Analysis of ‘Commando’

I: Introduction

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

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

Here‘s a link to quotes from the film.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III: Some Rather Needless Killing

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

Matrix, it seems, is next to be assassinated.

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

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

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

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

IV: Matrix and Jenny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V: Making Matrix Aid Arius’ Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI: The Female Factor

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

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

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

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

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

VII: Rescuing Jenny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIII: Confession, Projection, and Denial

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX: Conclusion

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

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

2025

I: Introduction

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

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

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

II: A Trump Meme

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III: Liberalism and Fascism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV: Trump and Fascism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liberals be libbing again. Oh, dear…

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

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

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

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

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

V: Kamala is NO Alternative to Trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She is a total airhead.

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

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

VI: Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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