Fergal Schmudlach

Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 4: beasts in human guise

We finish our run through Ivan’s parents’ adventures, including their support for Kenyan Mao Mao revolutionaries and participation in the American-sponsored “Kenyan airlift” that also produced Barack Obama Sr, supporting Greek and Turkish and Mexican communists in their way, but for one reason or another being unable to stop their son Ivan from becoming the essentially conservative crea...

Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 3: in the shadow of HUAC

We follow Ivan’s parents, the peripatetic idle rich leftist novelist/journalists Ira and Edita Morris, from their wartime career “writing” in Haiti on the eve of the coup that brought the progressive President Estimé to power, then making “democratic” anti-fascist propaganda for the American Office of War Information and the Voice of America while moving in Brecht’s circle includin...

Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 2: Communists in Cashmere

I remain haunted by the ghost of a weeb, a shitlib superspy who, after cutting his chops as a naval intelligence officer in U.S.-occupied Hiroshima and Osaka, wrote some of the first English-language scholarship of any depth on the Tale of Genji and the martial ballads, published geopolitical strategic analysis on how the Fourth Reich might best rule Japan, and was the preferred translator and ...

The Last Crusade (inshAllah)

A chatty episode to break the hiatus. I discuss recent news of the new final solution being demoed by the Zionist entity in Gaza. These days I’m walking around with posture like a ballerina because I’ve been de-settlerising and un-domesticating my leg muscles by running in huaraches and doing squats. We take a look at the First Crusade as seen in Arab chronicles, as well as the image of the...

Doraemon’s Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Family movie day with the Schmudlachs in Tokyo usually results in a special episode of the Kingless Generation, as I dissect the petit bourgeois propaganda to which I’ve been subjected in an (arguably) more constructive forum than ranting to my kids—but this latest Doraemon film outdid even last year’s Ukraine War puff piece, and I had to call on Prez of the Minyan to help me recover some...

Landback in Eurasia, 622 CE: As-Sulamī, Zhuangzi, Qohelet

How does an Indigenous-led movement rebuild in the wake of imperial decline? With the spectacular collapse of both Sassanian Persia and Byzantime Rome in 622 CE, a certain revolutionary communal movement led by masses of nomadic herders, merchants, and farmers, provides us with one of the greatest and earliest examples, albeit one poorly attested in surviving contemporaneous sources. We turn to...

Traces of Japanese matriliny in the Rainy Night Critique of Ranks (by 1021)

Kinship in Heian Japan (roughly 800–1200 CE) was matrilocal, which means it was men who moved in with their wives’ families and lived largely under their control. Although already thoroughly patriarchal in most respects, these last vestiges of what Engels calls Mother Right create fascinating tensions in a society where the world-historic defeat of the female sex was not quite complete—an...

Kingless Reads: How to Master Secret Work, pt 2 (South Africa, 1980s)

Purely for purposes of historical and mythological interest, here is a reading of a pamphlet on underground work by the Communist Party of South Africa.

https://manifestopress.bigcartel.com/product/how-to-master-secret-work

2023-06-08 01:45:58 +0000 UTC View Post

Kingless Reads: How to Master Secret Work, pt 1 (South Africa, 1980s)

Purely for purposes of historical and mythological interest, here is a reading of a pamphlet on underground work by the Communist Party of South Africa.

https://manifestopress.bigcartel.com/product/how-to-master-secret-work

2023-06-07 12:56:26 +0000 UTC View Post

Ruling classes have always wanted us dead: Atraḫasīs (Babylon, 18th c. BCE); The Extinction Narrative (2young Badazz, 2021 CE)

Plague, famine, flood; nuclear holocaust, nuclear winter, global warming. Seen through a class lens, these existential threats to humanity are threats indeed, but they are ultimately threats directed by the capitalist ruling class at the rest of humanity: that if they are truly faced with losing their position, they will carry out the mass depopulation that they have been plotting in myriad way...

Collectivize the Buddha: Dharma talks w/ Marcus, pt 2

We continue our free flowing conversation about our respective journeys as sketchy gaijin wandering in and out of the capitalist puppet states of East Asia and searching for ways to build the revolutionary saṃgha.

Land of the Rising Tensions

A newsy update on the non-release of the Abe Shinzō autopsy; the apparently accidental crash of a Japanese SDF helicopter which left multiple high-ranking military and intelligence officers dead including the leader of arguably the most important division of Japan’s Western Command (about whom I have made an interesting discovery); and finally an assassination attempt on PM Kishida using mor...

A Host Questions a Host: Dharma talks w/ Marcus, pt 1

I interview Marcus of the podcast Return of the Repressed about his journey, partially with reference to Dōgen’s Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (Japan, 13th c.) and the Record of Linji (China, 9th c.), and featuring a song from the noh play “Xiwangmu,” or the Queen Mother of the West.

On the Feast of Winding Water, block the flow with your hand and watch the wate...

LoFi Botanical Ramble: Gerald Horne, Race War! (2004), etc

We take a ramble through the diverse forest, plains, and mountainside biomes of a historic botanical garden here in Tokyo while discussing, among many other things, Gerald Horne’s fascinating first book on Imperial Japan and Black America, as well as that book’s perfidious falsification in Japanese translation, the rights to which were somehow given to a far-right press who translated less ...

Hammurabi’s COIN: Agushaya; The Cleaner; The Poor Man of Nippur; The Doctor; Sargon, Lord of the Lies (Akkad, 18th c. BCE seq)

In the 19th c., working backwards from Old Persian to Hittite to Amorite, modern scholars rediscovered the long-forgotten Semitic language Akkadian, and then an even older language, Sumerian. The logographic cuneiform script which was created to write Sumerian was adapted to write Akkadian, and a complex matrix of graphic and linguistic play was opened up by the power of the rebus principle, wh...

Weebs of the Ages: Ivan Morris, Mishima, and aesthetic GLADIO in Japan’s fourth reich, part 1 w/ Prez

In this ongoing series, we savor the weebery of the greatest weebs of history, pondering the roles they play in various regimes of class struggle including whiteness, patriarchy, capital, and data counterinsurgency. This time, the President of the United States joins me from the Minyan to explore the life of Ivan Morris, a Swedish-Jewish man who grew up in rural France and New York City, attend...

The ‘Real Little Mermaid’ was Indigenous, w/ Šuŋgmánitu: The Lusíads (Portugal, 1572), Disney’s Little Mermaid (1989), Ponyo (2008)

The Rob Marshall–directed live-action Little Mermaid, which should be coming out this May, was buzzed up by a good old culture war psy-op of which the two sides were: 1. Errm, the real Little Mermaid was white! This is cultural appropriation of marginalized white settler bodies and spaces and voices!; 2. The Little Mermaid is a fictional character, dumbass! But it occurred to me that the mode...

Transcendental Settlerism vs. Landback Enlightenment: Thoreau, Kunikida Doppo, Walt Whitman, Jairus Banaji, Arthur Rosenberg

We go long, looking at “progressive” settler idealism in Throeau and Walt Whitman, as well as a Japanese analogue, the romantic or naturalist novelist Kunikida Doppo. Connections are drawn to the mass appeal of fascism which comes in part from its partaking of the settler relation.

w/ Prez: Fascism from Hispania to Manchuria

Prez of the Minyan is here to discuss the dialectical deep history of fascism, starting with some readings from the Japanese far right and ranging back to Anglo settler colonialism, Iberian conquistadors, and even the crusades.

The Islamic Picaresque and the Birth of the Bourgeoisie: al-Jawbarī, Book of Charlatans (Damascus, 1210s)

The picaresque, a genre of satirical novel which is usually traced from Spain to Britain to America, where Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn would be the best-known example, follows the adventures of hucksters, preachers, and charlatans on the underside of capitalist society—as opposed to those on the top, who, these works often hint, just happen to be the most successful of the world�...

Mythodology with Marcus

Marcus’ travels around China and Europe, Daoist geomancy and natural foods, archaeobotany, the artefact versus the container, peoples’ archaeology and anti-malarial drugs during the Cultural Revolution, the immunology of smoking mugwort on different continents, ergot bacteria and sacred exstatic experiences, iron as a democratic metal, destruction of surplus as value producing spectacle, Ji...

Imperial Liberalism Lost: Endō Shūsaku, “Mothers,” (Japan, 1969)

The author of *Silence*, the famous novel of Japan’s early-modern persecution of Christianity recently adapted to the screen by Martin Scorsese (and actually drawing heavily on Graham Greene’s *The Power and the Glory*), bares his soul and reveals some of the sources of his obsession with the late-medieval Japanese Christians in a short story that switches between scenes of him, the famous ...

The Hellenistic Synthesis and the Christian ‘Image of Man’ (When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible)

In which Fergal revisits his old TradCath stomping grounds, discovers why so many of his old TradCath friends have now converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, and comes away with a deep appreciation for the contribution made to ideas of revolutionary transformation of society, universal human brotherhood, and scientific knowledge of history, by the Jewish people of the Hellenistic diaspora under the Se...

Hearts and Minds: Imamura Eiji, “Travelling Companion” (Changchun, 1938); Chae Manshik, “Mr. Pang” (Seoul, 1946)

After my conversations with Keith Allen Dennis and Recluse of the Farm podcast, I keep thinking how it’s the second-string fascists, the Nazi and Japanese imperial collaborators of Ukraine and Korea, who go on to be the absolute MVPs of the Cold War–era fascist international. ...

a quick change of pseudonym

Dear patrons, thank you always for your generous support: it means the world to me to know you find my ramblings worthwhile.

So, no big deal I hope, but I think I'm going to change my pseudonym real quick here: you see, schlampen means much the same as lumpen in German, like lumpenproletariat in Marx, and a schlamper means a chancer or a vagabond, so I was going for a picaresque kind of v...

Shotgun Blues: The Abe Assassination

“According to the hospital, there were two bullet holes in the right front side of Mr. Abe’s neck, spaced about five centimeters apart. It appears that the bullets went into his body from his neck, damaging his heart and the large arteries in his chest. Doctors say a large hole had been opened in the wall of his heart. On his left shoulder there was one wound which seemed to be from a bulle...

w/ Laihallll: Combat Techno-Transegalitarianism

My second conversation with Laihallll is followed by my own extended meditations on the secret society in prehistory and the present. I develop my hypothesis that the post-capitalist dystopia which the ruling class are currently ushering us into may be most accurately described as not techno-feudalism but rather techno-transegalitarianism. Indeed, I suspect that the term “transhumanism” was...

w/ Laihall: The Secret of Societies (Brian Hayden, The Power of Ritual in Prehistory, NW Turtle Island, 2018)

It’s not every day that you get to learn about a whole new mode of production, or phase in the meta of class society—much less the earliest one that we are (possibly) able to reconstruct or learn anything about—but here we are. Coordinating with anthropological data (problematically enough collected by and for settlers during the narrow window in which any Indigenous person would both sti...

Thulêan Kewpie Doll ET (Doraemon’s Little Star Wars, 1985/2022)

Doraemon: Nobita’s Little Star Wars (1985) was a masterpiece of late–Cold War bourgeois libertarian mythmaking: the kids of the Doraemon world join a miniature alien race in a righteous struggle for liberty from a totalitarian (aggressively Soviet-coded) regime, using Doraemon’s shrink ray to move back and forth between branded action figure size and regular size to bring about t...

Turning the Wheel of the Dialectic: Bhagavad Gītā (India, after 5 c. BCE); Ajith, “A Critique of Brahmanist Ethics”

We have seen how D.T. Suzuki’s take on zen was a very modern thing, tailor made in Illinois as a bourgeois ideology. This time, under the guidance of Ajith’s dialectical materialist critique of Brahmanism, we take up the Bhagavad Gītā (India, post 5th c. BCE), especially its modern bourgeois idealist interpretations as represented by Tilak’s Gītā Rahasya, a foundatio...