Fallen Idols and Cognitive Dissonance

I: Introduction

When you’re a leftist, one of the painful things you have to deal with is reconciling your political beliefs with the fact that many of the famous people out there whom you like and/or admire for their music, films, acting, writing, art, etc. often, if not usually, have either political stances you find abhorrent, or who have done despicable things in their personal lives. One simple, straightforward thing that one can say in these situations is, “I like their music/movies/acting/writing/art, not their politics…nor do I condone any personal misconduct of theirs.”

Sometimes this is easier to say that at other times.

I love Frank Zappa’s music, for example, yet other than his opposition to the American religious right, I don’t particularly care for his, as I’d describe them, libertarian-centrist views. He was dismissive of socialism and hung out with Vaclav Havel just after the ‘liberation’ of Czechoslovakia. I’m not comfortable with that, but it won’t make me stop listening to his music.

I enjoy listening to Led Zeppelin and David Bowie, but his and Jimmy Page‘s screwing of underage groupies like Lori Maddox will never sit well with me, and any references to rockers drooling over underage girls in their lyrics make me uncomfortable, to put it mildly. This can be especially difficult for me if the song has a great musical groove, but questionable lyrics, as with “My Sharona,” or “Sick Again.” To enjoy such songs, I have to have a deaf ear to the words. Talk about your cognitive dissonance!

Similarly, I can admire the genius of Stanley Kubrick and his perfectionistic vision that made The Shining the great film that it was, yet I’m also deeply saddened to know how that very perfectionism drove him to be so abusive to Shelley Duvall and to drive Scatman Crothers to tears, with retake after retake. Kubrick proved you can be a genius and an asshole at the same time.

Then there’s the admirable acting talent of Kevin Spacey, uncomfortably coupled with his aggressive sexual predation on, for example, a boy as young as Anthony Rapp, a year younger than he was as of the release of Adventures in Babysitting, when you can see how young he was then.

I also like some of the writing of Camilo José Cela, and while, to be fair to him, he would eventually become critical of Francoist Spain (how could he not have been, having written novels including such controversial content as matricide, mother-son incest, etc., which surely would have incurred the government’s disapproval?), it’s saddening to know that he’d ever supported Franco’s fascism at all (as he did during the Spanish Civil War, and then became a censor for Franco in 1943).

Similarly, there’s Salvador Dali, whose art I admire, but who also showed some sympathy for Franco and Hitler, getting him duly drummed out of the Surrealist movement for it. All of this sort of thing makes me most uncomfortable.

II: Ozzy

Recently, though, I’ve had to come to grips with another person much of whose music I’ve loved, yet also who had not only awful politics…right up to his death, but who also did some really horrible things in his life.

When Ozzy Osbourne died at the age of 76 a week or so before the publication of this article, I did what I typically do on Facebook whenever someone famous in the arts dies, someone who impacted my life in some significant way: I did a little tribute in the form of sharing a series of YouTube videos, in Ozzy’s case, old Black Sabbath songs, one from each album from the eponymous debut to Sabotage, then one from Blizzard of Ozz and the title track from Diary of a Madman. I also shared a few Ozzy memes and obituaries.

Now, as I was doing this, it occurred to me that Ozzy, being a rich bourgeois, in all likelihood had at least a number of reactionary attitudes, none of which I’d specifically known at the time, but which surely existed. We also know, of course, that he wasn’t exactly a vegetarian…if you know what I mean. Again, as before, I reconciled myself to these vices in the usual way: my liking of his music has never been, in any way, an endorsement of his politics or a condoning of his moral faults.

Then, I started learning about these faults, and my opinion of Ozzy accordingly began to sink. He claimed he didn’t know that the bat whose head he’d bitten off at a concert was a living one, a claim I find odd. Of course, there were also the doves.

And the animal abuse didn’t end there.

When his alcohol and drug abuse were at their worst, back in the early 1980s, he shot and killed his seventeen pet cats. He confessed to this later, remorseful and realizing he needed to do something about his substance abuse; there were, however, other incidents, including other abused animals thrown up from the audience at concerts during the Diary of a Madman tour, as well as his shooting up a henhouse full of chickens.

Then, there was his almost strangling to death of his wife, Sharon.

Now, as awful as all of these incidents were, we could perhaps forgive him on account of how his extreme substance abuse had addled his brain. There is, however, something else about him that the haze of booze and drugs do not account for in any way, shape, or form…his aggressive Zionism.

He and Sharon (née Levy) opposed a BBC documentary just months before his death, being among 200 public figures signing a highly publicized letter calling for an inquiry into the documentary on the Gaza genocide. The letter accused the broadcaster of “systemic bias against Israel” because of the film’s use of a child narrator with family links to Hamas. If anything, though, the BBC, as is the case with all mainstream media, has a pro-Israel bias. From time to time, there are liberal concessions showing sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians, but during the extremities of the ongoing genocide, even liberal supporters of the b.s. ‘two-state solution’ have no choice but to admit the truth occasionally. Such occasional concessions are not “systemic bias against Israel.”

Elsewhere, Sharon voiced opposition to a Coachella concert that featured pro-Palestinian Irish hip hop band Kneecap. Ozzy and Sharon have supported doing live shows in Israel, going against BDS. (Ozzy has also supported, in its war against Russia, the Ukrainian side, a side that is known to have Nazis in their army and government; in this connection, Ozzy also admitted to having admired Hitler–Nazism, or Zionism? It doesn’t matter when it comes to bourgeois support of fascism.)

Such support of Zionism is especially disturbing at a time when an Israeli-caused genocide is occurring, with tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians, many of them women and children, brutally murdered, displaced, children made amputees and orphans, and now, starved to death. This is not to be trivialized on account of Ozzy being one of our favourite rock stars. If you like a lot of his music, as I do, you can only feel the most grating of cognitive dissonance.

Now, I find it reasonable to assume that most, if not all, of Ozzy’s Zionism was Sharon’s influence, her being half-Jewish, and with Jewish Zionism being thickly linked with Jewish identity…hence, all the unfortunate confusion of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. (One should never forget that many of the most passionate anti-Zionists are Jews, and many of the most passionate Zionists are non-Jews.)

I find it hard to believe that Ozzy, a man whose brain was so fried by drugs and alcohol over the years, could have had any coherent set of political beliefs. He certainly claimed to be apolitical (translation: liberal). Still, his going along with Sharon does not excuse him; he may have been a druggie and a drunk, but he was also an adult, and therefore responsible for his choices.

Now, for those leftists who like neither Black Sabbath’s music, nor the music of Ozzy’s solo career, they’re free to hate him from head to toe as much as they like. For those of us who do like his music, though, and who wanted to eulogize him when he died, learning these awful things about him is painful, even heartbreaking. What can I say? The devil has the best tunes. Ozzy truly was the Prince of Darkness, in more ways than one.

Apart from his distinctive voice (including the expanding of his vocal range through the acquiring of mixed and head voice by the time Black Sabbath recorded Sabbath Bloody Sabbath), he didn’t contribute all that much to the music. Super-riff-man Tony Iommi created most of the music, as did guitar ace Randy Rhoads during Ozzy’s early solo years, those that I liked. Geezer Butler essentially wrote Sabbath’s lyrics, not Ozzy; as for his early solo career, bassist Bob Daisley wrote the lyrics. Ozzy’s musical contributions, therefore, tended to be just arranging a vocal melody, which was often just a doubling of the guitar riff (e.g., “NIB,” “Iron Man,” “Electric Funeral,” and “After Forever”).

As for his ‘crazy man’ stage persona, a lot of that was outright clownish, especially in the 1980s. Still, I’ll always enjoy all that music he sang that I grew up with as a teen. It’s just so saddening that all this other baggage, personal and political, has to be associated with him.

III: China

Well, so much for the fallen idols of Western pop culture. If it’s fair to judge the faults of a rock star for helping the Zionists out, though, it’s also fair to judge the faults of a supposedly socialist country for, in its own way, also helping Zionism.

Now, before I go into that, I want to start by pointing out that I’m not acting out of an ulterior Western imperialist motive. As a resident of Taiwan, I couldn’t be more opposed to the attempted American provocations of China to fight a war over this island in order “to liberate” it the way Russia was provoked into war with Ukraine. I don’t want to see the Communist Party of China overthrown; I want to see it purged of its dominance by its right-wing faction, the allowing of private business owners and bourgeois elements into the CPC under Jiang Zemin in the 2000s.

It’s one thing to allow the market back into China, under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, in order to build the productive forces and bring the country out of its former Third World status as the ‘sick man of Asia’ and make it into the truly impressive economic state it is in now, a rival of the US. It’s another thing entirely, once that transformation has been fully achieved, to maintain this economic way of doing things indefinitely, with extreme income inequality and the existence of a huge number of billionaires…in a socialist country? Any socialist worth his salt knows that billionaires shouldn’t exist at all, yet many Marxist-Leninists are still willing to give China a free pass.

I’m perfectly aware of the good that the Chinese government has done over the years: lifting millions of Chinese out of extreme poverty, punishing corrupt Chinese businessmen (which has included the death penalty), using much of the amassed wealth for the benefit of all Chinese (including the high-speed rail system), etc. That’s all fine and commendable, but it’s also supposed to be standard in a socialist state.

I’m also aware of the argument that, despite the bringing back of capitalism into China, it’s still legitimate socialism because the government controls the capitalists, and not vice versa, as is the case with the US. But with actual capitalists in the CPC over the past twenty years, and their resulting influence on party policy, I find it hard to believe that the government has all that much control over the country’s capitalists, with their billionaires.

China is supposed to be in an early stage of socialism, during which time capitalism is not yet fully defeated…or so the rationalization goes. Yet the CPC has been in control of the country since 1949–surely the ‘early’ stage has passed by as of now! Backward, agrarian Russia had its state capitalist NEP in the 1920s, and had gone past that by the 1930s, when Stalin came to power and pursued the achievement of socialism with the aggressiveness that we all know he pursued it with. What is slowing China down so much, when its material conditions are so much better than Russia’s were at the time?

Now, when China enables capitalism, particularly in our contemporary world, it will also, to at least some extent, enable imperialism and settler-colonialism, since in our world of late-stage capitalism, such enabling is inevitable. The enabling may not be on the scale of that of the Anglo/American/NATO empire (it’s easy not to be that bad!), but it’s bad enough, especially when a live-streamed genocide in Gaza has been going on since October of 2023.

Yes, China has had a healthy business relationship with Israel, particularly over the past two decades. This is all in spite of the CPC’s critical rhetoric against Israel’s brutal occupation and ongoing massacres of Palestinians. Note that Bernie Sanders and AOC are also critical of Israel…yet they continue to support Zionism’s ‘right to defend itself,’ which, interpreted correctly, means Israel is free to keep killing. Judge these ‘critics’ not by their words, but by their actions.

This healthy business relationship that China has with Israel helps the latter to make the money and have the electronics and machinery to function better, therefore facilitating the Zionist entity’s ongoing oppression of the Palestinians. In 2023, China’s exports to Israel reached $11.2 billion, and imports from China reached a record high of $13.53 billion in 2024. Key exports include electrical equipment, machinery, vehicles, and chemicals.

Israel has also recently managed to make a lot of money through exports to China. In 2023, Israel’s exports to China totaled $3.44 billion. In 2024, Israeli exports to China amounted to $2.81 billion. China is Israel’s second-largest trading partner. None of this reflects a sincere attitude of Chinese solidarity with the Palestinians.

When a state gets enmeshed with global capitalism, it tends to think first in terms of dollars and cents (or in China’s case, renminbi), and in terms of socialist principles second. China under Mao had firm solidarity with the Palestinians; ever since the reforms of Deng and Jiang, though, that solidarity has been, to put it gently, dwindling. China’s critical rhetoric against Israel seems to be more about saving face as the contemporary embodiment of socialism; amassing more and more wealth has been the priority.

Perhaps the worst, and most egregious, example of China’s colluding with Israel for money has been the sending of Chinese construction workers to Palestine to build homes for Israeli settlers! Private Chinese firms have invested, directly or indirectly, in Israeli settlements or companies operating with them. Yes, China has been helping Israel to colonize Palestine! Shame on China!

All of those leftists out there who, on the one hand, self-righteously condemn this or that rock star for this or that transgression, yet on the other hand sing the praises of ‘socialist’ China need to do a similar soul-searching and humbling of themselves as I’ve had to do about Ozzy. For as bad as Ozzy’s and Sharon’s support of Israel undoubtedly is, the support of a country, which is supposed to be socialist, for Zionism is much, much worse.

IV: Conclusion

It is saddening, truly heartbreaking, to learn that someone or something you once thought of as great was actually, in many ways, quite awful. You have come upon fallen idols. The cognitive dissonance in both loving and hating the idol simultaneously is stinging.

Something we Marxist-Leninists do is engage in dialectical thinking, which involves confronting contradictions. One sees opposing aspects in people and things: artists like Ozzy, Page, Bowie, Kubrick, Spacey, Cela, and Dali made great music, films, writing, and art that we love; they also did some pretty dreadful things, including having despicable politics. The same applies to the governments of countries that have done objectively both good and bad things.

Analogous to dialectics is something discussed in Kleinian psychoanalysis, namely, the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position. In the former position, one splits the good and bad sides of an object apart and, never attempting a reconciliation, projects and discards the object, originally, a baby’s mother when she frustrates it by not, for example, breastfeeding it. In the latter position, one goes through the painful process of integrating the good and the bad, reconciling the one with the other, as for example when a baby comes to terms with a mother who sometimes satisfies and, at other times, frustrates a baby.

Can we do such integrating with our idols’ good and bad aspects? Hmm…

Analysis of ‘Payback’

Payback is a 1999 neonoir film directed by Brian Helgeland, written by him, with rewrites for the theatrical release by Terry Hayes. The film is based on the 1962 novel, The Hunter, by Donald E. Westlake, writing under the pseudonym of Richard Stark; this novel had earlier been adapted into the 1967 film, Point Blank.

Payback stars Mel Gibson, with Gregg Henry, Maria Bello, Lucy Liu, Deborah Kara Unger, David Paymer, Bill Duke, William Devane, James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, and John Glover.

There are actually two substantially different versions of this movie, with different colour grading, different soundtracks, and most importantly, with completely reshot third acts, leading to totally different endings. The test screenings for the film, right after it wrapped, didn’t yield a positive result. It was felt to be excessively dark and violent, with a wife beating, a shot dog, and other characters killed in cold blood.

A more crowd-pleasing version was wanted, so Helgeland was out, Hayes’s rewrites were made, and the central villain–done in a voice-over by Sally Kellerman–was replaced by Kristofferson (both seen and heard), while removing the objectionable parts mentioned above and adding a voice-over narration by Gibson.

Helgeland’s version–the director’s cut–is called Payback: Straight Up, and it was released on DVD, Blu-ray, and HD DVD in 2007. According to The A.V. Club, Straight Up is “a marked improvement on the unrulier original.” Indeed, the theatrical release was not all that well received, and with the generally better critical reception of the director’s cut–which has a darker, more ambiguous ending–one realizes that the reaction of the test-screen audience perhaps should not have been taken too much to heart.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, here is a link to the director’s cut, and here is a link to a PDF of The Hunter. I’ll be comparing both film versions and the plot of the novel.

The main theme of the film is, most obviously, theft, since it’s not just the $70,000 cut that Porter (Gibson–Parker in the novel, who is double-crossed out of $45,000) loses after being double-crossed by his heist partners, Val Resnick (Henry–Mal Resnick in the novel) and Porter’s wife, Lynn (Unger). They’ve stolen the total amount of money from a rival Chinese mafia organization. Porter’s wish to get his $70,000 back from “the Outfit,” a powerful mafia organization Val has given the money to so he can rejoin them after having been kicked out for committing a blunder, is seen by the Outfit as a theft in itself.

Since the film deals with a number of mafia organizations, as well as two corrupt cops (Detectives Hicks and Leary, respectively played by Duke and Jack Conley), and since I have a habit of seeing mafia as representative of competing capitalists, we can see how the alienating, dog-eat-dog world of Payback is allegorical of our own, oh-so-troubled times.

When we don’t have solidarity among the working class, united in their struggle for liberation from capitalist exploitation, those very common people end up attacking each other, fighting with each other, hurting each other. Such is the kind of dog-eat-dog-world we see in Payback.

The theatrical release begins with a scene in a room where a doctor…or sorts…removes bullets from Porter’s back–bullets put there by Lynn during the double-crossing. Because Porter is a professional thief, and therefore would be tracked by the cops if he went to a hospital, he has to resort to this kind of low-quality ‘healthcare.’

The novel begins with Parker as a penniless, shabbily-dressed drifter (one might remember young Hitler during his destitute days…I’ll go into why I’m making this comparison later) crossing the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan and bent on getting his money back. The beginning of the director’s cut is similar (since it’s far more faithful in general to the novel), and after the crossing of the bridge, Porter comes out of a train station that looks like the one at the end of this film version, where he again gets shot, and he needs Rosie (Bello) to drive him to that ‘doctor’ before he dies, thus making the plot of the director’s cut come full circle.

Since The Outfit, as I see it, represents the capitalist system (an idea that can be seen more vividly in the novel, when it’s described as having branches all over the US–in New York City and Chicago, for example–and how it grew from the old Prohibition days into a corporation with an outer veneer of legitimacy, to keep the cops away), and violent, criminal types like Porter/Parker and Val/Mal work sometimes inside (the latter), and sometimes if not always (the former) outside of The Outfit, these two men can be seen to personify fascism in its different aspects.

If that observation seems odd to you, Dear Reader, let me elaborate.

Neither of these men are concerned with how the exploitative, hierarchical structure of capitalism as represented in The Outfit is harmful to the world’s most vulnerable…as fascists aren’t concerned with it, either. Val/Mal wants into the system in order to enjoy its perks (just as Hitler enjoyed the backing of big business to help him come to power). Porter/Parker is only concerned with getting back the money he was cheated from; since Val/Mal gave his stolen share to The Outfit, Porter/Parker wants them to give it back to him…and he’ll kill anyone who stands in his way.

Naturally, The Outfit doesn’t want to part with $70,000, so their top brass refuse to give Porter ‘his money.’ This refusal is similar to how the Western imperialist powers didn’t want to cede such territory as Poland to Nazi Germany, who wanted their piece of the pie…hence the Nazi invasion of Poland started the inter-imperialist WWII.

Remember that what our protagonist wants back is something he himself helped to steal…just as Nazi Germany ‘took back’ Poland, some of which (West Prussia and Silesia) was once part of the German Empire before it was lost at the end of WWI. This land was felt to have been ‘stolen’ from Germany, and the Nazis used all violence imaginable to get it back, as Porter does.

Like fascists, he couldn’t care less about the suffering of the poor; he just wants to bring himself out of pennilessness and back into wearing stylish suits as quickly as possible, like the petite bourgeoisie, who often side with fascism, especially if they lose power to the haute bourgeoisie (whom The Outfit could be seen to personify). At the beginning of the film, Porter steals paper money from a homeless man, justifying his theft (in the theatrical release, significantly) by noting that the homeless man is faking his lameness. There’s to be no sympathy for the destitute if they aren’t disabled, apparently. Those are neoliberal values for you.

The theatrical version changed the film to make Porter more likable, in spite of the fact that he’s hardly less sociopathic than Val…or your average fascist, for that matter. The scene of Porter fighting with and beating Lynn in her kitchen was removed, as was his killing, near the end of the film, of an Outfit soldier in cold blood in a truck for speaking to Rosie as if she were a mere whore.

But even without these scenes, Porter is still a nasty piece of work. He kicks Lynn’s apartment door in while her back is to it; she’s pushed into a wall, knocking the wind out of her. There’s all of his other, unfeeling violence, all just to get $70,000, which keeps being mistakenly thought to be $130,000. The very tagline of the theatrical release is “get ready to root for the bad guy.”

The crucial difference to be found between the theatrical release and the director’s cut is that the latter presents a dark, gritty world that is so harsh that one cannot watch it without thinking there’s something unacceptably wrong with it…it’s implicitly a social critique…whereas the former–with its more sympathetic Porter–makes his violence seem ‘hip.’ It’s significant that this glamourizing of sociopathic Porter should be in a film from the late 1990s, by which time the replacement of welfare capitalism with the neoliberal ‘free market’ variety had been firmly established.

You see, Porter demonstrates a kind of ‘triumph of the will’ that we’ve already seen in Conan the Barbarian. There’s a message advocating an acceptance of this kind of colder- and colder-blooded competition that has insidiously crept into otherwise mainstream liberal Hollywood movies, implicitly encouraging viewers to adopt the same unfeeling attitude.

First, we make it ‘cool’ and ‘badass’ to show a macho man killing and killing to get what he wants–in this case, seventy grand. Then, we make it hip to use racial slurs, as Tarantino did, and as we hear Val doing, calling the Chinese mafia “chows” and “fuckin’ slants!” All we need is for economic times to be hard–symbolically expressed in scruffy, penniless Porter itching to get his $70,000 at the film’s beginning–while one never challenges the capitalist system that caused these problems, of course, and the stage is set for fascist violence to come in.

After ripping off the homeless guy, Porter surveys the busy sidewalks to find a man who looks similar enough to him for a photo ID he can fake as being of himself. He finds a suitable guy, bumps into him and apologizes, brushing his suit to distract him while pickpocketing his wallet. As we can see, the theatrical release glamourizes a thief and killer, ruthlessly stopping at nothing to get ‘his’ money, whereas the director’s cut presents him as such not to make him seem ‘cool,’ but as an implicit social commentary, a dark one, meant to raise eyebrows.

Just before the wife-beating, Lynn tells Porter that Val has arranged to pay her rent, just as in the novel, Mal does this for her in return for a sexual relationship with her. Resnick has stolen far more than just money from our prickly protagonist.

In the film, a far better motive is given to Lynn to double-cross and kill Porter than is given in the novel: she thinks he has been having an affair with Rosie (which he claims happened before he met Lynn). In the novel, Mal threatens to kill her if she doesn’t shoot Parker…because he’s too much of a coward to do his dirty work himself.

Val, even more overtly violent than Porter, enjoys beating women–prostitutes in particular, suggesting a…shall we say, Joy Division mentality about them?–and has a racist attitude, at least towards Asians. His favorite prostitute is the S-and-M-leaning Pearl (Liu), who is linked with the Chinese mafia, and with whom he trades punches. One is reminded of Freud‘s comment: “A sadist is always at the same time a masochist.” Val utterly personifies fascism.

As I mentioned above, he stole Porter’s cut to buy his way back into The Outfit, which as I also mentioned above, represents capitalism in its more presentable form. There are different levels of viciousness in capitalism. When economic times are good, capitalism can pretend to be democratic; when they’re bad, the democratic mask falls off, and the ugly, violent face of fascism shows itself.

Val represents the kind of fascist who wants to hide in, and get the benefits of, capitalism’s respectability in the form of The Outfit. Porter, however, represents the kind of fascist who sees through the phony masquerade of The Outfit and the capitalism it represents, so he’d rather work outside of it, even butting heads with it, if necessary.

A middle-man between Val and Lynn’s seller of drugs is Arthur Stegman (Paymer), who also owns a taxicab operation (in the novel, the Rockaway Car Rental). As with the ‘legitimacy’ of The Outfit, Stegman’s cab business is the respectable one he, as a dealer of drugs like the heroin Lynn has ODed on, hides behind (in the novel, she kills herself by ODing on sleeping pills).

The point I’m trying to make–about the outer mask of respectability we have in capitalism (The Outfit, Stegman’s cab company) vs. the naked aggression of fascism as personified in Porter and Val–is that we shouldn’t have any illusions about the former as being somehow contrasted against the latter. To many of you readers, the point may be too obvious to need to be said; but remember that, as of my writing of this article, millions of Americans are voting for Harris or Trump, fully believing that who they’re voting for are acting in their interests.

Recall that quote by Frank Zappa–who was no supporter of socialism, yet nonetheless had no illusions about the American political and economic system he lived in–about how the illusion of freedom will last only as long as it remains profitable to do so. Once that illusion is too expensive to maintain (as it has been for several decades now), it will be removed, and we will see the naked reality of our hierarchical system based on money and power, and given expression in the form of fascism.

When the comfortable life of liberals is safe and intact, they can pretend to be magnanimous and gracious. When their class privileges are in any way threatened, though, they show their true, violent colours. Val, in the comfort and discreetness of his Outfit hotel room, can hide his sadism with Pearl. When he’s been told by Stegman at a restaurant that Porter is alive and well and presumably wants to kill Val, he shows how nasty he’s capable of being right out in public, right out in the open.

He’s speaking out loud at his table, with no regard for the other patrons. He speaks of having Porter killed for sure, again, loud enough for everyone to hear and not caring at all about it. He even threatens another customer, walking right up to his table, for merely looking at him.

When Val goes to see Carter (Devane), a superior to him in The Outfit, he’s all deferential, because of course he has to be. He’s hoping for help from Carter, but now that Carter’s class interests are also being compromised (as are those of The Outfit in general) by Porter’s visit to Val’s room the night before, Carter not only won’t help Val at all with doing away with Porter, he also wants Val to move out of the hotel, not coming back until he’s removed Porter all by himself (the same thing happens to Mal in the novel). The liberal in Carter has shown his true colours, too. There is to be no more “unpleasantness” from Porter at the hotel.

In the director’s cut, Val is standing outside The Outfit building, angry about having been cut loose from them. He shouts that to do something right, one must do it oneself; then, facing and gesturing to the two US flags by the front doors of the building, he shouts, “It’s the American way!”

Once again, this moment seems to demonstrate Helgeland’s original intentions for Payback, the implied critique of capitalism. When you’re in a bad situation as Val is, those in power won’t help you. You have to deal with the problem yourself–no government handouts, for that would be ‘vile socialism.’ Val is so brainwashed by American capitalist ideology, though, that he won’t even admit that the system is screwing him, knowing full well how screwed by it he is.

After all, it’s the American way. Long live the free market!

He has a racist attitude towards the Chinese (and presumably by extension, towards Asians in general), but this doesn’t mean he won’t enlist their help in killing Porter for him. It’s just as when the Nazis, though regarding the Japanese as racially inferior to them, nonetheless were content to have them in the Axis to keep the Americans occupied during WWII. Politics makes strange bedfellows, and Val has to make do with what little he has.

Though he helped Porter rip off the Chinese mafia, he’s enough of a snake to blame the entire robbery on Porter in order to motivate them to kill him and have their satisfaction in him alone. Unfortunately for Val, though, those two cops intervene just in time to scare the Chinese mafia away.

Now, Detectives Leary and Hicks are thoroughly corrupt, willing to be bought off by Stegman for selling heroin, as well as to save Porter from being charged with the killing of Lynn, etc. (i.e., by having Porter give them the $70,000); but that doesn’t mean they’ll let Val and the Chinese mafia finish off Porter after running into him with their car.

You see, Leary and Hicks represent the kind of capitalism in which the government intervenes, as opposed to the theoretical ‘free market’ capitalism as represented in the lawless Chinese mafia and The Outfit. Just as these two cops will extort money from Porter or Stegman, the state will gladly take cash gifts from capitalists, be they liberal, moderately conservative, or fascist in ideology, in exchange for government protection. Only right-wing libertarians and their extreme, deluded version–‘anarcho’- capitalists–entertain the fantasy that the state and the market are mutually exclusive, and that an unholy alliance between the two cannot be ‘true’ capitalism, but is ‘corporatism’ instead.

Leary and Hicks are a rewrite of cops in the novel who, investigating a shop-owner named Delgardo for moving marijuana from Canada into the States, suspect that Parker is in on the drug-dealing, too (Part III, Chapter 1). In the, to be frank, rather anti-climactic ending of the novel, Parker manages to get his money with minimal difficulty, as opposed to the bloody injuries Porter sustains in both the theatrical release and the director’s cut.

The cops in the novel, however, being incorruptible types compared to Leary and Hicks, finger Porter for helping Delgardo to move the marijuana into the country (Part IV, Chapter 4), and while he manages to get away from the cops, he flees with the wrong baggage, one with clothes rather than the one with the money. The novel ends with him, having enlisted the aid of three men, ripping off The Outfit again, but for a smaller sum of money.

While Parker kicks the asses of the cops in order to escape them in the novel, in the film, Porter plans to frame Hicks and Leary for his killing of Val; he does so by stealing Hicks’s badge, tricking Leary into getting his fingerprints all over the pistol he’s used to put a bullet in Val’s head, and putting Hicks’s badge in the hand of Val’s corpse.

In the novel, Parker needs Rose only to get an address so he can find Mal. In the film, Porter does more than that with her: he revives a relationship with Rosie, now that Lynn is dead. When killing Val, after learning that he needs to contact Carter and Fairfax (Coburn) about getting his money, he saves her from a brutal rape in her apartment. (In the director’s cut, he arrives too late, unfortunately, to stop Val from shooting and killing her dog.)

When Porter goes to Carter’s office, we come to the greatest divergence between the theatrical release and the director’s cut: the identity of the film’s central villain–respectively, Mr. Bronson (Kristofferson) and Ms. Bronson (Kellerman, in voice-over). Since we only hear her voice and never see her, this lends her a fascinating aura of mystery: she’s like a vengeful mother goddess after Porter has shot Carter.

Though I tend to prefer the soundtrack of the theatrical release, with the five-note, chromatic sax ostinato of its main title, I must say that I prefer the darker, more ambiguous ending of Helgeland’s version to the crowd-pleasing, raised-stakes version with Kristofferson, as superficially thrilling as it is. Hence, I’ll deal with the director’s cut ending.

Having not only a woman as the head of the mafia Outfit, but also a woman who surprises and shoots Porter at the train station, the director’s cut ending defies the stereotype of the ‘innocent woman’ vs. the necessarily male villain. This ending, though closer to the novel version (i.e., the payoff happens at a subway station–Part IV, towards the end of Chapter 3), also improves on its disappointingly anti-climactic denouement.

Helgeland’s ending can also be seen to reflect the relationship between fascism (as personified in cold-blooded killer Porter and sadistic Val) and the mainstream imperial ruling class (The Outfit). As Carter has observed, the sadism of Val “comes in handy,” but anyone…anyone…who causes trouble for The Outfit must be removed–either kicked out of the hotel (Val), or killed (Porter).

Similarly, the ruling class has always found fascists to be useful in beating the working class into submission; hence, for example, when Hitler was allowed to take the Sudetenland and encouraged to go east and invade the USSR. When he and Mussolini started to move in on such territory as that of the British Empire, though, they were making themselves into troublemakers of a sort that Porter could be seen to represent, with his fascist-like bent towards violence.

Hence, the violent, he-who-lives-by-the-bullet-shall…die?…by-the-bullet, fate of Porter is comparable to the crushing defeat of Hitler and Mussolini by the end of WWII. The two dictators died…as Porter just might die…but their fascist legacy lived on, through Operations Paperclip and NATO-backed Gladio, Western support of Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers to this day, etc.–as Porter just might survive.

When Tech Is Dreck

As a Canadian expatriate having lived in Taiwan for the past 28 years (as of the publication of this post), I have seen many instances of the locals’ fetishization of the latest in technology. They typically link high-tech with ‘convenience,’ which of course is its ostensible raison d’être.

One time, perhaps about fifteen to twenty years ago, I was a guest teacher in a class of high school English students. I was doing lectures on topics based on newspaper articles chosen by the regular teacher of the class. She typically chose articles on the topics of science and technology, since her students were probably mostly going to go into STEM fields.

Such choices of topics were fine with me, but at one point I suggested news articles based on current events in politics, which I thought would not only be far more interesting to the students, but also an important way to immerse the kids in the goings-on of other countries, as well as getting them to be more aware of the major political issues affecting the world. After all, I had noticed something of an island mentality among far too many of the locals, a tendency to be insular and show no interest in the world beyond Japan, South Korea, and mainland China.

That teacher was adamantly opposed to the idea of current events as lecture topics. I found her opposition utterly baffling. Apart from suggesting she get someone other than me to do the lectures for the class (for my apparent belabouring of the change in subject matter…!), she gave the following as her reasons: classrooms in general avoid discussions of current events, for such avoidance is “common sense.” It’s sensible to avoid the topic, because everybody else avoids it.

???

A discussion of political issues in class, far from being inappropriate, could be made into practical English conversation practice, in the form of debates in which students can be put into teams and argue the various points of view, regardless of whether or not they actually hold such points of view. But no: making students in any way politically literate was a no-no. We just stuck to topics on technology.

As an English teacher here, I’ve noticed over the years that kids in the Taiwanese education system are generally geared towards careers in engineering, computers, semiconductor and cellphone manufacturing, and that sort of thing. It’s about getting them to have jobs in high tech in order to make lots of money, in other words. One is totally indoctrinated into the capitalist system, never to question it. After all, TINA.

Now, my political leanings as of those years hadn’t yet drifted to the left (so I wasn’t trying to impose my personal political opinions on the kids), but the education system here shows no desire whatsoever to instill any kind of political consciousness in the kids, be it right-wing, left-wing, or centrist. As a result, all that’s left for the kids to espouse is the default worldview: neoliberalism, treated as if it were the universal truth, an ideological ‘end of history,’ in which prostrating oneself to the mercies of the all-mighty market is the only way to live. It isn’t even an ideology: it’s just ‘the truth.’

Further Taiwanese fetishizing of high-tech can be seen with the locals willingly buying things with their smartphones instead of using cash. Oh, boy–we have another excuse to play with our phones! It’s so convenient! Oh, really? Standing there, fumbling around with your phone, clicking things, making mistakes here and there, then clicking on them again…somehow, this fiddling around is more convenient than taking cash out of your wallet, giving it to the cashier, taking your paid-for items and change, then promptly leaving the store?

Using smartphones instead of cash to pay for things is leading to the idea of a future cashless society, something many of us have a legitimate fear of. Paying digitally increases our dependence on the internet. What if there’s an outage? What if we’re hacked? What if we, for some reason, get locked out of our accounts and cannot buy food or other necessities? What if our being locked out of them is because we’ve expressed an opinion that the snooping government doesn’t like?

In this imagined, and very possible, future scenario, we can see the duality of a fetishization of technology vs. a total lack of engagement with what’s happening in the world politically. But the problem doesn’t end with digital payment.

The latest technological trend, of course, has been AI, and in recent months I’ve seen the TV news here in Taiwan awash with stories on Jensen Huang and his company, in my opinion aptly named Nvidia (Invidia, a Latin word from which we get envy, means ‘looking at (someone) with the evil eye, with hostility.’). The locals are treating Huang like a celebrity, not least of all because he’s Taiwanese-American, but also, of course, because of their ongoing fetishization of the newest in technology.

Now, AI can be a good or a bad thing, depending on how it’s used. Put another way, AI can be used to do all of our work, which, depending on which economic system we have, can be a good or a bad thing.

If we have an economic system in which commodities and services are provided to fulfill everyone’s needs, then AI will be the great liberator of all of humanity. That is, if everyone around the Earth was provided with and guaranteed access to food, housing, education, healthcare, and all other forms of wherewithal, we’d never have to work again to survive. We could all actually enjoy life.

But, in our current economic system, in which commodities and services are here to maximize profits, with no consideration given to the needs of the poor, then AI taking our jobs away from us would be an absolute nightmare. I see no indications of our current economic system changing from a capitalist one to a socialist one any time in the foreseeable future. The shift from the US/NATO alliance to a BRICS one will still be largely of countries with a capitalist economic system.

It’s been argued that old jobs lost to AI can, in some cases, be replaced with new jobs operating the AI. Not everybody losing the old jobs, however, will have the ability, the desire, or the finances to be trained to do the new jobs. As an English teacher here in Taiwan, I’m very worried that, in the next few years, I’ll be replaced by a robot in at least some, if not most or even all, of my classes; and since the beginning of all the Covid hysteria, I’ve been chronically underemployed as it is.

Furthermore, AI can be used in aid of surveillance by the government and corporations, eroding our right to privacy. It was bad enough to know what Edward Snowden revealed about the NSA’s snooping around with our cellphone calls and email messages years ago. What is Facebook, but a large profile of each and every person’s likes and dislikes, political opinions, geographic location, friends and family, etc.? Then there’s surveillance through such things as Google. Our constant use of smartphones makes it easy to track us. AI is only going to make this monitoring easier, more meticulous, and more thorough.

Big Broadband is watching you. All of this surveillance, being expanded into such things as smart TVs, smart cars, and smart cities, is eerily Orwellian. Indeed, that smart TVs have cameras installed in them, so the watcher becomes the watched, reminds me of the telescreens in Nineteen Eighty-four. Now, while Orwell’s dystopia was meant as a satire of totalitarianism, and of Stalin in particular, we shouldn’t be so dull-witted as to think that any of this oppressive new technology is in the service of socialism–quite the contrary.

First of all, contrary to the alarmist right-wing nonsense we hear in the media (including the verbal flatulence we hear from the puckered mouth of Trump), our society is not being inundated with Marxist ideology. If anything, Marxism is moribund. The only Marxist-Leninist governments in the world currently are Cuba, North Korea, and (arguably) China, Vietnam, and Laos.

What the far-right idiotically calls ‘extremist, far-left, Marxist’ politicians are typically just liberals. A genuine communist would push for revolution to help the poor, not vote Democrat. Leftists are anti-Zionist, unlike any politician in the mainstream. Etc., etc.

But more to the point is that all this high-tech surveillance is in the service of capitalism and imperialism, not socialism. Right-wingers have to get over this cretinous idea that if the government does something, it’s automatically socialist, and that any form of political corruption is also socialist. There is such a thing as capitalist government, and it’s every bit as capable of being huge, bloated, and bureaucratic as a socialist state can be.

The kind of government we find in the vast majority of countries in the world are those supportive of the neoliberal ‘free market.’ Their governments intervene in and regulate the economy in ways that help the big corporations, which are capitalist—‘corporatism’ is needless verbiage used by right-wing libertarians to deflect responsibility away from themselves for having supported an economic system that has been, especially over the past 45 years, an unmitigated disaster.

Anyway, the state will use all of this AI surveillance, as well as the eventual disappearance of cash, to seek out and punish anyone who tries to make the people rise up in revolution and attempt to overthrow the capitalist system that continues to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Much censorship of Facebook and Twitter posts is for those who, for example, protest the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians. Support for Israel is extremely important to the Western empire and the maintenance of the so-called ‘rules-based international order.’ Some have argued that the liberation of Palestine will lead to a toppling of the capitalist/imperialist system. We who want that liberation are thus seen as a threat to the system: as AI surveillance and cashless societies flourish, we will surely be punished with far more than mere censorship.

The surveillance serves the interests of the bourgeois state because, of course, it also serves the very interests of the bourgeoisie itself. Most of us have surely seen by now that any time we show an interest in this or that product online, similar ones pop up in ads on our devices when we, for example, are scrolling on Facebook. Big Business is watching you.

Photo by panumas nikhomkhai on Pexels.com

At the beginning of this article, I wrote specifically of the Taiwanese fetishizing of technology not to suggest that only the locals where I live have this problem, but rather that seeing specifically the locals’ adoration of AI et al is just something I see right before my eyes. There’s little doubt in my mind that there’s at least a comparable, if not sometimes even greater, fetishizing of high-tech elsewhere, all over the world. As a symptom of a very global neoliberalism, fetishization of technology is a manifestation of what Marx called the fetishization of the commodity.

The worship of things, as opposed to acknowledging their origins in the workers’ production process, that is, focusing on things instead of on people, is what keeps us all, whether here in Taiwan (i.e., lectures on tech instead of on the current events that affect us all) or anywhere else in the world, under the spell of the ruling class. It’s one of many ways they keep us under their control.

There’s the brute force, surveillance, and gaslighting as depicted in Nineteen Eighty-four that is used to keep their power over us secure and intact; there is also the seducing and distracting of us with pleasure, as depicted in Huxley‘s Brave New World, with drugs and sexual indulgence. In our world, those drugs can be literal narcotics or the metaphorical opium of the people–religion. The sexual indulgence can come in the forms of internet porn, OnlyFans, or those countless photos of curvaceous beauties in string bikinis we see as we scroll down our Facebook feeds. The ruling class keeps us in check through bullying (militarized police, imperialist invasions, coups d’état), high-tech surveillance, propaganda, or addictions to pleasure.

I tried to allegorize all these issues in several short stories I’ve written over the past several months. In particular, these include “The Harvest,” “The Portal,” and “Neville.”

In “The Harvest,” reptilian aliens come to Earth and take over a town guised as doctors and nurses who take advantage of sick people and drug them so they can harvest all their organs. In “The Portal,” a young woman–while high on acid–stumbles into a portal that takes her to…a spaceship, or an alien planet?…where she discovers that aliens are working with human collaborators to conquer the Earth as part of an alien agenda of imperialism and colonization, enlisting the help of powerful human organizations like DARPA, with such forms of oppressive technology as robot dogs. In “Neville,” aliens invade Earth by impregnating women (through great sex!), having them give birth to half-alien children–all identical-looking and unusually large, growing fast–who hog all the food, starving the rest of humanity.

In these stories, I was using the invading aliens as personifications of imperialists who kill and plunder the Third World for resources. The use of drugs and sex in the stories was meant to represent how the ruling class uses these forms of pleasure to distract and control us.

Caitlin Johnstone made a comment that I assume to be a passage from one of her many articles, which I cannot for the life of me find so I can link it here. But to paraphrase the essence of what she said, it was that, while the potential for abuse of all of this new technology (digital payments, AI taking our jobs, surveillance through AI, smart TVs, cars, and cities, etc.) should be cause for alarm, the greatest form of control the ruling class has is through the control of our narratives via propaganda. Propaganda is a modern form of manipulative know-how.

Part of our liberation from all of these oppressive forces will be through the transforming of our narratives from ones that keep our eyes shut–dreaming all the time, as it were–to waking us all up. Addictions to pleasure–the drugs of religion or the literal ones, pics and video of beautiful nude or seminude women, video games, Hollywood movies (with CIA approval!), etc.–keep us asleep. Waking us all up, though, threatens the ruling class. Perhaps that’s why the political right speaks disparagingly about being ‘woke’? So, apparently, it is smarter to remain asleep?

On my blog, Infinite Ocean, I try to weave new narratives that can raise people’s political consciousness to lead to our liberation. I do this in the form of political articles like this one as well as, whenever applicable, my analyses of literature, film, and music.

We need new, liberating narratives. We need to find ways to take this new tech and use it for our benefit, not that of the ruling class. Most of all, we have to stop fetishizing tech and other commodities at the expense of the people; we need to start caring about the welfare of our communities, for while the ruling class are few, WE ARE MANY. If we take control of tech–to liberate us from work instead of depriving us of it, or having its pile-up of garbage destroy our Earth–then tech will no longer be dreck.

Analysis of ‘Commando’

I: Introduction

Commando is a 1985 action film directed by Mark L. Lester and written by Steven E. de Souza, after a story by Joseph Loeb III, Matthew Weisman, and de Souza. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rae Dawn Chong, with Alyssa Milano, Vernon Wells, Bill Duke, Dan Hedaya, James Olson, and David Patrick Kelly.

The music score, noted for its use of steel drums, was by James Horner, and the film ends with a song by The Power Station called “We Fight for Love,” when Michael Des Barres replaced Robert Palmer as lead singer.

Here‘s a link to quotes from the film.

Giving the film a rating of 67% based on reviews from 36 critics, Rotten Tomatoes aptly describes Commando in its consensus as having a “threadbare plot, outsized action, and endless one-liners.” In other words, it’s a crowd-pleaser with all the gratuitous violence, swearing, and cheesy puns that a movie-going philistine could ever want.

So, Dear Reader, you’re probably wondering why I’m wasting my energy with this Hollywood schlock. Well, apart from the fact that the philistine in me finds this mindless entertainment amusing (the nostalgic memories of watching it as a teen in the 1980s being a big part of that amusement), the flash and excitement that Commando delivers is a distraction from the political undertones that I feel should be discussed.

II: A Brief Digression, If You’ll Indulge Me, Please

As should be obvious to anyone watching the film with his or her brain turned on, Commando contributes to the mythology of the US as the great saviour of other countries from tyranny and despotism. I’m not saying this as if it were a great revelation to you, Dear Reader: I bring this up because I want to discuss the social effects of movies like this, and how they brainwash Westerners, Americans especially, into cheering for US/NATO imperialism.

I was trying to do such commentary on another film aptly starring right-leaning Schwarzenegger, Conan the Barbarian. The reader response to that analysis was mixed: while one positive responder understood my intentions, to alert people to the hypnotizing danger of passively accepting Hollywood action films as US imperialist and right-wing libertarian propaganda (an example of the kind of thing Michael Parenti analyzed in his book, Inventing Reality), two others blasted my Conan analysis for seemingly opposing reasons.

The first negative responder was a woman who went out of her way to be as insulting as possible, saying my analysis was ‘so superficial as to be silly,’ and that during the Reagan era, pretty much all movies reflected a right-wing ideology, so apparently there’s no insight to be gained from describing Conan the way I did. First of all, many 1980s movies did obviously reflect a right-wing stance, but many others didn’t–take They Live, for instance, as an anti-Reagan film. Secondly, only someone with a right-wing bias (as I suspect she has) would see no value in critiquing Conan‘s right-wing agenda, since a left-wing sympathy would see that value. I’d say it was her reading of what I wrote that was “superficial” and “silly”: I suspect she read only the first few paragraphs, snorted and called it ‘stupid!’, then jumped to conclusions and made her snarky comments without bothering to read any further.

The second commenter took the opposite view, seeing my discussion of a right-wing libertarian, anti-communist allegory in Conan as “the most half-baked review” of a movie that he’d ever read. Then he ‘corrected’ me by pointing out something I myself stated, however briefly, in my analysis: that the film is about determination in rising up against one’s obstacles (speaking of pointing out the obvious, hence my brevity in stating it). Never mind that I flooded the analysis with links to prove my point about the allegory (i.e., the director’s right-wing leanings as well as those of Schwarzenegger’s, a link stating that Nazi salutes were done on the set, etc.). And what I wrote wasn’t a review (my saying whether or not I liked the film), but an analysis, stated plainly in the title (a discussion of themes, symbolism, allegory, etc.). So, was I stating the absurdly obvious, or was I going off on some “half-baked” tangent? I’m not sure.

My point in bringing up the Conan analysis and its negative responses is to say that this one of Commando is one of many articles in which I’m not just saying what I like or dislike about a film. The film analyses are about relating the content of the films with either political issues (typically from a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint) or with psychoanalytic ones (usually Freudian and post-Freudian, but recently, more and more Jungian).

That kind of analysis is what I do here on this blog; so if that’s not your thing, please read no further (I gave just such a warning at the beginning of my Conan analysis, which as I explained above, went unheeded at least twice). If, however, you do like how I relate film, literature, and music to leftist politics and psychoanalysis, then by all means, read on, Dear Reader.

III: Some Rather Needless Killing

The film begins with three men assassinated, all former members of the unit of US Army Special Forces Colonel John Matrix (Schwarzenegger). The first victim is shot by two men posing as garbagemen; the second of these two killers, Cooke (Duke), then kills a car salesman by running him over right in the dealership with the car he’s supposedly interested in buying; and the third victim, Bennett (Wells), is supposedly blown up in a boat, though we later learn that his death has been faked.

Matrix, it seems, is next to be assassinated.

As it turns out, though, he isn’t to be killed, but rather to be forced to assassinate the president of a fictional Latin American country, Val Verde, this man being someone Matrix originally helped put in power there, having ousted Arius (Hedaya), a brutal dictator who wants to be reinstated. If Matrix doesn’t cooperate, Arius will have his men kill Matrix’s pre-teen daughter, Jenny (Milano), whom they’ve kidnapped.

Here’s my point: why were those two men killed at the beginning of the film, with Bennett’s death faked? Apparently, Arius’ men (including Bennett) mean to agitate General Franklin Kirby (Olson) and get him to go to Matrix’s home to warn him personally that he’s probably next to die, and in the process Kirby will unwittingly help the bad guys know where Matrix lives.

This is an absurd way to get to Matrix, whose address (somewhere in upstate California, in the mountains) is presumably private for his and Jenny’s protection. Would Kirby be stupid enough to go there personally, risking leading the assassins right to Matrix? Couldn’t the killers just find another way to find him (e.g., paying someone in the army a handsome sum to disclose the address, etc.)? Wouldn’t it be better to catch Matrix off guard in a surprise attack?

It’s obvious that the killings at the beginning were just an excuse to have excitement for its own sake, to lull the audience in, to make them passive recipients of more pro-US propaganda.

IV: Matrix and Jenny

Of course, Schwarzenegger as tough guy Matrix is supposed to personify how ‘indestructible’ the American empire is (an empire that, incidentally, failed to defeat North Korea, lost against Vietnam, and similarly left Afghanistan with its tail between its legs). The liberals, however, can’t have their big hero be just a cold-hearted killer; we have to see his sensitive side, so during the opening credits and before Jenny’s kidnapping, we see some father/daughter quality time between Matrix and her.

While they’re eating sandwiches at home, he makes a cliché joke about gender-bending Boy George. Then he refers to his life as a boy in East Germany, and how the communists said that rock ‘n’ roll is “subversive.” While communists back in the 1950s and 1960s were probably much more socially conservative (as were, obviously, at least half of Americans back then) than in recent years (a lessening of conservatism that can’t be reasonably be said of those half of all Americans!), we’re meant to deem this old judgement of the communists as an example of how ‘repressive‘ they were and are. Matrix’s later quip that “Maybe they were right” is meant to be flippant, yet it tells us which people still have the repressive attitude…still by the 1980s and since then. Putin may not be sympathetic to LGBT people, but he hasn’t been a communist in decades.

Now, we’ve acknowledged that Matrix is of German background (presumably to rationalize Austrian Schwarzenegger’s undeniable accent), yet his name sounds utterly English, since we don’t want our American hero to seem inordinately Teutonic (shouldn’t his name be more like ‘Johann Meetrichs’?).

Given the film’s obvious agenda to glorify Anglo/American/NATO imperialism as comprising the ‘good guys,’ as against anyone who would dare defy said imperialism (Arius et al), the idea of having a German-American hero fighting those defiant of that imperialism (who, in real life, tend to be left-wing) strongly suggests the enlisting of fascists, at least symbolically. Matrix would have defected from East Germany early on, and the real purpose of the Berlin Wall, or Anti-fascist Protection Wall, as the East Germans called it, was just that: to keep the West German fascists out (i.e., those ex-Nazis who, rather than be punished for their war crimes, were given cushy jobs to fight the ‘commies’), as well as to keep East Germany from losing needed skilled workers.

Matrix’s leaving of the socialist state would have stemmed from an ideological hatred of socialism. Germans who hate socialism have historically leaned towards fascism as a protection against Marxism. The capitalist class has always used fascism to protect themselves against left-wing revolution, as have the petite bourgeoisie. The film’s negative portrayal of Latin Americans reinforces the idea that there’s a Nazi racist undertone here, as there was in Conan, as I argued in my analysis of it (see link above).

So what we see in German-American Matrix is a personification of the continuum between liberalism and fascism. He’s the sensitive father, as I discussed above in his relationship with Jenny at the beginning of the film, but she can be seen as personifying his threatened class interests when she’s kidnapped, making him ruthless in his lawless, bloody, and murderous quest to get her back. The fact that she’s a sweet, helpless, and sympathetic girl shouldn’t deflect us from seeing that cynical reality. Her sweetness, taken from an allegorical perspective, is being used as propaganda to justify all of his killing. More on that later.

My point is that liberals, seeming progressive in their goals on the surface, will betray that progressive agenda in a heartbeat if their class interests are at stake, and that’s what’s represented in Matrix’s quick switch from sensitive father to unflinching killer, thief, destroyer of property, kidnapper (however briefly, of Cindy [Chong]), etc.

Stalin once said that “Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.” (Note that social democracy is the furthest left of liberalism.) His words may, on the surface, seem extreme, but put in their proper historical perspective, they are clearly understood. He said them in 1924, just five years after the social-democratic Weimar Republic had used the right-wing Freikorps to crush the Spartacist Uprising‘s attempt at a communist revolution in Germany, murdering Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The Weimar Republic’s soft and ineffective rule would lead to great dissatisfaction on both the far left and far right, one thing would lead to another, and by the early 1930s, you-know-who would rise to power in Germany.

If the ‘far left’ of liberalism can lead to fascism, so can more ‘moderately left’ versions of it. We easily backslid from the welfare capitalism of the era of post-WWII economic prosperity to the ‘free market’ capitalism of the Reagan/Thatcher years, and thence to the far-right nightmare of recent decades, all thanks to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which meant that a large welfare state was no longer needed to ward off the danger of proletarian revolution in the West. We’d reached ‘the end of history,’ and the ruling class no longer felt threatened by the working class.

That liberals today are supporting literal fascists in Ukraine and Israel should help you see the truth in Stalin’s words, Dear Reader.

V: Making Matrix Aid Arius’ Revolution

We never learn of Arius’ political ideology; we only know that he’s a brutal dictator, who’s “tortured and killed” those who have resisted him. But is he on the left, or the right?

He’s a Latin American, a former ruler of Val Verde, as I mentioned above. We know that Matrix helped overthrow Arius and put a new president, Velasquez, in power. Here’s the funny thing, though: the US army, CIA, etc. like putting brutal right-wing dictators in power in Latin America.

Indeed, the American government has a history of intervening in other countries’ political affairs, typically replacing democratically-elected heads of state with ones that further the capitalist/imperialist interests of the US/NATO countries. Examples include Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973…and more recently, Ukraine in 2014, and Bolivia in 2019, as well as attempted coups in places like Venezuela. One should look into US support for Operation Condor, too.

Of course, the Western corporate media likes to portray these interventions as ‘triumphs of freedom and democracy,’ when actually they were anything but. So we shouldn’t be surprised to see the ousting of Arius and replacement of him by US-backed Velasquez in Commando as portrayed as a good thing. It’s all just part of the propaganda used to make the US look like the good guys, while men like Arius are vilified.

So the very idea of the American military, as represented by Matrix, as not wanting to help spearhead a coup and install a dictator is ludicrous. Pinochet was the Arius of Chile in the 1970s, responsible for the deaths and disappearances of thousands of dissident Chileans, including dropping some of them from helicopters. The CIA helped put Pinochet in power, a “scumbag” who “tortured and killed” many, yet I doubt that any in the US military would have applied Matrix’s words to Pinochet the way Matrix applied them to Arius.

So Matrix not wanting to overthrow a Latin American government and replacing it with that of a brutal right-wing dictator is sheer denial on the part of the propagandists making this film. Moviegoers who see this film, knowing little if anything about the true political state of affairs in the world, will just eat up this propaganda uncritically, absorbing it and imagining that what the film portrays more or less corresponds with what the US government’s role in world affairs really is: the ‘policemen’ of the world, fighting tyranny and oppression everywhere, rather than the cause of so much of it.

This is a dangerous message to send to Western audiences, reinforcing a myth of our supposed superiority, which in turn is used to justify more and more imperial conquests, killing more and more innocent people. This urge to impose ‘freedom and democracy’ has led to possibly a million Iraqi deaths, and the destruction of Libya, changing it from a prosperous nation that took care of its people to a failed state with a slave trade. The current wish to bring ‘freedom and democracy’ to Russia and China could lead to a very nuclear WWIII, killing everyone on the globe.

Since Commando was made in the mid-1980s, I wonder why the film didn’t portray Arius as a left-wing dictator, but just as a generic one. Surely portraying him as a ‘commie’ would have made for effective Cold War propaganda, wouldn’t it have? Perhaps they didn’t specify his ideology because they knew enough left-wing critics still existed in the 1980s to trash the film for being even more obvious right-wing propaganda than it was and is. Still, for the reasons I’ve given above, it makes more sense for Arius to have a left-wing, rather than right-wing, ideology, so we’ll just go with that, remembering that his vilification, as well as the dehumanizing of his troops, is all part of Commando‘s obvious right-wing agenda.

VI: The Female Factor

Getting Cindy, an off-duty flight attendant, to help Matrix without there being any sexual chemistry between these attractive male and female leads seems as if this film is an example of the emerging kind that is trying to show more respect to female characters (her firing a rocket launcher correctly…on the second try; her flying a seaplane, etc.), especially since she’s a POC. Still, there’s plenty of sexism against women to keep Commando far behind more recent action films, which are sure to include women kicking lots of ass.

Poor Cindy is frequently treated like a whore, even explicitly called one by predatory Sully (Kelly, whom you’ll recall clinking those bottles together at the climax of The Warriors), leaving her in a huff for not letting him have his way with her. Later, without asking for her consent, in Sully’s motel room and waiting for Cooke, Matrix opens her top to make her look easy, that is, having indeed let Sully have his way with her. Even a cop, who’s later helped apprehend Matrix for trying to rob an army surplus store, sees her in a car next the cops’ truck and assumes she’s a “hooker.”

Earlier, Sully–asshole that he is–jokes in the airport about having “a little more time with” kidnapped Jenny. At the end of the film, Matrix carries her on his shoulder as if this damsel-in-distress were a prize he’s won after killing everyone else.

But the crowning piece of sexism in the film is the gratuitous display of a woman’s large, shaking breasts in a motel room next to Sully’s during Matrix’s fight with Cooke. It’s a completely unnecessary moment of titillation mixed with humour, meant as one of many examples of Commando‘s use of visuals to dazzle and distract the viewer as he or she absorbs the pro-US propaganda without thinking.

(By the way, Ava Cadell, who played the woman in the motel scene, has since become a therapist with a doctorate from Newport University, California. She has written a number of books on sexuality, has done lectures, and given counseling to couples on personal issues. Here’s her website. As we can see, she’s risen far above doing mere cheesecake roles in schlocky Hollywood movies.)

VII: Rescuing Jenny

Rescuing a damsel in distress is more acceptable in the modern world, of course, if she’s a child. Our sympathy for her is what makes the wiping out of everyone else on the island where she’s being held hostage seem perfectly justified.

Commando, however, is just a movie. It isn’t reality. As a piece of American propaganda, it causes us to transfer our desensitizing of the brutal killing of all the dehumanized Latin American soldiers to the killing of any other people in the world, be they soldiers or civilians, who in any way stand between the US/NATO empire and the achievement of its goals.

Part of ensuring the audience’s desensitizing to the deaths of the soldiers is a showering of contempt on them and their worth. Bennett tells Arius that his “little pissant soldiers…are nothing.” This sort of devaluing of them makes it all the easier for the audience to watch them all die.

On the other side of the coin, Matrix’s killing of them all comes with nary a scratch on his body, for he personifies the invincibility of the American empire. Indeed, one of the particularly ludicrous aspects of Commando is how Matrix can single-handedly wipe out so many dozens of soldiers, and not even one of them can get a lucky shot and give him a significant wound, let alone kill him.

The tool shed scene, apart from showcasing gratuitous violence for the sheer fun of it, demonstrates that shaving off the top of a man’s head with a small buzzsaw blade thrown like a Frisbee (in the director’s cut, a second buzzsaw blade hits a guy in the neck), the stabbing of an axe into a soldier’s balls, and the hacking off of a man’s arm with a machete are not horrifying sights to see, but exciting ones.

The message given throughout the film is that, since Matrix can break one law after another with impunity to save Jenny, and since he personifies American military might, then the US government, military, and intelligence are free to disregard international law, UN Security Council Resolutions, etc., to achieve their objectives and maintain their global hegemony.

Let’s see how these issues translate into the politics of the real world. Israel, properly seen as an extension of Western imperialism into the Middle East, has been given carte blanche by the US government to kill and maim as many Gazans as they like. The rationalization?…to rescue a number of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas on October 7th of 2023, rather like the kidnapping of Jenny. Where all those killed in Commando are soldiers, most, if not almost all, of the Gazans being killed are innocent civilians, including women and children.

Israel has made incursions into the West Bank, and the detonating of pagers in Lebanon–as well as airstrikes on several buildings in Beirut–has killed and injured many there, too, though there’s a similar rationale…the need to wipe out Hezbollah. The UN has, by the way, acknowledged that the armed resistance of fighters like Hamas is legitimate against an occupying force like Israel, but to the Zionist apologist, Hamas and Hezbollah are ‘terrorists’ whom he or she would surely sneer at as “little pissant soldiers” who “are nothing.”

Elsewhere, the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up by the US, with the help of Norway–an act of ecoterrorism practically confessed to by the American government. Seymour Hersh, the acclaimed investigative journalist who exposed the My Lai Massacre back in 1968, found conclusive, detailed evidence of how this crime was committed, yet the mainstream, corporate, imperialist media absurdly blamed the attack on Russia. How predictable. The motive behind this terrorist act, apart from the usual Russophobia/anti-Putin agenda (their ‘unprovoked’ invasion of Ukraine), was to stop Germany from buying cheap Russian oil and forcing the country to buy American oil.

Needless to say, the US government hasn’t been punished, nor will be, for this crime any more than Israel will be for her crimes against humanity. We, the general public, shrug these crimes off, or at least are expected to, just as we do the excesses of Matrix’s violence, all to rescue one little girl, who personifies his threatened class interests as I said above, and who is carried on his shoulder at the film’s end as a kind of trophy.

When Kirby, who has arrived with his army at that time, asks Matrix what he’s left for them, he callously says, “Just bodies.” Matrix then refuses to resume working for Kirby as a soldier, wanting instead to be the nice, sensitive father to Jenny; but as with any liberal, being the nice guy comes only when one’s class interests (symbolic ones in Matrix’s case) aren’t being threatened.

VIII: Confession, Projection, and Denial

In a conversation with Cindy in Sully’s car on the way to the motel to confront Cooke, Matrix explains why he has to rescue Jenny. In the process, he goes into a kind of confession of guilt, not only about how he, constantly on assignment as a Special Forces man somewhere on the other side of the world (Laos, Angola, Lebanon, Pakistan, etc.), has never had time to be with Jenny, but also about how he did “things you don’t want to know about,” and which he wishes he didn’t know he’d done.

Bennett, we learn, was kicked out of Matrix’s unit for being excessively violent (and this is why he, wanting to get revenge on Matrix for his expulsion, is willing to help Arius “for nothing,” to get a chance to get at Matrix). Yet given what we know Matrix has implied in his confession to Cindy, and what we know of his brutal killing of so many in this film…including his killing of Bennett, to get him to “let off some steam,” it’s hard to imagine Bennett being all that much more violent.

It should be obvious that, Matrix representing American militarism and seeing Bennett and Arius as far worse than he, the film’s pro-US propaganda tries to excuse American violence by projecting it out to other countries. Bennett, significantly, is Australian–just listen to his accent. Arius is Latin American. These latter two are so awful, apparently, that Matrix, and therefore the US, can’t be all that bad.

So in giving his brief confession, implying the awful things he’s done, while projecting far worse guilt onto people from other countries, Matrix–in spite of his constant violence and lawlessness, like that of the US, as I’ve explained above–can still be regarded as the liberal ‘good guy,’ as politicians like the Clintons, Obama, Biden, and Harris can be seen. One can safely deny being as bad as the antagonists are, and the protagonists’ guilt will be ignored and forgotten about by moviegoing lovers of action films.

Another thing that will be ignored and forgotten in Commando is the political ideology that Arius must have, as is typical of any Latin American head of state that opposes American imperial hegemony and ends up being ousted in a coup d’état. Such an ideology is glossed over and disregarded: all we know is that Arius believes the people of Val Verde need “an understanding of discipline,” which sounds unsettling coming from a generic ‘dictator,’ whom many in the audience would imagine to be a left-wing one, as I’m assuming Arius is.

Now, Marxism-Leninism does have an understanding of party discipline, but it isn’t anything brutal, as Arius is implying in Commando‘s propagandistic script. It’s about organizing the working class to rise up in revolution and defeat the ruling class, thus liberating the people from oppression, not subjecting them to oppression, the latter of which is what US puppets like Pinochet did to their people. As for how “extremist” a left-wing political ideology is, just read the <<<link. You won’t know the truth of the matter by watching Arius’ caricature of it.

IX: Conclusion

I hope, Dear Reader, that if you’ve read this far, that you understand my intentions in writing this analysis of Commando. I know it’s no Earth-shattering revelation that the film has a right-wing agenda: my purpose is to explore the political ramifications and social effects of said agenda, to warn of its dangers on a public not aware of how consent is manufactured for war and its atrocities.

The ‘tangents’ I went off on in elucidating these political and social implications, far from being “half-baked,” are the whole point of the article. People need to be conscious of the political wool being pulled over their eyes, not to be told, “Oh, come on, it’s just a movie. Lighten up!”

Analysis of Anton Webern’s ‘Zwei Lieder,’ Op. 19

I: Introduction

“Zwei Lieder,” or “Two Songs,” op. 19, is a short piece for mixed choir and five instruments by Anton Webern, set to two poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was composed in 1925-1926; the five instruments are celesta, guitar, violin, clarinet, and bass clarinet, with a choir of sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses.

Webern, along with Alban Berg (who composed the opera Wozzeck), was one of the most famous pupils of Arnold Schoenberg (who composed Pierrot Lunaire), these three composers being the most famous members of the Second Viennese School, who used Schoenberg’s twelve-note compositional technique. This technique involves taking the twelve semitones and rearranging them in any order to produce a tone row, or basic set. This tone row becomes the thematic, melodic, and harmonic basis of a composition.

Because the twelve-note system eschews the major-minor system, the resulting music is atonal, and therefore it is an acquired taste, to put it mildly. One must get used to the ’emancipation of the dissonance,’ which is no longer required to be resolved quickly back to consonance, and so the music sounds ‘harsh’ to the uninitiated listener.

When it comes to Webern’s music, I usually prefer to listen to his instrumental works, such as the Symphony, op. 21 (1927-1928), the Five Movements for String Quartet, op. 5 (1909), the Piano Quintet (1907), the Concerto for Nine Instruments, op. 24 (1931-1934), and the Quartet, op. 22 (1928-1930), for clarinet, tenor saxophone, violin, and piano. However, since when it comes to my doing analyses of music here on my blog, I prefer to have programmatic content along with the music, I’ve chosen a Webern composition with a text, among his music that I don’t listen to all that often.

Therefore, I’ve chosen to analyze his “Zwei Lieder,” among his least-performed, and therefore least-known, compositions. The reason that this otherwise superb piece of music is so rarely performed is that Webern’s choice of instrumentation is, sadly, impractical from the point of view of setting up performances of it. A choir, combined with the odd assembly of five instruments I mentioned above, all to perform a piece that lasts about two minutes, will be too much trouble for most organizers of concerts to put together.

Such a piece is best performed as a recording, and here is a link to a recording of the piece. Here is a link to the first poem in the original German and in English translation (which I will not be quoting here!); and here is a link to the second poem in the original German and in French translation (which I wouldn’t be quoting here even if I had permission to!).

The text of the two poems, in the original German as well as in English and French translations, can be found also in the booklet (pages 142-143) for the Complete Works of Webern, Opp. 1-31, conducted by Pierre Boulez for Sony Classical. I’ll be using these texts as the basis of my interpretation of the poetry; the websites linked in the previous paragraph are just there for your information, Dear Reader.

II: The Music

The tone row that Webern uses for the setting of both poems is G, B-flat, F-sharp, F-natural, E-flat, A, G-sharp, C-sharp, D, B-natural, E-natural, and C-natural. The “Zwei Lieder,” op. 19, is Webern’s first work to use the same tone row all the way through the entire composition.

A tone row can be played out in four ways: the original order, inversion (upside-down), retrograde (backwards), and retrograde-inversion (both backwards and upside-down). Furthermore, the tone row can be transposed to any key other than the original set of pitches. In the case of the “Zwei Lieder,” Webern transposes the tone row by a tritone, the diabolus in musica.

Now, as Samuel Andreyev demonstrates in his musical analysis of Webern’s piece (and my analysis owes a great debt to Andreyev’s analysis of the piece), one would find it impossible to hear the tone row played out in a clear, linear fashion because Webern breaks up the tone row among the instruments and choir in a way that the ear could never follow, certainly not without reading the score as one is listening.

For a precise demonstration of how the tone row is manifested in the piece, I’ll leave that to Andreyev to explain, since I lack his technical expertise. Instead, I’ll just make some more general remarks about the music.

Instead of the traditional kind of melody, which flows and is linear, having a singing quality, Webern’s concise musical style tends toward punctualism–an isolating of the successive notes through wide leaps, unorthodox uses of duration, dynamics, and attacks that are divorced from conventional ‘expressivity’–and Klangfarbenmelodie, or an assigning of the successive notes of a melody to different instruments. Therefore, melody isn’t perceived as musical lines, but rather as musical ‘dots,’ if you will.

Because of these kinds of innovations in Webern’s music, he has been associated, in retrospect, with the postwar total serialism of composers like Boulez (i.e., his Le Marteau Sans Maître) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (i.e., his Gesang der Jünglinge). Webern’s puncualism and Klangfarbenmelodie have been seen as anticipating the 1950s serializing of not only pitch, but also all the musical parameters as listed in the previous paragraph.

III: The Text

Goethe’s poems are both sets of two four-line verses in trochaic tetrameter (a line has four feet, each of which has a stressed, then unstressed, syllable), with a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD. They are vignettes of the beauty of nature, of flowers in bloom or soon to be in bloom. Images or scenes of natural beauty were something Webern always loved, and I understand that even among his instrumental works, there was the inspiration of nature.

His choice of having a mixed choir sing these verses–as opposed to, say, having just one singer–what must have been the main factor in causing the logistical difficulties in having op. 19 performed, must have been of such insistent importance to him, overruling the practical problems that would have forbidden frequent performances of the piece. I’m guessing that the choral singing was meant to give the verses a sense of holiness. For Webern, nature is sacred.

These poems are inspired by Chinese literature; in fact, these two poems are part of a cycle Goethe composed, called Chinesisch-deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten (“Chinese-German Seasons and Times of Day”). Chinese literature, all things Chinese, actually, had been quite popular in Europe at the time of his writing, ever since Voltaire‘s time.

The first poem describes narcissus flowers blooming in a garden in rows. The first verse gives us a vivid sense not just of the flowers’ beauty, but also of their ‘innocence,’ ‘purity,’ and ‘modesty.’ Since when is a narcissus modest, I wonder?

Indeed, one thing to keep in mind when interpreting poetry, or literature in general, is that things often aren’t as they seem. We may be reading a beautiful description of nature, but what the imagery is meant to represent may not be all that beautiful…once we have looked beneath the surface.

The narcissus flowers are as white as lilies; they have the purity of candles. Candles may give light, which is inherently a good thing, but the light comes from fire, the fire of the passions, which are anything but pure. Goethe’s word for pure is reine, the same word Heinrich Heine used in “Du bist wie eine Blume” (“You are like a flower”), “So hold und schön und rein” (“So lovely, fair, and pure”), a poem about a woman whose ‘purity’ broke Heine’s heart. ‘Purity’ isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Goethe would have been perfectly aware of the Echo and Narcissus myth, in which the latter broke the former’s heart, and the latter was punished for his vanity by being made to fall in love with the image of his own reflection in a pond, meaning that the handsome youth, in a sense, broke his own heart. In his grief over never being able to have what he saw, Narcissus died and turned into the flower of Goethe’s poem.

Now, obviously neither Webern nor especially Goethe would have known anything about narcissism in the modern psychiatric sense that people today would know of it. The seeds of the personality type, however–the vanity, haughtiness, and pitiless rejection of others–would have been intuited in the mythic character of Narcissus, intuited especially by a poet of Goethe’s stature. So on at least an unconscious level, Goethe must have used the flower as a symbol of sinful pride; Webern must have picked up on this idea–again, at least unconsciously, and reflected it somehow in his music.

Similarly, while Webern would never have consciously thought of the music he’d arranged for the poems as ‘harsh,’ he certainly knew, from the conservative public’s reaction to his atonal works (and those of his modernist contemporaries, like Schoenberg and Berg), that they were perceived that way. And even though his “Zwei Lieder” use softer sonorities, their atonality, dissonance, and wide melodic leaps are all clear signs of musical tension, deliberately used. Therefore this tension, set to these poems, suggests a sensitivity in his mind to Goethe’s expression of an undercurrent of tension in otherwise surface idyllic verses.

Now, I’m about to do a kind of ‘retrospective’ interpretation of these verses, applying a modern meaning to writing that’s showed no knowledge of contemporary ideas. Some of my readers, such as one who commented on my analysis of the Echo and Narcissus myth (link above), would balk at my ‘projecting of modern ways of seeing’ onto old texts, insisting instead that whatever the original meaning there was of the old text is the only ‘correct’ way of thinking about it.

I beg to differ. Just because the writing is old doesn’t mean the interpretation has to be old. The arts are not STEM fields: they don’t have only one correct answer, like 2 + 2 = 4, and an infinitude of incorrect answers. Artists often are reticent about what they’ve created because they want to allow us to find our own meaning in their works. Insisting that the work means only what the artist had originally intended takes all the fun and joy out of experiencing the work.

Another justification I have for interpreting the meaning of a work of literature, film, or piece of music, drawing on elements that came into being long after the work was created, is to give the work a new meaning and relevance for us now, so we can relate to it in our own way and therefore enjoy it far more. Insisting that the work’s ‘ancient meaning’ is its only meaning makes the work dead to us now.

Besides, some themes and ideas are so universal that they apply to all times of history, including those times when people knew nothing of the modern concepts. Just because narcissism wasn’t known as a personality disorder in, for example, ancient Greece, doesn’t mean that narcissists didn’t exist back then, let alone cause pain and suffering to the Echoes of their day.

With this understanding in mind, I can begin to do my interpretation of these verses. We should also keep in mind when Webern set the poems to music: in the mid-1920s, when certain…politically tempestuous…things were going on in Europe, in Germany and Austria in particular. As of the piece’s composition, Hitler would have been released from prison after having served just over eight months of his sentence for the crime of high treason after the failed Beer Hall Putsch. The Nazi Party may not have achieved their immediate goal of taking over the German government, but they did gain national attention and their first propaganda victory, which surely would have gotten Webern’s attention.

As an Austrian patriot, Webern did, for a while at least, have some sympathy for Nazism. By the time the Nazis had come to power in the early 1930s, though, he was growing in opposition to them. He even gave a public speech in 1933, publicly denouncing the Nazis for calling his music, as well as that of Schoenberg and Berg, “cultural Bolshevism” and “degenerate music.” (He was lucky the Nazis didn’t arrest him for this.)

He was certainly never an antisemite. His musical mentor, Schoenberg, was a Jew. He resigned from a position as chorus master for the Mödling Men’s Choral Society in 1926 (the year he finished his “Zwei Lieder”) over his controversial hiring of a Jewish singer, Greta Wilheim, to replace a sick one. So his attitude towards Nazism was complicated.

I’ll now relate these political issues to how I imagine Webern could have read Goethe’s poems. To think that Goethe would have intended the interpretation I’m about to make would be absurd, and I admit I’m stretching things when I make speculations about Webern interpreting them in the way I’m about to describe. But in making this interpretation, I’m hoping not only to make the poems relevant for our time, but also to show that there’s more to them than just a pretty painting of nature in words–there’s a deeper meaning.

These narcissus flowers, white and pure, like stars, are as pretty as lilies. They bow with a modest demeanour. Since, as I noted above, the associations one makes of this flower with vain Narcissus are so obvious, then the flowers appearing so modest must be mere affectation on their part.

The white flowers have a yellow centre with a red rim circling it, glowing love, as the first verse points out. This red around the yellow middle is thus the loving heart of the flowers. This love, affection, and affinity of the flowers is thus a personifying of them…and an idealizing of them.

This idealizing of the narcissus flowers is significant, for as is associated with such flowers, narcissism is all about an idealizing of the self. As is indicated in the second verse, these early narcissus flowers have bloomed in the garden in rows. They are a group symbolizing beautiful and idealized, but also vain, self-important people. They are thus representative of group narcissism.

Now Freud, who discussed how groups of people living in the same community may look down on those outside their circle with contempt, was writing about this issue as an example of group psychology in 1922, which was just a few years before Webern composed his “Zwei Lieder.” I’m not suggesting that Webern read Freud’s work and was influenced by it in setting the poems to music. What I am saying is that we’ve all–at any point in history, even back to Goethe and earlier–sensed the arrogance of the in-group toward outsiders. Parochial, chauvinistic attitudes have existed since time immemorial.

So, is Webern’s choral setting of the poems meant to suggest a holy beauty in these flowers, or a ‘holier-than-thou’ attitude? Webern surely would have been aware of the hyperinflation of Germany in the early 1920s and its effect on the German psyche. This pain is the kind of thing that can drive people to have nationalistic feelings, to looking for a leader who will ‘save the nation’ from its ruin. As we know, some Germans looked to Hitler in the hopes of such a saviour.

I suspect that Webern could have read such a meaning in the poem’s hope that the narcissus flowers know for whom they’re waiting. As they stand in their rows waiting for their idealized leader, they are described in the original German as “so spaliert erwarten,” or “so trellised in expectation.” They’re being held up, as if by a trellis, which implies that they’re “stand[ing] at attention,” as the translation in my CD booklet (page 143) has it.

Narcissism involves an idealizing of another–an idealized parental imago who may mirror back one’s grandiosity, as Heinz Hohut described the relationship, or an idealized political figure–who reflects back one’s own narcissism. This is the true meaning of Narcissus falling in love with his reflection in the pond: the ideal is oneself, yet it’s also out there, another, as Lacan spoke of the ideal-I in the mirror stage. One sees oneself in the idealized other, and hopes to attain that ideal oneself.

So the narcissus flowers, standing at attention in their neatly-arrayed rows in the garden…a kind of Garden of Eden in its idealization?…are like the SA standing at attention before Hitler, whom they wait for, in hopeful expectation, ‘to save’ their nation, while looking down with scorn and contempt for foreign nations and other ethnic groups.

Webern could have made these associations in his mind–consciously or unconsciously–as he read Goethe’s poem, and written the music the way he did in accordance with such a meaning–with the dissonance, atonality, and wide melodic leaps to express his own inner conflicts (should he, in his Austrian patriotism, support fascism, or oppose its antisemitism and rejection of his art?) about the political direction he saw Europe going in at the time.

As for Goethe’s intention, he could have imagined the narcissus flowers standing in an orderly group awaiting a leader of a more general sort, but one who has the same demagogic qualities. This ‘follow the leader’ mentality has always existed, of course, so his poem has a universal relatability in this regard.

Now, the second poem describes sheep leaving a meadow, revealing a pure green of grass. There’s that word, “reines,” or “pure” again: recall what I said above about both the positive and negative feelings that can come from the use of this word.

So, who are the sheep? Are they those who are timid and easily led, as the word is commonly used today to describe people who blindly believe all the nonsense in the mainstream media and follow mainstream politics uncritically? Such a meaning could be too contemporary and too English to be fitting in a reading of such an old, German poem.

Or are the sheep the followers of the Church? Certainly Goethe, as a freethinker, wasn’t fond of the more dogmatic aspects of the Church, and so he probably wouldn’t have thought much of the simple-minded, unthinking flock. The sheep’s leaving the meadow, to reveal the purity of the green, could be indicating an improved world once we’ve been rid of the uncritical believers.

Or are the sheep those who truly abide by the spirit of what it means to be a Christian, as opposed to the mere conformist churchgoers? Not those who say “Lord, Lord,” but those who do good works without regard of reward (Matthew 7:21)? Their leaving the meadow could reveal a grass whose purity is of a more ironic sort.

In any case, the sheep’s absence will result in the glorious blooming of the flowers. This blooming is described as a “paradise” (recall my reference to the Garden of Eden in its idealization). Again, is Webern’s use of a choir to sing these verses in earnest, or is it ironic? And whichever answer may be correct, for which is it in earnest, and for which is it ironic…for the sheep, or for the paradise?

Note that there are parallel themes going on in both poems. There’s an idealizing of the beauty of the flowers, with an ironic undercurrent. By the end of each second verse, there’s a hope or expectation of good which may end up being its opposite.

Hope, in the second verse, spreads a light mist in front of us, implying that what we see is no longer clear because of that hope. What will be true and what we want to be true are often very different from each other.

Similarly, a parting of the clouds should give us clear, sunny skies (‘the fire of the sun’), and therefore clear vision. Just as one hopes that the leader the narcissus flowers are waiting for will be a good one, so does one hope that one’s unobstructed vision will reveal happiness and the fulfillment of one’s wishes.

IV: Conclusion

Among all of the German and Austrian nationalists, like Webern, there was a growing feeling that fascism might fulfill their wishes and give them happiness by restoring glory to their countries. While he felt that national pride and hoped that leaders like Hitler would fulfill those wishes, his continued friendship with Jews, going all the way to the Anschluss and beyond, would have been a source of great conflict for him, not to mention a potential danger.

He surely would have felt that conflict as early as the mid-1920s, when he composed the “Zwei Lieder,” for Hitler had made no secret of his antisemitism, of course, just as he was putting his nationalism on broad display. I believe the second poem’s expression of hope as a mist obscuring one’s vision put Webern’s conflict into words.

Similarly, as I said above, the atonality, dissonance, and wide melodic leaps at least unconsciously expressed his psychological conflict about the growth of European fascism in the 1920s. This musical expression of that conflict extends to the transposition of the tone row by the tritone interval…known significantly as the ‘devil in music.’

So Goethe’s poems teach us that we need to be careful as we look through the mists of hope, as well as to know who we are waiting for. Will we get that happiness, or will we get horror? Are we waiting for a hero, or a villain? In Webern’s case, he got shot and killed by an American soldier in the end, after having been disillusioned by fascism’s bloody failure. Be careful what you hope for…and for whom you are waiting.

2025

I: Introduction

Some people take Facebook memes far too seriously. They also seem to think that the sharing of one meme, often done on a mere whim, encapsulates the essence of the sharer’s political thinking, rather than understanding that the meme is just one thought that passes through time, while a consistency of themes in memes would be a far better indicator of one’s political stance.

Of course, a lot of the snarky comments one gets from having shared controversial Facebook memes these days comes from the heated political climate leading up to the US presidential elections in November. One the one hand, the liberals are trying to scare us into voting for Harris/Walz because if Trump gets four more years, that will be ‘the end of democracy,’ as if democracy is even a meaningful concept in our global capitalist, imperialist system, exacerbated by over forty years of neoliberalism.

On the other hand, some people on the left seem to be trivializing the problem of Trump if he becomes the next president. 2025 will be an…interesting year, it seems…

II: A Trump Meme

A Trump meme that I recently shared showed a colour photo of him in absurd-looking blue shorts, and beside it was a black-and-white photo of Hitler, also in shorts. Both of them were posed similarly, leaning. Regrettably, I no longer have access to the meme, and I can’t find it anywhere.

The meme includes a quote attributed to Mark Twain: “History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Now, most people’s gut reaction to this meme will be to assume it’s equating Trump to Hitler, which is a little much, to put it mildly.

I didn’t interpret the meaning of the meme that way. Note that rhyme means the middle to the end of the words in question sound the same, while the beginning of those words sounds different. Rhyming words can even have completely different spellings: day and weigh, do and threw, etc.

My point is that when history ‘rhymes,’ one isn’t experiencing the same things, but rather some things that are comparable. To be sure, Trump is no repeat of Hitler, but should a mere paralleling of some of their politics be thought so controversial, particularly thought so among leftists?

[A second point to consider: the meme was a joke (i.e., the ridiculous shorts the two were wearing). As I said at the top of this article, some people take memes far too seriously.]

In order to highlight both differences between Trump and Hitler and the jocular nature of the meme, I added this quote by Marx at the top of my post: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” I was obviously implying that Hitler corresponded to tragedy, and Trump corresponded to farce.

Anyway, a few leftist Facebook friends of mine objected quite vehemently to my sharing of the meme. One woman in particular insisted quite stridently that Trump is not a fascist, but a clown. I agree with the second part of her objection; allow me to explain why I disagree with the first part.

Before I go into the reasons for why I see Trump as, if not a full-blown fascist, at least someone with fascist tendencies, I should remind you, Dear Reader, of the contemporary political context in which Trump has emerged. Fascism arises whenever capitalism is in crisis, and when the ruling class is worried that the restive working class is showing threatening signs of wanting to revolt. Fascism is used to beat the workers into submission.

Bourgeois liberal democracy is a sham. It’s a theatrical show meant to present the illusion that ordinary people have a say in how their government is run. Go to the voting booth, check the box next to the name of the candidate you want in office, and you’ve exercised your democratic freedom of choice. Then your country will be ruled by someone you think represents your interests for, depending on the country, four or however many years until the next election. Wow, what power to the people!

Anyone who has been properly paying attention to what has been going on, especially for the past forty years, almost everywhere in the world, knows that the governments (especially in the US) have been increasingly representing the interests of the 1%, while ignoring the needs of the 99%, with more and more brazen blatancy.

This. Is. Not. Even. Remotely. Democratic.

There have been plenty of protests and demonstrations over the past ten to fifteen years or so, from the Occupy movement to Black Lives Matter. This is the sort of thing, due to neoliberalism‘s causing the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer, that makes the ruling class nervous. We’ve also seen an increasing militarization of the American police, and Trump has expressed a desire to ramp up even more police power on at least two occasions.

A huge aspect of fascism is the settler-colonialist mentality, and the US–as well as my country, Canada, and Australia, New Zealand, Israel, etc.–is founded on the stealing of land from the indigenous peoples originally living there and killing all of those who resisted. Hitler’s ambition to go east and invade and colonize the Slavic countries, for the sake of lebensraum, was inspired by white Americans moving out west and taking more and more of the land away from the Native Americans, resulting in their genocide.

Fascists, thus, are more than just your garden-variety imperialists…they’re hyper-imperialists. Consider not only what I said above about Nazi lebensraum, but also fascist Italy’s invasions of African countries like Ethiopia in the 1930s. Just as Hitler wanted to make Germany great again, so did Mussolini want to make Italy great again. Sound familiar?

While most recent American presidents have timidly concealed their imperialist ambitions under the obvious lie that they want to bring ‘freedom and democracy’ to ‘tyrannical regimes’ that often just so happened also to be sitting on lots of oil, Trump, with respect to Venezuela and Syria, has made no attempt to cover up his coveting of their oil. One of the main purposes of territorial expansion, be it of an overtly fascist nature or not, is to take the natural resources of the land one conquers and to enrich one’s own nation with them. In this, we can see a connection between Trump and fascism, but more connections are to follow, if you’ll bear with me, Dear Reader, in another digression.

III: Liberalism and Fascism

Another part of the context in which fascism should be seen is its place on the continuum of all political ideologies. In my article, The Ouroboros of Dialectical Materialism, I imagined a circular continuum symbolized by the ouroboros, on which two opposite extremes meet and phase into each other–the serpent’s head biting its tail, and all other points on its coiled body corresponding to the intermediate points on the continuum. Fascism would be the biting head, and communism would be the bitten tail…not because the two ideologies are similar or identical (Of course not! They’re diametrical opposites! I’m not doing some idiotic horseshoe theory here!), but because the one is a reaction against the other (e.g., part of Nazi Germany became East Germany).

In that article, I also said that one could superimpose the four-way political compass on the ouroboros, so that–as I pointed out above–fascism and other far-right forms of government would be in the top-right corner, towards and including the serpent’s biting head, and communism and other far-left ideologies would be in the top-left corner, towards and including the serpent’s bitten tail. Anarchism and social democracy would be in the bottom-left, and right-wing libertarianism and other moderate right-wingers would be in the bottom-right. It would seem that social democrats and other liberals would be far from fascism.

Political matters aren’t that simple, though. Another thing I pointed out in that article is that there is a tendency to slide counter-clockwise from the tail all the way along the coiled body of the ouroboros to the biting head. Over the past forty to fifty years, we’ve seen just such a slide from, for example, the centrist Johnson years of ‘The Great Society‘ and ‘The War on Poverty‘ (all while dishonestly escalating the Vietnam War and brutally fighting the Cold War in its other aspects, don’t forget), to the neoliberal revolution of Reagan and Thatcher, which began the unravelling of such things as welfare capitalism in favour of the ‘free market,’ and thence to the current immiseration of the poor and the ruling class flirting with fascism (Ukraine, Trump, the Gaza genocide, etc.).

Stalin once said, “Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.” This may seem, on the surface, to be a rather extreme point of view, but consider the liberal slide to the right that I described in the previous paragraph. Liberals are ‘progressive’ during good times, but they’ll sway to the right either during bad times, or if progressive policies go against their class interests. With the dissolution of the socialist states by the early 1990s, no one in the capitalist West, including liberals, had a fear of left-wing revolution, so there was no more incentive to keep alive such things as the welfare state or a diversified media.

And since imperialism is a crucial part of late stage capitalism, the Western ruling class is concerned about the rise of Russia and China. These countries threaten the class interests of the Western ruling class, which again includes the liberals. This is the real reason behind the banging of the war drums against countries like Russia and China.

Accordingly, to counter Russia’s rise, the CIA helped orchestrate a coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014, ousting the democratically-elected, pro-Russian and anti-IMF Viktor Yanukovych and replacing his government with one including Nazi sympathizers. Recall what I said before about the capitalist class using fascism during capitalist crises in order to hold on to power. This is exactly what the Western NATO imperialists have been doing, having used these Ukrainian Nazis to provoke Russia for eight years with violence against ethnic Russians in the Donbas, forcing Putin–who between 2014 and late February 2022, did all he could to secure a peace deal with uncooperative people on the other side–to intervene in Ukraine.

Of course, the Western media have either downplayed if not outright denied or ignored the influence of Nazis in the Ukrainian government and military, but that country has had a history of Nazi sympathizers, nurtured by the capitalist West, ever since WWII. And since much of our current Russophobia is being kindled by liberals, including many in Hollywood, then we can see how liberalism–the farthest left of which is social democracy–can cozy up with fascism.

Now, if liberals can embrace fascism, why wouldn’t conservatives like Trump (a former Democrat, by the way)? The point is that liberals can, and often do, shift to the right, even to the point of fascism if it will further their own interests. Mussolini was a socialist in his youth, then he shifted to the right (with Britain’s influence, to keep Italy in WWI) and established fascism as an ideology.

Charleton Heston was a civil rights supporting liberal, then he shifted to the right and supported the NRA. Trump, as I said above, was a Democrat for a while before running as a Republican. One grows more conservative as one gets older, right? Well, if one has lots of capital to protect.

Conservatives are already closer on the political spectrum to fascism than liberals are, so if the latter can come to sympathize with the far right, then it’s all the easier for conservatives to come that way. Left and right politics aren’t a dichotomy of ‘them’ vs ‘us,’ but a continuum where anyone can slide the one way to the other, given the right material conditions.

IV: Trump and Fascism

Now that we’ve established the political, historical, and material contexts behind which someone like Trump can be seen as at least fascist-leaning, let’s see some actual things he’s done that indicate contributions to the general fascist agenda.

I’ve already explained the fascist nature of much of the current Ukrainian government. Trump sold millions of dollars worth of Javelin missiles to Ukraine. He may have hesitated at first, only agreeing when he was convinced it would be good for US business, but still, he did have them sold. Hitler also had big business backers because they knew supporting Nazi Germany would be good for business. Fascism is hyper-capitalism and hyper-imperialism. At the end of the day, it’s all about good business.

Of course, Trump was not unique in giving aid to Ukraine: Obama may have never sent the Javelins, but his administration sent other forms of aid to Ukraine–millions of dollars in security assistance. And the Biden administration has sent in billions in aid. My saying that Trump was not unique in sending aid to Ukraine is for the same reason that I’m saying Trump is not unique among US politicians in having fascist tendencies. I’m just establishing that Trump is very much a part of the general fascist trajectory that world politics are moving unswervingly towards.

The point is that if Trump were truly not a fascist, but just ‘a clown,’ he wouldn’t have sold those Javelins to Ukraine at all. He and his supporters like to portray him as anti-war; he’s boasted that as soon as he becomes president again, he’ll immediately end the war in Ukraine. I call bullshit on that. His boast is just the typical empty promise of a politician to get votes. The US and NATO are in too deep in Ukraine to get out; they’ve invested so many billions of dollars in it. Trump couldn’t pull out even if he wanted to, and I’d say it’s a safe bet he doesn’t want to. After all, with the sale of the Javelins, war with Ukraine is good for US business, isn’t it? Trump has owned stock in defence contractors like Raytheon. He knows that war is where the money is.

He may not have started any new wars in his administration, but he never ended any, either. He almost started a war with Iran by having Soleimani assassinated, and his administration attempted a ‘Bay of Pigs’ style coup on the Venezuelan government, to get all that oil, as I mentioned above.

War is a business, and Trump is a businessman; he isn’t anti-war.

Where his fascist tendencies are at their most obvious are in his ‘America first’ rhetoric and his discriminatory wish to keep out the Latin Americans with his wall. What should also be obvious is the fact that Obama was the ‘Deporter-in-Chief,‘ Hillary spoke of the need to have a ‘barrier’ to keep out ‘illegals,’ Biden has been pretty much as harsh in his dealing with ‘illegals’ (who might not have been pouring through the southern US border if not for the US government’s immiseration of Latin Americans in their home countries via such tactics as economic sanctions and replacing democratically-elected leftist governments with authoritarian right-wing ones, thus forcing the desperate poor to try their luck in the US), and that Kamala Harris promises to be even stricter with border security than Trump (and as a prosecutor who fought to keep non-violent offenders, and even innocent men, in jail, she can be trusted to keep her promise).

Again, I’m not saying Trump is unique in his anti-immigrant positions. He’s part of a general trend toward the far right. The point is that he isn’t outside of the fascist problem, and it’s absurd to say he is outside of it. The real difference between him and the other members of the fascist-leaning establishment is that when they discuss the problem of ‘illegals’ going into the US, they use polite language, whereas when Trump discusses it, he uses the bluntest, rudest language he can muster.

Next, we have to deal with an issue that would make Trump undoubtedly a dictator…if it really comes to be. Has all of this talk about Project 2025 been a real, legitimate worry, or is it just scaremongering in the media?

First of all, nothing in the manifesto of Project 2025 should be of any surprise. We’ve all known that the conservative agenda has always been about returning the US to the reactionary politics of the 1950s and earlier. We all know how reactionary Trump is, that his name is brought up many times in that manifesto, and many of the people involved in devising Project 2025 are associated with Trump (like the Heritage Foundation), which all implies that if he’s elected, he surely would enact much, if not all, of the backward policies of the manifesto (despite his attempts to distance himself from it, assuredly to prevent a loss of votes). His adding of conservative Supreme Court justices led to the overturning of Roe vs Wade [which the Dems have never shown any serious interest in codifying], so his enacting of Project 2025 is no idle threat. (Recall that the underestimating of Hitler was a factor in his rise to power.)

On the other hand, it should be obvious to everyone that the Democratic Party is just using Project 2025 to scare liberals into voting for Kamala Harris, even if they don’t like her (they shouldn’t, for the reasons I’ve given above and will give later). Since there’s no real choice for progressives to vote for in the corrupt two-party system (and as promising as the likes of Jill Stein are, even if she miraculously wins the election, the ruling class won’t allow her to make the needed reforms to the system), then the Democrats have to resort to slimy lesser-evil voting again.

Liberals be libbing again. Oh, dear…

Other things that suggest that Trump could be reaching for dictatorial powers, it seems, include his saying, about one hour into a speech he did for his Christian followers, that if he’s voted into office, they’ll never need to vote again. Now, did he mean this, or is it just another of the many examples of verbal flatulence we’re so used to hearing from him (e.g, his claiming that ‘extreme left, Marxist Democrats‘ want to allow abortions as late as when the baby is actually born)? Surely, the Democrats are also using these words of his to scare people into voting blue, regardless of what he actually meant in saying them.

Then there was the tweet he sent, with Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” as an eerie, dramatic soundtrack, showing Trump as president not just for 2024, but also 2028, 2032, 2036,…etc., going well into and beyond the 22nd century. Is this to imply a dynasty of Trumps, with his sons, grandsons, etc., to succeed him? That tweet, if anything, comes across as trolling, provocation for the mere fun of it, and suggests, to me, a collusion with the Democrats to scare people into voting blue. Trump has always been used as controlled opposition by the ruling class.

Finally, there was that botched assassination attempt…or (deliberately?) botched security…of Trump, attempted by a kid who makes a Star Wars stormtrooper seem a marksman by comparison. Lots of conspiracy theories are floating around online in response to that debacle, almost as spastic as the January 6th farce. Is Trump, if elected, nonetheless going to use that ‘attempt on his life‘ to give himself emergency powers?

The main factor that would allow Trump to assume dictatorial powers is if he has enough followers, enough muscle, to help him do it. He didn’t have enough of it, as was obviously demonstrated in that pathetic, unarmed January 6th attempt (the Nazi Beer Hall putsch was more of something to take seriously). Since the excesses and incompetence of the Biden administration, I can imagine a lot more Americans siding with Trump. The fascist-leaning types tend to work out in the gym and get military training far more than us on the left, sadly, so there’s more of a possibility of a putsch this time.

If Trump tries to take over, the CIA–in their wish to maintain the veneer of democracy that the masses need to have some sense of hope and thus stave off revolution–could try to have him killed and make it look as if he died of old age; the conspiracy theorists would have a field day, of course, but the ‘official’ explanation sent out in the mainstream media would probably drown out all of the Trumpers’ cries of foul play. Many attempts on Hitler’s life were made, and any more attempts on Trump’s life would reinforce our sense that he’ll have assumed dictatorial powers. But again, any success or failure in such attempts would depend in large part on how many followers Trump will have to make his fascism a reality.

V: Kamala is NO Alternative to Trump

Another meme I shared on Facebook that gave me some static was one of Kamala Harris wearing a necklace resembling one costing $62,000. It’s assumed that she’s wearing the exact same necklace, having paid that much for it. The meme has her say, “Hello, fellow working class people…Today is the day I hope you will donate.”

Shit-lib supporters of her naturally got upset and not only said the usual nonsense of not voting for her equalling voting for Trump, as well as doubting that the necklaces were the same. I personally couldn’t care less if the necklaces are the same or not. I don’t generally take memes literally, as I didn’t in the case of the Trump/Hitler meme discussed above. As far as I’m concerned, it’s what the expensive necklace represents: she, as vice president and thus in with the ruling class, is in no way connected with the working class. It isn’t really about how much money she makes (though, incidentally, she has a net worth of $8 million as of 2024); it’s about which class she’s affiliated with.

As with Trump/Vance, Harris/Walz support Israel, the racist, apartheid regime that’s been murdering Gazans by the tens of thousands–at least between 35,000 and 40,000 since October 7th, which was NOT the beginning of this nightmare. This ongoing genocide is a red line, and that’s all the reason anyone needs not to vote either red or blue. It doesn’t matter how much more of a ‘Hitler’ Trump either seems or actually is: the Biden/Harris administration is already more than fascist enough, and Ms. “I’m speaking!” has made it clear that she plans to keep things the way they are in Gaza.

By a sad irony, members of the same ethnic group that were victimized by fascism back in WWII are now, and have been since a few years after that war ended, the fascist victimizers in their settler-colonialist ethnocracy. Now, this is not to give credence to the idea that Israel somehow rules the US and therefore the world, an idea whose antisemitic overtones should be obvious. As I explained in more detail in this post, it’s the Western imperialist powers that use Israel as a crucial ally in the Middle East, an extremely important region for globally strategic reasons (as well as for all that oil!), to protect their interests. Back when he still had all his marbles (and was just as evil back then as he is today), Biden said the quiet part out loud here about the true relationship between Israel and the US…and by extension, the rest of the Anglo-American/NATO empire.

So, Kamala Harris, by continuing what Biden was doing, is thoroughly entrenched in the system, supporting not only Zionism (as many non-Jews–especially evangelical Christians–do, and many Jews oppose) but also the entire neoliberal agenda as well as the system of incarceration as discussed above. This entrenchment is the real reason for her rise to prominence in politics, not competence, of which people with discerning eyes and ears can find no evidence. The fact that she’s a woman of colour is also helpful to the ruling class, for while she’ll dutifully do all their bidding, her appearance as a non-white male creates the illusion–as it did with Obama–that her election will further racial equality.

As I said almost eight years ago in this article, it isn’t the women at the top (or the people of colour up there, for that matter) who count, but those at the bottom who do, for there are so many more down there than those at the top. Who do we want to raise up to a level of dignity, a small minority of people, or the great majority of them?

Because of Kamala’s willingness to prostitute herself to the system (I need use the word ‘prostitute’ only in a metaphorical sense), she’s never needed actual ability to get as far as she has in her career, in spite of the words of those who insist that, because of that career, she must be competent. For these reasons, I feel I can speak most bluntly about her in a way that should not at all be controversial.

She is a total airhead.

All one needs to do to see the truth of this is to watch the many video clips of her doing that ditzy cackle and engaging in her many word salads. One cannot reduce the word salads to the occasional gaffe, of which even the best speakers have the bad luck of doing once in a while. She’s done way too many of these–it’s a habit with her.

Biden was showing clear signs of dementia back in 2020, and surely those working with him, and helping him with his election campaign then, knew of this problem better than anyone else. His ability when younger was no longer relevant; he was put against Trump because he was associated with Obama, whose charm had been missed after four years of Trump. Biden is a Zionist and a whore for the system, too; his current incompetence had been irrelevant, as far as the ruling class was concerned, until it was exposed in his debate with Trump. Kamala’s incompetence is similarly irrelevant: as long as she furthers the interests of the ruling class, that’s good enough for them.

VI: Conclusion

So, in answer to that one woman’s objection that Trump is a clown: yes, he is a clown, of course (look at his hair and at his orange face, and listen to his ridiculous bragging about all the amazing things he promises he’ll do; listen, also, to his bizarre statements about the ‘extreme left, Marxist Democrats’–something, incidentally, that only a far-right extremist would think about the largely centre-right Dems). He isn’t the only clown, though.

Joe Biden is a clown–at least, his dementia has turned him into one. Kamala Harris is a clown (cackling, word salads). In fact, Hitler was a clown (the toothbrush mustache and the more-or-less bowl haircut, to say nothing of his weird conceptions of the state of world politics of his time). Mussolini was a clown. We need to remember, though, that clowns, just like Pennywise, can be scary as well as funny.

A female troll who gave me a hard time about the memes I’d shared that criticized Kamala asked me, in all snarkiness, if I was even American (I’m Canadian), as if anyone outside of her sacred country has any right to say anything about the election in November. We’re talking here about a country with hundreds of military bases around the world. This is a country that orchestrates, or at least helps to orchestrate, coup after coup in other countries to ensure the latter have governments friendly to the interests of the former. This country sells weapons and gives aid to countries that commit genocides (Israel on Gaza, Saudi Arabia on Yemen–granted, my country’s government has been guilty of giving the offending countries aid, too, and I don’t have any more love of the Canadian government than I do of that of the US). The US has been engaging in nuclear brinksmanship with Russia and China, bringing us all dangerously close to WWIII. To suggest that as a non-American, I have no business criticizing her government is extremely arrogant of her.

What goes on in the US does not happen in isolation from the rest of the world. The American government’s foreign policy is a poison to the entire world, so yes, we citizens of the rest of the planet, no matter how far away we live from the US, have not only every right to voice our opinions about this upcoming election…we have the duty to do so!

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether Trump, if elected, goes balls-out fascist on us, or if all that talk about Project 2025, ‘[Christians] will never have to vote again,’ and ‘Trump 4eva’ is just trolling and scaremongering to manipulate Americans into voting Democrat. The US has already been lapsing into fascism whether red or blue (the surveillance state, the wish for mass deportations, class collaboration in the form of simping for billionaires, the enabling of genocide, etc.), and the trajectory towards even more fascism, regardless of a Trump win or a Harris win, will assuredly continue, be it a faster or slower move farther to the right.

The US, founded on settler-colonialism (as, to be fair, is my country, Canada, and many others, no less so), the enslavement of blacks, and the genocide of the aboriginals, in which a small minority of people hoard most of the wealth, cannot reasonably be called a democracy. There’s no threat of losing a democracy that never even existed in the first place.

The problem won’t be solved by voting in the ‘better’ candidate. The problem will be solved by smashing the system the injustice is based on and replacing it with a new one, to serve the people. Doing so will be extremely difficult, if not bordering on impossible–I have no illusions about that–but it’s the only way.

In an accelerationist sense, a Trump win, with him assuming dictatorial powers, could cause just the outrage needed to motivate the people into rising up in revolution. I’m not hoping for such an outcome in the election, of course. For just as his move for those powers depends on him having enough people to back him, our success in revolution, in response to him doing that or otherwise, will depend on us having enough people to back us. Are there enough of us?

‘The Privatization of Retirement Funds and Support for the Military Industrial Complex,’ from Dennis Riches’s Blog

The Privatization of Retirement Funds and Support for the Military Industrial Complex

Often left-leaning people with good intentions let themselves be led astray by prioritizing their own personal interests over the need to commit to anti-capitalist activism, including concern for the environment, and even opposition to NATO.

‘Frank assessment of France and Macron by Maria Zakharova, June 8, 2024,’ from Dennis Riches’s Blog

Frank assessment of France and Macron by Maria Zakharova, June 8, 2024

Macron is a careerist and a lackey of US imperialism. As with so much of Europe, France is, in essence, a colony of the US.

Word Salad

Meat salad–Met Gala–mend Gaza
Rafah–fashion–fascism–famished–family–fatality
fame–fake–ache–knack for acting–snack bar–nakba–takbir
actor–anger–answer–innocents–inside–genocide–their side–our side–ours died
apartheid–traumatized–dramatize–Wanna wise up?

Synchronicity and September 11th

I: Introduction–What is Synchronicity?

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

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

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

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

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

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

II: The Three September 11th Years

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

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

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

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

III: The Chilean Coup D’état

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

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

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

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

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

IV: Bush’s ‘New World Order’ Speech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V: The Terrorist Attacks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI: The Collective Shadow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII: Conclusion (Including 119 and November 9th)

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

I see patterns. I can’t help it.

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

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

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

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

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