Tag: Marxism

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

Photo by KEVIN MACH on Pexels.com

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?

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.

Who Runs the World?

I: Introduction

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

I’m talking about something serious here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II: Ancient Antisemitism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III: Medieval Antisemitism and Money-lending

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

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

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

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

IV: The Rothschilds

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

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

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

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

There’s only one problem with this story.

It’s utter unsubstantiated bullocks.

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

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

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

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

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

V: Of Marx and Marxists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI: On Zionism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII: Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘Messiah of Evil’

Messiah of Evil, or Dead People, is a 1974 supernatural horror film written, produced, and directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. It stars Marianna Hill and Michael Greer, with Anitra Ford, Royal Dano, Elisha Cook Jr., and Joy Bang.

Though a lesser-known film, Messiah of Evil has been generally well-received. It’s wonderfully atmospheric, with beautiful, vividly colourful visuals. It’s been described as “unsettling” by Nick Spacek of Starburst Magazine, having given the film a score of ten out of ten. It was ranked #95 on IndieWire‘s 200 Best Horror Movies of All-Time; they said, “it’s full of  iconic and memorable scenes that recall to mind some of George A. Romero’s best work.”

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

As with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Messiah of Evil does a subtle critique of capitalism. We see a satirical commentary on consumerism in the supermarket scene, with the ghouls eating all the meat in the meat section, then feeding off of Laura (Ford). We’re reminded of a similar satire on consumerism in Dawn of the Dead, with the zombies haunting the shopping mall.

Recall that this film came out in 1974, when the same manifestations of political upheaval happened that inspired much of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which came out the same year and also dealt with cannibalism. Early on in Messiah of Evil, we see Arletty (Hill) drive her car to a Mobil gas station, giving us an association with oil in the early 70s, when the oil crisis happened, an issue I discussed in my analysis of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Note the tension of the Mobil gas station attendant (played by Charles Dierkop), who is first seen shooting at someone (or some animal, as he seems to claim to have been shooting at). Then, when the creepy albino truck driver arrives (played by Bennie Robinson), the attendant, knowing how dangerous this albino is (with the dead victims in his truck, one of whom has a slit throat and was the chased victim seen at the beginning of the film), urgently presses Arletty to drive away without need of paying for her gas with her credit card. Finally, the attendant is killed by the ghouls of Point Dume (an obvious pun on doom), where she is headed to find her father.

My point is that the 1973 oil crisis marked the end of the post-war economic expansion era, which included welfare capitalism, strong unions, Keynesian government intervention to smooth over economic crises, and a strong push for progressive social reforms. The end of this era also meant the beginning of a reactionary, neoliberal push to the right; these trends have continued unswervingly over the past forty to fifty years, leading to the extreme income inequality and endless imperialist wars we’ve been suffering these years.

The evil spreading from Point Dume to the rest of the world, as is understood to be happening by the end of the film, can be seen to allegorize how neoliberalism has engulfed the world by now. The “messiah of evil,” that is, the antichrist, or as he’s called in the film, “the dark stranger,” appeared a hundred years before the events of this movie, when he returns; so he first appeared around 1873-1874, and has returned around 1973-1974. His first appearance would have been around the beginning of the Gilded Age, a time of terrible income inequality (the “gilding” being a gold covering of a far less valuable material, symbolizing wealth masking poverty); and his second appearance coincides with the beginnings of neoliberalism and our new Gilded Age.

Note how the gas station attendant tells Arletty that Point Dume is a “piss-poor” little town. Contrast this poverty with evidently rich Thom (Greer), in his nice suits and his hedonist mini-harem of women, Laura and Toni (Bang), soon to be replaced, it might seem, with Arletty.

One critic of the film, Glenn Kay, complained that the lead characters’ motivations are never explained in a satisfactory way, especially those of Thom; Kay also said that the titular Messiah is never properly identified. What Kay seems to have missed, though, is what is amply implied, but deliberately not explicitly revealed: Thom is the Messiah of Evil. In the flashback sequences, Greer plays the “dark stranger”; if one looks carefully at him in those shadowy scenes, one can recognize Greer’s tall, thin build, with the broad shoulders, in the black coat and hat. In an interview (<<bottom page), Greer even said he was soon to play “the devil’s son” in this movie.

So the hell that is brought to this town, and from thence to the rest of the world, is the evil of the rich, taking from the poor (Thom is wealthy, coming to the “piss-poor” town of Point Dume.). Recall 1 Timothy 6:10. Also note that the Beast came out of the sea (Revelation 13:1), just as the dark stranger comes out of the sea on a night with a blood-red moon.

In her search for her father, Arletty comes to a motel room and meets Thom, Laura, and Toni. Thom is listening to a dirty, poor old drunk named Charlie (Cook Jr.) tell the history of his birth, and of Point Dume. A hint as to Thom’s unsavoury character is how, instead of answering Arletty’s questions about her father, he rudely tells her to close the door, so he can continue to listen to Charlie’s story without any interrupting noise. Thom is fascinated to learn about Point Dume’s legendary history of the “blood moon” and “dark stranger” because he is intimately connected to them.

Arletty discovers a diary her father has written about his disturbing experiences in the town. His art, often black and white images of men in suits (suggestive of businessmen, or capitalists), reflects the change in his mental state, and like the diary, seems to be an attempt, ultimately failing, at therapy through expressing his pain. There seems to be estrangement between him and his daughter; he’s warned her never to come to Point Dume.

Thom, Laura, and Toni come to stay in her father’s home, where she is, for the three have not only been kicked out of their original motel for their questionable behaviour (we learn that Charlie has been killed), but no other hotel or motel will take them in. Since Thom is the antichrist, the refusal to him and his ‘groupie’ friends of accommodations seems like a Satanic version of the Christmas story, when pregnant Mary and Joseph couldn’t find an inn to stay in for the night, and had to make do in a manger.

Since I am linking Thomas with not only the devil, but also class conflict (he’s a Portuguese-American aristocrat), it might seem odd that he would have difficulty finding accommodations. Similarly, towards the end of the movie, he is fending off the ghouls with Arletty. I think the point is that Thom is hiding his true identity from her, because he has special uses for her…so they don’t kill her in the end. Part of the power of evil is how we have difficulty identifying it.

To give explanatory context to the seeming contradictions discussed in the previous paragraph, consider a few quotes by Baudelaire and Ken Ammi about the Devil either supposedly not existing or being the good guy. Similarly, 2 Corinthians 11:14 says that “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.” Indeed, in dialectical contrast to the black clothes of the dark stranger, Thom is always wearing light-coloured suits.

Furthermore, while wealthy Thom is largely presented as if he were one of the sympathetic protagonists of the film, many billionaires in today’s world have postured as if they’re friends of the common people: Trump, Soros, Musk, etc., and many of the common people are fooled by this charade. Just as we shouldn’t be fooled by these narcissists in real life, though, neither should we be taken in by Thom, as the mindless ghouls are. Arletty is right, towards the climax of the film, to trust her initial instincts and stab Thom in the arm.

Another example of Thom’s unsavoury character comes out when it’s obvious to Toni and especially Laura that he aims to seduce Arletty. One of the key problems plaguing all human relationships is the jealous competition over who one loves the most…me, or my rival(s)? The prototype of this problem is discovered in the Oedipal conflict over whether the desired parent loves the child, his or her other parent, or his or her siblings. Laura is so disgusted with Thom that she leaves…for this, there will be fatal consequences.

She foolishly chooses to go to town that night by foot. On the way, the albino truck driver drives by and offers her a ride, which she foolishly accepts. He’s playing the music of Wagner (specifically, the Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin), whose name he incorrectly pronounces the English way (actually, an innocent goof made by actor Robinson, but one allowed by Huyck, who found it amusing), instead of the proper German way. Allowing the error in turn allows me to indulge in an interpretation of it: I see in the albino’s mispronunciation his limited, working-class education.

Some interesting associations can be made about the driver and his odd choice to play Wagner’s music in his truck (as opposed to listening to, say, pop music, or R and B). He’s an albino African-American, playing the music of a composer who was an old Nazi favourite. The linking of a ‘white’ black man with music associated with Nazism might make one think of Dr. Josef Mengele, who did such things as alter his patients’ eye colour to make them ‘more acceptable Aryans.’ Recall also that fascism exists to protect the interests of the capitalist class against socialism in part by turning the working class (people like the albino trucker) against the left and towards the right, as Trump did with his followers.

Beyond these political implications are other creepy things about the truck driver. His albino whiteness reminds us of that of Moby-Dick, especially in the chapter, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” in which it’s discussed how frighteningly unnatural the colour white can be. Finally, the disgusting fellow likes to eat living rats!

Laura naturally doesn’t want to stay in the truck of this freak, so she gets out and continues on foot to the town. She ends up in a Ralph’s supermarket, where she sees ghouls in the meat section eating all the meat like a bunch of gluttons. A number of the men among them, in suits and ties, remind us of the black-and-white men in the paintings of Arletty’s father, which gives us a clue as to what he, in his physically and mentally deteriorating condition, has been obsessed with.

The feasting ghouls all look over at Laura, and deciding that her flesh must be much tastier than what they’re currently eating, get up and run after her. Terrified, she runs, but can’t get out in time to save herself.

A key to understanding how this film is a critique, however subtle, of capitalism is seeing how the ghouls eating the meat in the supermarket, then eating Laura, is symbolic of consumerism. Note that in this feeding, we have a pun on consumer, as both eater and as excessive buyer of goods and services.

One way the capitalist class retains its power over us is by keeping us mindlessly buying things–rather like zombies–so we fill their wallets with money, instead of thinking about how to change the system. Volume One of Das Kapital begins with a discussion of the commodity, the basic unit of our economic system, seen as either a use-value or an exchange value, traded in for money. When our buying and selling focuses on only the things involved in the transactions (money and commodities), rather than the people involved, what results is what Marx called the fetishism of the commodity, which exacerbates alienation.

We get a sense, during the supermarket scene, of this excessive preoccupation with things, with products, over people when we see the greedy eating of not only the meat in the meat section, but of Laura, too, who is thus reduced to meat, a commodification of her body, as will later happen to Toni in the movie theatre scene.

Feminists have often written and spoken of how women’s bodies are commodified and exploited through such things as prostitution, stripping, and pornography. The cannibalistic eating of Laura, whom Thom has described as a model (Ford herself was a model), and later of Toni, can thus be seen as symbolic rapes.

Violence against women, as seen in the cannibalistic eating of Laura and Toni, as well as violence against the poor, as with the killing of Charlie, is an example of what I’ve described elsewhere as “punching down.” The capitalist class wouldn’t be able to keep its power over us if we “punched up” instead. We buy the capitalists’ products (we consume them), and we hurt each other (consuming each other, metaphorically speaking), instead of rising up in revolution.

This punching down connects the black albino listening to Wagner with the zombie-like ghouls eating meat, then eating Laura. Fascism is about punching down–that is, attacking foreigners, people of colour, leftists, homosexuals, etc.–to ingratiate oneself with the ruling class, or in a symbolic sense, making oneself ‘whiter,’ more class collaborationist, more pro-capitalist.

Another example of this film pushing the marginalized into the mainstream, that is, making them conform, is the choice of Greer to play Thom. Greer was known not only as one of the first openly gay actors to appear in major Hollywood movies, but also to act in early films that dealt with gay themes, like The Gay Deceivers and Fortune and Men’s Eyes. So in Messiah of Evil, we have in Greer a publicly-known gay actor not only playing a straight man in Thom, but also playing a womanizer.

On a comparable note, Thom as the antichrist is portrayed throughout the film as a normal man–that is, his evil is normalized. We wouldn’t know he was the dark stranger, a descendant of him, or his reincarnation–whichever–if we weren’t paying close attention. The same can be said about how neoliberalism has been insinuated into our lives over the past forty years without most of us even noticing this insidious evil–it has also been normalized for us. The bogus promise of economic prosperity that the “free market” is supposed to provide is an evil that’s been presented as a messianic cure to the ills of “big government” by such demagogic economists has Milton Friedman.

As for Toni, we can sense that her days, if not her hours, are numbered when she sings the famous first verse of “Amazing Grace,” but stops singing conspicuously at “I once was lost, but now…” once Thom enters the area. Like Laura, Toni is getting sick of Point Dume and wants to leave. She can’t even get entertainment from the radio, since it isn’t receiving any stations. Thom suggests that the bored girl go see a movie (he’ll have Arletty to himself that way).

Her in the movie theatre is yet another example of the film doing a social commentary on consumerism, our tendency to pay for pleasure instead of dealing with our relationship problems, such as her jealousy over his preference of beautiful Arletty. Thus we see in both Toni’s jealousy and her retreat to the movies a reinforcement of social alienation.

She watches a Western called Gone With the West, an indulgently violent parody of the genre. The zombie-like ghouls enter later in a large group; their mindless watching of the film is a social commentary on how so many of us do the same thing–pay to be dazzled by the media, which is part of the superstructure influenced by (and influencing) the base of society, or its means and relations of production.

It doesn’t take long for her to realize she has unwelcome company in the theatre, right from the sight of a ghoul staring at her just before the lights go out and the cowboy film starts. She snaps out of the lull the movie experience has put her in, and the ghouls notice her awakening. Then they, including the albino, go after her and indulge in more cannibalism. It’s as though they were punishing her for having woken up and begun thinking for herself.

Another way the capitalist class keeps us under their control is through that superstructure described above–in this particular instance, the media (movies, TV, the radio, the news,…and in today’s world, social media). The superstructure’s media wasn’t nearly as bad back in the early 70s as it is now–with 90% of American media controlled by only six corporations, who thus have control over most of our access to information (which is now extended to a global network)–but it was bad enough back then to deserve a social critique in Messiah of Evil.

I consider this film to be quite prophetic–whether intentionally so or not–through its symbolism and allegory, it being a film that came out during the huge political upheavals of the early 1970s (the Watergate cover-up, defeat in Vietnam, racial conflict, and economic convulsions), these being upheavals some of whose repercussions are being felt in full flower today; I discussed such prophetic, if you will, filmmaking in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (link above).

The sickness that takes over the people of Point Dume, each with a bleeding eye, can be seen in the context of my capitalist allegory to symbolize how the mindset needed to keep us all subjugated to the new neoliberal order has negatively affected our mental health. We see the world in pain, for we ourselves are in pain–we weep blood instead of tears.

Along with this growing sickness, the ghouls all act as an undifferentiated group, with no sense of individuality. They go to the beach at night, looking up at the moon (waiting for it to turn blood-red) in collective expectation of the return of the dark stranger, an act called “The Waiting.” Similarly, working class people today, far from experiencing the liberation promised after the disastrous dissolution of the Soviet Union, find themselves passively accepting worse and worse jobs, with low pay, reduced benefits, etc. They feel like mere cogs in a machine, pressured to work harder and harder, alienated from their work. The limited range of opinions allowed in the media result in conformist thinking among the masses, just like those ghouls watching the cowboy movie with blank faces.

There are moments when the film is outright surreal, such as when insects come out of Arletty’s mouth. This sense of the surreal adds to the disturbing atmosphere of the movie, and it can explain certain aspects of the plot that don’t seem to be properly developed or explained.

An example of such an unexplained moment, one that seems contradictory to my presentation of Thom as the real villain of the film, is when he, walking the streets of downtown Point Dume alone at night, is briefly chased and attacked by ghouls. The shots of the chase and attack are presented in a choppy way, as jump cuts, suggesting a dream-like quality, as if Thom has merely imagined the attack.

No bad person believes he’s evil; the villains of history have always imagined that their atrocities were meant ultimately for the greater good. These bad people also narcissistically imagine themselves to be the victim, rather than the victimizer…so why would Thom be any different, in wanting to associate himself with the real victims of the story? Recall in this connection what I said above about how the powerful and wealthy like to be associated with the common people, sympathizing with their interests. Thom’s imagining of himself being attacked can be understood in this light.

After Thom gets away from his attackers (imagined, as I see them, for surely they’d still be giving him chase if they were real), he stops to catch his breath, and a poor woman appears, begging him for help from the ghouls. He turns away, especially when he sees her eye bleeding. Of course he won’t help her: he’s the messiah of evil who is bringing on these evils, and he wants her to complete her transformation into another ghoul.

Arletty’s eye is bleeding, too, and like her father in his deteriorating condition, she’s beginning to cut herself. It’s around this time that she sees herself in the mirror, with a bug on her tongue, and she vomits out a host of insects.

Two police arrive on the streets, where Thom is wandering, to deal with the ghouls. One of the cops is bleeding from an eye, and the other shoots him in the neck and tries to run away. The ghoul cop then shoots him dead. In the context of my capitalist allegory, it’s easy to see how a cop could be spontaneously bleeding from an eye and becoming a ghoul: cops have historically existed to serve the ruling class; even if a small minority of cops, like the non-ghoul cop, are good people at heart, it’s the whole system of law enforcement that they work for that is the problem.

Something needs to be said about the origin of the “dark stranger.” He was a former minister (hence, his status as “messiah”) and a member of the Donner Party, who were a group of American pioneers migrating to California in a wagon train from the Midwest. During the winter of 1846-1847, they were snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains; some of the migrants resorted to cannibalism to survive, and two Native American guides were deliberately killed to eat the bodies. Our dark stranger seems to have derived his taste for human flesh from this grisly episode, and in Point Dume, he’s been spreading his “religion” with cannibalism as, if you will, a new form of the Eucharist.

It’s interesting to consider the murder and cannibalistic eating of the Native Americans in the light of not only the film but also of the migration of the pioneers out west. The migration is an example of settler-colonialism, associated with the genocide of the natives. It’s also related to imperialism, the theft of others’ land to exploit it and thus enrich oneself with it. Settler-colonialism and imperialism in the modern world are also manifestations of capitalism, which further solidifies the connection of Messiah of Evil with capitalism.

Arletty has been told that her father’s body was found on the beach, him having been building a huge sculpture there, but the tide, it seems, collapsed it on top of him. She doesn’t believe it was really his body on the beach, though, because the coarse hands of the body weren’t the same as those of her father’s. It’s later confirmed that her father is still alive, for he returns to his home to face Arletty. His transformation into ghoul is also just about complete.

He tells her the history of the dark stranger, of how he attacked and ate some of the flesh of a hunter who, as he lay dying, tried to warn others of his killer. They thought him delirious, just as many are thought crazy who try to warn people today of the evils of neoliberalism, which has come “to a world tired and disillusioned, a world looking back to old gods and old dark ways, our world.”

Remembering Charlie’s warning, she has to set her ghoul father on fire to destroy him. In his wild mania, he spreads blue paint all over his face and hands; it’s as if he’s making a desperate attempt to be at one with his art to treat his growing mental illness. Her being forced to commit such a violent, fiery patricide can be seen, in the context of my capitalist allegory, to represent how neoliberalism has exacerbated modern alienation, in this case, alienation in the family.

Thom returns to the house the next morning. His frown at seeing her father’s charred corpse can easily be seen as his sadness at the sight of one of his ghouls–his children–killed. Other ghouls are waiting on the glass roof to attack; for all we know, he’s summoned them there. She, screaming in her traumatized state, attacks him with the shears she used on her father before burning him, cutting a big gash in Thom’s arm.

After he lies in bed, resting a while and recovering from his wound, the ghouls on the glass roof break in, fall into the room, and attack him and Arletty. He helps her fight them off, though in a minimal way, and they run out to the beach. Again, all of this would seem to make him look like a sympathetic character, but I suspect his intention is really just to lure her out to the beach, and his disappearance in the water is to lead to an at least implied plot twist, in which he later reappears from the water as the dark stranger with the appearance of the blood red moon.

As he and Arletty are running together along the shore, we hear Phillan Bishop’s eerie synthesizer ostinato in 17/8 time (subdivided 4+4+4+5). The two briefly embrace like lovers: after all, this is part of Thom’s attempt at a physical and spiritual seduction of her.

The ghouls start to congregate at the beach, staring out into the ocean as they’ve done every night, waiting for the blood moon and the dark stranger. Thom and Arletty go out into the water in an attempt to escape the ghouls by boat. He seems weakened from his arm wound, making it hard for him to swim.

According to the Wikipedia article on the film, Thom drowns; but I don’t think that’s what’s really happened to him, though Arletty seems led to believe this was his fate. As I said above, he merely disappears to get ready for his return as the dark stranger, the Beast, the antichrist (Revelation 13:3-4).

The ghouls get her out of the water at night, but they don’t kill her. They dress her in a pretty gown to offer her to the returning dark stranger at night, under the blood moon and among the ghouls’ bonfires. She’s too horrified, I’d say, to say Thom’s name upon recognizing him. Instead, we get a loud, hysterical scream from her.

She’s taken to an insane asylum, and like her father, she takes up painting, presumably as a kind of art therapy to soothe her madness. Trying to warn the world about the coming evil causes one to think she’s insane. Indeed, this evil is so traumatizing, so crazy-making, that all she can do is scream…yet no one will listen.

The film ends as it began, with a return to a shot in a hall in the insane asylum, with light in the middle, where Arletty can be seen wandering, and dark shadows around the edges of the shot. Just as the dark stranger has returned, so has this shot from the beginning returned, a coming full circle…just as the Gilded Age has returned to us today.

We hear her distraught narration, her trying to warn people of the spreading sickness that makes one a ghoul. Similarly today, some of us try to warn people of the growing sickness caused by neoliberalism and imperialism–the alienation and its attendant mental illness, its pressure to conform to today’s ways, as the ghouls all conform to the grisly ways of the messiah of evil. Yet, just as no one will hear Arletty’s screams, no one will listen to our cries of help.

“No one will hear you SCREAM!!!”

Analysis of ‘Child’s Play’

Child’s Play is a 1988 horror film directed by Tom Holland, written by him, Don Mancini (whose story the film is based on), and John Lafia. It stars Catherine Hicks, Chris Sarandon, and Brad Dourif, with Alex Vincent, Dinah Manoff, and Jack Colvin.

Child’s Play gained a cult following, and its commercial success spawned a media franchise including seven sequels (with a TV series), comic books, and a 2019 reboot. It won a Saturn Award for Best Actress (Hicks), and was nominated for three–Best Horror Film, Best Performance by a Younger Actor (Vincent), and Best Writing (Holland, Lafia, and Mancini).

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

There is a subtle critique of capitalism in Child’s Play. We see a stark contrast between the haves and the have-nots, that is, people like Karen Barclay (Hicks) and her son, six-year-old Andy (Vincent), on the one hand, living in their nice apartment, and the homeless, one of whom (played by Juan Ramirez) has sold her a Good Guy doll.

The doll itself is a commodity sold to “bring…a lot of joy” to the child who plays with it. The Good Guy doll, especially when the soul of Charles Lee Ray, or “Chucky” (Dourif), is in the doll, is a literally fetishized commodity. One buys the commodity as a complete, finished product, without any sense of the workers who made it, just as one might worship an idol, believing in the god inhabiting the carved wood or sculpted statue, without any thought as to who made the idol. Chucky is thus like a pagan idol, with a spirit animating it, adored by Andy the idolater, because the lonely, alienated boy has no real, living friend to play with. In commodity fetishism, there’s a preoccupation between things (money and merchandise), not between people, hence its relationship with alienation.

As far as the opposition of those with shelter and the homeless is concerned, that opposition is in potential danger of being erased, in Karen’s case, as a consequence of her walking out on the job during her shift to buy the doll from the homeless peddler. Her manager, Walter Criswell (played by Alan Wilder), pesters her about walking off on the job, and implies a threat of firing her if she won’t agree to covering a sick worker’s shift…on Andy’s birthday. In this conflict, we see an example of worker alienation, which is adding to the Barclay family’s alienation as already discussed in lonely little Andy (whose father died).

Another thing should be mentioned about the homeless, as seen in the peddler in particular: they aren’t portrayed sympathetically. The peddler tries to suck as much money as he can out of Karen (but isn’t that what capitalists do?), on two occasions: his selling her the doll, and his exploiting her need to get information about where he found the doll, even to the point of wanting a sexual favour from the pretty woman in exchange for that information.

This associating of the homeless with criminals can be interpreted in two ways: either it’s a 1980s Reaganite lack of sympathy for the poor, or it links the peddler’s desperation with that of Charles Lee Ray. The frustrations of being poor often have a way of making people mean; they either try to get as much money out of better-off people, like Karen, as they can, or sexual frustration can make them act like creeps, as the peddler does to her; or the detrimental effect of capitalism on one’s mental health can drive one to commit violent crimes, as it drives Charles Lee Ray to become a sociopathic serial killer.

His passing of his soul into a doll represents a classic case of projective identification, a Kleinian concept that goes beyond the ordinary projection of imagining one’s own traits in others, but instead one succeeds in putting those traits into someone else (or in the case of the doll, something else). What’s more, the bad guy puts himself into a Good Guy, in the form of a voodoo incantation.

There is a lot of duality in this film. In particular, there are many pairings: Charles Lee Ray and Chucky, Andy and Chucky, Karen and her friend, Maggie Peterson (Manoff), Charles Lee Ray and his double-crossing partner-in-crime, Eddie Caputo (played by Neil Giuntoli), Detective Mick Norris (Sarandon) and his partner, Detective Jack Santos (played by Tommy Swerdlow), and Chucky with the voodoo doll of John “Dr. Death” Bishop (played by Raymond Oliver).

These pairings are generally parallels and/or opposites of each other, in some way: a bad guy in a Good Guy doll, a sweet little boy who physically resembles (sometimes even dresses like) his doll with the killer’s soul in it, his nice mother and his cranky baby-sitting substitute mom, two criminals, two cops, and a victimizer doll vs a victim’s doll. These parallels/opposites remind us of dialectical realities.

Because Karen has to cover the sick worker’s shift on her son’s birthday, her friend Maggie will babysit the boy that night. She’s rather cranky about Andy getting to bed without letting Chucky watch the news to know the latest about the police’s manhunt for Eddie Caputo, the partner of the presumed-dead Charles Lee Ray, and someone he wants to kill for having driven away and abandoned him when Norris was chasing them at the beginning of the film.

Maggie’s perceived crankiness as Karen’s substitute puts her in the role of what Melanie Klein called the bad mother, as opposed to Karen as the good mother. Maggie not letting the ‘boys’ stay up is frustrating to them, whereas Karen going all out to buy the doll for Andy makes her the good mother, who strives never to fail in pleasing her son. These women are thus like the “bad breast” that won’t give the baby milk, versus the “good breast” that will feed the baby.

This splitting of the women into two moms is a defence mechanism that Andy also does, in a symbolic way, on himself, with his understanding that Chucky is alive. Just as there is a good mom and a bad one, so is there a good boy and a bad ‘boy.’ Splitting as a defence mechanism is thus aided by another defence mechanism, projection. Andy is projecting his bad, hateful side into Chucky (in a symbolic sense), just as Charles Lee Ray has literally done.

It’s interesting that much of the doll’s violence and terrorizing happen in the apartment, with Maggie or Karen as the victims. We’re reminded of the last, and best, episode of Trilogy of Terror, “Amelia,” in which the Zuni doll terrorizes Amelia (played by Karen Black) in her apartment. In my analysis of Trilogy of Terror, I explored the projection and splitting-away of the bad character traits of the characters Black plays in all three episodes, leaving the remaining ‘good’ characters as timid and sexually repressed. Andy’s sweetness, as opposed to Chucky’s viciousness, can also be seen in this light. Maggie‘s falling out of the window and crashing through a car roof, incidentally, reminds me of the fate of Katherine Thorn (played by Lee Remick) in The Omen, another film about an evil boy.

When the police investigate Maggie’s death, Norris notices that the soles of Andy’s Good Guy shoes match the footprints leading up to the attack on her, so he deems Andy to be a suspect. Of course, Karen is too upset even to consider such suspicions.

Later that night, she’s talking to her son, who says that Chucky told him that he was sent to Andy by his dead father in heaven. I’m curious to know how Chucky learned of Andy’s father’s death in so short a time to be able to make up such a story. One wonders how much of the boy’s conversation with Chucky is real, and how much of it is just the boy’s imagination.

Andy also tells his mother that “Aunt Maggie was a real bitch and got what she deserved.” He insists that Chucky is the one who said it, which is of course perfectly plausible, given the killer’s personality…but technically, we never hear those words come out of the doll’s mouth. For all we know, Andy said and thought it himself, however unlikely that may be, given the context.

Even if all of this did come out of Chucky’s mouth, though, which is of course more than probably true, it’s true only on the literal level. On a symbolic level, we can still see the living doll as a case of projection and splitting-away of Andy’s bad side onto the doll.

His father’s death would have caused emotional trauma for the boy, who would have imagined the death as a kind of abandonment of him, thus making Andy’s father the bad father, in the Kleinian sense. The good father in heaven may have given him the doll as a gift; but the bad father gave Andy a Bad Guy in a Good Guy doll.

The police see Andy as a suspect, even though it’s hardly much more plausible that a little six-year-old boy could have had the strength to make a woman fly out of a window than a ‘living doll’ could have. Andy’s insistence that the doll is alive sounds like a manifestation of mental illness in him, even though Chucky really has the killer’s soul animating it, so it’s not surprising that he’s taken to a psychiatric hospital to be treated by Dr. Ardmore (Colvin).

As I said above, on both literal and symbolic levels, little Andy really does have issues. His father died, the death of Maggie is a shock to him even if he isn’t the perpetrator of the killing, and he’s so lonely, he needs a talking doll for a friend. His physical similarity to the doll, including their clothes, sometimes suggests a potential merging of identities, in spite of the splitting and projection.

Andy’s experience of what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position–a schizoid splitting of his mom into absolute good (Karen) and bad (Maggie, the mom substitute), as well as a paranoid fear that the bad projection will come back to get him (i.e., Chucky coming to the mental hospital to get him–actually, not to kill him, but to put the killer’s soul into the boy’s body…still, Andy doesn’t know that)–is a projection of the splitting of the good and bad sides of Andy himself. His splitting of his dead father into good and bad versions is also such a projection, as is his projection of his bad side into Chucky.

This splitting of people into good and bad, as well as the projection of this splitting onto people in the outside world, is symptomatic of the alienation we all feel in a society ruled by the profit motive, which splits people into rich and poor, then idolizes the rich while looking down on the poor. The capitalist class exploits this splitting and projection by selling us the commodities representing idealized people (Good Guy dolls, films and TV shows glorifying our objects of hero worship), and the war on the poor that results from chasing profits in turn results in desperate people we denigrate, the lumpenproletariat (criminals and the homeless).

Note how the story takes place in winter, with the homeless huddling together around outdoor fires to keep warm. One homeless man, the peddler of the doll, turns nasty and tries to get as much out of Karen as he can, even her body, in exchange for information about where he got the doll (never mind all the greedy capitalists who try to squeeze out as much profit as they can through the extraction of surplus value, some of whom exploit the bodies of females far younger than Karen!); but when Norris rescues her from the peddler and his meat-hook hands, he also points his gun at all the other homeless in the area, as if they were just as bad as the peddler, making them run away from their one source of heat, their outdoor fire, on that cold, bitter night.

Norris may be a good guy in his helping of Karen, but as a cop pointing his gun at freezing cold homeless people who never laid a hand on her, he is working to protect the class interests of the wealthy. By speaking of an area where the homeless hang out as a rough part of town that she shouldn’t be in alone at night, Norris is lumping the homeless together with criminals. This lack of sympathy for the poor and desperate makes Chucky’s revenge attack on him in his car not exactly surprising.

Now, Chucky learns from John “Dr. Death” Bishop, his former voodoo instructor, that in order for his soul to escape the doll (which is becoming increasingly human), he must put it in Andy’s body (he being the first person to know that Chucky’s alive). This putting of Charles Lee Ray’s soul into the boy’s body, a merging of bad Chucky with good Andy, should be understood, symbolically speaking, in terms of the paranoid-schizoid position, which is a splitting into absolute good vs bad, and the depressive position, an integrating of the split-off good and bad.

Though a child perceives the split-off good vs bad as being in his good vs bad parents, we must remember that the splitting is happening in the child’s mind, and it is thus a projection of a splitting that isn’t really in his parents, but rather in himself. Chucky, back in Karen’s apartment with Andy and having knocked the boy out, begins the incantation to put his soul in Andy’s body, a merging that represents the integration of the good and bad sides. He doesn’t complete the ritual, though, because Karen and Norris arrive just in time to stop him.

Just as the merging of Andy and Chucky isn’t complete, so is the integration of the good and bad mother, or the good and bad father, a child’s reparation with them, never complete. Throughout one’s life, one tends to shift back and forth between the paranoid-schizoid position (PS) and the depressive position (D), an oscillation Wilfred Bion expressed in this shorthand form: PS <-> D (e.g., in Bion, page 67).

Accordingly, Chucky as the bad Andy fights with Karen and Norris (who could be seen as a substitute father). When Karen, having put Chucky in the fireplace, screams to Andy to get the matches so she can burn the doll, the boy sits in hesitation at first–partly out of fear, no doubt, but also partly out of an unconscious wish to remove Karen the bad mother by letting Chucky kill her. Nonetheless, the good Andy wins out in his conflict, and gets the matches.

Chucky attacking Karen with, for example, him stabbing the knife through the door with her holding it closed on the other side, can be seen to symbolize how Andy, in unconscious phantasy, is attacking his mother through a projection of his bad self. He unconsciously wants to attack her because he feels she’s frustrated him in certain ways (not buying the doll at the beginning of the movie, not being with him at night for his birthday, but having cranky “Aunt Maggie,” Karen’s substitute and therefore split-off bad mother, instead to babysit him, etc.).

Later, when he sees Karen and Norris trying to protect him from Chucky, he can see the good mother in her, and he can understand that both the good and the bad mother are the same person. Now, instead of wanting to attack her in unconscious phantasy, Andy wants to keep her. In fact, even Chucky, wanting to merge with Andy, says he’ll let Karen live if she gives him the boy (a pretty weak promise coming from a serial killer, but still symbolic of an unconscious train of thought). So the bad side in Andy, Chucky, is still vicious, but thanks to his help in getting the matches, as well as his recognition that his bad side is really bad (“This is the end, friend.”), Andy can weaken his bad side and integrate it with his good side, a switch from PS to D.

With the final destruction of Chucky, through not only gunshots breaking off his limbs and head, but also that bullet in his now fully-formed heart, Andy no longer needs to project his bad side. He can now switch from paranoid anxiety to depressive anxiety, from the fear of being persecuted by the projected bad mother to the urge to hang on to his mom with all of her faults, her mixture of good and bad.

The film ends with a frozen shot of Andy leaving the room and looking at burned, mutilated, and dead Chucky. The boy’s frown isn’t only from his trauma: it’s also from his enduring sense of connection to his other, bad, projected self. The movement between splitting and integration doesn’t end in infancy or childhood: PS <-> D is a lifelong oscillation.

Terraces

The upper classes
are kept up by the middle classes,
who are scared of dropping to the lower classes.

The wealthy
should be lowered to the middle,
so that we can bring the poor up from their misery.

The super-rich
will never be brought down,
so the poor must rise up to take them down.

The establishment of a temporary workers’ state
can equalize us by keeping a tight leash
on the rich, stopping their rise;

then the capable
can produce all of the things
that everyone needs, down to the neediest.

Analysis of ‘Pulp Fiction’

Pulp Fiction is a 1994 film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, based on stories by him and Roger Avary. It stars John Travolta, Samuel L Jackson, Bruce Willis, Tim Roth, Ving Rhames, and Uma Thurman, with Harvey Keitel, Amanda Plummer, Eric Stolz, Rosanna Arquette, Maria de Medeiros, and Christopher Walken.

Pulp Fiction won the Palme d’Or at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. It was also nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Travolta), Best Supporting Actor (Jackson) and Actress (Thurman), and Best Film Editing (Sally Henke). It won Best Original Screenplay.

The film is widely considered Tarantino’s magnum opus, and as a cultural watershed, it has influenced many other films and media in terms of style. Pulp Fiction is on many critics’ lists of the greatest films of all time.

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

The main themes of the film are sin and death (as in, “The wages of sin is death“), as well as redemption, or at least attempts at it.

There is a vague sense of these themes already as Pumpkin (Roth) is telling Honey Bunny (Plummer) that he doesn’t want to rob liquor stores anymore because it’s too dangerous: either the couple will have to shoot the owners of the stores, or the owners, like “Grandpa Irving…with a fuckin’ Magnum in his hand,” will shoot them. Sin leads to death. Pumpkin attempts redemption, in a way, by not wanting to rob liquor stores anymore, but fails in that attempt by saying he wants to rob the restaurant he and Honey Bunny are dining in.

Failure at redemption in this film is best summed up in something Manohla Dargis says at the end of the Foreword to the script for Pulp Fiction: ‘When Jules [Winnfield–Jackson], Tarantino’s killer who witnesses divine intervention, says, “I’m trying real hard to be a shepherd,” it’s a miracle that he’s trying at all.’ (Tarantino, p. 4)

The plethora of pop culture references in Pulp Fiction–from its soundtrack, starting with “Misirilou” and “Jungle Boogie,” and continuing with references to McDonald’s burgers and TV show pilots, to all of the many movie allusions–is a reflection of what could be called the sin of idolatry, the worship, as it were, of pop music and movie stars, as well as commodity fetishism. We are all mesmerized by the production of images, sounds, and commodities, oblivious to the effort of workers in making these things all a reality.

Before I continue with the conversation between Jules and Vincent Vega (Travolta) as they approach the apartment where they’ll kill Brett (played by Frank Whaley), Roger “Flock of Seagulls” (played by Burr Steers), et al, I want to discuss my interpretation of who Marsellus Wallace (Rhames) represents. I see the crime boss as God, but in more of a Demiurge, Old Testament sense, than a Christian one.

The stealing of the briefcase by Brett et al is a sin not in the mundane sense of, say, stealing diamonds, but more as a form of blasphemy. Some in the mid-1990s believed that Wallace’s soul was in the briefcase, and I tend to go with that. The briefcase thus is in a way rather like the Ark of the Covenant, its contents representative and associative of God’s presence. The Ark of the Covenant was kept in the Holy of Holies, by the way, which was the inner sanctuary of the Tabernacle, where God’s presence appeared.

With these interpretations in mind, we can now begin to understand what’s going on when Jules is telling Vincent why Marsellus had Antwan Rockamora, or “Tony Rocky Horror,” thrown out of a window for having apparently given a foot massage to Marsellus’ wife, Mia (Thurman). According to Vincent, such physical familiarity with the crime boss’s wife is in “the same ballpark” as having performed cunnilingus on her, or, to use Jules’s most apt choice of words, “stickin’ your tongue in her holiest of holies.”

Both offences, Brett’s and Antwan’s, are comparable to the desecration of a holy place, a kind of blasphemy. If Marsellus is God, Mia (a possible pun on Maria) is a kind of ‘Mother of God,’ as it were. Getting too physically familiar with her, given that she, as his wife, is bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh, is tantamount to getting too physically familiar with him. Fornicating with her is thus comparable to raping him. I’m reminded of the 75th of Martin Luther‘s Ninety-Five Theses: “To consider papal indulgences so great that they could absolve a man even if he had done the impossible and had violated the mother of God is madness.” (Lull, page 28)

The juxtaposition of Brett’s and Antwan’s sins is significant, one dealt with immediately after the other. Mia later telling Vincent in Jackrabbit Slim’s that Antwan had only shaken her hand, and that only he and Marsellus knew why the latter had the former thrown out of a window could be the mere denials of an adulteress; and a “foot massage” could be a euphemism for, if you’ll indulge me, foutre, since a direct discussion of adulterous sex with Mia the ‘Queen of Heaven‘ would be a blasphemous taboo.

Remember how Jules compares Brett’s theft of the briefcase, a stealing of Marcellus’ soul, to having “tried to fuck ‘im and Marcellus Wallace don’t like to be fucked by anybody except Missus Wallace” (remember this in light of the later incident with Zed [played by Peter Greene]). Immediately after Jules says this, we get the Ezekiel quote, linking these incidents with God and sin all the more.

Before I go into the Bible quote, though, I’d like to discuss the significance of Jules asking Brett what Marsellus Wallace looks like. Note that there is no image or form for the Jewish or Islamic God, and to give God an image or form would thus be blasphemy. Small wonder Brett is unable to answer Jules’s question until the threat of being shot dead is too urgent to leave unanswered. All Brett can say is “What?”

If you were to look up Ezekiel 25:17, you would find only this: “And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.” The rest of what Jules says–inspired by the words of an offscreen narrator at the beginning of an old Sonny Chiba martial arts film, Karate Kiba (The Bodyguard, 1976)–is nonetheless central to Pulp Fiction‘s themes of sin and death. Associating these words with the Bible, and therefore with God as represented by Marsellus, is thus fitting.

The wages of sin is death, Brett. Having read the Bible, you should know that. You may have gone into this thing with “the best intentions,” but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Antwan was luckier: he only got a speech impediment. Still, all this fear surrounding the offending of Marsellus is enough to get Vincent, soon to take Mia out on a date while her husband’s away, very nervous.

Now, I’ve said that Marsellus represents God, but hardly in the Christian sense of personifying absolute good. After all, that briefcase’s combination is 666. As I said above, Marsellus is more like the Old Testament Demiurge, creator of the physical world (remember, Marsellus could give Jimmie [played by Tarantino himself] “a whole bedroom set” to replace the linen being sacrificed to help cover up Vincent’s accidental shooting of Marvin [played by Phil LaMarr), associated by many Gnostics with Satan.

In other posts–including two analyses I did of Tarantino films–I’ve written of mafia men, criminal businessmen, as being symbolic of capitalists, exploitative owners of businesses. Marsellus owns a large topless bar called Sally LeRoy’s. Religion has routinely been used by the ruling class to keep the masses in check. Many consider God to be protective of capitalism against ‘Godless’ communism. Marsellus is God, and he’s a capitalist.

An example of Marsellus’ exploitative nature is seen when he fixes a fight, paying boxer Butch Coolidge (Willis) to go down in the fifth round of an upcoming fight. A significant moment in Marsellus’ speech to Butch, meant to motivate the boxer to keep his end of the deal and really lose the fight, and thus to be known thereafter as a palooka, is when he says, “Fuck pride!” Pride is a deadly sin not only in the Christian tradition; Greek myth is full of stories of the fall of hubris.

I’m guessing that when Vincent calls Butch a palooka at the bar, the latter feels “a slight sting…pride,” which not only pushes him to win the fight, infuriating Marsellus, but also to shoot Vincent when he emerges from the bathroom.

After this, and just before his “date” with Mia, Vincent goes to buy some heroin off of Lance (Stolz). When we see Vincent shooting up, then driving high as a kite to the Wallace house to pick her up, we see what could be deemed a reversal of Marx’s old dictum: “Opium [or, in this case, heroin] is the religion of the people.” Glory to God in the…highest. When he goes into the house, we hear Dusty Springfield singing “Son of a Preacher Man,” reinforcing the film’s association with religious matters. Mia will “be out within three shakes of a lamb‘s tail.” (In the film, she says, “two,” but in the script, she says “three” [Tarantino, page 44].) When Marsellus’ Queen of Heaven is ready to go, we get to join in on Tarantino’s fetishization of her bare feet.

Their date in Jackrabbit Slim’s, a restaurant that pays homage to 1950s pop culture, demonstrates how capitalism exploits our idolatry of celebrities, movies, and rock ‘n’ roll. Note how an admittedly delicious milkshake in the restaurant costs five dollars. Commodities sold here are so fetishized, they’re named after famous directors, TV hosts, comedy duos, or radio/TV sitcom characters: for example, you could order a “Douglas Sirk steak,” a “Durwood Kirby burger,” a “Martin and Lewis shake” (vanilla), or an “Amos and Andy shake” (chocolate).

Waiters and waitresses do cosplays, if you will, of movie or rock ‘n’ roll stars: Vincent’s and Mia’s waiter is Buddy Holly (played by Steve Buscemi), and another one is dressed like James Dean; waitresses include Marilyn Monroe, Mamie Van Doren, and…Jayne Mansfield must have the night off. Performers impersonate Ed Sullivan, Ricky Nelson, etc. Of course, getting Travolta to dance is a pop culture reference in itself, even though Vincent’s iconic dance scene with Mia was written before Travolta got the role.

When Vincent and Mia return to her home, her wearing his overcoat, he’s feeling nervous about the temptation to fuck his boss’s wife. She wants drinks and music, which in a way could remind us of Mrs. Robinson’s attempt to seduce Benjamin Braddock in her home. Mia plays a cover of Neil Diamond‘s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” performed by Urge Overkill. The becoming a woman soon sounds a lot like Benjamin becoming a man soon, thanks to Mrs. Robinson. This is Vincent. He’s a little worried about his future.

He goes to the bathroom, the first of three times we see him do so in the film. Whenever he leaves the bathroom, there’s the danger of death. Since the wages of sin is death, using the bathroom–to take a shower, as we’ll see Butch do later, or to clean oneself out (to remove the filth and sin inside you) with the toilet, as Vincent does, and as Jules and Honey Bunny say they’ve got to do–is symbolic of an attempt at redemption, a cleansing of oneself of sin. As clean as you may be when you come out of the bathroom, though, you know you’ll have to return to the water of that Ganges.

Vincent does a monologue in the bathroom to help himself resist the temptation of seducing the drunk and stoned Mia, reminding himself that Marsellus’ wanting him to take her out while he’s away is a test of Vincent’s loyalty to his boss, just as God tested such men as Abraham. In sticking to his commitment not to take advantage of Mia, Vincent thinks he’s leaving the bathroom cleansed of sinful thoughts, redeemed, and safe from death…

…except that Mia, thinking the bag of heroin in his coat pocket is cocaine, has snorted a line of it, is ODing on it, and is dying.

Now he has to redeem himself again by saving her life, so he rushes her to Lance’s house for an adrenalin shot. After all, isn’t her taking his drugs up her nose, making her a “fucked up bitch,” a lot like her taking his d… up her…, as Antwan may very well have done? Ironically, a phallic needle stabbed into her breastplate, jizzing adrenaline into her heart, saves her. Her shock from coming out of it, seeing that needle in her chest, seems comparable to that of the Mother of God if she were violated. Girl, you just became a woman.

The next sequence shows Butch as a child watching a cartoon on TV. It’s one of those low-budget productions, using Synchro-Vox technology, superimposing talking lips on a static cartoon drawing–Clutch Cargo.

Staring in a daze, transfixed before a TV, being lulled into its illusion and suspending disbelief: all of these are so symbolic of the idolater adoring his image, his fetish, imagining there’s the spirit of a god inhabiting the carved piece of wood or metallic statue. And yet the poor quality of Clutch Cargo‘s limited animation is so obviously fake. The impressionable boy is totally immersed in the story, all the same.

Some critics think that Pulp Fiction‘s allusions to TV are more central to the film than its references to other movies or to popular music. Apart from Clutch Cargo, consider the many TV references in the film: Speed Racer, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, The Avengers, The Three Stooges, The Flintstones, I Spy, Green Acres, Kung Fu, Happy Days, and of course, Mia’s fictional TV pilot, Fox Force Five.

All of this TV idolatry reinforces the theme of sin in Pulp Fiction, a movie title inspired by old magazines “containing lurid subject matter.” Butch is told by his mother to turn off the TV and listen to Captain Koons (Walken) tell the story of all the trials and difficulties of getting a watch from Butch’s great-grandfather to his grandfather, then to his father, who gave it to Koons in a POW camp in Hanoi where the two had to hide it in their rectums to prevent it from being confiscated by the Vietnamese, and finally Koons is giving it to little Butch. These men are now the boy’s new heroes, new idols replacing those on the TV for his pagan adoration. Accordingly, the boy watches the captain with as rapt a look on his face, while Koons tells his story, as little Butch must have had while watching the cartoon on TV.

The childhood memory of Koons giving him the watch seems to have been a dream, for immediately after it, we see present-day Butch wake up from it in a shock, as if it were a terrible nightmare. The dream ought to have been disturbing for him, since he’s been reminded of the heroic efforts of the men who passed on the watch to him, while he’s about to let himself be made into a mere palooka.

The disappointment he feels like he’ll be to the men in his family looking down on him from heaven feels like too much for him, so he feels that “slight sting…pride.” The outcome of the boxing match he’s supposed to lose illustrates just how deadly a sin pride can be, for not only does Butch not lose the fight–he beats the other boxer so badly that he actually kills the man.

He rushes away in a taxicab in such a hurry that his boxing gloves are still on. His driver, a pretty Colombian woman named Esmerelda Villalobos (played by Angela Jones), has listened to the outcome of the fight on the radio, and she’s fascinated to have met a man who’s actually killed someone with his fists. Sin and death so permeate this film, not only do we have a plethora of murders, profanity (including outright pornographic dialogue), racial slurs (i.e., Tarantino’s by-now-typical fetishizing of the n-word), theft, idolatry of pop culture, etc., but we also even have admirers of crime.

As far as attempts at redemption are concerned, or at least attempts at repentance, when Butch learns from his driver that brutal beating of his opponent in the ring actually killed him, all he can muster is, “Sorry ’bout that, Floyd.” Then, when she asks him how he feels about having killed the man, he says he doesn’t feel at all bad about it. So much for repentance. “If saying ‘sorry’ ever meant anything, what are the police for?” as my wife would say in Chinese.

Hiding away with his girlfriend, Fabienne (Medeiros), Butch hears her talking about how she wishes she had a pot belly (translation: she wants to be pregnant). He says he’d punch her in her ‘pot belly,’ which, after walking in the shadows of his heroic father (as well as Koons), grandfather, and great-grandfather, sounds like the unconscious expression of a Laius complex. Butch doesn’t want there to be any more sons to have to pass a watch on to.

A symbolic attempt at redemption occurs during his shower (recall the bathroom as a place of purification), but he fails to attain grace when he taunts Fabienne by calling her a “retard,” getting her angry. His ‘taking it back’ sounds as insincere as his having said “Sorry” to Floyd for beating him to death in the ring.

Her forgetting to get the watch when packing all of their things forces Butch to go back to his apartment to get it, risking facing Marsellus’ men, at least one of whom (namely, Vincent) is waiting for him there. Butch’s killing of Floyd, then running away, is cowardly compared to what the previous men in his family went through, especially to keep the watch.

Now, in retrieving the watch from such a dangerous place, Butch can prove that he’s as brave as his dad, and his dad, and his dad. In effect, Butch is redeeming himself here. Indeed, in a scene cut from the completed film, when Butch has driven back to the apartment, he says in a monologue, “This is my war…This watch is a symbol…of how your father, and his father before him, and his father before him, distinguished themselves in war. And when I took Marsellus Wallace’s money, I started a war. This is my World War Two.” (Tarantino, page 114)

Butch goes into his apartment and gets the watch. Thinking he’s safe in there, he goes to the kitchen and puts some Pop Tarts in the toaster (more commodity fetishism, as with the watch), but he sees a small, compact submachine gun on the counter. He picks it up.

Vincent emerges from the bathroom, his second time to do so in the film (because of Pulp Fiction‘s scrambled order of scenes), but his third and last chronologically, of course, because this time he gets killed. Recall how I pointed out above that the use of bathrooms in this film symbolizes only attempts at purification–and therefore at redemption–and yet sin is still there (Vincent’s intention of killing Butch), so the wages of sin is still death.

Fittingly, Butch doesn’t fill Vincent with bullet holes until the Pop Tarts pop up from the toaster and are ready to be eaten. Commodity fetishism is a…product…of capitalism. Capitalism kills.

Butch wipes his fingerprints off the gun and leaves. He is driving back to Fabienne most confidently, but at a stop light, he sees crime boss Marsellus walking by, just as Marion Crane, in her car, saw her boss walk by in Psycho.

Yes, bosses can be that scary.

After Butch rams Fabienne’s car into Marsellus, he comes to and tries to shoot Butch, then Butch runs into a pawnshop, where he and Marsellus fight until the owner, Maynard (played by Duane Whitaker) pulls a gun on them, and the two end up in Maynard’s back room basement/dungeon, tied up and gagged. A corrupt cop named Zed arrives (Peter Greene, as I mentioned above), and he pulls a “squeal like a pig!” routine on Marsellus.

Given how extremely allusive Pulp Fiction is, we can see how this particular scene has references not only to Deliverance but also to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Allusions to the latter film are not limited to Butch’s considering the use of a chainsaw as a weapon to fight off Maynard and Zed; recall how Maynard slams the door shut to the room in which the rape is to occur, similar to how Leatherface slams shut that metal door after having cracked Kirk’s skull open with that big hammer and dragging the body into the back room where other terrible exploitations of the human body will soon occur.

Consider my use of the word exploitation in the context of the rape of Marsellus, who as a crime boss is a capitalist. Maynard, as the petite bourgeois owner of the pawnshop, is also a capitalist. Zed, as a cop, works as a protector of private property, of the capitalist system. None of this, however, means that all of them have to be friends.

As Marx once said, “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” (Marx, page 929) In this case, one capitalist fucks many others, that is, Maynard has his cop friend fuck many others, since I suspect that Maynard and Zed have pulled a Deliverance on many people, capitalist or non-capitalist.

As a crime boss, Marsellus represents the lawless, anti-government, “free market” version of capitalism. Maynard, with his cop-friend in Zed, represents the more state-oriented version of capitalism. This latter version isn’t any more ethical than the first, mind you. The differences don’t matter: capitalism is capitalism–it fucks us either way.

The connection of this scene with capitalism should be clearer when we remember that Butch’s and Marsellus’ original offence was having barged into Maynard’s pawnshop, his private property, to fight to the death. Incapacitating them, having Zed arrest them, then haul them off to the police station should be enough. Instead, Maynard and Zed think they have the right to rape them.

The owners of private property have no qualms whatsoever about exploiting the very bodies of those who have no such property. Maynard’s and Zed’s mistake is in assuming that Marsellus is not also an owner of private property…in fact, much more private property than the two hicks combined.

This barging into someone else’s property, only to be subjected to unspeakable horrors, is something Pulp Fiction echoes from Deliverance (the four city men canoeing into the mountain men’s area of the forest), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Kirk et al going into Leatherface’s house), and Psycho (Crane and Detective Arbogast entering Norman Bates’s private world).

Maynard’s and Zed’s even worse mistake is thinking they can get away with raping God, as I see Marsellus. Note that immediately after the Butch sequence, we return to the scene of Jules telling Brett his Ezekiel quote, beginning with him reminding us that Marsellus doesn’t like getting fucked by anyone other than his wife. So when Butch returns with the samurai sword, kills Maynard, and points it at Zed, Marsellus “will strike down upon [Zed] with great vengeance and furious anger…and [Zed] will know [Marsellus is] the LORD…” Zed took away Marsellus’ manhood, so Marsellus takes away Zed’s manhood by taking a gun and blowing his dick off.

Fair trade.

Zed’s about to feel the full weight of the wrath of Marsellus (i.e., Medieval, pliers, a blowtorch), but Butch, in having rescued the crime boss from his rapists, has achieved redemption for his sins. Butch has only to leave LA, never to come back, and never to tell anyone about the degradation Marsellus has just been put through.

In ‘The Bonnie Situation,’ when the fourth man (played by Alexis Arquette) comes out and shoots at Jules and Vincent at point blank range, but doesn’t even scratch either of them with the bullets, Jules concludes that God must have intervened and saved His two gangsters’ lives. Well, of course: Marsellus wants his soul back, and he needs Jules and Vincent to bring the suitcase containing it back; they can’t do that if they’re dead, now, can they?

There’s an interesting irony in the fourth man missing his targets, which in turn brings about Jules’s need to repent of his sin and redeem himself. Sin, or hamartia, literally means ‘missing the mark.’ Sin has saved Jules’s soul.

As they’re driving back to give the suitcase to Marsellus, with Marvin in the backseat, Jules and Vincent are discussing the miracle that saved their lives. Skeptical Vincent (who later dies, recall–he of little faith) is swearing, and repentant Jules is chiding him for blaspheming (though later, Jules himself will be cursing and swearing plenty; after all, so much of what we see is only an attempt at redemption).

Marsellus helps Jules and Vincent out of their next predicament, Vincent’s accidental shooting of Marvin in the car, by sending Winston Wolf (Keitel), a cleaner, who tells the two gangsters how to remove all evidence of the killing. Marsellus is God, and Wolf is one of His angels.

As Jules and Vincent are cleaning up Marvin’s bloody mess in the car, Jules–in spite of his apparent religious conversion–refuses to forgive Vincent for his careless, gory mishap with his gun. Vincent, reaching the limit of how much abuse he can take, tries to get Jules to understand that one should forgive those who admit to wrongdoing (Luke 6:37). In other words, repentance should lead to redemption.

Jules will have none of that (recall Butch’s empty-sounding “Sorry” to Floyd, and his tepid taking-back of his “retard” insult to Fabienne). Vincent’s warning that he could blow if he hears much more abuse only makes Jules nastier. Jules is about to blow up like a nuclear bomb. In fact, not only is Jules more abusive, he also insists that Vincent pay more for his killing of Marvin by cleaning up the victim’s brains and skull in the back seat. So much for even trying to repent and redeem oneself.

The cleaning of the car, as well done as it is, may not purify Vincent of his sin of accidentally…hitting…the Marvin mark, but Winston spraying a hose of cold water to get the blood off of Jules and Vincent just might do it, if only symbolically.

Redemption still comes at a price, that is, to the two gangsters’ pride, in how they have to replace their bloody suits with Jimmie’s dorky-looking T-shirts and shorts.

At the restaurant (where Pumpkin and Honey-Bunny are), Jules explains why he doesn’t eat pig’s meat, which he insists isn’t because of being Jewish (or Muslim, for that matter), though that might as well be why, since he considers the pig to be a filthy animal, and the wrathful God assumed to reign in the universe of Pulp Fiction sure seems to be of the non-Christian Abrahamic type. Indeed, we only hear “Jesus Christ” when someone is swearing. There’s no Divine Rescuer dying on a Cross to bring redemption to the sinful world of this movie. Everyone has to try to achieve it by himself.

A funny thing is that, after Jules hands off the case to Marcellus and quits being a gangster, he says he’s “gonna walk the Earth.” I’m reminded of Job 1:7, when Satan says he’s been “walking up and down in [the Earth].” The suggested association of Jules with Satan (though in Job, he admittedly isn’t the embodiment of radical evil as he is in Christianity) reinforces the sense of how tenuous Jules’s commitment to redemption is.

Vincent’s response to this is that Jules’s wandering of the Earth, perhaps never knowing where God wants him to be (after all, as I see it, Marsellus is God in this film, and Jules imagines his redemption, in all irony, is to leave God!), means that Jules will become a bum. Remember that Marsellus, as a crime boss, is a capitalist, and trying to live outside the capitalist system–especially in the post-Soviet, neoliberal world of Pulp Fiction, is at least to risk homelessness.

The invisible hand [!] of God stopped those bullets from killing Jules and Vincent, but only to get the case with Marsellus’ soul in it back to him, not to make Jules quit working for his boss. Jules thus has a most misguided idea as to what redemption is…and this ties in with the film’s theme of how redemption is so often just attempted.

Still, Jules isn’t completely wrong. Skeptical Vincent stays working for Marsellus, and he’ll be killed leaving Butch’s bathroom. He’ll get a kind of omen of this danger upon leaving the restaurant restroom, as he did leaving Mia’s bathroom.

When, during the restaurant robbery, Pumpkin points his pistol at Jules, telling him to open the case, he has the same look of awe on his face that Vincent had when looking inside it at Brett’s apartment. No, the case doesn’t contain diamonds, or cocaine, or anything ordinary like that. That orange glow must indicate something…spiritual.

When not only Jules is pointing his gun at Pumpkin, but Vincent, out of the restroom, is pointing his gun at Honey Bunny, she’s so scared, she’s “gotta go pee.” Since the wages of sin is death, she’s got to rid herself of the filth inside her by using what Vincent just did.

Jules has Pumpkin get his “Bad Motherfucker” wallet out of the bag of all the restaurant customers’ stolen wallets; he gives Pumpkin all the money in it–“about fifteen hundred dollars.” Jules is buying Pumpkin’s life with it. He’s paying a kind of ransom so he doesn’t have to kill Pumpkin.

Next, we get the third recitation of the Ezekiel quote, but instead of it being an expression of the wrath of God, Jules says it calmly. Now he’s actually thinking about what the words mean, instead of just saying them to sound like a badass before killing someone.

Jules has always said it as a judgement of the sin of the man he’s about to shoot. Now, as he says it, he’s judging himself. He’d like to think he’s “the righteous man,” as we all do when we judge the sins of others. But as much as he doesn’t like to admit it, he has to: Jules is “the tyranny of evil men,” killing for a capitalist crime boss.

His last words are so important, for they encapsulate so many of the themes of Pulp Fiction: he’s trying really hard to be a shepherd. It’s all about the attempt to redeem oneself of one’s sins, not whether one succeeds or not. The attempt at purification could be literal, as it is here with Jules and Pumpkin, or it could be symbolic, like all those trips to the bathroom, to clean oneself out from the inside by pissing or shitting, or to clean oneself on the outside, as Butch does during his shower.

Redemption is never fully attained: Jules hasn’t shot Pumpkin or Honey Bunny, but he hasn’t foiled their robbery of the restaurant, either. The couple leave with their bag of money feeling that robbing people is, if anything, even more dangerous than it was with the liquor stores.

The God of Pulp Fiction isn’t the Christian one, and the lack of Jesus is a conspicuous absence. There is no Good Shepherd: there’s only Jules trying to be one. This trying to be good, when we’re among the most sinful, is often the best kind of good we can hope for. There are no illusions here about a Holy Spirit guiding us down the path of righteousness; we just do the best we can…if we’re even doing that.

These attempts, however bumbling, awkward, and foolish, they make at redeeming themselves are part of what makes the characters of Pulp Fiction so relatable to us–at least on an unconscious level; and this, I believe, is a big part of what makes this film so enduringly popular.

Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction, a Quentin Tarantino Screenplay, New York, Miramax Books, 1994

The Danger of Counterrevolution

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

New World Order

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

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

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

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

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

The False Dichotomy of Conservative vs. Liberal

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

THIS IS NONSENSE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Normalizing War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neoliberalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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