I thought I had a hot take in response to the Little Mermaid discourse last year, but predictably I’m not the first one to think of reading the Isle of Venus in Camões’ Lusiads against the Age of Exploration diary entries in which roving European savages discuss their adventures in more complex Indigenous kinship structures where sex was not commodified and the family was not specialized to pass down private property—as well as (what one suspects was actually much more common) rolling up on Indigenous women around the world and committing sexual violence. Sure enough, my guest Min has written an entire scholarly thesis on two different poetic re-imaginings of the Isle of Venus which highlight the colonial violence that Camões’ poem works to conceal: one by a white Anglo woman in Brazil, and another by the leader of the Angolan revolution against Portuguese domination, António Agostinho Neto.

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The antisemitic, Nazi-adjacent ideology of Zionism says that members of the Jewish religion must be uprooted from their ancestral homelands and gathered into a white supremacist settler colony ruled by Jews native to Europe—a new kind of crusader state. And like the crusader states, at the behest of their Euro-American masters, the Zionist entity practices the fascist economics of nomadic destruction and chaos, taking the lead in illicit trade in weapons, drugs, and human beings. We are joined by Klonny Gosch of the ParaPower Mapping podcast to discuss the last of these as only he can.

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In the final installment of the series, we cover all that is known about the mysterious death of this strangely GLADIO-brained scholar of classical Japanese literature and favorite translator of “aesthetic terrorist” Mishima Yukio.

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We explore the Windsor Free Festival, Sunday Head, Albion Free State milieu of hedonist, individualist, libertarian (and decidedly anti-communist) radicalism in 1970s Britain, led by figures like Ubi Dwyer, Sid Rawle, and Paul Pawlowski, as well as scions of elite families like Heathcote Williams and Nic Albery—in light of the fact that, as we have already seen, Nic Albery and his movement appear in Nobuko Albery’s semi-autobiographical novel merged together (and not-so-subtly equated) with Mishima Yukio and his far-right Shield Society, with whom Nobuko and Ivan Morris were also closely associated.

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From the semi-autobiographical novel of Ivan’s second Japanese wife, Nobuko Albery (née Uenishi), we have some very sardonic portraits of the Morrises and their upper-crust left-wing milieu in France, as well as a fascinating subplot involving a drug-trafficking, blue-blooded hippie cult leader character who seems a fusion of Mishima Yukio and Nic Albery, the son of Nobuko’s elderly second husband and a pioneering figure in post-left radical politics and early internet-style social experimentation in 1970s Britain, and who is here connected to an attempt on the life of a certain Labour prime minister—with the Ivan Morris character giving wry and knowing commentary on these antics throughout.

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From 1956 through 1966, during which time he moved from London to Tokyo to New York, Ivan was married to the ballerina Ogawa Ayako, known in the society papers—by analogy with Jackie (Kennedy)—as Yakkie. In the realm of ballet, where other important Cold War battles were fought such as securing the defection of the Tatar dancer Rudolf Nureyev from the Soviet Union, Ayako became one of the first Japanese to work at the highest levels, then returned to Japan to spread her knowledge to a new generation here. Ultimately she played her part in proving Japan’s ‘eligibility’ for the honorary white status it ‘achieved’ in the postwar, as well as the supposedly unlimited translation powers of Anglo-American capitalism.

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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, 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 creature of the British establishment that he became, really quite naturally given the course that they had consistently set him on: elite boarding school, Harvard—and then came Hiroshima...

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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 including the Eisler siblings, whose persecution by the House Un-American Activities Committee led the brothers to flee to Europe and the sister, Ruth Fischer, to turn anti-communist professor at Harvard. In this context, Edita leaves behind a most puzzling letter to a member of the Eisler family, talking mysteriously about “the step which I have taken”...

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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 Tokyo, 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 lifelong friend of aesthetic GLADIO agent Mishima Yukio—all at the same damn time. On this outing we begin to deal with his parents: I promise you’ll never guess what they did for a living.

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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 rose in the Zohar, among other things.

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