Britain is a Figment of the Crusader Imagination: King Arthur as Farang Mahdī
Much modern scholarship on King Arthur has revolved around the question of his historicity and origins, the recent greatest example being Higham’s magisterial 2018 survey of all the major theories—except the one that I advance here: Arthur was only one of many legendary chivalric heroes with whom continental Crusader and Reconquistador storytellers populated the North Atlantic archipelago, in their imaginations the spiritual homeland of a fictional Europe innocent of Semitic influences (both Muslim and Jewish). First, we run through all the major Arthurian theories—including the all-time banger whereby Arthur was a Croatian-Roman general who led nomadic Iranian horse-rider recruits to fight off the Angles and Saxons in the last days of Roman Britain—as exhaustively investigated by Higham. Then I state the obvious: that all the most distinctive features of the Arthur story appear for the first time in French chivalric romance (with many parallels in Spanish, Italian, and Catalonian stories featuring other characters) in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as the new Crusader concept of taking territory “back” from Muslims became the conceit of knightly adventure and conquest of “islands that the Emperor of Rome could not hold”, and the phenomenon of Crusaders bringing back relics from the holy land grew into legends like that of the Holy Grail. Finally, we explore one of foundational Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki’s very first literary ventures, the Arthurian story “Kairokō” (“A Dirge”, 1905) and the modern, pseudo-modern, or hyper-modern twists and turns that it imposes on earlier Arthurian stories by Malory (1485) and Tennyson (1833), while trying to steer clear of allegedly un-civilized and un-modern predecessors in Edo-period kabuki and puppet theatre—which were perhaps in fact more authentically modern because rooted in Afro-Asiatic silk road capitalism. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Sisterfucker: Profound Desires of the Gods w/ Nathan, pt 3
In this final session, we put the proverbial big old boulder into the sweltering primordial pond with meditations on myths of brother-sister marriage and divorce from the Kojiki (712), the taboo on sibling incest in the mother-right kinship structures of Trobriand Islanders as seen in the anthropology of Malinowski and his debates with dogmatic Freudians in the 1930s, and finally the persistent postwar Japanese cultural theme of Japan as hotbed of incestuous “bed-creeping” (yobai), a feature which is either the dysgenic cause of the nation’s staunch patriarchy, persistent class rule, and gangsterismo (as in less helpful versions), or (as Nathan and I think) rather the effect of the mythopoetic comprador infestation of working-class movements and Indigenous resistance to dispossession which we have been discussing in this series. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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The Birth of the Comprador Chief and the Defeat of the Secret Society [PREVIEW]: Profound Desires of the Gods w/ Nathan, part 2
This time we hit our stride, discussing the interplay of Indigenous state and deep state, chief and secret society, sometimes in resistance to colonization and sometimes in service of comprador opportunism—though as Nathan points out, which it might be in any given moment is worked out through a collective mythopoetic process. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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A Yakuza Filmmaker Takes it Back to the Dawn of Time: Imamura Shōhei’s Profound Desire of the Gods, part 1
Nathan, AKA KUBARK Stare, @postcyborg on Twitter, an organizer of a film club in London which listeners should check out, joins me for a conversation about noided proletarian filmmaker Imamura Shōhei’s 1968 film Profound Desire of the Gods. Former Ozu disciple Imamura rejected the neat and clean nationalist family values of his early mentor to explore the deepest and most powerful forces slumbering fitfully at the bottom of fourth-reich Japanese society. Here he goes back to the “dawn of everything” (as he conceives of such things) to take up some prime paleo-parapolitical material—outcast shamans, tribal secret societies, masked death squads—so you know we have to check it out. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Japanese First! (into the digital prison and the war machine) [PREVIEW]
I have several episodes in development, but each one I feel like I need to read at least one more book before it’s ready, so for now, some newsy musings on current events mostly in Japan, where this weekend’s election sees a far-right populist party set to pick up a dozen seats: Sanseitō, whose draft constitutional amendments would abolish all individual rights and invest sovereignty in the state and not the people, and which is heavily astroturfed by all the usual suspects, including not only the original Unification Church but also Sean Moon’s Rod of Iron (known by the less openly violent name “Sanctuary” in Japan). All this they package under the racially provocatory slogan “Japanese people first!”, backed up by mass media campaigns about a wave of “crimes and annoying behavior by foreigners”—but of course tending in reality to shunt all Japanese class tensions onto the East, South, and West Asian captive nations that make up Japan’s proletariat, beef up digital surveillance and social credit systems, and further prepare Japan to become the Ukraine of the Pacific. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
A podcast on the deep history of class struggle, paleo-parapolitics, and the demonology of capital. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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