, of just being, seems to frighten Wally, to make him nervous, which Wally deems a perfectly understandable emotion to have in such a situation. Andre considers it equally absurd, and deadening, to find oneself always needing to have something to do, a neurotic need that, incidentally, has only grown exponentially worse in our neoliberal era.

One should only do things if one really feels the passion to do them; but if one does things mechanically, as Andre says, one isn’t really living. One is just acting out roles in the phony theatre of life. In relationships, in marriage, this can be a problem, too; we often only play the roles of partner, husband, wife…the love is gone.

An irony about Andre’s own relationship with his wife and kids, after a day of being annoyed with them, was that a contemplation of what it would be like to leave them all, to abandon them, led to the realization that he all the more wanted to stay with them. However one chooses to do it, by going to the Sahara or just staying at home, Andre insists that we must, at some point in our lives, “cut out the noise,” stop performing, and listen to what’s inside ourselves, the silence.

Wally admits to disliking “those quiet moments”: they scare him. Perhaps they’re like doing Shadow Work, “the fear of unconscious impulses.” He’d feel exposed and vulnerable to failure. Andre can understand Wally’s fears: feeling emotions as intensely as Andre’s been feeling them can be overwhelming…but one can also be filled with overjoyed enthusiasm, a true lust for life.

All the patrons except Andre and Wally have left. The restaurant is about to close. Andre pays for the whole meal, so Wally can treat himself to a cab ride home.

The first of Satie‘s Trois Gymnopédies is heard on the piano. It’s a fitting piece of music to end the movie with, firstly because the title means “three nude dances,” symbolic of how Andre threw himself into the world ‘naked,’ as it were, vulnerable and unprotected from the abrasiveness of his surroundings; secondly, because the opening back-and-forth of the G-major 7th and D-major 7th chords suggests a symbolism of that unity-in-opposition as personified in Andre and Wally.

As Wally’s going home in the cab, he looks out the window and remembers all the places he’s been to at some point in his life. He’s feeling a mystical union with New York. Andre’s words have touched him. He knows that all is one.

…and he didn’t even need to leave the city to realize that unity.