The Kingless Generation

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Sina Rahmani of The East is a Podcast and Red Media had planned to come on the show before this, and in light of the Zionist entity’s unprovoked attack on his ancestral country of Iran in violation of international law I offered him every chance to back out, but hardworking podcaster that he is, he joins us for some light vibing and riffing and unstructured meditations about, among other things, the unexpected similarities between the entity and postwar Japan, as well as the bright future that I nevertheless hope for in the latter (my adopted homeland in my recovering-settler existence)—which future must lie beyond the whiteness that Japan too has claimed for itself in the postwar, thereby following a path of delusion that many countries in Africa and West Asia are still being forced down today pending the working and peasant classes rising up and showing the way.

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If you had a male-coded childhood at all recently in the Anglo-American world, you have felt the influence of the Soldier of Fortune culture of the 1980s, within which martial arts and other action films featuring Silvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, and Steven Seagal were prominent, and accompanied by dojos proliferating even in mid-sized American towns. But what you may not know is that, like the sushi boom around the same time period this shadow-reich version of the East Asian martial arts was quite deliberately seeded into the pop culture of the Reagan Era by a rogue’s gallery of all the usual WACL suspects: Moon Seonmyeong of the Unification Church, his high-ranking lieutenant Jhoon Rhee, Sasakawa Ryōichi—as well as Zionists like Menachem Golan and Haim Saban. Moreover, the hyper-individualism and hierarchicalism of this WACL school of karate, far from being inherent to the art, represents its co-optation and enlistment in a fight against its true roots in the struggles of the colonized and the working class in the Japanese Empire. In the proletarian fiction of 1920s Japan we find a little-known earlier chapter in the story of karate, when it was a new and exotic weapon, developed by Ryukyuan peasants under early-modern feudal and mercantile rule, and now wielded by Ryukyuan proletarians and the Korean and Japanese comrades to whom they taught it, to devastating effect against the bosses and their yakuza goons.

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What is the difference between East and West? One helpful line to draw is that between Iranian and Indo-Aryan cultures, as seen in the extremely ancient traditions of the Avesta and the Ṛigveda, respectively. Whereas the common Indo-European heritage of multiple generations of gods (ahuras/asuras vs daēwas/devas, see also titans vs gods—which, as long as we’re painting with broad brushes, we might imagine have something to do with memory of past relations of production as “ages”) is ultimately nondual, the Iranian tradition demonizes the gods (Skt. devas, Av. daēwas) and elevates one of the earlier ahuras (cf. Skt. asuras) into an absolute good creator, to whom is opposed an absolute evil which has corrupted the world and from which a series of saviors must be sent to save us, culminating in a final eschaton, a resurrection and final judgment, etc—the whole apparatus of Abrahamism is basically here already. Within this, we explore the Indo-European myth of the first man and the first king, whose Avestan expression features a societal collapse and a post-apocalyptic remnant surviving in some sort of secure underground enclosure called the wara. The new Japanese translation of the entire Avesta by Prof. Noda Keigō (2020), the first into any language in nearly a hundred years, as well as the new English Ṛigveda of Jamison and Brereton (2014), equip us uniquely well for this investigation. Our main takeaway is the sheer age of ruling class myths of the need to hole up in a cult compound to survive the collapse of class society—when in fact (even supposing we will need counter-waras and defensive tunnels of our own to survive climate collapse and extermination campaigns) it was always the ruling class who most needed to hide away, whereas the masses have always found a way out and forward in the struggle for production and human flourishing.

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人類30万年。その大半を占めるさまざまな平等・自由・創造性ある先「史」社会、そして穀物国家における階級闘争五千年のごく小さな誕生。

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