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.

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 ‘Eyes Wide Shut’

Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 erotic thriller produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, his last film before he died. It was also written by him and Frederic Raphael, based on the novella Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler. It stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (actually married at the time), who play Bill and Alice Harford, a doctor and his wife who, just before Christmas, struggle with jealousy and temptations to adultery.

The film follows Schnitzler’s novella closely, changing only the setting (from early 20th century Vienna, during the Carnival, to late 20th century New York City, pre-Christmas) and characters’ names (Fridolin to Bill Harford, Albertina/Albertine to Alice, Nachtigall to Nick Nightingale [played by Todd Field], Mizzi to Domino, etc.), and adding more erotic or quasi-erotic content (i.e., more nude scenes). A 1969 German TV movie, with English subtitles, of Traumnovelle can be found here.

Here are some quotes:

“Don’t you think one of the charms of marriage is that it makes deception a necessity for both parties?” –Sandor, the Hungarian dancing with Alice

“Sex is the last thing on my mind when I’m with a patient.” –Bill, to Alice

Bill: Uh… look… women don’t… They basically, just don’t think like that.
Alice: Millions of years of evolution, right? Right!? Men have to stick it in every place they can, but for women it’s just about security, and commitment, and- and whatever the fuck else!
Bill: A little oversimplified, Alice, but yes, something like that.
Alice: If you men only knew.

“I first saw him that morning in the lobby. He was- he was checking into the hotel and he was following the bellboy with his luggage… to the elevator. He… he glanced at me as he walked past; just a glance. Nothing more. And I… could hardly… move. That afternoon, Helena went to the movie with her friend and… you and I made love. And we made plans about our future. And we talked about Helena. And yet, at no time, was he ever out of my mind. And I thought that if he wanted me, even if it was only… for one night… I was ready to give up everything. You. Helena. My whole fucking future. Everything. And yet it was weird because at the same time, you were dearer to me than ever. And… and at that moment, my love for you was both… tender… and sad. I… I barely slept that night. And I woke up the next morning in a panic. I don’t know if I was afraid that he had left or that he might still be there. But by dinner… I realized he was gone. And I was relieved.” –Alice, telling Bill about the naval officer she was tempted to have an affair with during the family vacation at Cape Cod

Mysterious Woman: [at the masked orgy] I don’t know who you are or what you think you’re doing, but you obviously don’t belong here.
Dr. Bill Harford: I’m sorry. I think you must have me mistaken for someone else.
Mysterious Woman: [whispering] Don’t be crazy. You are in great danger.

Red Cloak: [pleasantly] Please, come forward. May I have the password?
Bill: Fidelio.
Red Cloak: That’s correct, sir! That is the password… for admittance. But may I ask, what is the password for the house?
Bill: The password for the house…
Red Cloak: Yes?
Bill: I’m sorry. I… seem to have… forgotten it.
Red Cloak: That’s unfortunate! Because here, it makes no difference whether you have forgotten it, or whether you never knew it. You will kindly remove your mask. [Bill removes mask] Now, get undressed.
Bill: [nervously] Get… undressed?
Red Cloak: [sternly] Remove your clothes.
Bill: Uh… gentlemen…
Red Cloak: Remove your clothes. Or would you like us to do it for you?

“If the good doctor himself should ever want anything again… anything at all… it needn’t be a costume.” –Mr. Milich

“Listen, Bill, I don’t think you realize what kind of trouble you were in last night. Who do you think those people were? Those were not just ordinary people there. If I told you their names… I’m not gonna tell you their names, but if I did, I don’t think you’ll sleep so well.” –Ziegler

Bill: There was a… there was a… there was, uh, a woman there. Who, uh… tried to warn me.
Ziegler: I know.
Bill: Do you know who she was?
Ziegler: Yes. She was… she was a hooker. Sorry, but… that’s what she was.
Bill: A hooker?
Ziegler: Bill, suppose I told you that… that everything that happened to you there… the threats, the- the girl’s warnings, her last minute intervention, suppose I said that all of that… was staged. That it was a kind of charade. That it was fake.
Bill: Fake?
Ziegler: Yes, fake.
Bill: Why would they do that?
Ziegler: Why? In plain words… to scare the living shit out of you. To keep you quiet about where you’d been and what you’d seen.

Bill: The woman lying dead in the morgue was the woman at the party.
Ziegler: Yes.
Bill: Well, Victor, maybe I’m missing something here. You call it fake, a charade… Do you mind telling me what kind of fucking charade ends up with somebody turning up dead!?
Ziegler: Okay, Bill, let’s cut the bullshit, alright? You’ve been way out of your depth for the last twenty-four hours. You want to know what kind of charade? I’ll tell you exactly what kind. That whole play-acted “take me” sacrifice that you’ve been jerking off with had nothing to do with her real death. Nothing happened after you left that hadn’t happened to her before. She got her brains fucked out. Period.

“And no dream is ever just a dream.” –Bill

Themes pervading both Eyes Wide Shut and Traumnovelle include jealousy, temptation, and the blurry distinction between dream/fantasy and reality. Also, there’s a close relationship between sex and death, between Eros and Thanatos.

One night, Dr. Bill Harford and his wife, Alice, go to a Christmas party hosted by his wealthy friend and patient, Victor Ziegler (played by Sydney Pollack). Both husband and wife are assailed with temptations almost from their arrival: a handsome Hungarian named Sandor makes moves on her, while Bill has two beautiful young models charming him. Already tipsy Alice, while dancing with Sandor, sees Bill with the two women and feels a pang of jealousy.

Soon after, Bill is to be subjected potentially to more temptation when Ziegler needs him upstairs to take care of a beautiful and naked prostitute who has overdosed on speedball. Now, Bill can easily resist thoughts of lust for her, since his love and commitment to Alice are…so far…unshaken by any fears of unfaithfulness from her.

Indeed, the whole time Bill is examining the nude prostitute, he looks only at her face, asking her to open her eyes and look at him. He never gives in to the temptation of looking down at her body. He asks what her name is (Mandy, played by Julienne Davis), showing further that he, as a responsible doctor and family man, has no interest at all in treating her like a sex object.

He tells her that she’s lucky she hasn’t died…this time, but she mustn’t do these kinds of dangerous drugs ever again. To Bill, she’s a human being, though to Ziegler, her rich client, she’s a human commodity to be enjoyed. In this scene, we see the first example of sex juxtaposed with death, or at least the danger of death.

Bill, as a middle class bourgeois, is content with what he has, since he feels no threat of losing it. But when Alice, stoned with him on marijuana the night after the party, tells him of the temptation she had of having an affair with a naval officer while she and Bill were on vacation in Cape Cod the year before, he wonders if she’s told him the whole truth, or if she’s concealing an actual affair she’s had with the man.

Bill’s fear of having been cuckolded is a symbolic castration of him, an unmanning. The resulting lack gives rise to a desire for other women he hitherto hasn’t had. A further unmanning occurs when Bill is walking the streets of New York that night, after making a sudden house call (during which a woman, the daughter of a man who has just died, declares her love to Bill…more temptation for him). A group of college-age men, one of whom bumps into Bill, taunts him with homophobic slurs. Like Fridolin in Traumnovelle, Bill feels like a coward for not challenging them to a fight.

Soon after, as he continues walking the streets, moping, and ruminating about Alice’s suspected adultery, a pretty young prostitute named Domino (played by Vinessa Shaw) comes up to him and invites him up to her apartment. Here we see how his symbolic castration, his wounded sense of manhood, his lack, gives rise to his desire.

Though he doesn’t go through with having sex with Domino (a phone call from Alice ruins the mood), the point is that he has seriously considered the sex. He even pays her the full amount.

Bourgeois, middle class Bill is liberal in his thinking: smoking pot with Alice, respectful to women when they are undressed, and therefore repressing his darker desires. But when the security of his world is threatened, those darker impulses of his start to come to the surface.

In The Liberal Mindset, I described the psychological conflict the liberal has between his id impulses towards pleasure (sex, drugs, etc.) and his superego-influenced sense of morality about responsibility to social justice issues. Since Schnitzler and Freud thought very similarly about sex and psychology (they even exchanged correspondence), it seems appropriate to apply Freudian psychoanalysis to my interpretation of this movie.

Bill, as a doctor and devoted husband (and as a bourgeois liberal), has a strong superego that normally prevents him from indulging in any temptations to adultery or to objectifying women. As long as all that is his is secure, he will be a good boy; but if the security of what is his is threatened, his superego will no longer restrain his id.

Similarly with the liberal, as long as his or her class privileges are safe, he or she will be generous and have a kind attitude towards the disadvantaged. He or she will make endless pleas for peace, and will speak out against such problems as income inequality; but elect the wrong presidential candidate, and the liberal will bang the war drums against any country accused–without a shred of evidence–of having aided said candidate to win, and he or she will have no qualms about voting in a candidate equally right-wing as this wrongfully elected incumbent, no matter how unsympathetic this new, desired candidate is to millennials or to the plight of the poor…as long as he is a Democrat.

The mask of the superego slips off, and we see the face of the id. Speaking of masks…

After the failed encounter with Domino (already proof of Bill’s willingness to exploit the poverty of prostitutes to satisfy his desires), Bill finds a night club where he knows his old friend, Nick Nightingale, is playing jazz piano. The two men chat after the end of the gig, and Bill learns of Nick’s next, far more exciting one: in the mansion of a secret society whose members are masked and cloaked, and where there will also be a bevy of beautiful, nude women!

By the end of the movie, we learn that Ziegler is one of the masked men in the mansion, as is Mandy, according to him, anyway (though she, also masked, and the one who warns Bill to leave immediately, is played by a different actress–Abigail Good). These nude, masked women are obviously prostitutes meant to satisfy the lust of the men of the secret society, men of wealth, power, and influence. By an interesting irony, the men’s masks give them their power, the power of anonymity; the prostitutes’ masks strip them of their power, by making them faceless, robbing them of their individuality, making them mere commodities instead of letting them be human beings.

Bill–the man whose superego kept him from objectifying women before, kept him from ever dreaming [!] of exploiting prostitutes, now, with his suspicions of Alice’s infidelity (and the password to the house is Fidelio!)–is letting his id run wild. He eagerly insists that Nightingale give him the password and address to the mansion.

Given the outrageous nature of the goings-on in the mansion, the pagan, seemingly near-Satanic rituals, and the orgies, as well as how unlikely the members of the secret society would just let Bill in, him having arrived in a taxi cab instead of in a limo, it seems less likely that Bill has really experienced the orgy scene than that he has just dreamed it, or at least fantasized about it.

Traumnovelle means “Dream Story”; Eyes Wide Shut seems to mean “eyes wide open while seeing a dream” (i.e., with one’s eyes shut), or it could mean refusing to see reality, preferring to see one’s fantasies. In other words, one is so preoccupied with seeing the fantasies used to gratify the pleasure principle (id), and is so preoccupied with the accompanying guilt (superego), that one’s eyes are shut to the reality principle (ego).

Along with the controversy of the sexual material in much of Schnitzler’s writing, he was also known to have been a highly sexed man, given to many a dalliance with women. Added to this was his chauvinistic attitude, most prevalent at the time, of course, that his female lovers ought to have been virgins. Only he was permitted to have a multitude of lovers.

There is much of Schnitzler in Fridolin (and therefore also in Bill, though in a more muted form, thanks to Kubrick’s and Raphael’s rewrites), and so his sexual double standards are reflected in the protagonist’s attitude; though, to be fair, Fridolin and Bill have their share of guilt over their sexual venturings. Indeed, on some level, Traumnovelle seems to have been Schnitzler’s purging of his own voracious sexual appetite.

So, has the whole, wild night really happened, is it just Bill’s imagination, or is it somewhere in between? A dream is the fulfillment of a wish, as Freud originally observed; or, as he observed two decades later in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, with his theories of the death drive and repetition compulsion, sometimes one engages in patterns of self-injury, or acts out unpleasant experiences over and over again. In other words, sometimes one has self-destructive urges, as Bill’s refusal to heed the Mysterious Woman’s warnings of the danger that the secret society poses to him–were it all a dream dramatized in his mind–would seem to indicate.

Recall that Bill has just smoked weed with Alice before going out for the house call. I don’t think his being stoned has detracted from the fantastic aspects of his experiences that night. He could easily have nodded off in his cab a couple of times–the ride to the house call and back–and he could thus have dreamt all, or at least part, of the more extreme experiences.

Certainly his encounter at the costume rental, with Mr. Milich (played by Rade Serbedžija) and his sex-kitten teen daughter (played by Leelee Sobieski), her being caught undressed with two Asian men in that awkward incident, seems wild enough to have been part of a dream. Then again, maybe much of it really did happen, for such is the blurred line between fantasy and reality in this film.

So, when Bill arrives at the mansion, we can interpret the meaning of the ritualistic, orgiastic goings-on inside in two ways: as having really happened, or as a dream/fantasy of his. Let’s consider the former interpretation first.

Like the authoritarian power of priests in ancient religion, we can see the ritualistic elements in the mansion as symbolic of the religious awe one might feel in the presence of such powerful people. In Traumnovelle, the masked men wear monks’ hoods and cloaks, and the masked prostitutes wear nuns’ habits.

As for the orgiastic aspect, the prostitutes’ nudity represents their powerlessness as have-nots (consider Shakespeare’s use of naked, as meaning ‘stripped of all belongings, without means’ [Crystal and Crystal, page 292], as used in Hamlet, Act IV, Scene vii, lines 43-51), as contrasted with the clothed men, the haves, the rich and powerful. Their threat to strip Bill of his clothes is thus to deprive him of his power, too. The women’s powerlessness is a lack of their own, giving rise to the desire for such things as drugs (i.e., Mandy’s speedball), a manic defence against the depression they must feel from always being sexually exploited.

The secret society’s exploitation of the prostitutes reminds us of Jeffrey Epstein‘s and Ghislaine Maxwell‘s prostituting of underage girls to satisfy the hebephilia and ephebophilia of all those implicated in the scandal. Their gargantuan amounts of wealth buy them the power needed to silence or kill anyone who may squeal, just as Bill is threatened by the Red Cloak (played by Leon Vitali).

So much for the interpretation that the mansion scene really happened. Now let’s interpret the scene from the point of view that Bill has imagined, or dreamed, the whole thing. Now, the goings-on in the house are a dramatization of the thought processes of Bill’s unconscious.

What we have here is a dream that is a wish-fulfillment of Bill’s desires (an orgy of anonymous sex), as well as a fulfillment, on some level at least, of his self-destructive urges (the threats). Sex meets death.

Many of the goings-on represent unconscious ego defence mechanisms: denial (Bill’s mask; his pretence that he’s a member of the secret society), projection (the members of the secret society indulging in the naughtiness instead of him), reaction formation (in Traumnovelle, the monks’ and nuns’ clothes, symbolizing the secret society’s wish to seem virtuous rather than sinful; in the original script, they were supposed to be monks’ cloaks, and actually, the cloaks and hoods we see are still rather similar to those of monks), and turning against oneself (Bill is threatened, though he hasn’t indulged in any of the sex: he’s only been watching).

Since much of the ego and superego are unconscious, the defence mechanisms tend to be activated unconsciously, too: “…the ego also contains complex unconscious defensive arrangements that have evolved to satisfy the demands of neurotic compromise, ways of thinking that keep repressed impulses out of conscious awareness in an ongoing way. Unlike unconscious id impulses that respond with enthusiasm to the prospect of liberation in making their presence felt in the analytic hour, unconscious ego defenses gain nothing from being exposed…The ego, charged with the daunting task of keeping the peace between warring internal parties and ensuring socially acceptable functioning, works more effectively if it works undercover.” (Mitchell and Black, page 26)

The password, Fidelio, represents Bill’s wish that his wife be faithful to him, even though he, like Schnitzler, wishes he could get away with being unfaithful to her. The fact that he is tricked into thinking there’s a second password means that his id is fulfilled by being allowed in the house, while his superego‘s unconscious wish to be punished for his thoughts of infidelity is also satisfied.

If the mansion scene is all a dream, the Mysterious Woman can easily be Mandy, who can also know that he is Bill, the doctor who helped her get through her OD ordeal, which she can see as him having saved her life. (In his narcissistic imagination, Bill can then think that this nude beauty likes him.)

Her offer “to redeem him,” a perversely Christ-like moment amidst orgiastic activity that some may deem Satanic, can be seen thus as Mandy wishing to repay Bill for having helped her at Ziegler’s Christmas party. If the mansion scene has really happened, though, her willingness to take the punishment (presumably death) for a man she apparently doesn’t know could come from her hatred of her life as an exploited prostitute, a kind of suicide.

As the focal point of Bill’s dream, the secret society is, on the one hand, an intimidatingly powerful, wealthy, influential group, and on the other hand, an envied group whose indulgence in forbidden pleasures is something Bill would love to join. They could, in this sense, be seen to represent the NWO of the conspiracy theorists (many have tried unconvincingly to associate the secret society with such things as the Illuminati), that is, in his imagination, in his dreams, as opposed to reality.

The secret society could also represent–again, in Bill’s imagination only–the “corporatists” that the right-wing libertarians accuse of perverting the “free market.” The corporatist NWO is both feared and unconsciously admired and envied, since they have a power and influence that their detractors would gladly wield, were the detractors as rich and successful.

Bill is conflicted between his id wanting to join the big club we aren’t in and participating in their lewd indulgence, and his superego‘s moral condemnation of their wickedness, hence his leaving the house unscathed and sexually unfulfilled, with a prostitute dying for him. The right-wing libertarian similarly condemns the corruption of the bourgeois state and its super-rich beneficiaries, imagining that this corruption has nothing to do with “real capitalism,” when it is easy to believe that, were he to rise up to the level of the elite, he too would be defending his and their opulence, claiming they’d got there through ‘hard work, gumption, and talent,’ rather than through the merciless exploitation of the working class. Just look at the libertarian Koch brothers to see what I mean.

The liberal has similar repressed desires, including his wish to preserve his class privileges, though his loftier ego ideal would have him pretend to care for the exploited, as Bill consciously does Mandy.

So, a combination of Bill’s jealousy over Alice’s suspected infidelity, his smoking of weed intensifying that jealousy and fogging his mind, his fatigue throughout the night, his presumed napping in the cabs, and his own guilt over his near-succumbing to temptation has all blurred the boundary between fantasy and reality for him.

The stress he has felt–Was the Mysterious Woman murdered by the secret society? Was she Mandy? Did she just OD one too many times? Will the secret society have him and his family killed? Did he just dream/imagine it all?–is at least to a large extent just a dramatization of his own conflict.

Projecting onto a murderous, rich elite helps Bill to forget that he, too, has at least wanted, and has the money, to exploit prostitutes, just as Milich, the owner of the small costuming business, prostitutes his own daughter. Whether petite or grande, bourgeois are still bourgeois.

Bill has the same desires as Alice, who definitely dreams of being in an orgy with men and laughs while dreaming, then weeps about it after waking up. Here we see the difference between the indulgent unconscious and the censorious conscious mind. Bill also has the same desires as Ziegler, whose Christmas party, with the constant flirtation among the guests, is a double of the mansion orgy, as well as its inspiration for Bill’s dream. Alice’s orgy dream is also a double of the mansion orgy dream.

If the mansion orgy is a dream, so is every following scene associated with it. These scenes include Bill’s return to the house gates to receive the warning letter, his fortuitous discovery of a newspaper article about Mandy’s death by drug overdose, his seeing her body at the morgue (his id ogling her nude body like a necrophile, though his superego mourns her death and his ego fears for his and his family’s lives), and Ziegler’s explanation that her “sacrifice” was staged. All of these scenes thus are unconscious wish-fulfillments, expressions of Eros, as well as expressions of the death drive.

Finally, Bill breaks down and cries in his bedroom, waking Alice up, because he sees his mask on the pillow beside her. Is this because the secret society’s muscle have been following him everywhere, or has he, because of all the stress he’s been enduring, hallucinated it? (Alice doesn’t seem to notice it.)

After all, he returned to Domino’s apartment with a gift, hoping to finish what he started the last time; and since she wasn’t home, but her pretty roommate was there instead, he was tempted to cheat with her. The news of Domino being HIV-positive reinforces the sex/death link. Domino’s bedroom walls are also covered in masks, inspiring the mansion dream as well as linking his guilt feelings with seeing (or hallucinating) his mask lying on his pillow.

He tearfully confesses everything to Alice, and the last scene shows them Christmas shopping with their daughter in the toy section of a department store. Their discussion of the matter doesn’t seem to be so much about the threats of a secret society as about his guilt feelings. This would explain why, as a solution, their focus is on loving each other, and why Alice says that, as soon as possible, they should “Fuck.” It’s all about dealing with their temptations to adultery, not a fear of being murdered.

Meanwhile, Christmas lights and decorations have been seen throughout the movie, except for the ‘Satanic’ mansion scene, of course. Christmas in this context should not in any way be confused with the Christmas spirit. In line with the commodification of women (symbolic of the exploitation of the working class in general) seen from beginning to end, Christmas here should be understood only in terms of consumerism, the fetishization of commodities, hence the final scene of the Harfords doing their Christmas shopping.

The point is that ending the elite’s exploitation of prostitutes, and of all of the working class, must include those lower-level bourgeois, like Bill, also no longer exploiting other people. One cannot stop at overthrowing those at the very top; one must overturn the entire capitalist system, and those among the petite bourgeoisie can be a great help, provided they join the workers’ cause. As Mao once said, “Our closest friends are the entire semi-proletariat and petty bourgeoisie.” (Mao, page 7)

Consider the opening of Traumnovelle, when the daughter of Fridolin and Albertine is reading the story in which “brown slaves” row a prince’s galley to a caliph’s palace. The narration’s concern is with the prince meeting the princess once he reaches the shore; the slaves, however, are as faceless, as anonymously disposable, as the nude masked women in the mansion.

Bill has shown all that concern for Mandy, but he has done so from the hypocritical point of view of a liberal. As with his condolences for Domino over her having tested HIV-positive, his empathy for Mandy is a thin disguise–a mask–covering his desire to have both women in bed.

The proletariat is always “ready to redeem” the bourgeoisie, suffering and dying so the rich can continue to live well. “Someone died,” Ziegler says to Bill, referring to Mandy. “It happens all the time. Life goes on. It always does, until it doesn’t.” The eyes of the bourgeoisie are wide open to the pleasures they can see, but shut to the suffering of those they pay to give them that pleasure. Life is a dream story for the wealthy, but a nightmare, a trauma novella, for the poor.

Political Distractions

Of all the methods that the ruling class uses to keep the people in their control, the use of political distractions is among their most cunning. The vast majority of the population is, of course, angry about the corruption in the political systems of the world…but how should we understand the true nature, the origin, of this corruption? The ruling class’s deft use of distractions is what causes far too many people to misinterpret the nature and source of these problems.

Typically, these misinterpretations involve a mixture of some truth with many falsehoods. For example, we all know that there’s a kind of unholy alliance between corporations and the state: it’s a natural, logical state of affairs that in capitalism, the more successful businesses will centralize and concentrate their capital; then in the bloodthirsty world of competition, they’ll step on and crush the smaller businesses to ensure their ascendancy. Using the state to enact laws favouring the big businesses at the expense of the smaller ones is par for the course.

A misinterpretation of this process occurs, however, among the right-wing libertarians, who–unable to admit that their precious capitalism is the problem–imagine that this merging of government and corporations isn’t “real capitalism” (i.e., the no true Scotsman fallacy), but rather “crony capitalism,” or “corporatism” (that infelicitous word whose incorrect usage is a misinterpretation of Mussolini‘s meaning, and which should, if anything, be replaced by “corporatocracy”…which, incidentally, is capitalism brought to its logical conclusion!).

If there’s private property (factories, office buildings, apartment buildings, farmland, etc., owned by bosses, as opposed to being collectively run by workers…No, communists don’t want everyone to share his toothbrush or smartphone with everyone else!), that’s capitalism. If commodities are produced for profit, rather than to provide for everyone, that’s capitalism. If capital is accumulated (hence, the word capitalism), that’s capitalism. How extensive, minimal, or non-existent (this third being an impossibility) government regulation happens to be in an economy is completely irrelevant.

Right-wing libertarians believe the current system isn’t “true capitalism” because they can’t bring themselves to face the reality that capitalism has been an epic, spectacular failure…and it’s obvious even to them that the current state of political and economic affairs has been only a failure. But rather than face the facts, they’d rather be distracted by a belief in other, spurious causes.

Another group, one that to a great extent overlaps with the right-wing libertarians, is the conspiracy theorists who believe in such nonsense as the NWO: apparently, the ‘old world order’ wasn’t all that bad. They imagine a one-world government will be the ultimate dystopia, as if one cannot be as brutally oppressed by many governments. They imagine the Illuminati still exists, it supposedly having descended from the Bavarian one that helped end feudalism: this, incidentally, was a good thing. Then, there’s the whole chemtrails thing. And finally, we have to throw some bigotry into the pot, so there are the Masonic and Jewish conspiracies, too.

Though secret societies certainly have existed, one doesn’t need to believe in them, let alone those that apparently worship the devil, to understand that there’s a lot of wrongdoing in the world. One doesn’t need to believe the Devil exists to believe evil exists; nor does one have to limit one’s understanding of aggression and destructiveness to the instincts or to the ideas of the behaviourists–as Erich Fromm argued in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Our malignant aggression comes from our failure to transcend our nature through creativity, from our failure to feel a oneness with others, and a failure to feel a sense of accomplishment.

Fromm states that “the character-rooted passions are a sociobiological, historical category. Although not directly serving physical survival they are as strong–and often even stronger–than instincts. They form the basis for man’s interest in life, his enthusiasm, his excitement; they are the stuff from which not only his dreams are made but art, religion, myth, drama–all that makes life worth living. Man cannot live as nothing but an object, as dice thrown out of a cup; he suffers severely when he is reduced to the level of a feeding or propagating machine, even if he has all the security he wants. Man seeks for drama and excitement; when he cannot get satisfaction on a higher level, he creates for himself the drama of destruction.” (Fromm, page 29)

The conspiracy theorists seem to think it’s bad only when Jews, Freemasons, government workers, or businesses favoured by the state get rich, but if any other capitalist does well, then it’s OK. Their scapegoating of anyone outside of their circumscribed fantasy world of the “free market” is yet another political distraction from the real source of the world’s problems: capitalism.

Of course, the political right are far from the only people distracted by nonsense. Next, we must discuss the liberals, who often pose as left-leaning, but are really centrist or even right-leaning when the pressure is on to protect their privileged place in society. These are the people who think that, as long as Trump (or whoever the leader of the GOP happens to be at a given time) is booted out of the White House, and as long as a Democrat is elected, all will be well. (The same applies to the Tory vs. Liberal/NDP parties in Canada, Tory vs. Labour in the UK, etc.)

Things have gotten so bad in the US that liberals there think that voting in Biden is acceptable, even desirable. Who is more right-wing, I wonder: him, or Trump? Granted, I agree that, after his caging of “illegals,” the fascist antics he’s brought about in Portland, Oregon, and his wish to suspend the 2020 election that he’s increasingly unlikely to win, Trump has become intolerable by even neoliberal capitalist standards; but placing hope in Biden is yet another distraction from the real problem. Why can’t we try revolution instead?

Similarly among liberals, the whole Russiagate farce was yet another distraction from facing up to the Clintons’ corruption. I discussed here why there was, and is, little substantive difference between Trump and Hillary Clinton. That’s what I meant above by why ‘left-leaning’ liberals are centrists or right-leaning in disguise. The same can be understood with regard to Bernie Sanders, AOC, Elizabeth Warren, etc. They aren’t socialists: they just lure progressives over to vote for the Democratic Party.

And now, we have the greatest political distraction of all, one that has addled the right, centre, and many on the left: the coronavirus. Most of the world’s population has been distracted from dangers far greater than a virus that, when you catch it, you usually show few, if any, symptoms, and those who die of it are less than 1% (We need to be careful only with the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions, not the general population.). Lockdowns are causing millions to be thrown out of work, and out of their homes, in all likelihood.

Millions of people worldwide are either being thrown into poverty or from there to extreme poverty because of the coronavirus scare. Tens of thousands of people die of seasonal flu every year, but only this virus has gripped the world’s attention–and by an interesting coincidence, this is when the global economy has crashed, millions of dollars have transferred upwards to the already obscenely rich, and the administration of “anti-establishment president” Trump has, like those of Bush and Obama, bailed out the big financial institutions.

Millions of people in Third World countries die of malnutrition every year, especially children under five. We have, for a long time, had a perfect “vaccine” for hunger…food! The wealth of billionaires like Gates, Bezos, and Musk could easily feed these people, but they are never adequately fed. Gates‘s ever-so-dubious vaccine research–a real money-maker for him, but for Covid sufferers, virtually needless, and for other patients, possibly dangerous–is the priority. And no, I’m not an ‘anti-vaxxer,’ I just don’t trust him. That computer, not medical, man is practically running the WHO, so we shouldn’t be too sure about that organization’s objectivity.

The virus has, for the most part, declined, but the capitalist class is going to milk COVID-19 for all it’s worth. Small wonder we keep hearing warnings of the “next wave” of the coronavirus. Constantly wearing masks does virtually nothing to protect oneself or others from the virus, but wearing them for excessively lengthy periods of time can cause some other very serious health problems. (Granted, not bad enough to develop hypoxia or hypercapnia, but still, bad enough problems. In any case, if you’ve read enough of my posts, you should know by now, Dear Reader, how much I distrust the MSM, so their attempts at ‘debunking’ criticisms of the ‘rona narrative don’t impress me.).

The global capitalist class has every motive in the world to keep this coronavirus hysteria going. They’ll have ever more and more money to make, not just from Gates’s putative vaccine project, but also from the killing that e-commerce is making at the expense of physical stores (think of Bezos‘s soaring fortunes: as Marx once said, “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” [Marx, page 929]), and from the benefits the ruling class hopes to get from a cashless society (the result of customers being too scared to touch ‘tainted’ money).

You don’t have to be a flaming right-winger or conspiracy nut to doubt the coronavirus narrative. Nowhere in this post have I said we’re inching closer to a ‘one-world-government NWO.’ Nowhere have I said the Freemasons or the Rothchilds are behind this. Nowhere have I said the government has made “real capitalism” impure. Nowhere have I said the coronavirus isn’t real. Nowhere have I said that the lizard-people are behind this. And I’m not opposed to vaccines in general.

I don’t base my coronavirus research on YouTube videos made by cranks; I base it on the research of doctors, virologists, and epidemiologists who don’t conform to the MSM narrative (when CNN and the like sell the coronavirus scare without rest, that’s when I get skeptical). The right-wing conspiracy theories, as I said at the beginning of this post, are as much a political distraction as the b.s. mainstream liberal narrative is.

The capitalist class wants to keep the social distancing and lockdowns going on in order to increase our sense of alienation, and to keep the working class distracted from organizing and planning revolutions. They know that we are getting increasingly fed up with neoliberal capitalism…and any and all forms of capitalism. The capitalists are destroying the planet. They’re stealing from us and making us more and more desperate. They’re secretly scared that we’ll rise up one day. Hence, the virus is, for them, a Godsend. Keep us too scared of getting sick, and keep us from revolting.

Just because the Trumpist right talks about ‘prematurely’ ending the lockdowns and getting people back to work, doesn’t mean people like me are supportive of him and his ilk. Their wish to end the lockdowns, etc. only means that they’re right in a ‘broken clocks’ sense. Where the Trumpists are dead wrong is in their refusal to put any money into a decent healthcare system, what would truly stop the spread of COVID-19, as well as properly deal with all the other health problems Americans have.

People forget that the ruling class has several competing factions, not just one agenda. We must do a lot more than just get rid of Trump, or just get rid of the Democratic Party. It isn’t a matter of choosing conservative vs. liberal. That divisive thinking is just controlled opposition. We need to get rid of both sides. We need a revolution. Then we need to build socialism, which means providing guaranteed employment, housing, and healthcare, all the required solutions to our current problems. We don’t need masks; we need Marxism. We need socialism, not social distancing.

Nothing will do a better job of ending pandemics than universal healthcare. Nothing will do a better job of overthrowing the elite than a socialist revolution.

Analysis of ‘Brave New World’

Brave New World is a novel written by Aldous Huxley and published in 1932. Like George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is a dystopian novel about a future world tightly controlled by a totalitarian government. There is, however, a crucial difference between these two dystopias: Orwell’s Hell is a totalitarianism predicated on brute force, surveillance, and a manipulation of logic called doublethink; Huxley’s tyranny is more like a Heaven, or a Spenserian Bower of Bliss, predicated on a mindless pursuit of pleasure (promiscuous sex, getting high on soma, and watching ‘feelies’, this last being comparable to the 4DX experience in movies) to distract people from questioning the world around them.

At the same time, there are similarities between these two tyrannies: both involve intolerance of nonconformity, though where Orwell’s thought-criminals are tortured and killed, Huxley’s are simply exiled; and both systems of power do their utmost to erase history to ensure that their citizens never get a taste of an alternative culture, which might lead to a dangerous wish to rise up against the current regime. “‘When the individual feels, the community reels,’ Lenina pronounced.” (Chapter 6)

As with my analysis of Nineteen Eighty-Four, I can’t resist comparing Huxley’s dystopia with our world today. Indeed, in Brave New World Revisited, Huxley himself compared the world of his ‘fable’, as he called it, to the world he saw around him in the late 1950s, and found it disturbingly close in many ways to his fictitious world. He also contrasted his predictions to those of Orwell’s: “It is worth remembering that, in 1984, the members of the Party are compelled to conform to a sexual ethic of more than Puritan severity. In Brave New World, on the other hand, all are permitted to indulge their sexual impulses without let or hindrance.” (page 34)

Neil Postman, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, also made a comparison of Huxley’s novel with our world over thirty years ago, feeling that the America of the 1980s was far more like Huxley’s heavenly Hell than Orwell’s more blatant one. The whole idea of Postman’s book was how the once serious discussion of politics, which involved lengthy speeches, detailed analyses of the issues, and fierce debates, all by a literate public, has degenerated into mere TV entertainment. We are not so much bludgeoned by fascistic cops as we’re lulled to sleep with amusement. If Postman were alive today, he would see how much more correct, and prophetic, his analysis was by watching the clownish likes of Donald Trump on TV.

In my opinion, today’s world is about half Orwellian and half Huxleyan. For my comparison of Nineteen Eighty-Four with our world, please go here. And now, for my comparison of our world with that of Brave New World.

One thing to remember about Huxley’s novel is that it is a satiric exaggeration of the early 1930s (and, by extension, today’s world). We haven’t done away with families, procreation, pregnancy, parenthood, and monogamy, as has been done in World State society, but in many ways we are already well on our way to abolishing such things (and, recall above, that Huxley in Brave New World Revisited also believed that in the late 1950s our world was coming closer to such a state of affairs than he’d originally imagined). Western divorce rates are absurdly high, many people are opting out of marriage completely, artificial insemination has existed for decades, and in spite of the fear of STDs, or of men taking advantage of drunk or stoned women, one-night stands in Western countries are as common as the common cold.

As Huxley says in Brave New World Revisited: “The society described in Brave New World is a world-state in which war has been eliminated and where the first aim of the rulers is at all cost to keep their subjects from making trouble. This they achieve by (among other methods) legalizing a degree of sexual freedom (made possible by the abolition of the family) that practically guarantees the Brave New Worlders against any form of destructive (or creative) emotional tension.” (page 34)

A few words need to be said about Huxley’s World State when compared with today’s political world. The notion of an oppressive, global government is the subject of a popular conspiracy theory that sells lots of books and makes lots of money for right-wing kooks like Alex Jones. Needless to say, I don’t subscribe to such nonsense. I once read the beginning of a webpage about the ‘NWO‘ in which the writer claimed there are two ways to interpret all the phenomena of history: they’re either accidents–coincidences; or they’re all planned (i.e., conspiratorial). The belief in this false dichotomy among ‘truthers’ and the like was confirmed whenever I read their use of the term ‘coincidence theorist’ as a straw-man against any doubters of their paranoid ideas.

What’s especially interesting about these conspiracy theorists is how many of them are either right-libertarians or religious fundamentalists (Christian or Muslim). They fancy themselves anti-authoritarian, but they’re in total denial of the hierarchy and authoritarianism inherent in capitalism and religion. They won’t trust the mainstream media, but they don’t mind referring to it when it criticizes ‘socialist’ Big Government. And while we’re on the topic of conspiratorial thinking, since there has been, from the Reagan and Thatcher years to the present, a push towards greater and greater deregulation and tax cuts for the rich–which, as I’ve argued elsewhere, leads ironically to bigger rather than smaller government–it doesn’t seem an ill-founded suspicion to think that the rich oligarchy is more than happy to promote these conspiracy theories. After all, they criticize only the state, while leaving ‘free market’ capitalism and religion well alone. And if the elite is so incredibly powerful, we can’t do anything about it…so don’t bother trying. The capitalists have already won. They would love us to be so pessimistic.

As I see it, a more accurate contemporary parallel to the World State is globalization. The so-called ‘free market’ doesn’t pulverize the state, as the right-libertarians would have us think: it merely privatizes the state. World governments are increasingly being run by capitalists, as such shady deals as the TPP show; multinational corporations can use the TPP to sue any government that makes regulations that limit their profits. To know who has the power, follow where the money is going…and capitalism is all about making as much money as possible.

The state is just the bouncer of the World Casino, if you will; and who is the state’s boss, if he isn’t a capitalist? Huxley’s satire is as much a critique of capitalism as it is of the state. Indeed, in the 1946 Foreword to Brave New World (page xliii), he described his ideal society as being economically Georgist (which can be considered a variant on left-libertarianism) and politically ‘Kropotkinesque’, and it was he who thus introduced me to anarcho-communism.

References to capitalism in Brave New World include the World State’s class system, with people like Mustapha Mond, one of ten World Controllers composing the ruling class. Then there are Alpha-plus people like Helmholtz Watson and Bernard Marx, beneath whom are upper-middle-class Betas, then the Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, the equivalents of such groups as the petite bourgeoisie and the working classes who are conditioned into being content to stay in their respective castes and/or do menial labour. Note that there is nothing even remotely socialist about such a world, since socialism aims to create a classless, worker-ruled society.

Elsewhere, capitalism in Huxley’s world is seen in the World State’s promotion of consumerism, a constant buying and fetishizing of commodities (“Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches.”–Chapter 3). Indeed, with the World State’s requiring of its citizens to engage in promiscuous sex (“Every one belongs to every one else.”–Chapter 3), we see even a commodifying of people. In the Hatcheries, where babies, including cloned ones, are mass-produced instead of born the natural way, we see human commodification taken to a satirical extreme.

Speaking of mass production, a worship of Henry Ford has replaced that of Christ; there is even a regular singing of ‘Solidarity Hymns’ to Ford (Chapter 5, part 2). The crucifix is replaced by a T (i.e., the Ford Model T), and A.D. is replaced with A.F., “After Ford,” a new dating system beginning with the year that the first Model T was produced. Ford is honoured because of his development of assembly-line production, which represents the capitalist ideal in World State society. He is so godlike to the World State that expressions like “O, Lord, Lord, Lord,” and “Thank the Lord” are replaced with “O, Ford, Ford, Ford,” and “Thank Ford!” World State citizens worship capitalism just as today’s free market fundamentalists do, with their God-like ‘invisible hand,’ which allegedly guides consumers to making wise decisions in buying products. (I wonder how many of them are aware that such things as their coffee, chocolate, and diamonds are often produced through slave labour in the Third World.) World State citizens, just like so many of today’s conspiracy theorists (who are so above all those unthinking ‘sheeple’), worship capitalism as a religion.

Now, how are the citizens conditioned to be content with their lot, wherever it may be in the caste system? One way is through hypnopaedic conditioning: as children are sleeping, they hear recordings that subliminally teach them to conform. This is comparable to how we passively, thoughtlessly watch TV and accept every entertaining image, as if we were sleeping. TV, movies, and popular music these days are all mindless nonsense, or they bombard us with propaganda, either that of divisive political correctness, or of materialist pleasure (overt sexuality, the ‘He who dies with the most toys wins’ would-be philosophy, etc.). The CIA started influencing world media with Operation Mockingbird back in the 1950s, and it is doubtful if they ever stopped; one of the most influential feminists of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, Gloria Steinem, who helped in the shift from second wave to third wave and radical ‘Marxist’ feminism, had CIA connections.

Another way the World State controls the people is through a drug called soma, which gives people a high to help them forget their troubles (“A gramme is better than a damn.”–Chapter 3). This is like how disruptive children in the US are constantly given psychiatric drugs to treat conditions like ADHD or ODD. Pharma for profit, rather than for actually helping people. Elsewhere, people enjoy coffee and nicotine to keep them contented workers, and alcohol to make those workers forget their problems over the weekend. Sure, narcotics are illegal (the gradual legalizing of marijuana notwithstanding), but the prison-for-profit industry in America is all too happy to incarcerate drug addicts and traffickers (consider what a failure the ‘War on Drugs’ has been).

Then there’s all that sugary, fattening food we enjoy: our very own soma. Combining that with the dumbing-down of our society, consider what Huxley had to say in Brave New World Revisited: “And now let us consider the case of the rich, industrialized and democratic society, in which, owing to the random but effective practice of dysgenics, IQs and physical vigour are on the decline. For how long can such a society maintain its traditions of individual liberty and democratic government? Fifty or a hundred years from now our children will learn the answer to this question.” (page 21) Indeed, I think we have.

Of course, all these attempts to make the people conform don’t always succeed. Bernard Marx is unhappy because he is too small in physical stature. Lenina is criticized for not being polygamous enough. Helmholtz is too smart and creative a writer for the World State’s insistence on superficial slogans (for example,”A gramme in time saves nine.”–Chapter 6). Still, all three of them are conditioned enough either to want to fit in (Bernard, Lenina), or at least to accept the contrived World State morality (Helmholtz). Even Mustapha Mond owns forbidden literature, and has read it, and though he as a youth had a dangerously inquisitive mind (in scientific matters), he accepts and defends the need to keep conformity as an indispensable part of life, for the sake of social stability.

Another non-conformist, who nonetheless aches to fit into World State society, is Linda, mother of John the Savage. She is branded a whore both in the World State for accidentally getting pregnant (during a visit to a reservation in New Mexico), and in the reservation, where a conservative sexual morality condemns her for sleeping with the aboriginal women’s husbands.

These people are like most of us, who try to conform either to conservative or to liberal forms of morality, but fail to do so, to varying extents. We’re all trapped in a world of pursuing pleasure and social status.

Then there’s the greatest non-conformist of them all–John the Savage. Given the prejudices of conservative Westerners, there is an amusing irony in labelling John–a white man born to World State citizens (Linda and Thomas, the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning), but raised among aboriginals in the New Mexico reservation–a ‘savage’. Added to that irony is how his conservative morality, including such traditional values as monogamy, piety in family and religion, and a love of classic literature (John constantly quotes Shakespeare), is regarded as uncivilized among the people of the World State. Is this not like the scorn left-leaning liberals have for what they deem to be backward conservative ideas?

While I personally don’t believe in God, I don’t feel the need to stick my tongue out at religious people; as long as they keep their faith to themselves, I’ll tolerate it. Still, many of the New Atheists use their disdain for religion to justify Western imperialism in the Middle East. I’m no defender of anti-woman, anti-LGBT sharia law, but the American invasions of Iraq, Libya, and Syria have exacerbated the problem of Muslim extremism rather than diminished it.

This issue leads to my next point. Though John is a white man born out of wedlock and raised among aboriginals, I find it interesting to compare him to today’s Muslims living in the secular West. Like Muslims in America, Canada, and Europe, John is a fish out of water who has great difficulty adjusting to life in the World State. In chapters 8 and 15, John quotes Miranda in The Tempest, who, when she first sees people not from the island she’s been raised on, says, “O wonder!/How many goodly creatures are there here!/How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world/That has such people in’t.” But quickly, the novelty of the World State wears off, and John comes to despise this new world around him, as many alienated Muslims in the West must feel.

In the World State, notions of marriage, family, and religious tradition are laughed at and even abominated. In our world, such people as radical feminists on the one side (far more influential in the media than many care to admit) and MGTOWs on the other consider straight marriage to be a trap for their respective sex, a life-ruining decision to be avoided. Because of high divorce rates, Western families way too often are broken. And since religious authoritarianism has caused much more pain than given the comfort and black-and-white assurances it so dubiously promises, many in the West feel more than justified in criticizing religion, if not outright lampooning it.

John, however, believes that marriage, family, and religion fill our lives with a meaning that soma, consumerism, and promiscuous sex cannot. Muslims feel the same way, and just as John takes umbrage at Helmholtz’s laughing at Shakespeare’s writing of mothers and marriage (Chapter 12), or Mustapha Mond’s invalidating of religion (Chapter 17) or the values embodied in the literary classics (Chapter 16), so does the Muslim take offence at the stereotyping of his faith as being, essentially, violent fanaticism.

While we sympathize with John’s alienation, we shouldn’t idealize his alternative to the World State’s philosophy of happiness, either. His self-flagellations and over-reliance on Shakespearian poetry to give him meaning lapse into absurdity. The same can be said of the endless conflict between his desire for Lenina and his prudish refusal to satisfy that desire: consider his melodramatic reaction when she makes sexual advances on him, quoting Othello and calling her an “impudent strumpet!” (Chapter 13) Compare these absurdities to the Muslim insistence that the Arabic poetry of the Koran, for all of its undeniable beauty, is the eternal word of Allah rather than man-made dogma and religious laws created to help 7th-century Arabic tribes cope with the socio-economic and political pressures of their time. The Christian fundamentalist has similar problems with his ‘infallible’ Bible, as does the Mormon with his clumsily–written appendix to the ‘Word of God’.

Again, I can empathize with the isolated Muslim in the Western world, with his people in the Middle East routinely being killed by drone strikes, with countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria needlessly torn apart by Western imperialists (Iran likely to be the next victim), alongside Israel’s endless persecution of the Palestinians, and the media’s constant blackening of his religion. On the other side, freedom of speech, including the freedom to criticize all religions, must be respected. There are no straightforward answers to these problems.

John is right, however, to try to destroy all the soma (Chapter 15). Too many of us indulge in various forms of substance abuse instead of dealing with our problems directly. While smoking marijuana from time to time may be acceptable, it should be legal, and it’s certainly a lot of fun, many people ‘medicate’ themselves with it every day; and research has shown that there is a link–though a by-no-means straightforward one–between constant marijuana use and schizophrenia. Avoiding pain may be preferable to enduring it, but experiencing pain is part of being human; and people like Lenina and Linda are like living corpses when on soma. Indeed, the death of John’s mother (Chapter 14) from excessive soma use is what throws him over the edge.

Bernard and Helmholtz are exiled to far-away islands, these being almost pleasant punishments in Huxley’s dystopia. Indeed, they’re a far cry from Room 101. But John exiles himself, as it were, by leaving the cities and living in an abandoned ‘air-lighthouse‘ (Chapter 18). The nosy World State media and sight-seers, ever fascinated with this ‘savage’, follow him and do news stories of him beating himself. This is comparable to how the American media (mostly controlled by only six corporations) focus on Muslim extremism instead of Muslim acts of kindness and charity (or Muslim condemnation of Islamic extremism), to feed anti-Muslim sentiment and fuel more imperialist aggression in the Middle East, as well as to distract Westerners from many contemporary examples of capitalist corruption, like the Panama Papers.

John just wants to be left alone, just as Muslims want the US military bases out of the Middle East. Lenina wants him, and tries to seduce him again, just as Muslim men must be tempted by all those ‘half-naked’ Western women. Finally, John lashes out at Lenina, shouting “Kill it, kill it, kill it…” This could be compared to the scurrilous behaviour of what seems to have been mostly North African men (mostly not refugees) towards German women during New Year’s Eve, 2015-2016.

John’s attack on Lenina leads to an orgy with the other World State citizens present, in which he participates, to his shame. Overwhelmed with self-hate for having given in to his desire, John hangs himself. His despair is comparable to how many suicide bombers must feel. After all, however one may criticize the world John has been raised in, the World State is clearly much more at fault. The parallels of these two worlds with, respectively, the Muslim and modern Western worlds, should be obvious.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Vintage, London, 2007 (first published in Great Britain by Chatto and Windus, 1932)

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, Vintage, London, 2004 (first published in Great Britain by Chatto and Windus, 1959)

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