Analysis of ‘Kin-dza-dza!’

Kin-dza-dza! is a 1986 Soviet film directed by Georgiy Daneliya, and written by him and Revaz Gabriadze. A dystopian science fiction black comedy, it stars Stanislav Lyubshin, Levan Gabriadze, Yury Yakoviev, and Yevgeny Leonov.

In 2016, the British movie magazine, Little White Lies, described Kin-dza-dza! as a cross between Mad Max, Monty Python, and Tarkovsky, saying the film is still relevant. The same year, Russia Beyond said that Russians still love the film. Three years earlier, an animated remake of the film was done by Daneliya, called Ku! Kin-dza-dza! The cartoon won Best Animated Feature Film in the 2013 Asia Pacific Screen Awards.

Here is a link to quotes from the film in English translation, and here‘s a link to the complete film with English subtitles.

I see this film as not only relevant for our times, but also prophetic in how the planet Pluke, in the Kin-dza-dza galaxy–to which the Russian and Georgian protagonists, respectively Vladimir Mashkov, or Uncle Vova (Lyubshin), and Gedevan Alexandrovitch Alexidze, or the Fiddler (Gabriadze), are teleported–is representative of the capitalist world, as contrasted with the Soviet world from which the two originate.

Now, as of the making and release of Kin-dza-dza!, which had been achieved by December of 1986, Mikhael Gorbachev had not yet implemented his policies of perestroika and glasnost as an attempt to put an end to the ongoing economic stagnation that had begun during the Brezhnev years; but he had spoken of the two reform concepts in his report to the 27th Congress of the Communist Party, which occurred from late February to early March that same year.

Gorbachev had given a speech the previous year about the slowing economy, and the perestroika reforms that would come by the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s included the return of “free market” economics and private property. When Yeltsin took over, not only were these reforms all the more aggressively and brutally implemented, plunging millions of Russians–hitherto used to a planned economy that had provided for their basic needs–into poverty, but attempts to resist the reforms were ruthlessly suppressed.

I bring up this history to show how the film can be seen to have predicted, in allegorical form, the economic and political disaster that the bringing back of capitalism would cause. Despite the economic problems that the Soviet Union was undoubtedly going through in the mid-1980s, most Russians wanted to keep the Soviet system intact; indeed, majorities of Russians since the dissolution of the USSR have consistently said that life was happier then than it’s been since the return of capitalism, and a referendum had been held in 1991, the results of which said that the majority of Russians had wanted to keep the Soviet system.

So, when Russians in the mid-1980s were hearing Gorbachev’s talk of economic, market reforms, the instincts of many of them must have been warning them of the danger of his reactionary talk. Recall Stalin’s words in this connection: “What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.”

Such is the political background in which we should understand what Kin-dza-dza! is trying to say to us. Uncle Vova’s thoughtless tapping of a button on the teleportation device of the barefoot, alien stranger is like Gorbachev and his followers foolishly allowing themselves to be influenced by the Western capitalists and bringing about the “new world order” that has led to all of our economic and political problems today. For it is that very pressing of the random button on the teleportation device that sends Uncle Vova and the Fiddler from the city centre on Kalinin Prospect in Moscow to the dystopian, desert wasteland of planet Pluke, with its glaring class inequalities.

The story begins with Uncle Vova returning home from work as a construction foreman. He chats with his wife, Lucya (played by Galina Daneliya-Yurkova), about mundane troubles at work. She asks him to go out and buy some bread and noodles, which she earlier forgot to buy, so he goes out to do that.

He arrives at the city square to buy he food, and there he meets the Fiddler, who tells him about the unshod alien traveler with the teleportation device. What should be noted is that, up until our two protagonists’ unwitting teleportation to Pluke, that the world we see around them, Moscow, is a perfectly normal society, without Pluke’s deprivation. Furthermore, the alien traveler, barefoot, scruffy, and as lost as a fish out of water, makes one think of a homeless man, which is fitting given that, as an outsider to the Soviet Union, he is representative of the capitalist world.

Now, the sight of our two protagonists stuck in a strange desert, actually a desert planet, reminds me of R2-D2 and C-3PO on Tatooine. The arrival of Uef (Leonov) and Bi (Yakoviev) in their flying vehicle suggests the Jawas, though these latter two have little, if anything, in common with the short, hooded droid thieves.

I’m not saying that the filmmakers intended these similarities with the early scenes of the first Star Wars movie, but the coincidental parallels between Pluke and Tatooine are meaningful in how they illustrate that the two desolate, desert planets are reflective of how capitalism sucks the life out of a place’s ecology. On Tatooine, Luke helps his uncle and aunt use moisture vaporators to produce water; on Pluke, fuel is called “luts,” and it’s made from water, so drinking water is a rare and valuable commodity.

The two droids unwittingly land on Tatooine to escape from the Galactic Empire, and they’re chased by imperial stormtroopers. Uncle Vova and the Fiddler have been thrust upon Pluke, and they’ll have to deal with the planet’s “ecilopps” (police, spelled backwards), whose bullying nature reminds one of the skeletally-armoured stormtroopers (after all, ACAB). Not yet knowing where he and his Georgian friend are, Uncle Vova comments that they must be in “a capitalist country” when they meet Uef and Bi for the first time, seeing the two Pluke inhabitants do their customary squatting and opening-out of their arms in an act of obeisance to say “ku” (“good”).

This act of obeisance is the first of many signs of a society structured around class lines, hence Uncle Vova’s assumption that it’s “a capitalist country” is not far off the mark. Money, known on Pluke as “chatls,” is hard to come by (note how chatl sounds virtually identical to chattel).

There are two kinds of people who live on Pluke–Chatlainians, and Patsaks; Uef is one of the former, and Bi is one of the latter. A hand-held device called a “visator” determines which of the two kinds of people you are: an orange dot of light on the visator indicates a Chatlainian, or a person of higher social status; green indicates a lower-status Patsak, of whom Uncle Vova and the Fiddler are also determined to be by the visator. Our two Earth visitors consider this discrimination to be outrageously racist; but had they all been on a Patsak-dominated planet, the Chatlainian/Patsak discrimination would have been reversed.

Uncle Vova and the Fiddler are hoping for a ride in Uef’s and Bi’s vehicle, and they offer some of their things (coats, a hat) in exchange for it, since they lack money, chatls in particular. But Uef and Bi begin to fly away in their vehicle without our two protagonists, until Uncle Vova uses a match to light a cigarette, making Uef and Bi want to return. We learn that matches, called “ketse” on Pluke, are among the most valued of commodities.

Since the society of Pluke is a dystopian one, it’s interesting to note that it, as being also a capitalist one, has a number of things in common with the society as depicted in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The people of Pluke have a limited vocabulary, typically saying “ku” for whatever is good, or saying “kyu,” a mild swear-word for whatever is bad. These two words, as well as such words as have already been discussed above, make up the bulk of their vocabulary. Similarly, in Orwell’s dystopia, the development of Newspeak involved eliminating words in order to limit thought, including ideas potentially dangerous to the Party, such thoughts as being revolutionary. (On Pluke, though, this limited vocabulary seems unnecessary as such, for a plot device in the film gives the planet’s inhabitants telepathic abilities that, conveniently, allow them to converse in Russian and Georgian with our two protagonists!)

Furthermore, where the world of Orwell’s hell is led by Big Brother, a mysterious figure we never directly encounter in the story and who, for all we know, may not even exist, the leader of Pluke, named “Mr. P-Zh,” or “PG” (played by Nikolai Garo), is harmless and simple-minded, as it turns out. The film thus seems to be predicting such incompetent, ineffectual heads of state as Biden.

Now, such comparisons to Nineteen Eighty-Four are useful, since many in the capitalist West would dismiss Kin-dza-dza! as mere Soviet propaganda, while conveniently ignoring Orwell’s novel, as well as the deluge of such things as late twentieth-century Western movies, like Rocky IV, as blatant Cold War anti-communist propaganda. Western propaganda is “the truth,” apparently, not Eastern. How convenient.

That something as mundane and non-extraordinary as “ketse,” or match-like sticks, are among the most valuable commodities on Pluke is a satiric comment on the absurdity of our slavery to pieces of paper that, in essence, are IOUs. Furthermore, “luts,” fuel made from water, which makes drinking water so valuable, sounds like a comment on the petrodollar, as well as one on the ruthless destruction of the environment for the sake of profiting off of fossil fuels. In a fully communist society, there would be products as use values without exchange for money.

Uncle Vova and the Fiddler, however, have no choice but to exchange commodities–their ketse–with Uef and Bi if the former pair are to get the help of the latter pair to get back to Earth. Our protagonists try to exchange ketse for drinking water from some people who run off with the ketse, cheating them.

Uncle Vova and the Fiddler eventually get the idea to perform music in order to earn chatls. Though he’s referred to as “the Fiddler,” he doesn’t actually play the violin he carries around with hm. He was originally trying to find the violinist who’d forgotten to take his instrument when leaving. When the two perform their music, it’s actually Uncle Vova who ends up playing the violin…worse than a child violinist with no ear for music at all. In the Fiddler-as-non-fiddler, we see a satiric comment on Marx’s theory of the alienation of the worker from his labour.

The song that the two men sing, which sounds like some simple Russian folk song of some sort, includes such lines as, “Mama, Mama, what is to be done?” as well as “Winter is no fun,” “I don’t have a coat to keep warm,” and “How shall I live?” The song is all about a needy child asking his Mama for help, like a proletarian making a clamour about his needs.

The performing is typically done in small cages, or, on one occasion, on one’s knees, which should tell you something. The worker struggling to make enough to survive is, essentially, putting on an absurd performance, being an actor trying to please those who pay him, a wage slave caged in the world of capitalism, brought down to his knees. And the acting is all fake, and often it’s not performed very well, as we see of Uncle Vova and his scraping violin bow and his and the Fiddler’s bad singing. The alienation referred to above is enough to explain the poor, insincere ‘performances’ of the working class.

A physical indicator of lowly Patsak status is the wearing of a small nose-bell called a “tsak.” (Note in this connection that “Patsak” is backwards for “katsap,” a derogatory term for a Russian.) Bi would have Uncle Vova and the Fiddler each clip a tsak on his nose, which the two of course do with the utmost reluctance. The wearing of a tsak looks like the film’s commentary on the Nazis making the Jews wear the Yellow Badge, or German gay men wear the pink triangle.

Another indicator of class differences on Pluke is the wearing of differently colored pants: yellow, pink, etc. Uef covets them because, if he can wear those of the higher social classes, Patsaks and Chatlanians will have to do the “Ku!” squat of obeisance for him, the ecilopps can’t beat him up, etc. These colored pants are a social commentary on one’s preoccupation with social status as attained through high fashion.

At one point in the story, when Uef and Bi have enough ketse in their vehicle to buy what they need to get to Earth, they fly away and leave Uncle Vova and the Fiddler with nothing in return. Furious, our protagonists want to send the ecilopps after the two cheats; but they don’t have forty chatls to pay the ecilopps, so Uncle Vova lies that Uef and Bi failed to “ku” in obeisance to P-Zh’s image.

In these acts of dishonesty, we see how a world where money talks results in alienation. When Uef and Bi are apprehended, though, Uncle Vova quickly repents of his false accusation and hopes Uef and Bi won’t be imprisoned, which is particularly unpleasant, since instead of being put in a cell, they are locked up in a small metal box with barely enough room to hold the two of them inside. Given the dreadful state of prison life in the US, especially now, when corporations make practical slaves of the inmates, whose population outnumbers that of the Gulag (and even the CIA back then acknowledged that Gulag conditions weren’t anywhere near as bad as Western propaganda portrays them), we can see Pluke’s form of imprisonment as a comment on life in prison in a capitalist country.

Uncle Vova and the Fiddler are reunited with the barefoot alien they first met on Earth, the one with the teleportation device; he gives our two heroes a chance to return home immediately. Uncle Vova, however, feels guilty about causing Uef and Bi to be incarcerated, and he wants to pass up his chance to go back to Earth in order to help those two unfortunate ones.

Even though Uef and Bi double-crossed Uncle Vova and the Fiddler and made them wear those ridiculous bells on their noses, our two heroes want to help them, even to the point of giving up their chance to go home. While the capitalist world of Pluke teaches selfishness and alienation, leading to Uef’s and Bi’s double-crossing, the socialist world of the Soviet Union taught selflessness and solidarity. Though Kin-dza-dza! might be considered Soviet propaganda, it doesn’t teach its viewers to loathe and despise the citizens of capitalist societies (it may portray them as buffoonish and silly, but Uncle Vova and the Fiddler have their own foibles, too). In contrast, consider the malevolent scowls you see, for example, on the faces of Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), his wife (Brigitte Nielsen), and his trainer and promoter (Michael Pataki) in Rocky IV.

Indeed, Uncle Vova and the Fiddler postponing their return to Earth–even returning to Pluke after a brief trip to other planets on the way home, and going back in time–to rescue Uef and Bi both from their incarceration, and later their fate on planet Alpha to be turned into plants is a kind of selflessness that would remind one of that of the bodhisattva, who postpones entering nirvana upon attaining Buddhahood and returns to samsara to help all other living beings, however unenlightened they may be, to attain nirvana together, a liberation for the entire Earth. Such is the selflessness of the true socialist, who would ultimately share liberation from capitalism with the whole world, not just hog it in his own country.

The planet Alpha is an interesting topic in itself. The people of Alpha have a method of dealing with Uef and Bi–whom they consider miscreants–that may seem cruel (turning them into cacti). Still, since Uef and Bi are governed by “vile desires,” rather like those of us caught up in samsara, then perhaps being transformed into plants, without human sense perceptions and the pain associated with them, is a kind of nirvana for them.

That buffoonish pair might be best left not to decide their own fate (as Uncle Vova would have it), since if left to do so, they’d choose foolishly; still, bodhisattva Vova would leave the nirvana of Alpha and postpone his return to the Pure Land, so to speak, of the USSR and help those two Pluke bumpkins.

After going back in time and back to Pluke, and helping those two, Uncle Vova and the Fiddler reunite with the barefoot man and his teleportation device, and our two heroes finally get sent back to Moscow. We see a repeat of the beginning of the movie, as if their time on Pluke never happened: Uncle Vova comes home from work again, and his wife sends him out to buy groceries.

Back in that city square, he meets with the Fiddler again, but the latter doesn’t tell the former about the barefoot alien this time, because he isn’t there. Our two protagonists don’t even recognize each other: it’s as if they’d never met, let alone got stranded in the Kin-dza-dza galaxy. As we soon learn, though, what happened is really just a repressed memory.

They see a tractor with a flashing orange light pass by. This triggers their by-now-instinctive attitude of submission to the Chatlainian colour, and the two men do their “ku” squat of obeisance.

Their return to the socialist world of the Soviet Union does not render them immune to the classism of the capitalist world as represented by Pluke. This is why reactionary instincts must be guarded against; old attitudes have a way of coming back if we aren’t careful. Just recall how those former Soviets became Russian oligarchs.

Still, one good thing has come from Uncle Vova’s and the Fiddler’s relapse: they now recognize each other, and exchange smiles like good old friends. Uncle Vova then looks up at the sky and hears the voices of Uef and Bi saying “ku” and singing the “Mama” song. They feel united, if only in spirit, with their Chatlainian and Patsak friends once again. Whatever good or ill may happen to us, being reunited with friends is above all else in importance.

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.

Raised Fist

O, keep your fingers
on the pulse of what
the people need in this
alienating, unfair world!
A good rule of thumb is
remembering we can’t
do all of this alone.
We all must raise
our arms together
in loving solidarity.
Alone, we’re weak;
together, we’re not.
When our muscles
are stacked, one on
top of the other, we
can be unstoppable,
a giant which could
pound the crap out
of the ruling class. There are so many more of us than there are of them.
They want us just to be fingers and thumbs, all insignificant sinews. We
must link up–as ligaments–muscles and bones. A fist that’s connected
can punch out the rich, so let’s raise it together. Our rulers would have
us all fighting, so we won’t be fighting them, defeating them for good.

‘Slobodan Despot on the Parallels between Two Disintegrations, Yugoslavia and Ukraine,’ translated on Dennis Riches’s blog

Or, on the destruction of Yugoslavia, Ukraine, and ultimately, NATO’s credibility.

Slobodan Despot on the Parallels between Two Disintegrations, Yugoslavia and Ukraine

Analysis of ‘The Crying Game’

The Crying Game is a 1992 film written and directed by Neil Jordan. It stars Stephen Rea, Miranda Richardson, Jaye Davidson, and Forest Whitaker, with Adrian Dunbar, Ralph Brown, and Jim Broadbent.

While the theme of the marginalization of race, sex, and sexuality is placed at the forefront of this film, another issue, the right for the self-determination of nations, is also there, but it’s…well, marginalized, as I’ll discuss in more detail in the paragraphs below.

The Crying Game was a critical and commercial success, having won the BAFTA Award for Best British Film and an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. It also got Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Rea), Best Supporting Actor (Davidson), and Best Film Editing. The British Film Institute named The Crying Game the 26th-greatest British film of all time in 1999.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the complete film (minus the credits).

The proper political and historical context of The Crying Game is to be seen in the Northern Ireland conflict, also known as “The Troubles,” which went on for about thirty years, from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. Mainstream Western culture generally looks on the IRA as a bunch of fanatical, cold-blooded terrorists who indiscriminately killed out of a frenzied, passionate nationalism. What is ignored in this kind of judgement against them is the centuries of brutal British imperialist rule that provoked Irish resistance all the way up to the Troubles that began in the late 1960s.

The Crying Game, as well as The Cranberries’ song “Zombie,” are bourgeois liberal portrayals of the IRA as mindless, violent killers rather than embodying legitimate armed resistance against a colonial oppressor, which is recognized in international law and the UN. Ireland was England’s first colony. The Emerald Isle has been invaded again and again from as early as the 12th century, with the Anglo-Norman invasion. Indiscriminate massacres of the Irish, including women and children, went on countlessly. Just as the Palestinians have a legitimate right to armed struggle against Zionist settler-colonialism, so have the Irish had that right against British imperialism.

To go into more detail about this issue would be beyond the scope of this analysis; the links provided above and below should help with the details left out here. Still, I needed to bring this issue up and give it proper attention because The Crying Game fails to do so; just as blacks and transgender people are marginalized in the real world, so is Irish liberation tossed to the side and ignored, in the real world and in this film.

Granted, it is perfectly legitimate to sympathize with blacks and transgender people when they suffer prejudice and bigotry. The problem with The Crying Game is how the film uses these otherwise justified sympathies as forms of identity politics to keep us on the side of imperialist, colonial British rule. The fact remains that, in order to ensure and maintain the liberation of such marginalized groups as blacks and transgender people, the first thing that must be done is to overthrow the capitalist, imperialist system that uses marginalization as a weapon to keep the working class divided; and the IRA, with their leftist ideology, are one of many groups dedicated to that very overthrow.

One of the things the IRA does in The Crying Game, though, is something that very much divides the common people, in this case, the sexes–they have pretty Jude (Richardson) lure a British soldier named Jody (Whitaker) with a promise of sex, in order to kidnap him and threaten to execute him if an imprisoned IRA member is not released by the UK in three days. Jody curses at Jude for being such a Delilah to him. Well, what can I say? The capitalist/imperialist system must end first, then we can work on ending the social divisions.

As I said above, the real aims and purposes of the IRA are not properly explored in this film. As far as The Crying Game is concerned, these people are just a bunch of “extremist,” terrorist bad guys. Jody will be shot in three days, just because the UK authorities won’t free a fellow IRA man. Towards the end of the film, they want to assassinate a British judge: they don’t care who he really is–he’s just “a legitimate target.” As you can see, the IRA are portrayed as killers for the sake of killing, not as freedom fighters.

Note that the film came out in 1992, just after the disastrous dissolution of the Soviet Union, and thus neoliberalism could really get going without a leash on its neck. All sympathy for the poor and marginalized would be given within a liberal, non-socialist framework.

As Jody is held by the IRA for the last three days of his life, he cleverly establishes a bond with Fergus (Rea), a Provisional IRA member with long hair (I’ll get into the significance of that later). Jody talks about his girlfriend and his love of playing cricket. This bonding will make it harder for Fergus to shoot Jody when the inevitable third day comes, for the UK government will deem Jody expendable, anyway. From the point of view of the film, and the anti-IRA/pro-British imperialist message it’s trying to convey to audiences, this bonding will humanize Jody for us, making us want to sympathize with him, and therefore with the British side.

One of the ways he gains our sympathies is by complaining about the frank, blunt racism of the Irish that he, as a black man, has to put up with while stationed among them as a British soldier. This otherwise legitimate problem is used to distract us from another legitimate one: UK rule over Northern Ireland. Stereotyping the Irish as crass racists also camouflages their victimhood.

One could relate this racism, the using of a woman to lure a man into a trap, and even Irish collaboration with the UK, to Jody’s story about the Scorpion and the Frog, and how doing what’s against one’s interests is nonetheless in one’s nature.

Jody, as a member of the proletariat no less than Jude, Fergus, or Peter (Dunbar), should be concerned with the interests of the global working class (including other blacks, of course) over those of empire; instead, he chooses the job of British soldier for easy remuneration, and gets stationed in a place where not only will he be openly taunted as a “nigger,” but also where he’s at risk of being kidnapped and killed by the very kind of people who would otherwise be contributing to the fight for the kind of world in which that slur won’t be used anymore. Jody chooses easy money over liberation and safety, though, because it’s in his nature to choose what’s easy over what’s hard.

Jude, in going along with the plan to use her body to lure Jody in, rather than use some other, non-objectifying method, is going against her own interests as a woman, thus having to endure hearing Jody’s slurs of “bitch” and “whore.” Recall how, above, I compared her to Delilah (I’ll go into more Samson symbolism later); her name suggests another Biblical betrayer. Still, being a woman who can’t help having internalized the sexist attitudes of her society (including having to serve Jody, the man who now hates her, food and drink), she can’t help it: it’s in her nature.

The Northern Ireland Unionists, generally Protestant and therefore worried that a unified Ireland–being mostly Catholic–would marginalize them, side with the UK and its terroristic atrocities on the Irish in the hopes of preserving their version of Christianity (or so they rationalize). Instead, by siding with the IRA and its leftist agenda, they could help deal a blow to imperialism–which thrives on such forms of divisiveness as racism, sexism, and religious intolerance–which could lead eventually to a kind of world that would do away with such divisions and liberate us all. Still, it’s in one’s nature to choose the quick and easy solution over the long and hard road of ending capitalism.

Fergus, too, chooses the quick and easy solution of sympathizing with Jody, and later, Dil (Davidson), over sympathizing with his fellow Irish. This latter sympathizing would, as I explained above, ultimately lead to the liberation of everyone, including transgender people, if it were to succeed on a global level. Such a path, though, is long and hard, and Fergus can’t help it–it’s in his nature–to reject such a path, leave the IRA, and even go to jail for Dil’s murder of Jude.

To get back to Jody’s clever manipulating of Fergus to win his sympathy, Jody goes beyond just telling him the story of the Scorpion and the Frog, but he also tells Fergus about his girlfriend, Dil, back in London. He has Fergus take out his wallet so Fergus can see a photo of her, to see how pretty she is. By doing this, Jody humanizes both himself and Dil for Fergus. To humanize himself even more, Jody actually has Fergus take his penis out of his pants so he–his hands tied behind his back–can take a piss!

All of these tactics, of course, make it well-nigh impossible for Fergus to shoot Jody in the woods when the dreaded day comes, for the UK authorities–the ‘good guys,’ recall!–have no intention of saving Jody, only of finding the IRA hideout and killing all of the resistance.

Ironically, it’s the British forces who end up killing Jody by hitting him with an armoured vehicle on the road that he accidentally runs out on. They don’t mean to kill him there, but that doesn’t matter: they’ve never taken seriously the need to save one of their own. As I said above, they consider Jody to be expendable: such an attitude is proven by how the UK flies planes over the IRA hideout and reduces the entire shelter to flames, without a thought that Jody could be in there somewhere.

This moment of British viciousness gives us a taste of the might of Western imperialism, hinting as to why the IRA is resisting them in the first place…if we’d pay close attention. Still, the liberal slant of The Crying Game would have us see this viciousness as an example of how ‘there is bad on both sides.’ Little consideration is given to the fact that one side is much more powerful than the other, and that that powerful side has historically caused much more killing than the other. This same false moral equivalency is used in the worsening situation in Gaza, which is characterized in the mainstream media as a ‘war’ between the IDF and Hamas, rather than as an ongoing genocide of unarmed Palestinian civilians.

Fergus, keeping his promise to Jody to go to London and find Dil, has left the IRA–assuming that Jude and Peter are dead–and renounced their revolutionary ways. He changes his name to Jimmy, and he has his hair cut short, symbolic of Samson losing his strength when Delilah has a servant cut his own hair short. Fergus’s haircut thus can be seen to symbolize his giving up of his strength, a symbolic castration, his renouncing of solidarity to Ireland. His changing of his name only reinforces his turning his back on what he once believed in, as well as lying to Dil that he’s Scottish when she gives him a trim in her hair salon. Really: if he was so half-hearted about the IRA, then why did he join in the first place?

Along with losing his strength, “Jimmy” seems to have lost much of his intelligence, too, for he follows Dil to a gay bar, being attracted to her as a cis-woman, and never cluing into what anatomy she might have under her clothes. Though he falls in love with her, he gets a big surprise when her clothes come off as the two of them are about to be intimate, and his reaction is…as we on the left would say…reactionary.

Some might consider these elements to be coincidental, but leaving the IRA (an example of something that Mao would have called backsliding into liberalism), then being a creep and following a girl at night from her place of work to the local bar, and hitting her when he realizes she’s a transwoman…some of us see a meaningful connection here. This sort of thing is why some of us don’t think that liberals have the best solutions to dealing with marginalized people. When he tells Jody not to take being called a “nigger” seriously, that was bad enough. Look at how far he’s fallen since then.

“Jimmy” gets a job in London as a day labourer, and while he’s had dreams of Jody playing cricket, and he tries to identify with Jody by imagining himself playing the game while on the job as he sees other men playing it, he has to put up with a nagging boss, Mr. Deveroux (played by Tony Slattery), who hardly sympathizes with his apparent athletic aspirations. You chose to sell out to the capitalist world, “Jimmy”; you made your bed–you lie in it.

It’s remarkable after his having come to this gay bar, The Metro, and presumably having seen men with men, and women with women, and he needs the bartender, Col (Broadbent) to tell him that Dil is a transwoman (though Col never gets around to telling him). Dil is onstage, singing “The Crying Game,” a song fittingly covered by Boy George on the movie soundtrack.

“Jimmy” has to help Dil get rid of an abusive boyfriend named Dave (Brown, who you may recall played Danny in Withnail and I, and who also appeared in Alien 3 and Star Wars: Episode I). One night in Dil’s apartment with “Jimmy,” they hear Dave outside on the street calling up to her as if he were Stanley Kowalski calling “Hey, Stella!” Dave isn’t so lucky though: instead of her coming back to him, Dil throws his clothes and his goldfish out the window.

“Jimmy” is touched by how she keeps Jody’s old things: his clothes and old photos of him. As we can see, Jody is still being humanized even after his death. Even though “Jimmy” is initially repulsed to learn that Dil is a transwoman, he still has feelings for her, and so in his conflict over her, she is still being humanized for us. No humanizing of the IRA is anywhere to be seen, though.

She appears at his place of work, walking on the field where the cricket games are played, and therefore reinforcing in his mind the association of her and Jody when he sees her coming. The other workers are whistling at her: I doubt they’d be doing that if they knew what’s under her clothes. He breaks a window frame in his shock at her arrival, angering Mr. Deveroux. It’s interesting how LGBT issues can intersect with other leftist issues like labour (“Jimmy” will be docked pay for the damage), yet not with anti-imperialism.

There’s such mutual alienation between “Jimmy” and Deveroux that the latter calls the former “Pat.” (I suppose that the Irishman can be comforted that at least his boss isn’t calling him “Mick.”) Fergus is thus doubly alienated from himself with these two false names. Deveroux’s sexist attitude to Dil the “tart” is enough to make “Jimmy” want to stand up for her–fair enough–but centuries of British oppression of Ireland aren’t enough for Fergus to stand up for his people. Bonding with Jody is all it takes to make him end his commitment to Irish liberation.

So, “Jimmy” manages to reconcile himself with a transwoman, but he can never reconcile himself with the IRA…and this is when Jude suddenly comes back into his life–Delilah with a new hairstyle of her own. Her new, “tougher look” makes us dislike the IRA all the more–how fitting, for the purposes of this movie.

Her hair isn’t much shorter, though, so she still has her strength–aptly shown when she takes out her phallic pistol. Her hair has gone from blonde to a dark red; her clothes are also darker, all of which reinforces our sense that she’s one of the ‘bad guys.’ Her implicit threat on Dil’s life, if Fergus doesn’t comply with the IRA’s plan to assassinate the judge, also reinforces our sense of antagonism to her.

From here on, we’re meant to see the IRA as not just a bunch of nationalists who are a little too militant for their own good, not just one of ‘two bad sides,’ but as just pure, unmitigated evil. The evil side of the Western empire isn’t even to be considered as such: they’re just ‘mainstream society’ now; in the neoliberal new world order that just defeated the Soviet Union, this globalizing capitalist ‘rules-based order’ is just the way things are. If you try to rebel against it, you won’t just be killed, you’ll be forgotten by most people; history will vilify and blacken your name, and you’ll be marginalized in ways that not even blacks and LGBT people are these days.

The man Fergus is supposed to hit is an aging, arthritic judge. He’s to be shot on the street as he’s struggling to get out of his car and go with his security men into a building. His weakness is again to elicit our sympathy for him, as Jody was sympathized with. We’re not meant to feel any sympathy for, say, the unarmed Irish protestors who were gunned down on Bloody Sunday, for that sort of thing is never mentioned in the film.

Because he wants Dil to be unrecognizable to Jude (who’s seen him with her), Peter, and any other IRA members, Fergus takes her to her hair salon and cuts her hair short. He’d have her without makeup and dressed in Jody’s old cricket clothes. This removal of her feminine trappings thus strips her of her sexual power, not only depriving Dil of the femininity she wants to be able to express to the world, but also of what makes her feel desirable to him, thus making her feel especially insecure and vulnerable to his leaving her.

There is thus more Samson symbolism here, in Dil’s loss of power through her haircut from her–as she suspects–male Delilah, for she fears that he’ll betray her and leave her. In another reversal of sex roles, her dressing like Jody is what, from a transwoman’s point of view, would truly feel like cross-dressing. Still, her dressing like Jody must feel like, from Fergus’s point of view, his successful protecting of Jody where he previously failed to do so.

This Samson and Delilah symbolism brings up some important themes in The Crying Game, including loyalty vs betrayal, and having vs lacking the strength to fight one’s enemies. Samson eventually grows his hair back, the source of his strength, and defeats his enemies. He’s betrayed by Delilah, as Jody is betrayed by Jude, and Dil–jealous that Jude is about to steal “Jimmy” from her–fears his betrayal. But the greatest betrayal of all, though not properly reflected on by the average viewer of this film, is Fergus’s betrayal of Ireland, and his weak caving in to the UK through Jody and Dil, as symbolized by his haircut.

Fergus finally tells Dil, who’s drunk and in her flat, about the IRA plot to kidnap and kill Jody, and Fergus’s involvement in the plot. So betrayed does she feel by “Jimmy” that, while he’s asleep on her bed, she ties his hands and feet to the bedposts; she also takes out a pistol. Since he can’t shoot the judge now, Peter does it instead and gets killed by the judge’s security. Jude goes over with her pistol to Dil’s flat to confront Fergus.

Dil is in a most ironic situation here: a transwoman dressed like a man and thus feeling symbolically (though, of course, not literally) castrated, that is, having lost her sexual power. Still, with that phallic pistol in her hands and pointing it at Jude, she’s as much a phallic woman (!) as armed Jude is in a symbolic sense.

Knowing that Delilah-Jude used “those tits and that arse” to lure Jody in, Dil shoots and kills her. Fergus, however, takes the blame for the murder and goes to jail so Dil can go free.

It’s interesting how, in this confrontation between Dil and Jude, we see a case of strong women–be they cis or trans, it doesn’t matter–as part of a camouflaging of and a distraction from anti-imperialist struggle, just as the issues of prejudice against blacks and LGBT people have been used as such camouflage in this film. As I said above, eradicating capitalist imperialism–and its alienating divisiveness–is the best way to ensure an enduring protection for these people against these prejudices, but liberals wish to maintain the privileges of that imperialism while pretending to care about eradicating those prejudices–hence, this film.

Indeed, how does the film end?…with an Irishman in jail for a murder of an Irishwoman committed by a UK citizen. His sacrifice is seen by Dil as a Christ-like love (John 15:13), and Christ was crucified for having attempted to rise up against Roman imperialism, by the way. As far as other relevant Biblical references are concerned, when Dil visits Fergus in jail several months later, we see her hair growing back, like Samson’s–she’s getting her power back.

Now, remember, a British armoured vehicle is what actually hit and killed Jody, not any of the IRA, who were fighting to liberate Ireland from British imperialism. All the IRA agents in the film are dead. Fergus has given up his liberty to save that of a Brit.

The real crying game of this film thus is how sympathy is generated for marginalized people–blacks and LGBT people–which is in itself perfectly warranted, but done so here at the expense of an historically victimized people whose side of the story is never told, not even in passing. The Irish are the truly marginalized people in The Crying Game: denigrated, vilified…never heard.

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘Repo Man’

Repo Man is a 1984 film written and directed by Alex Cox, starring Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton, with Tracey Walter, Olivia Brash, Sy Richardson, Vonetta McGee, Fox Harris, and Dick Rude. Michael Nesmith of the Monkees was executive producer, and Iggy Pop wrote the Repo Man theme; he also sings the song during the end credits.

A satire on American life under the Reagan administration, on consumerism, and on the Atomic Age, Repo Man had a troubled initial release because Universal Pictures doubted the film’s commercial viability. It nonetheless received widespread acclaim, was considered one of the best films of 1984, and is now a cult film.

Here’s a link to quotes from the film, here’s a link to the script (including outtakes), and here’s a link to a rather poor quality video of the complete film (i.e., the image being in the bottom-right corner, it’s being sped up, with all the sound in a higher pitch).

After seeing, during the opening credits, a shifting road map of Los Alamos, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and finally to California, we’re in the Mojave Desert, with J. Frank Parnell (Harris) driving a ’64 Chevy Malibu. A cop on a bike pulls him over and wants to know what’s in the trunk of the Malibu. Parnell tries to warn him not to look in there, but the cop insists. He opens the trunk, a bright light shines out of it, and he screams as he’s being disintegrated from the mysterious thing in there, leaving only his flaming boots. Parnell drives away.

Later in the film, we learn from Leila (Barash) that aliens are what is in the trunk; they’re emitting the radiation that killed the cop. A question that should be obvious to ask is this: what business were the contents of the car to the cop? What right had he (I couldn’t care less about his badge) to stick his nose in Parnell’s personal business?

Now, aliens are heavenly beings, if you will. This fact, combined with the sinfulness of LA (where the bulk of Repo Man takes place), as well as the vaporizing of anyone who opens the trunk and exposes the ‘heavenly beings,’ makes me think of the Biblical story of Lot in Sodom. Such an association probably sounds far-fetched to you, Dear Reader, but please hear me out.

To get our bearings, I’ll start by saying that the aliens are like the angels God sent to destroy Sodom, which LA represents here. Granted, the aliens don’t destroy LA in the movie, they just kill a few people nosy enough to look in the trunk; but they do shake things up for a lot of people in and around the city. The radiation emitted by the aliens can be associated with the radiation from nuclear explosions, which can wipe out cities, as happened in Japan. These associations are close enough for me, since as was mentioned above, one of the satirical targets of Repo Man is the Atomic Age.

One of the major sins of Sodom and Gomorrah was inhospitality. The Sodomites surrounded Lot’s house when they knew he was accommodating the visiting angels. The Sodomites demanded he send out the angels so they could “know” them. (Gang rape, regardless of sexual orientation, can only be evil.) Knowing his duty to be hospitable to the angels, Lot couldn’t send them out. When the Sodomites tried to force their way into the house, the angels blinded them, which can be associated with the aliens vaporizing the intruding cop.

My point in bringing up the story of Lot in Sodom is that one of the central themes of Repo Man is impingement, encroachment, or imposing oneself on another’s personal space, just as the men of Sodom tried to impinge on Lot’s home and the guests to whom he was giving hospitality. If you impinge on others, they’ll impinge back on you, as the angels did when the Sodomites tried to break into Lot’s house and rape the visiting men.

The scene in the supermarket–where Otto (Estevez) and Kevin (played by Zander Schloss, bassist for the Circle Jerks, who appear later in the film as a nightclub band) are working as stock clerks facing cans–is full of impingement. Kevin, a geek who is annoyingly sycophantic to the whole capitalist system, is singing, of all things, a 7-Up jingle right next to Otto, irritating him. The last thing punk rocker Otto needs to hear is an advertisement for a soft drink while he’s doing monotonous wage slave work.

Otto impinges back on Kevin by sticking a price tag on his glasses. Then, to annoy Otto further, his boss, Mr. Humphries (played by Charles Hopkins), comes over to nag him about not only being habitually late for work, but also for not spacing the cans properly. He gives Otto an implicit warning of getting fired by mentioning how, in the bad economy of the time, one must be careful about the quality of one’s work. Luis, an armed security guard, gets in Otto’s face for not listening to his boss, then Otto curses at him, shoves chuckling Kevin into the pile of cans they’ve been facing, flips off Humphries and Luis, and walks out.

Incidentally, all the cans, cereal boxes, and other things sold in the supermarket are generically labelled and designed, as if either made by one company with no regard for visual style, or to indicate that it doesn’t matter who the makers of the commodities are. The satirical point being made here is about consumerism as an escape from eroding democratic freedoms in the Reagan era, which inaugurated the “free market” policies that have resulted in the neoliberalism that plagues us all today.

I’m reminded of what George Carlin would, in later decades, complain about: the illusory freedom of choice (i.e., lots of different brands and flavours to choose from) for consumers instead of meaningful, democratic freedom of political choice (viable political parties other than the GOP and DNC, ones that offer a genuine left-wing alternative). Seeing generic, no-name brands in the supermarket exposes the lie of consumerism as ‘freedom of choice.’

Kevin’s gloating over Otto losing his job, as well as his sucking-up to his boss, does him no good, because Humphries in his rage fires the “worm” too. Kissing the asses of capitalists is no guarantee of advancement.

More impinging is going on in the next scene, though it’s consensual–slamdancing to punk rock–at a party that night in the back of a warehouse. There, Otto meets Duke (Rude), a fellow punk who just got out of jail. The Circle Jerks song “Coup D’état” is heard. There’s a suggestion in this atmosphere of an anarchist wish for violent revolution, though it’s only a fantasy.

In the next scene, Otto is in bed with Debbi (played by Jennifer Balgobin) in Kevin’s house, where the party has moved. She asks him to go get her a beer from the kitchen, an interesting reversal of sex roles, especially seen in light of how she’s about the cheat on him with Archie (played by Miguel Sandoval) and Duke.

The partiers are living in a freely anarchist manner, while nothing is being done about the capitalist-based problems of the outside world, in the rest of LA and in the world in general. We don’t solve our problems by escaping the world and getting wasted, but far too many of us do this anyway. “Institutionalized,” a song by Suicidal Tendencies about teenage disaffection and alienation (a fitting subject for these punks), is heard from downstairs.

Speaking of disaffection and alienation, Otto is next seen alone outside in the early morning, in a vacant lot drinking a beer. He recites some of the lyrics from “TV Party,” by Black Flag. They’re lyrics about not wanting to think about anything important, about only wanting to watch the idiot box and drinking beer. Otto vaguely senses the futility of mindlessly partying instead of, say, organizing and advocating for social change.

Later, when it’s light out, Otto is still walking around outside, now in some neighbourhood. Bud (Stanton) is driving by in his car and offers Otto ten bucks, which sounds to Otto like he’s soliciting for gay sex, which of course would be more impingement. (Note how Otto’s homophobic response could be linked to the homophobic tone in the Bible story.) Bud actually wants Otto to help him repossess a car in the neighbourhood.

Repossessing someone’s car has to be one of the extreme forms of impingement, as well as the opposite of hospitality, which involves giving, not taking. Sticking one’s nose into someone else’s business, going into his or her personal space, and taking a vital personal possession of his or hers are among the worst forms of impingement.

Repossession of cars also makes for a vividly illustrative metaphor for the Reagan revolution, which was, in effect, a repossessing of so many of the working-class gains of the postwar period up to the 1970s. The Reagan years saw dramatic cuts in domestic spending, a steep increase in the number of homeless people, union-busting, and a number of other policies that resulted in the widening gap between the rich and the poor, policies continued and exacerbated by all succeeding US presidents.

Otto repos the car for Bud as requested, unaware that what he’s doing is a repo, and he takes it to the “Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation,” a misnomer for a repo organization so ridiculously bizarre as to be outright Orwellian doublethink. Indeed, proponents of the Reagan agenda similarly regard its rolling back of government benefits for the poor as a ‘liberating’ of the people from the ‘shackles’ of ‘big government,’ all while jacking up military spending to the point of leaving the American government with a deficit.

When Otto realizes the people in this business are repo men, a truly despicable, thankless job, he expresses his contempt for them by taking the can of beer they’ve given him and spilling it all over the floor–impingement on their property. Instead of being mad at him, Bud and Oly (played by Tom Finnegan) say he’s “all right,” meaning Otto has the kind of confrontational, impinging personality that makes for an ideal repo man. Still, he doesn’t want to do the job.

A government agent named Rogersz (played by Susan Barnes)–she has a metal hand–is leading a group of people who are investigating how the cop got killed in the desert. They will now try to find the Malibu, which is to become the MacGuffin of Repo Man, the car that will be the ultimate repossession.

Otto and Kevin are going through a newspaper, job-hunting and sitting by an unemployment office. Still deluding himself that if he works hard and plays the capitalist game, Kevin can become “manager in two years, King! God!” after dedicating himself as a fry cook. Otto isn’t so optimistic, though. He’s had a dream in which he and Kevin were 65-year-old bellhops in a “sleazy shithole motel” in Miami. It looked painfully real to Otto.

Since job prospects don’t look too good for him, Otto goes home (he lives in the garage, incidentally: see the outtakes [link above] at about 9:00) and asks his parents for a thousand dollars promised to him if he finishes school, so he can go to Europe. His mom and dad are stoners sitting on the couch sharing a joint and watching TV. The show they’re watching is of a televangelist, Reverend Larry, to whom they’ve given the thousand dollars to sell Bibles to El Salvador.

To make money, Otto will have to become a repo man. You’ve gotta love the “free market.”

The televangelist, of course, is a real character in himself, and a reflection of the Reagan years in many ways. Apart from the fact that Reagan himself was a conservative Christian, his preaching of ‘small government’ was a ploy to lower spending on the poor in order to increase spending to further the interests of the rich (e.g., increasing military spending for the sake of US imperialism), that is, big capitalist government! Similarly, the reverend tells his viewers, largely lower to middle-class people in need of ‘spiritual answers,’ to give him their money.

Also like Reagan, the reverend wants us all to “destroy the twin evils of godless communism abroad and liberal humanism at home.” Note how the religious right, calling these ideologies “twin evils,” is either too ignorant or outright lying when they don’t see the huge difference between communism and liberalism.

It’s safe to assume that Otto’s stoner parents used to be hippies back when he was a baby. Hippies are liberals, by the way, not communists. A common complaint we on the left have is when liberals backslide toward the right, as Otto’s parents have done by going beyond smoking marijuana to enjoying the opium of the people, a subject I explored in my analysis of Drugstore Cowboy.

Note how Otto’s parents aid US imperialism by selling Bibles to El Salvador instead of helping the country be free of the American empire. Religion is a drug used to help people forget their oppression. TV, of course, can also be a drug in itself, a kind of distraction from one’s everyday troubles, just as the partying punks did as observed above. In the outtakes (link above, at about 12:34), we can see cobwebs enveloping Otto’s mom and dad as they’re on the couch watching the idiot box, just as Black Flag sing about in their song.

In his having no choice but to do a despicable job in order to make the money he needs, Otto demonstrates the lack of meaningful freedom in a capitalist society. And just as the punks have their beer and partying, and Otto’s parents have their marijuana and religion as manic defences against the misery of the world, repo men have speed and booze for the same kind of escape.

This escape will be necessary for Otto, since as part of his selling of his soul to do this new job, he’ll take Bud’s advice and “dress like a detective…dress kind of square,” so people will think Otto is a cop. So much for being a punk rocker. Since one imagines punk rockers have at least anarchist tendencies, we can see how this tendency can backslide into liberalism, then to even more reactionary thinking, as Otto’s choice to become a repo man can be seen to symbolize.

As he and Otto are snorting amphetamine in a car in an alley, Bud sees some people outside and tells Otto he hates “ordinary fucking people.” This is because ordinary people always try to avoid tense situations, whereas repo men are always “getting into tense situations.” Such an attitude, glorifying an aggravating of alienation, sounds suspiciously to me like neoliberalism romanticizing confrontation for the sake of furthering capitalist interests; it’s somehow ‘cool,’ ‘rebellious,’ and ‘edgy’ to be a repo man, rather it simply being an asshole.

Bud and Otto go into a store to buy six packs of beer (generically labelled “drink”) while Bud is still talking about “tense situations” with people with knives or guns. They leave the store, and speaking of tense situations involving guns, we learn that Duke, Archie, and Debbi have been hiding behind the counter, where Bud bought the beer, the whole time. The three punks are holding guns on the cashier, about to rifle the cash register.

We’ll notice as we go through the rest of the film that whenever we see Otto and Bud in a store buying drinks, the three punk rock thieves will also be there. Repo men and thieves are thus being associated with each other. This juxtaposition sends the message to us that repossession, properly understood, is stealing. Bud himself admits this earlier when he’s explaining to Otto how much money you can make when you “rip [off]” a car. Making money by stealing: this is also known as capitalism.

In an outtake (link above, at about 6:42), we see Bud trying to repo a car from a man named Arthur Pakman. Bud gives him his name card, which curiously has the name “I.G. Farben” on it. This is the name of a German chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate that became a donor and major contractor to the Nazi government, relying on slave labour from the concentration camps; one of its subsidiaries supplied Zyklon B. That a repo man would have such a name on his name card is an obvious satirical comment on the corrupt Sodom and Gomorrah that is capitalist society, the fascism that hides behind its ‘freedom.’

More impingement occurs when Bud and Otto are driving around a concrete riverbed, and they encounter the Rodriguez brothers (played by Del Zamora and Eddie Velez) in their car, one of them flipping Bud off. They get into a car chase for a while, and Bud and Otto end up stuck in a puddle. Annoyed, Bud says he and Otto ought to go off and get drinks. Otto is amused at how “intense” the car chase was; Bud says that a repo man’s life is always intense.

Duke, Archie (with a paper bag on his head), and Debbi have just finished robbing the store that Otto and Bud are about to enter; the thieves have impinged on the store. They run out, and Archie knocks into a waist-high pole by the door, hurting himself in the balls…more impingement.

Next, Otto and Lite (Richardson) are driving up to Miss Magruder’s car, stopped at a traffic light, and get ready to repo it. Lite gives him a bag with a dead rat in it to throw into her car to upset and distract her, then Otto can get the car. He throws the rat on the seat just beside her; she sprays mace in his face and drives off when the light turns green. He who lives by impingement shall die by impingement, or get blinded by it, as the men of Sodom were.

After that, Otto and Bud drive over to repo a Cadillac owned by a millionaire named Peason, who is in a laundromat talking to two kids about the laundry, and how he wants it arranged. He has an unsurprisingly condescending attitude toward the kids. When Otto rips off the car, Peason runs out of the laundromat, and the kids toss his clothes outside while laughing at him. It’s hard to sympathize with a rich guy who can’t be bothered to make the payments on his Cadillac.

As he’s driving around in the Cadillac, Otto sees Leila running on the sidewalk. She’s attractive, so naturally he slows down to talk to her. He wants to offer her a ride, but she’s distracted him from his driving, so he drives his car into a pile of garbage on the side of the road (impingement), angering an old lady who nags him to clean it up; he ignores her, of course, Leila gets in the car, and he drives off.

It’s here where we learn that Parnell has been driving around with aliens in his trunk. She shows Otto a photo “of four dead aliens.” He laughs in disbelief at her story. Since she’s being chased by government men associated with Rogersz in their own car, Leila has ducked down and hidden herself from them; she’s afraid they’ll kill her over the aliens. She explains to Otto that Parnell has smuggled the aliens from an air force base in his Malibu. She needs to find him before Rogersz et al do.

In this sense, Leila and Parnell are like Lot and his family, and the government people are like the men of Sodom, so to speak. Otto drops Leila off at her place of work, “The United Fruitcake Outlet,” which sounds like a flippant pun on the United Fruit Company. Apart from the aliens being associated with the angels in the Lot in Sodom story, their deadly radiation implies an association with Soviet nuclear weapons, a capability that the American government would like to be about to take from them, as would any capitalists, such as the United Fruit Company, who spearheaded a coup against the leftist Guatemalan government in 1954 (remember the selling of Bibles to El Salvador in this connection).

It’s easy to see Rogersz’s government agents as the bad guys here, but one shouldn’t assume that Leila’s ‘fruitcake’ group of people are any more sympathetic just because she becomes Otto’s girlfriend…or something (Leila and Parnell aren’t the good guys, just as Lot’s family aren’t all that good, either, as we learn in Genesis 19–Lot offering his daughters for the sexual sport of the Sodomites, his daughters getting him drunk and committing incest with him, etc.). Recall how later Leila helps Agent Rogersz torture him by electric shock to get information as to where the Malibu is. At the end of the film, he leaves Leila to go in the car with Miller (Walter); she asks Otto about her “relationship” with him, and when he blows her off, she angrily says she’s glad she helped Rogersz torture him.

There isn’t really anyone in Repo Man who can be called a ‘good guy’ in a more or less pure sense. As I said, the LA of this film is a modern-day Sodom, a corrupt, impinging, inhospitable place. Even the aliens in the Malibu’s trunk, whom I’ve associated with the Biblical angels on the one hand, and with the USSR on the other (radiation>>Atomic Age>>Soviet nuclear weapons), aren’t to be considered the ‘good guys,’ given that this film is a product of Hollywood liberalism, which has no more sympathy for leftist anti-capitalism than conservatives do.

Accordingly, everyone in the film, those from the far-right to the left-of-centre of the political spectrum, wants to get his hands on the Malibu. Thus Agent Rogersz and Leila wanting to find it is simply symbolic of competing capitalists/imperialists wanting to thwart the Soviet accumulation of nuclear power, as represented by the radiation in the trunk of the Malibu. To repo the Malibu, one will get the unusually high reward of $20,000.

After repossessing a red car, Lite and Otto are driving around in it, and at one point, Lite mentions a book he once found when he swiped a Maserati in Beverly Hills. The book is called Dioretix: the Science of Matter over Mind. “That book will change your life,” Lite tells Otto. It is obviously a parody of L. Ron Hubbard‘s 1950 book, Dianetcs, and therefore a satirical stab at self-help books and pseudoscience in general. (Matter over mind? Not vice versa?)

In the next scene, we see Otto with Miller in a vacant lot. Otto is holding his copy of Dioretix and is about to toss it into a burning garbage can. Miller goes into a big spiel about how many things that seem to be coincidences are really interconnected in some secret, profound, mystical way; it sounds like Jung‘s notion of synchronicity, but Miller’s use of a plate of shrimp as an example of how it works sounds idiotic.

It seems as though Miller has been reading Dioretix, too. His absurd attempts at philosophical profundity give Otto the impression that he must have done way too much LSD over the years. Still, Miller seems like more of a Dostoyevskyan idiot, for though Miller expresses his opinions with ludicrous examples, he seems to have his instincts in the right places, for at the end of the movie, he gets into the Malibu, his gut correctly telling him that it’s an alien vehicle, a spaceship that goes up into the night sky, then into space, and…who knows?…may well even travel time, as he imagines flying saucers and time machines to be one and the same thing. He is a working-class man with a spark of intelligence never properly developed because of a lack of money for higher education.

When it’s learned from the repo men that the reward for finding the Malibu is $20,000 (and it’s speculated that the large amount of money offered for the car is due to it containing drugs, rather than celestial beings, symbolically linking the drug speculation to the “opium of the people”), Otto calls Leila about the car to arouse her interest. He, however, is aroused by her body, and when he arrives at The United Fruitcake Outlet, he tries to get sex from her…or at least a blowjob. Angered by his impinging on her at work, she slaps him…twice. He who leers with impingement shall get slapped with impingement.

But now that so many people are licking their lips over that $20,000, Bud is imagining a life of financial security without needing to work anymore. He insists to Lite that he can achieve this security with $20,000 because he has good credit.

In the next scene, he’s driving with Otto and telling him about how important credit is: it’s “a sacred trust,” what the American “free society is founded on.” (That’s funny: I thought American ‘freedom’ was founded on black slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans, but I digress…) This “sacred trust,” combined with getting the coveted money, is what Bud imagines is the capitalist ‘liberation’ he has within his reach.

He compares this dutiful payment of bills and debts favourably to how the Soviets don’t “give a damn about their bills.” When Otto implies that not needing to pay bills in the USSR is a better deal, Bud (recall his IG Farben name card from the outtake) takes umbrage at such an implication and wonders if Otto is a “commie.” So many Americans are brainwashed about what ‘freedom’ is under capitalism to such an extent that it’s inconceivable to them how not needing to pay bills is one of the most liberating things possible.

Now, Bud doesn’t want to sound too right-wing, so while he won’t tolerate any “commies” in his car, he doesn’t want any Christians in it, either. Such an odd appendage to his hatred of the left can only be explained, in my opinion, as an ego defence anticipating an accusation of far-right thinking, or an attempt to seem centrist and liberal. One ought, however, to take into account the “fish hook theory,” which illustrates how liberalism and centrism are actually closer to fascism (remember again Bud’s IG Farben name card) than communism ever was, in spite of what that nonsensical horseshoe theory says.

Parnell drives over to a gas station, where Kevin has a new job. The nerdy boy still kisses capitalist ass, doing the phony friendly-to costumers attitude and hoping it will lead to advancement. He approaches Parnell and offers a vacuum of the Malibu, but the sweaty old man wants to find junk food from vending machines, imagining such food to be healthy. Kevin offers to check Parnell’s trunk, and luckily for him, he ends up not doing so.

He does the same ass-kissing routine for the Rodriguez brothers, who recognize the nearby Malibu and swipe it while Parnell is gone and Kevin is looking for a non-existent box of matches for the brothers in the gas station office.

In someone’s home, Otto tries, instead of outright repossessing the car of a sweet middle-aged black lady named Mrs. Parks (interesting choice for a name on Cox’s part!), to get her to pay the rest of what she owes for it. Her musician son and his bandmates, all huge guys, come home and, learning Otto is a repo man, beat him up outside. Oh, the karma of impingement…

Otto returns to the lot at Helping Hand, and Miller bandages up his wounds. Plettschner, a cop played by Richard Foronjy, interestingly has the same first name as Otto but is practically the opposite in personality or likability. He gets in Otto’s face by saying he isn’t cut out to be a repo man, getting a “fuck you” reply, which just gets the already obnoxious cop angry, so he brags about all of his ‘achievements’ as a veteran and as a prison guard, whereas Otto is just a “punk” and a “little scumbag.” ACAB.

The Rodriguez brothers carelessly lose the Malibu, which is literally and figuratively hot (from the radiation), to Duke, Archie, and Debbi, who see their chance and steal it while it’s unattended. Otto and Lite try to repo a car, but the owner shoots at them. Lite takes out a pistol of blanks and shoots back, telling terrified Otto to get in the car and repo it. As we can see, this juxtaposition of swiping cars shows how repo men are hardly any different from any ordinary car thief. Otto is increasingly realizing that repo men, with their guns and intense lives, are crazy.

Leila is talking to Parnell on public phones, but a car with Rogersz’s agents smashes into her phone booth just after she’s gotten out; they chase and catch her, put her in their car, and take her away. Rogersz is in a van, looking at Leila on a monitor and questioning her about the Malibu. When Leila mentions the aliens in the trunk, Rogersz asks her if she’s ever thought of working for the CIA, Leila having already said she is in no way averse to torturing people. As we can see, the sides these two women work for aren’t all that opposed to each other.

Next, there’s a party in the Helping Hand yard. The staff ask Otto who beat him up, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. Marlene (McGee) asks Plettschner why he won’t go after Otto’s attackers, but the cop says he’s on his coffee break. ACAB. Bud says that repo men should get their revenge on Otto’s attackers without the need of cops. “Just like John Wayne,” Marlene says, sneering at the men, who insist that the Duke is the greatest of American men.

Miller rains on the parade of the repo men’s worshipping of this epitome of American machismo by calling John Wayne “a fag” who wears dresses. (One might recall, in this connection, the scene in Midnight Cowboy when Ratso Rizzo [Dustin Hoffman] tells Joe Buck [Jon Voight] that dressing like a cowboy in New York makes him look like a gay prostitute; Buck, shocked, says, “John Wayne? You wanna tell me he’s a fag?”)

The importance of this scene isn’t about the homophobia (though homophobia links this scene with the homophobia in the Lot in Sodom story, as discussed above). It’s a satiric jab at conventional masculine roles, something further developed when Oly says lots of straight men like to watch their friends fuck, as do Oly and tough-guy Plettschner…apparently.

The repo men insist that Otto tell them who beat him up, and he lies and says that it was his old boss, Humphries, who gets beaten up that night at his home. It’s hard to sympathize with a petit bourgeois capitalist, all the same.

Leila has Otto meet up with Rogersz in a bar to discuss the Malibu and the aliens in the trunk. The two women stress the urgency of finding the car. Recall how the aliens, via the radiation, represent the Soviet power that the women, in turn representing capitalist and state interests, want to get their hands on.

While this is all going on, significantly, the Circle Jerks are performing in the pub as a nightclub band. They’re playing a lame and square acoustic version (this must be deliberate) of their punk song, “When the Shit Hits the Fan.” It’s easy to see why Otto would say, “I can’t believe I used to like these guys.” Recall that the bassist of the Circle Jerks is playing Kevin the nerd.

The song, as you can glean from the lyric, is about economic hard times that hit the poor the hardest. It is an ironic take on the Reaganite way of seeing the problem: “blame the government for hard times”; “let’s leech off the state/gee, the money’s really great,” thanks to “welfare checks,” and “free loaves of bread.” However, thanks to Reagan, “social security has run out on you and me,” meaning that it’s the capitalist government, not a ‘socialist’ one (something the US has never had, by the way), that we should blame.

So when we see the Circle Jerks having changed from a punk band into a lame night club one, the transformation parallels what’s happened to Otto (from punk rocker to repo man), to his parents (from hippies to supporters of a televangelist), and to Leila (from avoiding the government to working for them). All of these transformations allegorize the Reaganite metamorphosis of a welfare capitalist society, one where there’s at least the hope of evolving into a more left-leaning one, into a nakedly neoliberal capitalist society, the worst of which we have now in the 2020s.

Small wonder when Duke, Archie, and Debbi enter the bar and see Otto, they speak derisively to the repo man, annoyed that he’s too busy with work to hang out with his punk friends. Though Otto’s choice of work is a bad one, no other money-making opportunities have been opened to him. As the Circle Jerks sing, “We just get by however we can/We all gotta duck when the shit hits the fan.”

Of course, the trio of punk thieves aren’t all that much better. Committing petty crimes hardly improves society. Debbi thinks Agent Rogerzs’s metal arm is fascinating: it merely symbolizes how the system has dehumanized her and made her part of ‘the machine,’ as it were. The three punks, in their own way, have degenerated from their would-be revolutionary ideals, as have Otto, his parents, Leila, and this fictionalized version of the Circle Jerks.

The three thieves leave the bar and find Parnell trying to retrieve his Malibu. They feel he’s impinging on him, not realizing he was originally impinged on, first by the thieving Rodriguez brothers, and then by these three. Their sticking their noses into his business is no different, in principle, to the cop’s having done so at the beginning of the film, so fittingly, Archie suffers the same fate as the cop. Duke and Debbi run off in terror, and Parnell gets his car back.

The Rodriguez brothers are driving along and see Parnell in the Malibu. They claim to be “special deputies” and tell him to pull over. This pretence of authority to justify taking away a man’s car is how we can see no substantive difference between cops, repo men, and car thieves. Might makes right in the end.

This mutual identity is especially apparent when the repo men, in Bud’s car, find the Rodriguez brothers and Parnell in the Malibu, then start vying over who will get the coveted car, which soon drives off. Bud et al get into a violent altercation with the Rodriguez brothers. Swinging a baseball bat at the two, Bud would like to repo their car, but they insist they’ve paid it off.

Because Bud hit one of the brothers with the bat, they’re suing Helping Hand “for malicious damages,” and Bud has lost his job in a nasty falling-out with Oly. He is next seen in a car with Otto. They’re driving in a neighbourhood with a bunch of homeless people. Bud has just lost his job, but he still has no sympathy for them; he’s internalized the Reaganite attitude that the destitute have somehow ‘chosen’ their lot, and they’re leeching off the welfare system. Bud doesn’t understand that, as an unemployed man, he’s closer to being one of the homeless than he is to being the ‘made man’ he thinks the repoing of the Malibu will make him.

Otto is so disgusted with Bud’s attitude that he gets out of the car and walks down the neighbourhood with the homeless, people who truly deserve our sympathy. People in radiation suits carry off a dead body and put it in a car trunk…rather like those melting aliens.

Otto then sees the Malibu. His sympathy for the poor dissolves, he has dollar signs in his eyes, and he runs after the car. Parnell lets Otto in the car, and they drive together. Parnell is actually dying right there as he’s driving, from his exposure to the radiation in the trunk with the aliens. His ability even to focus and follow a conversation is clearly impaired when, during his conversation with Otto, he mishears the boy saying he represents the Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation, hearing instead radiation, something impinging on Parnell’s brain.

Parnell claims, in his obvious, growing mental instability, that any talk of radiation being bad for you is “pernicious nonsense.” Then he speaks glowingly of lobotomies, a friend of his and he himself each having apparently had one. Soon, he slumps over the steering wheel and dies. Otto gets him out of the Malibu and drives it to the Helping Hand repo yard.

It seems that Otto’s going to get the $20,000 for the Malibu, so at a party at Miller’s that night, the wives of several repo men, including Oly’s, are all over Otto…”like flies on shit.” Someone, however, has broken into the yard and taken the Malibu. Otto goes walking outside; Bud drives by, and Otto gets in the car. They’ll go to that liquor store to get some drinks again.

Duke and Debbi are in a car just outside the store. He’s talking, in all absurdity, about how they ought to settle down, get a house, and have a baby, since “everybody does it,” and it “seems like the thing to do.” Here we see yet another example of initially rebellious attitudes degenerating into mere social conformity–from rebel to liberal. She can hear how ridiculous he sounds, and so they just go into the store to rob it.

Otto and Bud are in the store, and a gunfight ensues. Debbi shoots, and her bullet grazes the side of Bud’s head. Duke is mortally wounded. As he’s dying, he does a melodramatic speech about how ‘tragic’ his demise is, and that it’s society’s fault that he became a criminal, but he’s a white suburban (implying at least middle class) punk. He who lives by impingement, dies by it.

Since the Malibu is missing, the agents are trying to find it. Marlene and Otto want to stop the agents from getting it, but Plettschner, dick that he is, tries to stop her and Otto from stopping the agents. Otto throws scalding hot coffee on the cop’s face (serves him right–ACAB), and Otto and Marlene run out the door; but he’s caught by the agents.

Leila and Rogersz torture Otto to get information about the Malibu. Leila is still a little conflicted about hurting her apparent boyfriend, but Rogersz rationalizes torturing him with a typical psychopathic projection: “no one is innocent,” apparently. Marlene and the Rodriguez brothers break into the room where Otto’s being held and get him out of there. Rogersz is fine with this, since it will lead her to wherever the Malibu is.

The search for the car continues, and even the reverend is interested in it, which shouldn’t be at all surprising. Considering what the Malibu, which is glowing now, represents as I’ve described above, it’s easy to see how commie-hating religion fits in with the capitalist state as personified by Leila and Rogersz, respectively.

Eventually, the car is found in the Helping Hand lot, angelically glowing with Bud at the wheel. It’s raining ice cubes, a kind of dialectical opposite of raining fire and brimstone over Sodom. This is fitting, if we equate the Malibu with Lot’s house, and equate everyone gathering to get at the car with the men of Sodom surrounding Lot’s house.

Otto goes up to Bud and tries to make a deal over what percentage of the reward money each of them will get for the car. Someone from a helicopter above warns Bud to get out of the Malibu. He gets out, but he’s brandishing a pistol. He’s shot from someone in the helicopter, but before he dies, Bud quotes Emiliano Zapata, in all irony, given Bud’s established opposition to revolutionary ideas: “I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees.”

The agents get close to the car, but sense “a strange, eerie kind of force field” surrounding it. Another agent approaching the Malibu catches fire. The reverend comes near the car holding a large Bible; he’s flanked by others in religious garb, as he himself is dressed, and Rogersz is with him, even calling him “your holiness,” implying a link between the state and religion that the ruling class would keep intact. A bolt of lightning from the car zaps the Bible in his hands, causing him to expose the phoniness of his “holiness” by saying “holy sheep-shit!” The Church is every bit as corrupt and sinful as everyone else in LA, the modern Sodom.

The force-field, the fire, and the bolt of lightning coming from the car thus all parallel the angels (i.e., the aliens in the trunk) striking the men of Sodom intruding into Lot’s house (i.e., the Malibu) with blindness.

So who is worthy of getting into the Malibu and driving it (even though he can’t drive)? Miller is, and he waves at Otto to join him inside for a ride. Miller, recall, is the Dostoyevskyan idiot whose innocence and lack of interest in the $20,000 makes him worthy. Now, Otto, spurning Leila and her association with capitalism (the United Fruitcake Outlet) and the state (Rogersz and the agents), as well as his tiring of the repo man job, is now also worthy of being in the car and enjoying its true benefits.

The aliens take the car up into the sky. Just as Lot and his daughters escaped the sin of Sodom, Otto and Miller fly up in the car into space and freedom from the sin of LA and the rest of the world.

Analysis of ‘Foxtrot’

I: Introduction/Album Cover

Foxtrot is the fourth album by Genesis, having come out in 1972. It is the second of their albums with drummer/singer Phil Collins and lead guitarist Steve Hackett; it’s also their last album to have the cover artwork of Paul Whitehead (who also did the cover for Van der Graaf Generator‘s album, Pawn Hearts), as the band didn’t like the cover.

The most striking image we see on the surreal cover is that of a woman in a red dress with a fox’s head, or a “foxy lady,” hence the title of the album–also Whitehead’s idea. Singer Peter Gabriel, being the oh, so theatrical frontman that he was for Genesis as a progressive rock band at the time, dressed up in a red dress and fox’s head for the album’s tour. The rest of the band at first were uncomfortable with Gabriel’s ‘crossdressing,’ but when his showmanship gave the band lots of press attention, they were more accepting of it.

The ‘foxy lady’ is standing on a piece of ice floating on the water near a shore. If we look at the back cover, we’ll see four fox hunters on horses looking at her. Whitehead meant them to represent the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, since the end of the world is a major theme of the album–not just the “Apocalypse in 9/8” at the climax of the side-long epic “Supper’s Ready,” but also the aftermath of that as the subject of “Watcher of the Skies” opening Side One. One of the riders has an alien’s head, suggesting the alien watcher of the skies looking down on our world’s demise.

Fox hunters eyeing the foxy lady suggests male lechery. Note again her floating on that plate of ice on the water. She could be seen as personifying our Mother Earth. Let’s juxtapose this interpretation with the four fox hunters of the Apocalypse. The “foxtrot” of these four lustful men, going after the Earth, is destroying her. Global warming, along with rising sea levels, caused by such things as ocean heating and Antarctic ice loss, was a growing concern in the scientific community already by the beginning of the 1970s, around when Foxtrot was conceived.

An allusion to the cover design of the band’s previous album, Nursery Cryme, can be seen in a detail on the back cover of Foxtrot. The macabre croquet game (with decapitated heads instead of balls) depicted on the front cover of Nursery Cryme, reflecting the British upper class and implying their oppression of the working class, is thus linked with how the ruling class today is harming the environment for the sake of profit, which in turn is bringing about the end of the world for all of us. The profit motive, of course, is a major theme of “Get ‘Em Out by Friday.”

One of the horsemen, as I mentioned above, is an alien, implying his disconnect from humanity, symbolic of the social estrangement caused by capitalism. Another horseman has a monkey’s head, implying the foolishness of recklessly exploiting and raping the Earth out of a desire to maximize profit. Another horseman has a handkerchief to his face: he’s weeping, implying remorse over the wrongs done to the Earth. The last horseman has an unusually long nose, implying that he’s a lying Pinocchio, disingenuously claiming he’s doing no harm to the Earth, like the climate change deniers. His mendacity can be linked to that of the “Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man” (GESM).

Here‘s a link to the album’s lyrics, here‘s a link to a large image of the whole cover, and here‘s a link to all the music on the album.

II:Watcher of the Skies

“Watcher of the Skies” opens with a dark passage that keyboardist Tony Banks plays on a Mellotron he’d just bought from King Crimson, whose leader, Robert Fripp, would have wanted to get rid of on account of its tuning problems. The two opening major chords we hear in the song, a B-major seventh/F-sharp and a C-sharp/F-sharp, sounded especially good to Banks on this Mellotron, though, in spite of its faults; in fact, those chords sounded better on this instrument than on later Mellotrons Banks used. These two chords will be heard during the bridges between verses in the song, too.

Soon after these two opening chords, we hear Banks play cadences including Neapolitan chords: a first-inversion C-sharp major chord going into a cadence with G major and C major, this latter chord being the Neapolitan chord leading to an F-sharp major and a B minor added sixth. Soon after that, he does an ascension of minor chords in G-sharp, A-sharp, and C, then to G-sharp minor again, going down to chords in F-sharp major, E major, up to A major, and back down to G-sharp minor, then down to an F-diminished chord. This more-or-less descending progression will be heard again towards the end of the song.

The opening two chords return, and the rest of the band comes in, with Collins doing a kind of “Morse code” rhythm on the drums, a rhythm also played in a one-note staccato motif in F-sharp by Hackett and bassist Mike Rutherford. This main riff is said to be played in 6/4 time, though I’d notate it as an alternating 4/4 and 2/4, since 6/4 is a compound duple subdivided three plus three.

The progression resolves to F-sharp major, and Gabriel begins singing, with Banks accompanying him on organ, and that staccato motif is heard not as one note, but as C-sharp, F-sharp (9x), then octaves of F-sharp. The line “watcher of the skies” comes from John Keats‘s 1817 poem, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

Now, the new world that Keats, as a watcher of the skies, has seen upon reading George Chapman‘s brilliant translation of Homer‘s poetry (the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Batrachomyomachia) is an exciting discovery, a happy one. In contrast, the alien watcher of the skies that Gabriel sings of sees the remains of a most unfortunate world, a world we have destroyed. We have brought about our own apocalypse, a theme to be explored later.

“Now [our] reign has come to end/Has life again destroyed life?” Our foolishness in doing so is described as if it’s a form of childishness, for perhaps we “play elsewhere” now. Could we be capable of more than our mere “childhood games?” In the lizard’s shedding of its tail, the end of this civilization could bring the birth of a new one.

After this bridge, we have a verse in F-sharp major again, but with Gabriel stomping on the pedal of a bass drum to double that of Collins’s drum kit. Gabriel is also shaking a tambourine as he sings of how one shouldn’t judge a humanity already dead. After all, they’re unable to defend themselves against the reproaches they’re sure to get.

After this verse, we hear Rutherford play a bass riff, to the tight accompaniment of Collins’s drums, in one bar of 4/4 time, then Hackett does a lead in a bar of 7/16, then one in 4/4 with triplets; then we’re back to the alternating 4/4 and 2/4, with Banks playing those two opening chords again on the organ.

With this next bridge, Gabriel seems to be singing his “parting counsel” to us at the present moment, warning us that our journey isn’t done. Our ship may be sturdy, that is, the Western empire and the liberal order of the 1970s may feel as though it’s safe and secure, but the sea has “no mercy” (at the time, there were fears of nuclear war and the USSR), and would we “survive on the ocean of being”?

As of now, that old Cold War is no longer a problem, but that doesn’t matter, since there’s a new Cold War happening right now, giving this old song new relevance fifty years later. Our “thoughts turn to the stars,” sadly: “this is [our] fate alone.” Towards the end of the song, that “Morse Code” rhythm in alternating 4/4 and 2/4 gets expanded to two bars of 4/4; then the song ends with that descending keyboard progression I discussed that occurred during the Mellotron opening.

III: Time Table

“Time Table” is solely Banks’s song, musically and lyrically, and it’s centred around piano progressions. It opens with him playing two melodic lines in largely parallel motion on the piano.

Gabriel sings of the medieval world in a manner similar to how that world is portrayed in Rush‘s song, “A Farewell to Kings.” It’s depicted as a noble era from which we in the modern world have sadly declined. As with the Rush album, whose themes also include an idealizing of the past, though, we have to wonder if Banks is in earnest, or if he’s being ironic.

I’m betting on the latter. His references to “legends born” strongly implies that he’s perfectly aware that the ‘nobility’ of medieval times was a fiction. The key to seeing the irony is in these lines: “It seems because through time and space/Though names may change each face retains the mask it wore,” followed by a cloyingly mawkish melody in E major on what sounds like one of those old 18th century fortepianos. We hear a train of tinklingly high Bs before going down a fifth to E, then F-sharp, G-sharp, and a B an octave lower. The melody then modulates to F-sharp major before going to the next verse. The mawkishness of this tune, sounding as it does, as if it’s being played on such an old piano, reinforces the theme of a foolishly idealized past.

The point of the song is that, though this “carved oak table” from the past–where kings and queens once sat–is now dusty and of “musty smells” where “only the rats hold sway,” those times of the past had their faults, too. Times may change, but the masks people wear remain the same.

So many idealize the past as some ‘Golden Age’ from which we today have fallen. Surely the feudal era, with its impoverished vast majority, its religious superstition, and royal authoritarianism, is no improvement on our capitalist modern world, as bad as it admittedly is.

IV: Get ‘Em Out by Friday

…and speaking of capitalism, we now come to the next song, “Get ‘Em Out by Friday.” In the first song, we encountered the end of the world from an alien’s perspective. Each of the following songs in its own way seems to explain one of many factors leading to humanity’s demise.

A traditionalist, ultraconservative demonizing of progress through praising an idealized past (“Time Table”) at the expense of the present, instead of looking ahead to the future in an attempt to improve the quality of our lives, is one of those destructive factors. Capitalism was an improvement on feudalism; it was even revolutionary several centuries ago. It isn’t revolutionary now, though, and that’s where the problems dealt with in “Get ‘Em Out by Friday” come in…as a matter of landlords.

The song begins with a spirited passage in 6/8 and in the key of A major. Banks does a quick, ascending organ run of sixteenth notes from G-sharp to C-sharp. Then the progression goes down to E major, then up to the relative minor in F-sharp, and we hear that ascending organ run of sixteenth notes again.

Then it goes to the mediant in C-sharp minor, then to the subdominant in D major, with Hackett playing an ascension, in thirds, of alternating quarter and eighth notes starting on F-sharp and A, and ending with tied and dotted half notes in E and G-natural, then a parallel ascension from B and D to whole notes in A and C-sharp, with a change to 4/4 time. Variations of these two ascensions will be heard later in the song, one example being in a theme in Mrs. Barrow‘s verse with these lines: “I don’t know why, it seemed so funny/Seeing as how they’d take more money.”

Now the key is A-natural minor, and we hear Banks playing eighth-note triads on the organ; first, a bar in 7/4, then back to 4/4. The rhythm is in triplets.

Gabriel begins singing in the harsh voice of ruthless businessman John Pebble, of Styx Enterprises. He orders Mark Hall, “The Winkler,” to evict all the tenants in properties in Harlow that Styx has recently bought. In the Cockney accent of The Winkler, Gabriel sings to Mrs. Barrow, a tenant, that she must move out.

In The Winkler, we see an example of a crucial element not only in capitalism, but in all systems of power: the servile obedience of underlings to their masters’ laws and edicts. The systems of oppression that we all suffer under wouldn’t exist if the common people, like The Winkler, would simply refuse to do their bosses’ bidding. We’ll come back to this servility in my discussion of the next song, “Can-Utility and the Coastliners.”

Gabriel sings in Mrs. Barrow’s voice of her shock and dismay at the greed of her evictors, while plaintive music is played on 12-string guitar and Mellotron (flute tape). She’s willing to “pay double the rent,” but this isn’t enough for the new owners of the property, who know it’s “good money gone if [they] let them stay.” Under capitalism, it isn’t enough to make money–profits have to be maximized.

To her even greater shock, Mrs. Barrow learns, upon moving to “Harlow New Town,” the new area where Pebble et al want her and the other evictees to live, that they want to raise the rent. This, surely, will allow Styx to get back the four hundred pounds they gave the evictees to goad them into moving, plus get a lot more money, over time.

After a brief solo by Hackett of sobbing guitar leads over Banks’s organ triads, we come to an instrumental interlude meant to represent the passage of time over about forty years. The main motif of this passage is five notes played on the bass and organ: E D E D F-sharp. Soon after, we hear E D E D F-natural. This motive is harmonized on the Mellotron (flute tape again) and Gabriel’s flute.

When Gabriel’s singing returns, we’ve gone from 1972 to 2012, which I find most interesting from our point of view living now. The social commentary and prophetic nature of Gabriel’s lyric (inspired by his own landlord troubles of the time) are even more prescient, in a metaphorical sense as I’ll explain below, than he must have imagined.

One should bear in mind just how much the world has actually changed since the writing of this lyric, just before the 1973-1975 recession marking the end of Keynesian state intervention in failing economies and of the beginning of the end of welfare capitalism, and the dawn of neoliberalism and the “free market,” which in turn has metastasized into the horror it became by the 2010s.

Note how “Genetic Control” announces that there will be a restriction on tenants’ height to four feet. The directors of Genetic Control have been buying up all the properties recently sold, and with shorter tenants, “they can fit twice as many in the same building site,” thus doubling the money made in Pebble’s company, no longer Styx Enterprises, but now “United Blacksprings International” (sounds like BlackRock to me). Under capitalism, successful businesses grow into giant, multinational corporations.

We’ve all been made “shorter in height,” thanks to the depredations of contemporary neoliberalism. Capitalism makes the 99% small so the 1% can tower over us all. The cramming in of “twice as many in the same building site” reminds me of the terrible living conditions of the working class in 19th century England and elsewhere. See also Marx, pages 816-818.

Incidentally, Pebble has been knighted. When a rich, exploitative capitalist becomes Sir John De Pebble, we can see how foolish it is to idealize the era of kings, queens, and knights (à la “Time Table”).

“Satin Peter of Rock Development Ltd.”, an obvious pun on the saint, announces the coming of a capitalist heaven on Earth “with land in your hand.” Remember this religious imagery when we come to “The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man” in “Supper’s Ready.”

V: Can-Utility and the Coastliners

“Can-Utility and the Coastliners” opens with 12-string acoustic guitars–as integral a part of the early Genesis sound as the Mellotron was of the early King Crimson sound–and Collins hitting a triangle. “Can-Utility” is a pun on Canute, an old king of England, Denmark, and Norway back in the 11th century. Surrounded by flatterers, the king showed them he had no extraordinary powers by sitting on his throne at the shore and commanding the tide to stop coming in, which of course it didn’t.

The song is mostly Hackett’s, with some musical contributions from Banks and Rutherford. Hackett’s lyric demonstrates how foolish blind deference and obsequiousness to authority is. As I said of The Winkler, this thoughtless obeying of orders is what gives evil leaders their power. Luckily for Canute’s flatterers, he was not that kind of king; he just wanted his flatterers to realize how foolish their ass-kissing was.

The song begins, as I said above, with 12-string acoustic guitars, playing arpeggios of B major, C-sharp minor seventh, and F-sharp seventh added flat ninth chords, and a strummed B major chord. Then the song goes to D major, and Gabriel begins singing.

He sings of a history book telling Canute’s story. The book is by the sea, just as Canute was, and its pages get “washed by the waves,” just as the king was. We hear a chord progression of D major, A major, G major, and A major as Gabriel sings of the shadow of a cloud looking down on those pages “as eyes of the past.” Just as a king should not be deified, or made into a cult of personality, neither should history or tradition be so revered uncritically.

We hear those major chords in D, A, G, A again when the king commands the waves to “halt at [his] feet.” With the same music, the king makes the same judgement about the foolishness of obsequiousness as those “eyes of the past” that looked down on the pages that praised a king’s modesty…or was it a false modesty? After all, some have claimed that the king vainly commanded those waves to stop because he really did think he could stop them. Either way, the point is made clear about excessive praise of power and authority.

Rutherford hits a low D on his bass pedal synthesizer and Collins comes in on the drums as Gabriel begins to sing of a coming storm near the king’s throne on the shoreline. We hear those D, A, G, A major chords again with words of flattery to the king. Hackett plays a lead of nine notes through a volume pedal as a segue to 12-string acoustic guitar playing in D minor.

Collins bangs in with the drums again during this instrumental passage, with vigorous 12-string acoustic guitar strumming, Rutherford pounding his foot on that D on the bass pedals, and Banks playing a dark theme on the Mellotron. The music seems to be depicting the waves splashing against Canute’s feet and his throne, humbling him and his flatterers.

One senses that maybe the king, deep down, was hoping the waves would obey him when Gabriel sings “he forced a smile even though his hopes lay dashed where offerings fell.” This leads to another instrumental passage, beginning with a chord progression of D minor, G major, C major, and A major. Gabriel plays an oboe melody over this progression.

While we hear the oboe, Rutherford puts his 12-string acoustic guitar aside, and no longer needing the bass pedals, picks up his bass guitar. The key changes to F-sharp major, and he’s playing fast notes in E and going from there to hammer-ons in F-sharp. Banks is playing arpeggios on the organ, first in one bar of 5/4, then back to 4/4, where the time stays largely the same, except for the occasional time change to a bar in 5/4 again, then to a bar of 3/4. During this time, Hackett does a solo, the first few notes using the volume pedal again.

The key switches to C major, and Gabriel resumes singing over alternating C and F major chords. The king’s modesty sure seems to be false (as far as Hackett’s lyric is concerned, at least), for he hopes that–as the tide soaks him–at least his former flatterers won’t laugh at him.

Well, they do eventually laugh, his face turns red with humiliation, and he dies. Sic semper tyrannus?

The song ends with some tricky riffs, perhaps musically suggestive of the awkwardness of the king’s situation. The 4/4 switches to a bar of 6/4 with an ascension of C-D-E-G-C-D-E, then down an octave to an eighth note in E before going back to a bar of 4/4, and a G in a tied whole note. Then a bar of 5/4 with the G from the previous bar as the first of six eighth notes, the others being a G an octave higher, then E, F, E, and C, and ending with a C an octave lower after a quarter and an eighth rest. Then alternating 6/4 and 4/4, and Gabriel singing about the king’s red face and his death. That’s the end of Side One.

VI: Horizons and Supper’s Ready

Side Two begins with another Hackett composition, a short solo for six-stringed acoustic guitar called “Horizons.” It’s a beautiful piece in G major, featuring a clever use of bell-like harmonics.

After that, we come to the great Genesis epic, “Supper’s Ready.” It’s 23 minutes long, and divided into seven parts, the first of which is called “Lover’s Leap,” based on an experience late at night that Gabriel had with his wife, Jill, in their London flat. Hackett claimed that there was some drug use, and that Jill began speaking in a completely different voice at one point, something reflected in Gabriel’s lyric, “I swear I saw your face change; it didn’t seem quite right.” He made a makeshift cross from household items, and she reacted violently. Obviously, it was a bad trip.

A later incident that inspired some of this part’s lyric was when Gabriel looked out the window and saw seven shrouded men walking across the lawn to his parents’ house. These disturbing experiences would evolve into an epic story about good vs evil, including a journey through various scenes from the Book of Revelation, whose apocalypse ties in thematically with the end-of-the-world scenario of “Watcher of the Skies.” We’ve already dealt with such forms of evil as greed in “Get ‘Em Out by Friday.” (1 Timothy 6:10)

The song begins on an A minor chord with an added 6th, with Gabriel and Collins coming in immediately, singing an octave apart from each other, while Hackett, Rutherford, and Banks are all playing arpeggiated chords on 12-string acoustic guitars. As I said above, this dulcet, harpsichord-like sound of three acoustic guitars together was a staple of the early Genesis sound, something they’d already established on such songs as “Stagnation” from Trespass and “The Musical Box” on Nursery Cryme.

As the band was developing the first part of “Supper’s Ready,” though, they didn’t want to repeat themselves too much, so they made sure to have their epic go in different musical directions, as we’ll hear later in a piano arrangement by Gabriel that would become “Willow Farm,” as well as an instrumental passage by Banks, Rutherford, and Collins that would become “Apocalypse in 9/8.”

Behind the vocals and acoustic guitars, we hear Collins strike a triangle again, and–on the studio version–Rutherford playing a cello. The importance of “Lover’s Leap,” from a lyrical and thematic standpoint, is how the love of the husband and wife at the beginning of the epic establishes the good against which the evil will be later contrasted.

Now, I understand–from the programme notes Gabriel wrote for concertgoers to give further explanation of what’s going on in the story–that the two lovers are supposed to be experiencing all the events of the plot together. Still, I feel that there’s a huge contradiction between the notes and when Gabriel sings, twice, “I’ve been so far from here, far from your warm [loving] arms. It’s good to feel you again”/[alternatively] “Now I’m back again.” These lines are heard toward the end of “Lover’s Leap,” and again at the beginning of “As Sure As Eggs is Eggs (Aching Men’s Feet),” with the variations as given above.

Why would the husband sing this if he’s been with his “babe” the whole time? I tend to think of Gabriel’s lyrics as more canonical and authoritative than his programme notes, which he could have written while stoned, for all we know. Note also the line “A distance falls around our bodies.” He summed up the story as “a personal journey,” suggesting that we’re meant to think of him “walking through scenes from Revelation in the Bible” alone, not with Jill.

Then again, maybe Jill is with him throughout the song, but only in a metaphorical sense. That is, he misses her, and she misses him, so they imagine themselves together as a kind of dream-like wish-fulfillment. Perhaps this is what’s being implied in the programme notes when they say that in the “Lover’s Leap” section, that they are “transformed in the bodies of another male and female.” Perhaps this, indeed, is what is meant by lover’s leap: it’s a leap of faith that, one day after the apocalypse, they’ll be together again. So they dream, perhaps in a drug-induced stupor, that they’ve been together the whole time, but seeing each other in the bodies of a different man and woman.

If my interpretation–that the lovers are apart from the end of “Lover’s Leap” to “As Sure As Eggs is Eggs”–is true, then I can see “Supper’s Ready” as allusive not only to the Bible, but also, in a subtle sense, to scenes from Odysseus‘ leaving of Ithaca to fight the Trojan War, to his odyssey to get back home–he and his wife, Penelope, missing each other’s touch for twenty years. I’m thinking in particular of the way the story is related in the 1997 TV miniseries starring Armand Assante (Odysseus) and Greta Scacchi (Penelope). In this sense, Gabriel’s watcher of the skies really is reading Chapman’s Homer.

The lovers’ bodies transformed into those of a different male and female, and yet together as such throughout the middle of “Supper’s Ready,” can thus be paralleled in The Odyssey to how, on the one hand, Odysseus sleeps with Circe and Calypso, and Penelope is troubled by a horde of obnoxious suitors on the other.

The seven shrouded men moving across the lawn could be paralleled with Menelaus, Agamemnon et al calling Odysseus to join them in retrieving Helen of Troy. It’s interesting how the seventh shrouded man in the front has “a cross held high in hand,” which seems like a projection of the makeshift cross Gabriel had, the one that upset Jill so much. I’m sure Penelope was deeply upset about her husband being taken from her by the suitors of Helen to go to war for so many years.

After all the verses of “Lover’s Leap” have been sung, we hear Banks play a solo on the Hohner Pianet while the 12-string acoustic guitars are playing in D minor. A harmonized tune is played by Hackett on his electric guitar using the volume pedal and Rutherford on the cello. After that, Gabriel comes in with a brief flute melody.

The song soon segues into “The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man,” and we’re back in A minor, which in turn will soon become A major. A humble farmer simply looking after his farm is contrasted with a religious fraud, “who looks after the fire.” The farmer reminds me of Candide, who must cultivate his garden and not be distracted with philosophical and theological nonsense, while the “fireman” reminds me not only of how Pangloss has the opposite philosophical and theological attitude, but also of what a religious hypocrite Tartuffe is.

Religious frauds like the GESM are, of course, part of the evil of the world, promising heaven with their cure-all opium of the people, yet pulling us all into holy (and far-from-holy) wars, just as the GESM will do with his followers, who will do battle against “all those without an up-to-date ‘Eternal Life Licence‘,” as the programme notes tell us. This war, of course, is the subject of the next part, “Ikhnaton and Itsacon and Their Band of Merry Men.” This war also parallels the Trojan War, as I would have it.

“Ikhnaton” is Akhenaten, a pharaoh from 14th century BCE Egypt, not far in time or space from the Trojan War. We all know what the promise of heaven from the GESM is: it’s a con. The “band of merry men” sound like those of Robin Hood; yet the name must be ironic, for while those of Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor, those of the GESM steal to enrich himself.

This section is in D major, with Banks playing arpeggios on the organ, Rutherford quickly strumming a 12-string acoustic guitar, and Hackett tapping arpeggios in harmony with some more played by Banks on the organ. Just as Odysseus and the Greeks win the Trojan War, so does the GESM’s and the husband’s side win in our story. Thus ends this section, and we come to part IV, “How Dare I Be So Beautiful?”

It’s a soft passage in which Gabriel sings about the aftermath of the war and climbing up a pile of corpses. At the top, though, they (the survivors of the battle, or him and his wife, however you wish to interpret “we”) find “a plateau of green grass and green trees full of life.” It’s so surreal that they would find life up at the top of a mountain of death. Is this the GESM’s definition of heaven, after what he’d imagine to be a ‘life and death’ struggle with evil?

The husband’s journey through good vs evil and the apocalypse was also influenced by The Pilgrim’s Progress, which is also about a man, Christian, traveling from his hometown, the “City of Destruction,” or this world, to the “Celestial City,” or heaven, atop Mount Zion.

The husband sees “a young figure…by a pool.” Having “been stamped ‘Human Bacon’ by some butchery tool” sounds like his war injuries, or some other kind of wound. Narcissism’s origins are in some injury, or abuse, and we can see he has this kind of problem.

“He is you”…who? The husband’s wife? I suspect it’s the GESM, for he comes off as having narcissistic traits, given how he’s made for himself a cult of personality. “Babe” seems too sweet to have such vices as these.

The narcissism of powerful leaders is an evil that causes wars like the one just ended. The egotism of “this lad” causes him to turn into a flower, while his servile followers “watch in reverence.” And speaking of flowers, we then come to “Willow Farm.”

A willow, of course, is a tree or shrub–a plant. When willow leaves and bark are used medicinally, one doesn’t generally think about narcotics; when one considers the surreal lyric of “Willow Farm,” though, one may find it easy to think of willow as a kind of euphemism for drugs. So “Willow Farm” could be seen as a code for, say, cannabis farm.

Gabriel’s lyric playfully maximizes rhyme and wordplay, suggesting the imaginative flights of fancy of the stoned. I bring this up because this section of “Supper’s Ready” parallels that of The Odyssey dealing with the lotus eaters. Odysseus and his crew come to an island whose inhabitants eat lotus fruits and flowers, which have a narcotic quality, causing their eaters to sleep in peaceful apathy. This happens to Odysseus’ men, and he has to get them all back on his ship and sail away, for if he doesn’t, they’ll all stay there and never go home.

This lolling about is one of the evils that the husband must struggle against if he is to get back home and be with “Babe” again. So many of us, rather than band together in solidarity and fight the injustices of the world, prefer to sit around and smoke dope, lying about and doing nothing. In terms of the Seven Deadly Sins, this would be sloth.

In the lotus-land of Willow Farm, “everyone’s happy to be here.” If you go there, “open your eyes, it’s full of surprise [drug trip], everyone lies [tells lies, or lies down? I suspect the latter] like the fox on the rocks [inspiring the foxy lady on the cover, though I still insist she’s standing on a flat block of ice] and the musical box [reminding us of the first track on Nursery Cryme].”

Among the examples of surreal imagery in this lyric are “Winston Churchill dressed in drag [since this is not meant to be a reference to transgenderism, I’m delighted to hear that horrible man mocked], he used to be a British flag, plastic bag, what a drag.” Many bad things or people used to be good ones, or at least they were once perceived to be good. “The frog was a prince, the price was a brick, the brick was an egg, the egg was a bird.”

Such surreal imagery reinforces the idea that what’s being experienced in Willow Farm is a drug trip, or lotus-eating. Accordingly, the people are “as happy as fish, and gorgeous as geese, and wonderfully clean in the morning.” They’ve “got everything, [they’re] growing everything,” like good dope dealers.

In this stoned state, one never gets anywhere. As in the homunculus argument, one tries to explain a concept in terms of the concept itself, hence “mum to mud to mad to dad,” then “dad to dam to dum to mum.” One comes right back to where one started. Those in Willow Farm are thus like the lotus-eaters, high as kites and going nowhere.

However much the husband may yearn for his wife (“Mama, I want you now!”), just as Odysseus did among the lotus-eaters…or when with Circe or Calypso, for that matter…he’s stuck where he is and can’t get home (“like it or not…you’re under the soil…yes, deep in the soil…”).

Being seeds in the soil means that the husband and his fellow survivors of the war are underground, which can be associated with the Underworld, where Odysseus goes to learn from Tiresias how to sail safely back to Ithaca. “Willow Farm” segues into a soft instrumental passage during which Gabriel plays flute over guitar accompaniment in A minor. At the end of this is a marching snare drum with a trumpet-like restating of the GESM theme (“I know a fireman who looks after the fire.”). The martial nature of this restated theme reinforces the link between religious hypocrisy and war.

And now we come to the climactic “Apocalypse in 9/8 (Co-Starring the Delicious Talents of Gabbie Ratchet)”. Gabbie Ratchet refers to the Hounds of Hell; they’re also known as Gabriel’s Hounds. It’s called 9/8 time, but a compound triple should be subdivided three plus three plus three, not four plus five, as it is here.

The repeated riff, over which Banks improvises an organ solo, is eighth notes of E E F-sharp E B E E E F-sharp, heard on the guitar and bass, and briefly at one point on Gabriel’s flute. It was originally conceived as an organ improvisation with no defined time signature.

The lyrics are full of imagery from the Book of Revelation: “Magog” (20: 7-8, when Satan, released from his prison, assembles the nations of the Earth [including Magog] for battle); “Dragons coming out of the sea” (13:1), bringing “down the fire from the skies” (13:13); “666” (13:18), and “and the seven trumpets blowing” (8:2 and 6).

Now, the Revelation in the New Testament was referring, however poetically and cryptically, to events in the Graeco-Roman world in the latter half of the first century (i.e., Nero was the Antichrist); but Gabriel’s lyrics are bringing these ideas into the modern world, to a time when there were great fears of nuclear war between the US and the USSR. Since we’re in a new Cold War now, with the US/NATO empire on one side and Russia and China on the other, all nuclear-armed, the warnings of “Supper’s Ready” are all the more relevant today.

Indeed, it really does feel as if we’re coming dangerously close to the end of the world, not only because of this new Cold War, which is being expanded, it seems, to include the Middle East as struggles by Yemen to disrupt the Gaza genocide are being frustrated by the American empire (Israeli settler-colonialism in Palestine is a kind of “Get ‘Em Out by Friday” in its own right), but also by global warming (recall the foxy lady on the block of ice of Foxtrot‘s cover).

Those of us who want justice feel caught between Scylla and Charybdis: if we intervene in an attempt to bring about revolution, the fascist police can shoot us down; if we sit back and do nothing like the stoned lotus-eaters, letting the imperialists have their way (their all-too-obedient police and military being the Winklers and Canute-flatterers of our day), we’ll all die. Speaking of Scylla and Charybdis, the apocalypse of “Supper’s Ready” could be compared to the unavoidable danger and death faced by Odysseus and his crew, six of whom die.

Towards the end of “Apocalypse in 9/8,” after Banks’s organ solo and Gabriel’s singing of the second verse, Banks comes in with the Mellotron and plays a descending melodic line of high E, E-flat, D, and C. Then the song segues into the seventh and last part, “Sure As Eggs Is Eggs (Aching Men’s Feet),” with a reprise of the “and it’s ‘Hey babe, with your guardian eyes so blue'” section of “Lover’s Leap.” Just as Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca and into Penelope’s arms, so does the husband finally return (as I insist, in my interpretation of Gabriel’s lyrics, happens) to his wife.

Note how passionately Gabriel sings of how far away, and for so long, he’s been from her “loving arms.” This doesn’t sound like a man whose woman has been with him the whole time, as the programme notes would have us believe. Collins hits some tubular bells for even greater dramatic effect: first, a first-inversion B major triad, then B, B-flat, A-flat, G-flat, E. One might think of church bells, since a happy ending after the apocalypse can only be the attainment of heaven.

Just as the lovers could be likened to Odysseus and Penelope, in the context of all the Biblical imagery in Gabriel’s lyrics, the couple could also be likened to the Christian bride (the Church) and the groom (Christ), as the lovers of the Song of Songs are often allegorized. Recall also the influence of The Pilgrim’s Progress, as I mentioned above.

And with the “angel standing in the sun…crying with a loud voice, ‘This is the supper of the mighty God'” (Revelation 19:17), we come to the inspiration for the title of this side-long epic. (One might also think of Psalm 23:5.)

But what does all of this Christian symbolism mean? Note how the music of this last section is, ironically, the same as that of “The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man,” but much more passionate, climactic, and sincere. In these two sections of “Supper’s Ready,” we have a contrast between the religious hypocrisy of the GESM and the heartfelt love and genuine spirituality of “As Sure As Eggs Is Eggs.”

There’s a big difference between those capitalists, settler-colonialists, and imperialists who claim to have Christian motives for their evil acts, those who “invest in the church for [their] heaven,” and those whose love is as real as that of the husband and wife of this epic. There’s a big difference between toadying up to authority (people like The Winkler and Canute’s flatterers), and a genuine love of God (“lord of lords, king of kings”).

VII: Conclusion

So, what does the concept of Foxtrot as an album all mean? The destruction of all human life is observed by an alien, and we can see a number of the causes of that destruction. The idealizing of the past, as justifying conservative, reactionary attitudes, which undermine efforts at progressive change; the greedy control of land and wealth, whose ill effects range from landlords evicting tenants to settler-colonialists and imperialists taking land away from the indigenous peoples of the world; servile obsequiousness to authority, to narcissists, and to religious hypocrites, who manipulate us all into supporting wars that ultimately lead to the annihilation of the human race. And instead of doing anything about it, so many of us would rather lie about and smoke dope.

And what would be a cure to these ills? Yet another thing that the lovers of “Supper’s Ready” could represent is our communal relationship with each other. The husband and wife, thus, are the self and other. Their separation, as I interpret it to be during the middle of the story, and expressed as such at both the beginning and the end of the epic story (“I’ve been so far from here, far from your warm/loving arms.”), can represent social alienation in general, another well-known symptom of capitalism, or any form of class conflict.

So the cure of the ills that will destroy our world includes a restoration of that communal love, whose solidarity will end alienation, and with that, end war, greed, servility, slothful intoxication, and the wrong-headed idealization of the past. For it is to the future that we must look to make a better world, “to take [us] to the New Jerusalem.”

Who Runs the World?

I: Introduction

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

I’m talking about something serious here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II: Ancient Antisemitism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III: Medieval Antisemitism and Money-lending

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

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

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

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

IV: The Rothschilds

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

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

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

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

There’s only one problem with this story.

It’s utter unsubstantiated bullocks.

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

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

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

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

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

V: Of Marx and Marxists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI: On Zionism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII: Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tents

Camping
is supposed to be
for people who are on
vacation, not the homeless.

High rents
can toss you out
of buildings, and into
tents, but so can bombers.

There are
camps for the
summer, and there
are concentration camps.

You are
in the open air,
& yet still, you are
trapped, just like rats.

Rows of
tents replace
the homes of Gaza.
Zion’s a cruel landlord.

	Word Salad – I… on Nakba
	Word Salad – I… on Gaza
	Analysis of ‘K… on Analysis of ‘Rocky…
	Analysis of ‘K… on Analysis of ‘Nineteen Ei…
	Analysis of ‘K… on Analysis of ‘Star W…